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

[Artemis70]

How about if you got cancer?

Getting cancer changed my perspective on work quite a bit.

I'm sorry to hear that. I wish you the best.

There are obviously life changing events. I will be having fun until such a life changing event occurs. I can only hope that any life changing events that occur to me, are for the better and not for the worse.

 

[newyorksole]

this is the most accurate response. This has nothing to do with Productivity, Efficiency, or Covid. It has everything to do with that building

I think that's part of the reason, but not the entire reason. working together in person (for certain roles) is really necessary. can't blame Apple for wanting the culture to remain the same and have people collab face to face. there's nothing wrong with wanting to ensure your $1B campus doesn't go to waste AND wanting to uphold a similar culture while having employees be flexible.

 

[pshufd]

I think that's part of the reason, but not the entire reason. working together in person (for certain roles) is really necessary. can't blame Apple for wanting the culture to remain the same and have people collab face to face. there's nothing wrong with wanting to ensure your $1B campus doesn't go to waste AND wanting to uphold a similar culture while having employees be flexible.

Why does working together have to be in the office?

One of my old managers had a big house on Cape Cod and she invited us all there for an offsite meeting. It was a very good time. Our employer had a retreat campus where you weren't supposed to work. It could accommodate a few hundred people. How about a meeting at Panera Bread or Starbucks for face-to-face. Particularly if team members live in the same area?

 

[Artemis70]

You might be dealing with a selection bias here; if your coworkers are all in a similar line of work and socioeconomic status, your responses to this situation might also be similar. You asked if you were a rarity for a list of things that sounded like privilege to me (I'm not disparaging you; I'm saying that you probably are in a much better situation than most employees throughout the whole world of office work).

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, or mis-remembering your post.

I tagged you because I agreed with your post, while another person did not agree. That other person was bashing you.

My company is very different from many other companies. For example, my boss (the owner of the company) tried for many years to make me work less hours keeping the pay-check the same. I am definitely in a much better situation than many, and so are my co-workers.

I find it interesting to see the difference between different co-workers in their personal wishes. 50% of my co-workers were dying to get back to the office 100%, and are back to the office 100%. The other 50% are all over the place in their wishes. Some are finding that working from home can be challenging with hybrid meetings, when the majority of team members are in one room. Others do not have issues with this at all. It may also depend on the managers of the various teams how well hybrid meetings are run.

 

[Artemis70]

That's fine. The thing is, you made a lot of absolute statements and didn't follow them with any evidence. Since you're speaking from personal experience, that means it is anecdotal. Your experience does not act as a model to judge all other situations. That's why I reacted as I did (and because the phrases seemed to be very much like a copy/paste of other promotions of working in offices, such as the Apple statement, so it was a red flag to me).

I said:
Zoom/Teams are good enough for many, but not for always. With everybody working from home almost 100% of the time, creativity is often suffering. The question is what balance to strike. Also, the balance will not be the same for every role and for every person.

I'm not sure where I made absolute statements in the above? As far as I can tell, my statements are not absolute at all.

 

[Cesar Battistini]

Bye Felicia.

 

[Cesar Battistini]

Collaboration an team building is NOT the same. No matter what people say.

 

[bsolar]

That is not going to happen. Quite the reverse actually. Additionally, this is becoming a Republican/Democrat thing, where Republican owned companies are forbidding work from home. If you are in a blue state, you may have more time. Red States employees are probably not replying right now because they are at work.WFH is over, and fighting against it will screw you.

I'm not from the US so I know the situation there only indirectly. My direct experience with companies trying to use contractors to skirt employment regulations is that where I live and in many neighboring countries these practices have often failed and the companies involved were forced to treat the workers as full-fledged employees.

 

[bsolar]

You're responding because that is what you do. The way you will respond when you are directed to return to the office. There are few rock stars. I doubt you are one of them. Punch the clock, or its the Uber Driver life for you.

It's definitely true that employees which have more generic skill-sets will have a difficult time bargaining for work-at-home, or anything in their favour in general. An option for these kind of employees would be to unionize and offset their individual lack of bargaining power through the collective bargaining power an union offers.

