Apple’s Director of Machine Learning Resigns Due to Return-to-Work Policy

[Tsing]

It appears that Apple employees weren't exaggerating when they threatened to quit over the company's new policies that mandated workers return to in-office work.

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[Grimlakin]

Wow... that's actually pretty big.

 

[Brian_B]

Wow... that's actually pretty big.

IDK, Apple ain't what it used to be. There aren't any cult personalities left over there that keep people around just by their sheer magnetism, nor do they really embody any lofty or noble ideals like they have (arguably) in the past.

Now it's like every other big company - money talks. I'm sure Director (as well as any other fairly high profile position at any successful company) had no shortage of other offers queued up and just decided to jump on one of them. Poaching runs rampant when you have nothing other than your paycheck to feel loyal to.

 

[Dan_D]

It appears that Apple employees weren't exaggerating when they threatened to quit over the company's new policies that mandated workers return to in-office work.

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What an entitled sack of ****.

 

[Endgame]

What an entitled sack of ****.

I don’t know about that. I would quit tomorrow if there was a mandatory return to the office policy. I’m working from home no question. If there is any question at all, it would just be for who am I working for from home.

 

[MadMummy76]

To be fair, I'd instantly do the same if my employer mandated a full time return to work without apt compensation.
Going back to work is a giant loose-loose scenario for both parties.

I loose because:

1. Takeout prices skyrocketed since the start of the pandemic, so my in office meals would cost 2-2.5x as much as it used to be.
2. Gas prices have doubled also, so my commute would cost 2x as much.
3. Despite the above, traffic only got worse, so I'd either have to keep insufferable hours to beat traffic, or loose an extra 30-45 minutes daily in traffic (plus whatever extra fuel consumption that comes with), on top of the already 90 minute commute.
4. When there is no task, I can fiddle around doing something else, whereas at work I'd have to stare at the monitor until the 8 hours are up.

My employer looses because:

1. I'm much more efficient working from home, no distractions, no meetings, no watercooler talk, no 1.5 hour lunch breaks with co-workers.
2. I'm more flexible with work hours, in office you drop everything at 4pm, and don't even think about it until next day in the office. Working from home I'd keep working until 10 11pm when necessary on time sensitive projects.
3. I actually managed to complete tasks that have been put off for years, now that I'm managing my own time.
4. I still go into the office whenever there is something requiring my physical presence, no questions asked.

 

[Niner51]

What an entitled sack of ****.

I don’t know about that. I would quit tomorrow if there was a mandatory return to the office policy. I’m working from home no question. If there is any question at all, it would just be for who am I working for from home.

I agree with both of you here actually. If you can do everything from home for work then I completely understand why you would be upset. On the other hand I see way too many entitled people acting like they don't need to go back to work at the office even though they probably should due to their work demands. Then we have the select few that don't want to work in general.

 

[Zarathustra]

What an entitled sack of ****.

I don’t know about that. I would quit tomorrow if there was a mandatory return to the office policy. I’m working from home no question. If there is any question at all, it would just be for who am I working for from home.

My company told everyone who could work from home to do so 100% from March 2020 until Summer 2021, and then kind of let those who still could work from home do so at their discretion until earlier this year.

Those who had to be on site (to use the lab, etc) were doing so, and the fact that there were fewer people in the office allowed them to maintain better distancing and put up barriers and stuff during the worst of the pandemic.

Now I am being "asked" to work at least a day or two a week in the office.

When we first started working from home, I thought it was going to be an unproductive disaster, but - at least for me - it has been the exact opposite. My productivity level has gone through the roof!

On the one or two days a week I am going in to the office, I can't help but wonder why I am doing it. It is such a colossal waste of time, and I am actually more productive at home, where I am not constantly interrupted. Now, on the days I go in to th eoffice, I am spending a decent chunk of those days in online meetings from my desk, and objectively worse place to do it than my quiet home office. It's rather frustrating.

