Apple's Director of Machine Learning Resigns Due to Return to Office Work

[one more]

Absolutely no reason for anyone to work in the office. Zoom/Teams is perfectly fine, and likely more efficient than being in an office. I mean, you at least save the hour or 2 you waste commuting every day.

For anyone? Tell this to your dentist!

In person physical interaction is crucial for human psychological health, just look at the amount of damage done by lock-downs and what is going on in Shanghai right now.

As for the time “wasted” in commute, we can admire the scenery, chat to strangers, listen to stuff and just let our minds meander.

 

[sudo-sandwich]

Wonder how his next employer reacts when he asks why he quit Apple and his answer is “I wasn’t allowed to work from home anymore”

Where I'm interviewing, they made WFH flexibility a big selling point to candidates.

 

[bsolar]

Wonder how his next employer reacts when he asks why he quit Apple and his answer is “I wasn’t allowed to work from home anymore”

There are employers who offer work from home as a selling point since they recognize it's advantages for both parties.

For those companies not being able to work from home anymore is actually an understandable reason why someone is changing job and their ability/willingness to offer work-at-home conditions an additional selling point which might allow them to retain or acquire qualified employees which migrate from more restrictive companies.

The most qualified employees have no shortage of potential offers so they likely get to pick the work conditions they want most of the time, especially when distance from the workplace becomes a non-issue. Restrictive companies in the long run risk to selectively retain more the employees which have difficulty finding alternative options due to lack of qualifications.

 

[sudo-sandwich]

I agree Apple should do this. The 50% snowflakes will take Apple to court claiming unfair dismissal.

Even though Apple would be in the right, the anti Apple crowd will use it as an excuse to hate on Apple in the media. PR nightmare for Apple.

If you're required to show up to work and don't, seems like not a lawsuit the employee can win. Apple also has ways to get rid of unwanted employees without firing them, but they don't even need to. Most who don't want to work in the office will leave on their own once Apple makes it required or even just recommended, case in point here.

 

[MayaUser]

I think companies are ridiculous.

and companies are run by people...what are you thinking ?! ))))

 

[sudo-sandwich]

Plus, when you need something and you send a Teams message, people ignore it due to distractions.

Maybe they're ignoring it cause they're working.

 

[sudo-sandwich]

To quit over this is unreasonable and mildly childish.

Either he's prioritizing family, which is good, or feels more productive at home, in which case he'll do better elsewhere.

 

[Duncan-UK]

Aren’t we ending up in one infinite loop with the circular arguments in this thread?

 

[bsolar]

For anyone? Tell this to your dentist!

A dentist doesn't do "office work" when operating though: a dentist does office work when dealing with paperwork etc... which actually could happen at home likely.

In person physical interaction is crucial for human psychological health, just look at the amount of damage done by lock-downs and what is going on in Shanghai right now.

This doesn't mean you have to work at the office most of the time. Our team wants this kind of interaction but considers about 1 day per week at the office to be more than adequate for that.

Also note that the lock-downs impacted first and foremost the private social life, with pubs, discos, cinemas and restaurants closing. All of this is back in countries without lock-down anymore, giving plenty of opportunities to engage in social interaction among friends and family beside work colleagues.

As for the time “wasted” in commute, we can admire the scenery, chat to strangers, listen to stuff and just let our minds meander.

Which is all nice, but things you can still do willingly instead of having to travel to your work place if you want. Just take a walk in the park before starting you remote working session...

Not to mention, without commute you can still do all of what you mention, but also have the flexibility to do other stuff which are impossible or not practical in a commute.

For most of us time is the most precious resource we have, so being able to invest more of it freely is a massive advantage.

 

[MacRazySwe]

Research shows 70 % of employees are more likely to switch jobs, than go back to the office full time.

Apple will keep losing staff.

Apple was once at the top of my list of companies to work for. They are nowhere near it now. Luckily there are many other employers out there who are fully embracing remote work. It's the future. Offices should be a space for collaboration, learning and development and social interaction, but let me do my own day-to-day work where I work best.

 

[Shanghaichica]

It’s not like they have been doing a stellar job. Good riddance. Apple can actually hire somebody who will actually move Siri forwards and compete with google.

 

[hans1972]

Why can’t you meet in the office if everyone is local? They aren’t locked out.

Then it's not 100% working from home. At 3 days in the office per year you're down to less than 99% working from home.

Also, why would a company have an office if everyone is working 100% from home?

 

[chromite]

For anyone? Tell this to your dentist!

In person physical interaction is crucial for human psychological health, just look at the amount of damage done by lock-downs and what is going on in Shanghai right now.

As for the time “wasted” in commute, we can admire the scenery, chat to strangers, listen to stuff and just let our minds meander.

Why bring china into this? You do know that the US has 1mil+ covid deaths while China has less than 6k right?

 

[page3]

I guess this forum is predominantly US contributors? I’d be interested to hear what working from home conditions are like for you? Do you all have massive homes? Is the “den” still a thing? What if two family members work from home?

