These companies touting their solutions for creating a more connected world can't have it both ways. Apple was able to ship the M1 and roll out new iterations of many other offerings since the pandemic hit. They're just fine.
Apple didn't collapse since the pandemic hit, and the flexibility offered by remote work is far more valuable to lots of people than the loss of in-person collaboration opportunities. We deserve to have input into how we work best and if that means walking away from companies run by egomaniacs that need to see butts in seats, then so be it.
Not to undermine your point, wich which i agree wholeheartedly, but I wanted to address one thing.
I imagine quite a lot of people who worked on M1 hardware probably still had to show up to the office. For some positions it is just required. A friend of mine who worked on hardware at Apple had to go to the office almost every day throughout the pandemic (and no, i dont know what product he worked on, and I am not going to ask given the whole thing with apple being extremely secretive). So clearly, there are certain scenarios for certain positions which might require the person to work in the office.
However, to support your point, that director of ML in the article had been working remote for the past 2 years just fine. So clearly he wasn't in the same position as my friend, and that director's position didn't really have a need for him to be in the office. Which is why imo it was silly to lose him just because of such an unnecessarily arbitrary rule.
Typically the positions for which work is "just required" are lab and hardware positions. These don't tend to have the shoulder-to-shoulder squeeze of humans and desks that I always see in open-plan offices.
Any time I have worked in a lab or on electronic hardware, I have had around 10 times the amount of personal space compared to the tightly packed "collaborative" open-plan offices that consist of programmers sitting at desks with monitors with their headphones on and desperately trying to focus.
I'd be much more enthusiastic about returning to the office if I had a private office with a door, Fog Creek style.
I had an office with a door and window for 12 years at 2 different companies. It was great. I left the door open 90% of the time but it was great to be able to close the door for privacy the other 10%.
I changed to a much better job in 2019 regarding work and salary but everyone including the VP's are in cubicles. It is really annoying when everyone around you is on a different conference call and you have to block them out while trying to have your own conference call.
I only had to deal with that for 6 months before the pandemic sent us all home for 2 years. We are supposed to be in the office 3 times a week for the last 2 months. Some days I go in and immediately get annoyed by all the people talking loudly on their own meetings. I eat lunch and I just go home and work from there.
I look around on the days we are supposed to show up and about 1/3 actually show up. They are trying to entice us back with free lunch once a week but the food isn't even good. The company is doing well but the rest of the industry is doing great too so we have a retention problem. I don't think any of the managers really want to say "You have to be in 3 days a week" because they fear it will cause more people to leave.
I would really love to have an office with a door again but working from home is the next best thing. I like having my meetings with speakers and a speakerphone rather than headphones and a mic at my mouth.
Same lunch thing over here. I do enjoy meeting my team for lunch. But it's not any easier for me to get work done in the office and the theoretical face to face collaboration doesn't quite seem to happen. We've offices in a bunch of countries anyways and are pretty distributed in my project.
I'm an engineering manager and some of my fellow managers seem to feel very strongly about wanting people to come to the office despite 2+ years of evidence that we can work remotely. It's tough because everyone is different. Some people might benefit from the ritual of coming into the office, the additional social connections, and to some degree the peer pressure. Some people are very effective working from home. Some people live close by, some people live far away.
We have a lot of space in our offices and lots of meeting rooms so no real noise issues or feeling cramped. If I had my own space with a door and a 5 minute commute then I'd probably go more often but I have neither...
Hard to say where we go from here. I do think having the team in physical proximity has advantages for collaboration. But the other pieces to take advantage of that have to be in place as well. I've done some of my best work while working physically closing with others but I've also had some of the worst distraction heavy environments where I got little done. As long as companies are just optimizing for cost per employee then maybe they should just sell their office buildings...
So recognisable. In our office everyone is on international teams so everyone is side by side on different calls. It's a mess.
It was like this before covid but our company took advantage to reduce the number of floors and make all the office space hotdesks. So now I sit beside colleagues I don't even know and it's even harder to talk about noise.
Yeah, 75% of my team on the current and previous projects are in other parts of the US. We just had a massive reorg to make it more flexible to assign free people to projects around the world.
The CEO and senior VP's have said that we work better when we can see each other in person. At other companies I have really enjoyed brainstorming in a conference room around a white board or solving problems together.
But after this reorg we are going to have even LESS projects together as a local team. My response to my immediate manager was "Sure but then assign people to projects from the same office." It makes no sense to say "come in to work together" and then put us on even MORE remote projects.
A few of the managers also have people working on the project in Israel and India. The managers are constantly on the phone including 7am and 9pm meetings for the foreign offices. I'm glad I don't have to do that but why tell them to come in the office? They are already disrupting their personal lives for the company with those meeting times but it does make sense to make it convenient for the people in India when there are 10 people from India and only one from the US on the call.
I'm glad they are paying us well but the logic of this is idiotic.
I sometimes think that some Managers, and even primary founders, have such ungratifing gratifying social lives outside of work; They need the social bonding, and drama, that goes on in certain work settings
Kinda like my last girlfriend. I honestly felt if she didn't have an office to go to, and couldn't boss around someone beneath her in the organization around, gossip, and socialize; she couldn't sleep well.
Yea, if she couldn't make someone at work miserable--what's the point of it all?
She didn't even care about the money, it was an ego thing that I will never understand. That Bad Boss attitude who get things done. That, "Dam I'm good!" attitude.
This is not about her gender. I have met more than a few guys with the same flaw. I just didn't go home with them. I've had way to many bosses that loved the office "family".
I don't know how many times I heard we are a family here. Under my breath--I mutter, ya the Manson Family.
I get the social part, but why make everone miserable by dragging them into the office, especially if things get done at home?
