Expulsion from Garden of Steven: Apple staffers tossed out of Fruit Loop It you work for Apple, you're probably very excited about the supersized "spaceship" headquarters set to touch down in Cupertino. But don't get ahead of yourself, because almost 1,500 unlucky employees are set to be sidelined into a boring-looking group of office buildings on the side of a dual carriageway. Apple is planning …
The trouble is that finance, marketing, and admin, the political heart of the corporation, tend to cluster around the fireplace and shunt the productive people to the cold parts of the room. Fruit Loop Central will therefore be where powerful people do nothing worthwhile except pursue their own interests.
This is where Apple becomes Just Another Big Corporation.
Working inside a giant marketing exercise is the fucking pits if you've got a job that requires applied thought. An engineer, software developer or product designer that actually likes the work they do will probably continue to enjoy it longer if they aren't a zoo attraction. Which is what those fancy headquarters buildings are, a zoo with two purposes, neither if which involve the people working in them.
The first is straightforward, it's for institutional investors and partners (like contract manufacturers) and vendors to come to get beat over the head with how business savvy (company) is: 'We know our shit and we are really good at it. Doing business with us is smart'.
The second purpose is far more devilish. They want young talent to come there and be awed by their surroundings and work for less money than they really should. The whole thing is similar to a hotel brochure, the pictures are always nicer than the real thing, and once you get there it's easier just to stay. It works too. The costs of that fancy building are amortized over extremely long periods of time, but employee salary never stops increasing. It's a fuckofalot cheaper to build a fancy office than pay skilled staff top dollar.
Having done my time as a zoo exhibit I can tell you that the real work isn't done in the building with the ball pit, pingpong table and gym. It's done in places 'normal' people would find boring as shit. But that's just because they don't really know what they're looking at. That's fine, they don't have to know, but that's where the big work, big money and big influence are at. The kids are in the ball pit, the people who give zero fucks about their workspace and are there to make a lot of money come and go through the side doors into little beige offices and work. It doesn't matter to them because at 5PM they are going to zip away in their Ferrari and go to fancy bars and big homes. Maybe take three weeks of their six weeks of vacation and go to New Zeland for cocaine and a penguin egg omelette each morning.
It's a lot better that way. Unless you're an executive doing executive stuff all day you really, really do not want to be the equivalent of some assholes exotic pet he invites people over to see. It's a pain in the ass. It gets in the way of doing your work, and it's humiliating: 'Go ahead, ask him a math question. Do that thing where you make a bunch of squares a big circle'. Yeah, fuck you.
Some people get off on being in the fancy office. That's cool if that's what they're in it for. But if you're not an administrative person, if you're an applied knowledge professional the view is better from the little building down the way where nobody fucks with you.
Apple have make a song and dance about the futuristic design, environmentally friendly, "great-place-to-work" features of their new flagship HQ, but the reality (as always with these mega-corporation announcements) is a load of people shoe-horned into a box shaped office block.
I love that kind of hypocrisy :)
"I've seen more exciting news items"
I've seen much more exciting comments...
So the glamorous techies and visionary designers hang together in the new we're-(nearly)-all-in-it-together-mothership, and the poor sods that arrange for their salaries to get paid, order in toilet bleach, and schedule the window cleaners live in a neo-brutalist bloc.
Except the pictures show that seing as it is in Californ-i-ay, it looks pleasantly balmy, and airy, and stucco-ed instead of concrete.
ItsNotMe is correct. When two huge companies get too close together a variation of neutron spalling occurs but instead of some neutrons spalling off, medium size law firms spall off. This would work better if ASCII drawings didn't hurt my head, but I'll demonstrate as best I can below.
So we've got two big companies, each represented by a 0 and physical distance between their outermost stable orbits represented by - In this example, Google and Apple would look like this in the beginning:
0--------0
As the companies grow it looks like this:
0-------0
0-----0
0---0
0-0
00
This medium simply doesn't have the resolution to show it properly, but the space between the two 00 is filled with law firms and looks kind of like this (=) except the tops are joined. Kind of like the form submission buttons on this web page.
Because the ASCII medium doesn't support modeling it's hard to demonstrate correctly, but the two companies with tons of law firms in between (=) has three dimensions. Since I can't rotate the model I'll make do with what I've got. I'm sure you'll understand. Our two companies and the law firms (=) looks something like this when viewed from below 8--->
That view is the most accurate representation, no matter how you render it, because that's how the consumer is nearly always going to see it: 8---> coming down for a nice smack across the mouth or when they are looking backwards and up between their legs as they bend over to pick up the $700 phone that just broke after falling 2' to a carpeted floor.
"If there is a word to describe Sunnyvale and Silicon Valley, it is evolution," added Jennifer Garnett, a spokeswoman for the city of Sunnyvale.
Should be...
"If there is a word to describe Sunnyvale and Silicon Valley, it is tax revenue," added Jennifer Garnett, a spokeswoman for the city of Sunnyvale.
... they could auction off the space in the HQ Space. Of course with the no poaching contracts no mere engineer riff-raff could possibly aspire to the Fruit Loop, but unless you give them hope of eventual manumission they will eat, but they won't breed. The few nerds who know how to breed, anyway.
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Our Client ( It's GCHQ but we're not allowed to tell you that.) wishes to defend the intellectual property of a dough nut shaped office building..
Our client asserts that D'oh Nut archictecture promotes collaboration with out 'imposing' a heirarchy..(no corner office syndrome)
The central picnic\meeting space allows for private intra-organisation discussions and frisbee championships.
Our client asserts that a circular building with a central flag pole negates the need for office clocks as all employees can agree on the time of day based on the flag pole shadow on the numbers inscribed on the inside of the building. Each floor having a different number scheme to allow for world time zones.
Our client insists that a certain fruit based computer company is pirating this design in attempt to recreate the aura of corporate 'Omerta' due to the high internal visibilty
Our client also claims that the defendant has adopted this design to give an air of other worldliness and alien supremacy. (there is no practical evidence for this.)
All applications with CV, charge rates, and suggested damages claim to PO BOX 0 Cheltenham..
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