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Before the pandemic and surge of remote work, a lot of us complained not just about going to the office, but that the office itself was pretty crappy. The open
by abeppu 4y ago
Before the pandemic and surge of remote work, a lot of us complained not just about going to the office, but that the office itself was pretty crappy. The open plan creates an environment of high distraction, low privacy, and physical discomfort. Whether or not people wanted to listen to music or anything for hours at a time, they were pushed to do it just to drown out a constant background noise of words that are highly salient in your problem domain. You're probably constrained to the desk or chair set up that your office manager picked. The bottom line is you're spending a lot of time in an environment about which you may have zero input or control.
At home, I can work in silence if I want. If I want background noise, I can play music on a stereo or turn on the TV in the next room. When my back hurts, I can lie down on the sofa, or stretch and foam roll in a way which would be conspicuous in the office. I can be barefoot all day if I want. I can snack on the food that I like enough to buy, without broadcasting the pretention of bringing my own food to the micro kitchen. I can eat healthier lunches than the office catered food. Even without considering commuting, or the amount of time spent in synchronous interactions, just being able to control my own space is sooo much more comfortable. I injured my back this year, and taking care of it has been so much easier at home than it would have been in open plan hell.
A bunch of that stuff is nominally compatible with being "in the office" -- just give me a private office, with real walls, the ability to buy my own furniture, etc. But tech long ago decided that engineers get cubicles or open plan desks, that the way you know we're working is seeing that we're looking at screens rather than seeing our actual output, that a clean modern spaceship aesthetic is more important than workers being able to control or customize their workspace. Is it that we don't value the office, or that the office has been created by people who don't value us?
- organsnyder 4y agoExactly this. My last in-office job was an open floorplan where I had over fifty colleagues in my direct line-of-sight. The only conversations that took place in the open office were about sports or Game of Thrones—real work conversations happened in conference rooms (when they were available). One team decided to turn a small open area near my desk into their own "conference room", but the rollable whiteboards they used as "walls" didn't block any sound, especially from their speakerphone.
- abeppu 4y agoOr I guess to make it slightly more explicit: - prior to the pandemic and the surge in remote work, people were already talking about how offices are set up in a way which can be unnecessarily miserable, but crams more people in the same space, minimizing real estate cost per head. - but even though in my city, there's now a giant glut of vacant commercial office space, I've yet to see a single company make the pitch: we'll give you a private office if you come in to work face to face. - things become clearer if we frame this using a term with some history: working conditions. White-collar workers that have never unionized are now pushing for greater control of their working conditions. A partial list of grievances has been a subject of public discussion for years. Some employers are willing to deal with remote work as a bundled solution to multiple issues, but so far I've seen no employers who are willing to meaningfully compromise on what the office looks like.
- personalidea 4y agoThe place I am working at has an online booking system for all the desks available the entire office building (~14 floors) and while there are no private one person rooms, the offices are 4-8 seats and there is enough vacancies to find a quiet spot. Plus you get to know people from different departments by sitting in different areas of the building. Works pretty well. On top, my team could decide to only have a presence day every two weeks and we have that as a meetings day where there is no expectation to write code or do focused work but socialize. I found that this I am in favor of a hybrid setup like this. For the reasons stated in the post, I really do like coming together in person and at the same time I am a parent that appreciates the time saved when working remote from home most days.
- spelunker 4y agoOur team has decided to go in one day a week, and one day a week I am reminded why open work environments are awful. Mostly-remote work actually made it worse because there are multiple people near me who are now in wall-to-wall virtual meetings all day and just take them at their desk!
- skirmish 4y agoIndeed. I noticed my hearing was getting worse since in office I kept increasing music volume in (futile) attempts to block out chatterboxes at the next desk. Destroying your health is not worth whatever faster promotions in-office work promises.
- hkxer 4y agoNoise canceling headphones?
- jjav 4y agoNoise canceling headphones don't do anything against human voices, which is the noise problem in open offices.
- collyw 4y agoGet some of the muffler things for building sites. One of my previous workspaces had a couple of these siting around.
- ornornor 4y agoA colleague of mine used them at a previous job. I started wearing them too because they work well but also as a passive aggressive FU to whoever designed these open office floor plans (the ear protectors are usually bright colors like yellow so there is no mistaking them for headphones) We’re treated like assembly line workers in more and more companies anyway so why not also start wearing the PPE that goes with it?
- ManlyBread 4y agoThat's not really something I'd consider to be a perk of that office...
- beaugunderson 4y agoI have a pair of Sony wh-1000xm3 and wh-1000xm5 and they definitely block out human voices, for me at least.
- haho4 4y agoOpen Office, 1 hour commute each way in crappy transportation. No thank you.
- collyw 4y agoI find communication over messenger apps at least as distracting as the office.
- Zedronar 4y agoThere are usually ways for you as a user to customize these apps and make them less distracting (e.g. "Settings -> Notifications", etc).
- nikau 4y agoPlus that lazy category of people who seek help without even trying can be ignored for a few hours, and when you reply its usually "oh yeah i figured it out"
- recursive_ 4y agoWell summarized. I think a lot of people forget how anti-productive many working environments were before the pandemic. My employer at the time had us working in a retrofitted warehouse as software developers. Huge sprawling floor plans with cubicle farms thrown in. The sound acoustics of the building, lighting (sky lights mixed with arrays of fluorescent lights), and the shear amount of people walking around my desk made it nearly impossible to stay focused for any reasonable amount of time. This forced nearly all of us to use noise cancelling headphones which in turn killed any sort of social aspect of being in office.