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Apple staffers reportedly rebelling against open office plan

bizjournals.com

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Re: Apple staffers reportedly rebelling against open office plan

#31

Post by landhar »

nashashmi wrote: post #15

Man, I remember in college when we would be working long hours in the library on a computer lined up in a row of computers. Every one would be intensely working on what they needed to. Sometimes two would work together. This was especially true before presentations when we were trying to put our stuff together. It was neat. It was collaborative. It was fun. And we were happy. Open floor plan is reminiscent of those d…

IMHO, I think what's missing is focus. In college, people in the library were there to get stuff done and would leave when they were done or needed a break. In today's workspace it's less likely that everyone is completely focused on doing work every hour of the 8 to 5 work day, and that's what creates distractions.

Re: Apple staffers reportedly rebelling against open office plan

#32

Post by moron4hire »

loco5niner wrote: post #21
wlesieutre wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company moved engineering into the same open office as sales and customer support, we can collaborate with everyone all the time! Definitely a negative to productivity on my individual work because it's so much noisier in here.

Yes, they put our desks right next to finance, with that one person who is our "laugh really loud, laugh at everything and I mean _everything_" person.

We should make an audio output for our build scripts to play a really loud woodchipper sound. "Sorry, can't be helped, part of the process, the machine has to grind the source code up into small bits to fit into the CPU."

Re: Apple staffers reportedly rebelling against open office plan

#33

Post by bad_user »

gervase wrote: post #13
nemo44x wrote: post #6

It all seems so backwards. Instead of having collaborative working spaces with private rooms for meetings, doesn't it make more sense to have private rooms for working and collaborative meeting spaces?

I suspect the thought process is something like, "Collaboration makes the office more productive. Therefore, if we force the employees to collaborate all the time , we can maximize productivity!"

Collaboration is essentially contention, like CPU threads racing for the same memory location, needing synchronization. Synchronization kills parallelism.

Re: Apple staffers reportedly rebelling against open office plan

#34

Post by lowbloodsugar »

The "I don't like open spaces, so therefore my team doesn't" is the same failure as "I don't like an office, so my team doesn't get offices".

Developers are humans, and not all humans have the same preference. I personally prefer to work in an enclosed space that includes all my team. Open spaces suck for me. A closed office with just me in it also sucks, for me. If anyone on my team is more productive in an office, I'll do my best to get them an office.

There are two fundamental problems that always show up on this issue:

1. Believing that "I am human. My preference is X. Therefore X is the preference of all humans", and

2. "Office as a signal of seniority".

If a team can get past both of those, they should be good.

Re: Apple staffers reportedly rebelling against open office plan

#35

Post by Spooky23 »

pinewurst wrote: post #26
Cozumel wrote: post #3

Investing in everything but the people who work there.

I don't think that was the intent. My guess is that this was planned in an era (sadly now) where open space is portrayed as the "cool" way to work.

I'm sure Jony Ive has an office.

Re: Apple staffers reportedly rebelling against open office plan

#36

Post by Aqua_Geek »

gervase wrote: post #13
nemo44x wrote: post #6

It all seems so backwards. Instead of having collaborative working spaces with private rooms for meetings, doesn't it make more sense to have private rooms for working and collaborative meeting spaces?

I suspect the thought process is something like, "Collaboration makes the office more productive. Therefore, if we force the employees to collaborate all the time , we can maximize productivity!"

The most productive days I've ever had at my current employer -- by a significant margin --- were when most of the company was not present (off-site or holiday). Being able to come in those days and work in a distraction-free environment was amazing.

Open office floor plans are the worst.

Re: Apple staffers reportedly rebelling against open office plan

#37

Post by JSONwebtoken »

IBM wrote: post #27
nemo44x wrote: post #6

It all seems so backwards. Instead of having collaborative working spaces with private rooms for meetings, doesn't it make more sense to have private rooms for working and collaborative meeting spaces?

The WSJ story has some pictures of what it looks like [1]. There seems to be offices with doors, but they look like it seats about 20 people. There are also common areas with long tables between them. https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-UF776_0817CO_1... https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-UF775_0817CO_1... https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-UF777_0817CO_1... [1] https://www.wsj.com/art…

I don't get the complaints, that looks very cozy even if you have to share with what looks like a total of 4 engineers per room which is a reasonable number for collaboration. The second picture makes it look greater than 4, however.

Assuming the cubicles are walled off, it'll just feel like a college library meeting room.

Re: Apple staffers reportedly rebelling against open office plan

#39

Post by virtuabhi »

nashashmi wrote: post #15

Man, I remember in college when we would be working long hours in the library on a computer lined up in a row of computers. Every one would be intensely working on what they needed to. Sometimes two would work together. This was especially true before presentations when we were trying to put our stuff together. It was neat. It was collaborative. It was fun. And we were happy. Open floor plan is reminiscent of those d…

In library you are not supposed to make noise. Go outside to have a chat. Proably that helped.
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