I left Apple after years of lack of any flexibility on the remote work process. They wouldn't allow transferring to any alternative office for most teams. From what I understood, VPs could protect a small minority of some of their employees if a senior leader made a case to them.
Unfortunately, this just seemed to lead to the most politically connected folks going remote and directors friends and favorite hires getting the perk.
At three trillion market cap, I guess they just realized it doesn't really matter if attrition shoots up and they'll always have enough people to fill the trenches. Lots and lots of people left around the same time.
Having left, I forgot what it was like to be able to focus on something other than Apple. Incredibly toxic atmosphere on the inside. I work at a fast-paced startup and still work on average 10/hours a week less than at Apple.
COVID made my situation worse at Apple. I worked in a satellite office (NYC), and while in the office, most folks in California were reluctant to schedule meetings later than ~2pm california time because they didn't want to keep people in the office late. When we went fully remote, suddenly it seems like any compunctions about that vanished; I would have meetings until 9pm 3 nights a week, I guess because the managers figured that we were already home.
> Having left, I forgot what it was like to be able to focus on something other than Apple
Definitely sympathize there; we weren't even allowed to leave Github issues without Legal's approval, and when I wanted to open source something (basically an HLS server I wrote to handle my home security system), I was told that a) it was too competitive with Apple because my project had to do with video, and b) there's no such thing as "my own time" with Apple, since I was salaried and well-compensated.
> When we went fully remote, suddenly it seems like any compunctions about that vanished; I would have meetings until 9pm 3 nights a week
This is why there is a decline button next to the accept button. An outage or something disastrous, sure I'll stay online till midnight to help in anyway I can; a regular status update type meeting, no way.
>there's no such thing as "my own time" with Apple
Companies that aren't nearly as "cool" and pay a fraction, can be just as possessive or more so.
I am well aware of the saying "better to ask for forgiveness than permission" and how some rules are broken by everyone with a tacit understanding.
However, once when I investigated volunteering for an extremely well known and mainstream nonprofit, they gave me some required paperwork, which said that any IP created during my volunteer work belonged to them.
I didn't have a firm intention to do IT work as a volunteer or not, but I was told I had to sign to volunteer regardless.
I thought I would ask my employer if I could sign the agreement; if it was compatible with the stuff I'd already signed, that asserted ownership of work outside of regular hours, if related to the business.
At a lower level, people had no idea. It was passed up the chain all the way to the chief corporate counsel or whoever, and eventually they said no, with an air of "WTF why are you wasting my time?".
I felt like the ultimate decisionmakers can live in a different reality, where things don't happen because nobody has an incentive to tell them.
I didn't particularly mind, since I wasn't set on that particular organization to volunteer with, and I learned something.
Most arent as blatant as setting up ridiculous times in the calendar, but the same goal is achieved by more insidious means. For example, a manager assigning a task that needs to be completed before the next day at 5pm.
> Definitely sympathize there; we weren't even allowed to leave Github issues without Legal's approval...
This strongly anti-OSS policy makes me very sad, I occasionally see Apple employees in GitHub issues essentially saying they would fix this problem they're seeing themselves but are forbidden from participating by their employer (Apple). Seems like such a waste. Everyone has their price and priorities, definitely solving interesting problems at work and being paid well for it can outweigh satisfaction from OSS, but just seems so needless for the wealthiest organization in the world.
Fair warning: my experience has been very different than yours or tombert's in most respects and some things have changed over time (some OSS contributions are now much easier, a very recent change). It is also the first company I've worked for that backed up appreciation for my efforts with compensation to match, and where my management chain cared about burnout and mental health with actions rather than empty words.
It is still primarily an on-site company. That might mean on-site an an office in San Diego, Austin, Philadelphia, NYC, etc. But in-office nonetheless.
Every team does things differently, even down to the department or individual manager level. Compared to the other FAANGs it is far more varied in most respects. Just because someone didn't like (or loves) their role doesn't mean you will feel the same way about it. If possible I recommend talking to people who work in the department you are interested in.
At some point I would like people to quit vilifying a completely legitimate business setup because it doesn't fit their world view.
I want to be in the office, and I prefer it when my coworkers are there too. I respect that not everyone feels the same - but I do think it is up to the employer to decide. So I will be picking companies that suit my preferences.
> work at a fast-paced startup and still work on average 10/hours a week less than at Apple.
I am always floored by statements like this. I work as a principal data analyst and everything above 40 hours/week is overtime. While I have overtime included in my contract I still am able to reduce overtime (it is still being tracked to ensure compliance with local workers protection laws) if the project situation allows. On average I do something like 41 hours a week over the last few years. Including high profile client engagement or pitch situations.
I find myself having enough time to also work on my side business and do work for animal protection charities. While still being able to work in the garden and shop to relax.
>"While I have overtime included in my contract I still am able to reduce overtime (it is still being tracked to ensure compliance with local workers protection laws) if the project situation allows."
The people talking about working long hours at Apple are getting paid commensurately. There's a reason why people work at FAANG companies despite the constant complaints.
when the overtime is included why not push it to the limit? i once had a contract where deployments were shit shows every other weekend. i signed up for every single one...
on more than a handful of occasions i was able to bill 20 hours over overtime at 2x rate for simply being 'available' meaning my phone was on mute in a deployment support conference call.
they happily paid and i happily pretended to care about their product.
They seem very rooted in the past for lots of ideas, which is ironic given the image and culture they try to project. For example, I've heard at least one story of someone being asked lots of irrelevant CS questions for a front-end role when they interviewed there. He did fine, but he said he felt like the interview somehow felt fifteen years out of date, which really stuck with me.
There were times at Apple that people were given a "no" on the interview because, despite knowing the solution to the problem, had compilation errors in there code. I thought (and still think) that was idiotic.
> Having left, I forgot what it was like to be able to focus on something other than Apple. Incredibly toxic atmosphere on the inside. I work at a fast-paced startup and still work on average 10/hours a week less than at Apple.
Maybe it was because I worked there only during the pandemic, but I never really felt the emotional impact of Apple's toxicity. I could of course tell it was there, and if I actually cared about getting promoted or getting higher pay, I might have felt more stressed.
For example, after pointing out some areas where I thought a proposal could be improved, from that point on I just wasn't ever invited to any more design or strategy meetings. It's like I was just cut out from everything because I had the audacity to criticize something from some senior schmuck with tenure, and I wouldn't grovel and kiss whoever's ass I needed to in order to be "allowed" in those meetings from that point forward.
In hindsight I was glad I torpedoed myself right off the bat after I joined. Not actually ever having to be around any of those people in meatspace probably helped, but it was really easy for me to sit in my office at home and plug away undisturbed on the pet projects that I felt were interesting and worthwhile. What I created actually was helpful, but it was totally designed, written, and delivered in a silo. I collected my salary and stock for a year, added Apple to my resume, and then hopped on to another company with higher comp and a much healthier culture.
Now at this new place, everyone is falling all over themselves to have me in their design and strategy meetings. <shrug> Fare thee well, Apple. I hardly knew ye.
That term could fit most of the Santa Clara Valley if you’re operating on the definition provided by the person you heard that from. I won’t link their name here, since I do not believe it is worthwhile to give them attention.
Maybe it's me, but I have yet to experience 'innovation' result from a conversation held over coffee or a chance encounter. I've had better luck creating connections with other parts of the business and exchanging ideas over the infrequent cocktail party where it's a mission of the night. Say all you want about open floorplans and irrelevant quiet encounters.
I have worked in remote companies and companies that had butt in chair requirements, so far all the remote companies have been more innovative and had more cross talk between teams than the companies that required people to be in an office all day, every day.
