It's companies' fault we don't want to return to the office
innovationnation.blog
innovationnation.blog
The office should be a hang out: a pleasant place to spend time. If you’re meeting your friends for dinner after work you should want to meet at the office. As Philip Greenspun bluntly puts it: “Your business success will depend on the extent to which programmers essentially live at your office. For this to be a common choice, your office had better be nicer than the average programmer’s home. There are two ways to achieve this result. One is to hire programmers who live in extremely shabby apartments. The other is to create a nice office.”
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/09/24/bionic-office/
I wonder how many programmers he employed with partners and children back then though?
No amount of office niceness can compensate for the surrounding area to be not a place you want to live in.
I think it’s a huge missed opportunity for smaller startups to not place their offices in areas a bit off the beaten path. SF is uniquely weird about this from what I understand, but like NYC or Tokyo is filled with startups putting their office in places where workers either have an hour commute or have to increase rent by a lot to live closely. All for, frankly, the status of the address. Then companies whine about high salaries and nobody wanting to come or Mori tower.
Meanwhile there are many neighborhoods that are cheaper, have near equivalent services, and could offer a nice environment where people want to live closely. Commercial real estate is not always available, but the rent savings alone could easily pay for a lot of renovations to another building
take NYC for example. office space in manhattan is extremely expensive, but it's also very well connected. people can reasonably commute from four out of the five buroughs, and a bit less reasonably from NJ, the lower hudson valley, etc. pretty much anywhere else in the greater NYC area would be much cheaper to rent office space, but the subway and commuter rail are all designed around the expectation that people need to be moved en masse to/from manhattan. an office in queens would be attractive to people who live in queens, but it would exclude people who want to live in all those other places.
that said, some companies do exactly what you suggest. amazon has a lot of offices in less "desirable" areas. HQ2 is a prominent example. crystal city is far from the most prestigious place to have an office in the DC area, and it's not particularly well connected to most neighborhoods in DC proper. but if you're okay with living in alexandria or arlington, you can have a decent commute and save a bit of money on housing.
there are also a lot of smaller tech companies that set up in random suburban office parks. typically they do this because they are more focused on reliable profits (and lowering costs) than rapid growth. these places can honestly be pretty nice to work at, but you need to really adjust your expectations around comp. you don't hear about these places because they've essentially decided not to be competitive.
If I worked in a generic office building in the suburbs I would never want to go in.
Also Boss: How come none of you come into the office anymore?
Apropos of Spolsky's discussion of interior design, I think Greenspun's firm's old building is currently an office of IDEO, but I don't know whether it had great design back then.
It might've housed Greenspun's TCL+databases Web firm, then at some point seemed to be used by a niche college(?), and in recent years is IDEO.
First, developers think they want windows and then they can’t handle the light. So the people with windows close them and then nobody gets to use the windows. And news flash, it can be really hot next to a window. Better to pull the desks back and put the walkways near the window.
Also when you have 9 key employees and 7 window seats you end up snubbing 2 people you wouldn’t want to live without. That shit is part of the calculus of turnover.
Far better to put little tables with three chairs by the windows. Someone can take a break, or have a quick tête-à-tête there. It’s everyone’s window.
It's possible, just not with open floor plans and cubicles.
Airconditioning, positioning and judicious use of blinds is always enough.
A number of later buildings were H shaped, probably for similar reasons.
Two stories, large windows, green surroundings.
Of course it was inevitable they’d tear it all down to replace it with open offices shakes head
I’ve seen a few spaces where closely spaced buildings provide some afternoon protection for the lower floors, but that is relatively rare.
Coatings have gotten better over time, but most people don’t understand that glare is worst when the monitor is pointed straight at your eyes, and a little bit of tilt will solve most of your problems.
I'm not trying to forget the many others such as growth and challening opportunities for the super-smart ones, those yearning to get away from the mega-corps' monotonous grind.
It is absurd the number of one story retails blocks near major offices on LA’s Westside. Put 1, 2, 3, and 4 bedroom apartments and condos on top.
