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Is returning to office that bad because I can work from home 100% but I go to office at least once or twice a week to keep me sane. I find WFH very boring. It’s funny that people commented they want Bay Area salary but want to live in cheaper area. You think your company will still pay you same regional salary? Get real.
 
I understand Apple wants everyone under the big tent to ignite the serendipity of bumping into one another and brainstorming ideas. But that was before March 2020. The pandemic has totally turned the idea of the office upside down. I worked from home starting around November 2020 to July 2021. This is a workplace that said our job was impossible to do from home, but guess what, we had to do it and it worked just as well or even better. I could sleep in a little more, discard certain morning rituals. In fact, I think it worked too well and benefitted the employer more than it did me.
It was impossible because most people don't have the ability to work from home. If you did not previously have work from home abilities (VPN/VM, a "work" provided computer to use to connect back to the office. IT staff to support that, plus any an all infrastructure to make that work well enough to support however many people need to do so). During this time we had people in our organization that did work from home. That wasn't the issue. The issue was getting the other 100 or so devices they could use to do the same, in short order during a supply chain shortage. Not to mention, not being in the office to properly setup the devices and then provide it to said users.
Yeah, the asterisk is that we built that 5 billion dollar campus and it’s not being utilized. But that’s how life works sometimes.
Yes, there is that. Let's not let $5 billion get in the way of people coming to work. The place they agreed to go to before the pandemic. Does the building have COVID or something?
Don’t get me wrong, there are some groups that will need to be on campus, specially hardware engineering and software engineers working sensitive stuff. But seriously, if you are working on parts of iOS and macOS, coding from home or anywhere then submitting your changes over a secure Internet connection should be easy.
I'm not disagreeing with this part. But, what does Apple do with the empty space? And not just Apple. All other companies? What happens to the service industry that has to go to work? They can't operate with so many fewer people going to offices. That affects them the most. Less people working in a city, means less cabs, Uber's, fast food, bars, restaurants and so on. A 10% hit in people not coming to work would be a hit to all those other businesses. And they can't work from home.
Let’s not forget folks, Marklar which became OS X on Intel was compiled at home by an Apple employee.
I'm sure that person had a good setup at home to do this. I myself do not. I don't have a dedicated room for an office. I can't separate my home life (all the things going on at home) from work life. I'm personally better suited to going to the office. And I'm sure many others. Even if they have the ability to work from home. It's just not as productive.
Bringing up the entire Intel OS X project itself was done by a guy at home in New Jersey. That was 2006. If complex software could compiled for critical hardware 15 years ago at somebody’s home, I don’t see why not now.
We are also much more protective of sensitive data being located at anyone else's home vs only at the companies data center.
There will be some unfairness to it. But again, that’s life. Either Apple chooses to be a little more flexible or suffer poaching and brain drain.
I think those Apple/Google employees will find that those said companies will not be willing to waste the expense of those buildings for them to just work from home. No one is going to eat that just for this. COVID is going to be around forever in some variant/form etc. We can't all shelter at home, again forever. We can't turn into a society that has people saying "I want to work from home, and you have to let me". While others literally can't do that. Especially in the service industry. Which took the hit to the economy the hardest. People able to work from home kept making money. People working at a restaurant.. Not so much.
 
We have been working from home since 2019. I would rather be in the office. There is a great deal missed by having such fragmentation of people, in my opinion. It works well for some but not for all.

Also living in a place where home prices have gone up nearly 40% in the last two years because of Bay Area people moving here for remote work at not-area-wages has caused a great deal of stress in the community.

A hybrid workweek seems very reasonable and it’s petulant and whiny to make a “stand” about it. Just move on without creating drama.
 
You must be a business owner or manager. Otherwise, how are you this convinced to be against your own interests?

How do you get this bitter over people wanting to have better lives that you just start screaming “entitlement” and that they’re “crying” because other people make decisions that better their lives? If they’re able to be just as productive or more productive at home, what’s the issue?

Comments like these make me think you have no conversations with people in real life. I can’t see someone getting this angry if they’ve actually discussed the topic of WFH with friends and family unless they’re all just as pissed about it as you for god knows why.
He is right!!! The letter represents a selfish person that likely got recruited by Google and is trying to recruit others for them under the cover of “I’m doing this for you”.

Apple is a hardware company that makes software to support their hardware. They need employees at work to fulfill the duties required. The question becomes, are these people willing to work for half the salary to compensate for the diminished productivity while Apple hires a new staff to work in person?

I’m sure they wouldn’t and would fear those new people will eventually push them out anyway.
 
I don’t blame him! It‘s been said all the tech firms are going to have to be much more flexible to hire the talent, this could hurt Apple as some key members of his team could follow suite, if the leader said flexibility would be best for his ‘team’.

You are not born into this world purely to serve others and help the rich get richer, life is worth a hell of a lot more then that! And the pandemic and lock down helped the masses remember this and see with the internet you CAN work from home and have a much better work life balance. My global corporation has been incredibly flexible on policies around home working.
 
A mixture of remote and in-office work is reasonable. That is what my company is doing and I have no objection. There are pros and cons to both.

