12 ms·

Bring back private offices

245 points by AlbertCory 3y ago

cranberryturkey 3y ago
this is why i'm starting https://nightowls.space https://nightowls.space
- nomilk 3y ago
  Very cool. I'd been a tad disappointed by the limited open hours of coworking spaces (although I completely understand if the owner wants to be there then it can't open more than about 9 hours/day). Many evenings and weekends, and especially around public holidays, it can sometimes feel like you're the only one who wants to get stuff done. Finding a similarly minded community is very cool. Maybe you could make it into a global 'nightowls' facebook group or something (similar to how there are similar groups for nomads).
  - cranberryturkey 3y ago
    yeah, i have not had success with fb but i can setup a page once i launch. i work from home and miss the social environment of the office, but hate office politics. i also do my best work at night.
- CaliforniaKarl 3y ago
  Interesting! FYI, on iOS Safari, clicking the "Conditions" link just scrolls me to the top of the page. I noticed this is getting downvoted; you might want to do a post specifically for this.
  - cranberryturkey 3y ago
    thanks i'll check it out.
  - cranberryturkey 3y ago
    Should be fixed now
jrockway 3y ago
I don't know if there is any amenity at the office that would make me want to commute (and it is like 20 minutes for me to get to work). Like, I already have a private office. Nobody I work with wants to be interrupted with random conversation. So what would going into the office achieve; we'd each spend 40 minutes a day packed into a subway car, while still not actually talking to each other. If you want employees to be happier about work, assign fewer tasks. "Welp I'm done with everything this sprint, guess I'll not come in for 3 days." As an aside, I propose a new Olympic sport called "software engineering". We take the world's best 100m dash runners, and have them run 421.6 100m dashes one after another! If you're a sprinter, why can't you also be a distance runner!
- wodenokoto 3y ago
  That’s nice for you. We can’t afford to move to an apartment with two extra rooms, so wfh full time would require a raise for both of us.
  - javednissar 3y ago
    The WFH vs in-office debate is very much one that is dependent on personal circumstances and I do wish more people understood that
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - michaelmrose 3y ago
    The average price difference between a 2 bedroom and a 1 is about $3000 annually. I'm guessing that one bedroom is probably enough for 2 desks. An average couple will use about $5-$12k annually in terms of needing 2 cars, gas, maintenance etc not to mention spending collectively nearly 500 hours commuting over the course of the year. Details matter for instance your commute may be very favorable or the cost of changing apartments very expensive if you already have a good deal but on average WFH is a financial gain and a pretty big one at that.
    - 3y ago
feverzsj 3y ago
It's called home.
darknavi 3y ago
I'd love to see a breakdown of open office space sentiment and which industries people are in. I see open space hate dominate HN but in gaming open space can be amazing for cross-discipline communication and collaboration, especially on smaller teams.
- ffgjgf1 3y ago
  > especially on smaller teams. Having a few people from a smaller team in the same room is certainly not what people mean when they say open office. IMHO If you only had to share it with your team it wouldn’t be half as bad
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    No. These executive types fantasize about people in different teams or even different disciplines having these amazing chance encounters. You know: "major businesses are launched because Joe Executive had the foresight to put everyone in one room." I call it C-Suite Porn.
mianos 3y ago
As long as it's cheaper to just get some huge room and push a bunch of desks together over a few days, "open office", is going to be the choice of managers. For every person who says, "I don't mind open offices", I meet ten more who hate them. I know, statistics like this are just made up, but everyone I know would rather work in a closed office.
djrobstep 3y ago
I currently work from home, but with occasional (completely unforced) days in the (open plan) office. I’ve found I detest the noise of the open plan office so much that I end up using one of the spare meeting rooms instead because it’s quieter.
a_vanderbilt 3y ago
Ultimately, the sentiments offered by others are what drive this home. I have said it before and I'll be saying it on Hacker News again: I have become very accustomed to working from home, and very little will motivate me back into an office. Even a huge pay bump would make it a difficult decision. I like the coworkers I've had, but the distractions of an office are excessive. I can go anywhere I want with WFH, literally anywhere - and my employer supports it. No amount of pitiful pizza parties and stolen fridge food will make me want to go back.
- fargle 3y ago
  but - who do you yell at when someone burns the popcorn or is cooking fish in the microwave down the hall?
  - a_vanderbilt 3y ago
    Funny you mention that - one of my last office interactions was my boss burning salmon in the microwave. I literally walked into the server room because I'd rather be deaf than smell burnt fish.
  - sircastor 3y ago
    One my favorite gags from the early days of the pandemic was telling my coworkers that I left a cheesecake in the fridge, and they were all welcome to have some.
  - throwup238 3y ago
    > who do you yell at That's what kids are for. > cooking fish in the microwave down the hall That's what in-laws are for.
    - fargle 3y ago
      > in-laws i'd rather rto
      - throwup238 3y ago
skipkey 3y ago
A few years back I was working in an open office setting at a games studio and I got in a discussion with the branch manager about it. He was convinced that open office was a productivity multiplier. I asked him who he thought the most productive developers were on the team. When he gave me names, I pointed out that every one of them were wearing big noise-canceling headphones to block out the collaboration he thought he was fostering. My solution was different, I usually got in at 6am when almost no one else came in before the 10am standup. I would get most of my work done by then and then circulate and help the kids as needed. To be fair, it did seem like the artists did get some benefit, but it was definitely a net negative for most of the developers. I’ve been in private offices, and cubes, and open office, and honestly the most productive environment was when I was in a set of cubicles that had sliding doors, around a bullpen with multiple tables. When you needed to go head-down to get some code down you could, but otherwise you hung out at the tables in the middle.
- brailsafe 3y ago
  There was a time when I thought the same as that branch manager, but that time was long ago and it was based on absolutely no experience. In the last open office I worked in, I could not find headphones that allowed me to focus, not even construction-grade earmuffs; if someone's chewing food within 10 ft, I'll hear it, and that's all I'll hear. For literal constant music listening to actually help, it needs to be a choice, otherwise it just makes me tire of music and I don't get nearly as much out of my mental energy.
  - dailykoder 3y ago
    >In the last open office I worked in, I could not find headphones that allowed me to focus, not even construction-grade earmuffs; if someone's chewing food within 10 ft, I'll hear it, and that's all I'll hear. That's interesting. I have the same exact issue and whenever I tell people about it they think I am crazy. I don't have a problem with people chewing food when it's lunch break and we sit in the cafeteria, but man, when I try to focus it kills my brain. Just last week the guy next to me started eating kind of late in the day (where my brain was almost empty). I then tried to cancel it out with headphones, but that just wasn't possible anymore. And I still don't know how to deal with it. Sometimes I try to take a walk for 5 minutes and it helps, but not always. On some days I get a full mental breakdown because I get angry at myself getting angry on somebody just making noises any normal human being does while eating
xyst 3y ago
I’ll never understand why people want to go back to the office. Office has shit food. Shit coffee. In an open office, there’s a high risk of catching a virus from your co-worker. People love to tap your shoulder, interrupt your thought process (clearly I’m in the zone, asshole), and ask you mundane shit that could have been resolved over IM. Even worse, the idiot asshole that can’t be bothered to read documentation and asks you to go over it with him/her in a 1:1 session. Fuck off.
- UberFly 3y ago
  This may not be the experience that everyone else is having in the office. Some work better with the team experience. You obviously don't.
- fatih-erikli 3y ago
  Obviously you worked in someone elses desktop wallpaper that they call you an "office". Real working places exist, they are different than what you describe.
- spike021 3y ago
  >Office has shit food. Shit coffee. In an open office, there’s a high risk of catching a virus from your co-worker. People love to tap your shoulder, interrupt your thought process (clearly I’m in the zone, asshole), and ask you mundane shit that could have been resolved over IM. It's not that complicated to bring food from home for lunch, grab something on the way in, or go out for lunch -- I doubt you're working in a food desert after all. Ditto for coffee and even coffee shops. Catching a virus thing, sure that's a real concern. For personal experience though I've found I've gotten sick more often since COVID and 100% WFH than when I used to work out of the office 2-3 days a week, including public transit. As far as interruptions, a lot of offices have conference rooms engineers can use whenever they want. Even one person rooms or the newer telephone booths. Usually all soundproofed. You don't even have to tell coworkers which one you're working from and you can switch rooms throughout the day. I guess that's not feasible in like a 10-20 person office but I've been in offices for up to 75-100 people and it wasn't that difficult. Most of the problems you've cited have relatively simple solutions in my opinion.
rawgabbit 3y ago
