This is going to sound really odd, because I don't ever want to return to an office, but as a Graphic Designer, I don't really need to be in an office to get work done. That said, I get the push back about returning back to the office for Apple Employees, BUT, part of me wonders if the little bugs that popped up in the past year, like the Studio Display webcam, if that would have been caught earlier on if they were in office or how much more would we have seen released with people in office there. I can see software being remotely somewhat, but the hardware teams and the engineers I don't see working remotely helping them. I could be totally wrong about it.
You are exactly right. Software is the same. You work on designs that are independent. Apple software has to interact with hundreds of other applications and hardware devices that are either released or under development. Remote people spread all over the country can’t walk across the building and plug the new studio monitor into their laptop to test the new build of Keynote that uses its webcam during the presentation.
Real reason is people do not want to work at Apple Park because people do not have even a semi private office to work in. Really poor working conditions unless you are in management.
You mean like practically every other company in the world?
Poll sample size issues aside, the genie is out of the bottle w.r.t. working remotely there. Apple has successfully released significant new products, including he whole Apple Silicon lineup, while primarily working from home. These past couple years have rightfully made a lot of people across all manner of industries realize more can be accomplished alongside the added work-life balance remote work provides. Gotta work late? You can still be home for dinner.
The problem is most of these releases were in the final stages after years of development. The quality of many releases took a huge hit...
Apple's software QA started sucking years before the pandemic.
The last macOS I installed at its release was High Sierra. Every macOS version since then I've waited until March-May of the following year to install. I completely skipped Crapalina.
Same with my iDevices, also from before the pandemic. I'm basically six months behind. I'm still running iOS 14.8.1 on two iPhones.
Just weeding out the lame employees. Layoffs possibly incoming. No shortage of people wanting to work for apple.
What *IS* it about commenters feeling like they have to rush to the defense of the most valuable company that ever was and be stridently anti-worker about it? There are tech labor shortages everywhere. Apple hiring is notoriously picky. Sure, people want to work for Apple. But *qualified* people?
Has to do with apple and more to do with people working at an actual job site. What I find ridiculous is the sense of entitlement. Don't want to work in a physical location? Go work for someone else. In the words of the famous philosopher, Mick Jagger, you can't always get what you want.
Real reason is people do not want to work at Apple Park because people do not have even a semi private office to work in. Really poor working conditions unless you are in management.
You are wrong.
Cubicles became normal working conditions in Silicon Valley in the late Eighties and early Nineties. Before the pandemic everyone expected their desk to be in a cubicle in some office building. And this isn't just for Fortune 500 companies like Apple, Cisco, Intel, Nvidia, AMD, whatever. It's the same for that little startup on Castro Street in Mountain View or University Avenue in Palo Alto.
Remember: Intel's Andy Grove (CEO 1987-1998) famously worked in a standard sized cubicle with partitions of normal height. And no, he did not wear noise cancelling headphones. That's how ingrained the cubicle work environment is in Silicon Valley.
The main reasons why Apple employees don't want to return to Apple Park is the commute and the schedule flexibility.
Real reason is people do not want to work at Apple Park because people do not have even a semi private office to work in. Really poor working conditions unless you are in management.
You mean like practically every other company in the world?
Every other company in the world at least gives you a desk to work at. At Apple Park you get a table with 10 other people to collaborate with. A horrible working condition.
Real reason is people do not want to work at Apple Park because people do not have even a semi private office to work in. Really poor working conditions unless you are in management.
You are wrong.
Cubicles became normal working conditions in Silicon Valley in the late Eighties and early Nineties. Before the pandemic everyone expected their desk to be in a cubicle in some office building. And this isn't just for Fortune 500 companies like Apple, Cisco, Intel, Nvidia, AMD, whatever. It's the same for that little startup on Castro Street in Mountain View or University Avenue in Palo Alto.
Remember: Intel CEO Andy Grove (1987-1998) famously worked in a standard sized cubicle with partitions of normal height. And no, he did not work with noise cancelling headphones. That's how ingrained the cubicle work environment is in Silicon Valley.
The main reasons why Apple employees don't want to return to Apple Park is the commute and the schedule flexibility.
At Apple you don't even get a cubicle. You get a table with ten other people at it.
Real reason is people do not want to work at Apple Park because people do not have even a semi private office to work in. Really poor working conditions unless you are in management.
You mean like practically every other company in the world?
Every other company in the world at least gives you a desk to work at. At Apple Park you get a table with 10 other people to collaborate with. A horrible working condition.