Of course, that's just my experience but I do have a feeling that certain type of people feel that there's more innovation around coffee and chance encounter because it's a nice story to tell oneself but it doesn't really happen.
I'm interested in how you accomplish this. Everything has to be scheduled in a meeting these days, and meeting burn out over zoom is real.
Where as in the office it was just walking around and seeing someone in an elevator, the hall, "hey lets catch up" or "you have a minute" or "lets get lunch"
these types of interactions just don't happen anymore
> but I do have a feeling that certain type of people feel that there's more innovation around coffee and chance encounter because it's a nice story to tell oneself but it doesn't really happen.
It seems somewhat uncharitable to assume that there are different people who believe things about how innovation happens to them, but not that there may be differences between how people innovate.
A lot depends on culture and process. Usually companies which had remote on day 1 do better because they get to fine tune and evolve the process over time.
Would be really nice to see if this has held up, given it only looks at the first few months of the pandemic. I know my company has gotten much better at remote work over the past couple of years.
Yep. I loved WFH years ago as a contractor doing hired gun work where I didn't need to interact with many folks and just mostly fixed bugs. I also loved full time WFH during the panini for the most part, although doing it in a tiny SiValley apartment sucked. Now that I'm doing architectural work and going into the office twice a week I get it. Nothing beats in person discussion for certain critical discussions.
Really, do most employees contribute to innovation at all? Can they?
I certainly never have except in an explicit innovation job. The rest of the time I am an implementer. So keep me away from connections with the other parts of the business as that just becomes a sideways way to ask for feature requests I have no say in or other info/support requests.
The far majority of people do grunt work. Only a small group actually does anything both innovative and non-obvious, which is the "use case" presented for these small talks. Most devs who are not part of that small group and find something non-obvious have to fight through many layers of bureaucracy to even get their voice heard, let alone be given time to prove their idea without having to invest their own time. This also doesn't take into account the far majority of those select people have dedicated times where they research potential innovations, and getting into that small group is also difficult.
Even supposing FAANG, fortune 100s or whatever top percentile is likely to desire more innovation, the idea spontaneous talks one supposedly only could have in the office significantly impacting the rates of innovation is pretty far-fetched and mostly just an assumption.
I feel like not everyone works well remotely. Meanwhile if you can work well remote, you can probably work well at a desk. So the rest of us must suffer especially at these larger firms.
I guess it depends on the desk. These open office plans kill my concentration, to be completely honest. I get at least twice as much done in my home office =/
At the office, all I did was put on headphones with white noise and stare at the screen and hope that no one came and train wrecked my chain of thought, which happened all too often. My main form of communication was Slack anyways... and I'm not embarrassed to say, I wasn't the only one. It was this, plus a Seattle commute, which was an hour+ each way because I'm not going to raise my kid in an apartment downtown (personal preference).
Now, I will totally grant you, there were plenty that could juggle chatting and typing and hopping up to meetings and retaining what happened after Scrum and the flying Nerf darts and the smell of coffee and farts and B.O. and overpowering deodorant and cologne and perfume and hairsprays and hair product and people putting fish in the microwave, etc. etc. Bless the people who can super ultra multitask and keep a train of thought like that. I am so envious... I'm not that guy =[
> Meanwhile if you can work well remote, you can probably work well at a desk.
This is sadly not universal. I’d wagger there’s a decent number of people who could only barely work in an office.
I’ve memories of people who had issues keeping themselves and/or desk clean, and it wasn’t some cute story to laugh at, it had a direct impact on their performance and if their managers found any good excuse they’d be out pretty quick.
Then all the IRL office harrasment stuff, the one that looms at a level HR doesn’t give a fuck but you still deal with it every fucking day. Going remote makes it weirdly easier on both sides, I guess some people just couldn’t help it and now they have a private space where they can do what they need to calm down.
I’d say there’s a infinite number of circumstances, up until now we’d just think these people are just not fitted to work at any place. Working remote changes a lot of these pre-requisites.
I suspect we are going to see some turmoil in the tech hiring space with stock prices taking a beating in recent months. Large companies have gotten away with paying under market price for talent because employees have seen massive gains from stock appreciation over the last decade. If total comp starts going down year over year, suddenly the more traditional, no-frills system at places like Apple, Microsoft and Amazon isn't going to look nearly as attractive, especially compared to companies one tier below that are already offering higher comp and more flexible work options.
>I suspect we are going to see some turmoil in the tech hiring space
I agree, but I don't think the disruption will go the way you or I hope it would.
Many of the companies that is "one tier" below were able to offer higher comp only because of sky high valuation from the recent bubble. Most of them aren't in the kind of cashflow positions that can sustain such high cost if the stock value correct. If we enter an economic situation where stock value go down for companies like MSFT, Google and Apple, what do you think would happen to the stock price of high flying growth companies that don't even make a profit?
And guess what, most of them are coming to the realization that you don't need to actually pay $300k+/yr to hire some IC just to build React components or spin up another Node.js microservice. I know of quite a few companies (especially the ones that took a beating on the market recently) that's already starting to pivot more aggressively to foreign developers and starting to look at engineering offices outside of the country. If anything, the past two years only made a global workforce to be easier than ever to adopt.
Basically I think given the macroeconomic that's going on, the days when barely profitable or even cashflow negative "growth" companies offering FAANG-beating compensation packages will soon be gone. The numbers just won't add up anymore.
That's what I'm seeing as a hiring manager at one of the FAANGs. A lot of our candidates are interested in us simply because we provide stability and profitability that they can't get in the hot growth companies they already work at.
Thing is, we've had a unique situation in recent years where trillion dollar companies have seen startup-like growth quarter after quarter. Of course no one can predict the future, but I personally think this growth will stabilize to more traditional levels (see the history of the tech industry up until ~2010 for example). This does not mean that the VC industry will disappear and startup bubbles will stop being a thing. It will just be slightly more "boring" to get a job at Google or Apple the same way it was at Cisco or IBM back in the day, and top talent will want to look elsewhere for more risk and reward.
> ... what do you think would happen to the stock price of high flying growth companies that don't even make a profit?
They're already down as much as 80%. If I were looking around today, I'd kill to join one of those high growth tech startups with a solid balance sheet that just got the crap kicked out of its stock.
Can confirm, Google was really stingy with their RSUs compared to Apple, but the perks really aren't that good with the exception of the food, which, when speaking to current Googlers, they say the food quality has fallen precipitously. Google at the time I worked there seemed to lean heavily on its reputation to reduce total comp.
As someone who left Apple for Google, I can say that Apple was even more stingy for all but the most senior levels, where they were competitive. Their TC could come close to matching Google because the stock appreciation was greater with AAPL than GOOG, but the offer letters had lower salary and usually no performance based cash bonuses when I was there.
At least according to levels.fyi, Google is paying people at equivalent titles quite a bit more than Apple is. For example a senior engineer at Google is listed as having an average total comp of $380k, whereas at Apple it's only $310k.
Now it's entirely possible that there is title inflation at Apple, so that a "senior" engineer at Apple is less senior than a senior engineer at Google. Or perhaps the samples are skewed differently per company. But when I lived in the Valley, the word on the street was that Apple paid less well than Google as a general rule. So the observed data on levels.fyi does match with whatever I heard in real life.
> Large companies have gotten away with paying under market price
This doesn’t make any sense.
What the large companies are paying is the market price. By definition.
It’s literally not possible for all of the big companies to be paying under market price at the same time. That implies some other prevailing market price somewhere else, yet we’ve clearly seen the highest salaries come from the big companies.
