11 ms·

It's companies' fault we don't want to return to the office

134 points by gsibble 3y ago

paulryanrogers 3y ago
> Let’s be honest. This is about saving cities. Without commuting office workers, the office buildings go empty, they become worth a fraction of their cost, and retail cannot survive. This erodes the tax base of most cities so much as to create a more-than-serious problem. I wonder how true this is. Plenty of people seem to enjoy the city life. Though I suppose if they had to work from a small apartment they're already living in that could be unpleasant.
- quantumwannabe 3y ago
  Also, it’s not like demand for retail businesses has declined. Businesses near where people live are booming.
- NegativeLatency 3y ago
  Just annecdata: I used to go into the city core every day, now I stay at home most days. While the city core is certainly less busy (and many of my favorite restaurants have closed there), my home neighborhood (a streetcar suburb) is being revitalized. There are at least 5 new bars/coffee/food places that have opened up within walking distance and they seem to be doing healthy business.
  - allears 3y ago
    OK just a wild guess. Are you in the Sunset in SF?
    - NegativeLatency 3y ago
      Portland
- agumonkey 3y ago
  It's a strange time in life where centralization is not the most beneficial mechanism anymore. Internet influenced things down to the real world.
  - Nasrudith 3y ago
    Data centers benefit from economies of scale and thus centralization. Office spaces benefit marginally if we are being generous. Most office jobs wouldn't be improved in productivity if they spent time interacting directly with orders of magnitude more people.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  That's the urban attitude isn't? When commuters weren't riding the LIRR the LIRR was complaining about how they'd go out of business if people weren't riding it. We exist to ride transit, transit doesn't exist to get us where we want to go. On the other hand public transit companies don't get excited at all if you miss work because the bus didn't show up. I ride the bus most days and fortunately I am near the end of the line because frequently we get a minibus instead of a bus and the minibus fills up leaving passengers abandoned on the side of the road. You have no voice, they don't care. Loyalty only gets you so far. People exit by taking their car. This video points out the complete lack of a customer service attitude that causes public transit to languish https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3yXSD2O95E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3yXSD2O95E If your car broke down at least your car dealer would pretend to care.
  - jltsiren 3y ago
    It sounds like you live in an area that can't support reasonable public transit. If missing a bus is a big deal, and if the bus may get replaced by a minibus, population density is probably too low. When public transit works well, you see it more as a network of fixed routes than as catching individual vehicles. You show up at a stop, and the system takes you close to your destination. If you miss a bus/tram/train, the next one is probably not too far behind. If you miss a connection, the system may suggest you another route. The US is full of medium-density cities that don't work well. Population density is high enough that traffic gets bad if most people drive, but it's simultaneously low enough that public transit is only viable on most popular routes.
    - cvwright 3y ago
      I used to live in PDX, which is generally regarded as having very good public transit for the US. My experience was pretty close to what the poster describes.
    - PaulHoule 3y ago
      Certainly if you have transit running every five minutes it is entirely different then if it isn’t. (In that case unreliability isn’t the killer that it is when a bus runs every hour) I had no problem with the reliability of the bus before the pandemic (got an electric bus instead of a minibus) but the bus company in Tompkins has never really recovered. For a while we had people advocating the Utopian idea of letting everybody ride the bus for free, it seems to have become a reality by accident because the fare collecting machines have broken and haven’t been fixed.
- CapmCrackaWaka 3y ago
  Yeah, I read the article hoping for some elaboration. After all, I doubt ANY of my past employers would have cared what was happening to the city around them if they were saving a few bucks. The author says: “That’s all this is about. Your local government officials are pressuring CEOs to get butts in seats and your bosses want to walk around the office feeling like a God again watching their peons slave away in terrible conditions.” Uuuuuugh the second point is so tired. But the first point is interesting… IF it’s true. Is there any evidence of this? Are local governments putting some kind of pressure on companies to go back to the office? I doubt there’s much to it, given the rest of this article turned out to be ranting.
  - ytch 3y ago
    https://www.geekwire.com/2023/seattle-mayor-praises-amazons-back-to-office-policy-in-state-of-the-city-address/ https://www.geekwire.com/2023/seattle-mayor-praises-amazons-... the news didn't mention about pressure directly, but mayor and interest groups are happy about back-to-office.
- Jochim 3y ago
  I like city life but not because of office landlords. Most retail sucks as well. Cities are great for the variety of leisure, hospitality, and entertainment on offer.
- inamberclad 3y ago
  The problem with 'saving' cities via business is that since the 1950s, people have only thought of cities is being places for business. There are better ways to maintain a high-density area than one that empties out every night in a mass exodus of vehicles, but people can't seem to wrap their heads around that.
  - bobthepanda 3y ago
    The problem is that jobs are easy money. The services that cost the most money for governments to provide are often for residents; a person sends their child to school at home, not in their work area. And offices densely pack a lot of workers compared to homes, so you are getting a lot of tax revenue that doesn’t need as much services spending.
loloquwowndueo 3y ago
> companies seem to ignore they are asking all their workers to unnecessarily spend an hour or more a day driving Um - not all. A number of people use public transportation. Some walk to the office. I chose a home location close to a subway station that gets me downtown with a 25-minute commute if necessary - not that I have needed it since I do work from home :)
- 13of40 3y ago
