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Apple's Director of Machine Learning Resigns Due to Return to Office Work
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leebroath said:
"Working from a workplace is in my eyes a whole lot better, you go to work and come away and leave it for another day, the choice is taken away form you."
That's not modern work.
At my former job, you took a laptop with you on vacation. Everyone does this up to CEO level. You get a couple of hours late at night in the hotel after you enjoy the day. Employees are basically always on call.
I had major surgery several years ago. I couldn't work after the surgery because I couldn't move things. The next day, I had my laptop and was working in the hospital bed with nine tubes attached to my body. Typing is a pain with needles in both your arms. I received an email from my manager asking me to look at a few things. I see the managers doing the same thing so they expect no less of themselves.
"Working from a workplace is in my eyes a whole lot better, you go to work and come away and leave it for another day, the choice is taken away form you."
That's not modern work.
At my former job, you took a laptop with you on vacation. Everyone does this up to CEO level. You get a couple of hours late at night in the hotel after you enjoy the day. Employees are basically always on call.
I had major surgery several years ago. I couldn't work after the surgery because I couldn't move things. The next day, I had my laptop and was working in the hospital bed with nine tubes attached to my body. Typing is a pain with needles in both your arms. I received an email from my manager asking me to look at a few things. I see the managers doing the same thing so they expect no less of themselves.
If by "success" you are talking about Wall Street metrics, then you might want to consider there's more to life for the majority of people in the world than a corporation's stock performance. If Apple wants to let go of employees who choose free agency over micromanagement, then time will tell as to the outcome of that choice. The PAST performance of Apple management is not necessarily an indicator of how things will go with TODAY'S dramatic changes in work culture.
If by "success" you are talking about the Apple of iPhone... well, many of the mix of people who created the whole of that product are gone from Apple at this point. Today's management is not the Apple that lead to that success. Apple is riding its own coattails at this point. Software quality has been nosediving since 2013, as was hardware. There are some signs of improvement on the hardware side, but that's still in flux. Software has no signs of improvement, IMO.
Driving away more of their existing workforce is not likely to help matters, and it certainly wont inspire new people to come calling, unless they view Apple's resistance to the changing workplace culture as compatible with their own needs.
Same, because we are a focused, agile team and we take more then one viewpoint into account. See there are pesky thing called generalizations and biases.
A person with a reputation like Ian Goodfellow can work anyplace he wants. This is the danger of hiring such a person. If they see a better place, they can move. Also, a person like this attracts others. When he finds a new place, I bet some of his employees will follow him.
Years ago, we used to call this "firing your boss". When your boss makes a decision you don't like, maybe he canceled some project you were working on, the easy solution was to replace him with a new boss by simply swapping companies. Then you call your coworkers and tell them, "This new place is better and they all move.
Generally people at this level don't give a hoot about the company they work for, they just want to work on getting some project working or their research and the company is a means to that end.
Years ago, we used to call this "firing your boss". When your boss makes a decision you don't like, maybe he canceled some project you were working on, the easy solution was to replace him with a new boss by simply swapping companies. Then you call your coworkers and tell them, "This new place is better and they all move.
Generally people at this level don't give a hoot about the company they work for, they just want to work on getting some project working or their research and the company is a means to that end.
You're trying to say that he's not free because he chose different things in the past. That makes no sense. People change. Situations change.
The opportunity did not exist when he worked at Google the way it exists now. The WFH situation has woken up a lot of people who previously believed "this is the way", and they're now saying "this is not the way for me". It's STILL exercising their own personal free agency to act on an opportunity.
I used to work 12 hour days in an office. I can attest to the fact that the work followed me home. It became part of my life and my routine. I was always on the job -- vacation, weekends, and during personal time. So, the issue of work/life balance has nothing to do with where you actually work.
Because YOUR commute is 6 minutes, and your wife's commute is 4 minutes, then everyone else must have the same commute. ? Come on...
Microsoft hired Dave Cutler from Digital Equipment Corporation to develop Windows NT which became Windows XP and so on. A couple of hundred engineers came over with him. So a decent part of Microsoft's success was to hire this guy and to let him do his thing.
We have been given news articles about Apple's own internal policies being responsible for Siri not advancing. Why is it weird Google conspiracies and individual workers that get blamed? This is just bizarre thinking.
