Apple Employees Rebelling Against Apple Park's Open Floor Plan, Report Says (neowin.net) 271
During a new episode of The Talk Show podcast on Daring Fireball, John Gruber touched on the topic of the open floor plans that Apple has implemented within its new campus, Apple Park. A WSJ profile of Jony Ive, where he talked about Apple Park, mentioned how programmers, engineers, and other employees had already expressed concerns about working in such an environment. Gruber shared what he has heard: I heard that when floor plans were announced, that there was some meeting with [Apple Vice President] Johny Srouji's team. He's in charge of Apple's silicon, the A10, the A11, all of their custom silicon. Obviously a very successful group at Apple, and a large growing one with a lot on their shoulders. When he [Srouji] was shown the floor plans, he was more or less just "F--- that, f--- you, f--- this, this is bulls---." And they built his team their own building, off to the side on the campus ... My understanding is that that building was built because Srouji was like, 'F--- this, my team isn't working like this.'"
They're considering doing this where I work. (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:They're considering doing this where I work. (Score:4, Insightful)
Ford Motor Company is starting to do this with their offices because they saw Apple and the other cool companies doing it. Fuck you Ford. Fuck you.
No; Ford is doing it because architects work well in open plan offices - it suits their consultative, not too deep thinking, kind of work. And HR people. If they thought too deeply about what they are doing they would commit suicide, so they really really dream of open plan offices even though mostly they aren't allowed them. Then the two groups impose what would be good for their work on software developers and engineers, people who have two modes of work - absolute peace and heated discussion. There is no way a software developer can work effecively in a large open plan office.
I have seen multiple companies going bankrupt after going properly open plan. Yes, sure, in most cases you could say that they went open plan because they foresaw financial problems, however the going open plan is probably what made it impossible for them to recover.
Re:They're considering doing this where I work. (Score:4, Interesting)
It suits architects because most of them aren't doing the actual design work. You can bet the master designer is sitting somewhere completely undisturbed in a state of intense focus for a few hours at a time. But you only need one of those.
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Have you ever tried to actually do work on a manufacturing floor? You can't even hear to make phone calls. Idiocy. And whoever approved it is a total moron.
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They did this where I work. It's unbelievable to me how, today, someone can decide to do this to their employees when a simple google search for "open concept office" returns page after page about how terrible and anti-productive it is.
But I told my manager to expect to see me less. I've worked at home at least four times more than I've been at my desk... probably more. And when I do go in to the office because I have to be there for a meeting or something, I go in and leave after.
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If they do, I'll give them two options. Either I work from home, or I'm going to start looking for alternate employement.
I actually don't find it that bad. I have a good set of headphones to cut down on sound, good music to work to and large monitors to cover my field of view. I don't find it hard to concentrate or work effectively, just crank up the tunes and go at it. It sure beats the 6' cube walls in the dark corner of the rat maze I used to have with no windows in sight for 20 yards. I felt like a caged animal with nothing to see in the last place, here I can actually look outside when I like...
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Do you have an open floor plan at home?
As someone who went from an open-office to WFH... (Score:5, Insightful)
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However, I don't doubt that there are other disciplines where putting everyone in a separate office for the entire day is good. I wou
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...I would imagine that various types of creative teams work best when they can be together and easily interact as a group in most scenarios. I'm not certain of this, but I suspect that people who function like this may not realize that engineers just want to be left alone...
I duno... all creativity needs r-mode, when have you ever seen a brainstorming session among a group of people ever output anything particularly creative, group interactions tends to make it impossible to contribute anything that is not just prior knowledge.
Actual creativity needs peace and quiet to let ideas peculate through your brain, when actively and prematurely probed by external forces these ideas collapse like an illusive wave function as you scramble for solidified, easily verbalised thought.
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The introverts vs the extroverts problem becomes exacerbated when everyone's in close quarters. As an introvert, my strong desire to stuff a rag in someone's mouth becomes really high. I try desperately not to blather. I don't care the race, age, religion, gender, or sexual persuasion of the yammerer-- some do not understand how to STFU, or even how to have a conversational exchange.
