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

m4mario said:
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.
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OK. So you are not addressing something that I wrote. It was a different topic.

I am sometimes puzzled about how Apple conducts business. They make some fantastic problems but they have a ton of people issues that usually doesn't make it into the news.
 
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dysamoria said:
I don't have the answers to these questions. They are fair questions. I would have to work with policy experts, parents, etc, before I proposed a specific plan. I just don't think throwing our hands up and saying "whatever happens happens" is reasonable policy in the face of a pandemic. I feel the same frustration about people's reluctance to moderate their own adult behavior, but I thought children were being supervised to some degree by their parents/guardians.

Do children typically have free roaming opportunities in their communities? I did in mine, after a certain age (12??), but it was wooded, sparsely populated (at least compared to the urban-ish town I'm now suffering), and there were few other children my age with whom to socialize. My two friends and I didn't have a playground to show up at and be surrounded by tons of other kids (that required parents driving us a mile or more). I did have to inform my parents where I would be, with whom, and they told me when I was allowed to come and go, and how far they were okay with me going. I had a long leash, but I had fewer environmental dangers. My experience does not map to big cities or suburbia.

At what age did you let your kids just go wherever?
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I don't want to make assumptions, but it sounds like you don't have kids. Kids love to be with other kids. It's not about parent's letting kids roam around wherever. Kids will hang out together in their own neighborhood for hours with friends. They will have play dates. They love birthday parties. Kids will start a wrestling match or play king of the hill. They act spontaneously. You can put a mask on a kid, but they are likely to let it fall off or forget they should be wearing it in the first place.

The whole point is that regions with school closures did not get better outcomes partly because kids still found ways to mingle outside of school. It was an unworkable policy because it was easily undermined by behavior outside the classroom. You can imagine all kinds of additional restrictions to counter the nature of children, but they are unlikely to work because they can't be enforced and they aren't sustainable over a long period....certainly not over the school closure term.
 
pshufd said:
My kids grew up in an environment of paper, pencil and textbooks. They had computers but it was dialup access and social media sites were crude and generally for adults. They had feature phones in college. So I don't really understand the social media stuff with kids these days but I just see some glimpses of it in news reports. I've no doubt that it's a real problem but it's not something that I've cared to look into.
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The news doesn't capture it right either, since it tends to focus on cyberbullying and other scary-sounding things. The real issue is kids became antisocial. Lockdowns must've accelerated it a ton, but I wasn't in school by then.
 
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pshufd said:
They love the arts. I imagine that most people that get these degrees do so because they can. That is they have the family wealth that allows them to pursue their dreams.
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I do too, but you don't need a PhD to pursue art. Anyway if it's their families funding it, it doesn't really bother me.
 
sudo-sandwich said:
The news doesn't capture it right either, since it tends to focus on cyberbullying and other scary-sounding things. The real issue is kids became antisocial. Lockdowns must've accelerated it a ton, but I wasn't in school by then.
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The antisocial part I do see on Reddit. Though it's not limited to young adults and teens.
 
sudo-sandwich said:
I do too, but you don't need a PhD to pursue art. Anyway if it's their families funding it, it doesn't really bother me.
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This guy also is world renown in sound design so there are physics courses in his educational background. He also manages a family office and he is a very sharp trader.
 
ruka.snow said:
After 20 years of having remote workers and quite a bit of that being remote myself… no you won’t lose your job to someone in India or anywhere else.
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During the lockdowns, our department rapidly built up a team in India instead of hiring new people in the US. They rarely lay anyone off, but I can see them pushing people out if the India team works out.
 
pshufd said:
The antisocial part I do see on Reddit. Though it's not limited to young adults and teens.
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On Reddit, idk who exactly is on the other side, but it seems to be mostly males and might not represent everyone. In middle/high school, nearly everyone was on a phone at all times, and it was during transformative childhood years.
 
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Look it's pretty simple. Working remotely clearly works for some professions. There are professionals that can work from home or remote, and there are professionals that cannot.

