Hacker News Reader

Comment by JohnFen | Hacker News Reader

> Many workers have tasted the freedom of no commute, or at least a pleasant walk/bike commute to a nearby coworking space.

Yes, although I say it a different way. Working in offices has always been fairly terrible, and had been growing increasingly terrible over the last decade or two. People put up with it in part because they had no option.

But once they worked outside of those spaces and realized what hell they were, of course they resist returning.

So it's not just about discovering new "freedom", it's about discovering that a major thing that makes life suck doesn't have to be a thing at all.

View on HN

> Working in offices has always been fairly terrible, and had been growing increasingly terrible over the last decade or two.

Offices don't have to be terrible. IBM, GE, Bell, etc. knew how to put together offices that didn't suck. Occasionally the architects got out of hand and produced some monstrosity, but the offices were mostly fine.

It's only the whole dumbass "open office plan" bullshit that made everything suck. Given that's the "standard", is it any wonder everybody wants to work from home?

open plan offices were the norm until the 1960s.

I can't stand them either, just point out that they were the norm except for a 35-year period.

What I really hate about open offices is the fishbowl effect. Having someone behind my back and staring at whatever's on my computer screen feels extremely uncomfortable.

I do a lot of technical drawings. It feels way different to be in an open workspace with a horizontal drafting board (which is what I would have had prior to the 1990s) than with a brightly-lit, vertical screen. You have more privacy, even in an open space.

One way to mitigate this is to get into a position where it's illegal for someone to look over your shoulder. Barring one two-year stretch a decade ago I've always had a private office.

In what positions is it illegal? HR? CSM?

> open plan offices were the norm until the 1960s

I did not know this.

However, pre-1980+ (or later), most workers were probably head-down looking at paper on their physical desktop. And surely more of them had actual offices compared to the cubical 80s-2000s or open offices 2000+.

Also, I would assume that pre-voip technology meant that salespeople were not yelling into their phones for the "joy" of their open-office-mates as they were 2000+.

The cubicle was invented in the 60s as a way of liberating workers from the tyranny of the open plan. To give people their own space.

Ironic that it became its own oppression.

In retrospect, cubicles were just aesthetically unfortunate and a convenient target for those who wanted to mock business culture (a la Office Space). But full size cubicles were vastly superior in visual privacy and sound dampening to the hell of “open office” seating at long benches that came after.

Cubicles were mocked into being removed for no good reason. A programmer analogy would be the goto-statememt. Mental institutions are another.

> most workers were probably head-down looking at paper on their physical desktop

Not really. If you go back to the 50's you will find armies of people looking down at paper, reading and writing, but not most. By the 80's all of those people had machines on their desks, while most didn't do paper work.

I believe the majority of people only started doing information (since the paper isn't there anymore) work this century on the rich countries. On many countries they didn't yet.

Also, sales people were always loud.

    By the 80's all of those people had machines on their desks

What kind of machines? Computers? My father was an office worker his whole life. He didn't get a PC on his desk until the 90s. Before, he had a type writer.

Writing machines, calculators, card organizers, whatever counter, etc. All of them loud.

> open plan offices were the norm until the 1960s.

I remember visiting the workplaces of both of my parents in the 1970's and neither were anything like open plan. I know you said "1960s" but the buildings my parents were working in were well established at the time and had been there since, at least the 1960's.

When I interviewed with Boeing in 80s, it was large rooms filled with desks an no partitions with managers around the perimeter. (The company I took a job with had private offices but there was obviously a lot of variation.) Later in the 80s I had the stereotypical cubicles.

Sure and mud huts were there way longer than any kind of office but neither this or that is relevant now.

35 year is almost entirety of the working age if you started working after uni

It was not dumbass. It was an attempt to cut the spendings on the workspaces for the employees and increase the profits for shareholders.

Open plan in a nutshell: would you like to save 20% on seating costs for the low cost of a 30% reduction in productivity? Then open plan offices might be right for you.

The nutshell takeaway here is that concrete reductions in costs will always outweigh greater but less concrete increases in costs, because... well George Carlin covered that.

My theory is it's a classic cargo cult situation: "If we just do the same thing this successful startup did (we'll ignore that they were doing it in a different context for different reasons, and ignore the ones that did the same thing but weren't successful) then we too will have the same explosive success!"

One would argue that it was "dumbass" if the attempt to cut cost affected a greater loss of productivity.

But that is often the case; attempts to increase "shareholder value" come at an outsized and detrimental cost of productivity and ultimate profit. But such is life. You cannot know the outcome of two paths as you can only test one of them.

> It's only the whole dumbass "open office plan" bullshit that made everything suck.

Certainly that's at least part of the GP's "growing increasingly terrible over the last decade or two."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com