16 ms·

It's a pain when someone in my teams meetings is in the office because of all the noise in the background. This makes me laugh because it's clear that there's

by t43562 3y ago

It's a pain when someone in my teams meetings is in the office because of all the noise in the background. This makes me laugh because it's clear that there's a lot of distraction going on there. "Communication" can also mean getting distracted or drawn into irrelevant discussion or being continuously interrupted by people wanting something. I think it's quite ridiculous to claim to value personal presence in an age where I'm working with people all day who are in other countries and other offices - even down the hall - and that's all happening by chat and email and teams meetings. I really think it's about the way some people manage lazily by looking to see if you're typing or not instead of looking at results and understanding the work. It's nice to meet people in person once or twice but I don't need to see any of them once a week or once a month. I only manage 3 people but I have to work with a lot of people to get things done and have to understand their personalities and points of view and what they're doing up to a point. I can't come up with a reason why I would want to be able to look over their shoulder.

gregoriol 3y ago
The noise and interruption problem can be about the same at home: whether it's the spouse, the children, the dog, a neighbour, some builders doing work in the street, ... You can only get quiet time if it is properly managed, and in an office it is more manageable to have private spaces instead of open spaces, than it is to have a separated office at home.
- offices 3y ago
  The discourse around offices is almost as if they didn't exist before COVID. This: > in an office it is more manageable to have private spaces instead of open spaces was largely unsuccessful almost everywhere and the trend was for more open, more distracting spaces as time progressed. It was to the point that complaining about open offices & wishing we could complain about cubicles like our predecessors was a tired topic on HN.
  - JKCalhoun 3y ago
    Were offices "unsuccessful"? Because I always assumed the open spaces trend was just pablum being served up by Corporate to take us (engineering) down a notch. The open work spaces thing too allowed for rapid over-hiring without having to have the real estate to back it up.
    - cmiles74 3y ago
      Agreed, it was always about reducing cost.
      - greedo 3y ago
        Not always. You have to include the fad component. Our company isn't cost constrained, nor were we hiring a ton of new talent. Yet we updated our office layout and furnishings 2x in the last 8 years to look "better." Never underestimate the desire to keep up with the Joneses.
        Lio 3y ago
        I definitely agree with this. Those huge open plan offices of the 1970s looked amazing in magazine photo-shoots. If you're C-suite suit you can really preside over a room like that. Like a newsroom bullpen seen from a balcony above, lots of noise, lots of activity. It's a just bummer if your job is to think carefully about stuff without distraction.
    - offices 3y ago
      I'm saying the concept of creating private working spaces was unsuccessful. IME workers tended towards tolerating distractions or wearing headphones. > I always assumed the open spaces trend was just pablum being served up by Corporate to take us (engineering) down a notch. I don't disagree with this though.
  - dickersnoodle 3y ago
    I once worked at a small company in Florida where there were "offices" but the office manager would talk on speaker phone from his office at the top of his lungs all day. I had the headphones on and the only way I could drown him out was to blast music at high volume, or to take my laptop out into the hallway and hunker down, or to invent reasons why I needed to work at home so I could work without those all-day interruptions. The office manager got shirty about that, since they rented me a parking space in an old bank branch about four blocks away from the office; told me I took "a lot of liberties". I got a strong "because I said so!" vibe from that, and I bounced not too long after. Your contributions to this thread read like ChatGPT being used by Business Insider to try and prop up the corporate real estate market.
- Aeolun 3y ago
  > in an office it is more manageable to have private spaces instead of open spaces, than it is to have a separated office at home The big difference is that the private space in my own home is under my control. A private space in the office is under the CIO’s control. I’ll let you guess how often they think a private space is worth spending money on.
  - x3874 3y ago
    > The big difference is that the private space in my own home is under my control. So you have definite control over spouse, the children, the dog, a neighbour, some builders doing work in the street, ...? Must be magical where you live. I observe this with coworkers every week: - their special needs offspring needs special attention - their neighbor is noisy and an Grade A jackass - cats meowing for minutes - the wife of someone interfering to assign him chores for lunch time - i personally am plagued by sirens of medical emergency transports during months when it gets hot under the roof here, multiple times a day / night
    - loloquwowndueo 3y ago
      What you are describing is inadequate remote working conditions - it will be just as bad as inadequate office working conditions. Adequate ones can be had if you give a crap about your work - get a dedicated room with a closable door, set expectations with your family, soundproof where needed - again not different from setting those kinds of boundaries in an office setting.
