At my workplace they keep nodding at "hybrid" without any specifics and the resulting fear due to uncertainty is far worse than a clear policy that some (many) people might not like...
This is pure supposition based on no evidence. It's entirely a byproduct of a lack of trust in management intentions.
Taking my company as an example, while the executive team has been ambiguous, I know that a full return to 5 days of asses in seats is not being contemplated at all, not the least of which because we don't want to lose ~30% of our staff.
But for the suspicious, it appears to be impossible to convince them otherwise, and even the slightest hint of asking people to come to the office even just one day a month elicits exactly this kind of response.
And the funny thing is, I absolutely understand the suspicion! It's just that, as a person in a leadership position, it makes me want to tear my hair out because I can shout from the rooftops that, no, we're never going to mandate a full return to office, but some folks will simply never believe it.
Hence why I admire what Apple has done, here. They laid out their policy, they've demonstrated their commitment to that policy, and now they're letting the staff make their decision about how they want to react to that policy. Whether you agree with the policy or not, that's far better than ambiguity or constant flip-flopping.
Nobody is going to pay Bay Area salaries so you can live in the woods of Idaho or whatever.
I'm all for remote work but calling it "time theft" feels a bit weird.
You knew these things were a requirement when you signed your contract, right? If you didn't want these things then why didn't you either made a point of them in contract negotiations or simply went to a company that allowed remote work from the start?
This is not entirely fair. Pre-pandemic, remote work was much more difficult to find.
Something I don’t see on HN is how the ideal wfh works for people who can’t afford a study. What if you live with your parents and share with a sibling?
This might not be the case for established six figure programmers in the states. But there are lots of people with less money who might value having a separate space to work.
Might even be the silent majority outside of highly paid developers.
Although now I've got an idea to make coffee shops produce more revenue I'm realizing if the CEO of Starbucks is reading this give me a call.
Worker solidarity raises us all up. Support workers in improving their workplaces rather than blowing them off for making slightly more.
It doesn't make sense to go back to the office for five days a week when we've been working productively during the pandemic already for two years.
(Sarcasm)
To that end, 2 days a week in office seems like a great compromise. Personally, I wouldn't want a long commute to work, so I'd pay a lot to be near my office if I'm going in 5 days a week, but for 2 days a week, I'd have much less problem with say a 1 to 1.5 hour-each-way commute, which drastically opens up options for where I can live. And by requiring people to live in the area, these companies will still need to pay competitive salaries for that area, so this seems like a pretty good compromise.
The demand for good engineers far outstrips the supply, so companies are forced to compete with each other, which is why you get lots of other perks other than salary (free gym, free lunch, free dry cleaning, etc). Any big tech co that decide to pay the same regardless of location will have a huge advantage recruiting and maintaining remote employees. If a remote employee's only option is to jump to another FAANG company for a 15% salary decrease, what motivation will there be to leave?
You've got the order backwards.
Do they pay their teams in Canada, India, China, etc. as much as SV? No.
Isnt this backwards? Isnt the cost of living high because the companies pay so much?
>"... will change the makeup of our workforce [to] younger, whiter, more male-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied"
Was this an issue before COVID? I can see how this policy might help shape the workforce, but not how it would change the workforce from what it already is unless it became more diverse during COVID as a result of flexible WFH options.
I also understand their justification for how these might limit candidates except "whiter" and "neuro-normative", which their letter didn't seem to provide direct reasoning for. I suppose "whiter" might be the result of drawing more from the local population, but again they seem to be arguing that a policy that's still more flexible than pre-COVID will make things worse, which I don't follow.
>*"requiring everyone to relocate to the office their team
Again this shouldn't make things any worse than pre-COVID. Given that full WFH was stated as temporary then no one should need to relocate to accommodate a partial in-person requirement. Not unless they unwisely moved away during the lockdown despite things being temporary or are new hires who also failed to take the temporary status into account.
To reiterate, I'm very sympathetic to their overall complaint, but it appears that they might be doing their case a disservice by implying that this will make some things worse than they already are or were before.
And for some people it's the other way around. I have a colleague who has two young children and a small apartment, and it was very tough for him when work from home and school from home was mandatory.
> I also understand their justification for how these might limit candidates except "whiter" and "neuro-normative", which their letter didn't seem to provide direct reasoning for. I suppose "whiter" might be the result of drawing more from the local population, but again they seem to be arguing that a policy that's still more flexible than pre-COVID will make things worse, which I don't follow.
I suspect race, gender, and height biases are a big deal and substantially mitigated by various kinds of remote work, but I don't have much more to add about these things.
About "neuro-normative," I have ADHD. Open plan offices, while they are a blight upon the productivity of every worker, are substantially worse for me than for other people. Apple literally prevents teams from communicating with other teams. The combination of open plan offices, secrecy, and demands to come to the office and listen to salespeople on calls all day but not discuss your work with more than a few other people is truly mind-blowing.
> Was this an issue before COVID? I can see how this policy might help shape the workforce, but not how it would change the workforce from what it already is…
Don’t disagree with you, but I interpreted their point of comparison to be what would be if there were more WFH flexibility, rather than what is/was.
I am also sympathetic to that line of thinking because while I support diversity efforts, it strikes me that they are often framed around how to make more individuals who are underrepresented in an industry join a company (where they will be still be underrepresented) by relocating to a new community (where they will also be underrepresented), while losing the support of their previously local friends & family. Large companies that care about diversity could instead focus more on opening offices in diverse parts of the country in order create more attractive jobs within those communities, rather than simply bemoaning the challenge of getting underrepresented people to uproot their lives for them. Hopefully increased WFH opportunities will help address this issue.
We're now 20 years later, and they're still referring to it. But when any noninvited ask anything, they all get very very very vague. Whatever happened on the retreat, stays on the retreat. Don't get me wrong, I don't think anything illegal or untoward happened.
It worked. They became a tight social network. Ask anyone anything, and the right person and info magically appears. Even 20 years later, in a very political corporation, the trust built that weekend still persists.
