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

[pshufd]

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

I paid off my loan in about nine months because I didn't want to have to bother making the payments every month. But that was when college was cheap and you could easily pay off college loans in a short period of time with a professional job. I've done a lot of study into asset bubbles and market crashes and the common issues is debt to fuel bubbles. I'm pretty sure that we engineer these bubbles on purpose and then pop them when we have no other choice.

Given that, I'm loathe to borrow money. We paid off our mortgage in 2000 and so were able to pay college expenses out of income and a little out of savings. Our savings rate was 38% between when we paid off our mortgage and when they started college.

Why would you want to encourage debt for your kids? I understand that that debt can have some benefits but right now, there are hedge funds blowing up due to leverage. And this stuff will eventually bring us to recession; along with the Federal Reserve QT and rate hikes.

 

[pshufd]

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.

Goodfellow's book is on my list of things to read after my Cloud textbook. Thanks for the information.

Our process was that people had to be in the office for spec review time or if they were new employees that needed training. You had to be around if you were doing the training too. But you could otherwise work from home or from another country if you wanted to. My manager back around 2000-2005 was in the UK and she flew here a few times a year for meetings. Everyone expected everyone else to otherwise be adults about getting their work done. Our interviewing process was a good guarantee of that.

 

[pshufd]

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.

The war money comes back to us. We give military aid in the form of hardware manufactured by US defense companies so it pays a lot of salaries and props up the stock market. So there's a strong constituency for military spending as they make political donations to both parties. Education funding is mostly local in most states. There's state aid but it varies widely between states. State funding can not compensate for affluent and educated parents. The NJ Educational experiments in the 1990s demonstrated this. The home environment is just a massive factor in education that you can only overcome with boarding schools and our society doesn't support that approach.

If I were starting out, I'd work to ensure parents were educated, so that children could receive the exponential growth effect of that education, which would have the benefit of more efficient K-12 so that not everyone would need a college degree. A college degree today, is kind of like a high-school diploma in the past. It shows that you could show up, follow directions and learn. Some professions require specific skills, but, in the past, a degree in anything from a LAC could get you a good paying job that could turn into a good career.

 

[incoherent_1]

Are you trying to decide whether to be hostile toward him or supportive of him in his resignation?

Neither, actually!

I thought about it and realized that machine learning applied to potentially countless Apple features (for example: Siri results, auto-suggestions iOS keyboards, Spotlight search, Photos scanning, etc). Made me realize how far-reaching the work of a relatively unknown person can possibly be. But of course his purview could be all or none of those things!

 

[I7guy]

I paid off my loan in about nine months because I didn't want to have to bother making the payments every month. But that was when college was cheap and you could easily pay off college loans in a short period of time with a professional job. I've done a lot of study into asset bubbles and market crashes and the common issues is debt to fuel bubbles. I'm pretty sure that we engineer these bubbles on purpose and then pop them when we have no other choice.

Given that, I'm loathe to borrow money. We paid off our mortgage in 2000 and so were able to pay college expenses out of income and a little out of savings. Our savings rate was 38% between when we paid off our mortgage and when they started college.

Why would you want to encourage debt for your kids? I understand that that debt can have some benefits but right now, there are hedge funds blowing up due to leverage. And this stuff will eventually bring us to recession; along with the Federal Reserve QT and rate hikes.

I’m not encouraging debt. Both my kids live almost debt free. I’m genuinely annoyed Uncle Sam wants to forgive student loans. Exactly what does that how and teach our future generation.

 

[pshufd]

Neither, actually!

I thought about it and realized that machine learning applied to potentially countless Apple features (for example: Siri results, auto-suggestions iOS keyboards, Spotlight search, Photos scanning, etc). Made me realize how far-reaching the work of a relatively unknown person can possibly be. But of course his purview could be all or none of those things!

Xerox PARC has a long list of basic research that greatly benefited Apple and a lot of other companies. They didn't really build and sell products based on the basic research. What is the invention of Ethernet worth to Apple? Object-oriented programming? WYSIWYG? How important was Bell Labs to the prosperity and wealth of the United States? The C language?

In many cases, researchers invent things that may prove to be useful decades or centuries later.

I ran into an undergraduate statistics problem that was posted to a tennis forum. If you want to kill productivity in a university math department or development environment with a lot of CS PHds, drop a hard puzzle on them. I think that I spent a week of time on the problem and a UK math department worked on it in addition to many others. I found a solution using a 200-year-old theorem that was translated from French. There were a few errors in the translation but it was good enough. Apparently a university intern had a project to translate the works of a French mathematician.

The thing is that this guys work might be worth hundreds of billions of dollars to the US economy in the future. Or maybe just billions. Most people don't know because they can't understand exponential effects of discoveries.

 

[pshufd]

I’m not encouraging debt. Both my kids live almost debt free. I’m genuinely annoyed Uncle Sam wants to forgive student loans. Exactly what does that how and teach our future generation.

