4 ms·

>An open plan workplace, in which enclosed rooms are eschewed in favour of partitioned or non-partitioned desks arranged around a large room, are supposed to pr

>An open plan workplace, in which enclosed rooms are eschewed in favour of partitioned or non-partitioned desks arranged around a large room, are supposed to promote interaction between workers and boost teamwork. Instead, everyone's too busy maintaining social facades for the entirety of their day, day after day, rather than focusing on their work.

zebra 13y ago
Can you work if you can't hear your thoughts?
- ansgri 13y ago
  You can still see them.
  - pietro 13y ago
    You can, others can't.
debt 13y ago
My lord this is truth. I don't care what you did yesterday, what you're doing tonight, what you're doing this weekend, why you're wearing what you're wearing, who got you that thing, when you got in, when you leave, why you hate brad, why you hate brad but love donna, why donna's nice but you'd prefer to be home studying. did you get an extra $30 deducted from your paycheck? doesn't that suck? it only takes me 20 minutes to get work, it use to take me 15. I don't care. I've come here to work. I enjoy interacting socially, but I really honest-to-goodness would rather talk about work at work. I really truly don't care about your personal life at work. I would feel so relieved if I never had a conversation about something personal at work. It doesn't have to be Nazi Germany, but it doesn't need to be constant chatter. Yes I'm an engineer.
- Domenic_S 13y ago
  > what you did yesterday, what you're doing tonight Good Lord, now we're doing social-life standups. Agile really has taken over.
  - lotyrin 13y ago
    God yes. Particularly when part of the team has no real life outside their job and they get to spend the social-life meeting handwaving around that fact. It's useless and sad. So glad I don't work there anymore.
    - l33tbro 13y ago
      Heavens. Glad you're out of that dump.
- vectorjohn 13y ago
  Well, it sounds like you're mostly just an antisocial kind of person. I mean, if you decide to put an arbitrary wall between you and your co-workers where you are simply not allowed to make friends with anyone, that's a pretty sad existence. I mean, this job takes up ~50% of your waking life, and during that time you can't treat anyone around you as a friend? If all your co-workers are such uninteresting people, maybe you're at the wrong company.
  - jacques_chester 13y ago
    First, some people are introverts. They genuinely do not work well under conditions of heavy social interaction. This does not mean that they are "antisocial" or that they are sad; it means that they are more sensitive to some kinds of stimuli and so are more easily distracted and exhausted by it. Such people should be understood and given the distance that allows them to work, not browbeaten into keeping up with the extraverts.
    - ansgri 13y ago
      More than that, some people are antisocial and/or sad, yet are very good engineers. So employers and colleagues should be really interested in having those around, especially if they don't want to bother you with non-technical things.
  - debt 13y ago
    Whether or not my coworkers have unique and interesting lives shouldn't really matter in a work environment, no? Shouldn't the thing we're all working on and the goal were all striving towards be number one? My bend at work is definitely more towards the antisocial simply because I would like to focus on work. Bother me if it's work related otherwise maybe wait until 5pm or whenever we're all wrapping up. I'm down for making friends, but we don't need to talk all week long about the camping trip we're all going on this weekend. It's a thing, it's happening. Why don't we talk about it after it happens? Honestly, I know it sounds cheesy, but I wish so bad to have worked on an Apollo mission or the Manhattan project. In my fantasy, those engineers just showed up and talked about the most interesting and fascinating and craziest shit and then went and built it. At lunch people talked about the minutiae of putting a dude on the moon or what the hell Rutherford scattering was and NOT the perfect temperature to roast a coffee bean or why the iphone sucks. I know, I know, some people want to decompress and unwind throughout the day and not be so preoccupied with that intense shit all the time. I just think it'd be cool if people were more like that.

zebra 13y ago

Can you work if you can't hear your thoughts?

ansgri 13y ago
You can still see them.
- pietro 13y ago
  You can, others can't.

debt 13y ago

My lord this is truth. I don't care what you did yesterday, what you're doing tonight, what you're doing this weekend, why you're wearing what you're wearing, who got you that thing, when you got in, when you leave, why you hate brad, why you hate brad but love donna, why donna's nice but you'd prefer to be home studying. did you get an extra $30 deducted from your paycheck? doesn't that suck? it only takes me 20 minutes to get work, it use to take me 15. I don't care. I've come here to work. I enjoy interacting socially, but I really honest-to-goodness would rather talk about work at work. I really truly don't care about your personal life at work. I would feel so relieved if I never had a conversation about something personal at work. It doesn't have to be Nazi Germany, but it doesn't need to be constant chatter. Yes I'm an engineer.

Domenic_S 13y ago
> what you did yesterday, what you're doing tonight Good Lord, now we're doing social-life standups. Agile really has taken over.
- lotyrin 13y ago
  God yes. Particularly when part of the team has no real life outside their job and they get to spend the social-life meeting handwaving around that fact. It's useless and sad. So glad I don't work there anymore.
  - l33tbro 13y ago
    Heavens. Glad you're out of that dump.
vectorjohn 13y ago
Well, it sounds like you're mostly just an antisocial kind of person. I mean, if you decide to put an arbitrary wall between you and your co-workers where you are simply not allowed to make friends with anyone, that's a pretty sad existence. I mean, this job takes up ~50% of your waking life, and during that time you can't treat anyone around you as a friend? If all your co-workers are such uninteresting people, maybe you're at the wrong company.
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  First, some people are introverts. They genuinely do not work well under conditions of heavy social interaction. This does not mean that they are "antisocial" or that they are sad; it means that they are more sensitive to some kinds of stimuli and so are more easily distracted and exhausted by it. Such people should be understood and given the distance that allows them to work, not browbeaten into keeping up with the extraverts.
  - ansgri 13y ago
    More than that, some people are antisocial and/or sad, yet are very good engineers. So employers and colleagues should be really interested in having those around, especially if they don't want to bother you with non-technical things.
- debt 13y ago
  Whether or not my coworkers have unique and interesting lives shouldn't really matter in a work environment, no? Shouldn't the thing we're all working on and the goal were all striving towards be number one? My bend at work is definitely more towards the antisocial simply because I would like to focus on work. Bother me if it's work related otherwise maybe wait until 5pm or whenever we're all wrapping up. I'm down for making friends, but we don't need to talk all week long about the camping trip we're all going on this weekend. It's a thing, it's happening. Why don't we talk about it after it happens? Honestly, I know it sounds cheesy, but I wish so bad to have worked on an Apollo mission or the Manhattan project. In my fantasy, those engineers just showed up and talked about the most interesting and fascinating and craziest shit and then went and built it. At lunch people talked about the minutiae of putting a dude on the moon or what the hell Rutherford scattering was and NOT the perfect temperature to roast a coffee bean or why the iphone sucks. I know, I know, some people want to decompress and unwind throughout the day and not be so preoccupied with that intense shit all the time. I just think it'd be cool if people were more like that.