Here's one: https://www.macrumors.com/2017/06/08/apple-struggling-to-develop-siri-privacy/
Agreed. That's why we have experts who can recognize them, and put their reputations on the line when making decisions. We still collaborate, but not on small decisions.
I was going to attach an explanation, but google reminded me I already shared it on MR.
Agreed. But the reverse is also true: Some people cannot stand office workplaces, yet they are perfectly self-disciplined and productive at home. Both exist. Some mixtures of both also exist, in varying amounts. It's illogical and antisocial to expect everyone to fit into a monolithic model. Why not embrace diversity so you can pull from a wider source of workers?
As soon as corporations realize that they can get away with paying their people LESS to work from home, they will stop renting offices.
Oh let's not let facts get in the way of attacking this guy for daring to negotiate with, and ultimately leave his employer...
Yes, some of us are on-call 24/7. Working from home makes a lot of that more palatable.
In the case of Apple, Cook made a bad call in finishing the construction of the spaceship. They can't stop renting it, because they own it, and I suspect they would struggle to rent it let alone sell it.
HR and MBA types are far more acculturated to corporate sociopathy than to any minor in psychology. HR may serve a practical function in businesses, but my experiences of HR departments have been consistently unified: HR is a sociopathic organ in most organisms that have one.
On that note, our weather here is unpredictable and when I see the sun come out I load up my kindle with documents I need to review and go for a walk. Undistracted, I get through more in an hour than if I had to read in my office. Even if I tried to go for a walk at the office, I would never make it outside because I would keep getting stopped for a 'quick question.'
I mean, that's because HR is a legal department that specializes in protecting companies from their employees.
That's a weird reach, probably because you sincerely believe that WFH is fundamentally bad. You're biased against it, and therefore assume Apple's success would not have happened if WFH was a norm decades ago. We can never know how an alternative world would have gone, but I suspect every reality would be normal to its own residents. Apple, in such a world, would have operated as though WFH was the norm.
It's like asking me how I would feel if my parents had decided to abort me. I really have no opinion about it, because I would never have known the difference.
This is actually untrue in my experience. The people at the top are the C-suite, assuming the company you work for has IPO'd, RTO'd, whatever, that ticker symbol is a FOR SALE sign. The people who own the company are the shareholders, the board is accountable to the shareholders and has a fiduciary duty to make them money. The CEO is accountable to the board -- or the chairman directly if the chairman is an executive chairman -- who, again, are directly accountable to the shareholders. Directors direct and approve actions at board meetings. Officers do, and perform the work. If the shareholders are unhappy with the company, they can exert pressure at an AGM meeting and get rid of the directors and/or officers who are failing to represent their interests.
If you're a CEO, CFO, CTO, C-whatever, you generally have very high compensation coupled with very high stress levels and no life, because every problem is your problem. You can't pass the buck onto anybody else, because even if the issue was caused by some other person or group of people, indirectly, it's still your fault, because you're responsible for all of them. You, personally, are failing, not the entire strata of subordinates and constellation of departments supporting your role.
In this particular instance, as has been mentioned myriad times within this thread, I think Apple's biggest problem is... WTF do they do with tEh Mothership they just spent an insane amount of money/effort/time building. They need live bodies to fill it up.
Entitled young folks may want to consider reality when it comes to future earnings. Very few jobs are going to wind up being permanent work from home... those that are will all become contract jobs. Yup. Say hello to new job insecurity every 6 months or so as you are cut loose. And say goodbye to vacation and benefits as you enter your new freedom filled life as a tech contract worker.
I'd call it the appeal to an alternate reality fallacy.
People can be connected to reality without standing in front of each other in the same space. Social interactions are different, yes. Creative interaction is probably different, too. However, the majority of office work does not require face-to-face interaction. Video conferencing has existed for decades, and has facilitated plenty of "reality-based" interactions with people and businesses that would otherwise never have been able to work together.
The question of there being a qualitative difference does not negate the fact that a LOT of people want to stop being in offices to do work for they can do without wasting time on a commute, office socializing, meetings that could've been emails, getting illnesses from coworkers, being micromanaged, etc.
Forcing everyone into the one monolithic model that YOU believe is good will only result in annoying or driving away the people who aren't like you. So of course everyone who dislikes WFH has chosen to attack this resigning Apple employee, instead of accepting that he exercised his free agency and left Apple because they wouldn't accommodate his working preferences. That's his choice to make.