Google Employees to Return to Offices on April 4, Will Apple Follow?

[B4U]

This has been my experience as well. Along with the open office space that is highly distracting. Working in an isolated room at home for an office, I can spend 8 hours and not get distracted at my physical location. Its not like I need to deal with someone next to me on a daily basis talking loudly "HEY JIM YOU WATCH THE GAME LAST NIGHT?!?!"

There are people on this site that severely advocate the "watercooler talk" but in a large workspace half your day is pretty much gone by distractions running into people in the hall, bathroom, break room, going to your desk, people next to you being loud and more. I have been stopped in the hall 8 times in one day for 15 minutes each time just talking about real life stuff and NOT work. All that time now is spent on my actual work tasks and I feel less pressured and less stressed because others are not taking up a lot of my time away from my own workload.

Oh yeah, I totally forgot about the dreaded nightmare coming from stupidest idea ever called open office area.
When we were in the cubicle farms, other teammates will have to navigate their way to come find others for help when needed. This open office area makes them stop thinking and looking for the answers themselves.
"Hey, do you know how to blah, blah, blah?"
"Did you try to look it up on the company portal first?"

In regards to the watercooler talk. The thing is, I am hired to do a job, not to socialize with other people and find out which sports team is their favorite. Sorry if this offends anybody. I got 8 hours to do 10 hours worth of work because they laid people off to please the shareholders.

After hours? Sure, I may join some socializing and team building events (families are also welcomed).
There are always a few teammates where we get along well and will get to know them much more personally. The rest of them? Just need to get along and no need to know where they live.

Ultimately, it is really dependent on each individual. Some of us work best when locked inside a bunker by ourselves.

 

[AlexESP]

Why do you make things so difficult? There will be companies than require less WFH, and others will give you more. However, you can’t have everything: probably WFH positions will have way less responsibility. But it’s totally fine if you decide that’s worth it, just don’t complain about the associated downsides.

 

[Ethosik]

Oh yeah, I totally forgot about the dreaded nightmare coming from stupidest idea ever called open office area.
When we were in the cubicle farms, other teammates will have to navigate their way to come find others for help when needed. This open office area makes them stop thinking and looking for the answers themselves.
"Hey, do you know how to blah, blah, blah?"
"Did you try to look it up on the company portal first?"

In regards to the watercooler talk. The thing is, I am hired to do a job, not to socialize with other people and find out which sports team is their favorite. Sorry if this offends anybody. I got 8 hours to do 10 hours worth of work because they laid people off to please the shareholders.

After hours? Sure, I may join some socializing and team building events (families are also welcomed).
There are always a few teammates where we get along well and will get to know them much more personally. The rest of them? Just need to get along and no need to know where they live.

Ultimately, it is really dependent on each individual. Some of us work best when locked inside a bunker by ourselves.

I am the same way. And WAY TOO MUCH socialization goes on in an open office space. I used to deal with someone chatting with the person next to me for AN HOUR....and it was not during lunch. It was a full on hour of distractions only because of the open office space and I had to sit there listening to every word of their conversation. They would even sometimes ask me questions here and there every 5 minutes or so. Very distracting.

 

[ian87w]

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.

Software development, especially games, have been outsourced to many countries and coding farms long before the pandemic, and I didn't see anybody complaining.

Apple's software quality issues, eg iOS15, imo was due to something else. Microsoft and Adobe don't seem to have any severe software issues during the pandemic. Windows 11 launched and delivered on new PCs without much issues. They even transitioned many of their apps to Apple Silicon just fine.

Video games having issues are usually more of severely short datelines for launch. It's been an issue forever, regardless of the pandemic,

 

[ian87w]

It certainly isn't for everyone. That is why I advocate for choice, not force. Have people return to office if they want to. If they are effective and work better working from home, let them do that too.

And it's up to HR and management to set policies and KPIs appropriately. If the employees can reach their proper KPIs, who cares where they are located.
Remote working paired with old-school policies and KPIs won't work well.

 

[Spacetime Anomaly]

Someone has to put cover sheets on the TPS reports.

 

[steelhauler34]

Who knows. I wish all the pansies would stay home for good personally. We all know they can’t drive for .

 

[iPadified]

Look at it from a management perspective: less office space required, more possibilities to work concentrated and thus be more productive. In the end it is always about cutting costs (office space) and increasing productivity (less disturbances, stress associated diseases...). Knowledge workers needs to interact sometimes, so meet physically when needed.

If you assume people are lazy because they work from home, you have a much deeper problem in the organisation: trust and/or loyalty. Sort these out and the company will run much smoother.

I think it is ironic that we accept online dating and run our social life via a phone while at the same time have difficulties to accept working from home.

 

[incoherent_1]

Interested to see how this will shake out. For most software devs, WFH is no problem and better in many ways. When you're dealing with trade secrets or highly sensitive materials, an argument can be made that in-person is much more secure. Hopefully they can find a happy balance.

 

[RalfTheDog]

It will last until about mid June. Perhaps a bit of a shorter break if people stop masking.

 

[Solomani]

I'm sure there will be a lot of whining and complaining.

Back to daily workplace whining and complaining? That means we are 100% back to "pre-Covid Normalcy".

Excellent.

 

[wanha]

I'm sure there will be a lot of whining and complaining.

