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> Some people believe that offices should be pleasant places to work. The actual belief is that they are somehow more pleasant than my own home. > It's not a

> Some people believe that offices should be pleasant places to work. The actual belief is that they are somehow more pleasant than my own home. > It's not a grand conspiracy. We have a huge consumer goods economy. This was inevitable. > which means that more senior people also have to be in the office. What you actually need is for them to be accessible. Everyone driving to the same hole in the wall is definitely one way to achieve this. Junior and Senior engineers having slightly different schedules and planned availability might be enough. We should probably just measure this. > Not every company has that They wouldn't use this building either. I was artificially constraining my argument to that context.

tpmoney 1y ago
> The actual belief is that they are somehow more pleasant than my own home. Is it? Or is the belief something more like “there are real benefits that accrue from putting people that work together into the same physical meatspace location and as a consequence of that we want to have a single location that all people working together will be at, so as long as we’re doing that, we might as well make the location a pleasant place to be” It’s also probably worth remembering that for some people depending on where they are in their lives or what else is going on, that yes the office might just be a more pleasant place than their actual home. Not every person working in an office lives in a detached home with separate office space and a yard. Sometimes you live in a crappy apartment that’s too small for you and your roommates to all comfortably work from home. Sometimes you live in a fixer-upper that you’re working on, but is currently in a state of disrepair. Sometimes your home life isn’t great for various personal reasons. Sometimes you live alone and hearing other peoples voices is a novelty. No not every office is a great place to work, and not every person has a better place to work from. I truly do not understand this mindset that views trying to make a place you’re going to spend any amount of your time - whether it’s one day a month or five days a week - into some grand conspiracy to trick you or abuse you. I’m all about flexibility but you’re not going to get anywhere by pretending there’s nothing for about office spaces. If remote was good enough, we wouldn’t have conventions. We wouldn’t have meet ups. We wouldn’t have conferences. We wouldn’t have user group meets. Even some of the most famously remote forest companies like gitlab have a budget for people to visit their co-workers locations. Meet space matters and has real tangible benefits
SR2Z 1y ago
> We have a huge consumer goods economy Office space is not a consumer good. Buying a bunch of LaCroix is also not going to make a dent. > We should probably just measure this. We should also measure engineer productivity in general. Despite decades of research we still haven't found a way. > The actual belief is that they are somehow more pleasant than my own home. No, that's not the goal. This is a job and the point is not to make you have a good time; the point is for you to do work for the company and have it not suck too much.

tpmoney 1y ago

> The actual belief is that they are somehow more pleasant than my own home. Is it? Or is the belief something more like “there are real benefits that accrue from putting people that work together into the same physical meatspace location and as a consequence of that we want to have a single location that all people working together will be at, so as long as we’re doing that, we might as well make the location a pleasant place to be” It’s also probably worth remembering that for some people depending on where they are in their lives or what else is going on, that yes the office might just be a more pleasant place than their actual home. Not every person working in an office lives in a detached home with separate office space and a yard. Sometimes you live in a crappy apartment that’s too small for you and your roommates to all comfortably work from home. Sometimes you live in a fixer-upper that you’re working on, but is currently in a state of disrepair. Sometimes your home life isn’t great for various personal reasons. Sometimes you live alone and hearing other peoples voices is a novelty. No not every office is a great place to work, and not every person has a better place to work from. I truly do not understand this mindset that views trying to make a place you’re going to spend any amount of your time - whether it’s one day a month or five days a week - into some grand conspiracy to trick you or abuse you. I’m all about flexibility but you’re not going to get anywhere by pretending there’s nothing for about office spaces. If remote was good enough, we wouldn’t have conventions. We wouldn’t have meet ups. We wouldn’t have conferences. We wouldn’t have user group meets. Even some of the most famously remote forest companies like gitlab have a budget for people to visit their co-workers locations. Meet space matters and has real tangible benefits

SR2Z 1y ago

> We have a huge consumer goods economy Office space is not a consumer good. Buying a bunch of LaCroix is also not going to make a dent. > We should probably just measure this. We should also measure engineer productivity in general. Despite decades of research we still haven't found a way. > The actual belief is that they are somehow more pleasant than my own home. No, that's not the goal. This is a job and the point is not to make you have a good time; the point is for you to do work for the company and have it not suck too much.