I haven't considered quitting or anything over these one or two days a week, but if it went 100% or even 3-4 days a week, I might consider doing so. My life and my work performance have both been so much better during the work from home period, that I just don't see myself ever doing "the majority in the office" thing again. I honestly can't even imagine it.

If that were to become work policy, I'd have to do some serious thinking. I kind of like my company, and I believe in our product, and I have a boat load of stock options that might become worth something some day. These are things that keep me in place. At least for now. It depends on how much the frustration would build.

If I were in an industry where I had to be hands on to get **** done, sure, I'd be on site every day, but the pointlessness of it all is what gets to me, when you spend time getting work clothes ready, getting dressed in said work clothes, sitting in rush hour traffic to get to the office, either having to buy lunch or go through the effort to remember to bring something, and then go through rush hour back home again, just to sit in the same remote call meetings, and work on the same documents on screen as I would at home. It is groan-worthy.

Working from home I have my better screen setup at home to work on, I wind up being much more productive, AND I get 3 hours of my day back.

Now that I've had a taste, I'm not sure there is any going back.

 

[Endgame]

Z’s story is similar to my own, only mine started in 2012. My wife got a job offer we couldn’t refuse, so I was moving cross country. When I told My boss at the time that we would be moving, he asked if I would consider working from home instead of leaving. I figured that would ease the transition. So I said yes, not anticipating keeping the job long. Turned out I loved working from home - I saved money and time and ended up turning the time savings into some extra tasks to net a promo. I stayed in that job for 3 more years until a new CIO joined and told everyone that those working from home would need to relocate to 1 of 3 cities to come into the office. I said F that and had a new job offer within 2 weeks. The new offer was for 30% more base pay and they matched all my outstanding unvested stock on top of agreeing to having me work from home full time.

Now that I’ve been working from home this long, I can’t imagine having to go back to the office and deal with all the gossip junk, wasted meeting time, etc.

 

[Brian_B]

I serve grudgingly in a middle management role.

One one hand, with people working for me, they have to go in every day. They don't work in an office; they are down in a plant. When they have something going on, I'm there, very few questions asked. So they never got the option to work from home, not even when everything was locked down. We got papers to put in our trucks identifying us as essential workers in case we ever got stopped. I don't mind going in for this at all, and I don't think my employees do either. Your physical presence serves a critical function - and I think most of my employees realize if we were to automate that presence out, it would also automate out their jobs - which I do not think is worth the cost.

On the other, as a mostly office-based employee. I see pros and cons. Personally, I am more productive. But a lot of the work I do is as part of a team, and that has suffered greatly. Zoom/Teams/whatever just is not the same as sitting down in a conference room with a white board. When anything requires a degree of creativity or has complicated issues that need explanation, I really have a hard time doing those things remotely with my team. But those days when it's mostly just a bunch of phone calls or paperwork, yeah, why waste the time driving to the office - except for free (bad) coffee and I guess I can use the printer all I want?

Fortunately, I suppose, right now my local office consists of our admin assistant, who has to be there to get mail, answer the phone, etc. And me. No one else right now. The rest of our staff all migrated down to our southern office during the pandemic. So... there isn't a lot of difference in At Office and At Home right now regardless. I could go in and sit at my desk, and there are days that I do just so I can get away from the house for a bit, but it's not like there's a bunch of random idiots standing around the water cooler or that one dude who always burns the popcorn in the breakroom distracting me all day long.

 

[serpretetsky]

What an entitled sack of ****.

Why? I don't see it much differently from moving companies for a raise? Here someone is moving companies for working conditions they prefer?

 

[Dan_D]

Why? I don't see it much differently from moving companies for a raise? Here someone is moving companies for working conditions they prefer?

Quitting over a return to the office policy screams of entitlement. Presumably, he wasn't fully work from home prior to the COVID-19 restrictions. It was known that WFH was a temporary solution. If you were fully work from home and then had to return to the office, that would make sense. If you worked from the office full time or part time prior to COVID-19 lock downs, then it makes no sense to bitch about the hybrid model.