The big companies are paying whatever it takes to get the talent they need. That’s market price.
> Large companies have gotten away with paying under market price for talent because employees have seen massive gains from stock appreciation over the last decade.
Are you sure these places pay "below market price"? Just curious, what companies would pay significantly more than FAANG?
In the month it will the best time to look for software job ever. With Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian developers cut off, companies, that used to rely on remote teams, are going to be in the hiring frenzy to replace them.
Apple has always been the more stringent about remote work, in terms of maintaining secrecy by keeping its workers on-premises, so this is the least surprising move.
I have to imagine a lot of that has to do with the HW work they do, as a percentage of their business?
Even regardless of the confidentiality aspect (and we all know how Apple feels about that), for a decent number of folks, they might need some decently expensive equipment that wouldn't make sense to buy for everyone individually.
At least according to how I perceive the company, the folks coming from that side of the business really run things, and so they bring the in office culture with them even to the pure software businesses.
Obviously this is a lot of speculation, but it seems like a reasonable way to explain why they are the way they are.
That's my guess. And not just equipment, but prototypes and such.
Imagine trying to make something intuitive and comfortable. How can you even judge that remotely? First you have to ship it around(or else make tons more units), then hope video quality suffices to see everything.
In person you can get 20 people in a room and let them interact with widget x. See how they behave, hear feedback, etc.
I think it is safe to say that most people do not have access to any expensive equipment.
I worked for Samsung for a little bit. And even there with operating system basically borrowed from Google, only very small portion of people ever needed to use any special tools. We got some prototypes but the one time we needed to do anything was to desolder and solder again a battery for a prototype watch. And that because a mistake (charging controller circuit badly designed, not powering properly from external power when battery drained). We had one guy do this for the rest of the team and everybody else was just working on software.
I don't work for Apple, but it seems they've managed to get this far without any leaks so I guess whatever they did regarding their WFH policy worked out for them?
I had to go into the office a few times over the pandemic to use some testing equipment, but that was 7 or 8 days in the last 2 years?
This is me. But my boss’s boss doesn’t want to go back to the office either and every meeting she is saying that she is working to make it so we are all remote. I’m waiting to see what happens before I jump ship.
fwiw I just quit my first full-time job out of school in part because remote work has really held back my productivity + career growth. I started in May 2020 and have only met my coworkers a handful of times, and it's depressing. Among the students and early-career tech workers I know, working-from-home is almost universally a negative rather than a positive.
That may work at McDonalds but the average Apple employee has options and can work pretty much anywhere they want. “My way or the highway” is not a good strategy for retaining the best talent.
More people are dying with Covid now than were dying most of the previous two years, minus 4 peaks of various waves.
I'm happy we're returning to normalcy, but it just makes me wonder "why now?" It's like the government and big business just decided overnight to declare "mission accomplished" when nothing substantial has changed. Last summer, for example, could have been the reopening, and we'd have better data and "science" to support it.
Politics plain and simple. COVID protocols are very unpopular at this point and not every effective. Florida and Texas are having big inflows, california and New York huge outflows. Whatever your viewpoint this is the fact politicians see. And yes taxes and cost of living are a huge driving force not only COVID, but as long as remote work goes on people will keep moving to low cost of living and low tax states.
You don't think the fact that this country just had the largest ever COVID wave (in terms of cases), which is in the process of ending, is at all related to the decisions?
Also of the scant 40 million people remaining in California, who haven't yet moved to Texas or Florida, public support for at least some "COVID protocols" are very high [1]. I'm not sure you are giving an impartial assessment of the facts.
Yes, the polling changed and they follow the polls:
The message is backed by advice from Biden’s polling firm, Impact Research, which studied voter attitudes to Covid and found that most Americans are "worn out" by the restrictions and "have personally moved out of crisis mode."
In a Feb. 16 memo, the firm told Democrats to take "the win" on Covid, warning that by 49 percent to 24 percent, Americans are more concerned about it causing economic harm than infecting them or a family member, and that far more parents and teachers worry about learning loss than illness for their kids.
"The more we talk about the threat of COVID and onerously restrict people’s lives because of it, the more we turn them against us and show them we’re out of touch with their daily realities," Impact Research’s Molly Murphy and Brian Stryker wrote in the memo, which was viewed by NBC News. They warned that if Democrats continue to emphasize Covid precautions over learning to live in a world with the virus, "they risk paying dearly for it in November."
I get people are skeptical but let's be objective here. Not everything needs to be a conspiracy and an evil scheme. California and NY followed CDC guidance. We are past the Omicron phase and may be the data shows we are in the clear. If losing out people was the issue then did NY just participate in this "scheme" out of solidarity to California?
The not-just-poll-driven view of this is that you also should take into account:
- for many - not all, but many - of the more vulnerable to hospitalization and death, it's now a matter of choice.
- As a result, a bigger spike in cases caused much fewer hospitalizations and deaths than previous spikes, meaning less impact on the rest of the health system.
- behavior has changed dramatically in terms of things like event attendance even in areas with more cautious government policy. Compare how many people went to movie theaters in late summer 2020 when they reopened in limited capacity in California with now. The limited capacity isn't the biggest difference, it's the behavior.
- we can see that, say, California has fewer cumulative deaths per capita than Texas or Florida despite the urban areas being somewhat denser[0] (which itself seems to play a big role), and Arizona has more than NY or Massachusets despite being far less dense and with much milder winters... but the differences aren't orders of magnitudes.
- masks are cheaper and more available than they were earlier, and treatments are becoming more widely available too
So this is a reasonable point to say "we aren't able to eliminate this thing, but fortunately, it's much less dangerous to most of us than it used to be."
But make no mistakes: the biggest factor there in terms of danger is the vaccines, which have now been available over a year.
They asked him how he'd define when a pandemic is over, and he said there's a science aspect to it, but it's largely when "people stop paying attention to it".
They also said the 1918 flu pandemic had 4 waves, and most of the US put restrictions in for wave 2. For wave 3, some areas did and some didn't. By wave 4, which was approximately as severe, NO cities put restrictions in place. Some histories of the flu pandemic don't even mention the 4th wave.
We seem to be following a very similar pattern now. Maybe 2 years (and/or 4 waves) is roughly society's attention span for a pandemic.
I didn't use death rate for supporting closing and I won't use death rate for supporting opening.
Covid's main threats for most people are:
* Filling up hospitals to the point they stop functioning (that's been true here in Canada).
* Putting 10% ~ 20% of workers everywhere, including hospitals, out of commission for weeks at a time while they're acutely sick with Covid or infectious to others.
* Disabling some large % of people temporarily or permanently due to lingering symptoms of the virus.
The death rate for covid is significant but not substantial enough in itself to cause the world to lock down. The points above though, are.
> * Putting 10% ~ 20% of workers everywhere, including hospitals, out of commission for weeks at a time while they're acutely sick with Covid or infectious to others.
This one seems like a dubious point to me, services during the early-2020 lockdowns were much more impacted than they were during the Omicron spike which saw much less enforced lockdown but much more "shit, all our employees are sick" closures.
Completely agree with the hospitalization concerns, and I would add that the calculations also changed a lot re: protecting others after widespread vaccine availability.
This line of argument doesn't hold up to the slightest scrutiny. First of all, it's quite pedantic and naive to assume that governments and medical bodies in the richest and most advanced countries haven't worked through similar issues of causality with innumerable other diseases. More to the point, the peaks in COVID deaths magically align with proportionately large spikes in all cause mortality not seen in prior years that have yet to be explained by anything else.
