I'm happy we're returning to normalcy, but it just makes me wonder "why now?" It's like the government and big business just decided overnight to declare "mission accomplished" when nothing substantial has changed. Last summer, for example, could have been the reopening, and we'd have better data and "science" to support it.
Also of the scant 40 million people remaining in California, who haven't yet moved to Texas or Florida, public support for at least some "COVID protocols" are very high [1]. I'm not sure you are giving an impartial assessment of the facts.
1: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-02-24/californ...
The message is backed by advice from Biden’s polling firm, Impact Research, which studied voter attitudes to Covid and found that most Americans are "worn out" by the restrictions and "have personally moved out of crisis mode."
In a Feb. 16 memo, the firm told Democrats to take "the win" on Covid, warning that by 49 percent to 24 percent, Americans are more concerned about it causing economic harm than infecting them or a family member, and that far more parents and teachers worry about learning loss than illness for their kids.
"The more we talk about the threat of COVID and onerously restrict people’s lives because of it, the more we turn them against us and show them we’re out of touch with their daily realities," Impact Research’s Molly Murphy and Brian Stryker wrote in the memo, which was viewed by NBC News. They warned that if Democrats continue to emphasize Covid precautions over learning to live in a world with the virus, "they risk paying dearly for it in November."
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/democrats-tur...
- for many - not all, but many - of the more vulnerable to hospitalization and death, it's now a matter of choice.
- As a result, a bigger spike in cases caused much fewer hospitalizations and deaths than previous spikes, meaning less impact on the rest of the health system.
- behavior has changed dramatically in terms of things like event attendance even in areas with more cautious government policy. Compare how many people went to movie theaters in late summer 2020 when they reopened in limited capacity in California with now. The limited capacity isn't the biggest difference, it's the behavior.
- we can see that, say, California has fewer cumulative deaths per capita than Texas or Florida despite the urban areas being somewhat denser[0] (which itself seems to play a big role), and Arizona has more than NY or Massachusets despite being far less dense and with much milder winters... but the differences aren't orders of magnitudes.
- masks are cheaper and more available than they were earlier, and treatments are becoming more widely available too
So this is a reasonable point to say "we aren't able to eliminate this thing, but fortunately, it's much less dangerous to most of us than it used to be."
But make no mistakes: the biggest factor there in terms of danger is the vaccines, which have now been available over a year.
[0] https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/cumulative-covid-1...
Add in weather and TX and FL are actually nice places to live for the most part.
Today's episode of the Scientific American's podcast "COVID Quickly" (https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/the-push-...) had an interview with Flu pandemic historian John Barry. (The interview is the second half of the episode.)
They asked him how he'd define when a pandemic is over, and he said there's a science aspect to it, but it's largely when "people stop paying attention to it".
They also said the 1918 flu pandemic had 4 waves, and most of the US put restrictions in for wave 2. For wave 3, some areas did and some didn't. By wave 4, which was approximately as severe, NO cities put restrictions in place. Some histories of the flu pandemic don't even mention the 4th wave.
We seem to be following a very similar pattern now. Maybe 2 years (and/or 4 waves) is roughly society's attention span for a pandemic.
I have no expectation covid is done. At a certain point you have to pay attention if it’s bad enough. (It isn’t now)
I have no expectation covid is done. At a certain point you have to pay attention if it’s bad enough.
Covid's main threats for most people are:
* Filling up hospitals to the point they stop functioning (that's been true here in Canada).
* Putting 10% ~ 20% of workers everywhere, including hospitals, out of commission for weeks at a time while they're acutely sick with Covid or infectious to others.
* Disabling some large % of people temporarily or permanently due to lingering symptoms of the virus.
The death rate for covid is significant but not substantial enough in itself to cause the world to lock down. The points above though, are.
For USA the death rate is still higher than times when we were not RTO.
This one seems like a dubious point to me, services during the early-2020 lockdowns were much more impacted than they were during the Omicron spike which saw much less enforced lockdown but much more "shit, all our employees are sick" closures.