  Prior to COVID, it was tabboo at my company to schedule a meeting before 10 AM. Now 8 or 9 is the norm, and it doesn't look like they're giving that back even though we're expected to start commuting again. It doesn't matter if I drive, walk, or ride the donkey, it's still a bit of a kick in the knee to have to get up a couple hours earlier. (Or more likely roll out of bed and put on my headset before I've even brushed my teeth, then not make it to the office until noon.)
BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
I wouldn't blame the companies anymore than I would blame "work culture" I would even blame cities before companies, but these feels like blaming both all companies and none of them. the cities fault would be horrible traffic and delays moving from home to work, cause by all the companies having similar working hours
gpapilion 3y ago
I remember a two decades ago when the engineering team made us implement an open office plan at a company. No one wanted walls or cubes. Now it being rejected more and more. I feel it’s like it’s generational.
- goalieca 3y ago
  Cubes are ugly and visually unappealing. But privacy is important for focusing. Overcrowded Offices suck.
- parl_match 3y ago
  > I feel it’s like it’s generational. Aesthetically, it's way better. There was a huge emphasis in the 90s and 00s to reimagine what an office looked like, to get away from stuffy fabric, burnt coffee, and dull colors. It turns out that y'all were right about most of that stuff, but a few things (like visual/audible distractions) were made worse.
- analog31 3y ago
  What I observed at the time was that there was generally a strong backlash against open-plan offices within HN discussions, which represents some kind of weighted average of the tech worker hive mind. Many more "open offices are evil" articles were linked than "open plan offices are heaven." The coders defeated it by going remote, and wearing headphones. "Headphones are the new office door." Their walls of huge monitors replaced the cube walls. ;-) Open offices were rationalized by "collaboration," but engineering is inherently collaborative, and engineers were not consulted. In a department that I worked in, the coders went "virtual remote" by forming a protective silo and discouraging "distraction." Although, they still had lunch with the rest of us. The funny thing is that in a recent thread about digital nomads, pictures of people crowded together in coffee shops, sitting elbow to elbow at their laptops, sparked the reaction: "Those people can't really be working, or maybe they're not really techies." I personally think that what the new normal looks like is still unknown, if one even emerges.
  - VonGallifrey 3y ago
    I don't know what your experience is with "open offices", but the ones I have worked in where quite loud and distracting. That isn't to say that I discount the images of people sitting elbow to elbow in coffee shops. Coffee shops are, in my experience, quite a bit quieter then open offices and less distracting too. I would honestly prefer going to a coffee shop to work then a "open office", but also I am really thankful that I don't have to do either.
upthestake_s 3y ago
[flagged]
- Jochim 3y ago
  Capitulation is not the answer to that problem.
  - ddingus 3y ago
    Generally, organizing and collective action is.
- lolinder 3y ago
  The past 300 years have seen repeated instances of people without recognized power sticking it to the people who supposedly have it all. Why should we give up now, when the power involved is just monetary and not a monopoly on violence?
angmarsbane 3y ago
Personally, I blame cities for refusing to build to accommodate the working population and for refusing to build out safe, inexpensive and comprehensive transit between homes, schools, and workplaces. It is absurd the number of one story retails blocks near major offices on LA’s Westside. Put 1, 2, 3, and 4 bedroom apartments and condos on top.
- ttymck 3y ago
  Who are "cities"? It's the people who live there and vote for the city government. We did this.
  - PeterisP 3y ago
    One aspect is that often people who work there and would want to also live there don't get to vote for the city government which (through its decisions) prevents them from moving in the area where they work.
  - slabity 3y ago
    That's a vacuous argument. By that logic, you can easily dismiss all problems in a democratic society since the source of the problem is "the people". In reality, there were huge misinformation and lobbyist campaigns waged by automobile manufacturers and energy companies to stop any decent public transportation projects. Even our laws on jaywalking were originally manufactured as an effort to demonize pedestrian traffic.
    - ekianjo 3y ago
      i dont know about the automobile lobby but public transit projects have suffered from corruption mismanagement and awful planning as well.
    - ttymck 3y ago
      You're absolutely right. But I would argue "cities" is no less vacuous than my wording.
    - 3y ago
allears 3y ago
I think the author is right on. It's the whole 'open plan' BS that's coming back to bite penny-pinching corporations. Anybody who's ever been a knowledge worker knows that you need a certain amount of privacy and quiet in order to concentrate.
- jrott 3y ago
  Open office plans are a huge problem. It’s very hard to do anything that requires deep thought when there is a ton of noise and visual distractions.
burlesona 3y ago
I think there are two legitimate problems in this article, and the rest is basically a screed. Most legit: the complaint that RTO means “everyone must drive 1-2 hours each day.” Now, this is strictly not true as plenty of people choose to live close to their work, and some people live in places where they can take transit, etc. But most people in most of the United States have to live in a car centric environment pretty far away from the office in order to be able to afford comfortable housing. That is a massive policy failure at all levels of government, and I hope the office crisis hitting so many downtowns forces more governments to deal with it. Second legit point: open offices were taken way too far. It can be a lot of fun to have an open office when you’re a team of six. Having an open office for 600 is hell. Fortunately, this is straightforward to fix, as the authors story about the law office illustrates. Companies that want employees to come back to the office are going to have to provide reasonable working environments. The thing that this author, and so many other, ICs fail to understand is that (a) management is necessary, and is a key differentiator of good companies versus lousy companies, (b) no matter how good the managers are, it is much harder to manage remotely than it is to manage in person. Imagine being an IC software developer and being stuck on dial up. That’s what it’s like to be a manager in a remote environment. Your job is to know your people, to understand how they are doing, and to understand what they need, so that you can help them succeed. While it is possible to do this remotely, it is so very much harder and more intrusive, whereas in person you can just look around and see who is smiling and who looks stressed out without bothering anyone. So sure, cities may whine for offices to come back, but the fact that effective management actually matters to the fate of companies is much more likely to drive return to office than any amount of whining that cities do.