Here in the UK it’s not unusual to see people working from their kitchen or bedroom, on a totally unsuitable setup. I’m lucky that I had a third bedroom (called a “box room” because third bedrooms here are often tiny) which I converted into an office. Many aren’t so lucky.

We also still have a huge spectrum of broadband availability. One home might have FTTH 1Gb while next door could still be stuck on 50 year old copper.

I know families where two (or three) all work from home, necessitating the use of headsets or in one case converting the loft (attic) space in to two offices.

My point is, while it can work really well here, many homes just aren’t suitable. I’d be interested to hear if that’s a UK thing only?

 

[macduke]

You're not a marriage counselor to work from home. You work at a company that builds products, some are life-changing products, products that require maximum focus, productivity, discipline, quality check, again and again. At-home productivity will never equal at-work productivity. At-home discipline will never equal at-school discipline.

Just like you'd never be comfortable with a home-schooled heart surgeon; or get on a rocket built by engineers who worked from home.

Anyway, that said, good riddance to him. There are no irreplaceable people.

This is a terrible take that won’t age well. Have you heard of the labor shortage? The companies are losing their grip on the power and we the people are taking it back. You sound like a cranky CEO stuck in the past. My company pivoted to remote like most but made it permanent and we’ve never seen profit margins like these before. Our growth is outstanding and things are so efficient that we have a four day work week with the option to work Friday if we need to. I haven’t worked more than an hour on a Friday since, and 90% of Fridays I don’t do anything except catch up on errands or work on projects around the house or hobbies.

You have some weird outdated concept of working from home meaning the work isn’t as good. Obviously if you have a hands on job where you have to meet with the public and diagnose things in person you need to work outside the home. Don’t be dense about what we’re talking about here dude. I haven’t produced work of this quality or quantity in my entire professional career. I’m literally touching a hundred projects per day in meaningful ways as a senior developer. The best part is we can hire people on the other side of the world to do work during the night and check in with them in the morning before they sign off and everything I didn’t finish the day before is done and they inform us of any issues that cropped up during the night and we take action if needed. The flexibility is ridiculous and we can hire the perfect candidate anywhere in the country or world without restriction.

No offense but you sound like the few people we had to fire who didn’t make the work from home transition in that you don’t have the discipline to work from home, by your statement above. I have laser focus at home. I have a studio I built a year and a half before the pandemic (I also do photography and design) and I don’t have anyone stopping by my office to annoy me with chit chat or to go off topic on something random. I save money eating at home and not driving with expensive gas prices. I save money on commute and wear on my vehicle. We save money on our vehicle by sharing one as my wife works from home too. My work saves money by not having a building to pay for and maintain and heat or cool 24/7. This is all better for the environment.

Sure some jobs will never work remotely but for the majority of office work in this country, including developers working on machine learning, it’s incredibly productive to work from home. And for the 5% of people who can’t cut it and slack off at home (and honestly that number may be higher for many companies, we just tend to hire well), they get fired and go work for you where they will find ways to slack off and burn your company’s money in other ways.

Get with the times dude.

 

[Shanghaichica]

Why bring china into this? You do know that the US has 1mil+ covid deaths while China has less than 6k right?

That’s if you believe the reported figures.

 

[Boris Bronson]

I think it was mainly to do about security en secrecy, some already fled with terabytes of secrets.

From the hardware team that stayed on site throughout the pandemic. So the security argument loses a bit of sheen there.

 

[Schizoid]

Don’t worry, Apple Park will be declared as an obsolete product in 3 years time.

 

[mateytate]

Cool. How does Starbucks make your drinks?

Do baristas work in an office? No. He specifically said offices.

 

[Fomalhaut]

You're not a marriage counselor to work from home. You work at a company that builds products, some are life-changing products, products that require maximum focus, productivity, discipline, quality check, again and again. At-home productivity will never equal at-work productivity. At-home discipline will never equal at-school discipline.

Just like you'd never be comfortable with a home-schooled heart surgeon; or get on a rocket built by engineers who worked from home.

Anyway, that said, good riddance to him. There are no irreplaceable people.

OK - can you back up your assertion with data? I'm not saying that I could provide counter-data, but a blanket statement like yours needs to have some serious evidence behind it, rather than "your gut feeling". You may be right; but you may also be wrong.

In the case of this particular employee, I would imagine that at least *some* of their activities would *probably* be more efficiently carried out in the office with team members. It's pretty hard to measure this objectively though and the results would also, I suspect, vary widely with individuals.

As a practical example, I'm working on a project with a distributed remote team, but went into one of the office locations to collaborate with 2 other team members. This was a productive session because we could white-board ideas and have clearer and more focused communication than most video conferences allow. On balance it was more efficient - mainly because of the white boarding, which still doesn't seem to have an effective analog in the online world (maybe Miro boards, but it's less "organic" than even a badly drawn diagram on the board).

However, the majority of our work can be carried out equally well from home, with the advantages of fewer distractions, no time wasted with commuting (so working more hours), and easily joining meetings with different team without have to hunt for meeting rooms in a large office or campus.

 

[Kissmo1980]

The remote and returning to office will be a headache for many companies until they figure out the best way to do things.