Completely agree with the hospitalization concerns, and I would add that the calculations also changed a lot re: protecting others after widespread vaccine availability.
There is a huge difference between "dying with COVID" and "dying from COVID".
The distinction you're making isn't new - it's literally years old at this point.
Even vaccinated (and never testing positive), the immune response I got from taking care of a highly infectious toddler screaming in my face was terrible and really brutal. I’m not old, fully functional immune system, etc. and it had me out for weeks, brain fog, exhaustion, off and on high fever, you name it. I suspect I still am suffering side effects from the last infection in Jan.
If I hadn’t been fully vaccinated just before the first time he got it, I’d probably be dead.
Pretending that someone who was not as strong or healthy, gets it, then dies didn’t ‘die from Covid’ is probably disingenuous at least 90% of the time.
We all die eventually, it’s the norm for whatever obvious change occurred to be blamed for it, not ‘inevitable entropic reality’ or whatever.
At the end of the day, someone has to made a judgement call about the appropriate factor in a complex system.
Given how hard “with vs. from” is to tease apart, excess mortality is a good way to look at things, eg
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/17/us-excess-deat...
You also need to take into account the fact that that most of the deaths in the US are amongst the unvaccinated (something like 20:1 last I checked) so your personal risk of death, if vaccinated, is very different from the overall death rate.
Something substantial has definitely changed. That's not the same as knowing there won't be future variants or spikes. But if there's ever a time to get back to normal, now would be it. It's not total victory and may never be, but at some point we either declare that we can live with this while having normal lives, or we're tacitly declaring that we never intend to.
Yeah, it's called midterm elections are coming up and the Democrats are staring down the barrel of getting absolutely crushed if they continue on with mask and vaccine mandate policies.
That's surprising. Do you have a source?
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/02/24/health/covid-deaths-now-y...
NY Times, Washington Post, and other media have similar stories.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/national/corona...
Said deaths are also extremely focused in unvaccinated people, meaning that outside of the immunocompromised (whose situation sucks here), it's at least mostly people who chose the risk.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1M0mdNLpTWEGcluK6hh5L...
N95s and similar are obviously better but cloth masks do ok. Also remember they changed guidance to recommend cloth+surgical masks, which everyone laughed at. Lo and behold that combination tests in the 80% filtration range.
So cloth masks work, the guidance for double masking was valid, and the N95 recommendations more valid still.
"In fact, support for mask mandates has reached its lowest level since we began asking in August 2021. Now, a narrow majority (51%) support their state or local government requiring masks in public places compared to the roughly 63% that had over the last 6 months."
https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/axios-ipsos-coronavir...
There is literally new data every day. Case counts change, hospital usage changes, etc. The change in mask guidance is also not universal - it is dependent on that exact data. The CDC maintains a county-by-county map of the data so you know exactly what the guidance is each day based on the latest data.
If you want to keep up with the data, the map is not a bad place to start: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/your-health/covid-...
There are also differences now in how many people are either vaccinated, or have recovered from covid vs a year ago
As a data point, Denmark have been without restrictions since first of February 2022. There are still 20.000 infections daily, but most with very mild symptoms.
There are 1.600 hospitalized, which is considerable more than December, where there were about 600.
So number wise it doesn't make a lot of sense to remove restrictions, but I'm personally very happy having the old normal back.
Assuming you meant "from," not "with," this is clearly not the case in Santa Clara county, the location of Apple's HQ. The current daily average is 5 per day. It briefly peaked at 10, but the non-surge average is around 2. As others have said, deaths lag, so they'll likely be back to ~3 by April.
What blocks any expensive investments in US standard of living is the cost. The costs is so high, it's almost as much as the cost of inaction and that's too damn much.
See also climate change.