It is for this reason, constant, insipid, spewing blather, that I've left organizations; it was a good thing for both of us. T
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Don't you get cabin fever after a while? Working from home 1-2 days a week is great, but to me, being home 24x7 sounds a lot like being in jail. I've tried and it drove me nuts.
Commuting can be a bitch but I used to live really close to the office and it wasn't much better. I need at least a 15 minute buffer to make the switch between home and work life, but maybe it's just me.
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Ditto. For 1.5 years, I worked from home 100% as a Cisco contractor. I loved it! I noticed my office co(lleague/worker)s had open-office setups. Even my former employer before that job started doing those setups. I am glad I never had to work like that. I hope I never will have to do that for my future jobs if I ever get a job (almost eight months now :(). I'd rather work in a tiny cubicle with low walls.
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I know for a fact that I will never again have to work in an open floor plan, because I will not accept any position that requires it.
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I might have to if it is a local job and can't telecommute. :(
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My manager and peers are constantly amazed at how much work I get done. The secret? Working in an open plan means I overhear conversations and know about upcoming initiatives that will impact my team and my projects. I'm aware of the business needs and big picture, so can plan more successful deliveries.
Different people excel in different kinds of working conditions. There is no one-size-fits-all. Even though I'm an introvert, I would absolutely hate working from home or working in cubicles and would quickl
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My manager and peers are constantly amazed at how much work I get done. The secret? Working in an open plan means I overhear conversations and know about upcoming initiatives that will impact my team and my projects. I'm aware of the business needs and big picture, so can plan more successful deliveries.
I believe you. If your organization is typical, you also probably catch idiotic ideas before they get too far.
This doesn't require an open floor plan, though. It can be achieved in a cubicle or office setup if you get friendly with the right people and figure out an optimal path to the coffee machine.
Duh! (Score:2, Informative)
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How long can you wear that before it gets hot and annoying?
And is anyone surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
If I'm tired at lunch - I can't take a 20 minute nap because everyone will see me and label me lazy. I can't have a private phone call because I have someone 3 feet away from me. I can't log onto slashdot because I'll quickly get a reputation as someone who doesn't work and just surfs the web.
So essentially if I don't fall into that small category of folks that like to bullshit and smooze (because if you're talking to people it looks like you're doing work, after all), then I am quite literally in the worst possible environment imaginable.
But my boss clearly has super important things to do and needs HIS privacy. So he gets walls. And a door.
And if the guy next to me is a serial yakker? Nope. No work getting done. Or the two guys diagonally are pranksters? Nope. The open floor plan was created by some Dilbert-Esque pointy haired boss who should have been fired a long long time ago.
Re:And is anyone surprised? (Score:4, Interesting)
I worked in one tolerable open floor plan, and it worked for a few reasons: It was a small, close-knit team of a dozen, working on one project, with long tables to spread out over instead of cramped desks or cubes, with comfy chairs, and it was a corner room with windows the full length of two walls, with a private bathroom and kitchenette. Compared to where we moved from, that was fantastic. Offices would have been a step up, but compared to the dark dungeon of an open floor plan we came from, that quiet sunny office was amazing.
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I'd take open plan over small offices/cubicles with no windows or fresh air. The noise reducing material they make cubicles out of gets very dusty too, bad for allergies.
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I can't log onto slashdot because I'll quickly get a reputation as someone who doesn't work and just surfs the web.
That might be bad for you. It's not bad for your employer. I mean the days when slashdot was a good way of following what's going on in the tech world as a professional are long gone. Now it is just a time sink.
(And before the smart arse ACs come in, I'm at home, it's 10:50pm where I am, and so I'm definitely wasting my own time here.)
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Learn to read. I didn't say " following what's going on in the tech world as a professional" was a bad idea. Just that Slashdot is a very poor place to do it these days. It's days as a useful resource started declining about 15 years ago.
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If I'm tired at lunch - I can't take a 20 minute nap because everyone will see me and label me lazy.
