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> I find it funny that when people were required to be home, employers talked about what great productivity they were getting with people at home. Then when it
by lamontcg 3y ago
> I find it funny that when people were required to be home, employers talked about what great productivity they were getting with people at home. Then when it isn't required anymore, they want everyone back in the office for...productivity.
The decades of evidence that open office plans are utter shit for productivity already proved that the emperor wears no clothes and they have no idea what makes for better productivity.
- deaddodo 3y agoOpen offices are the literal reason (after commuting/traffic) that I no longer want to go into the office. My work doesn't require a ton of person:person engagement and it's much easier for me to just zone out in my own headspace to do it. When I was required in the office, I would just wear headphones to avoid distractions, but I would have to deal with 2-3hrs of driving/day on top of it. This meant that my employer generally only got those 8hrs out of me, period; because I had none of my personal time to spare. Working from home, on the other hand, gives me more flexibility for meetings, to work at different hours, to be on later in the evening, to put in more time (when needed), etc; and I'm happier.
- 0xblinq 3y agoThe headphones thing reminds me of a big events ticketing company I worked for that, when people complained about noise, distractions, etc they came up with the amazing solution of using your health and wellness budget to buy noise cancelling headphones. Most full of bullshit company I’ve ever worked for.
- ornornor 3y agoI’d be outraged.
- stevezsa8 3y agoReminds me of one job, my boss was looking to leave, and was handing over portions of her job to the rest of us. I said I don't have time to do more additional work... she said they can send me on a course to better manage my time. haha.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago"You guys had a health and wellness budget?!"
- 0xblinq 3y agoYeah, used for noise cancelling headphones and therapy. :thisisfine:
- gambiting 3y agoHahahaha same as my work - they said we understand concerns you have about coming back to the office - as a solution to these concerns we decided to buy everyone noise cancelling headphones.
- midoridensha 3y ago>they came up with the amazing solution of using your health and wellness budget to buy noise cancelling headphones. >Most full of bullshit company I’ve ever worked for. At least they bought you NC headphones; that's a LOT more than I can say about most companies. And the fact that you had a "health and wellness" budget at all.
- re-thc 3y ago> When I was required in the office, I would just wear headphones to avoid distractions That doesn't work for everyone. Some offices are louder than headphones and some people come around tapping your shoulders regardless.
- kadoban 3y ago> That doesn't work for everyone. Some offices are louder than headphones Depending on your budget, you can block out anything short of jackhammers with either IEMs or earbuds+noise reduction earmuffs. > and some people come around tapping your shoulders regardless Do they expect to continue living? What monsters.
- re-thc 3y ago> Depending on your budget, you can block out anything short of jackhammers with either IEMs or earbuds+noise reduction earmuffs. Perhaps more a personal thing but it induces a dizziness/ drowsiness with extended use. It’s fine when watching say a movie but I could never work for long periods with my ears blocked. Wonder if I’m the only 1 but I have heard of similar cases.
- andelink 3y agoI wear them all day during work and also then a couple hours in the evening without any issue. Pure bliss
- bombolo 3y agoI get pain from the hears not being in their natural position.
- alpaca128 3y agoThat problem went away for me once I found headphones that are actually over-ear and not only marketed as such. I can wear them all day every day because they're large enough to not even touch my ears, very light because of a plastic case and open headphones so they don't feel as "pressurized". Bad for noisy environments, though.
- wonderwonder 3y agoOpen offices are terrible. Management knows they are as well because Sr. leadership almost always have their own offices. The peons sit in the pit. Until the CEO is sitting next to everyone else they are all speaking lies when preaching the benefits of an open office. The only benefit is that its cheaper and they can keep an eye on you.
- WWLink 3y agoAhh my employer does this. The founding CEO had his desk over by the front door, and back in those days we all sat in the same big room. We have multiple big rooms now but the current CEO still has his desk out in the open. Last time I was in the office we talked about anime lol.
- Joeri 3y agoThere is one model even worse: when leadership claims that they too sit in the open office like everyone else … only to take up a big meeting room all day as if it is their personal office, causing the actual meetings booked there to have to move to the middle of the open space, making everyone an unwilling meeting participant.
- Zigurd 3y agoThere is an exception to this observation about senior management: Andy Grove used to sit in a cubicle. It was a big cubicle in a labyrinth of his assistants' cubicles. It didn't make cubicle farms any better though.
- midoridensha 3y agoThere's an exception to almost everything. Intel was a famous exception on cubicles for upper management; the CEO had a cubicle just like normal employees (except the CEO's was bigger and not accessible from the aisle of course). The CEO also didn't have his own special floor, special bathroom, special elevator, etc.
