Apple staffers reportedly rebelling against open office plan

Regarding open office plans: Focus does suffer in an open layout. Creativity does suffer too. In the face of a fire in production, an open office creates a low friction environment for task distribution to handle it. A factor that makes up for this is that we can work from home one day a week. I find these times to allow me to be most creative for planning long term solutions. Occasional remote work is possible and effective thanks to several technologies including Slack.

Regarding individual or paired offices: focus is easy to accomplish, and it is easier to be creative. It can be quiet, but it sure feels lonely when my team members take 3-6 minutes to walk to. Unfortunately, meetings, ad-hoc visits, and email were the communication methods here. Remote work was near impossible and impractical with just email for peer involved processes. This was also in a very corp-legacy environment and my ability to make an impact was unsatisfying. So I feel my creativity was often wasted and unvalued.

Overall, I think I like what I have now, which is mostly open office, but still occasional time for individual creativity.

I'm not paid to chitchat or stand around eating birthday cake. I don't need to love people to work with them. For the most part, even as a systems architect, I don't even need to talk to them. A few emails, echats, and meetings are sufficient.

This may sound harsh, when I heard they were pulling down the cube walls, I threatened to walk. I got to keep my high walled cube, but everyone else was surprised one Monday with low walls. A week later, after the whole office rioted, everyone got their walls back.

If you need/want company, go sit in a common area. But don't take away my isolation. And tell those kids to get the fuck off my lawn.

We have an open floor plan, and it works like this:

* Desk area is for getting work done. Everyone agrees on this.

* We have "phone rooms" for small discussions. But we limit those usually to 1:1s or discussing office politics.

* Try to limit all discussions at the desk area to 5 people or less.

* If someone sighs loudly as they put on their headphones when you're having a discussion right behind them, then that is their signal to you to keep talking loudly, as their noise-canceling headphones will eliminate any trace of your conversation.

* You can usually carry a conversation at your desk at any volume, because other engineers will let you know if you're being too loud. Engineers tend to be extroverted and won't hesitate to let you know if you're bothering them.

* When someone first sits at their desk, it's polite to immediately engage them in a 30-minute conversation about their weekend or what they did last night. It eases their transition into work.

* A person working without headphones on, signifies that it's ok to tap them on the shoulder to ask them a question.

* A person working WITH headphones on, signifies that it's ok to tap them on the shoulder to ask them a question.

* If someone usually works off in quiet parts of the building, one should always remind them "you're never at your desk" with an accusatory tone.