Not saying the retreat was a wholesale bad idea, but it sounds to me like part of the reason it's political could be because there's an in-group and out-group derived from the retreat.
> Can anyone honestly and sincerely tell me that online whiteboards are exactly equivalent to in-person whiteboard sessions?
Of course it's not an exact equivalent, but it doesn't need to be. Anecdotally speaking, the number of whiteboard meetings I had that I wanted to have were about 1 per year. Remote workers use tools like Notion, Miro, Jetbrains Code With me which have many/more of the advantages of a whiteboard.
> There is no value in having lunches together with your colleagues?
This one is company specific, but I don't need to be in the office to go to lunch with my colleagues. In my last office job, I had lunch with 2-3 colleagues maybe twice a week. In my current all remote job, I meet my colleagues once every other week for lunch, and I _still_ meet my previous job colleagues for lunch once a week or so.
> There is no value in body-language when communicating?
Honestly in a business setting with "trusted" coworkers, less so. I tend to take what my colleagues say at face value. With remote work, webcams do a reasonable job of picking up the "I'mn really uncomfortable with something you've just said" and "holy crap they've hit it out of the park". Again, in previous office job, a non-trivial amount of communication _in_ meetings happened in private slack groups that were messaging during the meeting - that still happens today. The big advantage now is that people who would have been steamrolled in meetings have a chance to get their thoughts heard, as most remote teams tend to practice async communciation practices (which are not required but are often combined with remote work)
That's... not all that body language conveys?
Body language helps with basic things like "Oh, Amy is trying to break in and is struggling to make her point", or "Hmm, Doug looks like he's concerned about something, I should ask him his opinion".
Digital A/V communication tools also bring with them a whole host of other sources of friction, including poor audio and video, latency issues, and so forth. They are, at best a weak by tolerable substitute for face-to-face conversations, and quite frankly, IMO anyone who tries to suggest otherwise is not being honest.
You might feel that the tradeoffs are justifiable, but let's not pretend there aren't tradeoffs.
> The big advantage now is that people who would have been steamrolled in meetings have a chance to get their thoughts heard
And conversely, people who type slower or struggle with written communication for various reasons, are significantly disadvantaged.
And that's ignoring the fact that written communication lacks critical nuance (which ends up being poorly filled in with things like emojis) that can lead to confusion and misunderstandings.
If that's not a concern for you then have at it. But if you are at the start or mid way through your career, are motivated and still hungry for advancement I'd be VERY careful of spending too much time full time remote.
At the end of the day employers want to see what their employees are doing and employees want to avoid insane commutes / high COL rents / not feel like they are being spied on all the time, in part cause they maybe do 4 hours of work a day anyway. That's what's driving this. The rest is noise.
This is probably the most honest take I've read. Also, it's been proven WFH on a grand scale is effective over the past 2 years, so many arguments against the efficacy of WFH crumbled over Covid. Bottom line is employers who don't want to allow WFH will have a smaller and more expensive pool than they are accustomed to. There are enough WFH opportunities that going to the office is no longer a given. The current debate is employees who want to WFH that are currently employed by companies who don't want employees to WFH. It will iron itself out in a year or two one way or the other.
FWIW, I've gone to the office 100% of the time maybe 1/2 of my 20+ year career, mostly early on. I've managed to negotiate work from home days, both in the 90s, 00s, and 10s. I WFH full time today. I meet the guys for lunch every week. It's nice and it gets me out of the house. We're a small team though.
It isn't. If you are disabled, black, female, or older, an open-plan office is not a comfortable place. It's a halfway house for frat boys, but people for whom being unfairly evaluated and unjustly terminated is the kind of thing that happens at least once in a career do not, in general, do well in it.
I would argue that you have priced in your commute to your market value when you take a job that requires you to commute, especially since knowledge workers tend to be salary, not hourly.
Given the number of companies that offer fully remote or hybrid work, a comparable company that wants their employees in the office five days a week has to provide higher compensation and/or lower standards to meet their staffing needs.
The important question for companies is not whether they want to be in-person/hybrid/remote in abstract, the question is how much they're willing to pay.
Of course not. They're an ersatz replacement for the in-person thing. They do the job about 90% as well. Is that a problem? In the corporate world, most things are ersatz, if you're not an executive. Mediocre supplies, mediocre management, mediocre training, mediocre pay... why should we force people to shlep just to pretend their jobs aren't mediocre? A standard-issue corporate job can be done from anywhere.
> There is no value in having lunches together with your colleagues?
Again, of course not; but if a company is going to expect or require people to do it, it should foot the bill for the inconveniences caused.
Sorry if I wasn't clear - these lunches have nothing to do with work. I eat lunch sometimes, my colleagues eat lunch sometimes. Sometimes we go out to eat together and socialize. Work doesn't enter into the equation. We lose that benefit when going fully remote.
There is value to me in having lunch with my current colleagues. I also get value out of having lunch with my ex-colleagues who are now just my friends in the same city. We still have lunches together. I am thankful that I used to work in the same city as my colleagues so that this is still possible!
For very extroverted people, the in-person experience might be superior, but I'd be willing to bet they just haven't put effort into connecting in online spaces. Until you've spent thousands of hours doing so, it's hard to knock it legitimately. On the flip side I've seen introverts really open up in these online scenarios in ways they never normally would, and I'm not about to design my entire life around something my team doesn't even want.
To each their own, I suppose, but I find this unhealthy. I would encourage my child to be interactive in person, not to hide behind the computer. I say this as a WFH IT employee who games - the desire to be away from people in person, the desire not to interact with others, the disdain for in-person contact, are all symptoms of a problem in my view.
I don't mean it to say I think less of people who are like this, or that they are worthy of derision. I simply think it is bad for the individual and the community.
And FYI there are plenty of extroverted engineers. Some of us actually enjoy team sports as well as technical problems.