      - nh23423fefe 3y ago
        no true remote worker would be distracted at home
    - elcomet 3y ago
      You make it sound like it's the only solution but you don't *have* to work remotely from your home. You can rent an office close to your house.
- rcarmo 3y ago
  No office I've ever worked in had private spaces that were usable on a permanent basis by anyone other than senior management (who are thus oblivious to how the rest of their company actually spent their days). And I've been working since 1992.
  - cmiles74 3y ago
    This is something these companies, who are so eager to have people in the office, could easily change. With space so inexpensive and after the many layoffs, why not add more private offices for those who do come in?
  - gregoriol 3y ago
    It's not because it has been done like this, that it should still be done like this.
    - SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
      The current push to return to office is because that was the way things were done before. It doesn't seem likely that THIS change would be on management would go with either.
  - bamfly 3y ago
    Private offices, minimal monitoring, high pay, and lots of schedule autonomy, are perks of the higher tiers of management, and, more generally, are markers of upper-middle class norms in a work setting. Letting programmers have all those things would cause a great deal of class distress among managers ("why, these middles and proles [Fussell's terms] are getting the same perks as me, their superior! Now how are we going to distinguish between those and the upper-middle, at work?") so they try to avoid the ones they can. High pay, can't do much about that (though they do their best); schedule autonomy, not universally available, but in general we do OK there, at least; they've had a fair amount of success keeping us under frequent monitoring that would be seen as an intolerable insult if applied to higher tiers of management ("Agile" has been a huge boon for them); and private offices, ooooh boy, offices, they've managed to all but eliminate them for us, and we helped with the same free-spirit fuck-traditional-office-norms hacker attitude that (on the flip side) also got us some of that schedule autonomy. IOW we threaten their class security, if you will, and giving us private offices would be a big step in the wrong direction on that front, from their POV, especially since that's the one aspect of upper-middle work perks they've been the most successful at keeping us from accessing. The "professional class" set of the Fussellian upper-middle has been under steady attack, with only lawyers mostly still hanging on (non-lawyers can't own law practices, is probably the only reason, or they'd be under the thumbs of MBAs and private equity just like doctors are these days) such that higher tiers of management are increasingly the only remaining large group (sans lawyers) who still enjoy an 80s-style upper-middle life at both work and home, and I think they'd like to keep it that way. The last thing they want is a whole bunch of software dorks "leveling up" a class, and becoming their social peers. It was bad enough when the '80s-and-earlier "analysts" were kinda-sorta upper-middle—luckily they nipped that in the bud by combining "analyst" and "programmer" and ensuring the new role tended to get only the latter's social status.
- itsboring 3y ago
  Meh. I worked from home while we had a toddler and an infant, now a first grader and pre-schooler. I’m not going to claim it didn’t have its challenges, but even at its worst it was better than commuting. I did some of the best work of my career during COVID lockdown. I was genuinely happy with life.
- lolinder 3y ago
  > and in an office it is more manageable to have private spaces instead of open spaces, than it is to have a separated office at home. It depends on who you work for and where you live. At my last job I refused to go back into the office, because when I was in there the boss would come in regularly to discuss the latest political blog he'd been reading. He's the one in charge of managing the quiet time, and he was a major extrovert who was terrible at it. Meanwhile at home, I have an 8x8 room that was once a closet and is now my office. It has a child lock on the outside to keep my kids out. I have a set of 37dB ear muffs that fit over my ear buds and block out basically all sound from outside. And I have control over my slack notifications and can ignore them until I'm ready. I need more quiet time than non-tech management thinks I do, and this way I get to manage it myself instead of making do with whatever management allows me.
thatsagreatcomm 3y ago
IMO you lose so much more by sacrificing spontaneous conversation & ideation that results. You also lose the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question. You also lose an unbelievable amount for anyone who lacks experience - training is AWFUL remote. Not even close. It's not perfect but a group of aligned people in the same physical working space will just dominate a similar group spread apart that has to use chats & zoom to communicate. Management has got to be seeing this, in various forms, across multiple business segments.
- steve1977 3y ago
  > You also lose the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question. Well, the person that got interrupted by you probably lost quite a bit of productivity because of you.
  - chrisallenlane 3y ago