We have napping rooms in our office for that.
I can't have a private phone call because I have someone 3 feet away from me.
We have private rooms with a phone in them for that.
I can't log onto slashdot because I'll quickly get a reputation as someone who doesn't work and just surfs the web.
My boss doesn't grade me on rumours of idiots.
They did it at my office (Score:5, Interesting)
When they first floated the idea of an open floor plan the response of universally negative (like 200+ negative comments to one positive). The management said they'd take our concerns into consideration and then promptly installed the new desks a week later. Turns out they already had everything ordered and the whole 'tell us what you think' discussions were just a smokescreen to placate people.
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Ahh... that, too. My open concept spot is less than half the size of my previous cubicle. I have two laptops and a full size desktop tower that I can't put on the floor. The actual desk space was purposely limited because they wanted a nice, uniform appearance with everybody with one monitor and one keyboard, and they actually started with a policy of one monitor on the desk until we told them (we all work in graphics) that it's simply not going to work... some of us even need TV preview monitors. Now I
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One monitor? Are they animals?
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Not even joking. Two monitors improves worker performance from accounting to IT to graphics. Keeping people at one for some aesthetic reason is crazy.
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Learn how to be a pain in the ass for big companies when they do this.
Step 1: "My back hurts, I need an ergo assessment."
Step 2: You get a big, VERY expensive chair that others covet. Let them know how you got it.
Step 3: "My DVT is bothering me. I need an ergo assessment."
Step 4: You get a special, extra large, VERY expensive sit stand desk that others covet. Let them know how you got it.
Step 5: "My tinnitus is bothering me. I need an ergo assessment."
etc etc etc
After spending $5000+ on each employ
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For fuck's sake! (Score:5, Insightful)
In the era of "suck his own cock" coming straight out of the White House, can we please stop trying to disguise fuck as f___?
Re:For fuck's sake! (Score:5, Insightful)
can we please stop trying to disguise fuck as f___?
No. The WHOLE POINT of profanity is its ability to shock and offend people. If it is used openly and casually, it loses that ability. This has already happened with "damn" and "hell" which used to be perfectly good swear words, and "shit" is less and less effective. If we give up on "fuck", then we have almost nothing left. Maybe "cunt", but that is used as more of an insult than as general profanity.
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Just get creative. There's always an ability to shock. If Fuck and Shit aren't good enough for you, start translating some Croatian profanities into English. English is really soft when it comes to swear words.
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start translating some Croatian profanities into English.
I have heard that Hungarian has some wonderful profanity.
I can speak some Mandarin Chinese, which also has some great profanity, but alas, I never get the tones right, and listeners end up confused rather than offended. So I understand enough to tell when I am being insulted, but not enough to retaliate in kind.
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Now that we have documented serial killers, can we just start killing people who annoy us?
There's something to be said for not joining the race to the bottom, even when it's minor things like foul language.
I love working in a open space (Score:4, Funny)
When I want to goof off or yap on for a half hour with the guys its great, its a fucking nightmare if you have to actually DO any work or god forbid have a phone call with a customer or a supplier
ROI (Score:3)
Guys, guys, guys. Before you start going on about how open office plans are just blatantly evil, please consider the shareholders. That's right, publicly-traded companies are owned by investors who want, nay NEED, to ensure that their corporate ownership investments are competitive against other investment vehicles. That how they get rich. With low corporate gains taxes, investors are practically FORCED to invest in corporate ownership compared to other forms of investment. So before you go blab blabbing about how you can't stand to sit next to Shouting Stan and Coughing Cassandra, please realize that your sacrifice yields a greater return on investment for your corporate overlords than if you were each allocated 8 more square feet of floor space, and $186 worth of divider walls.
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You'll never get a greater return on your investment if you totally destroy the productivity of the workers.
good for Srouji! (Score:2)
Johny Srouji (Score:2)
Apple Geniuses (Score:2, Informative)
Bahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.
Corporate jackassery at it's finest.
