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> "Instead of personality-stripping cubicles, organisations would go on to favour open-air office plans..." Absolutely nothing fundamental has changed. I feel

> "Instead of personality-stripping cubicles, organisations would go on to favour open-air office plans..." Absolutely nothing fundamental has changed. I feel like if "Office Space" were being re-made today, open floor plans would be one of the horrors that it would lampoon. Not so much the open floor plans themselves, mind you. But rather the surreal absurdism of which they're just an example. Twenty years ago, we understood that "Hawaiian Shirt Day" was superficially supposed to be a morale booster, but was actually a morale sink in practice. Today, open floor plans were initially pitched as "collaboration" aids, but most people have to come to realize that they're really about cost savings, and are counter-productive to actually getting focused work done. Most white collar humor comes from shining a cynical spotlight on the disconnect between what business leaders say, and what business workers actually experience. And the Kafkaesque situation of most people feeling this way, yet us not being able to openly say so in the workplace itself. The superficial examples may change, but that underlying theme is still central to white collar office work. Perhaps it always will be.

amatecha 8y ago
Hey, why aren't you wearing your Hawaiian shirt, dude?
- amatecha 8y ago
  (I'm pointing out the fact that one of the reasons Hawaiian shirt days are a bust is because it ends up being a continuous peer pressure situation when some employees don't participate. Seen it happen to so many people whose workplace enacts some kind of "[something] t-shirt day".)
harry8 8y ago
Instead of responding to everything s%&t about cubicles, organisations made all those things even worse by going with open plan. Good heuristic on these trends. "Will everyone absolutely hate it?" If so, it'll get really popular. Hotdesking. Oh yeah! It'll drive everyone nuts! What else you got?
- throes_death 8y ago
  Hot terminals?
  - auiya 8y ago
    Whomever came up with the concept of hot terminals and/or desking needs to be strapped to a tree and beaten with a bag of hammers. "Oh we can oversubscribe our desks now? Sweet we'll just make 'em all work a compressed 4x10 schedule to shoehorn as many of 'em in there as we can. Work life balance? Pfffftt overrated."
- slowmovintarget 8y ago
  Collaborative seating. (Basically a lunch table with a bunch of chairs in the hallway). Bring your laptop, hope you have a cord long enough to reach the outlet. No partitions at all. Though globally remote is worse. You're expected to be able to jump on cam at all hours. Have your cap nearby to cover up the bedhead.
  - Johnny555 8y ago
    Though globally remote is worse. You're expected to be able to jump on cam at all hours I think that's the price you pay for being globally remote. We have some overseas support staff, and they knew before they took the job when they'd need to be expected to dial-in for team meetings, and they all seem to be fine with it.
    - cableshaft 8y ago
      You can 'dial in' without a webcam. We do it all the time at my job, which went fully remote six months ago. Half the people in our various Webex meetings use their phones to dial in, even. My boss originally wanted people to use their webcam when joining those meetings when we first went fully remote. That initiative lasted about two weeks before no one did it anymore, including him. I just wear a headset, and half the time I can leave it on mute anyway (especially if the puppy decides now is the time to chew on her squeakiest toy, or bark at some people running down the path beyond our back yard).
jMyles 8y ago
I rarely see a comment on HN whose assessment and opinion are more foreign to my personal experience than this one. Open plans are much better than cubicles. The transition to open plans and standing desks has been a boon for social interaction in teams, more role-crossover, and just more physical movement in general. Office Space is a timeless and incredible film, but one aspect of it that seems almost like fantasy is the idea that people primarily working on software might sit down in cramped cubicles and prefer fake privacy to real social interaction. edit: Look, I know that some people like cubicles. If you do, that's fine. But if you actually seriously like small, cramped, stuffed cubicles in Office Space (or The Matrix) - which absolutely existed in the late 90s and early 2000s in IT and seem to have largely disappeared - I'd really like to hear why. If you do like cubicles: how do you move? Do you really have the discipline to get up and walk around every once in a while? Or do you end up having much less body movement than open plan participants?
- anyfoo 8y ago
