Apple Delays Plan To Have Staff in Office Three Days a Week (bloomberg.com) 64
Apple delayed a plan to require workers to come back to the office three days a week, citing a resurgence in Covid-19 cases, marking the latest setback in its efforts to return to normal. From a report: The company informed employees Tuesday that it's delaying the requirement, which had been slated to go into effect on May 23, according to a memo seen by Bloomberg. However, the company is still expecting workers to come to the office two days per week. The company said the requirement is being delayed for "the time being" and didn't provide a new date. Apple was set to require employees to work from the office on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays beginning next week -- a policy that had been controversial among some staff. Already, employees have been coming in two days a week as part of a ramp-up effort that began in April. For now, that mandate isn't changing.
Such toolbags (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple delayed a plan to require workers to come back to the office three days a week, citing a resurgence in Covid-19 cases
Apple has tried everything to justify their insane real estate adventures except creating an atmosphere that makes a substantial number of employees want to come back to the office.
No one wants to waste money to justify real estate (Score:2, Insightful)
Apple has tried everything to justify their insane real estate adventures except creating an atmosphere that makes a substantial number of employees want to come back to the office.
I guarantee big tech isn't eager to lose money to "justify their real estate adventures." It costs more money to have employees in the office and you can get out of leases or sell buildings. The cost savings from remote work should more than make up for a broken lease or selling a building at a loss...very quickly. I can accept if one or 2 big tech companies was stupid enough to PAY MORE to have workers come into the office, but when all of them want workers in, it's something more than bad managers or j
Re:No one wants to waste money to justify real est (Score:4, Interesting)
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If this was just Apple, this real estate conspiracy minded theory might hold. But many companies that lease 100% of their buildings also want workers to come back, so clearly that reason isn't for real-estate reasons. Apple *also* has plenty of leased buildings; it's the main reason they built the new building, they were spending a ton of money on leases.
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shit managers require their staff to be present to justify their shit management job.
If all their staff are working remotely, quite efficiently, it becomes all too apparent their role is not needed.
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Re:No one wants to waste money to justify real est (Score:5, Interesting)
I respect your argument; it has merit. Some people do need somebody keeping an eye on them and occasionally cracking a whip.
That actually isn't the argument used by tech companies, and I think they're sincere about the real reason. Big tech, like Apple, hires talented, dedicated people that don't require a lot of supervision, and pays them well enough to keep them motivated. Slackers will be identified by their poor/low output, and people don't want to lose their $300-500k annual pay packages.
The argument that is used is that WFH is less effective in terms of creativity. I work for Google and at least here it's pretty clear that WFH doesn't significantly reduce productivity, and in many cases actually increases it[*]. But the belief (I'm not sure whether data supports this belief, but it's not unreasonable) is that the lack of random hallway / water cooler / micro kitchen conversations significantly reduces creativity, because a lot of good ideas come out of such random interactions between people who are in somewhat adjacent but different teams.
This is related to the rationale given for preferring open plan workspaces with employees sitting at short-walled cubicles, and using headphones to block out distractions when they really need to focus. That rationale also includes claims that it makes teams more productive by enabling easier communication, since they can generally just swivel their chair around and talk directly to the teammate who knows the thing they need to know or who can suggest a solution.
I think both of these rationales are sincere (though I'm sure the lower real estate costs of the higher-density open plan workspaces are also attractive).
[*] What Google has found is that the productivity delta from WFH is strongly correlated with seniority. The most experienced people have large productivity increases, while the least experienced people have small productivity decreases, and those in the middle stay saw their productivity largely unchanged. On balance, overall productivity increased, which is undoubtedly part of why Google has adopted a hybrid model, encouraging people to WFH 2-3 days per week. The effect on junior engineers is troubling, though, and the realization that WFH will likely slow their development and result in a long-term hit to productivity undoubtedly affects the decision to want to get most people back into the office at least some of the time. It's pretty clear that what happened when people left the office is that the senior engineers got a lot of time freed up because they no longer spent it answering questions from the more junior engineers, but that's not sustainable.