    Yeah. One of my favorite things about working remote is that people can't do this to me. It's a feature, not a bug.
    - cdelsolar 3y ago
      Can you jump on a zoom real quick
      - sensanaty 3y ago
        I've literally never said yes to this question unless it was something incredibly urgent like prod being down or whatever.
      - mr_gibbins 3y ago
        triggered
      - zoover2020 3y ago
        Easy, just learn to push back or setup mechanisms like office hours to attend for folks whom are in need of support. Like security, the human chain will always be the weakest link here. If you don't have backbone to stand up for your own time, that's on you - not the remote work inherently IMO.
jraby3 3y ago
I have mixed feelings about this. I’m a partial owner of a company with 50 employees - about half are distributed. We used to meet 4-6x per year F2F pre COVID. Post COVID we’ve met twice in 2 years. I notice that people are much friendlier after we meet F2F. They remember that there’s a human who they know and have hung out with. This feeling fades as time passes. I don’t know what the right answer is, and I feel a little hypocritical living abroad and managing my team. But some things are definitely lost by solely working outside the office.
- bluefishinit 3y ago
  Some of the best teams have never seen each other face to face. You shouldn't have to rely on people meeting face to face to be nice to each other. It sounds like you have a larger cultural problem not associated with where people are working if that's an issue.
- EnragedParrot 3y ago
  I'm friendly and cordial with my coworkers, I don't need to be friends with them. The only thing that is missing for me is the pressure to pretend to want to spend social time with random people I only have contact with because our job responsibilities overlap. I always know there's another person on the other end of the Teams call, there's just less of a facade. All I want from my job is to log in, do my work well, and log off at the end of the day. I don't have holes in my social life that I need an employer to fill.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > I'm friendly and cordial with my coworkers, I don't need to be friends with them. This. My coworkers are colleagues. We have friendly professional relationships. But they are not my friends.
  - jraby3 3y ago
    I didn’t mean to hang out. It’s more that people get frustrated more easily and have less patience. Once they’ve seen each other, their are some warm feelings and friendliness that persist. We just spent a 3 day weekend at a casino, with food, drinks and some activities. I feel like there’s a big difference in the way people behave towards each other before and after the weekend.
bluefishinit 3y ago
One of the many benefits of working from home is that writing great software is heavily dependent on getting into a good "flow". Commuting alone absolutely destroys that for most people. When you work from home you drop so many stages and so much stress out of your morning routine. I find myself being productive within an hour of waking up. That's definitely not the case if I'm forced into an office. Especially if people start chatting me up once I get there (which always happens). Commuting home after a long day is soul destroying as well. It's time stolen from my personal life.
- dcow 3y ago
  I feel like this discussion is missing the hybrid part of the policy. 2 days at home for flow state work and 3 at the office to collaborate doesn't seem crazy. Maybe it should be 2-3 instead of 3-2 for some people, but in my experience the biggest productivity disruptor is meetings. And you’re only getting two “no meetings” days a week anyway. And the biggest downside from working at home is the hit to socializing and collaboration. You’ll hear anecdotes for days from both sides. A hybrid policy addresses both perspectives. Now if you just want to work for a fully remote company or in a remote role, why not take a job at a place where that’s the philosophy? And on the flip side, if companies want productive employees over the age of 28, and deliberately don’t want to be remote, maybe they should start providing offices instead of desk clusters…
  - troupe 3y ago
    If there is value in interacting in the office, hybrid work that has people coming in on random days seems almost like the worst of both worlds. If the value is to get face time with your teammates, then the in office days need to be aligned.
    - judge2020 3y ago
      The "solution" is for everyone on a team to come in on the same days.
      - 3y ago
makestuff 3y ago
To your first point it seems pretty clear to me their goal is to have everyone on the team in the same office so meetings are in person.
karaterobot 3y ago
> This makes me laugh because it's clear that there's a lot of distraction going on there. No, no. I think you mean there's a lot of creativity and community going on in the background. What you're hearing is serendipitous collaboration popping off like fireworks. Just kidding, open plan offices offices suck.
_raoulcousins 3y ago
This is a huge problem for me! Frequently I can't hear people at all. My team is fully remote from each other, but we're all required to go into one of the company's offices five days a week. The worst of both worlds.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Gigachad 3y ago
This says more to how shitty calls are. To a group in person, that background noise is hardly noticeable, but it becomes completely debilitating to a call. I'd be interested to dig more in to why, I guess the microphones on laptops are just not as good as our ears at picking up closer noises with priority or something.