> Dying from Covid is more or less optional at this point. If you want to remove the risk of dying, get the vaccine. If you want to take the risk, don’t.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29561158
This is a bit reductive -- people in some countries may not have easy access to the vaccine, people whose immune systems don't respond to the vaccine may need still-scarce antiviral treatment to maintain a mortality rate on par with the vaccinated, and in the US there may still be people who genuinely cannot logistically manage getting the vaccine.
But this is something I've been thinking about a bit lately: when will be the "tipping point" after which more than 50% of all US covid deaths will have been a personal choice?
We're at about 950k deaths now. The "everyone will be eligible to schedule an appointment" date was in April 2021 (at about 570k deaths). So maybe another 3 months?
The virulence of the virus isn't changing that much, the biggest effect is that most people have gained immunity.
The fact that 90% of the people in hospitals are unvaccinated though while vaccination rates are at least >60% everywhere is a sign though that the unvaccinated population still has failed to achieve a level of immunity equal to vaccination.
They're going to just accumulate immunity the hard way though with more human casualties and death. There isn't a lot to be done about that though.
Eventually the rates of unvaccinated in the hospital with each wave will start reflecting the population rate of unvaccinated and we'll be at pretty much 100% seroprevalence finally.
I'm not disagreeing with your point, however IIRC this is heavily concentrated among unvaccinated individuals, and I believe that Apple/Google/etc employees are overwhelmingly vaccinated. I would be shocked if these companies didn't have accommodation processes in place for individuals who are still at high risk.
I'm not disagreeing with your overall point, but there's no guarantee that the same trends/statistics exist in this sub-population.
Things trended well last summer, but 1) everybody expects a lull in warm weather and 2) vaccination numbers were still low. It was reasonable at the time to hold onto precautions hoping the unvaccinated people would come around before fall. And good thing too, because delta proved to be a real pickle before being displaced by omicron.
At some point, it becomes obvious that a large number of people just won't bother getting vaccinated, and you can't realistically keep asking the entire country to go out of their way to protect the people who won't protect themselves.
We'll see another wave in the fall, either omicron or some new variant, and hopefully our vaccines will stay ahead of it.
Kids became eligible to be vaccinated only a few months ago, which even if it wasn't actually risky to them it was a major concern for many parents.
Right about that time, the omicron wave hit, and ever since late december we've known it was very likely we'd peak and then crash on cases.
So we didn't return to normal last summer because loads of people weren't vaccinated yet, and kids weren't eligible. We didn't return once kids became eligible because omicron was looming. And we didn't return during omicron peak because hospitals were overwhelmed.
And these people are overwhelmingly unvaccinated. At this point, it's been a year that vaccines have been available. You're not going to change their minds, and the rest of us - heartless as this sounds - shouldn't continue to be held back just because of other people's stubbornness. They made the decision not to get it, they should live with whatever consequences may result from that choice.
Edit: I realize that some people can't get it for various medical reasons, and I empathize with them. It's everyone else I'm referring to.
We cannot force these people to vaccinate for their own good, but neither can we be held hostage by them.
given that you have to be vaccines to rto at Apple it didn’t really make sense to wait this long anyway
Do you have any idea how parochial you sound when you make generalizations in this manner?
Essentially everyone has an immune response to covid now--either by vaccination or because you already had. That is why case number are cratering. The immune response effectiveness will fade, but all evidence points to long lasting protection against severe infections.
Last summer was the re-opening a la "mission accomplished." Then omicron evaded previous immune responses. Why won't that happen again? It might, but less of the population is vulnerable b/c Omicron spread to more of the population. There was a big group of unvaccined protected by heard immunity.
Post Omicron how many people haven't gotten a vaccine or covid? Probably less than 10% of the public.
I check https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html to track how things are going. I don't like that, with ~2,000 people dying each day and Spring Break around the corner, the strongest push to reopen is happening now.
"Why now?" Just speculation, but: Because midterm elections are this year, because consumer spending is up and inflation is rising and the government wants to encourage the economy to remain strong, because businesses are seeing lower performance from employees especially regarding sensitive work, because ICUs have capacity and vaccines are readily available.