In reality, there were huge misinformation and lobbyist campaigns waged by automobile manufacturers and energy companies to stop any decent public transportation projects. Even our laws on jaywalking were originally manufactured as an effort to demonize pedestrian traffic.
What changed is that millennials and gen Z were screwed so hard that even their more affluent members are often willing to vote for people who say reform is necessary (climate change factors into this a lot, too, since even if cars were affordable and traffic wasn’t a problem we’d still have to change something).
I think it's disingenuous to pretend that the hacker news demographic isn't historically aligned with the NIMBY class, as you put: "affluent".
Its easier to say "cities" did this than admit there's real work to be done (as you also described).
Then there's the issue of noise. I used to work in a very nice office, rooms of 10-15 people. However, before 10 AM you have the cleaners going through, at 11 the overly loud chatter starts about what we are going to eat for lunch that day, which doesn't subside until 2-3 PM, etc. I have never worked in an office one could focus in.
I'm very happy to have worked from home for the last 3 years in the outskirts "in the green". I'm much more productive, can make my own food in my own kitchen, and have less stress and more free time. I can go pick up the kid if I so chose when school is out and do the homework with them, working late that day. If I can help it, I will never go back to an office and it's not due to the lack of transport or living opportunities.
Places like Google and Meta pay $$$$$ for their office space, hiring fancy architects and installing all sorts of perks. So I don't think it's simply a financial question.
I think there must be something that's actually appealing about it to most of the employees. Is it that it feels like studying in the library in college, everybody occupying a single seat at a long table? Does it make people feel high-paid information wizards, mimicking the long rows of traders at traditional Wall St. financial firms? Is it meant to feel like a "group project" where everybody's working shoulder-to-shoulder? Is it meant to feel "flat" and non-hierarchical, because offices are for fuddy-duddies from the 1950's? Is it so lots of the space can be dedicated to ping-pong tables and video-game areas and a fancy café area instead, because that's what influences prospective employees more?
If private offices really were deeply desired by employees, lots of companies would use them as perks in order to attract talent in the war for programming talent. Yet they don't.
So what's going on here?
Seriously, my office in grad school was a glorified closet. I never used it and rarely visited it.
Sometime around 2017-18 I was told that our (extremely high density) open office cost $25k/head per year. At that time I was only making $110k so that was mind blowing.
If you consider that the all-in cost of an L4 is more like $400-500k/year it becomes a little baffling that they don’t just get 2x the space they currently do if it will only cost $25k/y and make it so they get their own cubicle or mini office.
But yeah it can be distracting for sure. I tend to be much more productive at home, ironically, but I prefer the office because there are other people there and it doesn't feel like such a lonely rat race. That feeling goes away when everyone is in their own little office though.
But, that's why they have doors, which can be opened or closed, or left slightly ajar, all of which can be used to indicate your willingness to receive visitors. And why must "private office" mean "tiny cramped cube?" Do you not imagine there being any common areas where people can sit and work?
Sure, if your idea of "private offices" is "tiny, cramped cubes," I get it. I had an office in grad school I almost never visited, much less used, because it was the size of a walk-in closet and was assigned to me and two other students. But I'm thinking more like the professors' offices, where you can have a couch in there, and a desk, and a window, and some bookshelves, and go down the hall to get some coffee or sit in the commons room, etc.
Not saying either is better or worse, just different. I'd prefer the open collaboration model and would never want a private office, no matter how spacious it is. It's just lonely.
On the other hand, I also wouldn't force people to sit at the big table (or come into the office at all) if they work better alone. People are just different and their workspace needs should be respected as much as possible.
Even when fully WFH, I paid for a coworking space membership without a private desk, specifically for the collaborative feel and social chit chat. Many others did the same. And others still paid for private offices with their doors closed.
There's no one size fit all approach to this, and IMO there shouldn't be because people aren't the same. Companies that try to lump everyone together under one policy just ends up with a bunch of desks that sit empty most of the week, grumpy WFHers who reluctantly come in because they have to (getting nothing done that day), and sad extroverts like me who are surrounded by people who don't really want to be there.
