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This killed me my last few years at Apple in the spaceship. Everything in the fucking building is a distraction and most of it is constantly in your line of sig

This killed me my last few years at Apple in the spaceship. Everything in the fucking building is a distraction and most of it is constantly in your line of sight at all times. Even if I managed to angle my monitor right, put on headphones, and pull my hoodie up to reduce distractions some side conversation or impromptu stand up would inevitably distract me and pull me out of my flow. I tried to come in as late as practical in order to stay late so I could get work done for a few uninterrupted hours. I found myself going in a day on the weekend to actually get the previous week's work finished. Unfortunately management doesn't like people coming in "late" because they can't lord over them from their offices during the day and constantly interrupt them with meetings. It was downright insulting that a $5b building intended for professionals didn't have real offices with fucking doors. At the upper management level the fact the company worked as well if not better with WFH policies must be incensing. It makes plain the insipid claims about "collaboration" in that stupid building. Collaboration happens when engineers want to share ideas, not because they're imprisoned in a glorified fish tank for eight hours a day.

steve1977 4y ago
> This killed me my last few years at Apple in the spaceship. Everything in the fucking building is a distraction and most of it is constantly in your line of sight at all times. That‘s an interesting bit of information. Maybe this is one of reasons in the decline of quality at Apple - at least in temporal terms it could correlate.
- giantrobot 4y ago
  I'd put the source of a quality decline as the cumulative effect of the yearly OS release cadence. The schedule doesn't leave nearly enough time for feature development, testing, and then bug fixes based on the testing. At the end of the summer the OSes get declared "zero bugs" which really just means a bunch of bugs get punted back to the originator asking for reproduction or extra documentation. By this time no one has time for try reproducing the bug unless it's really egregious. So the new OS just has a bunch of new bugs and rarely do any of the bugs from the previous release get fixed unless they're particularly egregious or security issues. This leaves a lot of little bugs sitting around that might only affect say 1% of the user base but every bug is usually a different 1%. So almost everyone ends up running into annoying bugs for their particular usage/workflow. A secondary effect are big mid-cycle releases like iOS 16.4 which end up bundling features likely meant for the 16.0 release in the fall but slipped. Unfortunately due to the crunch they get the same level of testing/bug fixing as the fall point releases. The building doesn't lead to poor software quality, that's a failure of scheduling/planning on the part of management. The shitty building just puts the software development on Hard Mode.
mtrower 4y ago
> Collaboration happens when engineers want to share ideas, not because they're imprisoned in a glorified fish tank for eight hours a day. I feel like this is an obvious truth that is somehow overlooked a lot, willfully or otherwise.

steve1977 4y ago

> This killed me my last few years at Apple in the spaceship. Everything in the fucking building is a distraction and most of it is constantly in your line of sight at all times. That‘s an interesting bit of information. Maybe this is one of reasons in the decline of quality at Apple - at least in temporal terms it could correlate.

giantrobot 4y ago
I'd put the source of a quality decline as the cumulative effect of the yearly OS release cadence. The schedule doesn't leave nearly enough time for feature development, testing, and then bug fixes based on the testing. At the end of the summer the OSes get declared "zero bugs" which really just means a bunch of bugs get punted back to the originator asking for reproduction or extra documentation. By this time no one has time for try reproducing the bug unless it's really egregious. So the new OS just has a bunch of new bugs and rarely do any of the bugs from the previous release get fixed unless they're particularly egregious or security issues. This leaves a lot of little bugs sitting around that might only affect say 1% of the user base but every bug is usually a different 1%. So almost everyone ends up running into annoying bugs for their particular usage/workflow. A secondary effect are big mid-cycle releases like iOS 16.4 which end up bundling features likely meant for the 16.0 release in the fall but slipped. Unfortunately due to the crunch they get the same level of testing/bug fixing as the fall point releases. The building doesn't lead to poor software quality, that's a failure of scheduling/planning on the part of management. The shitty building just puts the software development on Hard Mode.

mtrower 4y ago

> Collaboration happens when engineers want to share ideas, not because they're imprisoned in a glorified fish tank for eight hours a day. I feel like this is an obvious truth that is somehow overlooked a lot, willfully or otherwise.