My department got called into the office last week. I assume it was for mandatory serendipitous communication. I did my best and struck up a conversation in our open plan office. I was shushed because half of the department was on the same zoom call and there wasn’t a meeting room big enough for them. I still remember the office I was assigned as a graduate student. It was far nicer than any I had in private industry. It had a window with a view of the campus and I could actually lock the door. The worst office experience I ever had was when I was rubbing elbows with my teammates and wearing noise canceling headphones the entire time. To get away from that gerbil in a cage claustrophobia, I took to walks in the parking garage which was the most humane space in the entire building.
w10-1 3y ago
People dedicated to working at home haven't worked in a good office. That was: an office with a door, and a big open space where people from a kind but competitive group had free-wheeling discussions. The main thing was that we together were shaping the product; if you convinced others, you could have an impact. And to convince others, you needed to do your homework (in your office). So it's not really the office or the desk but the rhythm of coming up with an idea and seeing it take root in your peers (or not) -- the opportunity to contribute. Nowadays, it's open desks or cubes and product managers, and any collective discussion is shot through with politics. When initiative is squelched and mutual respect is replaced by influence, the only thing to maximize is slack -- which makes working from home the absolute best.
- fatih-erikli 3y ago
  > People dedicated to working at home haven't worked in a good office. I agree. > The main thing was that we together were shaping the product; if you convinced others, you could have an impact. And to convince others, you needed to do your homework (in your office). This is not. Shaping a product is not a collaborative work. Thus, product is something different, we talk about the real work environment. > So it's not really the office or the desk but the rhythm of coming up with an idea and seeing it take root in your peers (or not) -- the opportunity to contribute. This is another not. Office has nothing to do with that topic. > Nowadays, it's open desks or cubes and product managers, and any collective discussion is shot through with politics. When initiative is squelched and mutual respect is replaced by influence, the only thing to maximize is slack -- which makes working from home the absolute best. This is office chatting. Product development is done inside the computer. You don't need an office for that.
  - hyperadvanced 3y ago
    On one hand, product-development on the computer is a lot better when people actually use the computer to the best of its abilities. A lot of people will just leave shit in people’s heads or request one-offs to be done EOD because, I swear, this was a last second client request and we really need it. On the other, I’ve done a lot of painful product meetings with PM seatwarmers who refuse to type anything at all into their tickets and devs who barely comment on important things like ticket size or whether or not something should be prioritized differently based on technical factors. I’ve met only a handful of good PO/PM types, and whether or not they work in person has had little to do with it.
stndef 3y ago
Speaking as someone who is autistic and has significant hearing loss, open offices are a form of torture. It might sound like hyperbole, but I promise it's not! I enjoy working in a team, but in more enclosed spaces. In my current job I share a room with two other people and it's just right (apart from when all of us are in remote meetings at the same time, but you win some and you lose some).
- tomcam 3y ago
  Speaking as someone who’s not autistic and who has sensitive hearing, I concur
  - tomcam 3y ago
    P.S. my wife & kid just characterized me as autistic and I don’t know what to do with that
    - hrnnnnnn 3y ago
      I recommend thinking back through difficult events from your past which were hard to understand at the time to see if autism could help explain them.
      - tomcam 3y ago
        They're doing it for me :O
        tomcam 3y ago
        It was a lot
stn_za 3y ago
I have my private office. It's at home.
steelframe 3y ago
I started working in industry in the early 2000's. For my first job I shared a private office with one other person. For my second job I had my own private office to myself. Between those two jobs I had 7 years with either a private or a semi-private office. The depth and quality of my work definitely benefited from the long periods of uninterrupted concentration on the task at hand. I accomplished more in 2 years with a private office than I did later in ~4 years with an open office. For my third jog I went to Google, where I was in open seating for about 10 years until the pandemic. The open seating was a big adjustment, but my brain was still young enough to filter out distractions well enough to get things done. My most productive work was accomplished as an individual task outside of any team effort. My job after Google was with a company that had cubicles with low walls, but this was before the vaccines and so nobody was going in. I struggled to really integrate with any other teams as there was literally no face-to-face interaction. I never even met my boss in person. Again, I did accomplish some significant technical work, but they were lone projects. My job after that again has open seating, Google-style. They've also started hot desking, so I have to reserve a desk for the days I go in. I get whatever monitor and chair are at that desk. Let's just say that the condition of the equipment is about what you would expect if it were rented on a day-to-day basis. As I've gotten older I've found my ability to filter out distractions has suffered. I've read about some studies that suggest that this is common, perhaps even normal as the brain ages. In order to get into a deep state of concentration in an open office I need to put in noise-canceling headphones, turn on a film score, and pull the monitor close to my face so as to minimize movement in my peripheral vision. Whatever spontaneous collaboration is supposed to happen in the office isn't happening, and I consider interrupting me while I have headphones in and am zeroed-in on a task to be actually pretty rude. That doesn't stop some people (usually TPMs putting together a status report) from interrupting me anyway. So I'm only happy coming into the office when I have a cluster of in-person meetings scheduled. I'll jump into meeting rooms and catch people in the hallway or the micro-kitchen to sync up on one or two things that I may not get as much traction on via random Slack messages. Then I GTFO of there and back to my private office that I customized at home during the pandemic to get any real heads-down work done. Even then I am only really productive when I close Slack and email for a couple of hours. Meanwhile everyone is always complaining about lack of conference or phone rooms, and so they're trying to set up a bunch of pods throughout the office for people who need some degree of isolation for uninterrupted coding sessions or Zoom meetings. This whole thing seems really farcical to me. I joked with a co-worker, "Oh, I know! We could build 'pods' into the structure of the building with rectangular panes of glass and planks of wood mounted on hinges with a latch. That would make it more easy to get HVAC and sprinklers set up in the 'pods' too!" I'd definitely come into the office for more full days if I had a private office again. As it stands I'll come into the office as infrequently as I can and for as little time as possible. It's just miserable compared to my workspace at home. That said, if it's at all feasible, I will refuse to take another job ever again that has mandatory office attendance policies unless they can provide me a private office.
tehjoker 3y ago
workplaces still do not have adequate COVID-19 controls, so offices are disabling and deadly places. the risk of being an office worker used to be tripping on the stairs, car crash while commuting, or sitting too much. now it means contracting a deadly virus multiple times a year. it's too bad OSHA doesn't set minimum standards here.
- nextlevelwizard 3y ago
  What does OSHA say about common cold? I have never any workplace to protect against any disease other than covid. Covid is here to stay and we will have yearly out breaks just like we have flu season. It isn't any more deadly than any other disease you might commonly encounter in your life.
  - bowsamic 3y ago
    Idk about OSHA but at my work in Germany it is a social taboo to come in to work if you have a cold and it's also against the safety instructions
    - nextlevelwizard 3y ago
      Pretty sure you dont come to work then with covid either, so I dont see the point you are trying to make
      - dagw 3y ago
        By the time you know for sure that you have covid, you have already been spreading it for several days. Most people would still go to work if they had a bit of a sore throat, runny nose or just felt slightly 'off'. Equally staying at home because you felt like you might possibly have a slight case of flu was very frowned upon and at most places would not make you popular with your boss. Just being able to work from home for a couple of days as soon as you feel like you might be coming down with something is a clear win for overall public health.
neilv 3y ago
> "The one big thing I forgot about that was the value of the employee communications you get with cubes." [paraphrased Eric Schmidt] [...] It’s utter bullshit and executive fantasy. If you walked around Google and their open offices, almost half the workers are wearing headphones to screen out the noise. Do you just yell over and communicate with people, like in the executives’ fantasy? No, first you have to wave your hand in front of their face to get their attention. FWIW, cubicles can work better than that. My first software engineering job, we had cubicles, and you could walk past and see what people were doing, knock (if they hadn't configured their cube to have the opening in view), wheel your chair to the opening and talk across the hallway, wave someone into your cube to see something on your screen, etc. People actually did all that often. And on occasion you could get some focus time. But when I visited one of the Google satellites, there was this big area of dystopian open office layout, with people clustered densely around these grotesque insectoid pods of desktop. I don't blame them for needing headphones. I recall the mere sight of the pods making me anxious, and thinking that I would have to find a way to work there without becoming a pod person. Anyway, I wouldn't take Eric Schmidt seriously, on the proper care and feeding of tech workers, after his involvement in screwing over all tech workers (at certain illegally colluding big companies, but also with presumed cascading market effects for everyone else): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt#Role_in_illegal_non-recruiting_agreements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt#Role_in_illegal_n...
