6 ms·

It is unrealistic to expect that everyone could have a private office with leather chair and fish tank behind it, however it would be great if people could have

It is unrealistic to expect that everyone could have a private office with leather chair and fish tank behind it, however it would be great if people could have smaller spaces,lets say 2-4 people per room ,which would have a door and etc. Open plan office,the way it is now, it's just a one level up from a hen battery.

eeZah7Ux 6y ago
> It is unrealistic It was absolutely the norm in the '70 and '80 and before. How comes that technology improves and worker's rights regress?
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  One reason is we stopped building buildings. So now we have to squeeze into and share the space already built. I also wonder how many people really had private offices 30-40 years ago.
  - bsder 6y ago
    > I also wonder how many people really had private offices 30-40 years ago. IBM (and presumably any other company of that ilk) certainly had one person per office up through 1990. One thing that people forget is that you had a land line phone. And you spent a lot of time on it. And haranguing people was considered a negotiation tactic. So, being able to close your door to not bother others was important.
    - fzzzy 6y ago
      I absolutely love this little piece of flavor. It takes me right back to that time. I think this is an important point I haven't heard discussed before: The cell phone kind of enabled the open office explosion. That really explains a lot. Before if you needed to be reachable in a company, you needed a physical location from which to engage in phone calls.
    - WWLink 6y ago
      Programming teams almost certainly talked over IRC back then though?
      - radiator 6y ago
        Why would a programming team talk over IRC?
      - bsder 6y ago
        AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Wait, why am I laughing? Oh, God, it's to keep from crying from how old I am ... In 1990 corporations? Goodness, no. Most companies didn't even have a corporate email system. IBM was probably one of the few exceptions. And external network access required signatures from 3 VP's (one senior), your firstborn, and probably your left ovary/testicle--it basically just didn't happen. Programming teams were colocated or they didn't communicate. CVS was an advanced idea. C and UNIX were those toys from academia--real programmers used mainframes and COBOL or FORTRAN. If you had a forward thinking team, they might circulate useful technical articles and ideas via inter-/intra-office memos. Otherwise, you bought a book or went down to the corporate library and borrowed a book. At IBM you could pull up old issues of the IBM Journal of Research and Development (which were gold--and still are). A 128Kbps (yeah, that's 12 kilobytes) dedicated leased line was considered pretty fast and was pretty expensive. A 250MB SCSI drive was considered pretty big and local networking at 16Mbps (Token Ring) was godly and ferociously expensive. I can go on and on ... but we're already well into "Back in my day, we walked uphill to school--both ways. And we counted our bits by hand." territory. Even in universities, 1988-89-ish was just at the point where using ftp to pull a .tgz from somewhere might actually be faster than sending a physical letter through the mail and having them mail you a magtape in return. And you sent a physical letter because very few people in a university at the time had an email address that was generally accessible. For God's sake, in 1988 /etc/hosts could still enumerate in an actual file every single host on the ARPAnet. The amount of technical change from 1990 to 1999 was ENORMOUS.
        binarysneaker 6y ago
        Thanks for the memories :)
  - anthonybullard 6y ago
    This is a good point. As supply of commercial real estate is restricted, rents increase and the impetus to reduce sq footage per employee increases. Also, open offices have been around - and common - for a long time. They called them bullpens and engineers, reporters, stock traders, and many more low-level professionals worked that way. We think of office professionals because they are the ones movies get made about.
  - alexashka 6y ago
    Building new towns and cities you mean right? There is a limit to the number of skyscrapers within a square mile before you've reached a dystopia. People confuse sane citizens not wanting a dystopian skyscraper-city with nimby-ism - wouldn't you rather drive with half the number of people on the roads? People who live somewhere feel the same way about their neighbourhood. Who's supposed to build new towns and cities? Gasp I'll say the forbidden word - government. Gasp the government can be a solution, not a source of problems? Yes my dear friend - you only need to implement a few laws, such as public hanging of corrupt politicians and businessmen. Gasp but aren't those the same people who decide the laws? No my dear friend, we the people decide, and we've decided to be a bunch of selfish, lazy, pathetic losers lately. Maybe this pandemic will be a wake-up call to some of you.
- ghaff 6y ago
  The "norm" pre-cubicle was more along the lines of some offices plus large open bullpens. But it did vary. Offices for at least most engineers were more common in the 70s/80s than today.
- onemoresoop 6y ago
  They pressed a lever to raise the extracted value from the workers is my guess
- SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
