Taking into account training resources, learning how the actual code works from a developer perspective, knowing how to diagnose some issues some college graduate never experienced before from a customer support perspective. Taking all that into consideration in the places I have worked on its at least double if not triple a person's salary for the first 6 months if not more.
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Apple Employees Continue to Fight Return to Campuses and Push for Better Remote Working Options
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This is also assuming the experienced employee is not causing any problems that would ultimately make him to be more trouble than he was worth.
It’s a judgement call. Just like when Tim Cook fired Scott Forstall, despite his years of experience working for Apple.
At Apple, the glue is ultimately still Apple, and the ideology is design. It is a shared belief system that “No” is more important than “Yes,” that focus is essential to making great products, and that no one individual is essential. Not Steve Jobs, and certainly not Scott Forstall.
It’s the same thing here. If the price of individual brilliance is collective friction, then that is a price I am not willing to pay. No matter how good that employee may be. I will rather bite that bullet now, than later.
Yes everything is situational. You can't just blanket say firing them will be cheaper for the company. If ALL they are doing is replying to an email 5 minutes every once and a while stating that still want to work from home, and the rest of their 8 hours they are as productive as they always are, firing them will NOT benefit the company.
Have you seen the damage retaining a prima donna can do?
Golden handcuffs serve two purposes— they show commitment by the company to encourage your best employees to stick around, and they require commitment by your best employees to stay aligned with the company objectives and keep their employment. The best employees at Apple should be at risk of leaving significant incentive pay on the table if they choose to walk away. Those who aren’t losing anything weren’t worth keeping.
Unless working from home is simply worth it for a lower salary/less incentive pay. I would gladly take a pay cut if I eventually get "forced" to come back to the office. And yes, I will also "fight" to work from home because I like the company. But it will eventually lead to me leaving if they do not agree.
And by "fight" I mean meeting with my boss/email replies and other things. I will still work, I will not pout or just sit there.
What I am saying (and which this and many other threads seem to not want to acknowledge) is that productivity here is often defined as simply ticking off a checklist of tasks, while I am trying to make a point that it’s often more than that.
While that technically may be true for some employees, I find this the argument ignores the aspects of work that aren’t clearly defined or written out as tasks needed to be done or completed. An example of one such task is the serendipitous transfer of ideas and thoughts that arise from simply being in the same physical space as others, and I just don’t think this can be done online effectively.
Claiming that software engineers at Apple don’t need or can’t benefit from this kind of in-person team communication is a joke, unless you are an extremely experienced engineer who just wants to be left alone, which strikes me as being a pretty selfish way of thinking actually if we going back to my original point.
I will say that Apple is compromising when it comes to return to office, and already compromising a fair bit.
Are you a software engineer? Do you work for a very large open-office company? The distractions are ridiculous at the office. Sorry, I don't want to overhear someone talking in the cubicle next to me about the sports game last night when I am trying to work. I don't want to chat about your kids 5 times a day. I don't want my 15 minute breaks to turn into 30 minutes. I get paid to work, not socialize. And I have strict commitments from clients and stakeholders to produces X amount of bugs/user stories in Y amount of time.
Context switching is a MASSIVE problem in development, and a massive problem at my company where the CTO and CEO are coming up with "DONT BOTHER DEVELOPER X!" times.
This is exactly what i thought too. Paid based on CoL where you WFH, not where homebase is.
And yet you've acquired Penryn and failed to notice that the post was edited over an hour after the original post. I didn't originally include that article but left my original, possibly incorrect assumption in there for posterity. Unlike many, I don't mind being wrong and am open to being proven so. If your point at the end of the day was to prove the other guy wrong by showing that there are homes within 20 miles of Apple's campus that are less than $1.6 million, then I guess you were successful. However, I'm not really sure what broader point that proves and as such is rather useless on its own.
This echos my thoughts also. https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...-remote-working-options.2304775/post-30117351
YMMV one size doesn’t fit all.
One could make the argument that WFH makes better decisions than in-person meetings for the simple reason that WFH communications are via email, collaboration tools like Teams/chat/etc that all have tracked info, so you’re far less-likely to miss things than an in-person meeting.
