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Apple's Director of Machine Learning Resigns Due to Return to Office Work
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There's more nuance to it, but you can indeed reduce it to exactly that statement and still be, for all intents and purposes, correct/accurate.
However, the discussion has long been far more than just that simplistic statement. I myself wouldn't even BE here in this thread if not for the suspicion (proven correct) that a great number of people would throw hostility at the now-former Apple employee over his desire to determine his own working conditions, and specifically WFH. That's the majority of the thread. That's what is really going on here, and it opens up a HUGE range of issues that DO relate and have important contextual contribution.
It's sad to see how disagreement with the guy's decision to quit leads to dismissing his qualifications, work ethic and worth.
It's entirely normal to tell people why you chose to leave a workplace, especially if you feel that the context is meaningful to your subordinates. It's only drama to you because you don't like this guy for some reason.
That reason appears to be your irritation over work-from-home that you've been forced into. I'm sorry for you to have been forced into it, but that does not mean it makes sense to judge that working model for EVERYONE ELSE, nor does it make sense for you to project your irritation onto someone that is trying to exercise the choice you did not have.
Maybe they were just filtering out the people who weren’t interested in coming into the office. 🤪
I would have been happy to come to this thread and find nobody attacking either party, because, yes, it's a simple business transaction where employer and employee cannot come to terms with what each wants out of the working relationship. I'd have come and gone silently.
Instead, weirdly hostile people launched into ad hominem attacks on the now-former employee, and against entire swaths of the working populous, as well as entire generations and sociopolitical groups. The responses to those attacks were essentially invited or solicited by trolling. Please do not make this a "both sides are a problem" proposition.
It's the hostile people who have the least amount of courage to ask and face what other people get because those people who get are the ones who are brave enough to take the risk.
Thanks for citing your source. I will take a look at this. However, it is crucial to recognize that there's a difference between "things done in an emergency" and "things done as a matter of general policy". Emergency policy can, and this one did, lead to an opportunity to study differences, a "huge experiment" per the article author, but it is not a "good" experiment by any means. Data collection can be useful, but it can also be useless or antagonistic to fact-finding if the data is misconstrued, misinterpreted, and not validated for biases, contributing factors, etc.Sorry. I believe it is true. From The NY Times (not a conservative paper by any measure):
‘Not Good for Learning’ (Published 2022)
New research is showing the high costs of long school closures in some communities.www.nytimes.com
Policy makers and health officials will sometimes make mistakes. Those things happen. We need to learn from those mistakes rather than pretend that they did not happen or that these officials are infallible.
It's also worth considering that the right thing can be executed in the absolute worst ways. The government SHOULD have shut things down, and for far longer, but it ALSO SHOULD have done FAR MORE in terms of supporting people during the shutdown. The intent was correct, but the actual execution was ABYSMAL and SHAMEFUL, and it did not get better when the next administration came along (only the messaging changed).
I commend that guy. As a leading TECHNOLOGY company, it is embarrassing if Apple still need to rely on people commuting to their office to "work."
Considering so many IT jobs have been outsourced to other countries, it shows that remote working is entirely possible. The idea of commuting and going to office to work should've been minimized years ago. Covid simply showed why we should've done that long time ago. Policies and HR need to evolve. But obviously, majority of companies(people) don't want to change.
I commend those who stood up and made the decision to leave due to backward policies like going back to office. In my country's capital city, where traffic is one of the worst and office space are increasingly expensive, you would think remote working is desirable. But we have too many boomers managers that still think they "manage people well" by looking over people's shoulders to "observe" them "working" in the office physically.
The next time Apple brags about Facetime or iCloud, we should ask them why should we trust their cloud/remote solutions if they themselves are requiring their own employees to be physically in the office.
Considering so many IT jobs have been outsourced to other countries, it shows that remote working is entirely possible. The idea of commuting and going to office to work should've been minimized years ago. Covid simply showed why we should've done that long time ago. Policies and HR need to evolve. But obviously, majority of companies(people) don't want to change.
