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

[pshufd]

News websites report facts if you visit reputable ones and when they all report the same thing it tends to be true, I agree a loss is a loss, but they still also announced profits double that if last year in the same quarter and a 2.4 billions share buy back scheme.

In this case they are slanting the facts.

Many oil companies borrowed money to fund buybacks and dividends. You do have to pay those loans back from real profits. This is why the energy sector has been the worst sector performer in the S&P 500 for the past decade.

Someone with an accounting background will understand the nuances of profit. There are a number of items on the earnings report that relate to income and picking and choosing which to report on compared to using the commonly-accepted term is misleading. This is why I prefer to just read the financial statements instead of letting someone else misread it for me.

 

[pshufd]

Actually, yes, because the little cups that people feed into the machines for single doses of coffee double the container usage (not gram per gram of plastic, but it's definitely twice in number compared to machines that make larger amounts of coffee at one time). A coffee/gas shop's 50 gallon boiler dispenses a billion bitter caffeine & acid doses before being trashed (or cleaned), and what goes into them doesn't come one-package-per-dose. The packaging is more resource efficient.

Someone informed me that one of the brands makes these little cups out of potatoes, so that's cool. Takes commercial composting, but if it's not petroleum and IS compostable at all, it's an improvement. Paper is also less harmful than styrofoam, but still terribly wasteful.

But all those cups... Still perfectly awful. So many things in our culture are environmentally horrifying. I respect those who carry their own reusable container with them, refusing disposables, when maintaining their caffeine addiction.

I disagree. Going to the shop for coffee results in these large, disposable cups. I use a coffee mug at home. Why would I waste the money on Styrofoam cups at home? Same thing in the office. People bring in their own coffee mugs and reuse them.

 

[pshufd]

Did you find that people didn't think you were doing anything productive because computer tasks look passive to a lot of people who expect furious "hacker typing" and flashing screens because of TV/movies?

Neat stuff!

And here I am with a sleep disorder that results in almost nothing but stage 1 & 2 sleep. All dreams/activity... but a greatly reduced creative capacity because I don't get restful sleep (stage 3, formerly 3 or 4 now merged in definitions), so I am generally always fatigued and emotionally worn out... and I'm surrounded by noise, and I have an inhibition problem (previously being on an SSNRI drug left me unable to control impulses for 6 years+ while on it, and now I have the opposite problem of not being able to act on impulses without considerable internal debate, especially since nothing seems worth doing at all, because of decades of punishment for my efforts, or just no reward of any kind).

While I've never woken up with a sudden realization, I have definitely found myself still working on problems while not working on them. Sometimes to the point where it's intrusive thinking. Occasionally, the correct solution comes in those times, if not merely "I have not tried this".

And at numerous times, I have suddenly realized or understood something I had previously not grasped, just by talking out my situation or problem to another person. Even without their input, the act of explaining it to them causes me to think differently (though I definitely can get this from a FaceTime chat).

This was before the days of the stereotypical hacker.

Their business was down and that's a terrifying thought if your tens of thousands of people can't do their jobs.

So they were concerned and I think that they felt that they needed to be doing something about it and so they were physically present as they felt that that was a necessary contribution to solving the problem.

I find that I get my best sleep from working out regularly. An hour of tennis or running 3-5 miles per day or both and I sleep really well. I have a fitness watch which tracks my sleep and sleep quality and exercise is one of the biggest factors. My son works out daily as well but sometimes he needs some help from melatonin for a good sleep. There are a lot of factors that can disturb sleep. I find that even barometric pressure is a factor - it kind of goes nuts at this time of the year which is part of the reason why we have all of these storms in the middle of the country.

 

[pshufd]

Anyone refusing to come into work should be fired immediately and hopefully be forced to work at McDonalds for the rest of their lives.

Those saying other companies will hire them, yeah, I’ll bet employers are just clamouring to hire people that got fired for refusing to do what their former employer asked of them.

Was this person actually fired or did he quit?

This guy invented a new area of science. I doubt that he'd have problems finding work. Any foreign country with tech ambitions would be happy to have him. I imagine the CIA would love to have him as well.

 

[JM]

....this was after the offer had been made and i rejected it. although it wasn't over that reason.

All good! Just a little levity, here.

Good luck on the job search.

 

[Zimmy68]

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.

Yep. There is a talented replacement out there willing to do the work.
At least this guy resigned instead of complaining about it.

I have worked in an environment where it was frowned upon if you left at the expect time. The bosses all stayed late and expected everyone else to do the same (they also arrived later).
That was unfair and hopefully that is going to be a thing of the past.

But if you are highly paid, top person at Apple and can't be bothered to show up at least 1 day a week while your staff has to. Well... Good bye and good luck.

I think what really happened, when the pandemic hit and he got to work from home, he sold his high $$$ house and moved to a much farther/cheaper location and now the time has come to pay the bill.
I'm sure he has another nice job lined up so no problem for him but at least tell it like it is.

