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Apple is About To Do Something Their Programmers Definitely Don't Want (medium.com)
Last week, The Wall Street Journal had a big feature on Apple Campus, the big new beautiful office the company has spent north of $5 billion on. The profile, in which the reporter interviewed Apple's design chief Jony Ive, also mentioned about an open space where all the programmers would sit and work. Ever since the profile came out, several people have expressed their concerns about the work environment for the developers. American entrepreneur and technologist Anil Dash writes: [...] There have been countless academic studies confirming the same result: Workers in open plan offices are frustrated, distracted and generally unhappy. That's not to say there's no place for open plan in an offices -- there can be great opportunities to collaborate and connect. For teams like marketing or communications or sales, sharing a space might make a lot of sense. But for tasks that require being in a state of flow? The science is settled. The answer is clear. The door is closed on the subject. Or, well, it would be. If workers had a door to close. Now, when it comes to jobs or roles that need to be in a state of flow, programming may be the single best example of a task that benefits from not being interrupted. And Apple has some of the best coders in the world, so it's just common sense that they should be given a great environment. That's why it was particularly jarring to see this side note in the WSJ's glowing article about Apple's new headquarters: "Coders and programmers are concerned their work surroundings will be too noisy and distracting." Usually, companies justify putting programmers into an open office plan for budget reasons. It does cost more to make enough room for every coder to have an office with a door that closes. But given that Apple's already invested $5 billion into this new campus, complete with iPhone-influenced custom-built toilets for the space, it's hard to believe this decision was about penny-pinching. The other possible argument for skipping private offices would be if a company didn't know that's what its workers would prefer.
iPoo
*pple has long been taken over by managers, marketers and fashion designers. The actual engineers are an afterthought.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Work in their cult of an environment. Apple making iDrones of their employees as well as their customers.
should be shot and killed
It's been a long time since Apple was (primarily) about technology. Apple is about fashion. Form over function. Appearance. Show. Illusion.
Apple has great technology. But unlike in the 80's and 90's, technology comes second (or lower) at the Apple of today. I remember when Apple was a great company. When BYTE magazine wrote that the history of the microcomputer industry was an effort to keep up with Apple, it was true, back when Apple was a truly great company.
Open plan space for developers to work? No surprise. Quite a difference from the day when Apple would do whatever it took to make developers productive.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
But given that Apple's already invested $5 billion into this new campus, complete with iPhone-influenced custom-built toilets for the space, it's hard to believe this decision was about penny-pinching. The other possible argument for skipping private offices would be if a company didn't know that's what its workers would prefer.
Or the 3rd choice: They don't really care what their employees prefer.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
I don't know why companies like Apple hamstring their developers with these open office design abominations. Study after study shows that developers are most productive when they have an office with a door they can close. The pointy headed bosses argument that they can wear headphones or take their laptop and move to a conference room doesn't work in reality.
For the salary they pay software engineers, it would seem that companies would not still be practicing outdated, brain-dead policies that are costing their company millions. Or in Apple's case billions.
just my 2 cent worth.
Isn't it pretty obvious, to anyone who has watched Apple over the last 20 years? They went from being fairly-well respected (and a lot of angry people will say I am criminally understating that, almost a back-handed complement) in terms of their software design quality, to worse-than-Microsoft. Apple's software is harder to use than it used to be, is ugly and embarrassing, chooses to serve other parties' interests over the interests of the user, and pretty much has nothing going for it.
They don't care about software. And it shows: Apple's software is junk.
They don't care if their programmers are less productive, or unhappy or whatever, because their programmers are about as an important part of their business as the janitors who work at the same office.
All they care about is that people keep buying their hardware in spite of its laughable, declining software.
Given the premise that Apple's users tolerate the platform in spite of the software being near dead-last-place in the overall computer scene, they are making the correct decision to get rid of the kind of employees who would rebel against this and try to fix things. Drive them out. Get in the unpaid interns. It's not so much a matter of being able to afford turnover, as realizing that they want a lot of turnover. Because, it doesn't matter, so why not save as much money as you can?
Who would have thought. The next thing that happens is that the best ones leave for greener pastures where they _can_ close the door.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Apple built that huge campus and work environment, knowing full well and completely expecting that most developers would hate it and therefore work from home.
OH THE BITTER IRONY.
Stop with the clickbait title
It's a simple matter of the real estate cost of square footage, and in the case of office space, the cost of the building. The 'everyone sits around a table' and even 'you don't need enough seats for everyone, and just assume x% of work from home' is all about that. Of course the problem is people *believing* the warm sounding rationalizing and starting to adopt it for things like this, where *clearly* cost efficiency was not at the top of the list.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
And raise you a privacy screen filter and noise canceling headphones.