Note also that these evaluations are in aggregate; many individuals had very different outcomes, especially parents of young children who suddenly found themselves trying to juggle work and home responsibilities. Many of the most experienced people are also those whose kids are old enough to require less focused attention (or even old enough to be empty nesters), so WFH was pretty much purely beneficial, from a productivity perspective at least.
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* Wish I had mod points left; that is also exactly what we see. Junior staff suffers but senior staff gains, and the sustainability of the situation is just not there. It gets exacerbated when senior staff start to retire early due to a variety of factors over the past two years.
Re:No one wants to waste money to justify real est (Score:5, Insightful)
I guarantee big tech isn't eager to lose money to "justify their real estate adventures." It costs more money to have employees in the office and you can get out of leases or sell buildings.
That's a nice theory until you look at the building in question. The problem with building such a big, expensive building is that if you don't want it, who else will buy it? And who's going to pay you what you've got into it? In this case, it's nobody, and double nobody.
The cost savings from remote work should more than make up for a broken lease or selling a building at a loss...very quickly.
The biggest problem with your analysis is that "Big Tech" isn't a person. It's a loose affiliation of corporations. And in those corporations, there are usually many managers whose primary purpose is to get in the way, although it's supposed to be to facilitate work. And those people jealously guard their privilege. They can't justify their existences if those people aren't in the building.
You're welcome to disagree with their assertion that you're more productive in the office and maybe you, personally, are more productive at home, but I can tell you that most of my coworkers are not.
That may well be true, I can't speak to the issue of your coworkers. But is that specifically because of them, or is it because of external issues?
These companies pay a lot to keep people in the office with free meals and various expensive perks.
And yet, they still don't want to be there. Maybe in additional to not building expensive offices, they could not give expensive perks.
If there was data that said their engineers are more productive remotely or even that there was only a small loss, Apple and Google would be tripping overthemselves to become a distributed remote workforce
Apple and google do things that don't make sense all the time, why do you insist that everything they do is rational? That's not at all supported by the existing evidence.
But it applies to all of big tech (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple and google do things that don't make sense all the time, why do you insist that everything they do is rational? That's not at all supported by the existing evidence.
They have armies of accountants and efficiency experts and mountains of data and big tech has a long history of being proud to break with tradition and sell it as innovation. The people making these calls have a ton of data and analyze productivity in depth. Labor is their number 1 cost, by far. I use Apple & Google as 2 examples, but the same applies to Facebook, MS, IBM, Oracle, Salesforce, Twitter, Netflix, Amazon, etc. If Apple & Google did something irrational, that would be one thing, but when it's the entire industry...
...either they think you're more productive in the office...or it's a weird dysfunctional sunk cost fallacy or conspiracy.
However, engineers are expensive and delays are even more expensive. In addition, the monthly cost of these perks are insanely expensive. Apple could just stop all perks, close their office, and make money just by having everyone be remote. Someone has done the numbers and presented it to the board...there are just too many advantages to having a remote workforce:
* Stop all meals/snacks/perks/extra-electricity, water, heat, etc
* Recruit people from anywhere in the world
* Either rent out their facility or sell it.
* Attract talent by spouting their "quality of life."
All of these factors would make them far too much money. So we have one of two choices...either, they're acting rationally or they're not. Either it's in their rational self-interest to be in the office, which I think they think it is and my management team thinks it is (I'm ambivalent personally)...or you think they're doing this for some irrational reason....spending thousands of dollars per employee for perks they could stop instantly and save money on...AND losing productivity?
I know you want to believe your argument. In fact, I do too...I love spending my workday pantsless...but I am not certain it's in my employers interest to have everyone remote. Some employees are just as productive or more so from their home. Most really aren't, in my experience. They're harder to get ahold of, things that took less time just seem to keep having unexpected delays
...plus there are assholes who do one of 2 things: disappear all day and just don't work that day because they didn't feel like it or something came up in their personal life or those who fuck around during the day and then ping me late at night because they wanted to fuck off for the day, but late in the day, realized they actually had to do their job, so they're spending their evening doing things that should have been done during business hours and asking for my time to help them...after I've completed my work day during business hours when I had child care, like a responsible adult.