 

[orionquest]

Congratulations on your deeply-considered "I know you are but what am I" contribution to the discussion. 😉

Your welcome! Just following your lead.

 

[pshufd]

Choose, or "choose"?

I know some people who are workaholics. I'm doubting that's the majority (especially seeing how those workaholics react to people who aren't like them; they feel like everyone else is lazy or unconcerned about making money, when I think it's more that other people generally want a better mix of life in their life).

This is the culture where I worked. We typically had about ten hours of interviews before hiring people as we wanted people who would put in the effort as well as having the background and qualifications. I don't think that it's that surprising having a concentration of people like this at one place. If you put a lot of effort upfront, you have fewer problems later on.

 

[I7guy]

It's not a straw man. It's an actual issue, and it has great meaning to the entire society and the world at large, especially those who will live past the current generation of "leadership" in our corporations and legislature.

I've engaged with you before on this site and I never felt like you were insincere or trollish, but I do feel like you miss the bigger picture via a reductionist and laissez-faire capitalist approach to topics you enter into. Remaining calm, using precise language and logical reasoning in your responses is all good. Missing or refusing to engage the human consequences and the bigger picture is not.

If we can't have rational people in positions of power then they need to either be removed or restricted.

The above, imo, is a strawman because it doesn’t quantify anything, especially related to the topic thread and what is rational and by whose yardstick.

 

[ofarlig]

So you agree with Apple's policy of 60% in the office and 40% at home?

Because a lot of people here seems to disagree with Apple. If they do, then they must believe that 60% is too much.
So what percentage should Apple enforce according to you?

I would quit on the spot no matter how much of a percentage they would try to enforce, I think it should be flexible because that is how work normally is. Some periods I will be more in the office when delivering the expected work requires so, right now for example I am more at the office due to us just hiring someone that needs more help and also due to social reasons when you get a new person on the team.

Once this period is over I will go back to being there once a week over a lunch and some meetings as long as I feel like it when I wake up in the morning.

 

[pshufd]

The problem is that it probably took him ages to get into work and only slightly less to get back.

Even if you've got a limo-driver, that time is essentially lost forever.

The question is: if there were huge high-rises around Silicon Valley (so that a large number of people could live in reasonable distance from work), would people move there with their families?

What would it take for people to give up the American Dream of living in a house with a front-yard, a back-yard and picket-fence around?

I believe, Tim Cook is more or less spot-on for requiring people to go back to the office.
But I couldn't see myself doing 90 minutes+ commutes (30 minutes by bike now).

If you want to raise a family, then you'll need good schools too. Or good private schools and the salary to afford them. That is an existing problem with SV.

 

[I7guy]

Would you support the immediate discontinuation of any tax credit you claimed on last year’s return that I didn’t get to claim, then?

I mean, hey, you chose to buy a house or have a kid or whatever else might have earned you a tax credit. Why does my money have to pick up the budgetary slack for your choices that don’t directly and tangibly benefit me?

We choose to invest as a society in people’s choices that hopefully benefit us all, even if intangibly, like an educated populace. And sometimes you’ll never see a direct benefit from a use of your tax dollars — for example, maintenance on a street in your town that you’ll simply never drive on. That’s fine, because their tax dollars support you, too. They’re probably not so whiny about it, either.

It’s almost like that’s the purpose of government or something, not campaigning and theatrics on legislative floors, but rather actually serving the needs of the people. I can agree that college costs are wildly out of control, and some students get duped into taking classes (or even getting an entire degree) they don’t need. Those are problems that are going to take a long time to fix, but student loan debt is a major drag on the economy right now and can be eased relatively quickly.

Tax Laws change from year to year and it’s generally known in advance. Forgiving student debt is unprecedented and unfair to those who worked hard to pay it off.

 

[pshufd]

With all that's been said in this thread, I think the most annoying thing to me is the people who think Machine Learning == Siri.

I can't explain why this irritates me so much but how are you a tech enthusiast and don't know more than one application of Machine Learning?

Hopefully everyone goes and reads the guy's AI book. I doubt that most have the math background to do so though.

 

[6787872]

All good! Just a little levity, here.

Good luck on the job search.

thanks, i actually got one at meta. they were paying almost 40k more than apple for SWE and remote was just an extra benefit. although, ironically, i despise meta.

 

[pshufd]

Yes, but having multiple cores is a recent invention in the history of computing.

The VAX 11/782 was my first multiprocessor system and that was back in the mid-1980s.

The PowerMac G5 (I have one in the basement) has a multicore multiprocessor option. I think that IBM Power 4 had multicore though I don't recall if it was available in Macs back then.

I used the VAX 6000 products in the 1980s and those were all multiprocessor systems. It created interesting synchronization problems with our software because we used timestamps for database backup, recovery and and other operations and having multiple timestamps for operations from different CPUs could result in data corruption.

 

[I7guy]

You recently implied that Apple's managerial success was proven via their financial results. Did I misunderstand, because now you're implying that the layoffs at Activision Blizzard were a result of horrible management, when everything done there was to get the same kind of financial results.