I usually liked all by co-workers, and even enjoyed their company outside of work. I was single though.
Covid proved many positions could could be done at home.
If I had the power, I would offer financial benefits to companies that kept employees home.
Working from home, if you can do it, should be celebrated.
And I won't even get started on the rediculious commutes we did for the past 100 plus years. I've know guys who commuted 3-4 hours a day.
If global warming is a problem wouldn't those in power want us at home instead of driving. But dude--we have electric cars? Most of us won't be able to afford one for years, and even then. Most electricity is still not carbon neutral.
I think onsite working can be nice but the problem is that it is really hard to find a company that doesn't try to cram you into an open plan office with at least half a dozen people.
I can't do any real work like that. Before COVID, I was going to the office to talk to people, attend meetings and do chores, whereas I did real work at home. It was unsustainable, as work ended up filling 80+ hours per week.
> it is really hard to find a company that doesn't try to cram you into an open plan office with at least half a dozen people
exactly
I'd be fine to go into the office but don't be under the illusion I'm going to accept materially worse working conditions in order to do it. I guess it isn't the same for everyone, but my home office is a very high bar to beat and it makes a real difference to my productivity and mental well being to be there.
I'm with you there, it just happens not to be the same with everyone.
Some folks have very complicated home situations, living with family they don't get along with, living with roommates that are fun, loud, and work for competitors, living with boyfriend/girlfriend that they're having a falling out with, etc.
Some folks have demons of their own that they can't deal with without social pressure. People with alcohol abuse problems for example, since nobody can smell your breath on videoconference, might have trouble not day drinking when they're at home with their stash all day.
Finally and perhaps most importantly, it is a very different experience for kids coming out of college or very fresh in the industry not to have any folks they can easily turn to for advice they'd otherwise have gotten from work colleagues. Work advice, career advice, life in the city kind of advice, you name it - especially if you moved cities or countries for your career, the workplace is a really important factor in helping you get settled.
I'm not saying on balance these would tilt things in favor of working from home or the office, but I'd encourage you to ask around coworkers how they feel in order to get a sense of what other situations might be like.
It's an interesting aspect of the whole situation that many people currently are in living arrangements that they may never have planned if they thought remote working was on the cards. We definitely have to be sensitive to those that have highly adverse circumstances, especially where that translates to being yet another form of discrimination or reinforcement of privilege.
Going forward I can see this being quite transformative for society in general as people seek out living arrangements that favor WFH as it becomes normalised. I feel like housing that offers segregated spaces for work and living etc are going to be highly prioritised.
You would think that the people in charge would see that real estate is an unnecessary expense, where applicable.
Also, I've been to a lot of meetings where we were told "there are other things people value in work besides money". Maybe being able to manage your own work environment and save gas and time fits in that slot. A content, well rested workforce would be better IMO than one that's frazzled and is getting less out of their employment than they know is possible.
I'm at the age where I see Time as more valuable than anything, really.
> You would think that the people in charge would see that real estate is an unnecessary expense, where applicable.
Some real estate is a sunk cost, and the execs doubling down on it. Apple and Google both dropped 2 or 3 billion combined on fancy new offices just before the pandemic. You can’t sell those buildings, their too big, and they’re not subdivided well enough to rent out parts of them, so everyone comes back to work
Apple's HQ campus is an interesting one because it's only a small percentage of their employees that actually work there. I imagine if they downsized their silicon valley properties down to infinite loop and the ring building, they'd still be able to easily fill them up with people who like working onsite, conference rooms, meeting spaces, labs, etc.
I am not personally aware but I do remember hearing they had office spaces all over the place because they don't have enough room on the main campuses for all of the employees.
Eng manager here. Honestly not everyone is sold on remote being better much less equivalent in productivity or output compared to being in an office. Remote also requires a lot of rethinking of team dynamics, work allocation and just plain old making sure stuff is done. Make no mistake, WFH may be arguably better and more pleasant from the employee perspective, but it makes projects more difficult for the rest of the company.
Yeah we're not all amazing managers that can make it work and sometimes we do need butts in seats. But also a lot of times, the ICs are slackers, loafing around, lying on tickets, getting bogged down and not speaking up, some need pair programming, some get lonely, some get emotional and miss their team, some have bad home lives and office setups.
But yeah sure, blaming it all on evil companies and their supposed sunk cost fallacy investments into real estate is the easy answer, so let's do that.
> Eng manager here. Honestly not everyone is sold on remote being better much less equivalent in productivity or output compared to being in an office.
Ad an IC, I would have potentially believed this if the past two years where everyone was working from home wasn’t anything but unbridled success for the tech industry. Companies literally can’t hire us fast enough right now, and yet there are really still some managers out there wondering about productivity and output? How about looking at the big picture?
> But also a lot of times, the ICs are slackers, loafing around, lying on tickets, getting bogged down and not speaking up
Again, this is purely about controlling others. If your IC is not performant, there are ways of addressing that like adults with performance and goal reviews, improvement plans, mentoring, etc. Requiring them to come in so they have adult supervision makes me chuckle. Are managers supposed to be like daycare supervisors of children or something?
And I’m not trying to rail on you personally, maybe I’m more triggered by my own management, but this whole post reads to me like such typical management speak of “we tried nothing and we are all out of ideas”
If by the tech industry you're including startups, then those all firms with money due to future expectations of success, not actual success.
Then you've got firms like Apple, Google and Microsoft with so much financial momentum they could lose half their employees tomorrow and their quarterly results would go massively up.
The cases where WFH matters are all the firms in the middle. Non tech firms, for example. Firms that are mature, but which don't mint money hand over fist.