 

[macsound1]

this is the most accurate response. This has nothing to do with Producitivity, Efficiency, or Covid. It has everything to do with that building

Apple employees sit in dozens of other offices besides Apple Park, most of which they don't own.
They could ask 5% of staff to return and fill up the spaceship.

 

[robinp]

Likely not salaried: Apple Store employees (except management), call centers, or anyone working in manufacturing (which Apple does not own, but I mention because they depend deeply on them, have dedicated Apple groups at Foxcon, etc.). The rest are likely salaried. The guy this article is about is definitely salaried, as are probably most people at Apple's main campus who isn't maintenance or sanitation.

But most people who WORK, in general, in the USA? Not salaried. By far.

This whole discussion is about return to office. That doesn’t include retail or manufacturing because they never worked in offices in the first place and never could work remotely.

Call centre staff and some other support workers are perhaps the ones who did work in offices and aren’t salaried.

 

[pshufd]

Elon Musk wants Tesla staff to return to office, but 52% of global workforce would rather take a pay cut than come back

And 64% of employees would look for a new job if their employer forced them to return to the office full-time, research shows.

www.marketwatch.com

And 64% of employees would look for a new job if their employer forced them to return to the office full-time.

No wonder this is so contentious. It's almost a 50/50 issue.

 

[nilk]

That is not going to happen. Quite the reverse actually. Additionally, this is becoming a Republican/Democrat thing, where Republican owned companies are forbidding work from home. If you are in a blue state, you may have more time. Red States employees are probably not replying right now because they are at work.WFH is over, and fighting against it will screw you.

It's probably true that we're going to see some contraction in the amount of remote work, simply due to the fact that a lot of it was a reaction to the pandemic and now people are acting like the pandemic is over. However, I don't think it'll completely return back to how it was before, and after some contraction we'll probably see gradual growth in remote work. This is especially true for software development / IT / tech which was already moving in that direction. Covid accelerated things and further developed the tools and practices necessary for effective remote work.

The company I work for was talking about going full remote years ago, before an office space lease renewal, well before the pandemic. Since we were leasing office space, when the pandemic came it was an easy decision to go full remote, and there are no plans to go back to having an office.

Remote positions are going to be more competitive since it opens up the pool of applicants to a much wider population and that includes at the global level. But, at least from what I've seen in software development, it's pretty hard to find competent people who can get the job done and communicate effectively. As a tech worker, you don't have to be a "rock star" to be able to get a remote job, just merely have to be competent and able to communicate, and able to prove that to a potential employer.

I'm actually not saying I'll WFH from here on out, but at least for the next several years I'm sticking to remote work, and there are absolutely no signs of it being over for the type of work I do.

 

[pshufd]

Remote positions are going to be more competitive since it opens up the pool of applicants to a much wider population and that includes at the global level. But, at least from what I've seen in software development, it's pretty hard to find competent people who can get the job done and communicate effectively. As a tech worker, you don't have to be a "rock star" to be able to get a remote job, just merely have to be competent and able to communicate, and able to prove that to a potential employer.

I'm actually not saying I'll WFH from here on out, but at least for the next several years I'm sticking to remote work, and there are absolutely no signs of it being over for the type of work I do.

One thing that helps is the ability to write well. If you write well, can put together video presentations and do well over the phone and zoom, then you may be more in demand as communications skills become more important. Distance may be a factor if the company wants to meet once a month, once a quarter or once a year.

My son worked in the office for three years and then worked remotely. He used to go in once a month before the pandemic. His hospital indicated that they were going to have meetings twice a month but there are signs that Delta is returning and so far, he's heard no updates on plans to return to the office. It seems like the situation can vary widely.

 

[macsound1]

One thing that helps is the ability to write well. If you write well, can put together video presentations and do well over the phone and zoom, then you may be more in demand as communications skills become more important. Distance may be a factor if the company wants to meet once a month, once a quarter or once a year.