No way i'm letting all of these noisy do nothings around me see my occasional facebook posting while my code is compiling!
I'll refrain from the obvious jokes about the workers' pods only having rounded corners...
I really think the companies that get this trend right and actually want to keep employees happy will eventually settle on a mix of public and private spaces. Those of us who are older and like our private spaces have to remember that this is the age where "social media manager" is a real, full-time, highly compensated position. There are some people who thrive on collaborative spaces, constant noise and distraction, and love to work at cafeteria tables with zero personal space. There are also some (me included) who can't get any serious work done unless I'm in a private location with the door shut and "do not disturb" turned on in my various messaging accounts.
Unfortunately, the more extroverted among us tend to have the ear of HR more than heads-down workers like me. In addition, most corporate HR departments just copy what Google is doing verbatim regardless of fit. Google's where all the kids work, and companies love to have as many young exploitable employees as possible, so it makes sense...sort of. Unitl it meets an organization with a high average age of employee, that lives and dies by conference calls and work that requires concentration.
I went into a job interview a few years back. Turn the corner and it's an open office. I laughed. I couldn't help it.
They had cubes but they were so low that you could see the persons across from you when sitting and the noise level was like a cafeteria at lunch time.
I didn't get the job but then it looked like it was just an H1B visa screen for some Indian company.
Some reason a private space.. is a status symbol in some professions.
The manager, boss, big cheese closed their door.
Now I'm some mid level VP of managment in marketing of itunes gift card graphics department, and I have to have a open office?
Let's consider the opposite strategy, then, if programmer is the 'single best example' of needing flow.
Should Apple sacrifice, I dunno, half the open area to work-pods you slide into like a fighter pilot? Basically a ring of three 4K monitors wrapped around you, the backs of the monitors 6" from the walls? I'm thinking four feet by six or seven. No windows, obviously. Sound insulation.
Is there no minimum to the amount of "distraction", that is, anything but what's on your monitors - that should be removed for optimum results?
If so, you've got the only argument they'll listen to - that you will take up even less of that precious office space. Open plans were never about anything but reducing that square-feet per person number.
That, and one other thing: 10x10 private offices were often places where people had some privacy in which to goof off. Watch YouTube in an open plan, and people notice. This is just not a real issue in a well-run place where the supervisor knows what the hell all her subordinates are doing and has done the work herself so that she has an idea how far along everybody should move every day. But when the super is too dumb to measure outputs, they will measure inputs.
When one of our corporate offices moved to a new location and got a ground-up remodeling as part of the deal, there were great opportunities to make a more functional space for everyone. Instead, the top level management for that location took charge of everything, designing a floor-plan the way THEY envisioned it. The "rank and file" employees barely got a chance to see it before it was approved and work begun on it.
The group of us in I.T. got a sneak peak at it, just before work started on it, and we collectively said, "Woah! Hold up! BAD ideas here!" The whole space was an open floor plan, except for a row of 6 "phone rooms" where you could shut the door to talk on a phone, placed on a small table, with a few chairs around it. That, and one short hall of offices with doors.
To be fair, it is a marketing oriented company, BUT a lot of the people working in this space are designers, or at least have jobs that require a lot of conference calls, video-conferences, and negotiating with clients over the phone. In other words, lots of need for quiet in the surrounding space so you can sound professional while communicating with people.
Our opinions held no weight though, and everything proceeded despite our complaints. So now? The office tends to be largely empty, because everyone decided they can get work done more effectively by just working from home whenever possible. The upper management folks who pushed for it? Well, they're rarely in the office anyway because they're constantly traveling. I guess they think it's fine when they finally come back for a few days though, since it's so quiet with so few people wanting to come in now?
Who the hell has offices with doors?
I work for a large corporation that is moving to the open work area / no assigned cube model. So far all the IT groups hate it, but it keeps getting rolled-out because.
1. The people who make these decisions typically do not give up their office or administrator or private break areas etc.
2. The real estate teams are not technical and like the idea of being able to "collaborate" in an open environment. ( though many of these people pull the site manager card and fall into the group that gets special exemptions)
3. When executives visit these sites it is more pleasant to look at and if this were a movie set then it would look great. They don't get the day to day issues people have with cube walls that are shorter than your waist and having to find a new seat every day because they are not assigned to better mix the groups up and collaborate.
More dribble on Slashdot. The 'headpsace' of a programmer is about being 'left alone', not being in a closed room. Go do a decent uni library. The workers aren't in their own cubicles- but can be with many others around a table. So long as the atmosphere is quite, calm and respects privacy, the student can get on with his/her work perfectly.
In a closed room, the 'privacy' becomes an excuse for doing nothing, or playing around. Or suffering from lonliness. The ideal working situation is being surrounded by other people quitely working away - which encourages one to do the same thing. If the open office is the 'play space' of over-paid idiots who don't have to do REAL work- then of course it's a negative. But the open office should be a space shared by people doing the SAME type of work so everyone feels equal.
