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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.
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.
Nobody but management and some handful of hyper-social outliers likes open floorplan. Cubicles are bad enough. But open floorplan is the devil. Of course the employees hate it. Management had to know that going in. They apparently didn't care or thought the level of spying they can do would be worth pissing the employees off and making them less productive. When you look at the confluence of IT type workers (that Apple, being a tech co, is heavy in), we tend to be on the "autism spectrum" (what was formerly called Asperger's). We don't do well with a cacophony - and white noise doesn't help.
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.
First-world-probleming on slashdot isn't a skill?
love is just extroverted narcissism
The did this for half of my building (top floor is open while the bottom is still the standard cubicals) and every HATES it. Not that the little half-cubes we had before were spacious, but the shared desks are tiny! You get about 3 feet to yourself an two little dividers between you and the next person. That's about enough room for a computer, phone, and a piece of paper. They also gave everyone a little rolling footstool instead of a chair. People are in pure hell now. The noise is unbearable, no one has any room to do actual work, and everyone is ready to kill the person next to them. Thankfully I'm in a locked lab where they decided not to do this. Sometimes I think the only reason I stay in my position is so I don't have to be in one of those open desk areas.
When they first floated the idea of an open floor plan the response of universally negative (like 200+ negative comments to one positive). The management said they'd take our concerns into consideration and then promptly installed the new desks a week later. Turns out they already had everything ordered and the whole 'tell us what you think' discussions were just a smokescreen to placate people.
apple is right everyone else is wrong.
I don't think so. There is evidence that open offices are bad for productivity. Some people like to work in a bullpen, but even for those people their productivity may go down more than they realize. Other people hate open offices, and refuse to work in them. These are often the best people, who have plenty of other employment options. Open offices are false economy. The cost of providing a real office is negligible compared to a typical tech salary in Cupertino.
My company has some open office space, and I work there sometimes. But I also have an office with real walls where I can sit and focus. It is small, about 8 ft by 10 ft, but that is enough for two chairs, a desk, and a bookshelf.
I will not accept any job that requires me to work in a cubicle or open office, although I did work that way when I was young and desperate.
I think part of the problem is that Apple has a lot of teams in a lot of different disciplines. An open floor plan is utterly terrible for programmers and other engineers. I don't mind having an open space where groups can meet for scrums or other occasional meetings, but for the rest of the time I want to be in an office or some other enclosed area where I can concentrate.
However, I don't doubt that there are other disciplines where putting everyone in a separate office for the entire day is good. I would imagine that various types of creative teams work best when they can be together and easily interact as a group in most scenarios. I'm not certain of this, but I suspect that people who function like this may not realize that engineers just want to be left alone so that they can function and if they get to make choices about how the workplace should be organized they make choices for how they like to operate.
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___?
I once worked for a company that did this. Why? Thermostats. The women were constantly pushing them higher, while the men were pushing them lower, leading to many arguments. The CEO finally got fed up and put the "hot" people in one room and the "cold" people in the other. This led to mostly segregation by gender, although there were some scrawny guys that went to the warm area, and a few "big" women preferred the cooler section.
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.
Open floor plans suck. It is noisy, there is no privacy, and it feels like a mess hall in prison where the guards can constantly watch you. Some claim open floor plan fosters better collaboration. I worked in open floors, cubes, and shared offices and shared offices was the best. Ideally, you are closely working with your office mate or have one who understands that once in a while he or she needs to take coffee break now because two or three have to hash something out. What better than to work in a small meeting room all the time where you can have small meetings without p*ssing off everyone else. Worse than open floor plan is the crap with unassigned seats. You come in and pick any workstation available. While that may be efficient and theoretically there could be more employees than workstations it does not allow for any kind of personalization. And yes, I want to get a good chuckle out of my collected Dilberts on the wall when work is a downer.
