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Apple 'Tracking Employee Attendance' in Crackdown on Remote Working
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Hello cost cutting.
This will all sort itself out eventually. Over time the people in the office conversations will begin to advance and those measuring productivity by the number of tickets closed will fall behind. People will learn that if they want to gain influence they need to be in the room when the casual discussion sparks inspiration, and they need to be seen to be recognized.
People will learn that having an "airtag" implanted is just a natural progression of the technology and more of the "never forget your wallet and ID" kind of thing not to mention the safety of the children and adults alike. After this is accomplished you will be free to choose if you would like to work remotely or in the office.
and you’re sure it has nothing to do with a sudden and severe surge in demand for goods?
I was talking psychologically.
When your parents coerced you to do something like clean your room or do your homework, I bet you did an awesome job and went well beyond what they asked for
If you work with animals or children, you'll quickly realize you can get them to do what you want by punishment or reward.
It's just that rewards tend to work remarkably better in the long run (there are lots and lots of studies to confirm this).
The same is true of adults, believe it or not.
Furthermore, companies have been paying bonuses to employees for ages to encourage certain behaviors and results. Would you say that is also bribing them to work harder and get better results? Does that make them snowflakes?
That sort of attitude will lead you to learn who really WASN’T indispensable… after they’re gone.
Truer words never spoken.
I have a t-shirt that says: "Born to read, forced to work."
But if you have bills and things you want to do that cost money and you are not financially independent? Gotta work.
Having a healthy work/life balance does not mean locking yourself in your basement and never coming out again. The article is about people not wanting to come back in to work. At all. Fear does awful things to people. On a personal note, I remember that when I got COVID a couple of years ago, I felt SO RELIEVED. I could finally GET IT OVER WITH! Since then, I haven't looked back (spoiler...it was like influenza for me, minus the cough and stuffy nose). Putting it simply: for me, the fear of COVID was FAR worse than COVID itself. It wasn't even close. I will NEVER live in that kind of fear again.
It's time to move on.
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The parts I’m referring to were unlikely to see a demand increase. Faucet cartridges for instance and small aircraft engines are relatively static, yet are difficult to get because of employee shortages.
One can’t ignore the fact that many people took years off from work. In the construction industry, many of those workers never returned. You can throw all the stats you want but I’m living it. Stats don’t tell the whole story. In fact, stats are often manipulated by asking highly specific questions intended to illicit specific answers.
That is really heavy handed. Scorched earth almost. I remember when immigration reform hit a few states and agriculture was hit really hard. The people behind the push said that 'Americans can take those jobs', and, well, they didn't. Sure, you can argue that if they get hungry enough, they will do *anything* for money, and that kinda fell flat. I've worked agriculture and it's back breaking and unforgivable. Someone can easily work 12 hour days at times, and others, well the plants just aren't ready. The pay is ridiculous, and finding 'Americans' to do the work, and KEEPING them is nearly impossible. There are things that people just won't do, and I'm not going to slag them for it. Meanwhile crops rotted in the fields.
And I've also worked other jobs that were soul crushing. Employers that seemed to revel in the psychological pain they imparted on their employees. If one thing the pandemic brought to focus, it was the hellscape that some employers, some corporations, created, supported, continued, fed.
So this remote work 'crisis' sounds like the hue and cry over seat belts, and turn signals, and just about any other thing that entrenched masses fear. Remote work is NOT the evil. The lack of respect for employees and the often horrific work conditions are.
A fast food restaurant had their entire employee base quit because of the evil of management. Employees are standing up and saying 'HELL NO!!', and that is biting, as it should. Have a nice day...
Apple and other corporations are running businesses not day care facilities. Many of these employees are being asked to go BACK to their pre-Covid routine of working in the office BUT ONLY 3 Days a week. No more PJs or working on your couch etc. Many have had it “cushy” working from home but at a loss of productivity to Apple and other employers. Some don’t have the discipline to work without some supervision while other have decided to “Quietly Quit” and do the bare minimum not to get fired. Those people will be looking for other positions or making career changes because that attitude will not be tolerated indefinitely by their bosses.
It's not about trust and I don't understand why you are embarrassed. It's about a culture that was set in place before Tim Cook and before COVID and the employees having a pretty good hybrid work plan.
Many companies do provide performance based bonuses. Just showing up for work should get one the minimum bonus for the employee class/job. Want a bigger bonus, go above and beyond. A bonus is not a bribe. Not doing ones' job can lead to a firing. Yes, I agree, rewards for a job well done produces a cycle where employees can perform above and beyond. Just showing up for work does not meet that criteria.
Similar results came from zooming education. Kids fell behind. Far behind. Remote learning proved to be inferior to in person learning.
For years everyone knows about the nerf gun parties at work, vending machines with free ipads, snack trays with m&ms brought around by concierge to workers throughout Silicon Valley. Things that are impossible in any corporate environment, but nobody said anything bad about these things because the products and innovations coming out of Silicon Valley tech was world class and game changing.
Right now software quality and more importantly innovation has been significantly degraded.
That is why you see so many people here taking issue with WFH.
If the quality of Apple software and innovation had increased over the last 2 years then I think we would all give our blessing for 100% WFH for Apple employees. More importantly, I bet many people here have dealt with a similar situation and has encountered the negative effects it has on the rest of the team. A form of selfishness. WFH has had disastrous effects on the economy and the quality of products coming out of Silicon Valley which is one of our shining lights. To see that light now starting to fade would be yet another disaster.
It’s that simple
Right now software quality and more importantly innovation has been significantly degraded.
That is why you see so many people here taking issue with WFH.
