I recently (within the last year) left Apple. 3 days in the office is mandatory for everyone except those with explicit work from home designations registered within the HR system. Anyone with a desk assigned in an office is required to badge at that office on their org's chosen 3 days per week. Most orgs chose T-W-Th.
The difficulty is that folks that had agreements with their management prior to Covid about flexible working arrangements were nullified with Apple's RTO. So, if M and F was your arrangement prior to Covid and your org chose T-W-Th, too bad. Badge-swipes are being tracked and upper management is applying pressure to managers to get their people in the office, regardless of individuals' needs.
So, yeah, it's technically hybrid, but extremely rigid.
Going full time remote is also significantly harder now, as it must be approved by an SVP on an individual basis.
Any of this may have changed in the months since I left, but I've not heard of anything changing from my colleagues that are still there.
I'd recommend folks read the last section of the announcement where these changes were announced [1]. The section is titled "Mission First", and I'm pretty sure the recent altercations at Google Cloud's offices over the past week [2] motivated much of the writing in this section. This seems like a stark change in how things happened at Google, and to put it explicitly in a blog was something I couldn't imagined to have happened in ~2017-2022.
> We have a culture of vibrant, open discussion that enables us to create amazing products and turn great ideas into action. That's important to preserve. But ultimately we are a workplace and our policies and expectations are clear: this is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics. This is too important a moment as a company for us to be distracted.
Honestly, good on them. Having a culture of honest and open discussion about work is important, but there's a very vocal minority in many companies that thinks their political opinions are both objective fact and the most important thing to discuss at any given work function.
When that kind of attitude seems to receive official support from the company it actually does make people with different political opinions feel unsafe at work. This is not okay, and it's not healthy for the company, and I'm glad to see Google finally pushing back against the idea that loud political fights are appropriate in the workplace.
When the mission is make money within the existing institutional frameworks it's much easier to be apolitical and that seems to be the change here. But when your culture is explicitly "make the world better" you can't avoid getting mixed up in political issues.
How the devs felt about police for example likely affected the maps feature for reporting cops on the road. Same with Google Maps history at abortion clinics. The read on various news organizations definitely affected the choices for Google News partnerships. How you feel about government surveillance and "the deep state" likely affected how they built their messaging apps. Even down to the sign-up form where you're asked your name/sex. A conservative Google would have made very different decisions.
It's really hard to do anything non-trivial that doesn't end up brushing up against political issues de jour.
I'm not so sure. You point to a vocal minority, I see something amiss for the company.
If I were "corporate" I would be asking myself why it is a group of my employees faced arrest, job loss to make a statement about company policies. I would want to know if it suggests a bigger problem down the road for the company.
Google employs ~180k people. At that scale, even 50 employees involved in these protests would be 0.02%. That sure sounds like a very vocal minority to me.
> If I were "corporate" I would be asking myself why it is a group of my employees faced arrest, job loss to make a statement about company policies. I would want to know if it suggests a bigger problem down the road for the company.
I think that's exactly what corporate is doing. Corporate thought it through and came to the conclusion that this happened because Google created a culture where a certain type of employee thought that Google was the place to push their personal politics. They would like people who feel that strongly about a political issue to move on to another workplace and let their coworkers get on with their lives.
I find the use of "this is a business" logic to dissuade political discussion about a company's own business practices to be extremely troubling. Yes, there can be a discussion about the proper way to have these conversations, but dismissing discussion of ethics with an attitude of "this is a business" has lead to some horrific outcomes throughout history.
TJ Watson (of IBM) had a similar "this is a business" outlook: “I’m an internationalist. I cooperate with all forms of government, regardless of whether I can subscribe to all of their principles or not.” IBM's machines were extremely important part of Nazi Germany's Holocaust efforts, and there is evidence that IBM was actively working with Nazi Germany after the invasion of Poland [1].
Anyone notice the last few days tons of people bringing up the IBM/Holocaust connection? I've seen maybe half a dozen people in different threads bring it up. It almost feels coordinated, like those are the marching orders that were given out somewhere: "If this topic comes up, compare it to IBM and the holocaust, make these points, etc."
Google is being accused of writing software that facilitates the intentional killing of civilians. Whether you agree or disagree, that's what the accusation is. In that context, for people who accept the accusations, IBM seems like an obvious choice for an analogous company. Do you have a better comparison?
Surprisingly, looks like Mark Zuckerberg is listed as a contributor in the Model Card [1]. I thought since its a pretty big effort, most executives would be added to it as well, but that does not seem to be the case at all. In fact I was surprised that Soumith Chintala was left out here [2].
Thank you for doing this! Is it hypothetically possible to switch jobs after your employer has filed for your H1-B (but before receiving approval from USCIS)? I've heard differing opinions online. I'm currently on the F1. I can potentially work for a very early startup that I'm excited by.
It does happen occasionally. For example Justin Garrison wrote what I would consider a fairly scathing review of Amazon's HR practices related to laying people off, while he was still at Amazon: https://justingarrison.com/blog/2023-12-30-amazons-silent-sa...
He left recently, but he wrote this blog while still being employed there, as mentioned at the bottom of the post.
What you're essentially asking for (especially with the toml like configuration) is SLURM + GPU cluster.
SLURM does that wrapping for you, where you essentially just point to the file that you want to run, along with some high level GPU and CPU resource allocation tags, and it just schedules and runs it for you.
I have seen some people trying to run GCP (lol) with SLURM, and wouldn't be surprised if it is possible with AWS/Lambda or any of the other cluster service providers (Cluster-as-a-service, CLaaS?).
How successful have precious iterations of the XPrize been? IIRC, there was (is?) one for landing a rover on Mars and another for cleaning up the ocean.
Have those companies yielded tangible benefits or even spurred innovations in their respective fields?
For transparency the below is entirely from GPT-4. All successful except for the Google Lunar XPRIZE. It's notable that these prizes ranged from $7M (Ocean Discovery XPRIZE) to $30M (Lunar XPRIZE), so the stakes have really gone up for this one.
Ansari XPRIZE (2004): Aimed at private spaceflight, won by Mojave Aerospace Ventures' SpaceShipOne, demonstrating private manned spaceflight.
Progressive Automotive XPRIZE (2010): Focused on energy-efficient cars. Edison2’s Very Light Car won in the Mainstream Class, and Li-ion Motors’ Wave II and X-Tracer Team Switzerland’s E-Tracer won in the Alternative classes.
Google Lunar XPRIZE (Not Won): Targeted private teams to land a rover on the moon. Although the prize expired in 2018 without a winner, several teams continued their lunar missions.
Global Learning XPRIZE (2019): Sought solutions for children to teach themselves reading, writing, and arithmetic. The prize was jointly awarded to Kitkit School and onebillion, both developing child-friendly learning applications.
Nokia Sensing XCHALLENGE (2014): Focused on health sensing technologies. The DMI team won for their invention of a lab-quality blood testing platform.
Carbon XPRIZE (2021): Aimed at converting CO2 emissions into valuable products. Two teams, CarbonCure Technologies and UCLA CarbonBuilt, won, demonstrating concrete production methods using CO2.
Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE (2019): Aimed at advancing deep-sea technologies. The GEBCO-NF Alumni team won, developing autonomous ocean mapping technology.
At least several of them must have a winner, so long as someone participates, as there is no hard goal and a winner is chosen from the participants. (For examples, "improve" and "build better" are soft goals.)
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