Some Apple employees prefer to continue the COVID-19 work protocol — doing it from a spare bedroom — even as Apple brass wants them back at the spaceship office complex in Cupertino. A note from an anonymous employee indicates that Apple’s super-sensitive leadership may be using the same old-time manipulation techniques used by less progressive firms.
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39 replies on “COVID-19 Fallout: Apple Staff Want to Work from a Spare Bedroom Rather than a Spaceship Office”
I do not care for working from home. I find significantly greater opportunities for collaboration and creativity when I am rubbing elbows with my colleagues in an office throughout the day.
It depends upon the terms under which the individual was hired. If you were hired with the expectation that you would work at the office, you shouldn’t have any expectation of getting to work from home. If you are a new hire, you might be able to negotiate working from home.
If they need a new name for that building, they can call it “The One Ring.”
I’m working from home trying to make a Minecraft mod…. @#$%^& its still not working!
The real problem is that the lower half of the staff can’t afford the real estate within 2 or 3 hours of Cupertino and Silicon Valley. It is simply unaffordable on the wages that they are paid. Many have moved away from Cupertino and Santa Clara Valley and are working from those homes. People were warned there was a shortage of housing in the area. There are some cheap suburbs in the area but they are seen as unsafe or have no internet. Several people pointed this out in articles in major journals and magazines when the spaceship office complex in Cupertino was announced. The lower end of the programmer pay range does not cover the rent in California.
I agree with Steve’s wife Melissa. I get far more done at home than in the office. Lucky for me, I’ve been working from home for the last five years. And I still haven’t met my boss in person — emails, phone calls and texting only!
I know how Apple and any companies that wealthy and forward-looking could entice people to come back to working onsite. And not only that, but attract new employees to replace those who don’t want to come in to the office and work.
I’m not going to describe that because Apple (and Microsoft, and etc.) steals ideas and doesn’t pay for them. Any Apple or other large corporation person of responsibility that reads this can PM me and we’ll arrange a fee agreement. Then I’ll tell you and we’ll both be happy.
Most people aren’t going to be entrepreneurs, most people don’t want to be entrepreneurs. I wish this right wing talking point would die because it is so out of touch. Another is, stop bringing up the Iphone as an example for everything. It was like 3 guys that made a multibillion company and it didn’t take off until about 30 years had passed. How many people out there have created a product like that? I would say that the country was built on a handful of entrepreneurs and mostly manufacturing base. That all moved out of the country and you goofs tell everyone to learn to code. You can tell Bill is frustrated.
I think when Scott mentions the country was built on small business, he is thinking of the time of the colonies and early part of the country, before the industrial revolution changed quite a bit. Even so, we then, and still do, have a very large number of small businesses.
Not everyone will, nor can be, their own boss running their own company, but with the information age connecting everyone to everyone, people that had small hobbies that made them no money but joy, can now sell their items to others for both money and joy.
I personally suspect we will be in a transition period for 50 years or more, though with the pace of change ever increasing that might not last 5. The largest companies though have inertia and people habits and mindsets do as well. As Bill pointed out, a visionary can only see so far, and someone like Jobs still was thinking in the last age while trying to look past the boundary into the next.
The learn to code epithets I think are part of the elitism of the left and those that think certain people are behind the times. Not everyone should need to code much less learn how. Once someone makes a Facebook Marketplace, everyone else can use it as a tool to make money doing whatever else they can. It will just take us a while to fully transition from an industrial, assembly line mindset society into an ad hoc, gig based one. I suppose this could be an extension of the Just-in-time concepts they talked about in another RA.
Considering that 99.9% of businesses (out of a total of 28.7 million firms) in the U.S. are small businesses and those small businesses comprise nearly half (47.5%) of all jobs* … I respectfully disagree with that premise. This country was not only built on small businesses, it relies today on small businesses for a large portion of our continuing economic vitality. Small business is essential and irreplaceable.
*These numbers are according to the U.S. Dept. of Labor and the U.S. Small Business Administration.