If the quality of Apple software and innovation had increased over the last 2 years then I think we would all give our blessing for 100% WFH for Apple employees. More importantly, I bet many people here have dealt with a similar situation and has encountered the negative effects it has on the rest of the team. A form of selfishness. WFH has had disastrous effects on the economy and the quality of products coming out of Silicon Valley which is one of our shining lights. To see that light now starting to fade would be yet another disaster.
It’s that simple
This is why you don’t build bazillionty dollar overkill buildings….so you don’t have to be a$$holes when then world changes.
Sounds like WFH wasn't the panacea that many thought it was.
It's not our place to "take issue" on how the management determine their work schedules. I think it's useful and served it's purpose when there were no other options.
Who is this we? My opinion is 100% WFH is not sustainable.
Yes because WFH served a useful purpose whose time has now passed.
It is simple. WFH 100% does not work. There are CEOs who want to bring their staff back 100%. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ronshe...ets-work-from-home-all-wrong/?sh=84694d97cb01 And this article is interesting saying a certain CEO got it wrong.
Sure it is. In fact, it is ours before it is anyone else's. When we are the ones performing the labor and sacrificing our best years to help make billionaires richer -- who already got wealthy off of decades of stolen labor -- we should unquestionably be in control of our own lives and how we get to live them. We...well, most of us, work to live -- not live to work. It's fine if you don't want to work from home. You're certainly entitled to feel that way. But laborers, not management, should be in control of that decision.
We spend a quarter of lives toiling away 5 of 7 days of the week in the best of scenarios. Working from home in roles like software development and call center-type jobs make a huge difference for quality of life and employee morale, while actually saving corporations money on real estate footprints and the utilities expended to otherwise house those people in an office 8+ hours/day. Maybe it's not a big deal to you, if you work a straight 8 or less. But many people, especially those in the tech sector, work 50-60 if not more hours per week on salary -- not getting an additional dime, let alone overtime pay, for going above and beyond their contracted hours despite often being required to perform upgrades at night, on weekends and holidays, and never going "off the clock" because of arduous on-call obligations. But our imbalanced labor laws, at least in the US, actually make all of that legal without compensation. There's a specific carve-out for "computer employees" that essentially nullifies hard-fought-and-won labor protections that many other workers are protected by. In a just world, the concept of "salary exempt" would not even exist except for the wealthiest executives, whose life and work are truly intertwined. It's ok... The average individual has no clue how much work it takes to keep systems and all the online services they enjoy running 24/7/365. Just as a factory doesn't build the widgets itself, neither do websites. It takes hard working people of all kinds to make that possible. At least factory workers got to unionize at a time before corporations fully captured Congress and the courts to dismantle labor rights.
But bending the knee to the billionaire class when our society is already careening toward a return to the feudal system isn't going to help you or any other laborer reclaim quality of life. In fact, unless you're Tim Cook himself, it's quite baffling how eager you are to defend the insatiable greed of a small group of wealthy individuals who would happily replace you or me in a second if they thought they could save a dollar. They're not going to lift a finger to address the quality of life for the average worker. They don't care about your welfare nor mine. If you and I don't stand up and fight for it, nobody will. And the result will be a perpetual erosion of labor rights where companies collude to universally suppress pay and withdraw quality of life aspects of work like WFH, as has already started happening. It's going to be a race to the bottom. Think about who Forbes is written for. It gives executives cover to slow-boil everyone back to the office under the guise of "JPM was wrong about WFH...because we said so," even though studies have shown that productivity improved during the height of work-from-home policies being in effect in 2020 and companies were awash in cost savings from reducing their real estate footprint and utility costs of operating enough office space for everyone.
They care about money, power, and control. That's why you have Elon Musk spending billions of Saudi dollars on a social networking website so that he can promote his own (and his investors') political agenda, and silence speech they don't like. And that's why these executives eager to end WFH: power and control. Bringing millions back to offices doesn't save money, at least in the short term. It costs a fortune to rent or buy, and maintain a dedicated office. But it fulfills a power trip that briefly started to tilt away from corporations, after a century of labor perpetually losing power to negotiate the compensation and quality of life for their own work. And in the long term, the end goal of having laborers powerless to negotiate their own compensation or leave for better compensation will be achieved.
There has been a systematic effort by corporations and the wealthy who run them over the past 50 years to suppress wage growth, undermine unions, repeal and strike down labor protections in law; and the only individuals who stand to benefit from any of it are those who already hoard more than 90% of the wealth, which was generated by the work of laborers like us. Why support their efforts to further degrade our quality of life for their sole benefit?
It's not our place to "take issue" with the way a legitimate company is run. If you don't like their policies, don't work for them, don't buy their products and don't buy their stock. And start your own company, which in the US you are free to do. You can spend a quarter of your life doing whatever you want. There is no governmental directive to work for a company for which the company's values and yours are not aligned.
This is our world, our society, and our lives. We have every right to take issue with the way it operates, and a responsibility to fight for our own welfare. Especially when we're being oppressed by a small group who holds nearly all the power. As I said, no rich person is going to do it for us.
When corporations have bottomless budgets to buy members of Congress, force binding arbitation, and consolidate their way into oligopolies that collude to suppress compensation across whole industries; that's not a fair playing field. And any rational person would recognize that no laborer is free in that world. But that's the world we're heading toward because of attitudes that think the average laborer still has freedom to not work or work in way that makes sense for their life and family.
The freedom to do what you feel is right is all yours. I personally want to eradicate some of the bigger societal issues, not WFH mandates, but YMMV. It's all well and good to shoot for the stars but only get to 1000 feet.
Then you have at it. I feel Apple is well within their rights to dictate their office policies as nothing untoward or illegal is happening here. But if you feel it is your mission to take on the world, then I commend you and good luck.