I’m pretty sure if you translate some of the clay tablets unearthed from the deserts near the Nile delta, you’ll find half of them contain meeting minutes…
Text as an information recording mechanism is unparalleled. Text as a communication medium is horribly inefficient.
Well stated! The lazy are left behind. This is real life. Welcome to the Business world 101, you will be walked on without care. To be honest good! We are all adults. Put real clothes on, stop dressing like slobs and start adulting.
I disagree with the premise that I should care about Apple’s success over the quality of life for it’s employees.
Employees aren’t being made to pee in bottles. I am not against better working conditions for employees, but I am not entirely sold on WFH, not least because I feel the merits have been largely overblown, while the potential downsides are being handwaved aside. WFH is still in my eyes a perk that is nice to have, but which ought to remain wholly optional, rather than some unalienable right.
Plus, why wouldn’t I want Apple to make the best products possible?
To me, it’s more about being cognisant about the relative pros and cons of working from home, rather than cheerleading for any one particular company.
In theory but a lot of people just don't want to drive into the office every day. Some of those people are not in lower cost of living areas as it based on other date. Instead of living in SF they live just outside of it commute in. Just outside of would have a huge reduction factor on pay.
Yeah the system is pretty busted and those WFH decreases in pay are not always as lined up as they should be.
I should clarify, I don’t care about Apple making the “best” products possible at any expense to its employees. It doesn’t have to be to the point where employees are peeing in bottles, and you have no idea what conditions are like working there, that’s a really weak point. How is this getting in the way of apple making the “best” products? “Best” isn’t quantifiable. If employees say they don’t want to return to the office, they have their reasons and they’ve proven they don’t need to. It ends there if you actually care about the employees over the company. There are plenty of reasons why WFH is better for employees including more job opportunities for economically disadvantaged areas, less time wasted on committing, less distractions and office politics, it provides a more comfortable work environment, it’s an all-around better experience for employees who want it. Your argument is in favor of the trillion dollar behemoth, not the actual people working under it.
I think this is a case by case basis, and it can be a false positive. I’ve seen some employees argue that they are more productive when their performance is in actuality not so great compared to their peers who do go into the office.
You can argue all you want about the reasons for remote working, but at the end of the day, it will be about performance in both the company and the employee. I think some perform well remotely, and others absolutely do not. It will probably be evaluated on a team by team basis
I think the concern that Apple will lose valuable employees is not as big of an issue as it’s being made out. Anecdotally and ironically, my friends (engineers, business analysts, designers) that work at Apple want to go back due to distractions at home.
It was stated earlier in the thread that the majority of folks asking to continue working from home are folks that USED to work in Apple Stores but, evil Apple “made up” jobs for them in order to have an excuse to still pay them even when they weren’t going to the stores (as they were closed). Stores are re-opening and Apple’s asking those folks to report for work at the Retail Stores.A lot of ancient relics in here. Some of corporate America has learned absolutely nothing over the past 18 months apparently. Let’s get back to the wasteful and unnecessary commuting to an office building everyday. WFH employees kept your businesses running and profitable during the last year and a half!
Actually, I looked up “inapt” and it appeared to match what I thought you meant. In context, you did fine.
AH, that actually makes a BIG difference. A job Apple “created” in order to be able to justify paying them while they couldn’t go into stores is now ending and Apple’s saying “head back to the store”.
I imagine if you told either group, “These are mostly folks that used to do Retail Store work but were given jobs they could do from home while all the stores were closed. Now that the stores are back open, they’re being asked to go do that thing they got hired for. Not developers, not admins, not b2b personnel, but retail employees, like the ones at McD’s and Target, initially hired to do work that really be done from home.” The majority of either group SHOULD agree that they should get back to the stores OR find another job that will hire them, from day one, to work from home rather than in a retail setting.
And Google are trying to cut pay by up to 25% if their employees work from home. https://www.news.com.au/finance/wor...e/news-story/0f9e3a145f2cf5fdbf7155ac54985ee5
Might be a harsh new reality for some employees to gain that freedom of not coming into the office. Seems like it's a good trade-off. And of course you are being paid according to your zip code.