The internet has been my main source of social contact since I was 12 (at which point I just stopped going outside and spent all my time building websites), so I guess I've adapted to this way of living.
The online whiteboard works great when one person is adding to it and it's easier to read (you don't have to deal with people's terrible handwriting) and you can save it.
In most cases I've found that only one person is usually writing on the whiteboard, everyone else is just pointing at it and making suggestions. So the one person with an iPad that is sharing it's screen is usually more than sufficient for online white boarding.
The rest of it you're right, seeing body language is helpful, getting a chance to hang out socially is helpful. But not helpful enough to outweigh working from home given that I already have a social circle.
If work were my social circle, like it was when I was younger, it would be a whole different story.
Very often back when I worked in an office.
> The online whiteboard works great when one person is adding to it and it's easier to read (you don't have to deal with people's terrible handwriting) and you can save it.
We took pictures of our whiteboards when we needed to save state, it worked great!
> In most cases I've found that only one person is usually writing on the whiteboard, everyone else is just pointing at it and making suggestions. So the one person with an iPad that is sharing it's screen is usually more than sufficient for online white boarding.
I'm glad you are able to make it work for you!
> But not helpful enough to outweigh working from home
I'm with you on this! I'll never go back to an office full time.
All changes in complex systems have tradeoffs. In-person whiteboard sessions can be exhilarating. They also tend to produce imprecise (or no) artifacts that rely heavily on the context of the meeting for interpretation.
I noticed that when our team went remote during COVID and ideation was done by async contributions to design docs, the completeness and reliability of our designs went way up. But again, it's never all positive. If there was a design that was underspecified or not fully understood by the team member leading it, the siloing could lead to analysis paralysis.
I'm not sure where you got that I said that, if you read what I wrote you'll see that I've been fully remote for over a decade. I don't in any way insist that fully remote work needs to be exactly the same as in-office work.
The tooling that has been developed during the pandemic has taken this space forward by leaps and bounds and I expect this to continue.
Instead of focusing on the how, I would focus on the outcomes you are looking for and lets investigate paths forward for those outcomes.
My two cents: There is still body language over video calls, Miro and other whiteboarding solutions work pretty well, not every day needs intense whiteboarding sessions so have onsites when those are required, and good riddance to the lunches with colleagues. If we wanna have lunch let's get on a call and/or have some one-on-one time setup instead of thinking that lunch is somehow a team building exercise.
Not to mention the IMMENSE benefits you get from remote work. Having those tradeoffs and changing the way we work: I am all in.
This is a totally fair point, but multi-cursor online whiteboards are not the same as standing in front of a whiteboard and brainstorming with a colleague. "Zoom happy hour" or whatever cannot replace spontaneous lunches, after-work drinks, pre-work coffees, etc.
> ... it just requires some thinking and investment, IMO.
I agree and understand, but let's not pretend we're not asking everyone to essentially "beta test" WFH and endure the friction of finding these new techniques. There are tradeoffs here and it's not a seamless transition. Remote work is a skill that needs honing, whereas office work is 'the standard'.
> Not to mention the IMMENSE benefits you get from remote work. Having those tradeoffs and changing the way we work: I am all in.
Working remotely has immense benefits, I agree. I agree so whole-heartedly that I will never work in an office again. That being said, despite all its benefits, there are tradeoffs that don't have equivalents in the WFH world. Anyone that dismisses working from an office entirely is either ignorant or being dishonest, in my opinion.
No. Online whiteboards have benefits that in-person whiteboard sessions do not, obviously.
> There is no value in having lunches together with your colleagues?
No, obviously there is value in having lunches together with your colleagues, just as there are downsides.
> There is no value in body language when communicating?
There is value in body language, just as there is probably more value in well-written communication.
> I think it's a bit naive or dishonest to say that it's exactly the same work experience
Many people who oppose returning to the office would agree with you. It's a much-improved work experience.
> but there are some things you just cannot replicate online or with video calls.
Exactly, and I agree with you. It is much safer.
A predominantly WFH experience is, in pretty much all your examples, a better experience than working every day from the office. Suggesting it's merely as good as working form the office does it a great disservice.
Is it obvious though? They're garbage for most of the teams I've worked with. They're tolerable to the rest.
> No, obviously there is value in having lunches together with your colleagues, just as there are downsides.
Ok, but I'm asserting some valuable things being lost by going fully remote only, it doesn't do either side of the argument any good to be so ambiguous and non-committal to a point.
> There is value in body language, just as there is probably more value in well-written communication.
Fair point! I don't know that I have ever, anywhere, read any informal text or technical document that could communicate the nuances of body language effectively and entirely though. I'm jealous that you work with such perfect communicators!
> Many people who oppose returning to the office would agree with you. It's a much-improved work experience.
I totally agree, it is much improved, even if we lost a lot of valuable things in the transition.
> A predominantly WFH experience is, in pretty much all your examples, a better experience than working every day from the office. Suggesting it's merely as good as working form the office does it a great disservice.
I did not do any such thing. I'm saying fully remote work is great, but we're losing a lot, so let's not pretend that we aren't. There are facets to in-person work that are completely lost and not translatable to fully remote work.
Digital whiteboards are trivial to share, recover, modify and maintain. They're light-years beyond the limited physical variety. My team leans heavily on Miro, for instance.
> Lunch
Lunch time is a break. Not everyone wants to spend their break with their coworkers; but even for those that do, nothing is preventing you from having a conference call or video call over lunch.
> Body language
Not everyone understands or can engage in body language. Many people find it ancient inducing that their appearance and movements are under constant judgement. WFH is equalizing for them.
I use Mira too, it's great! But it's not the same as brainstorming on a whiteboard with your colleagues in the same room.
> Lunch time is a break. Not everyone wants to spend their break with their coworkers; but even for those that do, nothing is preventing you from having a conference call or video call over lunch.
That's cool and I fully support your desire to do whatever you want on your break. For a lot of my breaks when I worked in the office I ended up sharing them with colleagues and made several (hopefully) life-long friends out of the habit!
