5 ms·

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 s

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.

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.