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Comment by harry8 | Hacker News Reader

Instead of responding to everything s%&t about cubicles, organisations made all those things even worse by going with open plan.

Good heuristic on these trends. "Will everyone absolutely hate it?" If so, it'll get really popular.

Hotdesking. Oh yeah! It'll drive everyone nuts!

What else you got?

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Collaborative seating. (Basically a lunch table with a bunch of chairs in the hallway). Bring your laptop, hope you have a cord long enough to reach the outlet. No partitions at all.

Though globally remote is worse. You're expected to be able to jump on cam at all hours. Have your cap nearby to cover up the bedhead.

Though globally remote is worse. You're expected to be able to jump on cam at all hours

I think that's the price you pay for being globally remote. We have some overseas support staff, and they knew before they took the job when they'd need to be expected to dial-in for team meetings, and they all seem to be fine with it.

You can 'dial in' without a webcam. We do it all the time at my job, which went fully remote six months ago. Half the people in our various Webex meetings use their phones to dial in, even.

My boss originally wanted people to use their webcam when joining those meetings when we first went fully remote. That initiative lasted about two weeks before no one did it anymore, including him.

I just wear a headset, and half the time I can leave it on mute anyway (especially if the puppy decides now is the time to chew on her squeakiest toy, or bark at some people running down the path beyond our back yard).

Is the video the real issue with dialing in at all-hours, or is it the "all-hours" part?

Yes.

Is the webcam a west coast thing? I work remotely for a NYC based company, and in the hundreds of meetings I've had both internally and with people from other companies, not once has someone turned on a webcam (or requested it).

It’s a tech vs non tech thing. Everyone in older companies tend to be used to communicating by phone.

I don’t know. Without a webcam I am missing about 100% of all your nonverbal communication. I can see why one would be handy.

Is it really that hard to put on a shirt for your meetings?

> missing...nonverbal communication

Screen sharing?

I don't think that was the non-verbal communication he was referring to.

I was hoping it wasn't body language, because that's more of a detriment to the meeting, since it's completely subjective. We have an exec that constantly interrupts meetings to ask people about their body language, but the bad part is that he's almost always interpreted it incorrectly, and he proceeds to make mountains out of molehills and waste everyone's time (often while making people extremely uncomfortable). Unless it's a sales presentation where a professional salesperson needs to "read the room", we're better off without cams.

We are east coast and always use webcams. I find it really helps communication.

If the goal is to match the level of communication of being local, then webcams are a must.

East coast company. Turning on webcams is pretty common but by no means universal. It's more common in smaller meetings.

We do cams on Thursday stand ups only, just as a team building sort of thing. Voice or Slack all other times.

At my company, we have global meetings daily and not once has anyone turned on the cam. We use Bluejeans and it seems to start with the cam on, but I guess everyone remembers to cut it off before joining.

IIRC, the Bluejeans app remembers your last used setting for video / mic.

In my remote job we do cam, but everyone wears whatever and nobody minds. Many people are in their pyjamas, I wear whatever old T-shirt I have, etc. That's one way of solving that problem.

However, in my previous company every remote developer had a Polycom phone in their home office and the main office ran a PBX for them. I found that an order of magnitude better, because the phones had much much better sound quality, they were physically on the desk so there was a feeling of "this device connects me to my coworkers" associated with them, and they just lowered the barrier of calling someone by a ton.

They were so good, that we'd routinely just call each other up and keep a line open while we worked, so we could chat about work, what we were doing or just generally about our lives, and we really felt like we were sitting next to each other in a way that Zoom doesn't.

The physical phone thing is also my best experience while working remotely. Like you said we would call each other up and leave the line open for hours. We never used a camera, but I went to the office at least once every other week.

I still miss the phone on my desk, and I've been considering to buy one for years, as a gate with an asterisk multiple choice menu in between :)

I am too social for that, when I see people's faces I want to talk to them. I need to have a corner where I can put my monitor and do that part of my job.

I can always do the social part of my job standing up, away from my desk; but if I have no permanent desk and corner, then I can not benefit from it.

Remote CTO here. We hardly ever use cam for calls and if we do it's 100% opt-in. We also have agreed upon business hours when people are available and generally book things in Google Calendar if there is a meeting unless it's a (rare) outage that requires immediate attention in which case pagerduty automates the process.

Aside: My ambition is to someday rise to that role, while staying remote. I would love to read your thoughts on how one can pursue and move into a CTO role remotely.

See reply to sibling comment.

Seriously: If you have a blog I can follow, or a book I can read that describes your story of becoming (and staying) a remote CTO, please share.

I don't have anything published but it seems like this is something that could have an audience. I do have extensive notes which I've been collecting to put into some sort of coherent form and publish so maybe it's time to do that.

that sounds great for ergonomics..

