Very cool. I'd been a tad disappointed by the limited open hours of coworking spaces (although I completely understand if the owner wants to be there then it can't open more than about 9 hours/day).
Many evenings and weekends, and especially around public holidays, it can sometimes feel like you're the only one who wants to get stuff done. Finding a similarly minded community is very cool. Maybe you could make it into a global 'nightowls' facebook group or something (similar to how there are similar groups for nomads).
I don't know if there is any amenity at the office that would make me want to commute (and it is like 20 minutes for me to get to work). Like, I already have a private office. Nobody I work with wants to be interrupted with random conversation. So what would going into the office achieve; we'd each spend 40 minutes a day packed into a subway car, while still not actually talking to each other.
If you want employees to be happier about work, assign fewer tasks. "Welp I'm done with everything this sprint, guess I'll not come in for 3 days."
As an aside, I propose a new Olympic sport called "software engineering". We take the world's best 100m dash runners, and have them run 421.6 100m dashes one after another! If you're a sprinter, why can't you also be a distance runner!
The average price difference between a 2 bedroom and a 1 is about $3000 annually. I'm guessing that one bedroom is probably enough for 2 desks.
An average couple will use about $5-$12k annually in terms of needing 2 cars, gas, maintenance etc not to mention spending collectively nearly 500 hours commuting over the course of the year.
Details matter for instance your commute may be very favorable or the cost of changing apartments very expensive if you already have a good deal but on average WFH is a financial gain and a pretty big one at that.
This is highly situational. Full time office would cost me $2500 in public transport. Rent difference to 2 bedroom is $15k pa here. The increased amenity of the extra room is totally worth it, but not everyone has the means to pay up to 10k a year extra in rent.
I mean, transportation is pre-tax, so not really $2500.
There's also no such thing as a free lunch. If your employer is buying you an office, then that comes right out of your take-home pay. Or, you're underpaid. Ultimately you provide $X value to the business, your salary and rent for an office don't increase the value, so they directly compete with each other. That's why open offices are so popular, people only compare offers with the $ that they take home. So, they don't put anything else into the other buckets. (I watched Google gradually remove all the perks in order to give people higher total comp. Part of it was taxing snacks and health insurance like income, but part of it was people leaving for the other FAANGs that had less benefits but paid more. The market decided they didn't want private offices at work.)
Good point. As you move towards expensive urban centers the advantage will tend to decrease as space becomes more expensive and transit improves.
That said I've lived with 2 people in a shoe box of a studio and still enjoyed working from home from it although I did have customers from time to time commenting on what was on the news across the way or my cat. I understand that the equation is different for others but I'm definitely firmly committed to this lifestyle.
The city is where all the fun things are. There's nothing more enjoyable than going for a five minute walk and picking which of the 10 restaurants and bars I pass I'd like to stop at.
This "problem" pretty much solves itself with the current trend.
Those who want to be in cities because of what you listed will pay the premium and stay and deal with the crowding constraints and workarounds such as open offices and high rent. People are sensitive to prices differently and crowding is not too big of a deal since they like people generally.
Those who want space and privacy will move out and work remotely and somewhat ease the crowding.
Personally I can only "enjoy" a city for a couple days before being drained, then it's back to life as a hermit.
But it doesn't look good for those who like in-office w/ private offices. I see no trend to bring that back.
Sad because that's the only way I would work in-office.
You might consider developing an interest in more sustainable hobbies, like running, the gym or an instrument. They offer less immediate gratification, but you can get out of living paycheck to paycheck as people with bar/restaurant habits do.
A good way to ease into it is moving somewhere where it’s a 5 minute bike ride instead of a 5 minute walk to bars and restaurants. You’ll save money, get more fit, and get a dopamine detox.
I didn't read their comment as a problem to be solved in the slightest. The great thing about living in the city is that one can also walk 5 min to their gym, then see people they might know from the gym on their way to the grocery store, and occasionally invite them to a drink within walking distance to their home if they want.
Or alternatively you can get on your bike and go wherever you want too, like many city people also do.
Living near options doesn't mean you're constantly engaging in those options, but if you are engaging in those too much, ya maybe move a bit further away.
Problem with many suburbs is that they're basically only a place to live in isolation, with a few exceptions. You see maybe a few scant people who walk their dog, everyone else is either at work, inside, in their backyard, or they've driven somewhere else.
Lots of suburbs - especially the so-called exurbs - are places that used to be a small town and still maintain a main street, but with a lot of living areas close to the main street. These suburbs are also "semi-suburbs" of the town, if that makes sense, and maintain many of the small town amenities.
I'd argue that North American style suburbs have no legitimate place in the urban landscape at all, regardless of the nature of residents' jobs, as in they're an insufficient, half-hearted, and often ugly solution that people just get used to living in. I find them unsettling places to be most of the time.
The difference between a small town and a neighborhood though that favors my disposition, is that there's generally more variety and specialization available in the local economy and community, as well as less of a dependence on a vehicle for visiting anywhere outside the neighborhood. There's not just 1 gym, there's 4, there's not just one physical therapy office, there's 5, there's not just one dentist or coffee shop, there's 13. Of course, I'm not visiting even 2 of these places at any given time, but others are, and it's nice to know that there are alternatives.
And it's not just meeting people for the sake of socializing, it's also a platform for a broader exposure to diverse cultures and a hypothetically larger dating pool, more education opportunities, access to an international airport, more telecom providers (in theory) that can provide better services if that's important to you.
Small towns however seem great if you've already done all that and just want a quiet place to putter around and maybe have access to the mountains or enjoy farming. There's a certain serenity you might not get near/in a city, and there's absolutely a lack of space that small town wouldn't have. People in that small town might be welcoming and friendly as opposed to cold and hard to pin down in the nearby city, but the reverse could also be true depending on where you've chosen. It's a perfectly valid choice, it just depends what you're into I suppose, and if there's train access that would be even better.
I think you have a somewhat generalizing idea of small towns
In a town w/ a pop. of 6,500 I have:
- 1 gig internet (+ starlink, but I only use when traveling now)
- 2 dentist offices
- 4 local coffee shops + 1 starbucks
- 2 grocery stores + 1 walmart supercenter
- 3 gyms (but one is a curves so essentially 2) but none are crowded ever.
As far as international airports, I can either drive to the nearest city, about 45mins - 1hr but I have flown to a big airport from the town's airfield in a small aircraft.
You can find many small towns with many amenities and most of the times you have at least 2 options.
There's no denying there's more variety in the city, but often it's really not the drastic limitations you're imagining.
I will say, with what we do have there's no crowding, everything is very friendly, there's a lot of local options and people will go out of their way to help you.
But God forbid you live in the town 15 minutes from me, it barely has cell service.
You really can't lump small towns together, there's such a wide range.
Ya that's fair, I'm definitely thinking about them from the Canadian perspective (in terms of connectivity) at the very least, and tend to think of what you're describing as sort of a big town or tiny city rather than a "small" town. Here, we don't really even get fiber in anything but relatively known mid to large cities, and any small cities that grew after the 50s are mostly beleaguered by huge parking lots and bland franchises. Small to midsize towns that have some kind of older area with small streets and small commercial spaces tend to seem pretty livable though.
Having traveled across the U.S a bit by road, there are plenty of great places like Olympia, WA that sort of sound like what you're describing, and seem pretty livable.
The airport thing is just a matter of reducing the overhead and increasing the accessibility of me travelling elsewhere and others visiting me without a car. When my Mom visited last time, she asked me to pick her up somehow so she could avoid an Uber or taxi, to which I just said "Just swipe your credit card and get on the train, then swap to bus". Back in my home city though, each relative lives in some suburban corner that's only served by a rickety bus system, and people are pretty used to just paying for a taxi or long-term parking during the entire time they're away. If I had the car, it would only take 45 min to get to them from the airport, but without one it takes almost as long as the flight did across half the damn country. Clearly, even among cities, things vary quite a bit, but I'm glad that there do exist viable and desirable options for both of us, and hope more open up in the future.
If sustainability is your metric, you should prefer cities. The general environmental impact and resource usage of rural living is much worse per capita than city living. (And yes, that can be true while cities generally use much more resources and pollute more: they also have many more people living there)
Dilution is only a solution if the total amount isn't harmful once diluted. That's not the case for greenhouse gases, at the very least. To say nothing of the other end of the equation: limited supplies of the raw ingreadients. The earth could likely only support a fraction of the current human population if they all lived rural lifestyles.
That long debate aside, today we can see the palpable smog in big cities vs the clean air in rural areas, small towns, and small cities.
You also risk ozone depletion in areas with concentrated aerosol emissions, these are short lived and would disperse, but they cause the most damage of all pollutants in concentration.
> The earth could likely only support a fraction of the current human population if they all lived rural lifestyles.
I'm not suggesting that, I'm suggesting people live where they want to and don't fall for that inaccurate guilt-trip talking point.
You don’t necessarily need extra rooms, just be smart about integrating a desk into an existing room. We added one desk in the living room and one desk in our bedroom and both work from home without issues while the kids are in school.
I mean when the pandemic hit we all made do with what we had, and put a office setup somewhere in the house. But not everyone likes or wants the aesthetic of living room/WFH office. And then when you're off work, your office is right there looking you in the face from the webcam when you're trying to relax in your living room.
I think what they meant was that you can build home offices which can sort of be “folded” away once you’re done with them. I have an office space in the living room which is what you wouldn’t want, we’ve sort of hidden it with some book shelves and some walk decorations and plants, but still, I don’t think you would want it.
Anyway, my daughter has a “gaming” setup at the wall next to it and it’s build into a bookcase with a folding table. When she’s not using it you genuinely can’t tell it’s there. It did require some woodworking and some creative furniture “hacking”, but neither my spouse or I are great craftspeople and I think most people would be able to do it. We found our inspiration on YouTube and some actual woodworking help for how to integrate a folding table into a bookshelf on DIY web sites.
It’s not for everyone, but you can do it.
I don’t work from home more than maybe once a week myself. I don’t really want to. I use it ti work shorter days and then do the rest of my hours at nights/weekends.
> I mean when the pandemic hit we all made do with what we had, and put a office setup somewhere in the house. But not everyone likes or wants the aesthetic of living room/WFH office.
The home office I have shoved into a corner is better than what any employer will provide.
I too wish for a raise, and the financial ability to afford an entire room to dedicate to work, and the crazy things I might be able to put in there, like a whiteboard.
> And then when you're off work, your office is right there looking you in the face from the webcam when you're trying to relax in your living room.
Post-It that webcam. But I agree, here, it does make it harder to disconnect.
But "the commute" is such a heavy negative, I think it outweighs it, still. Having so many weeks per year of my life back is wonderful.
> The home office I have shoved into a corner is better than what any employer will provide.
> I too wish for a raise, and the financial ability to afford an entire room to dedicate to work, and the crazy things I might be able to put in there, like a whiteboard.
How can you claim that your home office is better than your employer's when it doesn't even have a whiteboard? To bring it back to the point of the article, bring back private offices. Employers that want employees in the office should invest in offices to the point that it is a better office than a corner of your home. It won't be able to complete with your commute, as you pointed out, but why do you claim that the home office you have shoved into a corner is better than what any employer will provide?