- ascotan 3y agoit's a millennial thing. they grew up working on laptops and their dream office is to make the workplace look like starbucks. Open seating, no cubicles, a barista. It's a knee-jerk reaction to the old office place standard of 'cubes'. Managers hire out to consultants that hype this type of office layout because it will supposedly attract a talent. To be fair, cubes weren't any better. I remember having a guy slerping tea sitting across from me. I couldn't see him but I could sure hear him and there was no way for me to get up and move.
- ornornor 3y ago> When I was required in the office, I would just wear headphones to avoid distractions Sometimes I just want silence. Not music, not $color noise. I also get itchy ears after wearing headphones for hours on end, and noise canceling headphones give me a headache… or, you know, I could work wherever I prefer, with little to no commute, and an office arranged how I like it.
- deaddodo 3y agoYup, this too. Half the time I had headphones on, I didn't even have them playing anything. I just had ANC turned on to muffle the background noise (and deter people who didn't actually needy assistance with anything). But I definitely had ear stink/itch at the end of most days.
- roland35 3y agoEar stink... I never knew my ears smelled so bad before I started using airpod pros!
- willcipriano 3y agoStarted getting chronic ear infections after using headphones for long hours.
- badpun 3y agoIn my anecdotal experience, it’s important to take of headphones every now and then to prevent moisture from accumulating in the ear canal. That moisture is unnatural and id probably very nice for various germs.
- quickthrower2 3y agoThe worst place I worked I needed industrial earplugs, then chuck white noise on top of that to get almost distraction free. The way to get the desired peace was to leave
- skirmish 3y agoI used to do that but then every 15 minutes some coworker would tap me on the shoulder to ask some inane question, and I would spend 5 minutes taking things out of my ears before I could hear them. Fun (not).
- quickthrower2 3y agoI think specific problem is high density open plan offices. At about 20sqm per person, and keeping quiet and noisy professionals in separate rooms, it is not too bad.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- everdrive 3y agoI remember the first time I was in an open office. I was flabbergasted. We'd all get on a call so we could talk to some remote vendor. Other people would have their mics on, so I'd hear my own voice repeated and delayed through the Zoom call. I could barely talk, and barely hear anyone. It was a self-evidently terrible decision that everyone was just going along with. Sometime later we were moved to a different open office space. It was deafeningly loud in there, and I eventually discovered that there was a white noise machine on the ceiling above every single employees head. Apparently this was meant to help with the open office design, but it did the opposite: much like a busy cafeteria, everyone had to shout over top the all the extra noise in the room. (the combined sound of about 100 white noise speakers + the sound of about 100 employees talking or working) Again, such a stupid decision I can barely understand how someone could set it up this way. I eventually just waited 'til no one was around and unplugged most of the speakers. It was a huge improvement, and no one complained.
- heavyset_go 3y agoThis is both hilarious and terrifying at the same time. Thanks for being a hero.
- hdjjhhvvhga 3y agoParadoxically the only person thanking the parent for going through this shit might be an anonymous commenter on an Internet forum...
- TuringNYC 3y ago>> Open offices are the literal reason Bumping this up a notch, I have co-workers who work together 4hrs/day on the same meeting but cannot sit together because our Zoom calls all collide when any one person is speaking. Core issue is the lack of conf rooms in a zoom-centric organization.
- userbinator 3y agoThe only real reason for open offices is cost saving. Everything else is just an excuse to make it not seem like it is.
- philipov 3y agoAnd you know what's a bigger cost savings than open office? No office!
- petre 3y agoActually, the employers should really pay us rent for WFH because they are using our own facilities to make profits.
- johnnyanmac 3y agoMy last job did give me a stipend that more or less covered my internet bill. That was nice.
- arkey 3y agoSame here, add to that some office equipment at a huge discount, when they had to close the office during the pandemic, a one-time fair amount of cash for spending in home office equipment, and a smaller but nice yearly amount for the same.
- azmodeus 3y agoIn Germany you can tax deduct your rent for an office room with a door and a proportion of your utilities for the office
- Tomte 3y agoOnly if you don't use the room for anything except work. You've got a computer in there that you're also using for private stuff? Not tax-deductible anymore. Private books on the bookshelf? Not tax-deductible anymore. You've got a wardrobe with some clothes you're only accessing once per season (to store off-season clothes)? Not tax-deductible anymore.
