12 ms·

I think leadership at many of these companies have their wires crossed in terms of messaging but also expectations and ideas about what they want to extract out

by shmatt 4y ago

I think leadership at many of these companies have their wires crossed in terms of messaging but also expectations and ideas about what they want to extract out of employees They always start with return to office = productivity, which people push back on, because the office is full of 2 hour lunch breaks and water cooler discussions about fantasy football. Then discourse gets worse when CEOs talk about the "overemployed" and people running errands during a work day. If we're talking lines of codes written nothing beats working at home for most But you're right, there is a ton to learn during those 2 hour lunches, pulling people in to impromptu meetings, and socializing as a whole The messaging needs to be fixed, expectations adjusted, people should be empowered to both work heads down at home, and do less head down work at the office

mulmen 4y ago
There's another problem in that the modern office is not optimized for the really valuable interactions. There is some idea way up in the clouds about free communication and sharing ideas that manifests as open floor plans. What we really need are small quiet areas to focus and do work and separate large areas for socialization and collaboration. The modern office doesn't actually facilitate any of this. When I was a newbie I sat in a cube across the hall from my boss' private office and next to the kitchen. It was actually really nice. I was in a quiet corner of the office and had full height cube walls with bookshelves and a big whiteboard all to myself. But I could turn around and ask my boss a question or walk less than 30 feet to talk to any of the senior engineers, who all had private offices which doubled as collaboration spaces. The spontaneous interactions happened around the espresso machine. In hindsight it was wonderful but if you looked at that building from the outside you might think it was an outdated dump. We got bought out by a company in silicon valley and they moved us to a new building with an open floorplan and sat us next to the sales team. It was big and bright but we lost all our collaboration space.
- sefrost 4y ago
  I would love a private office. It wouldn't need to be very big - and it wouldn't even need a door. Just a door frame without a door on it would be fine. I guess it's not even private in that sense, I just don't like people standing behind me. Quite often in online discussions I notice people mention the move to open plan offices. I'm 31 and I've never known anything but open plan offices (apart from WFH). When did the switch to open plan offices happen? Did people have private offices before that or was it only cubicles?
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    From 1993-1994 and 1997-2002, I had private offices, one person [a few doubles] with a real, solid door. I’m class of ‘93, so this was most of my first decade with everyone having them. I then went back to private offices for most of 2009-2016, but that was as a Director/plus with devs in cubes. After 2016, even VPs went into cubes, which I hated.
    - oblio 4y ago
      Cubes are a luxury. Now all you get is a 1.5m tall panel in front of you, if you're lucky, and rows with 4-6 coworkers next to you and the same number behind you, and probably 30+ people in the same open space. I would have killed for actual cubicles at my past... 5 jobs.
      - mulmen 4y ago
        Yeah. At the beginning of my career I had full height cubes. Now I don't even have an assigned desk. It's all first-come-first-serve "hotel" desks with short partitions on the desk itself in an otherwise open workspace. Strangely we also have lockers for personal items, like I am going to pack up and redeploy my pencil cup and succulents every day.
        amalcon 3y ago
        Those lockers are great for ergonomic keyboards, but I don't think I've ever heard of someone using one for anything else.
        WWLink 3y ago
        > It's all first-come-first-serve "hotel" desks with short partitions on the desk itself in an otherwise open workspace. Honestly I hate those 'partitions'. Why bother? They're so stupid and pointless. It's ironic because they actually hinder collaboration and pair programming since they're never removable lol. If we're going to all sit together at a big table we might as well see each other lol.
- oblio 4y ago
  > There is some idea way up in the clouds about free communication and sharing ideas that manifests as open floor plans. It's just bullshit covering cost cutting. Same for flexible/agile desks.
  - mulmen 4y ago
    That seems incredibly short-sighted given the price in (ironically) lost productivity. Is there some new school of philosophy among the management class that doesn't believe in spending money to make money? How exactly do we create value without investment? I think there's an enormous opportunity out there for a company that actually treats their employees with respect and pays attention to their needs. That includes saying "we are big enough".
