A Team At Apple Says What We All Are Thinking: We Hate Open Plan Offices – Valutrics

Thank god there is more of us. And there are more of us in probably the biggest and the most company in the world.

Yesterday, news broke that there were some teams and executives at tech giant Apple that are not too big on Apple Park, the company’s shiny new spaceship-like $5 billion headquarters in Cupertino, California.

The reason? The complex’s open office plan.

This is a sharp departure from Apple’s existing offices and meant that a lot of engineers are now to work on long tables with other engineers instead of cubicles or offices.

Reportedly, the hardware tech team at Apple did not take lightly to it and revolted at the conceptualization stage. The result is that the said team is not in the new building at all and set up outside the spaceship in their own building. Take that.

Though I work within a small outfit now, I did work in a large media organization that believed a little too deeply about the open office plan and its potential for collaboration.

Ah no, thanks. I hate open offices almost as much as I hate broccoli.

This is not the first blow against open offices in the corporate world, but it is almost the most powerful one. Check out this video from 2016, where Joel Spolsky, CEO of Stack Overflow, starting at 3:00, talks about how open offices don’t really work in tech.

The talk says it all. So why did we get going with the open office plan at all?

Ostensibly, it is all about collaboration. The belief is that employees will be happier and more productive if they work together instead of being separated But more and more studies have disproved that notion.

A 2013 report, from the University of Sydney, found that the benefits of open plan offices such as more collaboration do not mean much. Overall, the report found that workers in open plan offices hate their work environment more than those in walled off offices.

What are these disadvantages? Lack of privacy, high noise levels, and less space.

The report found what we all know is true but do not want to say it. While we all appreciate the need for collaboration, the fact is that most of the time, we all need some breathing room away from our coworkers and bosses to really do our work.

Touche.

Thank you, all you Apple folk that spoke your mind, for echoing our thoughts from the biggest platform of them all.