I've worked from home for years and it works fine for me, but I also have a friend who's a senior tech exec at a non-tech firm. Sometimes he invites me round for BBQs on a workday, where he is "working" but no actual work gets done. Sometimes he naps in the afternoon. My brother is a tech executive at a software firm, his work consists of a few meetings a day and the rest of the time he chills, takes care of his kid or works on side projects.
For the employee? It's great. For the employer? Yes, you can view it purely transactionally, as in "we pay you for results" but in reality contracts aren't worded that way because it's impossible to write down in an understandable and conflict-free manner. So people are always being paid for time spent, and they then don't implement their side of the contract whilst expecting the firm to do theirs. It's tough, I don't know what the answer is, but to not see the employer's side of the story isn't right.
There are a limited number of times you can have coffee in an afternoon. The counterfactual here isn't machine-like productivity but rather, not sleeping when you're being paid to do work.
>>"Are managers supposed to be like daycare supervisors of children or something?"
I mean... Yes, sometimes? Coding skill and emotional intelligence don't necessarily have an embedded linear relationship :D. But more seriously, a lot of team members need anything from emotional support to soft skill coaching to nurturing and encouragement etc. But that again to me is orthogonal to the remote vs office. I can be a daycare supervisor to an adult remotely if need be :).
Can you elaborate? I hear this line of thinking a lot, but never explained fully. In particular, what about being in same office helps with unproductive ICs? E. G. you mention tickets - it's not by being in the office that I will notice tickets aging or not being tackled efficiently. Fully recognizing the slacking instinct, I don't see being in office addressing it effectively. You don't stare at any given person's screen 8hrs a day.
(other issues such as social and emotional preferences are also valid but I feel separate and may hash out either way).
This was exactly my problem pre-covid. Just couldn't focus at office and end up doing most of the core work from home in the evenings. It was very unsustainable.
I agree with your comments. As far as I know the work flow software and PDKs used for by the foundries (I know this is true for at least global foundries) has essentially unlimited liability (e.g. for "leaking") , so they often are running on dedicated computers even fenced off from the network. I find it hard to imagine they let hardware engineers take it home.
When I worked on drivers for a datacenter managed switch, we had hardware (sometimes prototypes) to work with, and would often have to swap hardware out, wire up network cards in some way, attach a traffic generator, etc. It was borderline of if I needed to be there on most days, but we had people in the lab doing rework, so some people definitely needed to be there.
There's a ton of lab work, reverse engineering, validation, prototyping, measurement, the list goes on forever. CAD and simulation are just the beginning.
It depends. Some fabless chip design work could be done at home. A dept I worked at did everything in simulation. But another dept did prototyping on FPGAs and would have at struggled -everyone would at least have had to take home a board
> We deserve to have input into how we work best and if that means walking away from companies run by egomaniacs that need to see butts in seats, then so be it.
The logical conclusion of this line of thinking is to organize your coworkers. You have much more bargaining power about your work conditions as an organized union. The history of unionization stems primarily from workers demanding safe working environments.
You have much more bargaining power, yes. But you’ll also be bargaining as part of a group that includes Joe Useless, who sits in the next cubicle over and ostensibly fulfills the same role as you.
The company may be happy to give you a 10% raise, but they’d rather lower JU’s salary by 10%, so they won’t budge on your demands for an increase, since it’d also apply to him.
The company doesn't want to give anyone a raise. They are not happy to give anyone a raise. Companies do not willingly increase their costs, full stop.
You could maybe make an argument that companies may increase wages for high performers for retention reasons, because needing to replace valuable employees is a large, if somewhat intangible cost, but that's pretty iffy. Companies are made up of and managed by humans, who are notoriously short-sighted and willing to discount potential risks when there are financial incentives to do so.
50% of the time Joe Useless makes more than you do already, because they joined later and market rate for the position shifted upward. You'll still need to fight tooth and nail, alone, individually, to reach parity, even if you're a top performer. Your manager isn't usually going to say "hmm, we're paying Joe Useless 1.2X, while we're paying Sally Superlative 1.0X--we really should pay Sally 2.0X! Your manager will be overruled by the CFO if they do suggest this anyway. Large wage increases based on expertise happen because you're able to better sell yourself to _another_ company when changing jobs.
Ultimately, I'd prefer a system where Joe Useless and I fight for equal wage increases collectively, because the balance of power is such that we're more likely to get them than each of us going it alone. Joe Useless is gonna be there anyway unless the company decides they're so useless as to fire them. So long as Joe Useless is there in the same role as I am, I don't care if they get equal pay, especially not if they're helping in the fight for increases in our equal pay.
> Large wage increases based on expertise happen because you're able to better sell yourself to _another_ company when changing jobs.
In that case, instead of banding together with Joe Useless to strong-arm the company into setting money on fire (from management's perspective), you're better off changing companies as frequently as the market will tolerate.
False dichotomy. You can do both, and an industry-wide effort to exercise our collective power would likely increase the salaries obtained via either route.
The problem is that you are more likely to get a wage increase. Not a wage increase that moves the needle for you individually.
I love seeing the “union fought for years, after many strikes employees ‘win’ and get a 5% wage increase over the next 4 years” news articles, but they never strike me as something that I’d want to apply to me.
Certainly my company is increasing wages for high performers. They may not be happy to do so, but they’ll do it to retain talent they desperately need.
I imagine this would be different if the sector I was in was different, but right now, for software development, it doesn’t make any sense to me. There’s too much variation in skill levels to collectively bargain for anything.
> You have much more bargaining power, yes. But you’ll also be bargaining as part of a group that includes Joe Useless, who sits in the next cubicle over and ostensibly fulfills the same role as you.
What if you're the Joe Useless on your team and you don't know it? A lot of people here seem to think they're the 10X dude but what if they're the 0.1X dude lol. What if you're really the 10X dude but your manager thinks you're the 0.1X dude because they don't like you as a person?