 

[Zarathustra]

Quitting over a return to the office policy screams of entitlement. Presumably, he wasn't fully work from home prior to the COVID-19 restrictions. It was known that WFH was a temporary solution. If you were fully work from home and then had to return to the office, that would make sense. If you worked from the office full time or part time prior to COVID-19 lock downs, then it makes no sense to bitch about the hybrid model.

You have no obligation to your employer beyond the 2 week customary notice.

If you find better work conditions that you like better, you are free to move at the drop of the hat.

Better pay, more comfortable work conditions that better meet the needs in your life, better benefits, etc. etc.

Nothing wrong with that.

Most of us never even considered working from home before the pandemic, but now that we've done it, we realize:
a.) How much more time we get back in our lives, which is something that is even more important to many than a higher salary.
b.) How much more productive we can be from home; and
c.) How utterly pointless driving to the office feels after having gotten used to working from home.

Prepping clothes, getting dressed for work, driving 45 minutes in, just to sit in the same Teams/GotoMeeting/WebEx/Zoom/Whatever you were sitting in from home is sigh/eyeroll-worthy.

There are certainly jobs that require being in the office (or on the job site, or whatever) for hands on work, but for stuff that doesn't, being in an office makes absolutely zero sense. And unlike @Brian_B I haven't actually found a problem with remote collaboration. Screen shares have been working excellently for us, and I haven't felt like we have lost anything at all in the process.

I think it was one of those where once you experience how utterly moronic wasting time and effort getting to an office feels after not having to do it for a year or two, it makes it pretty difficult to go back without rolling your eyes for 8 hours a day in the office and wondering what you are doing there. Especially since real-estate is expensive, and the company is paying a ton for office space they absolutely don't need.

 

[Dan_D]

You have no obligation to your employer beyond the 2 week customary notice.

If you find better work conditions that you like better, you are free to move at the drop of the hat.

Better pay, more comfortable work conditions that better meet the needs in your life, better benefits, etc. etc.

Nothing wrong with that.

Most of us never even considered working from home before the pandemic, but now that we've done it, we realize:
a.) How much more time we get back in our lives, which is something that is even more important to many than a higher salary.
b.) How much more productive we can be from home; and
c.) How utterly pointless driving to the office feels after having gotten used to working from home.

Prepping clothes, getting dressed for work, driving 45 minutes in, just to sit in the same Teams/GotoMeeting/WebEx/Zoom/Whatever you were sitting in from home is sigh/eyeroll-worthy.

There are certainly jobs that require being in the office (or on the job site, or whatever) for hands on work, but for stuff that doesn't, being in an office makes absolutely zero sense. And unlike @Brian_B I haven't actually found a problem with remote collaboration. Screen shares have been working excellently for us, and I haven't felt like we have lost anything at all in the process.

I think it was one of those where once you experience how utterly stupid wasting time and effort getting to an office feels after not having to do it for a year or two, it makes it pretty difficult to go back without rolling your eyes for 8 hours a day in the office and wondering what you are doing there. Especially since real-estate is expensive, and the company is paying a ton for office space they absolutely don't need.

I'm not debating work from home versus working from the office. I've done plenty of both, but for the bulk of the last 15 years, I've worked primarily from home. I know all too well how ridiculous commuting to an office is to do things you could just as easily do at home. That's not my point. My point is simply the sense of entitlement some of these people have concerning this. I have no problem with people quitting their job for a better one or for more favorable conditions.

It's just the way this guy comes across basically stating he quit on the sole basis that he was forced to come into the office a couple days a week.

 

[serpretetsky]

Quitting over a return to the office policy screams of entitlement. Presumably, he wasn't fully work from home prior to the COVID-19 restrictions. It was known that WFH was a temporary solution. If you were fully work from home and then had to return to the office, that would make sense. If you worked from the office full time or part time prior to COVID-19 lock downs, then it makes no sense to bitch about the hybrid model.

I guess I just don't see it. Whether he worked from home before or not also seems irrelevant to me. You are in a position where you can get a better job elsewhere at a given moment (regardless if it's better because of pay or certain conditions, this will be a personal opininion). Why would you not go?