My son worked in the office for three years and then worked remotely. He used to go in once a month before the pandemic. His hospital indicated that they were going to have meetings twice a month but there are signs that Delta is returning and so far, he's heard no updates on plans to return to the office. It seems like the situation can vary widely.

Communication skills are a huge part of being able to work remotely and stereotype or not, tech people aren't the best communicators. I assume this is part of the push for back to office in Apple, Google, and Facebook. There's probably a high percentage of employees that don't write eloquently and explicitly enough emails and slack messages for their bosses to know for sure they're doing ok alone at home without supervision.

 

[Itinj24]

You seriously have no clue who this guy is, what he does or what he has accomplished.

Read his university textbook on Deep Learning, MIT Press, if you have the math background for an idea of the kinds of things that he does.

I don’t give a crap who he is or what he accomplished.

As a consumer, my only concern is that the product I buy with my hard earned money is working as advertised and it’s not.

 

[Itinj24]

Or it could be that ML is extremely hard and there are other factors at play.

Do you know why Google is so good at ML? Because they don't care about data collection, they were collecting data from every possible source for years and years. Apple does not do this, they limit their data collection policies and that will always hamper those efforts because the data set simply isn't as refined or as large as other companies.

Siri has always been a mess, so I am unsure of why you would spend such money on a promise.

Then don’t advertise a product to work a certain way and deliver it another way.

Everyone is collecting data, yes even Apple. Nature of the beast when using tech.

 

[averagenerd81]

I don’t give a crap who he is or what he accomplished.

As a consumer, my only concern is that the product I buy with my hard earned money is working as advertised and it’s not.

You should care, because people are what make the products you want to buy work. Without people that are talented, you won't have your shiny stuff to play with.

You might even say Apple then doesn't "give a crap" who you are or that you want to buy products, because other people will continue to do so. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[Itinj24]

I must have missed the meeting where all of you collectively decided to conflate Machine Learning with Siri.

Reading posts like these is like hearing your mother call your Playstation a Nintendo.

Umm, does Siri not use machine learning?

A lot of iOS 15 has been garbage. Does that make you feel better?

 

[averagenerd81]

Then don’t advertise a product to work a certain way and deliver it another way.

Everyone is collecting data, yes even Apple. Nature of the beast when using tech.

Welcome to the world of the cloud and beta products, that is the world you inhabit and has been for awhile now. Is it great? In many ways no, in some ways .. I guess.

You're missing the point on data collection. Google's data collection and those of Apple are not the same, resulting in slower development for AI products like Siri. With more rich data, Google has jumped ahead in the AI space.

 

[pshufd]

I don’t give a crap who he is or what he accomplished.

As a consumer, my only concern is that the product I buy with my hard earned money is working as advertised and it’s not.

And why are you blaming this guy? Why aren't you blaming Tim Cook?

 

[Itinj24]

You should care, because people are what make the products you want to buy work. Without people that are talented, you won't have your shiny stuff to play with.

You might even say Apple then doesn't "give a crap" who you are or that you want to buy products, because other people will continue to do so. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Thanks for making my point. This guy didn’t deliver and now he’s gone so I care about that part.

I know Apple doesn’t give a crap about me. Only my money. Is that a surprise?

 

[macsound1]

Umm, does Siri not use machine learning?

A lot of iOS 15 has been garbage. Does that make you feel better?

My understanding is the only part of Siri that uses ML is the initial speech recognition part. The "Hey Siri"

Hey Siri: An On-device DNN-powered Voice Trigger for Apple’s Personal Assistant

The "Hey Siri" feature allows users to invoke Siri hands-free. A very small speech recognizer runs all the time and listens for just those…

machinelearning.apple.com

 

[averagenerd81]

Thanks for making my point. This guy didn’t deliver and now he’s gone so I care about that part.

I know Apple doesn’t give a crap about me. Only my money. Is that a surprise?

The world you live in, what is it like? It must be interesting.

 

[pshufd]

Umm, does Siri not use machine learning?

A lot of iOS 15 has been garbage. Does that make you feel better?

It may. I don't know. But this guy is the Director of Machine Learning. I've no evidence that he manages the Siri development team.