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When you work from home, you might be doing focused work, but overall, the team's productivity usually goes down. There is individual work, and then there is team work where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Where employees put the team's outcome ahead of individual accountability. Work from home has created an ambiance where everyone has done the job assigned to them, but the overall outcome of the project is not as innovative/exciting. Work and products are no more exciting, just something you do for money. And for a company like Apple, that was built on exciting products, its not going to work in the long run.

Management has the numbers. If overall productivity is actually better than earlier, as some employees who want to work from home claim, then management will want to continue that, won't they? If you see WWDCs after lockdown, most of the good releases have come from work done while offices where open. Last year was the most boring WWDC ever.
This just looks like you're projecting your dissatisfaction with Apple's current products onto something that you feel comfortable blaming for it, rather than acknowledging that Apple's had a problem for far more than two years during a pandemic.
 
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Right, because I’m sure that has nothing to do with the pandemic trend/narrative being put on the temporary back burner and everything to do with corporate office space.
They got more new users during the pandemic than they probably had in their entire history. The pandemic should have helped them. There's got to me more to it. Maybe the business model itself is not proving to be profitable. Or, you know, Wall Street gamblers are simply not excited about it right now...
 
The press (including Verge, Macrumors, and others) call him “Apple’s Director” as if there is only one of them, implying that he runs Apple’s machine learning efforts, which may be true, although it’s not evident from the reporting.

There are presumably dozens if not hundreds of Director level employees at Apple. There may also be numerous Director level employees working on machine learning (impossible for me to verify).

I don’t want to minimize the importance of Ian Goodfellow’s departure. However, this is really lazy journalism. He should be called “a Director” or “a Director on the machine learning team,” etc.
 
Can you provide some examples?
No. It’s pretty obvious that in certain situations all being in a room together can aid productivity.

That said the benefits of working from home outweigh most a lot of things for most a lot of situations, definitely when it comes to quality of life.
 
This will have over 1,000 comments before day’s end lol.

My thought? I think a hybrid option is good. Apple doesn’t have to let everyone be fully remote and not everyone has to stay at Apple.

I can see both sides. The pandemic definitely proved that a LOT of jobs can be done from home while still being productive/collaborative.

The people saying “just suck it up and go in 5 days a week.” Why? It’s just not necessary for everyone.

And that’s that.
 
Mr Cook said that despite a smooth transition to remote working, it was not an adequate replacement for in-person collaboration.

"For all that we've been able to achieve while many of us have been separated, the truth is that there has been something essential missing from this past year: each other," he said in the document, seen by The Verge.

"Video conference calling has narrowed the distance between us, to be sure, but there are things it simply cannot replicate."

He added: "I know I'm not alone in missing the hum of activity, the energy, creativity and collaboration of our in-person meetings and the sense of community we've all built."
I have a hard time taking this as anything but propaganda to get people back into that super-expensive, brand-spanking-new office building Apple built.

I accept that some people enjoy working face-to-face. I accept some people thrive on it. I do not accept executive claims at face value, and certainly not the ones they promote to the outside world (internal PR is only slightly more sincere).

I've never worked for a company that actually sincerely embodies the pleasant rhetoric it promotes about itself. While I've never worked for Apple, they're in the news and written about far too often for me to believe they're a healthy workplace (certainly not the Apple stores, and certainly not for me). Apple executives are also probably so insulated by privileged as to be unaware of the actual experiences of their workers, on campus or off.

I can't imagine how different an experience it might be to work in a place that actually provides a sense of community. I'm not saying they don't exist. I'm saying my employers have all been the exact opposite: a place to be because we needed money, and any sense of community that developed was limited camaraderie in the face of executive/management abuses.
 
So you are now claiming, when you say 'like him' you're actually claiming your comment wasn't anything to do with Apples director of machine learning quitting at all, it was a comment meant to include anyone working at Apple.
Well considering what you typed was:



Perhaps you should be more clear in your own context about who exactly you mean because anyone would think your referring to the director of machine learning at Apple. And FYI Apple doesn't just use machine learning in Siri. Try and phrase your comments better to avoid confusion.
You're trying to engage sincerely with someone who's here to troll others, which is evident in any observation of his posts that involves critical thinking. He's not interested in "avoiding confusion".
 
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This. The equity vesting in whole was probably enough to retire in alone.

It is interesting that he’d be driven to throw shade on his way out though. That swan song stuff is unprofessional.
He didn't throw shade. He indicated one of the reasons he left the job. Lots of people explain to their coworkers why they've chosen to leave. If a media entity asks, they also may choose to tell. You're creating drama by characterizing it as "throwing shade".
 
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Designing a new commercial aircraft?
What part of designing a new commercial aircraft will require two people to be in the same room at the same time?
No. It’s pretty obvious that in certain situations all being in a room together can aid productivity.

That said the benefits of working from home outweigh most a lot of things for most a lot of situations, definitely when it comes to quality of life.
No, it's not obvious at all. A conversation is never enough to justify it. If an item can be reviewed in person at separate times that still isn't enough. In order to justify two people being in a room together, you are going to need a physical item that must be handled simultaneously.
 
Be pedantic/twist my words all you want; it doesn’t change them. ”People like this” = people sharing in the entitled diva mindset. I thought that was clear enough but here I am having to spell it out (i.e. repeat) it again for you.
Man, you are definitely the diva here. No one is twisting your words. They're simply reading your implications and then you're getting pissy when they call you out on them. YOU are twisting words to evade the critiques.
 
What part of designing a new commercial aircraft will require two people to be in the same room at the same time?
The entirety of the design? Drug manufacturers researching new drugs?
No, it's not obvious at all. A conversation is never enough to justify it. If an item can be reviewed in person at separate times that still isn't enough. In order to justify two people being in a room together, you are going to need a physical item that must be handled simultaneously.
The employer still has the final say. What you believe are valid wfh scenarios may not be valid for another employer.
 