Those systems have good and bad sides to them, but I do think the good outweighs the bad.
I think the 0.1X guys (though I wouldn't use that term) tend to not be here as work is just work for them, not a hobby they are absorbed in at all hours.
Not saying that's healthy but I'm sure being on HN has a strong selection bias on 10X people :)
I've worked with many people with varying degrees of competence and I find that the "go out and satisfy your curiosity" is strictly an above average thing.
The average people tend to rely more on courses and certificates, anything approved by the vendor. And they tend to align with the vendor's gospel. If something is not in the training or documentation it doesn't exist. They are the kind of people that will just open a ticket when something doesn't work and go through the hoops for months :)
The really good ones don't really care about such things and just dive into a problem until they thoroughly understand it using any trip of resources necessary (ideally peer to peer info because official info, from the vendor tends to be politically/marketing biased). I would definitely put HN in the latter category.
But I don't think they are useless. The former are really good in operational roles and the latter more in design and architectural ones.
Those that want to rewrite everything in the cool tech of the day, or want to TDD everything or write Electron applications work maybe not at 0.1x but certainly 0.5x of the ability of a normal programmer.
> The company may be happy to give you a 10% raise, but they’d rather lower JU’s salary by 10%, so they won’t budge on your demands for an increase, since it’d also apply to him.
Then don't organize the union to work like that. A union is an agreement for the workers to pool their negotiating power, not an agreement for any particular pay structure.
> A union is an agreement for the workers to pool their negotiating power, not an agreement for any particular pay structure.
Are you a member of any union? the #1 thing they do is secure a collective bargaining agreement which precisely spells out the pay structure for everyone covered.
You have options choose a pay structure as a union. There is not a single pay structure to which all unions must adhere.
The suggestion is that Joe and Sally must be paid the same even though Joe is "useless". That is not the case. When creating a union, you can choose a different pay structure. The Screen Actors Guild, for instance, has very wide variation in how much members are paid.
The free-rider problem applies to basically any system with cohorts. It's part of the incentive structure, for sure, but it's not the only part. As long as you accept utility in collective systems (ie if you're anything but a pure anarcho-capitalist), you recognize that in some cases (such as public roads) the value outweigh the costs of the free-rider problems. Once you're past that point, it should be all about tradeoffs and execution. Yet, in the US at least, a strict set of specific issues – like organizing employees and health insurance – brings out the free-rider issue every time, conveniently deadlocking the conversation before it even begins.
I have noticed in the US more than anywhere else I've lived, the most important thing to everyone seems to be that no one gets anything unfairly. I've noticed more with Conservatives because of the noise they make about things like welfare freeriders, election fraud etc, but i imagine it applies to Liberals as well when talking about other issues.
People seem to genuinely prefer letting poor people starve over accidently giving a less-poor person free food. I find it extremely frustrating.
It’s a perennial wedge issue in American politics. These wedge issues ultimately benefit the two party system at the expense of the governed, as the underlying issues are never resolved, just papered over for a term or so.
It's a strange attitude, to be sure. In my experience, many Americans have the view of "if it's not perfect, it's not worth doing" when it comes to large-scale social or legal concepts. It's like they don't accept that there's going to be inefficiencies in any large organization.
And, yes, so many rail against something like single-payer healthcare because it would be "unfair" for them to pay for someone else's care, when they already are doing the exact same thing as part of private healthcare! Not to mention it would be cheaper, but paying $5,000 for single payer is seen as evil when people are paying $10,000 for private healthcare! (both figures are simply illustrative and not intended to be factual examples, before anyone rips my head off)
The private healthcare insurance industry is a private coverage holders’ Potemkin village prisoners’ dilemma, holding uninsured potential free riders hostage to prevent a sunk cost fallacy from becoming a self fulfilling prophesy of the insureds’ own design.
> I've noticed more with Conservatives because of the noise they make about things like welfare freeriders, election fraud etc, but i imagine it applies to Liberals as well when talking about other issues.
It's a big generalization to say that, because one side of an ideological divide behaves one way, the other side must, too! I think rather the Democrats (we don't really have a Liberal party) are a party that takes some tentative steps in the direction that it's better for everyone to have something, even if there are some people who don't deserve it; that is, that the malady you diagnose is a Republican, not an American, preoccupation.
Of course you can look back in history and find instances where Democrats have embraced such positions, too, and you can find plenty of odious things even in today's Democratic platform, but I think that today's Democratic party is consciously, if very slowly, trying to distance itself from exactly the mindset that you describe. But maybe I'm blinding myself to this behaviour in an attempt to justify my adherence to the lesser of two evils. Do you have examples?
I'm not saying that everyone must behave the same way, I'm saying that capital L Liberals here are not really that different from capital C Conservatives in any way except degree. Both would rank as lowercase c conservative compared to most of the rest of the West and both have this mindset that I have only really noticed in America.
I specifically am not using Republican and Democrat because the parties are not really important to the point. Libertarians and Greens also have this "imperfection is worse than nothing" mindset.
An example where Liberals needed to relax and not let perfect be the enemy of the good was the 2016 presidential election (and almost 2020 as well). The number of people who said things like, "I know Trump might win if I don't vote for Hillary, but too bad!" was so high that it actually happened.
That's true. The point I was trying to make is that everyone-but-ancaps implicitly support at least one collective system. I just picked that one because it's rare.
This is strangely individualist; maybe the company or your team would fall apart without him and he's doing something you don't personally know how to measure.
Or just to do what he did. Ian Goodfellow and probably all his team will have no problem finding another job in the condition they want. Apple don't have any monopole on AI jobs.
