These companies touting their solutions for creating a more connected world can't have it both ways. Apple was able to ship the M1 and roll out new iterations of many other offerings since the pandemic hit. They're just fine.
Apple didn't collapse since the pandemic hit, and the flexibility offered by remote work is far more valuable to lots of people than the loss of in-person collaboration opportunities. We deserve to have input into how we work best and if that means walking away from companies run by egomaniacs that need to see butts in seats, then so be it.
Not to undermine your point, wich which i agree wholeheartedly, but I wanted to address one thing.
I imagine quite a lot of people who worked on M1 hardware probably still had to show up to the office. For some positions it is just required. A friend of mine who worked on hardware at Apple had to go to the office almost every day throughout the pandemic (and no, i dont know what product he worked on, and I am not going to ask given the whole thing with apple being extremely secretive). So clearly, there are certain scenarios for certain positions which might require the person to work in the office.
However, to support your point, that director of ML in the article had been working remote for the past 2 years just fine. So clearly he wasn't in the same position as my friend, and that director's position didn't really have a need for him to be in the office. Which is why imo it was silly to lose him just because of such an unnecessarily arbitrary rule.
Typically the positions for which work is "just required" are lab and hardware positions. These don't tend to have the shoulder-to-shoulder squeeze of humans and desks that I always see in open-plan offices.
Any time I have worked in a lab or on electronic hardware, I have had around 10 times the amount of personal space compared to the tightly packed "collaborative" open-plan offices that consist of programmers sitting at desks with monitors with their headphones on and desperately trying to focus.
I'd be much more enthusiastic about returning to the office if I had a private office with a door, Fog Creek style.
I had an office with a door and window for 12 years at 2 different companies. It was great. I left the door open 90% of the time but it was great to be able to close the door for privacy the other 10%.
I changed to a much better job in 2019 regarding work and salary but everyone including the VP's are in cubicles. It is really annoying when everyone around you is on a different conference call and you have to block them out while trying to have your own conference call.
I only had to deal with that for 6 months before the pandemic sent us all home for 2 years. We are supposed to be in the office 3 times a week for the last 2 months. Some days I go in and immediately get annoyed by all the people talking loudly on their own meetings. I eat lunch and I just go home and work from there.
I look around on the days we are supposed to show up and about 1/3 actually show up. They are trying to entice us back with free lunch once a week but the food isn't even good. The company is doing well but the rest of the industry is doing great too so we have a retention problem. I don't think any of the managers really want to say "You have to be in 3 days a week" because they fear it will cause more people to leave.
I would really love to have an office with a door again but working from home is the next best thing. I like having my meetings with speakers and a speakerphone rather than headphones and a mic at my mouth.
Same lunch thing over here. I do enjoy meeting my team for lunch. But it's not any easier for me to get work done in the office and the theoretical face to face collaboration doesn't quite seem to happen. We've offices in a bunch of countries anyways and are pretty distributed in my project.
I'm an engineering manager and some of my fellow managers seem to feel very strongly about wanting people to come to the office despite 2+ years of evidence that we can work remotely. It's tough because everyone is different. Some people might benefit from the ritual of coming into the office, the additional social connections, and to some degree the peer pressure. Some people are very effective working from home. Some people live close by, some people live far away.
We have a lot of space in our offices and lots of meeting rooms so no real noise issues or feeling cramped. If I had my own space with a door and a 5 minute commute then I'd probably go more often but I have neither...
Hard to say where we go from here. I do think having the team in physical proximity has advantages for collaboration. But the other pieces to take advantage of that have to be in place as well. I've done some of my best work while working physically closing with others but I've also had some of the worst distraction heavy environments where I got little done. As long as companies are just optimizing for cost per employee then maybe they should just sell their office buildings...
So recognisable. In our office everyone is on international teams so everyone is side by side on different calls. It's a mess.
It was like this before covid but our company took advantage to reduce the number of floors and make all the office space hotdesks. So now I sit beside colleagues I don't even know and it's even harder to talk about noise.
Yeah, 75% of my team on the current and previous projects are in other parts of the US. We just had a massive reorg to make it more flexible to assign free people to projects around the world.
The CEO and senior VP's have said that we work better when we can see each other in person. At other companies I have really enjoyed brainstorming in a conference room around a white board or solving problems together.
But after this reorg we are going to have even LESS projects together as a local team. My response to my immediate manager was "Sure but then assign people to projects from the same office." It makes no sense to say "come in to work together" and then put us on even MORE remote projects.
A few of the managers also have people working on the project in Israel and India. The managers are constantly on the phone including 7am and 9pm meetings for the foreign offices. I'm glad I don't have to do that but why tell them to come in the office? They are already disrupting their personal lives for the company with those meeting times but it does make sense to make it convenient for the people in India when there are 10 people from India and only one from the US on the call.
I'm glad they are paying us well but the logic of this is idiotic.
I sometimes think that some Managers, and even primary founders, have such ungratifing gratifying social lives outside of work; They need the social bonding, and drama, that goes on in certain work settings
Kinda like my last girlfriend. I honestly felt if she didn't have an office to go to, and couldn't boss around someone beneath her in the organization around, gossip, and socialize; she couldn't sleep well.
Yea, if she couldn't make someone at work miserable--what's the point of it all?
She didn't even care about the money, it was an ego thing that I will never understand. That Bad Boss attitude who get things done. That, "Dam I'm good!" attitude.
This is not about her gender. I have met more than a few guys with the same flaw. I just didn't go home with them. I've had way to many bosses that loved the office "family".
I don't know how many times I heard we are a family here. Under my breath--I mutter, ya the Manson Family.
I get the social part, but why make everone miserable by dragging them into the office, especially if things get done at home?
I usually liked all by co-workers, and even enjoyed their company outside of work. I was single though.
Covid proved many positions could could be done at home.
If I had the power, I would offer financial benefits to companies that kept employees home.
Working from home, if you can do it, should be celebrated.
And I won't even get started on the rediculious commutes we did for the past 100 plus years. I've know guys who commuted 3-4 hours a day.
If global warming is a problem wouldn't those in power want us at home instead of driving. But dude--we have electric cars? Most of us won't be able to afford one for years, and even then. Most electricity is still not carbon neutral.
I think onsite working can be nice but the problem is that it is really hard to find a company that doesn't try to cram you into an open plan office with at least half a dozen people.
I can't do any real work like that. Before COVID, I was going to the office to talk to people, attend meetings and do chores, whereas I did real work at home. It was unsustainable, as work ended up filling 80+ hours per week.
> it is really hard to find a company that doesn't try to cram you into an open plan office with at least half a dozen people
exactly
I'd be fine to go into the office but don't be under the illusion I'm going to accept materially worse working conditions in order to do it. I guess it isn't the same for everyone, but my home office is a very high bar to beat and it makes a real difference to my productivity and mental well being to be there.
I'm with you there, it just happens not to be the same with everyone.
Some folks have very complicated home situations, living with family they don't get along with, living with roommates that are fun, loud, and work for competitors, living with boyfriend/girlfriend that they're having a falling out with, etc.
Some folks have demons of their own that they can't deal with without social pressure. People with alcohol abuse problems for example, since nobody can smell your breath on videoconference, might have trouble not day drinking when they're at home with their stash all day.
Finally and perhaps most importantly, it is a very different experience for kids coming out of college or very fresh in the industry not to have any folks they can easily turn to for advice they'd otherwise have gotten from work colleagues. Work advice, career advice, life in the city kind of advice, you name it - especially if you moved cities or countries for your career, the workplace is a really important factor in helping you get settled.
I'm not saying on balance these would tilt things in favor of working from home or the office, but I'd encourage you to ask around coworkers how they feel in order to get a sense of what other situations might be like.
It's an interesting aspect of the whole situation that many people currently are in living arrangements that they may never have planned if they thought remote working was on the cards. We definitely have to be sensitive to those that have highly adverse circumstances, especially where that translates to being yet another form of discrimination or reinforcement of privilege.
Going forward I can see this being quite transformative for society in general as people seek out living arrangements that favor WFH as it becomes normalised. I feel like housing that offers segregated spaces for work and living etc are going to be highly prioritised.
You would think that the people in charge would see that real estate is an unnecessary expense, where applicable.
Also, I've been to a lot of meetings where we were told "there are other things people value in work besides money". Maybe being able to manage your own work environment and save gas and time fits in that slot. A content, well rested workforce would be better IMO than one that's frazzled and is getting less out of their employment than they know is possible.
I'm at the age where I see Time as more valuable than anything, really.
> You would think that the people in charge would see that real estate is an unnecessary expense, where applicable.
Some real estate is a sunk cost, and the execs doubling down on it. Apple and Google both dropped 2 or 3 billion combined on fancy new offices just before the pandemic. You can’t sell those buildings, their too big, and they’re not subdivided well enough to rent out parts of them, so everyone comes back to work
Apple's HQ campus is an interesting one because it's only a small percentage of their employees that actually work there. I imagine if they downsized their silicon valley properties down to infinite loop and the ring building, they'd still be able to easily fill them up with people who like working onsite, conference rooms, meeting spaces, labs, etc.
I am not personally aware but I do remember hearing they had office spaces all over the place because they don't have enough room on the main campuses for all of the employees.
Eng manager here. Honestly not everyone is sold on remote being better much less equivalent in productivity or output compared to being in an office. Remote also requires a lot of rethinking of team dynamics, work allocation and just plain old making sure stuff is done. Make no mistake, WFH may be arguably better and more pleasant from the employee perspective, but it makes projects more difficult for the rest of the company.
Yeah we're not all amazing managers that can make it work and sometimes we do need butts in seats. But also a lot of times, the ICs are slackers, loafing around, lying on tickets, getting bogged down and not speaking up, some need pair programming, some get lonely, some get emotional and miss their team, some have bad home lives and office setups.
But yeah sure, blaming it all on evil companies and their supposed sunk cost fallacy investments into real estate is the easy answer, so let's do that.
> Eng manager here. Honestly not everyone is sold on remote being better much less equivalent in productivity or output compared to being in an office.
Ad an IC, I would have potentially believed this if the past two years where everyone was working from home wasn’t anything but unbridled success for the tech industry. Companies literally can’t hire us fast enough right now, and yet there are really still some managers out there wondering about productivity and output? How about looking at the big picture?
> But also a lot of times, the ICs are slackers, loafing around, lying on tickets, getting bogged down and not speaking up
Again, this is purely about controlling others. If your IC is not performant, there are ways of addressing that like adults with performance and goal reviews, improvement plans, mentoring, etc. Requiring them to come in so they have adult supervision makes me chuckle. Are managers supposed to be like daycare supervisors of children or something?
And I’m not trying to rail on you personally, maybe I’m more triggered by my own management, but this whole post reads to me like such typical management speak of “we tried nothing and we are all out of ideas”
If by the tech industry you're including startups, then those all firms with money due to future expectations of success, not actual success.
Then you've got firms like Apple, Google and Microsoft with so much financial momentum they could lose half their employees tomorrow and their quarterly results would go massively up.
The cases where WFH matters are all the firms in the middle. Non tech firms, for example. Firms that are mature, but which don't mint money hand over fist.
I've worked from home for years and it works fine for me, but I also have a friend who's a senior tech exec at a non-tech firm. Sometimes he invites me round for BBQs on a workday, where he is "working" but no actual work gets done. Sometimes he naps in the afternoon. My brother is a tech executive at a software firm, his work consists of a few meetings a day and the rest of the time he chills, takes care of his kid or works on side projects.
For the employee? It's great. For the employer? Yes, you can view it purely transactionally, as in "we pay you for results" but in reality contracts aren't worded that way because it's impossible to write down in an understandable and conflict-free manner. So people are always being paid for time spent, and they then don't implement their side of the contract whilst expecting the firm to do theirs. It's tough, I don't know what the answer is, but to not see the employer's side of the story isn't right.
There are a limited number of times you can have coffee in an afternoon. The counterfactual here isn't machine-like productivity but rather, not sleeping when you're being paid to do work.
>>"Are managers supposed to be like daycare supervisors of children or something?"
I mean... Yes, sometimes? Coding skill and emotional intelligence don't necessarily have an embedded linear relationship :D. But more seriously, a lot of team members need anything from emotional support to soft skill coaching to nurturing and encouragement etc. But that again to me is orthogonal to the remote vs office. I can be a daycare supervisor to an adult remotely if need be :).
Can you elaborate? I hear this line of thinking a lot, but never explained fully. In particular, what about being in same office helps with unproductive ICs? E. G. you mention tickets - it's not by being in the office that I will notice tickets aging or not being tackled efficiently. Fully recognizing the slacking instinct, I don't see being in office addressing it effectively. You don't stare at any given person's screen 8hrs a day.
(other issues such as social and emotional preferences are also valid but I feel separate and may hash out either way).
This was exactly my problem pre-covid. Just couldn't focus at office and end up doing most of the core work from home in the evenings. It was very unsustainable.
I agree with your comments. As far as I know the work flow software and PDKs used for by the foundries (I know this is true for at least global foundries) has essentially unlimited liability (e.g. for "leaking") , so they often are running on dedicated computers even fenced off from the network. I find it hard to imagine they let hardware engineers take it home.
When I worked on drivers for a datacenter managed switch, we had hardware (sometimes prototypes) to work with, and would often have to swap hardware out, wire up network cards in some way, attach a traffic generator, etc. It was borderline of if I needed to be there on most days, but we had people in the lab doing rework, so some people definitely needed to be there.
There's a ton of lab work, reverse engineering, validation, prototyping, measurement, the list goes on forever. CAD and simulation are just the beginning.
It depends. Some fabless chip design work could be done at home. A dept I worked at did everything in simulation. But another dept did prototyping on FPGAs and would have at struggled -everyone would at least have had to take home a board
> We deserve to have input into how we work best and if that means walking away from companies run by egomaniacs that need to see butts in seats, then so be it.
The logical conclusion of this line of thinking is to organize your coworkers. You have much more bargaining power about your work conditions as an organized union. The history of unionization stems primarily from workers demanding safe working environments.
You have much more bargaining power, yes. But you’ll also be bargaining as part of a group that includes Joe Useless, who sits in the next cubicle over and ostensibly fulfills the same role as you.
The company may be happy to give you a 10% raise, but they’d rather lower JU’s salary by 10%, so they won’t budge on your demands for an increase, since it’d also apply to him.
The company doesn't want to give anyone a raise. They are not happy to give anyone a raise. Companies do not willingly increase their costs, full stop.
You could maybe make an argument that companies may increase wages for high performers for retention reasons, because needing to replace valuable employees is a large, if somewhat intangible cost, but that's pretty iffy. Companies are made up of and managed by humans, who are notoriously short-sighted and willing to discount potential risks when there are financial incentives to do so.
50% of the time Joe Useless makes more than you do already, because they joined later and market rate for the position shifted upward. You'll still need to fight tooth and nail, alone, individually, to reach parity, even if you're a top performer. Your manager isn't usually going to say "hmm, we're paying Joe Useless 1.2X, while we're paying Sally Superlative 1.0X--we really should pay Sally 2.0X! Your manager will be overruled by the CFO if they do suggest this anyway. Large wage increases based on expertise happen because you're able to better sell yourself to _another_ company when changing jobs.
Ultimately, I'd prefer a system where Joe Useless and I fight for equal wage increases collectively, because the balance of power is such that we're more likely to get them than each of us going it alone. Joe Useless is gonna be there anyway unless the company decides they're so useless as to fire them. So long as Joe Useless is there in the same role as I am, I don't care if they get equal pay, especially not if they're helping in the fight for increases in our equal pay.
> Large wage increases based on expertise happen because you're able to better sell yourself to _another_ company when changing jobs.
In that case, instead of banding together with Joe Useless to strong-arm the company into setting money on fire (from management's perspective), you're better off changing companies as frequently as the market will tolerate.
False dichotomy. You can do both, and an industry-wide effort to exercise our collective power would likely increase the salaries obtained via either route.
The problem is that you are more likely to get a wage increase. Not a wage increase that moves the needle for you individually.
I love seeing the “union fought for years, after many strikes employees ‘win’ and get a 5% wage increase over the next 4 years” news articles, but they never strike me as something that I’d want to apply to me.
Certainly my company is increasing wages for high performers. They may not be happy to do so, but they’ll do it to retain talent they desperately need.
I imagine this would be different if the sector I was in was different, but right now, for software development, it doesn’t make any sense to me. There’s too much variation in skill levels to collectively bargain for anything.
> You have much more bargaining power, yes. But you’ll also be bargaining as part of a group that includes Joe Useless, who sits in the next cubicle over and ostensibly fulfills the same role as you.
What if you're the Joe Useless on your team and you don't know it? A lot of people here seem to think they're the 10X dude but what if they're the 0.1X dude lol. What if you're really the 10X dude but your manager thinks you're the 0.1X dude because they don't like you as a person?
Those systems have good and bad sides to them, but I do think the good outweighs the bad.
I think the 0.1X guys (though I wouldn't use that term) tend to not be here as work is just work for them, not a hobby they are absorbed in at all hours.
Not saying that's healthy but I'm sure being on HN has a strong selection bias on 10X people :)
I've worked with many people with varying degrees of competence and I find that the "go out and satisfy your curiosity" is strictly an above average thing.
The average people tend to rely more on courses and certificates, anything approved by the vendor. And they tend to align with the vendor's gospel. If something is not in the training or documentation it doesn't exist. They are the kind of people that will just open a ticket when something doesn't work and go through the hoops for months :)
The really good ones don't really care about such things and just dive into a problem until they thoroughly understand it using any trip of resources necessary (ideally peer to peer info because official info, from the vendor tends to be politically/marketing biased). I would definitely put HN in the latter category.
But I don't think they are useless. The former are really good in operational roles and the latter more in design and architectural ones.
Those that want to rewrite everything in the cool tech of the day, or want to TDD everything or write Electron applications work maybe not at 0.1x but certainly 0.5x of the ability of a normal programmer.
> The company may be happy to give you a 10% raise, but they’d rather lower JU’s salary by 10%, so they won’t budge on your demands for an increase, since it’d also apply to him.
Then don't organize the union to work like that. A union is an agreement for the workers to pool their negotiating power, not an agreement for any particular pay structure.
> A union is an agreement for the workers to pool their negotiating power, not an agreement for any particular pay structure.
Are you a member of any union? the #1 thing they do is secure a collective bargaining agreement which precisely spells out the pay structure for everyone covered.
You have options choose a pay structure as a union. There is not a single pay structure to which all unions must adhere.
The suggestion is that Joe and Sally must be paid the same even though Joe is "useless". That is not the case. When creating a union, you can choose a different pay structure. The Screen Actors Guild, for instance, has very wide variation in how much members are paid.
The free-rider problem applies to basically any system with cohorts. It's part of the incentive structure, for sure, but it's not the only part. As long as you accept utility in collective systems (ie if you're anything but a pure anarcho-capitalist), you recognize that in some cases (such as public roads) the value outweigh the costs of the free-rider problems. Once you're past that point, it should be all about tradeoffs and execution. Yet, in the US at least, a strict set of specific issues – like organizing employees and health insurance – brings out the free-rider issue every time, conveniently deadlocking the conversation before it even begins.
I have noticed in the US more than anywhere else I've lived, the most important thing to everyone seems to be that no one gets anything unfairly. I've noticed more with Conservatives because of the noise they make about things like welfare freeriders, election fraud etc, but i imagine it applies to Liberals as well when talking about other issues.
People seem to genuinely prefer letting poor people starve over accidently giving a less-poor person free food. I find it extremely frustrating.