Yeah, I really like my home office setup, with a curved ultra wide screen monitor and my special chair. I don't think that it's unreasonable that, if they want me in the office, that I have the same sort of set up there.
> How can you claim that your home office is better than your employer's when it doesn't even have a whiteboard?
Because "better" is a function with multiple inputs. The whiteboard was better, true, but by comparison the commute sucks, the noise sucks, the desk sucks, the chair sucks. The whiteboard is a pretty minor thing, in the scoring of it all.
(I actually do have a whiteboard at home, but it's ~8x11". Pen and paper, and Krita, make up the difference, I suppose.)
> Employers that want employees in the office should invest in offices to the point that it is a better office than a corner of your home.
… they should… but they don't? I've worked the majority? all? of my career in offices on 4ft desks, most of it on open office floorplans. The "best" in half-height cubical. Best I ever got was a summer internship with a full-height shared cube.
> but why do you claim that the home office you have shoved into a corner is better than what any employer will provide?
Because we, as an employee group, put up with that. If only there were some way we could band together and say we don't like these working conditions. some sort of disjoint set of a group of people.
See, you would not like that someone would force you to work from home. Same goes the other way around. So why not let people choose and refrain from carpet bombing policies mandating everyone be the same.
I too can't afford a room to call an office … but I still prefer WFH?
It does get a little hectic if there are two of us, and we both try to take a meeting overlapping each other. But the same is true of the "real" office, too, only balanced by meeting room availability. (But that only works for meetings where one can forego the rest of their computer, since you have to disconnect to move…)
I'd love to see a breakdown of open office space sentiment and which industries people are in.
I see open space hate dominate HN but in gaming open space can be amazing for cross-discipline communication and collaboration, especially on smaller teams.
Having a few people from a smaller team in the same room is certainly not what people mean when they say open office. IMHO If you only had to share it with your team it wouldn’t be half as bad
No. These executive types fantasize about people in different teams or even different disciplines having these amazing chance encounters. You know: "major businesses are launched because Joe Executive had the foresight to put everyone in one room." I call it C-Suite Porn.
As long as it's cheaper to just get some huge room and push a bunch of desks together over a few days, "open office", is going to be the choice of managers.
For every person who says, "I don't mind open offices", I meet ten more who hate them. I know, statistics like this are just made up, but everyone I know would rather work in a closed office.
Ultimately, the sentiments offered by others are what drive this home. I have said it before and I'll be saying it on Hacker News again: I have become very accustomed to working from home, and very little will motivate me back into an office. Even a huge pay bump would make it a difficult decision. I like the coworkers I've had, but the distractions of an office are excessive. I can go anywhere I want with WFH, literally anywhere - and my employer supports it. No amount of pitiful pizza parties and stolen fridge food will make me want to go back.
Funny you mention that - one of my last office interactions was my boss burning salmon in the microwave. I literally walked into the server room because I'd rather be deaf than smell burnt fish.
One my favorite gags from the early days of the pandemic was telling my coworkers that I left a cheesecake in the fridge, and they were all welcome to have some.
> No amount of pitiful pizza parties and stolen fridge food will make me want to go back.
FWIW, I WFH so I can eat my pizza in peace, instead of dealing with bullshit salad and fruit and fitness parties that have been a staple of the tech industry in the past decade.
A few years back I was working in an open office setting at a games studio and I got in a discussion with the branch manager about it. He was convinced that open office was a productivity multiplier. I asked him who he thought the most productive developers were on the team. When he gave me names, I pointed out that every one of them were wearing big noise-canceling headphones to block out the collaboration he thought he was fostering. My solution was different, I usually got in at 6am when almost no one else came in before the 10am standup. I would get most of my work done by then and then circulate and help the kids as needed.
To be fair, it did seem like the artists did get some benefit, but it was definitely a net negative for most of the developers.
I’ve been in private offices, and cubes, and open office, and honestly the most productive environment was when I was in a set of cubicles that had sliding doors, around a bullpen with multiple tables. When you needed to go head-down to get some code down you could, but otherwise you hung out at the tables in the middle.
There was a time when I thought the same as that branch manager, but that time was long ago and it was based on absolutely no experience.
In the last open office I worked in, I could not find headphones that allowed me to focus, not even construction-grade earmuffs; if someone's chewing food within 10 ft, I'll hear it, and that's all I'll hear.
For literal constant music listening to actually help, it needs to be a choice, otherwise it just makes me tire of music and I don't get nearly as much out of my mental energy.
>In the last open office I worked in, I could not find headphones that allowed me to focus, not even construction-grade earmuffs; if someone's chewing food within 10 ft, I'll hear it, and that's all I'll hear.
That's interesting. I have the same exact issue and whenever I tell people about it they think I am crazy. I don't have a problem with people chewing food when it's lunch break and we sit in the cafeteria, but man, when I try to focus it kills my brain. Just last week the guy next to me started eating kind of late in the day (where my brain was almost empty). I then tried to cancel it out with headphones, but that just wasn't possible anymore.
And I still don't know how to deal with it. Sometimes I try to take a walk for 5 minutes and it helps, but not always. On some days I get a full mental breakdown because I get angry at myself getting angry on somebody just making noises any normal human being does while eating
For me heavily depends on the music.
Just been listening to heavy drum and bass for the past 2 hours and been in absolute hyperfocus. Music is the best for me, should be familiar and not have too many lyrics tho.
Sometimes it's drum and bass, mostly some synthwave/chill beats.
Edit: But the problem here is. If I am already exhausted and got distracted by those noises, then getting into focus with just music often does not work. I do have adhd and it could be that misophonia is playing into it too. Still trying to figure out my best work environment, but it's hard
You may have misophonia. It’s not uncommon with misophonia to react with rage to eating noises. My husband cannot tolerate certain sounds, for example a dog lapping water.
I have misophonia too, related to chewing sounds. It actually developed in offices. I don’t really go to offices anymore. But the thing that definitely helped was listening to violent noises: wind storm in the forest, sound of jet engine, etc. Naturespace app for phones have some really high quality recordings.
Well, that and psychotherapy. My mental health directly allows me to spend mental resources resisting all these emotions.
My son (11yo) has had this as well for the last 2.5 years. Seeing an Audiologist for treatment.
Can you elaborate a little on "listening to violent noises" approach? When do you do this, for how long? Is it graduated in intensity, like exposure therapy?
It is just listening to noises that would distort other unpleasant sounds in a way that they stop being distinguishable/audible. Not a therapy, just masking them temporarily.
I know when the risk of disturbing noises is high, and turn on the noise beforehand, or right after it starts.
Like, there is a kindergarten near my house, it is noisy, but predictable. So every day I close the window and turn on headphones during the time children are outside.
The therapy, unrelated to this coping approach, was focused on figuring out why I got sensitive to some noises in the first place during childhood. Very individual, but to give an example, appearance of stepfather in my life, whose eating habits were conflicting with the way I was raised before.
It really is a kind of existential dread I get when having to contend with this. Thankfully it's rare now that I don't have a job in an office or at all, but when I did, I'd end up with the same solution; I had to leave the office, or ironically, take a breather in the kitchen and hope they were done their meal when I got back.
It consumed my consciousness in a way that literally dropped my productivity to near zero, and I couldn't catch up, and got fired. Thankfully my boss didn't do a damn thing except scold me for being slow, otherwise I'd still be making PDF editing software.
I'd just go to a cafe down the street for a few hours, which reflected poorly on me, but I had no choice. Not only was the coffee laughably better than the shit in the office, but my ability to focus there vs the office was like night and day.
To the improvement of my focus and productivity I recently-ish got into listening "arbitrary" music with little to no lyrics and an uplifting tempo.
I used to listen to particular bands which I felt "defined my identity" or something, which I still occasionally do, but I've since realized that when I'm working it's "distracting" to me and I now listen to things like generic "trailer" / epic music or "upbeat" music for workouts.
Can't do it myself, but I've heard that people listen to typical traditional "video game music" for this purpose. Fast, upbeat, and never something you need to focus on, but rather, it just helps you keep up the concentration.
...if you're the type of person who can listen to music while working, that is.
To add to the other comment. Game music/soundtracks can be good for that, lots of options there, usually that music is to fill the background and keep someone engaged with the game. I also find LoFi music good for that purpose.
I actually had the Golden Axe theme[0] on repeat for 4 hours and didn't notice =) I also have a feeling it wasn't the full song, but I had clipped it to a shorter length to fit into the space required for a ringtone at the time.
This is pretty much what I end up doing by choice, but it only acts as an aid if I can also take them off and get a break. The problem is made worse when you can also see the person chewing with their mouth open and possibly being able to smell it.
To shut out sounds, the thing that seems to work for me is to play thunderstorm sounds. Because it's got a high degree of randomness across the frequency spectrum, and its spectrum varies over short timescales, external noise is masked even if it's still audible - because the brain can easily fit it into the thunderstorm pattern. Whereas if I'm annoyed by something, my brain will pick it out from behind music in listening to, even if it's quieter.
When I'm hearing someone else's thump thump music and my ear buds aren't sufficient to block it, that's the only thing I've found to work.
It's real rain noise - if you pay attention to it, you can hear the drops - but it's overall a nice white noise that isn't the "boring" white noise.
> ... Our recording has been performed in the silence of the night, in a huge space - namely the Harau Valley in Sumatra - and in the absence of any wind, as to produce the most even noise one can get.
I built a white noise site which has a load of sounds which can help in a similar way (including thunder): https://ambiph.one
I find the 'bass rumble' and brown noise particularly useful for masking external noise, which I guess is pretty similar to a thunderstorm frequency-wise
in my opinion they're really good, though, to be honest, I haven't tried them in an open space env. I'm also a sufferer of misophonia, it's beeping noises and random notifications for me.
I also noticed they make getting into the flow a lot more easy; and, surprisingly, they also reduce the activation energy of getting into work. I suspect that's because our envs are EXTREMELY noisy (compared with the mythical natural state) and the brain always keeps track (subconsciously) of all the noises which leads to mental energy depletion
I used these when studying in the library for the CPA exam, and they were remarkably effective. The joke with my friends was if the library had caught on fire and the fire alarms had gone off, I wouldn’t have been aware and would have remained in my seat while everyone else evacuated.
I'm not sure if I tried that specific model or not, but I did try the beefiest 3Ms that were available and that others were recommending for the same issue back in 2020, and no they don't really work for this problem. They would probably work if I was already completely unaware of the noises, but then I probably wouldn't need them anyway and they wouldn't be an appropriate solution. Also they were comically large and introduced the anxiety that people were constantly looking at them.
The funny thing is that a lot of these startups give out a Bose noise cancelling headphones along with the onboarding. I have really good hearing, so loud clapping for example will make me cower. Listening to background discussions in startups is quite literally physically torturing to me.
