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Comment by ashton314 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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.

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.

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..

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.

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.

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.

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.

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