Goodbye to the office | Hacker News Reader

Goodbye to the office

sethgodin.typepad.com

8 pointsduck9 comments

    "I think in ten years the TV show 'the Office' will be seen as a quaint antique."

I think Godin is underestimating how entrenched the idea of an office is in our business culture, even for tech companies. But I would love for his prediction to come true.

Yeah just look large enterprises, particularly banks with creaking legacy systems from the 1960s that use COBOL that just refuse to die. The last 20 years might as well not have happened from a backend perspective.

I think that would be under-estimating the power of economics. COBOL still lives because it is more economical to keep them running than upgrading them, and tackling the resulting headaches. Companies would love to reduce their costs, and offices are a very big expense. The only issue I find is whether people really like working alone. After a few years of freelancing and working alone, I can say that I don't. Perhaps some kind of pairing would work, as and when required.

Godin nodded in that direction with item 5 about energy, but as you're pointing out there is a social aspect to the work itself that goes beyond general energy. I've worked alone for about a year and found that I get enough social energy from lunch and evening interactions. That's great, but there's something about the best spontaneous whiteboard sessions that you can't recreate alone or with a scheduled meeting.

You can still maintain offices, but they become more like collections of team rooms, private offices (ex: for phone calls), unassigned cubes (for telecommute folks) and assigned cubes (for office folks). Maybe you don't need as much office space and equipment to do the same work.

The ten years prediction made a good quip. I'll pop the DVDs in in 2020 and see how it panned out, if I still have a device that plays them. I think we'll need to give it more than ten.

The vast majority of people aren't capable of managing their time effectively. If people do abandon the office, expect to see a shift toward pay-for-performance compensation models.

I hear this so often but is there any evidence for it? I just don't think it's true.

If it is true then these are skills that can be learned, there is nothing magic about managing time.

Peoples lives would on the whole be infinitely better. I haven't worked in an office for 4 years and my life is better, my families life is better, my work is better, my home is better, my environmental impact is much lower.

It's funny, because a lot of people, esp in the Agile community emphasize the necessities of having people work together not only in an office, but in a wide open space.

Personally I find it rather frustrating as the noise sucks and sometimes I'm not going to get any work done whether I'm in an office or not and offices are generally lame to just hang out in and recharge until your ready to start the horses again.

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