7 ms·

Yeah and what kills me is how ubiquitous tellocomms are for multi-site corps. I can't tell you how many meetings I've been in where everyone was at their desk,

Yeah and what kills me is how ubiquitous tellocomms are for multi-site corps. I can't tell you how many meetings I've been in where everyone was at their desk, headphones on and each was playing the mute/unmute game in order to not blast everyone else on the meeting with the surrounding noise. Then, given all that, you get the coworker two seats down Slacking you. If you're Slacking folks within 10 seconds walking distance then what's the point of being in the office at all. I think the ideal would be commuting to the office one day a week to take care of meetings which are more productive in person such as sprint planning, grooming etc.

PietdeVries 8y ago
The thing is that this working-from-home people significantly impact the efficiency of your office. It's a trend (could be the open-office space started it) but resulted in people easily working 2 or more days from home. That implies that any desk you have is empty about 40% of the time. Or: your entire office is not being used for 40%... So when bosses realised they were throwing money away, they came up with the open office with flex-desks: no-one has a fixed place, you can sit whereever you want. And there are less desks than people. That can work out quite well (I work in such an office) but it depends greatly on ehtics or rules: no TVs with soccer games, no speaker-phone (but only headset) and rooms available for discussions or phone calls. And there is a general area (quite large) where you can drink your coffee and discuss the soccer matches or Tour de France results... For me it works, but I can imagine that without the requirements listed above it can be a cumbersome workenvironment.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  “flexdesks” or “hot desking” is just about the most juvenile reaction to working from home I can imagine. If a company believes it will gain more from “saving money” on open plan offices or hot desking than it will from just paying more to facilitate more and better work from employees through buying the best tools (a private office is a tool like a keyboard or ergonomic chair), it’s self-evidently a company to get far, far away from. Consider “flex keyboards.” Management realizes that not all keyboards are in use all day, because people are in meetings, at lunch, etc. So nobody gets their own keyboard. You have to locate an unused keyboard at the times when you need to type. This is no different than “flex desks.” In both cases (keyboards, desks), the unit cost of providing the dedicated resource to the employee is trivial compared to far more pressing concerns, like producing working software to increase revenue, or bullshit executive compensation. Even real estate costs for private offices in dense urban areas are trivial by comparison.
  - YouKnowBetter 8y ago
    As much as I share your sentiment, fact is that these trivial savings show up nicely on someone's target and the deteriorating effect shows up somewhere else, if at all. The open office I am in ATM is one such places where a handfull of people (loud, discussing totally not related to work, factually completly idiotic conversations) spoil it for all others. There is nothing to be done about these people since they've been with the company forever and a day and are thus basically exempt from all rules (be it noice or dresscode). 5 Years ago I have actively stoped working from home to segrate work from family. Now I have found myself to do at least 1, often 2 days from home again and planning to change employer. No I will not tell them the reason since I can not affort to burn that bridge. TL;DR Manager A makes a good impression by saving some office space, Manager B looses employees but will never find out why.
    - Chris_Jay 8y ago
      I don't understand why you can't tell them the reason you're leaving without burning a bridge - "I don't work well in an open-office environment, I found I was constantly distracted and inefficient. It's just not the right environment for me to thrive" isn't untrue or pointing fingers, and it's valuable feedback for your employer.
      - PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
        I think perhaps bigger than the open office problem is grand parent point seems obvious to me in our current society. Either you are 110% on board with what the company wants, or you aren't a team player (and implied a bad person/worker/resource). It is daring to question them, daring to say they did something imperfect.