Covid sucks. My toddler (for various shitty reasons I was unable to prevent) got it three times in the last 12 months.
Even vaccinated (and never testing positive), the immune response I got from taking care of a highly infectious toddler screaming in my face was terrible and really brutal. I’m not old, fully functional immune system, etc. and it had me out for weeks, brain fog, exhaustion, off and on high fever, you name it. I suspect I still am suffering side effects from the last infection in Jan.
If I hadn’t been fully vaccinated just before the first time he got it, I’d probably be dead.
Pretending that someone who was not as strong or healthy, gets it, then dies didn’t ‘die from Covid’ is probably disingenuous at least 90% of the time.
We all die eventually, it’s the norm for whatever obvious change occurred to be blamed for it, not ‘inevitable entropic reality’ or whatever.
At the end of the day, someone has to made a judgement call about the appropriate factor in a complex system.
You also need to take into account the fact that that most of the deaths in the US are amongst the unvaccinated (something like 20:1 last I checked) so your personal risk of death, if vaccinated, is very different from the overall death rate.
Deaths and cases are both dropping sharply, and since deaths lag cases, the deaths should be expected to continue to drop steadily for a few more weeks.
Something substantial has definitely changed. That's not the same as knowing there won't be future variants or spikes. But if there's ever a time to get back to normal, now would be it. It's not total victory and may never be, but at some point we either declare that we can live with this while having normal lives, or we're tacitly declaring that we never intend to.
Yeah, it's called midterm elections are coming up and the Democrats are staring down the barrel of getting absolutely crushed if they continue on with mask and vaccine mandate policies.
The pandemic is over because we as a society have decided it is over and most people accept the number of covid deaths as part of being in society. Numbers and science matter less than what we are willing to live with. People that don't agree will continue to protect themselves as much as possible.
Deaths tend to lag behind peaks of cases and we recently passed the peak of our biggest wave by far (official numbers for this peak are around 800k/day in the US, vs 250k for previous peak in jan 2021, but this doesn't account for the likelihood that many cases didn't get reported due to widely available at-home testing and other factors). Deaths going forward for people who catch it now will probably be far lower.
That stat has been widely reported, in the U.S. at least. There are more deaths from Covid occurring currently in the U.S. on an average daily basis that at any prior time in the pandemic.
My understanding (which could be wrong!) is that the current absolute death amounts are high, but the actual rate of deaths per-infection is low. This is because the trend in variants has (so far) been towards more-infectious but less-fatal, along with improved knowledge of treatments... so we have a vast number of people infected but they're mostly-surviving.
Said deaths are also extremely focused in unvaccinated people, meaning that outside of the immunocompromised (whose situation sucks here), it's at least mostly people who chose the risk.
It’s not like they just decided - they did, they actually just decided. The change in cloth mask guidance proves it: no new data, we always knew they were ineffective.
Cloth masks are estimated to be in the 50-60% effectiveness range. To me, that's quite effective, not ineffective. Especially when applied across an entire population.
N95s and similar are obviously better but cloth masks do ok. Also remember they changed guidance to recommend cloth+surgical masks, which everyone laughed at. Lo and behold that combination tests in the 80% filtration range.
So cloth masks work, the guidance for double masking was valid, and the N95 recommendations more valid still.
Well there's new data it's just not health related.
"In fact, support for mask mandates has reached its lowest level since we began asking in August 2021. Now, a narrow majority (51%) support their state or local government requiring masks in public places compared to the roughly 63% that had over the last 6 months."
There is literally new data every day. Case counts change, hospital usage changes, etc. The change in mask guidance is also not universal - it is dependent on that exact data. The CDC maintains a county-by-county map of the data so you know exactly what the guidance is each day based on the latest data.
Why not now? We have to return to normalcy eventually so what do we gain by waiting? Everyone is going to be exposed to the virus occasionally so whether that happens in an office or somewhere else hardly matters.
Who knows if the next variant will be milder (common talking point about how viruses evolve to be more contagious/less deadly) or worst (the unknown and media fear mongering... not to mean theyre equivalent), but if the trend points to anything it's that things peak twice a year. Around January/February and August/September. Not to mention, America is in an election year and the economy is tetering, so everything is about optics and giving people some feeling of autonomy over their lives at the very least :/
There are reasons to believe "this time is different". Omicron was a huge wave through the population that had the potential to consume all the "fuel" (non-immune people), making future waves much more difficult to get started. I don't think anyone thinks covid is going away, but moving to an endemic stage.
Some numbers to back up that claim would be nice. Make sure to discern between cases where COVID is the primary reason for dying and where it is not.
As a data point, Denmark have been without restrictions since first of February 2022. There are still 20.000 infections daily, but most with very mild symptoms.
There are 1.600 hospitalized, which is considerable more than December, where there were about 600.
So number wise it doesn't make a lot of sense to remove restrictions, but I'm personally very happy having the old normal back.
Yes, deaths are higher than they were the same time a year ago. Cases are still very high. Things only look better relative to the January peak. Everyone just decided they had enough.
> More people are dying with Covid now than were dying most of the previous two years
Assuming you meant "from," not "with," this is clearly not the case in Santa Clara county, the location of Apple's HQ. The current daily average is 5 per day. It briefly peaked at 10, but the non-surge average is around 2. As others have said, deaths lag, so they'll likely be back to ~3 by April.
It seems like a crucial thing to deal with surges is to dramatically increase hospital capacity. Making health care universal would fund it.
What blocks any expensive investments in US standard of living is the cost. The costs is so high, it's almost as much as the cost of inaction and that's too damn much.
Something I read[1] that resonated a few months ago:
> Dying from Covid is more or less optional at this point. If you want to remove the risk of dying, get the vaccine. If you want to take the risk, don’t.
This is a bit reductive -- people in some countries may not have easy access to the vaccine, people whose immune systems don't respond to the vaccine may need still-scarce antiviral treatment to maintain a mortality rate on par with the vaccinated, and in the US there may still be people who genuinely cannot logistically manage getting the vaccine.
But this is something I've been thinking about a bit lately: when will be the "tipping point" after which more than 50% of all US covid deaths will have been a personal choice?
We're at about 950k deaths now. The "everyone will be eligible to schedule an appointment" date was in April 2021 (at about 570k deaths). So maybe another 3 months?
Every wave now is also very likely to be less of a strain on the health care system than the last.
The virulence of the virus isn't changing that much, the biggest effect is that most people have gained immunity.
The fact that 90% of the people in hospitals are unvaccinated though while vaccination rates are at least >60% everywhere is a sign though that the unvaccinated population still has failed to achieve a level of immunity equal to vaccination.
They're going to just accumulate immunity the hard way though with more human casualties and death. There isn't a lot to be done about that though.
Eventually the rates of unvaccinated in the hospital with each wave will start reflecting the population rate of unvaccinated and we'll be at pretty much 100% seroprevalence finally.
The threat to hospitals is essentially gone now that immunity is widespread thanks to vaccines and recoveries. All that most restrictions were ever intended to do was to stop everyone getting sick at once, which would have resulted in mass casualties from lack of healthcare resources.
> More people are dying with Covid now than were dying most of the previous two years, minus 4 peaks of various waves.
I'm not disagreeing with your point, however IIRC this is heavily concentrated among unvaccinated individuals, and I believe that Apple/Google/etc employees are overwhelmingly vaccinated. I would be shocked if these companies didn't have accommodation processes in place for individuals who are still at high risk.
I'm not disagreeing with your overall point, but there's no guarantee that the same trends/statistics exist in this sub-population.
> Last summer, for example, could have been the reopening, and we'd have better data and "science" to support it.
