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

At work, I currently sit in an enclosed room that fits eight SWEs, all of whom are on my team. We have sliding glass doors on the room that we only use when we&#x27;re having our stand-ups so as to not disturb the people outside the room. Incoming noise never seems to be a problem. All of the conversations I overhear are from my team members, and are thus relevant to me. I also have my back facing a wall. I consider this a near ideal working environment, even better than everyone having private offices, as that seriously hampers spontaneous discussion.<p>In another month we&#x27;ll be moving out from our room into the general open office seating area, which I&#x27;m not looking forward to. It&#x27;s not even the noise that bothers me, it&#x27;s the raw animal insecurity of having things going on behind your back. I get horribly distracted in a big open area when people are moving around behind me, and I thus can&#x27;t concentrate effectively. I also feel self-conscious about what others can see on my screen, and can never relax. I feel a low-level anxiety from it throughout the entire work day.

Such a failure to learn. The US school system went through this with &quot;open classrooms&quot;. Schools were built to support the idea of no walls between classrooms. For years, teachers trying to maintain sanity erected temporary dividers. These days, most of those schools have been rehabbed to include actual walls, or they&#x27;ve been demo&#x27;d. Such a waste.

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 &quot;cultured&quot; tech company making 200k+ per year.<p>The quality of life and lack of freedom you exchange for the &quot;next 100k&quot; above and beyond a 100k base Salary is never worth it.<p>Time and health is your most precious resource and asset. And many are deluded into thinking it&#x27;s ok to trade that for (what they mistakingly) thing is a lot of money (hint: it&#x27;s not when taking taxes, commute and accomodation into account)

I have a really bad feeling about Apple and this building.<p>Companies tend to have bad things happen when they build or move HQ anyway, and the fetishization of Apple Park is a level beyond.<p>Even their product marketing is distracted by talking about how awesome the building is. How much time has been wasted in the company on the topic?

I&#x27;m moving my office at work from a nice office next to the production office (noisy, people banging in and out all day) to a much bigger windowless space on the other site across the road <i>just because of the noise</i>.<p>Boss keeps asking if I&#x27;m OK with no windows and I keep saying &quot;Have you ever seen me with the blinds open?&quot;, It&#x27;s amazing how even good managers don&#x27;t get that for some of us a cave with fast internet is the <i>best</i> environment.

Good.<p>Apple is one of my favorite companies. I just absolutely love what they&#x27;re doing and have done in terms of personal privacy.<p>I&#x27;m really disheartened that they&#x27;ve moved to an open office layout. It&#x27;s a surefire way to lose huge amounts of productivity from their engineers.<p>Open office layouts are a travesty. They make literally no fucking sense. As engineers we&#x27;re expected to maintain abstractions in our minds which can span hundreds if not thousands of lines of code.<p>So why would you put us in the middle of a fucking zoo?<p>I can hear sports TV while I try to work. I can hear my friends&#x2F;coworkers shoot the shit about the new South Park or Game of Thrones episode while I work. I can hear people talk about their weekend plans while I work. I can hear my coworkers planning projects I&#x27;m not involved in as I work.<p>And here I am, expectected, as a full stack engineer, to abstract complex data flows while all of this is going on.<p>To produce, while all of this is going on.<p>And do not forget that even if every single person was a deaf mute, their mere presence can knock me out of the zone.<p>I remember college. I remember working on projects and losing track of time. Because back then I had a room where I could work without distraction. Boy, how wonderful, to be so absorbed as to forget how much time has passed.<p>I literally have never felt that in an open office layout. It sucks. I love what I do. Why take that pleasure away from us?<p>It burns me out.

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.<p>On the micro level changing from offices to open floor is a huge change. How was that supposed to preserve and foster the engineering culture? Apple is the company where walls and secrets are not accident but carefully designed. I could imagine a part of the organization going to open floor but the whole building?

