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Apple Staff Complain About Plans for Return to Office Work in Letter to Tim Cook
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Why would they take lower pay in exchange for increased productivity?
If Apple were to issue a new contract stating this new and very generous offer, those who refuse to sign could be walking into redundancy anyway. Not sure if that would be the case in the US but that is certainly how it is in the UK.
You remind me a lot of someone I interviewed with for a job before I started working remotely.
I asked him if they had flexible working hours - not even remote, just flexible hours in the office.
"Oh yeah, sure. I mean, there's a daily team meeting at 8.30am, and you'd only be paid for fixed hours per day.... but hey you can take your lunch break any time you want".
I'm sure it will surprise no one to hear that when they offered me the job, I didn't even bother to respond to their email.
It's a pretty poor state of affairs when the working hours are more strict than either of the state or federal government departments I'd worked in previously. Funnily enough, none of those managers seemed to be overly bothered about my working hours, so long as the work was done. Turn up at 11, leave at 8, jobs done, no wuckin' furries mate.
Sure, that sounds fair, once the employer agrees to subsidise their internet costs, power costs, heating/cooling costs.
You may want to watch this documentary on Stress, Portrait of a Killer.This is kind of a tangent, but there's a recent Netflix documentary on how the human body deals with stress. The more your body is exposed to it, the more it can adapt and perform. Obviously it doesn't apply to everyone. I used to be super stress about work and driving back when I lived in a metro drivable city, but I noticed that I started to get used to the stress. My blood pressure at the beginning was fairly high (i.e. my body was physically flushed red), but when my body adapted, it began to regulate to normal. Now I'm addicted to the "stress" - which arguably is a bad thing
Stress is far worse and will kill you; lashings won’t kill you unless someone just kept going.
Just a very short list:
1. Not all employees are motivated enough to work alone. They will slack off.
2. The abuse/divorce rate will go up.
3. Much unneeded weight gain.
4. Mental health issues for those single people who live alone. Humans need personal contact with other humans.
5. An increase in addiction to drugs and/or alcohol.
The complainers should feel gratitude they still have a job to go to.
1. Not all employees are motivated enough to work alone. They will slack off.
2. The abuse/divorce rate will go up.
3. Much unneeded weight gain.
4. Mental health issues for those single people who live alone. Humans need personal contact with other humans.
5. An increase in addiction to drugs and/or alcohol.
The complainers should feel gratitude they still have a job to go to.
I'm not sure what kind of people you think are working at Apple, but I don't think it's normal to assume the only thing keeping anyone from abusing their spouse is 8 hours a day in a cubicle.
Lol this culture? I know you’re trying to make a dig, but isn’t “everything is up for debate” intrinsically American? Maybe you live in another country and don’t realize this “culture”. Just imagine how different this world/country would be if the American founding fathers followed you're same advice lol. Maybe you’re English and you’re still upset about losing the Revolutionary War?
Progress is never made when people just “do what you’re told”.
a few things things:
1) if you have anyone that essential that your "bus factor" isn't adequate and you need more people.
2) And there are very few jobs that require synchronous work for the full work day, if you can't manage with an employee out on a run for 1-22 hours something is very very wrong with your process or you have a very niche job. Do you not expect people to eat, use the bathroom, get coffee, etc either?
3) There's a *lot* of research that shows that a) nearly no one is fully productive for 8 hours/day b) breaks help with increasing that productivity, giving important resets, and log term make people and teams vastly more productive
4) I'm on call at the moment 24/7 because of some new systems, for a very large enterprise platform that hosts quite a few rather important services globally right now. You can be reachable on a run if needed, I have a smart watch, and it's likely everyone you work with at least has a phone. If they're someone who's critical to reach for some reason make sure they take a phone (and set appropriate boundaries, ie only call/text/whatever if it's actually critical). Also if someone's that critical you should be subsidizing their comms, for ex I get a $75/mo stipend towards my phone bill because I need to be reachable and be able to work when needed and that covers my unlimited data and most of my general phone bill otherwise. I have the choice of a company cell phone instead but I'd rather they subsidize my plan and I don't have to carry 2 devices. If you don't do that it's unreasonable to expect someone to be permanently reachable.
5) "People are paid to work at the end of the day" - no, people are paid to get their work done. Hours worked for anything that isn't *actually* time dependent (like working on a factory line or being on station as EMS or something) is an absolutely terrible metric for productivity and the idea that someone is in front of their machine for 8 hours means they're working at full productivity for 8 hours is absurd. As I mentioned earlier in the thread my boss has a habit of noting the stat that people are most productive and can focus on something with full productivity for 3-5 hours/day. If I estimate a task is going to take 4 hours that's a full days work (the other hours in the day include lunch, breaks, meetings, documentation work around the main task, and time for out of band asks). If I allocate 8 hours of actual tasks I'll never actually get through them without working 12 hours to account for everything else - and I'll be less productive overall. I already work a lot of long days when we're in crunch time, no need to make it worse.
6) "That also creates the headache for management to make sure that employee is in fact making up their hours" - no, again, unless it's time sensitive the appropriate metric is "are they getting their work done" not "are they literally in front of their screen for 8 hours"
7) "People are paid to work at the end of the day and disappearing and loving it up at home is not part of the deal when working from home in my view" ok, but you know what? I don't live for my job. Don't get me wrong, I love my job, but my job is what pays for my life, not the other way around. My pet had a medical issue recently that I only spotted in time because I was home with them. I let my team know and bolted to the vet. Saved their life. If you don't think that's more important than work I don't know what to tell you. My team gets it and that retains staff, long run net benefit for the company too. If I had a job that told me my pet was less important than work I'd instantly quit.
