Apple Staff Complain About Plans for Return to Office Work in Letter to Tim Cook

[Mike. Just Mike.]

Tim: guys we spent 87 billion dollars on this building, now haul your asses back in here.

I wonder how many of those workers asked for them to do that. Very few, I suspect.

 

[Brandhouse]

I've been WFH since March of last year and I'm not returning any time soon. Not until my wife and I have had our second vaccines jabs. It's not whining, it's people very rightly concerned for their families health. Where I work I'm supported to pick the model I choose, right now it's 100% WFM. At some point it'll be a hybrid model, when I choose to adopt it.

 

[scuac]

I WISH my workplace would tell us we can WFH twice a week, would take it in a heartbeat. What are these Apple people complaining about???

 

[Ubele]

It is not unreasonable to request working from home.

I've let my team members decide what both best suits them and what enables them to be productive. Some want to return to the office, mainly because they either have short commutes from their homes or live in a small condo. Others want a hybrid, flexible schedule. Those are mainly individuals who have a family and children. A decent number want to work from home and come to the office maybe once per two to three months.

I trust my team. They wouldn't be on it if they couldn't deliver. They're competent enough to collaborate amongst each other where necessary.

As a technical manager, my role is to ensure that my team succeeds. I'm there to stop executive politics and other managers from interfering with my team's day-to-day work. Likewise, I'm there to ensure that the company succeeds. That means translating ideas into products that are rolled out on time. If working from home can facilitate both, then there's no reason to not support it.

It sounds like you’re a great manager! That’s the philosophy at the company where I work. It starts with the CEO and filters down. We’re very picky about who we hire. If you’re the kind of person who can’t be trusted to do your job to the best of your ability whether you’re in the office or WFH, you probably wouldn’t have been hired in the first place — but, if you slipped through the cracks, you’d be fired (after being given a chance to improve, of course). I don’t get these posts about slackers who are taking advantage of pandemic WFH yet still keep their jobs. Why aren’t they fired? Of course, I’m looking at it from a US, non-union, at-will point of view.

 

[vi2867]

I really depends the link of work you are in. If you work for a company that needs to keep their work a secret and allowing their employees to work at home, where their work can be easily exposed, then I would understand why Apple feels that their employees need to come into the office.

 

[Ubele]

Good comments, sensible. I agree.

Thanks! I should add that I’m in the last decade of my career. I’ve reached the point where I’m really good at what I do, my job is low stress (for me), the pay is good (but I’ll never be rich), there’s no place higher for me to go, nobody else in my global company does what I do, most of my work involves interacting with people around the world, I’m an introvert with a retired wife and therefore don’t require in-person interaction with others, my home office is better equipped than my company’s open-floorplan desk space, I spend the 90 minutes I used to spend in traffic on the treadmill and have lost 20 pounds since the pandemic started, I eat better, and I’ve saved money on gas, work clothes, auto maintenance, and lunches. Why on earth would I want to return to the office? Fortunately, the powers that be agree with me (and others like me with similar arguments).

However, if I were earlier in my career, I’d worry about being “out of sight, out of mind.” I think that working in person with others would be important for my career development. And if my current job involved collaborating with a co-located team where being together in person really did add value, I’d be happy to go back to the office x number of days per week. But if the powers that be said that everyone had to go back, regardless of their situation… well, I’d do it, because everything else about my job is great, and I don’t have many working years left. But I’d grumble to my wife about it.

 

[fathergll]

Calling them spoiled brats is pure ignorance. The pandemic is a once in a lifetime opportunity to learn new ways of living and working. With the internet we have new opportunities to create a better world, and the pandemic has learned most people a valuable lesson we simply can’t ignore. Working from home for more than a year has given me more quality time with my family, less stress and way more energy towards my work than ever before. I save 1.5 hours of transport every day which goes to the above. Think about the decrease in pollution, decrease in stress related illnesses (which costs society huge amounts of money), and the overall improvement in life quality. It’s win win for everybody. Let people decide and trust each other. And stop the trolling, stating people will use it as an excuse to slack at home (thief thinks everyone steals).

100% agree. What I find more insane is that apparently some miserable people(in this very thread) want more people back on the road commuting(maybe because they can't do it). I mean has anyone seriously thought about how idiotic that is when our existing infrastructure cannot factually handle the amount of vehicles on the road not to mention the sheer waste of resources it takes to support these vehicles when you could eliminate some of this with a internet connection. Even from a 'selfish' standpoint don't you want less traffic??