&gt; &quot;Judging from the private feedback I&#x27;ve gotten from some Apple employees, I&#x27;m 100 per cent certain there&#x27;s going to be some degree of attrition based on the open floor plans, where good employees are going to choose to leave because they don&#x27;t want to work there,&quot; Gruber said.<p>But where are they going to go? Is there a single company left that hasn&#x27;t adopted the open floor plan ideology? If so, are they hiring because I&#x27;d like to send in my resume. :&#x2F;

I cannot believe how short sighted companies can be when it comes to these things, but I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s malice per se, it&#x27;s usually a variation of the person who makes the decision does not have to live with it and so doesn&#x27;t have any incentive outside of spending as little as possible.<p>It&#x27;s like how in many cases the desktops&#x2F;monitors for developers come out of the IT budget, so the IT department tries to buy the crappiest things possible (24&quot; single 1080p monitors, because they can&#x27;t find anymore the 22&quot; 900p they had before, 500 gig hard drives, etc.) because it does not impact them if developers are happy or not or are hampered by having to work with substandard tools.<p>In several past companies when we moved offices or had an office redesign, it was always up to the facilities department to deal with this, and developers were involved only at the very end when it was time to pick the seating and by that time all the design was locked, contractors hired and so on and so there was no way to change anything of significance anymore.<p>If I ever had a company I would make it a rule that any decision has to be made by the department &#x2F; people affected by it. Other departments can offer support as needed, but I would never have IT control which hardware the developers get, or facilities decide for open office&#x2F;cube height&#x2F;chairs, or the CTO decide for the code review tool, etc. etc.

I am no fan of open-plan office or just going to an office but there is a huge difference between a cramped open-plan office and one where you have so much space around your and your peer&#x27;s desk that you need a hoverboard to get to the next couple of coworkers. Also carpets, semi-wall, calling booths can make a difference.<p>So what I want to say is that every open-plan offices is different and yes, most are terrible. But I guess that if somebody made them right it must be Apple?!

If you really want a private office, there are a couple of spaces available right next to mine for $225&#x2F;month each - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.klopferbuilding.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.klopferbuilding.com&#x2F;</a> ;)<p>Obviously you&#x27;d need to live nearby (Northwest of Dayton, OH), but houses here go for ~ $120k - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.redfin.com&#x2F;city&#x2F;16281&#x2F;OH&#x2F;Pleasant-Hill" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.redfin.com&#x2F;city&#x2F;16281&#x2F;OH&#x2F;Pleasant-Hill</a><p>You could literally retire here and work on whatever you what with a few year&#x27;s worth of bay area salary. (Which is, more or less, what I intend to do.)

Open plan “offices” need to go away. I’m a professional and the products I develop make my company lots of money. Telling me if I need quiet I should put on headphones is insulting and is treating me like a child.

We have open plan, I revolted by never returning to my desk. I work from random location, old unoccupied desks, home, the cafeteria, but never my desk. You just burned that real estate.

I guess, once you&#x27;re big enough, you can afford to have people quit and let the rest work inefficiently, just for the vanity of a “design” chief.

Why bother working for a company that has <i>that</i> much money and still won&#x27;t invest it back in giving employees proper working conditions?

In EU all those glass doors would have to have matt texture&#x2F;stickers around eye level so you don&#x27;t enter them by accident - I&#x27;m surprised in US there&#x27;s no such requirement?

Apple people: Don&#x27;t quit, just refuse to work in unpleasant conditions. If they fire you, sue.<p>See my relevent comment yesterday: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15253333" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15253333</a><p>(But do talk to an attorney before taking internet advice.)

Where are they gonna go, though? The whole Valley has succumbed to this fad.

&gt; Similarly, Gensler&#x27;s 2016 UK Workplace Survey found that workers were more likely to innovate if they had access to a range of spaces supporting different working styles – including private, semi-private and open-plan environments.<p>This is my favorite part, because it confirms an intuition I&#x27;ve held for a long time: both open areas and private offices have their uses, so provide both. The only downside I can see is that it&#x27;s expensive to implement, which is, I&#x27;ll grant, non-trivial.