  I did some googling and found this article (I don't care much for the layout, but stay with it for the pictures). It seems like the 70's you're thinking of is a blip in time, and we've instead regressed back to the open office plan of old. https://www.morganlovell.co.uk/the-evolution-of-office-design https://www.morganlovell.co.uk/the-evolution-of-office-desig...
- wwweston 6y ago
  This is a really good question. I don't think there are a lot of good normative answers -- I dislike open offices and cubes aren't much better (and at present, I'd especially have trouble regarding a management team that's still on board with them with either respect or trust). But I'd guess the descriptive answer is that the open office is essentially the new factory floor. Many information age jobs look "white collar" but at a certain level, they function and are viewed through a widget-factory management lens.
  - cosmodisk 6y ago
    I think a lot if people don't realise that they are the new factory workers,only the production line is at their desks. It makes me laugh how some office people think they are very smart and often look down to those who don't work in an office.Ffs Jenny, you just sending emails to people all day long,you aren't doing rocket science here..
- ThrowawayB7 6y ago
  Microsoft used to have private offices as well that didn't take all that much seniority to get. Much like the FAANGs, it was a competitive place to get into and stay in, so productivity monitoring wasn't a thing.
  - Ididntdothis 6y ago
    I remember they always pointed to private offices as one of their productivity boosters.
- deadbunny 6y ago
  Because - in the UK at least - unions have successfully been demonized and defanged over the last 40 years.
thrower123 6y ago
It's not really unrealistic. Maybe the fish tank... Why pay someone six figures and bombard them with distractions and noise and render them useless? To save a couple hundreds of dollars in office space per person a month? It's moronic.
- dominotw 6y ago
  > pay someone six figures I assume by 'everyone' GP isn't referring just to software people.
rootusrootus 6y ago
I've thought for a while that conference rooms with desks would work pretty well. Though it definitely depends on your team. Wouldn't need to go grab a room everytime you wanted to have a team discussion. Could play music if you all agreed. Etc. Maybe they could even do themed rooms. This is the rock & roll room, this the country room, etc. Ha!
- pjc50 6y ago
  One of the best collaborative environments I've ever had was a repurposed conference room; the three of us, all in our early 20s, two devs and a consultant who did what we would now call the "product owner" and some of the coding, had the small space to ourselves. It was off in a corner of the building, so nobody would "drop in while passing" either. We called it the "war room", after Dr Strangelove. It was a huge success and we got a complex product built in a few months. Unfortunately that was 2001 and the client went bankrupt without ever paying the invoice and we were all made redundant over the next few months.
  - Ididntdothis 6y ago
    My company still does this when something really needs to be done. Several people who are working on the project in one room with full focus. But weirdly as soon as it's done the team gets dispersed into the cube farm and the headsets go back on.
- aksss 6y ago
  My first programming job back at Corp hq (not client site) was like this : three people in a room with an external window, a door and private cubes. It was great for morale and productivity. That was 20 years ago.
Ididntdothis 6y ago
This was the standard when I started working in the 90s. 2-6 people in an office and gasp a window with daylight. You could actually really collaborate in that environment and have a discussion without bothering neighbors. Much less meeting rooms needed because often you could talk out things straight in the office. For me the best setup I have ever worked in.
ken 6y ago
How much do knowledge workers cost? A leather chair and fish tank would be some of the cheapest perks ever.
- paxys 6y ago
  Commercial office space is the problem
  - beervirus 6y ago
    It's gotta be pretty cheap right now...
- cosmodisk 6y ago
  The leather chair and the fish tank part wasn't about the cost. What I meant is that there's no need to go the radical way claiming everyone should get a private office, however even having only small number of people working in a room would be a huge improvement to open space planning.
- kbr2000 6y ago
  Heh, that depends on how many "minutes of real, actual work" done [0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iiOEQOtBlQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iiOEQOtBlQ
  - walshemj 6y ago
    IBM found a 15% performance increase in private offices.
rantwasp 6y ago
yeah. the fish tank would be overkill. but to have a private office is totally doable. factor in the productivity gains and it's not only doable but it's actually cheaper than the current clusterf open space situation. also, up until 5-10ish years ago this was the standard at Microsoft for example where you would get your own office, or if you were a newb you had to share an office with someone else. let that sink in. the current state of affairs is something we have concocted in the last 10ish years - because savings.

eeZah7Ux 6y ago

> It is unrealistic It was absolutely the norm in the '70 and '80 and before. How comes that technology improves and worker's rights regress?