It’s a perennial wedge issue in American politics. These wedge issues ultimately benefit the two party system at the expense of the governed, as the underlying issues are never resolved, just papered over for a term or so.
It's a strange attitude, to be sure. In my experience, many Americans have the view of "if it's not perfect, it's not worth doing" when it comes to large-scale social or legal concepts. It's like they don't accept that there's going to be inefficiencies in any large organization.
And, yes, so many rail against something like single-payer healthcare because it would be "unfair" for them to pay for someone else's care, when they already are doing the exact same thing as part of private healthcare! Not to mention it would be cheaper, but paying $5,000 for single payer is seen as evil when people are paying $10,000 for private healthcare! (both figures are simply illustrative and not intended to be factual examples, before anyone rips my head off)
The private healthcare insurance industry is a private coverage holders’ Potemkin village prisoners’ dilemma, holding uninsured potential free riders hostage to prevent a sunk cost fallacy from becoming a self fulfilling prophesy of the insureds’ own design.
> I've noticed more with Conservatives because of the noise they make about things like welfare freeriders, election fraud etc, but i imagine it applies to Liberals as well when talking about other issues.
It's a big generalization to say that, because one side of an ideological divide behaves one way, the other side must, too! I think rather the Democrats (we don't really have a Liberal party) are a party that takes some tentative steps in the direction that it's better for everyone to have something, even if there are some people who don't deserve it; that is, that the malady you diagnose is a Republican, not an American, preoccupation.
Of course you can look back in history and find instances where Democrats have embraced such positions, too, and you can find plenty of odious things even in today's Democratic platform, but I think that today's Democratic party is consciously, if very slowly, trying to distance itself from exactly the mindset that you describe. But maybe I'm blinding myself to this behaviour in an attempt to justify my adherence to the lesser of two evils. Do you have examples?
I'm not saying that everyone must behave the same way, I'm saying that capital L Liberals here are not really that different from capital C Conservatives in any way except degree. Both would rank as lowercase c conservative compared to most of the rest of the West and both have this mindset that I have only really noticed in America.
I specifically am not using Republican and Democrat because the parties are not really important to the point. Libertarians and Greens also have this "imperfection is worse than nothing" mindset.
An example where Liberals needed to relax and not let perfect be the enemy of the good was the 2016 presidential election (and almost 2020 as well). The number of people who said things like, "I know Trump might win if I don't vote for Hillary, but too bad!" was so high that it actually happened.
That's true. The point I was trying to make is that everyone-but-ancaps implicitly support at least one collective system. I just picked that one because it's rare.
This is strangely individualist; maybe the company or your team would fall apart without him and he's doing something you don't personally know how to measure.
Or just to do what he did. Ian Goodfellow and probably all his team will have no problem finding another job in the condition they want. Apple don't have any monopole on AI jobs.
Your biggest power, the option of resigning to work somewhere else, is still with you. You just get backup from the union for when you don't want to exercise that power.
Well, since the original question before we got distracted was about flexibility in how you work, you definitely give that up as part of a union. Your collective agreement will spell out how, when and where you work, how much you get paid and also compel you do to things in support of the union, even if you don't agree with them. Those are all pretty big individual powers.
Since we're on the topic of remote, why do you think the union agreement would not state location of work being 'member's preference' rather than a specific location?
The problem with this question is there are people, like me, for whom the answer is "a lot". I have repeatedly gotten my employer to do things for me that they would not have done on their own. They need me more than I need them, and we both know it.
This is also by the way the main dissenting opinion in the recent Amazon union vote. There were several people who were interviewed by the economist as voting no, who said that they'd never had a bad interaction with HR and had gotten everything that they asked for.
This is not the one-sided issue that pro-union activists act like it is, and that level of ignorance is what is holding them back.
Say, for sake of argument, that I'm the World's Greatest Widget Engineer. I'm worth more than the average employee at my company, so I can get stuff I want by negotiating individually with my employer.
On the other hand, if a union imposes some broad agreement on the company under threat of strikes, I can't convince my company to break that agreement on my own because I'm not more valuable than the entire rest of the company combined.
A union's interests are probably not completely aligned with mine—they're focused on protecting the majority of employees, who are probably not as valuable as me—so forming a union could very easily lead to me getting less of the things I want. For example, if a union convinced a company to pay/promote based on seniority rather than performance, that could be good for most of the people in the union but bad for me.
This feels a little contrived. I work for an organisation with trade union representation and yes there is an agreed pay structure in place. This doesn't prevent management identifying particularly critical people and those people being rewarded/incentivised outside the norms of the pay scales (I am one of these people). Sometimes specific cases are discussed in the management/union meetings but not often and even then it's just a matter of management saying "Yeah that guy is the world's greatest widget engineer if he leaves we're screwed so we created a new job to keep him here".
It doesn't really go beyond that unless it's perceived that management are routinely violating the spirit of agreements and/or when the relationship between the union and management has already completely broken down.
The trading with a grocery store is heavily regulated as well. They have requirements for storage and handling, their scales have to be calibrated, and there can be very strict fines for things like screwing around with sale prices.
The behaviour, motivation, and goals of individuals (including your boss and CEO) working for a business very rarely has anything to do with the goals of the business itself. There is a lot of pretend going on, but that is mostly just surface BS. Why do you think CEO’s spend billions buying back shares instead of using that money to invest in new products and other innovations that will make the business more successful long term? Could it perhaps be (gasp! horror!) that they care more about personal enrichment than making the business successful long term?
> Sure, but the company's interests are almost completely opposed to yours in most ways
I'm sad that you think this, and would urge you to analyze your situation to see if it's really true. My one piece of advice is that companies seek to minimize cost centers, but invest in profit centers. Get out of the former and in to the latter.
Cost centers: anything that improves your experience as an employee.
It’s smart to move out of it, but the fact that you have to in order to progress is a clear indicator why companies will perpetually undervalue talent - even in competitive markets.
> but the company's interests are almost completely opposed to yours in most ways.
This really isn’t true. What you’re describing isn’t even a zero sum game it’s negative sum, where hurting the other party is among your goals in itself. The company is interested in using you to make money and for many purposes happy, satisfied employees who are growing in productivity are good. All of those are also things the employees usually want.
Are employee and company interests fully aligned? Absolutely not, but if your employer’s interests are almost completely opposed to yours get out.
The completely different industry structure. The film and theater industries work on time limited projects with a defined beginning, end and deliverable and most teams break up at the end of each project. Under those circumstances all a union can do to protect members is dualise, making lives better for insiders and harder for outsiders by restricting entry.
Long lasting organizations that have multiple overlapping projects with unions end up with compressed wage structures because the union campaigns for the median worker and the structure does not militate against that.
> Say, for sake of argument, that I'm the World's Greatest Widget Engineer.
Say, I am not.
> so I can get stuff I want by negotiating individually with my employer
I cannot, see above. Does that mean I don't deserve to have the bargaining power for the best deal for myself?
> A union's interests are probably not completely aligned with mine—they're focused on protecting the majority of employees, who are probably not as valuable as me—so forming a union could very easily lead to me getting less of the things I want. For example, if a union convinced a company to pay/promote based on seniority rather than performance, that could be good for most of the people in the union but bad for me.
Well, based on the fact that I'm part of the majority i.e. not as valuable as you, it works very well for us (who are not the World's Greatest Widget Engineer).
> Does that mean I don't deserve to have the bargaining power for the best deal for myself?
No, I do not believe you are entitled to a wealth transfer from people who are better at your job than you are. (Or, to put it another way, you're certainly free to do a little collective bargaining if you'd like, but the World's Greatest Widget Engineer has no reason to join your union.)
I think a lot of devs are led to believe they're the World's Greatest Widget Engineer but what they've really fallen for is the "Hank Hill Special Deal" lol.
Why hasn't he been promoted to management? Most companies don't have a career track for the single most productive IC ever, and he's probably capable of improving other people's work anyway if he managed them.
Because being an effective individual contributor and being an effective manager require different skills? Because the goal of a software company is at least nominally to produce software, and paying people who are good at producing software to produce software is how you produce software?
Even if you did promote your best engineer, that just means that a different employee at your company is now your best engineer and the same dynamics apply. (Until, of course, you promote everyone competent to management, and then your organization is doomed to slowly suffocate itself. Then it's beyond saving, union or no union.)
Thats ok - they are one in a million anyway. We are talking about people in general, not exceptional diamonds (they clearly can take care of themselves).
If you can become an enemy of the union simply by being good at your individual-contributor job, maybe that's why unions haven't really taken off in software engineering.
I'd venture a guess that the variance in quality between a set of "professional" electricians and another set of "professional" developers is different by an order of magnitude.
Said another way, I can go down to the union hall and pick an electrician randomly and have a great deal more confidence in that person's ability than I could choosing a random developer off of LinkedIn to write my application.
I think certifications have something to do with this, but it's also the complete lack of understanding of what makes someone a good developer by management... this is entirely the fault of management and I don't blame a developer for trying to "fake it til you make it."
As a person not necessarily opposed to labor unions, I'm curious as to how the previous post was hyperbolic? Violence and organized labor go together like milk and cereal, so let's not act like union folks are all saints.
>Violence and organized labor go together like milk and cereal
What do you base this on? Movies?
Telling someone to strap on a helmet isn't a threat of violence to a reasonable person. Putting a stuffed rat on a ledge near someone's bed is also not a threat of violence. If it had a noose or something, you'd have a better argument.
Here's actual violence done against picketers and looked the other way by police in Alabama:
But cross a picket-line or hire on as a scab during a strike in a small town and you'd best watch your back... hence the motivation for the "wear a helmet" comment. My hometown was founded on steel and railroads and I knew of more than one person growing up that got jumped for not toeing the line and playing ball with the union.
I see what you are saying. Yes, violence begets violence, certainly. I would also argue that while not defending the morality, the violence against scabs are done by rogue individuals while violence against picketers are coordinated by using companies known for strikebreaking. The company typically yields a much stronger threat of violence than any individual union individual can, and has more sympathy of the "law."
The history of it is quite fascinating. Here's an example.
I'm in Montana these days and just finished a book by Michael Punke about the Butte Mining Disaster. It does a fairly good job of pointing out how basically we're all assholes when you get down to it.
Yes, you would be compelled to support union actions, such as job action in support of collective goals you don't agree with, and get to pay for the right to do so as well. You would not be allowed to negotiate individual concessions for work or skill beyond the norm. Everyone is even more focused on "fair outcomes" (read: the same) than in any non-union environment.
We're not interchangeable cogs in some manufacturing machine; we're extremely skilled experts in the biggest seller's market of our careers. Why anyone would want to unionize right now is beyond me.
According to a family friend who worked for the UAW (the huge American auto workers union) the answer to this is yes. I suspect the answer is actually "it depends", but I don't know of any documented examples of unions whose members are allowed to make a separate peace. There are people in the comments who it sounds like have done so, perhaps they can weigh in on the mechanism.
It’s a such a coincidence that those are the same talking points the employees were forced to here during the many mandatory meeting. Also interesting that the NLRB found those forced meetings illegal.
Every year, Australian employees are entitled to 4 weeks of paid annual leave, two weeks of paid sick leave, 6 months of paid long service leave after 10 years of employment, about 10% of their salary paid into their retirement investments (superannuation).
Unions even up the negotiation power imbalance between employers and workers. Union power has been severely curtailed over the last few decades and as a consequence workers have seen stagnant wages, rising inequality of compensation and the rise of insecure work.
There's plenty of evidence to support the assertion that collective bargaining leads to better outcomes for workers. A rising tide lifts all boats.
> Those laws were a consequence of industrial action by unions.
You didn’t read my message, because this is what I already said. Unions helped push it into law. The unions are all but dead in the US, but weekends are still here because it is a law. What value do the unions provide now?
They have weekends in China and it’s not because of any labor movement. Working conditions and compensation increase because of supply and demand dynamics, which unions are a part of but not necessary for. For another example of countries that do not tolerate independent labor movements where economic growth led to better working conditions see Vietnam.
I have lived in China for the past 11 years. Middle income countries like China (average income per capita same as Thailand) often have people working more than five days a week. That’s a choice. Taking convenience stores as an example FamilyMart has six day weeks with 16 hour shifts. Lawson’s and 7-11, I think have five day work weeks with nine hour shifts. FamilyMart workers make as much as university graduates starting in decent companies.
There are similar splits in professional level work. There are jobs available where you ~never work six days a week and others where it’s routine. Trust me when I say no one at Nike or Booking in Shanghai is working 996.
My logic does not suggest the lack of unions and organized labor causes six day weeks. Six or seven day working weeks are the natural condition. Economic growth allows for different consumption leisure trade offs. Unions can only very indirectly effect economic growth. They matter much less than the ability to quit your job and find a new one easily. Firms desperate for workers are what make working conditions better, much more than unions.
Why? A totalitarian/authoritarian government that bans strikes where all worker’s organizations work hand in glove with the government and management describes fascist and communist approaches to unions perfectly. The historical roots of the ruling party are hardly relevant.
What power? You as an individual employee have absolutely no power to change Apple's behavior. Case in point the director of this story quitting because they couldn't convince Apple to change.
As the other comment mentioned the biggest individual power you have is quitting and a union doesn't prevent that.
Your lawyer is your agent. A lawyer representing a group of which you are a part is representing the group, and your interests and the groups can diverge.
Until you want something different from those who wield power in the union. At least I can quit my job and work for a different company. In heavily unionized industries, you can't escape.
Having seen how several family members fared in union jobs (several different unions), I swore I'd never belong to a union or work any job that required me to be part of one.
They all had such an adversarial relationship with work. It's always us against them mentality. They could never see anyone in management as a human. I can't imagine living like that.
As far as I can tell, the unions didn't ever solve any of their biggest gripes, took money out of their paychecks for lots of non-work related political activities, and didn't come through when they really needed to on things like pensions or healthcare.
I have the same feeling having seen family members in unions. My mother is a really hard worker, and plays by the rules, and that means nothing in her union while her colleagues abuse sick policies, push more work into her and so on. All what matters there is tenure, not the quality of employee you are. My takeaway is that she would be far more successful in a non unionized workplace because hers was definitely more beneficial for slackers.
>All what matters there is tenure, not the quality of employee you are.
From what I understand is this is done because it's the fairest way. Unions, like anything, can be corrupted. It would be funny if the union rep's nephew always got promotions over other people. This is an attempt to prevent that. In other words, it's the least-worst way of doing it.
>My takeaway is that she would be far more successful in a non unionized workplace because hers was definitely more beneficial for slackers.
Possibly. In my experience, it's usually in the form of a $5 Starbucks gift card every year. It really depends on the position and the company. I've seen a lot of hard ass workers get treated like shit.
Since we’re doing anecdotes, a member of my family is an airline pilot and a member of the pilots union. It has been extremely effective in negotiating better working conditions and higher pay for my family member. Keep in mind that, absent union representation, being a pilot can be absolutely punishing, to the point of being dangerous.
Also, the company is able to maintain very high standards for the quality and skill of the pilots. There are not “useless Joe’s”, as evidenced by the fact that the planes don’t crash.
This family member is a diehard conservative politically but openly espouses the value of the union for representing his interests against the company.
is it possible that adversarial relationship might exist even without a union but it would just be hidden?
personally, i think i would prefer a co-ownership (coop) scheme than union, since that adversarial relationship is basically dissolved since you are also the owner along with your co-workers... idk just a thought
> is it possible that adversarial relationship might exist even without a union but it would just be hidden?
It wouldn't happen in other countries because the US has a uniquely adversarial union structure, where Europe uses codetermination (ICs with board seats) and sectoral bargaining (don't have to convert one company at a time).
> that adversarial relationship is basically dissolved since you are also the owner along with your co-workers
This is only true if everyone has exactly the same responsibilities, hours, working conditions and pay. All differences lead to divergences of interest.
well, there will always be a divergence (no two people have the exact same needs or wants) but i would argue being co-owner with others helps as a forcing function to help converge interests (you wouldn't be happy with a co-worker slacking off since they're also wasting your money/time not just 'the companys')
and there are many successful co-ops where people have different responsibilities, hours and pay, i don't think that is a requirement for co-ownership (though the variance is definitely less than traditional top-down orgs thats for sure)
I now try to convince anyone who cold-calls me to join a trade union.
The employer can’t be all that good if they’re ignoring the do-not-call registry. And I think it slightly increases the chances of bad actors ceasing cold-calling.
The NLRA says "Nothing herein shall prohibit any individual employed as a supervisor from becoming or remaining a member of a labor organization, but no employer subject to this Act [subchapter] shall be compelled to deem individuals defined herein as supervisors as employees for the purpose of any law, either national or local, relating to collective bargaining."
...which effectively states that if a supervisor joins a union it's a no-op. The employer is not required to acknowledge their membership. In practice, unions specifically exclude managers for a bunch of obvious reasons related to their ability to bargain effectively on behalf of their members.
Your manager likely joined a union-ish entity open to supervisors. IIUC such entities are not protected by the NLRA and as such have few of the legal powers and protections that make a union a union. They’re basically affinity groups.
This means that manager unions do not gain the traditional protections from the law that other unions do. But - if a manager union and employer come to some agreement despite this fact, it has legal weight and the union can sue if the employer breaks the contract (and vice versa).
Managers, at least at the higher level like being discussed here, arguably do not need as many protections in order to be able to collectively bargain: Apple is likely to be much more concerned (and thus much more willing to negotiate) about 20 "Director of X" employees leaving than 20 engineers.
Besides SAG-AFTRA, lawyers and doctors also have unions and it's essentially the only reason they're highly respected, since they've psyched everyone into thinking they're rare and valuable by making themselves rare.
Nonsense, the screen actors and writers guilds are formal unions and their members include all of the top Hollywood stars that pull down 7 figure+ paychecks from films.
Same here. I currently work at a very prestigious tech company and I’m surprised by how boring it actually is.
There’s hardly anyone around in the office and frankly I couldn’t care less about the free stuff. They pay me enough that I can go out and buy my own snacks.
What I want is a team to learn from and grow. Not some teachers pets that sit behind zoom calls making sure they know exactly what’s “on the test” so they make themselves look better.
I’ll never work somewhere 100% remote or where employees don’t have an expectation of at least 3 days in the office.
Mind you, being able to spend a day a week at home vs full week in the office is quite nice.
> currently work at a very prestigious tech company
So do, and I have also worked for scrappy 100% remote startups. The 100% remote startup had better team cohesion and better knowledge transfer with more opportunities to learn.
You might get those things in the office, but pre-pandemic, at least my office environment provided none of those things. Don't conflate a good team dynamic with an office environment. I used to pair program with a guy for four hours a day and I never met him until we both left the company.
I'm on my second highly-collaborative, fully remote team and I'm always learning a lot and challenged. You're "teacher's pets behind zoom calls" example is very oddly specific and not a thing I've encountered.
I believe this is a problem with OKRs more then with remote work. It is too easy to game the OKR process by choosing easy but showy OKRs, doing the bare minimum and declaring victory.
I've been remote for 10 years and before that worked on a bunch of distributed research teams and it is perfectly possible to have a highly functioning distributed/remote team that really takes ownership. I mean look at open source projects.
Further office culture tends to favor a bunch of young people who all live in the same city and have time to go out for drinks after work etc. I'll take a bunch of crazy odd balls scattered across the globe doing their own thing any day.
That only kind of helps ... and can lead to micromanagement.
I've found a better approach is to focus on key metrics or KPIs and empower people to go after them without a heavy planing cycle. Like if your app is slow and buggy the OKR process tends to favor waterfally quarter long projects like "rewrite X in Y." A better approach is often to get good at monitoring and prioritize cycles spent on maintaining, optimizing, and refactoring existing stuff with a possible incremental rewrite.