  I've got to say, I'm not sure I ever met a software engineer who prefers open plan to individual offices. You said cubicles, but I'd argue that cubicles would be better than the proverbial nothing that open plan is. I'm certainly happy that I have my office, and if I need to talk to people, their offices (or their open plan, unfortunately) is usually not very far. But a lot of the time, I just need and want to focus a lot, and for that open plan is absolute cancer. My office seats two people, but it actually helps that the other person is not directly in my team. I don't see what standing desks have to do with it, as offices can have standing desks as well, and ours do. The last time I sat in open plan, I felt like an animal in a cage, to choose a seemingly paradoxical wording. It wasn't the walls closing in, but the distractions.
  - saberience 8y ago
    You found one right here. I work in videogames, I'm a programmer/engineer, I love my standing desk and open plan office. It's a huge game changer in terms of morale and quality of the life for the team and company, since the whole company has moved to open plan and standing desks by default. (and we're not a small game developer).
wnevets 8y ago
an open floor plan with a small team is great but anything over 5 is just too much.
- drdeadringer 8y ago
  Similar can and has been said for games like DnD. 8 players or more is stretching.
Apocryphon 8y ago
Economically speaking, aren’t open offices a necessity for a startup in Silicon Valley? I can’t fathom the rent for an office with personal offices for each employee. The solution that should make everyone happy, of course, is to just make everything remote.
- Someone1234 8y ago
  If that was legitimately a concern then why not just have everyone telecommute? Then you get an office for every employee and $0 in rent.
  - Apocryphon 8y ago
    That's... exactly what I was suggesting.
  - Gibbon1 8y ago
    Last time I dealt with this, 20 years ago. The cost of an office for a tech worker appeared to be basically nil. Less than 5% of wages, benefits, insurance. Place I'm in is a 1500sqft warren. Costs $300/month per tech monkey. Gonna pay $12000/mo for a code monkey? Costs $300-500/mo for him to have an office? The extravagance! I'm back to an old observation by Scott Adams; Ask yourself why the secretaries chair doesn't have armrests. Cost isn't an issue, the price difference is $50. This is all about status and class not money.
- sevensor 8y ago
  Someone should start a business renting shoulder-high partitions that you put between desks.
  - dmitriid 8y ago
    How would they help? I've been at companies whose answer to complaints about open space was exactly this: shoulder high partitions. Yay, the cubicles are back.
    - 8y ago
sharemywin 8y ago
Are you talking about the Panopticons?
caf 8y ago
The superficial examples may change, but that underlying theme is still central to white collar office work. Perhaps it always will be. Probably so. Billy Wilder's The Apartment executed a very similar lampooning of white-collar office culture 40 years earlier (if you haven't seen it, see it! It's probably Wilder's best film).
tabtab 8y ago
It's my opinion that open-air office design fit depends on the person. Some people are too easily distracted, and some are "charged up" by social interaction. One-size-fits-all doesn't work. Maybe slide-able walls could be a way to be able to focus when needed, but also interact heavily when needed. I haven't tried sliders myself. Any opinions on them? The boss in the movie is average, not "toxic" as the article claims. While he is annoying, he's not loud or blatantly abusive. It's relatively subtle "abuse", and common behavior. I've had much worse bosses, included a Trump-like boss who had one foot in marketing and one foot in tech. He was technically clueless, rash, ADHD, embellisher, media-savvy, forgetful, termination-happy, etc. Crazy days. (Even if you personally believe T is a great President, working for him may not be. Compare it to Steve Jobs: rough on employees although {arguably} he produced great results.)
- jplayer01 8y ago
  I'm not sure how programming is improved by constant social interaction. Distractions per research are a huge hit to productivity just because of how long it takes the brain to reach the same state again. If you're in PR or a job that is by nature social, then maybe it has its benefits, but for knowledge workers, there's plenty of research showing deep thought requires deep focus which isn't (generally) properly sustainable with a lot of external stimulus.
technofiend 8y ago
