The anti-worker hostility shown here is callous, presumptuous, and generally appalling. None of you have any idea what any of these employees’ lives are like.
The reason Apple wants to force every worker into being on site for a certain percentage of time probably has a lot more to do with making sure their insanely expensive building/campus isn’t sitting empty, because that would be embarrassing for a company that cares a lot about their image.
It’s been noted that people don’t like working there. Open floor plans and glass walls/doors suck for actual humans and productivity. The main building is like the Powermac G4 cube and the trashcan Mac Pro: all form; poorly-considered function.
Then there’s the basic fact that the 40-hour workweek and officespace culture is just plain unhealthy.
Instead of being bitter about what you see as “entitled” employees who should get shit on just the same as you do, maybe think about trying to raise the bar for EVERYONE (which includes yourselves). Stop licking the corporate boot and acting like you’re living vicariously through the boot wearers.
"Anit-worker". LOL. Apple is requiring these workers to only go into the office 3 days a week. Plus, they get two weeks a year of floating WFH. This is a marked change from just 18 months ago
These employees are beyond snowflakes. Pathetic. They need to be let go, for the sake of the company's culture and future success
Then quit. There are many who’d love to replace you.
Complaining about going to work at one of the greatest companies in existence.
Sheesh.
Well no, there aren’t. Apple is struggling to get enough developers, just like every other tech company. And this kind of thing certainly won’t help that situation when other companies offer similar salaries on remote working.
Apple used to be forward thinking, dynamic and “skated to where the puck was going”. But under the mundane profit above all Cook, it has slowly changed into another inflexible generic IBM-esque company. What happened to “the square pegs in the round holes”?
This is simply an extension of the struggle going on between the developed and developing nations.
It's a question of worker and societal well being versus productivity.
What drove the American industrial revolution was workers working 12 hour shifts, 6 days a week in incredibly hard, dangerous jobs for poverty wages while the captains of industry steered the ship that created those jobs. But, they built the American industrial empire that powered us to the top of the heap.
Was that abusive to the workers and to society? Yes!
Was it fair? Hell No!
Did it work to boost and build industry and our nation? Absolutely!
In free market capitalism (which includes competition between both corporations as well as between countries) productivity (both quality and quantity of work at ALL levels) is what separates the winners from the losers.
Elon Musk talks of working 100 hour weeks, sleeping on the factory floor and calling meetings at 1:00am.
Others want a good "work / life balance".
Perhaps the world needs a little of both -- but not too much of either one.
I think I know what Steve's response would be: He prized his "A Players" who were laser focused on creating great products and who didn't want to work with the "B Players".
Let those 20 or so whiners quit. They’ll really show Apple.
Yes, that’s exactly what will happen. And it will continue to be blown up as some major moral failure by Apple by tech blogs. This thread is a honeypot of clicks so it will be kept at the top of tech blog home pages for at least another week. There will be follow-up interviews with the aggrieved employees, crying about how Apple ruined their lives, how evil the company is, and how the government should step in and save them from Apple’s clutches.
The anti-worker hostility shown here is callous, presumptuous, and generally appalling. None of you have any idea what any of these employees’ lives are like.
The reason Apple wants to force every worker into being on site for a certain percentage of time probably has a lot more to do with making sure their insanely expensive building/campus isn’t sitting empty, because that would be embarrassing for a company that cares a lot about their image.
It’s been noted that people don’t like working there. Open floor plans and glass walls/doors suck for actual humans and productivity. The main building is like the Powermac G4 cube and the trashcan Mac Pro: all form; poorly-considered function.
Then there’s the basic fact that the 40-hour workweek and officespace culture is just plain unhealthy.
Instead of being bitter about what you see as “entitled” employees who should get shit on just the same as you do, maybe think about trying to raise the bar for EVERYONE (which includes yourselves). Stop licking the corporate boot and acting like you’re living vicariously through the boot wearers.
Wow. I certainly hope your opinion isn't widespread. It would be cancerous.
