Were's sorry that Silicon Valley which consists mostly of tree lined suburbs causes commute issues, sorry we con't have enough trains, light rail, busses, and freeways.
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Google Employees to Return to Offices on April 4, Will Apple Follow?
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Loving Tim Cook's shpiel about missing face-to-face collaboration. Apple makes $$$ from the tech that enables people to work productively remotely.
I always hated the drain flies in the bathroom at work. At home I can enjoy a clean bathroom and I don't get distracted when I am working. I see much higher productivity and less looking at Macrumors.com compared to the office.
Don’t be so sure. Looks like Apple employees are secretly unionizing. I wouldnt be the least bit surprised if they try to claim it’ll be too traumatic to return. Sadly there is permanent psychological damage to society that has been done, some of which will never be reversed.
Uggggh drain flies! Always a bad sign. That's definitely a WFH bonus - most of us take a lot of pride in keeping our homes in good repair. A lot of office buildings are sh*tholes.
I've done the full remote, full in office and hybrid all before COVID. Do what you want, but I'm staying full remote. I've seen the pros and cons from all three options and for me remote is the winner.
My employer is doing the same. Thankfully I'm personally moving to be officially fully remote and will never be going back.
I have a comfortable home office now, after 2 years of kitting it out, I've moved further away from the office, and I'll spend all my meetings on video calls no matter where I am since most folks I work with are spread across the country (including my boss, who works out of another office literally completely across the country). And my office is terrible for focusing since it's an open floor plan (I really really really hope if one good thing comes out of this pandemic it's the death of the open floor plan office).
So going into the office is just a pile of extra distractions and a lot of commute time for no reason. I have a feeling a lot of folks whose companies force them back, at least places that force them back full time, will just up and quit for similar reasons to why I justified to HR not going back.
I have a comfortable home office now, after 2 years of kitting it out, I've moved further away from the office, and I'll spend all my meetings on video calls no matter where I am since most folks I work with are spread across the country (including my boss, who works out of another office literally completely across the country). And my office is terrible for focusing since it's an open floor plan (I really really really hope if one good thing comes out of this pandemic it's the death of the open floor plan office).
So going into the office is just a pile of extra distractions and a lot of commute time for no reason. I have a feeling a lot of folks whose companies force them back, at least places that force them back full time, will just up and quit for similar reasons to why I justified to HR not going back.
Looks you could benefit from elementary school math…
Plus a lot of quitting. People are used to working remotely these days. Unless you have to be there to get your job done there’s no reason to go back to the office for 40+ hours a week anymore. There’s a labor shortage right now. Most boomers who left the workforce aren’t coming back which would be a challenge on its own without combining that with going up against competition who allow you to work remotely.
Plenty of us have moved on and aren’t going back to that model. Forward thinking companies that employe all remote workers where possible can pick from the best minds in the world. People who otherwise couldn’t or wouldn’t work for said employers precisely because they can’t relocate for family or other reasons more important than their day job become eligible members of a company’s workforce.
I don't know anyone who was working from home, but now I'm very jealous. It sounds like a dream.
There are two reasons for management to want their fully-productive-at-home people back: justification of real estate expenses and control. The genesis of efforts to get people back in the office start there; the "benefits" they enumerate to justify the changes to the workforce were contrived later.
The only benefit I can think of being back in the office is not having to use a VPN. Other than that, it's wholly wasted time and money. The company will get less productivity from me, as I will be burning 2 to 3 hours per office day behind a windshield. The commute isn't leisurely, so my stress will increase, necessitating more rest and recovery.
They will miss out on at least a week of work hours per month, a 25%+ productivity loss. My personal costs will be enormous in time, money, and quality of life.
Other than that, a hybrid work program is great!
The only benefit I can think of being back in the office is not having to use a VPN. Other than that, it's wholly wasted time and money. The company will get less productivity from me, as I will be burning 2 to 3 hours per office day behind a windshield. The commute isn't leisurely, so my stress will increase, necessitating more rest and recovery.
