5 ms·
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 w
by 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 agoCubes 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 agoYeah. 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 4y agoThose lockers are great for ergonomic keyboards, but I don't think I've ever heard of someone using one for anything else.
- WWLink 4y 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 agoI like them because I don't like people seeing my screen all the time. I like the sensation of privacy.
- sokoloff 4y agoThey are usually removable by loosening some clamping bolts that are hidden somewhere. Where there’s a will and tools, there’s a way…
- oblio 4y agoMany companies don't look kindly to unauthorized changes to their office infrastructure, even more so for agile desks. And even if the relevant people are ok with you, you might piss off a power hungry middle manager that doesn't like someone standing out (had that happen to me).
- mulmen 4y agoAs a peer please don’t fuck with our shared environment. You’re just going to make it worse.
- midasuni 4y agoDo you have a dedicated desk? When I stopped office work in 2012 that had pretty much gone. First come first serve
- oblio 4y agoI used to have one up until the last company, in 2020. But I did have an episode of about 1 year of flex desk before that.
- mulmen 4y agoI would love to know more about this trend. It fascinates me that we have settled on something that is so widely hated. It seems correlated with the decline in UI design. 30 years ago we had ideas of how people interact with computers which we had built up over decades. What appear to be dated UIs like Windows 3.1 or even XP actually had a lot of thought and care put into them, with sound reasoning. The modern take seems fixated on minor details without any holistic vision or even reason. How did we get so bad at decision making? It seems like we stopped valuing insight in favor of data. But without insight we just chase the data we have.
- sokoloff 4y agoSomething which is hated by the not-decision-makers but costs 25-40% as much of a big number will be overwhelmingly chosen by the are-decision-makers.
- mulmen 4y agoYeah, this reinforces another perception I have. Which is that we have lost any concept of opportunity cost. We might save on commercial real estate but what is the cost in productivity, innovation, and ultimately profit?
- JPws_Prntr_Fngr 4y agoOpportunity cost is a concept from microeconomics, a field completely alien to the vast majority of the managerial strata, in my experience; any lingering principles from microecon 101 having been long since replaced by MBA dogma.
- piva00 4y agoThose metrics demand a much deeper and proper investigation of data to materialise into a quantifiable way for management, management is pretty blind to anything that isn't easy-to-crunch numbers. Probably due to education in most MBA curricula. Everyone who has worked in an open plan office knows the pains, the constant interruptions, not only from chatter or shoulder taps but the incessant movement of people around, the alertness of being aware of people behind you, so on and so forth, but those are not easily quantifiable. Much like UX, to build a case for something that empirically most of us know is better takes a lot more effort than some bean counters/MBAs pointing to a number in a spreadsheet.