Why not just let people choose, as long as they can still do the work? The control freak mentality is the problem, not private offices vs open layouts.
Way happier to work hard and contribute to the company when I feel like I don't have to be forced to work in an office that isn't conducive to my life.
But in that case, the company would need to also supply cozy housing.
Most legit: the complaint that RTO means “everyone must drive 1-2 hours each day.”
Now, this is strictly not true as plenty of people choose to live close to their work, and some people live in places where they can take transit, etc. But most people in most of the United States have to live in a car centric environment pretty far away from the office in order to be able to afford comfortable housing. That is a massive policy failure at all levels of government, and I hope the office crisis hitting so many downtowns forces more governments to deal with it.
Second legit point: open offices were taken way too far. It can be a lot of fun to have an open office when you’re a team of six. Having an open office for 600 is hell. Fortunately, this is straightforward to fix, as the authors story about the law office illustrates. Companies that want employees to come back to the office are going to have to provide reasonable working environments.
The thing that this author, and so many other, ICs fail to understand is that (a) management is necessary, and is a key differentiator of good companies versus lousy companies, (b) no matter how good the managers are, it is much harder to manage remotely than it is to manage in person.
Imagine being an IC software developer and being stuck on dial up. That’s what it’s like to be a manager in a remote environment. Your job is to know your people, to understand how they are doing, and to understand what they need, so that you can help them succeed. While it is possible to do this remotely, it is so very much harder and more intrusive, whereas in person you can just look around and see who is smiling and who looks stressed out without bothering anyone.
So sure, cities may whine for offices to come back, but the fact that effective management actually matters to the fate of companies is much more likely to drive return to office than any amount of whining that cities do.
Sadly, as companies are demanding RTO under the guise of 'increasing collaboration', I don't think the right ears will be hearing this message.
We may be able to hold on forever this way. What are we going to do? Book a meeting room then 3/5 are remote anyway? Doesn't make sense.
Good management is probably #30 on the list, and companies with bad management (especially abusive management!) live for decades.
This implies that they picked their home based on where their employer's offices are located. For a lot of people (those with families, for instance), relocating is a massive pain, which makes it hard to switch employers. Remote work is more equitable because the cost of relocating is no longer a factor in job decisions.
> That’s what it’s like to be a manager in a remote environment. Your job is to know your people, to understand how they are doing, and to understand what they need, so that you can help them succeed. While it is possible to do this remotely, it is so very much harder and more intrusive, whereas in person you can just look around and see who is smiling and who looks stressed out without bothering anyone.
I think what a lot of us object to from management—especially management that pushes for RTO—is that it tends to infantilize us well into adulthood. A child needs to be watched in order to understand how they're feeling, because they have difficulty understanding—much less expressing!—their emotions. But you're dealing with adults! Why don't you just ask how people are doing instead of trying to read minds?
As an aside, if you tried this "look to see who's smiling" method on me, you'd think I'm always struggling because I have major RBF.
This feels analogous to “why don’t you just ask the users if the product if working, instead of setting up all these time consuming quality checks?”
Like, yea, that catches some stuff, but ignores almost all of the real complexity and will miss everything that could have been solved before it became a real problem.
Going to ask for a source for both of these.
Got a source for this?
Cause I dont think this can be true taking into consideration people change job relatively often once per a couple of years thus it cannot be true that most of them are living near their office.
This reminds me of a job I once had, where there was a cafe near the working area. That was shit, trying to work while the noise of espresso machines hiss and squeal away. Then at Christmas they decided to put an impromptu choir singing away for a few hours.
What the actual fuck. They weren't even any good, some funky jazzy Christmas choir that was just absolute noise. But it completely messed with my ability to talk to customers, and existing scheduled meeting.
Once you are open plan then everyone feels like they have the right to encroach on your attention without asking.
> Imagine being an IC software developer and being stuck on dial up. That’s what it’s like to be a manager in a remote environment.
