7 ms·

I live in the Midwest and would happily consider living here long-term in order to work at jobs like these, except that the jobs are generally terrible. They do

by p4wnc6 11y ago

I live in the Midwest and would happily consider living here long-term in order to work at jobs like these, except that the jobs are generally terrible. They don't pay well, even by lower-cost-of-living Midwest standards. Yet they do all of the same nonsense that companies do in larger urban areas: open-plan office layouts (even when private working space out here is much cheaper than the already cost-effective prices you'd pay for it in a city), Agile/Scrum crap, various over emphasized alcohol-based social functions, ping pong tables, etc. Why would a talented person stay around here for that? Most of us who like it out here like it because it's different than Silicon Valley or New York, and it suits our preference better. You're not going to win with the talented people in the Midwest if you just try to make it feel like Silicon Valley Jr. -- you have to be different, with a whole different ethos that's a bit more about the style of life here. Many people choose to live in the Midwest because they like having more personal space, they want to raise a family, they value frugality and consider cost-of-living carefully, they might possibly actually want to own property some day, and/or they just may not personally derive much value from urban amenities. But I've never seen start-ups or tech businesses here aim at providing a kind of working life that affords these values. It's all still the same "work hard play hard" bullshit as if by making yet another app or something-as-a-service, we're going to become masters of the fucking universe or something. That stuff is already stupid even in the urban tech hubs. It just comes off even dumber when you're farther away from the tech hubs. At any rate, I question the article's claim that there's a talent problem in the Midwest. The problem isn't that there are no talented people. The problem is that companies are not providing the opportunity for a lifestyle that matches up with the values of someone who would prefer to live in the Midwest. If I have to work a million hours, put up with aggressive deadline culture, deal with Agile/Scrum "sprint cycle" idiocy, and feign social interest in rock climbing while I code or joining the same people I've been working with for 10 straight hours at a bar for 2 more hours of trite conversation where I'll be judged by how much overt social signalling my alcoholic beverage of choice emits, then fuck it. I'm just going to move to a big city and demand a big city wage and career opportunities. On the other hand, if you can give me what the big city folks can't, like say a private office where I can actually get work done and feel productive instead of listening to the person at the desk next to me chew potato chips, or you can provide me with a work environment where 40 hours is exactly all that's expected, and also is exactly what is rewarded (i.e. you encourage workers to have a substantial life outside of work), and I don't feel like you're just doing a bunch of stuff like whisky night and ping pong to try to affiliate with the cool kids in SV, then we could talk.

jchewitt 11y ago
The hilarious thing is that the reason why open office spaces are popular in expensive real estate markets holds no water in the Midwest where there's ample space. People just do it to cargo cult the woo-magic ideology of open office spaces without realizing that the marketing hoopla around that just exists to avoid saying "we do open office spaces to cram more people into less space and save money on furniture."
- p4wnc6 11y ago
  Actually, a lot of the book Peopleware was devoted to showing that even in dense urban areas it is still cost-effective to provide private office space for knowledge workers. What you spend on extra real-estate is easily more than made up for with increased productivity, less sick time, fewer superficial conversations, etc., even over times spans as short as 1 year. I think even in large cities, open-plan madness is still cargo cult and more about fashion and subtle ageism than it is about the economic costs of real estate. There's also some weird patriarchal aspects of it too, especially in financial companies where the offices and workflow are almost engineered to be like a Panopticon. I always enjoyed reading Joel Spolsky on his choice to commit to having private offices even in Manhattan, both for Fog Creek and later for Stack Exchange. I'm sure there are cases where a company is strapped for cash, or where they need to be located in an extremely expensive part of SF/Manhattan/London/etc. If someone really used hard numbers to justify it, I'd have no problem with it. But the problem is nobody's using numbers. It's about fashion, signalling, and control. I worked for an established education technology company that had offices all over. They bought a fancy new loft space in the Boston area and decked it out just like a SV stereotype: glass whiteboards everywhere, bean bag chairs, video games, gourmet coffee. The open seating was awful -- you had about 4 lateral feet of personal space, and your computer monitor practically bumped into the monitor of your neighbor on either side. There was effectively zero privacy. It was even hard just put a notepad of paper on my desk-slice and try to draw some ideas or take notes. The company actually spent money, like > $10MM, to renovate their Columbus, OH, office to look the same. They didn't even have an engineering presence in Columbus. The people there were all veteran employees mostly within the HR, business, and regional sales departments. They all had private offices for years and were extremely productive with them, and also felt they had earned the right to work in offices given that many of them had long tenures with the company. And the company paid money to remodel the whole office. They actively destroyed privacy features that directly created productive and happy workers, and spent money to do so. When I did my exit interview at the company, I spoke with one of those HR reps in Columbus and talked a lot about my frustration with the Boston office's open layout. She shared my sentiment and lamented how, at her age and her rank in the firm, it was extremely frustrating to be placed back into a fully open-plan office and have no privacy to conduct calls or spread out her work materials and get things done. I asked her why the company chose to do it, and all she could say was that they had recently hired a new CTO for a major sub-division in the firm, and that CTO brought in sweeping changes that were meant to "modernize" the company, and specifically he decreed that all of the offices needed to be remodeled to have open-plan layouts because "that's what engineers want." And this was in a huge company, where presumably these kind of remodeling choices would have to be debated by committees, face political opposition from other parts of the company, etc. It was just insane.