Outside the USA this is OBVIOUS. Inside America the media view of 'creative' tech 'spaces' is hipster idiots loudly dossing around. If a company must employ hipster idiots, they must be given their own isolated playpen- away from those who do the real dollar earning work. How can this not be seen as common sense in the USA?
While some studies say that open office workers are less happy, there's nothing to say that all Apple programmers will work in open offices. Indeed some of their teams might have closed off sections like those working on the top secret projects that Apple doesn't want anyone to know about.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
reminds me a lot of Detroit in the 50s and 60s. The cars looked nice, but most are absolute crap under the hood.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
My last company moved to open office floor plan. No cubicles but devider less desks where everyone could see each other. Plus you were 2 feet way from your neighbor. It was absolutely the most distracting work environment I have ever worked at. Needless to say all the top talent resigned and left the company and they were forced to sell. Just trying to save a few bucks on rent caused the company to financially collapse.
I thought everybody already knew never to buy a odd numbered version of an Apple product? Apple Park 1.0 will be all flashy and shiny, but Apple Park 2.0 will actually work!!!
The penny pinching most likely doesn't happen on Apple's side but on the architect/project manager side that promoted it in the first place. The brass doesn't care about details like that, the middle managers see the project and will put "saved $50M" on their resume and by the time anyone picks up on it, the project is already halfway done and changing it would cost more than double.
You can't imagine how penny-pinching general contractors and architects are, not because the clients wants it, but because margins on cheap/open office spaces are so much higher than expensive office spaces. You can still charge the client the same amount of money for things like "design" but not have to worry about all the fire sprinklers on the plan, you just have to roll out some carpet instead of cutting around edges and either way gets charged per square foot. The only people not happy about it would be painters.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Offices are unrealistically expensive, open spaces are distracting, and cubicles are depressing. I don't even know what I want anymore.
A high-handed decision focused on form rather than function. Someone is surprised by this?
The very idea that a company spends $5 BILLION on its headquarters should speak volumes about conspicuous consumption, ostentation, and Apple. (And the fact that we're celebrating it not finding it abhorrent should be a comment on our society, generally.)
In 2017 dollars, the Pentagon (for years the worlds largest office building, not sure if it is today; more than 2x the size of Apple's building in square feet houses 26000 workers vs Apples 12000 - so it's not like Apple's staff are getting huge offices) would have cost around $1.4 billion.
-Styopa
Open office plans seem to be the fad for this decade. (See: "Management by magazine article".) The fact that it demonstrably only works for certain types of environments, and doesn't work at all in an environment where the workers are expected to dive deep and perform long complicated tasks, hasn't made an impression on upper management yet.
As our group had more than one physical location, conference calls were common. Very quickly after we switched to an open office plan, came an edict that employees would be required to book conference rooms for calls. The noise was, naturally, disrupting the people trying to write or debug software. (It wasn't just that the cubicle walls were gone, it was also that we were all sitting elbow-to-elbow in a 1950's-era bullpen arrangement. Wow, how progressive...)
Shortly after that, it was discovered that we did not have enough conference rooms to meet demand. This was never solved, and it became common to see employees in the cafeteria or visitor's lounge trying to manage a conference on their cell phones, with laptop balanced on their knees. This raised the issue of discussing company intellectual property in a semi-public place, but I don't think that was ever solved either.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I started in a more open office (not a buzz word back then - just room with cheap desks) and eventually was promoted and in the process got an office. Then eventually moved to a new building and lost the office had a cubical, etc. Worked at another company where we had cubicles -- but often teams would move into a conference room around a table. So I have had basically experience with all.
Open Office
There are times where you cannot seem to get your mind in gear -- and a little goofing off from time to time can help break things up. "Goofing off" being basically working on pet projects that you might not get full management buy-in -- not playing poker online. If you have good management that is able to value you based on real productivity and not "hours" logged in a time tracking machine -- and not necessarily value of that work - working in an open office where anyone walking by at "the wrong time" can be stressful since that is all you will be measured (those few times that you are not head down entering code into an editor).
If however, the open office is about a team working together around a common area - where you have some level of privacy just by the fact that you don't have people walking by your screen judging you on the minutia of every minute.... it can be a positive work environment.
The Apple offices though look completely open with no team dividers -- which may not be the best setup if there is not enough room to give a certain amount of limited privacy.
Closed Office / Offices
I found that working from an office can be just as bad since you are not likely to work together as a team -- since the effort of getting up and setting up an impromptu meeting for help when you are working on items - is also a very poor situation which limits mentoring and learning.