- stevezsa8 3y agoWhen we returned to the office, my boss decided even a single day WFH was frowned upon. Having to beg to stay home for a dentist appointment became a big ordeal. But my boss was a bit unhinged before covid. I found it funny that my lockdown productivity suddenly counted for nothing. I have friends at other companies who have been 3 days per week WFH for 2 years and really appreciate the flexibility.
- pennaMan 3y agoI hope the past tense means you're not working at that hell hole anymore
- stevezsa8 3y agoYeah I did in fact quit that place. My main gripe was that my manager seemed to be having mental health issues (manic over-talking and occasional hints of psychosis). WFH was what helped me last through the covid years as I could avoid her being sat near me. I was good friends with many people there, some of us still occasionally meetup. And I hear of a steady stream of other developers leavings because they can't work from home any more. Usually it's the younger guys who just had a kid or people with long commutes.
- vitaflo 3y agoOur team is still fully WFH even tho the corp expects us to come in 3 days min. My manager (and his manager) know we are waaaayyy more productive at home and don’t want to upset the apple cart so we don’t need to come in. And I gotta say stuff like that gets me even more motivated to do work cuz I know they’re catching heat from the higher ups but we’re just producing too much work for them to really complain too much.
- HellDunkel 3y ago100%. And don‘t forget about the useless standup meetings which are nothing more than a complete waste of time.
- arkey 3y agoWhy do you think standup meetings are useless? Maybe they are not run properly? I find them to be a pillar of our workday, within our team.
- miyuru 3y agodepends on the place of work. mine is also useless. the manager is clueless so some team members just tells every single thing they did for 15 minutes for clout with the manager.
- HellDunkel 3y agoJust my experience. A work culture where people approach each other without somebody telling them to do so is much better. Respect of each others time is also crucial. Get the motivating factors right and you dont need to bore the x out of everyone.
- arkey 3y agoIndeed, and I would even say that this applies to any meeting you can think of. However if you get the purpose of the meeting straight and somehow manage for everyone to properly collaborate, you'll get a 3-5min daily meeting that easily enables efficient collaboration and awareness.
- dboreham 3y agoDiscussions that should be 1:1 become 1:N, wasting the time of (N-1) people.
- mcv 3y agoDiscussions, yes, but discussions aren't for the standup meeting. Those are for informally updating everybody on what you're working on and whether you're stuck on anything. They lead to 1 on 1 meetings to solve those issues.
- renegade-otter 3y agoOh, l@@k: "Meta ditches open plan office structure to bring back cubicles" https://www.chargedretail.co.uk/2023/02/21/meta-office-space-change/ https://www.chargedretail.co.uk/2023/02/21/meta-office-space...
- midoridensha 3y agoWhat's old is new again. From your link: >Mark Zuckerberg’s firm says it is attempting to avoid returning to the cubicle culture of the 70s and 80s by introducing its own design. >The Cube helps to asorb sound instead of reflecting and echoing it around colleague’s workspaces. >Meta claims that its new design reduces sound levels by approximately 20 decibels. This is BS. Either Meta is actively lying, or they really are SO clueless they've never seen cubicles in the 90s and 00s (when they were really phased out, not the 80s), and really believe somehow that cubicles were made of sound-reflecting materials. They weren't. They were made of cloth, with what I think was cardboard behind it. The cloth worked very well to absorb sound and keep the ambient noise level down. (The cardboard was to give some structure, and also so you could use push-pins/thumbtacks on them to hold things in place.) The only thing "new" here is maybe using some kind of recycled plastic material to make the cloth. BFD. 90s/00s cubicles were a dream to work in, compared to the open offices of today. Everyone complained about them at the time because they sucked compared to walled offices with doors, but in reality, most workers never had those in the decades before. You can see photos online of engineers working in the 1950s: it was all open offices with a bunch of big desks in a grid.
- renegade-otter 3y agoI worked in cubicles up until 2011. Then I joined "trendy" startups. I only started hearing about open-plan offices around that time. In the 90s it wasn't even remotely a thing.
- civilized 3y agoIt's so frequent and so bizarre that people are getting paid by an employer, and they spend their work hours constantly thinking "I wish this employer would allow me to do the job they pay me to do". It feels like I'm thinking the Earth is the center of the universe, then watching Mars go retrograde. Something's profoundly wrong with my understanding of the world. I see two options: 1. Graeber's Bullshit Jobs. Which says that a lot of jobs are in large part about making the boss feel important, not about the assigned work. 2. Communication between leaders and workers is so bad that leaders have no idea what workers really experience in their working conditions.