Also, I suppose you've been to Apple Park since you commented on it.... I found it a very welcoming environment in which to work. There are many places where employees can run into each other, just like Jobs envisioned. And the amenities are second to none... it's a great place to work. I can't believe our opinions of the same place are so different.
The anti-worker hostility shown here is callous, presumptuous, and generally appalling. None of you have any idea what any of these employees’ lives are like.
The reason Apple wants to force every worker into being on site for a certain percentage of time probably has a lot more to do with making sure their insanely expensive building/campus isn’t sitting empty, because that would be embarrassing for a company that cares a lot about their image.
It’s been noted that people don’t like working there. Open floor plans and glass walls/doors suck for actual humans and productivity. The main building is like the Powermac G4 cube and the trashcan Mac Pro: all form; poorly-considered function.
Then there’s the basic fact that the 40-hour workweek and officespace culture is just plain unhealthy.
Instead of being bitter about what you see as “entitled” employees who should get shit on just the same as you do, maybe think about trying to raise the bar for EVERYONE (which includes yourselves). Stop licking the corporate boot and acting like you’re living vicariously through the boot wearers.
Wow. I certainly hope your opinion isn't widespread. It would be cancerous.
Also, I suppose you've been to Apple Park since you commented on it.... I found it a very welcoming environment in which to work. There are many places where employees can run into each other, just like Jobs envisioned. And the amenities are second to none... it's a great place to work. I can't believe our opinions of the same place are so different.
Marxism IS like a disease, the more you are exposed to it the more likely you will succumb to it. It is frightening to think people believe such stuff, but those people probably find it equally frightening when somebody doesn't. It really is a sad statement as to the direction of this country. It really does sadden me when I read tripe like what dysamoria wrote... and calling wd4fsu bitter is like the pot calling the kettle black.
Then quit. There are many who’d love to replace you.
Complaining about going to work at one of the greatest companies in existence.
Sheesh.
Well no, there aren’t. Apple is struggling to get enough developers, just like every other tech company. And this kind of thing certainly won’t help that situation when other companies offer similar salaries on remote working.
Apple used to be forward thinking, dynamic and “skated to where the puck was going”. But under the mundane profit above all Cook, it has slowly changed into another inflexible generic IBM-esque company. What happened to “the square pegs in the round holes”?
Inflexible? What was the WFH policy prior to the pandemic? Now it’s two days a week.
Working remote creates a gigantic communication barrier like there never was before. Case closed.
I say let them walk. They are not the type of people that should be at Apple with that attitude.
As for remote working, it's an adjustment, but it's perfectly viable. Europe has used the teleworking model for decades before North America caught the bug. and then this pandemic mandated it'
Lots of woke Snowflakes at Apple and all these tech companies. They need to see what other people have to endure to make a living.
From my experience, people using language like this, are the biggest snowflakes, quickest to claim victimhood, and usually projecting onto others their own traits. They're doing it with an air of superiority, too.
What's the functional reason for requiring the employees to come back in the office? This "culture" stuff is all very hand-wavy and lacks clarity of functional requirement. It has not at all been demonstrated that past successes were due to in-person interactions.
Some possible functional reasons to require people to collaborate in the company's space rather than in their own:
1. The ideas they share when in the company's space can be claimed by the company as property.
2. The management can exert physical and social pressure on conformity with management goals and ideas by manipulating the space and how the workers are encouraged and allowed to move, speak, and work within it.
I can't think of a more sure fire way to get congress to look at a company for anti-trust enforcement than to treat its employees like this. This will pretty much guarantee a lot of whistle blowers coming forward to show how Apple says one thing and does another. Also, how do you tell your customers that your tech has awesome security but then not trust it enough to allow your own employees to work remotely? Eat your own dog food!
We have been hearing about the toxic working conditions at Apple for decades. They treat different types of employees with differing levels of respect. It's like a cast system. "Oh no you can't use those bathrooms. Those are for the full time employees not for contractors like you." Even if you are one of the chosen full time employees, can you imagine working at a company like that? Is this one of the reasons why Apple employees don't want to return to work? How about the oppressive levels of security? We learned that in the latest version of MacOS that different groups got different parts of the operating system locked so that they could not see what other engineers were working on. How about that for being treated with distrust by your own company? It goes on and on. Apple has some very serious internal issues to work out.
