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

[ceriess]

We already have a caste system, and it is already built around people's wealth. Here's the problem with arbitrary equality:

Poor folks do not have proper work from home environments, when they have unemployed roommates and no electricity. They walk the 10 miles, or sneak on the bus without paying, and get to work. That means Richie Rich up in the hills is going to get into his Porsche and drive to work too. No more naps in the middle of the day for any of them. Fair is fair. You're all going back to the office.

 

[dysamoria]

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.

No argument. I should not have bothered engaging with that digression.

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

I interact with these people working from home almost every time I call any customer service. So even clock-punchers can work from home. I'm not saying it's a healthy work mode for these people (I have never thought so about clock punching), but we see that it doesn't need office buildings.

 

[dysamoria]

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.

As I have witnessed endless examples of tech people with poor communication/social skills, this is a really good point. It addresses one possible reasonable management motive, at least.

 

[dysamoria]

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're basically announcing that you're going to blame whoever you want, even when you don't know the facts. Cool, bro.

 

[dysamoria]

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

That's on marketing and executive management at Apple, and it has been a problem for far longer than COVID19 has.

 

[dysamoria]

[...]This guy didn’t deliver and now he’s gone so I care about that part.[...]

"I don't know anything about this guy, but I'll blame him anyway".

This is not the way.

 

[dysamoria]

They suck too.

Something I can agree on.

The entire computer industry sucks. All of it.

 

[dysamoria]

That’s exactly what I did but this Apple stuff has gotten worse over the past couple years. Coincidence? I’m not about to trash and spend on thousands of dollars worth of electronics to play trial and error.

That's exactly what the computer industry forces us into.

Yes, Apple stuff has gotten worse, but that started LONG before COVID19. I measure the start at 2013, around iOS 7's release, but it was no doubt going wrong inside Apple before we got that disgusting OS release.

 

[pshufd]

If your workplace has people reusing cups/mugs more than using disposables, then that's great. I think this is more common when the coffee is made in the office, by the employees working there, rather than with coffee bought in shops. Carrying reusables around in public, when eating at restaurants and such, has been a thing people remark about when I and my companion have done it, because it's rare for them to see it. My last workplace had a commercial coffee shop inside the building and most people used the disposables (which I noticed time after time, especially when I started utilizing a reusable container myself).

In my previous job, we had large carafes that could hold 12 cups of coffee. So I would open a foil packet, empty it into a filter and brew the coffee. The waste was the foil and the filter. The vast majority brought a coffee mug. There were disposable cups but those were mainly used by visitors. One minor note: there were about 5 of us that made coffee and about 80 that consumed it.

Our building had a cafeteria and nobody brought a cup or tumbler for coffee. A lot of people can't be bothered to wash it and put it in their bag to carry the next day. You can go to Dunkin or Starbucks with a reusable container, but, in practice, I never see anyone do it.

When I am out and about, I only drink water. I really don't like risking coffee stains.

 

[usagora]

Just wow. Utterly ridiculous. The entitlement mentality with some people is out of control!

 

[dysamoria]

So you are telling me a blacksmith was melting and banging iron with his co-workers between his kids in the living room and a carpenter and his two assistants are shaving and cutting wood in his bedroom?

Ha ha ha ha, NO!

Even if the workshop was attached to the home it was still a different place, not where he sleeps and eats. Even in that case those jobs were single man jobs, if 2 people worked together than at least one of them has to leave his home to go to the other's to work there so its not "working from home" any more.

This was a digression I should not have gotten into. We could split hairs and redefine things for days before settling on agreed terms, only to find out that maybe we don't even disagree with each other on whatever the hell this was about anyway.

 

[dysamoria]

Again, I’m a consumer, not an employer. I don’t need this guy’s resume. I don’t care what he did other than his involvement with the products I purchase.

Siri may be a trivial feature to you, but to me and the many other HomePod owners, it’s a critical feature when that’s the main way to interact with it. It’s obvious you don’t own any HomePods. When a headlining feature of a product is Siri, it’s not trivial.

Yes, I understand ML goes beyond that of a voice assistant. You can continue to be condescending but [...]

And stop right there. Anyone being condescending to you was entirely a reaction to your initial hostility toward the now-former Apple employee, through your own ignorance of what goes on behind the scenes. You triggered the response with your own dismissal and irrational argument.

just because it works with other features doesn’t make me happier that it doesn’t work well with Siri. Stuff working as advertised should be a bare minimum but you can congratulate Apple on a fine Spotlight search feature.

