Group of Apple employees pushes back against return-to-office order
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Personally speaking, and with Adam Neumann's new move and VC funded warchest, I'm convinced the real estate market will sooner self-cannibalize itself instead of correcting to a pre-2008 bubble mania and they are throwing anything they can to prop it back up by forcing back in office and making them re-inflate all the surrounding housing options. The truth is that after the layoffs they cannot spare losing more talent, so calling their bluff is really more a calculated risk and the worst case scenario is taking a few more offers via Linkden more serious this time around.
If they and the entire tech Industry stand their ground then we might have a chance at making it a norm because right now it's still incredibly shaky, and the truth is that it's foolish to even explore given how much unnecessary GHG is produced from commuting.
Ok. Keep being so entitled and watch Shenzen surpass Silicon Valley within 5 years.
We've already seen this with wages in India for software devs.
I just said they should return to office if/when their employer mandates it. You think this is "being pushed around like peasants" and working 996. Come on man. It's the damn office. You know. The place everyone worked from as recent as 2020?
People in China are working 996. People here are still "working" from home and refusing to come back to the office.
A lot of spoiled workers here.
Hopefully a recession will wake them up soon.
I loved it when Elon said everyone back in the office or quit. Apple won't say this because they don't want any bad PR but they should.
Calling acceptance of remote work "spoiled" is being ignorant of history. Just a few years ago, this extent of remote was unthinkable in tech. Companies would rather spend lavishly on slick hip offices with foosball tables no one played, on beer kegs that weren't exactly professional, to entice employees to work on-site, in open offices. Open offices are a near-universal bane of the industry and there was no check against management from adopting them. This past two years of remote was an unexpected windfall. And you call employees spoiled for finally getting a chance to escape the commute, away from open offices? Fine. That's your value system and you may live by it. Don't expect most people to agree.
As for Musk, the anti-remote tempest in a teapot was clearly another one of his acts of social media sleights-of-hand. Tesla was planning layoffs, and encouraging employees to quit because of the sideshow of remote vs. onsite was a convenient way to avoid paying termination benefits. Congrats on falling for the gambit.
It's true without 996 culture.
>And when they call for remote work as well, will you call them "spoiled" too?
When they don't call for remote work, will you call them hardworking?
>Calling acceptance of remote work "spoiled" is being ignorant of history.
It's not. How much history do you think there is? I wasn't born in 2020.
>Tesla was planning layoffs, and encouraging employees to quit because of the sideshow of remote vs. onsite was a convenient way to avoid paying termination benefits. Congrats on falling for the gambit.
Maybe part of the mandate was to ask some people to leave. But I believe the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Remote work is not more productive for a company. Maybe it's about the same for ticket crunching software engineers who don't care about anything else that is happening in the company.
That's a nonsensical reversal.
> It's not.
Then we agree. It is not spoiled to call for remote work.
> Remote work is not more productive for a company.
You may choose believe what you want, but a reasonable discourse needs data and studies.
Having to be in a particular location for a set number of hours per day because someone else says so, when it has exactly zero to do with your effectiveness on the job *is* being pushed around like a peasant, yes. It's someone trying to exert power over you for no other reason than the fact that they can.
> Keep being so entitled and watch Shenzen surpass Silicon Valley within 5 years.
Except that Biden has kept most of Trump's trade policies toward China in place, and even tightened others (chip making). Thankfully, a healthy distrust of the Chinese has become a rare point of bipartisan agreement in the U.S.
More likely, we're going to end up with multiple distinct internets and computing ecosystems in the future. Whether this is good or bad, who knows.
Economics aside, I can't believe someone on HN is seriously making the argument that our labor policies should be more like China's. Good grief.
Oh dear. I've written extensively on how American workers should advocate for a return to office. It's in the best interest of the workers long-term.
Back to Apple. Clearly Apple execs have data that productivity/creativity/whatever they measure on has decreased. Thus, they want people back in the office.