BurningFrog 6y ago
One reason is we stopped building buildings. So now we have to squeeze into and share the space already built. I also wonder how many people really had private offices 30-40 years ago.
- bsder 6y ago
  > I also wonder how many people really had private offices 30-40 years ago. IBM (and presumably any other company of that ilk) certainly had one person per office up through 1990. One thing that people forget is that you had a land line phone. And you spent a lot of time on it. And haranguing people was considered a negotiation tactic. So, being able to close your door to not bother others was important.
  - fzzzy 6y ago
    I absolutely love this little piece of flavor. It takes me right back to that time. I think this is an important point I haven't heard discussed before: The cell phone kind of enabled the open office explosion. That really explains a lot. Before if you needed to be reachable in a company, you needed a physical location from which to engage in phone calls.
  - WWLink 6y ago
    Programming teams almost certainly talked over IRC back then though?
    - radiator 6y ago
      Why would a programming team talk over IRC?
    - bsder 6y ago
      AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Wait, why am I laughing? Oh, God, it's to keep from crying from how old I am ... In 1990 corporations? Goodness, no. Most companies didn't even have a corporate email system. IBM was probably one of the few exceptions. And external network access required signatures from 3 VP's (one senior), your firstborn, and probably your left ovary/testicle--it basically just didn't happen. Programming teams were colocated or they didn't communicate. CVS was an advanced idea. C and UNIX were those toys from academia--real programmers used mainframes and COBOL or FORTRAN. If you had a forward thinking team, they might circulate useful technical articles and ideas via inter-/intra-office memos. Otherwise, you bought a book or went down to the corporate library and borrowed a book. At IBM you could pull up old issues of the IBM Journal of Research and Development (which were gold--and still are). A 128Kbps (yeah, that's 12 kilobytes) dedicated leased line was considered pretty fast and was pretty expensive. A 250MB SCSI drive was considered pretty big and local networking at 16Mbps (Token Ring) was godly and ferociously expensive. I can go on and on ... but we're already well into "Back in my day, we walked uphill to school--both ways. And we counted our bits by hand." territory. Even in universities, 1988-89-ish was just at the point where using ftp to pull a .tgz from somewhere might actually be faster than sending a physical letter through the mail and having them mail you a magtape in return. And you sent a physical letter because very few people in a university at the time had an email address that was generally accessible. For God's sake, in 1988 /etc/hosts could still enumerate in an actual file every single host on the ARPAnet. The amount of technical change from 1990 to 1999 was ENORMOUS.
      - binarysneaker 6y ago
        Thanks for the memories :)
- anthonybullard 6y ago
  This is a good point. As supply of commercial real estate is restricted, rents increase and the impetus to reduce sq footage per employee increases. Also, open offices have been around - and common - for a long time. They called them bullpens and engineers, reporters, stock traders, and many more low-level professionals worked that way. We think of office professionals because they are the ones movies get made about.
- alexashka 6y ago
  Building new towns and cities you mean right? There is a limit to the number of skyscrapers within a square mile before you've reached a dystopia. People confuse sane citizens not wanting a dystopian skyscraper-city with nimby-ism - wouldn't you rather drive with half the number of people on the roads? People who live somewhere feel the same way about their neighbourhood. Who's supposed to build new towns and cities? Gasp I'll say the forbidden word - government. Gasp the government can be a solution, not a source of problems? Yes my dear friend - you only need to implement a few laws, such as public hanging of corrupt politicians and businessmen. Gasp but aren't those the same people who decide the laws? No my dear friend, we the people decide, and we've decided to be a bunch of selfish, lazy, pathetic losers lately. Maybe this pandemic will be a wake-up call to some of you.
ghaff 6y ago
The "norm" pre-cubicle was more along the lines of some offices plus large open bullpens. But it did vary. Offices for at least most engineers were more common in the 70s/80s than today.
onemoresoop 6y ago
They pressed a lever to raise the extracted value from the workers is my guess
SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
I did some googling and found this article (I don't care much for the layout, but stay with it for the pictures). It seems like the 70's you're thinking of is a blip in time, and we've instead regressed back to the open office plan of old. https://www.morganlovell.co.uk/the-evolution-of-office-design https://www.morganlovell.co.uk/the-evolution-of-office-desig...
wwweston 6y ago
This is a really good question. I don't think there are a lot of good normative answers -- I dislike open offices and cubes aren't much better (and at present, I'd especially have trouble regarding a management team that's still on board with them with either respect or trust). But I'd guess the descriptive answer is that the open office is essentially the new factory floor. Many information age jobs look "white collar" but at a certain level, they function and are viewed through a widget-factory management lens.
- cosmodisk 6y ago
  I think a lot if people don't realise that they are the new factory workers,only the production line is at their desks. It makes me laugh how some office people think they are very smart and often look down to those who don't work in an office.Ffs Jenny, you just sending emails to people all day long,you aren't doing rocket science here..
ThrowawayB7 6y ago
Microsoft used to have private offices as well that didn't take all that much seniority to get. Much like the FAANGs, it was a competitive place to get into and stay in, so productivity monitoring wasn't a thing.
- Ididntdothis 6y ago
  I remember they always pointed to private offices as one of their productivity boosters.
deadbunny 6y ago
Because - in the UK at least - unions have successfully been demonized and defanged over the last 40 years.