Please let's not glorify working from 6am (effectively allocating time since 5am for work) unless you also left office at 2pm. Only seeing your children on weekends to make your boss 10% happier is not something to be proud about
No it isn't, not in any big multinationals, not unless you have some extremely specific agreement with management. More acceptable is say 7:30 - 16:30, and is still often seen as slacking by folks who stay till 6-7pm. Of course if you do consistently excellent work way above rest of the peers this doesn't matter.
The reason is trivial - if you are not around half of the time rest of the team is, teamwork suffers quite a bit (which is cca constant situation with distant remote places like India, ie if you have any questions in the afternoon you are blocked and they need to wait till next day)
Having spent some time living in Zurich I call bullshit on this; the streets and train stations are _deserted_ at 6am. Shops are still getting deliveries, coffee shops are still closed.
No significant numbers of people - in Zurich at least - are starting work in offices at 6am.
A previous coworker used to get into the office early, around 7am, because they dropped off their kid at school. They also left around 3pm. This is reasonable and would be accepted by any competent manager.
This is how I always worked over a 15 year developer career. I’d get in at 6 maybe take a 2 hour lunch break and then put a few more hours in until around 4pm as a standard pattern.
The vast majority of useful work I ever did was between the hours of 6-9am.
If someone choses to do it (and is not required) then why is it an issue?
I do 6:30am - 3pm and have done for years, it fits my day well. Others I work with might not start till 10am. Thats the great thing about working from home, you get more flexability in your start/end time. As long as you get your working hours done it's a total non issue.
When I was a PhD student and post-doc, I used to also arrive by 7am, and get most of my work done before anyone else arrived at 11am. I had all the equipment to myself, and enjoyed being able to settle in to the work day without having to interact with people.
I generally left around 3pm to avoid the Austin rush hour traffic. Sure, I would occasionally stay late but I generally didn’t work much more than a 40 hour week. But this was Facebook games, with a daily release cycle, so there wasn’t really the crunch time that you would have seen at a AAA studio. They catered lunch every day but I almost always left and ate somewhere else.
Personally I appreciated the flexibility to work and leave early.
>He was convinced that open office was a productivity multiplier.
The productivity multiplier does not have to be constant over the entire employee base to make it worth it. Also good direction / avoiding bad direction is one of the biggest productivity modifiers but it is harder to measure since it may look like people are productive but what they are producing is not beneficial.
That to me is the critical tell. By all accounts the Bloomberg office model is very well regarded but Bloomberg himself sits in a cubicle with his directs around him in their own cubicles. There are break-out conference rooms of course just around them.
The CEO and directs should have a similar work situation to all the other office managers and their directs.
While I sympathize with that notion, I guess overhearing everything the C level is talking about would make everyone an insider regarding (own) stocks trading. Also, any layered security approaches would be hard to realize.
They're still separated by floor. His cubicle farm is just for the very senior people who are already in (and anyway something very sensitive would happen in a room).
> The CEO and directs should have a similar work situation to all the other office managers and their directs.
I would call this kind of dogfooding a necessary but insufficient condition for accepting what they say about open-plan offices.
After all, just because an open-plan office is better for people whose job (often) literally consists of talking to people all day doesn't mean it is better for people whose job is to focus all day on code, spreadsheets, or other kinds of individual work.
Private offices and cubicles with high walls are the best if we are excluding remote.
Microsoft used to give most employees a private office in the late 90s to roughly the mid 2010s - and that was heaven. Collaboration was great because you could go to your coworker's private office or even bring people along for the much-vaunted in-person whiteboarding. It happened a lot. The only thing that was frowned upon was to leave your office door closed 100% of the time, but some people did just that anyway; that was similar to the remote experience, but at the office.
To be clear, I agree they are not meaningfully equivalent. I just meant to say that they are the best options other than remote, especially if you consider that private offices haven't been common for software developers for over 30 years. Private offices are awesome and cubicles are tolerable to fine depending on your coworkers.
Open offices are almost invariably terrible for employees - although I have to say that I was once in a large room with a (often closed) door along 5 other engineers as a sort of "private open office" and that was actually okay.
> you could go to your coworker's private office or even bring people along for the much-vaunted in-person whiteboarding.
I was at one company; it had private offices, and this is exactly what would happen. You'd go to someone's office; you could share ideas back and forth, often on the whiteboard; it was low-judgment -- just you, the other person, and maybe a third -- so people spoke freely.
I was at another company; it had a SV-style open office and a SV-style interview which, in pre-COVID days, used a whiteboard. It was competitive; people were from top schools. You could tell nobody wanted to use the "you can write on this glass surface" whiteboards scattered around the open office, because they knew there'd be a dozen sets of eyes able to see their vulnerable thought processes and silently judge them; it'd be a show; and they were slightly traumatized by the interview that had gotten them in.
I think large open offices change things from, "I'm interacting with another person", to "I'm putting on a show." And nobody wants to put on a show, quite understandably.
I think open offices are really about reducing employees' feelings of being sheltered or safe. It comes out of the same mindset that speaks of employees "hiding" and not doing work.
I found that I was spending too much mental energy scanning the horizon for predators, and not enough thinking about the ostensible technical problem.
I’ll never understand why people want to go back to the office.
Office has shit food. Shit coffee. In an open office, there’s a high risk of catching a virus from your co-worker. People love to tap your shoulder, interrupt your thought process (clearly I’m in the zone, asshole), and ask you mundane shit that could have been resolved over IM.
Even worse, the idiot asshole that can’t be bothered to read documentation and asks you to go over it with him/her in a 1:1 session. Fuck off.
Obviously you worked in someone elses desktop wallpaper that they call you an "office". Real working places exist, they are different than what you describe.
>Office has shit food. Shit coffee. In an open office, there’s a high risk of catching a virus from your co-worker. People love to tap your shoulder, interrupt your thought process (clearly I’m in the zone, asshole), and ask you mundane shit that could have been resolved over IM.
It's not that complicated to bring food from home for lunch, grab something on the way in, or go out for lunch -- I doubt you're working in a food desert after all.
Ditto for coffee and even coffee shops.
Catching a virus thing, sure that's a real concern. For personal experience though I've found I've gotten sick more often since COVID and 100% WFH than when I used to work out of the office 2-3 days a week, including public transit.
As far as interruptions, a lot of offices have conference rooms engineers can use whenever they want. Even one person rooms or the newer telephone booths. Usually all soundproofed. You don't even have to tell coworkers which one you're working from and you can switch rooms throughout the day. I guess that's not feasible in like a 10-20 person office but I've been in offices for up to 75-100 people and it wasn't that difficult.
Most of the problems you've cited have relatively simple solutions in my opinion.
> It's not that complicated to bring food from home for lunch, grab something on the way in, or go out for lunch -- I doubt you're working in a food desert after all.
Or, try to stay with me here, I'm just at my fucking house and I can pop into the kitchen whenever I want to get food. I can even take my laptop into the kitchen and be on a meeting while I'm cooking or eating.
I can make fresh coffee whenever I want. If I'm lazy I can order DoorDash and hot food just shows up at my door.
The idea conference rooms are places to get work done is ludicrous. Conference rooms are perennially booked, often overbooked, and at best you might get an hour of uninterrupted work done in one. Woe be unto the poor engineer that's found in a conference room by a middle manager. They'll get no end of shit for *reasons*.
Offices have only gotten worse over the past few decades. If my work doesn't involve physically touching hardware (all my shit deploys to The Cloud) there's no reason I can't work from my house. I've been working remote for several years now and it's been amazing for my mental health and productivity. Not to mention I've saved thousands of dollars a year not having to commute.
>Or, try to stay with me here, I'm just at my fucking house and I can pop into the kitchen whenever I want to get food. I can even take my laptop into the kitchen and be on a meeting while I'm cooking or eating.
Obviously those defeat the point of the article and the very subjective stated problems that have very simple solutions.
>The idea conference rooms are places to get work done is ludicrous. Conference rooms are perennially booked, often overbooked, and at best you might get an hour of uninterrupted work done in one. Woe be unto the poor engineer that's found in a conference room by a middle manager. They'll get no end of shit for reasons.
I never had this problem across jobs at three different companies, working out of multiple locations that each had quite varying differences in office culture. Maybe it's a company-specific work culture thing?
I'm not sure I'm following. You are proposing to bring the lunch from home and hide in some conference room the whole day, but why go back to the office at all then?
I never said all day. I said you can use different ones at different times of the day, basically _as needed_, like if you need an hour or two to get very heads down with Slack closed and no "taps on the shoulder" as the OP mentioned.
… you understand 2 coffee shop lattes are like the same price as the entire bag of ground beans, right? But the bag will make 10-15 times the coffee; the price difference is phenomenal. Its only saving grace is that my budget is dominated by rent, really.
There are cheaper shops, yes … but the coffee is terrible. I can do far better myself.
> As far as interruptions, a lot of offices have conference rooms engineers can use whenever they want
If any significant number of people even attempted this, it'd be ended immediately. There's not enough to go around.
> the newer telephone booths. Usually all soundproofed.
… so lug keyboard and monitor into a phone booth, and proceed to hog it for the day?
> I guess that's not feasible in like a 10-20 person office but I've been in offices for up to 75-100 people and it wasn't that difficult.
It's not feasible in any office of any size that I've ever been in, because the resources you're talking about are can only simultaneously serve like 2–5% of the office's population at a time.
>… you understand 2 coffee shop lattes are like the same price as the entire bag of ground beans, right? But the bag will make 10-15 times the coffee; the price difference is phenomenal. Its only saving grace is that my budget is dominated by rent, really
And you can't bring in a small bag of beans/pre-ground beans from your favorite roaster?
Every office I've worked in had a coffee maker or espresso machine or both, and if you prefer to brew with say a Hario V60 it's not that big a deal to keep one at your desk and just bring a bag of beans lol.
You don't even have to lug it to work every day with all the easy ways to order beans these days. And if you're buying your own bags and using those beans you're not spending any more than you would otherwise.
Not the OP but some of their points are genuine things. Quite surprised they didnt mention the obvious - the added personal costs and time.
Everything thats mentioned as a counter point is a compromise to working from home, almost like a "well you could work from home, and save money, and have your own coffee...but why do that when you can come to work and bring coffee with you".
I'm sure some thrive in a typical open plan office. Most in technical roles however do not, and find it extremely counter productive.
> Quite surprised they didnt mention the obvious - the added personal costs and time.
I'm not sure what personal costs are, if you're referring to my comment? DIY coffee is considerably cheaper. As for time … because it's mostly a wash? While I think the coffee shop will win out, you still have to walk there, wait to order, order, wait for them to make it, and walk back. It definitely takes me less time to make coffee myself; it's the washing of the equipment where the coffee shop might then come out ahead.
In terms of personal costs I was thinking more car/petrol/public transport costs to get to work, the personal time (which could be counted as a cost) it takes to get to and from work, having to get up earlier etc)
> And you can't bring in a small bag of beans/pre-ground beans from your favorite roaster?
Literally no? I've basically had a mix of … industrial coffee vats, managed by the office? IDK what they're really called; and machines that make jarring noises & reconstitute coffee from what feels like freeze dried ingredients (touch screen interface, constantly breaking due to clogs).
