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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.
*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
More like "Hey Siri, please wash me and then flush."
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.
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.
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?
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 do even though I'm not a programmer or manager. I got a great view of the roofline. :/
https://twitter.com/cdreimer/status/858056822648750080
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.
This is Apple's campus we're talking about here. They should consider themselves lucky to have windows.
#DeleteFacebook
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.
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.
We're in the middle of the build process for a new building, and I will have an office with a door (and a window!). I'm our entire IT department, so I have to share my office with the server rack, but we didn't have any other good place to put it...
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?
White on white with no way to tell what is a button and what isn't.
That's a failure at understanding what minimalism is, not a failure of minimalism.
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.
Didn't you hear? Their whole building is wireless. They haven't figured out how to make the lights work yet, though.
Minimalism has been redefined recently to mean the fewer controls the better.
It's completely lost the context that fewer is only better if you don't lose the ability to access the needed functions.
My office used to have 4 of them, it also had 6 windows... of course it also had 4 wheels and an engine. That's the only job I ever had where I had a company supplied office with a door.
Other than that, my second job after college I had a desk in an open area with the servers and 4 offices off of it, but at least it was only me in that area, and then my next job was open floor plan until I got promoted to a cubicle that I shared with 2 other people (at the same time) and now I have no assigned desk at all, but I work from home 80% of the time (the other 20% I either work in a conference room with 2-6 other people, or in an open floor plan office.
I can tell you that I've never been more productive than when I had that mobile role, or when I work at home. The shared office spaces involve a lot more socializing, and a lot less working (even if all I want to do is work, some of the others don't seem to want to)
The library model falls apart completely the first time one of these programmers has to talk to the person who requested the work. They're on a conference call, and nobody else in the office can work.
The more people in the office, the more often this happens, until at a certain number of people it's a constant situation.
Sure, you can slack off in a private office, but you can equally slack off in an open floor plan. If that's your concern about your employees, you need to monitor their output to see if they're doing the amount of work you asked them to.
There are 2 big fads right now in management:
- open concept offices
- forcing everyone back in to the office and not allowing work from home
Combine the 2 and you get miserable employees who are unproductive.
This is really due to lazy management. It's hard to actually do your job and look at the quality and quantity of work done by your employees, it's much easier to just make sure they're physically in the office the right number of hours and that their computer monitor appears to show something work related on it. Of course that also leads to miserable employees who are unproductive, but productivity and happiness were pretty much doomed when the manager started caring more about the hours worked than the end result anyway.
No, it's all wireless now. Make sure your computer is charged up before you come in to the office in the morning!
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.
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.
Einstein was a genius. The people doing "minimalist" design today are not. Every single product I've ever seen that has had any mention of "minimalism" has had valuable features removed and functionality compromised.
That's not to say that I haven't seen good examples of minimalist design, just that those I've seen have never bragged about having it, instead they just focused on making something simple and intuitive instead of focusing on removing things to make it more "minimal".
.. taken over by extroverts
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.
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.
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
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
I mostly agree, but not for the ones working at Apple. I think they should get a reward. I'm hoping they'll make the work environment there so noisy and chaotic that nothing they produce works right.
Next, I'm hoping Microsoft does the same thing.
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**
Yep, clickbait horseshit. Deliberately thin on information.
A good title should be as informative as possible given the space constraint.
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!
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.
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?
Yup. I have been learned through experience over the past couple of years that if a UI is described as "minimalist", "sleek", or "modern", there's a 99% chance that it's going to suck hard.