Pew research says, as of 2019, that there were 157 million workers in the U.S. Bizjournal states there are 32 million businesses in the U.S. That right there shows that there are almost 5 times more workers than employers and of that 32 million that includes small businesses with a few employees to mega corporations that employ thousand. Apple has high job numbers, yes, but a lot of their employees are working in factories in China or are working minimum wage or close to minimum wage in Apple stores across the country. Not a lot of engineers, marketers, developers compared to the populous.
Plus there are people who, like you say, do it as a hobby but it isn’t their primary source of income.
Also the learn to code meme has picked up on the internet because it is ridiculous to think that everyone can learn how to program. Ironically that seems based on a progressive concept that we are all the same intelligence and ability. Not to mention age. To just pick up coding even when you are past 40 is much more difficult than when you are 30 or younger.
People like Tucker Carlson have a much more realistic view of what America and Americans want and like. I respect Bill Whittle so much but when he starts in with these tired and failed talking points he really seems out of touch. Scott is just totally clueless. Steve is a libertarian so that speaks for itself, but I still respect him.
Being an entrepreneur on the scale of the late Steve Jobs isn’t the same thing as being an entrepreneurial small business owner. Steve Jobs started out as a small business owner but what came after that is the exception not the rule. Most entrepreneurs never get to that scale but that doesn’t make entrepreneurship an “out of touch right wing talking point”.
It also doesn’t mean that someone can never be the next Steve Jobs, the possibility is always there but if you don’t play you can’t win.
There are a lot of small businesses. In fact 99.9% of all businesses in the U.S. are small businesses. ‘Small business’ is generally defined as having 500 employees or less and businesses with less than 100 workers employ the largest share of working Americans.
Nearly all small businesses at some point were entrepreneurial ventures. Someone somewhere organized those businesses and assumed the risk for doing so. That’s the definition of “entrepreneur”.
Obviously entrepreneurship on any scale is a very positive and ubiquitous thing in America making up the most businesses and the largest class of employers. This is something to be encouraged.
Going by the numbers it’s clear that owning a small business is well within reach of any hardworking, reasonably intelligent American. You may not end up the head of a billion dollar company but you can certainly make a good living that way.
(BTW – Apple didn’t take 30 years to “take off” either, it was profitable from shortly after production lines fired up. Apples products were and still are on the upper side of mediocre offerings but their marketing and business strategies are text book worthy as examples of how to succeed even so. Apple continued to build on that profit and profitability, it did not languish in red ink for 30 years and then all-of-a-sudden explode into a money making company. Apple was quite profitable well before the advent of the iPhone and iPad. The iPhone and iPad became possible because Apple’s previous successes paid for the R&D, startup and manufacturing costs of them.)
If you don’t want to be a business owner, that’s your call and that’s fine. It’s a lot of hard work and a lot of long hours. When everyone else has clocked out and gone home there are a lot of times you’re still working. A business owner is often putting in double the hours you employees are. When someone calls in sick you’re either juggling to fill the hole that day or you’re doing your job and theirs at the same time. Other people take two week vacations and that will be rare for you if it ever happens. Even when you can get away, you’re still working because those employees will call you wherever you are — Either because they need something only you can do or because they don’t want to take responsibility for something and want to put that monkey on your back.
There’s a lot more and as a semi-retired small business owner I know every bit of it. Remember that most of us who have owned a business have also at some point worked as an employee at someone else’s business too. The percentage of people who have owned a successful business and were not employees is a much, much smaller number.
Running a business is a headache a lot of the time. There are rewards that offset the downsides but I can see why you’d rather just clock in (or take your salary) and not worry about the actual operations end of a business. But …
That doesn’t make anyone “goofs” and it certainly doesn’t “make this right wing talking point out of touch”. The numbers show quite clearly that it’s anything but out of touch and it seems to me that whether you’re a small business operator or an employee of either a small or large business this should all be fairly clear to you.