Lots of woke Snowflakes at Apple and all these tech companies. They need to see what other people have to endure to make a living.
The entitled of today don't seem to be able to look beyond their own little selves, and for that I pity them.
I suppose this is what you get when a generation or two have been deprived of exposure to world history, not to mention the concept of gratitude.
To a large degree I think you are right on. With apologies to the many history teachers out there who try their best, world history as it is taught in American public schools has been an abomination and an afterthought for decades. We are now reaping the fruits of the woeful ignorance of the younger generation in the work force. Spoiled from childhood, they have no concept of the struggles of previous generations and what they had to do to put food on the table.
Most of our history lessons, however, are learned through life experience. And these young individuals at Apple are about to experience, as they say, a “teachable moment.“ Good luck to them.
Can you imagine if today's generation were thrust back into WWII, risking their lives under the most trying, miserable circumstances? An Axis victory would have been assured.
It's doubtful today's entitled generation could even imagine such sacrifice, let alone understand how their abundant freedoms come directly from all that sacrifice made not so long ago.
What a pile of garbage. This could be said by each generation of the generation following it, if you had this kind of attitude. This could probably have been said of the WW2 generation before US entered the war, while US was isolationist, by the generation that fought in WW1. Truth is, each generation will do what it needs to be done, if put on the spot, as they were during WW2. I'd be more worried about entitled brats like yourself, thinking you have the monopoly on sacrifice, and hardships. That's the easiest thing for people to do, thump their chest and call others entitled. When you're sitting in traffic, with nothing to do productive except listen to audiobooks, you can think that time can be spent better. Some people work better from office, some better from home, depending on their personality, position, family situation, location, etc. A sensible company such as Apple should take in consideration all of those things. I hope they will. To me their position is a bit too rigid.
Apple being the Uber Woke company they are should allow work from home for all Office workers. As much as I love Apple products, I am equally disgusted by them drawing lines in the sand on social issues.
I miss the days of companies making products and not marketing the CEOs and boards' social views all while taking advantage of questionable worker situations abroad, lets see how far Apple, Disney, NBA, NFL do peddling this malarky in China or Russia.
Lots of woke Snowflakes at Apple and all these tech companies. They need to see what other people have to endure to make a living.
The entitled of today don't seem to be able to look beyond their own little selves, and for that I pity them.
I suppose this is what you get when a generation or two have been deprived of exposure to world history, not to mention the concept of gratitude.
To a large degree I think you are right on. With apologies to the many history teachers out there who try their best, world history as it is taught in American public schools has been an abomination and an afterthought for decades. We are now reaping the fruits of the woeful ignorance of the younger generation in the work force. Spoiled from childhood, they have no concept of the struggles of previous generations and what they had to do to put food on the table.
Most of our history lessons, however, are learned through life experience. And these young individuals at Apple are about to experience, as they say, a “teachable moment.“ Good luck to them.
Can you imagine if today's generation were thrust back into WWII, risking their lives under the most trying, miserable circumstances? An Axis victory would have been assured.
It's doubtful today's entitled generation could even imagine such sacrifice, let alone understand how their abundant freedoms come directly from all that sacrifice made not so long ago.
You do realize that it is millennials and gen z who make up almost 100% of our active duty military? While you sit on your butt and complain about how entitled they are. That’s almost the exact definition of irony.
ON THE ONE HAND, I empathize with employees who want to have greater flexibility for their working conditions. And there are many, many reasons to want Work From Home, and it’s not because they’re “entitled snowflakes” or because they’re lazy or whatever other reductive derogatory rationale a lot of close-minded people have. It can be an issue of cost-of-living in the area around the campus, it could be about family demands, it could be because they are more effective in a WFH situation, or a lot of other reasons. We have the capability to allow people to succeed and contribute to businesses now that we didn’t have five or ten or twenty years ago, and that kind of flexibility can allow for Apple and other companies to find and retain talent that would otherwise never get hired or end up leaving for greener pastures.
