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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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'm a thermosexual.
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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.
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.