Your biggest power, the option of resigning to work somewhere else, is still with you. You just get backup from the union for when you don't want to exercise that power.
Well, since the original question before we got distracted was about flexibility in how you work, you definitely give that up as part of a union. Your collective agreement will spell out how, when and where you work, how much you get paid and also compel you do to things in support of the union, even if you don't agree with them. Those are all pretty big individual powers.
Since we're on the topic of remote, why do you think the union agreement would not state location of work being 'member's preference' rather than a specific location?
The problem with this question is there are people, like me, for whom the answer is "a lot". I have repeatedly gotten my employer to do things for me that they would not have done on their own. They need me more than I need them, and we both know it.
This is also by the way the main dissenting opinion in the recent Amazon union vote. There were several people who were interviewed by the economist as voting no, who said that they'd never had a bad interaction with HR and had gotten everything that they asked for.
This is not the one-sided issue that pro-union activists act like it is, and that level of ignorance is what is holding them back.
Say, for sake of argument, that I'm the World's Greatest Widget Engineer. I'm worth more than the average employee at my company, so I can get stuff I want by negotiating individually with my employer.
On the other hand, if a union imposes some broad agreement on the company under threat of strikes, I can't convince my company to break that agreement on my own because I'm not more valuable than the entire rest of the company combined.
A union's interests are probably not completely aligned with mine—they're focused on protecting the majority of employees, who are probably not as valuable as me—so forming a union could very easily lead to me getting less of the things I want. For example, if a union convinced a company to pay/promote based on seniority rather than performance, that could be good for most of the people in the union but bad for me.
This feels a little contrived. I work for an organisation with trade union representation and yes there is an agreed pay structure in place. This doesn't prevent management identifying particularly critical people and those people being rewarded/incentivised outside the norms of the pay scales (I am one of these people). Sometimes specific cases are discussed in the management/union meetings but not often and even then it's just a matter of management saying "Yeah that guy is the world's greatest widget engineer if he leaves we're screwed so we created a new job to keep him here".
It doesn't really go beyond that unless it's perceived that management are routinely violating the spirit of agreements and/or when the relationship between the union and management has already completely broken down.
The trading with a grocery store is heavily regulated as well. They have requirements for storage and handling, their scales have to be calibrated, and there can be very strict fines for things like screwing around with sale prices.
The behaviour, motivation, and goals of individuals (including your boss and CEO) working for a business very rarely has anything to do with the goals of the business itself. There is a lot of pretend going on, but that is mostly just surface BS. Why do you think CEO’s spend billions buying back shares instead of using that money to invest in new products and other innovations that will make the business more successful long term? Could it perhaps be (gasp! horror!) that they care more about personal enrichment than making the business successful long term?
> Sure, but the company's interests are almost completely opposed to yours in most ways
I'm sad that you think this, and would urge you to analyze your situation to see if it's really true. My one piece of advice is that companies seek to minimize cost centers, but invest in profit centers. Get out of the former and in to the latter.
Cost centers: anything that improves your experience as an employee.
It’s smart to move out of it, but the fact that you have to in order to progress is a clear indicator why companies will perpetually undervalue talent - even in competitive markets.
> but the company's interests are almost completely opposed to yours in most ways.
This really isn’t true. What you’re describing isn’t even a zero sum game it’s negative sum, where hurting the other party is among your goals in itself. The company is interested in using you to make money and for many purposes happy, satisfied employees who are growing in productivity are good. All of those are also things the employees usually want.
Are employee and company interests fully aligned? Absolutely not, but if your employer’s interests are almost completely opposed to yours get out.
The completely different industry structure. The film and theater industries work on time limited projects with a defined beginning, end and deliverable and most teams break up at the end of each project. Under those circumstances all a union can do to protect members is dualise, making lives better for insiders and harder for outsiders by restricting entry.
Long lasting organizations that have multiple overlapping projects with unions end up with compressed wage structures because the union campaigns for the median worker and the structure does not militate against that.
> Say, for sake of argument, that I'm the World's Greatest Widget Engineer.
Say, I am not.
> so I can get stuff I want by negotiating individually with my employer
I cannot, see above. Does that mean I don't deserve to have the bargaining power for the best deal for myself?
> A union's interests are probably not completely aligned with mine—they're focused on protecting the majority of employees, who are probably not as valuable as me—so forming a union could very easily lead to me getting less of the things I want. For example, if a union convinced a company to pay/promote based on seniority rather than performance, that could be good for most of the people in the union but bad for me.
Well, based on the fact that I'm part of the majority i.e. not as valuable as you, it works very well for us (who are not the World's Greatest Widget Engineer).
> Does that mean I don't deserve to have the bargaining power for the best deal for myself?
No, I do not believe you are entitled to a wealth transfer from people who are better at your job than you are. (Or, to put it another way, you're certainly free to do a little collective bargaining if you'd like, but the World's Greatest Widget Engineer has no reason to join your union.)
I think a lot of devs are led to believe they're the World's Greatest Widget Engineer but what they've really fallen for is the "Hank Hill Special Deal" lol.
Why hasn't he been promoted to management? Most companies don't have a career track for the single most productive IC ever, and he's probably capable of improving other people's work anyway if he managed them.
Because being an effective individual contributor and being an effective manager require different skills? Because the goal of a software company is at least nominally to produce software, and paying people who are good at producing software to produce software is how you produce software?
Even if you did promote your best engineer, that just means that a different employee at your company is now your best engineer and the same dynamics apply. (Until, of course, you promote everyone competent to management, and then your organization is doomed to slowly suffocate itself. Then it's beyond saving, union or no union.)
Thats ok - they are one in a million anyway. We are talking about people in general, not exceptional diamonds (they clearly can take care of themselves).