Steve Jobs saw a productivity increase when he was at Pixar according to Ed Catmull&#x27;s book (Creativity Inc.)<p>The problem is that what Mr. Catmull described as open space for creative people to let them mingle and bounce off creative ideas. That&#x27;s the whole premise of an open office space.<p>Now, programming can be a creative field, but most of the time when I code I&#x27;d like to be quiet around me. If anybody distracts me that&#x27;s an instant 15 minutes loss (at least) of whatever I was doing. At least for me.

In all my 25+ years in the valley, I&#x27;ve seen office trends come and go. None have been more hated than the open floor plan. Especially when you don&#x27;t have a wall behind you.<p>It&#x27;s why I now work from home. Why many work from home. Open offices are not comfortable, collaborative, friendly, or enjoyable. They make people feel watched, interrupted, and stressed.<p>Want me to come back to work in the office? Give me walls.

we had a web group to great fan fare had all new work area created for them, open ceilings, glass walled conference rooms, and open-plan in general. I am not sure if anyone like it. from lack of perceived &quot;my space&quot; to simple increase in noise. plus if the computer setups are not well planned out it just looks wrong.<p>for me, it reminds me of one especially bad contract where we worked on school lunch room tables. five of us in a row facing a wall with one phone at the end. amazing after spending our hourly rate what they thought they could save without realizing the impact on productivity if not turn over.<p>people deride cubicles now but they are last safe haven, just like dogs and other animals, there is a lot to be said from the subconscious feeling you have from the walls of the cube and single entrance

I&#x27;m always reminded of those stock photos of typing pools or pre-computer accountants, where you had a vast noisy field of people (usually gender-segregated) clattering away on typewriters: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gettyimages.co.uk&#x2F;detail&#x2F;photo&#x2F;secretarial-pool-1930s-high-res-stock-photography&#x2F;10075686" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gettyimages.co.uk&#x2F;detail&#x2F;photo&#x2F;secretarial-pool-1...</a><p>Really if there is to be a change in the industry it has to be led at the biggest, most fashionable employer. Everyone else will then be able to follow suit without the tedious need to actually think about the problem.<p>(Maybe there will even be a union threatening a strike over working conditions?)

I&#x27;m one of the outliers who likes open floor plans, BUT at densities much lower than what makes economical sense. 1 person per thousand square feet would be my minimum and I&#x27;d really like half again as much space.<p>Problem is the economics of it. Open floor plans I see on blogs are often side by side working stations with less than 200sqft per worker. That&#x27;s not really open floor plan in my mind, just removing the walls to recoup a couple of inches to cram more people in.

The article links to a previous article on the local impact of the campus that is also interesting: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dezeen.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;06&#x2F;13&#x2F;apple-park-new-campus-foster-partners-sucks-wired-magazine-review&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dezeen.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;06&#x2F;13&#x2F;apple-park-new-campus-fost...</a><p>Edit: clarification

I think it’s easy to reversed TOP floor for quiet working environment and noisy environment at lower level.<p>Looking at Singapore has an office look similar to Apple Park spaceship. Directors, professors and councillors are working in open space, I don’t see why not?

Where will they go? Facebook&#x2F;Google? That won&#x27;t solve their problem... maybe Oracle?

They just need to get a pair of DND Shades™ for everyone (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dndshades.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dndshades.com</a>). Problem solved.

First world problems

Chicken farm

If as an engineer your only Job is to write code based on perfectly written functional specs, then open offices may not be the best. However, In larger project communication and transparency is an as important part of the job. While many people are more comfortable alone, you are part of a team and not just a coder. I find it selfish for people to feel their alone time is more important than learning how to work as a team. Noise canceling headphones do wonders when you need to focus.

Every time I hear someone complain about open offices, I want to say &quot;Shhh! They&#x27;ll send us all back to our cubicles and chain us to our desks!&quot;. Seriously, if you have an open office it&#x27;s not that hard to put headphones in or pop into a side office for some focus time. But being required to spend 40 hours a week alone in a tiny box is my personal definition of hell.