> Not everyone understands or can engage in body language. Many people find it ancient inducing that their appearance and movements are under constant judgement. WFH is equalizing for them.
I understand! However I can understand body language and I find a lot of value in it. It's easier to empathize and relate to my colleagues when I can understand them better through body language when we're talking about life. If we worked in the same office you'd be free to have lunch (or whatever you want to do while I go have lunch) by yourself without judgement from me!
Well you sure as hell aren't going to get better at it by throwing up your hands and declaring it just isn't for you. I'm naturally introverted, but when I say that to co-workers they don't believe it - because over the years I have learned to adapt. I'm very extroverted at work - because it's necessary. Yup, I pay a price - it's exhausting and I need time to recharge. But the benefits of adapting to normal work environments instead of demanding the world adapt to me are immeasurable.
There are tons of things I can do now that I couldn't do before. Many of them are unpleasant. But they are necessary and without many of them I wouldn't be anywhere near where I am today. Good luck with waiting for the world to adapt to you. Let's get back together in 30 years and see how that attitude works for you. I'm sure the universe will have been incredibly unfair to you :p
This whole victim = anything hard/I just don't want to do is getting old. And it devalues people with legitimate issues.
I find that people actually give away more with their body language over whatever conferencing software you may use. When you have all the portraits up on your screen, the little micro things are much easier to spot. I hope I didn't give you even more anxiety! We are just trying to see how people feel in order to manage the situation :)
So no, without a tablet to draw on I find online whiteboards 100% useless so far.
(Btw, this took me on a tangent trying to figure out the proper way to pluralize 'only'.)
There's tradeoffs to everything, the market is going to decide whether remote work is viable or not. Maybe the Apple tier companies can force office work, but startups that are remote are going to be able to snag some great talent who refuse to waste hours of their lives commuting
in my experience the people pushing for return to office are 95% managers who are feeling exposed that they don't really do much and potentially aren't needed. Also people who relied on office politics to survive rather than actually being good at their job
Not every perk is about oppressing your freedom or exploiting your time and labor.
I always went out by myself when I wanted to eat alone, or sat at my desk with headphones in watching Youtube and eating.
You can communicate with people to help them understand you'd like your break to be a solitary one.
We're a social species. Building relationships is something we do. Is it work? Yes. But it's also something we need to do.
Apple choosing the office over WFH in 2022 feels a lot like the US choosing coal over solar in the early 2000s - a manifestation of the sunk cost fallacy that will look short-sighted embarrassingly soon.
If that's not important to you - like you are towards the end of your career and pretty much happy with where you are - then that's a trade off that might not have as big an impact. But it IS a trade off and people need to be honest about it and stop hiding behind ridiculous gobbledygook like the crap that was at the start of that employee letter.
I've worked in software for > 20 years. I've been a tech lead of a few projects that shipped and YOU likely use in your daily everyday life. Outside of interviews, i've had to use a real-life whiteboard ... twice ...
That's neat! I hope you don't think your anecdotal evidence discredits my own anecdotal evidence about how useful they are. People use different tools and I'm guessing you're not intending to say folks that have been productively using whiteboards for decades are somehow wrong.
Doing things correctly would help if you were in the office too, but you can paper over the inefficiencies of doing things incorrectly by wasting more time on the backchannel communication face-to-face.
Having lunch with colleagues has nothing to do with 'backchannel communication'. Sometimes it's nice to hear about where we like to go camping, or what cities are nice to visit in their home countries, or ... nothing to do with work or shipping products.
No matter how 'correctly' you think you're doing things, you still haven't convinced me after over a decade of shipping products that online whiteboards are useful, or refuted any of my other points.
It not obvious what carrot or stick motivates people to deliver. But there has to be a way to achieve what the team|org|company wants even with remote workers. As a company - clearly specify and quantify goals, regularly share metrics of progress, provide better tools for working and focus on the long-term.
In person I am socially clueless and add next to nothing to the whiteboard.
Also, unlike Meet/Zoom, in VR you share everyone's screens at the same time (show a virtual monitor/laptop for each persion, have multiple shared whiteboards, have different people virtually standing in front of different whiteboards, etc....
No one even made that claim. From the open letter:
> We definitely see the benefits of in-person collaboration; the kind of creative process that high bandwidth communication of being in the same room, not limited by technology, enables. But for many of us, this is not something we need every week, often not even every month, definitely not every day.
I, personally, get just as much work done working from home. While I do miss the social aspect of the office, it’s just not worth giving up the hours of commute time or dealing with a lot of the in-person bs that work entails.
I realize this is a very privileged position but I’ll keep doing it as long as it’s an option.
There are great tools, which should be available for every worker in home, but that does not happen for some reason?
Not for me, no. I'm neurodiverse, and that shit is just lost on me.
You might as well complain that you are missing out on being able to tell racist jokes with your same-race buddies, because you're missing out on the benefits of social bonding.
Sure. single-cis-straight-white-neurotypical-abletypical-male can be super optimized, or the equivalent in what ever is the dominant race (looking at salarymen in Japan).
Feel free to continue to argue that position.
I hear you and understand. Lots of people are neuro-normative though, and that stuff is valuable. Let's not assert that remote-only is the Best® though, because for a lot of folks, there is a loss of fidelity in communication going fully remote only.
> You might as well complain that you are missing out on being able to tell racist jokes with your same-race buddies, because you're missing out on the benefits of social bonding.
Believe it or not, some people bond over things they have in common that don't have anything to do with racism. You probably have some prejudices or biases leaking through your comment that you might want to explore privately.
> Sure. single-cis-straight-white-male can be super optimized, or the equivalent in what ever is the dominant race (looking at salarymen in Japan).
When I go to lunch and talk to my colleague about her favorite places to snorkel, my sexuality, gender, relationship status or race never come up in the conversation. Have you tried having conversations with folks without making it about you?