I've done globally remote for 10 years with 3 companies. Never been expected to jump in any call that's inconvenient for me.

It would take a lot for me to give it up for an office of any kind.

Another anecdotal data point: I've been remote for about a decade and I've never expected to be on a call (visual or otherwise) outside business hours for my timezone (9-5). I work with folks in SF, London, Tel Aviv, Bangalaru.

How about "desk utilisation monitoring"? Do an internet search for "occupeye". And then look to see if you've a spy cam under your hot desk.

And yet WeWork is apparently the 4th highest valued company right now (by some metrics) and is a place where people voluntarily pay to be in open plans. No one is twisting their arms.

> As of early-January 2019, WeWork had a valuation of roughly US$47 billion

Well holy shit, I did not expect that.

WeWork is a real estate holding company, not an office renting company. They just happen to be able to monetize their assets by renting space.

Hot terminals?

Whomever came up with the concept of hot terminals and/or desking needs to be strapped to a tree and beaten with a bag of hammers. "Oh we can oversubscribe our desks now? Sweet we'll just make 'em all work a compressed 4x10 schedule to shoehorn as many of 'em in there as we can. Work life balance? Pfffftt overrated."

So basically every possible configuration in which people can be made to work together is intolerably unbearable along some dimension or another.

What have we learned?

There isn't a configuration that is good, productive and cost effective.

Pick any two.

I doubt the cost of an office, whether private or a 6-8 person bull pen style, is more than a rounding error compared to the cost of salaries + benefits for most tech employees. Another commenter put forth a figure of $300/month/person. That’s less than the cost of those shiny new MacBooks seemingly everyone in SF carries around.

> Another commenter put forth a figure of $300/month/person. That’s less than the cost of those shiny new MacBooks seemingly everyone in SF carries around.

…But nobody is buying a new MacBook every quarter.

If valued employees needed a new MacBook every quarter, the company would find a way to make it happen. For some reason I've never understood, that doesn't apply to office space.

Valued employees also get offices if they want. It's the plebians that get stuck in open offices with four year old HP laptops with busted fans.

It's not just the office space. The commute is very costly as well. Employees add the commute and all the other annoyances to their salary requirements. It's good for the employer and employee to "keep the money on the field" aka maximizing the time happily making value for the customer.

"There isn't a configuration that is good, productive and cost effective."

I think you meant cheap. It's quite possible to have expensive, cost-effective configurations.

but is it possible to have expensive, cost-effective configurations that (by default since they are cost effective must be productive) AND are deemed to be good working conditions by all parties?

This is my claim. However you arrange it there exists some suckiness which people inevitably complain about that is a trade-off of having it in that specific configuration.

Rooms for 6-8 people isolated from external noises is a good sweet spot.

Yes, people will complain. But there's a huge difference between "John, could you please turn the volume of your headphones down" and "study after study has proven that open-floor plans are detrimental to productivity and health".

> Rooms for 6-8 people isolated from external noises is a good sweet spot.

You just have to pray you don't get stuck with people quite capable of generating a lot of extremely irritating internal (to the office) noise.

> Rooms for 6-8 people isolated from external noises is a good sweet spot

Sweet spot for me does not depend on the number of people. I used to work for a company in a huge open space with 25+ devs who understood the need for silence.

Now I'm in an open space with 8 people who do not understand the need for silence.

One guy's been on a diet for the past year and eats only raw carrots for lunch. The crunching is so loud I can hear it through my Bose QC15 headphones.

It starts with the screeching carrot peeler, I want to hang myself. The same guy spends all day making obnoxious snorting sounds and doesn't know what a Kleenex is.

Then another colleague decides to go on the same raw carrot diet. Is this a candid camera episode?

Then there's the daily chatter about last night's football game, incessant complaining about whatever the latest company announcement was, other people coming in to the room to yak about their code. Other people fart and stink out the whole room.

I understand the need people to be able to have a chat behind their desk, for professional or personal reasons. But that also bothers others. Conclusion is, open plan doesn't work.

I'm now on the verge of quitting my job for this reason and it's the same reason I quit my previous job.

When I start interviewing for other jobs, how can I ask "do people here understand the need to shut up" without appearing like an asshole?

If I didn't have kids I'd move to outer Mongolia and farm sheep.

>When I start interviewing for other jobs, how can I ask "do people here understand the need to shut up" without appearing like an asshole?

Honestly? I don't think you can. If you're at the point of regularly quitting jobs over people eating and chatting in an office, you may just have to prioritize a private office or remote work. That will limit your options of course but it may be a tradeoff worth making.

I actually like this. I need it.

I once walked into an office for an interview and it was too quiet for the number of devs in there. I knew it wasn't right for me.

I guess listen for the background noise?

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