My idea of an Office Space remake ten years ago was the gang is hired back, kept on for a year and then forced to cross-train their overseas replacements to get a severance package. Not terribly original but definitely what was happening then. Now I imagine Gary Cole reprising his Bill Lumbergh role but he's shaved twenty years off his resume. He has a man bun he has to dye, rides a scooter to work (which he despises) and woefully misuses modern platform terms and "may mays" in typical /r/fellowkids style. The main characters are rehired as part of a lawsuit settlement against Silcon Valley's rampant ageism. fRAGILe has taken over (we must acknowledge our weakness to transcend it) and each day is started with a scrimmage that includes mandatory hugs, incense and mediation. No one is allowed to discuss development progress because it brings too much negative energy. Completely ignored by their coworkers the old gang invent something that makes the company a takeover target. Rather than acknowledge their worth and shatter SV group think about anyone over 25 having a good idea much less give up equity, management gives them all awful reviews and fires them, returning their shares to the firing manager. (It's assumed if you got rid of dead weight you did the company some good and should be rewarded.)
- EGreg 8y ago
  So basically Dilbert - the animated series :)
  - technofiend 8y ago
    I'll take your word for it! I didn't watch the animated series. It was too painful.
    - EGreg 8y ago
      I meant the animated series!
    - alsetmusic 8y ago
      Filbert had a short run as an animated series (cartoon show). I think that was the reference.
- 8y ago
0x8BADF00D 8y ago
> Absolutely nothing fundamental has changed. I feel like if "Office Space" were being re-made today, open floor plans would be one of the horrors that it would lampoon. It was remade, essentially into Silicon Valley.
akhilcacharya 8y ago
I think engineers are paid too much for Office Space to still work. SWE jobs aren’t normal office jobs anymore.
- sl1ck731 8y ago
  What does pay have to do with a job being an "office" job? Are corporate lawyers and accountants not office jobs? If you work in an office, then by definition, you work an office job.
  - akhilcacharya 8y ago
    Accountants usually don’t have lavish perks or doctor-level paychecks though. The lifestyles of all of the big2+elite startup engineers I know is miles different from the characters in the movie. I watched the movie much later than most people on this website and was most shocked by the fact that he was neighbors with a construction worker. That sort of class co-mingling seems vanishingly rare in my social circle.
    - systemtest 8y ago
      In Europe it's pretty normal for software developers to live next-door to a construction worker. If the construction worker is very experienced or a contractor he may even earn more than you do.
    - purple_ducks 8y ago
      > Accountants usually don’t have lavish perks or doctor-level paychecks though Accountants absolutely have lavish perks bestowed upon them by the "Big 4" - annual week abroad in foreign destinations for team building. > doctor-level paychecks though Neither do devs. In Europe, accountants are paid better than devs. With better hours(except at quarter end) and a straightforward career path..and no-BS job interviews. Chartered accountants (still talking about company employed- not sole practice) earn even more - like 30% more than a senior dev.
      - 8y ago
baxtr 8y ago
What is the best alternative to open space btw? I hate them too, but I wonder what else one can do. Sitting in a 2 people office all day is also not great, is it?
- Krasnol 8y ago
  > Sitting in a 2 people office all day is also not great, is it? Why isn't it? The only better thing I can imagine is a single office. Closely followed by home office.
  - baxtr 8y ago
    I feel some people start talking all the time in the smaller offices. They don’t feel observed and then just talk all day, about everything, private and work stuff. When I’m at work I want to work and socialize at points I chose. People seem to be more cautious in open space
    - Krasnol 8y ago
      I had the opposite experience. Every single time I had to spend time in an open office environment. There is just one person you need to tell to be quiet in a small 2 person office. There are countless people you want to tell to shut up in an open office. This is also the reason so many people work with their headphones on. For some time I had those massive over ear headphones with me while I traveled through our offices. I didn't even listen to anything. Just put them on so I didn't have to listen to the environment. It's hell...
      - P_I_Staker 8y ago
        Really? Sounds like you found a common sense solution. People can be so dramatic.
        Krasnol 8y ago
        It's not a solution. It's a workaround which reflects a problem that is being sold as an improvement. Which also makes it a bigger problem. This can't get enough drama to become recognized as a problem.
matwood 8y ago
Your comment reminded me when I first started working I could 'win' casual days which meant a golf shirt instead of a tie. Oddly enough, I think in some cases it has gone too far in the other direction. When I see people barefoot in a public restroom wearing a t-shirt full of holes I don't think about getting work done.
- mercer 8y ago
  > When I see people barefoot in a public restroom wearing a t-shirt full of holes I don't think about getting work done. Why not?
dwighttk 8y ago
Office Space is kinda being remade today with each episode of Silicon Valley they make.