- wildrhythms 3y ago
  >Having an open office for 600 is hell Sadly, as companies are demanding RTO under the guise of 'increasing collaboration', I don't think the right ears will be hearing this message.
  - doubled112 3y ago
    My manager lives a town over and hates this "increasing collaboration" idea. He and I are the only employees who live here. The other three on the team are each in a different country. We may be able to hold on forever this way. What are we going to do? Book a meeting room then 3/5 are remote anyway? Doesn't make sense.
trinsic2 3y ago
Good article. I never thought about it from the office space for worker perspective. As I always had an office, since I am an independent service provider, I didn't think about that. No wonder people don't want to go back. I hope workers stick to their guns.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mattbee 3y ago
Joel Spolsky's 20 year old post on designing an office is still relevant here. He imagines a lifestyle and tries to create a perfect space and location to enable that: The office should be a hang out: a pleasant place to spend time. If you’re meeting your friends for dinner after work you should want to meet at the office. As Philip Greenspun bluntly puts it: “Your business success will depend on the extent to which programmers essentially live at your office. For this to be a common choice, your office had better be nicer than the average programmer’s home. There are two ways to achieve this result. One is to hire programmers who live in extremely shabby apartments. The other is to create a nice office.” https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/09/24/bionic-office/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/09/24/bionic-office/ I wonder how many programmers he employed with partners and children back then though?
- bombadil44 3y ago
  Offices also have to be good enough to warrant having to travel hours each day to get to/from them, which is a pretty tough to compete with for a lot of people
  - rtpg 3y ago
    To put an even finer point on this: no matter how good your office is, if your office is in the middle of a huge metropolis then you are now asking people to either do long commutes or make some honestly hefty sacrifices in living arrangements to be close. No amount of office niceness can compensate for the surrounding area to be not a place you want to live in. I think it’s a huge missed opportunity for smaller startups to not place their offices in areas a bit off the beaten path. SF is uniquely weird about this from what I understand, but like NYC or Tokyo is filled with startups putting their office in places where workers either have an hour commute or have to increase rent by a lot to live closely. All for, frankly, the status of the address. Then companies whine about high salaries and nobody wanting to come or Mori tower. Meanwhile there are many neighborhoods that are cheaper, have near equivalent services, and could offer a nice environment where people want to live closely. Commercial real estate is not always available, but the rent savings alone could easily pay for a lot of renovations to another building
inamberclad 3y ago
I don't care how nice the office is (and I've worked in some nice ones), if it's too far I just don't want to go. My life and stress levels are too valuable and short to spend them commuting.
- twayt 3y ago
  Yea you can create the nicest office of all time, still wouldn't want to live there or trade it for my own private personal space. Way happier to work hard and contribute to the company when I feel like I don't have to be forced to work in an office that isn't conducive to my life.
- MattGaiser 3y ago
  I’d be willing to live on a high end university type campus as a single guy to get rid of the commuting (pre remote I would have been anyway). But in that case, the company would need to also supply cozy housing.
mesh 3y ago
I don't mind being in the office. I do mind going into the office.
api 3y ago
For everyone I know it’s commute time and real estate cost in major cities. WFH lets you escape both of these.
didgetmaster 3y ago
>While I could see it, I don’t think it’s likely. Those officials that passed such laws would be literally run out of town. When was the last time a public official was 'run out of town' for doing something that made life for their constituents miserable? One thing our democracy is absolutely terrible about doing is actually holding our elected officials accountable.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
crazygringo 3y ago
I've genuinely never understood why competition for workers hasn't resulted in giving programmers their own offices. Places like Google and Meta pay $$$$$ for their office space, hiring fancy architects and installing all sorts of perks. So I don't think it's simply a financial question. I think there must be something that's actually appealing about it to most of the employees. Is it that it feels like studying in the library in college, everybody occupying a single seat at a long table? Does it make people feel high-paid information wizards, mimicking the long rows of traders at traditional Wall St. financial firms? Is it meant to feel like a "group project" where everybody's working shoulder-to-shoulder? Is it meant to feel "flat" and non-hierarchical, because offices are for fuddy-duddies from the 1950's? Is it so lots of the space can be dedicated to ping-pong tables and video-game areas and a fancy café area instead, because that's what influences prospective employees more? If private offices really were deeply desired by employees, lots of companies would use them as perks in order to attract talent in the war for programming talent. Yet they don't. So what's going on here?
- lolinder 3y ago
