3 ms·

I don't think its a generational thing so much as a self inflicted culture thing. I was in college in the mid/late 00s and being social/collaborating never suff

I don't think its a generational thing so much as a self inflicted culture thing. I was in college in the mid/late 00s and being social/collaborating never suffered for us having offices (two grads to a lab/office usually). We used computer labs or the common areas instead of conference rooms but same same. That said in addition to a mandatory visitors chair, white boards everywhere. Just fucking everywhere. Nothing seemed to help collaboration like being able to start water cooler level talk about a problem and with out even noticing transition to hashing it out on a whiteboard.

VLM 12y ago
I think there is a generational gap in that some youth in general don't seem to realize most offices were not a broom closet with precisely one desk and one chair. Usually we had at least one spare table (maybe a cheap lunchroom class table, but still..) and piles of extra chairs and often a desk for the guy who quit last month and hasn't been replaced yet. So the "old timers" get very strange questions like "what if you're in an office and need to talk to someone" where the younger people don't understand the architecture and the older people don't understand the younger people's lack of experience. In 1995 the office I worked in had 4 desks (usually 3 empty because of flex time/remote work, meetings, collaboration, etc) and 4 chairs (again, usually 3 empty) and two big lunchroom sized folding tables and I believe six chairs crowded around the lunchroom tables. Admittedly mostly covered with these new fangled (at that time) "cisco multiprotocol router" things. So if someone walked into my office and wanted to talk, or even a moderately large team appeared at my door with pitchforks or whatever, I could and did occasionally host parties of ten plus people, like if there was an emergency and we had to config and ship out like an entire data center of routers at the same time. And yet most of the time my office was ALSO blissfully empty and silent so I could concentrate on studying release notes and design new configurations and test network designs using routers set up all over the conference tables. It was extremely flexible, and therefore extremely productive, unlike an open office.

VLM 12y ago

I think there is a generational gap in that some youth in general don't seem to realize most offices were not a broom closet with precisely one desk and one chair. Usually we had at least one spare table (maybe a cheap lunchroom class table, but still..) and piles of extra chairs and often a desk for the guy who quit last month and hasn't been replaced yet. So the "old timers" get very strange questions like "what if you're in an office and need to talk to someone" where the younger people don't understand the architecture and the older people don't understand the younger people's lack of experience. In 1995 the office I worked in had 4 desks (usually 3 empty because of flex time/remote work, meetings, collaboration, etc) and 4 chairs (again, usually 3 empty) and two big lunchroom sized folding tables and I believe six chairs crowded around the lunchroom tables. Admittedly mostly covered with these new fangled (at that time) "cisco multiprotocol router" things. So if someone walked into my office and wanted to talk, or even a moderately large team appeared at my door with pitchforks or whatever, I could and did occasionally host parties of ten plus people, like if there was an emergency and we had to config and ship out like an entire data center of routers at the same time. And yet most of the time my office was ALSO blissfully empty and silent so I could concentrate on studying release notes and design new configurations and test network designs using routers set up all over the conference tables. It was extremely flexible, and therefore extremely productive, unlike an open office.