Companies consider abandoning open office layouts to prevent disease spread

Last company I worked for, the CEO said to me he doesn't care where anyone work as long as the work get done well. However, this was not the case with my own manager. He micro managed everything. He had an office manager sitting with the engineers reporting to him multiple times a day on if the engineers were sitting on the desk. You can feel you are being watch the moment you step into the office. It was an absolute shit place to work for.

I feel this is pretty important. I am only renting a room (not making FAANG money) and as such quarantine has me spending nearly 24 hours a day in my bedroom. I can't follow the standard advice of maintaining a separate space for work

Ultimately you will be judged on how well the work gets done -- but the social signals are table stakes.

I very much hope all of GAFAM/FAANG are paying attention and learning from this situation.

(I've asked about remote work policies every time I've ever interviewed with GAFAM/FAANG. I've seen such a fascinating mix of hypocrisy about remote work in such interviews.)

I guess the benefits outweigh the costs now, so I hope those companies will more proactively consider more WFH friendy employment options.

I would spend it on renting a bigger apartment with an extra room to use as my office.

Don't get me wrong: I love my wife and kids dearly. But having anything done requires concentration and some moderate insulation from distractions. Achieving this from a coach in the living room is hard. Grabbing my kid's room only works as long as the school day isn't over, and not at all during a recess, like, say, the whole summer. My wife already works from home, so our bedroom doubles as her office.

I didn't need a proper workplace as long as my employers provided me with (a piece of) an office. Now that they stopped due to the quarantine, its lack becomes a significant problem.

Obviously, some would say: leave your expensive city, move to somewhere really cheap, in the middle of (almost) nowhere! Two problems. (1) What about schools there? (2) When enough people move into a cheap and convenient place, it quickly ceases to be as cheap.

During my exit interview after I resigned, I told my director I was leaving partially because I wanted to work remotely more and that they should either encourage or at least allow more WFH. She laughed, said they don't do that there, and told me that I'd be back.

Now they're all working from home and I'm with a new remote-friendly company with no plans on ever going back to the FAANG world. Good riddance.

A coworker of mine left for a company where all employees have offices and according to him the gain in productivity was wild.

Open office is my favorite by far. I'm a programmer and I'm not easily distracted and I find the environment a lot more social and enjoyable.

My least favorite was the shared office and cubicle. I found offices isolating, but at least you had privacy unless you shared your office. Cubicles were the worst of both worlds, which is a lack of privacy but you're still isolated.

I think that's right. Currently these companies are learning to effectively remote work under the duress of COVID-19. How long until they start to ask themselves "what do I do with all this expensive office space." Returning to pre-COVID-19 life requires a vaccine, of which there is no guarantee. But a path forward with dramatically reduced office space requirements will look sure -- and offer value to employees who like the flexibility.

There are some really good reasons to want to have an office and face to face interactions; but right now they all look pretty fragile.

Then why not make those rationales explicit and have the same norms around noise and distractions as you'd find in a library reading room. Keep a reduced number of separate private offices, small meeting rooms, cubicles etc. in case people need to do something that would annoy or distract others. Being disingenuous about these things is pointless, it just keeps people from reaching good compromise solutions.

This argument never made sense. How is open office cheaper than WFH? Answer, it's not.

It's just the cheaper option that also allows you to retain your illusion of control.

To add to your sunlight comment, though, is I also rarely, if ever, see notes about ventilation. Converting an open-space office into a private-space office (or potentially even cubicles) is non-trivial as far as ventilation is concerned. Not that I think it is an excuse for an open office, but it isn't as simple as throwing up some temporary walls in an open space.

Do I believe it is worth it? yes. Would most places see the work required and want to deal with the hassle of coordinating everything with the building owner to get the work done? probably not.

> Other research shows that one of the best ways to reduce transmission in the workplace is to provide paid sick leave that encourages ill employees to stay home.

The saying goes, "Safety regulations are written in blood". This is one of the many reasons unions are useful even if you make a great salary. It gives you someone on site whose job is to look out for you, and it gives you a lever with which to institute necessary workplace changes.

I think it's a foggy cloud of reasons this came to be such a fad, from cost savings in floorspace/etc., to managers wanting to micro-manage butts-in-chairs, to the cargo-cult-esque promotion of it, etc.

In America, color me "not surprised" that it takes something outstanding like COVID to move the needle in the corporate sector.

To be honest, I think the true innovation is WFH. Bypass all these things and make a full-mixed city where folks can work without commuting and walk to their diner spots and everything. It's what they made the future look like in sci-fi. I can't wait.

Combine that with my personally highest desired innovation: work times. In California, the most beautiful time of day is right now morning to noon, and afternoon to evening. I want to be out. Fortunately, I can be, but so many people are missing out on this.

With WFH will come a competitive advantage - the worktime shift. And we will live our best lives.

Interestingly, all of these companies ran outmoded spec and dev waterfall processes. And every truly agile place I've worked at or experienced has been everyone in an open room on each other's nerves. Weird correlation!

My office is next to my bedroom.

So glad to be working from home now, get my own private bathroom & can manage my heat dressed in a blanket

By the end of the eighties, the set of _Office Space_ was the norm.

This claim is repeated in every HN post about open floor plans. I'm sure there are some cases where it's true (Manhattan!), but in every case where a manager forced me into an open plan layout, I pushed back, and they admitted it wasn't really about the money.

Dengue does have a vaccine, but like many vaccines, it isn't 100% effective. While it does reduce the chances of being infected, it also increases the likeyhood of a severe infection (similar to the risk increase from a previous dengue infection) and thus is only recommended for those who have already been been infected once.

Malaria also has a vaccine. It also is not 100% effective but it does reduce infection rates.

In fact, many vaccines are like this and confere some level of resistance rather than full immunity. This further illustrates your point that vaccines and immunity have a wider range of forms than commonly understood and we don't really know what form of vaccine is possible for Covid-19.

Edit: Another example is the typhoid vaccine I got last fall, it is only 50-80% effective.

This belief was reinforced when Twitter was marketing a building they didn’t need any more. It was such and such space including so many workstations, and the ratio of desks to floor space was only half what I had expected based on my experience at google SF. So it seems that even failing businesses like Twitter give their engineers more space than google does.

A small nitpick that doesn't take away from your overall point, just mentioning it because it's interesting: we've developed two widely-used coronavirus vaccines to date.

They aren't used in humans, though. They target feline and bovine coronaviruses.