Apple’s most talented workers can’t stop walking into doors
Apple recently completed its brand-new headquarters in Cupertino, California. The giant UFO-shaped building — the most expensive building in the US — is sprawling glass-and-steel manifesto, a very physical manifestation of Apple’s ethos to always put design first. And, in the most Apple way possible, putting form over function is causing some problems.
According to Bloomberg, Apple employees keep walking into the glass panes and glass pods littering the building. Attempts to make things safer by putting Post-It notes on the most dangerous doors have been struck down by Apple leadership, since it interferes with the building’s design.
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“Surrounding the Cupertino, California-based building are 45-foot tall curved panels of safety glass,” Bloomberg reports. “Inside are work spaces, dubbed “pods,” also made with a lot of glass. Apple staff are often glued to the iPhones they helped popularize. That’s resulted in repeated cases of distracted employees walking into the panes, according to people familiar with the incidents.”
Although Apple Park has received rave reviews from architects and Apple fans, this isn’t the first time we’ve heard that employees aren’t enamoured with their new office. Last year, John Gruber reported that Johny Srouji, the head of Apple’s silicon design team, didn’t like the layout either:
When he 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. So they’re not even in — not only are they not going along with the open floor plans, but Srouji’s team is in their own building. And maybe internally they’re saying it’s for security or that’s there’s a logical reason for it, but my understanding is that that building was built because Srouji was like, ‘f*** this, my team isn’t working like this.’
There’s also been criticism that the open-plan design isn’t condusive to a good working environment for Apple’s software engineers, who need a simple environment with a lack of distractions to work well. Maybe that’s why Apple’s software has been problematic lately.
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