by t43562 3y ago

gregoriol 3y ago

The noise and interruption problem can be about the same at home: whether it's the spouse, the children, the dog, a neighbour, some builders doing work in the street, ... You can only get quiet time if it is properly managed, and in an office it is more manageable to have private spaces instead of open spaces, than it is to have a separated office at home.

offices 3y ago
The discourse around offices is almost as if they didn't exist before COVID. This: > in an office it is more manageable to have private spaces instead of open spaces was largely unsuccessful almost everywhere and the trend was for more open, more distracting spaces as time progressed. It was to the point that complaining about open offices & wishing we could complain about cubicles like our predecessors was a tired topic on HN.
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  Were offices "unsuccessful"? Because I always assumed the open spaces trend was just pablum being served up by Corporate to take us (engineering) down a notch. The open work spaces thing too allowed for rapid over-hiring without having to have the real estate to back it up.
  - cmiles74 3y ago
    Agreed, it was always about reducing cost.
    - greedo 3y ago
      Not always. You have to include the fad component. Our company isn't cost constrained, nor were we hiring a ton of new talent. Yet we updated our office layout and furnishings 2x in the last 8 years to look "better." Never underestimate the desire to keep up with the Joneses.
      - Lio 3y ago
        I definitely agree with this. Those huge open plan offices of the 1970s looked amazing in magazine photo-shoots. If you're C-suite suit you can really preside over a room like that. Like a newsroom bullpen seen from a balcony above, lots of noise, lots of activity. It's a just bummer if your job is to think carefully about stuff without distraction.
  - offices 3y ago
    I'm saying the concept of creating private working spaces was unsuccessful. IME workers tended towards tolerating distractions or wearing headphones. > I always assumed the open spaces trend was just pablum being served up by Corporate to take us (engineering) down a notch. I don't disagree with this though.
- dickersnoodle 3y ago
  I once worked at a small company in Florida where there were "offices" but the office manager would talk on speaker phone from his office at the top of his lungs all day. I had the headphones on and the only way I could drown him out was to blast music at high volume, or to take my laptop out into the hallway and hunker down, or to invent reasons why I needed to work at home so I could work without those all-day interruptions. The office manager got shirty about that, since they rented me a parking space in an old bank branch about four blocks away from the office; told me I took "a lot of liberties". I got a strong "because I said so!" vibe from that, and I bounced not too long after. Your contributions to this thread read like ChatGPT being used by Business Insider to try and prop up the corporate real estate market.
Aeolun 3y ago
> in an office it is more manageable to have private spaces instead of open spaces, than it is to have a separated office at home The big difference is that the private space in my own home is under my control. A private space in the office is under the CIO’s control. I’ll let you guess how often they think a private space is worth spending money on.
- x3874 3y ago
  > The big difference is that the private space in my own home is under my control. So you have definite control over spouse, the children, the dog, a neighbour, some builders doing work in the street, ...? Must be magical where you live. I observe this with coworkers every week: - their special needs offspring needs special attention - their neighbor is noisy and an Grade A jackass - cats meowing for minutes - the wife of someone interfering to assign him chores for lunch time - i personally am plagued by sirens of medical emergency transports during months when it gets hot under the roof here, multiple times a day / night
  - loloquwowndueo 3y ago
    What you are describing is inadequate remote working conditions - it will be just as bad as inadequate office working conditions. Adequate ones can be had if you give a crap about your work - get a dedicated room with a closable door, set expectations with your family, soundproof where needed - again not different from setting those kinds of boundaries in an office setting.
    - nh23423fefe 3y ago
      no true remote worker would be distracted at home