The best of both worlds would be having an open office for teams with frosted glass dividers with sound dampening where you can work around an area with some limited privacy -- but encourages people to work as a team together. The caveat is that you really have to get rid of people faster if they are a burden in that environment where they are disruptive to productivity. While also having individual offices that are available from time to time where you really just need to put your head down and you don't want any interruptions what-so-ever.
Maybe they can hire Trump. Looks like he's going to be needing a new platform to bullshit about by next year.
Make Apple Great Again #MAGA
Open Office Spaces for the Small-Souled Bugman Panopticon
The ultra minimal design fad started by Jony Ive for UI is terrible. It is the laziest possible design. White on white with no way to tell what is a button and what isn't. Designing a building that costs more to build than it is worth is easy, especially when you hire architects and architectural engineers to do all the actual work. The easiest way to design a building that costs more than it is worth is to make it round. The emperor has no clothes and everyone thinks that the fact that they hate his design work must mean they themselves just don't get it. Hand an iphone to a child and they will find it harder to use than the original iphone, not easier. The only reason people are still able to use the UI is because the buttons are in the same place as they were before they stopped looking like buttons or having any clear meaning. It's sad that everyone at Microsoft is so eager to ape the bad design coming out of Apple. Let engineers do design and you will get functional design. Let designers do design and you will get fads over function.
You need a manager/marketer/fashion designer at the top, because engineers wouldn't know UI if their asinine choices bit them in the ass.
That's not true. You need Marketers/Fashion designers to guide project requirements and approval the results NOT to decide working conditions for professions conducting work they know almost nothing about.
It's not like Apple is moving every single employee into their new campus. They will have their old campus and many additional office buildings for a long time.
They can, over time, effectively do A/B testing to find out what teams work best in the new campus, and what teams work best elsewhere with different styles of offices.
They could end up with very little engineering types in the new campus, and having the marketing teams there working well in an open environment.
Apple has sufficient resources and cash that moving teams around is just an annoyance. If it needs to be done they won't need to figure out how to pay for it, just how and when to schedule the move.
I remember contracting at a start-up. The place was too busy to get a few hours of straight work done. Then a manager dude said "go work in the quiet space" or whatever it was called. It was a little phone booth with glass on all three sides. I think I left because the place was crazy and the founders didn't respect the fact that engineers need hours or days of quiet time.
Hopefully their fashionable office is more flexible and able to accommodate their changing needs than their phones. I miss phones with protective bezels, distinctive-feeling controls at the edges, changeable memory cards, upgradable batteries and standardized audio jacks. Fair or not, I generally assign blame to Apple for for the loss of these features and laughably-thin form factors requiring after-market protection shock-protection on even the majority most non-Apple phones. If their office is absolutely locked into a certain "visionary and innovative plan" well...Apple will just have to deal with it, just like they've made us deal with their silly fashion dictates.
They didn't know that's what their employees would prefer? How's about doing some research you lazy bastards. Do a quick Google search or send out a blind survey with one question... "open office design or individual spaces?"... doesn't seem too difficult to me
"Hey, boss, I need to work on this super detailed thing and I think I need a few solid hours of concentration. I've cleared my calendar tomorrow and I plan on working from home, where I can get in the zone."
And as long as you show your ass up with the code done the day after, nobody is going to give you any shit about it*. If it takes you less time than planned -- great. Go do your laundry. Or spend your commuting time doing that.
*: And if they do give you shit, its time to quit.
I see Scaramuci has found his new calling.
Yes but, does the office have a headphone jack?
Apple doesn't seem to value input from their users (bye bye USB 3.0, headphone jack, etc) so why would they value input from their coders?
The number of times that another employee has distracted me in that entire time is zero.
If you ask me, I think that the devs are probably opposed to an open work environment is because it gives them less opportunity to waste company time using their computer for non-work-related activities.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
"It does cost more to make enough room for every coder to have an office with a door that closes."
It does not cost more, and that's the point. Any up front savings on the building will be lost in diminished productivity. It doesn't make sense to pay people as much as programmers are paid without doing everything possible to make them as efficient as possible.
Do you have ESP?
They're keeping Infinite Loop and all the rest of the space they've already got in Cupertino. They have a lot of individual offices, and coders aren't even the majority of their staff.
I can't write code in an open-plan office, because headphones are not an adequate substitute for office walls. If I ever went back to Apple, I'd just make it clear that I'd need a private office, or I'd be writing all of my code at home.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
There's a section in John Gall's "Systemantics" that discusses what he calls "Climax Design": the biggest, the awesome-est, and that's where the big donut fails IMO. The place is over-designed and meant to do exactly what someone envisaged, but what if that's not what it needs to do? After all, the real thinking bit of Bell Labs - to take one example - was a hodgepodge of shacks that the occupants felt entirely free to modify any way they damned well pleased. It's the diametric opposite of the big donut: so exactlingly built that pushing the first tack into the wall will feel like a violation of some kind.