If you can become an enemy of the union simply by being good at your individual-contributor job, maybe that's why unions haven't really taken off in software engineering.
I'd venture a guess that the variance in quality between a set of "professional" electricians and another set of "professional" developers is different by an order of magnitude.
Said another way, I can go down to the union hall and pick an electrician randomly and have a great deal more confidence in that person's ability than I could choosing a random developer off of LinkedIn to write my application.
I think certifications have something to do with this, but it's also the complete lack of understanding of what makes someone a good developer by management... this is entirely the fault of management and I don't blame a developer for trying to "fake it til you make it."
As a person not necessarily opposed to labor unions, I'm curious as to how the previous post was hyperbolic? Violence and organized labor go together like milk and cereal, so let's not act like union folks are all saints.
>Violence and organized labor go together like milk and cereal
What do you base this on? Movies?
Telling someone to strap on a helmet isn't a threat of violence to a reasonable person. Putting a stuffed rat on a ledge near someone's bed is also not a threat of violence. If it had a noose or something, you'd have a better argument.
Here's actual violence done against picketers and looked the other way by police in Alabama:
But cross a picket-line or hire on as a scab during a strike in a small town and you'd best watch your back... hence the motivation for the "wear a helmet" comment. My hometown was founded on steel and railroads and I knew of more than one person growing up that got jumped for not toeing the line and playing ball with the union.
I see what you are saying. Yes, violence begets violence, certainly. I would also argue that while not defending the morality, the violence against scabs are done by rogue individuals while violence against picketers are coordinated by using companies known for strikebreaking. The company typically yields a much stronger threat of violence than any individual union individual can, and has more sympathy of the "law."
The history of it is quite fascinating. Here's an example.
I'm in Montana these days and just finished a book by Michael Punke about the Butte Mining Disaster. It does a fairly good job of pointing out how basically we're all assholes when you get down to it.
Yes, you would be compelled to support union actions, such as job action in support of collective goals you don't agree with, and get to pay for the right to do so as well. You would not be allowed to negotiate individual concessions for work or skill beyond the norm. Everyone is even more focused on "fair outcomes" (read: the same) than in any non-union environment.
We're not interchangeable cogs in some manufacturing machine; we're extremely skilled experts in the biggest seller's market of our careers. Why anyone would want to unionize right now is beyond me.
According to a family friend who worked for the UAW (the huge American auto workers union) the answer to this is yes. I suspect the answer is actually "it depends", but I don't know of any documented examples of unions whose members are allowed to make a separate peace. There are people in the comments who it sounds like have done so, perhaps they can weigh in on the mechanism.
It’s a such a coincidence that those are the same talking points the employees were forced to here during the many mandatory meeting. Also interesting that the NLRB found those forced meetings illegal.
Every year, Australian employees are entitled to 4 weeks of paid annual leave, two weeks of paid sick leave, 6 months of paid long service leave after 10 years of employment, about 10% of their salary paid into their retirement investments (superannuation).
Unions even up the negotiation power imbalance between employers and workers. Union power has been severely curtailed over the last few decades and as a consequence workers have seen stagnant wages, rising inequality of compensation and the rise of insecure work.
There's plenty of evidence to support the assertion that collective bargaining leads to better outcomes for workers. A rising tide lifts all boats.
> Those laws were a consequence of industrial action by unions.
You didn’t read my message, because this is what I already said. Unions helped push it into law. The unions are all but dead in the US, but weekends are still here because it is a law. What value do the unions provide now?
They have weekends in China and it’s not because of any labor movement. Working conditions and compensation increase because of supply and demand dynamics, which unions are a part of but not necessary for. For another example of countries that do not tolerate independent labor movements where economic growth led to better working conditions see Vietnam.
I have lived in China for the past 11 years. Middle income countries like China (average income per capita same as Thailand) often have people working more than five days a week. That’s a choice. Taking convenience stores as an example FamilyMart has six day weeks with 16 hour shifts. Lawson’s and 7-11, I think have five day work weeks with nine hour shifts. FamilyMart workers make as much as university graduates starting in decent companies.
There are similar splits in professional level work. There are jobs available where you ~never work six days a week and others where it’s routine. Trust me when I say no one at Nike or Booking in Shanghai is working 996.
My logic does not suggest the lack of unions and organized labor causes six day weeks. Six or seven day working weeks are the natural condition. Economic growth allows for different consumption leisure trade offs. Unions can only very indirectly effect economic growth. They matter much less than the ability to quit your job and find a new one easily. Firms desperate for workers are what make working conditions better, much more than unions.
Why? A totalitarian/authoritarian government that bans strikes where all worker’s organizations work hand in glove with the government and management describes fascist and communist approaches to unions perfectly. The historical roots of the ruling party are hardly relevant.
What power? You as an individual employee have absolutely no power to change Apple's behavior. Case in point the director of this story quitting because they couldn't convince Apple to change.
As the other comment mentioned the biggest individual power you have is quitting and a union doesn't prevent that.
Your lawyer is your agent. A lawyer representing a group of which you are a part is representing the group, and your interests and the groups can diverge.
Until you want something different from those who wield power in the union. At least I can quit my job and work for a different company. In heavily unionized industries, you can't escape.
Having seen how several family members fared in union jobs (several different unions), I swore I'd never belong to a union or work any job that required me to be part of one.
They all had such an adversarial relationship with work. It's always us against them mentality. They could never see anyone in management as a human. I can't imagine living like that.
As far as I can tell, the unions didn't ever solve any of their biggest gripes, took money out of their paychecks for lots of non-work related political activities, and didn't come through when they really needed to on things like pensions or healthcare.
