Apple CEO Impressed By Remote Work, Sees Permanent Changes (bloomberg.com) 59
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Apple Inc. Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook said he's been impressed by employees' ability to operate remotely and predicted that some new work habits will remain after the pandemic. During an interview at The Atlantic Festival on Monday, Cook said Apple created products including new Apple Watches and iPads that are launching on time this year, despite the need for most employees to work away from the office due to Covid-19.
Cook said he doesn't believe Apple will "return to the way we were because we've found that there are some things that actually work really well virtually." Cook said 10% to 15% of Apple employees have gone back to the office and he hopes the majority of staff can return to the company's new campus in Silicon Valley sometime next year. The CEO said he goes into the office at different points during the week and he noted that remote work is "not like being together physically." Working in the office sparks creativity such as during impromptu meetings, he added.
Cook said he doesn't believe Apple will "return to the way we were because we've found that there are some things that actually work really well virtually." Cook said 10% to 15% of Apple employees have gone back to the office and he hopes the majority of staff can return to the company's new campus in Silicon Valley sometime next year. The CEO said he goes into the office at different points during the week and he noted that remote work is "not like being together physically." Working in the office sparks creativity such as during impromptu meetings, he added.
What worries me about remote work prospects (Score:3, Interesting)
And then there's all the fast food restaurants. I've told this story before, but in my small city the fast food restaurants blocked a bypass for decades so that commuters would be forced to drive past their shitty little restaurants and buy the breakfasts they didn't have time to make at home.
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I hadn't even thought of that (Score:2)
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> They will try to drag us all back into the office until false pretexts.
Easy come... easy go.
False pre-texts out... false pre-texts in.
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Many countries have a shortage of housing, convert those office buildings into apartments.
People also still need to eat, so restaurants will still exist.
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Depends on the nature of the buildings, there have been a lot of office buildings repurposed into apartments. Often they will put the living rooms on the outside with windows, and then things like kitchens, bathrooms and store rooms on the inside as they don't need windows.
Often the ceilings are higher in offices, then a false ceiling and/or false floor is added to leave space for ducting etc so there's usually plenty of space to add plumbing if required.
Some buildings will be easier to repurpose than other
And you'll immediately have (Score:2)
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We see already that some spaces are being repurposed to different uses. Some malls are converted to warehouses, schools, medical offices etc.
If you can do your job from home... (Score:3)
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But then it wouldn't be "Designed by Apple in California"
Re:If you can do your job from home... (Score:5, Funny)
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In this day and age what exactly does an office provide that your home doesn't? Reminder, meetings can be done remotely now.
Re: If you can do your job from home... (Score:2)
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Then don't do the meeting that way. Call a meeting just to brain storm. No agenda. You might call that just a video call, but to most people that's called a meeting. Working meetings are common in many places, they're not just the same old status update every day. Get a group of people discussing a thorny issue in front of a white board does so much better than anything I've seen on video, and everyone who's tried a video whiteboard app quickly abandons it.
Meetings in person also have a good effect of li
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they're easy to ignore when you're not there in person
Solutions to that are in development. I've seen a demo of a popular conferencing software that will provide a report of the percentage of the time each attendee spent looking at the camera versus looking away. Whether anyone sent an email during the meeting and at what time they did. The same for reading them. Same for IMs.
Further integrations planned were said to be things like browser activity and GPS data.
I think there will be an increasing number of things that were previously considered "managemen
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Space to work that isn't mentally either sleeping space or fun space.
People to talk to and interact with (yes, this is a good thing).
The ability to walk over to someone's desk and see what they're talking about.
Meetings. Remote sucks. Its hard to understand people, you talk all over each other, there's audio and video issues, there's network issues. There's no good replacement for a whiteboard (yes, I've used various pieces of software. They all suck so bad I'd rather draw in my personal whiteboard and
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There are MANY good things about working from home, and many of your points
Space to work that isn't mentally either sleeping space or fun space.
Dedicate a room to work.
Don't have an extra room for this purpose? Since you no longer need to be within commuting distance of your office, you have far more flexibility about where you can live - so go somewhere cheaper and you get more space for the same money.
There is also nothing that says you must work from home, you can go to a public library and work there, or find a shared working space etc.
People to talk to and interact with (yes, this is a good thing).
Most people have neighbors you can
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Better desk, better chair, better snacks, people to talk to, places to hike nearby during lunch, free lunch. Now a lot of money can fix a lot of that, and some time. No time to rearrange and buy furniture before the lockdown, the home computer desk cannot be used as a work computer desk. If you have an awesome home office that has room for professional and personal, then great, you planned ahead better or had more money.
Oh ya, A/C. Miss that when it gets hot.
Also lab space and equipment - vital and mand
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Better desk, better chair, better snacks, people to talk to, places to hike nearby during lunch, free lunch. Now a lot of money can fix a lot of that, and some time. No time to rearrange and buy furniture before the lockdown, the home computer desk cannot be used as a work computer desk. If you have an awesome home office that has room for professional and personal, then great, you planned ahead better or had more money.
Depends on the company...
Many companies cheap out on chairs and desks, most offices i've worked at had very bad chairs/desks with only one or two exceptions. My chairs at home on the other hand are comfortable for me and were my choice.
Most companies also don't provide snacks or a free lunch. The few that do, may not provide something that caters to your taste. You can eat whatever you want at home.
