I like that he specifically mentioned open floor plans. This is the number one reason why I don't want to return to the office. I kinda do want to go back. But I need my privacy and some quiet. I can't do the open floor plan ever again.
It's not enough you want to be cheap but you want to make it seem like you're doing it for our benefit.
So your choice is WFH micromanaging or keeping that seat in the cube warm.
> So your choice is WFH micromanaging or keeping that seat in the cube warm.
Can't WFH work without micromanagement?
At least I can say that I never felt more free than during the work from home phase in the pandemic.
I have a dream that one day we will shit hard on that sort of stuff instead of validating it. See also "alpha male".
(2) Less healthy = great social circle at work, separate great social circle outside of work
(3) Even less healthy = no social circle at work (just a job), great social circle outside work
(4) Worse = great social circle at work, no social circle outside of work (I never seen this situation. If you have a great social circle at work it's practically inevitable you'll do things outside of work)
(5) No social circle anywhere
This being HN I know lots of people will rebel against (1) but there are tons of stories about friends starting companies together and you can be sure they loved spending time together both at work and outside of work.
Just to make it more concrete I can't personally imagine The Beatles just calling their music "a job" and not getting close to their fellow band members. Sure that's a band but it's not really different from other famous business friend founders. I'm pretty confident Larry and Sergei socialized with each other outside of work. Hewlett and Packard. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were certainly friends when starting Apple and socialized outside work.
The third I married.
God forbid you run into issues with your outside social circle, you've still got your work circle, and the other way around.
I've only had option #1 happen once, and it was when I encouraged a few friends to apply at my company, and even then, it didn't really merge the social circles, I just had some people which were in both. I wouldn't do it again, either.
It's great to have multiple groups of friends, they don't all need to be related through work.
It makes sense in a way, when you spend 7+ hours a day with those people, you're bound to find some common interests that could bring you closer. What's hard is maintaining those friendships once they're no longer coworkers, as usually those "common interests" are mostly about the company's.
(1) Healthiest - Doing my morning work at a place where I know a few other coders who like to chat but don't bug me
(2) Less healthy - Same thing, but in the afternoon with beer.
Lol, in my experience mixing groups of friends has rarely been a good idea.
seems like it would lead to dating and that could be problematic for various well known reasons.
The pandemic then pushed me between (2) and (3) - good social circle at work etc.
Work is not a place to make friends.
But work friends should not be your main friends. It's like saying your main friends should be a group of bowlers but at any moment on any day your local bowling alley could decide you are banned or that if you decide another bowling alley is better you dont get to bring your new friends to it.
Having a social group at work is great but having boundaries between work and personal is much healthier.
It is beyond insulting.
Nobody has ever proved any benefits to open plan offices. Their pathologies however are well documented e.g. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2017.023...
Teams can thrive in same room. High cadence communication needs same room (NASA flight control). If the work is not actually about a team delivering value together - concretely, and the only rationale for open space is "hypothetically it would be nice if they collaborated more" open office will create negative multipliers to everything (except facility costs).
The pathology is statistical. On average open offices are bad. Individuals can love and thrive in open offices. I suppose that's why it's so hard to kill them - you can always find a few persons who claim honestly it's the best place for them.
I feel bad that my dad had to deal with that BS. He went full remote as soon as he was able.
I once shared a space with a girl who played dance music quite loudly. I asked her to turn it down a bit and from her reaction you would think I had just kicked her new puppy to death.
The following few weeks were frosty, to say the least, and I ended up moving elsewhere.
Soon they'll be back to their antics playing maybe baseball (just kidding, sounds crazy right but so does playing soccer in the office). They're just not concerned about other people's productivity. The general point is that open-office floor-plan easily leads to distractions like these and can even lead to animosity between co-workers.
My health is significantly better overall because of this. I would feel very odd doing this in an office. I have lots of other reasons why I don't like going into an office (mostly losing 1-2 hours a day to commuting) but this is at the top of the list of why I wont go back.
Dreams? You are stuck in some weird emotional place.
And since there's no such thing as "your desk" there, you will never feel at ease. Every day might bring someone that's incredibly annoying, and collaborating with your coworkers would mean either annoying others or booking a conference room.