Maybe I’m misremembering but weren’t there allegations of Sexual harassment and other bad management?

 

[pshufd]

So you agree with Apple's policy of 60% in the office and 40% at home?

Because a lot of people here seems to disagree with Apple. If they do, then they must believe that 60% is too much.
So what percentage should Apple enforce according to you?

My former workplace had the 60% threshold to retaining your office. If your average in-person occupancy was below 60% for the previous quarter, you lost your office. You could come in and use a temporary office though. Some employees came into the office, used the gym for an hour and then went back home to work. An office can be a carrot. We didn't have a really expensive office that we had to fill though.

 

[sirozha]

Cool. How does Starbucks make your drinks?

Starbucks is for those who can’t get a real job. They should drive to the job site.

 

[sirozha]

To quit over this is unreasonable and mildly childish.

The guy will get a better job elsewhere and will continue to enjoy working from his mansion on a mountain lake somewhere a thousand miles away from the Silicon Valley. Good for him.

 

[pshufd]

Tax Laws change from year to year and it’s generally known in advance. Forgiving student debt is unprecedented and unfair to those who worked hard to pay it off.

Life is inherently unfair though.

How about those of us who put our kids through college through our own savings and their grants and scholarships? We don't get to pick our parents.

 

[sirozha]

IMO, he's a privileged whiner, complaining about actually having to show up a work a couple of days/week.

The vast majority of workers have absolutely ZERO flexibility, and have to be at work 5+ days/week, every week.

Because they were ****ing around while others were studying their ass off.

 

[pshufd]

Because they were ****ing around while others were studying their ass off.

Getting a computer science degree is typically brutal. Same thing with EE, ME, CE and others. There are far easier majors. I had a look at one of my son's courses in his first year. 130 programming assignments ranging from 10 minutes to 10 hours of work. That's on top of 3,000 pages of reading, lectures, quizzes, tests, and attending classs. And that's just one course. The degree programs force you to prioritize as it's difficult to get all of the work done regularly.

The big cap tech companies hire kids with CS degrees as they know that they've been put through the ringer in undergraduate and that they survived four years of it.

The washout rate for Physics (for scientists and engineers) is typically two-thirds so only a third actually finish. The state schools usually have large auditorium classes with little support for the students. It's really a sink-or-swim environment. I would guess that the LACs provide far more support which is why they have higher graduation rates but you definitely pay for that support in terms of smaller classroom sizes.

 

[I7guy]

Life is inherently unfair though.

How about those of us who put our kids through college through our own savings and their grants and scholarships? We don't get to pick our parents.

Yep, would have told my son to not pay off a dime of his loan.

 

[nilk]

Certain types of software development don't need to be in-person, and may actually benefit from WFH. I'm a software engineer and have been WFH full time for the last few years, and even before the pandemic would do a day or two a week from home. Productivity went up because it minimized distractions. Instead of random interruptions throughout the day, I can now focus for many hours on my work, which is what the type of work I do requires. And we were already using chat, e-mail, issue trackers, etc, as well as having a few of our employees remote. Using asynchronous communication meant less likelihood of knocking someone out of flow state. So the transition wasn't hard for us.

Sure, sometimes the impromptu hallway meetings were productive, but largely they were inefficient as some of the people who got sucked into them had their time wasted because it would meander into subjects that they didn't need to be there for. Now that we're fully remote we can have impromptu meetings online and they are more purpose-directed and bring in only the people who need to be in it. Going fully remote has been very effective for the company I work for, and we have no plans of going back to office work.

I think if you're also escaping an open plan workplace by switching to WFH, that can also be another benefit to WFH. I will say, someone's home environment can be a factor. Having an option for going to the office with private offices (as opposed to open plan) would be the ideal, since not everyone can function efficiently at home. Seems to have not been a problem for my team though.

Another thing is long commutes. Long commutes are incredibly inefficient. It saps an employee of energy and adds stress, and reduces the time they could be using to get exercise and be healthy. I had a short commute before I switched to WFH, but it was enough time that I gained through WFH that now I have time to exercise each morning.

And having dabbled with ML so I have some idea of what this type of work may be like, I would think its one of the software problems that benefits less from in-person communication. And people who are really good at ML are not going to have a problem finding remote work elsewhere.

The new state of software / tech work is that a lot more workers have the expectation of remote work. Of course I think the remote positions are going to have more competition, so it's going to be the top talent who benefit most.

 

[MRrainer]

If you want to raise a family, then you'll need good schools too. Or good private schools and the salary to afford them. That is an existing problem with SV.

Yeah. Apple would probably need to team up with the rest of the SV trillion dollar companies to sponsor these schools (and all the infrastructure around it).

But then, in a "normal" country, that would be paid by taxes....

Weird that people have no problem for the US to throw away trillions in wars but god forbid some poor parents' kids get a "free" education even though they pay little or no taxes.