I also don’t think that having one of their senior people quitting over this is very helpful to working towards something that can be sustained and accepted by their workforce. He can afford to get on his high horse and quit over something like this. Most workers do not have that luxury.
 
Apple's director of machine learning, Ian Goodfellow, has resigned from his role a little over four years after he joined the company after previously being one of Google's top AI employees, according to The Verge's Zoë Schiffer.
Isn't AI research in trouble these days? It seems like a good time to jump ship and go somewhere to hide from the fallout of hyping AI as a series of easy-to-monetize schemes.

We were hoping to see a lot more machine learning with AI but where is it? How about Siri, on iPadOS it currently breaks up Silicon Valley zip codes for weather into locations instead of the city they are suppose to represent. MacOS its fine.
 
We have been working from home since 2019. I would rather be in the office. There is a great deal missed by having such fragmentation of people, in my opinion. It works well for some but not for all.

Also living in a place where home prices have gone up nearly 40% in the last two years because of Bay Area people moving here for remote work at not-area-wages has caused a great deal of stress in the community.

A hybrid workweek seems very reasonable and it’s petulant and whiny to make a “stand” about it. Just move on without creating drama.
Right! If you are going just be gone already!
 
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reading this forum, it's clear that some people really feel more comfortable in the office, some really advocate WfH and some want a mixed approach. Bottom line: Apple's Director of Machine Learning is absolutely right that flexibility is primordial and forcing people to follow a fixed model won't work.
 
He most likely got a better job with the work-life balance that he wanted so how is that childish?
Because he thought he did something by making a “stand” (see: Karening-out/throwing a tantrum in public) over an already-flexible set of policies. If you can’t see that that’s pretty much childishness personified it might be an appropriate time to reflect.
 
A year and a half working away from home because of a pandemic and everybody thinks they can dictate where they work now? GTFOH.
Right now, it's pretty much an employee market; companies can give in to demands or hope they can find a replacement. The company I left last year after working there for nine years never could replace me. And out of fear of losing other key employees, they started letting more people WFH full time.
 
When you sell your home, realize you can’t buy another one for any decent price, and you realize you’d have to work for the next ten just to pay for it… and your boss calls to tell you, your now required to work in-person again…
 
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Absolutely no reason for anyone to work in the office. Zoom/Teams is perfectly fine, and likely more efficient than being in an office. I mean, you at least save the hour or 2 you waste commuting every day.

It's such a knee-jerk thing to blame the employer if they don't want to accommodate working from home.

None of us commenting here have any idea about the details of the work being done here, and we don't know if discussing or working on these things remotely would present some potential compromise to Apple's business secrets. (And yeah, I'm sure there aren't any corporate spies out there looking for Zoom sessions run by Apple's employees.) Lots of employers are figuring out how to let people work from home but that doesn't mean all jobs are going to work out that way. Sweeping commentary about nobody having to work in the office is definitely oversimplifying and overstating things.
 
I just don’t know how viable a company like Apple can have certain departs work from home. Especially with all the secrecy that’s involved. Leaks are bad now, and trade secrets are being stolen. I don’t know what solution they can come up with.
 
I work in the public sector and my employer has been bleeding IT and software developers since they mandated a return to the office in late 2020. Once someone realizes that it is ridiculous to get into slacks and sit in a cube city to RDP into a server, console into a SAN or vSphere, or access a git repository...you're never going to make them see mandatory in-office any other way than a wage cage. Tech also happens to pretty much perpetually be in demand so some other entity that offers full-remote or office optional is going to poach your talent...and nobody gives a damn that your whole university model value-add hinges on maintaining the appearances that in-person operations are happening.
This delusional thought-process of virtual-everything being good for society is just that: delusional. A recent study just came out and concluded what most of us already knew. Creativity plummets when you're not face-to-face... which is bad for business, and will prove a disadvantage to those who want to try the virtual route.

If people want to run for the exit because they're not "fit" enough, let them run. There are a whole slew of hungry grads fresh out of college that will gladly take those jobs.
 
It’s not up to you to decide whether he could work effectively from home. It’s a compact between him and his employer that is what matters. You‘re in no position to assess his relative performance at home versus at the office. Even if an employer is wrong it is their prerogative to be wrong.
You are right and he decided he didn't like the offer and moved on. That is what I did when I was told I it wasn't up to me, I had a new better job in 7 days and turned in my two week notice.
 
It’s shocking how so many people in this thread are equating working from home with laziness. Feels like there’s a lot of projecting going on.

I work for a Fortune 50 company that was — pre-COVID — working to slowly in-house the ~30% of WFH associates. During COVID when everyone — including call center — was at home, productivity was so high that the company is largely changing course. The teams that were 100% in the office are going hybrid.

I changed jobs (in the company) in 2019, where my team was fully remote and I asked my boss to find me space in one of our local offices. There was no one in the building I worked with regularly. There was no one in the three other offices I worked with regularly. There was no one in my state that I worked with regularly. The camaraderie around the office would have been nice, but I didn’t know them and never really got the chance to. I moved to working from home at the end of the year.
 
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