At my current company, the last CIO changed the WFH policy when he came on board. Instead of just “at manager discretion”, where the employee had to make the case for WFH, he changed it to presumed that WFH would be allowed. The manager had to present to the CIO the explicit reasons why they thought WFH wouldn’t work.
So, yeah, the print room operator that quite literally supports the physical printers, they’re not WFH. That question was pretty easy. But, a developer, where half the development team is off shore contractors, there is quite literally no reason to prevent WFH. If there was, the entire operating model with half off shore contractors would fall apart.
That was like 8 years ago, before I joined the company. Since 2020, we’ve hired people from all over that will never (or super rarely) come to the office. I can count at least 3 people I work with every day that have sold their houses and moved 500+ miles away from the office in the same time period. South to warmer weather, some of them not that far from each other, actually.
It’s amazing when you make management actually manage instead of just see people sitting at their desks.
Well this particular story is about a director, and they can afford Cupertino housing. It won’t be as nice as what they could buy half an hour’s drive away though.
No, Apple doesn’t do user studies. They shoot from the hip, which lands outstanding products far more than it should, but also has a lot of really wide misses that people seem to mostly forget about. I guess having an undiluted vision makes the upsides of success more valuable then it makes the downsides of failure.
So, they should work together in person to build products that connect people remotely? Why not work in the environment their target customers exist in? Working remotely will only increase their awareness of that culture’s needs.
My daughter and husband work from home. She works in the payroll department for a very large international IT company. One of her supervisors lives and works in another country. She’s permanent at home.
Her husband is some sort of graphic designer engineer something or other for one of the big auto companies. He makes a bunch of money and has a really cool 3 monitor work station at home. He’s at home for at least another year.
They have a 2 bedroom apartment and share one office. He can set his hours so they don’t have to be in the room at the same time. They haven’t killed each other yet and are very happy.
I did learn on Facebook a couple weeks ago that most people working from home are just getting paid to drink and do drugs while real workers have to go into work. So put the booze and the pipe down and get back to work.
This is me. We were recently given the option of (depending on certain criteria) working from home full time, hybrid 50/50 model or 100% in the office. I chose to return full-time to the office.
I find the commute (about 45 minutes each way) gives me time to put my brain in “work mode” on the trip in, and in “home mode” on the trip out.
My company spent a small fortune building two adjacent “state of the art” buildings. One designated for various labs/hardware shops, the other for software. These brand spanking new facilities opened March of 2020… so you see what happened.
Because the efforts of the people working in the hardware/lab building couldn’t be performed from home, they moved in (albeit with a lot of modifications/concessions to the pandemic). The software side sat basically empty.
Towards the end of last year, they started “gently” encouraging us to start coming in to the office. Then it became a lot more forceful. Now there is a mandatory weekly minimum of “days in office”, and the expectation is that will increase. Reception is mixed, half or so (myself included) wanted to continue to WFH full time. The rest were happy to go back full time or hybrid.
During all of this though, while many reasons have been thrown out, an honest reason has also been provided by our leadership:
They “need” to “justify” the building. Employee happiness / productivity / preference be damned, if we don’t have butts in seats, we “wasted” money on the building. Thus, get your butt in a seat.
That’s not really accurate though. There has long been an insistence that under Jobs they didn’t do Market research (which may have changed under Cook), but they have invested heavily in User/Usability research. They hire a lot of UX researchers, and spent quite a bit on this going back to the earliest days before it caught on across the industry.
As for the HQ, it’s hard to know what the goals of the campus were. One could easily conceive of a design that was peak efficiency that had the tradeoff of maximum misery.
Ha, trust me… they haven’t tried to claim that in a while. We’ve seen heavy attrition in my segment with no hiring pipelines or retention strategies, meanwhile we’ve been made acutely aware of stock performance.
There is at least a small segment that genuinely believe that we will be more profitable once everyone is “back in the office”, and the people who won’t return to that are welcome to leave.
^This, right here. The excess noise is chaotic, it breaks my concentration, and my productivity suffers for it. Yet, every time I put earbuds in, one of my 3 phones or Teams rings, or someone wanders around to talk at me. I am measurably more productive working remotely.
