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

[nwcs]

You were willing to admit yours is an opinion, and then say "it works well for some but not for all" in your first paragraph, but then you swung around to make a personal attack on those who prefer it in your last paragraph. ? People like you, attacking workers for articles they had no hand in writing, are the ones "creating drama".

Let me summarize then for you: this person created drama where it wasn’t needed. Some people function well working from home and some do not. A hybrid approach is a fair compromise in my opinion. I personally do not like working from home.

If saying this person created drama is a “personal attack” you REALLY need to recalibrate your vocabulary. Or is that also a personal attack?

 

[dysamoria]

This delusional thought-process of virtual-everything being good for society is just that: delusional. A recent study just came out and concluded what most of us already knew. Creativity plummets when you're not face-to-face... which is bad for business, and will prove a disadvantage to those who want to try the virtual route.

If people want to run for the exit because they're not "fit" enough, let them run. There are a whole slew of hungry grads fresh out of college that will gladly take those jobs.

Interesting. There are a number of typos in the original study at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04643-y (one of which suggested the opposite of their apparent findings), and the experiments were based on a scenario that is... well... I'm not sure how applicable it is to the daily business of most any company that is resisting work-from-home models as a norm. It seems the only task examined here was "idea generation", and that is NOT what the majority of office work is about. Even for creative workers, the actual WORK itself is labor, often a solo labor, and not a continuous state of interacting with others.

I certainly accept that modality affects social behavior, but there's so much diversity in social behavior and in people, in the first place. There are people who would LOVE to be part of an in-person workplace, and others who DESPISE the concept and only do it because they have no other choice. Then there are people in each group who would feel oppositely if the social experience/environment were different (better suited them, or home life sucked, etc).

This makes me wonder about selection bias: are the people who volunteer to make a few bucks on a social experiment more likely to show these very results?

This part is especially curious:

"Participants (334) from a university student and staff pool in the United States participated in the study in exchange for US$15. We also recruited 18 participants from Craigslist in an effort to accelerate data collection. However, the students reported feeling uncomfortable, and idea generation performance dropped substantially with student–craigslist pairs, so we removed these pairs from the analysis."

I would love to know what was going on with the Craigslist participants. It again makes me wonder how the results may be skewed based on participant selection.

Then there is the focus of the study authors:

Marketing Division, Columbia Business School, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
Melanie S. Brucks

Marketing Division, Stanford Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
Jonathan Levav

Marketing divisions at business schools... There may be implicit bias right here. Who paid for this study and why? The word "fund" was not present anywhere on the page.

I'm not dismissing it out of hand. I am trying to be thoughtful about this. There may be value in the findings, it may or may not apply to the topic of this conversation thread, or the study may be entirely biased and non-applicable to any job at all.

 

[dysamoria]

I wish everyone would admit that working from home is just an excuse to not work as much as they would if they worked at the office. Just admit it.

Are you an office manager?

 

[rp2011]

The pandemic was the nudge that woke a lot of folks up to the reality of where the future of the workplace was heading. Once you see something, you can’t unsee it. All anyone can do now is finally implement the tools and protocols to make it better. The workplace is going to have to adjust going forward . It’s not going away.
And of course not all jobs can be done from home, and the market will have to adjust to compensate those workers accordingly.

 

[abowlby]

How many companies have you owned that built a beautiful campus or anything at the scale you mention? Many have such a feeling of entitlement in this labor and economic bubble we are experiencing.

So the AI Director’s job is to ensure Apple is financially justified in building a self congratulatory edifice? Interesting.

Artificial “intelligence”. Funny, that.

 

[4jasontv]

There are no irreplaceable people.

Why not? Apple believes in irreplaceable parts.

 

[JustSomebody12]

Late to the topic.

I will say what I think:

Some jobs require local presence more than others, still the idea of never meeting my own colleagues scares me somewhat.

I suppose I enjouy human contact.

 

[Pezimak]

Where did you hear that BP reported the largest profits in a decade in Q1? Their website says that they lost $20.4 billion in Q1. Yahoo Finance reports the same thing at https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BP/financials?p=BP



View attachment 2002392

Yahoo Finance also reports that Shell earned $7.1 billion in Q1 but they reported $11.5 billion in Q42021 so Q1 was definitely not their biggest profit quarter in the past decade. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SHEL/financials?p=SHEL

Where did you hear that BP reported the largest profits in a decade in Q1? Their website says that they lost $20.4 billion in Q1. Yahoo Finance reports the same thing at https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BP/financials?p=BP



View attachment 2002392

Yahoo Finance also reports that Shell earned $7.1 billion in Q1 but they reported $11.5 billion in Q42021 so Q1 was definitely not their biggest profit quarter in the past decade. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SHEL/financials?p=SHEL

