If you're able to share, I'm curious what you mean by "Apple RTO policy has only gotten stupider"? Isn't it still 3 days in-office (or 4 days for some teams)?
The degree to which it is enforced, managers being required to enforce the policy, and to which compliance is used as a measure in performance reviews have all increased and, as you mention, some teams have gone to 4 days with pressure to exceed the minimum three days. At least one person I've spoken with indicated that their promotion was delayed until they could get their RTO compliance numbers up.
One possible reason is that Apple wants to build more fintech products that they still need a banking partner for, and don't want to launch anything new with Goldman since they know the partnership hasn't worked out. So it may just be easier to start the process to find a new partner so you don't slow down product launches.
I would rather look at the data than at the tone of the comment.
The person they were replying to referred to studies; the person you replied to essentially said they love their children and that childless people find emptyness towards the end.
I believe both, and both can be true at the same time, especially considering that I've also heard of studies which showed that people tend to diminish past negative experiences. The parent will view the here and now, with happy children that are doing well, and see that all is good and hard work paid off. The childless person may have fewer people around them in later years, but which has a greater sum of total happiness? Being able to do for fifty years whatever your heart desires, or some happy end where someone sees you go and has a lot of pain from that? (I guess the latter might be partially my bias talking, but I truly am trying to view this objectively, like how one can explain both the study and the subjective experience from the person you replied to.)
IANAL so I don't fully understand the legal merits of this case. That said between Nuvia and Rivos it seems like the pattern is pretty clear: if you want to eventually try to do your own chip design startup, don't work at Apple.
> But some people need to be around other people more or less all the time to be happy.
That's fine, but no one is obligated to spend time with them. They need to be more convincing or charismatic then to get people to spend more time with them. "If you don't endure a commute to spend time with me, I won't be happy" won't cut it.
This view is too zoomed in. The human organism generally expects other humans to be around. Solitude in nature is a death sentence for humans, so our organism provides inbuilt incentives to avoid solitude. We can’t turn this instinct off, except to partially anesthetize it via fake social interaction like television, podcasts, etc. The anesthesia works better or worse for different people.
Some people have convinced themselves that they don’t like social interaction, but this is probably due to a trained negative association caused by repeated past negative experiences. It seems very unlikely that some humans simply lack the social instinct congenitally.
Society is currently set up in a way that social urges are largely satisfied by work. Is that a good setup? No, it definitely isn’t. Is deleting it without a proven replacement a good idea? Also no.
My point is that there are many other, more fulfilling ways to get human company than forcing your co-workers to commute to the office everyday. Besides, for the many people who live with a family/kids/partner, WFH lets them spend even more time with them. The solution for people whose only source of social interaction is the office is to develop a social life outside of the office, not to force everyone else into RTO.
This is simply a non-starter. I have not witnessed a single work environment where long-term remote workers don’t effectively become second-class citizens against in-person workers on the same team, in a way that materially harms productivity.
How cold the world is to make the primary form of communal spaces be working in the rigid hierarchy, abuse, and discomfort of the modern American workplace.
I recommend the 1999 American film “Office Space” or the 2003 British television series “The Office” if you somehow think this is a novel sentiment. Or “Bartelby the Scrivener” by Herman Melville from 1856.
Not everyone is a single tech employee who lives alone. Some (in fact, many) people have a social life outside the office where not going to an office doesn't result in eternal solitude.
It's not grandstanding, I only brought up social life because someone mentioned social isolation from remote work. That is a real problem and I can empathize with it, but the solution isn't forcing RTO on co-workers to force them to hang out with you.
There are too many companies offering fully remote for it to be even worth interviewing for a non-remote job. At this point I'll happily accept 10-15% lower total compensation if it means fully remote.
