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posted by janrinok on Tuesday July 20 2021, @04:43PM   Printer-friendly

Apple employees threaten to quit as company takes hard line stance on remote work:

Apple employees claim the company is not budging on plans to institute a hybrid work model for corporate workers and is in some cases denying work-from-home exceptions, including one accommodation covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act.

In June, Apple announced a hybrid work schedule that will see employees return to the office for three days a week starting in September, a shift toward normal corporate operations after the pandemic forced a lengthy work-from-home period. Days later, participants of what is assumed to be the same remote work advocacy Slack channel cited by The Verge asked more flexibility, saying that working from home brings a number of benefits including greater diversity and inclusion in retention and hiring, tearing down previously existing communication barriers, better work life balance, better integration of existing remote / location-flexible workers, and reduced spread of pathogens.

That request was flatly denied. In a video to employees late last month, SVP of retail and people Deirdre O'Brien toed the company line on remote work policies, saying, "We believe that in-person collaboration is essential to our culture and our future. If we take a moment to reflect on our unbelievable product launches this past year, the products and the launch execution were built upon the base of years of work that we did when we were all together in-person."


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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 20 2021, @05:53PM (13 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 20 2021, @05:53PM (#1158342) Journal
    Free market goes the other way too.

    Apple isn't a charity. Their employees aren't living to work. An actual free market intermediates. It doesn't pick sides.
  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 20 2021, @06:45PM (12 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday July 20 2021, @06:45PM (#1158373)

    The thing is, if enough techies local to Silicon Valley refuse to come in to work, Silicon Valley's only real option is hire remote workers - the industry would have to open their cash hoard very wide to pay relocation and local cost of living for a new batch of drones to fill their cubes.

    --
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    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 20 2021, @09:42PM (8 children)

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 20 2021, @09:42PM (#1158453) Journal

      if enough techies local to Silicon Valley refuse to come in to work, Silicon Valley's only real option is hire remote workers

      Or pay the people who do show up for work. That's a real option too. We'll see what works, and whether telecommuting is a real advantage or not.

      • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 20 2021, @11:42PM (7 children)

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday July 20 2021, @11:42PM (#1158504)

        Or pay the people who do show up for work. That's a real option too.

        I don't know what makes Apple tick. My beehive needs a certain supply of drones or else the whole colony collapses. I think we're turning about $1B/yr in annual sales on the backs of about 1000 drones. You can swap out a hundred drones or so a year and not notice, but when turnover gets too high productivity suffers, and that revenue stream dries up. It's business, if only 500 drones show up next year that's not $100M saved in employment expenses, that's potentially a complete shutdown of the revenue stream, loss of market share, maybe decades to rebuild.

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        • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 21 2021, @03:22AM (6 children)

          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 21 2021, @03:22AM (#1158604) Journal

          It's business, if only 500 drones show up next year that's not $100M saved in employment expenses, that's potentially a complete shutdown of the revenue stream, loss of market share, maybe decades to rebuild.

          Well, if telecommuting doesn't count as "showing up", then it's not going to matter how much it hurts the business.

          • (Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday July 21 2021, @01:18PM (4 children)

            by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday July 21 2021, @01:18PM (#1158735)

            Well, if telecommuting doesn't count as "showing up"

            Well, our local hive survived the pandemic with revenues intact, projects proceeding on schedule, and 100% of R&D working from home for 16 months now. Just because a couple of managers don't like not seeing butts in chairs doesn't mean WFH doesn't generate income for the business. If those managers insist and force the issue, a good chunk of our workers will start WFH with another business helping them to generate their revenues instead.

            So, the question is: what "counts" more, results, or opinions of leadership? In the past it has been the opinions in control, but we just got a demonstration of what happens when those opinions are overridden, and the macro-scale savings for businesses, employees and government funded infrastructure provisioning for working from home are enormous - like a +25% margin at least.

            Picture Octopus man Davy Jones from the Pirates of the Caribbean movie: Do you fear change?

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            • (Score: 0, Flamebait) by khallow on Wednesday July 21 2021, @05:51PM (3 children)

              by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 21 2021, @05:51PM (#1158804) Journal
              Will your local hive survive when it's competing with hives that went back to the old ways? Sure I can see plenty of businesses that could thrive with telecommuting, but nobody has explained why Apple should be one of those. Their resistance to telecommuting indicates otherwise.
              • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday July 21 2021, @06:18PM (2 children)

                by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday July 21 2021, @06:18PM (#1158822)

                Will your local hive survive when it's competing with hives that went back to the old ways?

