Later coverage shows Apple turning that target into a phased corporate-staff requirement, beginning with one office day and rising to three days per week.
First-order effects
Apple employees receive up to four weeks of remote work per year, while teams must plan around a February 1 office-return goal.
Tim Cook gives Apple managers a fixed hybrid-work baseline rather than the open-ended remote arrangements used during the pandemic response.
Second-order effects
Apple’s later phased office-attendance mandate makes the four-week allowance a bounded exception to regular in-person work, rather than a broadly flexible remote-work policy.
Corporate staff and their managers must coordinate schedules around both shared office days and a limited pool of remote-work time.
Third-order effects
Apple’s sequence of policies points to a managed hybrid model: remote work becomes a defined employee benefit while the company retains authority over recurring in-office collaboration.
If this model persists, workplace flexibility at Apple will be governed through standardized attendance rules rather than team-by-team remote arrangements.
The trend: Large employers are converting pandemic-era remote work into capped flexibility paired with prescribed office attendance.
If we take iOS 14 (announced in June 2020, released in September 2020), that would have been in development for a good part of 2019 and pre-pandemic 2020. But for iOS 15, announced/released at the same times in 2021, the majority of its development has been during the pandemic.
This is a good thread on a topic I've talked at length with my pal @cwarzel about. Almost two years later, I maintain the pandemic has made people, abled folks, consider things that disabled people have long known but were heretofore ignored. Because, ableism. https://twitter.com…
Reminder: This year's software will be the most impacted by the pandemic. Many releases in 2020, like iOS 14 or Android 11, were in development phases before the pandemic took hold. This year, more of the development has been impacted by WFH, COVID-19 cases, and more.
Scoop: Apple will let employees work from home for up to one month each year as company begins return to office in Feb. 2022, per memo from Tim Cook https://www.theinformation.com/ ...
NPR, Axios & now WaPo have all reported on the return to offices' impact on disabled workers. Disabled talent thrived during COVID, but that progress is swiftly being erased thanks to companies insisting we return to the office. He's a roundup of articles on topic: #Workplace
NEW: Apple is pushing back its return to office plan until February. The company is asking workers to return to the office one to do days a week for the first month, before rolling out its full hybrid model: https://www.nbcnews.com/...