I sympathize with your point, but object strongly to this analogy on the grounds that being racist is a choice, while benefiting from body language is not a choice. It's also very offensive, but that is a secondary issue.
I had my own office as intern. When I needed focus time (which is a lot of time as a developer), I could close a door.
Especially with Apple’s open-concept HQ, the delta between WFH and office is larger than it has to be.
The market is speaking. Apple pays well below the rest of FAANG already. Because of their policy, they can only recruit from a narrow, already highly-paid pool of developers. I know an Apple manager that is leaving partly because he can’t recruit anyone to come work for him.
Yeah. I think this is significantly being understated.
There is a VAST difference between "in person" meaning "You have your own office" and "in person" meaning "Open office plan with no dividers at all".
For the first, I wouldn't have much of an issue coming in. For the second, I'd probably take up pitchforks to avoid it.
Now I need to keep track of which days of the week they have to be in the office, because traffic in Cupertino will be 2x-3x worse on the days they are in the office.
Their choice of forcing everyone back on the same day is not only bad for their workers, but it's bad for all of their neighbors and the planet.
That being said, I really do miss the traffic from those first few weeks of the pandemic, when I could get from Cupertino to the airport in 12 minutes at 6pm (a drive that now takes about 25 minutes, and pre-pandemic took 45+).
This was a common source of frustration for employees because they couldn't just work at the office closest to them or work from home. Very few people I knew there worked directly along side their team while I was there. I'm sure this wasn't true for everyone though, however I think it was at least at the time, the majority.
Another extroverted MBA who doesn't understand why many engineers need big, unbroken chunks of silence & concentration to do great work.
I say this as someone who works from home and is a huge WFH advocate.
We need to stop assuming every role in an org revolves around “I stare at my screen for 9 hours do not interrupt me.”
I'm with the engineer on this.
Yes, you need that focus time. But running into someone on another team can be very valuable - you might learn that they're solving the same problem, you might learn that they're consuming the same API you're trying to figure out, you might learn that they're planning on working with your team in a few weeks, etc.
I would argue the benefits of having more of your state in Slack more than make up for “surprise productive watercooler meeting” thing that managers are so hot on. I think I’ve had that interaction maybe twice in 25+ years, and one of those times was just pointless gossip in the end.
That's a good point. I would go so far as to say that the majority of what engineers do is communicate with their future selves and other engineers, in that writing software is to use a communication medium. What code you write today will need to be read and understood later. What the code does on the computer is only a part of software.
Out of all the companies out there, I'd imagine Apple benefits from this the least. With all the badge-locked doors, literal curtains hiding projects from one another, and internal NDAs preventing one engineer from even disclosing what they are working on with another engineer, cross-pollination of ideas is going to be almost impossible. "Serendipitous conversations" is not something that comes to mind when one thinks about Apple's internal engineering culture.
I understand that people like work from home, but implying engineering can’t be done in an office building is overselling the issue by quite a bit.
The products you listed are hardware products (with integrated software) which are much more difficult to work on remotely, especially in a company that prioritizes secrecy as much as Apple does.
https://www.macrumors.com/2017/08/09/apple-park-employees-op...
I think even office areas are not equatable and greatly depends on the team.
At Apple employees in a hallway will not be allowed to talk about each other's projects at all. All the product directives are strictly top down. As an individual engineer you have zero say in the product and very little in broader engineering decisions.
And... I would say a majority of the major project setbacks / failures I've seen over my career have not been due to engineering failures, but have been due to either:
1) Misalignment or lack of agility about priorities / goals and inter-team dependencies. Situations where people and teams put their heads down and do a lot of engineering... that ends up not being the right engineering.
2) Interpersonal conflicts that simmer, escalate, and aren't defused early enough and harm collaboration.
In theory, both of these could be addressed well in fully remote environments, with careful product, product, and people management.
In practice, I have personally seen it be much easier to head these problems off in environments where people are having regular informal face-to-face and non-transactional interactions. The lunch / coffee break / hallway-chat-after-the-meeting sort of discussions. Even being in separate buildings across a large tech campus has been a barrier to this.
Again, I would be personally happy to WFH, but I do feel I've multiple times seen significant project and company-level benefits from shared workspace interaction, so there are tradeoffs.
Not sure I would call him an extrovert either.
But enough about the Wall Street Journal
Most of my success has been because I'd spoken, independently and unofficially, to people in unrelated divisions who hadn't met who _really needed to talk_. I don't expect others to take this on because they're almost definitely busier than me. And I don't necessarily like taking to people, but I'm really good at this one stupidly simple thing, and I'd rather be the one getting dragged into the meetings instead of everyone else so they can focus.
It's why corporate org charts are so bullshit to me; the real work happens when people can form their best structures, which typically takes knowing who you're working with or being known by someone who can protect that for you. For some, that's churning out work while being with their families way the fuck away from everyone else. For others, it's being wherever they can get some perspective and inspiration digging in and deciding something about the trajectory of the org they're at, usually involving people. If it works, it's valid.
I can say as someone who now works full time remote while also geographically isolated, it's not all a bed of roses. I do miss the serendipitous hallway conversations - some of the best directions in my career came from those spontaneous and unplanned in person interactions. I'm toward the end of my career so I now have enough contacts and informal interactions with folks where I can still force those kinds of engagements; if I need to. 10 years ago? No way would I be happy working remotely full time. You just can't get the connections and synergies unless you are in close proximity to other folks; especially those outside of your immediate work unit but still relevant to your work.
A lot of these younger folks pushing for full time remote at the start of their career are putting themselves into a box I don't think they fully appreciate - and won't until it's too late. In a way I'm glad telework didn't become more accepted until later in my career - I absolutely wouldn't be where I am today if I had been full time remote - I wouldn't have had near the opportunities to connect and be noticed.
For example, so many people are going about saying that they should be paid the same whether they work in SF or Topeka. And the assumption is that means people in Topeka will be paid SF salaries. And that may be true for a few years while we are still inside an extremely tight labor market. However, once there is the slightest bit of slack, it's far more likely that employees in SF will be paid Topeka salaries.