I commend those who stood up and made the decision to leave due to backward policies like going back to office. In my country's capital city, where traffic is one of the worst and office space are increasingly expensive, you would think remote working is desirable. But we have too many boomers managers that still think they "manage people well" by looking over people's shoulders to "observe" them "working" in the office physically.
The next time Apple brags about Facetime or iCloud, we should ask them why should we trust their cloud/remote solutions if they themselves are requiring their own employees to be physically in the office.
Ad revenue is just a disguise under bigger picture of human replacement. One thing Portal game portrayed pretty well is the idea of replacing human with robots because “they are better”.
Come to think about it, when AI evolves enough, what advantage do human have left? I’d say very little. “I, Robot” also expresses concerns of that outlook.
Anyways, off topic.
This is a personal decision. My preference is to work from home, which I transitioned to over the past 5 years after 20 years in an office environment. In my case, being a design consultant with clients all over the U.S., it is completely irrelevant whether I sit in a cube in an office building or in a home office. I find the lack of distractions, and the time saved from eliminating a 2 hour round-trip commute, well worth any downsides (which are few). Of course, those in a different line of work, or at a different place in their career, might have differing priorities that would make the opposite true for them.
Imo, nobody in this forum is in the position to judge the way apple manages its professional staff. Have some opinion, sure.
Those people probably don't understand what kids are dealing with, or they don't care and it's really about themselves. The must succinct thing I can say is, I'm glad I wasn't born even a single year later.
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They do to a lesser extent. When I was in college, my friends were taking out subsidized student loans to buy Bitcoin. They maybe couldn't legally spend it on that directly, but they had some other source of money that went into BTC instead of school because the loans would cover that. And it was wise of them.
The more common abuse is, people go to college for no good reason, maybe partying the entire time, because someone else is picking up the bill, whether it's their parents or the government or both. Some of them extend it as long as possible with an MS then a PhD; this leads to the common saying that PhD students are either brilliant or aimless, with nothing in between. Anyone trying decently hard towards a career they actually want to pursue will go through the required schooling then pay off the loans easily. The others are either mooching or didn't plan things well, and I have no interest in supporting that.
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Personally I think people should be able to work from home where possible, but also think there is a lot of value from communicating and interacting with colleagues in person. I believe there needs to be a compromise from both employees and employers, dealing with absolutes is not the solution.
There's a happy medium, which is, people go to offices but not all in one place. Where I'm moving to, there will still be a company office, but it's a random tiny one rather than the HQ. For employees of smaller companies, they may rent shared office space.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.
What we (tech employees) had before covid was absurd. Everyone consolidated into one overcrowded, overpriced city that was never really planned as a dense urban area, taking long commutes from adjacent cities, just because the leadership wanted everyone in one place.
While I agree with you in my heart be careful here. The obligation of which you speak is an ethical or moral obligation. The best of humanity understand this and support it but we can’t fault those that do not. They are still human just none of us are perfect. This obligation is largely fulfilled by humans as a whole (some 80% of people who have means beyond survival give in a fashion) but it can not rightly be expected of the individual. Tricky stuff I know but that’s the mess that humans are. Sorry for dumping philosophy. 😝
Funny you bring immuncompromused up. My previous boss was immuncompromised so she understood the benefits of working from home even before Covid. She left the company a few months a go. I now report to a vip. He says hey if you can work from home then why not! My company had record breaking profit last year. Guess what. Everyone was working from home... For what I do (cyber security) there is no need to be in an office.
All the politics and “opinions” people have had and engaged in regarding the pandemic are a joke.
Simple fact. Working remotely has been promoted and advocated for over two decades by the information technology field. We’d been trying to reduce operating overhead by phasing out the company issued laptop, phone, desk and so on and allow people to use the tools that make most sense to perform their duties using their own judgement and talents.
If Tim Cook believes he needs to micromanage his company to this level to accomplish anything then he hasn’t learned anything as a technologist or as an entrepreneur. Well… he never really was an entrepreneur. Just a company man.
I personally don’t like working from home. I enjoy the person to person interactions and miss them. But we do what must be done when necessary.
What wokeness? This is just capitalism. Why am I supposed to stay at my job when a competitor is offering better pay or better conditions? Don't tell me loyalty; my employer is being equally disloyal to me if they won't match the offer.