When I want to goof off or yap on for a half hour with the guys its great, its a fucking nightmare if you have to actually DO any work or god forbid have a phone call with a customer or a supplier
Guys, guys, guys. Before you start going on about how open office plans are just blatantly evil, please consider the shareholders. That's right, publicly-traded companies are owned by investors who want, nay NEED, to ensure that their corporate ownership investments are competitive against other investment vehicles. That how they get rich. With low corporate gains taxes, investors are practically FORCED to invest in corporate ownership compared to other forms of investment. So before you go blab blabbing about how you can't stand to sit next to Shouting Stan and Coughing Cassandra, please realize that your sacrifice yields a greater return on investment for your corporate overlords than if you were each allocated 8 more square feet of floor space, and $186 worth of divider walls.
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.
Libre Office is almost as bad as Open Office for productivity.... just sayin.
Let me get this straight - all the hot women were on the same floor. Where do I sign up?
...I would imagine that various types of creative teams work best when they can be together and easily interact as a group in most scenarios. I'm not certain of this, but I suspect that people who function like this may not realize that engineers just want to be left alone...
I duno... all creativity needs r-mode, when have you ever seen a brainstorming session among a group of people ever output anything particularly creative, group interactions tends to make it impossible to contribute anything that is not just prior knowledge.
Actual creativity needs peace and quiet to let ideas peculate through your brain, when actively and prematurely probed by external forces these ideas collapse like an illusive wave function as you scramble for solidified, easily verbalised thought.
I'm a thermosexual.
I must be weird then... We've been in an open floor plan now for a year at the new digs and I actually like it. I NEVER had a window view before and I like it much better than the 6' cube walls I had before. I also like being able to see if a coworker is in the office or not at a glance and I like being able to keep up with office happenings by listening in when I want to. I also feel like it helps me keep good discipline, keeping my desk space clean and staying on task and off things like Slashdot...
I get the complaints though, they are distracting, loud and don't offer ANY privacy but I've found ways to cope. I have a set of headphones that cover my ears so I can tune out the noise. The monitors on my computers cover most of my vision area when I want.
I suppose they are not for everybody though..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Trying to have a conversation with someone in an open-plan office while two other groups of people are already having conversations is maddening. When I worked in one of those places, I seriously found myself losing track of sentences I was speaking midway through... something going on in another conversation distracted me. I sometimes found it easier to wear noise-isolating headphones and use jabber to chat with people, even when they were sitting a few feet away.
Not idiots.. Freshly minted Masters of Business Administration holders.
Wait... I repeated myself..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
apparently covered in the TFA; "open office" is only for rank and file. Executives have their REAL offices on the 4th floor.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
The OP assumed that readers understand satire.
Big mistake.
Which reminds me of my friend who works at Google.
I asked him how it was there, and he said he couldn't complain.
Intel is another company where everyone works in a cubicle, even the CEO.
There are more: CEOs who work from cubicles.
But just because cubicles may work for a CEO, that doesn't mean they work for programmers. The jobs are very different. There is nothing a CEO does that is analogous to tracking down a race condition in a 10,000 line threaded real-time application written by an intern three summers ago.
Yes, they save the company some money in the short term, but in the long term, they're very expensive in terms of lost productivity and loss of talent as people quit.
I had a great position at major company that moved to an open floor plan. I gave it an honest try, but in the end it was crippling, and I quit because of it. Along with about 40% of the other engineers.
I will not accept any job that requires me to work in a cubicle or open office
I don't mind a cube if the walls are tall enough.
It's interesting that people have forgotten that when cubicles were invented, office workers rejoiced -- because cubicles brought an end to the nightmare of the open floor plans that used to be the standard office environment.
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.
Why didn't they just do what the majority of office buildings do? Don't connect the thermostats to the HVAC system.
That would be about 90% of the time I'm at my desk.
Well, it's Apple, and Apple is all about trendiness. They probably saw other companies doing it and figured that if all the other cool kids are doing it, they should too.