deathanatos 3y ago
> In the Before Times, you just came to the office every day. It wasn’t even a question; “working from home” was just not practical. “Going to work” meant leaving the house. Then the pandemic happened. Well, now… hold on a minute. It was entirely practical. I did it … my whole team did it. We didn't do it 100% of the week, since the expectation was that we worked in the office, but we had an informal "work from home Wednesdays" that permitted us to collectively accomplish the various chores that life requires must be done inside working business hours (i.e., mostly visiting other businesses). The tradeoff is pretty straight-forward: I'm going to trade the commute hours for a mix of "work, not work, and getting stuff done", and my employer gets effectively the same real work out of me. That we collaborated (all took the same day) made is simpler since we knew to avoid scheduling each other for meetings that day. But there was nothing that stopped that from being 5d/wk, and I was glad I did it when the pandemic hit, since I knew that it was quiet possible to work remotely. > Be honest now: would you want to work in that? …but yeah, nobody. My home "office" (i.e., the living room) is (especially now; upgrades were made in the pandemic once it became obvious how much I'd be home) the nicest office I've ever worked in. Because I've never had an office. > And the concept of a completely customizable workspace didn’t sit well with executives who didn’t value the individuality of their workers. Some things never change. > Extroverts always think, “We need more communication! One of the things I witnessed even prior to the pandemic was that some people are truly incapable of effective communication. I had a coworker who was utterly terrible at Slack, and real difficult to handle when remote … but it wasn't much different if you were sitting there talking to them face to face either. Bad, faulty logic, spewed as fast as the fingers would go, and often with less than a sentence per message. Orgs are mostly terrible at Slack. (And email. And meetings.) Things lobbed into n-way DMs is terrible. If it has a topic, put it in a channel. People act like there's a shortage of channels & user groups, and they must be rationed. Same with email DLs. IT is of no help here: for whatever reason, I'm forbidden from creating new email DLs or channels, so it is no real wonder to find my coworkers cramming things into n-way DMs. (Thankfully Slack finally added a "copy the history" to DMs. So clearly Slack sort of sees the problem … just not an effective solution.) And if only people could stop with the "Hi." followed by line silence. Meeting tech is still terrible, though. Bloated and slow, and features like {draw on screen, not banning multiple people from screen sharing, etc.} just aren't widely available. Teams is utterly terrible, only loading successfully like half the time, and the one third-party we have to deal with, however they're sending invites, they often don't include a URL in the invite body, only in a non-standard (i.e., invisible in any Calendar program aside from I presume Outlook) attribute called "x-skype-something-something" which is a quite the tell as to Team's roots. And I only have to use it when some other org forces me to. Even calls with Microsoft themselves will run into technical issues. … and it seems like some orgs (users of Zendesk in particular, maybe?) expect one to auth by sending from the contact email on the account. Except that it's a DL, such that emails can reach my whole team, and sending from a DL is utter black magic. (But possible, it turns out!) And like, one wonders … y'all know you can edit messages in Slack and correct your typos, …right? The amount of politely worded "parse error in English, line 1" replies I have to send is kinda ridiculous. There's "they made a typo" and then there's me, cocking my head, trying to find a parse that even remotely makes any sense at all. That XKCD YT feature of reading your comment back to you could make a comeback. We need people to work on their writing skills. I don't know how, though.
mnky9800n 3y ago
I have a private office at the university I have a position at. I also have an open office at the company I work at. I love my private office. I have a big white board to sketch out ideas on, a couch, lots of table space for various projects or whatever. I have speakers that I can play music without headphones. My private office is a joy to go and work at. At the company we have two open offices, one quiet and one for collaboration. We also have an open desk policy. We also don't have enough desks for everyone so there's work from home if you want and the company pays for your setup. Tbh, the only thing I ever did with my WFH setup was to play video games on the screen. If I need to concentrate or write proposals or whatever I can go to my university office. If I want to talk to colleagues I go to the company office. If I decide I hate it all I go to a coffee shop. Sure whatever works for you works for you. But I love my private office.
- geraldhh 3y ago
  congratulation! sounds like you made it
mattlondon 3y ago
I would love love love even a cubicle! I have only ever known row upon row of open plan desks. A cubicle with some semblance of personal space feels like nirvana to me.
timthelion 3y ago
For most of history most skilled workers worked from home or lived in the workplace: watchmakers, metal workers, shoemakers. Newton was working from home when he developed his version of calculus. While it is not new to have a study or a workshop, commuting is a modern phenomenon.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  Read Bartleby the Scrivener. Or A Christmas Carol.
  - timthelion 3y ago
    I've read "A Christmas Carol", not sure how it relates to what I wrote. Can you explain?
neilv 3y ago
> "IMO, the best layout I ever saw was the old Tech Square MIT AI Lab (not* the current Geahy monstrosity).""* I think that quoted person has the right idea of some of the better ways to do things. But in partial defense of that Gehry building (the Stata Center, which houses the merger of the AI Lab and LCS into CSAIL)... The floors included some of the elements they describe. I shared a nice window office with a postdoc, but ended up working most of the time from a laptop on the moveable tables in a common area of our floor in front of the elevators. That space got used for lunches, random meetings, the occasional laptop worker, after-hours social events, and chance encounters with people passing through. There's also patterns that I'm not sure Tech Square had, like cutouts between floors, wide open staircases that people can pause upon for conversation, big windows, outdoor space, the main street first floor. (I only got to visit 545 Tech Square once before people moved to Stata, and Building 20 right before it was torn down. Both had obvious merits, and all three buildings were very different from each other.)
paxys 3y ago
This idea is outdated now more than ever. I don't want to commute across the city to sit in a dark windowless room by myself all day and then commute back home. I already have the best possible private office at home. On the days where I do go in, I want to sit around coworkers and collaborate rather than do focused solo work.
renewiltord 3y ago
We're in software. Just out-compete with a superior product. If you're more productive with one of these things, you will iterate faster and be more agile. Pick a good space and out-execute the incumbent in a market someone's demonstrated there. You don't have to convince me. You can just beat me in the market.
Havoc 3y ago
Yeah don’t think that’s ever coming back
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3y ago
There's so much vacant office space right now, it's absurd to me that companies aren't giving out offices to their employees like it's 1976. For nearly every job, some work is much better done in a focused, quiet, environment, and some work is best done in a highly collaborative setting. Give permanent offices to anyone who wants one (and actually uses it 3 or 4 days/week), reservable offices for anyone else who wants to pop in for a day, tear out all the cubicles, and create great collaborative spaces in their place.
- Clubber 3y ago
  >it's absurd to me that companies aren't giving out offices to their employees like it's 1976. It's because offices are now a status symbol and the manager who works in an office and forces their employees to work in a pit feels those employees are below them. Not only that, he wants them to know they are below him. This is also the reason your salary ceiling is usually less than whatever your manager makes. It's an example of office political bullshit and another reason many/most people prefer WFH.
  - kamaal 3y ago
    To add to your point, they also don't like to set a new precedent, if it takes off everybody would have to do it. Managerial jobs seem to now be a thing of the past. In the past year, I haven't felt the need for a manager. Even while executing projects that need some form of central collaboration. At this point in time manager largely feels like some sort of legacy aristocratic position, which a big fat salary all to do nothing. And in most cases, add negative value.
srg0 3y ago
Devil's advocate. Private offices facilitate sexual harassment and some other undesirable behaviors.
- bencelaszlo 3y ago
  That's why we should remove the restroom doors, too. The external walls of the office building, the fog, the night and the shadows.
- esskay 3y ago
  That's got to be the worst excuse/reason given for forcing crummy openplan offices I've ever heard. Kudos on coming up with something so creative and ridiculous.
- blitzar 3y ago
  There is a decent chance that the retired old guy who is complaining about kidz these days not wanting to work spent from 9am till 5pm in their private office sleeping, drinking and trying to bang Doris from they typing pool. This is why we cant have nice things.
- Clubber 3y ago
  Well according to that logic, having everyone go to an office also facilitates sexual harassment and other undesirable behaviors. No one can grab my ass when I'm WFH except my spouse.
phendrenad2 3y ago
What percentage of knowledge workers, across all time, have had private offices? Probably 1% at this point. It's a fading memory in most domains, except for maybe self-employed attorneys and accountants. So it's not a matter of bringing private offices "back", it's a matter of convincing people, ex nihilo, that private offices are a good idea. Considering how long companies have been lying that they "hire only the best" (and then throw "the best" into a big noisy animal paddock), it's quite an uphill battle.