  - elcomet 3y ago
    You make it sound like it's the only solution but you don't *have* to work remotely from your home. You can rent an office close to your house.
rcarmo 3y ago
No office I've ever worked in had private spaces that were usable on a permanent basis by anyone other than senior management (who are thus oblivious to how the rest of their company actually spent their days). And I've been working since 1992.
- cmiles74 3y ago
  This is something these companies, who are so eager to have people in the office, could easily change. With space so inexpensive and after the many layoffs, why not add more private offices for those who do come in?
- gregoriol 3y ago
  It's not because it has been done like this, that it should still be done like this.
  - SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
    The current push to return to office is because that was the way things were done before. It doesn't seem likely that THIS change would be on management would go with either.
- bamfly 3y ago
  Private offices, minimal monitoring, high pay, and lots of schedule autonomy, are perks of the higher tiers of management, and, more generally, are markers of upper-middle class norms in a work setting. Letting programmers have all those things would cause a great deal of class distress among managers ("why, these middles and proles [Fussell's terms] are getting the same perks as me, their superior! Now how are we going to distinguish between those and the upper-middle, at work?") so they try to avoid the ones they can. High pay, can't do much about that (though they do their best); schedule autonomy, not universally available, but in general we do OK there, at least; they've had a fair amount of success keeping us under frequent monitoring that would be seen as an intolerable insult if applied to higher tiers of management ("Agile" has been a huge boon for them); and private offices, ooooh boy, offices, they've managed to all but eliminate them for us, and we helped with the same free-spirit fuck-traditional-office-norms hacker attitude that (on the flip side) also got us some of that schedule autonomy. IOW we threaten their class security, if you will, and giving us private offices would be a big step in the wrong direction on that front, from their POV, especially since that's the one aspect of upper-middle work perks they've been the most successful at keeping us from accessing. The "professional class" set of the Fussellian upper-middle has been under steady attack, with only lawyers mostly still hanging on (non-lawyers can't own law practices, is probably the only reason, or they'd be under the thumbs of MBAs and private equity just like doctors are these days) such that higher tiers of management are increasingly the only remaining large group (sans lawyers) who still enjoy an 80s-style upper-middle life at both work and home, and I think they'd like to keep it that way. The last thing they want is a whole bunch of software dorks "leveling up" a class, and becoming their social peers. It was bad enough when the '80s-and-earlier "analysts" were kinda-sorta upper-middle—luckily they nipped that in the bud by combining "analyst" and "programmer" and ensuring the new role tended to get only the latter's social status.
itsboring 3y ago
Meh. I worked from home while we had a toddler and an infant, now a first grader and pre-schooler. I’m not going to claim it didn’t have its challenges, but even at its worst it was better than commuting. I did some of the best work of my career during COVID lockdown. I was genuinely happy with life.
lolinder 3y ago
> and in an office it is more manageable to have private spaces instead of open spaces, than it is to have a separated office at home. It depends on who you work for and where you live. At my last job I refused to go back into the office, because when I was in there the boss would come in regularly to discuss the latest political blog he'd been reading. He's the one in charge of managing the quiet time, and he was a major extrovert who was terrible at it. Meanwhile at home, I have an 8x8 room that was once a closet and is now my office. It has a child lock on the outside to keep my kids out. I have a set of 37dB ear muffs that fit over my ear buds and block out basically all sound from outside. And I have control over my slack notifications and can ignore them until I'm ready. I need more quiet time than non-tech management thinks I do, and this way I get to manage it myself instead of making do with whatever management allows me.