  These days it's probably because there's a lot of overlap between the people who really want a private office and the people who really want to work from home. It's far cheaper for a company to offer the latter, and for many employees it's preferable, even compared to a private office (no commute!).
- somewhereoutth 3y ago
  A good question. I had a private office once, however it did not have a window or other source of natural light, which was a big problem. Maybe that's one advantage of open plan - it brings natural light to everyone.
  - rootsudo 3y ago
    How do you distinguish a private office with no window from a closet?
    - 3y ago
acdha 3y ago
I want a Simpson’s style sign to tap: “We’d want to go back to the office more if we had offices to go back to” Even with a 12 minute bike commute, it’s hard not to see open plan offices as anything but an unpleasant, unhealthy productivity impediment. I understand why the people with private offices want others to envy them but it’s hard to justify the cost of such low productivity spaces.
- zdragnar 3y ago
  There's good and bad ways to do open offices. I've worked in both. Good open offices still segregate noisy from quiet environments- i.e. nobody should be putting the lunchroom, games or sales people near engineers. They provide enough desk space that you aren't right on top of anyone else. Lots of smaller meeting rooms nearby for people to pair or have extended conversations. Quick collaboration is easy, and you can physically see when someone doesn't want to be disturbed. Bad open offices lump different departments together, cram you in and make you listen to the microwave constantly ding and smell that one guy's leftover fish every day. They invite constant distractions. That said, I've moved out of the city and i would need an unrealistic amount of money to be convinced into taking a job that wasn't fully remote again.
  - closeparen 3y ago
    It’s really easy to accidentally get more concurrent meetings than meeting rooms (for any realistic number of meeting rooms) and then you’ve got to either not talk to each other or call into Zoom from desks. Most companies choose the latter. Worse with distributed or partial remote companies where a lot of people need to be the only one in the building joining a particular call. At the limit you need as many phone booths as desks, which is just private offices with extra steps.
  - opportune 3y ago
    By this metric, I’ve only ever worked in good open offices, but I still dislike them all the same. Yeah, they could be worse, but the noise and movement are unavoidably distracting for me even if it’s “just” engineers chatting. The benefits of an open office require a culture of significantly more collaboration than my team (and I wager most teams) have in practice. With cubicles or actual offices I think it wouldn’t in practice change the rate at which people stare at the same screen to show others’ stuff, because we aren’t doing it on a super impromptu basis so as not to interrupt each other as we work.
OldManRyan 3y ago
What is a good alternative to open offices that make efficient use of space? Creating private offices for everyone seems like it would use quite a bit more square footage.
- Aeolun 3y ago
  On the cost of a programmer salary the extra cost is not that great though.
  - OldManRyan 3y ago
    I made no mention of cost. There is not enough square footage in my office to make a private office that doesn't feel like a sardine can for everyone.
    - clipsy 3y ago
      If only there was some way of acquiring more office space... oh well, too bad! /s
      - OldManRyan 3y ago
        This isn't The Sims. You can't always purchase the exact amount of square footage you need where you need it. Opening a second office or moving offices is not a casual endeavor.
        Aeolun 3y ago
        So you consider it from the start when building/renting a (new) office. Being in a suboptimal situation is no excuse for not getting out of it. Of course, whoever control the office space probably thinks least space per developer is optimal.
        OldManRyan 3y ago
        You aren't going to make any meaningful change with that mindset because as far as many in the industry as concerned open offices are good enough. The lift from going from open office to 100% private offices is likely too much to move from a good enough.
somewhereoutth 3y ago
An important component to all this is control. Essentially, people would much rather a poor environment that they had control over, versus a great environment that could be changed around at the whim of 'management'.
- Paul-Craft 3y ago
  Bingo. The problem is, so would "management," and they're the ones who do the hiring.
_raoulcousins 3y ago
No office compares to my own home.
gsibble 3y ago
Woah. Author here. Had no idea this blew up. Thanks for all the support! My primary point was over open offices and how disrespected engineers are as knowledge workers that need a quiet environment in order to perform successfully, as most of you seemed to pick up on. Maybe I should have focused on that more as indeed not everyone needs to commute very far for instance. But I sure as hell am never going back to an open office pit of despair.
diogenescynic 3y ago
I'll return to office if we can accept a 4 day work week as a standard going forward. Otherwise, why do we need to return to the office if it worked fine for the last 3 years? Because some bean counter wants to watch me work? Can't they just log my computer or something...
lamontcg 3y ago
I love the counter-argument that CEOs of FAANGs are claiming that WFH harms productivity, and we should just trust them based on their word. They've been pushing open office plans for 15-20 years now that actively disrupt productivity. Their opinions have been discredited by decades of studies on open office plans and they're the worst people to listen to about office productivity.
- shaklee3 3y ago
  If they really believed it they would use an open office themselves. But, of course, they don't believe it.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  Why do you think they're pushing for RTO if it doesn't boost productivity? Do you think they believe it benefits the business but they're just wrong?
  - lamontcg 3y ago
    https://wheresyoured.at/p/the-work-from-home-future-is-destroying https://wheresyoured.at/p/the-work-from-home-future-is-destr... discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36382994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36382994
georgeplusplus 3y ago
If the company and employee signed a telework agreement that is no longer valid I hope these companies should fire everyone who doesn't wanna get back. If the employees seriously think they've been wronged they can sue for damages.