I have the same feeling having seen family members in unions. My mother is a really hard worker, and plays by the rules, and that means nothing in her union while her colleagues abuse sick policies, push more work into her and so on. All what matters there is tenure, not the quality of employee you are. My takeaway is that she would be far more successful in a non unionized workplace because hers was definitely more beneficial for slackers.
>All what matters there is tenure, not the quality of employee you are.
From what I understand is this is done because it's the fairest way. Unions, like anything, can be corrupted. It would be funny if the union rep's nephew always got promotions over other people. This is an attempt to prevent that. In other words, it's the least-worst way of doing it.
>My takeaway is that she would be far more successful in a non unionized workplace because hers was definitely more beneficial for slackers.
Possibly. In my experience, it's usually in the form of a $5 Starbucks gift card every year. It really depends on the position and the company. I've seen a lot of hard ass workers get treated like shit.
Since we’re doing anecdotes, a member of my family is an airline pilot and a member of the pilots union. It has been extremely effective in negotiating better working conditions and higher pay for my family member. Keep in mind that, absent union representation, being a pilot can be absolutely punishing, to the point of being dangerous.
Also, the company is able to maintain very high standards for the quality and skill of the pilots. There are not “useless Joe’s”, as evidenced by the fact that the planes don’t crash.
This family member is a diehard conservative politically but openly espouses the value of the union for representing his interests against the company.
is it possible that adversarial relationship might exist even without a union but it would just be hidden?
personally, i think i would prefer a co-ownership (coop) scheme than union, since that adversarial relationship is basically dissolved since you are also the owner along with your co-workers... idk just a thought
> is it possible that adversarial relationship might exist even without a union but it would just be hidden?
It wouldn't happen in other countries because the US has a uniquely adversarial union structure, where Europe uses codetermination (ICs with board seats) and sectoral bargaining (don't have to convert one company at a time).
> that adversarial relationship is basically dissolved since you are also the owner along with your co-workers
This is only true if everyone has exactly the same responsibilities, hours, working conditions and pay. All differences lead to divergences of interest.
well, there will always be a divergence (no two people have the exact same needs or wants) but i would argue being co-owner with others helps as a forcing function to help converge interests (you wouldn't be happy with a co-worker slacking off since they're also wasting your money/time not just 'the companys')
and there are many successful co-ops where people have different responsibilities, hours and pay, i don't think that is a requirement for co-ownership (though the variance is definitely less than traditional top-down orgs thats for sure)
I now try to convince anyone who cold-calls me to join a trade union.
The employer can’t be all that good if they’re ignoring the do-not-call registry. And I think it slightly increases the chances of bad actors ceasing cold-calling.
The NLRA says "Nothing herein shall prohibit any individual employed as a supervisor from becoming or remaining a member of a labor organization, but no employer subject to this Act [subchapter] shall be compelled to deem individuals defined herein as supervisors as employees for the purpose of any law, either national or local, relating to collective bargaining."
...which effectively states that if a supervisor joins a union it's a no-op. The employer is not required to acknowledge their membership. In practice, unions specifically exclude managers for a bunch of obvious reasons related to their ability to bargain effectively on behalf of their members.
Your manager likely joined a union-ish entity open to supervisors. IIUC such entities are not protected by the NLRA and as such have few of the legal powers and protections that make a union a union. They’re basically affinity groups.
This means that manager unions do not gain the traditional protections from the law that other unions do. But - if a manager union and employer come to some agreement despite this fact, it has legal weight and the union can sue if the employer breaks the contract (and vice versa).
Managers, at least at the higher level like being discussed here, arguably do not need as many protections in order to be able to collectively bargain: Apple is likely to be much more concerned (and thus much more willing to negotiate) about 20 "Director of X" employees leaving than 20 engineers.
Besides SAG-AFTRA, lawyers and doctors also have unions and it's essentially the only reason they're highly respected, since they've psyched everyone into thinking they're rare and valuable by making themselves rare.
Nonsense, the screen actors and writers guilds are formal unions and their members include all of the top Hollywood stars that pull down 7 figure+ paychecks from films.
Same here. I currently work at a very prestigious tech company and I’m surprised by how boring it actually is.
There’s hardly anyone around in the office and frankly I couldn’t care less about the free stuff. They pay me enough that I can go out and buy my own snacks.
What I want is a team to learn from and grow. Not some teachers pets that sit behind zoom calls making sure they know exactly what’s “on the test” so they make themselves look better.
I’ll never work somewhere 100% remote or where employees don’t have an expectation of at least 3 days in the office.
Mind you, being able to spend a day a week at home vs full week in the office is quite nice.
> currently work at a very prestigious tech company
So do, and I have also worked for scrappy 100% remote startups. The 100% remote startup had better team cohesion and better knowledge transfer with more opportunities to learn.
You might get those things in the office, but pre-pandemic, at least my office environment provided none of those things. Don't conflate a good team dynamic with an office environment. I used to pair program with a guy for four hours a day and I never met him until we both left the company.
I'm on my second highly-collaborative, fully remote team and I'm always learning a lot and challenged. You're "teacher's pets behind zoom calls" example is very oddly specific and not a thing I've encountered.
I believe this is a problem with OKRs more then with remote work. It is too easy to game the OKR process by choosing easy but showy OKRs, doing the bare minimum and declaring victory.
I've been remote for 10 years and before that worked on a bunch of distributed research teams and it is perfectly possible to have a highly functioning distributed/remote team that really takes ownership. I mean look at open source projects.
Further office culture tends to favor a bunch of young people who all live in the same city and have time to go out for drinks after work etc. I'll take a bunch of crazy odd balls scattered across the globe doing their own thing any day.
That only kind of helps ... and can lead to micromanagement.