The losses have only come from withdrawing from Russia. Otherwise it’s been widely reported:

Oil giant BP reports highest profit in 8 years on soaring commodity prices

BP's results come at a time when millions of U.K. households are facing a record-breaking increase in their energy bills amid a cost of living crisis.

www.cnbc.com

Energy prices lift BP profits to 8-year high

BP's profits hit their highest in eight years in 2021, lifted by soaring gas and oil prices, as the company boosted share repurchases and accelerated plans to cut emissions with increased spending on low carbon energy.

www.reuters.com

Note the dates of the above.
Now read the following that was posted 5 days ago and includes the losses from Russia and Ukraine, its doubled its profits over the same quarter from last year! They are raking it in.

BP profits soar as calls for windfall tax grow

The energy giant said underlying income hit $6.2bn due to "exceptional oil and gas trading".

www.bbc.co.uk

Please note I am in no way what so ever a trading or market expert, but us here in the UK are definitely feeling the massive increase in fuel and heating prices, and I do mean massive, whilst BP and Shell are announcing record profits.

 

[abowlby]

Are you an office manager?

There is a lot of truth to this. Middle management is sweating because of how much exposure there is to how little value so many of them bring to the table. “I don’t want to do the hard work my team does anymore,” is about the gist of it.

 

[Feyl]

This can only happen in America ?‍♂️ People are working normally in my country for a long long time and nobody is complaining about it. In fact, people are more productive and disciplined at work.

 

[dysamoria]

Let me summarize then for you: this person created drama where it wasn’t needed. Some people function well working from home and some do not. A hybrid approach is a fair compromise in my opinion. I personally do not like working from home.

If saying this person created drama is a “personal attack” you REALLY need to recalibrate your vocabulary. Or is that also a personal attack?

Maybe step back a bit and address this question: What "drama" was created, exactly?

If you do not like working from home, that's fine. I certainly wouldn't want to force upon you a working modality that you dislike. Hopefully you will never be forced to work in a modality that sucks for you. Can you allow that other people may be the complete opposite from you in terms of needs in this regard? Is it "drama" that you expressed your dislike of working from home?

 

[dysamoria]

Yep. My entire department worked from home for most of 2020 and the first part of 2021 and our management confirmed that we were collectively far more productive than when we were in the office the year before. I have to wonder about people equating working from home with slacking off and what they're telling us about themselves. I didn't slow down or reduce my output at all. Maybe some people do. ?‍♂️

The authoritarian mindset seems to be a combination of "Do as I say, not as I do" and "I accuse you of doing the very thing I myself am doing, or would do if I was in your position".

 

[dysamoria]

how is that a waste of time if they still get their work done at the end of the day? The mentally of „you are only productive if you work exactly 8 hours in one sitting!“ needs to finally go away. We literally have no core working hours or whatever it’s called in English at our office. I work whenever I feel like it. Sometimes I start at 7, sometimes at 10, other times at I decide to pick up my laptop again at 10 pm because whatever my bf is watching on tv is boring me or I answer slack message or team calls when I am out with my dog. I certainly wouldn’t pick up my laptop again in the evening, if i was tied to the desk all day already

It's really telling, isn't it, when managers are only capable of thinking in terms of "hours", rather than results...

 

[barkomatic]

I think a possible consequence of remote work will be lower salaries for all such positions regardless of where one lives. A person living in NYC or San Francisco will eventually not have the power to command a higher salary if someone from rural Nebraska will take the job. The employer will simply say, "You don't have to live in San Francisco so I'm not paying you a salary to support you there."

I also like remote work, but this environment of empowered workers will not last. Companies will always readjust to swing employment conditions back in their favor. The pandemic caught them off guard and they are still figuring out how to take advantage of the situation--but they will.

 

[dysamoria]

Why? He is apparently a high level employee who will have no problem finding high paying work on his own terms. Why should he let some company that he doesn’t need to work for dictate terms? People at the bottom may have to do that, but people at the top don’t need to.

Wouldn't it be nice if people at the bottom weren't so fenced in by awful employment opportunities that they could do the same? They're already being blamed for "laziness" because they're not "bootstrapping" themselves into high paying executive positions...

 

[dysamoria]

I fully support work from home, and I think a lot of it is Apple being petty. But high end officers, like directors? They probably should be around the office alot, just from a leadership standpoint, especially for employees that have to be there.

Why should directors be in the office a lot, even if their reports are there? A lack of accessibility to ask questions, or get feedback, for example, is addressed by a solid work-from-home availability policy.