In the end, it's easier to collaborate with them via video from home.
I think there are advantages to having an office, but I don't think collab work places have those advantages.
The idea is to have a building/location with actual private offices after all.
I'm in a situation right now where my office is near by and open, but attendance is mostly optional and ad hoc. I find that days when I have lots of meetings are the best days to WFH because it's so much easier to talk over Zoom and not have to rush back and forth to meeting rooms. Having a chat window secondary to the out loud talking is also invaluable. The in-person situation is most valuable when I'm working on some tactical problem (ie coding) and want a second set of eyes or just to complain for a minute. It can be done over Slack, but it's less natural.
This is a hugely stupid move that companies made.
It was done because the benefits are tangible and immediate, and the costs are soft and indirect. CFO wins over HR.
People should recognize what a big deal this is.
I won't do it either.
Where are the external monitors? The laptop chargers? The plants? The photos of family? The screens in meeting rooms? The whiteboards?
They're missing all of those, there's a guy trying to work on a laptop while in a hammock?
I'll stick with my home office, thanks.
[1] https://officesnapshots.com/2019/01/29/airbnb-headquarters-s...
“don’t mind focusing [but] really like getting distracted out of that … interaction … helping … and stuff”
This sounds annoying to at least 50% of your peers, and destructive to focus for almost everyone.
Engineering (as opposed to, say, “coding” that just transcribes requirements into code) usually requires building systems in one’s mind then factoring them into well-architected structure and describing that literately in code. This is not a social hang-out (“hey, wassup, can I help w anything?”) activity.
Certainly system conception and architecture can happen great at a whiteboard, but the steps after that tend to go better focused, alternating with iterative collaborative feedback syncs that don’t break concentration for anyone in the system-to-literate-artifact time consuming phase.
Think 3 to 4 hour cycles: 2 to 3 hrs uninterrupted focus, 30 mins break, 30 mins collab for ideation and review, back into focus. Shorten either the morning or afternoon focus cycle depending when you focus most productively, allocate the extra to lunch/learn/whatever. 2x3hrs+1hr lunch = 30 hr work, 5 hrs lunch, per week. Beyond that you probably don’t engineer productively and should enjoy non workplace environments to recharge / defrag.
Since focus time is the phase with most time, it means at any given moment most people need library quiet, and the reflective syncs should be elsewhere.
- Privacy by default with collab spaces allows focus and interaction, without interaction annoying or destructive to anyone. (It’s by-and-large only annoying to (a) profit-over-productivity accountants who think it’s expensive, (b) micro-managers who adore management by walking around, aka getting paid executive pay to chit chat everyone’s focus away, and (c) people who haven’t yet learned how to deep focus consistently.)
- Collab by default without (or with only limited) private focus space prevents this beyond whatever threshold of private space availability. That said, allowing people to pick their own work-start times helps distribute focus and collab usage. The less private space, the more flexible working hours and location must be.
Effectively zero people can translate systems to code while “human-interacting and helping people and such” the way you describe, advocating for that as default is literally counter productivity.
There’s a solution though: devs craving continuous interaction can seek out a company (correctly) believing in “XP” aka eXtreme Programming or paired programming. In this model, the default private spaces have two engineers who program symbiotically. Research suggests 1+1 = 2.5 or 3 or more. For some problems, 10x.
Not only co-thinkers thrive in XP. Standard deviations of engineers need fewer iterations till correctness, meaning, produce higher quality faster. It’s been shown this helps introverted thinkers too, even if they only pair with a rubber duck to explain their thinking aloud to!
As a fellow dev, I dislike open office plans, but not because I spend my day browsing the web. I dislike them because I'm rather noise-sensitive, and it's hard for me to tune out the sound of ping-pong balls being batted back and forth. I can't just put on headphones, because my team pair-programs extensively. With WFH, I can pair program and not deal with that or the myriad of other aural distractions.
That said, I appreciate your comments on this post and yes, I wholeheartedly agree that the preferences of folks who prefer WFO are just as valid as those of us who prefer WHF. Plenty of room for both in the world. :-)
And with that, I'm off to play today's Wordle while half-listening to a Zoom meeting.