orange_bear

The user was correct in my case, stereotype or not.

Hate to say it, but I caught a guy one day after he completely ruined the toilet seat and it was an Indian H1B contractor. No I didn't go chase him down at that point.

Please don't ban my account, that's true and anecdotal - 75%+ of my coworkers in that department were Indian so maybe it was just the odds.

I remember the IL buildings having almost exclusively single-occupant offices and cubicles throughout the 2000's. In the last few years you can't even find a parking spot out there. Maybe things will be better for you with people shuffled to the new hell building.

Thanks for the info! At my last workplace (Apple), the department had brought in a ton of H1B visa workers from body shops and I'm skeptical about if it was legal. They were all crammed elbow-to-elbow in bullpen cubicles. As a contractor at the time, I sat on a bench in the hallway because there were no free bullpen cubes!! The bathroom urinals always had pools of urine beneath them, due (in part) to excessive use. The toilet seats were always urinated on. Oh, good times.

Former Apple employee here. That sounds exactly like what I witnessed. The new Apple HQ is very much open office and the design was definitely top-down from execs - I just know that I had no input at all even though it was my workplace. Always got my best work done at home.

Apple placed me in an experimental building where they were changing the interior design constantly, trying to decide how to design their new "space ship" building. The whole time, I fumed at no longer having an office and having to work in an open office design. I could not focus due to audio and visual interruptions while I worked (programmer) in the open office spaces. But no one ever asked me for my opinion about the experimental open office environments!

Now this: https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2017/08/08/apple-pa... "Apple staffers reportedly rebelling against open office plan at new $5 billion HQ"

Glad I wasn't the only coder there who utterly despised the move to the open office design.

I read this as "I don't write code all day." I did write code all day, and when I worked in that exact environment, I could not do it. Too many audio distractions and distractions in my peripherals. And I was supposed to be doing difficult programming work? I have always gotten my best work done at home, alone, while you "not a code monkey" types chit chat in the office.