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A Look Inside Apple’s New Campus

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Re: A Look Inside Apple’s New Campus

#261

“It’s an obsolete model that doesn’t address the work conditions of the future,” says Louise Mozingo, an urban design professor at UC Berkeley." Everyone should note that Louise Mozingo has criticized the Apple campus from not having large open floor plans where employees can stare at each other across narrow tables and "collaborate" by yelling to one another over their co-workers heads. She simply doesn't get how so…

This is great!

Too many companies are in the 1920's, where they want an open plan so bosses can stare at people while they work.

Re: A Look Inside Apple’s New Campus

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask which company it was? I'm making a mental list of companies to try to interview with once I graduate, and having offices sounds amazing.

This was long ago I'm afraid, not sure if still in business.

Ah, That's ok. Thank you anyways!

Re: A Look Inside Apple’s New Campus

#263
post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did you charge for the work? How long did it take for you to do this? Was the price higher or lower because it was for Apple?

I charge around $70/hour for that kind of work, which tends to be a mix of CAD, CAM, Setup, Lifting/moving crap, packaging, and cleanup. Usually 1 hour minimum. I charge more for work in MDF because of the mess and because the dust is harder to clean up/get rid of and it is heavier. More again for aluminum. If I need to make whole assemblies with glue, finishing, etc, I tend to just go fixed bid. It's not super scien…

I didn't answer your full question - I didn't charge more based on the client. Just standard, and it took me ~8 hours of work. Turned out to be a great learning experience. (making those puzzle joints caused a revelation: .25" diameter bits are frequently, and irregularly, not .25". Most of mine end up being around .242" Once you compensate for that in CAD, things fit together nicely. )

Re: A Look Inside Apple’s New Campus

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone would jump on board if the city would just allocate the parking revenues to the home or building owners.

Where has this successfully been implemented? There's a similar mechanism to what you proposed, resident-only parking permits. This pits the business owners against the residents. It also means that a resident can't have their friends come to visit without risking a ticket. The knee-jerk HN-ism of quick fixes doesn't work here. The only actual solution is the long-term dual-pronged approach: parking structures in the…

Many many cities in Europe.

People who live there can park for free, anyone else has to pay a meter.

This solves the issues.

Re: A Look Inside Apple’s New Campus

#265

“It’s an obsolete model that doesn’t address the work conditions of the future,” says Louise Mozingo, an urban design professor at UC Berkeley." Everyone should note that Louise Mozingo has criticized the Apple campus from not having large open floor plans where employees can stare at each other across narrow tables and "collaborate" by yelling to one another over their co-workers heads. She simply doesn't get how so…

increase of 0.5% for one person offices compared to cubicles sound highly unlikely, i don't think you can replace 2*2m cubicle with same size closed office for 0.5% increase in cost

Yea, it was a while ago, but I think we estimated the cost around $500 a year, and our average cost per developer at $100k per year.

IIRC we were paying around $20 per square foot, and the office sizes were small, like 8 by 8. So an extra 25 SF cost about $500 per year. You can make an office almost as small as a cubicle, the difference is you need space for a door to swing in, office walls are thicker than cubicle walls, and you need HVAC and power.

So there is extra expense in the build-out, but that's trivial over time if you are going to stay there a long while.

Edit: And even if you want 10 by 10 offices or my math is off, 1% a year is essentially trivial as well.

Its the same old Peopleware/Mythical Man month issues. Lets say you have 10 developers who each have an average throughput of X working as a team, but you need to double output. You double the size of the team, but get only 17X output because of the overhead of working together, so you add more developers until you end up with 25 devs providing 20X output.

What if instead you give everyone the latest fastest computers, individual offices, etc, and you make your devs 10% more productive? Now you only have increase the team size to 21 devs to get an output of 20x. Essentially you've saved 20% of your engineering payroll, over a half million dollars annually in todays dev costs, to achieve the same objective.

The costs of providing a good productive workspace is trivial in comparison to it's benefits, no matter how you measure it.