dusted 3y ago
Oh god yes please! We're 4 people per office, and while this is tolerable, I really imagine I'd be much more productive (and less annoying) if I had my own space.. I know I can just work from home, but thing is, I like going to work, I enjoy having those people around, and being able to drop by to ask or talk about something. I always appreciate the coffee machine and lunch, so I'd love to combine the advantages of the WFH with the advantages of working in office.
nextlevelwizard 3y ago
I have worked at the same job before pandemic until now. Before pandemic we had open-ish layout with my teams desks all together (8 desks, four side-by-side in two rows with our backs to the other row) with ~1.5 meter separating noise/sight walls between us and the next team(s). To me it was good. It helped me learn much faster when I could just ask a question out loud and get help. Same with bouncing ideas. Also rotating and wheeling over to help someone was easy. And when you needed someone from another team you could just stand up and see if they were at their table or not. That lasted few years then came "smart" office of flexible seating. We had two desks side by side with separating sight walls in multiple rows and you had to reserve your seat the day before or risk someone removing you during the day. Here we could still somewhat maintain our teams cohesion, but no longer could you just ask questions and have it be heard by everyone nor could you just stand up and see if someone was at the office or not. Now it is just random teams chats and meetings. No idea if anyone is present or reading any chats. I can shout into the void and have no responses. Of course the upside is that I can dick around all day, like now I am writing this stupid post instead of working and there isn't even a risk someone might shoulder surf me and question if I am doing my work or not. Once a week we go to the office and work in one of the few "team rooms" which brings back the old effectiveness and we get a lot of shit done during those days. Also I have noticed that many newer employees are lacking a lot of knowledge about processes and operations that were common knowledge before pandemic and big part of it the lack of coffee/watercooler/desk/lunch talk. There is no way to just casually over hear or stumble upon or just ask about random stuff. Part of me wishes we could go back to the office, but also the benefits of being able to start working an hour late and quit and hour early and just not do the work you are paid to do is too much to give up on. I held strong for couple years, but after seeing how everyone else was abusing WFH to take care of their kids or run errands during work day I also gave in.
- jen20 3y ago
  > no longer could you just ask questions and have it be heard by everyone That sounds like a serious win for your colleagues. > newer employees are lacking a lot of knowledge about processes and operations that were common knowledge before pandemic Sounds like you should fix your documentation, automation and onboarding problems then?
ktosobcy 3y ago
In the ancient days (15y ago) before I started working remotely (very hipster of me :-D) I worked in office building - each for had a corridor and each team had their of office room. It was great as at maximum tete was about 8-10ish people working on related problem. Most of the time it was quite quiet, occasional discussion involved whole team and didn't bother anyone else. It should be like that.
k99x55 3y ago
Even better is WFH.
sourcecodeplz 3y ago
What I minded most about open-office was the noise. the constant noise. always had to wear headphones to do any non-mundane work. 2-3 people in a real office was the best years of my working life really.
solatic 3y ago
If you're an engineer and you think the way you make money is by writing code, and there's no need to leave your house to write code, why aren't you working for yourself? Serious question. Software engineering is fundamentally a collaborative, team effort. Team efforts work best when the team is "gelled", and people enjoy working with each other. Half the opposition I read here about going into the office, y'all are rationalizing to avoid the simple conclusion that you just don't like the people you work with. Maybe your teammates make you shitty coffee and expect you to drink it. Maybe your manager doesn't care about your feelings about the value of quiet, heads-down time. Maybe your teammates pressure you into grabbing lunch from somewhere unhealthy and they don't respect your boundaries. Maybe your manager thinks everything is hunky-dory, and you're upset, and they're not emotionally intelligent enough to understand that or to work with you to deal with what's upsetting you. These are not problems with open offices, and having an office with a door will not solve them. These are people problems. A word of advice: life is too short to work with people who don't respect you. Spend your energy instead looking for people who will. Before trying to fix your office, fix yourself first, by not forcing yourself to be at a company you dislike so much.
- steve1977 3y ago
  One of the major problem in open offices for me are the acoustic and visual distractions of people talking and moving around. Noise canceling headphones help a bit, but only so much. So private offices absolutely help with that.
  - solatic 3y ago
    So why make the decision to work for a company with an open office? Why not apply to work for a remote-only company with a proper remote-only culture?
    - steve1977 3y ago
      I'm currently working primarily remote. My point was to say that at least some of the problems with open offices are actually the open offices - not that I don't like the people. I love my wife, but I'm still getting disrupted when she comes into the office (at home) and talks to me. And purely remote also has its downsides. The best mix would be something like remote and private offices.
tjpnz 3y ago
I've already got a private office. It's down the hall from my bedroom and doubles as a reading/gaming/escape from the kids room.
steve1977 3y ago
Just look at what engineer projects got done during the era of private offices and what gets done now.
hoseja 3y ago
"Caves and Commons" sounds like actual paradise.
DuctTapeAI 3y ago
I think it's important to consider the shift in home dynamics if someone is WFH vs in office. WFH gives a lot more flexibility to help out with house chores, childcare etc. In contrast, in office work removes this possibility which can be either a feature or a bug. Talking to a lot of old timey in office proponents, it sounds like many of them shifted housework/childcare to a partner and had a good time mostly because they weren't doing any of that work.
sys_64738 3y ago
Open plan offices are awful experiences and cause you to be constantly interrupted. WFH is best as you get to control everybody, especially your manager.
silverlake 3y ago
At one startup they got 2 adjacent open plan rooms at a WeWork. One was the quiet room, the other was not. I worked in the quiet room and it was really nice, like a library late at night. I’d chat with the guy sitting next to me on Slack. And if we needed to discuss something, we’d all move to a meeting room or the loud room. The CEO could not understand how we could prefer the quiet room. He’s a sales guy who chatters constantly. To him the silence was miserable, like a tomb. For us it was very productive and we could easily take a break to chat on our schedule.
jeromechoo 3y ago
Back when I managed a small coworking space, one of our most loyal members paid the premium for 1 of 2 private offices we had where he would show up to every day and shut the door for 8 hours working in the dark. He liked our rowdiness outside but hated being in the middle of it. People know what they need to be productive. Everything else just gets in the way. Ultimately this has very little to do with “the right office layout” and far more to do with how much trust your employer affords to its employees to manage themselves by default.
kkfx 3y ago
I am not interested in non-home offices in 2024... So no, even if offered for a dedicated, large, nice etc office I decline in advance.
dave333 3y ago
Have worked in just about every conceivable style of office over my career and the worst was probably the beehive style six desks in a hexagonal "cubicle." Too noisy and the snacks were kept on the table in the middle which wrecked any possible attempt to diet. An interesting one was in the UK in the late 70s where a large factory space was divided into glass-walled spaces so anyone could see anyone but mostly not hear them. My favorite were the private offices and my first internship in a physics lab at Oxford was one of the most collaborative where twice a day mid morning and mid afternoon a tea lady came around with a cart with Tea urn (milk and sugar premixed) and various snacks. Everyone came out of their labs almost without fail and talked informally with everyone else for 20 minutes on anything and everything. The corridor was lined with large chalkboards that were put to good use. All for the minor cost of a tea lady to focus the collaboration.
isaacremuant 3y ago
Nah. Remote. Full stop. Don't negotiate down. You're ceding power in a move that benefits no one except real estate investors. We've absolutely proven it should be optional and people can be extremely effective fully remote, but it makes downtown real estate investments falter so workers must lower their quality of life and savings to help the poor magnates and gov officials. Optional full remote is better for the environment, better for decentralisation of cities (sustainability), better for quality of life and money and time saved. Whoever doesn't like it can still go to an office. It also easily allows for cross region teams which happen anyway, even with return to the office mandates, where the move is so clearly arbitrary that people must go to join remote calls alone in the office and have no one from their own team with them. Don't just fold, is my advice. Corporations will just save costs and peddle BS HR like propaganda. If the office is so good that it's better than home then people will naturally go, if not, then so be it. Mandates show that it's not about employees or productivity but about real estate. Manager types also might prefer it due to their own situations and ease of going to the office but notice that higher levels will often be exempt from mandates. Again, get full remote jobs if you have a bit of leeway and slowly change the course. It's akin to game theory. The more people do it, the more common it'll be.

