And Apple by now has offices all over the world, so it's not like "everybody bumps into each other in Cupertino" is a universally feasible model anyway.
I would say it's a much higher bar to be hired in as a remote worker vs an existing employee moving to being remote because you already whether the employee is productive, fits in the team and has the social connections to be productive.
I have to disagree - this is a common premise that you have to see that someone is productive "in person" first.
But seriously, it doesn't matter if someone is remote or in-person, you won't know how productive they actually will be until after they have been hired.
FWIW, I am an engineering manager at a fully remote org and we have had great success with hiring people and getting them productive from day 1.
I have only seen one person in my org successfully get to work remote in my org, he even got to keep his Cupertino comp for the period of time he worked remote - he had to come back to Cupertino within two years though or he would get let go. Otherwise, I have seen top performers get to work remote anywhere they wanted for a period of time as long as they got their work done (the longest I have heard of someone doing so is one month working from Asia and not in an office). I've done it myself for 3 weeks.
Being a top performer is a lot of hard work though, and you do end up sacrificing work-life balance to some degree, but Apple treats their top performers very well.
Edit: I take that back, I did once have a teammate in a remote office in Europe who only goes into the office there once a week. He does good work though and knows his stuff, and the more remote offices probably have a little more flexibility in some regards due to having to keep to Cupertino hours.
2. Apple has always had some people working remotely but really just depended on what you were doing. You can't design an iPod remotely. But you can build software.
3. Situation is definitely different now as the quality of internet and tooling is such that remote work can be high quality and the feeling of detachment can be managed. So definitely agree that at Apple and elsewhere you will see more remote work.
After speaking to some recruiters recently, the feeling is that everyone will „do remote for the next 3 to 4 months, until pandemic is over” but afterwards „we are looking forward to seeing our colleagues at the offices in X”.
I was just guessing Apple might soften their stance on it a bit, although it sounds from others like that ain't the case (which also doesn't surprise me--Apple gonna Apple).
When you work remote it's assumed you have flexible hours and when people need more or less of your time, they queue it up whenever it's good for them, your freetime and personal life can take the back burner.
I've seen plenty of my coworkers staying late at the office or, just as often, having to login at home to do nights and weekends work. So, whatever line in the sand you think exists for office work is purely imaginary. If they want to extract more hours from you, they'll keep pushing until you say no.
This time of indefinite, could be one month, could be three WFH is kind of a bad demonstration of WFH to a lot of people because it's not worth it to spend too much investing in a good setup.
This is true only insofar as you allow it to be. My coworkers make none of those assumptions about me or my time.
I'm concerned that some companies will take a productivity hit during the covid19 outbreak, and fail to attribute some of that hit to their inexperience / unpreparedness with all-remote teams.
(Edited for tone.)
"Don't generalize, it depends on the team!"
As if that's any excuse. The bad teams get staffed too, not just the good ones. Reorgs happen, managers come and go... even if you get lucky at first, you might not stay lucky.
Probably not worth moving to CA for though.
Where are we actually seeing a lot of this? Particularly for companies where they primarily sell hardware products such as Apple?
But also often it is for the lower lever, just implement this pre-designed and pre-architected feature roles. Most of the decision making and design will get done face to face at the main office.
This model seems to be the standard but it's also toxic and cruel. Even the most independent person will feel isolated and segregated from their peers and the decisions that others ultimately make.
If you want remote to truly work it has to be the Gitlab model. Everyone is remote, every decision is transparent and all corporate knowledge is captured in a single, collaborative handbook.
Anecdotally, yes.
My company was staunchly against remote work or work-from-home of any kind. When I was hired, one of the first things they told me was, "We don't do remote. Don't ask."
It's about 5,000 employees in maybe 20 cities around the country.
When the virus started spreading, 95% of the workforce was working from home within eight business days. It was a massive mobilization by the IT department. Fortunately, they were already in the process of upgrading everyone's computer, so there were plenty of spares to go around.
https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200144575/software-engi...
Pretty much a lot of requirements as a sticks and bricks business since some employment laws are based on where the worker is doing the work from. So the only option is you pack up and move across the country or more likely they’ll find someone else.
Not an HR expert but a company in San Francisco reached out to me unsolicited (I guess since I put some stuff on Github and NPM) but I wanted to give it a try remotely working from home to see if I was good with their tech stack and stuff before committing to moving but was told no. And then that opens up a lot of other questions and stuff too.
All this employment stuff is a mind field it seems, then if your workforce travels to a convention in a neighboring state even could open up issues. Then some states have city taxes, so I guess if your team went somewhere for a day and you still paid them, extra stuff too. Then health insurance too if your company is big enough to require it and can't be sold across state lines. So having a group plan in California is useless, so now you have to get an Ohio plan... and what address do you even use since you don't have an office and someone is working from home?
As things become more remote and global, I wish the states could work together to make things simpler. Seems some states would benefit letting residents work remotely without much burden to the out of state business, as the way now it seems like they’ll lose residents who are encouraged to move elsewhere for work instead. It just sounds like a mess. My idea was if I ever got a big company and let people work from home, I'd also open up offices in a few cities across the country people could commute to or work remotely some days. Make them sorta like an office but also sorta like co-working spaces but for staff only.
I guess though if you decide to contract out stuff, instead of making them an employee though not as big of a burden then. But if you deal with a business that creates an intellectual property, that could cause some problems unless contracts in place. Since contractors still own the IP, unlike a employee where the company automatically owns the IP. However I was reading something after 35 years, they can reclaim their copyright if a contractor but maybe you could have some failback licensing agreement so you could still use it but no longer have exclusive rights if that'd hold up - but this isn't something I've researched too much on personally. So contracting out tech support probably not a issue since not really creating any IP, but if creating assets like 3D models, sounds, music, etc for a game that could be a problem if planning for a long term brand around it, etc. So if that relates to your business, would want to make sure you research and get the right agreements in place before even contracting out asset creation - but personally I'd rather have an employee instead just to be certain to make sure the company owns any code, graphics, etc.
I get why Jobs wanted it that way: the value of hallway conversations and the ability to bounce things off other engineers is invaluable, and until recently it was difficult to make that viable with people flung off in different locations. Moreover, it's really difficult to have most of your team in one location and a few scattered people elsewhere: the people elsewhere just aren't part of the loop in the same way, and it makes things really hard for them.
That said, I'd be surprised if Apple continues with a hard-line stance on that after all of this: I think we're seeing that an awful lot of work that people insisted had to be local can indeed be done effectively from remote.
EDIT: Having read the thread on this one, I apologize for my over-generalization based on anecdote. I work for a company that pushes the ability to remote-work, and the folks I've talked with about working at Apple were all very "yeah, they don't do work-from-home". However, the plural of anecdote is not data. :)