Either work in an open floor plan where you can shoot quick questions and crack jokes with your neighbors. Or work from home and be fully focused and comfortable. Alternate on different days of week if you need a balance and use noise cancelling headphones for added focus at work. In office, you are not interracting with your coworkers and you are never as comfortable with furnature, lighting, views, food or termostat settings as in your own house. It's a waste of money in the age of high definition videoconferencing and collaborative editing software.
But I will come here to say I'm not reading it.
Seriously - go work for some crappy PPC "content marketing" house and take your cynical headline writing with you.
Now they'll know what it's like to be a third-party Apple developer.
They're treating their programmers like their end users - they don't know what they want. You have to show it to them.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
.. taken over by extroverts
I disagree with your assertion that Jony Ive has no talent. He definitely has a talent for making the ooh-shiny hardware that drives millions of sales. I hate it - especially the obsession with thin, but that's a legitimate talent.
The problem is that he seems to have his fingers in everything remotely creative at Apple now, because Tim Cook is just an operations guy (a very, very talented operations guy, but without any creative vision). Jony Ive was given control over software UI, and it became unusual shit (all grey, low contrast, much harder to use). He was given control over the new campus and of course, being the small-minded designer that he is, assumed that all teams should work in the same open office plan that his select team of designers uses. It works for them - spectacularly well - but it is absolute crap for most engineering and other teams. And this man has no idea this is the case because he's surrounded by yes-men and thinks his shit smells like roses and orgasms.
Steve Jobs was an asshole, but he kept Ive in his place. Without Jobs, simpleton Cook has given equal simpleton Ive the reins over everything, and it's slowly eroding Apple's quality. They have enough cash to sit with their thumbs inside their asses for the next 200 years and be fine, so they aren't dying. But I really don't look forward to the significant drop in software quality that'll come in the next few years as their engineers transfer to the new offices and productivity plummets.
We switched to Agile Scrum at the beginning of the year. Our team now sits at a table in an open office with about 400 developers. Agile teaches us it's all about collaboration! A quiet dev team is bad! You should be constantly talking with each other. We all sit at a table and collaborate all day. In the past 6 months, we haven't written a lot of code, but we've done a lot of collaboration! And that's what matters.
Apple has been following Samsung on phone features for a few years now, and we all know that Apple will implode when the iPhone money stops rolling in. They have a huge hoard of cash to cushion the fall, but cheap Android phones and replace iPhones for most people now. Eventually the applefanatics will tire of paying $600 more for a phone that their friends make fun of. Apple will probably start buying startups like mad ala Microsoft to stifle competition and hunt for the next big idea, but that's a crapshoot, as the execs usually use the process to line their pockets.
So at what point do we call it for them? What's the big clue before the stock price tanks?
big new beautiful office
Ahem. Bloated nerd jail hubcap, more like it. Competes (perhaps unfavorably) with the world's ugliest yacht.
(No I'm not joking. Trust me, that scow was actually built to Steve Jobs' specifications. Obviously you need to sail it right, because the first breaking wave that hits one of those windows is going right through it as if it wasn't there.)
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
When I finally got my iPhone I downloaded iTunes on my PC expecting awesome UI friendliness. It's the biggest pile of shit I have ever seen. Slow, un-intutive, unreliable and bloated.
Recently I got an Android phone and transferring files to it is a breeze: easy, fast and zero-overhead.
iTunes is shit so those closed-door offices didn't help Apple much.
The lack of whiteboards was a problem I ran into in my experience with a pure open-plan workspace. With our cubicles we were constantly adding more whiteboards to the walls whenever we found them. We were even lining the aisles between the cubicles. When they took away our cubicles we had vastly less wall space to hand whiteboards.
My university is looking at an open plan office for our department.
Needless to say, we are not happy.The thinking is that with an open office, the control of people looking over your shoulder will lead to less wasted time,
and they can have people share desks, and work from home some days.
Well, for obvious reasons that doesn't work.
There are experimental setups that cannot be moved every day, and cannot just be left out for everyone to take.
The "looking over shoulder factor" will just lead to stress, since you can never relax, or talk to your team mates without scheduling a meeting room, or bothering everyone around you.
As a researcher you need time to think, and I for one cannot concentrate in a room with everyone seemingly looking at me.
Unlike many people I actually liked the Cubicle I had when I was in the US (in EU now).
It had a door I could close. I had some amount of privacy. But if needed people could come to my cubicle to look at my screen and discus things quickly.
You could look over the wall if you wanted, but no one was there standing behind you looking 24/7.
Force the executives to share that lovely open concept office space too.
No more posh offices or interns for you.
