Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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___?
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.
Ford Motor Company is starting to do this with their offices because they saw Apple and the other cool companies doing it. Fuck you Ford. Fuck you.
No; Ford is doing it because architects work well in open plan offices - it suits their consultative, not too deep thinking, kind of work. And HR people. If they thought too deeply about what they are doing they would commit suicide, so they really really dream of open plan offices even though mostly they aren't allowed them. Then the two groups impose what would be good for their work on software developers and engineers, people who have two modes of work - absolute peace and heated discussion. There is no way a software developer can work effecively in a large open plan office.
I have seen multiple companies going bankrupt after going properly open plan. Yes, sure, in most cases you could say that they went open plan because they foresaw financial problems, however the going open plan is probably what made it impossible for them to recover.