This was a humbling lesson for me in WFH as well. I’ve always loved it, but I have a home office and live alone. When I’d see my coworkers in Zoom calls in tiny downtown apartments with multiple screaming kids and a dog swinging from the ceiling fan behind them, I understood why they might miss the office. I missed the office A/C but that’s it.
As for Apple, it does seem like sunk cost fallacy on their fancy campus. They made it such a part of their identity– it’s featured in elaborate drone fly throughs in every single keynote for WWDC and such. For it to sit empty is intolerable for them, I guess?
If they stick to it though, they’re going to have retention problems. I worked for a tech company during the pandemic that wouldn’t commit to WFH long term. They weren’t saying “no”, just “we haven’t decided yet”. We lost six new hire candidates because of that and we were desperate to hire, thus making very competitive offers. But when they’d ask “can I work from home forever?” we were forced to say “we don’t know yet”. They all took other jobs based on that.
Hiring in tech is a huge problem, so this is a big deal. Supply is an order of magnitude below demand so companies need to go to extreme lengths to acquire and retain staff. I saw my last employer do things that would make European companies look like libertarians. Apple is going to feel this one.
Anecdotally, I know one recent grad who successfully negotiated not only their salary but also their position/department within Apple. They’ll be working on-campus, but that’s just because it’s a lab job that can’t be done from home anyhow.
I’m also getting a an uptick in unsolicited job offers ranging from entry level to C-level on LinkedIn because of my tech background. The desperation is amongst employers is real.
I heard this best described as measuring output, not input. This also goes for work hours, etc. Most companies fixate on measuring employee input of hours, presence, etc rather than work output. I suspect this is because measuring input is easier, but everyone who has ever worked in an office knows it doesn’t work. I once worked for a company that mandated 60 hour weeks to hit deadlines. Not officially, since that would be illegal of course. It’s all enforced passive-aggressively with glares, raised eyebrows, and accusations of “not being a team player”. What was the result? Everyone took 2-3 hour lunches and called in “sick” more and more. You can force people to be present. You can’t force them to be creative.
There are a lot more requirements than that in the US. Europe and Canada are much better generally, but working in the US is not the post-apocalyptic hellscape that reading BoingBoing would lead one to believe, either. The main issue is that the benefits are unevenly distributed. If you work in tech, you get everything a European or Canadian does and sometimes more, depending on the company and market conditions. For example, several companies (including one I worked for recently) offer unlimited vacation, even though the legal requirement is a measly 10 days a year. It varies a lot by company though. What’s missing compared to other more enlightened regions is the guaranteed minimums on these things. However it’s not really fair to assume every company only offers the minimums because that’s definitely not the case generally. I think I only worked at one place while I was down there that had the bare minimum on every benefit.
In Apple’s case I think you hit the nail right on it’s head. They are, certainly, an exception to the rule. The engineers and designers would be served by living the use case of their products, to be sure.
This was the kicker for me. My organization is spread across New York state. 90% of my meetings are with people scattered about, and most of my day would continue to be on zoom, with a mask (I’d be the only one…) sitting in a cube. I’m a web dev and screen-sharing is also MUCH more efficient way to share software updates than huddling together or using a projector.
My office is trying to return 100% in-person because our HR infrastructure is run by a large university that considers its remote learning to have been an abject failure. We’re not instructional staff or associated with a campus.
Long story short, I’ve been just not going in since the return to office started about 6 months ago, and don’t plan to. It didn’t help my dedication to the cause that my supervisors didn’t even flinch at last holidays’ case surge, or the current spate of COVID absences turning everyone’s schedules to swiss cheese. I’m pretty much the only person who hasn’t gotten sick. After 14 good years, I’m looking for other opportunities.
Nonsense. Just use the damn technology. Things like Zoom, Slack, Teams, etc are perfectly good meeting and collaboration platforms. Document things in wikis and such. Use email for more asynchronous communication. Hold in person gatherings a couple times a year to build that personal connection if needed.
Much of my team is scattered across the world and has been for over a decade. Many of us didn’t meet face to face for years. We’re still highly productive.
The notion that you have to be physically in the same room with others to effectively collaborate is just old fashioned nonsense. Yes it can take some learning and adjustment but it’s very doable.
The “return to office” push is no doubt driven more by bean counters and managers who want to observe workers and justify their expensive real estate holdings. Not for the benefit of the workers.