Such shenanigans existed before the pandemic, but they were MUCH RARER when people had to be in the office.
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Just as a data point, facilities cost (for office space) is generally less than 10% of salaries. The decisions are not being made because of that 10%, but the ~25-35-100% of salaries that are in the operating margin being compromised long-term.
The concerns might be exaggerated right now, but it is hard to know for a long time.
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I don't think the middle managers have a lot of pull with the C-level execs. If the company wants to save money, then the middle managers are often in the pack that get the pink slips. When times are good then the middle managers are often kept around even when redundant but that's because of "institutional knowledge"; ie, they're the only ones who understand what Project X is.
Ie, I've been at a company that moved location far enough that many were upset. The middle managers were told to suck it up or le
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I don't think the middle managers have a lot of pull with the C-level execs.
Pull? I don't know I'd put it that way. It's more that the managers listen to other managers because they speak the same language of bullshit. Bullshitting is a valuable business skill, I don't want to imply that I think otherwise, but you can't make decisions with it or you do stupid things. You're supposed to baffle other people with your bullshit, not yourself.
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I gave a presentation fairly early in my career to the CFO of a Fortune-10. He was quite effective at shutting down all types of engineering rationale for why the decision he wanted backup for was "wrong," and didn't mind paying my company more money to reach the same conclusion.
Point being middle mansgers have precious little ability to change the minds of senior executives and their influence is limited to their agreement with executive foregone conclusions. (In defense of the executives, often times th
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I don't have enough detail about your anecdote to know if it speaks to what we're talking about here or not. Business types tend to on one hand respect the technical abilities of technical types, and on the other hand they tend to seem to think that they don't know shit about shit. Over and over again the MBAs make decisions based on what some slicker than snot sales slime sells them over cocktails instead of what their in-house experts tell them, even though they'll go to those same experts and ask them to
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I don't buy the notion that they must know what they are doing. This is all largely uncharted territory, with no obvious established models to follow. Yes there can be data, but it's probably full of confounders. Plus the future has to be thought about: what's the long term effect?
There are also the unconscious drives and patterns -- we are all human and most of what we analyse is full of unconscious biases. It only takes an underlying feeling of this being a new situation, to make people imagine it is unsa
There are a few established models, though (Score:2)
I don't buy the notion that they must know what they are doing. This is all largely uncharted territory, with no obvious established models to follow. Yes there can be data, but it's probably full of confounders. Plus the future has to be thought about: what's the long term effect?
There are also the unconscious drives and patterns -- we are all human and most of what we analyse is full of unconscious biases. It only takes an underlying feeling of this being a new situation, to make people imagine it is unsafe and so demand we all return to an environment which is felt to be safer because it is more controlle
RedHat has long been full time remote, distributed across the globe, and every project I volunteered for them on was a total shitshow. I am willing to concede that maybe that's something to do with RedHat and people who are really devoted to open source and turn down Google or Morgan Stanley to work at RedHat, but still, the virtual office model is decades old. My first job out of college in 2000 was for a consulting company where everyone telecommuted. Working remotely is OLD. In my experience, talented
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Most of the companies that are especially focused on return to the office [think they] have a unique company culture that needs to be preserved in order to maintain success. This "culture" gets to the types of people they hire, where they recruit, how they are trained, and any number of other factors. They don't know how to sustain that in an 100% remote environment.
Remote works for some organizations, but far too many lack the internal controls and tools to make it really work. It isn't about technology
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I won't argue or contradict your experience, and I found it interesting. One small caveat is that, to me if people are more civil or get on better in person, that's a sort of tribalism and more about unconscious patterns. Unconscious doesn't mean stupid, it just means it isn't the reasons which get written down.
