I am still thinking about the $500,000 cubicle in Switzerland.
Couldn't they build a live/work community and the workers living space at the campus would allow them to work from home? Wouldn't that be perfect? But somehow, employees still have to commute every day from their homes to the work place. Could this be a corporate behaviour where the gap between living and working realities must be "hammered in" every day? Alternately, the executives want to have their palace and what the employees do in between time is their own worry.
Let's take Apple's headquarters in Cupertino. It has an estimate of around 12,000 employees at an estimated cost of $5 billion. That's $417,000 per employee with 2,3000 square feet each. I return to the notion that this turns out to be a house a person. That includes research and development facilities as well as office space, so perhaps reduce it a bit for real laboratory work that has to happen vs all those meetings and presentations, etc.
What else is there in that 2,8 million square feet of space?
A "Main Atrium", 1,000 seat underground auditorium, fitness and wellness centre (how would you get to it give you might be over a million square feet away), cafes and an organic farm, green roof, rainwater harvesting systems, visitor centre, the Steve Jobs Theatre. They don't mention it, but there is a picture of the Aqua Park. On site is a hair salon and dry cleaning service. Many things for every day living, just not the living quarters.
And the conclusion? From its website:
"Apple’s massive $5 billion “spaceship” headquarters is a truly impressive building, designed with innovation, sustainability, and employee well-being in mind. With its beautiful architecture, landscaping, and state-of-the-art facilities, it is a fitting home for one of the world’s most innovative companies."
So it is a "home for the company" and not what makes up the company - its employees. The questions on Quora and Redditt are about where Apple employees live while working at the Cupertino facility?
Here's some advice for a person who has just got a job at the Cupertino location: "Buy a good home in Cupertino. The interest rates are low. You can get a decent house for $2M"
We'll be in Denver next week for the railroad convention. Here's an example of a layout in the competition from a few years ago.
