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And then you're finally fed up with all this and go full remote, if the company allows it. Congrats, now you lost access to 80% of what is going on and fell out of the loop for anything important, and you're now guaranteed to lose in any power struggle that could happen.

In one of the companies I worked for, it was comfortable in the beginning - there were offices, 2-3 programmers in each, not too crowded, but close enough to see when the coworkers were focusing on something and when it would be ok to do a quick "hey, do you know how to...". The company grew, moved to a bigger building, rooms became larger, now there were 4-5 programmers in each. It was still OK then. Calls and longer talks were done in separate rooms, and a quick chat with the guy next to you could be done like you'd do it in a cinema - quietly.

When I was leaving the company years later, it was after it moved to a place with one huge open space and a set of rooms that you needed to book days in advance to use. Some of them were permanently occupied by "important" people even though they had their own offices. That resulted in everybody and they're cat making calls and meetings and sometimes even plannings right in the middle of the open space or in the kitchen. Finally, a "hot desk" system was implemented, and you had to book your desk days in advance.

I asked the CTO who I've know for quite some time - WTF man? He said that he likes it, because he can see at a glance that everybody is working. I was reminded of storehouses with special elevated rooms that had a view on all that happens on the floor. Saying that I got disillusioned doesn't even begin to describe what I've felt then...

> I asked the CTO who I've know for quite some time - WTF man? He said that he likes it, because he can see at a glance that everybody is working. I was reminded of storehouses with special elevated rooms that had a view on all that happens on the floor.

This kind of panopticon is how prisons are often organized.

I can be lying on a couch working hard. How does the CTO see that? The typing part is just the tip of the iceberg.

> I can be lying on a couch working hard. How does the CTO see that? The typing part is just the tip of the iceberg.

It is amazing that most knowledge worker management does not understand how knowledge workers work. Most of our hardest work does not involve hands on a keyboard.

I've been full remove for a decade. There's no way I could work in an office where "butts in chairs" was the way. I guess I would just have a notepad and a pencil and just sort of move my hand back and forth on it while I was in my head solving the real problems.

A modern version of the Panopticon, so to say: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

And interestingly enough, a recent podcast on it.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-panopticon-effect...

Similar raising. At one point I was ASE certified, at another I was a landscaper.

The first thing I noticed about white collar work was how gossipy and lazy everyone was. We didn't have time for that in blue collar work. I had no idea how these people were useful to work or society.

It seems so bizarre to me, even today, that most white collar jobs make more money. It's like they took the people who couldn't work physically, made them feel superior, and for some reason paid them unreasonable wages.

It's not really a secret that a lot of white collar jobs are bullshit jobs - if all blue collar jobs were to stop working, society would collapse overnight. Not so much with white collar jobs. We got a taste of that with the various lockdowns during covid : only the truly essential jobs must be done live and cannot be done remote.

Aye, same. The level at which my time was structured and accounted for on the blue collar level would astound the white collar folks. Entirely directed vs. entirely self-directed.

> It's like they took the people who couldn't work physically, made them feel superior, and for some reason paid them unreasonable wages.

Easy killer, you're projecting.

I could go back to being a bartender today, and could do 90% of the job (I'd have to refresh my memory how to mix a few drinks, but most of em are still there). I could probably go back to Private Investigator, or food truck work too.

But it took a whole lotta learning to get to the point where I can do my current white collar job. No one I bartended with could stay sober 4+ days a week or avoid DUIs; no way in hell I'd trust them with a production GCP cluster.

IMO you work harder in blue collar but its less stress because people don't expect you to hustle to meet a deadline.. I was also a landscaper for a while. Labor is labor in that sort of job, it marches at an expected rate and is dependent on how many hands are working. You often cannot just work for longer, either, if you are bound by the constraints of daylight, or having to clear out of the area by a certain time due to noise perhaps. There is also no way to weed, mow, or lay sod faster than you are already doing it. The deadlines end up moving to fit the realities of the speed of labor against the realities, rather than what happens in white collar work where labor being expected to meet self imposed rigid deadlines, which leads to burnout and poor quality work, and still missing deadlines.

For sure. White collar work is treated as unreal, mentally malleable, in a way people have mostly learned to not do with physical work.

> And sure, why don't you put me next to the salespeople making calls all day.

I’ve worked next to people with zero volume control and who like to take calls on speakerphone.

