Thoughts on Office-Bound Work ➹

An open letter from Apple employees regarding returning to the office.

Two passages that immediately caught my eye, for distinct reasons:

This one is a very stark contrast to what I experience daily at Microsoft, where we dogfood Teams and Office collaboration on a daily basis:

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?

…and this one is something I’ve had an interesting run-in with myself:

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?

There is a lot more to unpack in the open letter (including procedural and work-life balance aspects that feel foreign to me these days), but in an age when even very conservative, non-technical companies are allowing full remote or flexible hybrid work, the scenario it portrays is… out of touch, at the very least.