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Our entire team at Google is now fully remote. We're far more productive and have the data to validate that claim.
Not all TPMs embrace telework. Some are worried that they'll become irrelevant, so they want people in the office to keep track of them. Others like the direct interaction.
Re:No one wants to waste money to justify real est (Score:4)
I've been working remotely for years, well before the pandemic. It definitely makes me more productive.
Yeah, I'll admit it, sometimes I might be distracted during a meeting, or even spend "work time" on personal stuff. But you know what? Hell, _this morning_ I was playing Elite Dangerous on my VR headset, while waiting for a load test to finish. But that's balanced by the fact that I'm also more willing to work in the evenings or even on the weekends, depending on the circumstance. When I worked at a physical office, I was desperate to go home at 5. I was exhausted from sitting, exhausted from being around people, and I was starving. And once I was home, that was it--I was absolutely not going to touch anything related to work.
But while working from home, I'm so much more willing to work outside normal business hours. If I didn't make as much progress on my work task as I'd like that day, why not jump back on it after I eat dinner, when I'm rested again? Or how about working on something for an hour or two on a weekend? Not a big deal to just walk into my home office and take care of something.
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It costs more money to have employees in the office and you can get out of leases or sell buildings.
Commercial leases are long term (5+ years), and when you lease a building there is always substantial investment in renovation to make the space suitable, at the lease holder's expense. It took almost a year for the building to be readied where I currently work (~300 person office).
I can accept if one or 2 big tech companies was stupid enough to PAY MORE to have workers come into the office
One thing I know about corporations is that they like money. If it saved them money they'd do it. They want employees back in the office because productivity is in the toilet. They've had all of COVID to evaluate this, they have,
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Do you really think the little trillion dollar company called Apple hasn't considered this from every possible angle? That they are just "stupid"?
This would be the same trillion-dollar company that decided a mouse should have only one button, and that you should have to turn it upside down to charge it.
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Apple has tried everything to justify their insane real estate adventures except creating an atmosphere that makes a substantial number of employees want to come back to the office.
I guarantee big tech isn't eager to lose money to "justify their real estate adventures." It costs more money to have employees in the office and you can get out of leases or sell buildings. The cost savings from remote work should more than make up for a broken lease or selling a building at a loss...very quickly.
But these money came out from DIFFERENT BUDGETS.
Have you never worked in corporate where costs in one department and savings in one department were never ever considered together? If something created a cost and a saving resulting in a net gain for the company, the department that took the cost will have to find other ways to reduce cost to stay within budget, while the department that got the savings have to spend it elsewhere otherwise their budget will be cut next year!
The department that provided for t
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That is actually pretty common, especially in non-union manufacturing environments.
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These folks are not going to ever find a "better" office to work in, no smaller companies can compete on that. Any company can complete on work/life balance though. Next step hopefully will see the trickle down of more flexibility for people who still need to work in on-site or customer facing jobs. T
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Apple has tried everything to justify their insane real estate adventures except creating an atmosphere that makes a substantial number of employees want to come back to the office.
IKR? The state of the art theater, gym, garden of fruit bearing trees, commuter credits, tuition reimbursement, subsdized meals, beer bashes, etc. No regular person could be expected to get anything done in such an oppressive environment.
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If you can come into the office 2 days a week, you can come in 3 days a week. What's the difference. If you can come in 3 days a week you can come in 5 days a week.
My office has been open 5 days a week for the last year. Open floor plan with 200 people. No masks. No vaccine mandate. And no covid cases. I feel like I live on a different planet than the rest of slashdot.
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Cool story bro!
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We've been open mostly. There were already essential workers; myself on that list though it felt a bit iffy. But factory workers stayed on of course. IT rotated in and out, they were there 2 days a week usually, stuff that can't be done remotely (help desk, servers, etc). Lab workers and testers were the other big group there on semi-regular basis. No one else is "required" to come in if they don't want to, but some did. I only came in once in a while in the first year. Now I'm sort of twice a week; no
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And no covid cases. I feel like I live on a different planet
You personally know all 200 of these people, and can unequivocally confirm that none of them got Covid? Or are you just assuming nobody didn't because HR didn't send out a memo? Sorry dude, I call bullshit. Even from a statistical standpoint your assertion isn't very likely.