Also work from home isn't this new pandemic concept like some people think it is. I know some tech workers who started to do this full time back 20 years ago when something called September 11th occurred and flights were grounded and time cost of travel increased after the attacks thus the remote working was pushed harder.

Companies only concern is their bottom-line and the issue that the employees face in Cupertino is that their company spent 5 billion constructing a place so it's not a case of a typically company that can actually save money by selling or stopping the lease of a building.

 

[Ethosik]

It's not about how productive a worker is.

In a company like Apple, it's about how productive a worker makes other employees who aren't even working on the same project (e.g. never in the same organized meeting). It may also be about idiotic ideas that no smart person would ever mention over a live microphone and on camera (stupid ideas which sometime fail in the upward direction). The spaceship was designed to make that more likely.

In any case, Apple not only has to compete for talent with other tech companies (and whatever WFH policies they converge upon) for chip designers and software architects, etc. Apple has to stay innovative enough to compete with China and the rest of the world and the work ethic in those countries.

That is just very poor team management. You should not have your team depending on another team for "productive". That is just crazy "our team was not as effective because we could not physically see Jimmy on a daily basis on another team".

 

[Ethosik]

Unfortunately that’s statistic doesn’t apply to everybody working remotely. My department were continuously productive throughout the pandemic but we had major problems with some going missing during the day and blaming ‘the internet’ or the ‘server’ etc.

The way around all this is to put everybody working remotely on performance review to maintain a watchful eye on employees output IMO.

And prior to working from home, you heard similar ones - "stuck in traffic/car broke down".

 

[benspratling]

Apple’s plan to return to the office was very fair. Talk about entitled. You cant stay home forever. Get vaccinated and be happy they offered work from home Fridays as well."....

Actually, as a software developer, we spend most of our time working independently and on a computer anyway. We have a high affinity for new tech and can use it effectively for intra-team communication, which we do anyway to keep the noise down when they jam us into offices sharing desks with each other with no cubicle walls. The company I work for has been working 100% remote for over a year, and many people have gotten back 2 hours of their day due to not needing to commute. Which, if you think about it, of 24 hours, minus 8 for work and 8 for sleep, and about another 2.5 for eating, is around a 50% increase in our free time over what we had before covid. Many are able to live in different cities and take care of family members, or simply avoid wasting all their money on ludicrously expensive housing to be near enough to get their daily commute time down to 1 hour. Like many office jobs, there really is almost no need for us to actually be in office. I've previously had jobs where we came into an office 3 days per quarter, not 3 days per week, and it was more team-building exercises than real work. I've been talking with the other team leads who work with me, and we think 1 day per week in office is enough to accomplish all the in-person meetings that work better if we're in person.

 

[benspratling]

And prior to working from home, you heard similar ones - "stuck in traffic/car broke down".

I had a friend who had his team turn their video chat on all the time instead of just during meetings.

 

[Ethosik]

I suppose it’s only safer if those same employees stay at home and don’t visit supermarkets, pub beer gardens, beaches and any public space now opening back up where they are mixing with people outside their household. Sadly a lot of the resistance comes from people who feel entitled but aren’t so worried about the safety aspect when it comes to their social lives, just the workplace. This has become apparent for a select few in my wife’s company at the moment and she has been managing 3 employees who have used every trick imaginable to not come into the office but have been loving the fact Cardiff’s bars are reopening lol. Their dream came to an end last week.

A 15 minute store run is very different than an 8 hour day in the office. And yes, I still wear masks and gloves when I make my store run. However, I CANNOT wear a mask and gloves for 8 hours every day. 15 minutes is about as long as I can take with a mask before the need to remove the mask is massive.

 

[benspratling]

Among other things, Apple software quality has really plummeted these last few years. B and C players, here they are.