thatsagreatcomm 3y ago

IMO you lose so much more by sacrificing spontaneous conversation & ideation that results. You also lose the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question. You also lose an unbelievable amount for anyone who lacks experience - training is AWFUL remote. Not even close. It's not perfect but a group of aligned people in the same physical working space will just dominate a similar group spread apart that has to use chats & zoom to communicate. Management has got to be seeing this, in various forms, across multiple business segments.

steve1977 3y ago
> You also lose the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question. Well, the person that got interrupted by you probably lost quite a bit of productivity because of you.
- chrisallenlane 3y ago
  Yeah. One of my favorite things about working remote is that people can't do this to me. It's a feature, not a bug.
  - cdelsolar 3y ago
    Can you jump on a zoom real quick
    - sensanaty 3y ago
      I've literally never said yes to this question unless it was something incredibly urgent like prod being down or whatever.
    - mr_gibbins 3y ago
      triggered
    - zoover2020 3y ago
      Easy, just learn to push back or setup mechanisms like office hours to attend for folks whom are in need of support. Like security, the human chain will always be the weakest link here. If you don't have backbone to stand up for your own time, that's on you - not the remote work inherently IMO.

jraby3 3y ago

I have mixed feelings about this. I’m a partial owner of a company with 50 employees - about half are distributed. We used to meet 4-6x per year F2F pre COVID. Post COVID we’ve met twice in 2 years. I notice that people are much friendlier after we meet F2F. They remember that there’s a human who they know and have hung out with. This feeling fades as time passes. I don’t know what the right answer is, and I feel a little hypocritical living abroad and managing my team. But some things are definitely lost by solely working outside the office.

bluefishinit 3y ago
Some of the best teams have never seen each other face to face. You shouldn't have to rely on people meeting face to face to be nice to each other. It sounds like you have a larger cultural problem not associated with where people are working if that's an issue.
EnragedParrot 3y ago
I'm friendly and cordial with my coworkers, I don't need to be friends with them. The only thing that is missing for me is the pressure to pretend to want to spend social time with random people I only have contact with because our job responsibilities overlap. I always know there's another person on the other end of the Teams call, there's just less of a facade. All I want from my job is to log in, do my work well, and log off at the end of the day. I don't have holes in my social life that I need an employer to fill.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > I'm friendly and cordial with my coworkers, I don't need to be friends with them. This. My coworkers are colleagues. We have friendly professional relationships. But they are not my friends.
- jraby3 3y ago
  I didn’t mean to hang out. It’s more that people get frustrated more easily and have less patience. Once they’ve seen each other, their are some warm feelings and friendliness that persist. We just spent a 3 day weekend at a casino, with food, drinks and some activities. I feel like there’s a big difference in the way people behave towards each other before and after the weekend.

bluefishinit 3y ago

One of the many benefits of working from home is that writing great software is heavily dependent on getting into a good "flow". Commuting alone absolutely destroys that for most people. When you work from home you drop so many stages and so much stress out of your morning routine. I find myself being productive within an hour of waking up. That's definitely not the case if I'm forced into an office. Especially if people start chatting me up once I get there (which always happens). Commuting home after a long day is soul destroying as well. It's time stolen from my personal life.

dcow 3y ago
I feel like this discussion is missing the hybrid part of the policy. 2 days at home for flow state work and 3 at the office to collaborate doesn't seem crazy. Maybe it should be 2-3 instead of 3-2 for some people, but in my experience the biggest productivity disruptor is meetings. And you’re only getting two “no meetings” days a week anyway. And the biggest downside from working at home is the hit to socializing and collaboration. You’ll hear anecdotes for days from both sides. A hybrid policy addresses both perspectives. Now if you just want to work for a fully remote company or in a remote role, why not take a job at a place where that’s the philosophy? And on the flip side, if companies want productive employees over the age of 28, and deliberately don’t want to be remote, maybe they should start providing offices instead of desk clusters…
- troupe 3y ago
  If there is value in interacting in the office, hybrid work that has people coming in on random days seems almost like the worst of both worlds. If the value is to get face time with your teammates, then the in office days need to be aligned.
  - judge2020 3y ago
    The "solution" is for everyone on a team to come in on the same days.
    - 3y ago

makestuff 3y ago

To your first point it seems pretty clear to me their goal is to have everyone on the team in the same office so meetings are in person.

karaterobot 3y ago

> This makes me laugh because it's clear that there's a lot of distraction going on there. No, no. I think you mean there's a lot of creativity and community going on in the background. What you're hearing is serendipitous collaboration popping off like fireworks. Just kidding, open plan offices offices suck.

_raoulcousins 3y ago

This is a huge problem for me! Frequently I can't hear people at all. My team is fully remote from each other, but we're all required to go into one of the company's offices five days a week. The worst of both worlds.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Gigachad 3y ago

This says more to how shitty calls are. To a group in person, that background noise is hardly noticeable, but it becomes completely debilitating to a call. I'd be interested to dig more in to why, I guess the microphones on laptops are just not as good as our ears at picking up closer noises with priority or something.