Things trended well last summer, but 1) everybody expects a lull in warm weather and 2) vaccination numbers were still low. It was reasonable at the time to hold onto precautions hoping the unvaccinated people would come around before fall. And good thing too, because delta proved to be a real pickle before being displaced by omicron.
At some point, it becomes obvious that a large number of people just won't bother getting vaccinated, and you can't realistically keep asking the entire country to go out of their way to protect the people who won't protect themselves.
We'll see another wave in the fall, either omicron or some new variant, and hopefully our vaccines will stay ahead of it.
A lot has changed in the last year? Loads of people have been vaccinated that weren't a year ago (even if they were eligible then).
Kids became eligible to be vaccinated only a few months ago, which even if it wasn't actually risky to them it was a major concern for many parents.
Right about that time, the omicron wave hit, and ever since late december we've known it was very likely we'd peak and then crash on cases.
So we didn't return to normal last summer because loads of people weren't vaccinated yet, and kids weren't eligible. We didn't return once kids became eligible because omicron was looming. And we didn't return during omicron peak because hospitals were overwhelmed.
>More people are dying with Covid now than were dying most of the previous two years, minus 4 peaks of various waves.
And these people are overwhelmingly unvaccinated. At this point, it's been a year that vaccines have been available. You're not going to change their minds, and the rest of us - heartless as this sounds - shouldn't continue to be held back just because of other people's stubbornness. They made the decision not to get it, they should live with whatever consequences may result from that choice.
Edit: I realize that some people can't get it for various medical reasons, and I empathize with them. It's everyone else I'm referring to.
Numbers of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths are all way down and still dropping. Vaccinations have turned out to be highly effective both against severe disease and long COVID. The Omicron variant is far less deadly than the Delta variant and has almost completely replaced the Delta variant.
The difference is now almost everyone dying is unvaccinated, and almost everyone unvaccinated (in the Western industrialized world) is that way by choice.
We cannot force these people to vaccinate for their own good, but neither can we be held hostage by them.
It's not "mission accomplished." It's more like our withdraw from Afghanistan--admission of defeat. Omicron was like the Taliban taking Kabul in 2 weeks. We just lost to Covid--at least for now.
Essentially everyone has an immune response to covid now--either by vaccination or because you already had. That is why case number are cratering. The immune response effectiveness will fade, but all evidence points to long lasting protection against severe infections.
Last summer was the re-opening a la "mission accomplished." Then omicron evaded previous immune responses. Why won't that happen again? It might, but less of the population is vulnerable b/c Omicron spread to more of the population. There was a big group of unvaccined protected by heard immunity.
Post Omicron how many people haven't gotten a vaccine or covid? Probably less than 10% of the public.
I have the same questions. We've seen government and businesses try to be aggressive on relaxing lockdown policy in the past, and then quickly re-implement restrictions when the next wave of infections hit. Multiple times I've seen schools, government, offices set terms that had to be met before moving to the next 'phase' and every time those terms avoided their expectations they just declared that it was a bad plan to begin with, scrapped it, and moved on to implement whatever policy they wanted regardless of the current status.
"Why now?" Just speculation, but: Because midterm elections are this year, because consumer spending is up and inflation is rising and the government wants to encourage the economy to remain strong, because businesses are seeing lower performance from employees especially regarding sensitive work, because ICUs have capacity and vaccines are readily available.
>> More people are dying with Covid now than were dying most of the previous two years, minus 4 peaks of various waves.
You can’t just exclude the data that disproves your point. The peaks were the original variant, Alpha(?), Delta and now Omicron. Deaths in this wave are extremely lower than in any other wave due to severity, immunity and vaccinations. Hospital stays are reduced and shorter. The original point of avoiding covid en masse was to prevent the healthcare system from being overwhelmed. Although it varies from place to place the healthcare systems in highly vaccinated countries are no longer seeing that kind of pressure even with high case numbers (still lots of pressure but not enough to risk overwhelming the system entirely).
Deaths are currently at around 2,000 PER DAY in the United States. That is not in any way, shape, or form "extremely lower" than earlier waves. The Omicron wave was equal to the initial wave in severity, and we're still not out of it.
I think you're both right, but sort-of arguing different issues. Here's two points:
* Covid deaths per-day are at-or-near their highest ever levels
* the current wave is less dangerous
These sound contradictory, but aren't: deaths are high, death rates aren't -- if you catch Covid you're more likely to survive than ever before, but you're also more likely to catch Covid. This is because we're (currently) in a wave of a high-infection low-mortality variant.
Yes, they need to prove that commercial real estate still holds any value at all, though I'm not convinced seeing this incredible shift towards remote economy. I think they just burned a bunch of money to be honest. Maybe in 15 years we will see the Apple campus converted to high quality free public housing, which would be a good outcome for all and certainly would create more value for society than it does now.
> need to prove that commercial real estate still holds any value at all
You've hit the nail on the had, the entire human civilisation could reorganise around smaller cities without the commute to be more healthy, less polluting and more environmentally friendly
Instead we are witnessing whole COVID-is-gone theater only to protect parasite investors that 'invested' in assets that don't produce anything
I suspect that at the root of all of these companies with massive office investments insisting that everyone gets back to the office as soon as possible is something to do with taxes.
Something like deductions that cannot be taken when those facilities are not used or not used enough in the development of income.
Having X employees in a given city/county/state is often part of agreements for skipping taxes or even attaining grants for new office development, that's true.
I certainly expect the HR heads of the big tech companies know each other and talk now and then. Even if they're not colluding in some illegal way, I'd actually be a bit surprised if they weren't discussing COVID-related matters.
To be honest, I’d be way more pissed if my HR and Facilities teams weren’t talking to their peers in the industry and sharing learning/best practices throughout all this.
There's no need to collude when you can just notice how the wind is flowing; expect a flood of these announcements over the next weeks.
Apple didn't just decide to do it because Google did, they'd already decided it was coming, and perhaps moved up the announcement now that someone (Putin? Google?) took the news cycle.
Readit News
Unfortunately, this just seemed to lead to the most politically connected folks going remote and directors friends and favorite hires getting the perk.
At three trillion market cap, I guess they just realized it doesn't really matter if attrition shoots up and they'll always have enough people to fill the trenches. Lots and lots of people left around the same time.
Having left, I forgot what it was like to be able to focus on something other than Apple. Incredibly toxic atmosphere on the inside. I work at a fast-paced startup and still work on average 10/hours a week less than at Apple.
> Having left, I forgot what it was like to be able to focus on something other than Apple
Definitely sympathize there; we weren't even allowed to leave Github issues without Legal's approval, and when I wanted to open source something (basically an HLS server I wrote to handle my home security system), I was told that a) it was too competitive with Apple because my project had to do with video, and b) there's no such thing as "my own time" with Apple, since I was salaried and well-compensated.
This is why there is a decline button next to the accept button. An outage or something disastrous, sure I'll stay online till midnight to help in anyway I can; a regular status update type meeting, no way.
Is there 1 FAANG company that is the most friendly/accomodating to someone who wants to develop their own software/indiegames on the side?
Companies that aren't nearly as "cool" and pay a fraction, can be just as possessive or more so.
I am well aware of the saying "better to ask for forgiveness than permission" and how some rules are broken by everyone with a tacit understanding.
However, once when I investigated volunteering for an extremely well known and mainstream nonprofit, they gave me some required paperwork, which said that any IP created during my volunteer work belonged to them.
I didn't have a firm intention to do IT work as a volunteer or not, but I was told I had to sign to volunteer regardless.