245 points by AlbertCory 3y ago

cranberryturkey 3y ago

this is why i'm starting https://nightowls.space https://nightowls.space

nomilk 3y ago
Very cool. I'd been a tad disappointed by the limited open hours of coworking spaces (although I completely understand if the owner wants to be there then it can't open more than about 9 hours/day). Many evenings and weekends, and especially around public holidays, it can sometimes feel like you're the only one who wants to get stuff done. Finding a similarly minded community is very cool. Maybe you could make it into a global 'nightowls' facebook group or something (similar to how there are similar groups for nomads).
- cranberryturkey 3y ago
  yeah, i have not had success with fb but i can setup a page once i launch. i work from home and miss the social environment of the office, but hate office politics. i also do my best work at night.
CaliforniaKarl 3y ago
Interesting! FYI, on iOS Safari, clicking the "Conditions" link just scrolls me to the top of the page. I noticed this is getting downvoted; you might want to do a post specifically for this.
- cranberryturkey 3y ago
  thanks i'll check it out.
- cranberryturkey 3y ago
  Should be fixed now

jrockway 3y ago

I don't know if there is any amenity at the office that would make me want to commute (and it is like 20 minutes for me to get to work). Like, I already have a private office. Nobody I work with wants to be interrupted with random conversation. So what would going into the office achieve; we'd each spend 40 minutes a day packed into a subway car, while still not actually talking to each other. If you want employees to be happier about work, assign fewer tasks. "Welp I'm done with everything this sprint, guess I'll not come in for 3 days." As an aside, I propose a new Olympic sport called "software engineering". We take the world's best 100m dash runners, and have them run 421.6 100m dashes one after another! If you're a sprinter, why can't you also be a distance runner!

wodenokoto 3y ago
That’s nice for you. We can’t afford to move to an apartment with two extra rooms, so wfh full time would require a raise for both of us.
- javednissar 3y ago
  The WFH vs in-office debate is very much one that is dependent on personal circumstances and I do wish more people understood that
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- michaelmrose 3y ago
  The average price difference between a 2 bedroom and a 1 is about $3000 annually. I'm guessing that one bedroom is probably enough for 2 desks. An average couple will use about $5-$12k annually in terms of needing 2 cars, gas, maintenance etc not to mention spending collectively nearly 500 hours commuting over the course of the year. Details matter for instance your commute may be very favorable or the cost of changing apartments very expensive if you already have a good deal but on average WFH is a financial gain and a pretty big one at that.
  - 3y ago

feverzsj 3y ago

It's called home.

darknavi 3y ago

I'd love to see a breakdown of open office space sentiment and which industries people are in. I see open space hate dominate HN but in gaming open space can be amazing for cross-discipline communication and collaboration, especially on smaller teams.

ffgjgf1 3y ago
> especially on smaller teams. Having a few people from a smaller team in the same room is certainly not what people mean when they say open office. IMHO If you only had to share it with your team it wouldn’t be half as bad
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  No. These executive types fantasize about people in different teams or even different disciplines having these amazing chance encounters. You know: "major businesses are launched because Joe Executive had the foresight to put everyone in one room." I call it C-Suite Porn.

mianos 3y ago

As long as it's cheaper to just get some huge room and push a bunch of desks together over a few days, "open office", is going to be the choice of managers. For every person who says, "I don't mind open offices", I meet ten more who hate them. I know, statistics like this are just made up, but everyone I know would rather work in a closed office.

djrobstep 3y ago

I currently work from home, but with occasional (completely unforced) days in the (open plan) office. I’ve found I detest the noise of the open plan office so much that I end up using one of the spare meeting rooms instead because it’s quieter.

a_vanderbilt 3y ago

Ultimately, the sentiments offered by others are what drive this home. I have said it before and I'll be saying it on Hacker News again: I have become very accustomed to working from home, and very little will motivate me back into an office. Even a huge pay bump would make it a difficult decision. I like the coworkers I've had, but the distractions of an office are excessive. I can go anywhere I want with WFH, literally anywhere - and my employer supports it. No amount of pitiful pizza parties and stolen fridge food will make me want to go back.

fargle 3y ago
but - who do you yell at when someone burns the popcorn or is cooking fish in the microwave down the hall?
- a_vanderbilt 3y ago
  Funny you mention that - one of my last office interactions was my boss burning salmon in the microwave. I literally walked into the server room because I'd rather be deaf than smell burnt fish.
- sircastor 3y ago
  One my favorite gags from the early days of the pandemic was telling my coworkers that I left a cheesecake in the fridge, and they were all welcome to have some.
- throwup238 3y ago
  > who do you yell at That's what kids are for. > cooking fish in the microwave down the hall That's what in-laws are for.
  - fargle 3y ago
    > in-laws i'd rather rto
    - throwup238 3y ago

skipkey 3y ago

A few years back I was working in an open office setting at a games studio and I got in a discussion with the branch manager about it. He was convinced that open office was a productivity multiplier. I asked him who he thought the most productive developers were on the team. When he gave me names, I pointed out that every one of them were wearing big noise-canceling headphones to block out the collaboration he thought he was fostering. My solution was different, I usually got in at 6am when almost no one else came in before the 10am standup. I would get most of my work done by then and then circulate and help the kids as needed. To be fair, it did seem like the artists did get some benefit, but it was definitely a net negative for most of the developers. I’ve been in private offices, and cubes, and open office, and honestly the most productive environment was when I was in a set of cubicles that had sliding doors, around a bullpen with multiple tables. When you needed to go head-down to get some code down you could, but otherwise you hung out at the tables in the middle.

brailsafe 3y ago
There was a time when I thought the same as that branch manager, but that time was long ago and it was based on absolutely no experience. In the last open office I worked in, I could not find headphones that allowed me to focus, not even construction-grade earmuffs; if someone's chewing food within 10 ft, I'll hear it, and that's all I'll hear. For literal constant music listening to actually help, it needs to be a choice, otherwise it just makes me tire of music and I don't get nearly as much out of my mental energy.
- dailykoder 3y ago
  >In the last open office I worked in, I could not find headphones that allowed me to focus, not even construction-grade earmuffs; if someone's chewing food within 10 ft, I'll hear it, and that's all I'll hear. That's interesting. I have the same exact issue and whenever I tell people about it they think I am crazy. I don't have a problem with people chewing food when it's lunch break and we sit in the cafeteria, but man, when I try to focus it kills my brain. Just last week the guy next to me started eating kind of late in the day (where my brain was almost empty). I then tried to cancel it out with headphones, but that just wasn't possible anymore. And I still don't know how to deal with it. Sometimes I try to take a walk for 5 minutes and it helps, but not always. On some days I get a full mental breakdown because I get angry at myself getting angry on somebody just making noises any normal human being does while eating

xyst 3y ago

I’ll never understand why people want to go back to the office. Office has shit food. Shit coffee. In an open office, there’s a high risk of catching a virus from your co-worker. People love to tap your shoulder, interrupt your thought process (clearly I’m in the zone, asshole), and ask you mundane shit that could have been resolved over IM. Even worse, the idiot asshole that can’t be bothered to read documentation and asks you to go over it with him/her in a 1:1 session. Fuck off.