Engineers like myself, we already work "remote" since we work on servers that are colocated else where on someone else's computer, aka The Cloud. So people like these, they should be allowed to work from wherever they want and not tied to an office.

All these years of corporations beefing up their VPN's and remote capabilities that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per month, were being wasted anyways if they are not being used. Now that they are being used, people on the remote force are migrating their way of thinking to be, "why work from the office, when I can work remote?"
These companies need to realize that dragging an engineer across town to work on their cubicle is far more expensive for them than to allow said engineer to work from a remote location of their choice as long as they can do their work.

There are no irreplaceable people. But there are replaceable companies.

Take it as you will.
 
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dysamoria said:
"We must not change one because it causes change elsewhere" seems to be what you're saying. This is what leads to people in positions of privilege adhering aggressively to the status quo.

In the long run, dense population zones are bad for civilization and the planet's ecology. Humanity adapts (when given the chance, or when forced to). "Because people are employed in a fundamentally harmful socioeconomic model" is not a good reason to keep things the way they are.
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I think we need to provide an alternative to it "before" making a drastic change.

The ones that will suffer are the ones that can least afford to suffer more. I'm not advocating to keep the status quo. However, the status quo was what we all agreed to, especially for working in large cities. You go to the office. If you can work from home, great. If that is apart of what your company offers. If not, and it was needed to get through COVID. The expectation is that we go back to work. Emptying 10% of workers going in and out of big city areas or major companies so they can work from home because they are scared to go outside or work closely with others isn't something we should be aspiring to do.

To save on fuel/transportation costs, sure. Save the environment, sure. If you have the ability to do so just as well as working in the office, sure. All of course depends on ones situation. But in mass? Maybe we need a proper plan that doesn't cause as much damage as COVID did in the first place? Maybe.
 
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I love how this thread if full of folks convinced everyone slacks off and does nothing when working at home. Classic middle manager speak. "How will I know they're working if I can't see them in their cubicle". I've worked at home for 10 years with highly skilled engineers also at home. Folks grinded hard from their living rooms. We got far more done than when I worked in traditional office environments. Old school managers and companies need to realize this is what employees want and if they expect to retain talent they better be flexible.
 
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dysamoria said:
This assumes that every employee or potential employee thinks they have the OPTION, when they initially got the job. The world changed because of a pandemic. It revealed the lie of the office workplace as a necessity for every job. If companies aren't willing to change with culture, they might win or they might lose. This specific situation looks like a loss for Apple, if they thought this employee was worth hiring in the first place.
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I wouldn't go as far as calling it a lie. If you had a job that you could work from home. That's great. But, for many people, working from home isn't really an option for full time work. I myself lack the space to make it work very well. And the constant home traffic (for lack of a better word) makes it even worse. So, should we all just switch to work from home even if it's not ideal? What happens to those offices that held hundreds or even thousands of people? Just walk away from them? And again, all the ancillary business that are supported by those offices. Schools, local services, food, transportation, and so on. Everything supported by all those people going to the office.

For those that will only work from home. And will not go to an office anymore. I do hope that your successful in that endeavor. I don't personally expect business will "adapt" to paying for all that office space, and not have it utilized. Maybe they start to pay less for those that work from home. And maybe they start to demand more from those that work from home. IDK, and not saying that will happen. But, if there is an adjustment made on one end (Employee), there will be adjustments made by the employer at some point too. Maybe business adapt more quickly and get on board with letting more people work from home. I just personally doubt it in the short term.
 
IllinoisCorn said:
To quit over this is unreasonable and mildly childish.
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People quit for things that are important to them. Everyone has different needs. If you enjoy working in the office, continue to do so. For many, work from home improved their overall quality of life.
 
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genovelle said:
It’s a job that they took for very good pay that required them to work in Apple’s office. I can promise these people are going to the store, out to eat at restaurants, to events like weddings and concerts etc.
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And now the world is different and people realize they prefer working from home for the multitude of reasons already explained in this post. We don't have to keep doing something just because that's the way it was done in the past.
 
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Peak hedonic adaptation. Can't believe people aren't more glad we got hybrid work schedules out of this whole ridiculous situation.
 
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