If it doesn’t pertain to you, then it doesn’t. If you, like many, would rather be an employee than an employer then talk about entrepreneurship doesn’t apply to you. That doesn’t mean it’s not a valid point so … Eat the meat and toss the bone.
It’s clearly white privilege … no matter what color the complainant is. Yes, they’ve actually made this argument possible by virtue of some of their previous arguments.
At the office: 09:00: You done with that? 10:00: Gonna finish today? 11:00: hows it going on your project? 1:00: Where are you at on that now? 2:00: Getting late. You gonna finish? Etc.
At home: 09:00 ………………………….. Done.
I’ve worked factor work, automotive maintenance, supervision, aviation maintenance. In every one the fewer management in the area, the more production got done, quicker, less errors, happier.
And in the 90s Managers and Supervisors were trained in MBWA. Even in engineering management. Make sure you know what people are working on and talk to them morning and afternoon.
How about I leave people alone and let them work? No one needs me looking over their shoulder when working on a design or completing a BOM.
if parents were smart (mostly mothers as fathers are now back benched by the ten’s of millions) they would dump k12.
So Apple has this enormous, mostly empty building that has, among other things, private rooms, a cafeteria, bathrooms, probably a gym, showers, and its own park. Someone page Gavin Newsome, I think we just found a place to put some of the homeless that CA produces so readily.
Lots of homeless in that area.
So Apple is stuck with a billion-dollar-plus white elephant. Not to worry. They’ll simply build the cost into their future products, which will be eagerly snapped up by all the lemming-like souls who crowd around the doors of their stores in the middle of the night, eager to be the first to own the next generation of overpriced iPhone or whatever.
My sister was the DBA (Data Base Administrator), the top person in charge of keeping up the database at a large defense contractor for decades. She was telecommuting long, long before COVID was ever heard of.
She worked in an office on site when she and her husband decided that if they didn’t have a kid now they never would. So she went to her boss(es) after she became pregnant and said, more or less –
“I’m going to be a mother to my child, I’m not going to outsource parenting just so I can keep this job. That means I’m going to be a stay-at-home Mom. You have two choices. Either I quit or I telecommute and work from home. Choose wisely.”
To be fair, she knew she had them over a barrel, at least somewhat. Because there was no one else in the world that could do her job without major expense, a training lag of significant duration, and the serious and likely risk of downtime on a mission critical database. Database goes down, clients don’t get their deliveries, bad scene for the company.
So her boss(es) agreed to telecommuting. They offloaded some of her assigned work that didn’t have to be done by her to lesser minions, pared down her job description to only things directly related to the database, cut her salaried hours to just enough to keep her benefits and she accepted a cut in pay commensurate with the new situation.
From pre-pregnancy to post maternity leave implementation everything was planned and there was plenty of time to implement the plans.
This all worked out great for everyone as it turned out.
The company had to develop a “work at home” policy as a contingency for similar occasions in the future. Some really smart people developed the system that was later to become the default for that company.
My sister saved a huge chunk of her own money by not having to commute an hour each way every day. Savings in time, fuel and vehicle maintenance were all very significant. The company paid for a high-speed internet connection and VOIP phone line, then let her “bundle” other services if she paid the difference. That was also a major savings and there were other things like not having to buy lunch every day etc.. On top of that had she continued to work onsite there would have been the huge expense and headache of childcare/daycare. At the end of the day she took home and kept more money than she got on full time working in an office on site.
The company would in the process of this development in telecommuting designate a block of several adjacent offices on site where when someone had to come in for some reason they could just plug in, log on and go to work at a dock with their own company issued laptop.
There were no security breaches or other IT related threats that resulted from the telecommuting program.
With COVID the company already had a system in place to allow telecommuting by workers who could do their jobs offsite from home. All they had to do was expand it to meet the need.
Over time, the company saved a pile of money as more people opted for telecommuting and took a pay cut, even though most of them were like my sister and saw a net gain in their income.