 

[dysamoria]

Before we make this a endless argument about working from home, have you even considered what contributions Ian Goodfellow has provided?

When he was hired this was stated.



So can anyone point us to anything significant he contributed? If not why is this even news?

What does it matter?

This is notable, or newsworthy, because there's a major cultural change going on due to COVID19 shutdowns revealing the lie that everyone should always be in the office to do work. A high-level person at Apple has left his job due to Apple executives not being willing to allow him to work from home.

Look at the endless comments here already: it's a noteworthy event that has sparked lots of commentary. MacRumors.com has put the discussion into the "political" forum because they knew it was a hot-button issue.

 

[dysamoria]

Thank God comments are enabled. Watching basement-dwelling redditors get a cold, hard, much-needed reality check is beautiful

Man, you need to go outside and take a walk, or a hike, or a jog, or something. Then get together with some friends and socialize outside the computer. You seem really deeply invested in "us vs them" thinking. Reality is way more nuanced than you are demonstrating your thinking to be.

PS: I'm absolutely certain you'd find Reddit groups that can feed your particular biases in this subject matter.

 

[dysamoria]

I took home the same Dell Optiplex 750 I was using at work. This is Apple, not your employer, they obviously have the resources to work from home.

...assuming that Apple management is willing to spend the money on their employees to make it work well. There's probably a HUGE sunk cost issue going on with their insane spaceship campus. A company with this much money SHOULD be willing to DO MORE and to ACCEPT CHANGE, but executive management at large corporations trend toward being conservative and insular, if not outright authoritarian.

 

[dysamoria]

Years ago I worked for a fabless semiconductor startup in Silicon Valley with four other engineers; all working out of our homes. As we grew we eventually moved into an office. And with that communications and productivity noticeably improved.

Nice anecdote.

 

[dysamoria]

Sometimes people see transitions as a good time to leave. Other times, they don’t like a policy and find a place with one they like.

If we started to see a mass resignation over this… I think we could maybe blame Apple, else this is just one guy quitting, with possibly a million other contributing reasons.

My personal experience with apple has been that they don’t like outside contractors: when Tim took over, one of his biggest changes was the elimination of “out of house” internal developers. In the course of a few months, Apple lost most of their best overseas programmers, anyone who refused to move locally, or disagreed with Tim’s design to supply approach.

Essentially the people that built the roadmap for iOS, iPadOS, ARM Architectures, and eventual Apple custom silicon: had to hand it off to whomever could make the move to California and was willing to deal with Tim’s management.

Sounds like bad management in terms of finding the best people for whatever task was needed. Apple has a long standing problem with insular thinking and silos. I don't see how this policy helped that in the slightest. Tim has been great for the Wall Street numbers (which I could not care less for), and I appreciate his willingness to take a stand on social issues, but his leadership has not left me feeling at all happy about the actual software and hardware coming out of Apple.

 

[I7guy]

Uh... Would you be supportive of this guy quitting over this if he DIDN'T have the luxury of doing it? Would his effort to choose the work-life balance best for him be not a "high horse" if he was paid less?

You seem to be attacking one kind of worker because they CAN exercise agency that another kind of worker OUGHT to be able to do but cannot. I don't think that dichotomy is helpful to workers in general.

I support the concept of at will employment. (Which is the way it is in most of the US).

Neither employee nor employer are beholden to one another.

 

[dysamoria]

Well said. And very unprofessional.

Define "professional".

 

[MNGR]

This is the dumbest take ever.

At the professional level there is no "clock". You have a job to do, you do it and get it done. That's it. If you do three hours of workin the morning, four hours in the afternoon and finish something up for an hour at 23:30 before bed, you're being just as effective as someone who has to go to the office do it in an 8-10 hour chunk.

People who want to slack off will do so at the office too. Eventually their low output will be noticed and they'll be talked to and possibly dismissed like any other bad employee.

Poor analogy. Every company/job has different requirements. I worked in IT since the mid 60’s. Pay was based on hours worked and had to be recorded daily.
Some jobs are “piece” based. Many are not.
And any jobs that require hands-on can’t be done at home.

 

[I7guy]

Sounds like bad management in terms of finding the best people for whatever task was needed. Apple has a long standing problem with insular thinking and silos. I don't see how this policy helped that in the slightest. Tim has been great for the Wall Street numbers (which I could not care less for), and I appreciate his willingness to take a stand on social issues, but his leadership has not left me feeling at all happy about the actual software and hardware coming out of Apple.

Imo, companies that mass produce consumer oriented products and are doing well, is because they are firing on all cylinders. And while one may or may not like the current management, for their own reasons, it’s hard to argue with success.