Re: A Look Inside Apple’s New Campus

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then don't. Corporate childcare isn't mandatory... just because you don't like it doesn't mean it isn't incredibly valuable to other working parents. I've considered employers I wouldn't have otherwise considered because the thought of on-site child care is incredibly appealing.

Child care is a competitive business that can almost always be provided better and cheaper elsewhere. So it's much better to use stipends to subsidize employee child care. Having child care is also an expensive distraction and liability for management. Do you want to deal with employee complaints over childcare hours, personnel, facilities, etc, or do you want to spend your time thinking about how to better sell prod…

This is all a bunch of weird handwringing...

>Child care is a competitive business that can almost always be provided better and cheaper elsewhere. So it's much better to use stipends to subsidize employee child care.

Child care facilities aim for profit like any other business, and a corporate add-on doesn't need to seek profitability (and even if they did, assuming it's on-site the operational overhead is ultimately lower). So how exactly would outside facilities compete with that?

>Having child care is also an expensive distraction and liability for management

Having children is an expensive distraction whether or not your company is involved. If something happens at a remote daycare, your employee will leave the building to manage that. If there's a child-care gap that doesn't align with work schedules, your employee will take time off to deal with that.

>What happens when an employee accuses a child-care worker of hurting their child?

What happens when an employee accuses another employee of hurting them?

>or do you want to spend your time thinking about how to better sell product and keep employee's employed

I want to spend my time making a good product and making my employees lives easier so they can do their best work.

Re: A Look Inside Apple’s New Campus

#267

Beautiful building. I wonder though - for those who read the article and have worked in both suburban environments and urban ones - would you rather work in the amazing Apple spaceship in the suburbs, or a normal office building in a city-center? For me, I think I'd still prefer a short commute and the density of stuff that comes with being downtown.

beautiful building? meh, it's just extremely boring massive ring designed by some megalomaniac without any imagination, it's shame since Apple products have usually decent design but this is shameful mediocrity

this is beautiful building which looks cool and like actual 2017, not that Apple thing which looks like something from 80s http://www.archdaily.com/778933/harbin-opera-house-mad-archi...

http://www.architectureartdesigns.com/breathtaking-harbin-op...

Re: A Look Inside Apple’s New Campus

#269

Beautiful building. I wonder though - for those who read the article and have worked in both suburban environments and urban ones - would you rather work in the amazing Apple spaceship in the suburbs, or a normal office building in a city-center? For me, I think I'd still prefer a short commute and the density of stuff that comes with being downtown.

I'd rather work from home, and have done for decades. I'm not convinced it's a beautiful building. It's a very careful building, trying to be a temple and - IMO - failing. What's missing? Randomness. Playfulness. Quirkiness. Fun. Colour. Warmth. Individuality. Art. At Pixar, everyone was encouraged to personalise their work space in a creative way. I can't imagine that happening here, because it would be a mortal wou…

yep, it looks really awful like something from 80s almost in par with commie architecture, these guys wasting money apparently never heard of Zaha Hadid and likes

common, it's just massive boring circle, even Pentagon building is more original, there are only two things making this building interesting - size, Apple HQ

make it ten times smaller and put there unknown company and nobody would bother to read about it

Re: A Look Inside Apple’s New Campus

#270

5B for 13k employees - that's ~$384,000 in construction costs per head, operating and maintenance expenses are perhaps 5% of that annually (maybe more!) - taken together this is an office building that's costing apple ~$3500/head/mo . It's a beautiful office, but seriously? Avg apple cash comp is what, 12500/mo? 3500 is almost 30% of that!

You are missing the point. It's only an office because apple is a company. That could have been the great pyramids, saint sophia or notre dame. Your calculations are off because you don't realize that while a lot of servants are enjoying their life in the castle, it's been built for the royal family and its court.

it's just massive boring circle and i can show you immediately dozen more interesting buildings

now pyramids at the time of construction were massive engineering, this is just dumb boring building

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