        pivo 8y ago
        Or more simply, if he wants to return to this employer in the future and they have the same or similar office space, they will surely ask him why he thinks that he will now, somehow, be able to work well in in that environment that was so problematic for him in the past. Not criticizing this person, I despise my open office environment too. I also wouldn't (and didn't) tell tell my employer about this when I left for a few years in the past for the same reason.
- Retric 8y ago
  We used flexible desks for years as a consultant shop, but where given actual offices and could easily reserve meeting rooms. That's a much better cost / productivity trade-off. Really though the cost of office space vs people making 100k/year means you don't actually need top optimize it that hard. The core problem is they tend to come out of separate budgets, so some middle manager can write down they saved x million on a review / resume while costing the company 3x that indirectly. PS: Used Model S's are also something to keep an eye on.
- hw 8y ago
  Too many people work from home who don't need to. Some people have reasonable commutes and don't bother showing up in the office most of the week. While working from home may help your productivity since you don't have to worry about commute time, it has a negative impact on the rest of your team who walks into a half-empty office. It's just unfortunate that the commute here in the Bay Area has gotten so bad that a lot of people end up working from home.
  - darth_mastah 8y ago
    I'm sorry, what criterion other than the commute time do you use to determine who "needs to" work from home? Increased productivity while working from home does not simply stem from lack of commute. It's all in the article.
    - ohnoesmyscv 8y ago
      Why bother with offices at all then? Why are companies paying tons of money for office space on prime real estate in SF, or dishing out free lunches and dinners, if people are more productive working from home? Google and Facebook should just mandate that people work from home.
      - BerislavLopac 8y ago
        Covered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17506044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17506044
    - hw 8y ago
      I didn't say that commute was the only factor, but it is a major factor. Give each person a private room and eliminate the commute, people will still work from home. It's comfortable, you don't need to deal with your manager or colleague in person, and everything's async so you can focus without getting interrupted by a knock on your private office door.
  - Pica_soO 8y ago
    I have heard that argument before, mostly its by people for whom the office is some sort of social life replacement/ bro club experience. Also there are sun-king-middle-managers who only get that power feeling when a huge crowd of admirers tours the hallways with them. All of it is completely unrelated with work. And sort of sad, although its a good thing, that no matter what happens, humans will needs humans.
BoysenberryPi 8y ago
I slack and email co-workers who are within spitting distance of me. More often than not they are busy and I don't want to interrupt their flow with something that does not require immediate attention. So I'll shoot a Slack or email their way and let them get to it when they get to it.
- jamaicahest 8y ago
  That's a nice sentiment, however a lot of people have notifications turned on in both their email client and in Slack, so you end up interrupting them anyway. There was a study done on the interruption effect of e-mail https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/13287260180000760 https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/1328726018000...
  - thirdsun 8y ago
    While true, there's a significant difference: It's very easy to ignore a notification - the same can't be said about a verbal/face to face interruption.
- skgoa 8y ago
  You are a saint. I have a near retirement age coworker in the same office who mutters a lot while working and from time to time will just start talking loudly to people across the room. It's one of the main reasons why I got a noise-canceling headset.
- mnky9800n 8y ago
  I do this as well. Mostly I want a record of what was discussed because how will I remember otherwise.
Waterluvian 8y ago
I agree. But I like slack more than talking because I get time to think and a transcript after. Probably yet another reason I love working from my home office.
