Apple Executive Rejoins Google AI Unit After a Disagreement With Apple’s Work Policy

In early May, Ian Goodfellow, the executive in charge of artificial intelligence and machine learning at Apple, left the trillion dollars company due to a disagreement with the company’s work strategy.

The operating cause for his resignation is the lack of flexibility in the work policy of Apple. The company intended to require the corporate employees to begin working from the office on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays.

According to various sources, Ian Goodfellow has accepted a prominent position in the DeepMind division of Google that primarily focuses on artificial intelligence. Although the company is yet to endorse his hiring, it’s worth noting that it isn’t the first time Goodfellow has joined the Google offices.

Ian became a part of Apple offices in 2019; however, the engineer previously worked for Google, where he was obliged for artificial intelligence and machine learning projects.

He was popularly known as “the father of general adversarial networks, or GANs,” technology capable of generating media content containing “deep fakes.”

After completing three successful years at Cupertino, Goodfellow communicated his desire to leave Apple through a memo to his team. In his words, Goodfellow wrote that “more flexibility would have been the best policy for my team,” referring to Apple’s policy which is mostly against the working from the home narrative.

Several Apple employees rejoined the in-person work last month, and all the employees were expected to return to the offices at least three times per week beginning from May 23.

However, the company’s work policy is under constant criticism from several workers for the lack of flexibility, particularly in working remotely. Meanwhile, Google allows its employees to consider more flexible work possibilities.

Apple re-schedules in-person work conditions:

Despite Apple’s intentions to reinstate a regular in-person workflow from May, the company again had to temporarily postpone and re-schedule these conditions. However, the decision was taken based on the growing count of COVID-19 cases rather than fulfilling employees’ demands.

The employees will still have to restart the in-person work, tho only twice each week. Additionally, Apple will oblige everyone to wear a face mask while in the common areas.

Unfortunately, the stringent requirements and the lack of consideration for the employees’ demands for working remotely may see Apple lose more talent. Particularly, it could be a huge loss when other giants in Silicon Valley have much more flexible regulations governing the aspects.