I decided there and then that cubicles has material benefits over open offices.

I'm old enough that I remember a time when developers had offices... sometimes private, sometimes 2 to a large office, but usually shared with other developers who generally also understood the benefit of not being interrupted so it worked out fine.

Young me's head would explode if I got a glimpse into a future where cubicles are now looked at as the good old days.

And the progression keeps going with a lot of companies that have open office "hot desking" where not only are you working in a chaotic open environment, but you don't even have your own little space there from day to day.

All of this makes it seem increasingly bizarre to me that a lot of the industry was forced to make remote work viable through the pandemic and many companies saw productivity go up and now a lot of them are trying to claw back on remote as quickly as possible.

There was a lot of “hurry up and wait” at my last job, so I had time to reflect on the hotdesking there.

And I theorized that one aspect of hotdesking is absolute control over employees by having them go through the experience of “clearing their desk” every day so they feel like they’re fired every day. This puts the grunts back in their place and keeps everyone docile because you know you’re just a cog and your job is not a permanent thing at all but rather something that you must work hard at earning again for the next day, lest today’s daily desk clearing be your last one.

The cause of all this is the grafted on management caste, that does not code. For them the whole endavour suspicously looks like not doing a thing, for to do a thing, there needs to be communication, information flowing up and down the hierarchy. Not some dude sitting there like a zen monk, reading, ocassionally typing. Slackers! Best load there calendars, to get them going..

I'd say the cause of this is the developers can't explain themselves, cannot defend why they need isolation, why they should not be interrupted, and more often than not can't explain what they do, what their jobs are and why they are required, in an understandable manner to the management caste. They act as they do because the developers are an opaque pool who talk nonsense when asked questions. Of course they/we get treated poorly.

Nah. I am extremely good at explaining these things. At this point I have a deep grounding in the theory of work. Explaining isn't enough, because the people with power don't care about the same things. Productivity is just not that important at most companies. Conformance to the feelings of the people at the top of the primate dominance hierarchy is generally what matters most.

If I walked into a foreign profession, with no clue, no previous research and assumed to be in command, with the base assumption that its the task of the surrounding eco-system to explain my job to me..

Lets say it that way, such a mindset ought to be valuable to the extreme. Thats why we see a constant stream of meddle-managers, setting out to make compliance and "apply presure" startups. Its definatly at the core of value generation.

ChatGPT: Ask me on the hour, every hour for my status and remind me of the deadline..

We share an old (1960's) building with our research department. Almost everyone has an office, except for contractors and administrative assistants who are in cubes.

This building is scheduled for demolition and we're being moved to an open-area workspace in a new building.

At least it's above trendy retail so we can get overpriced coffee and sushi on our lunch breaks.

It's not about productivity, it's about power and control.

Also, companies aren't independent entities with their own will. They are just groups of people.

My internship at IBM twenty years ago was like that. A fellow intern and I shared an office (and an apartment—we were sick of each other after a while), but the FTEs all had their own offices. No idea if it was the norm for IBM at the time (my team was part of an acquisition that was still mostly isolated from the wider company), but it was extremely conducive to productivity.

> I decided there and then that cubicles has material benefits over open offices.

The cubicle was invented in the 60s as a way to liberate people from the tyranny of the open plan office (just look at film from before then — say, “The Apartment” —- and you’ll see the open plan was the norm.

It’s a shame that the cubicle itself became a tool and exemplar of anomie.

I think the distractbility and the opportunity to just sit in meetings and chats all day is an example of the priviledge that we as white collar workers enjoy. Our productivity isn't measured in output, in number of pallets cleared, in end of day take, it often feels like it's measured in just time spent under a contract.

It feels like I can get away with only a few hours of what to me feels like productive work a week. Actually, I had a really good day last week, but then it takes days for the feature to pass review, rework for said review (often trivial remarks), and to end up in the main branch ready for deployment.

> And sure, why don't you put me next to the salespeople making calls all day.

Dude, how about a trigger warning next time?

Ya for real this made me go blind for a few seconds

Wait, are you me? I’ve had the exact same experiences! Especially being sat next to sales people. Even when they are not on the phone, they tend to be very loud, outgoing, exuberant, extroverted, etc. and are constantly chatting.

> And sure, why don't you put me next to the salespeople making calls all day.

Or better yet, put me next to the salespeople that instead of making calls all day are just goofing off.