And these people accepted the job & did the work there, pre-pandemic. If the working conditions were so bad, why did they continue to work there, and not look for employment elsewhere, complain, etc., pre-pandemic? So it was Ok pre-pandemic, but not now?
Remember that Apple Park opened in 2017, two years before the initial shelter-in-place order. Employees knew what they were getting into. Longtime Apple employees had cubicles when their offices were at One Infinite Loop or one of the nearby buildings.
If they didn't like the communal table concept, they could have quit five years ago.
The best and brightest are often the first to leave as they are the ones with the best opportunities elsewhere. Judging by today's Apple software QA standards it appears many of them did.
Real reason is people do not want to work at Apple Park because people do not have even a semi private office to work in. Really poor working conditions unless you are in management.
You mean like practically every other company in the world?
Every other company in the world at least gives you a desk to work at. At Apple Park you get a table with 10 other people to collaborate with. A horrible working condition.
And these people accepted the job & did the work there, pre-pandemic. If the working conditions were so bad, why did they continue to work there, and not look for employment elsewhere, complain, etc., pre-pandemic? So it was Ok pre-pandemic, but not now?
Real reason is people do not want to work at Apple Park because people do not have even a semi private office to work in. Really poor working conditions unless you are in management.
You mean like practically every other company in the world?
Every other company in the world at least gives you a desk to work at. At Apple Park you get a table with 10 other people to collaborate with. A horrible working condition.
And these people accepted the job & did the work there, pre-pandemic. If the working conditions were so bad, why did they continue to work there, and not look for employment elsewhere, complain, etc., pre-pandemic? So it was Ok pre-pandemic, but not now?
Most did look for work. Why do you think Apple started giving stock grants to valued engineers who they could not afford to lose?
Apple should also think of converting the Apple Park into combination of homeless shelter and museum !
Why? It worked Ok 2+ years pre-pandemic as their headquarter offices. What's wrong with it now that would prevent it from working Ok as their headquarter offices?
Real reason is people do not want to work at Apple Park because people do not have even a semi private office to work in. Really poor working conditions unless you are in management.
You mean like practically every other company in the world?
Every other company in the world at least gives you a desk to work at. At Apple Park you get a table with 10 other people to collaborate with. A horrible working condition.
And these people accepted the job & did the work there, pre-pandemic. If the working conditions were so bad, why did they continue to work there, and not look for employment elsewhere, complain, etc., pre-pandemic? So it was Ok pre-pandemic, but not now?
Real reason is people do not want to work at Apple Park because people do not have even a semi private office to work in. Really poor working conditions unless you are in management.
You mean like practically every other company in the world?
Every other company in the world at least gives you a desk to work at. At Apple Park you get a table with 10 other people to collaborate with. A horrible working condition.
And these people accepted the job & did the work there, pre-pandemic. If the working conditions were so bad, why did they continue to work there, and not look for employment elsewhere, complain, etc., pre-pandemic? So it was Ok pre-pandemic, but not now?
Most did look for work. Why do you think Apple started giving stock grants to valued engineers who they could not afford to lose?
You can't document/prove that Apple started providing stock grants, due to valued engineers not liking the new office arrangements - pulled that straight out of your ARS.
And they agreed to stay and work under the same conditions - must not have been that bad.
Real reason is people do not want to work at Apple Park because people do not have even a semi private office to work in. Really poor working conditions unless you are in management.
You mean like practically every other company in the world?
Every other company in the world at least gives you a desk to work at. At Apple Park you get a table with 10 other people to collaborate with. A horrible working condition.
And these people accepted the job & did the work there, pre-pandemic. If the working conditions were so bad, why did they continue to work there, and not look for employment elsewhere, complain, etc., pre-pandemic? So it was Ok pre-pandemic, but not now?
Real reason is people do not want to work at Apple Park because people do not have even a semi private office to work in. Really poor working conditions unless you are in management.
You mean like practically every other company in the world?
Every other company in the world at least gives you a desk to work at. At Apple Park you get a table with 10 other people to collaborate with. A horrible working condition.
And these people accepted the job & did the work there, pre-pandemic. If the working conditions were so bad, why did they continue to work there, and not look for employment elsewhere, complain, etc., pre-pandemic? So it was Ok pre-pandemic, but not now?
Most did look for work. Why do you think Apple started giving stock grants to valued engineers who they could not afford to lose?