Our experiences are very different then. We do 1:1 personal zoom calls, we’ll play board games online, we have a drop-in company-wide hang out every other week, and we pair quite a bit and very often through a zoom link in slack asking for help.
I guess it depends on what you want out of work. If you’re the type who wants work to be _only_ work and absolutely nothing more, then I can see how the forced interaction at an office would be beneficial. Otherwise a strong culture around people and collaboration makes the office largely irrelevant. Yes, you do miss out on the random hallway interactions, but there is no perfect solution and I happily trade that for no commuting, hanging with my dog all day, mid-day naps, my own office, throwing in loads of laundry during the day, private bathroom, better coffee, etc etc etc.
Is this a bad thing? I understand that it might be for some people, but others like me think that's great. I don't work to make friends; I do it make money and build something interesting in the process. The fact that remote work allows me to minimise social interactions while still being effective is great.
These sound like separate problems. Your coworkers being more interested in perf than work will not change just because you force them all to commute for two hours a day.
My experience talking to a lot of people both for and against wfh has been that people with shitty teams hate being remote, because it's hard to do when everyone is putting in zero effort to make remote work "work." The other big group that wants wfh to end are the "my coworkers are my only friends" people. Good for them, i guess, but personally i think that's not a wise way to structure one's life. I understand why companies love it and want to foster it though.
A very small number say things like "I find it difficult to collaborate with anyone over the internet."
Is being in the same physical place the requisite for being 'a team'? Open-source work traditionally has been distributed, and I bet it often results in teams that are closer than the ones from work.
Is a comfortable car with plenty of fuel a requisite for a long road trip? No, you can go by foot, horse, etc. it sure does help though.
Open source work is a infinitesimally small proportion of *work*. No I don’t think it results in teams that are closer at all, I think (and can present no data either) that it’s just as likely to result in bickering and infighting. Guido leaving Python might be a good example.
> What I want is a team to learn from and grow. Not some teachers pets that sit behind zoom calls making sure they know exactly what’s “on the test” so they make themselves look better.
I’m not sure what your role is but zoom calls really don’t mean anything as an IC. Not unless you’re responding to or handling an outage and debugging on the fly.
What you produce and how well it works is how you’re measured. Documentation and written communication is equally as important.
I totally understand your pov and it’s often the one shared by full remote folks who enjoy it that way: “I produce good work nothing else matters”.
I find that a really sad, if not completely rational, outlook.
See I don’t want to work with someone who outputs great work only. I want to work who can share a joke, help out, bounce ideas of, experiment with new things and fail/succeed.
In other words, I like work to be joyful and productive.
I completely agree. I've always worked remotely. This separation is all I know, and I can't imagine why someone would want something different. As a manager, I don't conduct "team building" exercises. I try to ensure that collaboration is flowing, but I don't care if team members are only talking about work or if they develop some social relationship.
This is in stark contrast to my wife, who had worked in the office before the pandemic and continued with the same philosophy during remote work. She finds my way too cold, and I find hers too wasteful. I would dread working on her pseudo-remote environment.
I have times and tasks for which I'm more productive at home, and times and/or tasks where I'm more productive at work.
Good in-person collaboration, sometimes accidentally overhearing someone else, is invaluable. At the same time, people can get off task and chit chat becomes a hindrance.
Sometimes we all know our role and what has to be done, we just have to get it done. Sometimes we don't know how to solve a problem.
Some employees don't have a good work environment at home. A Ph.D. student with a young special-needs child felt horrible ignoring his daughter while working on his dissertation at home (where his wife was caring for his daughter), bit coming into campus was far better for him, productivity-wise and psychologically.
I think the balance might be a dynamic one, in that what's best can change over time and task and stage of a task and stage of a person's career. And by employee, and by task.
Being a good manager must be immensely difficult, but also being an employee also requires adapting and compromising between all of these trade-offs.
I like working from an office and I like informal interactions with colleagues — from chatting over coffee to peeking around and seeing who is free to whiteboard a problem.
Same here. Except I also hate wasting time on commuting, not having the flexibility to take care of a home-related task in the middle of the day, etc. So the experiment to find a balance has begun…
Some people prefer remote teams, some people prefer in-person teams.
I don't know anyone who likes hybrid teams though.
Eventually I suspect we'll end up with a mix of remote and in-person employers, and workers who have a strong preference one way or another will just have to filter potential employers accordingly. There might be a way for larger businesses to have certain teams work remotely while others go into the office, but I suspect it would be difficult to manage.
Yep I fell the complete opposite. I suspect that long term people who prefer in-office will gravitate towards companies that are in-office and the opposite will be true for people who prefer WFH. I personally will never ever work for a company that isn’t WFH flexible.
Yeah, the M1 mac is not a strong example. They began _shipping_ in Nov 2020, so I bet the design was finalized or close to it before the March shutdowns in the Bay Area began.
It may not have been too visible to the outside but Apple never really halted operations as urgently as other companies did. They kind of took a more skeptical approach and kept people coming into the office and taking up the mask and temperature reading protocol among other precautions from what I understand.
I genuinely believe many people who prefer working in an office versus at home have unfulfilling social lives or bad home lives. The social dynamics, competition, in physical offices fills the void in their lives. Also seems like most of the people clamoring for a return to the office are also climbers & middle managers.
For some work a physical presence is required not just preferable, but for most of a software engineer's day to day there really is no unquestionable upside.
I'll quit before I go back full time. I've never been happier or more fulfilled with my work/life balance, and I've never been more productive with my time. I'll even take a different remote position at a 20% pay cut and a reduction in equity, at least, to retain WFH. Most I'm willing to give is a day a week in office, and maybe temporarily longer in rare circumstances where the benefit in performance is clear.
> Warning: Hot Take. I genuinely believe many people who prefer working in an office versus at home have unfulfilling social lives or bad home lives. The social dynamics, competition, in physical offices fills the void in their lives.
Warning: Hot Take.
I have similar logic, but reach an almost opposite conclusion. I genuinely believe many people who prefer working at home rather than an office have unfulfilling work lives and struggle to form meaningful friendships/relationships with colleagues.
I genuinely enjoy interactions with my colleagues during a work day, and wouldn't want to replace that with staring at a screen for 7.5 hours of my day or only talking to them via Slack. I have a great social group outside of work, but that doesn't diminish the value of enjoying the company of people I work with too.
Sure, it might technically be more productive if I just locked myself in a room and worked intensely on my own for my whole career and only communicated through a webcam, but that doesn't seem particularly enjoyable to me personally.
> I genuinely believe many people who prefer working at home rather than an office have unfulfilling work lives and struggle to form meaningful friendships/relationships with colleagues.
Absolutely not true.
I've been WFH since 2008. Many followed overtime and the company went full WFH in 2015 closing our office. We have a video call 3x a week and shoot the shit learn about each others lives just the same before we talk about work. I don't feel any less connected to my coworkers than my physical friends.
I also am part of a telegram group with ~10 old college buddies who live all over the country where we chat everyday and hop on voice to play video games or a monthly poker. This obviously isn't the same since we started out as physical friends and went to chat groups after going out separate ways, but again I haven't lost touch with any of them or felt less connected/meaningful because we are now remote only.
Not only that but with all the various video games we have added random people we connected with to that group, I don't even know what their face looks like but I know just as much about them as my physical friends. They are just part of the daily discussions about sports, politics, movies/tv, whatever.
I think if you are not connecting with someone you maybe aren't trying enough because it is totally possible. What exactly can't you talk about remotely that you can in person? I've yet to find a topic myself
> I also am part of a telegram group with ~10 old college buddies who live all over the country where we chat everyday and hop on voice to play video games or a monthly poker. I haven't lost touch with any of them or felt less connected/meaningful because we are now remote only.
If you all lived next door to each other, would you still do it over telegram voice? If not, why not if you can connect the same over voice chat?
My view is that something is lost on voice chat compared to being in the same room. I am part of a 10-year WhatsApp group with my university buddies too - but we were bonded with real-life interactions and experiences while being together at university. If those in-person, real-life interactions were replaced by a slack group with other people on my course, we wouldn't have built the same relationship.
It is different. Yes, there are some colleagues with whom I have regular online contact, some of them I really only got into contact with during the pandemic. We have regular calls and exchanges.
But I also have a lot of colleagues, which I don't have close contact with and contact to those has mostly evaporated during the pandemic. That are those people, I might talk to when meeting them in the coffee room, but really no reason to call outside of that or vice versa.
Speaking of coffee rooms, they have another important property: it is very nice, even healthy, to leave your desk from time to time and both take a break for your mind and your body from work. In the office you walk to the coffee room in that time and there you meet people in the same phase. They are taking a break and you don't interrupt each others work when having a chat. In a sense, online social contact can be very disruptive, as when you start an online interaction, you don't know whether your recipient is willing for an interrupition or not.
Of course, there are ways to arrange that too, but things aren't just black and white and interactions are complex.
> In the office you walk to the coffee room in that time and there you meet people in the same phase. They are taking a break and you don't interrupt each others work when having a chat.
Except those whose assigned desks happen to be close to the coffee room/kitchen. That's the problem with the way offices have been designed - there is always going to be some subset that has less than ideal conditions.
The worst open office setup I saw a year before the pandemic had a conference room with no door, just a big pane of glass and a gap in the glass to enter. There were desks outside this conference room (like everywhere else on the floor) which meant whoever had to sit there was subjected to meetings and speakerphone all day long.
Where I work, the coffee room is pretty isolated. My office is actually the closest one, but I can close the door. When I am talking about the advantages of offices, I am thinking of good offices. No doubt that bad offices are almost always worse than working from home. Unfortunately, many companies have no idea (at least their upper management), about what makes a "good office". Otherwise the nonsense of "open space" would have stopped long ago.
Our minds and bodies are made for "real-reality" and not for "virtual-reality". That is one of the reasons why you cannot turn a webcam on a beach and say you are on holidays on the Caribe. Even if you heard all the sounds and try to relax, is not the same.
Work and leisure are very different. When relaxing between work sessions I'd usually rather read IRL with my 4yo than chat IRL with same coworkers I've already spent the morning with.
While working I prefer control over interruptions and means of communication. And there are no emergencies in my line of work that require physical interruption.
Here's an even more radical thought. Hear me out: different people have different preferences. Forcing either way-of-working will be received with discontent by people who have different preferences.
I love a hybrid approach because I really enjoy the random conversations that crop up in the office… but my social life is so much improved outside of work in the last year or so that everything about physically being present feels tedious.
I have a coworker I call to talk shop for a few minutes and then bullshit for another 15-20 minutes almost daily when I’m wfh.
I’m very strongly considering asking my boss if my in-office/wfh ratio can switch from 3/2 to “whatever I want”
Better social life makes work feel like work. My drive to get stuff done has gone up, because I’ve gotta get out at a good time.
The problem with the hybrid approach is that I’d still have to live in the area. However I want to be geographically independent from my employer and prefer a quiet, low cost of living area as my home.
Yeah, in that case solely remote works best for sure. Maybe you fly to the office (if there is one) a couple times a year… though still nice for that to be optional
"(...) struggle to form meaningful friendships/relationships with colleagues."
Whenever you're forced to do something, yes you will struggle. My colleagues are my colleagues. And if I like someone, I will bond with them and it might become a friendship regardless of whether i see them in person or not.
Still, I'm at work to work, not to make meaningful bonds. Using the word 'meaningful' in a work context makes the word almost lose its meaning and make it seem banal. Meaningful bonds happen by chance, and most people we come across with, we don't make meaningful bonds with anyway. And whether we want it or not, work environment is not the same as hobby or home or relaxation.
I have good friends, who i have meaningful bonds with, and I'm happy with that. At work, i'm getting paid to do a job, not to form meaningful bonds with people. I don't need those, because I have those already.
Maybe you enjoy interactions with colleagues, who don't enjoy interactions with you because they'd rather be home where they don't have to talk with someone they don't have or want a meaningful bond with.
And for the last point of "Sure, it might be technically more productive (...)". Companies try to make us believe it is less productive to WFH all the time. Remove that point, and there's nothing more on the table to want people at the office, than the fact that some need social interaction and to form meaningful bonds at work.
A few days/week of working at the office for people who want meaningful bond making could be arranged, and you all could connect with each other, sing kumbaya together, and make life long friendships then. Just don't force others to do the same.
I have met people who seem to have terrible marriages and seem to spend as much time away from home as possible due to that situation. I have also met people that enjoy working on group projects and enjoy building relationships through that process.
I've worked from home for most of the past 17 years and would never go back to 100%, but I also miss making friendships at times.
Why? You'll spend a huge time of your life working, why is it not worth it to build relationships? You don't have to meet them in your free time to consider them friends.
In the US you may have to change jobs frequently or accept pitiful raises. If your healthcare and social circle become too tied to one employer then leaving or being fired could be a huge change.
Building a professional network is important, and some bonding is natural, so I don't mean to discourage them. Though I do prefer seeking most social fulfillment through other means.
I agree, but I'm not saying anyone should only have friends where they work, but rather that you can have both.
I don't live in the US, and almost all of my friends I meet on my free time are not through work, but I do have colleagues who I consider friends and it makes work a lot more enjoyable. That being said, there's only very few of them who I would be likely to keep in touch with if they or I quit.
This is unquestionably false for everyone I know including myself.
1. Many people already have built good relationships with their colleagues prior to WFH and talking to them over GVC helps the relationship. You are allowed to open up more when you know no one else is around except you and the person you're talking to 1:1. You don't have to be afraid that someone outside the meeting room or cubicle is going to hear you. A lot of the day-to-day frictions are also removed from the equation. Being completely honest, things like appearance, odor, height differences, physical presence, status symbols (watches, car keys, wallet, phones) all cause insecurities in a competitive office space. I find that in a remote work setting, you can focus more on the person as an individual.
2. Working remotely offers the flexibility to work from a location that better suits your social preferences. A LOT of my friends and myself were completely and utterly miserable socially working in the Bay Area. As soon as we had the option, we moved out and have built thriving social circles. It is not always the person's fault if they struggle to form meaningful friendships. It can also be the environment and whether it is a good fit. This eases social insecurity and allows colleagues to connect more authentically.
3. Working remotely offers the flexibility to detach from work and go do other things (if you don't have meetings etc.). This allows you to interact with people outside the office more and develop more meaningful relationships over time.
Remote work isn't about being locked up in a room and only communicating through a webcam. It is primarily about removing the unnecessary overhead that we previously thought was a prerequisite of work (e.g. commuting, "fake work", watercooler conversations, stressful and contrived socializing events at work, open office plans, can't work on other things during unnecessary meetings, running into people you don't like or who distract you, sexual tension with workers of the opposite sex, being exposed to people's bad moods, dirty public restrooms, walking to meeting rooms across the building, working from a cramped cubicle with smelly people, who can type louder and faster competitions, etc. etc. etc.)
I think your post paints a false dichotomy. It's not always a choice between working from home and commuting huge distances to an office in a city you hate.
I live 10 minutes from the office and live in a town I love. This isn't luck - it's a choice I have made.
Also, please don't take this the wrong way, but some of your comments make it sound like you might be in the category of people who don't find it as easy as others to form relationships with colleagues in real life (Comments such as finding socialising events at work stressful, and about experiencing sexual tension if there is a worker of the opposite sex).
It's naive and a function of serious privilege to posit that your home and job location are generally just a choice you can simply make. If you want a nice environment and a short commute, that substantially limits your opportunities. If you have a family or other ties with their own geographic restrictions, vastly more so. You absolutely were lucky to find something you liked. Saying otherwise is a textbook example of being born on third base and thinking you hit a triple.
> You absolutely were lucky to find something you liked. Saying otherwise is a textbook example of being born on third base and thinking you hit a triple.
Well I don't think I was lucky actually - I sacrificed for it. I could be based in London and have a better salary and different opportunities.
I'm privileged in that I have skills that are in demand in several cities/towns and no dependents, but I suspect lots of people are in that place on this website, and these things are choices. Not everyone has to choose to take the biggest salary with the biggest companies somewhere they hate.
If you are a programmer in the UK for instance, the best programming jobs with the highest salaries are in London, but there are plenty of opportunities in Leeds, Manchester, Sutton Colefield, Edinburgh, Bristol, Brighton, York, Oxford, Bath... All places which are lovely to live in and will give you jobs within 10 minutes if you choose to have that life.
> What junior engineer is going to turn down an offer from Google because the Mountain View area is a wildly expensive dump?
Well in my view that actually is a choice.
They are making a choice between commuting lots and living somewhere they don’t want to in exchange for career advancement / to work for Google.
That’s not to say that they might not be happier with alternative decisions. Or maybe they decide to suck it up for a while and move where they want later down the line? But these are all choices.
Perhaps 95% of people truly don't get that choice, but your hypothetical junior engineer certainly does, at least given the current market for developers. Unless you consider "taking the highest paying job above anything else" to be an irrepressible force.
Nope. Never said it is "always a choice between working from home and commuting huge distances to an office in a city you hate".
It is a counterpoint to the original comment that hypothesizes that most people who enjoy working from home do so due to some social deficit.
> people who don't find it as easy as others to form relationships with colleagues in real life
If you read my comment carefully you would notice that I mentioned I already have great relationships with my colleagues that have persisted through remote work. So not sure where that inference is coming from.
Second, I am not going to take it the wrong way, but your comment makes it seem like you have some insight into a complete stranger's life without any information to go off of. I would probably not be so overconfident in making such statements about someone else's life.
Putting that aside, your reasoning seems incomplete. Why does finding socializing events at work stressful imply someone doesn't find it easy to form relationships with colleagues in real life? Surely it depends on how the colleagues behave in those settings and the nature of those events does it not?
For example, grabbing lunch with a coworker is very different from contrived board game events where everyone is trying to compete for who the smartest person is and people make awkward comments linking their board game talents to their work competence.
> experiencing sexual tension if there is a worker of the opposite sex
I don't feel the need to debate this point at all. If you are a human with a healthy mental and hormonal profile and are around someone you find attractive, you will inevitably find yourself in a situation where you need to suppress certain feelings that may be sexual in nature in order to work with them. It can be done and is usually done without a second thought, but it takes effort and is a lot easier to do over video conferencing. It is human to have certain impulses, be it sexual, status oriented or fight/flight related when you're physically surrounded by people. They need to be dealt with effectively in order to be productive and even keeled.
> Second, I am not going to take it the wrong way, but your comment makes it seem like you have some insight into a complete stranger's life without any information to go off of.
I mean it was just a hunch, but looking at your comment history definitely implies it too.
For instance, while your response states that you are comfortable getting lunch your post history says this:
> Feel like a social failure during lunch and forced to sit passively as a couple douchebag workers on adderall dominate the conversation? [I] Feel like a bitch for a few hours.
Which implies the opposite.
> Attractive coworker or someone I want to impress within sight? I can’t concentrate on actual productivity and try to overcompensate by typing more and acting zoned in.
> I find that I get more emotionally jerked around working in person and can insulate myself from it working from home.
I mean all this seems to follow the same idea. It’s totally cool, each to their own and it’s fine, but to me this matches the trend that some people working from home don’t seem to have the same ease at forming relationships in work in real life.
You have no way of determining that unless you're in the same environment. For someone who's usually successful socially, it is an utter shame to have to sit through the lunch and be forced to listen to a couple of idiots hopped who can't shut up. Would you want to be in that situation?
The other two comments have no bearing whatsoever on your point.
The first one describes what it is like to be distracted. Replace attractive coworker with anything else.
The second one is a natural response to the frictions present in real life.
