wow....bitter much? Yup they are out to get you.....
Have you ever worked in an open office? Hot desking? lets take apple out of the equation here.
I have, it was a crap experience to be honest.
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Some Apple Park Employees Said to Be Dissatisfied With Open Office Design
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wow....bitter much? Yup they are out to get you.....
Have you ever worked in an open office? Hot desking? lets take apple out of the equation here.
I have, it was a crap experience to be honest.
If you listen carefully, you can hear the whip crack and clinking of chains in the background! :-D
My parents were the same way as I was growing up.
'It's a job. You aren't supposed to like it' they would yell as I quit, or was fired from another soul crushing 'job'.
"Gruber went on to mention Apple vice president Johny Srouji as one of the employees dissatisfied with the Apple Park office spaces. Srouji was allegedly so against the changes that Apple "built his team their own building" outside of the main spaceship building. "
Programming is very focus-driven. Having to listen to the guy next desk over talk about getting his Mercedes into the shop for repairs for 30 min, then have three people chatting on the other side about some completely different project than what you are working, then the guy right next to you starts digging around behind his monitor to plug a cable in for 5 minutes is HELL. That is a continuous thing in open floor plan offices.
Anyone who says "Tough! You poor baby just deal with it!" has either never worked as a Professional Programmer in an office with other people, ever, or is one of those loud-mouthed jerks who think they are the center of the universe and can make as much noise/distraction as possible while NOT doing anything productive.
If you need to "collaborate" then go to a conference room or a specifically designated public space AWAY from the desks. This is how it used to be in tech. Now everything has to be open so the managers can look out and see everyone toiling away while the people doing the real work are annoyed and distracted.
I worked at Apple last year, doing actual programming, on incredibly demanding schedules. Distractions are a productivity killer and open floor plans are the most evil thing ever because EVERYTHING becomes a distraction.
Imagine going to a new movie you really wanted to see and having to sit and listen to conversations/phone calls of every. Single. Person. You'd probably be pretty peeved too.
Anyone who says "Tough! You poor baby just deal with it!" has either never worked as a Professional Programmer in an office with other people, ever, or is one of those loud-mouthed jerks who think they are the center of the universe and can make as much noise/distraction as possible while NOT doing anything productive.
If you need to "collaborate" then go to a conference room or a specifically designated public space AWAY from the desks. This is how it used to be in tech. Now everything has to be open so the managers can look out and see everyone toiling away while the people doing the real work are annoyed and distracted.
I worked at Apple last year, doing actual programming, on incredibly demanding schedules. Distractions are a productivity killer and open floor plans are the most evil thing ever because EVERYTHING becomes a distraction.
Imagine going to a new movie you really wanted to see and having to sit and listen to conversations/phone calls of every. Single. Person. You'd probably be pretty peeved too.
That's because Jony designs for himself now. Original gold Apple Watch Edition was his own pet version and failed. Mac Pro, failed.
I worked in a school designed with an open floor plan. Had a library on the 2nd floor and a "Commons" on the first floor with classrooms around both places. When the library or commons had an event, plus the commons also doubled as the lunchroom, the noice levels distracted the surrounding classrooms. It may be "cool" in theory, but doesn't work well in practice. To make it worse, the gym's on the 3rd floor (the top floor of the school). I mean, WTF? When kids in gym were really active, you could actually feel the floor on the 2nd floor shake.
Day one at the new Apple Park HQ. Ernie shows up ready to work in his new open concept space...
Individual offices are not common either.
More usually, people work in private rooms with a handful to at most a dozen fellow workers who are all doing the same thing. That keeps it pretty quiet, while at the same time promoting camaraderie and collaboration.
One thing about the new Apple HQ is that the walkways are on the innermost and outermost part of each ring, thus the offices are all stuck in the middle of each ring with no views. Except I bet anything that upper management have offices that DO smack up against windows.
