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Very well done! If you had a blog, I'd read it. I think that getting to the psychology of the problem as you are attempting (or succeeding) is a very worthy t

Very well done! If you had a blog, I'd read it. I think that getting to the psychology of the problem as you are attempting (or succeeding) is a very worthy task that lots of people need to be working on. I'm no water vapor ignoring tree-hugger, but the inefficiency of our current work system where people heat and maintain homes that are empty for 12 hours a day, go to office buildings that are empty for 12 hours a day, using a car that they use for two hours a day, to do work that could be done at home, is insanity. Why do we tolerate this as companies or as employees? We can seriously look for solutions, or we can wax cynically about "the man". One path leads forward, to a solution. If your hypothesis is correct, there are compromises we can do, to satisfy the inner-ape, while gaining some efficiency. - We can remove people's personal effects from their work areas, so multiple people can work in that cube. On Monday and Tuesday, it a marketing guy. On Wednesday and Thursday, it's an engineer. On Friday and Saturday, it's an accountant. Let groups that never interact anyway, REALLY not interact, and as a bonus, you reduce your necessary office space by 2/3rds while still maintaining ape bonding time for two days a week. The other three days of work, people work at home, freeing up our highways by 2/3rds as well. Actually, we free up our highways by 3/5ths (math left as exercise for the reader) because now we have staggered our weekends a bit. Nobody works on Sundays still, but accountants work on Saturdays. Would there be tons of coordination hassles, with accountants needing to talk to engineers about their annual budgets? No, not really. Because our whole premise here, is that none of this face time is actually needed from a business standpoint. Internet and telephone would be just fine. It's needed at a deeper level, among team-mates and up/down hierarchies, but it's not needed from one tribe to another. The accountant tribe and the engineer tribe will never form an alliance, they are evolutionary enemies. Why force them to live in the same jungle?

mechanical_fish 18y ago
A few observations: One: Glad you liked the writing. Two: Please do not think like this: The accountant tribe and the engineer tribe will never form an alliance, they are evolutionary enemies. You need to refactor those tribes. Because, in fact, every engineer should know something about accounting. One of the things I regret is that nobody in my youth ever found a way to make accounting seem compelling enough that I was convinced to learn it. It turns out, though, that modern economic life is a big game played according to complicated rules, and accountants are the referees. Most engineering decisions cannot be made without an accountant. If money were no object we could solve many website scaling problems by buying one server for every anticipated visitor -- or, alternatively, by only allowing one visitor at a time into our sites. (Let them stand in line!) These are not silly ideas: People used to have to stand in line at major universities to use scientific calculators, but now we've made them cheap enough that we can just give one to every math student. The thing which makes many obvious solutions silly is: They cost too much, or they don't make enough money. And to answer the questions "how much is too much? how much is enough?" requires accountants. Finally, please don't call this thing I've just written "a hypothesis". That makes me wince. I'm having fun with the metaphor, but it would be a mistake to reify it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy) The metaphor is fun because I really am related to monkeys (well, chimps, technically), and because many human behaviors really do make sense in chimp terms as well, and because it's quite possible that this is not entirely a coincidence, or a case of convergent evolution. But let's not go too far. It is only a metaphor. I'm built out of chimp parts, but I'm also built out of distinctly human parts. For example, it would be bad to argue like this: Early humans lived as free-ranging nomads, so a better office design would be one that forces us to live like free-ranging nomads. That idea has been tried. And it turns out that one of the hacks that make the modern world possible is personal collections of artifacts: piles of papers (with the most relevant ones on top) and post-it notes to cue your memory, photos of your family to regulate your mood, egg timers to remind you to take breaks, vastly complex, expensive, and personalized suites of hardware and software to help you write code, the custom-adjusted chair that keeps your back in working order, etc. In other words: Having your own office makes you more productive.
abalashov 18y ago
I have to disagree with you on the personalised work areas. As the sibling poster pointed out, having those types of effects and environmental settings in a space that is definitively yours is highly conducive to productivity, a sense of organisational inclusion, and overall satisfaction and comfort. No, I'm not saying that people that have personal effects in their cubes are all eminently satisfied; the point is that they would be even less satisfied if they were crammed into even smaller and yet _more_ generic spaces, or in spaces of which they could not claim even a provisional kind of ownership and which did not have any qualities of (semi)permanence. I've had several jobs where the business owners didn't really want to spend money or time setting up any kind of meaningful barriers, even something so rudimentary and otherwise disheartening as a cube farm. Everybody basically got to sit in a large, contended, noisy and alienating open space at some kind of rickety, smallish plastic table. It was not feasible to define one's "space" in such a setting. Everyone felt like a temp. I don't think it helped anyone's morale, ability to concentrate, or productivity. It's a terrible idea; "open spaces" do not mean "open companies," to paraphase Joel Spolsky's biting criticism of open-area interior design thought in corporate circles. In the jobs in which I and almost everyone I know has had, there is a clear and identifiable positive correlation between the amount of privacy and personal space in which they got to tailor their work environment to their preferences and the overall investment they felt in the company, its culture, and of course, the work. While, of course, environmental attributes cannot smooth over a crappy place to work, they can make an enormous difference in the level of psychological investment an employee has in a place that is -- by all other metrics -- decent. I think the one exception to this may be in that I definitely think there is a market out there for creating workday "hubs" for freelancers and WFH employees to get away from the house (and small children, if they have them) and other environmental obstacles and show up with their laptop and set up shop. It could be something as simple as a glorified coffee shop whose table arrangements and interior design lends itself better to that than the average one. Make data ports and power abundantly accessible and you've got a winner. (Of course, you've somehow got to persuade these people to keep buying something all day, which is the problem coffee shops typically run into with students, freelancers and other people who spend all day there with their laptops. Perhaps there is an opportunity to charge a decent membership fee for a cool, happening freelancers' "club" of this sort. I'd pay $100/mo to be able to go somewhere close-by and ambiently pleasant with my laptop and partake of great bandwidth, numerous power and data ports (then I could bring a little SIP phone), and coffee and other beverages on tap or heavily discounted.)

