Open Letter About Apple Remote Work

"If anyone can choose to be remote, that prevents the rest of their team from being able to choose to work (with them) in person. I don’t think anyone prefers hybrid meetings."

I work for a company where people get to choose, and the concern you raise here has turned out to be a complete non-issue. The primary reason people want to go back to the office is not that they want to have meetings in person. They want to go back because they don't enjoy being alone all day, but instead enjoy being in an office with other people. They like taking coffee breaks and going for lunch with their work friends, and having random Nerf battles.

All of our meetings are online, but we do offer multiple ways for people who are in offices to join. They can use a shared meeting room where all local meeting participants can go. It has a projector and a room microphone, so they can all join the meeting as a party. We also have soundproof phone booths that people can use. In reality, 99% of people in offices just put on a headset and join from their normal workplace.

I should also add that, as the letter points out, purely local meetings already did not exist before the pandemic for all but the smallest companies. Every company of any size above maybe two dozen people has multiple offices across different locations, external contributors, clients that are involved in meetings, people who are sick (but still want to join a meeting) or need to look after a kid at home for a day, and so on. For many companies, office-local meetings did not exist before the pandemic, and they won't exist after the pandemic, and forcing people back into the office won't change that one bit.

Do you really have Nerf battles in the office?

Sounds like a nightmare.

@Kristoffer: presumably the Nerf battles are fully consentual, and they're not randomly sniping unwilling bystanders.

"Sounds like a nightmare."

No, it's fantastic, because the people who want to go to the office are generally also people who want to participate in Nerf battles. And since I don't have to go to the office, everybody wins.

"they're not randomly sniping unwilling bystanders."

Not intentionally. But also, the office is huge, so people know where the Nerf zone is, and don't sit there if they don't want to end up as collateral damage.

I hope more people behave like Ian. The neoliberal ideology that people are indistinguishable "resources", cogs in a machine, is difficult for many people to combat. However, those who have a track record of inventing things others didn't, can make the point much more forcefully. No, we are not cogs. Each of us is unique, and deserving of humane treatment.

As someone who finds working in an office to be challenging (interruptions means I end up waiting until everyone else leaves to actually do my work), I have very little sympathy for the "serendipity" which helps those who know little and constantly "need" help but not those who don't constantly need help but instead need quiet space to think. To me, their so called "serendipity" means "opportunity to turn everyone into a cog, rather than reward competence".

> In your first email titled “Returning to our Offices”, you talk about “the serendipity that comes from bumping into colleagues” when everyone is in the same place. Except we are not all in one place. We don’t have just one office, we have many. And often, our functional organizations have their own office buildings, in which employees from other orgs cannot work.

Yup.

I think that serendipity is real, and can lead to results that are hard to replicate in asynchronous communication. But let's not pretend the old status quo was that everyone ran into everyone else.

>They want to go back because they don't enjoy being alone all day, but instead enjoy being in an office with other people. They like taking coffee breaks and going for lunch with their work friends, and having random Nerf battles.

Yup.

(Foosball table, in our case.)

> What is also required for creativity and excellent work for many of us is time for deep thought. But being in an office often does not enable this, especially not many of our newer offices, with their open floor plans, which make it hard to concentrate on anything for an extended amount of time.

Yup.

You'd think a computer company would understand that a lot of engineering requires peace and quiet more than anything else. It doesn't even really require much machinery. Shower thoughts are real; some of the greatest insights happen in an environment completely devoid of distractions.

Me, I sometimes like working from home in long stretches. And sometimes I like spending a day working with a dozen other people. Chatting, whiteboarding, eating lunch. Then focusing again.

>I should also add that, as the letter points out, purely local meetings already did not exist before the pandemic for all but the smallest companies.

This. And even those small companies have phone calls with customers. All the same arguments apply there: sometimes, adding video to the call makes it better. Sometimes, adding screen sharing does. Sometimes, it would work best if it were local. Sometimes, the opposite is the case: just fire of an e-mail or make a ticket and let the engineers get to the issue when they can.

But that obviously adds a lot of cost and latency, so until we have Star Trek teleportation, we pick the right medium for the right time. Not everything should be or needs to be synchronous, but yes, asynchronous also isn't always the best option.

Apple was already facing a problem of attrition before this policy, and they're only making it worse. They're being stubborn, and it's about to hurt them.