UberFly 3y ago
This may not be the experience that everyone else is having in the office. Some work better with the team experience. You obviously don't.
fatih-erikli 3y ago
Obviously you worked in someone elses desktop wallpaper that they call you an "office". Real working places exist, they are different than what you describe.
spike021 3y ago
>Office has shit food. Shit coffee. In an open office, there’s a high risk of catching a virus from your co-worker. People love to tap your shoulder, interrupt your thought process (clearly I’m in the zone, asshole), and ask you mundane shit that could have been resolved over IM. It's not that complicated to bring food from home for lunch, grab something on the way in, or go out for lunch -- I doubt you're working in a food desert after all. Ditto for coffee and even coffee shops. Catching a virus thing, sure that's a real concern. For personal experience though I've found I've gotten sick more often since COVID and 100% WFH than when I used to work out of the office 2-3 days a week, including public transit. As far as interruptions, a lot of offices have conference rooms engineers can use whenever they want. Even one person rooms or the newer telephone booths. Usually all soundproofed. You don't even have to tell coworkers which one you're working from and you can switch rooms throughout the day. I guess that's not feasible in like a 10-20 person office but I've been in offices for up to 75-100 people and it wasn't that difficult. Most of the problems you've cited have relatively simple solutions in my opinion.

rawgabbit 3y ago

My department got called into the office last week. I assume it was for mandatory serendipitous communication. I did my best and struck up a conversation in our open plan office. I was shushed because half of the department was on the same zoom call and there wasn’t a meeting room big enough for them. I still remember the office I was assigned as a graduate student. It was far nicer than any I had in private industry. It had a window with a view of the campus and I could actually lock the door. The worst office experience I ever had was when I was rubbing elbows with my teammates and wearing noise canceling headphones the entire time. To get away from that gerbil in a cage claustrophobia, I took to walks in the parking garage which was the most humane space in the entire building.

w10-1 3y ago

People dedicated to working at home haven't worked in a good office. That was: an office with a door, and a big open space where people from a kind but competitive group had free-wheeling discussions. The main thing was that we together were shaping the product; if you convinced others, you could have an impact. And to convince others, you needed to do your homework (in your office). So it's not really the office or the desk but the rhythm of coming up with an idea and seeing it take root in your peers (or not) -- the opportunity to contribute. Nowadays, it's open desks or cubes and product managers, and any collective discussion is shot through with politics. When initiative is squelched and mutual respect is replaced by influence, the only thing to maximize is slack -- which makes working from home the absolute best.

fatih-erikli 3y ago
> People dedicated to working at home haven't worked in a good office. I agree. > The main thing was that we together were shaping the product; if you convinced others, you could have an impact. And to convince others, you needed to do your homework (in your office). This is not. Shaping a product is not a collaborative work. Thus, product is something different, we talk about the real work environment. > So it's not really the office or the desk but the rhythm of coming up with an idea and seeing it take root in your peers (or not) -- the opportunity to contribute. This is another not. Office has nothing to do with that topic. > Nowadays, it's open desks or cubes and product managers, and any collective discussion is shot through with politics. When initiative is squelched and mutual respect is replaced by influence, the only thing to maximize is slack -- which makes working from home the absolute best. This is office chatting. Product development is done inside the computer. You don't need an office for that.
- hyperadvanced 3y ago
  On one hand, product-development on the computer is a lot better when people actually use the computer to the best of its abilities. A lot of people will just leave shit in people’s heads or request one-offs to be done EOD because, I swear, this was a last second client request and we really need it. On the other, I’ve done a lot of painful product meetings with PM seatwarmers who refuse to type anything at all into their tickets and devs who barely comment on important things like ticket size or whether or not something should be prioritized differently based on technical factors. I’ve met only a handful of good PO/PM types, and whether or not they work in person has had little to do with it.

stndef 3y ago

Speaking as someone who is autistic and has significant hearing loss, open offices are a form of torture. It might sound like hyperbole, but I promise it's not! I enjoy working in a team, but in more enclosed spaces. In my current job I share a room with two other people and it's just right (apart from when all of us are in remote meetings at the same time, but you win some and you lose some).

tomcam 3y ago
Speaking as someone who’s not autistic and who has sensitive hearing, I concur
- tomcam 3y ago
  P.S. my wife & kid just characterized me as autistic and I don’t know what to do with that
  - hrnnnnnn 3y ago
    I recommend thinking back through difficult events from your past which were hard to understand at the time to see if autism could help explain them.
    - tomcam 3y ago
      They're doing it for me :O
      - tomcam 3y ago
        It was a lot

stn_za 3y ago

I have my private office. It's at home.

steelframe 3y ago

I started working in industry in the early 2000's. For my first job I shared a private office with one other person. For my second job I had my own private office to myself. Between those two jobs I had 7 years with either a private or a semi-private office. The depth and quality of my work definitely benefited from the long periods of uninterrupted concentration on the task at hand. I accomplished more in 2 years with a private office than I did later in ~4 years with an open office. For my third jog I went to Google, where I was in open seating for about 10 years until the pandemic. The open seating was a big adjustment, but my brain was still young enough to filter out distractions well enough to get things done. My most productive work was accomplished as an individual task outside of any team effort. My job after Google was with a company that had cubicles with low walls, but this was before the vaccines and so nobody was going in. I struggled to really integrate with any other teams as there was literally no face-to-face interaction. I never even met my boss in person. Again, I did accomplish some significant technical work, but they were lone projects. My job after that again has open seating, Google-style. They've also started hot desking, so I have to reserve a desk for the days I go in. I get whatever monitor and chair are at that desk. Let's just say that the condition of the equipment is about what you would expect if it were rented on a day-to-day basis. As I've gotten older I've found my ability to filter out distractions has suffered. I've read about some studies that suggest that this is common, perhaps even normal as the brain ages. In order to get into a deep state of concentration in an open office I need to put in noise-canceling headphones, turn on a film score, and pull the monitor close to my face so as to minimize movement in my peripheral vision. Whatever spontaneous collaboration is supposed to happen in the office isn't happening, and I consider interrupting me while I have headphones in and am zeroed-in on a task to be actually pretty rude. That doesn't stop some people (usually TPMs putting together a status report) from interrupting me anyway. So I'm only happy coming into the office when I have a cluster of in-person meetings scheduled. I'll jump into meeting rooms and catch people in the hallway or the micro-kitchen to sync up on one or two things that I may not get as much traction on via random Slack messages. Then I GTFO of there and back to my private office that I customized at home during the pandemic to get any real heads-down work done. Even then I am only really productive when I close Slack and email for a couple of hours. Meanwhile everyone is always complaining about lack of conference or phone rooms, and so they're trying to set up a bunch of pods throughout the office for people who need some degree of isolation for uninterrupted coding sessions or Zoom meetings. This whole thing seems really farcical to me. I joked with a co-worker, "Oh, I know! We could build 'pods' into the structure of the building with rectangular panes of glass and planks of wood mounted on hinges with a latch. That would make it more easy to get HVAC and sprinklers set up in the 'pods' too!" I'd definitely come into the office for more full days if I had a private office again. As it stands I'll come into the office as infrequently as I can and for as little time as possible. It's just miserable compared to my workspace at home. That said, if it's at all feasible, I will refuse to take another job ever again that has mandatory office attendance policies unless they can provide me a private office.

tehjoker 3y ago

workplaces still do not have adequate COVID-19 controls, so offices are disabling and deadly places. the risk of being an office worker used to be tripping on the stairs, car crash while commuting, or sitting too much. now it means contracting a deadly virus multiple times a year. it's too bad OSHA doesn't set minimum standards here.

nextlevelwizard 3y ago
What does OSHA say about common cold? I have never any workplace to protect against any disease other than covid. Covid is here to stay and we will have yearly out breaks just like we have flu season. It isn't any more deadly than any other disease you might commonly encounter in your life.
- bowsamic 3y ago
  Idk about OSHA but at my work in Germany it is a social taboo to come in to work if you have a cold and it's also against the safety instructions
  - nextlevelwizard 3y ago
    Pretty sure you dont come to work then with covid either, so I dont see the point you are trying to make
    - dagw 3y ago
      By the time you know for sure that you have covid, you have already been spreading it for several days. Most people would still go to work if they had a bit of a sore throat, runny nose or just felt slightly 'off'. Equally staying at home because you felt like you might possibly have a slight case of flu was very frowned upon and at most places would not make you popular with your boss. Just being able to work from home for a couple of days as soon as you feel like you might be coming down with something is a clear win for overall public health.

neilv 3y ago

> "The one big thing I forgot about that was the value of the employee communications you get with cubes." [paraphrased Eric Schmidt] [...] It’s utter bullshit and executive fantasy. If you walked around Google and their open offices, almost half the workers are wearing headphones to screen out the noise. Do you just yell over and communicate with people, like in the executives’ fantasy? No, first you have to wave your hand in front of their face to get their attention. FWIW, cubicles can work better than that. My first software engineering job, we had cubicles, and you could walk past and see what people were doing, knock (if they hadn't configured their cube to have the opening in view), wheel your chair to the opening and talk across the hallway, wave someone into your cube to see something on your screen, etc. People actually did all that often. And on occasion you could get some focus time. But when I visited one of the Google satellites, there was this big area of dystopian open office layout, with people clustered densely around these grotesque insectoid pods of desktop. I don't blame them for needing headphones. I recall the mere sight of the pods making me anxious, and thinking that I would have to find a way to work there without becoming a pod person. Anyway, I wouldn't take Eric Schmidt seriously, on the proper care and feeding of tech workers, after his involvement in screwing over all tech workers (at certain illegally colluding big companies, but also with presumed cascading market effects for everyone else): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt#Role_in_illegal_non-recruiting_agreements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt#Role_in_illegal_n...