There's a lot of crap wrong with Apple product. That's not the issue here.

Further… of course an Apple employee should be blamed for a botched feature. Who the heck else you going to blame? A Google employee? The consumers? Sheesh.

You don't know WHICH Apple employee is to blame. You just decided this guy leaving WAS THE ONE and went on a rant about him. Then you came right out and admitted you know nothing of the situation, which should be where you STOPPED attacking one Apple employee. Instead, you doubled down on it.

That's why you got the responses you got. If you started from a different position, you'd have gotten different results.

EDIT: And since I've been reading them, I don't think anyone has been all that condescending to you, especially in light of how you started, and then continued, here with your own attitude.

 

[dysamoria]

Is person tied to Siri? Because if so, might be a good thing for Apple.

There's a whole thread to have stopped you from going here...

 

[dysamoria]

People don't quit choice jobs for petty reasons. I don't know his true reason but I'm guessing that the job proved to be just too much for him.

OR MAYBE this wasn't a "petty" issue to this employee...

 

[pshufd]

I showed up, followed directions, and learned... for which I was punished and disposed of.

I was at the very tail end of "graduate high school, get a job, work your way up". It was a trick. A lie. It was a goalpost that was being moved under my feet, even as I tried to travel with it. Several types of employment I considered in my 20s went to the scrap heap of "not worth doing", and it was all "you should have a degree" just to get in the door. I WAS in the door, several times, in several places, but the game playing and greed just kept ratcheting up and moving those goalposts.

The jobs were going from specialist positions to "one person does 12 different job titles" generalists, being paid far less than any of the individuals who used to have one of those specialist jobs. Output quality went down, but nobody cared because quality no longer mattered. The death of expertise and craft has been expanding into every area because of the demand to devalue the work to squeeze more profit from the product. Hell, I was unknowingly part of that: I was once hired to be a design specialist, but I was actually the cheap alternative to another guy who had much more experience and training. I benefitted in that moment, but the screwing of skilled workers eventually caught up to me at the same damned place when they laid me off, eliminating my position, and then putting me in the call center, and asking me to "occasionally do a few design tasks" anyway.

It was abuse, and I was too naive to know to walk away before being driven out.

I was pushed toward "practical work" by family, and I hated it. But I obeyed. No matter what area I attempted to become proficient in, it was made worthless by the 800-pound gorillas of the market. My life was watching people move the goal posts beyond where I was able to be at any moment in time. I was sick of it before I was barely in the "professional" space 6 years.

What's left to aim toward? High paying jobs are now only for a very small percentage of human beings with the appropriate neurology, obsession, and luck. Even programmers aren't worth anything to corporations that have realized the "coder boom" resulted in a market flush with competent programmers they can hire and then dump at the end of a project, to boost quarterly profit numbers.

I was inculcated and then betrayed by the society I was brought up in. "A four year degree is the new high school diploma" is just moving of goal posts to extract more money from the masses to line the pockets of the wealthy few.

I'm not against higher education, but it did not work for me due to disabilities nobody acknowledged until it was too late. I may have started with some lower-middle class privilege, but every goddamned thing I worked hard at was never enough for anyone, and here I am in poverty, with callous jerks telling me I don't deserve to live and it's all my own fault. That's why I'm on this thread: an attack on workers pisses me off, even when that worker is privileged themselves.

People like me who fall through the cracks (or are outright pushed out by abusive systems) grow greater in number as the access to jobs becomes worse. This is not a sustainable civilization. People who want to work can't make a living, let alone "pursue happiness" or thrive. Eventually they realise there's no place for them and they give up. Then some jackass calls that "laziness", while also calling this now-former Apple guy (a literal rockstar in a specialist field that cannot [yet] be made irrelevant) "lazy". It's disgusting.

I got hired into a professional job after a year of college. That was back around 1979. Demand for anyone with skills or a college degree, and it didn't necessarily matter what degree you had, was pretty high. It was a different time because we didn't face a lot of foreign competition in a lot of areas.

My wife worked as a secretary in Singapore (Exxon-Mobile) and in Australia (Barclay's Bank). Back then, companies hired lots of secretaries. Then in the 1980s, people learned how to type in college thanks to word processors and so a large swath of jobs were eliminated. One of the projects that I worked on for my first job was writing accounting systems. They had four people doing ledgers on large sheets of paper and in books. When you changed a number, you had to change the totals, manually. The software that I wrote eliminated the need for them as the information flowed in from other automated systems. The spreadsheet and accounting software has eliminated job areas.