You can't document/prove that Apple started providing stock grants, due to valued engineers not liking the new office arrangements - pulled that straight out of your ARS.
And they agreed to stay and work under the same conditions - must not have been that bad.
No I pulled it out of past articles right here on Appleinsider.
Real reason is people do not want to work at Apple Park because people do not have even a semi private office to work in. Really poor working conditions unless you are in management.
You mean like practically every other company in the world?
Every other company in the world at least gives you a desk to work at. At Apple Park you get a table with 10 other people to collaborate with. A horrible working condition.
And these people accepted the job & did the work there, pre-pandemic. If the working conditions were so bad, why did they continue to work there, and not look for employment elsewhere, complain, etc., pre-pandemic? So it was Ok pre-pandemic, but not now?
Real reason is people do not want to work at Apple Park because people do not have even a semi private office to work in. Really poor working conditions unless you are in management.
You mean like practically every other company in the world?
Every other company in the world at least gives you a desk to work at. At Apple Park you get a table with 10 other people to collaborate with. A horrible working condition.
And these people accepted the job & did the work there, pre-pandemic. If the working conditions were so bad, why did they continue to work there, and not look for employment elsewhere, complain, etc., pre-pandemic? So it was Ok pre-pandemic, but not now?
Most did look for work. Why do you think Apple started giving stock grants to valued engineers who they could not afford to lose?
You can't document/prove that Apple started providing stock grants, due to valued engineers not liking the new office arrangements - pulled that straight out of your ARS.
And they agreed to stay and work under the same conditions - must not have been that bad.
No I pulled it out of past articles right here on Appleinsider.
Link? That states it's because of the new offices?
Real reason is people do not want to work at Apple Park because people do not have even a semi private office to work in. Really poor working conditions unless you are in management.
You are wrong.
Cubicles became normal working conditions in Silicon Valley in the late Eighties and early Nineties. Before the pandemic everyone expected their desk to be in a cubicle in some office building. And this isn't just for Fortune 500 companies like Apple, Cisco, Intel, Nvidia, AMD, whatever. It's the same for that little startup on Castro Street in Mountain View or University Avenue in Palo Alto.
Remember: Intel CEO Andy Grove (1987-1998) famously worked in a standard sized cubicle with partitions of normal height. And no, he did not work with noise cancelling headphones. That's how ingrained the cubicle work environment is in Silicon Valley.
The main reasons why Apple employees don't want to return to Apple Park is the commute and the schedule flexibility.
At Apple you don't even get a cubicle. You get a table with ten other people at it.
I worked an engineering contract at a company a few years ago that moved to a fancy new building that had the “open office” theme. They wanted everyone to keep their desk a certain way. Your keyboard went here and your stapler went there.
Bottom Line is the collaboration idea is bullshit. People need at least a small cubicle that every other employer gives you.
This really should not be an either-or situation.
Would it make you feel better to know that this kind of thing is not exclusive to Apple?
I do believe that I've lived through pretty much all of the "How can we make engineers (and creatives in general) be more productive?" social experiments. Offices with doors? Single Person Cubes? Bullpens (multiple bodies per cube)? Pair Programming (two people working at the same workstation at the same time)? Open Office Plans? Floating Cubes/Offices? Hybrid Inside/Remote? Innies and outies? - just kidding!
It's doubly bad if you work in software development or product development because they'll also layer on "What's the latest software development process that we need to follow this year?" experiments. SEI CMMI? RUP? RAD? XP? Scrum? Agile? SaFe?
Oh, why not also layer on "What is the latest software framework, design strategy, and languages we should use?" Structured Design? OOD, OOP, SOA, C? C++? ObjectiveC? MFC? Java? COM, DCOM, .Net? Swift? SwiftUI? ..... just shoot me!
The last project I worked on adopted the "open office whole team colocated" plan where we all had desks stuffed into the same lime green, royal blue, and soft pink decorated room, kind of like a 1960s typing pool approach but with garish colors, standing desks, and dual/triple monitors which provided some tiny degree of privacy. Yeah, you could see, hear, and smell everything going on in your colleagues lives. Noise cancelling headphones helped with the hearing part, but also created some awkwardness when you realized one of your coworkers had been standing behind you for who knows how long and that warm breeze on the back of your neck was human generated. As some consolation, we had small "teaming rooms" with glass doors where 2-3 people could cram into and talk at high volumes, draw on a whiteboard, and gesticulate, which was entertaining for outside observers. There were also small and somewhat strange looking heavily upholstered chairs with a semicircular curved back on them and a roof kind of thing - a small "cone of silence" sprinkled around the big room that you could retreat to when you wanted some privacy or to escape from your closest roommate after the effects of Taco Tuesday started to set in.