Sounds like you're desperately trying to cast someone into a role so that you can feel better about yourself. You sound like you might have social deficits you're trying to overcome yourself based on your comments that show a lack of understanding of what socializing at work feels like for a lot of people.
> [...] based on your comments you show a lack of understanding of what socializing at work feels like for a lot of people.
So you agree that socialising at work is more difficult for some people than others...
And you agree that it's one of the reasons you work from home...
And the part of my premise that you were disagreeing with was that I said some people work from home because they struggle to create relationships while at work...
But you have stated is true for you when working in an office environment...
So... It sounds like you at least partially agree? Or is there something I am missing?
> So you agree that socialising at work is more difficult for some people than others...
That statement paints an incomplete picture of my views. It is the combination of the person and environment. I'm sure there is variance among peoples' inherent ability to socialize at work, but in certain work environments, people who are otherwise good at socializing don't have the desire to socialize or don't find it meaningful.
> And you agree that it's one of the reasons you work from home...
Nope, I have no problem socializing at my current job. Most of my comments are about prior workplaces. I mention them because I can empathize with a lot of people who might be working in such environments. Like I mentioned, I can and do socialize with my current colleagues well remotely, which I consider to be "socializing at work" too.
> And the part of my premise that you were disagreeing with was that I said some people work from home because they struggle to create relationships while at work...
Nope, I never disagreed with that. I disagree with your characterization that that is the reason I work from home.
I would summarize your comment as “just give me the money and don’t bother me.” Easy to say that when stronger people than you have put up just with the things that your delicate character is unwilling to put up with, to build great thriving businesses and afford people like you the luxury of WFH. I say ‘grow up’! Face those aspect of the office work that brother you. Became a stronger person. Be more courageous. Our society does not need more incels working from home because ‘they don’t like the person sitting next to them’. Don’t be a leech on society. Get out and contribute.
This is me. Doesn’t help that I’ve been the youngest person on every team I’ve worked on, usually by at least a decade. I’m polite and friendly with my coworkers, but I’ve never felt enough of a connection with any of them to want to continue the relationship outside of work.
I prefer working from home for other reasons as well, but certainly avoiding the annoyance of coworkers I don’t like all that much is part of it.
> This is me. Doesn’t help that I’ve been the youngest person on every team I’ve worked on, usually by at least a decade.
This tends to be me both at work and basically in every social setting. I’ve also never really formed more than a highly casual acquaintanceship at work with usually doesn’t follow a job hop.
I prefer remote now. It lets me squeeze in a little more sleep that would otherwise be used to get ready and go to an office where I’d have to sit in the morning and listen to people around me ramble on and I just gets tiring.
At home I control everything about comfort the setting and I’m not losing much I’d gain in-office.
I still go in to my office occasionally. Every time I do I get very little actual work done. I chat for hours with my colleagues, we play board games over lunch, and we generally just show each other our side projects and discuss pain-points about our work
This is great one day every couple of weeks, but I get way more done at home and in far less time. So that I have more than enough left over to exercise and appreciate my day
My experience with programming is that if it's not happening, staring at a screen in an office won't make it happen faster. Stepping outside to go for a run, enjoying nature for a bit, picking up my kids up early so I can spend time with them (and then working at night when they're back to sleep) feels far less wasteful of the time I have on this Earth than commuting to a building where I am essentially stuck for eight hours before I can do anything else
> I genuinely believe many people who prefer working at home rather than an office have unfulfilling work lives and struggle to form meaningful friendships/relationships with colleagues.
I infinitely prefer working at home because I hate commuting, I particularly hate open-plan offices which is all they offer us, and I like quiet when I write code.
Right now my two coworkers - both remote, one in Indonesia, I have never met either of them in person - are amongst my closest friends, but often this is not the case. I nearly always like my coworkers, but outside the work, what do we necessarily have in common? Are they going to go to noise music concerts or vegan restaurants with me?
You can learn to maintain friendships without being in the same room, and mitigate some considerable portion of your footprint on this Earth by giving up commuting.
Saw this at a hybrid company. Chat wasn't required over Slack. Though if it was a work topic requiring a remote coworker (like myself) then sometimes they'd use a conference room and call to bring in remote folks, or everyone would go back to desks for the call.
Occasional all hands conferences provided some IRL a few times a year. IME these weren't strictly necessary yet did provide a chance to bond with the people on the other side of the glass.
Career wise I do think that fully remote can be a boon to shorter and less attractive coworkers, since it reduces or eliminates some of the tall+beautiful biases.
>I have similar logic, but reach an almost opposite conclusion. I genuinely believe many people who prefer working at home rather than an office have unfulfilling work lives and struggle to form meaningful friendships/relationships with colleagues.
People who fill a void through work are the unhappy ones. Even when I was in the office I made meaningful connections with Indian coworkers who I never met but spoke to almost daily for years.
Instead of talking to coworkers I get to see my 2 young kids grow up.
> I have similar logic, but reach an almost opposite conclusion. I genuinely believe many people who prefer working at home rather than an office have unfulfilling work lives and struggle to form meaningful friendships/relationships with colleagues.
This take makes no sense at all.
If people had unfulfilling work lives they would not be threatening resignation to preserve the work life they loathe, and they would definitely not wait out for diktats to return to the office to switch jobs, specially in a supply-driven market which is today's job market.
More importantly, if people had a hard time forming meaningful friendships at the office then they would not stay remote, where it's easier to get ignored, nor would they stick around a toxic corporate environment that makes it difficult to be integrated and feel welcomed.
> I genuinely enjoy interactions with my colleagues during a work day, and wouldn't want to replace that with staring at a screen for 7.5 hours of my day or only talking to them via Slack. I have a great social group outside of work, but that doesn't diminish the value of enjoying the company of people I work with too.
Your personal anecdote is great, but ignores the fact that even in the office the majority of us are paid to stare at screens for over 7.5 hours a day, and are criticized if you spend even 0.5 of that time doing anything other than staring at the screen.
The foosball table recruiters are always boasting about is just for show, and is always unused.
> Sure, it might technically be more productive if I just locked myself in a room and worked intensely on my own for my whole career and only communicated through a webcam, but that doesn't seem particularly enjoyable to me personally.
That's precisely the point that the OP stated: people who prefer working in an office tend to have unfulfilling social lives or bad home lives.
They need the office because it's their way to fill the void in their lives and escape their personal problems.
In the office they surround themselves with people who, for the sake of keeping things professional, have no alternative to exchange pleasantries and treat them cordially, something they don't get anywhere else. Thus they waste hours per day commuting just to have a shot at those irrelevant social interactions they fail to get anywhere else.
In contrast, those who prefer to work from home do have far better and more fulfilling things to do at home. They don't need to waste precious personal time commuting, and instead spend it in more meaningful ways.
More importantly, let's not forget the age old trope of retirees finding themselves in the pit of despair because by losing their job they lost their life and reason to live.
> Why does having a fulfilling social life mean I can’t have a fulfilling work life too?
Those who already have fulfilling social lives don't point out their shot at having a fulfilling work life as their justification to return to the office.
Also, that chance of using work as a way to fill in the void in their personal life comes at a steep expense: hours of their personal life wasted in long commutes, and constraining their choice of places to live as a tradeoff between how far they live from the office and how much they are willing to spend for a home.
> Everything is predicated on it being an either/or, but I feel lucky enough to have great relationships both in and out of work.
It is an either/or. The time, money, and energy you're forced to waste every single day just to commute to work is ripped out of your personal time.
The two hours you spend in traffic every single day are two hours you don't get to spend with your family/friends. Either you spend those hours playing with your son/daughter, or driving from the office.
Alternatively, some of us (well, me at least) view "in the office" work as a way to help achieve work/personal-life separation.
Saying this after many, many years of remote working, where the boundaries between work and personal life blurred so far they became practically indistinguishable. (yay 24/7 "DevOps" culture :/)
Exactly. I even use the same monitor and everything, but when I'm done for the day, the laptop goes in the drawer and whoever wants something from me will have to wait for the next business day.
I find the same kind of creep can happen at the office, too. Many colleagues end up leaving at 8 PM or later [0] because they have to do this one more thing or someone shows up with just a quick question to ask.
However, I realize that for some people, who have a harder time saying no for whatever reason, it's easier to have a hard, external excuse. "Sorry, I need to catch my train, so I don't have to sleep here" works less well when you're already home. But I think that in both cases it's very important to set boundaries and stick to them.
I wonder how many fully grown adult humans are walking around not knowing that they can silence push notifications of any and all types from any and all applications they wish. Their phones must be Hell on earth.
And you can't achieve that with a co-working place? That's what I do. But I get to live in any city or country I want while earning the salary of any city/country I want.
I've found that co-working even then is beneficial. There's usually a co-working closer to me than the office, so less commute, not to mention I don't like working in a place where a manager oversees everything I do, every break I take, etc. What if I get my required work done in half the time of my peers and then just chill around the office? That might be a problem in the office, not a problem in a co-working. I like some autonomy.
That's still an office paid by your company, with all the benefits that go to the company.
The company I work for before opening a new office for their employer has to provide:
- security
- daily cleanings
- insurances for all the people working there
- reception
- authentication and authorization (badge readers etc.)
- secure connectivity and storage
- water, beverages, sometimes a cantine if the office is big enough.
That's by contract (at least my contract).
If they are really going through the route of paying for your coworking they should sign a contract, which means a lot of bureaucracy and most of all it would force the employer to always use the same space for at least a few years.
So the better way is to ask for a pay rise to pay it by yourself.
You've skipped over an important group of people here: in any healthy workplace, new starters, graduates and other junior developers benefit massively from being in the same office as their more senior colleagues. The amount they learn from accumulated small interactions that would not happen in remote working cannot be overstated.
What exactly do you learn from your coworkers? It isn't like you are pair programming constantly with senior devs all the time.
I've learnt way more reading papers and documentation than being in the same physical space as more senior colleagues. People sometimes bring this point up re: onboarding but I don't quite understand what people learn that they can't do otherwise remotely.
Different people absorb knowledge in different ways. Just because you learned the most by reading articles doesn't mean that is true for everyone.
I believe there is value in newcomers/junior devs begin in close proximity with their more experienced coworkers because this greatly improves the chance to talk about important work-related topics. Many times in my live I have started a casual conversation with someone at work and this lead to discussion about current work-related software topics and I was able to share some opinions with someone.
These things happen much more rarely when they are scheduled slack calls, and people seldomly just slack to talk about random things.
> Different people absorb knowledge in different ways. Just because you learned the most by reading articles doesn't mean that is true for everyone.
...and that's precisely the reason I asked the question
> Many times in my live I have started a casual conversation with someone at work and this lead to discussion about current work-related software topics and I was able to share some opinions with someone.
This sounds like general information sharing amongst coworkers. The way you phrased the comment made it seem like there was something specific you were referring to pertaining to newcomers/junior devs.
I agree with your point that you have less airtime to share your general thoughts about interesting things in a remote setting. I do agree with your general point and have experienced that too. Just observing more certain people equivocate about a topic is inspiring and that helps to learn more.
For me, it's lunch breaks and coffee machine chit-chat. Just by talking to your colleagues daily and meeting people you'd usually never work with you get a lot of knowledge transfer - they talk about problems they need to solve, interesting challenges or just hobbies. You can also do after hour events on Zoom, but it's just not the same relaxed atmosphere as in the office and it nearly never happens randomly.
Agreed, it is great when it works. I don't miss it though, many times in the past, it has been some "senior" dev high on his own stimulant supply dominating the conversation for the entire lunch, not letting anyone else get a word in edgewise. Either that, or it is the same 3 people talking about things that interest them, completely ignoring the rest of the people while the others just eat their lunch and observe.
More chance to chat about random things or casually ask work-related questions.
> I've learnt way more reading papers and documentation than being in the same physical space as more senior colleagues. People sometimes bring this point up re: onboarding but I don't quite understand what people learn that they can't do otherwise remotely
It is much harder to gain tacit knowledge (The important stuff) when you're remote. I read a lot, and it's no match for picking a skilled person's brain for even just 30min-1hr.
I've found I generally have to explicitly ask if I want someone to explain what they're doing and why. There is very little 1:1 teaching/mentoring. In an office I think there is more informal mentoring.
> I've found I generally have to explicitly ask if I want someone to explain what they're doing and why. There is very little 1:1 teaching/mentoring. In an office I think there is more informal mentoring.
Asking people questions and engaging in 1-1 conversations is no more difficult over Slack + voice + screen share than in person. In fact it gives you more options for how to conduct the conversation and remember the results.
It's really not hard, and some people are great at it. The problem is that people sleepwalk through their remote experience and don't spend any time thinking about how to make the small changes needed to fill the needs that in-office used to fill. For some reason, it only occurs to them to seek out information if they can walk to a person in a room rather than type in a box.
I constantly observe people excitedly blabbing in person, seemingly reaching all sorts of epiphanies, but at the end of the day, the conversation lacked specificity and no one really learned anything. It's a perfect medium for feeling like you learned something without actually doing so.
Figuring out how to make remote work produces better results when the team is willing to do it. It enhances all work, including in-person work, and there are lots of resources by now for how to do it well. But if the team is unwilling to do it, no surprise that remote doesn't work for them. They chose to make in-office the only possible way to work.
It's not an inherent thing to the environments, but a choice that particular team made.
There is a massive difference between Slack and in-person. In-person there is often a casualness that doesn't exist over Slack. It's hard to have a serendipitous conversation over Slack vs in-person. This is what I meant by "I think there is more informal mentoring [in an office]".
> I constantly observe people excitedly blabbing in person, seemingly reaching all sorts of epiphanies, but at the end of the day, the conversation lacked specificity and no one really learned anything. It's a perfect medium for feeling like you learned something without actually doing so
Generally I would much prefer feeling like I've intuited something rather than coming away with specific knowledge because specific knowledge is usually easy to find elsewhere.
> It's not an inherent thing to the environments, but a choice that particular team made
I believe it is inherent to a remote environment. I also believe it can be overcome, but it's not the path of least resistance.
> It is much harder to gain tacit knowledge (The important stuff) when you're remote. I read a lot, and it's no match for picking a skilled person's brain for even just 30min-1hr.
I have the exact opposite experience. During discussions, people are less informed with facts and speak conceptually. In a book or documentation, there's both. Thus is easier to get more reliable information. It is easier to follow logical chains constructed people but the constituents of said chain could potentially be fraught with approximations, thus obfuscating the entire story.
I've discussed topics with really smart people (experts in their field) for hours with many potential ideas but no conclusion. But I only had to read documentation/code for 30min to understand exactly what the real gist of the field was about.
> It is easier to follow logical chains constructed people but the constituents of said chain could potentially be fraught with approximations, thus obfuscating the entire story.
It's not possible to logically explain everything. Intuition is very important. Hence, the value of tacit knowledge.
I would generally much rather hear an expert talk conceptually and about their intuition than them give me a lecture on logic and facts. It's impossible to glean some things through pure logic.
It's not about the office, it's about the commuting, which can often increase the length of the working day by 25% or more, and can add a thoroughly miserable start and end to that day (stuck in traffic, or on delayed/overcrowded trains), and make life seem much worse even if you're doing enjoyable work with great people in a really nice office.
Offices have their pros and cons (WFH can be a horribly lonely experience for anyone who lives alone, for example). But it's removing the commuting that makes WFH such a massive win for most people. And a big win for the environment (which should be reason enough to try and keep it going)
I just went back to the office and commute is one of the reason. The walk or bike ride is what I have been missing the last months. Of course that means you need to work and life in some city that doesn't force you to have a long train ride or even worse take a car.
Commuting is not the only part of work life that has an impact on the environment. It is dramatically less efficient to heat/cool thousands of separate homes throughout the day as opposed to one large office building. Remote work could actually be much worse for the environment.
Exactly this for me. I actually think an office environment is much better for many (if not most) aspects, but it’s difficult to argue with eliminating 1-2 hours of daily commute.
> I genuinely believe many people who prefer working in an office versus at home have unfulfilling social lives or bad home lives. The social dynamics, competition, in physical offices fills the void in their lives.
You're implying that this is a bad thing and I don't get why it should be.
No. I do not think he's implying it is a bad thing by itself. Instead he explicitly says that those are the people who try to solve their problems at expense of others.
The expense of others is a point that works both ways. You could equally say that someone who insists on being remote because it's better for their family life is preventing/slowing down the return to office, and that's at the expense of people who prefer to be in the office.
But I wouldn't put it that way because I don't think it makes for a productive conversation - office or remote, people like what they like and they have their reasons for it.
These are not morally equivalent. The office-worker wants others to modify everyone's behaviour to support them, whereas the remote worker just wants to control their own behaviour. The remote worker is completely ambivalent to where others want to work.
- In a big team if everyone is in-office and 1 person is remote, that person certainly cares about being the only remote person. Maybe some people would be okay with it, but being the only remote person has been known to be a not-so-great working arrangement even before the pandemic. So you can't say that remote people don't care where others work.
- If enough people choose remote, they're forcing everyone else to be remote too (whether they attend the office or not) because the communication model for the whole team has to be different now. <<< This is remote people modifying everyone else's behaviour to support them.
disclaimer: I have worked from home most of my life, so I'm not against it, BUT, people like what they like and they have their reasons for it is a very immature thing to say when talking about work: work means taking full responsibility to respect a contract in return of an economic compensation.
If you signed to work in an office and don't like it, resign.
Nobody will cry over it, just know that you signed for something you did not like.
Your fault.
Also: people working from remote do that at the expenses of others too. When I am at the office to talk with my colleagues, the one person refusing to come over forces all of us (10 or so) to turn on the video conference in some meeting room, while we could have had the same chat in the garden of the bar down the office.
They do. They might be able to say that they don't care where their coworkers are (and I believe them), but when enough people are remote, their colleagues are forced into a remote working model too because the team needs to communicate in a different way now.
How people work is a mutual agreement, not something that's being done to one group by another.
Remote fans force everyone to use tools to accommodate their remoteness.
We used to have a stand-up meeting each morning at a time "when everyopne's arrived" and we used to have a whiteboard on the wall with the most current tasks. None of this can work with even one remote worker, so it's gone to scheduled Zooms, online task managers, and endless Slack messages.
In exchange, now you have proper record of everything said and done.
I love the fact that I can always go back to Slack and say “See? This is what we agreed upon”, instead of having to recall the specifics of a meeting where notes weren’t taken in detail.
I don’t find any difference in the record-keeping of remote vs. in person meetings. The record button is available to both, but the resulting video files just as unwieldy, and Zoom’s transcripts are garbage.
Nor do I see any increased willingness to hash out complex issues in writing. The moment things get even slightly complex in a thread, it’s “let’s hop on a call.”
So you like the written “proof” so you can face off your colleagues in case of disagreement? You seem to have negative feelings about your work environment. You should consider changing jobs.
No, I want processes, agreements, and ideas, documented. Slack, Zoom and other tools make this easier.
As someone who had to train many junior employees, having a record trail is the best answer to the question “why the hell did we do this in the first place?”.
Much is still being said in person or calls, because talking is much more efficient than writing, so ... no, we don't "have proper record of everything said and done."
Whether we should have that record or not is completely orthogonal to the conversation about how remote workers force (or not) the others to behave in a certain way to accommodate the remoteness of these workers.
> You're implying that this is a bad thing and I don't get why it should be.
The quote points at “social dynamics” and “competition” in offices, not personal relationships or even friendships. Meaning that the mere fact of being surrounded by people with relatively the same professional goals, is good enough for some craving for social interaction. There isn’t necessarily any more depth to it, and it doesn’t really solve any other pending socialising issues.
