Tech giant Apple recently resumed face-to-face work offline, but it has been met with considerable resistance from employees. Many reports have shown that some employees have even left the company because of the policy, opting for new jobs that are more open to telecommuting. Among them, Apple's head of machine learning, Ian Goodfellow, left Apple because of the resumption of work policy, which caused widespread discussion.
Ian Goodfellow, a technology executive that Apple poached from Google in 2019, joined Apple's "special project team" as director of machine learning. Goodfellow, who previously worked at Google for more than six years, was already a "senior staff research scientist" when he left Apple in March 2019, known as the "father of the general adversarial network or GAN."
And just three years later, Goodfellow chose to leave Apple, no matter what the real reason, the trigger is Apple's resumption of work policy. In a memo to employees, Goodfellow wrote: "I firmly believe that greater flexibility will be the best policy for my team. ”
Affected by the epidemic, Apple has implemented a remote work policy for nearly two years, allowing employees to return to offline work on April 11, and apple is currently implementing plans to return to offline work in stages. At first, the company required employees to be on duty at least one day a week. On May 4, Apple increased office hours to two days a week. Starting May 23, employees will need to work in the office three days a week. This is the beginning of Apple's "hybrid" work program, which will require employees to work in the office every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday.
In fact, Google has also begun to ask some teams to resume offline work from last month, but has given many employees the right to work from home permanently. Apple reportedly offers teams some flexibility, allowing managers to adjust policies as they see fit, but Goodfellow's team doesn't seem to be. By contrast, Airbnb, a well-known short-term rental site, announced last week that it would allow employees to work remotely forever without a pay cut. Airbnb co-founder CEO Brian Chesky said working in the office is now a thing of the past. Perhaps, Goodfellow should consider Airbnb.