    - 6510 3y ago
      > Is there some new school of philosophy among the management class that doesn't believe in spending money to make money? Yeah! Your salary scales with the number of underlings you command while the number of underlings depends on what task was assigned to the department. You can't add in some fully unproductive people nor can you assign someone to be unproductive thus therefore and so on the hip choice is to gradually lower everyone's productivity. You might see a pattern of counter productive measures if you look for it.
      - mulmen 3y ago
        Woah. This… actually makes sense.
- PeterisP 3y ago
  I work in an environment which has rooms for 3-4 desks, maybe 2 or 5 in some. This results in good communication and collaboration within a project team without the excessive noise of a full pen office, and if you have just a couple colleagues there then you also get a "feel" for when they need to focus and when a discussion would be good.
whatshisface 4y ago
>The messaging needs to be fixed The present messaging accurately reflects how managers are seeing the situation (they think employees goof off when they aren't being watched, and don't have the metrics necessary to tell that's not true), replacing it with "messaging" about career development is essentially lying just to get people to go along with RTO. If they really cared about young professionals that wouldn't be "changing the messaging."
- ok_dad 4y ago
  I goof off a lot more working from home through the day, but at the same time I get more done at night and on weekends. The best part about working from home is that I don't have to sit in front of a screen from 9-5 from Mon-Fri, I can sit down anytime I get the motivation to do so and get my work done. I guarantee that if I were in an office, I would have been burnt out and quit my job by now, but instead I'm able to just not work much for several days if it doesn't suit me, then finish up my work in a 20-hour blast on a Saturday. What's it matter to my boss or company when I get work done as long as it is complete prior to the due date? Probably those managers that hate "goofing off" don't realize that's not the same as not doing your work. When I was in the Navy, my sailors would goof off all the damn time, but I let them because telling sailors not to goof off goes against their nature! They still got the work done.
908B64B197 4y ago
> Then discourse gets worse when CEOs talk about the "overemployed" and people running errands during a work day. They completely lose credibility when bringing up those points. Errands are nothing compared to the ~2h per day of commute people save.
aeturnum 3y ago
I agree that "in office" culture implicitly values informal, face-to-face interactions that happen "for free" if you are in office. The problem, in an increasingly globalized world, is that it's only "free" for the company - the employee commutes (and buys lunch, etc). I also find the casual interactions in-office valuable - but I'm not going to "eat" the cost of enabling them for the good of the company. If someone actually offered me an in-office position that took the time I spent enabling those interactions seriously (i.e. compensated me for them) - I would be a lot more receptive to returning! Instead, companies tend to want it both ways: they want their employees to donate the time to get the benefits of working in-office, then they want to use the same employees lower raw productivity stats to fire them down the line. I'm old enough to recognize such an obvious trap.
- midoridensha 3y ago
  >The problem, in an increasingly globalized world, is that it's only "free" for the company - the employee commutes (and buys lunch, etc). Maybe this needs to be changed then. Employers should be paying commuting expenses anyway: here in Japan, this is the norm. And large employers could also be providing free lunch as well.
  - Larrikin 3y ago
    Having a free zone between home and work was somewhat of a perk in Tokyo, but I don't know if you can really quantify it as a perk anymore now that WFH is common and you don't have to waste time on a crowded train. Maybe pay a higher salary to compensate for time during the commute as well as the paid for PASMO.
  - piva00 3y ago
    In Brazil transportation and food allowances are also pretty common benefits (at least for office workers). Back when I worked there it was transitioning from paper tickets to cards. It's so common to the point where an employer not offering those are seen as extremely cheap ones that you should avoid.
- jgraettinger1 3y ago
javier2 3y ago
The 2 hour lunches are actually useful once a week. Sitting at your desk is even less a guarantee anyone is working. Its a fools errand to try to micromanage that.