mechanical_fish 18y ago

A few observations: One: Glad you liked the writing. Two: Please do not think like this: The accountant tribe and the engineer tribe will never form an alliance, they are evolutionary enemies. You need to refactor those tribes. Because, in fact, every engineer should know something about accounting. One of the things I regret is that nobody in my youth ever found a way to make accounting seem compelling enough that I was convinced to learn it. It turns out, though, that modern economic life is a big game played according to complicated rules, and accountants are the referees. Most engineering decisions cannot be made without an accountant. If money were no object we could solve many website scaling problems by buying one server for every anticipated visitor -- or, alternatively, by only allowing one visitor at a time into our sites. (Let them stand in line!) These are not silly ideas: People used to have to stand in line at major universities to use scientific calculators, but now we've made them cheap enough that we can just give one to every math student. The thing which makes many obvious solutions silly is: They cost too much, or they don't make enough money. And to answer the questions "how much is too much? how much is enough?" requires accountants. Finally, please don't call this thing I've just written "a hypothesis". That makes me wince. I'm having fun with the metaphor, but it would be a mistake to reify it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy) The metaphor is fun because I really am related to monkeys (well, chimps, technically), and because many human behaviors really do make sense in chimp terms as well, and because it's quite possible that this is not entirely a coincidence, or a case of convergent evolution. But let's not go too far. It is only a metaphor. I'm built out of chimp parts, but I'm also built out of distinctly human parts. For example, it would be bad to argue like this: Early humans lived as free-ranging nomads, so a better office design would be one that forces us to live like free-ranging nomads. That idea has been tried. And it turns out that one of the hacks that make the modern world possible is personal collections of artifacts: piles of papers (with the most relevant ones on top) and post-it notes to cue your memory, photos of your family to regulate your mood, egg timers to remind you to take breaks, vastly complex, expensive, and personalized suites of hardware and software to help you write code, the custom-adjusted chair that keeps your back in working order, etc. In other words: Having your own office makes you more productive.

abalashov 18y ago

I have to disagree with you on the personalised work areas. As the sibling poster pointed out, having those types of effects and environmental settings in a space that is definitively yours is highly conducive to productivity, a sense of organisational inclusion, and overall satisfaction and comfort. No, I'm not saying that people that have personal effects in their cubes are all eminently satisfied; the point is that they would be even less satisfied if they were crammed into even smaller and yet _more_ generic spaces, or in spaces of which they could not claim even a provisional kind of ownership and which did not have any qualities of (semi)permanence. I've had several jobs where the business owners didn't really want to spend money or time setting up any kind of meaningful barriers, even something so rudimentary and otherwise disheartening as a cube farm. Everybody basically got to sit in a large, contended, noisy and alienating open space at some kind of rickety, smallish plastic table. It was not feasible to define one's "space" in such a setting. Everyone felt like a temp. I don't think it helped anyone's morale, ability to concentrate, or productivity. It's a terrible idea; "open spaces" do not mean "open companies," to paraphase Joel Spolsky's biting criticism of open-area interior design thought in corporate circles. In the jobs in which I and almost everyone I know has had, there is a clear and identifiable positive correlation between the amount of privacy and personal space in which they got to tailor their work environment to their preferences and the overall investment they felt in the company, its culture, and of course, the work. While, of course, environmental attributes cannot smooth over a crappy place to work, they can make an enormous difference in the level of psychological investment an employee has in a place that is -- by all other metrics -- decent. I think the one exception to this may be in that I definitely think there is a market out there for creating workday "hubs" for freelancers and WFH employees to get away from the house (and small children, if they have them) and other environmental obstacles and show up with their laptop and set up shop. It could be something as simple as a glorified coffee shop whose table arrangements and interior design lends itself better to that than the average one. Make data ports and power abundantly accessible and you've got a winner. (Of course, you've somehow got to persuade these people to keep buying something all day, which is the problem coffee shops typically run into with students, freelancers and other people who spend all day there with their laptops. Perhaps there is an opportunity to charge a decent membership fee for a cool, happening freelancers' "club" of this sort. I'd pay $100/mo to be able to go somewhere close-by and ambiently pleasant with my laptop and partake of great bandwidth, numerous power and data ports (then I could bring a little SIP phone), and coffee and other beverages on tap or heavily discounted.)