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Open office plans suuuuuuuuuuuck. They are soul-crushing, productivity-destroying disasters. Especially if you are trying to code while the telemarketer android

Open office plans suuuuuuuuuuuck. They are soul-crushing, productivity-destroying disasters. Especially if you are trying to code while the telemarketer android is right next to you, repeating his or her script for the 90th time that day. But even if its just developers. Everyone talks about productivity, but its also the lack of privacy. I find that just draining. The "get shit done" part of it, however, may be something different. If you have to defend yourself against heavy incoming meeting emails, and if those meetings are purposeless, meandering blancmanges, then WFH is really a way to evade the meetings.

sdoering 13y ago
We are only 8 to 9 people in our room here. We have our own conference-space inside this room, without separation. I am siting between editors, but I am a data-wrangler. I do code (ok, ugly code, but code non the less). I try to wrap my head around sql-commands, awk, sed, grep, python and so on. And absolutely yes, this is the most frustrating and draining environment, I was ever forced to be in. Productivity is something I do not really know anymore.
scrabble 13y ago
"Accounts Payable, Nina speaking! Just a moment!"
- zentiggr 13y ago
  "Good morning, thank you for calling Initech --- JUST a moment!" Yep.
- baddox 13y ago
  I believe it was corporate accounts payable.
OrwellianChild 13y ago
I can vouch for open plans being terrible even in a non-dev intensive environment... Open plans stifle the ability to have the ad-hoc meetings that actually allow things to get done, since having that conversation at a person's desk disrupts the entire floor within a large radius. Natural light is critical to happiness, at least for me, but I exit to coffee shops rather than attempt to corner the limited supply of conference rooms.
caw 13y ago
You know what's even more soul crushing? Unassigned cubicles. Every day you come in, potentially to a new cube. Every day you leave, and it's exactly like how you found it that morning when you came in. There's a number of large companies moving to this, not just for people who are frequently out of the office, but the engineering and operations staff as well. That's soul crushing. I could work at an open office desk with the noise (it's pretty noisy in my cube), at least it's my own personal space.

sdoering 13y ago

We are only 8 to 9 people in our room here. We have our own conference-space inside this room, without separation. I am siting between editors, but I am a data-wrangler. I do code (ok, ugly code, but code non the less). I try to wrap my head around sql-commands, awk, sed, grep, python and so on. And absolutely yes, this is the most frustrating and draining environment, I was ever forced to be in. Productivity is something I do not really know anymore.

scrabble 13y ago

"Accounts Payable, Nina speaking! Just a moment!"

zentiggr 13y ago
"Good morning, thank you for calling Initech --- JUST a moment!" Yep.
baddox 13y ago
I believe it was corporate accounts payable.

OrwellianChild 13y ago

I can vouch for open plans being terrible even in a non-dev intensive environment... Open plans stifle the ability to have the ad-hoc meetings that actually allow things to get done, since having that conversation at a person's desk disrupts the entire floor within a large radius. Natural light is critical to happiness, at least for me, but I exit to coffee shops rather than attempt to corner the limited supply of conference rooms.

caw 13y ago

You know what's even more soul crushing? Unassigned cubicles. Every day you come in, potentially to a new cube. Every day you leave, and it's exactly like how you found it that morning when you came in. There's a number of large companies moving to this, not just for people who are frequently out of the office, but the engineering and operations staff as well. That's soul crushing. I could work at an open office desk with the noise (it's pretty noisy in my cube), at least it's my own personal space.