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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
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.
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.
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?
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!?
Headphones don't work.
Even good ones let enough sound in that you can hear conversations, if you turn up the volume enough sound leaks out that your co-workers will complain about your music selections.
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For a while I tried earplugs + shooters ear muffs. It didn't work: at some point you block off your ears enough and bone convection brings the sound to your ears through your skull. Also when you open your mouth things get louder.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
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 seems like when big-name companies build new office space the people at the top of the organization value HUGE open spaces for their dramatic value. I've walked into wholly owned office buildings where the main entry way is like walking into a cathedral, a giant mostly empty space meant to make a big statement to visitors (possibly even the same psychological impact cathedrals were meant to have to peasants).
At Apple the building is so large that they have to have the "main cathedral" for the really big impact, and then mini-cathedrals for various major departments and to provide a secondary impact for people having meetings with specific departments or who didn't use the main entrance.
The Pentagon comparison is interesting -- I got a tour inside last year, and there's like a ton of space used for what amounts to a freaking mall *and* a mall-sized food court, so that they fit even more people is surprising. Combine this with the huge amount of security, where lots of areas are extra-secured and hence totally walled off, which I'm sure results in a large amount of space inefficiency and Apple's space seems REALLY ostentatious.
Offices, with closable doors, surrounding nice communal areas. Steve Jobs designed the Pixar building that way to encourage the right amount of interaction and production.
I work in an open office in Atlanta. It's so damn loud that some days I just send my developers home to work.
I bought some $300+ Bose QuietComfort 35 headphones to cancel the noise -- they help, but it's not enough.
I can use the foam earplugs you use for working around heavy machinery, but honestly, at that point how much degradation of productivity have you taken on when that's your own recourse?
I truly don't understand the open floorpan. It's only result is unhappy employees.
- Vincit qui patitur.
The number of times that another employee has distracted me in that entire time is zero.
Lucky you, but I've been in places where people were tossing beanbags and nerf balls around, and it gets old, really fast.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
I work in an open office in Atlanta. It's so damn loud that some days I just send my developers home to work.
You are in a position where you can send developers home, but you don't have an office with a door?
Is that a roll of dimes in your pocket or are you happy to see me?
You are in a position where you can send developers home, but you don't have an office with a door?
Nobody in our office has a door (even the VP in charge of the whole site). We have the entire development staff in one large room (300+ developers and QE). I measured the noise level today at 67dB. It's really absurd.
- Vincit qui patitur.
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.