A few years further it's even more likely that people in Topeka and SF will be paid Bangalore or Rio or Mexico City salaries.
If there's no benefit from being geographically co-located, then the market should drive everyone to locate themselves in the cheapest geographies possible.
Now, this may not actually be true, even in a looser labor market, and there may be other reasons that would lead to salaries across Topeka and SF remaining at SF levels, but a clear eyed discussion would start from the earlier assumption, that salaries would drop, and then justify why that wouldn't happen.
What I'm seeing instead is that everyone is assuming that salaries will rise, and then operating based entirely on that assumption, without any discussion about why this may or may not be true.
It seems like the software developer market has much more hiring activity than pre-pandemic so I don't think equalizing to the cheapest geography/salary for remote is going to happen. It appears the trend upwards with a labor shortage is more the case that "A rising tide lifts all boats" type of thing where other markets are also trending upwards.
What would be more interesting about remote work is a discussion about the labor shortage. Is it because more people are leaving for more pay and causing a ripple effect in the place they left (like a game of musical chairs)? Are there a lot more VC, therefore startups and just more open positions?
Although this may force people to skip the overrated bubbles.
Some of that is possible remotely, but I don't think it would have been the same as there was a lot of on and off collaboration and chatting over the course of a month sitting side by side. Especially with someone senior who worked on a parallel team where we might not have talked as much if we'd only been meeting through meetings.
And as someone who's managed teams during the pandemic, I'll say that I saw WFH be especially challenging for some earlier-career folks and new hires, who I've seen trying to learn everything "on their own" and feeling a bit adrift. I went out of my way to have more 1:1 check-ins with them, set them up with other senior peers for regular video "coffee chats" and mentorship opportunities, and so on. But it was challenging.
I've also seen Slack be a powerful force for new or junior people asking questions about how to use a tool or the history of some decision (once we built a culture of "it's fine to just ask questions to this channel, no question is dumb"), especially across teams or offices, so async digital collaboration is powerful as well, of course.
So maybe it would be just different. But hard for me to wrap my head around.
I'm not sure what you're saying here. Do you not think neuro-normativity is a real thing? Or do you think that neuro-divergent people will be worse off with a truly flexible work-from-home policy?
I don't think they are requesting that the office cease to exist. It sounds like they want a hybrid approach that has no required office time.
> A lot of these younger folks pushing for full time remote at the start of their career are putting themselves into a box I don't think they fully appreciate
This is condescending. It assumes that people who want full-time remote are not aware of the trade offs. I try to think better of people when they make an effort at self-determination. They know their lives better than I do, I imagine.
"They said that Apple's reasons for implementing the policy don't stand up, and that the policy is wasteful, inflexible and will lead to a "younger, whiter, more male-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied" workforce."
I, for one, have no idea what neuro-normative means.
Anywho, u/EricE isn't agreeing or disagreeing. They're just advising that people can just state their preference plainly, no tortured nonsensical rationalizations necessary.
"If you're explaining, you're losing." -- Lee Atwater
Labor now has greater power. Wield it. Those who would take away your power don't bother to explain themselves. Why should Labor?
Unless, of course, you'd rather be right, over actually winning.
These kids could enter a fully WFH workforce without blinking an eye and continue to develop life long relationships with their new colleagues if they desired. I've done both. But to be honest, the only friends I've maintained from previous in person jobs are the ones who I also connected with via a chat program.
It's about spontaneous and unplanned interactions that provide new paths for you. Yes, you can still have those remotely - but they are no where nearly as frequent, nor anywhere near as impactful. They simply can't be - your fighting millions of years of social evolution if you think otherwise. Heck I doubt most of us remember a fraction of spontaneous in person interactions with others in our day to day life - but let me tell you there are a handful in my past that made all the difference in where I am today. None would have happened if I had been working remotely.
Not one of them.
You simply can't quantize the value of those interactions and I fear for those who are seemingly so willing to casually tossing those away. Yes, commuting sucks. Yes, committing to a schedule sucks. Yes, listening to the same story from Bob for the millionth time while you are trying to focus on something else sucks. But there are other benefits that are irreplaceable too.
Probably the best illustration I can think of in pop culture is the Star Trek:TNG episode where Picard's artificial heart dies and he has that whole near death experience with Q. It's a great analogy for this whole discussion. I'm too am glad I had the bloody nose early on and the much more interesting life overall.
Nearly all of our younger hires have their social networks _entirely online_, and most of our older employees are in a similar situation albeit with a few token IRL friends.
That said, I work in game development and I suspect that causes some selection bias.
I wish it were same, but, even as someone who grew up with more online relationships than meatspace ones, I'd be lying if I said it is. Maybe VR in some 15-minutes-after-tomorrow future can bridge the gap.
I experienced how "not the same" it is with in-person and then remote interactions with other young people in college classes and then with older people in work, and, in both cases, I felt things were lost once we went remote.
I'm in my 30s now, and much of this is unfamiliar to me, but I'm interested in learning more about it. My social network has definitely shrunk significantly these past two years.
This 100%—I worked remotely for my first 5 years after graduating college, and I thought it was great until I went into a real office and found out what I was missing. I vowed to never work a remote job again (of course, the pandemic forced a quick end to that vow, hah.)
People work differently, commuting is a nightmare and gets worse every year, if you want to be in an office I don't think you'll have trouble finding a job to accommodate. A few years before the pandemic I swore I'd never commute again and I intend to live out the rest of my career that way. You will never catch me commuting every day.
Barring a union contract, seeking shelter via anti-discrimination laws is the best aircover. So you shift from complaining about work conditions to complaining about conditions that do not reasonably accommodate a protected condition.
Being not “neuro-normative” is a great one to use as it feeds into tech stereotypes and is really difficult to disprove.