But let's have a random arm-chair HN poster tell Tim Cook how to run Apple.
>Except that Biden has kept most of Trump's trade policies toward China in place, and even tightened others (chip making). Thankfully, a healthy distrust of the Chinese has become a rare point of bipartisan agreement in the U.S.
I think you're trying to say that America is actively trying to sabotage China's tech industry, right?
Maybe in hardware, though China has just launched their homegrown 7nm tech.
But in software, China is pretty close. I think they'll surpass the US in software within the next 5 years. By surpassing, I mean new products from China will outcompete new products from US.
>Economics aside, I can't believe someone on HN is seriously making the argument that our labor policies should be more like China's. Good grief.
Why not? Keep an open mind. Not everything in the USA is the greatest. Maybe we can learn a bit from Chinese businesses and how they operate. They're clearly winning in many industries and they're gaining on Silicon Valley in software fast.
But you're simply exaggerating. All I've been trying to say is that remote work will lose to office work in the long run for both businesses and workers.
No one's telling Tim Cook how to run Apple; just stating facts about how the world works. Tim Cook (presumably) wants the best developers. The best developers have many good options to choose from when it comes to where and how they work.
That means if Tim Cook wants the best talent he needs to give them a really compelling offer. And for many of the most talented individuals, a job that requires commuting 2+ hours a day in Bay traffic is not "really compelling", never mind the nightmare that is the Bay Area housing market.
I'll grant that there are advantages to having everyone working face to face, but do those advantages outweigh the fact that you're going to take a noticeable talent hit as a result of not offering remote work? Neither one of us has a crystal ball, but my bet is "No".
Tim Cook is free to make his own bet and deal with the consequences, which he seems to be aware of, hence the hesitation on his part vs. just laying down the law. I suppose we'll find out the answer to this debate in 10 to 20 years.
How about the Apple ML Director?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/16/apple-tel...
The petition was created by actual Apple employees, not by random armchair HN posters.
You don't think Apple has anticipated that some will quit over this mandate? You don't think they have data on their employees? Or surveyed a portion of them?
Leave it to senior executives.
Just because he knew how to write some ML algorithms in Python makes him qualified to speak on behalf of the entire company?
Also, Goodfellow invented generative adversarial networks. That's far more than simply knowing how to "write some ML algorithms in Python." Your dismissive tone makes you sound like a troll.
It's amazing how entitled some people are.
How are they entitled? Employment is a business deal. Apple has something the employees want, money, and the employees have something Apple wants, their labor and know-how.
These folks have other options and both they and Apple know it. There's absolutely nothing entitled about using your talent to negotiate an employment situation that suits your lifestyle.
You can have the most talented folks in the world but if your working culture is not productive, it means nothing.
Apple has decided that a return to office should increase productivity. It's likely that they've collected enough data to make this decision.
Also, I'm sure Apple has calculated that some people will leave but they're ok with that. They probably want people to quit anyways so they don't have to pay layoff costs.
You think Apple would come out and say their productivity has decreased, therefore they need people to return to office?
It'd be a huge PR nightmare.
That's why they're entitled.
What’s a word where workplace dystopia meets Stockholm Syndrome?
The New American Dream?
I saw someone was bragging about how quiet quitting wasn't a thing for them because they entered the workforce early enough to be able to lock themselves into a similar position via career, mortgage, furniture, family obligations etc...
Quite frankly, it's incredibly dystopic to think of Life in those terms; I'm sad to say that for most that is what 'growing up' and 'making it' now.
I laughed so hard, I spit out my coffee reading this line.
Um...you mean the terms under which the labor originally agreed to work for? How would that be "dictating" when it was literally what they agreed to?
Also, I don't know if you know this, but employers generally have the right to decide the basic terms of how their employees do their jobs. If the employees don't like how the employer wants them to do the job, they are not being held hostage. They can leave anytime.