- nannal 8y ago
  plus with CYA, Tim can't deny being told about the remogolio project direction change if you can screenshot the slack message you sent to him at 14:28.
corobo 8y ago
> what's the point of being in the office at all Amen. We can work remotely. Let me work in my home office.
- reitanqild 8y ago
  Writing from my home office: I'm sitting here now because there's scheduled railway maintenance going on. If not I prefer traveling to the office (it's more than 45 minutes each way.) But as long as everyone can choose for themselves I think more people probably should work from home.
eqdw 8y ago
The reason I slack people who are ten seconds walk from my desk is mostly because, if I walk up to them and talk to them, I'm generating noise which will disrupt the other hundred people in my open plan office
- anxiouspete 8y ago
  Which when you think about it is absurd really. Here we are in this open plan office that is meant to encourage communication and collaboration and yet we're communicating over Slack because we don't want to disturb our other colleagues.
  - DEADBEEFC0FFEE 8y ago
    As a manger who has had to support moves to these environments, I can share that it is also about money. Higher density offices, cheaper to furnish and easier reconfigure. Less fixed wiring. No desk phone, no pabx.....and collaboration.
    - hinkley 8y ago
      Aren’t you comparing apples and plums here? Fully wired cubes versus loosely and insubstantially wired desks. If you’re not going to give people phones just take the phones away, not pack people in like sardines.
    - convolvatron 8y ago
      i miss having an office. and lately i've started to miss having a desk, as it seems they are always shuffling people around, or someone is trying to have a bullpen meeting over your head. or as someone mentioned those awful group video conferences which make me resent having even bothered to commute. seriously, lets just give up on the notion of assigned spaces, idk what value there is when we cant even collaborate because the 4 tiny meeting rooms for 100 people are sitting at the margins of the giant open office. and there aren't any other whiteboards or projectors to use to have conversations. everyone is already wearing headphones so they can try to have a thought to themselves. there are lots of alternatives. assign rooms to projects and have the principals mostly hang out there. couch areas and pub areas and cubby areas...rooms where you really aren't supposed to talk or hum or do anything out loud. we've given up any actual utility of the office and are just hanging on to the barest trapping.
dvtrn 8y ago
Then, given all that, you get the coworker two seats down Slacking you. If you're Slacking folks within 10 seconds walking distance then what's the point of being in the office at all. I have a coworker within ONE second of me, I can lean back a few inches and tap them on the shoulder. And I do, frequently, when they send me a 1:1 slack message. "What's up?" "Oh I had a question for you in Slack" "I'm three feet away from you, I'm not doing this over slack, what's up?" Obviously this is different if they send a code snippet or an app screenshot that I need to look at, but even then when we need to discuss the next steps relevant to that snippet or screenshot, I'll still tap them over the shoulder "Hey, did you try x?" "Oh no I didn't, lemme see what happens..." pause "Yup that worked, thanks!" "No problem"
- jpindar 8y ago
  You are part of the problem, disturbing the whole room for no reason.
devhead 8y ago
Slack affords a method of passive communication where waving hands or tapping someone on the shoulder is an invasive method of communication. Unless there's an urgency, or some complication that should be discussed in person; slack is the preferred method so as to allow the party you are interrupting a chance to change their focus in the least impactful manner. If I go to someone directly, I am losing 10-15 minutes of my own productivity + the length of the conversation and that's multiplied by the number of people I interrupted. Some people who I've worked with, love to have to have a face to face for questions or information that is not urgent and could easily be taken care of via slack. They seem to do so because they prefer to small talk, lament, debate or some other personal reason; they don't do it for technical reasons. If your team can effectively communicate passively, on slack, your on a team that has a foundation from which a remote-work policy can easily be enacted.