You want to see entitlement, it's in the SWE who stays at one level at one job for 10+ years, holding back the department's progress to ensure they're always needed. "Only I know this old technology," "only I can maintain this," etc. Whoever pays me the most, I genuinely try to help them succeed, not entrench myself.
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I believe WFH working better for some companies, but profit isn't a good comparison tool. During the pandemic, demand for every kind of virtual service shot up. Tech companies benefitted massively from lockdowns just running business as usual.
The NY Times has actually been criticized for "both sides"ing issues (problematic when one side is presenting rational discourse and the other side is throwing out outlandish conspiracy theories and antisocial commentary). I don't have a link to share to you about this issue.
The article cites economist Emily Oster, who is an author of another similar study, while not mentioning that she is not an author of the primary study they cited. A bit problematic, that, IMO. The article does not seem to pull from the studies as much as from opinions in other sources. One of those other sources is an article by said economist titled "schools are not super spreaders", which is a curious double dip here in this subject for this article, especially when Oster is an economist, not an education or healthcare worker The push to "return to normal" has been primarily from the money sectors, so I am not comfortable granting her the benefit of the doubt as to potential bias here.
‘Not Good for Learning’ (Published 2022)
New research is showing the high costs of long school closures in some communities.
Policy makers and health officials will sometimes make mistakes. Those things happen. We need to learn from those mistakes rather than pretend that they did not happen or that these officials are infallible.
"One of the most alarming findings is that school closures widened both economic and racial inequality in learning." Well, this should not be surprising, if it can be characterized as "alarming". Everything about the pandemic was worse in areas of economic and racial inequality; the worst outcomes are found in areas already associated with poverty and in communities of people of color. We also know that education gets a pittance of funding, when corporations and military get an insane amount of funding, so no surprise when The American Rescue Plan only required districts to spend 20% on academic recovery. Not news.
Much of this publication points to systemic inequality and a lack of education funding in general, compromising any serious effort at analyzing what remote learning has caused. The regional distribution of the school closures exacerbates it (comparing longer closures to shorter closures, which are in different regions, and which were referenced as "democrat vs republican"), making for a poor "study" in terms of control for socioeconomic and environmental variables. However, I'm not really sure about the details behind this without studying the actual paper, which I also have opened up in another tab to read. The article does not bother to address it; it is shallow, short, and seems to only be interested in making the statement "remote learning bad", and then moving you on to another article.
I also want to point out that I don't think anyone believes that remote learning, implemented as an emergency effort, would ever have been GOOD for students. You offered the statement that so-called experts changed their views that it should not have been done after all. I see nothing supporting that claim in the article you provided, and I suspect I will not find it in the paper itself. When emergencies strike, we take action as best we can at the time. As I said earlier, the government took some correct actions, but executed them disastrously. The question is not "should we have done this at all?"; the question is "how should we have done this correctly?"
The paper: At the very first I find that the study was funded in part by The Walton Family Foundation, and Kenneth C. Griffin (an American hedge fund manager, entrepreneur and "investor"; you can guess his political party affiliation). Yeah, no possible bias there, in terms of "getting us back to normal ASAP" /s 😬 So much red flag material here in the funding. I am more bothered by the capitalism linkages than the political party leanings, but the political part really does matter when you consider the end results being characterized as being politically strategic for the party whose wealthy members financed the paper. In an perfect world, we would not be concerned about the funding sources, but we live in such an imperfect world that funding sources often get left out in order to protect the biases in place. Sometimes things only get published when the funding sources favor the conclusions.
"We find that remote instruction was a primary driver of widening achievement gaps. Math gaps did not widen in areas that remained in-person (although there was some widening in reading gaps in those areas)."
Interesting...
And at this point, I have spent an inordinate amount of time and text replying to this very off-topic topic, and I think I will move on.
Was this a demonstrable fact (kids being less vulnerable) or has it simply been oft-repeated meme without citation of source? I have definitely read that one of the variants were putting more kids into the hospitals.
The second issue (being able to pass it on to others) is absolutely reason enough to close schools and keep kids at home, but I find the oft-repeated meme of "kids are fine" to be suspect.