> Every office I've worked in had a coffee maker or espresso machine or both,
I've had an espresso machine exactly once, but that's sort of the thing, it is the exception, not the rule. (I did like the coffee, then.)
When we had the espresso machine, the beans in use were a very low key office politics thing? (In a friendly way.) There was one guy who liked a particular brand that the rest of us pretty much didn't, but the rest of us weren't too picky otherwise. Just … not that one. Nobody much minded, since it's really not that big of a deal, of course.
Our espresso machine had a hopper, so you're not realistically grinding "your" beans. You can bring in some, but you're sharing, and it'd be until the next time the hopper needs a fill. Easier to just get it on the office shopping list.
>Someone who has never been in a suburban business park, I see!
Actually I have, and the comment about going out nearby work was like the last option out of the three I listed. Now you're just cherry-picking.
>So - and I mean this in a very real way - WTF is the point of this?
I never said for the entire day? The idea is if you want to be heads down on important work with zero interruptions you can duck into a room for a couple hours at some point in the day, and if you need another hour or so you can do the same thing. Assuming 6-8 hour work days that's nowhere close to hiding all day, which you're implying I said.
Yes, cherry-picking the arguments that actually matter.
Most people going to an office spend their whole day on video calls, and have the temerity to shush people around them who are actually collaborating. They do this while drinking shit coffee from an awful machine (at best) or mediocre coffee from an expensive coffee bar (at best).
If people want offices to work out, they have to be downtown, near amenities, not stuck out in a suburban hell-hole because "parking".
My department got called into the office last week. I assume it was for mandatory serendipitous communication. I did my best and struck up a conversation in our open plan office. I was shushed because half of the department was on the same zoom call and there wasn’t a meeting room big enough for them.
I still remember the office I was assigned as a graduate student. It was far nicer than any I had in private industry. It had a window with a view of the campus and I could actually lock the door.
The worst office experience I ever had was when I was rubbing elbows with my teammates and wearing noise canceling headphones the entire time. To get away from that gerbil in a cage claustrophobia, I took to walks in the parking garage which was the most humane space in the entire building.
People dedicated to working at home haven't worked in a good office.
That was: an office with a door, and a big open space where people from a kind but competitive group had free-wheeling discussions.
The main thing was that we together were shaping the product; if you convinced others, you could have an impact. And to convince others, you needed to do your homework (in your office).
So it's not really the office or the desk but the rhythm of coming up with an idea and seeing it take root in your peers (or not) -- the opportunity to contribute.
Nowadays, it's open desks or cubes and product managers, and any collective discussion is shot through with politics. When initiative is squelched and mutual respect is replaced by influence, the only thing to maximize is slack -- which makes working from home the absolute best.
> People dedicated to working at home haven't worked in a good office.
I agree.
> The main thing was that we together were shaping the product; if you convinced others, you could have an impact. And to convince others, you needed to do your homework (in your office).
This is not. Shaping a product is not a collaborative work. Thus, product is something different, we talk about the real work environment.
> So it's not really the office or the desk but the rhythm of coming up with an idea and seeing it take root in your peers (or not) -- the opportunity to contribute.
This is another not. Office has nothing to do with that topic.
> Nowadays, it's open desks or cubes and product managers, and any collective discussion is shot through with politics. When initiative is squelched and mutual respect is replaced by influence, the only thing to maximize is slack -- which makes working from home the absolute best.
This is office chatting. Product development is done inside the computer. You don't need an office for that.
On one hand, product-development on the computer is a lot better when people actually use the computer to the best of its abilities. A lot of people will just leave shit in people’s heads or request one-offs to be done EOD because, I swear, this was a last second client request and we really need it. On the other, I’ve done a lot of painful product meetings with PM seatwarmers who refuse to type anything at all into their tickets and devs who barely comment on important things like ticket size or whether or not something should be prioritized differently based on technical factors. I’ve met only a handful of good PO/PM types, and whether or not they work in person has had little to do with it.
> People dedicated to working at home haven't worked in a good office.
Or, alternatively, some people work better from home and some work better in an office. And basing "all truth" off your anecdata isn't really reasonable (the same is true of those that say everyone would be better off working from home).
The biggest problem is that the people that work better in an office tend to see that benefit because there are co-workers there. And if half the people are working from home, the co-workers aren't there. So you can really only make one group optimal, and the other one suffers.
> The biggest problem is that the people that work better in an office tend to see that benefit because there are co-workers there. And if half the people are working from home, the co-workers aren't there. So you can really only make one group optimal, and the other one suffers.
That is exactly what I noticed in 2020 mostly. The people who kept going to the office were almost screaming and crying on the internet about working in an empty office and basically begging everyone to come back and keep them company.
All this time we'd accepted that as the norm. Dare I say it, the world favored extroverts. And in 2020 for a brief few months, it didn't. It was interesting seeing the table flipped.
Of course that's kinda exaggerating. Lots of people are "fine" in either situation. Lots of places were closed for a while and even after, there was still a spooky vibe to it, so WFH wasn't quite as nice.
I love socializing and stuff. TO me there are other reasons I prefer WFH - for example, the business district my company HQ is in, is very VERY pedestrian unfriendly. It's basically a corner of 2 super busy 6-lane streets. Walking to get lunch is impossible. Getting parking is a nightmare. The commute to/from the office is awful. I don't even like the town the office is in lol.
I have worked in the environment you describe. It’s still worse than working from home with a team that communicates over written mediums even semi competently.
The problem with what you describe is it still requires either coordinated interruption of your peers or working effectively remotely anyway.
There is an inverse relationship to the people available for arbitrary “free-wheeling discussions” and how busy they are actually working. Getting a bunch of do-nothing flap-jaws to give you quick feedback seems productive but it’s actually worse than no meeting at all.
> People dedicated to working at home haven't worked in a good office
This is a crazy generalisation. I am fortunate enough to have a job doing something I enjoy, and I try hard to be a productive and reliable part of my team. But work is still just a means to an end for me. If I won the lottery tomorrow my notice would be in before I even cashed the cheque. I’m dedicated to working at home because it minimises the impact work has on my life in so many ways.
Speaking as someone who is autistic and has significant hearing loss, open offices are a form of torture. It might sound like hyperbole, but I promise it's not!
I enjoy working in a team, but in more enclosed spaces. In my current job I share a room with two other people and it's just right (apart from when all of us are in remote meetings at the same time, but you win some and you lose some).
I started working in industry in the early 2000's. For my first job I shared a private office with one other person. For my second job I had my own private office to myself. Between those two jobs I had 7 years with either a private or a semi-private office. The depth and quality of my work definitely benefited from the long periods of uninterrupted concentration on the task at hand. I accomplished more in 2 years with a private office than I did later in ~4 years with an open office.
For my third jog I went to Google, where I was in open seating for about 10 years until the pandemic. The open seating was a big adjustment, but my brain was still young enough to filter out distractions well enough to get things done. My most productive work was accomplished as an individual task outside of any team effort.
My job after Google was with a company that had cubicles with low walls, but this was before the vaccines and so nobody was going in. I struggled to really integrate with any other teams as there was literally no face-to-face interaction. I never even met my boss in person. Again, I did accomplish some significant technical work, but they were lone projects.
My job after that again has open seating, Google-style. They've also started hot desking, so I have to reserve a desk for the days I go in. I get whatever monitor and chair are at that desk. Let's just say that the condition of the equipment is about what you would expect if it were rented on a day-to-day basis.
As I've gotten older I've found my ability to filter out distractions has suffered. I've read about some studies that suggest that this is common, perhaps even normal as the brain ages. In order to get into a deep state of concentration in an open office I need to put in noise-canceling headphones, turn on a film score, and pull the monitor close to my face so as to minimize movement in my peripheral vision. Whatever spontaneous collaboration is supposed to happen in the office isn't happening, and I consider interrupting me while I have headphones in and am zeroed-in on a task to be actually pretty rude. That doesn't stop some people (usually TPMs putting together a status report) from interrupting me anyway.
So I'm only happy coming into the office when I have a cluster of in-person meetings scheduled. I'll jump into meeting rooms and catch people in the hallway or the micro-kitchen to sync up on one or two things that I may not get as much traction on via random Slack messages. Then I GTFO of there and back to my private office that I customized at home during the pandemic to get any real heads-down work done. Even then I am only really productive when I close Slack and email for a couple of hours.
Meanwhile everyone is always complaining about lack of conference or phone rooms, and so they're trying to set up a bunch of pods throughout the office for people who need some degree of isolation for uninterrupted coding sessions or Zoom meetings. This whole thing seems really farcical to me. I joked with a co-worker, "Oh, I know! We could build 'pods' into the structure of the building with rectangular panes of glass and planks of wood mounted on hinges with a latch. That would make it more easy to get HVAC and sprinklers set up in the 'pods' too!"
I'd definitely come into the office for more full days if I had a private office again. As it stands I'll come into the office as infrequently as I can and for as little time as possible. It's just miserable compared to my workspace at home.
That said, if it's at all feasible, I will refuse to take another job ever again that has mandatory office attendance policies unless they can provide me a private office.
workplaces still do not have adequate COVID-19 controls, so offices are disabling and deadly places.
the risk of being an office worker used to be tripping on the stairs, car crash while commuting, or sitting too much. now it means contracting a deadly virus multiple times a year.
it's too bad OSHA doesn't set minimum standards here.
I have never any workplace to protect against any disease other than covid. Covid is here to stay and we will have yearly out breaks just like we have flu season. It isn't any more deadly than any other disease you might commonly encounter in your life.
By the time you know for sure that you have covid, you have already been spreading it for several days. Most people would still go to work if they had a bit of a sore throat, runny nose or just felt slightly 'off'. Equally staying at home because you felt like you might possibly have a slight case of flu was very frowned upon and at most places would not make you popular with your boss.
Just being able to work from home for a couple of days as soon as you feel like you might be coming down with something is a clear win for overall public health.
You are already contagious for multiple days before you know you have the flu with exact same symptoms as you listed. Again covid is just like a flu now. What is your point?
Yes. Good. Now, the original comment was about offices are death traps for covid. If people are now coming to work less sick, wouldn't that include covid? And thus make the concern mute.
This isn't a cold. It's not even a flu. Flu you get once every 7-10 years. Covid is more severe and the average person gets it 1-2 times a year. It's a vascular disease that causes multi-system organ damage.
We are very privileged to live in the 1980s-2019 when most serious infectious diseases with workplace implications in America had been conquered. That's why no one took it seriously. You wouldn't be talking this way about malaria, dengue, etc. The seriousness of the disease matters.
> "The one big thing I forgot about that was the value of the employee communications you get with cubes." [paraphrased Eric Schmidt] [...] It’s utter bullshit and executive fantasy. If you walked around Google and their open offices, almost half the workers are wearing headphones to screen out the noise. Do you just yell over and communicate with people, like in the executives’ fantasy? No, first you have to wave your hand in front of their face to get their attention.
FWIW, cubicles can work better than that.
