I‘m happy and sad at the same time to announce that after 4 years I’m leaving Apple (and the US) in 3 weeks.
Working on developer tools at Apple was a dream come true. I met lots of great people at Apple and really enjoyed working with them and I’m grateful that I was able to help ship some improvements to „our“ tools.
But I severely overestimated Apple‘s flexibility and ability to adapt to a changed world of how work is done nowadays.
Yes, I’m leaving because of Apple‘s #remotework policy.
@helge @grork I feel like I explained that in the the prev two messages? Yes, I knew this was officially a US position and only parked in Germany for the first year.
But it was also shortly after the pandemic and everyone was working remotely, including at Apple. When I joined only half my team was in Cupertino, the other half was distributed across various locations in the US and Europe.
So I had hoped that Apple’s leadership would realize that this is completely fine and just let us be.
@helge @grork also, I know people who made this work before the pandemic (moved to the US temporarily and then came back to Germany and work remotely for Apple). So I hoped it would become easier to do this. Instead Apple has become extremely restrictive about these kinds of models to the point they are virtually non-existent.
It’s now much *harder* to work remotely for Apple than before the pandemic.
@helge @grork lastly, I’ve worked for companies with partial WFH-agreements before.
The last one before Apple was Yelp. There I managed to get an agreement to work only two days per week in the office and three from home. It took quite a bit of negotiating to get to that point before the pandemic. But shortly after the pandemic started Yelp transitioned to „work wherever you like (and we have payroll)“ to the best of my knowledge. I had simply hoped that Apple would make a similar transition.
Joachim
Dominic Hopton
Helge Heß