134 points by gsibble 3y ago

> Let’s be honest. This is about saving cities. Without commuting office workers, the office buildings go empty, they become worth a fraction of their cost, and retail cannot survive. This erodes the tax base of most cities so much as to create a more-than-serious problem. I wonder how true this is. Plenty of people seem to enjoy the city life. Though I suppose if they had to work from a small apartment they're already living in that could be unpleasant.

quantumwannabe 3y ago
Also, it’s not like demand for retail businesses has declined. Businesses near where people live are booming.
NegativeLatency 3y ago
Just annecdata: I used to go into the city core every day, now I stay at home most days. While the city core is certainly less busy (and many of my favorite restaurants have closed there), my home neighborhood (a streetcar suburb) is being revitalized. There are at least 5 new bars/coffee/food places that have opened up within walking distance and they seem to be doing healthy business.
- allears 3y ago
  OK just a wild guess. Are you in the Sunset in SF?
  - NegativeLatency 3y ago
    Portland
agumonkey 3y ago
It's a strange time in life where centralization is not the most beneficial mechanism anymore. Internet influenced things down to the real world.
- Nasrudith 3y ago
  Data centers benefit from economies of scale and thus centralization. Office spaces benefit marginally if we are being generous. Most office jobs wouldn't be improved in productivity if they spent time interacting directly with orders of magnitude more people.
PaulHoule 3y ago
That's the urban attitude isn't? When commuters weren't riding the LIRR the LIRR was complaining about how they'd go out of business if people weren't riding it. We exist to ride transit, transit doesn't exist to get us where we want to go. On the other hand public transit companies don't get excited at all if you miss work because the bus didn't show up. I ride the bus most days and fortunately I am near the end of the line because frequently we get a minibus instead of a bus and the minibus fills up leaving passengers abandoned on the side of the road. You have no voice, they don't care. Loyalty only gets you so far. People exit by taking their car. This video points out the complete lack of a customer service attitude that causes public transit to languish https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3yXSD2O95E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3yXSD2O95E If your car broke down at least your car dealer would pretend to care.
- jltsiren 3y ago
  It sounds like you live in an area that can't support reasonable public transit. If missing a bus is a big deal, and if the bus may get replaced by a minibus, population density is probably too low. When public transit works well, you see it more as a network of fixed routes than as catching individual vehicles. You show up at a stop, and the system takes you close to your destination. If you miss a bus/tram/train, the next one is probably not too far behind. If you miss a connection, the system may suggest you another route. The US is full of medium-density cities that don't work well. Population density is high enough that traffic gets bad if most people drive, but it's simultaneously low enough that public transit is only viable on most popular routes.
  - cvwright 3y ago
    I used to live in PDX, which is generally regarded as having very good public transit for the US. My experience was pretty close to what the poster describes.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    Certainly if you have transit running every five minutes it is entirely different then if it isn’t. (In that case unreliability isn’t the killer that it is when a bus runs every hour) I had no problem with the reliability of the bus before the pandemic (got an electric bus instead of a minibus) but the bus company in Tompkins has never really recovered. For a while we had people advocating the Utopian idea of letting everybody ride the bus for free, it seems to have become a reality by accident because the fare collecting machines have broken and haven’t been fixed.
CapmCrackaWaka 3y ago
Yeah, I read the article hoping for some elaboration. After all, I doubt ANY of my past employers would have cared what was happening to the city around them if they were saving a few bucks. The author says: “That’s all this is about. Your local government officials are pressuring CEOs to get butts in seats and your bosses want to walk around the office feeling like a God again watching their peons slave away in terrible conditions.” Uuuuuugh the second point is so tired. But the first point is interesting… IF it’s true. Is there any evidence of this? Are local governments putting some kind of pressure on companies to go back to the office? I doubt there’s much to it, given the rest of this article turned out to be ranting.
- ytch 3y ago
  https://www.geekwire.com/2023/seattle-mayor-praises-amazons-back-to-office-policy-in-state-of-the-city-address/ https://www.geekwire.com/2023/seattle-mayor-praises-amazons-... the news didn't mention about pressure directly, but mayor and interest groups are happy about back-to-office.
Jochim 3y ago
I like city life but not because of office landlords. Most retail sucks as well. Cities are great for the variety of leisure, hospitality, and entertainment on offer.
inamberclad 3y ago
The problem with 'saving' cities via business is that since the 1950s, people have only thought of cities is being places for business. There are better ways to maintain a high-density area than one that empties out every night in a mass exodus of vehicles, but people can't seem to wrap their heads around that.
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  The problem is that jobs are easy money. The services that cost the most money for governments to provide are often for residents; a person sends their child to school at home, not in their work area. And offices densely pack a lot of workers compared to homes, so you are getting a lot of tax revenue that doesn’t need as much services spending.

loloquwowndueo 3y ago

> companies seem to ignore they are asking all their workers to unnecessarily spend an hour or more a day driving Um - not all. A number of people use public transportation. Some walk to the office. I chose a home location close to a subway station that gets me downtown with a 25-minute commute if necessary - not that I have needed it since I do work from home :)

13of40 3y ago
Prior to COVID, it was tabboo at my company to schedule a meeting before 10 AM. Now 8 or 9 is the norm, and it doesn't look like they're giving that back even though we're expected to start commuting again. It doesn't matter if I drive, walk, or ride the donkey, it's still a bit of a kick in the knee to have to get up a couple hours earlier. (Or more likely roll out of bed and put on my headset before I've even brushed my teeth, then not make it to the office until noon.)

BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago

I wouldn't blame the companies anymore than I would blame "work culture" I would even blame cities before companies, but these feels like blaming both all companies and none of them. the cities fault would be horrible traffic and delays moving from home to work, cause by all the companies having similar working hours

gpapilion 3y ago

I remember a two decades ago when the engineering team made us implement an open office plan at a company. No one wanted walls or cubes. Now it being rejected more and more. I feel it’s like it’s generational.

goalieca 3y ago
Cubes are ugly and visually unappealing. But privacy is important for focusing. Overcrowded Offices suck.
parl_match 3y ago
> I feel it’s like it’s generational. Aesthetically, it's way better. There was a huge emphasis in the 90s and 00s to reimagine what an office looked like, to get away from stuffy fabric, burnt coffee, and dull colors. It turns out that y'all were right about most of that stuff, but a few things (like visual/audible distractions) were made worse.
analog31 3y ago
What I observed at the time was that there was generally a strong backlash against open-plan offices within HN discussions, which represents some kind of weighted average of the tech worker hive mind. Many more "open offices are evil" articles were linked than "open plan offices are heaven." The coders defeated it by going remote, and wearing headphones. "Headphones are the new office door." Their walls of huge monitors replaced the cube walls. ;-) Open offices were rationalized by "collaboration," but engineering is inherently collaborative, and engineers were not consulted. In a department that I worked in, the coders went "virtual remote" by forming a protective silo and discouraging "distraction." Although, they still had lunch with the rest of us. The funny thing is that in a recent thread about digital nomads, pictures of people crowded together in coffee shops, sitting elbow to elbow at their laptops, sparked the reaction: "Those people can't really be working, or maybe they're not really techies." I personally think that what the new normal looks like is still unknown, if one even emerges.
- VonGallifrey 3y ago
  I don't know what your experience is with "open offices", but the ones I have worked in where quite loud and distracting. That isn't to say that I discount the images of people sitting elbow to elbow in coffee shops. Coffee shops are, in my experience, quite a bit quieter then open offices and less distracting too. I would honestly prefer going to a coffee shop to work then a "open office", but also I am really thankful that I don't have to do either.

upthestake_s 3y ago

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Jochim 3y ago
Capitulation is not the answer to that problem.
- ddingus 3y ago
  Generally, organizing and collective action is.
lolinder 3y ago
The past 300 years have seen repeated instances of people without recognized power sticking it to the people who supposedly have it all. Why should we give up now, when the power involved is just monetary and not a monopoly on violence?

angmarsbane 3y ago

Personally, I blame cities for refusing to build to accommodate the working population and for refusing to build out safe, inexpensive and comprehensive transit between homes, schools, and workplaces. It is absurd the number of one story retails blocks near major offices on LA’s Westside. Put 1, 2, 3, and 4 bedroom apartments and condos on top.

ttymck 3y ago
Who are "cities"? It's the people who live there and vote for the city government. We did this.
- PeterisP 3y ago
  One aspect is that often people who work there and would want to also live there don't get to vote for the city government which (through its decisions) prevents them from moving in the area where they work.
- slabity 3y ago
  That's a vacuous argument. By that logic, you can easily dismiss all problems in a democratic society since the source of the problem is "the people". In reality, there were huge misinformation and lobbyist campaigns waged by automobile manufacturers and energy companies to stop any decent public transportation projects. Even our laws on jaywalking were originally manufactured as an effort to demonize pedestrian traffic.
  - ekianjo 3y ago
    i dont know about the automobile lobby but public transit projects have suffered from corruption mismanagement and awful planning as well.
  - ttymck 3y ago
    You're absolutely right. But I would argue "cities" is no less vacuous than my wording.
  - 3y ago

allears 3y ago

I think the author is right on. It's the whole 'open plan' BS that's coming back to bite penny-pinching corporations. Anybody who's ever been a knowledge worker knows that you need a certain amount of privacy and quiet in order to concentrate.

jrott 3y ago
Open office plans are a huge problem. It’s very hard to do anything that requires deep thought when there is a ton of noise and visual distractions.

burlesona 3y ago

I think there are two legitimate problems in this article, and the rest is basically a screed. Most legit: the complaint that RTO means “everyone must drive 1-2 hours each day.” Now, this is strictly not true as plenty of people choose to live close to their work, and some people live in places where they can take transit, etc. But most people in most of the United States have to live in a car centric environment pretty far away from the office in order to be able to afford comfortable housing. That is a massive policy failure at all levels of government, and I hope the office crisis hitting so many downtowns forces more governments to deal with it. Second legit point: open offices were taken way too far. It can be a lot of fun to have an open office when you’re a team of six. Having an open office for 600 is hell. Fortunately, this is straightforward to fix, as the authors story about the law office illustrates. Companies that want employees to come back to the office are going to have to provide reasonable working environments. The thing that this author, and so many other, ICs fail to understand is that (a) management is necessary, and is a key differentiator of good companies versus lousy companies, (b) no matter how good the managers are, it is much harder to manage remotely than it is to manage in person. Imagine being an IC software developer and being stuck on dial up. That’s what it’s like to be a manager in a remote environment. Your job is to know your people, to understand how they are doing, and to understand what they need, so that you can help them succeed. While it is possible to do this remotely, it is so very much harder and more intrusive, whereas in person you can just look around and see who is smiling and who looks stressed out without bothering anyone. So sure, cities may whine for offices to come back, but the fact that effective management actually matters to the fate of companies is much more likely to drive return to office than any amount of whining that cities do.