My first software engineering job, we had cubicles, and you could walk past and see what people were doing, knock (if they hadn't configured their cube to have the opening in view), wheel your chair to the opening and talk across the hallway, wave someone into your cube to see something on your screen, etc. People actually did all that often. And on occasion you could get some focus time.
But when I visited one of the Google satellites, there was this big area of dystopian open office layout, with people clustered densely around these grotesque insectoid pods of desktop. I don't blame them for needing headphones. I recall the mere sight of the pods making me anxious, and thinking that I would have to find a way to work there without becoming a pod person.
Anyway, I wouldn't take Eric Schmidt seriously, on the proper care and feeding of tech workers, after his involvement in screwing over all tech workers (at certain illegally colluding big companies, but also with presumed cascading market effects for everyone else):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt#Role_in_illegal_n...
> In the Before Times, you just came to the office every day. It wasn’t even a question; “working from home” was just not practical. “Going to work” meant leaving the house. Then the pandemic happened.
Well, now… hold on a minute. It was entirely practical. I did it … my whole team did it. We didn't do it 100% of the week, since the expectation was that we worked in the office, but we had an informal "work from home Wednesdays" that permitted us to collectively accomplish the various chores that life requires must be done inside working business hours (i.e., mostly visiting other businesses).
The tradeoff is pretty straight-forward: I'm going to trade the commute hours for a mix of "work, not work, and getting stuff done", and my employer gets effectively the same real work out of me. That we collaborated (all took the same day) made is simpler since we knew to avoid scheduling each other for meetings that day.
But there was nothing that stopped that from being 5d/wk, and I was glad I did it when the pandemic hit, since I knew that it was quiet possible to work remotely.
> Be honest now: would you want to work in that?
…but yeah, nobody. My home "office" (i.e., the living room) is (especially now; upgrades were made in the pandemic once it became obvious how much I'd be home) the nicest office I've ever worked in. Because I've never had an office.
> And the concept of a completely customizable workspace didn’t sit well with executives who didn’t value the individuality of their workers.
Some things never change.
> Extroverts always think, “We need more communication!
One of the things I witnessed even prior to the pandemic was that some people are truly incapable of effective communication. I had a coworker who was utterly terrible at Slack, and real difficult to handle when remote … but it wasn't much different if you were sitting there talking to them face to face either. Bad, faulty logic, spewed as fast as the fingers would go, and often with less than a sentence per message.
Orgs are mostly terrible at Slack. (And email. And meetings.) Things lobbed into n-way DMs is terrible. If it has a topic, put it in a channel. People act like there's a shortage of channels & user groups, and they must be rationed. Same with email DLs. IT is of no help here: for whatever reason, I'm forbidden from creating new email DLs or channels, so it is no real wonder to find my coworkers cramming things into n-way DMs. (Thankfully Slack finally added a "copy the history" to DMs. So clearly Slack sort of sees the problem … just not an effective solution.)
And if only people could stop with the "Hi." followed by line silence.
Meeting tech is still terrible, though. Bloated and slow, and features like {draw on screen, not banning multiple people from screen sharing, etc.} just aren't widely available. Teams is utterly terrible, only loading successfully like half the time, and the one third-party we have to deal with, however they're sending invites, they often don't include a URL in the invite body, only in a non-standard (i.e., invisible in any Calendar program aside from I presume Outlook) attribute called "x-skype-something-something" which is a quite the tell as to Team's roots. And I only have to use it when some other org forces me to. Even calls with Microsoft themselves will run into technical issues.
… and it seems like some orgs (users of Zendesk in particular, maybe?) expect one to auth by sending from the contact email on the account. Except that it's a DL, such that emails can reach my whole team, and sending from a DL is utter black magic. (But possible, it turns out!)
And like, one wonders … y'all know you can edit messages in Slack and correct your typos, …right? The amount of politely worded "parse error in English, line 1" replies I h...
I have a private office at the university I have a position at. I also have an open office at the company I work at. I love my private office. I have a big white board to sketch out ideas on, a couch, lots of table space for various projects or whatever. I have speakers that I can play music without headphones. My private office is a joy to go and work at. At the company we have two open offices, one quiet and one for collaboration. We also have an open desk policy. We also don't have enough desks for everyone so there's work from home if you want and the company pays for your setup. Tbh, the only thing I ever did with my WFH setup was to play video games on the screen. If I need to concentrate or write proposals or whatever I can go to my university office. If I want to talk to colleagues I go to the company office. If I decide I hate it all I go to a coffee shop. Sure whatever works for you works for you. But I love my private office.
I would love love love even a cubicle! I have only ever known row upon row of open plan desks. A cubicle with some semblance of personal space feels like nirvana to me.
For most of history most skilled workers worked from home or lived in the workplace: watchmakers, metal workers, shoemakers. Newton was working from home when he developed his version of calculus.
While it is not new to have a study or a workshop, commuting is a modern phenomenon.
> "IMO, the best layout I ever saw was the old Tech Square MIT AI Lab (not* the current Geahy monstrosity).""*
I think that quoted person has the right idea of some of the better ways to do things. But in partial defense of that Gehry building (the Stata Center, which houses the merger of the AI Lab and LCS into CSAIL)...
The floors included some of the elements they describe. I shared a nice window office with a postdoc, but ended up working most of the time from a laptop on the moveable tables in a common area of our floor in front of the elevators. That space got used for lunches, random meetings, the occasional laptop worker, after-hours social events, and chance encounters with people passing through.
There's also patterns that I'm not sure Tech Square had, like cutouts between floors, wide open staircases that people can pause upon for conversation, big windows, outdoor space, the main street first floor.
(I only got to visit 545 Tech Square once before people moved to Stata, and Building 20 right before it was torn down. Both had obvious merits, and all three buildings were very different from each other.)
This idea is outdated now more than ever. I don't want to commute across the city to sit in a dark windowless room by myself all day and then commute back home. I already have the best possible private office at home. On the days where I do go in, I want to sit around coworkers and collaborate rather than do focused solo work.
We're in software. Just out-compete with a superior product. If you're more productive with one of these things, you will iterate faster and be more agile. Pick a good space and out-execute the incumbent in a market someone's demonstrated there.
You don't have to convince me. You can just beat me in the market.
There's so much vacant office space right now, it's absurd to me that companies aren't giving out offices to their employees like it's 1976.
For nearly every job, some work is much better done in a focused, quiet, environment, and some work is best done in a highly collaborative setting.
Give permanent offices to anyone who wants one (and actually uses it 3 or 4 days/week), reservable offices for anyone else who wants to pop in for a day, tear out all the cubicles, and create great collaborative spaces in their place.
>it's absurd to me that companies aren't giving out offices to their employees like it's 1976.
It's because offices are now a status symbol and the manager who works in an office and forces their employees to work in a pit feels those employees are below them. Not only that, he wants them to know they are below him. This is also the reason your salary ceiling is usually less than whatever your manager makes.
It's an example of office political bullshit and another reason many/most people prefer WFH.
To add to your point, they also don't like to set a new precedent, if it takes off everybody would have to do it.
Managerial jobs seem to now be a thing of the past. In the past year, I haven't felt the need for a manager. Even while executing projects that need some form of central collaboration.
At this point in time manager largely feels like some sort of legacy aristocratic position, which a big fat salary all to do nothing. And in most cases, add negative value.
241 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 260 ms ] threadMany evenings and weekends, and especially around public holidays, it can sometimes feel like you're the only one who wants to get stuff done. Finding a similarly minded community is very cool. Maybe you could make it into a global 'nightowls' facebook group or something (similar to how there are similar groups for nomads).
i work from home and miss the social environment of the office, but hate office politics. i also do my best work at night.
I noticed this is getting downvoted; you might want to do a post specifically for this.
If you want employees to be happier about work, assign fewer tasks. "Welp I'm done with everything this sprint, guess I'll not come in for 3 days."
As an aside, I propose a new Olympic sport called "software engineering". We take the world's best 100m dash runners, and have them run 421.6 100m dashes one after another! If you're a sprinter, why can't you also be a distance runner!
We can’t afford to move to an apartment with two extra rooms, so wfh full time would require a raise for both of us.
An average couple will use about $5-$12k annually in terms of needing 2 cars, gas, maintenance etc not to mention spending collectively nearly 500 hours commuting over the course of the year.
Details matter for instance your commute may be very favorable or the cost of changing apartments very expensive if you already have a good deal but on average WFH is a financial gain and a pretty big one at that.
There's also no such thing as a free lunch. If your employer is buying you an office, then that comes right out of your take-home pay. Or, you're underpaid. Ultimately you provide $X value to the business, your salary and rent for an office don't increase the value, so they directly compete with each other. That's why open offices are so popular, people only compare offers with the $ that they take home. So, they don't put anything else into the other buckets. (I watched Google gradually remove all the perks in order to give people higher total comp. Part of it was taxing snacks and health insurance like income, but part of it was people leaving for the other FAANGs that had less benefits but paid more. The market decided they didn't want private offices at work.)
That's not really how this works. At all.
If it was the case, big tech wouldn't push for return to office.
That said I've lived with 2 people in a shoe box of a studio and still enjoyed working from home from it although I did have customers from time to time commenting on what was on the news across the way or my cat. I understand that the equation is different for others but I'm definitely firmly committed to this lifestyle.
Those who want to be in cities because of what you listed will pay the premium and stay and deal with the crowding constraints and workarounds such as open offices and high rent. People are sensitive to prices differently and crowding is not too big of a deal since they like people generally.
Those who want space and privacy will move out and work remotely and somewhat ease the crowding.
Personally I can only "enjoy" a city for a couple days before being drained, then it's back to life as a hermit.
But it doesn't look good for those who like in-office w/ private offices. I see no trend to bring that back.
Sad because that's the only way I would work in-office.
A good way to ease into it is moving somewhere where it’s a 5 minute bike ride instead of a 5 minute walk to bars and restaurants. You’ll save money, get more fit, and get a dopamine detox.
I didn't read their comment as a problem to be solved in the slightest. The great thing about living in the city is that one can also walk 5 min to their gym, then see people they might know from the gym on their way to the grocery store, and occasionally invite them to a drink within walking distance to their home if they want.
Or alternatively you can get on your bike and go wherever you want too, like many city people also do.
Living near options doesn't mean you're constantly engaging in those options, but if you are engaging in those too much, ya maybe move a bit further away.
Problem with many suburbs is that they're basically only a place to live in isolation, with a few exceptions. You see maybe a few scant people who walk their dog, everyone else is either at work, inside, in their backyard, or they've driven somewhere else.
Small towns are a great option, you can bike literally everywhere and meet people very easily. Only two gyms, but not crowded!
The suburbs really only serve a purpose to house people near a city to commute to, which is moot if you're working remotely.
There's no perks of a city or a town living in a suburb. People live in them because of their jobs.
The difference between a small town and a neighborhood though that favors my disposition, is that there's generally more variety and specialization available in the local economy and community, as well as less of a dependence on a vehicle for visiting anywhere outside the neighborhood. There's not just 1 gym, there's 4, there's not just one physical therapy office, there's 5, there's not just one dentist or coffee shop, there's 13. Of course, I'm not visiting even 2 of these places at any given time, but others are, and it's nice to know that there are alternatives.