I thought I would ask my employer if I could sign the agreement; if it was compatible with the stuff I'd already signed, that asserted ownership of work outside of regular hours, if related to the business.
At a lower level, people had no idea. It was passed up the chain all the way to the chief corporate counsel or whoever, and eventually they said no, with an air of "WTF why are you wasting my time?".
I felt like the ultimate decisionmakers can live in a different reality, where things don't happen because nobody has an incentive to tell them.
I didn't particularly mind, since I wasn't set on that particular organization to volunteer with, and I learned something.
Remote work became anytime work.
Most arent as blatant as setting up ridiculous times in the calendar, but the same goal is achieved by more insidious means. For example, a manager assigning a task that needs to be completed before the next day at 5pm.
HP to Woz: "Sure, go for it, good luck."
Apple to their own employees: "Uh, let's see here.... how about 'No.' Does 'No' work? Good, then we'll go with 'No.'"
Gotta love the Valley. You either flame out early, or you live long enough to become the face on the telescreen.
This strongly anti-OSS policy makes me very sad, I occasionally see Apple employees in GitHub issues essentially saying they would fix this problem they're seeing themselves but are forbidden from participating by their employer (Apple). Seems like such a waste. Everyone has their price and priorities, definitely solving interesting problems at work and being paid well for it can outweigh satisfaction from OSS, but just seems so needless for the wealthiest organization in the world.
It is still primarily an on-site company. That might mean on-site an an office in San Diego, Austin, Philadelphia, NYC, etc. But in-office nonetheless.
Every team does things differently, even down to the department or individual manager level. Compared to the other FAANGs it is far more varied in most respects. Just because someone didn't like (or loves) their role doesn't mean you will feel the same way about it. If possible I recommend talking to people who work in the department you are interested in.
At some point I would like people to quit vilifying a completely legitimate business setup because it doesn't fit their world view.
I want to be in the office, and I prefer it when my coworkers are there too. I respect that not everyone feels the same - but I do think it is up to the employer to decide. So I will be picking companies that suit my preferences.
> work at a fast-paced startup and still work on average 10/hours a week less than at Apple.
I am always floored by statements like this. I work as a principal data analyst and everything above 40 hours/week is overtime. While I have overtime included in my contract I still am able to reduce overtime (it is still being tracked to ensure compliance with local workers protection laws) if the project situation allows. On average I do something like 41 hours a week over the last few years. Including high profile client engagement or pitch situations.
I find myself having enough time to also work on my side business and do work for animal protection charities. While still being able to work in the garden and shop to relax.
The people talking about working long hours at Apple are getting paid commensurately. There's a reason why people work at FAANG companies despite the constant complaints.
If you're in the fancy new hotness that has VP political support, great.
If you're in a team with a manager who has your back and pushed back on extra work and raises and bonuses for the whole team, great.
But you're one of the lucky ones.
on more than a handful of occasions i was able to bill 20 hours over overtime at 2x rate for simply being 'available' meaning my phone was on mute in a deployment support conference call.
they happily paid and i happily pretended to care about their product.
Maybe it was because I worked there only during the pandemic, but I never really felt the emotional impact of Apple's toxicity. I could of course tell it was there, and if I actually cared about getting promoted or getting higher pay, I might have felt more stressed.
For example, after pointing out some areas where I thought a proposal could be improved, from that point on I just wasn't ever invited to any more design or strategy meetings. It's like I was just cut out from everything because I had the audacity to criticize something from some senior schmuck with tenure, and I wouldn't grovel and kiss whoever's ass I needed to in order to be "allowed" in those meetings from that point forward.
In hindsight I was glad I torpedoed myself right off the bat after I joined. Not actually ever having to be around any of those people in meatspace probably helped, but it was really easy for me to sit in my office at home and plug away undisturbed on the pet projects that I felt were interesting and worthwhile. What I created actually was helpful, but it was totally designed, written, and delivered in a silo. I collected my salary and stock for a year, added Apple to my resume, and then hopped on to another company with higher comp and a much healthier culture.
Now at this new place, everyone is falling all over themselves to have me in their design and strategy meetings. <shrug> Fare thee well, Apple. I hardly knew ye.
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Having said that, every situation is unique.
Of course, that's just my experience but I do have a feeling that certain type of people feel that there's more innovation around coffee and chance encounter because it's a nice story to tell oneself but it doesn't really happen.
Where as in the office it was just walking around and seeing someone in an elevator, the hall, "hey lets catch up" or "you have a minute" or "lets get lunch"
these types of interactions just don't happen anymore
It seems somewhat uncharitable to assume that there are different people who believe things about how innovation happens to them, but not that there may be differences between how people innovate.
A lot depends on culture and process. Usually companies which had remote on day 1 do better because they get to fine tune and evolve the process over time.
So yeah, YMMV
I certainly never have except in an explicit innovation job. The rest of the time I am an implementer. So keep me away from connections with the other parts of the business as that just becomes a sideways way to ask for feature requests I have no say in or other info/support requests.
Even supposing FAANG, fortune 100s or whatever top percentile is likely to desire more innovation, the idea spontaneous talks one supposedly only could have in the office significantly impacting the rates of innovation is pretty far-fetched and mostly just an assumption.
At the office, all I did was put on headphones with white noise and stare at the screen and hope that no one came and train wrecked my chain of thought, which happened all too often. My main form of communication was Slack anyways... and I'm not embarrassed to say, I wasn't the only one. It was this, plus a Seattle commute, which was an hour+ each way because I'm not going to raise my kid in an apartment downtown (personal preference).
Now, I will totally grant you, there were plenty that could juggle chatting and typing and hopping up to meetings and retaining what happened after Scrum and the flying Nerf darts and the smell of coffee and farts and B.O. and overpowering deodorant and cologne and perfume and hairsprays and hair product and people putting fish in the microwave, etc. etc. Bless the people who can super ultra multitask and keep a train of thought like that. I am so envious... I'm not that guy =[
This is sadly not universal. I’d wagger there’s a decent number of people who could only barely work in an office.
I’ve memories of people who had issues keeping themselves and/or desk clean, and it wasn’t some cute story to laugh at, it had a direct impact on their performance and if their managers found any good excuse they’d be out pretty quick.
Then all the IRL office harrasment stuff, the one that looms at a level HR doesn’t give a fuck but you still deal with it every fucking day. Going remote makes it weirdly easier on both sides, I guess some people just couldn’t help it and now they have a private space where they can do what they need to calm down.
I’d say there’s a infinite number of circumstances, up until now we’d just think these people are just not fitted to work at any place. Working remote changes a lot of these pre-requisites.
I agree, but I don't think the disruption will go the way you or I hope it would.
Many of the companies that is "one tier" below were able to offer higher comp only because of sky high valuation from the recent bubble. Most of them aren't in the kind of cashflow positions that can sustain such high cost if the stock value correct. If we enter an economic situation where stock value go down for companies like MSFT, Google and Apple, what do you think would happen to the stock price of high flying growth companies that don't even make a profit?
And guess what, most of them are coming to the realization that you don't need to actually pay $300k+/yr to hire some IC just to build React components or spin up another Node.js microservice. I know of quite a few companies (especially the ones that took a beating on the market recently) that's already starting to pivot more aggressively to foreign developers and starting to look at engineering offices outside of the country. If anything, the past two years only made a global workforce to be easier than ever to adopt.
Basically I think given the macroeconomic that's going on, the days when barely profitable or even cashflow negative "growth" companies offering FAANG-beating compensation packages will soon be gone. The numbers just won't add up anymore.
They're already down as much as 80%. If I were looking around today, I'd kill to join one of those high growth tech startups with a solid balance sheet that just got the crap kicked out of its stock.