True. MacCatalyst has been a particular disaster; I tried really hard to build an app with it, and much of it worked, but they had a bug where drag and drop in collection views only worked 80% of the time in mac os 10.15. Didn't fix it till Big Sur. And in Big Sur, if you command-q instead of selecting "Quit" from the application menu, the sandbox cuts off access to writing the document file before the autosave mechanism can write out changes. No wonder there are no mac catalyst app; it "just doesn't work". Lost 2 years of coding to that. Apple has known for months, admitted there is no work around; released 2 versions of Big Sur since then; the bug actually got worse. But these problems started long before work-from-home covid. I would say problems like these are due to the fact that software developers just aren't trained in the kinds of reliably and rigorous testing that real engineering disciplines are. There are many features of apps that simply cannot be tested at all with apple's UI automation frameworks. They have totally-undocumented features as well. And when there are advances, it seems to take apple 3 years to trickle out changes that are useful, and then we have to wait another couple of years for users to update before we can use them. Heck, in the music notation industry, one major app only confirmed their app works in Big Sur last month, and we'll get betas of a totally new os tomorrow.

 

[Ethosik]

Again it depends on the discipline and type of job you have. But there are some jobs that require close collaboration and require help from others to be successful.

I work in software development and it was amazing how much things improved in our satellite offices once we regularly visited onsite. Folks wanted to contribute not just because it was their job to do so, but because of the interpersonal relationships that were built.

And that’s my experience in the last 20 years.

That is just a problem with the company, not an issue with working from home. We have a dedicated 30 minutes to 1 hour each week for anyone on our team to jump on a call, talk about things, bond and whatnot, and enjoy ourselves. Its in fact better to have team bonding than in person as people are free to join/drop as they see fit, continue to work on a big project instead of brushing people off in person or avoiding the meeting entirely. As I have said before, I started a new job AND changed teams all during the pandemic. We had no issues collaborating or bonding or anything like that, and I play games with a few of them on Steam.

 

[unapologetic.brit]

spoiled overpaid brats

You sound like someone who doesn't work for the company, so I'll just assume they didn't want to hire you. These are legitimate concerns. Have some compassion for other human beings.

 

[4jasontv]

w

It feels like the interests in your view are heavily on the side of the employee and not the employer. Working from home if that is the situation should benefit the ‘employer’ too. People work for a business and are extremely lucky to have a job that gives them that wage in order to enjoy the things in life. If working from home means the business suffers or underperforms, then the employee needs to realise it’s not working.

If it’s ok for someone to recreationally sit in a pub with 40 strangers exhaling in the same space, it’s ok to sit in a distanced office with 4 - 10 people they know and work collaboratively IMO. Some here have said they want WFH to become a right, yet having a job isn’t a right but merely a privilege.

It should only be a right in the way that having fire extinguishers and multiple exits is a right. Not that they have to employ you but that if they do they should offer WFH as an option. If a company doesn't want the job done remotely then they shouldn't hire anyone for that job. It's the companies right to not fill the position.

I don't understand this whole if they do X to themselves we can do Y to them as well argument. There is a major difference between a person deciding to engage in risky behavior and a company requiring them to engage in risky behavior as a condition of employment.

 

[I7guy]

Thanks! I should add that I’m in the last decade of my career. I’ve reached the point where I’m really good at what I do, my job is low stress (for me), the pay is good (but I’ll never be rich), there’s no place higher for me to go, nobody else in my global company does what I do, most of my work involves interacting with people around the world, I’m an introvert with a retired wife and therefore don’t require in-person interaction with others, my home office is better equipped than my company’s open-floorplan desk space, I spend the 90 minutes I used to spend in traffic on the treadmill and have lost 20 pounds since the pandemic started, I eat better, and I’ve saved money on gas, work clothes, auto maintenance, and lunches. Why on earth would I want to return to the office? Fortunately, the powers that be agree with me (and others like me with similar arguments).

However, if I were earlier in my career, I’d worry about being “out of sight, out of mind.” I think that working in person with others would be important for my career development. And if my current job involved collaborating with a co-located team where being together in person really did add value, I’d be happy to go back to the office x number of days per week. But if the powers that be said that everyone had to go back, regardless of their situation… well, I’d do it, because everything else about my job is great, and I don’t have many working years left. But I’d grumble to my wife about it.

Different companies, different values. Our teams got a helluva lot of work done during the lockdown, but it clearly wasn't as efficient as being in the office to talk to others face to face. Things that could have taken literal minutes to resolve, took hours or more, and it wasn't because people were goofing off. That face to face to go into a conference room and draw things out was what was missing.