I can see how an open office is distracting, because I am one who finds them distracting. I can also see how an open office could promote more collaboration. That being said I'm not sure in practice I've actually seen it promote collaboration. That might be more based on personality than environment.
I find the most distracting thing is not my environment but email. More specifically the requirement to respond to every email in a timely manner. If short discussions replaced emails that would be better for me in most cases. However I've typically found the email distractions are from people I'm not working near.
I find the most distracting thing is not my environment but email. More specifically the requirement to respond to every email in a timely manner. If short discussions replaced emails that would be better for me in most cases. However I've typically found the email distractions are from people I'm not working near.
Coders, as I understand it, tend to be solitary types who prefer to be left along to do their thing. Nothing wrong with that at all, and I can see how it would irk them to be surrounded by other groups of people or passers by, who may be chit chatting, and who are not related to their own team.
Granted, I have my own office, and have never worked in an 'open work space' environment (although I have previously been in a cubicle setting, but even that was in a small room). I enjoy having my own office and feel I am very productive because of it.
Granted, I have my own office, and have never worked in an 'open work space' environment (although I have previously been in a cubicle setting, but even that was in a small room). I enjoy having my own office and feel I am very productive because of it.
No opinion on the merits of open floor plans for offices, but it does seem as of this entire story is based on at most a handful of emails sent to Gruber. And how many employees will Apple Park hold at buildout, a mere 12,000? Hmm. Basic arithmetic tells me the complaints of a few are being magnified and this is probably a total non-story.
Ah, the old open floor plan ploy. I've been around software development for over 20 years. I've seen the open floor plans, the tall cubes, and the offices. Open floor plans do help with collaboration but ultimately hinder more than help. Office fiefdoms help with work but tend to be isolating. Tall cubes are the best and worst of both.
What works, I think, is having meeting rooms aplenty with closed doors and whiteboards. Have 8 foot/2.5m high cubes and co-locate the teams and encourage interaction and team dynamics in the co-located meeting rooms. They could easily do scrum in the meeting rooms and standup next to it or inside. Also gives people some privacy to focus.
The companies that are full in on open environments claim a lot of things but ultimately it's cost no matter how it is spun. Some companies even require you check in/out a laptop each day so you don't even have the same laptop per day. People are just widgets then. And most tech people, especially developers, loathe it.
What works, I think, is having meeting rooms aplenty with closed doors and whiteboards. Have 8 foot/2.5m high cubes and co-locate the teams and encourage interaction and team dynamics in the co-located meeting rooms. They could easily do scrum in the meeting rooms and standup next to it or inside. Also gives people some privacy to focus.
The companies that are full in on open environments claim a lot of things but ultimately it's cost no matter how it is spun. Some companies even require you check in/out a laptop each day so you don't even have the same laptop per day. People are just widgets then. And most tech people, especially developers, loathe it.
Sure, but you can bounce ideas off people by going to their office or cube. You can't make an open office quiet and not distracting.
open space is distracting. I enjoy working in noisy environments, music, tv noise, people talking and it helps me concentrate but I get distracted visually I can't get into what I was doing that easily. I rather be cubed off to be productive.
Open workspaces have been the norm everywhere in Western Europe my whole working life... I've been working 17 years in open plan offices, it's just something that is normal to me. It's true that they can be noisy if the space is over filled and they aren't suited to certain types of businesses, especially those where people use phones a lot, but I don't think that is the case with coders and engineers. You do need to make sure that meeting spaces are provided and that they have good acoustic isolation and climate control (otherwise people open the doors to cool the meeting space, letting sound out).
In open plan spaces, people become more aware of other people, this has both positives and negatives.
Some positives are that you can develop a better awareness for things that others are doing, by extension you get a better idea of how what you are doing is impacted by or is impacting on those things, you get to know your colleagues better, you get the opportunity to interact with them socially and to exchange ideas, without this process needing to be formalized, it's possible to catch issues earlier, simply because you talk more with your colleagues about what you are all doing.