I've found a better approach is to focus on key metrics or KPIs and empower people to go after them without a heavy planing cycle. Like if your app is slow and buggy the OKR process tends to favor waterfally quarter long projects like "rewrite X in Y." A better approach is often to get good at monitoring and prioritize cycles spent on maintaining, optimizing, and refactoring existing stuff with a possible incremental rewrite.
Our experiences are very different then. We do 1:1 personal zoom calls, we’ll play board games online, we have a drop-in company-wide hang out every other week, and we pair quite a bit and very often through a zoom link in slack asking for help.
I guess it depends on what you want out of work. If you’re the type who wants work to be _only_ work and absolutely nothing more, then I can see how the forced interaction at an office would be beneficial. Otherwise a strong culture around people and collaboration makes the office largely irrelevant. Yes, you do miss out on the random hallway interactions, but there is no perfect solution and I happily trade that for no commuting, hanging with my dog all day, mid-day naps, my own office, throwing in loads of laundry during the day, private bathroom, better coffee, etc etc etc.
Is this a bad thing? I understand that it might be for some people, but others like me think that's great. I don't work to make friends; I do it make money and build something interesting in the process. The fact that remote work allows me to minimise social interactions while still being effective is great.
These sound like separate problems. Your coworkers being more interested in perf than work will not change just because you force them all to commute for two hours a day.
My experience talking to a lot of people both for and against wfh has been that people with shitty teams hate being remote, because it's hard to do when everyone is putting in zero effort to make remote work "work." The other big group that wants wfh to end are the "my coworkers are my only friends" people. Good for them, i guess, but personally i think that's not a wise way to structure one's life. I understand why companies love it and want to foster it though.
A very small number say things like "I find it difficult to collaborate with anyone over the internet."
Is being in the same physical place the requisite for being 'a team'? Open-source work traditionally has been distributed, and I bet it often results in teams that are closer than the ones from work.
Is a comfortable car with plenty of fuel a requisite for a long road trip? No, you can go by foot, horse, etc. it sure does help though.
Open source work is a infinitesimally small proportion of *work*. No I don’t think it results in teams that are closer at all, I think (and can present no data either) that it’s just as likely to result in bickering and infighting. Guido leaving Python might be a good example.
> What I want is a team to learn from and grow. Not some teachers pets that sit behind zoom calls making sure they know exactly what’s “on the test” so they make themselves look better.
I’m not sure what your role is but zoom calls really don’t mean anything as an IC. Not unless you’re responding to or handling an outage and debugging on the fly.
What you produce and how well it works is how you’re measured. Documentation and written communication is equally as important.
I totally understand your pov and it’s often the one shared by full remote folks who enjoy it that way: “I produce good work nothing else matters”.
I find that a really sad, if not completely rational, outlook.
See I don’t want to work with someone who outputs great work only. I want to work who can share a joke, help out, bounce ideas of, experiment with new things and fail/succeed.
In other words, I like work to be joyful and productive.
I completely agree. I've always worked remotely. This separation is all I know, and I can't imagine why someone would want something different. As a manager, I don't conduct "team building" exercises. I try to ensure that collaboration is flowing, but I don't care if team members are only talking about work or if they develop some social relationship.
This is in stark contrast to my wife, who had worked in the office before the pandemic and continued with the same philosophy during remote work. She finds my way too cold, and I find hers too wasteful. I would dread working on her pseudo-remote environment.
I have times and tasks for which I'm more productive at home, and times and/or tasks where I'm more productive at work.
Good in-person collaboration, sometimes accidentally overhearing someone else, is invaluable. At the same time, people can get off task and chit chat becomes a hindrance.
Sometimes we all know our role and what has to be done, we just have to get it done. Sometimes we don't know how to solve a problem.
Some employees don't have a good work environment at home. A Ph.D. student with a young special-needs child felt horrible ignoring his daughter while working on his dissertation at home (where his wife was caring for his daughter), bit coming into campus was far better for him, productivity-wise and psychologically.
I think the balance might be a dynamic one, in that what's best can change over time and task and stage of a task and stage of a person's career. And by employee, and by task.
Being a good manager must be immensely difficult, but also being an employee also requires adapting and compromising between all of these trade-offs.
I like working from an office and I like informal interactions with colleagues — from chatting over coffee to peeking around and seeing who is free to whiteboard a problem.
Same here. Except I also hate wasting time on commuting, not having the flexibility to take care of a home-related task in the middle of the day, etc. So the experiment to find a balance has begun…
Some people prefer remote teams, some people prefer in-person teams.
I don't know anyone who likes hybrid teams though.
Eventually I suspect we'll end up with a mix of remote and in-person employers, and workers who have a strong preference one way or another will just have to filter potential employers accordingly. There might be a way for larger businesses to have certain teams work remotely while others go into the office, but I suspect it would be difficult to manage.
Yep I fell the complete opposite. I suspect that long term people who prefer in-office will gravitate towards companies that are in-office and the opposite will be true for people who prefer WFH. I personally will never ever work for a company that isn’t WFH flexible.
Yeah, the M1 mac is not a strong example. They began _shipping_ in Nov 2020, so I bet the design was finalized or close to it before the March shutdowns in the Bay Area began.
It may not have been too visible to the outside but Apple never really halted operations as urgently as other companies did. They kind of took a more skeptical approach and kept people coming into the office and taking up the mask and temperature reading protocol among other precautions from what I understand.
These companies touting their solutions for creating a more connected world can't have it both ways. Apple was able to ship the M1 and roll out new iterations of many other offerings since the pandemic hit. They're just fine.
Apple didn't collapse since the pandemic hit, and the flexibility offered by remote work is far more valuable to lots of people than the loss of in-person collaboration opportunities. We deserve to have input into how we work best and if that means walking away from companies run by egomaniacs that need to see butts in seats, then so be it.