I get that.
Throughout the pandemic, I got to witness this firsthand in my profession. Due to my home situation, I had to physically go into work every day in order to do my job even when the vast majority of my coworkers were entirely virtual, but most of my coworkers were just as effective at home—and made a lot of major changes to their home life in order to accommodate WFH. And some of them weren’t happy with the way my employers approached the return to hybrid work. (Frankly, I didn’t like how my employer handled things, either, but I was already coming in 5 days a week anyway.) So I get it, I really do. And I imagine it sucks to change your life to make WFH work, and realize it works really well for you, and then be told you have to come back in for whatever reason.
ON THE OTHER HAND, Apple is already being flexible and it is the company’s decision how employees should work, not the decision of the workers. The workers get to decide if they want to work for the company; and if they don’t, they are entirely within their rights to quit and do something else. The thing that’s getting lost in the reporting on this is that Apple is already compromising by adopting a hybrid model at all. This minority of employees complaining and threatening to quit are like the mouse in the children’s book If You Give A Mouse A Cookie. They’ve been given the cookie, and now they want some milk. They’ve been given a hybrid model that they didn’t have before. They’ve been given other allowances that they didn’t have before. Apple is giving them something. But that’s not good enough; they want more.
I think the way these employees have handled the situation is pretty bad. It has not helped their cause at all. At the end of the day, Apple is not obligated to listen to them, and they are not obligated to work for Apple. Would it make Apple a better company if they compromised further? Who knows! I mean, it will probably be another 1-3 years before we really see any impact on Apple hardware from the pandemic given the long development cycles. And we can all project our own thoughts on Apple’s upcoming software releases, depending on if we think the updates for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS are good or bad. But at the end of the day, it’s up to Apple’s leadership to decide the right course for the company and then make decisions. And employees are, of course, free to voice what they think about it (in appropriate ways), but if they don’t like it, nobody is forcing them to keep that job.
But leaking to the media in what has clearly been an attempt to get public sentiment on your side to force Apple leadership to change their minds about what really is a compromise from where Apple was pre-pandemic? That’s contemptible. If this hybrid model works, press for more changes and flexibility in the future and bring the data to back it up. But deal with it like mature adults who are being well-compensated in order to do a certain job with certain requirements.
So yeah, as much as I understand where these employees are coming from, they are clearly in the wrong and, to quote my favorite euphemistic “you’re fired” phrasing from WWE, I wish them the best in their future endeavors.
Comments
These employees are beyond snowflakes. Pathetic. They need to be let go, for the sake of the company's culture and future success
Please.
Clickbait.
Also, I suppose you've been to Apple Park since you commented on it.... I found it a very welcoming environment in which to work. There are many places where employees can run into each other, just like Jobs envisioned. And the amenities are second to none... it's a great place to work. I can't believe our opinions of the same place are so different.
I say let them walk. They are not the type of people that should be at Apple with that attitude.
As for remote working, it's an adjustment, but it's perfectly viable. Europe has used the teleworking model for decades before North America caught the bug. and then this pandemic mandated it'
From my experience, people using language like this, are the biggest snowflakes, quickest to claim victimhood, and usually projecting onto others their own traits. They're doing it with an air of superiority, too.
We have been hearing about the toxic working conditions at Apple for decades. They treat different types of employees with differing levels of respect. It's like a cast system. "Oh no you can't use those bathrooms. Those are for the full time employees not for contractors like you." Even if you are one of the chosen full time employees, can you imagine working at a company like that? Is this one of the reasons why Apple employees don't want to return to work? How about the oppressive levels of security? We learned that in the latest version of MacOS that different groups got different parts of the operating system locked so that they could not see what other engineers were working on. How about that for being treated with distrust by your own company? It goes on and on. Apple has some very serious internal issues to work out.