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Nobody died. Nobody was hospitalized. Nobody was out for extended sick leave. Nobody is on a ventilator and crippled with long covid. It's been business as usual.
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And no covid cases.
Nobody died. Nobody was hospitalized. Nobody was out for extended sick leave. Nobody is on a ventilator and crippled with long covid.
Well, that goalpost got moved to a completely different zipcode.
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Statistically the idea that out of 200 people nobody was off for a long time, nobody needed a ventilator, and nobody got long COVID is so extremely unlikely so I call bullshit.
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My office has been open 5 days a week for the last year. Open floor plan with 200 people. No masks. No vaccine mandate. And no covid cases. I feel like I live on a different planet than the rest of slashdot.
And nobody has noticed there is anything better out there?
Well by all means enjoy then!
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I wonder if your building has particularly effective ventilation or air filtration? If we had that, and regular air-quality monitoring (CO2 etc) it would be much easier to imagine a return to large groups being pretty safe most places.
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'Citing a resurgence in Covid', right! (Score:4, Insightful)
Who wants to bet the back-to-the-office response didn't go as expected?
The work from home upside to work/life balance makes it a higher priority than working for Apple.
Why edicts? Be flexible (Score:1)
Why don't they offer bonuses or the like instead of edicts: X extra bucks for each day-in? If in-seat employees are more valuable, then pay them more compared to teleworkers. I don't get the all-or-nothing approach big orgs use. (My current big org is also stupid this way, by the way.)
I do agree that some forms of collaboration are better in-person, but such meetings don't have to happen every day. Most the details can be ironed out in Teams etc. Save the trickier issues for in-presence meetings once a wee
God (Score:4, Funny)
Kirk: What does Tim Cook need with a starship?
Forces people to have a home and work office (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: Forces people to have a home and work office (Score:1)
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Really?
That sounds like a suck job.
Even working full time from home, I don't work nights or weekends.
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I already have that. My condo isn't big enough for everything I need, and there are time when I do need to be in the office on occasion. I really don't want to lug everything back and forth. So it's mostly half at home and half at work. I do want to get my dining table back for actualy dining purposes instead of as a second desk (the first desk is home computer only). Someone really should have told me 10 years ago that I needed to make room and get furnished for a second work space at home. And they
As long as it's a "Sellers" employment market... (Score:4, Interesting)
... the "Sellers" call the shots.
Right now, software devs and associated roles, are in HIGH demand.
Even working at one of the giants of the tech industry isn't immune to that simple fact.
For software developers in particular, WFH has been the norm for a while - at least, for a few days a week.
The pandemic simply accelerated that trend and most have been more than happy remote working pretty much full time.
I guess Apple figured moving too fast = losing good devs.
Clearly there was enough feedback along the lines of "screw you"
I work for a large corporate - I'm in the UK - that has offices all over the world, plenty in the US.
There's been no demands yet, because, for the most part, remote working has equalled zero drop in profit and productivity.
On the contrary, it's actually increased it - and made employees happier too.
Whilst the developer shortage lasts, employers need to tread _very_ carefully with demands for more office bound working.
I'm happy to _never_ go back to the office again - and if I'm forced to and the market for jobs is still active, I'll vote with my feet. I'll change jobs.
Apple have clearly realised this...
Just don't go. (Score:2)
So, put your foot down. Just refuse to go back. One of two things will happen.
If Apple considers you important enough, you'll get away with it. Happens all the time. Almost all rules are soft rules, relaxed or broken for the truly valued.
If they don't, and your internal judgement of your worth to the company is different than theirs, you'll get fired. Probably for cause. And you'll walk away with a valuable piece of new information.
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