You can’t just exclude the data that disproves your point. The peaks were the original variant, Alpha(?), Delta and now Omicron. Deaths in this wave are extremely lower than in any other wave due to severity, immunity and vaccinations. Hospital stays are reduced and shorter. The original point of avoiding covid en masse was to prevent the healthcare system from being overwhelmed. Although it varies from place to place the healthcare systems in highly vaccinated countries are no longer seeing that kind of pressure even with high case numbers (still lots of pressure but not enough to risk overwhelming the system entirely).
* Covid deaths per-day are at-or-near their highest ever levels
* the current wave is less dangerous
These sound contradictory, but aren't: deaths are high, death rates aren't -- if you catch Covid you're more likely to survive than ever before, but you're also more likely to catch Covid. This is because we're (currently) in a wave of a high-infection low-mortality variant.
Unfortunately, this just seemed to lead to the most politically connected folks going remote and directors friends and favorite hires getting the perk.
At three trillion market cap, I guess they just realized it doesn't really matter if attrition shoots up and they'll always have enough people to fill the trenches. Lots and lots of people left around the same time.
Having left, I forgot what it was like to be able to focus on something other than Apple. Incredibly toxic atmosphere on the inside. I work at a fast-paced startup and still work on average 10/hours a week less than at Apple.
> Having left, I forgot what it was like to be able to focus on something other than Apple
Definitely sympathize there; we weren't even allowed to leave Github issues without Legal's approval, and when I wanted to open source something (basically an HLS server I wrote to handle my home security system), I was told that a) it was too competitive with Apple because my project had to do with video, and b) there's no such thing as "my own time" with Apple, since I was salaried and well-compensated.
This is why there is a decline button next to the accept button. An outage or something disastrous, sure I'll stay online till midnight to help in anyway I can; a regular status update type meeting, no way.
Is there 1 FAANG company that is the most friendly/accomodating to someone who wants to develop their own software/indiegames on the side?
Companies that aren't nearly as "cool" and pay a fraction, can be just as possessive or more so.
I am well aware of the saying "better to ask for forgiveness than permission" and how some rules are broken by everyone with a tacit understanding.
However, once when I investigated volunteering for an extremely well known and mainstream nonprofit, they gave me some required paperwork, which said that any IP created during my volunteer work belonged to them.
I didn't have a firm intention to do IT work as a volunteer or not, but I was told I had to sign to volunteer regardless.
I thought I would ask my employer if I could sign the agreement; if it was compatible with the stuff I'd already signed, that asserted ownership of work outside of regular hours, if related to the business.
At a lower level, people had no idea. It was passed up the chain all the way to the chief corporate counsel or whoever, and eventually they said no, with an air of "WTF why are you wasting my time?".
I felt like the ultimate decisionmakers can live in a different reality, where things don't happen because nobody has an incentive to tell them.
I didn't particularly mind, since I wasn't set on that particular organization to volunteer with, and I learned something.
Remote work became anytime work.
Most arent as blatant as setting up ridiculous times in the calendar, but the same goal is achieved by more insidious means. For example, a manager assigning a task that needs to be completed before the next day at 5pm.
HP to Woz: "Sure, go for it, good luck."
Apple to their own employees: "Uh, let's see here.... how about 'No.' Does 'No' work? Good, then we'll go with 'No.'"
Gotta love the Valley. You either flame out early, or you live long enough to become the face on the telescreen.
This strongly anti-OSS policy makes me very sad, I occasionally see Apple employees in GitHub issues essentially saying they would fix this problem they're seeing themselves but are forbidden from participating by their employer (Apple). Seems like such a waste. Everyone has their price and priorities, definitely solving interesting problems at work and being paid well for it can outweigh satisfaction from OSS, but just seems so needless for the wealthiest organization in the world.
