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Apple Park employees revolt over having to work in open-plan offices

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Re: Apple Park employees revolt over having to work in open-plan offices

#171

Post by rndmswethrwawy »

flachsechs wrote: post #166
rndmswethrwawy wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My argument isn't that it didn't take equity to get there, but that it's not intractable through "ordinary work". The big tech companies are essentially always hiring, and they're not the only ones offering marketable equity as part of the comp package. Yes, the performance of that equity can (and does) vary, but unless they're a company with Amazon's "total compensation philosophy" you benefit from the ups and the d…

there are probably tens of millions of engineers in the world, a small percentage of whom work for FAMG. yeah, no kidding, you'll make a ton of money if you work there get equity compensation. you don't say!

Yet FAMG are always hiring.

This suggests an interesting asymmetry that could make a lot of people very wealthy. Either they don't want it, they aren't skilled enough for it, they've found another way to achieve it, they don't believe it, or our recruiting sucks.

Re: Apple Park employees revolt over having to work in open-plan offices

#172

Post by bmarkovic »

CydeWeys wrote: post #110
pklausler wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you concentrate now in a pen of eight? Do you all agree to have occasional quiet times for thinking, wear earmuffs, or what?

It's really not bad at all. I'm not overly prone to distractions. Most of the time no one is talking (we're all engineers on the same team after all; it's not like we have salespeople on calls throughout the day). It's naturally pretty quiet most of the time, and I almost never feel the need to put on headphones to escape from the conversations that do occur, as they're all related to the team's work and thus somethi…

This. On a prior job I was in a mixed team (me being the only engineer in the room, and a team lead) and it was like a dorm room or a cafe. No way to concentrate doing anything, but luckily it was a gov't shop so no one was expected to do much real work anyway.

Currently I'm a much more relaxed (in terms of HR rules and even IT rules) tech company but the work atmosphere is full zone in. Very little chatter, soft downtempo music plodding along all day long and people doing actual work all the time and ever so rarely some "clear our heads" banter.

Re: Apple Park employees revolt over having to work in open-plan offices

#174

Post by justin1364 »

justherefortart wrote: post #40
heisenbit wrote: post #4

Steve Jobs is said to have poured in a lot of thought on how the architecture of the building is supporting work. Steve also had some architectural experience from Pixar. On the macro level the alignment of the architecture with the organization as it was explained always made sense to me. On the micro level changing from offices to open floor is a huge change. How was that supposed to preserve and foster the enginee…

For all the loving of open offices, I've never seen an exec that works in an open area themselves. I heard about one, but never saw it with my own eyes. This is in 30+ years of working.

i worked next to a billionaire software co-founder for 4 years, right in the pit with all of us (open office). i found it unbelievably awesome - humanizing, motivating, and egalitarian.

Re: Apple Park employees revolt over having to work in open-plan offices

#175

Post by piva00 »

peferron wrote: post #105
acty1 wrote: post #87

Once you work remotely (and you have your own office, in your own house) you feel bad, terribly sorry for anyone that stays in an open office "cultured" tech company making 200k+ per year. The quality of life and lack of freedom you exchange for the "next 100k" above and beyond a 100k base Salary is never worth it. Time and health is your most precious resource and asset. And many are deluded into thinking it's ok to…

Don't assume that your own preferences apply to everyone. I worked remotely for a few years, with my own dedicated room/office in my home, and am much happier now that I moved back to our company office even though it has an open-floor plan. I enjoy face-to-face contact with my coworkers, and the light level of noise really doesn't distract me from my work—if anything, the surrounding activity motivates me. We don't…

The same for me, worked for almost 2 years remotely and thoroughly missed having co-workers, face-to-face communication and discussions. You lose a whole level of expressiveness being remote, doesn't matter what tools you try to use to mitigate that (video-conference doesn't cover having a whiteboard to draw and people interacting, virtual whiteboards are clunky to use with a trackpad/mouse, etc.).

The perfect situation for me would be to have an office where I can go to when I feel like or it's necessary and working from home whenever I can.

I also like pairing or mob-programming a lot and still haven't found a proper solution to do those remotely.

Re: Apple Park employees revolt over having to work in open-plan offices

#176

Post by flachsechs »

rndmswethrwawy wrote: post #171
flachsechs wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there are probably tens of millions of engineers in the world, a small percentage of whom work for FAMG. yeah, no kidding, you'll make a ton of money if you work there get equity compensation. you don't say!

Yet FAMG are always hiring. This suggests an interesting asymmetry that could make a lot of people very wealthy. Either they don't want it, they aren't skilled enough for it, they've found another way to achieve it, they don't believe it, or our recruiting sucks.

> they've found another way to achieve it

there are literally thousands of technology companies you have never, ever, ever heard of, in the who do you think is buying all your cloud computing services?

Re: Apple Park employees revolt over having to work in open-plan offices

#177

Post by fapjacks »

piva00 wrote: post #175
peferron wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't assume that your own preferences apply to everyone. I worked remotely for a few years, with my own dedicated room/office in my home, and am much happier now that I moved back to our company office even though it has an open-floor plan. I enjoy face-to-face contact with my coworkers, and the light level of noise really doesn't distract me from my work—if anything, the surrounding activity motivates me. We don't…

The same for me, worked for almost 2 years remotely and thoroughly missed having co-workers, face-to-face communication and discussions. You lose a whole level of expressiveness being remote, doesn't matter what tools you try to use to mitigate that (video-conference doesn't cover having a whiteboard to draw and people interacting, virtual whiteboards are clunky to use with a trackpad/mouse, etc.). The perfect situat…

Using Zoom is totally fine for pair/mob programming, but if you want a collaborative IDE, Cloud9 offers this functionality, and everybody on the task can hop onto Zoom (or really anything) in order to facilitate the audio/video. People behave as though there is no way to do this because of their preference for doing it live (the "proper solution"). But this is absolutely possible and I would say actually better facilitated using these tools than everybody gathered 'round a single machine. Anybody can jump in at any moment and make a comment and a change and have it immediately propagated to everyone else's screen. No need for "Let me sit in the chair" or taking five minutes to nitpick over the minutiae of programming to convey an idea.
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