That's a given, regardless of company, time or topic

 

[Jeaz]

they will, Apple has announce the 3 days at work quite some time back and postponed twice (?).
All companies will follow, initially they'll support "hybrid" but that will change over time, and go back to where it was, they might not "mandate" it as such but as we will get back into old routines, the pressure will be there.
WFH is great, don't get me wrong, but for one, it is not for everyone, secondly it is not for every job ...

I think it’ll go the other way.

But yeah, it’s not for everyone and every type of job.

But beyond that, the main reason companies are mandating returns to offices is because of the costs they have tied to their offices. But over time contracts will renegotiated and/or offices repurposed.
Also, the average age of senior management is high and maybe a bit more change adverse than the workforce.

Either way, companies will adjust. There is no way we are completely going back to how it was for so many reasons such as:
* productivity remains as high or even higher
* reduce costs for offices etc.
* save time on commuting, meaning more time for work.
* a great win for the environment. It’s unsustainable to have to move people from on desk to another for hours each day just to do the same thing.

I’m contacted daily by headhunters and pretty much all of the lead with “flexible/hybrid/remote-work” and surveys show people are willing to change work because of it.

So the change has already happened, and it will be a time of “testing the water” now to find the right balance.

 

[ScottishDuck]

as they should. Life is pretty much back to normal now.

2000 deaths a day in the US, still

 

[0924487]

My University forced everyone to return since Feb 28.

 

[JM]

Interesting thought, actually. Monetarily, WFH/hybrid only benefits the employee, not employer.

That made me think of the next logical outcome: reduced starting wages for future hires who WFH-only, and slower/lower wage growth for all the "legacy" hires (and possibly lower/slower wage growth for new/WFH hires; a double-whammy).

Ironically, this whole ordeal could could end up being much worse than we expected. Extrapolating further, hypothetically, this could result in a massive and protracted recessionary environment leading to another "lost decade", or more, of wage and economic growth.

The FOMC just might be staring down the barrel of a very very bad economic cycle and not know it yet.

Right, who knows what tertiary effects a 100% WFH environment will create?

Small businesses in cities are already (reportedly) losing at on their lunch customers since they all were at home. The need for delivery shopping might go up dramatically for WFH’s which in turn gives more power to a central entity: Amazon. The indirect “water cooler talk” synergy (had to say it, ha) that creates new ideas, bonds, and untold problem solving opportunities goes away.

If a person is only interested in completing the hourly tasks, and zero interest in career development, then WFH makes sense for them, but they are missing out on all the intangible and tangible spontaneous interactions that helps them and the company and the society create better “things”.

 

[BuffaloTF]

Truth! Rocket scientists cannot work from home.

They probably could… but it may upset the neighbor(hood).

 

[hasanahmad]

Has Productivity gone down at Google with WFH? is that the reason they are asking everyone to come back into office?

 

[urnotl33t]

On the contrary, it reduced our overhead considerably and we get higher quality work out of our people. If that doesn't benefit us, I don't know why we're in business.

But I like your idea of penalizing people for that success. Maybe we could tell them that meeting performance goals will be inversely proportional to health benefits and their 401k too. Really grind em down.

Crap.. I didn't add to my post: "NB: I'm not actually advocating this; just hypothesizing a business economics possibility".

Oops, my bad... sorry y'all...

 

[urnotl33t]

In what way? WFH has yielded WAY more hours of work out of employees, and the Internet access, power, water, and A/C & heating costs are all passed to them.

That said WFH/Hybrid does not fit all scenarios, but in my tech company we have embraced, er, tech and have become even more productive in the organizations that do not require face-to-face at all times. Zoom meetings are more than sufficient in our case.

The company building is now a huge waste of money, because it sits empty most of the time. Instead of leasing 12 floors they could've leased 5 (server farms and IT infrastructure for in-person teams).


Good luck with that type of thinking. Managers/directors need to communicate, adapt, and lead properly; those that cannot are the ones to be left in the dust because of their poor communication/task dissemination and supervision skills.


Perhaps, although this is pessimistic in outlook. We won't really know for sure, but one thing's clear: for the last 2 and a half or so years the corporate world didn't end, and depending on the company, it grew.

Yeah, I hear you. I posted elsewhere that I forgot to state in my post that I'm not actively advocating this possibility.. it was just hypothesizing.
My error of omission.. oops.

 

[TrancyGoose]

I work for a company that embraced remote working, they really did.
And I am very glad for it.
While both me and the wife live literally 30 mins away from our offices, I can not bring myself to endure the "culture" and the "people", ultimately, it's all *********, we do work to make a living, and literally, nothing else matters. If people can do it from everywhere, they will.

 

[citysnaps]

It's up to Apple. Life goes on. As expected.

 

[Syk]

Apple's solution of working 3 days in the office and 2 days out and with a month of working from home seems like a fair compromise to me.

Like I joked before. With the way iOS15 was so bugged and the rumor next iPhone having an ! instead of notch. Maybe they do need to work in the office?

 

[kemal]

Can we correlate working from home with poor software quality? Then end the WFH.

 

[gleepskip]

Why do you make things so difficult? There will be companies than require less WFH, and others will give you more. However, you can’t have everything: probably WFH positions will have way less responsibility. But it’s totally fine if you decide that’s worth it, just don’t complain about the associated downsides.

WFH will have less responsibility? You are greatly misinformed.