And it's not just meeting people for the sake of socializing, it's also a platform for a broader exposure to diverse cultures and a hypothetically larger dating pool, more education opportunities, access to an international airport, more telecom providers (in theory) that can provide better services if that's important to you.
Small towns however seem great if you've already done all that and just want a quiet place to putter around and maybe have access to the mountains or enjoy farming. There's a certain serenity you might not get near/in a city, and there's absolutely a lack of space that small town wouldn't have. People in that small town might be welcoming and friendly as opposed to cold and hard to pin down in the nearby city, but the reverse could also be true depending on where you've chosen. It's a perfectly valid choice, it just depends what you're into I suppose, and if there's train access that would be even better.
In a town w/ a pop. of 6,500 I have:
- 1 gig internet (+ starlink, but I only use when traveling now)
- 2 dentist offices
- 4 local coffee shops + 1 starbucks
- 2 grocery stores + 1 walmart supercenter
- 3 gyms (but one is a curves so essentially 2) but none are crowded ever.
As far as international airports, I can either drive to the nearest city, about 45mins - 1hr but I have flown to a big airport from the town's airfield in a small aircraft.
You can find many small towns with many amenities and most of the times you have at least 2 options.
There's no denying there's more variety in the city, but often it's really not the drastic limitations you're imagining.
I will say, with what we do have there's no crowding, everything is very friendly, there's a lot of local options and people will go out of their way to help you.
But God forbid you live in the town 15 minutes from me, it barely has cell service.
You really can't lump small towns together, there's such a wide range.
Having traveled across the U.S a bit by road, there are plenty of great places like Olympia, WA that sort of sound like what you're describing, and seem pretty livable.
The airport thing is just a matter of reducing the overhead and increasing the accessibility of me travelling elsewhere and others visiting me without a car. When my Mom visited last time, she asked me to pick her up somehow so she could avoid an Uber or taxi, to which I just said "Just swipe your credit card and get on the train, then swap to bus". Back in my home city though, each relative lives in some suburban corner that's only served by a rickety bus system, and people are pretty used to just paying for a taxi or long-term parking during the entire time they're away. If I had the car, it would only take 45 min to get to them from the airport, but without one it takes almost as long as the flight did across half the damn country. Clearly, even among cities, things vary quite a bit, but I'm glad that there do exist viable and desirable options for both of us, and hope more open up in the future.
Concentrating in one spot will be more efficient but cause more damage than dispersing.
The efficiency you gain in centralizing is irrelevant since you lowered the total but concentrated it so it can grow instead of disperse.
Which is worse, dumping a ton of salt in one spot in the ocean or dumping 1.2 tons throughout a large area?
There's a reason cities generally have smog and towns generally don't.
Dilution is the solution to pollution.
It certainly is, especially for SLCPs.
That long debate aside, today we can see the palpable smog in big cities vs the clean air in rural areas, small towns, and small cities.
You also risk ozone depletion in areas with concentrated aerosol emissions, these are short lived and would disperse, but they cause the most damage of all pollutants in concentration.
> The earth could likely only support a fraction of the current human population if they all lived rural lifestyles.
I'm not suggesting that, I'm suggesting people live where they want to and don't fall for that inaccurate guilt-trip talking point.
But there's still a lot of activities that people like to do on site. Shopping, restaurants, meetings, concerts, exhibitions, etc.
There's also a difference in lifestyle; some prefer an apartment (less maintenance), or not owning a car.
Anyway, my daughter has a “gaming” setup at the wall next to it and it’s build into a bookcase with a folding table. When she’s not using it you genuinely can’t tell it’s there. It did require some woodworking and some creative furniture “hacking”, but neither my spouse or I are great craftspeople and I think most people would be able to do it. We found our inspiration on YouTube and some actual woodworking help for how to integrate a folding table into a bookshelf on DIY web sites.
It’s not for everyone, but you can do it.
I don’t work from home more than maybe once a week myself. I don’t really want to. I use it ti work shorter days and then do the rest of my hours at nights/weekends.
The home office I have shoved into a corner is better than what any employer will provide.
I too wish for a raise, and the financial ability to afford an entire room to dedicate to work, and the crazy things I might be able to put in there, like a whiteboard.
> And then when you're off work, your office is right there looking you in the face from the webcam when you're trying to relax in your living room.
Post-It that webcam. But I agree, here, it does make it harder to disconnect.
But "the commute" is such a heavy negative, I think it outweighs it, still. Having so many weeks per year of my life back is wonderful.
> I too wish for a raise, and the financial ability to afford an entire room to dedicate to work, and the crazy things I might be able to put in there, like a whiteboard.
How can you claim that your home office is better than your employer's when it doesn't even have a whiteboard? To bring it back to the point of the article, bring back private offices. Employers that want employees in the office should invest in offices to the point that it is a better office than a corner of your home. It won't be able to complete with your commute, as you pointed out, but why do you claim that the home office you have shoved into a corner is better than what any employer will provide?
Yeah, I really like my home office setup, with a curved ultra wide screen monitor and my special chair. I don't think that it's unreasonable that, if they want me in the office, that I have the same sort of set up there.
And yet, they typically do not…
Because "better" is a function with multiple inputs. The whiteboard was better, true, but by comparison the commute sucks, the noise sucks, the desk sucks, the chair sucks. The whiteboard is a pretty minor thing, in the scoring of it all.
(I actually do have a whiteboard at home, but it's ~8x11". Pen and paper, and Krita, make up the difference, I suppose.)
> Employers that want employees in the office should invest in offices to the point that it is a better office than a corner of your home.
… they should… but they don't? I've worked the majority? all? of my career in offices on 4ft desks, most of it on open office floorplans. The "best" in half-height cubical. Best I ever got was a summer internship with a full-height shared cube.
> but why do you claim that the home office you have shoved into a corner is better than what any employer will provide?
Larger desk area, quieter environment, better view, better equipment.
> I don't think that it's unreasonable that, if they want me in the office, that I have the same sort of set up there.
I agree. Employers, in my experience, don't.
It does get a little hectic if there are two of us, and we both try to take a meeting overlapping each other. But the same is true of the "real" office, too, only balanced by meeting room availability. (But that only works for meetings where one can forego the rest of their computer, since you have to disconnect to move…)
I see open space hate dominate HN but in gaming open space can be amazing for cross-discipline communication and collaboration, especially on smaller teams.
Having a few people from a smaller team in the same room is certainly not what people mean when they say open office. IMHO If you only had to share it with your team it wouldn’t be half as bad
For every person who says, "I don't mind open offices", I meet ten more who hate them. I know, statistics like this are just made up, but everyone I know would rather work in a closed office.
I’ve found I detest the noise of the open plan office so much that I end up using one of the spare meeting rooms instead because it’s quieter.
That's what kids are for.
> cooking fish in the microwave down the hall
That's what in-laws are for.
i'd rather rto
FWIW, I WFH so I can eat my pizza in peace, instead of dealing with bullshit salad and fruit and fitness parties that have been a staple of the tech industry in the past decade.
To be fair, it did seem like the artists did get some benefit, but it was definitely a net negative for most of the developers.
I’ve been in private offices, and cubes, and open office, and honestly the most productive environment was when I was in a set of cubicles that had sliding doors, around a bullpen with multiple tables. When you needed to go head-down to get some code down you could, but otherwise you hung out at the tables in the middle.
In the last open office I worked in, I could not find headphones that allowed me to focus, not even construction-grade earmuffs; if someone's chewing food within 10 ft, I'll hear it, and that's all I'll hear.
For literal constant music listening to actually help, it needs to be a choice, otherwise it just makes me tire of music and I don't get nearly as much out of my mental energy.
That's interesting. I have the same exact issue and whenever I tell people about it they think I am crazy. I don't have a problem with people chewing food when it's lunch break and we sit in the cafeteria, but man, when I try to focus it kills my brain. Just last week the guy next to me started eating kind of late in the day (where my brain was almost empty). I then tried to cancel it out with headphones, but that just wasn't possible anymore.
And I still don't know how to deal with it. Sometimes I try to take a walk for 5 minutes and it helps, but not always. On some days I get a full mental breakdown because I get angry at myself getting angry on somebody just making noises any normal human being does while eating
Sometimes it's drum and bass, mostly some synthwave/chill beats.
Edit: But the problem here is. If I am already exhausted and got distracted by those noises, then getting into focus with just music often does not work. I do have adhd and it could be that misophonia is playing into it too. Still trying to figure out my best work environment, but it's hard
I feel like Concerta marginally helps with this, but it's tough to remember the last time I've had to test it.
Can you elaborate a little on "listening to violent noises" approach? When do you do this, for how long? Is it graduated in intensity, like exposure therapy?
Thanks!
The therapy, unrelated to this coping approach, was focused on figuring out why I got sensitive to some noises in the first place during childhood. Very individual, but to give an example, appearance of stepfather in my life, whose eating habits were conflicting with the way I was raised before.
It consumed my consciousness in a way that literally dropped my productivity to near zero, and I couldn't catch up, and got fired. Thankfully my boss didn't do a damn thing except scold me for being slow, otherwise I'd still be making PDF editing software.
I'd just go to a cafe down the street for a few hours, which reflected poorly on me, but I had no choice. Not only was the coffee laughably better than the shit in the office, but my ability to focus there vs the office was like night and day.
I used to listen to particular bands which I felt "defined my identity" or something, which I still occasionally do, but I've since realized that when I'm working it's "distracting" to me and I now listen to things like generic "trailer" / epic music or "upbeat" music for workouts.
- Two Steps from Hell
- Sultan + Shephard
- Tom Player
- Matias Puumala
Some other random playlists:
- https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1E8PiJpaZ8rWVi?si=...
- https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1E35ecXdUS92X1?si=...
- https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1E36Le7GAznRHV?si=...
- https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1E366Mpiqxs399?si=...
I don't really curate my stuff, I occasionally "like" songs or start radios off songs I'm enjoying in the moment.
...if you're the type of person who can listen to music while working, that is.
I used to like working to the Hotline Miami soundtrack myself, which worked great for coding menial stuff but sucked for troubleshooting.
The Unreal Tournament '99 OST is way better in that it's fast, low-key, and repetitive. I put on a 3-hour megamix and I'm crushing it until lunch.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWkT180hNLE
It's intense, upbeat music.
When I'm hearing someone else's thump thump music and my ear buds aren't sufficient to block it, that's the only thing I've found to work.
It's real rain noise - if you pay attention to it, you can hear the drops - but it's overall a nice white noise that isn't the "boring" white noise.
> ... Our recording has been performed in the silence of the night, in a huge space - namely the Harau Valley in Sumatra - and in the absence of any wind, as to produce the most even noise one can get.