This is hyperbolic. I would also suggest it takes some autonomy and responsibility away from managers to adapt and learn new ways for building an understanding of your engineers. If adapting to remote is problematic, adapting to employees with dramatically different methods of thinking and communication (of which there are many) will also be problematic.
Are there challenges? Sure. From my perspective, the largest among them likely being the loss of organic opportunities to casually interact and build rapport, such as over lunch. The second worth mentioning is the friction added to nonverbal communication. (Onboarding is one of the most critical places these hit, but they're ongoing headwinds as well.) But neither of these are in any way insurmountable, or even high on the list of "things that keep me up at night" managing a team. At the risk of a simple answer, I've found they're usually well addressed by intentionally making opportunities to just... interact, and of course finding what works for an individual dev, with a team-wide emphasis on async methods of alignment, knowledge sharing, and consistency/coordination.
None of the things you mentioned, what a dev is doing, what they want and need, should have in-person as a requirement. The statement of "more intrusive" is especially ironic, as I find knocking on an office door and interrupting flow, or bugging someone in the hallway or over lunch "what's the status of X" far more intrusive than having a good process and cadence and ongoing awareness for work being done, and trusting/cultivating engineers to reach out if something comes up. (These are systems which, to emphasize my point, come very naturally when one is supporting a remote or hybrid team, but have broad benefit.) I'd add as well that "is someone smiling" is an... extremely lossy and unreliable heuristic for knowing your engineer, to put it more gently than I probably should.
The funny part with all this said: Your core point, that managers are contributing to the RTO push, potentially has some truth to it. (although I'm inclined to disagree that it's THE major component just knowing the discussions and tax implications between legislators/business owners/bigcos in my own city, it's totally a guess on my part) I've just been reading a bunch of posts lately that seem to defend what is, in my eyes, a cop-out for a manager who should be adapting to far more than remote on a day-by-day basis, resulting in concrete costs both for employees in location/commute and for managers in being unable to hire high quality remote engineers, and this being said so overtly pushed me to write this wall-of-text.
They've been pushing open office plans for 15-20 years now that actively disrupt productivity. Their opinions have been discredited by decades of studies on open office plans and they're the worst people to listen to about office productivity.
Even with a 12 minute bike commute, it’s hard not to see open plan offices as anything but an unpleasant, unhealthy productivity impediment. I understand why the people with private offices want others to envy them but it’s hard to justify the cost of such low productivity spaces.
Good open offices still segregate noisy from quiet environments- i.e. nobody should be putting the lunchroom, games or sales people near engineers. They provide enough desk space that you aren't right on top of anyone else. Lots of smaller meeting rooms nearby for people to pair or have extended conversations. Quick collaboration is easy, and you can physically see when someone doesn't want to be disturbed.
Bad open offices lump different departments together, cram you in and make you listen to the microwave constantly ding and smell that one guy's leftover fish every day. They invite constant distractions.
That said, I've moved out of the city and i would need an unrealistic amount of money to be convinced into taking a job that wasn't fully remote again.
Worse with distributed or partial remote companies where a lot of people need to be the only one in the building joining a particular call. At the limit you need as many phone booths as desks, which is just private offices with extra steps.
Yeah, they could be worse, but the noise and movement are unavoidably distracting for me even if it’s “just” engineers chatting. The benefits of an open office require a culture of significantly more collaboration than my team (and I wager most teams) have in practice. With cubicles or actual offices I think it wouldn’t in practice change the rate at which people stare at the same screen to show others’ stuff, because we aren’t doing it on a super impromptu basis so as not to interrupt each other as we work.
A few things made me change my mind. The first was that we also reorganized how our teams were structured, which ended up with people working on the same projects sitting close to each other. Being able to just scoot your chair over a bit made collaboration more fluid than having to get up and walk across half the office to talk to someone.