PietdeVries 8y ago

The thing is that this working-from-home people significantly impact the efficiency of your office. It's a trend (could be the open-office space started it) but resulted in people easily working 2 or more days from home. That implies that any desk you have is empty about 40% of the time. Or: your entire office is not being used for 40%... So when bosses realised they were throwing money away, they came up with the open office with flex-desks: no-one has a fixed place, you can sit whereever you want. And there are less desks than people. That can work out quite well (I work in such an office) but it depends greatly on ehtics or rules: no TVs with soccer games, no speaker-phone (but only headset) and rooms available for discussions or phone calls. And there is a general area (quite large) where you can drink your coffee and discuss the soccer matches or Tour de France results... For me it works, but I can imagine that without the requirements listed above it can be a cumbersome workenvironment.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago
“flexdesks” or “hot desking” is just about the most juvenile reaction to working from home I can imagine. If a company believes it will gain more from “saving money” on open plan offices or hot desking than it will from just paying more to facilitate more and better work from employees through buying the best tools (a private office is a tool like a keyboard or ergonomic chair), it’s self-evidently a company to get far, far away from. Consider “flex keyboards.” Management realizes that not all keyboards are in use all day, because people are in meetings, at lunch, etc. So nobody gets their own keyboard. You have to locate an unused keyboard at the times when you need to type. This is no different than “flex desks.” In both cases (keyboards, desks), the unit cost of providing the dedicated resource to the employee is trivial compared to far more pressing concerns, like producing working software to increase revenue, or bullshit executive compensation. Even real estate costs for private offices in dense urban areas are trivial by comparison.
- YouKnowBetter 8y ago
  As much as I share your sentiment, fact is that these trivial savings show up nicely on someone's target and the deteriorating effect shows up somewhere else, if at all. The open office I am in ATM is one such places where a handfull of people (loud, discussing totally not related to work, factually completly idiotic conversations) spoil it for all others. There is nothing to be done about these people since they've been with the company forever and a day and are thus basically exempt from all rules (be it noice or dresscode). 5 Years ago I have actively stoped working from home to segrate work from family. Now I have found myself to do at least 1, often 2 days from home again and planning to change employer. No I will not tell them the reason since I can not affort to burn that bridge. TL;DR Manager A makes a good impression by saving some office space, Manager B looses employees but will never find out why.
  - Chris_Jay 8y ago
    I don't understand why you can't tell them the reason you're leaving without burning a bridge - "I don't work well in an open-office environment, I found I was constantly distracted and inefficient. It's just not the right environment for me to thrive" isn't untrue or pointing fingers, and it's valuable feedback for your employer.
    - PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
      I think perhaps bigger than the open office problem is grand parent point seems obvious to me in our current society. Either you are 110% on board with what the company wants, or you aren't a team player (and implied a bad person/worker/resource). It is daring to question them, daring to say they did something imperfect.
      - pivo 8y ago
        Or more simply, if he wants to return to this employer in the future and they have the same or similar office space, they will surely ask him why he thinks that he will now, somehow, be able to work well in in that environment that was so problematic for him in the past. Not criticizing this person, I despise my open office environment too. I also wouldn't (and didn't) tell tell my employer about this when I left for a few years in the past for the same reason.
Retric 8y ago
We used flexible desks for years as a consultant shop, but where given actual offices and could easily reserve meeting rooms. That's a much better cost / productivity trade-off. Really though the cost of office space vs people making 100k/year means you don't actually need top optimize it that hard. The core problem is they tend to come out of separate budgets, so some middle manager can write down they saved x million on a review / resume while costing the company 3x that indirectly. PS: Used Model S's are also something to keep an eye on.
hw 8y ago
Too many people work from home who don't need to. Some people have reasonable commutes and don't bother showing up in the office most of the week. While working from home may help your productivity since you don't have to worry about commute time, it has a negative impact on the rest of your team who walks into a half-empty office. It's just unfortunate that the commute here in the Bay Area has gotten so bad that a lot of people end up working from home.
- darth_mastah 8y ago
  I'm sorry, what criterion other than the commute time do you use to determine who "needs to" work from home? Increased productivity while working from home does not simply stem from lack of commute. It's all in the article.
  - ohnoesmyscv 8y ago
    Why bother with offices at all then? Why are companies paying tons of money for office space on prime real estate in SF, or dishing out free lunches and dinners, if people are more productive working from home? Google and Facebook should just mandate that people work from home.
    - BerislavLopac 8y ago
      Covered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17506044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17506044
  - hw 8y ago
    I didn't say that commute was the only factor, but it is a major factor. Give each person a private room and eliminate the commute, people will still work from home. It's comfortable, you don't need to deal with your manager or colleague in person, and everything's async so you can focus without getting interrupted by a knock on your private office door.
- Pica_soO 8y ago
  I have heard that argument before, mostly its by people for whom the office is some sort of social life replacement/ bro club experience. Also there are sun-king-middle-managers who only get that power feeling when a huge crowd of admirers tours the hallways with them. All of it is completely unrelated with work. And sort of sad, although its a good thing, that no matter what happens, humans will needs humans.

BoysenberryPi 8y ago

I slack and email co-workers who are within spitting distance of me. More often than not they are busy and I don't want to interrupt their flow with something that does not require immediate attention. So I'll shoot a Slack or email their way and let them get to it when they get to it.

jamaicahest 8y ago
That's a nice sentiment, however a lot of people have notifications turned on in both their email client and in Slack, so you end up interrupting them anyway. There was a study done on the interruption effect of e-mail https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/13287260180000760 https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/1328726018000...
- thirdsun 8y ago
  While true, there's a significant difference: It's very easy to ignore a notification - the same can't be said about a verbal/face to face interruption.
skgoa 8y ago
You are a saint. I have a near retirement age coworker in the same office who mutters a lot while working and from time to time will just start talking loudly to people across the room. It's one of the main reasons why I got a noise-canceling headset.
mnky9800n 8y ago
I do this as well. Mostly I want a record of what was discussed because how will I remember otherwise.