Paying off debt is a patch to a problem with very complex roots. But it would provide relief to a lot of people with significant burdens. Fixing the actual problem would mean:

- Providing parents with the tools and education to raise their kids
- Funding efficient and effective schools
- Providing cheap higher education

The best example that I can see of this is Singapore. They went from a third-world country to a first-world country in forty years. This is exceedingly rare. They frequently come out in the top five of the TIMSS tests and they usually do well in terms of per capita GDP (they are currently #4). This in a country with no natural resources (Qatar is first).

 

[incoherent_1]

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.

Great point. There’s a really interesting part of a book about Apple that discussed their team project structure and it turns out most major Apple projects are in small teams — I don’t remember the exact number but much smaller than you’d expect for blockbuster, world changing features — something like 3-8 people. Beyond that group, most information on the project is secret except to direct supervisors.

Reading that really gave me perspective on what’s needed to build a great product. You could turn 200 developers loose on the same project and even if they were “productive” in the MBA sense of writing code and logging hours, you wouldn’t necessarily end up with a better product compared to the small, highly focused team. As you say, I’m sure Apple has the data, although I think anyone who has worked on a major tech product has seen what a clusterf@&* it becomes with one too many cooks.

 

[cocky jeremy]

Because they want you back in the office instead of taking numerous breaks? Slacking off? Running and doing errands while on the clock?

I do that in the office, so what's the difference?

 

[duffman9000]

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.

You seriously have no idea what you’re talking about.

 

[pshufd]

Great point. There’s a really interesting part of a book about Apple that discussed their team project structure and it turns out most major Apple projects are in small teams — I don’t remember the exact number but much smaller than you’d expect for blockbuster, world changing features — something like 3-8 people. Beyond that group, most information on the project is secret except to direct supervisors.

Reading that really gave me perspective on what’s needed to build a great product. You could turn 200 developers loose on the same project and even if they were “productive” in the MBA sense of writing code and logging hours, you wouldn’t necessarily end up with a better product compared to the small, highly focused team. As you say, I’m sure Apple has the data, although I think anyone who has worked on a major tech product has seen what a clusterf@&* it becomes with one too many cooks.

Good products aren't necessary for tactical success though.

Netscape had a large team and they were a competent threat to Microsoft. Microsoft responded by throwing a few thousand engineers on Internet Explorer and put Netscape out of business. They had a buggy, security-hole laden product but they eliminated the competition and they had 93% marketshare and essentially a monopoly.

Then a high-school student got together with three other Mozilla engineers and developed what became Firefox providing the first real competition to Internet Explorer. But Microsoft had the market to themselves for a number of years. And a huge amount of business because of that monopoly.

 

[Mr Retina]

You can tell whether someone actually works in Tech or not based upon these awful takes in the comments lol…

 

[jhwalker]

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.

He's not BUILDING anything - there is absolutely no reason his job cannot be done 100% remotely.

 

[jhwalker]

Apple will lose top talent to competitors because of this.

Obviously - they already are.

 

[pshufd]

Obviously - they already are.

Apple Silicon leader and T2 security processor developer Jeff Wilcox has left Apple to rejoin Intel and oversee architecture for all Intel System-on-a-Chip (SoC) designs.

As Apple heads to the end of its self-imposed two-year transition from Intel to its own Apple Silicon, the company has lost the leader of its M1 development team. Jeff Wilcox originally joined Apple from Intel in 2013, and is now returning to that company as it works on introducing new processors.

"After an amazing eight years I have decided to leave Apple and pursue another opportunity," wrote Wilcox on his LinkedIn page. "It has been an incredible ride and I could not be prouder of all we accomplished during my time there, culminating in the Apple Silicon transition with the M1, M1 Pro and M1 Max SOCs and systems. I will dearly miss all of my Apple colleagues and friends."

Apple loses lead Apple Silicon designer Jeff Wilcox to Intel | AppleInsider

Apple Silicon leader and T2 security processor developer Jeff Wilcox has left Apple to rejoin Intel and oversee architecture for all Intel System-on-a-Chip (SoC) designs.

appleinsider.com

Seems to me that this guy was a pretty big loss.

 

[arvinsim]

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.

Wars = profit
Free education = no profit

 

[m4mario]

Do you think that a lawsuit will arise? The employee in this case didn't cite any negatives with Apple.

Employee lawsuits are rare because you sign away a lot of your rights when you accept employment.

You can see the relative imbalance in power in the ongoing unionization efforts at Starbucks and Amazon.

If a company is caught intentionally lying to employees to get them back to office when they had covid concerns, a lawsuit will definitely arise. All it would take is one COVID death in any of the employees’ households. But for that they should be lying in the first place. Which is why I said Apple is not likely to lie in this case.