Offices have hierarchy, promotions, payscales, politics. Socializing in the office is a PC minefield.
My current direct manager is about my age, with kids about my kids age, he is an overall great guy. If we weren't working together I am sure we would have beers together, but in the current context I would hate to blur the work/leisure line.
I have to agree with you. It's not necessarily a bad thing. Where people get their fulfillment from is their own business, and if their needs are met -- all the better. Everyone deserves contentment and fulfillment.
But, don't force me to make my life worse for that reason. You like the office? Go to the office.
My life is much worse for having 30+ Zoom meetings per week instead of the 1-2 it was before. Design discussions and collaborative problem solving are activities I used to find satisfying & be pretty efficient at. On Zoom I find them excruciating, draining, and very slow - requiring more hours for the same output, compounding the pain of sitting on Zoom, and sapping my own focus time.
Part of the job is to knock out tickets but part of the job (particularly when senior) is to help coworkers. If we lived in a fully transactional gig-worker kind of model then I would bill you 10x as much to get involved in your problem over Zoom. We don't, so that's impossible. And I realize this is silly on the grand scale of labor exploitation but I feel like by expecting me to treat remote workers the same as in-office workers, management is extracting a lot more value from me than was our deal pre-pandemic.
I get very little utility from the "flexibility" (always prioritized living close to the office, prefer the change of scenery) but a lot of disutility from remote collaboration.
I was much better off when I was among a small group of people free to go or not go to the office.
Now that everyone wants to do that, without the knowledge or the experience to do it, but only because they want to work in their pajamas (let's be honest!) I am forced to go through endless meetings where the first half is about "can you hear me?" "can you see me?" "where is X?" "coming, is in another meeting" "OK let's wait another 5 minutes then" and then half of them has an horrible voice quality, worse video, you have to repeat the same things over and over for the benefit of those not listening (let's be honest!) etc etc
it's exhausting and the fact that we aren't physically in the same room make people think two hours meetings are something normal
It's making me frankly think that all of this "freedom to work everywhere" trope has gone too far.
For devs, it's hard to debate this point. It's even hard to explain to others what the value of the flow state is, where you're just one with the code and you feel like you're making progress. You really need to not be interrupted, and you need comforts like your own chair, food, and clothes. I'm mostly coding these days so 100% WFH suits me just fine.
Yesterday I talked to some people I used to face, ie they were taking the phone at another business years ago when I was trading with them. They are all against working from home, having continued to go to the office during the lockdowns.
The point they made was that some things really benefit from being interruptible. Some things even benefit from not being recorded. Immediacy really matters for certain things like gauging who you should approach with some deal.
What also matters is being able to weigh the mood. A lot of what we call political decisions depend on this kind of weighing of what the team wants to do, and is hard through zoom.
Finally there's the problem of juniors. In finance you'd learn stuff when there was a quiet moment and someone more experienced seemed like they had a second to explain something to you. Unscheduled but valuable training.
These folks basically took the opposite view of what you seem to have, and decided that people who like WFH are basically not productive and are just phoning it in, knowing that it has gotten harder to hire people willing to be in the office all day. It's kinda interesting the take that people on opposite ends of the spectrum have of each others motivations.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to imply with the first paragraph, but let me tell you how it sounds to me:
“Hot take: people who have a different work style preference than me are inferior and damaged, and/or have motives which I despise or work a job I think is useless.”
Rethink this. These are your colleagues. Compassion for people who are different from you improves your own humanity and makes working with you more enjoyable.
> I genuinely believe many people who prefer working in an office versus at home have unfulfilling social lives or bad home lives.
Feels like you are mixing a lot of stuff together. My desire to interact with my collegues about our field of work has nothing to do with my social live outside of work.
It's not like I'm going to talk about new C# 11 features during our Sunday barbecue or at soccer practise. Of course I can go to a meetup or invite friends from tech to a pub, but that's not gonna replace 40 hours a week of "random interaction" with my colleagues. Maybe I'm just lucky and have great colleagues that are fun to interact with? Hard to say ...
I definitely fall into this camp. I’m introverted, so the forced social interaction at work was perfect for me and sufficient to keep me socially gratified. I’ve tried to make up for it in the pandemic by being more socially active but it hasn’t been working. I’ll definitely be looking for an in-office position soon since some companies are returning. I think my mental health will greatly recover.
Forcing yourself to get your social interaction requirements met at work isn't ideal.
It is like trying to get your protein requirements met from potatoes. Yes, you can if you force yourself and try really hard. However, it is much more efficient and pain-free to get it from a protein shake.
In this context, it means using the time you save with working from home and using it to meet people interested in the things you care about.
I don’t see what’s so bad about it. Half of my waking hours are spent working, a lot of the other half are spent eating, working out, and relaxing. Am I supposed to spend an hour a day hanging out with people after work? Not only does that sound exhausting, it doesn’t seem like enough if that’s my main social interaction. At work, there is a shared goal and a community that I can be a part of, and it’s there for me for most of my waking hours during the week.
Find hobbies other than working. You can use the weekend to do that.
The reason socializing at work sucks is because it is not a very natural environment to make friends. Alliances, yes but friends are harder. Even if you make genuine friends with someone there, if you're working with them directly, their career will take precedence over you. Most people are skeptical of their coworkers and it is a constant power dynamic to prove one's competence and status.
I never understand this or any hot take related to WFH. Why is it necessary to assume something negative about another person simply because you’re different? It’s nonsense.
It truly doesn’t matter. WFH can be great, working from the office can be great. Find a company where the social and work culture fit with what you prefer.
You really don't understand the incentive people have here?
It is the same as politics. The more polarized you can make things and the more you point out the flaws of the opposing perspective, the easier it is to influence public opinion.
In situations where policy needs to be determined, the decision made will benefit one side and harm the other side. In an ideal world, companies will allow employees to do whatever they want and pay them the same as long as they are productive.
However, companies want to actively reduce chaos and this means making consistent rules for everyone and measuring how this affects productivity in aggregate. So the rules become "fully remote" or "hybrid work" instead of allowing people to do what makes them optimally productive.
> Find a company where the social and work culture fit with what you prefer.
You say this presuming that people don't care about what they are working on or the prestige of the company they are working at. A lot of people have a fairly good setup and would rather influence their own company (or by proxy the industry at large) than simply move to a different potentially suboptimal company that allows remote work.
Yeah people seem to be incapable of understanding that people have different preferences! It's like everyone is arguing that red is the best colour, no blue is clearly the best...
My friend joined Coinbase who he recommended to me. They are highly remote or very remote friendly. The CEO has a great vision too, I enjoyed some of the talks he gave eg with Gary Tan, etc.
Despite the horrendous tone and attitude, you're 100% right. I prefer working from the office because I get to be less lonely for a third of my waking life, probably in part because I can rarely get that kind of social fullfillment from my private life. I'm just not quite sure what's so bad about not wanting to be unconditionally alone 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.
I kind of fall into this category, but it's a little more nuanced. I have a very fulfilling social life / hobbies outside of work, and have taken sabbaticals before to great success. WFH was great because I could exercise a lot more, hangout with friends, etc.
But I am excited to be back in office on some hybrid schedule, because there was a social component to work that I very much missed. I enjoyed the work part of the work the same, but missed the occasional coffee with a coworker, full-fledged in person brainstorming session, off hand conversations about zany ideas, lunch at the cafe, etc.
It's not that my social fulfillment declined at all overall with WFH -- other social activities filled the time -- but the specific social activity of bonding in person with folks I worked with definitely decreased, and it's nice to have that come back. That's not a reason to force folks back in the office (this is at no-one's expense, as I've seen it suggested), but it's a nice benefit.
It doesn't take being socially unfulfilled to prefer working in an office. It just takes not having adequate work space at home; e.g. if you have kids and not a mansion.
I am a very social person. I want to be around people. My home is good. But too noisy, too many kids :) I love meeting people in my work field and I love to have a real conversation in which I can read body and speech. Not just speech. For me the whole working from home thing sucks. I don't like it.
You are categorizing it way to one sided in an offensive way. "Bad home lives" can be as simple as having too much social interaction e.g. by having children at home, which can be quite distracting. And of course, a lot of people don't have a separate room set aside at home for work. Real estate in many places is prohibitively expensive. And even if there is one, with full home office, both partners might compete for that working space and on many days even need 2 office rooms.
Also, the "social interactions" at the office are usually not about replacing private social life, but well, interacting with your colleagues about work related topics which go beyond the range of scheduled meetings. There is a lot of value in meeting random people over a coffee without a set agenda. No surprise, that during the pandemic there were a lot of meetings schedule with no agenda set, just to keep conversation between people alive, the more so as they don't work directly together.
On the one side I certainly appreciated the ability to work undisturbed at home for certain tasks, on the other side, I am working in a large organization (and I don't mean by large just a large headcount but a lot of people on joint or related projects), which mostly are not software engineers (but engineers of other disciplines). A lot of that goes online too - and as our organization is spread across large distances, always has been online - but I am aware of the benefits of direct interaction. At minimum, I like to have had some direct interactions with people I am working online with.
But of course, one cannot (and should not) just turn back the clock. The pandemic happened, and a lot of people had a taste of the advantages of work from home and a lot of companies had to work hard at facilitating that, so for a huge amount of jobs this is technically possible now. Working from an office isn't the only option any more and employers should understand that. Forcing people to come back into the office is a huge warning sign. It means that there are actually no convincing reasons, or the employees wouldn't have to be pressured.
Which of course raises the questions, why did spend Apple 5 billion on that fancy new headquarter and didn't put emphasis onto making this a place people want to go to? In the contrary, it was designed with open office spaces, which especially software engineers just hate. It was unpopular even before the pandemic. Instead, they should have asked groups and single employees how an office attractive for their line of work should look. It couldn't possibly have been a problem of the budget :).
Understandable. Some of us actually want team cohesion and collaboration instead of working on Jira tickets in isolation. Others want a purely asynchronous communication style that keeps the chit-chat to an absolute minimum.
I personally want to know what's going on in far-flung corners of the company, because I'm fundamentally a generalist who wants to understand the big picture. I don't just want to put in my 8 hours and clock out, although I can see why people just trying to put their kids through school might want to do that.
Personality types and home situations matter a great deal in these situations.
Other way round for me.
Having more time for family/kids because I don’t have to commute is great.
Also, starting out in a completely remote setting sounds a bit daunting to me.
> I genuinely believe many people who prefer working in an office versus at home have unfulfilling social lives or bad home lives. The social dynamics, competition, in physical offices fills the void in their lives. Also seems like most of the people clamoring for a return to the office are also climbers & middle managers.
This.
I've recently switched officially to a de-facto full remote position after years of full remote due to COVID, as did most of my team, and I also see this pattern among the coworkers who decided to go to the office. The return-to-office cases boiled down to:
* Rented a tiny apartment to maximize disposable income but it's very unpleasant to live in, let alone work,
* Share a 3-bedroom flat with 3 or 4 newly-graduated and yet-to-graduate buddies,
* A young upwardly-mobile professional who wants to maximize his presence around the senior manager to fulfill his career-growth plans.
I dare say that in two dozen team members, only 5 or 6 want to return to the office, and about half of them need it because they can't afford a decent apartment.
I can't say that's true for me personally, and I greatly prefer working in the office. In my case I mostly like the office because it allows me to keep work physically compartmentalised from real life - I don't have work things invading my personal space (and using it for free, I might add).
I think I would prefer to work in an office over remote solely because it's harder to meet new people in the company and make good connections remotely.
I'd like to have some professional connections that carry over from my current company.
Some of us just have kids and finding a flat with enough rooms for everyone plus an office room is almost impossible. So it's good to have the option to also go to the office in addition to WFH.
I genuinely believe many people who prefer working at home are very young and have not developed social awareness and/or don't feel the need to separate life and work, because their life is their work and vice versa.
Most people that do not want to return to office are still in that phase of their life where they need to rebel to authority to feel alive and will end up being those "middle managers" that they critique today.
Also: WFH as the only possible option is not different from office as the only option.
I don't like going to the office when it rains, but I enjoy going out of my house when the Sun shines or meet my colleagues to have an informal chat on how to progress with some project, it makes everything smoother and a lot of the underground tensions generated by only communicating through video and voice disappear.
The truth is the majority of the workplaces are not "for coders only" and trying to find a balance with other people's needs, for example those people that have to work in presence, it's sign of and good willing and maturity.
You can decide to quit to WFH, IMO that doesn't mean you're standing up for yourself, it only means you're not willing to change your habits.
So, spending hours in a car instead of with my own kids is "mature".
Spending the family income on cars and gas and paying an extra million for a house in order to make commuting even feasible is "mature".
Destroying the environment, wasting precious resources and spewing out poisonous particles that enter the lungs and bloodstream of other human beings is "mature".
And engaging in office maneuvering and chit-chatting instead of producing great value for my employer is "mature".
> So, spending hours in a car instead of with my own kids is "mature".
I spend 15 minutes walking in a park.
Yes, spending hours in a car is not the best choice.
One should ask themselves why they chose to sign a contract with a company hours away by car in the first place.
If that isn't ok, why did you accept?
> instead of producing great value
I think you're giving yourself too much importance and too little to your co-workers who took a break.
That's immature, yes.
And not spending time in the same place will only reinforce the idea that someone is working to " create great value" while others are slacking at coffee machines stealing a salary and being unproductive, only that in the case of WFH it has become "they are home all day doing nothing. it's basically like being on holiday for them."
Which shouldn't be any employer concern, since they're not the ones paying their salaries (and it's probably very false)
In other words: why should WFH be considered more important than chit-chatting at work?
Aren't they two ways for people to enjoy their job more and maybe be more productive or more satisfied?
> Good for you, realisticly not many people are that fortunate to find a nearby opportunity
If that's true, then you can't really complain about it.
But in my opinion if people are willing to resign or accept a (rather big) paycut to work from home, they could have found a lower paid job closer to home.
In my case it wasn't luck, I moved to another city to get the job, but I chose to live at 15 minutes walking distance from the office, because commuting for hours it's not what I want.
It's all about compromises, I believe anglophones say "you can't have your cake and eat it too"
> but remote work opens endless opportunities for me.
that's true also for companies.
Why should they hire someone from US and not someone somewhere else where the pay is lower?
But if you want to separate life from work, you can work in whatever place you'd like. Coworking space, cafe, personal office etc. Then you don't need to live near your company's office, and can choose the best possible place to live and work for you and your family.
or you can chose to work for a company whose offices are not two hours away.
coworking, cafes, etc are not really suited to actually work, especially of your work requires some kind of concentration or secrecy (an NDA for example)
Personal office in house is the worst combination of them all IMO.
Not that I do not work from home, I did it for good part of my life, it's just not for everybody.
You have also to consider that having their parents around all day could be the worst possible way to live for teenagers, it makes more sense only when they are small kids, but in my country we have parental leaves and specific holidays to take care of that.
I think the best option is to have possibility to work in any company, and live in any place. You don't want to limit your job opportunities just because they are far away.
Now tell people from Mexico that they can't go to work in US because immigration laws, but Americans can go work there because they just need an internet connection and you can serve them drinks while they sit on the beach.
Any company is 1% thinking, many companies hire only local workers because it's their market.
Take into account timezones and you can't possibly work for Australians or New Zealanders while living in Europe, unless there's an office in Europe that coordinates the efforts with HQ.
I've worked for long time with US based companies from GMT+2 and it's been exhausting at times. Wouldn't do it again if I can avoid it.
Some things look better on the surface than they really are.
I'm trying to hire for a position right now and it has dragged on for months for two reasons:
1) WFH is now limited to 1 day per week, and a 3 month probationary period where new hires don't even get that.
2) Salary. It's still a job seeker's market and my workplace is not keeping pace. It's spec'ed for 3 years of experience but salary is about the median for a new graduate w/o professional experience. I'm happy to train someone but if I rework the job class to allow for new grads then HR will lower the starting salary. So, I'm hoping to find someone who's a new grad but had a part time job or internship or any other non-coursework experience the could be even the least bit argued as adding up to the required experience. (the position is basically a data wrangler / sql jockey / light analysis position, but it directly supports the main revenue-generating operations of the organization so there is real $$$ lost by having this position empty. ::Grrrrr:: end rant.)
> How companies consider that a cost center is beyond me. But I’ve seen them do it.
I may have an answer: Because of our fetish with metrics. It is possible to measure the cost of an engineer or computer programmer. This can be assigned a cost which is arbitrarily precise. Calculating teh benefit is usually not so easy. So the decision makers (rational beings, just mislead by an intellectually bankrupt management philosophy) concentrate on what they can count.
There's also a tendency for humans to over optimise the wrong things.
John Sturman has a business game to illustrate this called the Beer Game[1].
It's supposed to illustrate shocks to a supply chain with limited knowledge of how the rest of the system is behaving.
The players in charge of their part of the system try to reduce costs to get a better score but in doing so often catastrophically open themselves up to shocks in the system.
IMHO the same thing is true for managers and accountants trying to reduce costs in their development teams. If you get it wrong you can get a short term gain and long term problem that kills the company.
Might be as simple as the decision maker assuming they won’t be around for the catastrophe. Or outright malice, for any number of reasons. “Hate of job” is a widespread phenomenon that people don’t even think they have to justify.
It’s simple. If you’re in operations it’s all about increasing operating margin (omx). The simplest way to do that is to cut op expenses until you scrape bottom and op revenue dips. Then you adjust, firefight, and find other op expenses to cut.
Or hire contractors like they do here in Europe.
So you go from spending up to 150kCHF for a lambda software engineering to paying 250kCHF to a consultancy. But the company "invest". Doesn't matter if that contractor will end up working there for 4 years or more, that's call investment in the finance book or Switzerland is a at will country (but with notice period).
Just madness.
This may change soon. Meta and Netflix reportedly have hiring freezes in place now. Other companies are cutting staff. The later half of 2022 may bring significant changes to the job market(along with many other things).
Thanks for posting the heads-up re: Meta and Netflix; in the latter case I’m not surprised (or maybe they could just reduce the obscenely high salaries they overpay so they can feel superior to other members of FAANG, which doesn’t really fool anyone about their engineering prowess (they’re a content company, not an engineering/product/big-cloud company like the others, and everyone knows it). That would also allow them to get rid of this let-a-person-go-after-a-few-months-but-don’t-worry-there’s-warmth-and-respect BS.
Regarding your 2nd statement: “Other companies are cutting staff”; you mean in big tech already? Who?
I'm very upfront when I schedule the interview, give them a range when we set the time and if they're still interested we proceed. It's education analytics, so there's a little bit of "doing it for the mission" that gets people who are willing to make a little less because the job really has a very direct impact on students' success and lives. My work reduces student debt and increases success rates and identifies those individuals most at risk of having difficulties so others can make proper targeted interventions.
The work environment is laid back, 40 hour weeks & rarely any expectation of going over that so there can be a very good work/life balance. Benefits are pretty good too: very good retirement plan matching contributions, above average health insurance, 37 days PTO each year. So I need to find the right candidate that appreciates those things even if they could easily get 30%+ salary somewhere else. TCP where I work isn't to far off from other opportunities if the candidate considers & values those other benefits.
And again I am very upfront about that, and even explain these factors to them before interviews. I want people who know what they're signing up for, and not waste each other's time. It's a position that will give them lots of hands on experience to easily get the next step up in their career after doing this job for 3 years or so. They can grown from a basic analyst as described above into creating more sophisticated predictive modeling, bringing them up closer to my level. I view my role as managing someone as 1) to keep away from them as much as possible so they can do their work and I can do mine instead of sitting in meetings. And 2) to prepare them for their next job, their next step in their career. Because that's what a good manager does, and because by preparing them that way it means their last year working for me will be at a very high level of productivity, making my life easier as well.