Within a week the whole idea will get shitcanned and everyone will get their own space again.
in an open office, it is much easier to spy on each other.
Apple has said many times they are trying to crack down on leaks.
open offices are great for this. you can see who is talking to who, who is writing what, who is doing what. you can see body language. you can overhear things. you can stare into their eyes and see if they stare back.
it could be part of the anti leak initiative.
Which the vast majority of users will use to hang themselves right after they shoot themselves in the foot.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
every work day.
Screw that. Uncomfortable, hot, dirty, ineffective. Not happening.
Do not work on software for a company that puts you in an open plan office. Period.
It shows profound misunderstanding by the powers that be of the nature of the work you do,
and your basic requirements for being able to do it effectively and with high quality.
That lack of understanding telegraphs that you will be ineffectively managed on many other aspects of your work too.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
There are these amazing new things called meeting rooms...
With big white boards all around.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
NVIDIA's new building is only about 6 miles away from Apple's and it is essentially one giant room with 11.5 acres of cubical. I exaggerate, obviously the full 500,000 sqft of floor space is not cubicles, my rough calculations show it more like 2.75 acres of cubes (6' x 8' * 2500 people).
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Ok, first of all I'm not sure Tom Cook plans to put programmers in Apple Park into open offices. The Wall Street Journal article starts out mentioning "soundproof offices". Can any current Apple employees tell us definitely what Cook's plan is?
But if that is Cook's plan, then this is what he should do:
1) Remember that work spaces should be designed to get work done, not to look cool.
2) Remember that different jobs have different requirements. I'm sure Tim Cook spends lots of time on the phone and in meetings, getting ideas, spreading ideas, and managing things. But when it's been decided what software should be written, the sw engineers need peace and quiet to write it.
Also I've read that Ive's group works in an area with loud piped in music. If that works for Ive and his team, fine. But it doesn't work with most sw engineers.
(Same with most other employees, besides sw engineers.)
3) If he hasn't done so, get honest feedback from the people who will work at Apple Park.
4) Move the people into Apple Park a few at a time. For each group, if the employees in that group have been there for a month, and they still don't like open offices, then change their open office into individual offices.
5) If only a tenth of the sw engineers have moved to Apple Park, and if they have been there for a month, and if most of them hate the open offices, then it's back to the drawing board for the building's architects. They'll have to re-design the interior of Apple Park before they move the rest of the sw engineers in.
I don't know where they'll get the extra space for real offices. Maybe a combination of sacrificing some conference rooms (putting offices there instead), and moving fewer people into Apple Park.
> You need a manager/marketer/fashion designer at the top, because engineers wouldn't know UI if their asinine choices bit them in the ass.
You need people who care about users and know how to hire skilled UI designers. These people might be managers, they might be engineers (I know some good ones), they might be graphic designers. But being a manager/marketer/fashion designer doesn't make anyone care about human factors design any more than being an engineer does.
Apple used to have a top-notch cadre of human factors people. I still have a copy of the Apple human interface guidelines from the 80's. The people that created it obviously cared about usability more than anything else -- that is, they cared about USERS. And that sold computers, because suddenly you could buy a computer, set it up in 10 minutes, and be using it effectively after another 10 minutes, even if you had never used an Apple computer before. Even people who had never used a computer before AT ALL could do productive work the same day they got their computer. That was a totally new experience for many, many people.
Now, Windows is as inconsistent and confusing as it ever was, but Apple keeps hiding things or removing them entirely in the name of visual artistry. Somewhere along the line they stopped caring about what users wanted (and I know why, it's because they found out they could charge 3x what a product was worth by making people believe that it was what all the cool people have.)
Philosophically, yes. But practically, it comes down to the money, benefits, and working environment.
I'm in the second worst working environment I've ever worked in right now. I'm in cubeland, in an isle of 6 which is in a row of about 14, which is in a column of about 8 or so. Under fluorescent lights, away from windows. That's about 700 people in this giant rat-maze of a floor. The bosses get cubes with walls to the ceiling, and that's about the best you can do around here.
Why do I stay?
Decent pay, the building is walking distance to everything I want in a little city, and the benefits are better than any I've ever had. On top of that, I've got great freedom in my job, I don't punch a clock, and if I want to piss off and walk 5 min to one of the dozen pubs around here, I can.
Just because you're in a shitty working environment doesn't mean it's not worth being there, or that you could do better. I don't think I could. I could get paid lots more, but I'd have to pull 60-80 hrs per week. I'd have to work somewhere far more remote than I work now. A decent set of headphones is a very reasonable trade-off for all the other benefits of my job. FFS, I blew off work at 3pm today to go sit in the shade on the patio at a pub and drink a few beers, because it was 80F, sunny and breezy, and everything was pretty dead at work. I'll gladly wear headphones half the year for that sort of benefit!
