“Apple is working from a place of hubris in believing that it’s a desirable place to work and there’ll always be people who will want to work for Apple regardless of the conditions.”
“There is some palpable anxiety,” said one hardware engineer at the iPhone maker, who asked to remain anonymous.
While Big Tech companies were quick to send their workers home at the onset of the pandemic, the sector has been markedly less decisive in calling everybody back over concerns it could trigger an exodus of top talent. The move by Apple, a bellwether of Silicon Valley, has led to growing disquiet among tech workers on whether their company will follow. A group calling itself AppleTogether warned on Monday there should be no “uniform mandate from senior leadership”, while a Slack channel advocating for remote work at Apple has grown to 10,000 members.Īttendees gather to listen to Apple chief Tim Cook at the company’s California campus. It took just a few days for Apple’s employees to hit out against the tech giant’s demand for staff to return three days a week from September. San Francisco | When Tim Cook sent his workforce home in March 2020, calling coronavirus a “challenging moment”, it is unlikely the Apple chief executive anticipated that he would have a battle on his hands to get those workers back to the office two-and-a-half years later.