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Comment by culturestate | Hacker News Reader

> ... nice one Jony ... design a brave and “beautiful” open plan workspace for a paranoiacally secretive organisation.

I feel like it's worth pointing out that Steve Jobs was still running Apple when this building was designed. I don't work for Norman Foster so I have no way to know how much changed internally after he died, but I doubt the balance shifted too wildly given the logistical constraints of massive construction projects.

As an aside - and I don't mean this in reference to office layouts - were I in charge of a global consumer products company that competes in multiple cutthroat markets, I'd want to foster a corporate culture of extreme openness and collaboration inside the walls but absolute silence outside. That's not exactly what Apple is today, obviously, but it's within the realm of possibility that it's their goal.

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Steve Jobs described the whole point to the design: he wanted people to frequently bump into each other, rather than being hidden away in private offices. He noted it was one of his favorite aspects of the Pixar office. It's strange that anybody would blame Jony Ive for a design that Jobs chose. Jobs took what he thought worked about Pixar's office to spur creativity & innovation, and used it in building the new Apple campus design.

> According to Jobs’ recent biography, the [Pixar] headquarters was to be a place that “promoted encounters and unplanned collaborations.”

> Pixar’s campus design originally separated different employee disciplines into different buildings – one for computer scientists, another for animators, and a third building for everybody else. But because Jobs was fanatic about these unplanned collaborations, he envisioned a campus where these encounters could take place, and his design included a great atrium space that acts as a central hub for the campus.

> Brad Bird, director of The Incredible and Ratatouille, said of the space, “The atrium initially might seem like a waste of space…But Steve realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen.”

> And did it work? “Steve’s theory worked from day one,” said John Lasseter, Pixar’s chief creative officer “…I’ve never seen a building that promoted collaboration and creativity as well as this one.”

https://officesnapshots.com/2012/07/16/pixar-headquarters-an...

> Steve Jobs described the whole point to the design: he wanted people to frequently bump into each other, rather than being hidden away in private offices. He noted it was one of his favorite aspects of the Pixar office. It's strange that anybody would blame Jony Ive for a design that Jobs chose. Jobs took what he thought worked about Pixar's office to spur creativity & innovation, and used it in building the new Apple campus design.

Perhaps it spurs creativity and innovation, but only few programming activities are highly creative and innovative. Rather to me, programming is about writing bug-free code. In this sense, I tend to compare programming activities with Air Traffic Control.

I'll tell you as someone in a large IT organization creating a new paradigm for us re: public cloud vs. private: Collaboration and communication are huge. Absolutely critical that people are talking more often than not. It's decision making and design at that point, not just DevSecOps.

This is a good point, but as I understand it, it's the designers who run the show at Apple.

Programmers working on products like the iPhone or on networked services can end up applying creativity more often than you think. Sometimes there are difficult problems that can only be solved with applied creativity, and you also get much better results if your thinking is informed by the people who will be using your product (or taking it across the finish line once your code is 'done').

In my past jobs working on tools and infrastructure, the best results usually come from sitting next to the people who use the tools or at least watching them use them. The traditional model used by the teams I've helped typically was partitioned off and people tossed things over the wall, but I always got significantly improved results by actually collaborating with the users.

You can compare programming with Air Traffic Control but in that case you need to realize that ATCs are in constant communication with their customers (i.e. pilots) in order to deliver the best results for passengers. If ATCs behaved like programmers in monolithic organizations they'd simply issue flight plans without talking to pilots at all and they'd be ill-equipped to respond to emergencies and sudden changes in flight situations.

> Sometimes there are difficult problems that can only be solved with applied creativity

For these really hard problems, long hours of completely undisturbed concentrated working are the key to success.

Strong collaboration ("bumping into each others") is rather helpful if the "problem" is not that the problem is hard, but it is unclear what problem is even to solve, e.g. you don't know what the customer wants.

Addendum: My comparison with ATC is rather meant the way that it is of central importance to avoid mistakes (bugs in software, plane crashing in ATC) and the work environment should be centrally concern itself around this theme.

> I'd want to foster a corporate culture of extreme openness and collaboration inside the walls

Open space offices are entirely othogonal to this idea.

How so? I'd argue that while open-plan offices can profoundly affect people's productivity and morale, they have relatively little impact on collaboration or communication - I view these more as functions of the team's culture.

As long as your group makes a conscious effort to bounce ideas around and ask each other for advice, what's the difference between sitting at a table wearing headphones or in an office with the door shut? Or, for that matter, everyone being remote?

I can kind of see how you could make a case that open-plan offices change the dynamic of communication, i.e. they make people less willing to "bother" their coworkers, but collaboration can (and probably should, most of the time) happen asynchronously over slack or email or post-it note anyway.

That’s what “orthogonal” means, in this context … :-)

Whoops, thanks for that. I must've read it as 'antithetical.'

Even (information) openness and collaboration themselves are orthogonal. You can certainly have one without the other. Then the physical openness is another dimension. And so on and so forth.

So we'd need more information to know whether or not Apple is best optimized in all these, and more, dimensions. Way more information than we'd ever get from one person or team. (Definitely way more than Apple would ever give out.)

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/07/in-open-offices-work...

> I'd want a corporate culture of extreme openness and collaboration inside the walls but absolute silence outside

Aspiration driven design it is so ...

EDIT ... with no consideration for the practicalities of what it takes to achieve those aspirations.

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