by p4wnc6 11y ago

jchewitt 11y ago

The hilarious thing is that the reason why open office spaces are popular in expensive real estate markets holds no water in the Midwest where there's ample space. People just do it to cargo cult the woo-magic ideology of open office spaces without realizing that the marketing hoopla around that just exists to avoid saying "we do open office spaces to cram more people into less space and save money on furniture."

p4wnc6 11y ago
Actually, a lot of the book Peopleware was devoted to showing that even in dense urban areas it is still cost-effective to provide private office space for knowledge workers. What you spend on extra real-estate is easily more than made up for with increased productivity, less sick time, fewer superficial conversations, etc., even over times spans as short as 1 year. I think even in large cities, open-plan madness is still cargo cult and more about fashion and subtle ageism than it is about the economic costs of real estate. There's also some weird patriarchal aspects of it too, especially in financial companies where the offices and workflow are almost engineered to be like a Panopticon. I always enjoyed reading Joel Spolsky on his choice to commit to having private offices even in Manhattan, both for Fog Creek and later for Stack Exchange. I'm sure there are cases where a company is strapped for cash, or where they need to be located in an extremely expensive part of SF/Manhattan/London/etc. If someone really used hard numbers to justify it, I'd have no problem with it. But the problem is nobody's using numbers. It's about fashion, signalling, and control. I worked for an established education technology company that had offices all over. They bought a fancy new loft space in the Boston area and decked it out just like a SV stereotype: glass whiteboards everywhere, bean bag chairs, video games, gourmet coffee. The open seating was awful -- you had about 4 lateral feet of personal space, and your computer monitor practically bumped into the monitor of your neighbor on either side. There was effectively zero privacy. It was even hard just put a notepad of paper on my desk-slice and try to draw some ideas or take notes. The company actually spent money, like > $10MM, to renovate their Columbus, OH, office to look the same. They didn't even have an engineering presence in Columbus. The people there were all veteran employees mostly within the HR, business, and regional sales departments. They all had private offices for years and were extremely productive with them, and also felt they had earned the right to work in offices given that many of them had long tenures with the company. And the company paid money to remodel the whole office. They actively destroyed privacy features that directly created productive and happy workers, and spent money to do so. When I did my exit interview at the company, I spoke with one of those HR reps in Columbus and talked a lot about my frustration with the Boston office's open layout. She shared my sentiment and lamented how, at her age and her rank in the firm, it was extremely frustrating to be placed back into a fully open-plan office and have no privacy to conduct calls or spread out her work materials and get things done. I asked her why the company chose to do it, and all she could say was that they had recently hired a new CTO for a major sub-division in the firm, and that CTO brought in sweeping changes that were meant to "modernize" the company, and specifically he decreed that all of the offices needed to be remodeled to have open-plan layouts because "that's what engineers want." And this was in a huge company, where presumably these kind of remodeling choices would have to be debated by committees, face political opposition from other parts of the company, etc. It was just insane.