rcomeau

Has VMWare announced anything good in the last few years? Seriously, they seem to have gone downhill.

mr lizard said:

The backside of these phones are sure getting ugly. 

Maybe, but the broken glass look that most seem to have on the older phones is also looking bit dated...

Many if us in the business world (e.g. engineering where a few essential apps like Soidworks or Altium are the standard) will pay whatever it takes. While 95% of my apps are macOS (including the app we develop and sell to our customers), some industries are locked into a standard. I'd LOVE a real-world macOS native alternative for Solidworks (including  macOS native Solidworks!), but given reality of the world, this hopefully will be palatable. 

lukas_canji said:

I wonder what is apple's ability to monitor employee performance.

The big issue is that while there are employees who can manage high levels of productivity from home, there are a large cohort that are unproductive and hidden under the current work from home situation. 

I feel that apple must have some way of measuring this difference in output, but are being too polite to just come out and say it.

Plus, from the outside, I think that apple makes what they do look easy. When in actuality the high level of integration between software, hardware, and between devices requires next level coordination between teams that is not sustainable in the work at home world we find ourselves in right now.

The problem is it is hard to quantify the benefits of having a cohesive team. A lot off good ideas that can be the next iPhone come from random conversations that can only happen when people are in the same room. You can never measure the loss of an idea that could have happened but never happened and the metrics that are measurable end up carrying too much weight because they are tangible.

We'll see in a few years time if companies that embraced the work from home do well, or become the latest fad that got a lot of hype but faded away because they missed the next wave while emailing from the kitchen table.

elijahg said:

9secondkox2 said:

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”? 

I suppose it all depends on where the puck is actually going, not where the flavour of the month thinks it is going. We have a ton of hype on WFH but most employers know very well that you can coast for a while with your team working from home, but is is very hard to maintain a good team over the long haul that way. New hires are denied the natural interactions needed to build trust and integrate into the team that old members had before. Creativity and trust go down and team cohesiveness goes down. You can manage for a while, but it is better to be in person and WFH is only a  compromise to keep the peace as much as possible. Inevitably, employees that come in will benefit more than at home employees with more face time with bosses and other team members and they will do better career-wise, so in the long run, a new equilibrium will be reached and those who value WFH more will get what they want, but that will not be the same as those who value in person work more.

I admit this is a sweeping generalization and there are tons of jobs that are perfectly suited for WFH, but generally, not so for teams, particularly when developing hardware where access to physical devices (prototypes, machinery etc...) are needed.