5 ms·
Clickbait title because arstechnica is a garbage publication. Employees are expected to work 2 days a week out of the office, and will swap the desk with anoth
by JPKab 4y ago
Clickbait title because arstechnica is a garbage publication.
Employees are expected to work 2 days a week out of the office, and will swap the desk with another employee. They will not sit at the same desk at the same time.
Doing anything less is wasteful, and if Google was doing this before it was robbing investors.
- lovich 4y ago> Doing anything less is wasteful, and if Google was doing this before it was robbing investors. Overton window keeps moving in the direction of fuck the employees to benefit the shareholders I guess. Having a personalized space used to not be considered a perk but table stacks for working at a company not too long ago. I get that the employees aren’t in office all week but that’s kinda on google for not having enough desks given that they mandated a return to office.
- robswc 4y agoI honestly hate open offices so much. I'm constantly amazed any work gets done with the layout.
- JPKab 4y agoI despise them. I'm convinced that they became "cool" purely for two reasons: 1.) Bosses loved the feeling of superiority they had by having their own office but everyone else is sitting out in the open where they can easily see them all and bother them at a moment's notice. 2.) Fresh out of college grads would see them and get this feeling of a cool, buzzing, hypersocial hive that made them feel all good inside.
- robswc 4y agoYep, I will 100% admit they "look better" but I'm convinced productivity is not the same. I'm all for having "collaborative" spaces but surely the optimal environment is one where employees can get hours of work in without distraction. With an open office, the opportunity for distraction is practically everywhere.
- imroot 4y agoAccountants love the cost — you can not only save money on construction costs, you can squeeze more bodies in there…
- threatripper 4y agoAnd it's very easy to rearrange things if some departments grow or shrink.
- spacemadness 4y agoThe first time I was introduced to a massive open office space, they tried to play it off as exciting and it just filled me with an utter sense of dread. It caused a massive amount of stress then my brain compartmentalized it all and ran the stress subroutine in the background. Blaring bright lights overhead, endless chatting and movement in your perpipheral view, witn an absolute requirement to wear isolation headphones to get any concentration. Tech can be utterly barbaric.
- lost_tourist 4y agoI wouldn't have made it through my last consulting gig without headphones/earbuds and a 45" (114 cm for the more enlightened measurement connoisseurs among us) ultrawide screen to block 95% of my view that I bought and brought in to the office.
- AtlasBarfed 4y agoThe hilarious contradiction: Companies: please come back to the office Employees: why? Why have them at all? I don't have an "office" I have a small section of table. At home I have an office. Companies: we invested money in these work spaces and want them to be used Employees: you mean the shitty open space you moved to in order to save money rather than real "offices"? the ones that make us provably/demonstrably less productive than being at our home offices? If its about money, get rid of them entirely. Companies: Um, yes. It helps build interaction and community Employees: No, being shoved together like cattle breeds resentment and irritation and distraction and a feeling of no privacy or ability to think. Companies: Just come back to the office. It's about buy-in Employees: You mean the buy-in you refuse to provide for reasonable work spaces?
- robswc 4y agoYep! I mean honestly, a rather nice "perk" of working with a company could be a private office, almost like an extension of your home... but within reason. They have the building anyways. Similar to how professors at university usually have such an office. With how much remote work has taken off and how much companies want to bring at least some people, this is certainly a perk that I would consider.
- JPKab 4y agoWould you pay to rent a car for 5 days if you were only going to drive it for 2 days? You wouldn't, because you care about your own money. Why is it that we pretend like "shareholders" are these mythical beasts that are different than us? I have money in the stock market. You probably do as well. Why does your money suddenly become ok to waste if it's invested in a company? 5 days a week, yes, everyone gets their own desk. You don't want them having their productivity hurt by being crammed in like sardines. But in this case, let's be real. Nobody but the most OCD germophobe is going to have lower productivity because they are sitting in a desk that someone else was in a day before.
- Adraghast 4y agoRead the comments on this post alone. It affects morale. Morale affect productivity, no germaphobia required.
- lovich 4y agoWould you pay to keep inventory on the shelves when you could do JiT delivery of parts and keep expenditure on stocks at a minimum? Did not having spare capacity work out for car companies when the logistics chain was disrupted during Covid? I bring this up as an example because you seem to be(and this is entirely my interpretation that could be incorrect) implying that the spare capacity of the space per person is always a negative to be ruthlessly optimized out. I would posit that it has benefits like morale that need to be evaluated as a tradeoff. That's also ignoring the whole point that they demanded the workers return to the office and then didn't invest in making that possible, so now workers are dealing with the worst of both worlds. >Nobody but the most OCD germophobe is going to have lower productivity because they are sitting in a desk that someone else was in a day before. I wouldn't expect germaphobia to be the issue, it's the constant change that prevents employees from getting into a routine. We all already know that software engineers need to get into the zone to be productive, which takes time and becoming comfortable with what they are working on. How easy is that going to be when you have to adapt to a new environment everytime you go to work and reset up your workstation in the manner that works for the engineer?
- Imnimo 4y agoI go even further - I OWN a car I don't drive every day. I don't even split it with my neighbor.
- chmod600 4y agoMaybe change happens for a good reason sometimes? Engineers no longer have secretaries, file cabinets, etc. We have all this technology to help us organize things, is an individual office still the right thing? I get the value of quiet time, I just don't feel like it's lost. Still plenty of places to hide. Maybe I'm an outlier.
- flangola7 4y agoI can't think of any place I've worked where I had my own dedicated seat. There's 168 hours in a week that seat could be used and I only need it for 40.
- marssaxman 4y agoWhat industry do you work in?
- hindsightbias 4y agoIf they could just optimize search to be as useful.
- wly_cdgr 4y agoChill, bro, it's not that heavy
- naikrovek 4y ago> arstechnica is a garbage publication. hmm... disagree. strongly. have you seen the quality of some publications? surely the line between garbage and not-garbage is lower than this. unless you are someone who considers something extremely political to be the only good publication or something; I hope not
- JPKab 4y agoI hate political stuff. I used to like arstechnica but it's degraded into what I am complaining about. The title of the article implies that people are crammed in desks next to each other by being purposefully vague.
- naikrovek 4y agowell the headline says that employees are being told they must share desks and the article says the same thing. maybe the headline put a different picture in your mind than what the article said, but the headline seems ok to me. if you wrote the headline for that article, what would it say?
- victor106 4y ago> arstechnica is a garbage publication. 100% this. I think they were good about 10 years ago. Now they are just garbage
- poisonborz 4y agoWhy tho? They still deliver great on topics in a tone and depth not many do (eg. popular science). I do agree their comment section became comprised of bitter 50+ people.
- rhaway84773 4y agoThey’re pretty good. The problem is that the clickbaity stuff becomes viral. Which is why the clickbaity stuff exists. The real issue is that readers like you and me are garbage and reward publications for the garbage they write. The good stuff won’t even get a fraction of the views.
- tennisflyi 4y ago"Hot desk" aren't new, but not something from the calibre of Google.
- JPKab 4y agoIt's not 2010 anymore. Google sucks to work at if you're a talented engineer that actually wants to do impactful things. In fairness I should specify that there are a few teams at Google that do amazing things but the vast majority of the employees are just cogs in a vast machine. This article sums it up: https://medium.com/@pravse/the-maze-is-in-the-mouse-980c57cfd61a https://medium.com/@pravse/the-maze-is-in-the-mouse-980c57cf...