Apple employees have to follow Googlers back to the office next week

Google employees are back this week

Google's employees in several areas of the US have begun the transition to a mandatory hybrid work arrangement: Today, April 4, is the deadline the company set for those employees to begin showing up to work in person at least three days per week. Apple's employees are in for a similar transition, as they'll need to start showing up at the office at least one day per week starting April 11 — one week from today.

The timeline for Apple employees' mandatory return to their offices was first reported last month. Employees will have to show up in person at least once per week by a week from today, twice per week a couple of weeks later, and three days per week — Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday — by May 23. The changes come amid waning concern over the spread of Covid-19.

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports that while many Apple employees are dismayed over the change — "Working from home has so many perks," one former employee said; "Why would we want to go back?" — resistance to the shift is far from universal. Plenty of Apple employees have already started working in their offices again voluntarily, in advance of next week's deadline.

While Apple's return to physical offices may be more gradual than Google's, Gurman notes that Apple's return-to-office policies are stricter than at a lot of other big tech firms. Facebook parent company Meta is allowing indefinite remote work for anyone not engineering hardware, for example. Google, meanwhile, has been reviewing requests to relocate or work remotely individually — and apparently approving 85 percent of those requests.