Work From Home!

Last week I wrote about the unique work culture in Silicon Valley, in which unproductive employees in bloated organizations are nevertheless remarkably entitled. This falls out to some extent everywhere in tech, but it's at its worst up in the San Jose area. I discovered a new manifestation of this phenomenon at Apple, where for the past two years employees have "worked from home" due to COVID, but management is now asking them to return to the office three days a week in something called the Hybrid Working pilot.

From my own anecdotal experience as a cutstomer of companies claiming to have been hurt by COVID, the actual impact of lockdowns occurred in the first half of 2020 but gradually abated throughout the rest of the year. Companies that claimed to have had their ability to serve customers badly reduced by early 2021 were using it as an excuse. For Apple to be trying to get back to normal only in mid 2022 suggests that everyone had simply been coasting, not least management.

As you might expect, there's pushback. An employee group called Apple Together has written a letter to management:

Dear Executive Team,

We have a long relationship with Apple. In fact, even before spending years, sometimes decades, working at Apple, many of us were devoted Apple customers. We grew up with Apple, we told our friends and families about Apple, we dreamt of one day joining Apple. Then, one day, we did. Apple grew through us. Like you, many of us were there through Apple’s near-death experience. We are still here, now that Apple is the most valuable company in the world. Today, with your leadership and our ideas we still serve all of our customers and still try to surprise and delight people with our products. But our vision of the future of work is growing further and further apart from that of the executive team.

They stress a cult-like relationship with the company as an idea and finally get around to saying they "still serve all of our customers" -- but their idea of how to do this is departing from the managers who want them back in the office. The Conclusion of the letter aptly expresses the employees' state of mind:

In the original “Returning to our offices” email, Tim said “we’d make sure Apple delivered on its promises to its customers regardless of the circumstances”. It’s true, we delivered on our promises and continue to do so. We were incredibly flexible and resilient and found new ways to do our work, despite not being able to go to an office in many cases.

Now we ask you, the executive team, to show some flexibility as well and let go of the rigid policies of the Hybrid Working Pilot. Stop trying to control how often you can see us in the office. Trust us, we know how each of our small contributions helps Apple succeed and what’s required to do so. Our direct managers trust us and in many cases would happily let us work in a more flexible setup. And why wouldn’t they, we’ve successfully done so for the last two years. Why don’t you?

It sounds as if in the original appeal to come back to the office, management was delicately suggesting that work wasn't getting done and customers weren't being served. Back when I was working for a living, "work from home" was a perk reserved for the bosses, and it was manifested by the bosses calling phone conferences while they were doing things like driving their kids to dancing class but the rest of us were stuck in the office. Since the phone meetings were as useless as any other meeting, you'd have the kids screaming in the back seat of the car while the boss drove and talked on the phone, in fact a dangerous situation, and even less got done than usual.

I had one boss, Kim, who as far as I could tell spent her entire day driving the freeways around the San Francisco area and calling people from her car. I suspect alcohol was also involved, and I never understood how she avoided DUIs or worse. Nobody above her seemed to mind, but then, the CEO eventually spent a dozen years in federal prison for securities fraud. No company makes real money that way.

It sounds like Apple managed to extend this version of "work" to pretty much everyone, or maybe more accurately, everyone in the bourgeois office force -- I can't imagine that the people in China who actually built the phones got the same option. And the whole arrangement was about as wasteful and unproductive as anyone might imagine, to the point that management apparently began to feel pressure to get things done again.

When I left teaching to go into tech in the 1970s, I read a then-new book by Gerald Weinberg, The Psychology of Computer Programming. I skimmed over it again just recently, but it's as if I'd read two different books. The point I took in the 1970s was that any tech group follows an informal organizational pattern whereby there are one or two people who know how things work and how to fix them, and the others are simply engaged in bringing their problems to the experts who do the work.

This dovetailed with other treatments like Fred Brooks's The Mythical Man-Month, in which the key observation was, "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." In other words, most tech workers are incompetent idlers who use the organization to conceal their laziness and ineptitude from the managers, who don't know who the effective workers are. This was confirmed by my consistent observation throughout my tech career. Indeed, Scott Adams got rich writing comic strips that said the same thing.

When I reread Weinberg, I discovered that while he recognized that most tech workers weren't doing the work, he actually proposed a unicorns-and-rainbows solution to the problem whereby there would be "egoless programming", collaboration, no-fault peer review, and the like. Baloney. Things don't happen that way. For effective peer review, you would need a group of skilled programmers or engineers at roughly equal levels of job knowledge -- but that's not the environment Weinberg started with, and he had no realistic plan to get there.

Apple's problem in Silicon Valley represents Weinberg's paradox. In theory, you could treat the few highly creative tech workers like Apple treats all of its employees and get good results. Apple is succeeding only because its good people are barely tolerating the environment, while great crowds of drones are busily concealing from the managers who is actually doing the work -- and working from home has been an even more effiocient way to do that.

Someone at Apple has belatedly realized this won't work in the long run. Elon Musk, I have a feeling, is going to try a different model at Twitter, basically a version of nuke 'em all and let God sort it out. We'll see.