Name that syndrome (Score:2)
When he [Srouji] was shown the floor plans, he was more or less just "F--- that, f--- you, f--- this, this is bulls---." And they built his team their own building, off to the side on the campus ... My understanding is that that building was built because Srouji was like, 'F--- this, my team isn't working like this.'"
Tourette's? I sometimes think of it as "Debra Morgan Syndrome". C--k S--k motherF---!
Open Floor Plans hurt everyone (Score:3)
Yes, they save the company some money in the short term, but in the long term, they're very expensive in terms of lost productivity and loss of talent as people quit.
I had a great position at major company that moved to an open floor plan. I gave it an honest try, but in the end it was crippling, and I quit because of it. Along with about 40% of the other engineers.
If open offices were really meant to facilitate (Score:5, Insightful)
collaboration and communication you'd the usual office layout would be reversed:
Managers would be in the open space so they could coordinate things effectively with one another and people with actual work to do would have the offices so they could concentrate.
We all know the reason why this is not the case.
Re:If open offices were really meant to facilitate (Score:5, Interesting)
That's exactly what we're trying to do at my company for exactly that reason.
I am a manager, and I need to talk to way too many people every day. I hate repeating the same conversation over and over. And I really hate when people feel like they're out of the loop because they didn't get a chance to be in on an important conversation. Still, we're a small company, need to move fast, and simply can't schedule absolutely everything that needs to happen.
The solution is that the management needs to be out in the open and accessible at most times. A couple conference rooms with doors are all we need; most conversations I have shouldn't be hidden.
I'm also the technical lead at my company. The folks I manage under no circumstances want to work the way I have to. They want solid blocks of time with no interruptions. I want them to have that too!
I'm also the founder of my company. That is why these things can happen here and why our business folks understand the value of the technical team's culture.
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You're the exception to the rule!
Anyone surprised by this (Score:4, Insightful)
...has literally never met a programmer.
Nearly all of our wasted time comes from trying to navigate a context switch. Sometimes it's unavoidable—the code is compiling, and so unless you're only waiting less than 15s, you're going to start doing anything else, and that 15s is suddenly 15m. But that's how it goes, and we all learn to navigate this to greater or lesser degrees.
But being interrupted by someone else's random conversation is largely avoidable when you don't work in an open plan office, and largely impossible when you do. You're killing the productivity of your programmers if you put them in these open plans. Want to increase productivity and decrease costs without firing OR hiring anyone? Give them offices, or at least spacious (i.e., can fit 2 people and a white board) cubicles. It's like friggin' magic.
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I work from home. A random 60-seconds clip on YouTube to change my mind can magically turns into a one-hour... let's call it "viewing session" on pornhub.
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Nearly all of our wasted time comes from trying to navigate a context switch.
Even if true, it may not matter in way anyone should care. Because your employer cares about your team's overall productivity, not your productivity. Good software companies in the 21st century are not infatuated with engineers churning out huge piles of code, but with a merely good amount of code productivity that meets the real needs.
Code that is built wrong, in either the wrong way or the towards the wrong goal, often has near zero or even negative value, once you factor in the opportunity costs.
If you
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Please? (Score:2)
I don't particularly want to work for Apple, but goddamn do I want to work for Johny Srouji.
What a coincidence! (Score:3)
That was pretty much my reaction when Apple announced the 2014 Mac mini.
Maybe the right person has to say no (Score:3)
From the article, I noticed that Johny Srouji is quoted as defending his team...quite vocally...against having an open office imposed on them. Individual workers will never win over the MBAs touting cost per square foot, or the design eggheads like Jony Ive demanding everything be white, flat and rounded. But the boss of a very influential part of the company has a little more pull. If a boss has sufficient leverage (and guts) to say something like, "Maybe I should take my chip design team over to Qualcomm/Intel/AMD and you can just buy processors for your iThings from them!" things like corporate "mandates" tend to fall away pretty quickly. Problem is that most managers aren't like that; if I were a computer engineer I sure wouldn't mind working for this guy.