So you have the crush of technology eliminating jobs that you used to be able to get with a college degree. Even a sociology degree.

I saw the difficulties when my son graduated. He had top grades in a university computer science program and several internships. This was during the time of The Great Recession - horrible time to graduate. He went into an MS program and got hired to work in oncogenomics and they paid for the rest of his MSCS degree. One of my coworker's son just graduated from an Ivy in engineering and he didn't have a job lined up. He told me that all of his friends were either going into grad school, taking a year off to travel, or just spend their time looking for work.

There are lots of other reasons for this but it's a very long discussion.

 

[djphat2000]

The larger the structure, the slower the changes, sure. No argument. But there's a point at which the reluctance to change just becomes a terminal problem all of its own. We are at that point in so many ways.

Agreed. However, even for the smaller areas not so big cities it's a problem. It's like everyone getting off of oil overnight. It's not going to happen. We should look towards more options, more off ramps to the road we are on. So it's not a traffic jam to get off the office highway. We need options, and for them to be very viable.

 

[usagora]

Apparently prioritising your family and your wellbeing is childish while imposing unnecessary stress and lowering your employees' quality of life is reasonable and mature

Reading this reply, you'd think the article was about Apple forcing 100 hour work weeks or something. Dude, it's 1-3 days a week at the office. The whole "it's about our families" thing is so obviously just a self-righteous sounding excuse. The real reason is they've gotten too comfortable/spoiled and don't want to give even a bit of that up. You know, sort of like how children act.

 

[dysamoria]

How many where hospitalized? Here in Ontario still over 1360 cases gov pushing to extend mandatories in province well over 5 million! 2nd day in 30 days reporting (none more) still no deaths.

How many deeaths reported?

This is an epidemic not a pandemic now all global bodies have stated this, just no gumption to make it official cause reasons. But that’s a topic for another thread.

Here's the problem: you're thinking the only issue is deaths. Look into Long COVID. Tell me if you want any of those issues...

 

[pshufd]

Here's the problem: you're thinking the only issue is deaths. Look into Long COVID. Tell me if you want any of those issues...

There is progress being made on Long COVID.

 

[dysamoria]

You have an employer do you not?

No

You have agreements and responsibilities to be paid by them and rules governed by HR do you not?

See above

This is regardless of WFH or not right?
Do you got stock options as part of you bonus?

I never had bonuses or stock options when I was employed.

Are you an executive level at your place of employment?

Never was, never will be.

Questions 1-3 if you answered yes then that called being aun The Rat Race! Many confuse that as being called The American Dream.

Not sure I follow.

The American Dream is opportunity of jobs to not be in poverty that your $ value of worth isn’t determined by being an employee but having the ability to rise up to start your own business, or have a better quality of life and opportunities (be it jobs, investment, being your own boss, etc), and finally living in a democratic free society. This for the most part despite jaded citizens holds true for so many immigrants or refugees to the USA today, citizens included!!

Most people do not have this opportunity, but it keeps being claimed anyway. A major problem with understanding this is that people who DO experience success in this way tend to think they're the norm, and they succumb to what's called "survivorship bias" when they look at the rest of the world. They WANT to believe they got where they are because of their own hard work, because, goddamnit, hard work is hard and we all want to feel like we are in control of our lives. So it's offensive to them to tell them "well, you also had privilege and luck on your side". Many people just shut down immediately and refuse to entertain the possibility that this is true.

Texas has no state income tax, Alberta has no provincial sales tax a HUGE difference between the two (Texas wins here by a long shot).

From what I've read, Texas has some nasty property taxes...

If we look at the average income of all citizens of every country (looking at average e hang e rate), and compare cost of living cost of home ownership on a mortgage, car insurance, employment benefits, travel costs for vacations anywhere in the world starting from each country, very few are better at most of those metrics than the USA.

We should not compare unlike things. WHICH countries are you comparing against the USA?

Many jaded people take that for granted.

You might want to ask people why they're jaded... And try to listen when they answer.

Other than China programmers I’d say American. Orders, on average live a pretty decadent life compared to your factory worker in the USA or live like rock stars ( without the drama, drugs, and notorious lifestyle).

I have no idea what this block of text is saying.

Musicians in the USA have the biggest influence on the world than any other on average and earn the biggest incomes, more successful side businesses, and more easily transition to other careers with higher success rates.

