Apple Machine Learning Director Resigns Over Return-to-Office Policy

Source: Apple

Apple machine learning director, Ian Goodfellow, has reportedy left the company. After only three years in his role, Goodfellow made known his decision via email to staff and stated, “I believe strongly that more flexibility would have been the best policy for my team.” The resignation first tweeted by The Verge’s Zoë Schiffer, is the first reported departure by one of the company’s high-ranking employees since Apple implemented its return-to-work policy last month.

Goodfellow previously worked at Google as a software engineer intern before he moved to Apple back in 2019. He joined Apple’s “Special Projects Group” as the director of machine learning. He is known as “the father of general adversarial networks, or GANs,” which is technology being used to generate online content.

Apple CEO Tim Cook sent out a memo to employees in April informing them of the company’s hybrid, return-to-office plan. Under the plan, employees were first required to be in the office at least once a week. On May 4, it was pushed to two days per week and by May 23, employees will be required to show up three days a week.

This plan didn’t sit well with many employees as many have become comfortable with their remote work setups since the  COVID-19 lockdowns happened in 2020. A recent open letter to company executives expressed the dismay of an employee group called “Apple Together,” and cited the inflexibility of the hybrid program. They argued that following a three-day-per-week in-office mandate can change the workforce of Apple. It will be one that is “younger, whiter, more male-dominated and favors “who can work for Apple, not who’d be the best fit.”

The group also argued that in-office collaboration can be accomplished in much better ways using remote work software tools and Apple’s products themselves.

As stated in the letter: “We tell all of our customers how great our products are for remote work, yet, we ourselves, cannot use them to work remotely? How can we expect our customers to take that seriously? How can we understand what problems of remote work need solving in our products if we don’t live it?”

“How can we expect to convince the best people to come work with us, if we reject anyone who needs the smallest bit of flexibility? How can we expect them to do their best work, but don’t trust them to know how to do so?”

SaaS Remote Work Tools Are Here to Stay

Management and employees are clashing over return-to-office orders as employees voice their desire for flexible work arrangements. The assumption that having your team in one physical location is the best way to be productive only holds true as long as the team members perceive it to be true. However, with two years of remote work, distributed teams, and reliable remote work software like Zoom and Microsoft Teams that have been helping employees do their job, companies pushing their return-to-office policy will certainly have a hard time convincing workers.

Tech companies, especially, will have to present really strong arguments. With Twitter and Airbnb allowing their workforce to work remotely and indefinitely, companies like Apple might see more departures of tech talents in the future.

Remote work trends show that flexible work hours, hybrid setups, and the adoption of cloud-based tools will continue to thrive in the post-COVID workplace. Not all organizations will bend to the wishes of their employees, but with the strong clamor for flexible work, we expect SaaS software products such as collaboration platforms, project management software,  file hosting/sharing, and video conferencing tools to continue rising in demand. It’s unlikely that the world will go back to its pre-pandemic ways of doing work, especially since we now all know that productivity is possible even outside office walls.