Some negatives are that you need to be more conscious about your impact on the space, in terms of noise or hygiene and you become more aware of others impacts on the space in the same ways. It means that you have to use the space properly, since you don't have your own cubicle, you need to use the different areas of the space for what they are designed for and not just lazily do everything at your desk, it means actually using 'calling booths' in the office when you need to make long or personal calls, gathering in meeting rooms or coffee areas when you want to discuss something with other people for more than a few minutes, instead of disturbing others in the open office. It also means sometimes working out how you can focus, which may mean using headphones or booking a quiet space when you need to concentrate, possibly having a traffic light system (green - I'm available, amber - only interrupt if important, red - don't interrupt) and respecting the systems of others or any generally established conventions.
In general though, having open spaces make people more comfortable around other people, simply by them becoming familiar, they fosters a sense of collaboration and family, which you don't get when you isolate yourself away in a box. I personally would hate to work in an isolated office, the idea seems so antisocial to me.
Open-plan offices are the pits. I used to share a really nice room overlooking the Mall (just near Buckingham Palace) with 3 or 4 other people and the new chief executive turned the whole building (with the notable exception of his own office) open plan. The only ones who didn't seem to mind were the academics from Oxford and Cambridge who all seemed to work quite happily even if they were in a corridor (which some of them were).
Sounds like really poor execution or a company that wasn't sorted out around the concept - occasional distractions, sure, but like I said (see my post #137), it really requires significant forethought not only for implementation, but if it should be pursued at all. If you've got a bunch of developers, attenuated to a complex, single, less collaborative task mingled in with, let's say, salespeople, yeah, that's never going to work
Doing an after-the-post-quote since it sort of punctuates what I was saying above
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In the beginning of my career in Silicon Valley, when I was in a cube, I wanted an office. Now, at the other end of my career in an open floor plan, all I want is a trash can. You have to get up and walk some distance to throw out a dirty tissue.
More seriously, open floor plans completely overlook the concept of different work styles and requirements. On the phone all day? Architecting, coding, strategizing? Different workspace requirements. The issue, in my experience, is that people have different sensibilities and expectations for "personal space." In an open environment, I've sat next to someone who is speaking loudly into the phone and slamming her hand on the desk to emphasize a point in the conversation. Others talk loudly enough that people within 75 feet put on headphones.
The challenge is that employees are going from a nice closed-door office environment to an open plan. Workspace designers seem to love this concept. Everyone else? Not so much.
More seriously, open floor plans completely overlook the concept of different work styles and requirements. On the phone all day? Architecting, coding, strategizing? Different workspace requirements. The issue, in my experience, is that people have different sensibilities and expectations for "personal space." In an open environment, I've sat next to someone who is speaking loudly into the phone and slamming her hand on the desk to emphasize a point in the conversation. Others talk loudly enough that people within 75 feet put on headphones.
The challenge is that employees are going from a nice closed-door office environment to an open plan. Workspace designers seem to love this concept. Everyone else? Not so much.
I'm the same way. I like white noise, but my own white noise. I usually have the news streaming on my iPad at my desk, or listen to music on my iPhone. Being surrounded by other people would visually distract me to no end, make me constantly worry about my voice volume, whether the contents of my conversation are being eavesdropped, etc etc...
I've seen variations on this argument several times. The problem with making this charge for Apple Park is it perhaps one of the costliest buildings of its size on a per square foot basis ever constructed. Only a few months ago we were reading articles about how Apple's lavish demands for interior finish specifications were driving the architects nuts and pushing the costs of construction up even further. So say what you will about the merits of open office space planning, clearly Apple is not doing it to build on the cheap.
What a surprise, Apple putting the design and 'looks' as the most important thing. Everything else is a distant second, including employee satisfaction.
The old 'it's better than the 1870's, so no need to improve' argument! There are no shortage of less talented people willing to put up with more ******** for less pay ready to take your job also, Reason077.
Or why doesn't Apple outsource all their development to India to save money?