But the candidate really has to be the right sort of person at the right stage in their life, someone looking for these things. And if my organization would ease up & recognize the job market requires at least a 15% increase in base salary I'd probably not have so much difficulty finding such a person.
Maybe you need to re-pitch this role as a contract and hire a remote contractor. I think you would get plenty of interest from experienced analysts if you could hire nationally. I might even be interested with that generous PTO policy, but on-site is like going back to the stone age for me. Whatever metro area you are in that salary must be a show stopper. Many younger people are stuck with incredibly high housing costs without the benefit of being grandfathered into rent control or mortgage payments from 7 years ago.
Unfortunately we don't like to hire contractors much, and when we do it's only for a 6 month period, has to be reviewed and reapproved every months. So I could lose someone just as they're starting to learn the intricacies of our system, because a lot aren't renewed as they're only supposed to be short term. I've got catch 22's all around me.
Yeah, I could probably get +50% if I went job hopping, but the non salary benefits are very good, work is not stressful-- 40 hours, rarely the expectations of more than that, though it does happen maybe one a month. Very good PTO, 5 minute commute... So it's all an extremely good work life balance, which has always been the most of mportant factor for me if the money is otherwise sufficient to cover things.
I get paid very well for 36 hour weeks (half-day Fridays) in a low stress atmosphere with no expectation of over time. All I'm saying is that there is no harm looking around as there are plenty of jobs like that out there.
Good point... I'm very comfortable where I am and really like the work & mission of my organization, so I haven't looked around much. Maybe I should, maybe my situation isn't as unique as I though it was....
I work 20 hours a week now, fully remote, making (a little bit) more than I used to doing 40. Granted, it's a machine learning gig and I took the pandemic to brush up on these skills, but it's definitely achievable in this market to have a good work/life balance.
You should resync with HR on that salary. If it's below market, the company is losing money while it's vacant, and your not able to fill it then you have proof the salary or other benefits are too low. Sort of an efficient market theory: if it was a good offer, someone would take it.
Yeah, I tried that, there's a small amount of wiggle room but not much, because they said "it wouldn't be fair to our current workers in that classification that aren't making as much". A poor answer. Ignores market conditions and says they know they're underpaying other people too, many of whom are probably looking for a new job as a result. I'm embedded in an operational division, but we've lost a very significant % of our core IT folks as well.
From the company's perspective it rarely makes sense to pay an regular employee more than the amount that the company makes per employee.
Yes, there are variations and management can go a bit on the higher side of that number - though also note that that is revenue and doesn't take into account operational costs, taxes, and the like.
In many cases, the company just can't reasonably pay what the "market" suggests the role should get. In these cases, it is a question of trying to point out that the value that the role brings is much more than what they're paying and that the company, upon recognizing that, should offer more.
The other alternative for the company is that they aren't losing money compared to the current set of accounting books. They may be leaving money on the table that they could get from expanding, but that's a risk.
Speaking of risk, there are a lot of risky candidates out there. It is far too easy to hire a person who fails to perform at the expected level or to train the person up for a few months in the tech stack and domain only for them to leave for a different company.
As it is, an unfilled role that has what is perceived as low compensation, to the company, is the less risky than a role filled with someone who is paid more but may not be performing - or even if they are performing aren't bringing the value to the organization compared to the revenue that is needed to justify that role.
I’m surprised such a company isn’t going out of business. That’s a very low amount to make per-head for software engineers. Do they make up for it in volume?
Not a software dev or inherently tech-base business. Vast majority of employees are not in a tech related positions.
I'm in Higher Ed analytics, embedded at a high level in an operational division at a university. So, maximizing revenue isn't a primary goal. It's certainly a secondary concern, some amount of "profit" is necessary to plow back into resources for students & researchers and capex, but if we're making a ton of profit it would kind of mean we're charging students more than we need to and putting a higher debt burden on them. Some schools, unfortunately, take that path but not where I work. We are honestly very focused on doing what's best for the student, even at the cost of leaving some easy money on the table.
Minimizing student debt burden is a primary target metric for the university. Of course it's much more complicated than that though, countless variables and interlocking & sometimes competing goals & requirements.
And while Higher Ed isn't perfect and could use some disruption, quality instruction doesn't have much economy of scale. Sure, a very self-motivated person can plow through self-paced college courses without a lot of handholding or overhead costs to get them through, but that's not the majority of students. For most students the ability to get quality help along the way is inversely proportional to class size and directly proportional to support resources. So, high labor costs. Though again, some amount of disruption could probably improve things. As would the realization that not everyone needs to go to a traditional 4-year college, that for many people learning a skilled trade is both a faster path to financial self-sufficiency and better suited to their interests. But that's all a bit off topic so I'll end it there.
I don't know about Apple, but I do have a ton of experience consulting for multiple F500's. Many at these companies who want people to come back to work are just middle managers who find it harder to justify their jobs since remote work has become so prevalent. They simply can't grasp how work can get done without them telling people what to do. And of course the easiest way to do that without requiring much thought is to see their underlings in person.
I do think this mirrors my office’s original logic for returning but they almost immediately became more flexible.
At one point, returning to the office wasn’t mandatory but “good for our promotions etc”.
When I’m in office few if any people actually give me marching orders… and when they do, I push back, correct them, and continue what I was doing. (We aren’t great at project management and my position luckily allows for this)
I don't get the fuss about such posts. At the end of the day, it boils down to your personal choices. You love to remote work, find a job with a flexible work policy. You don't, well, here are another companies you would love to work for.
Ultimately, markets (including job market) is all about equilibrium.
Either companies are going to increase the salary to come back [or reduce if you are staying back at home].
The thing which matters the most is picking up the best option for yourself. [and don't _always_ wait for your company to catch up]
It's because he is so high profile and a visionary in his field at Apple. Or was. He is merely an early big fish swimming away so expect more as draconian old-school companies try to drag employees back to their cubes.
I think inventing Generative Adversarial Networks, which enable everything from Alexa to GPT-3 to DALL-E to thousands of other models we use today, is pretty visionary to the field of ML.
I’m sure you have some nitpick but I don’t think it matters
Nothing directly. One could argue that GANs did kick-start the boom in generative model research as the first approach in some time that worked in a big way. Either way, certainly Ian is a huge name in ML.
> At the end of the day, it boils down to your personal choices.
I like working remote fine I guess but all else being equal I'd consider an office for the right job.
All else isn't equal though and the reason we went remote is still in play. A company I left a few years ago went back into the office in january. My old manager who was still working there just died of covid a few weeks ago. Vaccinated, boosted etc.
The risk might be lower now but it's not gone. I never fully recovered from my first round with covid almost two years ago. I'm not looking for another go.
The balance of risk/benefit might favor companies choosing to have workers back. We really might be more productive in there, and hey probably only a handful will die. There's a little more going on than my personal choices though.
If you are part of a team that can be productive, remotely, then you are very lucky.
I am not. We are in trouble as a tech business and have a very large piece of tech debt that we need to get over, this year. (We also have an amazing product and smart people invested in our growth. It’s one of those good problems to have, but it’s still a problem.)
We experimented (a long time ago, before I joined) with an “open source model” of siloed teams who made internal releases to each other. This had the unfortunate side effect of hampering our release process and also, far worse, embedding a really unproductive them-vs-us culture that holds back our ability to ship on time.
On a technical level, it’s kind of like the bad old days of when people all had their own branches, and all tried to merge at once in the week of the release. If you’re familiar with this anti-pattern then we are in a similar situation but with individual repositories instead of branches.
Our team has a lot of veterans, many with the title architect, and all of whom are emotionally invested in the status quo being the right approach. There’s a lot of friction between us. Frankly this might not be the right team for me in the long run, but there are so many awesome people here as well that I want to make it work.
We objectively have a problem shipping our product, and because most of the old guard work remotely it is nigh on impossible to effectively build consensus around making any kind of big change. It is very a hard ship sail.
The saving grace? My manager and I go in three days a week. So does our VP Eng and the manager and tech lead of a couple of other important teams. We have whiteboard diagrams, 1:1 walks in the park, and chats in the kitchen. When we meet with the old guard, we sit together in a meeting room while they are on individual calls. I feel like we are getting somewhere, slowly, but an unsettling amount of time has been spent on how to effectively do staff-level persuasive tech-leadership, in the face of a highly talented but highly conservative cadre of senior engineers who keep themselves at arm’s length over Zoom.
It sounds more like the team is rather inexperienced for that kind of work environment.
Communication, the overarching priorities and alignment are super important. I work for a German insurance company and we rolled out crazy amounts of stuff over the last two years and started a re-org that is actually going well.
Also, emotional investment can be quite problematic. All the teams need to work on the overall goal. Having people fixated on their golden toy is a good way to crash into a hard wall.
I don't know this but it sounds to me like a typical case where the senior engineers are the ones who really know how things work and they are also the ones doing the actual coding (which is probably why they prefer to work from home since it's much more productive). Then there's a bunch of manager types who only talk and write powerpoints who have a bunch of ideas that are divorced from reality. But they imagine that the people-actually-doing-the-work are the problem.
I honestly think almost everyone should be required to code themselves, at least part time. That would clear out the parasitic office-politics talkers and bring power back where it belongs: to the people who actually know something, but don't have time for scheming because they actually work.
> “bad old days of when people all had their own branches”
I’m sort-of-an-SRE at a large enterprise and I see many developers gravitate towards this pattern. There’s a Dev1 branch for the first developer and a Dev2 for the second, etc…
And as you said, a huge merge the day before production rollout.
I’m trying to steer them in the right direction but it’s hard to find a good source that covers everything.
E.g.: this this the bad way, here’s how it goes wrong, this is the good way, this is how it fixes it.
Sounds like a lot of cultural issues. My pre-covid job was a very small company but similar stuff.
We hired an in-town workforce and cut the old guard out completely. Worked in person everyday until lockdown but had flexibility as well.
We were all pretty close (10ish people including execs) so remote work was fine and we shut down the office… I’m a much bigger remote work fan now because of how well it went.
The people on the same page will be on the same page whether they’re waking through the park or not. It may be time for the others to move along.
I get people who want to work from home. I get people who want to work from the office. I get people who want to do hybrid. The one group of people I don’t get are the ones who suggest people should be forced to work from the office, and not able to decide for themselves. (Obviously it depends on the role - if you’re doing hardware design you need to go in sometimes, of course.)
I see some people in the macrumors comments saying “good riddance” like he’s being ungrateful or something. He’s a manager who’s standing up for what he believes is best for his team, and when he was overruled he did the only thing he could do to protest - quit. Good for him, and hopefully others follow suite. And as someone who works in the same field, he is absolutely right. ML teams right now are absolutely starved for good talent. Apple should be doing everything it can to hire and retain these people, including letting them live where they want.
> The one group of people I don’t get are the ones who suggest people should be forced to work from the office, and not able to decide for themselves.
I guess I can give a bit of perspective. I don't think people should be "forced" into 100% office work, but I can say that as a junior engineer, I am wildly more productive when I'm in the office with my co-workers compared to at home alone.
I graduated into the pandemic and my first job out of school was full-remote. My company had no idea how to effectively manage remote workers and after two years I knew barely anything about my coworkers except their names, and I could feel my career stagnating. WFH was lonely, inefficient, and since my home was my office, I had no escape from the stress of work. Whenever I was at home I felt guilty for not working.
I recently quit that job and started a new one. The first thing I asked prospective employers was whether they had office space I could work from. I'm much, much happier working from the office and benefit greatly from my other coworkers who choose to commute.
Part of the problem is that the benefits of in-office work are long-term and asymmetrical. You might not benefit from being in the office, but other people might benefit greatly from having you there. Senior engineers should consider passing down knowledge as part of their responsibilities -- there might be ways to accomplish that remotely, but a lot of that transfer happens organically when colleagues share meals, walk outside together, etc..
Being in the office also gives me a chance to interact with people at the same company who I don't directly work with -- sales people, office managers, etc.. For me, WFH takes all the enjoyment out of work, leaving only the bad stuff.
> I am wildly more productive when I'm in the office with my co-workers compared to at home alone.
I get next to nothing done during a whole day in the office. Over 2 1/2 hours commute a day, and then I have to sit there with (my own) ANC headphones on because people talk all day. Then there's coordinating where and when to go eat which can take up to half an hour. People come around to talk. I'm basically at 10-20% of productivity compared to WFH.
That's a rough commute indeed. I do wish American cities (for instance, idk where you are) made it simpler to live close to with without sacrificing too much in other areas of life. It's one reason I now live in Tokyo.
Other than the commute, I think those are all things that a cohesive team should be able to resolve. It's definitely important to set boundaries in a shared space. I don't agree that the answer is to entirely retreat from the office though, as much as I do understand that inclination.
Also, just a thought: your colleagues might find the discussions they have with you to be really valuable to their own productivity / job satisfaction.
> Also, just a thought: your colleagues might find the discussions they have with you to be really valuable to their own productivity / job satisfaction.
Might be the case but when compared with a 30 second commute it's hard to care about that.
That sounds to me more like a team failing to adjust to a good WFH setup than anything intrinsic to the difference between WFH/office work. To be clear I’m not in an engineering role, I’m more of an applied scientist, but I started my newest job the day my company forced everyone to work from home for the pandemic, and overall my experience was very positive. Got lots of support and help, spent lots of time in slack/webex with senior members of the team, and overall had a great experience with onboarding. Only part I didn’t enjoy was IT working through all the hiccups of switching to WFH.
1) Unfortunately yes, I have seen some of that. I mean both the companies and the sideline quarterbacks.
2) Of course, but I’d hope most companies would be smart enough to be paying for productive output, not for bodily location.
3) Agreed. I personally prefer remote work, but I know many people who prefer going in - either to better structure their day, or to see others, and they should be able to do that. And I believe a competent company structure can support both of those work patterns. (At companies large enough for that sort of complexity)
> 2) Of course, but I’d hope most companies would be smart enough to be paying for productive output, not for bodily location
I think on this point, you’re seeing companies who value control, consistency, and predictability over maximum productivity. They just think that they’d rather get less done overall and have more control over the people they hire because they know not everyone will be more productive in a remote environment. There’s nothing wrong w/ that. It’s not a decision everyone will agree w/ but that’s why resignation letters exist.
I can tell you from direct experience that he is no big loss for Apple. And he wasn't "Apple's Director of ML" as in the headline makes it sound like the top company lead for this topic. He was a director, among many. A reasonably sized group leader, not say, a JG.
Companies typically hire these people to bolster their reputation and draw in new talent. It's the same reason companies keep hiring a guy like Guido van Rossum, even if they don't really care how productive he is.
I didn't take it to mean that, exactly. GANs are a very impressive trick. But their social cachet is not, as far as I'm aware, in proportion to people's success at using them for practical applications that generate revenue. So the implication might be, "Don't expect a brain drain in Apple's GAN department to have a significant impact on their business fortunes."
GANs were just low hanging fruit that Schmidhuber already found. By most accounts Ian Goodfellow is kind of an asshole, and there was some drama about him a few times over the years. I don’t know the man, that’s just what I’ve heard.
You know, if it were anyone else I would probably ignore this comment, but you seem to do your homework, to put it mildly. Are you saying he's, uh, misrepresenting himself?
(I like Schmidhuber but I'm not knowledgeable enough to really evaluate his work or claims.)
he's had a decades-long tendency to just say that stuff has been invented before, sometimes by him, sometimes by obscure russians, that one time by Gauss. sometimes he's right, more of the time he's materially wrong, all of the time he's got no social sense.
To be fair, it’s not just him. Whenever I gave a poster at a conference, there was a chance that someone with a Russian sounding name would call the work trivial and say they had already published it in the nineties ;). Of course, on closer inspection that was not the case.
I don’t fully understand the tendency to do so, but it appears to be fairly widespread.
"Director of Machine Learning" is different than "A director of a machine learning project." "Director of Machine Learning" kind of implies that he oversaw a lot of machine learning projects across the company. Being "a director of a machine learning project" means you run a team. Big difference.
No, especially in fields that have as much citations and papers on average as ML/DL/RL.
If a paper in any other field was cited 44k in ~8 years, it must have made life-changing discoveries. Maybe some of the early papers on COVID-19 will reach that number.
Some people are extremely sensitive to the issue of the remote work, like it is some kind of inalienable right, and any (perceived) threat to it makes them want to grab a pitchfork and proteat.
I don't get it. Things are simple. The employer sets the terms, where you work and how the work is paid. The employee either accepts the terms or walks away. Sometimes the sides engage in negotiations, where the side with more leverage receives an advantage (like a valuable hire can get a pay raise our rights to work remote in an office-first company, for example). Why make so much drama out of it? If you don't like to work in office, find a remote job, end of story.
Because the collective bargaining power of people who prefer to work in offices has been shattered and the remote workforce is fighting back as a collective. There's a lot of drama because the stakes are incredibly high. Pro-office workers had successfully promoted the idea that their model of work should be subsidised by an average of 10 hours a week of unpaid labour (called commuting) and massive government infrastructure spending. That is asking workers to sacrifice north of a year of their lives unpaid. Somebody going from a WFH job to a 1 hour commute at the same salary is de facto taking a massive hourly paycut in the middle of high inflation while having their work hours greatly extended. It's easier to push for a change in work conditions than an increase in pay because working in an office is such a massive inefficiency that cutting it is the easiest place for a company to save money. "Voting with your feet" is less useful than getting a bunch of others to vote with theirs.
Collective action being used to bargain a better deal for workers is a simple enough concept.
I think there's a few obvious responses to your comment. First of which is that switching jobs is not as easy as you make it sound, even in the tech industry. There's still a lot of effort that must be put into interviewing and it takes quite a few weeks unless you get lucky. It becomes even more difficult when you need arrangements due to a disability, visa sponsorship, future maternity/paternity leave, etc. Second, it's an expression of frustration. A company can have an excellent outlook, competent leadership, good technical innovation, and great financial health. But a deal-breaking change in arrangements (such as having to return to the office when that's difficult/uncomfortable for the employee) is saddening. It's natural to be intellectually/emotionally invested in your employer after putting effort into them and closely following their growth. Frustration is natural after seeing someone make a shortsighted decision, and most people will want to try and talk that person out of it.
I totally get that but come on.. if you can get into FANG you literally don’t have any job security fears. Don’t mention edge cases that may affect a few people but for the vast majority? Please.. the most pampered group of workers in tech. I would understand if this was non tech, and I’m not familiar with outside of US, but this is a non issue.
IT workers at FAANG is the edge case tbf. I get that you bring it up because of the article, but even the the average FAANG employees can spend over a month interviewing.
I think they naturally replace fear of getting fired with fear of not getting a bigger stock grant every year, and end up in the same place via hedonic treadmill.
"The employer sets the terms, where you work and how the work is paid. The employee either accepts the terms or walks away."
And employers can go on setting the terms of where people work; they are just going to have to do it facing the prospect they are going to lose a LOT of employees now that we've gotten the chance to work from home, made it work, and have spent considerable personal money optimizing our home offices and family lives around this WFH reality we've had.
Remote work was always a desired thing, but companies would always make the case that it would affect productivity and the bottom line. The pandemic showed that is simply not true. In fact, the opposite happened - productivity increased, and many companies showed record profits. Now that things are returning to normal, companies are going back to the same argument, which is no longer valid. It may not be an inalienable right, but after the pandemic it should very much be an option at most, if not all, companies.
If you don't like to work in office, find a remote job, end of story.