wildrhythms 3y ago
>Having an open office for 600 is hell Sadly, as companies are demanding RTO under the guise of 'increasing collaboration', I don't think the right ears will be hearing this message.
- doubled112 3y ago
  My manager lives a town over and hates this "increasing collaboration" idea. He and I are the only employees who live here. The other three on the team are each in a different country. We may be able to hold on forever this way. What are we going to do? Book a meeting room then 3/5 are remote anyway? Doesn't make sense.

trinsic2 3y ago

Good article. I never thought about it from the office space for worker perspective. As I always had an office, since I am an independent service provider, I didn't think about that. No wonder people don't want to go back. I hope workers stick to their guns.

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mattbee 3y ago

Joel Spolsky's 20 year old post on designing an office is still relevant here. He imagines a lifestyle and tries to create a perfect space and location to enable that: The office should be a hang out: a pleasant place to spend time. If you’re meeting your friends for dinner after work you should want to meet at the office. As Philip Greenspun bluntly puts it: “Your business success will depend on the extent to which programmers essentially live at your office. For this to be a common choice, your office had better be nicer than the average programmer’s home. There are two ways to achieve this result. One is to hire programmers who live in extremely shabby apartments. The other is to create a nice office.” https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/09/24/bionic-office/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/09/24/bionic-office/ I wonder how many programmers he employed with partners and children back then though?

bombadil44 3y ago
Offices also have to be good enough to warrant having to travel hours each day to get to/from them, which is a pretty tough to compete with for a lot of people
- rtpg 3y ago
  To put an even finer point on this: no matter how good your office is, if your office is in the middle of a huge metropolis then you are now asking people to either do long commutes or make some honestly hefty sacrifices in living arrangements to be close. No amount of office niceness can compensate for the surrounding area to be not a place you want to live in. I think it’s a huge missed opportunity for smaller startups to not place their offices in areas a bit off the beaten path. SF is uniquely weird about this from what I understand, but like NYC or Tokyo is filled with startups putting their office in places where workers either have an hour commute or have to increase rent by a lot to live closely. All for, frankly, the status of the address. Then companies whine about high salaries and nobody wanting to come or Mori tower. Meanwhile there are many neighborhoods that are cheaper, have near equivalent services, and could offer a nice environment where people want to live closely. Commercial real estate is not always available, but the rent savings alone could easily pay for a lot of renovations to another building

inamberclad 3y ago

I don't care how nice the office is (and I've worked in some nice ones), if it's too far I just don't want to go. My life and stress levels are too valuable and short to spend them commuting.

twayt 3y ago
Yea you can create the nicest office of all time, still wouldn't want to live there or trade it for my own private personal space. Way happier to work hard and contribute to the company when I feel like I don't have to be forced to work in an office that isn't conducive to my life.
MattGaiser 3y ago
I’d be willing to live on a high end university type campus as a single guy to get rid of the commuting (pre remote I would have been anyway). But in that case, the company would need to also supply cozy housing.

mesh 3y ago

I don't mind being in the office. I do mind going into the office.

api 3y ago

For everyone I know it’s commute time and real estate cost in major cities. WFH lets you escape both of these.

didgetmaster 3y ago

>While I could see it, I don’t think it’s likely. Those officials that passed such laws would be literally run out of town. When was the last time a public official was 'run out of town' for doing something that made life for their constituents miserable? One thing our democracy is absolutely terrible about doing is actually holding our elected officials accountable.

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crazygringo 3y ago

I've genuinely never understood why competition for workers hasn't resulted in giving programmers their own offices. Places like Google and Meta pay $$$$$ for their office space, hiring fancy architects and installing all sorts of perks. So I don't think it's simply a financial question. I think there must be something that's actually appealing about it to most of the employees. Is it that it feels like studying in the library in college, everybody occupying a single seat at a long table? Does it make people feel high-paid information wizards, mimicking the long rows of traders at traditional Wall St. financial firms? Is it meant to feel like a "group project" where everybody's working shoulder-to-shoulder? Is it meant to feel "flat" and non-hierarchical, because offices are for fuddy-duddies from the 1950's? Is it so lots of the space can be dedicated to ping-pong tables and video-game areas and a fancy café area instead, because that's what influences prospective employees more? If private offices really were deeply desired by employees, lots of companies would use them as perks in order to attract talent in the war for programming talent. Yet they don't. So what's going on here?