deathanatos 3y ago

> In the Before Times, you just came to the office every day. It wasn’t even a question; “working from home” was just not practical. “Going to work” meant leaving the house. Then the pandemic happened. Well, now… hold on a minute. It was entirely practical. I did it … my whole team did it. We didn't do it 100% of the week, since the expectation was that we worked in the office, but we had an informal "work from home Wednesdays" that permitted us to collectively accomplish the various chores that life requires must be done inside working business hours (i.e., mostly visiting other businesses). The tradeoff is pretty straight-forward: I'm going to trade the commute hours for a mix of "work, not work, and getting stuff done", and my employer gets effectively the same real work out of me. That we collaborated (all took the same day) made is simpler since we knew to avoid scheduling each other for meetings that day. But there was nothing that stopped that from being 5d/wk, and I was glad I did it when the pandemic hit, since I knew that it was quiet possible to work remotely. > Be honest now: would you want to work in that? …but yeah, nobody. My home "office" (i.e., the living room) is (especially now; upgrades were made in the pandemic once it became obvious how much I'd be home) the nicest office I've ever worked in. Because I've never had an office. > And the concept of a completely customizable workspace didn’t sit well with executives who didn’t value the individuality of their workers. Some things never change. > Extroverts always think, “We need more communication! One of the things I witnessed even prior to the pandemic was that some people are truly incapable of effective communication. I had a coworker who was utterly terrible at Slack, and real difficult to handle when remote … but it wasn't much different if you were sitting there talking to them face to face either. Bad, faulty logic, spewed as fast as the fingers would go, and often with less than a sentence per message. Orgs are mostly terrible at Slack. (And email. And meetings.) Things lobbed into n-way DMs is terrible. If it has a topic, put it in a channel. People act like there's a shortage of channels & user groups, and they must be rationed. Same with email DLs. IT is of no help here: for whatever reason, I'm forbidden from creating new email DLs or channels, so it is no real wonder to find my coworkers cramming things into n-way DMs. (Thankfully Slack finally added a "copy the history" to DMs. So clearly Slack sort of sees the problem … just not an effective solution.) And if only people could stop with the "Hi." followed by line silence. Meeting tech is still terrible, though. Bloated and slow, and features like {draw on screen, not banning multiple people from screen sharing, etc.} just aren't widely available. Teams is utterly terrible, only loading successfully like half the time, and the one third-party we have to deal with, however they're sending invites, they often don't include a URL in the invite body, only in a non-standard (i.e., invisible in any Calendar program aside from I presume Outlook) attribute called "x-skype-something-something" which is a quite the tell as to Team's roots. And I only have to use it when some other org forces me to. Even calls with Microsoft themselves will run into technical issues. … and it seems like some orgs (users of Zendesk in particular, maybe?) expect one to auth by sending from the contact email on the account. Except that it's a DL, such that emails can reach my whole team, and sending from a DL is utter black magic. (But possible, it turns out!) And like, one wonders … y'all know you can edit messages in Slack and correct your typos, …right? The amount of politely worded "parse error in English, line 1" replies I have to send is kinda ridiculous. There's "they made a typo" and then there's me, cocking my head, trying to find a parse that even remotely makes any sense at all. That XKCD YT feature of reading your comment back to you could make a comeback. We need people to work on their writing skills. I don't know how, though.

mnky9800n 3y ago

I have a private office at the university I have a position at. I also have an open office at the company I work at. I love my private office. I have a big white board to sketch out ideas on, a couch, lots of table space for various projects or whatever. I have speakers that I can play music without headphones. My private office is a joy to go and work at. At the company we have two open offices, one quiet and one for collaboration. We also have an open desk policy. We also don't have enough desks for everyone so there's work from home if you want and the company pays for your setup. Tbh, the only thing I ever did with my WFH setup was to play video games on the screen. If I need to concentrate or write proposals or whatever I can go to my university office. If I want to talk to colleagues I go to the company office. If I decide I hate it all I go to a coffee shop. Sure whatever works for you works for you. But I love my private office.

geraldhh 3y ago
congratulation! sounds like you made it

mattlondon 3y ago

I would love love love even a cubicle! I have only ever known row upon row of open plan desks. A cubicle with some semblance of personal space feels like nirvana to me.

timthelion 3y ago

For most of history most skilled workers worked from home or lived in the workplace: watchmakers, metal workers, shoemakers. Newton was working from home when he developed his version of calculus. While it is not new to have a study or a workshop, commuting is a modern phenomenon.

AlbertCory 3y ago
Read Bartleby the Scrivener. Or A Christmas Carol.
- timthelion 3y ago
  I've read "A Christmas Carol", not sure how it relates to what I wrote. Can you explain?

neilv 3y ago

> "IMO, the best layout I ever saw was the old Tech Square MIT AI Lab (not* the current Geahy monstrosity).""* I think that quoted person has the right idea of some of the better ways to do things. But in partial defense of that Gehry building (the Stata Center, which houses the merger of the AI Lab and LCS into CSAIL)... The floors included some of the elements they describe. I shared a nice window office with a postdoc, but ended up working most of the time from a laptop on the moveable tables in a common area of our floor in front of the elevators. That space got used for lunches, random meetings, the occasional laptop worker, after-hours social events, and chance encounters with people passing through. There's also patterns that I'm not sure Tech Square had, like cutouts between floors, wide open staircases that people can pause upon for conversation, big windows, outdoor space, the main street first floor. (I only got to visit 545 Tech Square once before people moved to Stata, and Building 20 right before it was torn down. Both had obvious merits, and all three buildings were very different from each other.)

paxys 3y ago

This idea is outdated now more than ever. I don't want to commute across the city to sit in a dark windowless room by myself all day and then commute back home. I already have the best possible private office at home. On the days where I do go in, I want to sit around coworkers and collaborate rather than do focused solo work.

renewiltord 3y ago

We're in software. Just out-compete with a superior product. If you're more productive with one of these things, you will iterate faster and be more agile. Pick a good space and out-execute the incumbent in a market someone's demonstrated there. You don't have to convince me. You can just beat me in the market.

Havoc 3y ago

Yeah don’t think that’s ever coming back

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3y ago

There's so much vacant office space right now, it's absurd to me that companies aren't giving out offices to their employees like it's 1976. For nearly every job, some work is much better done in a focused, quiet, environment, and some work is best done in a highly collaborative setting. Give permanent offices to anyone who wants one (and actually uses it 3 or 4 days/week), reservable offices for anyone else who wants to pop in for a day, tear out all the cubicles, and create great collaborative spaces in their place.

Clubber 3y ago
>it's absurd to me that companies aren't giving out offices to their employees like it's 1976. It's because offices are now a status symbol and the manager who works in an office and forces their employees to work in a pit feels those employees are below them. Not only that, he wants them to know they are below him. This is also the reason your salary ceiling is usually less than whatever your manager makes. It's an example of office political bullshit and another reason many/most people prefer WFH.
- kamaal 3y ago
  To add to your point, they also don't like to set a new precedent, if it takes off everybody would have to do it. Managerial jobs seem to now be a thing of the past. In the past year, I haven't felt the need for a manager. Even while executing projects that need some form of central collaboration. At this point in time manager largely feels like some sort of legacy aristocratic position, which a big fat salary all to do nothing. And in most cases, add negative value.

srg0 3y ago

Devil's advocate. Private offices facilitate sexual harassment and some other undesirable behaviors.

bencelaszlo 3y ago
That's why we should remove the restroom doors, too. The external walls of the office building, the fog, the night and the shadows.
esskay 3y ago
That's got to be the worst excuse/reason given for forcing crummy openplan offices I've ever heard. Kudos on coming up with something so creative and ridiculous.
blitzar 3y ago
There is a decent chance that the retired old guy who is complaining about kidz these days not wanting to work spent from 9am till 5pm in their private office sleeping, drinking and trying to bang Doris from they typing pool. This is why we cant have nice things.
Clubber 3y ago
Well according to that logic, having everyone go to an office also facilitates sexual harassment and other undesirable behaviors. No one can grab my ass when I'm WFH except my spouse.

phendrenad2 3y ago

What percentage of knowledge workers, across all time, have had private offices? Probably 1% at this point. It's a fading memory in most domains, except for maybe self-employed attorneys and accountants. So it's not a matter of bringing private offices "back", it's a matter of convincing people, ex nihilo, that private offices are a good idea. Considering how long companies have been lying that they "hire only the best" (and then throw "the best" into a big noisy animal paddock), it's quite an uphill battle.