amatecha 8y ago

Hey, why aren't you wearing your Hawaiian shirt, dude?

amatecha 8y ago
(I'm pointing out the fact that one of the reasons Hawaiian shirt days are a bust is because it ends up being a continuous peer pressure situation when some employees don't participate. Seen it happen to so many people whose workplace enacts some kind of "[something] t-shirt day".)

harry8 8y ago

Instead of responding to everything s%&t about cubicles, organisations made all those things even worse by going with open plan. Good heuristic on these trends. "Will everyone absolutely hate it?" If so, it'll get really popular. Hotdesking. Oh yeah! It'll drive everyone nuts! What else you got?

throes_death 8y ago
Hot terminals?
- auiya 8y ago
  Whomever came up with the concept of hot terminals and/or desking needs to be strapped to a tree and beaten with a bag of hammers. "Oh we can oversubscribe our desks now? Sweet we'll just make 'em all work a compressed 4x10 schedule to shoehorn as many of 'em in there as we can. Work life balance? Pfffftt overrated."
slowmovintarget 8y ago
Collaborative seating. (Basically a lunch table with a bunch of chairs in the hallway). Bring your laptop, hope you have a cord long enough to reach the outlet. No partitions at all. Though globally remote is worse. You're expected to be able to jump on cam at all hours. Have your cap nearby to cover up the bedhead.
- Johnny555 8y ago
  Though globally remote is worse. You're expected to be able to jump on cam at all hours I think that's the price you pay for being globally remote. We have some overseas support staff, and they knew before they took the job when they'd need to be expected to dial-in for team meetings, and they all seem to be fine with it.
  - cableshaft 8y ago
    You can 'dial in' without a webcam. We do it all the time at my job, which went fully remote six months ago. Half the people in our various Webex meetings use their phones to dial in, even. My boss originally wanted people to use their webcam when joining those meetings when we first went fully remote. That initiative lasted about two weeks before no one did it anymore, including him. I just wear a headset, and half the time I can leave it on mute anyway (especially if the puppy decides now is the time to chew on her squeakiest toy, or bark at some people running down the path beyond our back yard).

jMyles 8y ago

I rarely see a comment on HN whose assessment and opinion are more foreign to my personal experience than this one. Open plans are much better than cubicles. The transition to open plans and standing desks has been a boon for social interaction in teams, more role-crossover, and just more physical movement in general. Office Space is a timeless and incredible film, but one aspect of it that seems almost like fantasy is the idea that people primarily working on software might sit down in cramped cubicles and prefer fake privacy to real social interaction. edit: Look, I know that some people like cubicles. If you do, that's fine. But if you actually seriously like small, cramped, stuffed cubicles in Office Space (or The Matrix) - which absolutely existed in the late 90s and early 2000s in IT and seem to have largely disappeared - I'd really like to hear why. If you do like cubicles: how do you move? Do you really have the discipline to get up and walk around every once in a while? Or do you end up having much less body movement than open plan participants?

anyfoo 8y ago
I've got to say, I'm not sure I ever met a software engineer who prefers open plan to individual offices. You said cubicles, but I'd argue that cubicles would be better than the proverbial nothing that open plan is. I'm certainly happy that I have my office, and if I need to talk to people, their offices (or their open plan, unfortunately) is usually not very far. But a lot of the time, I just need and want to focus a lot, and for that open plan is absolute cancer. My office seats two people, but it actually helps that the other person is not directly in my team. I don't see what standing desks have to do with it, as offices can have standing desks as well, and ours do. The last time I sat in open plan, I felt like an animal in a cage, to choose a seemingly paradoxical wording. It wasn't the walls closing in, but the distractions.
- saberience 8y ago
  You found one right here. I work in videogames, I'm a programmer/engineer, I love my standing desk and open plan office. It's a huge game changer in terms of morale and quality of the life for the team and company, since the whole company has moved to open plan and standing desks by default. (and we're not a small game developer).