Now it's entirely possible that there is title inflation at Apple, so that a "senior" engineer at Apple is less senior than a senior engineer at Google. Or perhaps the samples are skewed differently per company. But when I lived in the Valley, the word on the street was that Apple paid less well than Google as a general rule. So the observed data on levels.fyi does match with whatever I heard in real life.
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This doesn’t make any sense.
What the large companies are paying is the market price. By definition.
It’s literally not possible for all of the big companies to be paying under market price at the same time. That implies some other prevailing market price somewhere else, yet we’ve clearly seen the highest salaries come from the big companies.
The big companies are paying whatever it takes to get the talent they need. That’s market price.
They did and there was a lawsuit about it…
Are you sure these places pay "below market price"? Just curious, what companies would pay significantly more than FAANG?
If they aren’t struggling to hire and retain, they’re paying market rate. It’s as simple as that.
Smart ones are already in the hiring frenzy.
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This sounds incredibly disconnected from reality.
Even regardless of the confidentiality aspect (and we all know how Apple feels about that), for a decent number of folks, they might need some decently expensive equipment that wouldn't make sense to buy for everyone individually.
At least according to how I perceive the company, the folks coming from that side of the business really run things, and so they bring the in office culture with them even to the pure software businesses.
Obviously this is a lot of speculation, but it seems like a reasonable way to explain why they are the way they are.
Imagine trying to make something intuitive and comfortable. How can you even judge that remotely? First you have to ship it around(or else make tons more units), then hope video quality suffices to see everything.
In person you can get 20 people in a room and let them interact with widget x. See how they behave, hear feedback, etc.
I worked for Samsung for a little bit. And even there with operating system basically borrowed from Google, only very small portion of people ever needed to use any special tools. We got some prototypes but the one time we needed to do anything was to desolder and solder again a battery for a prototype watch. And that because a mistake (charging controller circuit badly designed, not powering properly from external power when battery drained). We had one guy do this for the rest of the team and everybody else was just working on software.
I had to go into the office a few times over the pandemic to use some testing equipment, but that was 7 or 8 days in the last 2 years?
-Lou Mannheim
I'm happy we're returning to normalcy, but it just makes me wonder "why now?" It's like the government and big business just decided overnight to declare "mission accomplished" when nothing substantial has changed. Last summer, for example, could have been the reopening, and we'd have better data and "science" to support it.
Also of the scant 40 million people remaining in California, who haven't yet moved to Texas or Florida, public support for at least some "COVID protocols" are very high [1]. I'm not sure you are giving an impartial assessment of the facts.
1: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-02-24/californ...
The message is backed by advice from Biden’s polling firm, Impact Research, which studied voter attitudes to Covid and found that most Americans are "worn out" by the restrictions and "have personally moved out of crisis mode."
In a Feb. 16 memo, the firm told Democrats to take "the win" on Covid, warning that by 49 percent to 24 percent, Americans are more concerned about it causing economic harm than infecting them or a family member, and that far more parents and teachers worry about learning loss than illness for their kids.
"The more we talk about the threat of COVID and onerously restrict people’s lives because of it, the more we turn them against us and show them we’re out of touch with their daily realities," Impact Research’s Molly Murphy and Brian Stryker wrote in the memo, which was viewed by NBC News. They warned that if Democrats continue to emphasize Covid precautions over learning to live in a world with the virus, "they risk paying dearly for it in November."
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/democrats-tur...
- for many - not all, but many - of the more vulnerable to hospitalization and death, it's now a matter of choice.
- As a result, a bigger spike in cases caused much fewer hospitalizations and deaths than previous spikes, meaning less impact on the rest of the health system.
- behavior has changed dramatically in terms of things like event attendance even in areas with more cautious government policy. Compare how many people went to movie theaters in late summer 2020 when they reopened in limited capacity in California with now. The limited capacity isn't the biggest difference, it's the behavior.
- we can see that, say, California has fewer cumulative deaths per capita than Texas or Florida despite the urban areas being somewhat denser[0] (which itself seems to play a big role), and Arizona has more than NY or Massachusets despite being far less dense and with much milder winters... but the differences aren't orders of magnitudes.
- masks are cheaper and more available than they were earlier, and treatments are becoming more widely available too
So this is a reasonable point to say "we aren't able to eliminate this thing, but fortunately, it's much less dangerous to most of us than it used to be."
But make no mistakes: the biggest factor there in terms of danger is the vaccines, which have now been available over a year.
[0] https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/cumulative-covid-1...
Add in weather and TX and FL are actually nice places to live for the most part.
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Today's episode of the Scientific American's podcast "COVID Quickly" (https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/the-push-...) had an interview with Flu pandemic historian John Barry. (The interview is the second half of the episode.)
They asked him how he'd define when a pandemic is over, and he said there's a science aspect to it, but it's largely when "people stop paying attention to it".
They also said the 1918 flu pandemic had 4 waves, and most of the US put restrictions in for wave 2. For wave 3, some areas did and some didn't. By wave 4, which was approximately as severe, NO cities put restrictions in place. Some histories of the flu pandemic don't even mention the 4th wave.
We seem to be following a very similar pattern now. Maybe 2 years (and/or 4 waves) is roughly society's attention span for a pandemic.
I have no expectation covid is done. At a certain point you have to pay attention if it’s bad enough. (It isn’t now)
I have no expectation covid is done. At a certain point you have to pay attention if it’s bad enough.
Covid's main threats for most people are:
* Filling up hospitals to the point they stop functioning (that's been true here in Canada).
* Putting 10% ~ 20% of workers everywhere, including hospitals, out of commission for weeks at a time while they're acutely sick with Covid or infectious to others.
* Disabling some large % of people temporarily or permanently due to lingering symptoms of the virus.
The death rate for covid is significant but not substantial enough in itself to cause the world to lock down. The points above though, are.
For USA the death rate is still higher than times when we were not RTO.
This one seems like a dubious point to me, services during the early-2020 lockdowns were much more impacted than they were during the Omicron spike which saw much less enforced lockdown but much more "shit, all our employees are sick" closures.
Completely agree with the hospitalization concerns, and I would add that the calculations also changed a lot re: protecting others after widespread vaccine availability.
There is a huge difference between "dying with COVID" and "dying from COVID".
The distinction you're making isn't new - it's literally years old at this point.
Even vaccinated (and never testing positive), the immune response I got from taking care of a highly infectious toddler screaming in my face was terrible and really brutal. I’m not old, fully functional immune system, etc. and it had me out for weeks, brain fog, exhaustion, off and on high fever, you name it. I suspect I still am suffering side effects from the last infection in Jan.
If I hadn’t been fully vaccinated just before the first time he got it, I’d probably be dead.
Pretending that someone who was not as strong or healthy, gets it, then dies didn’t ‘die from Covid’ is probably disingenuous at least 90% of the time.
We all die eventually, it’s the norm for whatever obvious change occurred to be blamed for it, not ‘inevitable entropic reality’ or whatever.
At the end of the day, someone has to made a judgement call about the appropriate factor in a complex system.
Given how hard “with vs. from” is to tease apart, excess mortality is a good way to look at things, eg
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/17/us-excess-deat...
You also need to take into account the fact that that most of the deaths in the US are amongst the unvaccinated (something like 20:1 last I checked) so your personal risk of death, if vaccinated, is very different from the overall death rate.
Something substantial has definitely changed. That's not the same as knowing there won't be future variants or spikes. But if there's ever a time to get back to normal, now would be it. It's not total victory and may never be, but at some point we either declare that we can live with this while having normal lives, or we're tacitly declaring that we never intend to.