They will miss out on at least a week of work hours per month, a 25%+ productivity loss. My personal costs will be enormous in time, money, and quality of life.
Other than that, a hybrid work program is great!
Apples office locations do include Elk Grove (south Sacramento area) which is where a lot of mail back trade-ins is sent. If you ignore the three larger campuses, they have numerous buildings in numerous places in parts of Sunnyvale, Cupertino, and further away in the SF Bay Area. But Central Valley is not beneficial once you get away from a large population centers. Remember Sacramento even has its deep water port where cargo/tankers can load/unload. This is why most of California's other Apple office sites as well as Google's are located LA thru San Diego populous areas.
From a cost perspective it only makes sense reduce the in office headcount and that’s reduce the space then you have funds that can be used for things like bonuses more infrastructure etc.
I'm a software engineer for a bank. The technology group was to go back to the office last week Tuesday. I already told my manager I wasn't going back until June or July. She was fine with it. From what I hear, not many people in my area went back to the office.
Remote work and teleconferencing, when possible, are the way of the future. When I left Microsoft, more than 10 years ago, our group already had one full-time employee who lived in England and attended weekly meetings electronically. Covid-19 has forced many companies to innovate and make adjustments they should have made long ago. There has been and will continue to be push back in some quarters, partly for political reasons and partly because “that’s the way it’s always been done”, but in the end, the dinosaurs will lose.
I know new things lose their thrill, and I have no clue what the work culture would be like there... but every time I see a picture of Apple Park I think, "Man, I would love to go to something like that every day."
We know that the likes of Google are going WFO not because of efficiency. It's basically to have indirect 24 working hour a day. They built so many facilities and amenities in their campus so the employees are tempted to just stay (and work longer than they thought they would) instead of going home.
If the employees are WFH, then they will put more balanced time between work and families that are in front of them. Can't let that happen.
It's no different than the old school working condition like in many Asian countries where you are forced to burn the midnight oil in the office.
The modern and digital age of slavery.
Yup, and for a tech company like Google to be sticking with old habits, it's embarrassing.
I guess "it depends." There are so many unique work situations that one size doesn't fit all. I lived in Manhattan for many years and was able to walk, train or cab it to work. Then I moved to the burbs and rode the rails for many years. Now my office is 17 miles away in mostly moderate traffic. I'm in a hybrid work situation and would be more than happy to make it more home and less office. However, productivity has increased since office return two weeks ago as I don't have to play zoom tag.
Point being I don't envision (although I could be wrong) major corporations on the east coast letting go of tens of thousands of square feet of office space. Even NYC Mayor Adams wants a return to office, as without that, Manhattan (and maybe NYC) will be a shell of it's former self....and Broadway woes aren't helping.
I don't see business who retrench on office space, using those new found funds for more compensation, which in today's day and age is really performance based. Companies and people have adapted to a new work-from-home norm, but for many types of jobs, departments, and companies, it's not a holy grail. But it's nice to know in some other catastrophic event, it is a doable thing.
And finally, people and companies have to be flexible. Pandemic showed us it is possible to fully WFH and that clearly is a good side benefit both for existing jobs and a draw for a potential new job.
At this point, everyone should be required to go back to work.
Vaccines work
Masks work
COVID is going to be here forever, so you might as well learn to coexist with it like we did with flu.
Vaccines work
Masks work
COVID is going to be here forever, so you might as well learn to coexist with it like we did with flu.
Its been way more than two years. Catalina and Sierra (which FYI was coded before the whole work from home) were way more buggy than anything Apple has done currently. Micro management and agile actually kills a lot of the development - forcing regular checkins on a daily basis even if the work is not complete that you are working on at the time, and having more meetings than necessary to do the work. A lot of places gate keep bonuses and performance to how many times do you check in on a daily basis.
Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, a lot of video games, and many other software has been suffering for years of bad quality development.