This savings made the company more competitive and grew the bottom line. Wage increases in the form of raises continued at their previous rate and parameters but because the company was making more money it was able to expand proportionately and hire more people.
The major disadvantage turned out to be IT support. If someone had a problem with their equipment or networking they were not on site where they could call IT support, a support ticket created and a tech dispatched immediately. However, this was also an advantage because the IT support staff didn’t need to be as big to cover onsite tech issues either. Some, not all but some, of the tech support could be done remotely too. So there were techs that telecommuted also. More savings.
When and where it can work, and with people who can manage their own time efficiently, telecommuting is the way to go. This only applies in situations where telecommuting is mutually beneficial to both employer and employee and to the kind of person who can work responsibly where ever they might be.
Obviously not everyone can telecommute. A restaurant waiter or an assembly line worker (or more often now a robotics technician) have to be physically present at their work site. The increase in productivity, thinning out of rush hour traffic, and many other benefits argue for telecommuting where telecommuting is the best option.
The inertia of the older system whereby management absolutely could not get past the idea of people working from home has been greatly reduced in the last couple years. This may be the one very most positive outcome of the COVID-19 situation.
Working from home poses another set of interesting problems that a lot of folks don’t even consider. If most folks are working from home, what happens to commercial real estate values? Business property taxes? Are a portion of your 401K or other investments tied up in business property development? What happens there when the buildings sit virtually empty for long periods of time?
I think the shift for many office workers will eventually be to work from home full time, but there’s going to need to be a lot of creative thinking going into what to do with those abandoned buildings and the revenue they generated.
Loved this discussion. My boss doesn’t want to come back to the office, and I’m in a situation where I’ve learned to work with pretty much the same efficiency either way. But, that’s because I have my own office with a door at the office, and people seldom interrupt me. I found great value in each of your opinions on the topic!
Similar issue however now, due to “boss” not being at work, instead I am now fielding all incoming calls, actual action items, maintaining daily needs of location, the go to for delivery of hard copy items, continually being asked if other employee’s have shown up. The IT for all the needs from anyone and everyone including the “boss”. Absolutely no back up or direct contact for any issues/assistance. I know you are saying what about zoom… well the issue becomes you have to schedule meeting for the future and the issues are right now….
Yes, working in an office can have interruptions, it is a needed part of the system. Ignoring or letting others forget you exist/work/have value is self defeating. In other words if nobody sees you work are you needed or even why give raises. The loss of one on one contact and networking weakens the bonds and shrinks the understanding of the bigger picture. Mentorship will definitely be thing of the past.
All the while, I still have the work of two people (actual two positions (1) unfilled for 1.5 years now and only been filled for 1 year total in 6 years time) needing to be done and requirements for supervisors to be involved.
I don’t want or desire the supervisor position, have turned it down twice before. All I am saying is this system is not flowing, instead it is likely to cause even more outsourcing of jobs to foreign markets if we lose the personal direct contact side.
you’re being played by your ‘boss’…..big time.
The large multi-national for whom I work has gone through an amazing change in the past 18 months. Prior to the must work from home order from the CEO, I was working on several projects. One had my working with “co-workers” in Ireland and the other with “co-worker / clients” in China. Having to be in the office between 8 and 5 meant that either – I did much of that collaboration through email, or one end or the other had to have early morning, late night calls. Somedays were 14 hours. I had broached the idea of working from home somedays so that I could more easily interface and was told emphatically NO!.
Then magically, I must work from home and that’s all good. Now, the company is evaluating who actually has to be at the office. One of the points that has been emphasized by the bean counters is 9 figure savings in travel. (Did I mention it’s a big company?) Now there are 3 categories: Must be at work / hybrid (at work some, at home some) / MUST work from home.
I am told that I fall into the middle ground and that 3 days in / 2 at home each week is desired. For all the same reasons, I will renegotiate that. I suspect that my boss and I will start at 2 in / 3 home and end with 1 in / 4 home as the same worldwide logistics still apply and we are adding other folks in Japan and Korea with whom I will need to collaborate.
