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Comment by flax | Hacker News Reader

When I was at Google (Kirkland), the offices were basically open-plan fishbowls. WFH was massively better.

I once worked at a startup (pre-covid) that had an open-plan setup with a significant portion of people using standing desks. They provided one stool for 2 standing desks justifying it because "if you use a standing desk you should be standing most of the time".

Pure cheapskate short-sightedness.

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Standing desks were the only desks that knowledge workers (clerks mostly) had in Dickensian times.

Good to see the tech industry bringing us back to the workplace of the 1800's.

Up next: Child labor!

> They provided one stool for 2 standing desks

They had it better in the movie Brazil. At least they had offices!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS5WLkb_Cxk

I liked the fishbowls, but I had a team whose office was just the right size for it - The glass walls kept out the noise well enough, and the view of the rest of the office didn't bother me. I was for a period in the open plan area without an enclosure - That sucked, modulo the Sennheiser headphones we had provided which I blasted music and white noise in.

Well, that could be justified as maintaining the health of the employees by forcing one of two to stand up at any time.

It would have to be timed so each employee got equal stool time. IIRC standing all day isn't necessarily healthier than sitting all day. You want to alternate.

That would be incentivised with this system, no? Employees would fight the other off the stool constantly, to get their share of sitting.

And perhaps get a little exercise in the process. Good point.

It’s not like standing statically is good for your health either, and it can be easy to do that when focusing.

I hit that issue when I got my standing desk early during the pandemic, I tend to lock my knees when static and doing that for hours at a time was not good.

I‘m not sure standing 4+ hours a day has been established as healthy without exception. Long sitting is bad, sure; but switching things around ad libitum might be better than enforcing standing all the time.

Healthy human beings can walk, let alone stand still, for over four hours a day easily.

Standing still is different from walking. It’s not that great really: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00140139.2017.14...

Swelling in lower limbs doesn’t sound good. From an evolutionary POV I can’t really imagine why our bodies should be optimized for standing still.

Sounds like the best option for a standing desk is to add one of those walking treadmills then. For me though, whenever I'm using a standing desk I move around a lot; I almost never stand still.

I can walk all day quite happily. Standing still for even an hour is quite uncomfortable, however.

That's not the employer's purview. They can incentivize health but, seriously F right off with that controlling nonsense. They're employees, not your charges or children.

Not that I agree with the practice, but many retail employees (at least in the USA) are required to stand while working, even if the job can easily be done while seated, as is the case for receptionists, fast food and grocery cashiers, and so on. It's definitely within the company's purview, even if the practice is unnecessarily cruel.

I think the only cashiers I see standing in Germany are at IKEA and hardware stores (because they have to stand to scan half the huge parts), and even then I think they have a chair inside their little spot next to the scanner and the conveyor belt. Only the "info booth" people are usually standing.

Ironic that in the United States, the only cashiers I've ever seen allowed to sit are Aldi employees

Yeah, that's "amazing" for those employees with very common conditions like plantar fasciitis.

Yeah. Right. We can add it to the long list of ways that tech bros assert their false sense of transferable expertise onto other people. The average startup…whatever person, has never actually asked an expert if standing desks do much if any good. The truth is way more nuanced.

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