wnevets 8y ago

an open floor plan with a small team is great but anything over 5 is just too much.

drdeadringer 8y ago
Similar can and has been said for games like DnD. 8 players or more is stretching.

Apocryphon 8y ago

Economically speaking, aren’t open offices a necessity for a startup in Silicon Valley? I can’t fathom the rent for an office with personal offices for each employee. The solution that should make everyone happy, of course, is to just make everything remote.

Someone1234 8y ago
If that was legitimately a concern then why not just have everyone telecommute? Then you get an office for every employee and $0 in rent.
- Apocryphon 8y ago
  That's... exactly what I was suggesting.
- Gibbon1 8y ago
  Last time I dealt with this, 20 years ago. The cost of an office for a tech worker appeared to be basically nil. Less than 5% of wages, benefits, insurance. Place I'm in is a 1500sqft warren. Costs $300/month per tech monkey. Gonna pay $12000/mo for a code monkey? Costs $300-500/mo for him to have an office? The extravagance! I'm back to an old observation by Scott Adams; Ask yourself why the secretaries chair doesn't have armrests. Cost isn't an issue, the price difference is $50. This is all about status and class not money.
sevensor 8y ago
Someone should start a business renting shoulder-high partitions that you put between desks.
- dmitriid 8y ago
  How would they help? I've been at companies whose answer to complaints about open space was exactly this: shoulder high partitions. Yay, the cubicles are back.
  - 8y ago

sharemywin 8y ago

Are you talking about the Panopticons?

caf 8y ago

The superficial examples may change, but that underlying theme is still central to white collar office work. Perhaps it always will be. Probably so. Billy Wilder's The Apartment executed a very similar lampooning of white-collar office culture 40 years earlier (if you haven't seen it, see it! It's probably Wilder's best film).

tabtab 8y ago

It's my opinion that open-air office design fit depends on the person. Some people are too easily distracted, and some are "charged up" by social interaction. One-size-fits-all doesn't work. Maybe slide-able walls could be a way to be able to focus when needed, but also interact heavily when needed. I haven't tried sliders myself. Any opinions on them? The boss in the movie is average, not "toxic" as the article claims. While he is annoying, he's not loud or blatantly abusive. It's relatively subtle "abuse", and common behavior. I've had much worse bosses, included a Trump-like boss who had one foot in marketing and one foot in tech. He was technically clueless, rash, ADHD, embellisher, media-savvy, forgetful, termination-happy, etc. Crazy days. (Even if you personally believe T is a great President, working for him may not be. Compare it to Steve Jobs: rough on employees although {arguably} he produced great results.)

jplayer01 8y ago
I'm not sure how programming is improved by constant social interaction. Distractions per research are a huge hit to productivity just because of how long it takes the brain to reach the same state again. If you're in PR or a job that is by nature social, then maybe it has its benefits, but for knowledge workers, there's plenty of research showing deep thought requires deep focus which isn't (generally) properly sustainable with a lot of external stimulus.

technofiend 8y ago

My idea of an Office Space remake ten years ago was the gang is hired back, kept on for a year and then forced to cross-train their overseas replacements to get a severance package. Not terribly original but definitely what was happening then. Now I imagine Gary Cole reprising his Bill Lumbergh role but he's shaved twenty years off his resume. He has a man bun he has to dye, rides a scooter to work (which he despises) and woefully misuses modern platform terms and "may mays" in typical /r/fellowkids style. The main characters are rehired as part of a lawsuit settlement against Silcon Valley's rampant ageism. fRAGILe has taken over (we must acknowledge our weakness to transcend it) and each day is started with a scrimmage that includes mandatory hugs, incense and mediation. No one is allowed to discuss development progress because it brings too much negative energy. Completely ignored by their coworkers the old gang invent something that makes the company a takeover target. Rather than acknowledge their worth and shatter SV group think about anyone over 25 having a good idea much less give up equity, management gives them all awful reviews and fires them, returning their shares to the firing manager. (It's assumed if you got rid of dead weight you did the company some good and should be rewarded.)