That's exactly what Apple's director did. He resigned to find a remote job. There is no drama in that, other than it being reported and people talking about it. Many workers (myself included) simply refuse to go back into the office. It's quickly becoming an archaic social norm that you have to have your butt in an office chair to be productive. That simply isn't true. The employer has the right to set their work terms, just as the worker has the rights to set their work terms too.
Well, lets see duckduckgo search the largest tech companies back to office dates...
> Google tells employees to return to offices in April
> Apple sets April 11 date for return to in-person work for corporate ...
> Microsoft Returning to the Office on Feb. 28 as Covid Cases Decline
I doubt they decided independently on a back to office date in the same ~1 month timeframe, remember these same folks had an anti poaching agreement and set limits on engineer salaries. They colluded to control engineers and they'll collude to force them back to the office if they feel it's best* for their industry.
Unless employees have a similar level of coordination and control, for example a cross industry union, they will continue to be pushed around. If people don't make a big deal of these moves the company can withstand the few hold outs quitting.
*I doubt best for "the industry" is best for the consumer. Best for them is probably most controllable pliable workforce.
> I doubt they decided independently on a back to office date in the same ~1 month timeframe
Given the reason for office closures was covid, I'd guess that companies in the same geographical area would make similar decisions about when it was appropriate to return to office work. It would be more surprising to me if large companies with similar decision-making throughout the pandemic, in the same geographical area, had drastically different timelines.
Because actions have consequences and action at a scale sets norms. Considering he has the choice to walk away and is exercising it, it is sending the signal to the market that forcing people to return to office will have consequences. If he doesn't and everyone doesn't, it just kills the work-from-home momentum at large.
In fact I am grateful to him for doing so because I am not in a position to do so myself but would certainly like to reap the benefits of such actions.
You will also likely reap not only the benefits of such actions, but also the consequences, because fully remote companies have little reason to choose employees living in a high cost places like Silicon Valley over remote developers from far cheaper places who will agree to work for 1/4 of the compensation paid to office workers.
Yep. Which is why I walk away from companies that are not WFH flexible. No pitchforks wanted or required. As for drama: there seems to be an equivalent amount of drama on both sides of this issue. I have seen people who want to force everybody to work in the office just because they prefer it that way. I suspect there is a fair amount of incompetent micro-managing middle managers in that group. While competent middle managers are flexible and wants to do whatever makes sense for the team, negotiating a solution that works for everybody.
Because we would all like companies to treat us like adults and let us work from home. Our company has done just fine with WFH - amazingly, even - but they want us back in the office because they fundamentally don't trust us.
Many adults take pride at working several remote jobs simultaneously, slacking off and faking productivity at every one of them, check news from a few months ago.
> I don't get it. Things are simple. The employer sets the terms, where you work and how the work is paid. The employee either accepts the terms or walks away.
The employer makes an offer. Every job should be one where all parties see it as a fair exchange of value.
For a majority in software engineering, offers are not that hard to come by. There is an onus on both employer and employee to ensure the exchange of value continues to remain fair.
Things are not simple though, because people are messy. We’re all different. We need slightly different things. We have different challenges we’re working with.
Remote work has been a dream for some, and a reality for a small group. The pandemic forced a trial under less than ideal circumstances and productivity generally didn’t suffer (sometimes it went up).
The desire to work in an office or remote is something I keep finding differs person to person. If you mandate either all remote or all in an office you’re going to annoy someone.
We’re human. We need different things.
If your employer is refusing, in this industry you have options.
“Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.”
I don't understand why your comment is written so argumentatively. The person talked about in the article didn't grab a pitchfork. He decided to walk away because he wasn't happy with the employer changing the terms from what he was happy with. That's completely within his right as an employee.
I have a number of colleagues who have resigned because they don't want to go back to the office. Nothing about any sort of inalienable right BS. They just prefer remote work now after doing it for 2 years and they're no longer content with having to work at the office anymore. And honestly, my company is losing out far more than they are with them leaving.
> If you don't like to work in office, find a remote job, end of story.
That's exactly what's happening (in the linked story).
I think the drama comes because there's a cost to quitting your job and finding a new one. It's annoying to say the least, and if the only reason you have to do it is because the company is making what will undoubtedly be seen in a few years as a huge, obvious, frankly stupid mistake about their remote work policy, it rises to the level of a pain in the ass worth arguing about.
Especially for someone in a director/lead position at Apple, it’s quite common for a change like this to be accompanied with an explanation to their team. MacRumors and The Verge are the ones who turned it into a story.
sounds like that's what this fellow is planning to do. I don't mind if companies want a return to office, but some of us don't want to go in if we can avoid it.
And it's not just Google. A recent report showed that corporate execs are twice as likely to still be working remotely compared to the rank-and-file, even as their companies mandate returning to the office..
Oh, he said the most profitable business would be to buy people for what they're worth and sell them for what they think they're worth. The joke being people think they're worth a lot more than what they actually are.
Honestly, I think it's a bit much to call that "endorsing slavery" since the intention isn't to say that buying and selling people is good.
That’s a good point (and I think it’s true), but that’s not shown here. If he wanted to work remote, they probably would have let him. Maybe he’d be an ICT7 rather than a Director, but same pay scale. His reason for quitting was he felt a more flexible policy would be best for his team. Maybe he even likes being in the office but wasn’t willing to have to tow the party line for a policy with which he didn’t agree.
At Apple, Director is an executive. It’s sort of equivalent to making partner at a law or consulting firm. Your pay may double or triple as a result, and your annual comp is likely ~$1M+.
The whole reckoning behind this is not organizational but aesthetic. How does it look if Apple spend a billion bucks on an office, and it's half empty because Bob from Oakland prefers spending his working day at home in a bathrobe and slippers.
The work, more than likely, gets done just the same, but it's all about appearances.
When the pandemic started and everyone was on lockdown, there were very few cars on the roads around SF. I remember being able to see into the distance so clearly, it was surprising. I read that 2/3 of the SF Bay Area could work remotely. In the age of climate change (not to mention air pollution) we probably should insist on, or even mandate, remote work whenever possible. Supposed productivity benefits from in person work are not as important.
Yes, when you zoom out, this debate become quite ridiculous. WFH has already been proven to not destroy the company and many roles beyond dev can be done remotely. The amount of road building, carbon emissions, fossil fuel, and traffic congestion generated for this questionable value of gathering every day is pretty staggering. It's the kind of thing we will look back at in future years in disbelief that we could be so wantonly wasteful with the limited resources of our fragile biosphere.
Whether you favor in office or remote, you have to admit our cost structures have fundamentally reoriented the last 2 years.
Think of the commuting costs, living near/far from the office, the different types of day care options, etc etc that have shifted in the last two years. Imagine being told you’re going to get a 10% cut in pay due to the need to go in the office? That’s what RTO probably feels like to peoples pocket books.
Good point and 10% is low. Let’s say you are in Bay Area and 1 hour commute each way - so 2 hours a day.
Even if you put in 10 hours at the office it’s still 20% lost time in the commute. 20% is a lot of your “working time” to be non-productive. And that is not quality time - that is stressful time that leads to burn out over time.
A RTO concept should factor this in. RTO for many people means working more and the employer getting less of your brains best output. It is a loss/loss. Why would either side of the equation wants this?
My team is fully WFH - 700 people globally - and the only time anyone is required to come into the office is when a job task can not be done remotely.
We’ve also reduced our office footprint 70% in the process; with the savings going to a WFH monthly stipend. We also arrange two social events a month to keep the in person connections alive; with numerous smaller groups having TGIF’s or other sorts of activity clubs.
Regus membership has given all the WFH folks a place to grab an office if they need to get out of the house for whatever reason.
To get over the “are my employees slacking off?” We’ve put in a simple peer review system that is working well:
1) If you are assembling a team for a very challenging and demanding project who are your top 5 choices?
2) If you could give out a spot bonus who would you give it to and why?
3) Is there anyone you feel should be reduced from your team and why (optional)?
This was bumpy as hell to get rolling but now working well. And yes, Q2 does drive quarterly spot bonuses based on responses.
This is exactly right and it can be much more than 10%. And at the same time, many professionals can go out and land a new, remote job
with a pay bump. I’ve seen it nonstop the last year. People are speaking with their feet and I love it.
A theory is that VP+s love their teams to be in office. Their values are in talking to people all day long, and in-person meetings amplify the perceived values. Therefore, they do mandate returning-to-office policy. This also explains why companies argue how important in-person meetings are for productivity yet engineers are saying the opposite.
It’s simpler than that. Insecure managers feel anxious when their employees have the freedom to set their own work conditions and hours. It’s about controlling how and when work is done.
I wonder if the flatter an organization is the more working from wherever works for them. The flatter the organization the less need there is for "management by walking around" by middle and upper managers.
I think it's ego. If there's no one around to make them feel important when they enter a room, then it doesn't stroke their ego the way it used to when everyone was in the office.
hahaha ... havent laughed this much in a long while ...
That would be the next evolution of workspaces after open plan. One giant cesspool err .. watercooler where everyone can sysnergize and regurgitate err... ideate.
I can’t help but notice the timing of this. ML is starting to fizzle out as a “savior” of the industry after lofty promises were never fulfilled.
Goodfellow was hired right at the peak of ML hype, so I have to assume his salary/total compensation was extraordinarily high, so he was very expensive to keep around.
Apple would’ve made an exemption for exceptional talent. They didn’t make the exception for him.
Don't know about your first point on ML, but I think the second point is the more salient one. If Goodfellow was that productive and that much of a value add they would have found a way to keep him.
I don’t mean to disparage ML generally. I think it has a lot of promise in academia, but its utility in the consumer electronics industry (especially one that’s pivoting towards entertainment services) seems pretty limited.
ML has reached a level of maturity and ubiquity that it is having an effect on almost every area of computing. I have personally seen applications for ML that have moved the needle of consumer electronics applications. A lot of this is old hat stuff at this point but there is also a ton of value. Things like finding the white balance in photos, the next letter on a keyboard or how quickly to charge a phone are all areas that benefit from simple ml.
I would for one would really appreciate it if Apple photos had a decent search function.
Maybe these don’t move the needle as much as Wall Street analysts hope but these marginal improvements add up in a highly competitive space and I can’t see a world where mobile manufacturers turn their backs on ML.
"ML is starting to fizzle out as a “savior” of the industry after lofty promises were never fulfilled."
What? Siri, text completion, all the health- and activity-tracking features of Apple Watch, computational photography, Photos app, Face ID, and many, many more depend on machine learning. And let's not forget the Neural Engine in M1.
Especially in biosciences. But it’s probably the case that the hardware that Apple produces don’t use fancier methods such as DL/RL that much and depend on more traditional methods. You need capable GPUs for the state of the art stuff (e.g. DLSS by Nvidia).
It used to be AI then was renamed to ML (I know, ML is supposed to be a component of AI). AI has been touted since, let's see, my first encounter with it was in the early 1990's. It sucked. Then again in the early 2000's. It sucked. ML today is almost somewhat barely usable with hurculean efforts, IOW...it still sucks.
this is not a very informed take. ML is increasingly used across all kinds of use cases. Some of the wild uninformed visions haven't materialized cause they never do in any tech fad, but saying ML is fizzling is just totally inaccurate.
> Apple would’ve made an exemption for exceptional talent. They didn’t make the exception for him.
Mmm. Don’t count on it. Apple will bend a lot for you, but stuff like office location was never very flexible even before the pandemic. If your team switched offices to an inconvenient location, tough luck. Ultimately it was on you to adapt.
If you were a top performer and threatened to quit over it… well, Apple has a deep bench.
A probable take I heard from an insider: companies used to boast about their new AI developments for investors, but now are very hush-hush to avoid regulatory scrutiny
Wow, reading a few pages of mostly spiteful & angry (at Mr. Goodfellow) replies on macrumors.com was really eye-opening. Ordinary people seem to have no idea at all how much in-demand someone at the level of Ian Goodfellow is.
Really. If someone like me who has a fraction of the ability and a much more common skill set is in high demand, I can’t imagine how easily he could find work. He’s going to find remote work no problem.
Worked remote 80% of my career. I understand the advantages, but here there is, I fear, an undervaluation of the advantages that seeing other coworkers at least a few days every week brings on the table. Especially if you are doing innovative, design work, to be on the same table from time to time, take the coffee break together, allows to "multiply" the ideas.
I definitely agree. The WFH zealots risk a backlash because they seem incapable of acknowledging that there are benefits of working in an office.
I still think if the commute wasn't a factor then working from home wouldn't remotely be a thing. Eliminating the commute is a pretty huge benefit though (unless you happen to live really close to work, which some people do).
I'm so happy to work for a company who tried to do hybrid and when no one showed up (no way i was going back its a 50 mile one way drive) beginning of April they just said we are now a remote company.
Apple, Google, etc are going to learn quickly and change to all remote soon too I bet. Weighing their prestige vs. the improved quality of life remote brings to most workers can not compete. Especially with company's like Air BnB which pays same very high salaries who says work anywhere in the world.
Overall a raise of 50 to 100k in salary would not get me back into any office and I live alone in a small town in south central PA. The pandemic forced me to find a new social life with new friends that Im equally enjoying as I did with friends I had at work (they are still around some socially but the connection isnt as strong).
I assume Ian wants to get back into research/publishing papers as well, he hasn't published any good papers in a while.
He probably wanted the industry experience/research of machine learning in commercial applications with the scale and support of Apple behind it. When Apple designs things they design it with a fixed narrow purpose. Where as with Google you build general solutions. I think he wanted the experience of both.
This return to office probably just gives him a good out after he accomplished what he wanted to do at Apple.
Let’s say he wants to get back into research. I assume you mean academia? Do you think academics should be forced back to office, I.e. campus? Should universities just be fully remote? Researchers don’t need in-person interaction with each other and neither do students?
I'm not sure remote work is for me, but if justice can be done to a position with little, or no, in-office time... then why force employees into the office?
Money can be saved on all the accomodations necessary for office workers, so it would seem like a win-win if remote work arrangements are viable for a position.
Amazon recently recruited me for a job, a job that I already do remotely for a different company, and I turned it down for the same reason. The job at amazon paid way more, but I'm far more productive and happier at home.
I see other jobs at amazon that are remote, but this particular department worked with hardware that they weren't interested in leaving the office. Again, I've worked remotely with similar hardware from the company that pioneered this type of hardware and have done so since 2008. We figured out security, remote testing, local development, software simulations, etc. and haven't had a single leak, hack, etc.
I am working for Amazon, fully from home. Zero expectation to ever step into the office. Each organization within Amazon is taking a different approach, leading to a lot of variability. Throwing this information out there in case anyone is put off by assuming that Amazon is demanding a return to office.
I can vouch for this as I am the only east coast employee on my west coast team at AWS and I also have no expectation of moving to west coast or returning to office. I have spoken to managers on other teams around Amazon and flexibility is entirely dependent on your director/VP (the manager 1-2 levels above your group manager).
If you’re considering an offer from Amazon I suggest you make it very clear from the start to your hiring manager your expectations on remote work and working hours. Theres some teams at Amazon that are taking a strong return to office stance and others like
mine that allow for fully remote.
Maybe? I recently interviewed and nobody could tell me what the policy would be in a few months.
“It’s WFH today, but that’ll probably change. And you can always take our bus from your local AWS office to the office where the rest of the team may or may not be because we don’t know what our policy will be.”
I’d expect a company of Amazon’s size and stature to have a better plan than “whatever your VP wants this week.”
Why? The world changes around us, and the best businesses are capable of adapting to suit. It doesn’t make any sense to make promises that one can’t keep. They can’t promise that some teams can WFH forever, because it might not make sense forever. Nor should every team have the same policy, because different teams do different things.
I think it makes more sense to be non-committal than to make promises and then have to renege on them later. The latter makes people much more justifiably upset.
Why? Because people have responsibilities outside of work. People have children and spouses with chronic conditions that require them to be available at a moment’s notice to deal with, for example. And it’s not going to change just because some manager at ConHugeCo wants people back in the office. I cannot take a job without knowing that I’ll be allowed to work a particular way for the foreseeable future, as it just wouldn’t be safe for my family.
And yes, reneging on agreements is bad. Employers need to be forced to understand that humans have rights and their employees are humans. Telling someone their job is remote then changing that 3 months after they start should be illegal. Unfortunately, it’s not, so you’re SOL if you find yourself in that position.
I don’t either, but they could have at least been open about “we’re WFH today but going hybrid as soon as COVID allows.” Instead they waffled and hedged around and wouldn’t commit.
Add in several other factors… 1. the VP and extended team I would have been working with was in Seattle and this position was in VA. 2. There’s an AWS office down the street from my house but they were 100% non-committal about the position being located there (vs the new Arlington HQ2). 3. Would have been a new team with lots of new hires, so I could have just hired them locally (if deemed necessary, though I’ve managed remotely for years now with success so seems silly to me).
From what I hear, policy in general is wildly inconsistent within Amazon. I have heard all sort of stories from people at Amazon ranging from "world's best boss" to "horrific and Dilbertesque".
Every time there's a news story about someone at a big company with the title "Director", headlines phrase it as if it's a much higher title than it actually is. Apple surely has many Director-level people working in ML.
I think the confusion for people outside of industry is between a director of the company (eg. board member) and a director-level employee.
When I was there, Apple had 1 director for about 50 engineers (though certain people like Jordan Hubbard were director just because). 12,000 engineers gives us 240 directors of engineering. I'd say given the breadth of the software and hardware needed at Apple, maybe five of these are in ML.
guessing goodfellow has specific reasons for this move (like everyone), but feels increasingly like wfh has exposed gaps in our ability to manage or even measure the productivity of knowledge workers
Right now people are living a honeymoon moment for remote work , because it's not just remote, it's asyncrhonous. But as management is coming to terms with the reality of permanent remote, they will start using virtual tools that allow them to have a synchronous overview of what is happening. Something like working in second life or whatever zuck's Sims will look like. That shift to synchronous is going to make remote slighty more unpleasant (but still preferable)
Good for him and good for all the others that are able to do this (resign and find a new full remote job). For the rest of us it’s going to be a struggle to persuade our companies that WFH is well suited for a percentage of the workforce and they should offer it if they want to keep good/skilled workers. WFH is not for everybody and there are many people that want to return to offices, but the companies that realize that can offer both will come out of this better staffed ;-)
There are both good arguments for in-office work as for work from home. The first might give you better access to interaction with colleagues, the second more flexibility, less communte and often better productivity due to less interaction with colleagues :).
No doubt there is a huge challenge for companies how to organize their work as they are reopening their offices. In general, I think they should allow for more time. No one likes to be forced back to the offices, but as more and more people return to the office, they might gain more attraction as a place to meet people again. The 3 day in-office work week might happen on its own quickly enough, forcing people might be quite counter-productive.
The big elephant in the room in the case of Apple surely is their shiny new headquarter. They spent like 5 billion on it, and from what I read it wasn't even popular before the pandemic. Because it was designed by upper management, but somehow the people who should work there were not asked. With that amount of budget, it should be possible to design offices that people desparately want to work in. Hint: open offices aren't this :p
For any decent employee, those are refreshed annually with a new grant that has a new four-year runway. If you're a good employee, the grants grow in size.