It is still primarily an on-site company. That might mean on-site an an office in San Diego, Austin, Philadelphia, NYC, etc. But in-office nonetheless.
Every team does things differently, even down to the department or individual manager level. Compared to the other FAANGs it is far more varied in most respects. Just because someone didn't like (or loves) their role doesn't mean you will feel the same way about it. If possible I recommend talking to people who work in the department you are interested in.
At some point I would like people to quit vilifying a completely legitimate business setup because it doesn't fit their world view.
I want to be in the office, and I prefer it when my coworkers are there too. I respect that not everyone feels the same - but I do think it is up to the employer to decide. So I will be picking companies that suit my preferences.
> work at a fast-paced startup and still work on average 10/hours a week less than at Apple.
I am always floored by statements like this. I work as a principal data analyst and everything above 40 hours/week is overtime. While I have overtime included in my contract I still am able to reduce overtime (it is still being tracked to ensure compliance with local workers protection laws) if the project situation allows. On average I do something like 41 hours a week over the last few years. Including high profile client engagement or pitch situations.
I find myself having enough time to also work on my side business and do work for animal protection charities. While still being able to work in the garden and shop to relax.
The people talking about working long hours at Apple are getting paid commensurately. There's a reason why people work at FAANG companies despite the constant complaints.
If you're in the fancy new hotness that has VP political support, great.
If you're in a team with a manager who has your back and pushed back on extra work and raises and bonuses for the whole team, great.
But you're one of the lucky ones.
on more than a handful of occasions i was able to bill 20 hours over overtime at 2x rate for simply being 'available' meaning my phone was on mute in a deployment support conference call.
they happily paid and i happily pretended to care about their product.
Maybe it was because I worked there only during the pandemic, but I never really felt the emotional impact of Apple's toxicity. I could of course tell it was there, and if I actually cared about getting promoted or getting higher pay, I might have felt more stressed.
For example, after pointing out some areas where I thought a proposal could be improved, from that point on I just wasn't ever invited to any more design or strategy meetings. It's like I was just cut out from everything because I had the audacity to criticize something from some senior schmuck with tenure, and I wouldn't grovel and kiss whoever's ass I needed to in order to be "allowed" in those meetings from that point forward.
In hindsight I was glad I torpedoed myself right off the bat after I joined. Not actually ever having to be around any of those people in meatspace probably helped, but it was really easy for me to sit in my office at home and plug away undisturbed on the pet projects that I felt were interesting and worthwhile. What I created actually was helpful, but it was totally designed, written, and delivered in a silo. I collected my salary and stock for a year, added Apple to my resume, and then hopped on to another company with higher comp and a much healthier culture.
Now at this new place, everyone is falling all over themselves to have me in their design and strategy meetings. <shrug> Fare thee well, Apple. I hardly knew ye.
I agree, but I don't think the disruption will go the way you or I hope it would.
Many of the companies that is "one tier" below were able to offer higher comp only because of sky high valuation from the recent bubble. Most of them aren't in the kind of cashflow positions that can sustain such high cost if the stock value correct. If we enter an economic situation where stock value go down for companies like MSFT, Google and Apple, what do you think would happen to the stock price of high flying growth companies that don't even make a profit?
And guess what, most of them are coming to the realization that you don't need to actually pay $300k+/yr to hire some IC just to build React components or spin up another Node.js microservice. I know of quite a few companies (especially the ones that took a beating on the market recently) that's already starting to pivot more aggressively to foreign developers and starting to look at engineering offices outside of the country. If anything, the past two years only made a global workforce to be easier than ever to adopt.
Basically I think given the macroeconomic that's going on, the days when barely profitable or even cashflow negative "growth" companies offering FAANG-beating compensation packages will soon be gone. The numbers just won't add up anymore.
They're already down as much as 80%. If I were looking around today, I'd kill to join one of those high growth tech startups with a solid balance sheet that just got the crap kicked out of its stock.