                Almost certainly. We "innovate" by acquisition, it's not like much (benefit to the company) was going on in the office when we were all there.

                Sure I can see plenty of businesses that could thrive with telecommuting, but nobody has explained why Apple should be one of those.

                I feel a strong kinship between our product lines and the Apple ones. Loyal customers, "best in class" halo on the products, high prices, slow design cycle update rate... after a decade+ on track it's hard to derail the train, but it is possible if you completely de-staff. The big "Apple Innovation" I've noticed in the past couple of years is a magnetically attached auxillary battery lump - doesn't exactly take a room full of stable geniuses to come up with this kind of stuff, pretty sure that could be accomplished on a Zoom call.

                Their resistance to telecommuting indicates otherwise.

                Their resistance indicates the opinions of management - how often do you think these types of opinions reflect accurate facts?

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                🌻🌻 [google.com]
                • (Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Thursday July 22 2021, @01:08AM (1 child)

                  by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday July 22 2021, @01:08AM (#1158978) Journal

                  Their resistance indicates the opinions of management - how often do you think these types of opinions reflect accurate facts?

                  And your resistance indicates the opinion of someone who isn't management. I think we're just at a standard conflict of interest where each wants something. We'll see who gets what they want.

                  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 22 2021, @02:23AM

                    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday July 22 2021, @02:23AM (#1158996)

                    And your resistance indicates the opinion of someone who isn't management.

                    I've been both, and in the 1990s when it was "crunch time" I'd take my work home and accomplish more in 2 weeks than I could accomplish in 3 months in the office - I got other kinds of things done when I was in the office, and for people who do that kind of work they should be there face to face getting those things done. The majority of work that I have done, however, gets done better out of all that, and I believe that applies to large portions of most tech corporations, from R&D to quality to accounting. Sales, marketing and upper management can continue to travel and meet as normal - they'd wither and die without their actual face time.

                    --
                    🌻🌻 [google.com]
          • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday July 21 2021, @01:20PM

            by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday July 21 2021, @01:20PM (#1158736)
    • (Score: 2) by Mykl on Tuesday July 20 2021, @11:01PM (2 children)

      by Mykl (1112) on Tuesday July 20 2021, @11:01PM (#1158491)

      These workers should be careful what they wish for.

      If it does turn out that remote work is "just as good" then there's no reason to hire Silicon Valley locals. Halve the salaries and hire techies in North Dakota or Kentucky. Or perhaps offshore the whole thing?

      We all have our horror stories about work done offshore. I do genuinely believe that there is advantage in physical co-location. What percentage of the week that needs to be remains to be seen.

      • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 20 2021, @11:36PM

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday July 20 2021, @11:36PM (#1158502)

        I have watched offshoring fail miserably for two decades, but it's not so much about the lack of butts in chairs. Different problems with different projects and cultures, and sometimes it works, but it never seems to be strong enough to shut down a whole office the way "Outsourced" portrayed. Our current company is trying to use offshoring for growth. I'm in R&D, so we continue domestic R&D and work with partners offshore for various projects. Maybe some day they'll embarass us in terms of productivity or efficiency or innovation - the way the Chinese did the cellphone industry - but in the things I've been doing for the last 20 years? Nah. Hasn't put any downward pressure on my salary.

        I think the ability to show up in the office is 99% of the battle, actually coming in? As long as my coworkers aren't there, I seem to have a "need" to be in office about 1 day out of 100. Coworkers are actually easier to reach now than they were when they had a desk they were supposed to be at.

        Are Silicon Valley salaries in jeopardy? At this point in my life, I couldn't care less - seems like they should be, but maybe they'll keep splashing out the big bucks and just use it to hire more attractive resumes.

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        🌻🌻 [google.com]
      • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 20 2021, @11:50PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 20 2021, @11:50PM (#1158507)

        Offshore is more than just working remotely, its timezone differences, language barriers, cultural nuances, tax implications, regulatory costs, etc. Yes, hiring from the country side or rural areas within the same region would make sense and that's the point. I'd rather move to the country side even with a pay reduction to match the lowered cost of living and work remotely than having to maintain an inflated cost of living so that I'm as close as possible to an over populated and polluted metropolitan hub.