I know people have different work styles, and some extroverts and recent college graduates want to continue the college lifestyle by recreating the dorm/dining hall/open classroom feel. But in my experience, it's going to take Google saying "oops, we screwed up...open plan is only good for web startups with 25 people, and everywhere else should have a mix of styles and let teams/people choose." Every large company I've ever worked for copies HR policy verbatim from either GE, IBM or Google. I think they all use the same management consulting firm.
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no less than 1 BTC/month with current value
That's $3,000 / month... and that's "entitled"? I guess you're some kind of GeekSquad guy who thinks 35k is a big salary, but at my company we pay a lot more than that for helpdesk, which is pretty much at the bottom of the IT ladder.
I hope you live somewhere cheap.
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dream skill set for today's IT workers (Score:2)
First-world-probleming on slashdot is a soft skill, which is one of the biggest difference makers to get hired in IT (besides gender and other forms of diversity-oriented qualities). Runner-up: being involved in a github project that has a code of conduct.
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My demands will increase until you hire me. So you're better off not bothering with the interviews or things like that--for every day I'm not working, I'm coming up with new demands. So hire me now!
Re:I can see the comments now.. (Score:5, Interesting)
apple is right everyone else is wrong.
I don't think so. There is evidence that open offices are bad for productivity [inc.com]. Some people like to work in a bullpen, but even for those people their productivity may go down more than they realize. Other people hate open offices, and refuse to work in them. These are often the best people, who have plenty of other employment options. Open offices are false economy. The cost of providing a real office is negligible compared to a typical tech salary in Cupertino.
My company has some open office space, and I work there sometimes. But I also have an office with real walls where I can sit and focus. It is small, about 8 ft by 10 ft, but that is enough for two chairs, a desk, and a bookshelf.
I will not accept any job that requires me to work in a cubicle or open office, although I did work that way when I was young and desperate.
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A very good friend had her office building staff (major medical provider) moved into an open office type building. It's been 2 years now... Productivity is down, tempers are up, sickness is up, management is still fucked with what to do with their multi-million dollar shithole. There you go.
what I like to know... (Score:2)
Is if Cook and his cronies are getting massive offices with real door(s), walls and windows.
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Some CEOs do. Mark Zuckerberg for example works in an open plan office.
Apple? Who knows. First of all Apple is secretive. Second, as a company they are not in the open plan offices yet.
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Intel is another company where everyone works in a cubicle, even the CEO.
There are more: CEOs who work from cubicles [forbes.com].
But just because cubicles may work for a CEO, that doesn't mean they work for programmers. The jobs are very different. There is nothing a CEO does that is analogous to tracking down a race condition in a 10,000 line threaded real-time application written by an intern three summers ago.
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If you're letting interns write critical code you don't work for a real company.
So...IBM?
Re:what I like to know... (Score:4, Informative)
apparently covered in the TFA; "open office" is only for rank and file. Executives have their REAL offices on the 4th floor.
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Is if Cook and his cronies are getting massive offices with real door(s), walls and windows.
The article [neowin.net] says,
The open floor work spaces will only be for standard employees, while the high-level executives will be exempt from the collective work environment and will have their own offices on the fourth floor of Apple Park. Other employees won’t even be moving to the new HQ, on this list is Eddy Cue, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Internet Software and Services; he and his team will remain at the current headquarters at Infinite Loop.
The high-level executives who move to Apple Park get their own offices. So I guess they know the value of having an office.
I wonder if Eddie Cue fought to keep his group at Infinite Loop, to protect them from open offices.
Re:I can see the comments now.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The worst thing is that open offices aren't just bad for productivity - they're bad for collaboration. Conversations in individual offices happen by poking your head around an office door and discussing something with your colleague. The same conversation in an open office will do one of three things - 1) not happen (because the person initiating it thinks 'this conversation will disturb everyone'); 2) happen in a meeting room, and involve 6 more useless people, because by making it a formal meeting you needed to make sure you used your 1 hour effectively, and had everyone you might possibly need in that meeting; or 3) happen anyway in the open office, slowly accumulate more people throwing random ideas into the pot, and not actually make any decisions.
