[jc__denton]

I seem to recall an anecdote from a colleague that interviewed with one of Apple's security teams. The actual room where the interview took place was locked from the outside and you had to use a badge reader on the inside to leave. I guess they didn't want folks wandering if someone needed to make a restroom break, but I can't help but wonder about issues like, say, a fire...

[astrange]

Presumably it unlocks if there's a fire alarm. The security team aren't more powerful than the fire marshal.

[JoshTriplett]

One wonders how well that is tested, as well as what happens if a fire goes detected, or if someone's badge stops working, or if there are technical difficulties with the badge reader or its infrastructure...

There are far too many things that can go wrong with such a setup.

[astrange]

This is a "midbrow dismissal".

Yes, the fire marshal has also thought of the first thing you just thought of to post. They aren't stupid.

[JoshTriplett]

I have personally worked in buildings that had a "badge readers all stopped working for a while" problem. Fortunately, the badge readers only affected ingress and not egress, and only controlled exterior doors and labs; that's easily solved with a doorstop and a person checking badges. I can very easily imagine what could have happened in those buildings if a badge was required to leave a conference room.

And if you want to make that scenario terrifying, imagine being there on a weekend or holiday.

[astrange]

You're doing it again!

> I can very easily imagine what could have happened in those buildings if a badge was required to leave a conference room.

The facilities team and fire marshal are also easily capable of imagining this, already have, and you can ask them about it.

In this case the doors would fail open, or are made of glass and can be broken down. It's not a /really/ secure location. It's just a tech company that likes to seem secure during work hours. After hours of course the janitors get to see everything.

[JoshTriplett]

You are utterly missing the point, to the point that you are analyzing this conversation through entirely the incorrect lens, in an effort to belittle.

In an effort to steelman your comment, you may have incorrectly interpreted the earlier "I wonder how well that is tested" as "this is unsafe and illegal" rather than "among the many things wrong with this, this has increased the number of things that can go wrong, and is less safe on an absolute scale, whether or not it's strictly legal and up to code", and then assumed everything else in subsequent comments was about fire safety, rather than being a series of points in support of locking people into a building is a bad idea.

You are asserting the competence of the fire marshal, as an argument in a conversation about locking employees and interviewees and visitors inside a company's office rooms.

What you may think was happening here: "heh, nerds think they're smarter than the fire marshal and nobody involved thought of this until they came along; of course there'd be a way for sufficiently capable humans to get out of a room if something went wrong, and of course this will have been made to pass fire code, which is the only thing being talked about here".

What was actually happening here: While with sufficient analysis (which has most likely been done) it is possible to provide a sufficient degree of fire safety to make it not against fire code to lock people into a building, that doesn't make it right or zero-cost or risk-free, nor does it alleviate the stress and potential problematic-but-non-fatal situations that could arise. At no point was the primary purpose of the comment "people might burn in a fire", even though the risk of that is not zero at any time and has likely been raised (within presumably-acceptable-to-fire-code levels) by such a setup.

When I said "I can very easily imagine what could have happened", I was not imagining a fire burning down the people with the building inside. I was imagining how few failures it would require to end up with people being trapped in a room for long enough to reach the level of stress required to physically break out of a room, compounded by having worked in labs where the air conditioning was sometimes woefully insufficient.

It takes a lot of stress to get normal people to the point that they're willing to break windows or doors or walls in order to escape a room, and nobody should be subjected to such things, because there's zero security justification for a company locking people inside at any time.

[floriannn]

Grenfell Tower was "fireproof", and yet...

[Reason077]

Grenfell Tower was fireproof as originally designed. The problem was renovations that compromised the original design, by adding highly flammable cladding panels to the exterior that allowed the fire to spread easily around the entire building.

[ascorbic]

Old, poorly-maintained social housing vs the brand new flagship HQ of the largest company in the world. Right.

[astrange]

More importantly, the HQ is built in California, which despite appearances isn't a capitalist dystopia but a local government dystopia.

Any random local government staffer is the most powerful person in the universe and obeying them is a religious edict. Apple has zero power to disobey anything in the fire code and they're probably not even capable of imagining doing so. That's why the random suburb they're in has the best public schools in the country and all the houses are like $5 million.

As an example there's currently a big empty lot next to said HQ where the mall used to be, because a random woman on the city council has blocked apartment construction for the last decade, because she thinks Apple employees will move in and molest local high school students.

https://x.com/housingvalley/status/1154781703262498816

[smadge]

The obvious solution if you want to badge on exits but maintain fire safety is emergency exits trigger the fire alarm when opened.

[heavenlyblue]

arent most of these doors magnetic, ie the power goes down, all doors open

[JoshTriplett]

Power failure is a best case. I've observed firsthand cases of "badge access system went down, none of the doors open". That's less of a problem for external doors that allow people out but not in, because it can be solved by propping the door and posting a guard who checks badges. It's a massive problem when conference rooms and offices lock people in.

[gorfian_robot]

there is also the earthquake issue where interior doors (badge access or no) can become jammed. thus god invented the crowbar. my Big Company emergency response team folks all had one. also good for head crabs.

[DonHopkins]

And what about the goats??!

[throwaway48476]

Apple was bribing the police with ipads. Surely they could bribe the fire marshall too.

[abenga]

Presumably. We wouldn't know until it's too late.

[PaulHoule]

A few times in my life I really had to get through a locked door and asked myself "What would Kojak do?" and always got through with at most three kicks.

[throwaway173738]

I just go up and over through the drop ceiling.

[DonHopkins]

It took Milchick a lot more kicks than that to get out of the bathroom!

[jedberg]

It probably still opens, just sets of an alarm if you don't badge out.