Apple's Director of Machine Learning exits over return-to-office policy
Apple's director of machine learning, Ian Goodfellow, has resigned from the company after three years, in part due to the iPhone maker's policies about returning to work in offices.
The machine learning lead is leaving over three years after he joined Apple, as part of Apple's bid to increase its existing AI and machine learning technologies development. In an email to staff, Goodfellow confirmed the imminent departure.
While the official reasons for leaving are unknown, Goodfellow did let on that the policy change by Apple to get more people working from its offices was an issue. "I believe strongly that more flexibility would have been the best policy for my team," Goodfellow wrote in the note according to Zoe Schiffer of The Verge.
Goodfellow joined Apple in March 2019, according to his LinkedIn profile, as the "Director of Machine Learning in the Special Projects Group." The profile has yet to be updated with the departure.
Previously, Goodfellow worked for Google as a senior staff research scientist. He is also known for his work on Generative Adversarial Networks, or GANs, which put two competing neural networks against each other, so as to improve the accuracy of the systems.
The policy at issue had Apple setting staff to work at its various offices from April 11 onward, starting with a hybrid work schedule of one day per week in the office and gradually increasing the in-office days over time.
Not all Apple employees are keen to proceed with the plan. One survey of a small number of employees found a high proportion were actively looking for employment elsewhere, with the return-to-office policy, the possibility of COVID infections, a toxic company culture, and a lack of a work-life balance cited as reasons for the need to move on.
Read on AppleInsider
The machine learning lead is leaving over three years after he joined Apple, as part of Apple's bid to increase its existing AI and machine learning technologies development. In an email to staff, Goodfellow confirmed the imminent departure.
While the official reasons for leaving are unknown, Goodfellow did let on that the policy change by Apple to get more people working from its offices was an issue. "I believe strongly that more flexibility would have been the best policy for my team," Goodfellow wrote in the note according to Zoe Schiffer of The Verge.
Goodfellow joined Apple in March 2019, according to his LinkedIn profile, as the "Director of Machine Learning in the Special Projects Group." The profile has yet to be updated with the departure.
Previously, Goodfellow worked for Google as a senior staff research scientist. He is also known for his work on Generative Adversarial Networks, or GANs, which put two competing neural networks against each other, so as to improve the accuracy of the systems.
The policy at issue had Apple setting staff to work at its various offices from April 11 onward, starting with a hybrid work schedule of one day per week in the office and gradually increasing the in-office days over time.
Not all Apple employees are keen to proceed with the plan. One survey of a small number of employees found a high proportion were actively looking for employment elsewhere, with the return-to-office policy, the possibility of COVID infections, a toxic company culture, and a lack of a work-life balance cited as reasons for the need to move on.
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
seems to me perhaps apple (and business in general) doesn’t trust their employees integrity much. Maybe it’s time to let go of that extremely outdated work ethic. I think we’re seeing the American workforce has had a taste of what a real “work/life balance,” actually looks like and they really like it. Good for company moral and good for employee production and ultimately good for the company.
*I believe Apple will soon need to respond more fluidly/pragmatically to the rise in covid. In just a few days perhaps, Goodfellow's WFH rationale may be moot.
in addition, have seen a number of people who used to work in office are now more out of shape and put on weight.
My workplace team has largely RTW by default, but i make it quite easy to WFH whenever necessary or convenient. It works well. But my teams are members of the laptop class. Service industry and retail it never was an option. Permanent WFH is not a solution, particularly for team building, accountability and training the next generation. It is suboptimal to train someone remotely. It takes three years after graduation for someone to be useful as it is.
In any workplace, there would be those whose productivity rises with WFH, and those you know are slacking off. Just the saving from the commute for Type As means more output, and they probably end up working longer too. But if I am brutally honest, that is not the case for most people, and WFH is harder to track and manage. Overall though I suspect loss of productivity in the long run, after it has already flatlined for years.
Nothing lost.
Surprised they haven’t done this.