The only advantage of my being at work is the one that I find disadvantageous (much like Steve’s wife): people can interrupt me with questions. Now, people can contact me through other interfaces and those chats are less frequent and quicker. If I need to talk to someone in China, I do it when convenient for both of us. The company gets more time from me, and I don’t feel bad about posting on this site during the day.
I’m essentially in the same boat. I currently work on a project with people from 4 different time zones. With the connectivity of Zoom and Microsoft Teams, there is now an expectation from colleagues in India that I be available at any time of the day, which is obviously not sustainable. But, they all seem to do it. I’ve never had to wait more than a few minutes for a response even though they are 9 hours time difference from me and so their normal work day barely overlaps with mine.
Yep, I don’t mind doing what is best most of the time. As long as I get some flexibility on the other end of things. If I am on a call with someone in china until after 11pm, don’t expect me to “clock in” at 8 just to show the world I exist at a desk. When I need to be at the office, that’s fine. But we have proven what is “needed”.
I’m also in the same boat as you, Ron, but a much smaller co. 140 employees which used to come to work every morning in 1 building on the Central Coast of California. I, too, have those 7pm pacific time zoom meetings with associates in Asia. Loved working from home! However, I also run a test lab at the brick and mortar HQ, inside where I build, break, measure and rebuild products. Wuhan flu put a damper on lab activities for a long time. Now I’m itchin to get back into the lab and get back to ‘doing instead of talking about ‘doing’. Of course, my commute is rare. 6 min to work without traffic, so I can see why those who have 1 or 2 hour commutes each way, each day, might feel that “at home” is much better than “at the office”.
I wouldn’t mind one work from home day a week, but I just do better getting out of the house and going to work.
I do all my work at home. Of course I’m retired, living in Ecuador, and spend most of my productive time listening the Bill Whittle and Steven Crowder. It is a problem though when I need to do something with the government here or get certain service for my car. So I guess the answer is: It’s okay for me but not for thee.
Isn’t “Apple Park” designed much like the Pentagon?
The majority of my work can be done remotely, so I continue to do so. However, I need to go to the office periodically to satisfy those in-person requirements. Now, I am also obligated to comply with mandatory (at the point of the “gun” called “disciplinary action”, which is a euphemism for termination) COVID-19 testing with an apparent frequency of 3 weeks. What I find appalling about all of this is my employer’s invasion into my personal space without any room for negotiation.
It seems that my employers did not get the second memo — the first was remote working is possibly more cost effective, and the second is that the damned CCP Virus is not as dangerous as the power-craving fear mongers claim.
What has evolved is the result of lawyers covering their collective butts and spineless managers caving to their demands.
Lawyers, and vultures, gotta eat too … I’d argue that the vultures are the more beneficial of the two.
Not only are the vultures more beneficial, they are also prettier. I’d prefer the former would just learn to starve to death and save the world.
Until you need a lawyer
Thankfully my customer is located a few hours away and is fine with staying on telework once the Cough Cough ends. Under normal circumstances, as a govt. contractor, my mantra has always been that our first job is being in our customer’s faces so they know we’re there to support them.
That changed when Litttle Bob’s school decided to hold their kids & parents hostage by going virtual for most of the year & only going back to two days in person since March. If they pull this s*** again in the fall (and I believe they’ll find an excuse to move the goalposts since the teachers like working from home) we’ll be moving. At least finding a new job won’t be one of my worries if this comes to pass
Steve, that was a terrible take on the Don Corleone analogy. You’re assuming that the author of that note identifies as a man
I am working from home and have been told by my boss that I almost certainly not need to come into work until I retire and have to turn in my computer. I have 4 dogs that I need to walk (or just let out) every so often, and I still am more productive at home. Actually have fewer interruptions. And as an introvert, boy, am I happier here! That is probably part of it. I also save wear and tear on my car and gas money.