I just have to point out the irony that a company which believes so much in virtual work that they renamed themselves after the "metaverse" is now thinking to require employees to return to the office.
If cube farms or offices with doors are so much better, where are the companies without open-offices and outsized performance financials.
I suspect most employees just aren't that productive for it to matter much.
There is probably some small percentage who are more productive, and even fewer who are much more productive, but their needs are overwhelming by larger business decisions, and fads in management and design.
This is correct. The first capacitive touchscreen phone was the LG Prada.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada
Interestingly, it came out just before the iPhone, and LG even alleged that Apple had stolen the idea from them. Considering how Jobs stole a bunch of ideas from PARC, and Apple really doesn't have a history of inventing anything, but rather taking other peoples' ideas and commercializing them better, it seems very plausible.
Conway’s law may result in products’ appeal, thus what people are willing to pay for.
Then again peacooks have like huge swag backs for no good reason other than looks.
I feel the concept of open offices are abit like agile. It is a virtue signaling "cult".
It doesn't matter it is counterproductive. You just need it to get the female peacooks.
Literally any of the top companies in the DOW Jones - very few offices are open plan - tech is an outlier here
Going back to actual offices with doors would be way better for employees’ health.
Cubicles are still a way to treat employees like cattle. Except that this free-range approach to cubicles mixes the worst of cubicles with not having ways to deal with interruption, distraction, noise.
That doesn't mean open space offices are better. Free range cattle is still cattle, isn't it?
Working from home is like working in your private office, which in the 90s was reported as a perk and a status symbol.
Offices are great! Unless they're internal and don't have windows (although some people definitely still like them).
Cubicles are great! Unless they're in giant internal rooms that don't have windows, or don't have enough windows / the right kind of windows for the space (although some people definitely still like them).
AFAICT it's not that cubicles sucked, it's that they correlated with a bunch of things that made the job also suck, but cubicles were an easy thing to refer to about that kind of workplace culture.
...arguably, the same can be said about a chunk (but not all) of the complaints around open offices.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson_Wax_Headquarters
That's an open office plan from ~1930, that, IMHO, is designed with the people who're gonna be working in it in mind.
Edit: I think this photo might be from much closer to construction. It's even more sparse / a lot less crowded:
https://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2014/04/30/realestate/comm...
Open plan is just awful. Everyone can watch you and nobody does any work and its so loud and impossible to talk on the phone.
Meanwhile, my wife is dealing with health issues, but can't speak English very well. So I have to talk to various doctors' offices and insurance companies all the time, and every time I make a call I feel the need to hoof it across the building so I'm not blasting medical details into the cube farm. The quiet rooms are usually all full of people in meetings, so I have to hide in the mail room or walk a couple of blocks to my car.
I'm done with this shit.. I think I'm going to hop ship after my next $100k RSU vesting, this kind of work is just too undignified for me
It makes the economy more efficient by reducing transportation costs, reducing carbon emissions etc.
It allows companies to hire from locations that they previously thought were unviable.
It helps employees spend less time in traffic and more time with their loved ones.
There may be some negative side-effects, such as making it harder to provide guidance to new hires, holding unmotivated employees accountable etc. But I think these problems should be manageable. Some ways to manage them would be: building more on-boarding resources (videos, documents, etc.), having regular virtual meetings with new hires and status meetings with unmotivated employees etc. It may be a good idea to pair new hires with each other on some projects or require new hires to come to office once in a while.
Ideally, companies should work around the problems with virtual work because remote work has certainly demonstrated its benefits. Let's hope that they will find those ways and improve the work-life situation for many of us.
Edit: sorry, I completely lost myself on a sidetrack
Actually I believe that your assessment is spot on, only that I would weigh the drawbacks a little different, in particular everything that involves new hires, even more in particular those new hires who are new to the field. This is a long term cost that is very difficult to predict: how will "second generation" remotes work? Is there hidden knowledge implicitly present in those who started in person that can diffuse from formerly present to pure remotes, but not from one pure remote to another?
When you swap money for products, you don't need time. If the economy shifts to visibility and attention, instant transactions are not possible anymore. Whatever people produce, somebody needs time to consume it. So all the productivity gains will be used to create more audience.
The paragraph ended with:
> we’re focusing on understanding this further and finding ways to make sure people build the necessary connections to work effectively. In the meantime, I encourage all of you to find more opportunities to work with your colleagues in person
So this is not in the least requiring employees to return to the office. In fact a reasonable reading of it is that it's actually supporting remote work by specifically articulating what is necessary for it to work well and then planning to facilitate that. It's a far more intelligent approach than the blunt option of "let's just force everyone back to the office 3 days a week".
"Bold new VR technology, what should we do with it? I know! Let's recreate brutalist grey concrete meeting rooms".
I remember hearing that his house has 2 foot thick RPG-proof windows, that it's a fortress. He literally has a large degree of optical distortion looking through his windows every morning. Let alone all the crazy stuff, real or imagined, that his security team is telling him.
So, he longs for even simple things like a boring meeting. Like when Michael Jackson closed down a supermarket just so he could go shopping like a normal person would. Same pathos here.
This is not ironic. It sounds like a disingenuous ploy to force employees out of the company without having to pay them what they owe or deal with the fallback.
Amazon seems to be pulling the same stunt.
The coincidence between mass layoffs and forced return to office starts to look like a massive wave of workplace bullying, and I'd be surprised if it wasn't breaking laws.
To put it short, it's the same way early Swift engineers were spending most of their time in C++. They had to to build the new language.
Same way I could see a metaverse company needing engineer physically present not just to get access to the newest hardware but also work around the limitations of their own products until it's actually ready to be used 24/7.
Now I'd still see whole classes of engineers not bound by those issues (e.g. backend engineers etc.).
For example, do you measure if a project is completed on time and the amount of bugs/regressions from it or do you measure how efficient contributors were by looking at loc, how much they are available,etc... because if things are getting done on time and with good quality but A lot if "unproductivity" then you have a metric problem not a productivity problem.
At the very least, there control there is less then absolute compared to meatspace.
Neuromancer's plot motivation is the guy who desperately wants his cyberdeck to work again, such that he takes on the big mission to do so.
Remote work is here to stay in society so finding ways to improve it will be valuable.
Outside of some very specific circumstances, I have a hard time seeing the value of VR meeting for work purposes that regular old video chat doesn't already have.