Sorry to say it, but unless you are your own boss in your own little world you're going to be subjected to this kind of churn and turmoil for the rest of your career. It never stops and it exists pretty much everywhere I've worked or visited inside and outside the companies I've worked for, including in the US, Canada, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Switzerland, Japan, Singapore, and China. It kind of goes with the territory at least if you work in tech and product development.
Wait so one person has been with the company for three weeks so they knew about the return-to-office policy and they are complaining? Am I understanding this right? Because it sounds ridiculous.
The level of entitlement these people have is next-level. Imagine what all the millions of people who worked through the entire pandemic think of these snowflakes.
Comments
You mean like practically every other company in the world?
The last macOS I installed at its release was High Sierra. Every macOS version since then I've waited until March-May of the following year to install. I completely skipped Crapalina.
Same with my iDevices, also from before the pandemic. I'm basically six months behind. I'm still running iOS 14.8.1 on two iPhones.
Cubicles became normal working conditions in Silicon Valley in the late Eighties and early Nineties. Before the pandemic everyone expected their desk to be in a cubicle in some office building. And this isn't just for Fortune 500 companies like Apple, Cisco, Intel, Nvidia, AMD, whatever. It's the same for that little startup on Castro Street in Mountain View or University Avenue in Palo Alto.
Remember: Intel's Andy Grove (CEO 1987-1998) famously worked in a standard sized cubicle with partitions of normal height. And no, he did not wear noise cancelling headphones. That's how ingrained the cubicle work environment is in Silicon Valley.
The main reasons why Apple employees don't want to return to Apple Park is the commute and the schedule flexibility.
If they didn't like the communal table concept, they could have quit five years ago.
The best and brightest are often the first to leave as they are the ones with the best opportunities elsewhere. Judging by today's Apple software QA standards it appears many of them did.
And they agreed to stay and work under the same conditions - must not have been that bad.
Would it make you feel better to know that this kind of thing is not exclusive to Apple?
I do believe that I've lived through pretty much all of the "How can we make engineers (and creatives in general) be more productive?" social experiments. Offices with doors? Single Person Cubes? Bullpens (multiple bodies per cube)? Pair Programming (two people working at the same workstation at the same time)? Open Office Plans? Floating Cubes/Offices? Hybrid Inside/Remote? Innies and outies? - just kidding!
It's doubly bad if you work in software development or product development because they'll also layer on "What's the latest software development process that we need to follow this year?" experiments. SEI CMMI? RUP? RAD? XP? Scrum? Agile? SaFe?
Oh, why not also layer on "What is the latest software framework, design strategy, and languages we should use?" Structured Design? OOD, OOP, SOA, C? C++? ObjectiveC? MFC? Java? COM, DCOM, .Net? Swift? SwiftUI? ..... just shoot me!
The last project I worked on adopted the "open office whole team colocated" plan where we all had desks stuffed into the same lime green, royal blue, and soft pink decorated room, kind of like a 1960s typing pool approach but with garish colors, standing desks, and dual/triple monitors which provided some tiny degree of privacy. Yeah, you could see, hear, and smell everything going on in your colleagues lives. Noise cancelling headphones helped with the hearing part, but also created some awkwardness when you realized one of your coworkers had been standing behind you for who knows how long and that warm breeze on the back of your neck was human generated. As some consolation, we had small "teaming rooms" with glass doors where 2-3 people could cram into and talk at high volumes, draw on a whiteboard, and gesticulate, which was entertaining for outside observers. There were also small and somewhat strange looking heavily upholstered chairs with a semicircular curved back on them and a roof kind of thing - a small "cone of silence" sprinkled around the big room that you could retreat to when you wanted some privacy or to escape from your closest roommate after the effects of Taco Tuesday started to set in.
Sorry to say it, but unless you are your own boss in your own little world you're going to be subjected to this kind of churn and turmoil for the rest of your career. It never stops and it exists pretty much everywhere I've worked or visited inside and outside the companies I've worked for, including in the US, Canada, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Switzerland, Japan, Singapore, and China. It kind of goes with the territory at least if you work in tech and product development.
The level of entitlement these people have is next-level. Imagine what all the millions of people who worked through the entire pandemic think of these snowflakes.