This sounds entirely out of touch with reality. MOST musicians (and artists in general) don't get to attempt to live off of their craft. It is an INCREDIBLY RARE outcome. It is insanely competitive and the culture of the USA does not value art or music as a product worth paying for. Publishers are disinterested in the majority of music people create, so publishing deals are SUPER RARE compared to the boom in the 70s through 90s.

Compare the average cost of a 3bdrm home in Texas, Arizona, Ontario (CA), British Columbia (CA). Look at the cost equating for current exchange rate or average the last 15yrs, then look at the average square footage. You’d poop just looking at Ontario home costs and smaller land size!

I don't know what this has to do with anything. I don't want to live in Texas or Arizona. No way in hell. The culture is entirely opposite what I want. I can't afford to move to any place in Canada either. Why are you comparing to Canada? Why are you picking the places you're picking? What is your goal here?

Course you’d get angry cause you don’t agree with me and others and see it as a continued attack against your personal view or situation becaus maybe how difficult it is to transition to this new paradigm, and I can see you’re internalizing even just a bit becaus of how close it hits to home. Likewise as I’ve stated my personal experiences it also hits close to home on the reverse view.

What are we talking about??

I got angry at this thread because of anti-worker sentiment. The American Dream came up through digression into all the associated details about how lousy the USA is for employment and living, compared to the propaganda we are sold. I specifically was abused nonstop by employers and other authority figures most of my life. There is FAR TOO MUCH detail going on in my life to get into why I'm angry at being mislead and betrayed by the society that bore me here in this thread. I have done some, and that's traumatic enough. Suffice to say, my experience has been VERY BAD, but not as bad as it has been for many other people doing even worse than I am.

You really need to look at the people who are NOT doing well before you try to further promote how great this country's systems are for people.

When someone waits THIS long, as a leader of a team and suddenly bounce out, with a slow transition yet it was VERY publicly known for 7 months that Apple would be going this right, I say it’s lazy to have waited this long.

Okay, back to the thread topic. You don't know what was going on with this guy and Apple management. You only know what was published in the article here and we can all be certain that there's more behind the scenes. You characterize it as "waiting". You don't know what was going on. You don't know what discussions were going on behind the scenes.

You cannot deny its strange to wait this long and lazy to not even take the time to help the transition of those working under his leadership!

Of course I can deny it's strange: I don't know what was going on in his life, inside Apple, etc., therefore I am not inventing some kind of narrative in my head about it. It seems you, and many people ARE, and THAT is strange!

As for his reports, it's not his job to manage Apple and everyone who works under him in Apple's hierarchy. Would it be nice of him to stay longer to help them transition? Maybe? Would it be a hardship on him? We have no way of knowing. Stop crafting a narrative about events of which you know nothing.

Like he didn’t even consider others may have wanted what he wanted, his send off email speaks only for himself. As a leader at such a a IG corporation after leaving yet another big influential corporation this move speaks as a lazy effort.

By definition: lack of effort or care. He didn’t care for his team to aid in transition. Waiting to suddenly bounce out again after 7 months of public knowledge is a long time.

Maybe he could’ve got what he wanted if he worked with his team collaboratively to negotiate this with Apple, who knows.

I have nothing more to say to this same thing said over and over.

I guess we can both agree to disagree. That’s fine with me, that’s what discussions and debates are for becaus we’re not the same, our experiences are not the same.

This is true. What I have difficulty with is when someone like yourself wants to INVENT a narrative from tidbits of info, just to lay criticism on a person who has nothing to do with anything in your life.

Yet this situation is far from over with various companies of various sizes.

Agreed!

Example: It took a very long time for corporations to eschew suit and tie business attire for men.

It sure did, and some still hang on to it.

I can thank Apple mostly for that,

Wait, WHAT? How can you thank Apple for this change?

as I personally loathe that.

I loathe it too. We agree with each other on one very important thing 😆

But I’d not go into a workplace having to wear suit and tie expecting it to change because I want it to after a temporary global event changed that, and think it would remain the same.

We can't know. A global event is definitely a very strong catalyst for change. If we want to help push what we see as a preferred change, we can choose to do so. We may not win, but we might add just enough extra pressure so that the next employee's pushback is the time that it changes.

 

[sirozha]

Piss off with the elitism on job types. It's as real a job as any other.

ANY JOB worth doing at all should pay a worker a LIVING WAGE to do it.