What a pile of garbage. This could be said by each generation of the generation following it, if you had this kind of attitude. This could probably have been said of the WW2 generation before US entered the war, while US was isolationist, by the generation that fought in WW1. Truth is, each generation will do what it needs to be done, if put on the spot, as they were during WW2. I'd be more worried about entitled brats like yourself, thinking you have the monopoly on sacrifice, and hardships. That's the easiest thing for people to do, thump their chest and call others entitled. When you're sitting in traffic, with nothing to do productive except listen to audiobooks, you can think that time can be spent better. Some people work better from office, some better from home, depending on their personality, position, family situation, location, etc. A sensible company such as Apple should take in consideration all of those things. I hope they will. To me their position is a bit too rigid.
I miss the days of companies making products and not marketing the CEOs and boards' social views all while taking advantage of questionable worker situations abroad, lets see how far Apple, Disney, NBA, NFL do peddling this malarky in China or Russia.
ON THE ONE HAND, I empathize with employees who want to have greater flexibility for their working conditions. And there are many, many reasons to want Work From Home, and it’s not because they’re “entitled snowflakes” or because they’re lazy or whatever other reductive derogatory rationale a lot of close-minded people have. It can be an issue of cost-of-living in the area around the campus, it could be about family demands, it could be because they are more effective in a WFH situation, or a lot of other reasons. We have the capability to allow people to succeed and contribute to businesses now that we didn’t have five or ten or twenty years ago, and that kind of flexibility can allow for Apple and other companies to find and retain talent that would otherwise never get hired or end up leaving for greener pastures.
I get that.
Throughout the pandemic, I got to witness this firsthand in my profession. Due to my home situation, I had to physically go into work every day in order to do my job even when the vast majority of my coworkers were entirely virtual, but most of my coworkers were just as effective at home—and made a lot of major changes to their home life in order to accommodate WFH. And some of them weren’t happy with the way my employers approached the return to hybrid work. (Frankly, I didn’t like how my employer handled things, either, but I was already coming in 5 days a week anyway.) So I get it, I really do. And I imagine it sucks to change your life to make WFH work, and realize it works really well for you, and then be told you have to come back in for whatever reason.
ON THE OTHER HAND, Apple is already being flexible and it is the company’s decision how employees should work, not the decision of the workers. The workers get to decide if they want to work for the company; and if they don’t, they are entirely within their rights to quit and do something else. The thing that’s getting lost in the reporting on this is that Apple is already compromising by adopting a hybrid model at all. This minority of employees complaining and threatening to quit are like the mouse in the children’s book If You Give A Mouse A Cookie. They’ve been given the cookie, and now they want some milk. They’ve been given a hybrid model that they didn’t have before. They’ve been given other allowances that they didn’t have before. Apple is giving them something. But that’s not good enough; they want more.
I think the way these employees have handled the situation is pretty bad. It has not helped their cause at all. At the end of the day, Apple is not obligated to listen to them, and they are not obligated to work for Apple. Would it make Apple a better company if they compromised further? Who knows! I mean, it will probably be another 1-3 years before we really see any impact on Apple hardware from the pandemic given the long development cycles. And we can all project our own thoughts on Apple’s upcoming software releases, depending on if we think the updates for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS are good or bad. But at the end of the day, it’s up to Apple’s leadership to decide the right course for the company and then make decisions. And employees are, of course, free to voice what they think about it (in appropriate ways), but if they don’t like it, nobody is forcing them to keep that job.
But leaking to the media in what has clearly been an attempt to get public sentiment on your side to force Apple leadership to change their minds about what really is a compromise from where Apple was pre-pandemic? That’s contemptible. If this hybrid model works, press for more changes and flexibility in the future and bring the data to back it up. But deal with it like mature adults who are being well-compensated in order to do a certain job with certain requirements.
So yeah, as much as I understand where these employees are coming from, they are clearly in the wrong and, to quote my favorite euphemistic “you’re fired” phrasing from WWE, I wish them the best in their future endeavors.