Related / previous HN posts
https://rain.today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9908909
https://mynoise.net https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32366075
I find the 'bass rumble' and brown noise particularly useful for masking external noise, which I guess is pretty similar to a thunderstorm frequency-wise
3M Peltor Premium Plus Earmuffs X3A https://www.3m.co.uk/3M/en_GB/p/d/v101190004/
in my opinion they're really good, though, to be honest, I haven't tried them in an open space env. I'm also a sufferer of misophonia, it's beeping noises and random notifications for me.
I also noticed they make getting into the flow a lot more easy; and, surprisingly, they also reduce the activation energy of getting into work. I suspect that's because our envs are EXTREMELY noisy (compared with the mythical natural state) and the brain always keeps track (subconsciously) of all the noises which leads to mental energy depletion
Also, building owners are getting so desperate for tenants they'd probably cut you a good deal if you needed more space instead of less.
The reason is trivial - if you are not around half of the time rest of the team is, teamwork suffers quite a bit (which is cca constant situation with distant remote places like India, ie if you have any questions in the afternoon you are blocked and they need to wait till next day)
Those aren't the only companies that exist.
No significant numbers of people - in Zurich at least - are starting work in offices at 6am.
The vast majority of useful work I ever did was between the hours of 6-9am.
I do 6:30am - 3pm and have done for years, it fits my day well. Others I work with might not start till 10am. Thats the great thing about working from home, you get more flexability in your start/end time. As long as you get your working hours done it's a total non issue.
I agree with your sentiment but I think in this case, it's misplaced.
Personally I appreciated the flexibility to work and leave early.
The productivity multiplier does not have to be constant over the entire employee base to make it worth it. Also good direction / avoiding bad direction is one of the biggest productivity modifiers but it is harder to measure since it may look like people are productive but what they are producing is not beneficial.
The most ludicrous thing is that those managers are usually sitting in their own offices and not with the rest in open office chaos.
The CEO and directs should have a similar work situation to all the other office managers and their directs.
I would call this kind of dogfooding a necessary but insufficient condition for accepting what they say about open-plan offices.
After all, just because an open-plan office is better for people whose job (often) literally consists of talking to people all day doesn't mean it is better for people whose job is to focus all day on code, spreadsheets, or other kinds of individual work.
Microsoft used to give most employees a private office in the late 90s to roughly the mid 2010s - and that was heaven. Collaboration was great because you could go to your coworker's private office or even bring people along for the much-vaunted in-person whiteboarding. It happened a lot. The only thing that was frowned upon was to leave your office door closed 100% of the time, but some people did just that anyway; that was similar to the remote experience, but at the office.
I really wish people would stop conflating these, as if they were meaningfully equivalent.
Like, yes: compared to open-plan, high-walled cubes are obviously much better.
But I've been in high-walled cubes, and I've been in (and now have) a private office.
There's really no comparison when it comes to privacy, customizability, and just overall the feeling of it being your space.
Open offices are almost invariably terrible for employees - although I have to say that I was once in a large room with a (often closed) door along 5 other engineers as a sort of "private open office" and that was actually okay.
I was at one company; it had private offices, and this is exactly what would happen. You'd go to someone's office; you could share ideas back and forth, often on the whiteboard; it was low-judgment -- just you, the other person, and maybe a third -- so people spoke freely.
I was at another company; it had a SV-style open office and a SV-style interview which, in pre-COVID days, used a whiteboard. It was competitive; people were from top schools. You could tell nobody wanted to use the "you can write on this glass surface" whiteboards scattered around the open office, because they knew there'd be a dozen sets of eyes able to see their vulnerable thought processes and silently judge them; it'd be a show; and they were slightly traumatized by the interview that had gotten them in.
I think large open offices change things from, "I'm interacting with another person", to "I'm putting on a show." And nobody wants to put on a show, quite understandably.
I think open offices are really about reducing employees' feelings of being sheltered or safe. It comes out of the same mindset that speaks of employees "hiding" and not doing work.
I found that I was spending too much mental energy scanning the horizon for predators, and not enough thinking about the ostensible technical problem.
Office has shit food. Shit coffee. In an open office, there’s a high risk of catching a virus from your co-worker. People love to tap your shoulder, interrupt your thought process (clearly I’m in the zone, asshole), and ask you mundane shit that could have been resolved over IM.
Even worse, the idiot asshole that can’t be bothered to read documentation and asks you to go over it with him/her in a 1:1 session. Fuck off.
It's not that complicated to bring food from home for lunch, grab something on the way in, or go out for lunch -- I doubt you're working in a food desert after all.
Ditto for coffee and even coffee shops.
Catching a virus thing, sure that's a real concern. For personal experience though I've found I've gotten sick more often since COVID and 100% WFH than when I used to work out of the office 2-3 days a week, including public transit.
As far as interruptions, a lot of offices have conference rooms engineers can use whenever they want. Even one person rooms or the newer telephone booths. Usually all soundproofed. You don't even have to tell coworkers which one you're working from and you can switch rooms throughout the day. I guess that's not feasible in like a 10-20 person office but I've been in offices for up to 75-100 people and it wasn't that difficult.
Most of the problems you've cited have relatively simple solutions in my opinion.
Or, try to stay with me here, I'm just at my fucking house and I can pop into the kitchen whenever I want to get food. I can even take my laptop into the kitchen and be on a meeting while I'm cooking or eating.
I can make fresh coffee whenever I want. If I'm lazy I can order DoorDash and hot food just shows up at my door.
The idea conference rooms are places to get work done is ludicrous. Conference rooms are perennially booked, often overbooked, and at best you might get an hour of uninterrupted work done in one. Woe be unto the poor engineer that's found in a conference room by a middle manager. They'll get no end of shit for *reasons*.
Offices have only gotten worse over the past few decades. If my work doesn't involve physically touching hardware (all my shit deploys to The Cloud) there's no reason I can't work from my house. I've been working remote for several years now and it's been amazing for my mental health and productivity. Not to mention I've saved thousands of dollars a year not having to commute.
Obviously those defeat the point of the article and the very subjective stated problems that have very simple solutions.
>The idea conference rooms are places to get work done is ludicrous. Conference rooms are perennially booked, often overbooked, and at best you might get an hour of uninterrupted work done in one. Woe be unto the poor engineer that's found in a conference room by a middle manager. They'll get no end of shit for reasons.
I never had this problem across jobs at three different companies, working out of multiple locations that each had quite varying differences in office culture. Maybe it's a company-specific work culture thing?
… you understand 2 coffee shop lattes are like the same price as the entire bag of ground beans, right? But the bag will make 10-15 times the coffee; the price difference is phenomenal. Its only saving grace is that my budget is dominated by rent, really.
There are cheaper shops, yes … but the coffee is terrible. I can do far better myself.
> As far as interruptions, a lot of offices have conference rooms engineers can use whenever they want
If any significant number of people even attempted this, it'd be ended immediately. There's not enough to go around.
> the newer telephone booths. Usually all soundproofed.
… so lug keyboard and monitor into a phone booth, and proceed to hog it for the day?
> I guess that's not feasible in like a 10-20 person office but I've been in offices for up to 75-100 people and it wasn't that difficult.
It's not feasible in any office of any size that I've ever been in, because the resources you're talking about are can only simultaneously serve like 2–5% of the office's population at a time.
And you can't bring in a small bag of beans/pre-ground beans from your favorite roaster?
Every office I've worked in had a coffee maker or espresso machine or both, and if you prefer to brew with say a Hario V60 it's not that big a deal to keep one at your desk and just bring a bag of beans lol.
You don't even have to lug it to work every day with all the easy ways to order beans these days. And if you're buying your own bags and using those beans you're not spending any more than you would otherwise.
This is really just moving the goal posts.
Everything thats mentioned as a counter point is a compromise to working from home, almost like a "well you could work from home, and save money, and have your own coffee...but why do that when you can come to work and bring coffee with you".
I'm sure some thrive in a typical open plan office. Most in technical roles however do not, and find it extremely counter productive.
I'm not sure what personal costs are, if you're referring to my comment? DIY coffee is considerably cheaper. As for time … because it's mostly a wash? While I think the coffee shop will win out, you still have to walk there, wait to order, order, wait for them to make it, and walk back. It definitely takes me less time to make coffee myself; it's the washing of the equipment where the coffee shop might then come out ahead.
I should time the two.
Literally no? I've basically had a mix of … industrial coffee vats, managed by the office? IDK what they're really called; and machines that make jarring noises & reconstitute coffee from what feels like freeze dried ingredients (touch screen interface, constantly breaking due to clogs).
> Every office I've worked in had a coffee maker or espresso machine or both,
I've had an espresso machine exactly once, but that's sort of the thing, it is the exception, not the rule. (I did like the coffee, then.)
When we had the espresso machine, the beans in use were a very low key office politics thing? (In a friendly way.) There was one guy who liked a particular brand that the rest of us pretty much didn't, but the rest of us weren't too picky otherwise. Just … not that one. Nobody much minded, since it's really not that big of a deal, of course.
Our espresso machine had a hopper, so you're not realistically grinding "your" beans. You can bring in some, but you're sharing, and it'd be until the next time the hopper needs a fill. Easier to just get it on the office shopping list.
I'm not sure this is making a solid case for office work.
Someone who has never been in a suburban business park, I see!
> Ditto for coffee and even coffee shops.
ESPECIALLY for acceptable coffee!
> You don't even have to tell coworkers which one you're working from and you can switch rooms throughout the day.
So - and I mean this in a very real way - WTF is the point of this?
Actually I have, and the comment about going out nearby work was like the last option out of the three I listed. Now you're just cherry-picking.
>So - and I mean this in a very real way - WTF is the point of this?
I never said for the entire day? The idea is if you want to be heads down on important work with zero interruptions you can duck into a room for a couple hours at some point in the day, and if you need another hour or so you can do the same thing. Assuming 6-8 hour work days that's nowhere close to hiding all day, which you're implying I said.
Most people going to an office spend their whole day on video calls, and have the temerity to shush people around them who are actually collaborating. They do this while drinking shit coffee from an awful machine (at best) or mediocre coffee from an expensive coffee bar (at best).
If people want offices to work out, they have to be downtown, near amenities, not stuck out in a suburban hell-hole because "parking".
I still remember the office I was assigned as a graduate student. It was far nicer than any I had in private industry. It had a window with a view of the campus and I could actually lock the door.
The worst office experience I ever had was when I was rubbing elbows with my teammates and wearing noise canceling headphones the entire time. To get away from that gerbil in a cage claustrophobia, I took to walks in the parking garage which was the most humane space in the entire building.
That was: an office with a door, and a big open space where people from a kind but competitive group had free-wheeling discussions.
The main thing was that we together were shaping the product; if you convinced others, you could have an impact. And to convince others, you needed to do your homework (in your office).
So it's not really the office or the desk but the rhythm of coming up with an idea and seeing it take root in your peers (or not) -- the opportunity to contribute.
Nowadays, it's open desks or cubes and product managers, and any collective discussion is shot through with politics. When initiative is squelched and mutual respect is replaced by influence, the only thing to maximize is slack -- which makes working from home the absolute best.
I agree.
> The main thing was that we together were shaping the product; if you convinced others, you could have an impact. And to convince others, you needed to do your homework (in your office).