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Where do you work? A library?
You'd need enough separation between each workstation for sound and visual attenuation. My neighbors across 10 feet of setback are too close, but the next set on the other side of a 50' lot (so 60' away) are far enough. With say 2500 square feet for each developer, that'd be a bit more square footage than a typical open plan space, but there may be ways to tighten that up. Perhaps the green spaces between each desk could be constructed of denser materials with sound deadening qualities, fully opaque. Section of this denser material would have to be on some form of balanced carriage so you could move them out of the way to navigate between spaces.
The reason for this is manager gratification. They can step out of their office and view all their busy little beavers.
In matrixed organizations, many people work on multiple teams. co-location is a nice idea if everyone is charging 1FTE to one job, but when you have 15 people, each charging 1/3 to each job, not so nice.
Just put a forest in the middle of the $5b infinte loop building. Let anyone choose their place of work..either in cubicles or the forest. By the way, this tycoon has $1b home http://www.businessinsider.com/antilia-mumbai-most-expensive-house-mukesh-ambani-2012-5?IR=T
The Spaceship is reserved for corporate, designers and marketeers. So duh it is open plan. Most programmers at Apple just book the conference rooms for coding sessions. Its absolutely impossible to get a conference room at short notice on any of the campuses.
**Life is too short to be serious**
Agreed. And to be 100% honest I might have become one of the worst offenders until I pushed to work remotely. Previous job, I had an office. Quiet and amenable to concentration while programming. Current job, I was dropped into cubicle-ville, where the constant chitchat was quite distracting. After a while, I "got used to it" -- *too* used to it. I realized I was chatting as much as anyone else, rather than concentrating on work.
Fast-forward a few years and I finally pushed to work remotely, to move to a new home in a more desirable location. My manager and director both feel my productivity is actually now. I think my team's productivity is better as well, frankly I think it's partly to do with more of us now working from home. Cubicles and open pens are bullsh*t. If the company won't give a closed office to devs, then they better damn well allow remote work or you should GTFO. There is no excuse in this day and age for chaining people to the office for purely IT/programming work other than insecure, ineffective management.
I've recently begun working in an environment that's all about open plan collaboration, being Agile, execs Whatsapping employees, etc. etc.
The only bright point was the flexi-time, so I got most work done before 9:30 when most people were in, and after 15:00 when people started leaving again.
At a point I really wanted to make this work out and started googling about the benefits of open-plan offices (OPO) and how to use them to your best advantage.
A really eye-opening search...
Even the most gushing articles about it start off with a list of caveats and issues people experience with this. And the suggestions regarding this all to my mind negate the purported benefits, e.g.:
* Companies should provide ample private space - negating the reduced floor area benefit
* People should wear noise-cancelling headphones - negating the ability to hear and pick up on communication around the table
* One suggested booking a conference room all to yourself to get some work done - now that will fly like a lead zeppelin in a company where there are not enough rooms to go around even for normal needs
I was reminded of Fred Brooks' essays from 1975 (The Mythical Man-Month), amongst others putting forth the adage that "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later". His reasoning was related to Combinatorial explosion: the more people, the more paths of communication, the more time was spent communicating and less working. Which looks very much like the situation around an OPO: everyone talking (or listening to the talkers), very little work getting done. And even if your team has just finished "collaborating" and are busy working, the neighboring team starts their collaboration, stand-up, or discussion about last night's sports or recent politics.
Seems people don't learn lessons from history and are bound to repeat them...
I guess Apple is going all-the-way Ion Storm. Either that or Ive overheard that one of the engineers was also a gamer and he's elected to limit their influence going forward, in order to ensure they don't sully his gorgeous designs with an actual, half-decent graphics layer.
Presumably, this building was designed before it became commonly known that open offices create these issues. As you may recall, they were intensely praised until recently and they deserve some of the credit for the flattening in hierarchy that our industry has experienced (e.g. your discussions with your boss are more public).
Nonetheless these floor plans could present a major challenge. Yet, it's important to remember that Apple's culture is unique, and the way they manage their projects, their timelines, their personnel and their stress are clearly distinct from essentially every other technology group. For instance, look at the presentations made during WWDC. The speaking and presentation style displayed is far better than almost any other conference. And, these are not marketing or communications officers - they are the engineers and managers who create and design the technology presented. Their poise, integrity, and capability make it easy to guess that they are not as beleaguered by indecisiveness, unrealistic deadlines, and petty swagger as many other technology workforces. It's very plausible that the social and emotional skills of this workforce are strong enough that they may reap most of the benefits of open floor plans while transcending most of the pitfalls.
