{"id":35779,"date":"2022-05-05T16:55:42","date_gmt":"2022-05-05T20:55:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=35779"},"modified":"2022-08-29T13:40:39","modified_gmt":"2022-08-29T17:40:39","slug":"open-letter-about-apple-remote-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2022\/05\/05\/open-letter-about-apple-remote-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Letter About Apple Remote Work"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stephen Warwick<\/a> (Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

A group of Apple employees has penned an angry letter to the company’s executive team over its office-bound work policy that doesn’t let them work remotely for more than two days a week.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

The group says the most important reason that the hybrid working pilot is bad, is because it sends a bad message to customers:<\/p>\n

We tell all of our customers how great our products are for remote work, yet, we ourselves, cannot use them to work remotely? How can we expect our customers to take that seriously? How can we understand what problems of remote work need solving in our products if we don’t live it?<\/p><\/blockquote>

The same irony was not lost in a March video<\/a> posted by the company touting the benefits of remote working using devices like its best iPhones<\/a>, iPads, and MacBooks for remote collaboration. The film told the story of a group called ‘The Underdogs’ who literally escape “from their evil boss’s clutches.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Apple Together<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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. This siloed structure is part of our culture. It doesn’t take luck to overcome the communication silos and make cross-functional connections that are vital for Apple to function, it takes intentionality. We need to be able to reach out to each other intentionally, and have the chance to do so.<\/p>\n

Slack has made this much easier over the last two years. Yet, you choose to keep us all in separate siloed Slack workspaces and try to prevent us from talking to each other, so software engineers don’t accidentally talk to AppleCare employees, and retail staff don’t accidentally meet hardware engineers.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

And with everyone working “remotely” it was much easier to reach out to colleagues in other offices. For example, a US team member could easily have a meeting with someone from the UK in the morning and meet with someone from Japan a couple hours later in the afternoon. This enabled a kind of international collaboration that we didn’t see before, where especially colleagues from “far away” locations could finally contribute as well as people in our major offices and no longer felt like second-class participants in meetings.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

They make a lot of good points. It’s hard for any of us on the outside to adjudicate how well the previous remote policy worked, and different people and groups probably have different opinions on that. I think the main weakness in the letter’s argument is that it’s framed as “people should get to choose,” but that’s not really possible. 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<\/em> prefers hybrid meetings. There’s no solution that will please everyone.<\/p>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n