Company management recognized that also, with multiple surveys taking the pulse of the environment. The employees gave that feedback, not something that was pulled out of thin air. I'm hopeful that when employees start to return to the office, management will have a flexible WFH policy.

But as I said earlier, it's a case by case basis with no one stock answer and as always...YMMV.

 

[benspratling]

I’m sure with the ones complaining there is a better than average chance they aren’t the most prized employees to begin with.

True. Where I work the most prized employees management is telling that they won't be allowed to work remotely after we've been doing it effectively and productively for over a year, well, they're just quitting entirely and taking those prized skills to companies who will let them work remotely. It's the ones who don't work well who are trying to keep their heads down and not complain. The ones complaining the loudest, where I work, are the team leads who are seeing their best people quit because management is too committed to the idea of having people who work independently and on laptops drive into an office at 25 mph for an hour at a time in bumper to bumper traffic multiple days per week, while we're still working remotely and being as productive as we've ever been.

 

[benspratling]

Unbelievable. Sitting on your ass for 18 months, collecting your employment, and then trying to stay home forever.

Unemployment? Maybe you don't know what it is software developers do all day. We're still employed. We've been doing our jobs constantly since covid began. At least where I work, we've been very productive.

 

[Stella]

Hi

I WISH my workplace would tell us we can WFH twice a week, would take it in a heartbeat. What are these Apple people complaining about???

Why are you applying your preference onto other people? A bit selfish on your part?

 

[benspratling]

No, you’re including retail. Trust me, that is not even close to true for Silicon Valley corporate employees. My estimate is closer to $100K-$120K area employee median accounting for the skewed engineering wages. $57K is starvation wages in the valley, even post-pandemic. Can’t speak for other corporate areas like NYC. I’d guess it is a slightly lower median there since that is marketing/retail ops.

Yeah, given silicon valley housing prices, I think if I were getting paid 120 I wouldn't be able to afford a car, I'd be taking the train in every day, and I'd be in a 400 sq ft 1 bedroom. Actually I know a guy in la getting paid 200 and he was in a 400 sq ft 1 bedroom. also he had a beamer... but then everyone had a beamer.

 

[benspratling]

I imagine the days when they have to back at the workplace typically coincide with meetings with other people. So what I am guessing will happen is that all the meetings will be scheduled during these few days, and they can then use the rest of the time to get their work done.

So people may not really have that much of a say in when they want to come back.

3 days of meetings per week? just fire me now. I talked it over with other team leads where I work, and we think 1 day of meetings per week is completely sufficient for all our regularly scheduled team-wide touch points, team leads coordination & planning, and even some team-building socials. Did I say 1 day per week? I meant 1 day per 2 weeks. We're just being over cautious and suggesting once per week in case things get out of hand. And as software developers, any minute we're in a meeting is a minute we're not building the products....

 

[Ethosik]

3 days of meetings per week? just fire me now. I talked it over with other team leads where I work, and we think 1 day of meetings per week is completely sufficient for all our regularly scheduled team-wide touch points, team leads coordination & planning, and even some team-building socials. Did I say 1 day per week? I meant 1 day per 2 weeks. We're just being over cautious and suggesting once per week in case things get out of hand. And as software developers, any minute we're in a meeting is a minute we're not building the products....

I have meetings every day. We have a team meeting every day, that is typical for Agile development environments to have a touch point every day.

 

[benspratling]

Get back to work people. No reason not to.

I think what software developers are saying is there's no reason to. They (we) can work remotely just fine; have been for over a year. Driving in to sit at a desk with our laptops where we can all get distracted by every idle noise and fight over the thermostat and music selection is wasted time, effort, frustration, and it's driving up real estate prices unnecessarily to reduce commute times. Several people where I work have been told that once we aren't working remotely full time they'll have to come back in the office. 4 have quit already to work for giant silicon valley companies who pay extra because they're used to paying silicon valley prices to cover silicon valley real estate prices, and are now allowing people to work remote. If there's one industry that should just immediately stop meeting in person and go 100% remote, its software developers.

 

[benspratling]

I have meetings every day. We have a team meeting every day, that is typical for Agile development environments to have a touch point every day.

Yeah, "stand up" for 3 minutes, and we manage that online. super easy. Driving 2 hours a day for a 3 minute meeting that we do effectively as a chat comment, now that would be absurd.