A senior director at Apple has quit his job in protest at the company and is demanding employees return to the office three days a week.
Ian Goodfellow, the director of machine learning, is believed to be the longest-serving employee to resign as a result of the plan.
On April 11, the company began mandating one day a week in the office — a requirement that was raised to two days on May 2. By May 23, all employees had to be at their desks three days a week.
A survey of Apple employees April 13-19 found that 67 percent said they were dissatisfied with the return-to-the-office policy, Fortune reported.
And Goodfellow said in his resignation that he wouldn’t do it.
“I firmly believe that more flexibility would have been the best strategy for my team,” he said The edge.
Ian Goodfellow, Apple’s director of machine learning, has resigned in protest at its policy of forcing people back into their offices three days a week
Pictured is Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California
An Apple employee speculated that Goodfellow’s departure precedes a possible announcement that the company will increase in-person work requirements to up to five days a week.
“Everyone and their grandma know that Apple is using the pilot as a stepping stone to 5 days back in the office,” the Apple employee wrote on Blind, which verifies employment through company email addresses.
‘Ian probably found out this was coming and left.’
The tech news site described Goodfellow as the most cited expert on machine learning — a type of artificial intelligence that studies computer algorithms that can improve automatically both through experience and through the use of data. As a result, the applications can better predict the results.
Goodfellow joined Apple in March 2019 and describes himself on LinkedIn as “an industry leader in machine learning.”
The tech analyst is dubbed the “father of General Adversarial Networks, or GANs,” according to website 9to5Mac — a breakthrough technology that can be used to generate fake media content.
His salary is unclear, but according to Insider and Glassdoor.com, he’s likely to make more than $270,000 a year given his status as a director and his high profile in the tech world.
After graduating from Stanford with a computer science degree in 2009, Goodfellow received his PhD in Machine Learning from the University of Montreal.
He worked at Google on the “Google Brain” team and then moved to OpenAI, a research institute founded in 2015 by Elon Musk and several others.
Goodfellow returned to Google and then moved to Apple.
He joined Apple at 34 and was described by The Verge as “young for an AI researcher with so much clout.”
They called his hiring a coup for Apple.
He should be in high demand following his departure from the Cupertino-based company.
Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, is seen at the company’s headquarters in Cupertino
Unlike other companies in Silicon Valley, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has been adamant about his employees returning to office.
In early March, he wrote to staff that they needed to prepare to return.
“In the coming weeks and months, we have an opportunity to combine the best we’ve learned about working remotely with the irreplaceable benefits of working in person,” Cook said in the memo, according to Bloomberg.
“It remains important that we support each other in this transition, with the challenges we face as a team and globally.”
Cook acknowledged that not everyone was excited about the prospect.
“For many of you, I know that returning to the office is a long-awaited milestone and a positive sign that we can engage more with the colleagues who play such an important role in our lives,” Cook said.
“For others, it can also be an unsettling change.”
After the announcement, employees on internal forums vowed to quit.
“I don’t give a damn about ever coming back to work here,” an Apple employee ranted on the corporate message board Blind, according to The New York Post.
“I’ll go in to say hello and get to know everyone as I haven’t since I started and then hand in my resignation when I get home.
“I already know I can’t handle the commute and sitting around for 8 hours.”
Another Apple employee responded with a laughing emoji and wrote, “I’ll do the same.”
A third replied: “Damn yeah man let’s do this! F*** RTO.’
In contrast, Twitter has decided to allow employees to work remotely forever if they choose – although that could change under Musk’s new ownership.
In March, CEO Parag Agrawal told employees that his predecessor Jack Dorsey’s policy of allowing employees to work remotely forever would be retained.
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal (left) and co-founder Jack Dorsey (right) have both supported remote work
Elon Musk, who has agreed a deal to buy Twitter, has poked fun at the company’s policy of allowing employees to work remotely forever, and some believe he could reverse it if he takes over
“As we reopen, our approach remains the same,” Agrawal said.
“You will work where you feel most productive and creative, and that includes working full-time from home forever.
“Office every day? That works too. Some days in the office, some days from home? Naturally.’
Slack has followed suit and is making remote work permanent.
On Facebook, the parent company Meta announced in the summer of 2020 that all full-time employees could apply to work from home if their job allows it.
Facebook executives have made the most of the deal, The Wall Street Journal reported, with Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg spending much of his time away from Menlo Park headquarters and more of his time in Hawaii.
According to a company spokesman, Alex Schultz, chief marketing officer, plans to move to the UK, while Guy Rosen, the company’s vice president of integrity, will move to Israel.
Naomi Gleit, Meta’s head of product and one of its longest-serving employees, has relocated to New York, while Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, has been working remotely from locations including Hawaii, Los Angeles and Cape Cod, the newspaper said.
Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, is calling for all employees to return to the office three days a week
Apple and Google are the outliers, with Google also requiring workers in March to come back to the office three days a week starting April 4.
The offer comes with the proviso that employees could take pay cuts if they leave the San Francisco Bay Area or New York City for less expensive parts of the country.
An open letter signed by more than 1,050 past and present Apple employees urged the company’s executives to reconsider their plans.
“They characterized the hybrid work pilot choice as being about combining the ‘need to communicate in person’ and the value of flexible working,” the letter reads.
“But in reality it doesn’t recognize flexible work and is just driven by fear. Fear of the future of work, fear of worker autonomy, fear of losing control.”
They write that remote work allows them to effortlessly connect with colleagues in Europe and Asia and argue that enabling remote work encourages diversity in the workforce. They also complain about the commute to the office and the frustration of wasting time.
“We tell all our customers how great our remote work products are, but we can’t use them for remote work ourselves?” they write.
“How can we expect our customers to take this seriously? How can we understand what remote work problems need to be solved in our products if we don’t live them?’