But trying to explain this to folks who consider their office careers as pinnacle of their lives with some numbers on account to back this up are relatively high is often futile. Something about strong resistance to admitting mistakes done / direction taken in life that can't be undone.
I don't get why things need to be strictly this or that. Some way in between is almost always best. My needs may be very different from next guy's needs, but as long as we deliver what is expected who cares about the details.
Or to summarize this for those in back seats - WFH gains are not in added work productivity for most (some achieve that, mainly due to crappy offices) but what we gained for our personal lives while still able to perform enough. Its not even only about commuting, for me its 20 mins each way, but overall amount of freedom I gained is massive. Life is damn too short. Don't do decisions that you will almost guaranteed regret later. Chasing career is frequently quoted as #1 regret by dying folks.
I say let the experiment run. It will soon become apparent.
- open layout offices are awful places to work where many people struggle to focus at all, to the point where their work is negatively impacted
- separating home location from work location opens up opportunities to work places certain people would never have considered before, unless they wanted to leave their friends/family/social groups/etc. behind
- cutting out a commute every day saves folks time, money, stress, and likely cuts down on a lot of wasteful greenhouse gas emissions
I'm relatively early in my career, but I also love WFH compared to in-office work. Why? I hated the commute, I don't like socializing with my coworkers outside of actual work, and I struggle to focus with folks on calls around me and without decent thermostat control. I acknowledge that some people can deal with all of those things, still be productive, and reap the benefits of in-person work. But there are also those of us whose careers have skyrocketed in the past couple of years specifically because we have a working arrangement that works better for us now.
It's hard to say how much this will impact my career trajectory in the long term. But I'm also more concerned about my private social life and hobbies than I am about my career, and remote work works far better for that, too.
TL;DR: Different strokes for different folks. Young people are not doomed by remote work.
because then suddenly you draw a conclusion that all personal spontaneity which has life-changing implications must happen in person (and that only these kinds of interactions can be serendipitous) and must happen according to <whatever arbitrary rules you think governs (your personal, remember) interactions>.
however your lens fails to resolve the context for what it is: a set of circumstances around how you personally lived (and worked).
Nothing more, nothing less.
many moons ago i happened to accidentally click on a game server for a game i play which has quite a niche, but super competitive online gaming community (fps). i quickly found myself in a server where there were a handful of people spectating a couple of people playing. all very casually. sometimes taking turns.
i then discovered each person in the server was a professional player, who previously and currently for the time competed for money, and were to varying degrees successful. i spent the remainder of my night unexpectedly well, not playing, and just watching. hanging. getting pointers.
ultimately it led to me making some cool friends, but specifically finding a mentor -- one of them took me under their wing and taught me how to really play the game. that interaction alone pushed me to not only stick with the game and to become a better player -- which under this person's guidance was crazy because of the knowledge they possessed -- but it also left me with a life-long friend.
this friendship is one i very much so value, and it was formed totally accidentally, unexpectedly, serendipitously, and completely 100% virtual -- i have yet to meet this person, or any of the others (they are foreign) in person to this day.
that is one of many personal experiences i have had on the internet.
i have absolutely no idea how people arrive at a general conclusion that `office == only_vector_for_serendipity` other than this line of thinking being a direct consequence of drinking Steve Jobs'/Apple kool-aid (ie: designing bathroom layouts to favor random interactions), while also conflating personal experience with universal truth-ness.
that does not mean in-person interactions, random or otherwise, serve no purpose (ever work with someone who has valuable input but often self-censors? body language is hard to hide). i am just baffled as to how one can make such a sweeping statement about a thing being absolutely necessary.
Perhaps Apple cannot acknowledge the foot in their mouth because it would contribute to a systemic collapse of the commercial real estate market... crazy times.
It's hard not to notice that so many of the complaints around return to work from SV area posters centre around commuting woes.
If SV cities were compact, walkable places where people could easily walk, bike and take transit to work returning to work wouldn't cause so much grief.
People are upset at the notion of a return to an hours long commute on the highway. If their commute was a 15 minute bike ride there'd be less opposition.
Apple built the wrong thing in the wrong place, and never became politically involved in trying to make life better for their employees.
Humans need extrinsic motivation. Outside of overheated labour markets, this is going to be a real problem. Expect intrusive monitoring to become widespread if wfh persists.
That next week, a recruiter from BigTech sent me a message about applying for a software engineering position. I asked them would it be permanently remote. They said “no”. I was about to end the conversation. But then we kept talking and they suggested I talk to another department that was always designed to be remote. I got a job there.
There are way too many opportunities for software engineers to be begging a company to WFH.
If WFH was so terrible for business there should be ample proof, but so far it has only be shown to be a success.
Correlation != Causation
I personally don't plan to commute to an open office just to use software tools designed for remote work at a desk there instead of my more comfortable, quieter one at home. If I had a private office at work then maybe I'd reconsider.
There is certainly some desire for controlling the workers. But for the most part this is about access to the cash flow commuting workers generate.
The Mayor of New York for instance has made many public declarations about everyone needing to get back to the office, but this is just one public example. Any city has these same pressures, they're simply more acute in NY. Unless you go back to the office you won't spend a ton of money you wouldn't need to otherwise. This is the crux of it.
Not every company needs to have the exact same policies on everything.
Is what you’re saying here.
They’re trying to make company changes to improve their relationship with someone they like to work for, without using the nuclear option.
If this is a deal breaker, yes. But this kind of approach is a last resort. Why shouldn't someone try to influence company policy before taking such a drastic step?
Why force either?
But I understand it's far easier for companies to pick one and apply (especially Apple and other large companies who have invested heavily in expensive real estate that would otherwise sit empty).
At least at home I don't need to feel like there's someone standing over my shoulder.
[1]: https://appletogether.org/hotnews/thoughts-on-office-bound-w...
This may be an opportunity for companies who need technical teams, but aren't able to compensate at FAANG levels, to compete.
[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/nyregion/google-buys-buil...
The longer companies waffle on these policies the more likely it is they will hamper recruitment and face attrition to companies with more consistent policies.