Burger flipping jobs can’t be done remotely. Engineering jobs can be. Deal with it.

 

[sirozha]

Here, again, is the job type snobbery and elitism. Knock it off. Every time you lick the elite boot to piss on those below you, you're just strengthening the grip they have on EVERYONE.

How are you doing, proletariat? Tell your kids to study hard instead of telling them they don’t need an education. Maybe they can live in the mountains and work remotely as well. Cheers, proletariat.

 

[dysamoria]

There Is nothing proving he did try to negotiate with Apple for months ass well.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Your work ethic is how you work.
It has nothing to do with: how you look, how you dress, your orientation, life preferences, your family, your home or where you live, the languages you speak, your age, gender, or physical condition. While some of these may affect your work ethic (physical condition meaning abilities or limitations regardless of how these came about), but even so the work ethic you put in isn’t personal to these or directly apart of these.

I’ve learned a VERY long time ago when some drops a laptop to me and screams and curses about their hardware or services of the business is angering them, that it isn’t personal to me. They don’t KNOW me well enough to be angry, unless of course they have an issue with my heritage for example. They’re angry because what they’re having to deal with exasperates that they need to accomplish being delayed or stopped. This has happened in 10ths almost 4x a week, and lately only twice in 7yrs. Of all those times I’ve been understanding, shaken only twice the last two times, and only the last two times did each person not apologize directly or indirectly.

Of the last two the most recent, the persons manager an executive thanks me for how I handled it , still helping the person (that simple kindness was done out of that executives way, he’s now the ceo of the corporation, and no I don’t feel important nor protected but I know good people work here), the other a few years back was fired for their misconduct. My pint again is my work ethic is not personal to me as a person. I can separate “work from church” as the saying goes even if a good friend whom asked me to describe my job summed it up as “so from in day to Friday 9 to 5 and after hours support, you basically take crap and complaints from people all day long, have to work under pressure to fix it, barely get a thank you, and possibly have to take crap and friends to fix their computer issues on your personal time”.

I respect what you describe here about how you deal with clients in a support capacity. That's great. If you've built up an ability to NOT take it personally when a client treats you badly because they're in a bad mood, and it has nothing to do with you, then that's great for you.

I still don't see how that makes it okay for you to attack someone else's work ethic, especially when you have no information about what went on behind the scenes. You continue to present supposition to justify your characterization of the guy.

It looks like YOU are creating a narrative in your own head, for whatever reason, and then reacting to it. Like if your spouse wakes up from a bad dream and is mad at you for something that "you" did in THEIR dream.

 

[dysamoria]

Every year is the same thing. New iOS comes out in September and it’s broken until around this time, right before the new iOS is announced. Takes quite a few updates to polish it.

THIS one thing above here, is absolutely an accurate depiction of Apple's releases and it HAS TO STOP. But then, who's going to stop them?

And it's not polished yet, either. I am finding new bugs in iOS 15 regularly, and some of them are bugs (or just fundamentally broken designs) that have been with iOS since iOS 7. It's unacceptable, but we have no choice but to keep taking it, or move to a different product that is broken in [possibly] different ways.

This isn't the responsibility of department heads or directors. It's the responsibility of upper management, especially the CEO, for deciding what workers will be paid to do. If they WANTED to truly fix and polish the product, they would prioritize doing just that.

Top executives either do not use the products (or not enough), and/or do not listen to anyone who tells them how broken things are, and/or creates an environment around them that punishes people telling them how broken things are, and/or simply do not care. I gave Tim Cook the benefit of the doubt for years, but I've gotten to where I am just settling on: THE BUCK STOPS AT THE CEO and he needs to fix Apple. There have been some small signs of this with the departure of Ive, in terms of hardware design, but it's an unknown where that's going.

 

[pshufd]

How are you doing, proletariat? Tell your kids to study hard instead of telling them they don’t need an education. Maybe they can live in the mountains and work remotely as well. Cheers, proletariat.

Education is one of the huge differences between classes that furthers income inequality. The wealthy and educated live in districts with better schools and can provide supplemental experiences and accelerated instruction. You can see this in a country like Singapore where the overall average of education is world-class.

Studying hard isn't really helpful if you don't know what to study, how to study or you don't have a good environment to study. We have a library of 3,000 books at home. So I could just pull out a book if one of our kids had a question or they could look things up themselves. A lot of the books were curated so that I could steer them in specific areas that I thought would be useful.