What amazes me about this phenomenon and so many others is just how long the executive class are willing to stick with a counterproductive trend. RTO, open offices, development methodologies that disempower the developers, devops without people who understand ops, databases without dbas, Business Intelligence in basically every flavor. The unoriginality and lack of independent thought are striking. It’s as if they would rather fail doing the conventional thing than risk failure by doing something different.
> ...Business Intelligence in basically every flavor.
Ouch! That's precisely[1] what I've been working with for a quarter-century now. And for the most part, my colleagues and I have been suffering from the exact same ills. It's not as if we are the ones coming up with all this shit and inflicting it on everyone.
(For a few fleeting moments -- maybe months, at most -- I've worked in one/two/three-person offices, or in actually Agile ways, or with eager and responsive ops people or competent and cooperative DBAs... Almost never all at once, though.)
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[1]: Well, almost precisely. Mostly DW and ETL, really, but I'm guessing to most people it's all one and the same.
Does the "standard office" even exist? I have never seen one in my working years. I don't even know what to imagine. The closest I got was a shared office in grad school in the late 90s, but after that it's been cubes at best, long slabs of desk in an open room at worst.
A lot of discussions around open offices is induced compliance/conformance.
Years back I was one of the decision makers for an office move for a mid-sized engineering company. I'm a big believer in private spaces such as offices, but where that isn't possible at least sound and visual distraction blocking cubicle designs.
I was treated like an obsolete relic that wasn't onboard with the whole mega teamwork, super-social open office trend. Was I anti-social? Don't I understand collaboration?
Regardless, I made my case and have a lot of pull, so we compromised and made two separate classes of work spaces. An open concept "bullpen" type design, and then a cloistered section of high-walled cubicles (all areas had loads of light, windows, and all other amenities, awesome desks and shelving, etc). Everyone got to choose which area they wanted to work in.
100% of those not given private offices chose the private cubicles. Not 99%, but to a woman it was the universal choice, including among the moralizing, very outspoken "team work" open office advocates.
Because they didn't believe a word of what they were saying. It was just patter to convey their great team bonafides.
When i was apprenticing long ago on my way to master mechanic, I worked for a luxury dealership in the midwest. The manager was the owners son (as per tradition) and he had just graduated with a business degree. We had a good system of 3 closed office areas, one for sales, one for service, and one for management. In the managers wisdom, we should combine all 3 into an open office format.
this lasted nearly a year and was pretty similar to a nightmare-mode run in Doom. Customers eager to buy a vehicle would be immediately exposed to the masses of howling and screaming customers who couldnt fathom a $7500 suspension service as they barely made payments on their suburban assault tank. mechanics would routinely wander into the office to talk to the shop service lead, tracking all sorts of fluids onto sales floor carpets, and leaving greasy handprints on all the desks. the entire office usually smelled like burnt oil or gas (combined with the one peach air freshener the admin assistant bought.) finally management was becoming way too distracted with the heretical temptation to micromanage anything and everything. i was once pulled off the shop floor to clean carpets for 20 minutes, and another time i was tasked to restock and clean the customer lounge. 40 minutes of shop time (not cheap) to sit in the AC and munch on doritos while i watered plants and changed out the water cooler bottle.
all the while the 3 impact printers for invoices were wailing away in the center of the "open office" making casual conversation pretty challenging.
I have worked in so many open office environments. 100% of the time the senior executives will have designated open office seats to make it look like they are one of the gang but will actually be fortified up in a fancy office like they are marines in Baghdad.
"Open" office space is very often an excuse for reducing the area size per employee in a company's offices. They can't get away with squeezing people into offices of 1.8 x 1.5, which is a not-atypical personal cubicle space area for a single employee, or even 2x2 - it is too oppressive. Even with two-person offices - more space is needed that 2 cubicle seats.
So, cost saving => ideology which extolls the merits of this choice, in spite of any evidence to the contrary.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 32.4 ms ] threadOuch! That's precisely[1] what I've been working with for a quarter-century now. And for the most part, my colleagues and I have been suffering from the exact same ills. It's not as if we are the ones coming up with all this shit and inflicting it on everyone.
(For a few fleeting moments -- maybe months, at most -- I've worked in one/two/three-person offices, or in actually Agile ways, or with eager and responsive ops people or competent and cooperative DBAs... Almost never all at once, though.)
___
[1]: Well, almost precisely. Mostly DW and ETL, really, but I'm guessing to most people it's all one and the same.
Years back I was one of the decision makers for an office move for a mid-sized engineering company. I'm a big believer in private spaces such as offices, but where that isn't possible at least sound and visual distraction blocking cubicle designs.
I was treated like an obsolete relic that wasn't onboard with the whole mega teamwork, super-social open office trend. Was I anti-social? Don't I understand collaboration?
Regardless, I made my case and have a lot of pull, so we compromised and made two separate classes of work spaces. An open concept "bullpen" type design, and then a cloistered section of high-walled cubicles (all areas had loads of light, windows, and all other amenities, awesome desks and shelving, etc). Everyone got to choose which area they wanted to work in.
100% of those not given private offices chose the private cubicles. Not 99%, but to a woman it was the universal choice, including among the moralizing, very outspoken "team work" open office advocates.
Because they didn't believe a word of what they were saying. It was just patter to convey their great team bonafides.
When i was apprenticing long ago on my way to master mechanic, I worked for a luxury dealership in the midwest. The manager was the owners son (as per tradition) and he had just graduated with a business degree. We had a good system of 3 closed office areas, one for sales, one for service, and one for management. In the managers wisdom, we should combine all 3 into an open office format.
this lasted nearly a year and was pretty similar to a nightmare-mode run in Doom. Customers eager to buy a vehicle would be immediately exposed to the masses of howling and screaming customers who couldnt fathom a $7500 suspension service as they barely made payments on their suburban assault tank. mechanics would routinely wander into the office to talk to the shop service lead, tracking all sorts of fluids onto sales floor carpets, and leaving greasy handprints on all the desks. the entire office usually smelled like burnt oil or gas (combined with the one peach air freshener the admin assistant bought.) finally management was becoming way too distracted with the heretical temptation to micromanage anything and everything. i was once pulled off the shop floor to clean carpets for 20 minutes, and another time i was tasked to restock and clean the customer lounge. 40 minutes of shop time (not cheap) to sit in the AC and munch on doritos while i watered plants and changed out the water cooler bottle.
all the while the 3 impact printers for invoices were wailing away in the center of the "open office" making casual conversation pretty challenging.
So, cost saving => ideology which extolls the merits of this choice, in spite of any evidence to the contrary.