They are not saying that everyone will be chained to their desks 40 hours a week starting from April 11. They are stipulating 1 day per week with an undisclosed schedule that increases required physical presence over time. Nowhere do they state that all employees will be required for in-person office work exclusively.
Apple's overall approach to the pandemic has actually been closely in step with Santa Clara County (SCC) public health policy which was the very first county in the USA to issue a shelter-in-place order in March 2020 (courtesy of SCC public health officer Dr. Sara Cody). Apple has implemented pretty rigorous testing procedures for those who do show up to work in person, at their corporate campuses as well as their retail locations.
In fact, their retail store operations probably gives them a fair amount of data about virus transmission and infection rates from a controlled group of identifiable individuals.
Even in its corporate locations, Apple has always had personnel on the premises throughout the pandemic. From SCC's very first shelter-in-place order, there were always exemptions for "mission critical" staff like corporate IT, network admins in server rooms, plant operations, security, shipping and receiving, maintenance, etc. Again Apple probably has pretty good data on infection rates both before and after vaccines became readily available (May 2021).
For sure Apple executives and employees have been in countless discussions about in-person attendance concerning their own children in schools. A lot of Apple corporate employees have children who attend private school; those institutions have often taken a different path than the public school system.
And it's also worth noting that the general attitude of residents of Santa Clara County have taken the pandemic threat quite seriously compared to many other places elsewhere in the USA.
There are still tons of people who mask up in Santa Clara County to this day, even outdoors where the risk of infection is virtually non-existent. Bob Wachter (chair of the department of medicine at UCSF) says he hasn't worn a mask outdoors since the earliest days of the pandemic; Wachter has however returned to wearing a mask in some indoor public situations with the recent uptick in coronavirus infections (mostly driven by BA.2).
While no government mask mandate exists for businesses, there are still plenty of workers in the hospitality industry who are wearing masks in SCC. Does the average restaurant server have a better chance dying in an auto accident on US-101? Yes, but the mask hurts no one. And yes, Santa Clara County residents have a very high vaccination rate.
My guess is that this Goodfellow chap wasn't happy at Apple regardless and took this opportunity to make a theatrically bombastic exit as wait for more of his RSUs to vest. That's his prerogative, California is an at-will employment state.
SCC publishes the updated 7-day rolling average of new infections on weekdays somewhere between 2-4pm Pacific Time.
https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/home.aspx
Yes, infections have increased but not at a crazy rate. However, the SCC data is mostly restricted to PCR results from labs and there's less official testing happening. A lot of analysis is being done at wastewater treatment plants looking for increases in community infection that is only being tested at home. The wastewater treatment plant in Palo Alto is probably a good barometer for infection trends for Apple corporate employees compared to a plant that serves more lower income neighborhoods.
It's worth pointing out that vaccine rates (by ZIP code) in West Valley (Palo Alto, Mountain View, Los Altos, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, Saratoga) are considerably higher than lower income ZIP codes in the same county. Likewise infection rates, hospitalizations and fatalities are also much lower. And always have been since the pandemic started.
Apple isn't going to make their Apple Park return-to-work decisions based on statewide or nationwide statistics.
For people whose work strongly benefits from in-person sessions, regular office time is valuable. For myself, now, I hate soulless open plan offices, yet my company loves them. Every meeting I have is with people who are based in corporate offices in other cities, countries, and frequently different time zones. For us, prior to Covid, we were already effectively working remotely; we just also had a commute to a lousy environment to do it. Turns out that dropping the commute just meant we all got more time for sleep, hobbies, spouses, and family. The nature of the work remained unchanged.
And how will they do this? Maybe they should raze Apple Park and build a bunch of 1 BD/1 BA 700 sq. ft. condos? And then consolidate the headquarters into one 50,000 sq. ft. building in Barstow. Well they better hurry before Alphabet, Meta, Intel, Nvidia, AMD get the same idea.
But I'm eager to hear what sort of "solutions" you have to offer.