Apple Preparing to Occupy 200,000 Square Feet of Temporary Space Ahead of New $1 Billion North Carolina Campus

[Mr. Dee]

What type of work are these people doing in these spread out Apple campuses? Are they writing actual code that goes into macOS, iOS, prototype hardware? I’m just thinking why all this sprawl of Human Resources is really needed. I remember a Flickr/Quora post many years ago an Apple engineers whose sole responsibility was to bring up the Intel release of OS X. He did this at his home in Pennslyvennia. Not to mention a guy who compiled Marklar did this by himself with off the shelf products from New Egg.

I know, software products become bigger and more complex which requires larger complex teams. But it’s not like OS X wasn’t already a big enough, complex project in 2001 vs 2021. The fact that one guy was able port OS X at home to run on a Sony Vaio back in 2001 shows how nimble software development was.

Anyway, I don’t work at Apple. But iPhone just required 150 million to create now Apples R&D is probably 10 billion. I would like to see exactly where the money goes.

 

[Pezimak]

If companies are doing remote work, it’s basically the same as outsourcing. They might as well out source the jobs to China or India and save salary costs. You don’t want to open this flood gate and destory the job market. A Chinese Engineer will work 3 times harder than you for a third of the pay, and they are good at what they do when managed well. Unless there is a wage parity between China and the US, which eventually there will be, I don’t see this remote work thing being viable for Americans.

No it isn’t, out sourcing is employing the services of another company to fulfill those tasks, remote working is employing people directly yourself to perform the tasks, big difference. It is cheaper to have the remote working I’d think as you can reduce office space, plus you still need local employees, you cannot do everything from foreign lands.

 

[0924487]

No it isn’t, out sourcing is employing the services of another company to fulfill those tasks, remote working is employing people directly yourself to perform the tasks, big difference. It is cheaper to have the remote working I’d think as you can reduce office space, plus you still need local employees, you cannot do everything from foreign lands.

I think the input and output is the same between remote work and outsourcing. Apple can transfer jobs to Apple China HQ, for example. Just like companies such as Schnaider and GE have been exponentially expanding their China R&D centres over the past 20 years, and not just factories. I don’t think there is a difference between outsourcing and remote work for the companies. There is little friction between one v.s. the other.

Nowadays, when we say outsourcing, it’s no longer those dreaded call center jobs, it’s jobs that were traditionally secure and required advanced education.

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

North Carolina is so hot right now

One last comment: OH YEAH!!!

I remember nights where it was 100/100! ONE HUNDRED DEGREES, and ONE HUNDRED PERCENT HUMIDITY!

Bed sheets became Syran Wrap. A fart is welcomed because it's moving air. Nights where there was no breeze to provide any respite. I can only imagine that it's gotten much much worse. (We had a hurricane pass a few miles north of us too, that left a huge impact on me. No reasoning with hurricane season)

 

[Wahlstrm]

I can testify that working from home has a lower productivity because of all the family nonsense that comes up. If I'm working at the company, then if there is a wedding at noon, not my problem, I can't be there. I'm working that day. Or, if my daughter had a bad night of sleep and is cranky, not my problem, I'm working. If I'm home, I'd have to personally deal with all those things, which reduces my productivity.

Of course, you save childcare and nanny costs, but you pay it with you sanity.

Also, you are less creative and more limited by your individual domain of expertise, you can't very easily make new friends and meet new people. It's very difficult to do multidisciplinary work, especially in STEM.

Unless it was an active choice to stop sending your kid to daycare / fire the nanny (to "save childcare and nanny costs"),
then this sounds more like a "pandemic problem" than a "WFH problem"?

If your kid was at daycare-, out with the nanny- or in school all day, you would likely have a different experience?

 

[tonywalker23]

Forgive my ignorance, but according to that blueprint there are nine personal offices compared to a bunch of cubicle looking seats. Is that a normal ratio?

Other than working at an apple store around 2010, I’ve never had a tech or company type job. Several assembly line type jobs (Michelin etc) but have been at a church for the last portion of my life. We invisibly don’t have tons of workers (5), but I do enjoy having my own office to think and concentrate with my computer and books.

Perhaps I just haven’t been in the culture to understand, but being surrounded by that many people in an open office would make my brain shut down. What is it like in real life to have an open office?