This is not. Shaping a product is not a collaborative work. Thus, product is something different, we talk about the real work environment.
> So it's not really the office or the desk but the rhythm of coming up with an idea and seeing it take root in your peers (or not) -- the opportunity to contribute.
This is another not. Office has nothing to do with that topic.
> Nowadays, it's open desks or cubes and product managers, and any collective discussion is shot through with politics. When initiative is squelched and mutual respect is replaced by influence, the only thing to maximize is slack -- which makes working from home the absolute best.
This is office chatting. Product development is done inside the computer. You don't need an office for that.
Or, alternatively, some people work better from home and some work better in an office. And basing "all truth" off your anecdata isn't really reasonable (the same is true of those that say everyone would be better off working from home).
The biggest problem is that the people that work better in an office tend to see that benefit because there are co-workers there. And if half the people are working from home, the co-workers aren't there. So you can really only make one group optimal, and the other one suffers.
That is exactly what I noticed in 2020 mostly. The people who kept going to the office were almost screaming and crying on the internet about working in an empty office and basically begging everyone to come back and keep them company.
All this time we'd accepted that as the norm. Dare I say it, the world favored extroverts. And in 2020 for a brief few months, it didn't. It was interesting seeing the table flipped.
Of course that's kinda exaggerating. Lots of people are "fine" in either situation. Lots of places were closed for a while and even after, there was still a spooky vibe to it, so WFH wasn't quite as nice.
I love socializing and stuff. TO me there are other reasons I prefer WFH - for example, the business district my company HQ is in, is very VERY pedestrian unfriendly. It's basically a corner of 2 super busy 6-lane streets. Walking to get lunch is impossible. Getting parking is a nightmare. The commute to/from the office is awful. I don't even like the town the office is in lol.
The problem with what you describe is it still requires either coordinated interruption of your peers or working effectively remotely anyway.
There is an inverse relationship to the people available for arbitrary “free-wheeling discussions” and how busy they are actually working. Getting a bunch of do-nothing flap-jaws to give you quick feedback seems productive but it’s actually worse than no meeting at all.
This is a crazy generalisation. I am fortunate enough to have a job doing something I enjoy, and I try hard to be a productive and reliable part of my team. But work is still just a means to an end for me. If I won the lottery tomorrow my notice would be in before I even cashed the cheque. I’m dedicated to working at home because it minimises the impact work has on my life in so many ways.
I enjoy working in a team, but in more enclosed spaces. In my current job I share a room with two other people and it's just right (apart from when all of us are in remote meetings at the same time, but you win some and you lose some).
For my third jog I went to Google, where I was in open seating for about 10 years until the pandemic. The open seating was a big adjustment, but my brain was still young enough to filter out distractions well enough to get things done. My most productive work was accomplished as an individual task outside of any team effort.
My job after Google was with a company that had cubicles with low walls, but this was before the vaccines and so nobody was going in. I struggled to really integrate with any other teams as there was literally no face-to-face interaction. I never even met my boss in person. Again, I did accomplish some significant technical work, but they were lone projects.
My job after that again has open seating, Google-style. They've also started hot desking, so I have to reserve a desk for the days I go in. I get whatever monitor and chair are at that desk. Let's just say that the condition of the equipment is about what you would expect if it were rented on a day-to-day basis.
As I've gotten older I've found my ability to filter out distractions has suffered. I've read about some studies that suggest that this is common, perhaps even normal as the brain ages. In order to get into a deep state of concentration in an open office I need to put in noise-canceling headphones, turn on a film score, and pull the monitor close to my face so as to minimize movement in my peripheral vision. Whatever spontaneous collaboration is supposed to happen in the office isn't happening, and I consider interrupting me while I have headphones in and am zeroed-in on a task to be actually pretty rude. That doesn't stop some people (usually TPMs putting together a status report) from interrupting me anyway.
So I'm only happy coming into the office when I have a cluster of in-person meetings scheduled. I'll jump into meeting rooms and catch people in the hallway or the micro-kitchen to sync up on one or two things that I may not get as much traction on via random Slack messages. Then I GTFO of there and back to my private office that I customized at home during the pandemic to get any real heads-down work done. Even then I am only really productive when I close Slack and email for a couple of hours.
Meanwhile everyone is always complaining about lack of conference or phone rooms, and so they're trying to set up a bunch of pods throughout the office for people who need some degree of isolation for uninterrupted coding sessions or Zoom meetings. This whole thing seems really farcical to me. I joked with a co-worker, "Oh, I know! We could build 'pods' into the structure of the building with rectangular panes of glass and planks of wood mounted on hinges with a latch. That would make it more easy to get HVAC and sprinklers set up in the 'pods' too!"
I'd definitely come into the office for more full days if I had a private office again. As it stands I'll come into the office as infrequently as I can and for as little time as possible. It's just miserable compared to my workspace at home.
That said, if it's at all feasible, I will refuse to take another job ever again that has mandatory office attendance policies unless they can provide me a private office.
the risk of being an office worker used to be tripping on the stairs, car crash while commuting, or sitting too much. now it means contracting a deadly virus multiple times a year.
it's too bad OSHA doesn't set minimum standards here.
I have never any workplace to protect against any disease other than covid. Covid is here to stay and we will have yearly out breaks just like we have flu season. It isn't any more deadly than any other disease you might commonly encounter in your life.
Just being able to work from home for a couple of days as soon as you feel like you might be coming down with something is a clear win for overall public health.
We are very privileged to live in the 1980s-2019 when most serious infectious diseases with workplace implications in America had been conquered. That's why no one took it seriously. You wouldn't be talking this way about malaria, dengue, etc. The seriousness of the disease matters.
FWIW, cubicles can work better than that.
My first software engineering job, we had cubicles, and you could walk past and see what people were doing, knock (if they hadn't configured their cube to have the opening in view), wheel your chair to the opening and talk across the hallway, wave someone into your cube to see something on your screen, etc. People actually did all that often. And on occasion you could get some focus time.
But when I visited one of the Google satellites, there was this big area of dystopian open office layout, with people clustered densely around these grotesque insectoid pods of desktop. I don't blame them for needing headphones. I recall the mere sight of the pods making me anxious, and thinking that I would have to find a way to work there without becoming a pod person.
Anyway, I wouldn't take Eric Schmidt seriously, on the proper care and feeding of tech workers, after his involvement in screwing over all tech workers (at certain illegally colluding big companies, but also with presumed cascading market effects for everyone else): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt#Role_in_illegal_n...
Well, now… hold on a minute. It was entirely practical. I did it … my whole team did it. We didn't do it 100% of the week, since the expectation was that we worked in the office, but we had an informal "work from home Wednesdays" that permitted us to collectively accomplish the various chores that life requires must be done inside working business hours (i.e., mostly visiting other businesses).
The tradeoff is pretty straight-forward: I'm going to trade the commute hours for a mix of "work, not work, and getting stuff done", and my employer gets effectively the same real work out of me. That we collaborated (all took the same day) made is simpler since we knew to avoid scheduling each other for meetings that day.
But there was nothing that stopped that from being 5d/wk, and I was glad I did it when the pandemic hit, since I knew that it was quiet possible to work remotely.
> Be honest now: would you want to work in that?
…but yeah, nobody. My home "office" (i.e., the living room) is (especially now; upgrades were made in the pandemic once it became obvious how much I'd be home) the nicest office I've ever worked in. Because I've never had an office.
> And the concept of a completely customizable workspace didn’t sit well with executives who didn’t value the individuality of their workers.
Some things never change.
> Extroverts always think, “We need more communication!
One of the things I witnessed even prior to the pandemic was that some people are truly incapable of effective communication. I had a coworker who was utterly terrible at Slack, and real difficult to handle when remote … but it wasn't much different if you were sitting there talking to them face to face either. Bad, faulty logic, spewed as fast as the fingers would go, and often with less than a sentence per message.
Orgs are mostly terrible at Slack. (And email. And meetings.) Things lobbed into n-way DMs is terrible. If it has a topic, put it in a channel. People act like there's a shortage of channels & user groups, and they must be rationed. Same with email DLs. IT is of no help here: for whatever reason, I'm forbidden from creating new email DLs or channels, so it is no real wonder to find my coworkers cramming things into n-way DMs. (Thankfully Slack finally added a "copy the history" to DMs. So clearly Slack sort of sees the problem … just not an effective solution.)
And if only people could stop with the "Hi." followed by line silence.
Meeting tech is still terrible, though. Bloated and slow, and features like {draw on screen, not banning multiple people from screen sharing, etc.} just aren't widely available. Teams is utterly terrible, only loading successfully like half the time, and the one third-party we have to deal with, however they're sending invites, they often don't include a URL in the invite body, only in a non-standard (i.e., invisible in any Calendar program aside from I presume Outlook) attribute called "x-skype-something-something" which is a quite the tell as to Team's roots. And I only have to use it when some other org forces me to. Even calls with Microsoft themselves will run into technical issues.
… and it seems like some orgs (users of Zendesk in particular, maybe?) expect one to auth by sending from the contact email on the account. Except that it's a DL, such that emails can reach my whole team, and sending from a DL is utter black magic. (But possible, it turns out!)
And like, one wonders … y'all know you can edit messages in Slack and correct your typos, …right? The amount of politely worded "parse error in English, line 1" replies I h...
While it is not new to have a study or a workshop, commuting is a modern phenomenon.
I think that quoted person has the right idea of some of the better ways to do things. But in partial defense of that Gehry building (the Stata Center, which houses the merger of the AI Lab and LCS into CSAIL)...
The floors included some of the elements they describe. I shared a nice window office with a postdoc, but ended up working most of the time from a laptop on the moveable tables in a common area of our floor in front of the elevators. That space got used for lunches, random meetings, the occasional laptop worker, after-hours social events, and chance encounters with people passing through.
There's also patterns that I'm not sure Tech Square had, like cutouts between floors, wide open staircases that people can pause upon for conversation, big windows, outdoor space, the main street first floor.
(I only got to visit 545 Tech Square once before people moved to Stata, and Building 20 right before it was torn down. Both had obvious merits, and all three buildings were very different from each other.)
You don't have to convince me. You can just beat me in the market.
For nearly every job, some work is much better done in a focused, quiet, environment, and some work is best done in a highly collaborative setting.
Give permanent offices to anyone who wants one (and actually uses it 3 or 4 days/week), reservable offices for anyone else who wants to pop in for a day, tear out all the cubicles, and create great collaborative spaces in their place.
It's because offices are now a status symbol and the manager who works in an office and forces their employees to work in a pit feels those employees are below them. Not only that, he wants them to know they are below him. This is also the reason your salary ceiling is usually less than whatever your manager makes.
It's an example of office political bullshit and another reason many/most people prefer WFH.
Managerial jobs seem to now be a thing of the past. In the past year, I haven't felt the need for a manager. Even while executing projects that need some form of central collaboration.
At this point in time manager largely feels like some sort of legacy aristocratic position, which a big fat salary all to do nothing. And in most cases, add negative value.