 

[MrDerby01]

Did anyone expect anything else? Everyone seems to be using Covid as some type of excuse. Pay rent, Stay home instead of going to work prior to covid.. I can't do this .. or that because of covid.. Far to many excuses and no one serious about working or doing their part. You wounder why other countries are far ahead of the US to date.

 

[Blackstick]

Lot of bitter folks in this thread who can't work from home and come off as jealous or envious.

Good for this guy. Go find work where your employer accommodates remote working arrangements. Been full time remote since pre pandemic. Even took my existing salary and bought a much larger home in Ohio. Should do it if you can.

 

[pshufd]

If a company is caught intentionally lying to employees to get them back to office when they had covid concerns, a lawsuit will definitely arise. All it would take is one COVID death in any of the employees’ households. But for that they should be lying in the first place. Which is why I said Apple is not likely to lie in this case.

There is absolutely no evidence of this here. Everything that I've read so far indicate that he left amicably. Do you know anything to the contrary?

I recall employer liability protections in federal and state bills. Here's an example:

The Alabama legislature passed Senate Bill No. 30, which provides that any business, healthcare provider, church, educational entity, government entity, or cultural institution is immune from claims for injury caused by exposure to COVID-19, vaccinations for COVID-19, or providing personal protective equipment. The immunity does not apply if the injury is alleged to have been caused by “wanton, reckless, willful or intentional misconduct.” The Bill was signed by the Governor on February 12, 2021.

50-State Update | COVID-19 Business / Employer Liability Protections

A number of states have passed or are considering passing legislation to shield certain businesses from liability from claims for injury caused by exposure to COVID-19. Read Husch Blackwell's 50-state update.

www.huschblackwell.com

 

[ksec]

Apple's Director of Machine Learning must be reading lots of Macrumors,

So he decided to pull out of Apple.

 

[pshufd]

Did anyone expect anything else? Everyone seems to be using Covid as some type of excuse. Pay rent, Stay home instead of going to work prior to covid.. I can't do this .. or that because of covid.. Far to many excuses and no one serious about working or doing their part. You wounder why other countries are far ahead of the US to date.

Ahead of the US in what? You expect the US to be ahead in everything? For whatever reason, countries around the world like the US dollar. It has been on a monster of a run over the past year. I didn't think that the US dollar index was ever going to get back over 100. But this is a vote on economic strength and the return on our currency.

 

[pshufd]

Wars = profit
Free education = no profit

Maybe jealousy.

Reminds me of The Prodigal Son:

Luke 15

25 “Now his older son was in the field, and as he came and drew near to the house, he heard music and dancing. 26 And he called one of the servants and asked what these things meant. 27 And he said to him, ‘Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fattened calf, because he has received him back safe and sound.’ 28 But he was angry and refused to go in. His father came out and entreated him, 29 but he answered his father, ‘Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends. 30 But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him!’ 31 And he said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. 32 It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.’”

 

[m4mario]

There is absolutely no evidence of this here. Everything that I've read so far indicate that he left amicably. Do you know anything to the contrary?

I recall employer liability protections in federal and state bills. Here's an example:

The Alabama legislature passed Senate Bill No. 30, which provides that any business, healthcare provider, church, educational entity, government entity, or cultural institution is immune from claims for injury caused by exposure to COVID-19, vaccinations for COVID-19, or providing personal protective equipment. The immunity does not apply if the injury is alleged to have been caused by “wanton, reckless, willful or intentional misconduct.” The Bill was signed by the Governor on February 12, 2021.

50-State Update | COVID-19 Business / Employer Liability Protections

A number of states have passed or are considering passing legislation to shield certain businesses from liability from claims for injury caused by exposure to COVID-19. Read Husch Blackwell's 50-state update.

www.huschblackwell.com

I am not talking about this person leaving. I am talking about Apple lying to employees to get them back to work.

And like I said, even when Apple can win a lawsuit, it will settle out of court to avoid bad press and to keep employee/customer/developer morale. I already gave examples for this. The fact that the law provides protection to companies reopening, does nothing to protect large companies from facing a PR nightmare.

 

[friedmud]

At my company we were so effective working from home for the last 2 years... that they are giving every employee the option to do what they want. You can choose full-remote, in-office, or hybrid... and if you go hybrid you can set your own in-office schedule.

Now - my particular team (of programmers of scientific software) are _ready_ to get back to the office _some_. There are some interactions that we weren't able to have as effectively when we were full remote. Most of our team settled on a hybrid schedule with 3 days a week in the office and we lined them up: Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. That way when anyone is in the office, we all are, so we can collaborate.

We have always had a few full-remote people - and a couple more chose to go that path. We've set up a nice "Teams Room" using a Logitech Rally Bar that lets us pull our full-remote people into discussions very easily.

I don't understand all of the hatred towards these people who are quitting because their job is saying they need to be in the office. There are many jobs in the world (especially in tech)... and we should all work to find the one that fits our goals/lifestyle/pay needs. For some people that will mean working from home - so they should seek out employers that do that.

Why are so many here so *angry* ?