Re:I can see the comments now.. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I can see the comments now.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I can see the comments now.. (Score:5, Interesting)
I will not accept any job that requires me to work in a cubicle or open office
I don't mind a cube if the walls are tall enough.
It's interesting that people have forgotten that when cubicles were invented, office workers rejoiced -- because cubicles brought an end to the nightmare of the open floor plans that used to be the standard office environment.
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It's hard to think of a less sensible place to go open-plan. Was their kool-aid during the architectural planning session? Some understimulated extro
Re:I can see the comments now.. (Score:4)
Well, it's Apple, and Apple is all about trendiness. They probably saw other companies doing it and figured that if all the other cool kids are doing it, they should too.
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blah blah blah. apple is right everyone else is wrong.
Except it's actual Apple employees - and rather important ones - saying they don't want to work in that open environment.
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I must be weird then... We've been in an open floor plan now for a year at the new digs and I actually like it. I NEVER had a window view before and I like it much better than the 6' cube walls I had before. I also like being able to see if a coworker is in the office or not at a glance and I like being able to keep up with office happenings by listening in when I want to. I also feel like it helps me keep good discipline, keeping my desk space clean and staying on task and off things like Slashdot...
I ge
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When I was trying to make the open floor plan work, I tried using noise-cancelling headphones. But that just made everything worse because then people had to tap me on the shoulder to get my attention, which startled me every time. It made my hypersensitive to everything around me as I was constantly on guard in case someone wanted me.
So, the headphones had to go. As did the job, in the end.
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The trick is to only use the headphones when you really need to focus on something. People eventually figure out you don't want to be disturbed and wait until you take them off.
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That would be about 90% of the time I'm at my desk.
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I once applied for a job at one of them. They were offering considerably less than market rate. It was
Re:Put all the women on a seperate floor (Score:5, Interesting)
I once worked for a company that did this. Why? Thermostats. The women were constantly pushing them higher, while the men were pushing them lower, leading to many arguments. The CEO finally got fed up and put the "hot" people in one room and the "cold" people in the other. This led to mostly segregation by gender, although there were some scrawny guys that went to the warm area, and a few "big" women preferred the cooler section.
Re:Put all the women on a seperate floor (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Put all the women on a seperate floor (Score:5, Funny)
Why didn't they just do what the majority of office buildings do? Don't connect the thermostats to the HVAC system.
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This is actually very common. Ask the security or maintenance people in the building where you work, they will confirm it.
Re:Put all the women on a seperate floor (Score:5, Informative)
This is actually very common.
Yes it is, but he asked for a citation, not a repetition of the assertion.
Here is a citation: Employees Only Think They Control Thermostat [wsj.com].
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I once worked for a company that did this. Why? Thermostats. The women were constantly pushing them higher, while the men were pushing them lower, leading to many arguments. The CEO finally got fed up and put the "hot" people in one room and the "cold" people in the other. This led to mostly segregation by gender, although there were some scrawny guys that went to the warm area, and a few "big" women preferred the cooler section.
Ah yes. My company is transitioning to an open floor right as I type this. One of my colleagues is known for having his window open, even when the temperature drops far below freezing in winter. If I still had a whiteboard, I'd write "WINTER IS COMING" on it in large letters...
Re:Put all the women on a seperate floor (Score:5, Funny)
I'm a thermosexual.
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Been in this nightmare before: open floor plan and the thermostat happened to be just behind a menopausal woman.
Re:Put all the women on a seperate floor (Score:5, Funny)
The OP assumed that readers understand satire.
Big mistake.
Which reminds me of my friend who works at Google.
I asked him how it was there, and he said he couldn't complain.
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Not idiots.. Freshly minted Masters of Business Administration holders.
Wait... I repeated myself..
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Don't even get me started about how evil Agile is.
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Easy answer: you're an extrovert. You get your energy from outside sources.
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Walt Disney.
Western Digital.
It begins.