thrower123 6y ago

It's not really unrealistic. Maybe the fish tank... Why pay someone six figures and bombard them with distractions and noise and render them useless? To save a couple hundreds of dollars in office space per person a month? It's moronic.

dominotw 6y ago
> pay someone six figures I assume by 'everyone' GP isn't referring just to software people.

rootusrootus 6y ago

I've thought for a while that conference rooms with desks would work pretty well. Though it definitely depends on your team. Wouldn't need to go grab a room everytime you wanted to have a team discussion. Could play music if you all agreed. Etc. Maybe they could even do themed rooms. This is the rock & roll room, this the country room, etc. Ha!

pjc50 6y ago
One of the best collaborative environments I've ever had was a repurposed conference room; the three of us, all in our early 20s, two devs and a consultant who did what we would now call the "product owner" and some of the coding, had the small space to ourselves. It was off in a corner of the building, so nobody would "drop in while passing" either. We called it the "war room", after Dr Strangelove. It was a huge success and we got a complex product built in a few months. Unfortunately that was 2001 and the client went bankrupt without ever paying the invoice and we were all made redundant over the next few months.
- Ididntdothis 6y ago
  My company still does this when something really needs to be done. Several people who are working on the project in one room with full focus. But weirdly as soon as it's done the team gets dispersed into the cube farm and the headsets go back on.
aksss 6y ago
My first programming job back at Corp hq (not client site) was like this : three people in a room with an external window, a door and private cubes. It was great for morale and productivity. That was 20 years ago.

Ididntdothis 6y ago

This was the standard when I started working in the 90s. 2-6 people in an office and gasp a window with daylight. You could actually really collaborate in that environment and have a discussion without bothering neighbors. Much less meeting rooms needed because often you could talk out things straight in the office. For me the best setup I have ever worked in.

ken 6y ago

How much do knowledge workers cost? A leather chair and fish tank would be some of the cheapest perks ever.

paxys 6y ago
Commercial office space is the problem
- beervirus 6y ago
  It's gotta be pretty cheap right now...
cosmodisk 6y ago
The leather chair and the fish tank part wasn't about the cost. What I meant is that there's no need to go the radical way claiming everyone should get a private office, however even having only small number of people working in a room would be a huge improvement to open space planning.
kbr2000 6y ago
Heh, that depends on how many "minutes of real, actual work" done [0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iiOEQOtBlQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iiOEQOtBlQ
- walshemj 6y ago
  IBM found a 15% performance increase in private offices.

rantwasp 6y ago

yeah. the fish tank would be overkill. but to have a private office is totally doable. factor in the productivity gains and it's not only doable but it's actually cheaper than the current clusterf open space situation. also, up until 5-10ish years ago this was the standard at Microsoft for example where you would get your own office, or if you were a newb you had to share an office with someone else. let that sink in. the current state of affairs is something we have concocted in the last 10ish years - because savings.