Apple staffers reportedly rebelling against open office plan

> Apple has insisted in presentations to the city of Cupertino that the open floor plan designs are conducive to collaboration between teams

Oh, please. A trip to Wikipedia would have told you that[1]:

> A systematic survey of research upon the effects of open-plan offices found […] high levels of noise, stress, conflict, high blood pressure and a high staff turnover. The noise level in open-plan offices greatly reduces productivity, which drops to one third relative to what it would be in quiet rooms.

> Open-plan offices have frequently been found to reduce the confidential or private conversations which employees engage in, and to reduce job satisfaction, concentration and performance, whilst increasing auditory and visual distractions.

Further, open office plans spread disease more readily[2]:

> elevated risks [for disease] were found among employees in all three traditional open-plan offices

An open office floor plan robs you of the ability to control the noise level in the environment. There is literally no way for me to convince enough of my coworkers that they should:

* Either take their phone with them, or silence it if leaving it at your desk.

* Stop having meetings in the aisle immediately next to my desk.

* If you're going to video conference in the meeting rooms, and have the other end at full volume, close the damn door. If you don't know enough about video conferencing to understand what a feedback loop is, and want to spend the first 10 minutes of the meeting generating them, close the damn door. Stop looking at me like I'm rude when I close the door for you.¹

Calling people out gets a typical "oh, sorry", but not an actual change in behavior.

Maybe it encourages me to talk to the team nearby. Maybe. But is it worth the losses? No. (The team next to me is sales. They're not bad people, but they are fairly noisy. (And I'm sure they'd say the same of us, in fact!))

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_plan

[2]: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00140139.2013.871...

"But the high-level executives, including Apple CEO Tim Cook, are exempt from this collaborative environment and have offices on the fourth floor of the new building."

Because private offices offers control over your working environment; if you need to collaborate, use a conference room, if you need a quick discussion, call them up on Slack.

I'm not going to touch wether or not the CEO has earned the best working environment, but let's bring attention to the fact that the CEO is promoting less control over your working environment for his employees and claim open-office plans offers all kinds of benefits, while the C-level management chooses to opt out. Either that's very noble of them to sacrifice all the benefits of open-office, or they're being a bit disingenuous about why almost everyone else gets an open-office plan.

> if I may repost a comment I wrote here before

Please don't do that. We have too much repetition on HN already, and copy-paste doesn't go well with thoughtful discussion.

'peopleware' by demarco and lister, goes over this and lot of other issues in great detail. imho, it should be required reading for s/w managers at the very least.

edit-001 : added author info for the book.

If you are a developer who has to check in code, then you need a quiet place for focused work. You can try to argue that some developers don't need that, but those who can achieve peak concentration while context switching and talking to others are biological curiosities, if they exist at all. I haven't met anyone like that.

Now most employees working in tech companies are not developers. There is a whole "developer abstraction layer" (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/04/11/the-development-ab...) but tech companies should at least have a place for all of their engineers to do quiet, focused work that is free of distraction.

I would also say that many people who are managers and do marketing also need a quiet place for focused work. So do QA people, infrastructure engineers, etc.

A larger point is that there are so many easy ways to communicate and collaborate now that to fix the physical plant to optimize for communication is just plain nuts. Why not use something that is very expensive to change, like the architecture, to meet needs that can't be met with software. Software can let you talk to someone easily, but it can't give you a quiet space. Only the architecture can do that. So I would err on the side of giving everyone an office with a door and then creating some common meeting spaces for them rather than building the office to have open offices and then adding a few multi-use closed door areas.