Furthermore, this phase could be a step in a timeline that will only last as long as its needed. Although many Slashdotters are too rageblind to know, a discerning observer of Apple's history will see many 'inhale, exhale' phases in their products, interfaces, policies, marketing, and strategy. It's well-known that Tim Cook chose to relax much of the internal culture of secrecy that prevented different divisions from communicating. The technology teams have benefitted from cross-pollination of both concepts and tools in the first phase of this change. Now they will undergo another social transformation, and continue to ramp up the utility of shared discoveries. As modern technologists know, when complex questions can be swiftly addressed to hundreds of working developers, they can sometimes be answered or even upgraded just as swiftly. Leveraging this in a team like Apple's will surely be a source of explosive power as these casual relationships develop.
As the dust settles and the needs of each team and each engineer become apparent, there are lots of possible avenues for revision of the openness. For instance, engineers could augment their reality to manage visual or auditory distractions. They can build pods or walls if it's really necessary. But recall that they still have an existing headquarters with just as much capacity as the new one, which I believe is about 5 minutes away (maybe 15). Segmenting a team can impact productivity in some cases, but in others, a physical separation that leads to meetings only at deliberate intervals is a major boon to workflow. And, they can obviously use video chat as liberally as they see fit. People who have major difficulty adjusting to the new building can be housed in one of the tens of thousands of other offices that Apple can provide.
I think if we wait and see how this building works out, there will be lessons for some of us. It's good that everyone wants to stick up for the engineers and help them produce their best work. To suggest that Apple's leadership has other priorities is lazy.
True, my workplace is nicer than you describe, but the one job I held where I had a real office strangely enough happened to be my lowest paying job in the industry. I'm now making tenfold more than that, though now I'm in a shared cube (at least not at a random table).
I have not seen a company paying enough to have strong talent *also* provide real office space anymore.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
"The Panopticon is a type of institutional building designed by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. The concept of the design is to allow all (pan-) inmates of an institution to be observed (-opticon) by a single watchman without the inmates being able to tell whether or not they are being watched. Although it is physically impossible for the single watchman to observe all cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched means that all inmates must act as though they are watched at all times, effectively controlling their own behaviour constantly. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I used them abroad. I feel cleaner after using them. I bought a $40 attachment for my toilet so I have one at home.
But having to use the toilets at work always feels kind-of gross.
Women don't seem to get why guys like bidets so much. Well, consider the considerably larger amount of hair they have on their butts.
Water works 10x better than wiping 20 times. No more degos!
...there can be great opportunities to collaborate and connect. For teams like marketing or communications or sales, sharing a space might make a lot of sense.
Who else works at Apple's Cupertino headquarters anymore?
They stopped making software a long time ago and all the hardware folk work for Foxconn in Shenzhen.
That's not a UX designer if they're acting like that.
Seems people on Slashdot don't actually know what UX is, or they've worked with designers who got shoehorned into the job with no training and no clue.
Perhaps this decision is just furthering the Orwellian/marxist cult that permeates the non-technical team at apple.
Bunch of marxist c***'s.
Stop with the click bait!
Though in a way it works because I clicked on this expecting something about programming and got something about open plan offices instead.
You lose control over your environment.
Trestle tables in open-plan are just the cube farm of the 2Ks.
Distractions:
* Every time someone touches the shared table your equipment is on, bumps it with a chair, adjusts a display.
* Visual field continually interrupted by people moving around.
* Noise; even if noise cancelling headphones work wearing them all day everyday puts pressure on your head that becomes painful (at least for me)
* No control over light levels
* No control over temperature levels
* No control over air-flow / smells you suddenly end up subject to anyone who eats or farts or just generally stinks due to some of our peers being hippy about their hygiene
* No control over hygiene people come into contact with things in your work area and having to lather it down with anti-bacterial wipes every morning before you start gives you chemical poisoning
* When you're not there people will fool with your settings, grab / adjust your chair just a for a minute while they sit down and talk to someone near you.
Companies build open source work areas for the same reason air lines keep squeezing seats closer and closer together. Money and it doesn't matter that they have a lot in the bank already. Also, those asshat managers who choose to go this route are often not stuck in those areas and have no frame of reference holding the attitude "what's the big deal".
I recently (temporarily) ended up sharing my office with another person for a couple of months and it was horrible. Within a week I ended up working from home and never coming to the office to avoid all of the above.
Who cares if it works? It's infuriating, insulting, and doesn't belong on Slashdot.
Is it not possible to have a product that is usable, well designed and still something that people believe is what all the cool people have. Sure seems that would be the winning combination that makes everyone happy and should be what Apple is striving for. If Apple is removing desired functionality shouldn't they be hearing complaints from their customers? I'm sure not going to let some company remove functionality that I'm using in an update without complaining. Are Apple users so caught up in the RDF that they won't do that?
Doors are so unfashionable. Get rid of them.