8) Lastly I think you don't understand a key important metric in hiring talented engineers these days: "work/life balance". A lot of companies pay lip service to that idea, but until WFH suddenly became common it wasn't really actually doable. It seems like a lot of managers like you are having trouble coming to terms with the fact that people actually want what it says on the tin.
I find this in-thread focus on body language as an excuse to force people back to offices hilarious. Who actually believes people in meetings care or respond to body language? I spent 25 years in IT and I don’t recall anyone who hosted meetings changing anything based on body language. They steamrolled their agenda regardless of comfort level of anyone in the meeting.
Nor is progress made when inmates are allowed to run the asylum.
Apple didn’t make this move just for the hell of it. Apple obviously believes productivity has suffered, and Apple almost undoubtedly has the data to prove it.
Erm.....good for you? But a little naive on your part. We don't all live close to our offices. It also sounds like you have crummy co-workers if they are all slacking off.
Once upon a time, I lived within walking distance from my workplace, but those days are long gone. I lived 100km (60 miles), away from my last workplace, (in a different country as well I might add so I had to tackle border controls on a daily basis). So in a nutshell, there is no public transport to my workplace.
I actually did a little calculation of how much it would cost to go by public transport and gave myself a giggle.
I live literally on the side of a mountain. I own my home so renting another place isn't an option. The cheapest ride to the coach station would. be about 40eur one way by Uber.
80eur.
The return coach fare is about 30eur from the city to where I have to be. It takes about 3 hours to get to its destination, so to arrive at work, I would have to leave my home at about 5.30 am. So all in all, public transportation would cost me about 110eur daily and would mean I leave my home at 5.30 am and return home at about 11 pm at night.
While my situation is fairly unique (along with the 35,000 fellow "frontier workers" as we are known), my situation has improved dramatically.
Funnily enough, my new company isn't even based in the country I'm in and it would require a 3-hour flight to get there (if we were allowed to travel).
I'm pleased that you are happy to return to the confines of an office environment. I for one am not and if it suits you, great. But I'm not complaining. I'm just enjoying my massively improved work-life balance and the company I work for has chosen to steer its recruitment accordingly.
Enjoy the water machine gossip! I'll be out training on the side of a mountain during my lunch breaks
Humans work there, and after 55+ years working with them I think I understand them. As to the abuse/divorce comment, try understanding what I wrote. The key word was "up".
And please don't resort to posting any more stupid gifs. Those are for adolescents.
Especially considering the poor quality of the education system in places like India where a lot of IT work has been sent.
What all of us?
You claimed that if more people work from home, some of them will abuse their spouse and/or get divorced - which suggests that you think spending 8 hours a day in an office will keep them from abusing their spouse...
Oh c'mon. Everybody likes a good reaction gif.
Are you saying you don't find them even the slightest bit amusing?
Are you unaware of the data on domestic and child abuse over the past 15 months? The numbers jumped even among people who were getting paid piles of money to stay at home.
Stark difference between inmates at an asylum and able-bodied, intelligent employees, that were hand picked by Apple.
it might sound nice to say “I’m sure they have the data” but you don’t know that. If they did, they could probably squash this thing pretty quickly by presenting actual numbers to back up their decision. My company is by no means Apple, but they are pulling the same stunt with the whole “company culture” excuse. They spent a year and a half bragging about how great the company is doing, how amazing our production is, and how we’ve seen record profits… I’ll guarantee they have zero “data” showing it’s better for us to be in the office.
It's almost like we need better support structures and funding for social services to handle this.
You don’t believe one of the largest data-tracking companies in the world is able to track employee productivity?
Regardless, Apple doesn’t owe the whiny employees anything here.
As for your company, what did you expect them to say? “Our company is a mess right now, and customers should spend their money elsewhere?”
Come on, man.
Work-from-home theoretically saves companies a mountain of money. Companies aren’t moving away from it just to spite their employees.
I think we all approach this topic based on our own experiences and the experiences shared with us by people we know. It’s those experiences that form our opinions that we in turn share here etc. It’s amusing you dismissed my opinions and experiences because they are what you think are exclusive to me or anecdotal, but somehow promote your own ‘experiences’ as the reality that represents this topic as a whole. We clearly approach this topic from different angles but neither of us is wrong really. It would be physically impossible to do my job 100% remotely because I’m an engineer. People who sit in front of a computer 100% of the time have a different situation but even then it’s down to the employer to set the rules.
If you don’t like the terms of a job, you move on and find another and I doubt either party worries as long as they get what they want.
No sorry I'm not a walking talking statistics machine. I was vaguely aware of a surge in Chinese divorce rates. But let's consider some context on the concept in general.
This article for example, mentions a lot of figures from all over the place... but it also includes this little piece of clarification, which you seem to have forgotten:
You do realise there is a significant difference between someone being able to work from where they wish, and people being forced to stay indoors for the vast majority of the time, for months on end, right? Please tell me you understand those are two different scenarios.
As a side note, I really prefer the term 'remote work' rather than 'work from home' - because it needn't necessarily be your actual home.