docwallaby

Correct me if my memory is wrong, but wasn’t the S7 a negligible update over the S6? And wasn’t the S5 almost the same as the S4? Apple hasn’t exactly made all that much progress with the S-series System-in-Packages for the Apple Watch in quite a while. Not faulting them, as I am almost totally ignorant of this stuff, but … yeah, it’s not a big surprise that the S8 isn’t going to be much of an improvement, but it also is a little disappointing.

I am of two minds on this issue.

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.