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“talking is extremely discouraged at work, in an open office, so even at work you're basically alone just siting there listening to music or podcasts all day”

“talking is extremely discouraged at work, in an open office, so even at work you're basically alone just siting there listening to music or podcasts all day” That’s the nutty thing about open office. The thing that’s officially supposed to encourage collaboration leads to people sitting there with headphones trying to isolate themselves and rules to not talk to each other.

ryanmercer 7y ago
Our open office isn't for fostering communication or anything, we don't need to communicate, if you have time to communicate you aren't working. Our open office is so the team lead at the back of each row can watch everyone. :/
- stirfrykitty 7y ago
  A sort of paid-worker panopticon situation is how I see it. I did the cube farm thing back when I worked for UUNet, and it sucked. Everyone talking, prairie dogging talking to the guy in the next cube, people farting out loud, the stinky food, the phone conversations of the admin next to you trying to work out some awful multi-spoke VPN issue with a distant office, cursing all the while and everyone within earshot hearing it. Not a good scene. One of the senior admins got a talking to for one night on his shift printed out name tags with "Winston Smith" and taping them over the 90 cubes in the office.
stirfrykitty 7y ago
I cannot work in an open office. I was forced to when I began my career in NOVA as a young Unix nerd, but now that I'm over 20 years into it, I won't work where I don't have my own office. I have one now that I share with one other person, but it's a massive office and our desks face each other from across the room. The lights are out and the trance is streaming. I cannot concentrate around people walking around, the jocks talking about fantasy sports, or silly gossip. And the smell of some people's food is truly off putting. Anyone with any kind of seniority needs an office to work. I just cannot fathom working around a dozen or more people. You have to love these IT companies that have job offers up with photos of people working in complete harmony. It's total rubbish. No one wants to work that way given the choice.
segmondy 7y ago
depends on which one, at mine, the developers can often sounds like sales people with how chatty we can get. :D a few are annoyed by it, but that's what headphones or working remote are for.
wallacoloo 7y ago
First tech job: started out as cubicle work. Got in at 9, hour break for lunch with coworkers, then completely focused with extremely few social interactions for the rest of the day. On occasion, I would meet 1-on-1 with a coworker in their cube for an extended period of time to discuss some large technical design I wanted to sort out. A year into this, the company redid the building into open-office space (but where everyone still had their own L-shaped desks and they were only packed maybe 20% more densely than the cubes. Now you never talk with someone at their desk for more than a minute, because while you talk you’re distracting everyone. So even less collaboration. Second tech job: this one has always been open office. It’s packed much tighter: I have a person four feet to my left and four feet to my right, more in front and more in back. At any moment, one of them might just pipe up a relatively simple question to me (“where do I look in the codebase to find X functionality”): something he could find out on his own, but asking me saves 5-10 minutes. The 5 people around me are on my team. The people behind me are on a different team. There’s conversation across the teams at least hourly, an even split between jokes/banter and technical talk. If you overhear a conversation, you’re totally welcome to insert yourself into it, and doing so is the norm. In this open office, collaboration is more of a real thing. If someone left feedback on your code change, half the time the discussion on how specifically to address it is done in person without leaving your desk. I’m able to identify topics that are raised frequently and recognize where the real organizational issues are, because it’s all discussed right there in the open. And I’m exposed to a diverse range of ideas and solutions just by choosing to listen. A few times a week I might even pair program with one of my teammates and learn something (vim commands I didn’t know about, a new way to use one of our in-house tools, or just practice). The difference between these two is stunning. And jarring: I’ve gone about a year now without reaching a state of flow at work. I’m not even sure if half the people I work with have ever experienced it in their life (while programming). But I’m learning to adapt. I tend to work in short bursts of productivity throughout the day which leaves me with more energy at the end than being heads down at my desk for 8 hours. The code I write is far more reliable than what I used to write —— undoubtedly because of the collaboration. Not all offices of a particular style are equal. I think it’s silly to label open offices as either universally good or universally evil: the ideal work environment depends on the execution, the context of the work, and the individual.

ryanmercer 7y ago

Our open office isn't for fostering communication or anything, we don't need to communicate, if you have time to communicate you aren't working. Our open office is so the team lead at the back of each row can watch everyone. :/

stirfrykitty 7y ago
A sort of paid-worker panopticon situation is how I see it. I did the cube farm thing back when I worked for UUNet, and it sucked. Everyone talking, prairie dogging talking to the guy in the next cube, people farting out loud, the stinky food, the phone conversations of the admin next to you trying to work out some awful multi-spoke VPN issue with a distant office, cursing all the while and everyone within earshot hearing it. Not a good scene. One of the senior admins got a talking to for one night on his shift printed out name tags with "Winston Smith" and taping them over the 90 cubes in the office.

stirfrykitty 7y ago

I cannot work in an open office. I was forced to when I began my career in NOVA as a young Unix nerd, but now that I'm over 20 years into it, I won't work where I don't have my own office. I have one now that I share with one other person, but it's a massive office and our desks face each other from across the room. The lights are out and the trance is streaming. I cannot concentrate around people walking around, the jocks talking about fantasy sports, or silly gossip. And the smell of some people's food is truly off putting. Anyone with any kind of seniority needs an office to work. I just cannot fathom working around a dozen or more people. You have to love these IT companies that have job offers up with photos of people working in complete harmony. It's total rubbish. No one wants to work that way given the choice.

segmondy 7y ago

depends on which one, at mine, the developers can often sounds like sales people with how chatty we can get. :D a few are annoyed by it, but that's what headphones or working remote are for.

wallacoloo 7y ago

First tech job: started out as cubicle work. Got in at 9, hour break for lunch with coworkers, then completely focused with extremely few social interactions for the rest of the day. On occasion, I would meet 1-on-1 with a coworker in their cube for an extended period of time to discuss some large technical design I wanted to sort out. A year into this, the company redid the building into open-office space (but where everyone still had their own L-shaped desks and they were only packed maybe 20% more densely than the cubes. Now you never talk with someone at their desk for more than a minute, because while you talk you’re distracting everyone. So even less collaboration. Second tech job: this one has always been open office. It’s packed much tighter: I have a person four feet to my left and four feet to my right, more in front and more in back. At any moment, one of them might just pipe up a relatively simple question to me (“where do I look in the codebase to find X functionality”): something he could find out on his own, but asking me saves 5-10 minutes. The 5 people around me are on my team. The people behind me are on a different team. There’s conversation across the teams at least hourly, an even split between jokes/banter and technical talk. If you overhear a conversation, you’re totally welcome to insert yourself into it, and doing so is the norm. In this open office, collaboration is more of a real thing. If someone left feedback on your code change, half the time the discussion on how specifically to address it is done in person without leaving your desk. I’m able to identify topics that are raised frequently and recognize where the real organizational issues are, because it’s all discussed right there in the open. And I’m exposed to a diverse range of ideas and solutions just by choosing to listen. A few times a week I might even pair program with one of my teammates and learn something (vim commands I didn’t know about, a new way to use one of our in-house tools, or just practice). The difference between these two is stunning. And jarring: I’ve gone about a year now without reaching a state of flow at work. I’m not even sure if half the people I work with have ever experienced it in their life (while programming). But I’m learning to adapt. I tend to work in short bursts of productivity throughout the day which leaves me with more energy at the end than being heads down at my desk for 8 hours. The code I write is far more reliable than what I used to write —— undoubtedly because of the collaboration. Not all offices of a particular style are equal. I think it’s silly to label open offices as either universally good or universally evil: the ideal work environment depends on the execution, the context of the work, and the individual.