Apple recently resumed in-person work, but it has faced considerable resistance from employees. Numerous reports suggest that some employees have even left the company due to the policy, opting for workplaces that are more receptive to remote work.
Now, borderline Zoe Schiffer Ian Goodfellow, Apple’s head of machine learning, has left the company over a return-to-work policy, reports say.
Apple’s face-to-face work policy leads to high-profile departures
Apple poached Goodfellow from Google as early as 2019 to join its “special projects group” as director of machine learning. Goodfellow worked at Google for more than six years, starting as a software engineering intern and becoming a “senior research scientist” when he left Apple in March 2019.
Goodfellow has been called “the father of general adversarial networks or GANs”. The technology can be used to generate fake media content, which has become increasingly important in recent years.
However, just three years after he joined Apple, Goodfellow is now leaving the company due to the company’s return to work policy. In a memo to employees, Goodfellow wrote: “I firmly believe that greater flexibility would be the best policy for my team.”
After two years of remote work due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Apple employees began returning to on-site work on April 11. Apple is implementing its return-to-work plan in phases. At first, the company required employees to work in person at least one day a week. On May 4, the company increased office hours to two days a week.
Starting May 23, employees will be required to work in the office three days a week. It’s the start of what Apple calls a “hybrid” work plan, which will require employees to be in the office on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Goodfellow’s former employer, Google, asked some teams to resume in-person work last month, but many employees can work from home permanently. According to reports, Apple is giving teams some flexibility, allowing managers to adjust policies as they see fit. However, Goodfellow’s team doesn’t seem to be that way.
While some Apple employees have reportedly left the company for insisting on in-person work, Goodfellow’s departure is by far the most high-profile case publicly reported. Whether we’ve heard of other, more high-profile departures remains to be seen.
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