Now it's entirely possible that there is title inflation at Apple, so that a "senior" engineer at Apple is less senior than a senior engineer at Google. Or perhaps the samples are skewed differently per company. But when I lived in the Valley, the word on the street was that Apple paid less well than Google as a general rule. So the observed data on levels.fyi does match with whatever I heard in real life.
This doesn’t make any sense.
What the large companies are paying is the market price. By definition.
It’s literally not possible for all of the big companies to be paying under market price at the same time. That implies some other prevailing market price somewhere else, yet we’ve clearly seen the highest salaries come from the big companies.
The big companies are paying whatever it takes to get the talent they need. That’s market price.
Are you sure these places pay "below market price"? Just curious, what companies would pay significantly more than FAANG?
If they aren’t struggling to hire and retain, they’re paying market rate. It’s as simple as that.
Smart ones are already in the hiring frenzy.
Having said that, every situation is unique.
Of course, that's just my experience but I do have a feeling that certain type of people feel that there's more innovation around coffee and chance encounter because it's a nice story to tell oneself but it doesn't really happen.
Where as in the office it was just walking around and seeing someone in an elevator, the hall, "hey lets catch up" or "you have a minute" or "lets get lunch"
these types of interactions just don't happen anymore
It seems somewhat uncharitable to assume that there are different people who believe things about how innovation happens to them, but not that there may be differences between how people innovate.
A lot depends on culture and process. Usually companies which had remote on day 1 do better because they get to fine tune and evolve the process over time.
So yeah, YMMV
I certainly never have except in an explicit innovation job. The rest of the time I am an implementer. So keep me away from connections with the other parts of the business as that just becomes a sideways way to ask for feature requests I have no say in or other info/support requests.
Even supposing FAANG, fortune 100s or whatever top percentile is likely to desire more innovation, the idea spontaneous talks one supposedly only could have in the office significantly impacting the rates of innovation is pretty far-fetched and mostly just an assumption.
At the office, all I did was put on headphones with white noise and stare at the screen and hope that no one came and train wrecked my chain of thought, which happened all too often. My main form of communication was Slack anyways... and I'm not embarrassed to say, I wasn't the only one. It was this, plus a Seattle commute, which was an hour+ each way because I'm not going to raise my kid in an apartment downtown (personal preference).
Now, I will totally grant you, there were plenty that could juggle chatting and typing and hopping up to meetings and retaining what happened after Scrum and the flying Nerf darts and the smell of coffee and farts and B.O. and overpowering deodorant and cologne and perfume and hairsprays and hair product and people putting fish in the microwave, etc. etc. Bless the people who can super ultra multitask and keep a train of thought like that. I am so envious... I'm not that guy =[
This is sadly not universal. I’d wagger there’s a decent number of people who could only barely work in an office.
I’ve memories of people who had issues keeping themselves and/or desk clean, and it wasn’t some cute story to laugh at, it had a direct impact on their performance and if their managers found any good excuse they’d be out pretty quick.
Then all the IRL office harrasment stuff, the one that looms at a level HR doesn’t give a fuck but you still deal with it every fucking day. Going remote makes it weirdly easier on both sides, I guess some people just couldn’t help it and now they have a private space where they can do what they need to calm down.
I’d say there’s a infinite number of circumstances, up until now we’d just think these people are just not fitted to work at any place. Working remote changes a lot of these pre-requisites.
You've hit the nail on the had, the entire human civilisation could reorganise around smaller cities without the commute to be more healthy, less polluting and more environmentally friendly
Instead we are witnessing whole COVID-is-gone theater only to protect parasite investors that 'invested' in assets that don't produce anything
Something like deductions that cannot be taken when those facilities are not used or not used enough in the development of income.
And props to Apple for adding that Friday PR synergy to the mix!
Edit: my best attempt at a good faith argument here is this: it was a move that was supposed to be in sync with Biden's SOFU comments on returning to the office, but other breaking news affected the plan.