Waterluvian 8y ago

I agree. But I like slack more than talking because I get time to think and a transcript after. Probably yet another reason I love working from my home office.

nannal 8y ago
plus with CYA, Tim can't deny being told about the remogolio project direction change if you can screenshot the slack message you sent to him at 14:28.

corobo 8y ago

> what's the point of being in the office at all Amen. We can work remotely. Let me work in my home office.

reitanqild 8y ago
Writing from my home office: I'm sitting here now because there's scheduled railway maintenance going on. If not I prefer traveling to the office (it's more than 45 minutes each way.) But as long as everyone can choose for themselves I think more people probably should work from home.

eqdw 8y ago

The reason I slack people who are ten seconds walk from my desk is mostly because, if I walk up to them and talk to them, I'm generating noise which will disrupt the other hundred people in my open plan office

anxiouspete 8y ago
Which when you think about it is absurd really. Here we are in this open plan office that is meant to encourage communication and collaboration and yet we're communicating over Slack because we don't want to disturb our other colleagues.
- DEADBEEFC0FFEE 8y ago
  As a manger who has had to support moves to these environments, I can share that it is also about money. Higher density offices, cheaper to furnish and easier reconfigure. Less fixed wiring. No desk phone, no pabx.....and collaboration.
  - hinkley 8y ago
    Aren’t you comparing apples and plums here? Fully wired cubes versus loosely and insubstantially wired desks. If you’re not going to give people phones just take the phones away, not pack people in like sardines.
  - convolvatron 8y ago
    i miss having an office. and lately i've started to miss having a desk, as it seems they are always shuffling people around, or someone is trying to have a bullpen meeting over your head. or as someone mentioned those awful group video conferences which make me resent having even bothered to commute. seriously, lets just give up on the notion of assigned spaces, idk what value there is when we cant even collaborate because the 4 tiny meeting rooms for 100 people are sitting at the margins of the giant open office. and there aren't any other whiteboards or projectors to use to have conversations. everyone is already wearing headphones so they can try to have a thought to themselves. there are lots of alternatives. assign rooms to projects and have the principals mostly hang out there. couch areas and pub areas and cubby areas...rooms where you really aren't supposed to talk or hum or do anything out loud. we've given up any actual utility of the office and are just hanging on to the barest trapping.

dvtrn 8y ago

Then, given all that, you get the coworker two seats down Slacking you. If you're Slacking folks within 10 seconds walking distance then what's the point of being in the office at all. I have a coworker within ONE second of me, I can lean back a few inches and tap them on the shoulder. And I do, frequently, when they send me a 1:1 slack message. "What's up?" "Oh I had a question for you in Slack" "I'm three feet away from you, I'm not doing this over slack, what's up?" Obviously this is different if they send a code snippet or an app screenshot that I need to look at, but even then when we need to discuss the next steps relevant to that snippet or screenshot, I'll still tap them over the shoulder "Hey, did you try x?" "Oh no I didn't, lemme see what happens..." pause "Yup that worked, thanks!" "No problem"

jpindar 8y ago
You are part of the problem, disturbing the whole room for no reason.

devhead 8y ago

Slack affords a method of passive communication where waving hands or tapping someone on the shoulder is an invasive method of communication. Unless there's an urgency, or some complication that should be discussed in person; slack is the preferred method so as to allow the party you are interrupting a chance to change their focus in the least impactful manner. If I go to someone directly, I am losing 10-15 minutes of my own productivity + the length of the conversation and that's multiplied by the number of people I interrupted. Some people who I've worked with, love to have to have a face to face for questions or information that is not urgent and could easily be taken care of via slack. They seem to do so because they prefer to small talk, lament, debate or some other personal reason; they don't do it for technical reasons. If your team can effectively communicate passively, on slack, your on a team that has a foundation from which a remote-work policy can easily be enacted.