He is a jumper, see his linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/ian-goodfellow-b7187213

WFH policy from Apple is not his main reason, he just wants to exploits the “controversy”. But yeah, he is a jumper.
What's a "jumper"?

If you mean he jumps from job to job, that's completely normal when someone comes out of school and into the working world. If I read the LinkedIn page correctly, he started with internship, and then worked for a few months to multiple years at different places in Google, and then started having longer term jobs measured in years. What exactly do you want?
 
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...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.
What would Steve Jobs do?

Jobs said in 2010: When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that's what you needed on the farm. But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular … PCs are going to be like trucks.

If Steve Jobs could have an evolved thinking on computing itself and used an analogy like that; why wouldn’t he have a similar evolution of the workplace, too?

2022 is not the same as 2010. Tim Cook and Apple are pushing the idea of 5G providing more freedom and mobility; the ability to work anywhere, anytime. If you even look at demo of their products it’s most people using them in home spaces. Strange the same company pushing these ideals can’t embrace.

Apple Management just feels suckered by the pandemic.
 
Not sure why everyone has to take sides on this. Both sides are perfectly justified on this. If a company wants their employees in the office, that not overly unreasonable. And employees don't have to like it, and can move on if they don't. Can't really fault either side. Though I do think Apple will lose more people over this. Probably not as many as we might think, though.
Here are the sides:

1. People who want to attack employees for daring to exercise free agency,

and

2. People who are disgusted at the people in number 1.
 
The entirety of the design? Drug manufacturers researching new drugs?

The employer still has the final say. What you believe are valid wfh scenarios may not be valid for another employer.
None of these examples are sufficient to justify face-to-face work. To justify face-to-face you need a clear task that requires two people to engage with a real-world object simultaneously.

Any employee be it a grunt or manager that depends on face-to-face interaction to do their job effectively after two years of remote employment should be fired. Why? Because if your ability to do your job effectively is dependent upon the geographic location of others then you are not the type of person who is willing to adapt to changing cultures.

This employer who wants face-to-face meetings is a strawman (as you like to toss about). What most employers likely want is productivity and growth. If an individual need inhibits others' productivity then the only response is to not let the door hit them on the way out.
 
Maybe. Maybe not. When the economy plows head-long into a recession, which all indications are that it will, the corporate layoffs start, and the startups that were WFH friendly that poached a lot of this talent close their doors, a lot of people are going to regret playing the work-life-balance card when they can't pay their mortgages over Zoom.
Hey, if mass layoffs start, there's not going to be a lick of loyalty shown to ANY employees anywhere, regardless of their work model. Hell, the gaming industry has made a point of laying off developers just to bump the numbers for the board of directors in the quarter after a game releases. They don't NEED to lay people off. They do it because even being a programmer leaves people entirely expendable; for profit, not for company survival.

NONE of this is the fault of workers. If we plow head-long into a recession, it will have NOTHING to do with the rank and file worker populous and EVERYTHING to do with executive management, rampant corporatism in government, and Wall Street greed.
 
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Many people here think that individual productivity (or the feeling of individual productivity) is important. It's not. Company wide productivity is not the sum of individual productivity. You can have a lots smart people working very hard, and still produce cr*p, buggy, and un-interesting new products. I've seen lots of startups, with smart people, fail, after eating millions in investment.

Apple has the data. They know whether the stuff they started developing 3 or 4 years ago has better sales, better customer satisfaction potential, and less bugs than the new projects started last year (where employees felt more productive due to less commute time, etc.). If that data says slightly miserable employees (due to commuting) produced better stuff, and the best competition is only offering equally miserable jobs, then they will make them come back to work in the office.

And that will be good for both Apple's customers... and shareholders.
 
As an employee if you don't like Apple's policies, simply muster up some courage, resign, and find happiness at another company. Easy. It's no more complicated than that and Apple does get to set the rules.

Apple will continue to do well as it always has.
This is LITERALLY what the guy did. He resigned. For some reason, the corporate boot lickers here have gone after him, and it looks psychotic.
 
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Good riddance. You clearly did nothing to improve Siri in 4 years so I doubt you would have done much working from home or in the office. Just another overpaid engineer who thinks too highly of himself.

He, and the people who wrote that letter is just another example of people who are self-entitled and too self-absorbed to appreciate what they have. There are literally billions of people who would switch places with them and all they care about is their precious time at home?? Jeez, talk about privilege and first world problems.

What makes you think he was tasked to improve Siri exactly?

You do realize machine learning is a field that has applications beyond voice recognition and NLP right? Please tell me you know this.
 
The inflation caused by covid is happening because demand is outpacing supply. As covid recedes, ao wil the chances of recession. And its not just small startups offering WFH. Everyone from many giant corporations to banks are offering it too.
The current price increases we see people calling "inflation" is caused somewhat by supply constraints, but mostly by corporate greed. Prices are being raised because they CAN be, not because companies are struggling to continue operating or being profitable (I'm not talking about local mom & pop places that were hurt by shutdowns; I'm talking about your Apples, Amazons, etc). Profits by many major corps have been better during the COVID19 era than ever before. Some of them have set record profits/gains. They're not hurting; they're exploiting.
 
[…]

2022 is not the same as 2010. Tim Cook and Apple are pushing the idea of 5G providing more freedom and mobility; the ability to work anywhere, anytime. If you even look at demo of their products it’s most people using them in home spaces. Strange the same company pushing these ideals can’t embrace.

[…]
Apple is providing the underpinnings for this mobility revolution to happen. And for apple to implement this, requires in person work…is my opinion.
 
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