There are few points I do not see much discussed so far:
- remote work, for jobs eligible to such model, does need a paradigm shift, it's not sustainable trying mimicking the in-office model in a "virtual" world. I see almost no discussion about that, especially in work division, outcome measuring, hw&sw vs hosted platforms etc terms. IMVHO that's a hyper central point to mainstream WFH for all eligible jobs;
- remote work administrative aspects from beyond-borders (different tax systems, rules, TZs, ...) and "global wages" vs "local wages". Again that's HYPER important because before arriving to something established and well-run on scale enough to stabilize a new model we must expect tremendous backfires in revenues terms;
- hybrid mess handling where companies have offices, with gears etc and have to move stuff back&forth AS WORKERS to handle less people, but still some, in the office and some from remote;
- where to live, considering local services since we do not eat from remote do not have "virtual remote connections" etc, and how such areas can evolve in a reasonably short and mean timeframe because if we choose to relocate we choose typically with a certain care. Personally I choose few years before covid to leave a big city for a mountain area, served enough, near enough to the "civility" etc, I'm VERY happy of the choice even if I miss a significant slice of local in-person acculturated environment for discussions, interactions, surely social life is better here, but at a low cultural level, just parties, not much real technical, political, philosophical discussions aside are possible since simply there aren't enough mass of acculturated people nearby to do them. That's another central aspect: how can our demography can evolve if we are not all together at scale like before?
- how a remote-first society can be organized, at least a general idea.
Just see sabre rattling and crushing between two party, one for one against, is spectacle, but of no help.
In a big city there are enough people to form a kind of apt circle of friends, perhaps around the uni. At least that happen for me, I still talk with some after 5 years but it's not the same as before...
Talking in person with tea or coffee, decide to go out for a common dinner it's a thing, having a call just for acculturate discussion is another... Let's say I feel a bit of lack of "groups stimulus", while I have more time to think myself, draw new ideas, potential projects etc, it's not a net loss but still a certain loss, well compensated by other aspects of the sparse life in the nature. A thing still to be considered depending of age, career, family etc at personal level and another thing to be considered in general social terms to draw a new distributed society, we still need aggregation points, only perhaps not big nor generic as cities, like small poles who will be abandoned/redone from scratch at a certain point in time, but small enough and centered enough to been able to redo and abandon them at sustainable time and costs.
So far I here exactly ZERO serious talks about a future society where WFH became mainstream for eligible jobs even on HN, just to say.
If companies can figure out how to use a mostly remote workforce effectively, they can hire anywhere in the world with good Internet. They would no longer need to put an office where there are plenty of qualified workers; they could hire one-at-a-time without regard to geography. And if time zones are a problem, hire north-south rather than east-west. Rio de Janeiro, for example, is only one hour later than New York City.
Over the short term there are arbitrage opportunities for tech workers moving out of high-cost and high-pay regions, but the equilibrium could be quite different.
> If companies can figure out how to use a mostly remote workforce effectively, they can hire anywhere in the world with good Internet.
While technically true, you’re overlooking the tax, legal, and other issues this causes. A non-hurdle for Google, but a huge one for smaller businesses.
I doubt that he quit just because he was forced to go back to the office. He was probably unhappy there for multiple reasons. Keep in mind that he can get a job anywhere and probably will get better pay if he even needs to work ever again. So quitting is not a big deal for him. So keep that in mind to anyone thinking they can do the same.
It also speaks to the fact that no one is irreplaceable.
Not terribly surprising. While other companies realized that they will lose this fight, Apple dug in their heels. While some provided flexibility and retained talent, Apple decided that the last two years never happened and that the talent that will walk as a result of this idiocy is expendable. The results will speak for themselves in the coming months.
I understand that some managers and PMs whose jobs meeting people the whole time might think that office work is superior. But I've honestly been surprised that they lack the intelligence to see that many good software engineers work better alone in quiet environments.
Looking at how the economy is going, leaner times can be expected. Unrelated to the article, but are there any data points on whether remote workers are more likely to get cut in a restructuring when a company needs to reduce costs?
WFH is screwing young workers by eliminating the mentorship, learning by osmosis and relationship-building that has propelled many knowledge-based careers. If Goodfellow were truly a good fellow, he would recognize the higher purpose.
I have personally never met someone, who was under the age of 20, who didn't have a solid grasp of working with other programmers remotely. With open source being the power house that it is most promising programmers growing up now are already way ahead of the curve.
I don't really get the debate. Surely people recognize that Apple is one of the most left-wing friendly (worker rights etc., you know the deal) and accomodating places to work at, if you care about such things. Surely people recognize that Apple was generous with the whole work from home thing. So now some people don't want to go back to the office, which is understandable, but there's one little problem from Apple's point of view, well actually one massive problem if you're upper management at Apple: for all the talk about the positives of working of home, there is a bottom line and that is the fact that productivity is down.
You can argument all day and night about how great WFH is, but if the management is seeing a drop in productivity, they will want you back at the office. THAT is why Apple (and others) is doing that. If you have a measurable productivity levels in your company (i.e. you're not Twitter), you should expect to be returning back to the office sooner or later because even if YOU are more productive, on average the productivity suffers with entire teams working from home.
And it just makes sense. It really does. Even if you don't want it to.
You can try to work hard and be focused, but not everyone can do that. I don't see people here talking about this often, but office isn't just a place for the employer to take advantage of you... it's a place where you're away from HOME on PURPOSE. You're supposed to get into a different head space, temporarily forget about your home life and issues and focus on work. How can you do that at home unless you have anything but a completely 100% supportive partner, no kids, no pets, no obligations or chores and an iron will? Most people don't have that... and for these people, working at the office will be more productive.
This actually seems a bit crazy to me. You're one of the most important figures leading the charge on cutting edge technology at _the_ industry leader...and you resign because they ask you to come to the office.
It's crazy that Apple would so easily throw away someone "leading the charge on cutting edge technology" just because they want him to show up at the same place every day.
All I know is that the reasons people give that they are leaving and the actual reasons can vary. This might be just as much about the state of Apple’s ML division as anything wfh related.
random though. was walking around union square in SF today. It dead. Sooo many stores gone. Than walked down to the FiDi and it's dead too. With no one going to work the business that relied on the workers for business had to close up.
It made me curious how to redistrict things. If those buildings turned into apartments the business would have a much better time and that area could be even more walkable
The chances that people in a given area have a specific skillset or are of the commensurate skill level for a position, pushes the compensation necessary to entice those "equally qualified people" upwards. The issues is the tradeoff of compensation for office time. If individuals want less office time than the company consensus on policy (which implies attempted negotiation), all they can do is quit. If the company wants to spend more, they can choose to do that and will likely have to. It's not uncommon that a position sits empty, for some time, after a high level exit. It's equally possible this person was already in a position of weak confidence. It's unlikely that the public will be made aware of that level of detail. It's not as simple as swapping in cheaper, available labor, in the interest of corporate profit.
I've had WFH people around for more than 20 years at all the places I worked over that time. Mostly they were doing their job, yet there were always limits felt to what they can do and how much they can do.
A director shouldn't be worrying about his hiring grant vesting. I get the impression they're well-paid at that level until they're suddenly out the door.
I want to be clear I'm playing devils advocate here. I'm a software engineering team lead who likes both in person and remote work. I'm comfortable with having fully remote team members, I've successfully been a team lead for groups where some members were Europe, other I the US and still other in India all at the same time. Overall things worked so long as I focused on being a team lead and not on being the most productive senior/principal engineer. We actually had this going on both during and before the pandemic even started. I don't generally seeing an overwhelmingly compelling reason not to allow that.
However, I still see problems that are difficult or even impossible to resolve. Even though I was able to maintain team velocity comparable to a fully in-person team there are significant downsides. First off, I have always overworked myself, but I don't think it's healthy and I discourage others from doing so. Leading a fully remote team required me to work more hours even when we were in the same time zone. Yes, you get back time from not having to commute, but on average my hours increased by more than my commute time when my teams were fully remote. I will summarize the root causes of this problem as I have been able to identify them.
First, remote meetings are dramatically less productive regardless of their length the second there are more than 3 people involved. Someone will attempt to multi-task if any topic they are not heavily involved in gets brought up. In short, getting organized and ensuring everyone involved has received and retained important information becomes far more difficult and time concuming. Anything I tell a group larger than 3 will ultimately result in my having to repeat that information for at least 1 person, and the larger the group the more times I end up repeating that information. This increases the time I spend organizing my team to keep them productive from maybe 1/6th of my time to easily half. Given that I also need to train lower level developers to become higher level developers, this tends to reduce the time I have to develop by 1/2 to 2/3rds.
Second, not having clear start and stop times makes it far more difficult for developers to manage their time effectively. I've seen senior devs that would normally have developed for 5 hours (plus meetings) and been done for the day jumpt to 10 hours and burn out. I've also seen a lot more junior devs try to work on a problem for 2-3 hours, feeling they can't interrupt seniors or mid level devs because of our online status, and then give up for the day. In either case, the odds that they quit and look for a different job shoots through the roof. This means developers that would otherwise have productive enjoyable careers are more frequently leaving the industry because they aren't in the upper 10% of people when it comes to self-management.
I'm not saying remote work is a bad thing, but it's really important we understand their are trade offs, and that these trade offs either reduce the number of people we can work with, or may require us to work more hours than are healthy.
To be completely clear, I don't advocate requiring people to come in, but when choosing an employer if everything else is equal I'm more likely to pick the company where everyone lives in the same city and we have the option to come into the office or not. I will especially choose them if I'm able to require that some people come in on certain days if I've identified them as someone that doesn't pay attention during meetings or has time management issues like overworking or giving up because they can't figure it out on their own.
I can't think of the last time I've seen an app even remotely cluttered where calls for simplification/decluttering were called for (and the changes made sense)
While the opposite, dumbing down and minimalism for it's own sake is a way more common occurrence (think: not showing MB/s when copying/downloading files, etc)
Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do...
This sounds great. Maybe Apple thinks it can find someone else can do the same job in office. Also they can't just make exceptions for "talented" people, I guess.
By putting the former head of Pepsi in charge, letting him push out Jobs, and then putting the company in such a dire financial situation that when they rehired Jobs, he had to go to Microsoft for a bailout.
Jobs hired Sculley as CEO, then disagreed with him, attempted to have the board kick him out, instead had the board turn against Jobs himself, was stripped of his roles, and quit.
I'm one of those misfits/troublemakers/etc. I've done my life mostly on my terms, and I've had it really tough. Conformists generally get it much easier. I'm all for more independent thought and fuck-you-ness but never forget that for most people that comes at a high price, so take off the rose-tinted specs.
That was a direct quote from Steve Jobs, except the last bit at the bottom. The whole point of the comment, I think, is how this goes against the old Apple ethos of encouraging non-conformity (to an extent).
here's to you, good luck in your journey. make it worth it
"If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is."
I do not think that Charles Bukowski is a good role model. I love his writing, some of it is very disturbing, and some I only read once - will not repeat the experience.
Glorious, glorious loneliness...good one. Even introverts know that being alone sucks. Medical studies show a correlation between poorer health and loneliness.
Yeah. What are we trying that we should expect to lose the most important relationships in our lives? Unsaid but heavily implied is this person would be an atrocious parent, and a very real price is paid for that.
I don't know if it's worth it. It's the way I am and I seem to have as much choice over it as ivy chooses growing up a wall.
I've never been hungry by choice and I've always had a roof over my head, and I'm grateful for both of those things, but let's look at something I do know: "..could mean losing ... maybe even your mind"
Yeah, BTDT. A lifetime of mental health problems culminating in a complete ... I dunno, breakdown? ... where I was barely able to function for 2 years and became a risk to others (should have been hospitalised but wasn't), and another 2 years recovering. 4 years of my life wasted. Any projected glamour of mental illness is purely done by those who've never had it. Mental illness is fucking shit and has no redeeming value.
Edit: oh yes, and "Isolation is the gift" - Never is loneliness a gift, ever.
Hmm, the one redeeming value of my anxiety (and the accompanying fear of imminent death) is that it makes it much easier to contemplate things I wouldn’t otherwise contemplate.
I’d still rather do without that, but I guess it’s interesting enough I can call it redeeming?
I suppose it depends. A redeeming feature of death is you never again wake up with a stinking hangover. You can find a positive everywhere I suppose. I don't know.
I am curious at the number of downvotes to this which I take as disagreement, but with what? Have others had years of mental health crashes and found it a great positive in the end, or what? Genuinely would like to know.
I wouldn’t say he has FYM yet. Enough to maybe FIRE but more than cash, he’s in a position where almost any tech or related company would hire him, pay him a ton, and let him work on what he wants to do. Essentially, tenure at a university but paid 10X as much.
I certainly don't have "fuck you money", but these days I think most competent tech workers can easily get jobs elsewhere, so I don't think it's a big, risky move to quit your job.
I don't think anyone (or, at least not many people) is arguing against working in the office if you have a specific need to be there. What people have an issue with is requiring a return to the office for no other reason than "group synergy".
I left a job over open office plans. I really hate it. And I am one of those tech + social people too. Like having people nearby.
But the distractions are everywhere. It is hard to flow. It is hard to have a phone call with a prospect or customer. Things get moved, borrowed, lost.
But mostly I hate it because everytime I have seen open plan, the people who set it up have big offices with windows looking out at the people they screwed over and seek to ultra micro manage. (And this is exactly what happened at the company I left)
"I saw you doing that, why?"
"How come you wander around several times a day?"
"Your desk is a mess"
And so it goes. Nope. Do not have time for that. Happy to work elsewhere or make less, whatever.
Anyway, they announced, I counter announced, and then was out before the move. They lost a few people, and that company was sold a while back.
Now pretty much everyone doing that work has a new email and works mostly from home! New owners saw no need for a group office scenario and has small teams all over the place. Given the nature of the work, that makes a ton of sense.
Funny how things can work.
Having talked with the old owner after all this went down, the real reasons were to save money and manage people and their relationships. Profound lack of trust.
Synergy means multiplication instead of addition when things are put together, like male and female oxen. You put them together in an open office and more oxen are sure to be produced.
This guy is doing machine learning though. All he needs is an internet connection.
I understand the idea that hardware WFH is going to be a no-go, but software? We already had the revolutionary moment where the internet is everywhere.
I work for a large semiconductor company and during the pandemic the test engineers in the lab and IT staff were the only ones allowed into the office for the first year. Even the test engineers were allowed to take a lot of lab equipment home with them. The CEO did an all hands where he shared pics of all the lab people testing and evaluating chips at home.
In my case it is hobby fun rapidly turning professional. The way to fund hobby / new work is to get your investment at home to pay for itself. Free tools and gear essentially.
Early on, as I picked up skills and scored deals on equipment, I ended up able to take side gigs and or take on special projects. Sometimes I would do these on a "keep the gear" basis. No money changes hands. Recommended.
Pros:
Picking up new skills
Research on ones interest and terms
Flex time working is possible
Reduced commute
Work when ideation is high tide, so to speak
Cons:
It can be expected to work more
Personal / company boundaries are less clear (IP and overwork)
Can be expensive
Need space
Summary:
Personally, I have always had a lab at home, and I rarely take company gear home. Sometimes I have, but I try to buy my own, or the gear from the company.
I have had to make a few career jumps and the next one has pretty much been made possible by what I had at home and what I could do with it.
Be very careful about IP. The reward for that caution can be a real opportunity for you.
It can be the place where you show young people stuff they would never see otherwise and or, until much later. This happened for me as a teen and it was a huge boost! And it was where home lab started for me. My bedroom was my shop.
Of course, you gotta sort this for your scene too. The CEO letting people take gear home is nice and maybe a non issue for people. Depends on what one is doing and or plans to do.
People are smart enough ( I'm sure there is a hiding bar at these companies) to go to the office if they require access to certain equipment which they cannot take home. Why impose a rule that doesn't make sense.
I know right. I mean to be able to test his his AI algorithms, instead of just walking into the supercomputer room with a briefcase full of punchcards he would either have to make a long distance trip or else FedEx in his punchcards(and expose Apple to the risk of losing them or having them leak).
Sorry, this is 2022 and we have high speed Internet and networked computers. And we don’t have to physically load punchcard into then supercomputer.
> Btw that quote is describing the potential customers of Apple, not employees
Why does that matter? Does Apple not want the most talented, world-changing people working on their products? If your marketing sounds good for customers but dumb for employees, particularly in knowledge-driven work, then maybe your marketing is just hypocritical?
Do marketers care whether their marketing is intellectually honest? Maybe that matters if the people you're marketing to are very discerning or cynical, but I'm not sure I'd put the typical Apple customer in that bucket. As long as the marketing gets people to consume the product, I don't think it matters if it's stupid or if it's lies.
My guess is that people who work for Apple do it more because of the giant FAANG salary and the social cachet than because of the product marketing.
>but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward,
Honestly such people are extremely rare. The quote doesn't apply to the vast majority of employees at Apple. There are always going to be other talented people willing to take their spot.
Their revenues and profits are in a historical low. Remote work is a scam. The company must return to the office, otherwise they'll go bankrupt in months.
How is remote work a scam? Engineers don’t need a schmuck like you bothering them in person to do great work. Work from home gives everyone a private office, focus and quiet.
I've found people's views on remote work say more about their personal ethics than universal truth.
People who would (or do) slack off without direct oversight think everyone is that way. They don't understand that the people in these positions are highly motivated, driven people.
I really doubt that most people would give up a job in a satisfying office environment with people they truly enjoy working with on a product/project they are excited to work on everyday simply because of they are told they have to go in and meet those people they really groove with three times a week.
some people have a life outside of the office and found that the commute takes a very large toll on that. they didn't know previously, but now have two years of experience that they'll never forget.
Prior to the pandemic, people I worked with in NYC wore their commute times as badges of honor. “You commute 90 minutes each way? That’s nothing. I commute 2 1/4 hours each way”
Think of that. Some people were spending 4.5 hours commuting every day. And it was ok with them.
It’s really hard to believe that Apple management is willing to act against their own interest.
Is it worth considering that the self-reported productivity gains which dominate these comments are not objective and are colored by employees acting in their own interest? That maybe Apple managers know what they’re doing?
It's amazing how bigoted some of the employees are. Having never witnessed the type of racism until recently when it has become en vogue, it's disgusting, and incredible how people admit their bigotry, and how others tolerate it.
It is interesting that the employees seem to realize that before technology allowed for people to work remotely, it was more an issue of individual merit that determined who had which jobs. They'd probably not admit it, but that is consistent with their claims given the circumstances.
Sorry but human beings aren't meant to live or work in isolation and no, Zoom does not cut it. Someone resigning would not change my mind, I'd say "don't let the door hit you on the way out becauase we have about 10,000 other people in line for your job who would happily work at Apple Park."
Furthermore, it is NOT healhty to sit at home. It causes "cabin fever" and that's a well known and documented fact. It causes unhealthy habits. It IS healthy, however, to leave your home and get out into the world.
This whole issue tells me how incredibly ridiculous people have become not to realize the small businesses they are literally killing off with their "i've got to stay home" attidude. How selfish of people to not realize that businesses around workplaces depend on the commerce. So basically it's just OK to say, "hey who cares about you small business owner, I am too lazy to commute and I've made a millione excuses to need to stay home and supposedly work."
I can go into an office and get 50 times more productive things done interacting with real humans and working together. It's also fulfilling to socialize and if you are an introvert then it helps you that much more.
It's just plain sad to see so many people whining on and on when they are literally damaging themselves from isolation....and video is NOT a replacement and never will be.
Note also that the United States' productivity is going down....wonder why.
These companies touting their solutions for creating a more connected world can't have it both ways. Apple was able to ship the M1 and roll out new iterations of many other offerings since the pandemic hit. They're just fine.
Apple didn't collapse since the pandemic hit, and the flexibility offered by remote work is far more valuable to lots of people than the loss of in-person collaboration opportunities. We deserve to have input into how we work best and if that means walking away from companies run by egomaniacs that need to see butts in seats, then so be it.