dusted 3y ago

Oh god yes please! We're 4 people per office, and while this is tolerable, I really imagine I'd be much more productive (and less annoying) if I had my own space.. I know I can just work from home, but thing is, I like going to work, I enjoy having those people around, and being able to drop by to ask or talk about something. I always appreciate the coffee machine and lunch, so I'd love to combine the advantages of the WFH with the advantages of working in office.

nextlevelwizard 3y ago

I have worked at the same job before pandemic until now. Before pandemic we had open-ish layout with my teams desks all together (8 desks, four side-by-side in two rows with our backs to the other row) with ~1.5 meter separating noise/sight walls between us and the next team(s). To me it was good. It helped me learn much faster when I could just ask a question out loud and get help. Same with bouncing ideas. Also rotating and wheeling over to help someone was easy. And when you needed someone from another team you could just stand up and see if they were at their table or not. That lasted few years then came "smart" office of flexible seating. We had two desks side by side with separating sight walls in multiple rows and you had to reserve your seat the day before or risk someone removing you during the day. Here we could still somewhat maintain our teams cohesion, but no longer could you just ask questions and have it be heard by everyone nor could you just stand up and see if someone was at the office or not. Now it is just random teams chats and meetings. No idea if anyone is present or reading any chats. I can shout into the void and have no responses. Of course the upside is that I can dick around all day, like now I am writing this stupid post instead of working and there isn't even a risk someone might shoulder surf me and question if I am doing my work or not. Once a week we go to the office and work in one of the few "team rooms" which brings back the old effectiveness and we get a lot of shit done during those days. Also I have noticed that many newer employees are lacking a lot of knowledge about processes and operations that were common knowledge before pandemic and big part of it the lack of coffee/watercooler/desk/lunch talk. There is no way to just casually over hear or stumble upon or just ask about random stuff. Part of me wishes we could go back to the office, but also the benefits of being able to start working an hour late and quit and hour early and just not do the work you are paid to do is too much to give up on. I held strong for couple years, but after seeing how everyone else was abusing WFH to take care of their kids or run errands during work day I also gave in.

jen20 3y ago
> no longer could you just ask questions and have it be heard by everyone That sounds like a serious win for your colleagues. > newer employees are lacking a lot of knowledge about processes and operations that were common knowledge before pandemic Sounds like you should fix your documentation, automation and onboarding problems then?

ktosobcy 3y ago

In the ancient days (15y ago) before I started working remotely (very hipster of me :-D) I worked in office building - each for had a corridor and each team had their of office room. It was great as at maximum tete was about 8-10ish people working on related problem. Most of the time it was quite quiet, occasional discussion involved whole team and didn't bother anyone else. It should be like that.

k99x55 3y ago

Even better is WFH.

sourcecodeplz 3y ago

What I minded most about open-office was the noise. the constant noise. always had to wear headphones to do any non-mundane work. 2-3 people in a real office was the best years of my working life really.

solatic 3y ago

If you're an engineer and you think the way you make money is by writing code, and there's no need to leave your house to write code, why aren't you working for yourself? Serious question. Software engineering is fundamentally a collaborative, team effort. Team efforts work best when the team is "gelled", and people enjoy working with each other. Half the opposition I read here about going into the office, y'all are rationalizing to avoid the simple conclusion that you just don't like the people you work with. Maybe your teammates make you shitty coffee and expect you to drink it. Maybe your manager doesn't care about your feelings about the value of quiet, heads-down time. Maybe your teammates pressure you into grabbing lunch from somewhere unhealthy and they don't respect your boundaries. Maybe your manager thinks everything is hunky-dory, and you're upset, and they're not emotionally intelligent enough to understand that or to work with you to deal with what's upsetting you. These are not problems with open offices, and having an office with a door will not solve them. These are people problems. A word of advice: life is too short to work with people who don't respect you. Spend your energy instead looking for people who will. Before trying to fix your office, fix yourself first, by not forcing yourself to be at a company you dislike so much.

steve1977 3y ago
One of the major problem in open offices for me are the acoustic and visual distractions of people talking and moving around. Noise canceling headphones help a bit, but only so much. So private offices absolutely help with that.
- solatic 3y ago
  So why make the decision to work for a company with an open office? Why not apply to work for a remote-only company with a proper remote-only culture?
  - steve1977 3y ago
    I'm currently working primarily remote. My point was to say that at least some of the problems with open offices are actually the open offices - not that I don't like the people. I love my wife, but I'm still getting disrupted when she comes into the office (at home) and talks to me. And purely remote also has its downsides. The best mix would be something like remote and private offices.

tjpnz 3y ago

I've already got a private office. It's down the hall from my bedroom and doubles as a reading/gaming/escape from the kids room.

steve1977 3y ago

Just look at what engineer projects got done during the era of private offices and what gets done now.

hoseja 3y ago

"Caves and Commons" sounds like actual paradise.

DuctTapeAI 3y ago

I think it's important to consider the shift in home dynamics if someone is WFH vs in office. WFH gives a lot more flexibility to help out with house chores, childcare etc. In contrast, in office work removes this possibility which can be either a feature or a bug. Talking to a lot of old timey in office proponents, it sounds like many of them shifted housework/childcare to a partner and had a good time mostly because they weren't doing any of that work.

sys_64738 3y ago

Open plan offices are awful experiences and cause you to be constantly interrupted. WFH is best as you get to control everybody, especially your manager.

silverlake 3y ago

At one startup they got 2 adjacent open plan rooms at a WeWork. One was the quiet room, the other was not. I worked in the quiet room and it was really nice, like a library late at night. I’d chat with the guy sitting next to me on Slack. And if we needed to discuss something, we’d all move to a meeting room or the loud room. The CEO could not understand how we could prefer the quiet room. He’s a sales guy who chatters constantly. To him the silence was miserable, like a tomb. For us it was very productive and we could easily take a break to chat on our schedule.

jeromechoo 3y ago

Back when I managed a small coworking space, one of our most loyal members paid the premium for 1 of 2 private offices we had where he would show up to every day and shut the door for 8 hours working in the dark. He liked our rowdiness outside but hated being in the middle of it. People know what they need to be productive. Everything else just gets in the way. Ultimately this has very little to do with “the right office layout” and far more to do with how much trust your employer affords to its employees to manage themselves by default.

kkfx 3y ago

I am not interested in non-home offices in 2024... So no, even if offered for a dedicated, large, nice etc office I decline in advance.

dave333 3y ago

Have worked in just about every conceivable style of office over my career and the worst was probably the beehive style six desks in a hexagonal "cubicle." Too noisy and the snacks were kept on the table in the middle which wrecked any possible attempt to diet. An interesting one was in the UK in the late 70s where a large factory space was divided into glass-walled spaces so anyone could see anyone but mostly not hear them. My favorite were the private offices and my first internship in a physics lab at Oxford was one of the most collaborative where twice a day mid morning and mid afternoon a tea lady came around with a cart with Tea urn (milk and sugar premixed) and various snacks. Everyone came out of their labs almost without fail and talked informally with everyone else for 20 minutes on anything and everything. The corridor was lined with large chalkboards that were put to good use. All for the minor cost of a tea lady to focus the collaboration.

isaacremuant 3y ago

Nah. Remote. Full stop. Don't negotiate down. You're ceding power in a move that benefits no one except real estate investors. We've absolutely proven it should be optional and people can be extremely effective fully remote, but it makes downtown real estate investments falter so workers must lower their quality of life and savings to help the poor magnates and gov officials. Optional full remote is better for the environment, better for decentralisation of cities (sustainability), better for quality of life and money and time saved. Whoever doesn't like it can still go to an office. It also easily allows for cross region teams which happen anyway, even with return to the office mandates, where the move is so clearly arbitrary that people must go to join remote calls alone in the office and have no one from their own team with them. Don't just fold, is my advice. Corporations will just save costs and peddle BS HR like propaganda. If the office is so good that it's better than home then people will naturally go, if not, then so be it. Mandates show that it's not about employees or productivity but about real estate. Manager types also might prefer it due to their own situations and ease of going to the office but notice that higher levels will often be exempt from mandates. Again, get full remote jobs if you have a bit of leeway and slowly change the course. It's akin to game theory. The more people do it, the more common it'll be.