lolinder 3y ago
These days it's probably because there's a lot of overlap between the people who really want a private office and the people who really want to work from home. It's far cheaper for a company to offer the latter, and for many employees it's preferable, even compared to a private office (no commute!).
somewhereoutth 3y ago
A good question. I had a private office once, however it did not have a window or other source of natural light, which was a big problem. Maybe that's one advantage of open plan - it brings natural light to everyone.
- rootsudo 3y ago
  How do you distinguish a private office with no window from a closet?
  - 3y ago

acdha 3y ago

I want a Simpson’s style sign to tap: “We’d want to go back to the office more if we had offices to go back to” Even with a 12 minute bike commute, it’s hard not to see open plan offices as anything but an unpleasant, unhealthy productivity impediment. I understand why the people with private offices want others to envy them but it’s hard to justify the cost of such low productivity spaces.

zdragnar 3y ago
There's good and bad ways to do open offices. I've worked in both. Good open offices still segregate noisy from quiet environments- i.e. nobody should be putting the lunchroom, games or sales people near engineers. They provide enough desk space that you aren't right on top of anyone else. Lots of smaller meeting rooms nearby for people to pair or have extended conversations. Quick collaboration is easy, and you can physically see when someone doesn't want to be disturbed. Bad open offices lump different departments together, cram you in and make you listen to the microwave constantly ding and smell that one guy's leftover fish every day. They invite constant distractions. That said, I've moved out of the city and i would need an unrealistic amount of money to be convinced into taking a job that wasn't fully remote again.
- closeparen 3y ago
  It’s really easy to accidentally get more concurrent meetings than meeting rooms (for any realistic number of meeting rooms) and then you’ve got to either not talk to each other or call into Zoom from desks. Most companies choose the latter. Worse with distributed or partial remote companies where a lot of people need to be the only one in the building joining a particular call. At the limit you need as many phone booths as desks, which is just private offices with extra steps.
- opportune 3y ago
  By this metric, I’ve only ever worked in good open offices, but I still dislike them all the same. Yeah, they could be worse, but the noise and movement are unavoidably distracting for me even if it’s “just” engineers chatting. The benefits of an open office require a culture of significantly more collaboration than my team (and I wager most teams) have in practice. With cubicles or actual offices I think it wouldn’t in practice change the rate at which people stare at the same screen to show others’ stuff, because we aren’t doing it on a super impromptu basis so as not to interrupt each other as we work.

OldManRyan 3y ago

What is a good alternative to open offices that make efficient use of space? Creating private offices for everyone seems like it would use quite a bit more square footage.

Aeolun 3y ago
On the cost of a programmer salary the extra cost is not that great though.
- OldManRyan 3y ago
  I made no mention of cost. There is not enough square footage in my office to make a private office that doesn't feel like a sardine can for everyone.
  - clipsy 3y ago
    If only there was some way of acquiring more office space... oh well, too bad! /s
    - OldManRyan 3y ago
      This isn't The Sims. You can't always purchase the exact amount of square footage you need where you need it. Opening a second office or moving offices is not a casual endeavor.
      - Aeolun 3y ago
        So you consider it from the start when building/renting a (new) office. Being in a suboptimal situation is no excuse for not getting out of it. Of course, whoever control the office space probably thinks least space per developer is optimal.
        OldManRyan 3y ago
        You aren't going to make any meaningful change with that mindset because as far as many in the industry as concerned open offices are good enough. The lift from going from open office to 100% private offices is likely too much to move from a good enough.

somewhereoutth 3y ago

An important component to all this is control. Essentially, people would much rather a poor environment that they had control over, versus a great environment that could be changed around at the whim of 'management'.

Paul-Craft 3y ago
Bingo. The problem is, so would "management," and they're the ones who do the hiring.

_raoulcousins 3y ago

No office compares to my own home.

gsibble 3y ago

Woah. Author here. Had no idea this blew up. Thanks for all the support! My primary point was over open offices and how disrespected engineers are as knowledge workers that need a quiet environment in order to perform successfully, as most of you seemed to pick up on. Maybe I should have focused on that more as indeed not everyone needs to commute very far for instance. But I sure as hell am never going back to an open office pit of despair.

diogenescynic 3y ago

I'll return to office if we can accept a 4 day work week as a standard going forward. Otherwise, why do we need to return to the office if it worked fine for the last 3 years? Because some bean counter wants to watch me work? Can't they just log my computer or something...

lamontcg 3y ago

I love the counter-argument that CEOs of FAANGs are claiming that WFH harms productivity, and we should just trust them based on their word. They've been pushing open office plans for 15-20 years now that actively disrupt productivity. Their opinions have been discredited by decades of studies on open office plans and they're the worst people to listen to about office productivity.

shaklee3 3y ago
If they really believed it they would use an open office themselves. But, of course, they don't believe it.
HDThoreaun 3y ago
Why do you think they're pushing for RTO if it doesn't boost productivity? Do you think they believe it benefits the business but they're just wrong?
- lamontcg 3y ago
  https://wheresyoured.at/p/the-work-from-home-future-is-destroying https://wheresyoured.at/p/the-work-from-home-future-is-destr... discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36382994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36382994

georgeplusplus 3y ago

If the company and employee signed a telework agreement that is no longer valid I hope these companies should fire everyone who doesn't wanna get back. If the employees seriously think they've been wronged they can sue for damages.