In-office is much less effective when your team is distributed across multiple sites/time zones anyway which seems to be the new normal.
Get this, our meetings are on zoom in the office anyways. lol
They are free to leave and enrich other companies.
should the response always be to leave? what about fighting to try to make the place you are currently in better?
Two years later, I onboarded many people on my team, figured out productive ways to collaborate remotely and developed very much real friendships with people I have never been in the same room with.
It takes effort to ensure people have a forum to ask questions, mentor people or just hang out online. But it's not impossible.
Doesn't forcing people to work with home lead to this more? Not everyone has an available, suitable work space at home, and those who don't or who have noisy families etc (generally less white, male, etc etc) are likely to miss opportunities they could have taken in an office.
Making this a social justice issue is a weird, speculative way to deal with this. Why bring gender and race into it, why not just argue the merits (which do seem to be in favour of remote work). Seems a silly letter to me.
That said, being remote or hybrid first seems like it would be a huge competitive advantage for a least some teams in Apple...like the Facetime team.
I tried using their "new" like zoom Facetime meeting with a URL feature for a work-related meeting. The lack of basic functionality like a text chat to share links and other notes in shows that Apple either doesn't actually use Facetime for their own remote meetings or they have no idea how most people use these types of tools to collaborate.
If Apple suffers in the market as a result, their executives will be gently kicked out with substantial severance packages, and workers will be laid off en masse. That's an anti-worker result.
Win-win for executives, lose-lose for workers.
Instead I’m often felt feeling like someone at apple said “we can do this better” but gets distracted shortly after deploying the MVP.
We've reached a technological tipping point when it comes to flexibility. Either embrace it or die.
I've had my head in my hands watching one of our departments efforts trying to hire staff (who are forcing in-office presence), they cannot find the employees and are now offering other benefits to compensate. No dice. Not their fault, it's being forced by directors. From afar, I'm watching the slow death of the company as existing talent withiers and isn't replaced.
Embrace it or die.
I'm almost 40, and most of my work life has been at the office (like most people who have experienced work pre-Covid). I also spent ~5 years WFH when running my small startup, although now I'm back in the corporate. In my opinion, and from asking around, what many people want is "choice". Hybrid seems to be that.
> They said that Apple's reasons for implementing the policy don't stand up, and that the policy is wasteful, inflexible and will lead to a "younger, whiter, more male-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied" workforce
How does this even work?
Work from home also allowed for more schedule flexibility - it's hard to run an errand, pick the kids up from school, etc. when that's a 15 minute trip, rather than having to commute back home. This burden often falls disproportionately on women, and workers with families (who are likely slightly older than those who don't).
Removing the constraint of "You have to have the capital to move to SV to work here" allows hiring from a broader and more diverse pool of groups with less generational wealth, which means likely a more diverse body of job candidates.
Whether you agree with this or not, there is a logic behind it. Heck, I think they actually missed a couple axes of workers Apple is going to miss out on.
is this true?
Majority of ppl do not want to work in an office after working from anywhere past two years. We want our freedom as all have shown to do our jobs successfully remotely no need to go back to an office ever!
Work life is forever changed.
Cities whose economies are hurting and will continue to hurt I say need to turn that commercial real estate into remote worker fully furnished and temporary apartments. Place for remote workers who can...city hop every 3 to 6 to 9 month to 12 months. I'd enjoy city hop remote working as nothing really is tying me down .. those Im dating and or in a relationship can join me or visit me and I can experience living in different cities like Chicago, Honolulu, Seattle, Miami, Austin, etc
I mean, they're just asking you to come to the building 3 days a week.
I feel confident we'll begin to see HOAs justifying their grass-length rules because "longer lawns disproportionately affect historically oppressed, disabled, and neurodivergent persons"
This is not a great trend, if you care about equality in society, because shit is getting so watered down it's about meaningless.
Which is only possible for people who live in the same hemisphere as the building and have citizenship or visa.
Remote work is international work.
Edit: just imagine if the text said "younger, blacker, more female-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied"
Or "younger, more Jewish, more male-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied"
We blew five billion dollars on Apple Park. its a monument and a testament to the ineffable power and glory of our babel made manifest. You will attend this church of man in blessed reverence or you will find the cold streets at your feet.
[1] https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2021/12/apple-poisoned-me-...
[2] https://disasterarea.home.blog/2019/07/12/apple-headquarters...
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/04/apple-reports-second-...
Does anyone take tossing around words like this seriously anymore?
I am pro working remotely, but this is just ridiculous.
Younger = less likely to have a family so commutes are not as big of an issue + the many responsibilities of having a kid that are easier to manage wfh
Whiter = this is the one that I have the least contextual evidence for off the top of my head, but feel safe assuming it's at least partially true given the other factors
Male-Dominated = the kid issues raised above certainly affect women more than men
Neuro-normative = designing your own wfh space + not requiring travel to an office seems pretty clearly better for neuro-divergent people, especially when the office still exists for those that need to utilize it
Able-bodied = much easier to wfh when you're in a wheelchair, don't have to commute with eyesight impairments, etc
I'm physically disabled. I use a wheelchair, which makes commuting hard, and a reclining desk which is too big to fit in an open office. I can't type much, so I sometimes rely on dictation and eye tracking. I definitely can't do that in an open office. I have a bunch of doctor's appointments, weekly PT etc. and sometimes I'm too fatigued to work, so I have to crash, so I end up with weird schedules.
despite this, I've invented several critical algorithms for extremely hard problems that helped our company scale, along with singlehandedly writing tons of formally-verified distributed systems infrastructure. I'm valuable enough to keep around despite being damaged goods. hence I have permanent WFH. still miss the office sometimes though.
In this case it seems like lazy people throwing everything at the wall, including prejudice, to prevent going to work.
Love to see the source of data that supports every single one of these issues.
I remember the Google memo from James Demore was backed by sources unlike this letter.
