Yeah, I know. What I'm saying is anyone who bitches and moans about having to go to work like a snivelling child should be fired immediately before they even have a chance to quit.
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Apple's Director of Machine Learning Resigns Due to Return to Office Work
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No. He's obviously the guy with some serious skills and knowledge under his belt. Real HR/top management is able to distinguish their employees' pros and cons, figure out conditions under which one delivers the most, and act accordingly in setting the working hours, procedures and stuff. You can't treat your employees all the same, and trying to impose that "all of you will work mon-wed in office, or some 60-40 ratio" system is just plain stupid and unproductive.
It definitely stinks of middle/micromanagerial BS, coming from useless control freaks who are afraid of losing their non-stop-useless-meetings-and-spying-on-employees positions within the company.
True. Retail employees for example get treated differently than professional employees. But making exceptions only for certain employees breeds discontent, imo.
Oh, I'm sure he's very skilled and knowledgeable. He's free to choose wherever he wants to work. For some reason, apparently he was cool with coming into the office when he was first hired, and now he's changed his mind and wanting 100% remote. That's fine - obviously Apple's company culture is not a great match for him anymore then. What I have a problem with is writing an open letter to your company basically issuing an ultimatum of "give me my way or I quit". That's childish and poor form imo.
I think that most don't understand basic research in a company that is more about applied research. Those doing basic research can benefit their own company with products or ideas that directly apply to products that they are working on or products coming out in the future but basic research can benefit a lot of other companies and people as well. So Apple may very well benefit from his work when he's working for another company.
In my experience, nearly all engineers are "no men."
That's pretty agreeable, but I don't think the director in question was being childish.
For sure. As with pretty much anyone who previously worked in an office, they more or less moved successfully to working from home along with all the other office based staff.
Have you heard of China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, and Japan?
Their populations are 1.4B, 1.3B, 273M, 212M , and 126M respectively so I am pretty sure there are many replacement for him not to mention simply people in his department that were working below him at Apple or equivilant in other high tech companies like FB, Google, Microsoft, Oracle...etc.
He was known for groundbreaking work. There may be someone better for the job, but it's not clear who since there's no directly comparable replacement for anyone at such a level.
Apple's requirements are at least questionable when many competitors don't have them. A few years ago, it wasn't like that.
And this thread's theme is the free market, but given Apple, Google, and others' late-2000s incident with no-cold-call agreements that Jobs and Schmidt were directly involved in, there's reason to watch out for cartel (i.e. non competitive market) behavior when they've all been so keen on keeping employees in the same particular valley all these years.
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Yes and Apple will have to offer higher pay than others who are allowing remote work. And people will take it.
Say there's no change to an employee's desire for remote work. Now is the time to take remote work because for once there are great options at other companies that allow it.
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Show me one of them.
There are a lot of people in the world but only one Hikaru Nakamura. Or Tom Brady. Or Kipchoge.
I think what many members have failed to understand, even those that have experience of office work is that ever since the introduction of the internet as we know it today, there has always been this underlying suspicion from office workers that the work they do can be done from home and that there is no actual basis for them to work in an office just because 'thats they way it's always been and that's the way company bosses want it'. Company bosses have always resisted allowing their staff working from home with the bosses coming up with all sorts of excuses why they must come into work. There has not been anything that has allowed office employees to test their work from home theory until now. The pandemic forced company bosses to come up with solutions to allow their employees to be able to carry on working but this has actually played into the hands of office workers because company bosses were now being forced to do something their office employees had been telling them for years was possible to do which is to be able to work from home.
New phone lines or extra phones were installed in peoples homes. Internet access was installed into peoples homes. Company phone numbers and fax numbers were rerouted to homes of office staff that required it. Remote access to company servers was set up. Video calling software and messaging software was installed on some home computers (many company computers was moved to the homes of office staff). Everything was set up and put in place to allow office staff to carry on doing their job but from home. Something company bosses over the years kept insisting was not possible or too cumbersome hence why home working requests were always turned down. The pandemic has proven office employees were right. It has proven supporters of home working that they were right, which is that there are many many office based jobs that do not require the person to be situated in an company office building and that they can just as efficent and productive doing their job from home.
Now company bosses are saying 'we need you back at work' and the working from home (WTH) employees are asking why? If they can do their job from home, complete all the job tasks that are expected of them, doing it efficently and productively, why should they return to an office building where they would be doing exactly the same thing.
For the majority WTH has worked and company bosses are now scrambling to come up with legal ideas on how to get their WTH staff to move back into the company offices. They have lost their 'that's how it's always been' excuse.
New phone lines or extra phones were installed in peoples homes. Internet access was installed into peoples homes. Company phone numbers and fax numbers were rerouted to homes of office staff that required it. Remote access to company servers was set up. Video calling software and messaging software was installed on some home computers (many company computers was moved to the homes of office staff). Everything was set up and put in place to allow office staff to carry on doing their job but from home. Something company bosses over the years kept insisting was not possible or too cumbersome hence why home working requests were always turned down. The pandemic has proven office employees were right. It has proven supporters of home working that they were right, which is that there are many many office based jobs that do not require the person to be situated in an company office building and that they can just as efficent and productive doing their job from home.
Now company bosses are saying 'we need you back at work' and the working from home (WTH) employees are asking why? If they can do their job from home, complete all the job tasks that are expected of them, doing it efficently and productively, why should they return to an office building where they would be doing exactly the same thing.
For the majority WTH has worked and company bosses are now scrambling to come up with legal ideas on how to get their WTH staff to move back into the company offices. They have lost their 'that's how it's always been' excuse.
I remember calling the phone company to set up dual phone lines in my house back around the early 1980s. I bought a DEC Rainbow 100 PC so that I could connect to the office via dialup modem to work. Subsequent jobs loaned me VT100s and communications gear to connect from home. I wrote an email program for one employer back in 1980 but email was included in the operating system when I started using VAX/VMS in 1982. Email was only within the company unless you used an email gateway to the outside world which was a precursor to the public internet which was to come over a decade later.
Then he can go to those other companies. Just don't write an open letter to your company giving them an ultimatum, because it makes you look petty. Apple doesn't have to do what other companies do. There is absolutely NOTHING unreasonable about wanting in-person teamwork to take place. Most people I know vastly prefer in-person interactions. As a teacher, for a while I had to teach remotely, and while it was obviously better than nothing, both I and my colleagues were SO thrilled to be able to return to in-person teaching. I simply can't imagine quitting over that, but if I did, I wouldn't be first demanding they change to adapt to MY wants.
As far as I'm aware, he didn't send an open letter to the company. There is an open letter from high-level employees but do you have evidence that he signed it? I thought that the knowledge that RTO was a reason for him leaving was in a letter to the people that worked with him which is a fairly common practice in tech.
Ok, I misread and thought he spearheaded the letter, but in any case he obviously agrees with it based on his email. So how did his internal email become public? Isn't that a gross breach of privacy?