Apple Still Planning Return to In-Person Work in September, Despite Employee Complaints

[Blackstick]

Let them. Then they'll just go hire more talented people. Plenty of them out there who would be so grateful to have a job at Apple. Me included.

Except you and me don’t have the specific knowledge of the firmware in the upcoming M2 or M3 chip due out in 2024.

Remember, these aren’t Walmart cashiers they’re replacing. In some instances, there’s maybe a handful of human beings who can even do the job and replacing them is a nightmare, and extremely expensive. There’s no training or documentation to teach the new guy, it’s coming from the current guy’s Albert Einstein like brain — and you better believe it’s a problem for Apple if he or she takes that proprietary knowledge to Google or Microsoft or plenty of other shops.

There’s relatively few people who aren’t replaceable in the business world, but Apple has more than virtually any other company.

 

[s4d1k]

Let them. Then they'll just go hire more talented people. Plenty of them out there who would be so grateful to have a job at Apple. Me included.

If you want a job at Apple, you can just apply, they have plenty of open positions. Apple loosing employees won’t change your odds of getting a job.

 

[Jim Lahey]

People are compensated for work by being paid. You don’t get to dictate how your employer runs their business. It’s nice to be happy in your career but it’s not supposed to be utopia. That’s why it’s called work.

 

[Abazigal]

If you think that the top engineers at Apple don’t have several great options, you’re wrong. If they are not happy, they will leave. Replacing them won’t be easy.

Then the haters should totally support these people leaving Apple, if they feel this will make Apple “doomed”.

I don’t think anyone is indispensable. Not even Tim Cook. Heck, Basecamp (the company that makes the $100/year email app) had ⅓ of their employees quit overnight and they are now (reportedly) doing better than ever. You know why? Because for all the people who hated their new policy barring political speech during work, there were evidently just as many, if not more who were fine with it. And it all just worked itself out.

Talent aside, I don’t think it’s a bad thing for a company to get rid of people whom they feel are a bad fit, culture-wise. Every garden needs pruning once in a while.

 

[Jony Ive and Co.]

What a joke some employees think they can complain/oppose or make Tim Cook change his mind. Timmy the supply chain master is not someone to mess with; don't let his "quiet" appearance fool you, he is hard as rock or he wouldn't have made it to CEO and weather Apple through so many storms and challenges.

 

[George Dawes]

Tim is the real deal

He’s shown that on countless occasions

 

[laz232]

Well it is still valid, what I told my employer some time ago: "You don't need to do this, but I do not need to work here either". So if you want't good and motivated employees you should listen to their wishes, at least to some extend.

Depends - there is a "madness of crowds" effect. With the current hysteria and outrage regarding "everything" I no longer think that the average employee is a meaningful barometer for the establishment of good policies.

 

[Blackstick]

People are compensated for work by being paid. You don’t get to dictate how your employer runs their business. It’s nice to be happy in your career but it’s not supposed to be utopia. That’s why it’s called work.

That was my dad’s generation. Times have changed. Employees have leverage in many tech companies.

Our people requested less restrictive vacation time, we got unlimited PTO.

We requested a better 401k, now the company matches 45% up from 15%.

New moms wanted more time with the baby, they went from 6 weeks to 20 weeks and new dads went from 1 week to 4 weeks.

The company now picks up the healthcare premiums for the entire immediate family, not just the one employee.

The old days of “you’re the employee, you’re not supposed to get anything more than a paycheck!” have ended.

Prior to the pandemic, we were 40% working from home, it’ll be about 65% permanently at home at the end of this.

If you take care of your employees, they’ll take care of your customers, who will take care of your shareholders. That’s our founder’s quote. He started the place with 4 people and sold it with 6,000. Now we’re merged to 15,000.

 

[chris1958]

I expect Apple will lose some very talented people over this.

By letting people work at home You will loose a lot of very talented people. Without personal contact to colleagues and superiors people are just doing their job without any emotional bindings to the company they are working for.

A major problem is on-boarding. Working at the office there are colleagues to show You around. This cannot be replace by online-meetings. In Japan people seldon quit a regular job. But now being forced working from home a lot of new hires are quitting within the first months.

 

[Blackstick]

By letting people work at home You will loose a lot of very talented people. Without personal contact to colleagues and superiors people are just doing their job without any emotional bindings to the company they are working for.

A major problem is on-boarding. Working at the office there are colleagues to show You around. This cannot be replace by online-meetings. In Japan people seldon quit a regular job. But now being forced working from home a lot of new hires are quitting within the first months.

This is true, hence the hybrid option is gaining steam.

 

[m4mario]

If you think that the top engineers at Apple don’t have several great options, you’re wrong. If they are not happy, they will leave. Replacing them won’t be easy.