The introverts vs the extroverts problem becomes exacerbated when everyone's in close quarters. As an introvert, my strong desire to stuff a rag in someone's mouth becomes really high. I try desperately not to blather. I don't care the race, age, religion, gender, or sexual persuasion of the yammerer-- some do not understand how to STFU, or even how to have a conversational exchange.
It is for this reason, constant, insipid, spewing blather, that I've left organizations; it was a good thing for both of us. They were good enough to wave goodbye. Not a good fit.... and it's a vortex for problems in an open environment. If concentration and focus is revered or needed, I'll find my own brainstorm, thank you.
Unless Apple has something up their sleeves not yet revealed, they blew a huge wad of shareholder dough on yet another bad idea.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
That was pretty much my reaction when Apple announced the 2014 Mac mini.
#DeleteFacebook
I once applied for a job at one of them. They were offering considerably less than market rate. It was cubicles, not open plan, but pay peanuts, get monkeys.
If you're letting interns write critical code you don't work for a real company.
So...IBM?
Been in this nightmare before: open floor plan and the thermostat happened to be just behind a menopausal woman.
lucm, indeed.
Don't you get cabin fever after a while? Working from home 1-2 days a week is great, but to me, being home 24x7 sounds a lot like being in jail. I've tried and it drove me nuts.
Commuting can be a bitch but I used to live really close to the office and it wasn't much better. I need at least a 15 minute buffer to make the switch between home and work life, but maybe it's just me.
lucm, indeed.
This is actually very common.
Yes it is, but he asked for a citation, not a repetition of the assertion.
Here is a citation: Employees Only Think They Control Thermostat.
You're right. Google isn't a real company.
Is if Cook and his cronies are getting massive offices with real door(s), walls and windows.
The article says,
The open floor work spaces will only be for standard employees, while the high-level executives will be exempt from the collective work environment and will have their own offices on the fourth floor of Apple Park. Other employees won’t even be moving to the new HQ, on this list is Eddy Cue, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Internet Software and Services; he and his team will remain at the current headquarters at Infinite Loop.
The high-level executives who move to Apple Park get their own offices. So I guess they know the value of having an office.
I wonder if Eddie Cue fought to keep his group at Infinite Loop, to protect them from open offices.
I once worked for a company that did this. Why? Thermostats. The women were constantly pushing them higher, while the men were pushing them lower, leading to many arguments. The CEO finally got fed up and put the "hot" people in one room and the "cold" people in the other. This led to mostly segregation by gender, although there were some scrawny guys that went to the warm area, and a few "big" women preferred the cooler section.
Ah yes. My company is transitioning to an open floor right as I type this. One of my colleagues is known for having his window open, even when the temperature drops far below freezing in winter. If I still had a whiteboard, I'd write "WINTER IS COMING" on it in large letters...
create beautiful and useful products.
The article says it's about apple though.
From the article, I noticed that Johny Srouji is quoted as defending his team...quite vocally...against having an open office imposed on them. Individual workers will never win over the MBAs touting cost per square foot, or the design eggheads like Jony Ive demanding everything be white, flat and rounded. But the boss of a very influential part of the company has a little more pull. If a boss has sufficient leverage (and guts) to say something like, "Maybe I should take my chip design team over to Qualcomm/Intel/AMD and you can just buy processors for your iThings from them!" things like corporate "mandates" tend to fall away pretty quickly. Problem is that most managers aren't like that; if I were a computer engineer I sure wouldn't mind working for this guy.
I know people have different work styles, and some extroverts and recent college graduates want to continue the college lifestyle by recreating the dorm/dining hall/open classroom feel. But in my experience, it's going to take Google saying "oops, we screwed up...open plan is only good for web startups with 25 people, and everywhere else should have a mix of styles and let teams/people choose." Every large company I've ever worked for copies HR policy verbatim from either GE, IBM or Google. I think they all use the same management consulting firm.