Oh ya, A/C. Miss that when it gets hot.
You can't install A/C at home? Nothing stopping you really...
Not all offices have decent temperature control e
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Only formally booked meetings can.
Impromptu meetings are very hard to do online - these are where the meeting just happens because someone was walking by and overheard something interesting and starts contributing to the discussion. It just happens and it's practically impossible to replicate online because it's something that happens organically and really, by accident and luck.
In th
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The aughts called, they want their bogeyman back (Score:3)
It's a weird little economic eddy.
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On the other hand I need to collaborate on daily basis with people from sites in other states and other countries. What is the difference if I am calling them form my desk in my office or from my desk in my house?
The people who really need offices are people who work in labs.
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It sometimes solves itself. Remote offshore work is very often very substandard. Hey, it's remote, it should be perfect, no? Except that it sucks. Which is why you end up offshoring a large team, with full knowledge that that team is really working for 4 companies at the same time, and you could get one guy local to do all of it only he's busy on something more important. The workers are cheap, but you need more of them, it takes longer to get anything done, they really don't see or care about the big
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If that was the case they would already have done it.
I edit text files all day (Score:3)
Some call this programming. Either way it doesn't matter if I'm at home, in an airport, or 6 feet from my boss.
wrong title (Score:3)
Working in the office sparks creativity? (Score:3, Informative)
I keep hearing this same old trope over and over and over.
I can not remember one time in my entire career where anyone came up with some impromptu great idea because they bumped into someone in the hall. Almost everyone I ever knew couldn't wait to get out of the office.
When I code, I find my best solutions on long walks. When we run up against some new design "feature" that needs a work around, we usually figure those out at 3am on a swat call when everyone is delirious. When working in the electrical engineering space, most new ideas are jotted down on napkins at a bar after a round or two of beers.
Maybe there is some small percentage of people where this works, but I have never seen this.
--
You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before. - Rahm Emanuel
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I can not remember one time in my entire career where anyone came up with some impromptu great idea because they bumped into someone in the hall
You are a technical person, worst, a EE. Other people are mostly a liability to us.
If you're an MBA, your brain may or may not even activate without the presence of nearby resonators. What is unclear to me what starts this resonation, is it like a crystal oscillator and it just needs a bit of a kickstart, or do they have some kind of magnetic field that interacts
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And some asshole hasn't also cornered a bunch of your time, interrupted your train of thought, and generally wrecked your workflow equally as often?
When working from home, I am so much more efficient, it's almost problematic. It's easy to be creative when you're running out of things to do because you're blasting efficiently through your work with no interruptions. I can go take a 20 minute walk, futz with something around the house, hell, even go mow the lawn if I need a mental break. That's excellent. Not
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And some asshole hasn't also cornered a bunch of your time, interrupted your train of thought, and generally wrecked your workflow equally as often?
Sorry, but that shit has happened more with Slack and emails. At least in the office the interruptions are limited only to asshole and not all of your coworkers.
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I know people who go to their cube and mentally shut out everyone else. Noise doesn't bother them, they tend to disparage others from even trying to talk to them. In the end? They tend to be clueless about the big picture. They've spent the last 4 weeks working on a project that is so back-burner that it may as well be canceled, and the bluffed their way through the scrums without every hinting that they were working on the wrong thing. And they skip all the corporate meetings and don't read the emails
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>I can not remember one time in my entire career where anyone came up with some impromptu great idea because they bumped into someone in the hall.
I can. Many times. It's often not some insanely great idea, it's just alignment of your stuff with someone else's stuff. That's really valuable for a medium to large shop.
Yes "coding" is best done alone. However, figuring out what to code and making it all work together as a whole is much harder than that.
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Try talking to them. It helps. There's been plenty of times I've talked to someone I see in the hall and they gave me some insight. There's even more times that someone starts a technical conversation near me and that I can contribute to and help them (or I start one and they help me). Its a weekly, if not daily occurence.
Re:Working in the office sparks creativity? (Score:4, Insightful)
You never stood in front of a white board with other coworkers and worked on a design? Don't bother explaining about some javascript based scribble app for collaboration that people can use from the cloud because those all suck.
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It does happen in other fields. A lot of issues at the old chemical plant were solved in door way meetings, and even more in emergency meetings called with a few minutes notice.
Then, being the metallurgist there are all the times someone showed up at my door holding mangled or corroded metal and sobbing "what happened?" Or if it was to big to carry I had to go to it.
Not everything can be done from a home office.
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Another engineer and I came up with all sorts of ideas by spinning our chairs around and bouncing ideas off each other.
That kind of thing
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There are a lot of replies to this that are basically of the type, "I've totally seen it/had it happen to me!"
The thing is that the hallway or watercooler is a solution to a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place. If you feel like everyone is too busy to talk to unless you see them walking down the hall (and now you're interrupting a break for more work), the problem is that the work environment feels inherently anti-social. If you can't ping a colleague to talk to them about problems, communicatio
Re: Working in the office sparks creativity? (Score:1)
"impromptu meetings"... (Score:1)
this is terrible news for pants companies (Score:2)
i ... do i even still own a pair? man... id have to dig into that pile in the corner. . .
Death to open plan offices (Score:1)
Seems good, but (Score:4, Interesting)