Apple has 2 options:
1) Let everyone work from home, not delaying any new product launches, but loose out on all the long term benefits their new workspace and working together will bring, and has bought through all these years of working together.
2) Let some very talented employees quit, face some hard delays over the next 2 years, but get the long term benefits of working together in their state of the art, new workspace. Face short term delays, but get back on track to the model that built something as insanely huge and consequential as Apple itself.

I don't know about you, but option 2 makes a lot more sense to me.

 

[sdz]

Very good, the employer decide what its best for its business, not the employee
Of course its good if you can land on middle ground where everyone can be satisfied enough

Prepare to lose talent

 

[incoherent_1]

I expect Apple will lose some very talented people over this.

And go where? What employer conducting cutting edge, top-secret development will be totally cool with someone working from wherever they please? It's one thing to make due during a pandemic because they had to, but this isn't a tenable long term solution for any such company.

 

[DelayedGratificationGene]

I expect Apple will lose some very talented people over this

Exactly…I’m betting the very small amount of people complaining are not exactly your prized employees to begin with

 

[Isengardtom]

It’s important to allow some flexibility within the possibilities of the type of job you do. I think some jobs, especially if you’re working on projects with little team interaction, are perfectly possible from home.

When lots of team collaboration is important it becomes a tougher discussion.

That said, I believe some flexibility on both sides is important. I easily work 45-50 hrs a week. I often work a bit on weekends too. As a counter, I wouldn‘t accept my manager whining if once in a blue moon I want to leave an hour too early to get to an appointment.

 

[yabeweb]

I strongly agree with Apple on this one, while mileage might vary from job to job, I still believe that being in the office is the right way.

That is especially true when the office has been well tought out and designed.

 

[supercoolmanchu]

This is the answer. A lot of folks on this thread are likely easily replaced and approach their jobs that way. I’m in this boat, there’s plenty of JamfPro administrators out there, it’s not hard to learn Tanium, BigFix or SCCM either.

If you have a knowledge set that realistically less than a few dozen engineers on the planet have, there’s any number of tech companies that’ll match your salary and benefits and couldn’t care less where you work from. They’ll fly you in on biz class for any critical in person meeting.

To the average cog in the engine, they don’t see how this is possible, but Apple has a considerable amount of individual contributors with this leverage over them. Time will tell how it pans out.

It’s hard to recruit a new crew member for any ship, if the candidate has recently become scared of the water.

I mean they could drown, or get eaten by a shark, or stung by a jellyfish, or knocked overboard by a storm or a strong wind, or a sea monster, or sirens, or the Bermuda Triangle!

Once a mind is locked in irrational phobias, they have elected to become cargo rather than crew.

 

[tucupeis]

what these employees want is to earn bay area salaries and be able to live cheaply in the middle of nowhere

 

[The_Gream]

If you take care of your employees, they’ll take care of your customers, who will take care of your shareholders. That’s our founder’s quote. He started the place with 4 people and sold it with 6,000. Now we’re merged to 15,000.

I really wish more companies had this mentality. I work in a warehouse, we have pretty much worked 5-6 days a week since March 2020. We supply about 180 company stores, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but we have like 30-50k skus that could need to be picked for each stores. Our inventory control people could start changing a handful of skus weekly to be replaced by their inner packs vs the general single which would reduce us picking that item every week. Yet, they don’t want that much money in the stores (that’s the excuse I hear).

 

[^^BIGMac]

Apple be like: "We didn't built this 5 billion dollars spaceship for you guys to just stay at home working naked"

...or sitting at home watching the 3:30 PM movie! 😉

 

[Rychiar]

Most of us were back to work by last September 🤷‍♂️

 

[TimFL1]

Regarding all the „plenty of jobs lined up“ talk in here, speaking from experience: the people boycotting this here and wanting permanent home office deals are usually the most replaceable of them all. We have a similar situation at our place and the most vocal voices are from employees you could easily replace within a handful of days.

The people in charge or mission critical are pretty much in favor of returning to the offices. Anyone coming to management, threatening us with job offer XYZ with 100% home office gets a friendly „you should take that offer“ answer and you pretty much never hear from them again (not that they quit, they just gave up requesting home office deals).

//EDIT: Don‘t get me wrong, I‘m in favor of Home Office wherever and whenever possible. I just look at it from both sides (employee and employer): presence days still make sense but I‘m in favor of moving towards a hybrid approach to working. Some companies can get there sooner rather than later, some may never be able to fully offer HO.

 

[Denmac1]

Were these people complaining before the pandemic?

 

[tridley68]

How rediculious get back to work or Apple find people. That are willing to work. After being paid to sit at home for a year and a half it's long overdue put on the big boy and big girl Pants because you can be replaced

 

[the8thark]

The workers here need to realise they work in one of the most [censored] companies in all of tech but they still want more. The staff are really acting like spoiled little children who want everything and when 1% of it is denied, they start complaining about the 1% they did not get, whule totally ignoring the 99% of great benefits they have working at apple.

PS. The censored word is not a bad word, it's just a fact I am not allowed to share in this particular topic.