It is always possible for there to be multiple plausible reasons for something, and the least generous assumptions can be frequently incorrect
I am really starting to question if my values align with Google's anymore.
If you go looking for it, you will find it. Doesn't make it true though.
Even regardless of the confidentiality aspect (and we all know how Apple feels about that), for a decent number of folks, they might need some decently expensive equipment that wouldn't make sense to buy for everyone individually.
At least according to how I perceive the company, the folks coming from that side of the business really run things, and so they bring the in office culture with them even to the pure software businesses.
Obviously this is a lot of speculation, but it seems like a reasonable way to explain why they are the way they are.
Imagine trying to make something intuitive and comfortable. How can you even judge that remotely? First you have to ship it around(or else make tons more units), then hope video quality suffices to see everything.
In person you can get 20 people in a room and let them interact with widget x. See how they behave, hear feedback, etc.
I worked for Samsung for a little bit. And even there with operating system basically borrowed from Google, only very small portion of people ever needed to use any special tools. We got some prototypes but the one time we needed to do anything was to desolder and solder again a battery for a prototype watch. And that because a mistake (charging controller circuit badly designed, not powering properly from external power when battery drained). We had one guy do this for the rest of the team and everybody else was just working on software.
I had to go into the office a few times over the pandemic to use some testing equipment, but that was 7 or 8 days in the last 2 years?
-Lou Mannheim
Apple didn't just decide to do it because Google did, they'd already decided it was coming, and perhaps moved up the announcement now that someone (Putin? Google?) took the news cycle.
I also hate the obsession with in office work. I know for many people there's a social aspect to being in the office, but honestly I don't consider 4 hours of commuting each day to be worth the socializing aspect of in office work.
And as an aside- did you have your own office or cubicle, or was it open layout?
> We will then begin the hybrid pilot in full on May 23, with people coming to the office three days a week — on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday — and working flexibly on Wednesday and Friday if you wish.
2 MASSIVE “ifs” there.
Remote wasn’t a choice for the vast majority of people over the past 2 years — it was thrust upon them. And despite what the pro-remote people will say, a huge number of them didn’t thrive because of it. They may have been more productive but they were also more miserable. Remote “worked” because it was the way companies stayed in business - it essentially had to work, even if it sucked for a ton of people. When remote truly becomes a choice then we’ll start to see whether it really works or not.
And then there’s the old saying about markets staying irrational longer than most of us can stay solvent.
Can anyone list some medium-to-biggish orgs with fully remote options? Is there a website somewhere that might have a list?
Think if you worked remotely without covid restrictions, and with a healthy social life outside of work. Wouldn't that be good?
I'm staunch in favour of remote. I like it, it works. But I recognise the benefits of in-person. I would wager that what most people like me want is a bit of control of their schedule and to be able to work in a hybrid manner. The end.
I know as that's what I was going to ask my boss, before he dragged us all back in to the office and stopped remote completely in Nov-21. Most of our team have left and I'm just about to leave.
Hybrid is a reasonable way forward. 100% on-site isn't given everything that's happened, and those are the companies who will lose their employees.
Mostly /s
Having led, grow, and work on remote and hybrid-remote teams for 12+ years now, I almost feel like I just repeat myself all the time when I say the right answer is about flexibility and choice at the team and individual levels, not at a corporate mandate level. And also, maybe it goes without saying, focus on results and outcomes rather than arguing how the sauce has to be made. People will be creative in many settings and supporting them and helping them navigate how they work best (whether that is in an office part-time, full-time, or fully remote) is going to be winning solution. Not biblical commandments like "Thou shalt be in the office 3 days a week."
I wonder if Apple will try to retain remaining employees with a cost of living wage increase.
Which begs the question, does Cook support Ukrainian and on the side of whole world, or is he on the side of invasion? Why is he not helping the sanction, but instead ordering more gas consumption?
I don't know how else to say this, but... No.
Why not Tue,Wed,Thu with Monday and Friday flexible?
so we'll see how that works out for them
