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Apple Employees Rebelling Against Apple Park's Open Floor Plan, Report Says (neowin.net)
During a new episode of The Talk Show podcast on Daring Fireball, John Gruber touched on the topic of the open floor plans that Apple has implemented within its new campus, Apple Park. A WSJ profile of Jony Ive, where he talked about Apple Park, mentioned how programmers, engineers, and other employees had already expressed concerns about working in such an environment. Gruber shared what he has heard: I heard that when floor plans were announced, that there was some meeting with [Apple Vice President] Johny Srouji's team. He's in charge of Apple's silicon, the A10, the A11, all of their custom silicon. Obviously a very successful group at Apple, and a large growing one with a lot on their shoulders. When he [Srouji] was shown the floor plans, he was more or less just "F--- that, f--- you, f--- this, this is bulls---." And they built his team their own building, off to the side on the campus ... My understanding is that that building was built because Srouji was like, 'F--- this, my team isn't working like this.'"
If they do, I'll give them two options. Either I work from home, or I'm going to start looking for alternate employement.
That will make everyone happy.
My manager and peers are constantly amazed at how much work I get done. The secret? Being a work at home employee means you don't have to deal with the incessant noise, eavesdropping on phone calls, office nonsense ("It's Tina in HR's birthday! Come sing!") etc. You can actually concentrate, especially when you're dealing with complex coding issues. Context switches are a fantastic productivity killer. I don't blame the Apple CPU designers. They're probably among the teams that require the most concentration in tech. Good for them for willing to buck the "accepted wisdom" about open offices.
Open floor plans suck. Horribly. Why? Privacy. I'm stuff in a place doing work for 8 hours a day, and now you're going to take away my small walls so that everyone can watch my computer and listen to my phone calls.
If I'm tired at lunch - I can't take a 20 minute nap because everyone will see me and label me lazy. I can't have a private phone call because I have someone 3 feet away from me. I can't log onto slashdot because I'll quickly get a reputation as someone who doesn't work and just surfs the web.
So essentially if I don't fall into that small category of folks that like to bullshit and smooze (because if you're talking to people it looks like you're doing work, after all), then I am quite literally in the worst possible environment imaginable.
But my boss clearly has super important things to do and needs HIS privacy. So he gets walls. And a door.
And if the guy next to me is a serial yakker? Nope. No work getting done. Or the two guys diagonally are pranksters? Nope. The open floor plan was created by some Dilbert-Esque pointy haired boss who should have been fired a long long time ago.
In the era of "suck his own cock" coming straight out of the White House, can we please stop trying to disguise fuck as f___?
A very good friend had her office building staff (major medical provider) moved into an open office type building. It's been 2 years now... Productivity is down, tempers are up, sickness is up, management is still fucked with what to do with their multi-million dollar shithole. There you go.
The worst thing is that open offices aren't just bad for productivity - they're bad for collaboration. Conversations in individual offices happen by poking your head around an office door and discussing something with your colleague. The same conversation in an open office will do one of three things - 1) not happen (because the person initiating it thinks 'this conversation will disturb everyone'); 2) happen in a meeting room, and involve 6 more useless people, because by making it a formal meeting you needed to make sure you used your 1 hour effectively, and had everyone you might possibly need in that meeting; or 3) happen anyway in the open office, slowly accumulate more people throwing random ideas into the pot, and not actually make any decisions.
collaboration and communication you'd the usual office layout would be reversed:
Managers would be in the open space so they could coordinate things effectively with one another and people with actual work to do would have the offices so they could concentrate.
We all know the reason why this is not the case.
When I was trying to make the open floor plan work, I tried using noise-cancelling headphones. But that just made everything worse because then people had to tap me on the shoulder to get my attention, which startled me every time. It made my hypersensitive to everything around me as I was constantly on guard in case someone wanted me.
So, the headphones had to go. As did the job, in the end.
...has literally never met a programmer.
Nearly all of our wasted time comes from trying to navigate a context switch. Sometimes it's unavoidable—the code is compiling, and so unless you're only waiting less than 15s, you're going to start doing anything else, and that 15s is suddenly 15m. But that's how it goes, and we all learn to navigate this to greater or lesser degrees.
But being interrupted by someone else's random conversation is largely avoidable when you don't work in an open plan office, and largely impossible when you do. You're killing the productivity of your programmers if you put them in these open plans. Want to increase productivity and decrease costs without firing OR hiring anyone? Give them offices, or at least spacious (i.e., can fit 2 people and a white board) cubicles. It's like friggin' magic.