by shmatt 4y ago

mulmen 4y ago

There's another problem in that the modern office is not optimized for the really valuable interactions. There is some idea way up in the clouds about free communication and sharing ideas that manifests as open floor plans. What we really need are small quiet areas to focus and do work and separate large areas for socialization and collaboration. The modern office doesn't actually facilitate any of this. When I was a newbie I sat in a cube across the hall from my boss' private office and next to the kitchen. It was actually really nice. I was in a quiet corner of the office and had full height cube walls with bookshelves and a big whiteboard all to myself. But I could turn around and ask my boss a question or walk less than 30 feet to talk to any of the senior engineers, who all had private offices which doubled as collaboration spaces. The spontaneous interactions happened around the espresso machine. In hindsight it was wonderful but if you looked at that building from the outside you might think it was an outdated dump. We got bought out by a company in silicon valley and they moved us to a new building with an open floorplan and sat us next to the sales team. It was big and bright but we lost all our collaboration space.

sefrost 4y ago
I would love a private office. It wouldn't need to be very big - and it wouldn't even need a door. Just a door frame without a door on it would be fine. I guess it's not even private in that sense, I just don't like people standing behind me. Quite often in online discussions I notice people mention the move to open plan offices. I'm 31 and I've never known anything but open plan offices (apart from WFH). When did the switch to open plan offices happen? Did people have private offices before that or was it only cubicles?
- sokoloff 4y ago
  From 1993-1994 and 1997-2002, I had private offices, one person [a few doubles] with a real, solid door. I’m class of ‘93, so this was most of my first decade with everyone having them. I then went back to private offices for most of 2009-2016, but that was as a Director/plus with devs in cubes. After 2016, even VPs went into cubes, which I hated.
  - oblio 4y ago
    Cubes are a luxury. Now all you get is a 1.5m tall panel in front of you, if you're lucky, and rows with 4-6 coworkers next to you and the same number behind you, and probably 30+ people in the same open space. I would have killed for actual cubicles at my past... 5 jobs.
    - mulmen 4y ago
      Yeah. At the beginning of my career I had full height cubes. Now I don't even have an assigned desk. It's all first-come-first-serve "hotel" desks with short partitions on the desk itself in an otherwise open workspace. Strangely we also have lockers for personal items, like I am going to pack up and redeploy my pencil cup and succulents every day.
      - amalcon 3y ago
        Those lockers are great for ergonomic keyboards, but I don't think I've ever heard of someone using one for anything else.
      - WWLink 3y ago
        > It's all first-come-first-serve "hotel" desks with short partitions on the desk itself in an otherwise open workspace. Honestly I hate those 'partitions'. Why bother? They're so stupid and pointless. It's ironic because they actually hinder collaboration and pair programming since they're never removable lol. If we're going to all sit together at a big table we might as well see each other lol.
oblio 4y ago
> There is some idea way up in the clouds about free communication and sharing ideas that manifests as open floor plans. It's just bullshit covering cost cutting. Same for flexible/agile desks.
- mulmen 4y ago
  That seems incredibly short-sighted given the price in (ironically) lost productivity. Is there some new school of philosophy among the management class that doesn't believe in spending money to make money? How exactly do we create value without investment? I think there's an enormous opportunity out there for a company that actually treats their employees with respect and pays attention to their needs. That includes saying "we are big enough".
  - 6510 3y ago
    > Is there some new school of philosophy among the management class that doesn't believe in spending money to make money? Yeah! Your salary scales with the number of underlings you command while the number of underlings depends on what task was assigned to the department. You can't add in some fully unproductive people nor can you assign someone to be unproductive thus therefore and so on the hip choice is to gradually lower everyone's productivity. You might see a pattern of counter productive measures if you look for it.
    - mulmen 3y ago
      Woah. This… actually makes sense.
PeterisP 3y ago
I work in an environment which has rooms for 3-4 desks, maybe 2 or 5 in some. This results in good communication and collaboration within a project team without the excessive noise of a full pen office, and if you have just a couple colleagues there then you also get a "feel" for when they need to focus and when a discussion would be good.

whatshisface 4y ago

>The messaging needs to be fixed The present messaging accurately reflects how managers are seeing the situation (they think employees goof off when they aren't being watched, and don't have the metrics necessary to tell that's not true), replacing it with "messaging" about career development is essentially lying just to get people to go along with RTO. If they really cared about young professionals that wouldn't be "changing the messaging."

ok_dad 4y ago
I goof off a lot more working from home through the day, but at the same time I get more done at night and on weekends. The best part about working from home is that I don't have to sit in front of a screen from 9-5 from Mon-Fri, I can sit down anytime I get the motivation to do so and get my work done. I guarantee that if I were in an office, I would have been burnt out and quit my job by now, but instead I'm able to just not work much for several days if it doesn't suit me, then finish up my work in a 20-hour blast on a Saturday. What's it matter to my boss or company when I get work done as long as it is complete prior to the due date? Probably those managers that hate "goofing off" don't realize that's not the same as not doing your work. When I was in the Navy, my sailors would goof off all the damn time, but I let them because telling sailors not to goof off goes against their nature! They still got the work done.

908B64B197 4y ago

> Then discourse gets worse when CEOs talk about the "overemployed" and people running errands during a work day. They completely lose credibility when bringing up those points. Errands are nothing compared to the ~2h per day of commute people save.

aeturnum 3y ago

I agree that "in office" culture implicitly values informal, face-to-face interactions that happen "for free" if you are in office. The problem, in an increasingly globalized world, is that it's only "free" for the company - the employee commutes (and buys lunch, etc). I also find the casual interactions in-office valuable - but I'm not going to "eat" the cost of enabling them for the good of the company. If someone actually offered me an in-office position that took the time I spent enabling those interactions seriously (i.e. compensated me for them) - I would be a lot more receptive to returning! Instead, companies tend to want it both ways: they want their employees to donate the time to get the benefits of working in-office, then they want to use the same employees lower raw productivity stats to fire them down the line. I'm old enough to recognize such an obvious trap.

midoridensha 3y ago
>The problem, in an increasingly globalized world, is that it's only "free" for the company - the employee commutes (and buys lunch, etc). Maybe this needs to be changed then. Employers should be paying commuting expenses anyway: here in Japan, this is the norm. And large employers could also be providing free lunch as well.
- Larrikin 3y ago
  Having a free zone between home and work was somewhat of a perk in Tokyo, but I don't know if you can really quantify it as a perk anymore now that WFH is common and you don't have to waste time on a crowded train. Maybe pay a higher salary to compensate for time during the commute as well as the paid for PASMO.
- piva00 3y ago
  In Brazil transportation and food allowances are also pretty common benefits (at least for office workers). Back when I worked there it was transitioning from paper tickets to cards. It's so common to the point where an employer not offering those are seen as extremely cheap ones that you should avoid.
jgraettinger1 3y ago

javier2 3y ago

The 2 hour lunches are actually useful once a week. Sitting at your desk is even less a guarantee anyone is working. Its a fools errand to try to micromanage that.