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Comment by JustinSeriously | Hacker News Reader

    "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.

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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.

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