Re:Silicon Valley Is Not a Fad
by AstralStorm on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @04:29AM
(#19786081)
The main thing to blame is open plan... Read: cheaping out on walls.
This includes undamped glass walls and doors.
And I just can't figure out if it actually IS cheaper - I mean you're dealing with interior architects after all, as well as the glass walls which can't be cheap either.
Plus, personnel costs (especially in Silicon Valley) are a multiple of floor space, so I can't understand that argument either.
But then, so far, I've never had someone who calls the shots on the open office model go public on why they went for it. I mean the cynic in me thinks it's about cutting costs (but then why do they have developers in SV instead of outsourcing it?) or showing off (open offices look good on pictures / when the manager walks around in it).
I don't think it has much to do with money. These companies either have or are already burning trough a lot of it. It is about careerists avoiding accountability. That is why you hire contractors, have open offices and host in the cloud. As long as no one can blame you for anything, which they will to further their own career, you will make it to the next level.
I take issue with this. For most of my career I worked in a standard office building. False ceiling tiles, cubicles, rectangular concrete 'tilt and pour'. It served the job well. It was relatively quiet, comfortable, intimate and fostered my productivity.
Now I work in an architectural masterpiece of modern green engineering. It is loud, impersonal, distracting, and not at all conducive to actually getting work done. It's like the people who designed the building hated engineers and typical engineering personalities and set out to design a building to torture them.
Apple has a similar problem. Apple's senior vice-president of hardware technologies Johny Srouji refused to move his team into their new, piece of shit exercise in architectural masturbation.