I believe that it will take some time for companies to realize what works best but it’s clear that a lot of talent realized work life balance during remote work is accomplished much easier.

Losing hours to commute is a pain which many suffered but only realized fully when they were forced to work from home.
Back to office is also needed in some cases and hopefully someone will figure out a solution to have a mix for these.

The guy leaving Apple is just one person, there will be others interested in his role. And it’s not just Apple suffering from it.
The world is changing again… I am curious about the future?

 

[Fomalhaut]

If you’ve ever watched a group of a handful of engineers in front of a whiteboard you know that this scenario CANNOT be replicated via zoom or teams or whatever…
There were promising tools to enable that 20 years ago but since we’ve evolved into social media type sharing…

Agreed. Spontaneous white boarding still doesn't have a good enough online analog (and I worked on some of the initial T.120 protocols to define this over 20 years ago), and even though things like Miro, screen-sharing draw.io diagrams etc can get some of the way, it lacks the simplicity of sitting around the board with coloured marker pens and explaining things to a small group of people.

For me, this kind of active collaboration is one of the main reasons for at least some on-site working. Other reasons include relationship building that is more easily done in an office or over coffee, a meal or a drink, and interactive team-building activities or training.

It really depends on the job and the task - some things are just better with face-to-face human interactions. Others can be done just as well or better given some peace and quiet in a comfortable environment (which is often home for many people, but not all).

 

[diddl14]

Must be pretty frustrating to have this huge magical campus and now everyone prefers the comfort and privacy of their own home as working space.

 

[bsolar]

My point is, while it can work really well here, many homes just aren’t suitable. I’d be interested to hear if that’s a UK thing only?

I observed people from multiple countries in Western Europe adapt to remote working, mainly France, Germany and Switzerland. In most situation people had to invest some time and effort in creating a better work environment at home but were ultimately satisfied with the result.

Most had already at least 1 room set up as office and could find a solution for another home office room or area when necessary. Note that at least in my company we had already the ability to do 1 day per week of home office established long before the lockdown, so many had already at least a partial solution in place when the lockdown hit.

My company actually offers discounts for private purchase of office gear, like adjustable desks and monitors. Especially an adjustable desk is a must for many of my colleagues and a quality one can be pretty expensive, so the discounts were very helpful in setting up a better office at home.

In most situations the broadband situation at home was more than adequate. I don't know anyone lacking FTTH among my colleagues. We actually have less network issues at home than in the office due to the more decentralized nature of our connections when we work remotely.

Also note that during the lockdown we had mandatory 100% remote working for almost 2 years and during that time some relocated. When they relocated they accounted remote working when they selected their new location and I assume this will be an important point for most in the future.

 

[Jeaz]

It was 1 day a week, then currently 2 days a week. But you think slowly over the course of 19 days going to 3 days a week is bad?

Check my earlier posts in this thread. I’m in Canada working for a financial corporation and we went strong from 1wk full out of 3 to full M-F for 1.5 months now back to same 1wk/3wk rotation. I’m not complaining. My mom isn’t complaining.

This was the norm - going into work M-F less than 2.1/2.3yrs ago.

This guy had a FULL 2yrs to comtemplate this would happen and it would’ve looked a LOT better if he did this during mid pandemic. He’s waited this long - what did he think for 2yrs that stay at home would be the norm with a global corporation which is publicly traded and a HUGE central (custom) HQ that he’d get to stay at home after a pandemic? Then only now citing generics about family, etc. lol.

Very slow transition. He’s lucky it was like this. Many are lucky to have a slow transition.

I still think its lazy - the whole complaint, implementation and waiting until 2 days/wk just before 3 days per week.

This is becoming more common but not ideal especially for GDP nor for work ethic. He works in AI which is a very highly sensitive and protective field for any corporation building such efforts. Curious what his reason for leaving Google was 4yrs ago. Now leaving Apple. I’d say there is only 2 companies having a better AI team than either … and THAT company had 3 million applications worldwide in 2021 alone, only hiring 1%! Not all obviously in AI btw.

Guess what … that company isn’t pandering to those that want to work at home 5days/week either. Take a guess what that company’s those are: 1 begins with a T the other with an N.

When they see this (if he hasn’t already found something before leaving Apple) it’ll not be so easy. We’ll see or we wont. This will not be the last of this story going around but it’ll be tougher for many to get replacement jobs as easily as it was during the pandemic. No job has security.

It’s backwards and old fashioned. Whatever worked in the past is irrelevant. We‘ve now had two years that has proved that office work isn’t necessarily better. Just going back to the old way because ”it was like that before” is like arguing we should abandon cars because walking worked before. It worked because we didn’t know any better. Now we do.

All I’m arguing for is flexibility. Office work is great for you, well, you should have an option to do that. He and many others think working from home is better. And they should have that option as well. I personally think that hadn’t Apple recently invested billions into their new office, then this would have been a non-issue.

EDIT: Also, you seem to be under the impression that you owe your company. I earn my keep, I don't owe my company anything. I'm profitable for my company and I'm guessing so are you, or you'd be out of a job. It's that simple, either you are making them money or you don't have a job, and if there's anything, they owe me a lot of gratitude.