Yeah, it's called midterm elections are coming up and the Democrats are staring down the barrel of getting absolutely crushed if they continue on with mask and vaccine mandate policies.
That's surprising. Do you have a source?
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/02/24/health/covid-deaths-now-y...
NY Times, Washington Post, and other media have similar stories.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/national/corona...
Said deaths are also extremely focused in unvaccinated people, meaning that outside of the immunocompromised (whose situation sucks here), it's at least mostly people who chose the risk.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1M0mdNLpTWEGcluK6hh5L...
N95s and similar are obviously better but cloth masks do ok. Also remember they changed guidance to recommend cloth+surgical masks, which everyone laughed at. Lo and behold that combination tests in the 80% filtration range.
So cloth masks work, the guidance for double masking was valid, and the N95 recommendations more valid still.
"In fact, support for mask mandates has reached its lowest level since we began asking in August 2021. Now, a narrow majority (51%) support their state or local government requiring masks in public places compared to the roughly 63% that had over the last 6 months."
https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/axios-ipsos-coronavir...
There is literally new data every day. Case counts change, hospital usage changes, etc. The change in mask guidance is also not universal - it is dependent on that exact data. The CDC maintains a county-by-county map of the data so you know exactly what the guidance is each day based on the latest data.
If you want to keep up with the data, the map is not a bad place to start: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/your-health/covid-...
There are also differences now in how many people are either vaccinated, or have recovered from covid vs a year ago
As a data point, Denmark have been without restrictions since first of February 2022. There are still 20.000 infections daily, but most with very mild symptoms.
There are 1.600 hospitalized, which is considerable more than December, where there were about 600.
So number wise it doesn't make a lot of sense to remove restrictions, but I'm personally very happy having the old normal back.
Assuming you meant "from," not "with," this is clearly not the case in Santa Clara county, the location of Apple's HQ. The current daily average is 5 per day. It briefly peaked at 10, but the non-surge average is around 2. As others have said, deaths lag, so they'll likely be back to ~3 by April.
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What blocks any expensive investments in US standard of living is the cost. The costs is so high, it's almost as much as the cost of inaction and that's too damn much.
See also climate change.
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> Dying from Covid is more or less optional at this point. If you want to remove the risk of dying, get the vaccine. If you want to take the risk, don’t.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29561158
This is a bit reductive -- people in some countries may not have easy access to the vaccine, people whose immune systems don't respond to the vaccine may need still-scarce antiviral treatment to maintain a mortality rate on par with the vaccinated, and in the US there may still be people who genuinely cannot logistically manage getting the vaccine.
But this is something I've been thinking about a bit lately: when will be the "tipping point" after which more than 50% of all US covid deaths will have been a personal choice?
We're at about 950k deaths now. The "everyone will be eligible to schedule an appointment" date was in April 2021 (at about 570k deaths). So maybe another 3 months?
The virulence of the virus isn't changing that much, the biggest effect is that most people have gained immunity.
The fact that 90% of the people in hospitals are unvaccinated though while vaccination rates are at least >60% everywhere is a sign though that the unvaccinated population still has failed to achieve a level of immunity equal to vaccination.
They're going to just accumulate immunity the hard way though with more human casualties and death. There isn't a lot to be done about that though.
Eventually the rates of unvaccinated in the hospital with each wave will start reflecting the population rate of unvaccinated and we'll be at pretty much 100% seroprevalence finally.
I'm not disagreeing with your point, however IIRC this is heavily concentrated among unvaccinated individuals, and I believe that Apple/Google/etc employees are overwhelmingly vaccinated. I would be shocked if these companies didn't have accommodation processes in place for individuals who are still at high risk.
I'm not disagreeing with your overall point, but there's no guarantee that the same trends/statistics exist in this sub-population.
Things trended well last summer, but 1) everybody expects a lull in warm weather and 2) vaccination numbers were still low. It was reasonable at the time to hold onto precautions hoping the unvaccinated people would come around before fall. And good thing too, because delta proved to be a real pickle before being displaced by omicron.
At some point, it becomes obvious that a large number of people just won't bother getting vaccinated, and you can't realistically keep asking the entire country to go out of their way to protect the people who won't protect themselves.
We'll see another wave in the fall, either omicron or some new variant, and hopefully our vaccines will stay ahead of it.
Kids became eligible to be vaccinated only a few months ago, which even if it wasn't actually risky to them it was a major concern for many parents.
Right about that time, the omicron wave hit, and ever since late december we've known it was very likely we'd peak and then crash on cases.
So we didn't return to normal last summer because loads of people weren't vaccinated yet, and kids weren't eligible. We didn't return once kids became eligible because omicron was looming. And we didn't return during omicron peak because hospitals were overwhelmed.
And these people are overwhelmingly unvaccinated. At this point, it's been a year that vaccines have been available. You're not going to change their minds, and the rest of us - heartless as this sounds - shouldn't continue to be held back just because of other people's stubbornness. They made the decision not to get it, they should live with whatever consequences may result from that choice.
Edit: I realize that some people can't get it for various medical reasons, and I empathize with them. It's everyone else I'm referring to.
We cannot force these people to vaccinate for their own good, but neither can we be held hostage by them.
given that you have to be vaccines to rto at Apple it didn’t really make sense to wait this long anyway
Do you have any idea how parochial you sound when you make generalizations in this manner?
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Essentially everyone has an immune response to covid now--either by vaccination or because you already had. That is why case number are cratering. The immune response effectiveness will fade, but all evidence points to long lasting protection against severe infections.
Last summer was the re-opening a la "mission accomplished." Then omicron evaded previous immune responses. Why won't that happen again? It might, but less of the population is vulnerable b/c Omicron spread to more of the population. There was a big group of unvaccined protected by heard immunity.
Post Omicron how many people haven't gotten a vaccine or covid? Probably less than 10% of the public.
I check https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html to track how things are going. I don't like that, with ~2,000 people dying each day and Spring Break around the corner, the strongest push to reopen is happening now.
"Why now?" Just speculation, but: Because midterm elections are this year, because consumer spending is up and inflation is rising and the government wants to encourage the economy to remain strong, because businesses are seeing lower performance from employees especially regarding sensitive work, because ICUs have capacity and vaccines are readily available.
You can’t just exclude the data that disproves your point. The peaks were the original variant, Alpha(?), Delta and now Omicron. Deaths in this wave are extremely lower than in any other wave due to severity, immunity and vaccinations. Hospital stays are reduced and shorter. The original point of avoiding covid en masse was to prevent the healthcare system from being overwhelmed. Although it varies from place to place the healthcare systems in highly vaccinated countries are no longer seeing that kind of pressure even with high case numbers (still lots of pressure but not enough to risk overwhelming the system entirely).
* Covid deaths per-day are at-or-near their highest ever levels
* the current wave is less dangerous
These sound contradictory, but aren't: deaths are high, death rates aren't -- if you catch Covid you're more likely to survive than ever before, but you're also more likely to catch Covid. This is because we're (currently) in a wave of a high-infection low-mortality variant.
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You've hit the nail on the had, the entire human civilisation could reorganise around smaller cities without the commute to be more healthy, less polluting and more environmentally friendly
Instead we are witnessing whole COVID-is-gone theater only to protect parasite investors that 'invested' in assets that don't produce anything
Something like deductions that cannot be taken when those facilities are not used or not used enough in the development of income.
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Apple didn't just decide to do it because Google did, they'd already decided it was coming, and perhaps moved up the announcement now that someone (Putin? Google?) took the news cycle.