EGreg 8y ago
So basically Dilbert - the animated series :)
- technofiend 8y ago
  I'll take your word for it! I didn't watch the animated series. It was too painful.
  - EGreg 8y ago
    I meant the animated series!
  - alsetmusic 8y ago
    Filbert had a short run as an animated series (cartoon show). I think that was the reference.
8y ago

0x8BADF00D 8y ago

> Absolutely nothing fundamental has changed. I feel like if "Office Space" were being re-made today, open floor plans would be one of the horrors that it would lampoon. It was remade, essentially into Silicon Valley.

akhilcacharya 8y ago

I think engineers are paid too much for Office Space to still work. SWE jobs aren’t normal office jobs anymore.

sl1ck731 8y ago
What does pay have to do with a job being an "office" job? Are corporate lawyers and accountants not office jobs? If you work in an office, then by definition, you work an office job.
- akhilcacharya 8y ago
  Accountants usually don’t have lavish perks or doctor-level paychecks though. The lifestyles of all of the big2+elite startup engineers I know is miles different from the characters in the movie. I watched the movie much later than most people on this website and was most shocked by the fact that he was neighbors with a construction worker. That sort of class co-mingling seems vanishingly rare in my social circle.
  - systemtest 8y ago
    In Europe it's pretty normal for software developers to live next-door to a construction worker. If the construction worker is very experienced or a contractor he may even earn more than you do.
  - purple_ducks 8y ago
    > Accountants usually don’t have lavish perks or doctor-level paychecks though Accountants absolutely have lavish perks bestowed upon them by the "Big 4" - annual week abroad in foreign destinations for team building. > doctor-level paychecks though Neither do devs. In Europe, accountants are paid better than devs. With better hours(except at quarter end) and a straightforward career path..and no-BS job interviews. Chartered accountants (still talking about company employed- not sole practice) earn even more - like 30% more than a senior dev.
    - 8y ago

baxtr 8y ago

What is the best alternative to open space btw? I hate them too, but I wonder what else one can do. Sitting in a 2 people office all day is also not great, is it?

Krasnol 8y ago
> Sitting in a 2 people office all day is also not great, is it? Why isn't it? The only better thing I can imagine is a single office. Closely followed by home office.
- baxtr 8y ago
  I feel some people start talking all the time in the smaller offices. They don’t feel observed and then just talk all day, about everything, private and work stuff. When I’m at work I want to work and socialize at points I chose. People seem to be more cautious in open space
  - Krasnol 8y ago
    I had the opposite experience. Every single time I had to spend time in an open office environment. There is just one person you need to tell to be quiet in a small 2 person office. There are countless people you want to tell to shut up in an open office. This is also the reason so many people work with their headphones on. For some time I had those massive over ear headphones with me while I traveled through our offices. I didn't even listen to anything. Just put them on so I didn't have to listen to the environment. It's hell...
    - P_I_Staker 8y ago
      Really? Sounds like you found a common sense solution. People can be so dramatic.
      - Krasnol 8y ago
        It's not a solution. It's a workaround which reflects a problem that is being sold as an improvement. Which also makes it a bigger problem. This can't get enough drama to become recognized as a problem.

matwood 8y ago

Your comment reminded me when I first started working I could 'win' casual days which meant a golf shirt instead of a tie. Oddly enough, I think in some cases it has gone too far in the other direction. When I see people barefoot in a public restroom wearing a t-shirt full of holes I don't think about getting work done.

mercer 8y ago
> When I see people barefoot in a public restroom wearing a t-shirt full of holes I don't think about getting work done. Why not?

dwighttk 8y ago

Office Space is kinda being remade today with each episode of Silicon Valley they make.