Apple employees working from home stumble over confusing security guidelines

As Apple employees adjust to working from home, they discover that slow home network speeds and confusing security restrictions are impacting their ability to work effectively.

Apple CEO Tim Cook told employees on March 6th to work from home as necessary to combat the spread of the coronavirus. Now, a week later, those employees and developers that are able to work from home are feeling the strain of doing so.

Complaints to staffers include slow download speeds impacting workflows and still-changing rules surrounding secrecy and what work can actually be performed remotely. Apple's own internal networking and infrastructure is built to keep outsiders from breaking in, and this seems to include Apple employees as well.

As Apple adjusts its security guidelines, some employees still show up to the office to work. They have no other choice but to do so, since hardware cannot be removed from campus if it has not been released.

In a wide-ranging article that covers the state of all remote work in Silicon Valley, the Wall Street Journal asked some employees about their work conditions.

One Apple employee remarked, "It's all about lowering the density." Meaning that having less employees in a central location, like Apple Park, still matters during the outbreak.

Apple is conducting daily health screenings at the security desk. All of these efforts combined with the recent closure of all Apple Stores outside of China are a result of responding to CDC recommendations in fighting the spread of coronavirus.

18 Comments

dewme 5739 comments · 10 Years

About 4 years ago

No surprises here. Going from an office with 10 gig networking to local servers and storage to even a fast hundreds of megabit home connection through a VPN is going to really slow some people down. If your home connection is shared bandwidth and everyone around you is also working from home things only get worse.

Perhaps having people who need really the high speed and high capacity resources are split into 3-4 shifts on-site would be more productive than having everyone working from home, which we’re seeing is not without its challenges. In other words, time share access to the campus to keep densities below a target threshold.

If a single campus team is predominantly working the traditional 9-5 workday splitting those same folks into 3-4 shifts would reduce the density of workers on-site. The same approach could be applied for the cleaning staff where fewer workers are on-site in shifts rather than one big cleaning crew descending on the facility at the end of the traditional workday.

This emergency will absolutely stress the limits of the infrastructure that was already put in place with naive assumptions about our ability to maintain normalcy under this kind of disruption. It’s a steep learning curve for everyone so we’ll just have to do our best to get through it and learn from the experience so the next time we’re better prepared.

ihatescreennames 1971 comments · 19 Years

About 4 years ago

dewme said:

No surprises here. Going from an office with 10 gig networking to local servers and storage to even a fast hundreds of megabit home connection through a VPN is going to really slow some people down. If your home connection is shared bandwidth and everyone around you is also working from home things only get worse.

Not to mention the people who are home that can not work from home so instead they're binge watching Netflix. Or the kids that aren't in school but are watching Disney+.

Not that I think this would happen but a place like Apple Park is probably well equipped to handle people basically living there. Get a few key people tested and cleared and the facilities probably make it fairly decent living. There's the cafeteria, the gym (and showers), throw in a cot and this sounds like something close to what I've done (though not for consecutive days).

EsquireCats 1268 comments · 8 Years

About 4 years ago

While I fully appreciate that this is not going to be the experience for all people: Files in the Cloud and iCloud photo library are frustratingly slow for me.

I'm a bit glad that Apple's own employees now get to experience this, as I'm confident they've never really had to see how frustrating it is to be waiting for a simple download. (Sometimes it's even faster to download the file via the browser Files interface.)

oscarg 26 comments · 11 Years

About 4 years ago

Hahahaha, I love it when random Web sites claim to know what's going on inside this or that company.

People at Apple work at home quite frequently with little difficulty. But hey, "everything is fine" doesn't generate clicks, does it?

By the way, here's another tidbit that doesn't happen across the board at Apple: extensive user testing