 

[Pezimak]

I think the input and output is the same between remote work and outsourcing. Apple can transfer jobs to Apple China HQ, for example. Just like companies such as Schnaider and GE have been exponentially expanding their China R&D centres over the past 20 years, and not just factories. I don’t think there is a difference between outsourcing and remote work for the companies. There is little friction between one v.s. the other.

Nowadays, when we say outsourcing, it’s no longer those dreaded call center jobs, it’s jobs that were traditionally secure and required advanced education.

I don't think you do understand the differences between our sourcing and employed workers, and no Apple aren't going to start moving more staff into China, in fact they probably want less staff over there.

 

[0924487]

I don't think you do understand the differences between our sourcing and employed workers, and no Apple aren't going to start moving more staff into China, in fact they probably want less staff over there.

There is a difference between what you want and what corporate executives want… There is a big disconnect between the common man and the elites.

 

[macwhiztech]

Forgive my ignorance, but according to that blueprint there are nine personal offices compared to a bunch of cubicle looking seats. Is that a normal ratio?

Up until 2020, it was common... if not generous for that many middle managers to have offices. Open-plan offices, increasingly with unassigned bench seating for higher density, was increasingly the norm. Managers below Senior VP level would be lucky to have cubes with three-quarter-height walls; often, they'd have an open desk and need to hunt down an open conference room for private one-on-ones.

My employer spent millions on building newer, denser open-plan, bench-seating offices in 2019.

They spent the last year tearing out the bench seating and installing cubicles with six-foot spacing between people. And not the "six inches above the desktop counts as a cubicle, right?" cubicles... I mean old-fashioned, stand up to see the next person cubicles.

I'm surprised Apple is submitting plans for pre-pandemic open-plan offices. They were terrible for productivity. They were terrible for morale. Management said they fostered interaction, but the reality was they caused everyone to wear noise-cancelling headphones and isolate themselves even more than when they had real cubicles. The open-plan bench office looks nice, and it's certainly cheaper to pack employees into... but it's a relic of pre-pandemic times when there was no quantifiable risk to packing people into an office like sardines.

Beyond the operational risk from having upset and distracted employees who could become superspreaders, I'm surprised Apple's attorneys haven't pointed out the potential regulatory and legal risks. OSHA could still decide that an open-plan office is an unsafe workspace in a world where novel, highly-transmissible respiratory viruses are a thing.

 

[Pezimak]

There is a difference between what you want and what corporate executives want… There is a big disconnect between the common man and the elites.

I think corporate executives want to cut costs and offer good service so they don't get a bad name in the business or public world, because then you don't sell products or services and you go bust.
Having staff working from home and offices ensures both criteria are met, they can have smaller offices, save in carbon footprints as a result, save energy costs, tax's, rent, and have the same results. And no they aren't going to outsource those jobs to foreign lands or increase foreign wotk forces, because they also want to keep the skills and talents in house.

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

I can testify that working from home has a lower productivity because of all the family nonsense that comes up. If I'm working at the company, then if there is a wedding at noon, not my problem, I can't be there. I'm working that day. Or, if my daughter had a bad night of sleep and is cranky, not my problem, I'm working. If I'm home, I'd have to personally deal with all those things, which reduces my productivity.

Of course, you save childcare and nanny costs, but you pay it with you sanity.

Also, you are less creative and more limited by your individual domain of expertise, you can't very easily make new friends and meet new people. It's very difficult to do multidisciplinary work, especially in STEM.

I'm just so glad we never had kids. Rarely do kids make things better enough, I've seen, to make it worth it. My personal opinion. So many friends have admitted that they shouldn't have had kids, or should have waited longer before it happened. The environment isn't conducive for having children. The numbers of avenues where kids can learn bad habits, and the 'food' and 'drinks' that can encourage their metabolism to feed anxiety and spastic behavior is epic. Anyone watching 'kids shows' will see bratish behavior, and endless marketing of literal garbage for your kids to whine and cry for, and will make you want to put them in 4-points in the basement! YIKES!!! My youngest brother was a hellion. I joked with the mom unit that she could have invented the 'kid leash' with him. She finally admitted it was a 'missed opportunity'.

Today's parents should get combat pay, if they can raise children that aren't impulse driven monsters. Kudos to them. Kudos also, major kudos, to those that don't rely on iPads, TV, DVD's, etc to function as babysitting devices.

I was reminded of one of our friends who were busy lamenting their choice to have children at all, in ear shot of their KIDS!!! What kind of reaction would that cause for a child to hear that their parents should never have had them? Wow... I can imagine. Those poor kids...