The second bit was realizing that, for the most part, people spoke more quietly in the open office than they did in cubicle land, so the overall noise level really didn't change much. Starting out in cubicles and moving to open office may have made people more cognizant of the need to change, or perhaps cubicle walls simply didn't block as much noise as I'd initially thought.
The last was that, due to people having more visibility of what I was doing, I ended up with fewer messages on the team chat (pre-slack days). Either they'd stop over for a quick question while I was already in a conversation, or if I had a "heads down" sign up on a little stand on my desk, they'd leave me be. I felt more productive, because I didn't have a constant slew of conversations to stay on top of every time I looked at the computer screen.
The problem is, so would "management," and they're the ones who do the hiring.
When was the last time a public official was 'run out of town' for doing something that made life for their constituents miserable? One thing our democracy is absolutely terrible about doing is actually holding our elected officials accountable.
I wonder how true this is. Plenty of people seem to enjoy the city life. Though I suppose if they had to work from a small apartment they're already living in that could be unpleasant.
While the city core is certainly less busy (and many of my favorite restaurants have closed there), my home neighborhood (a streetcar suburb) is being revitalized. There are at least 5 new bars/coffee/food places that have opened up within walking distance and they seem to be doing healthy business.
When commuters weren't riding the LIRR the LIRR was complaining about how they'd go out of business if people weren't riding it. We exist to ride transit, transit doesn't exist to get us where we want to go.
On the other hand public transit companies don't get excited at all if you miss work because the bus didn't show up. I ride the bus most days and fortunately I am near the end of the line because frequently we get a minibus instead of a bus and the minibus fills up leaving passengers abandoned on the side of the road. You have no voice, they don't care. Loyalty only gets you so far. People exit by taking their car. This video points out the complete lack of a customer service attitude that causes public transit to languish
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3yXSD2O95E
If your car broke down at least your car dealer would pretend to care.
When public transit works well, you see it more as a network of fixed routes than as catching individual vehicles. You show up at a stop, and the system takes you close to your destination. If you miss a bus/tram/train, the next one is probably not too far behind. If you miss a connection, the system may suggest you another route.
The US is full of medium-density cities that don't work well. Population density is high enough that traffic gets bad if most people drive, but it's simultaneously low enough that public transit is only viable on most popular routes.
I had no problem with the reliability of the bus before the pandemic (got an electric bus instead of a minibus) but the bus company in Tompkins has never really recovered. For a while we had people advocating the Utopian idea of letting everybody ride the bus for free, it seems to have become a reality by accident because the fare collecting machines have broken and haven’t been fixed.
“That’s all this is about. Your local government officials are pressuring CEOs to get butts in seats and your bosses want to walk around the office feeling like a God again watching their peons slave away in terrible conditions.”
Uuuuuugh the second point is so tired. But the first point is interesting… IF it’s true. Is there any evidence of this? Are local governments putting some kind of pressure on companies to go back to the office? I doubt there’s much to it, given the rest of this article turned out to be ranting.
the news didn't mention about pressure directly, but mayor and interest groups are happy about back-to-office.
My primary point was over open offices and how disrespected engineers are as knowledge workers that need a quiet environment in order to perform successfully, as most of you seemed to pick up on. Maybe I should have focused on that more as indeed not everyone needs to commute very far for instance. But I sure as hell am never going back to an open office pit of despair.
Now it being rejected more and more. I feel it’s like it’s generational.
Aesthetically, it's way better. There was a huge emphasis in the 90s and 00s to reimagine what an office looked like, to get away from stuffy fabric, burnt coffee, and dull colors.
It turns out that y'all were right about most of that stuff, but a few things (like visual/audible distractions) were made worse.
The coders defeated it by going remote, and wearing headphones. "Headphones are the new office door." Their walls of huge monitors replaced the cube walls. ;-)
Open offices were rationalized by "collaboration," but engineering is inherently collaborative, and engineers were not consulted.
In a department that I worked in, the coders went "virtual remote" by forming a protective silo and discouraging "distraction." Although, they still had lunch with the rest of us.
The funny thing is that in a recent thread about digital nomads, pictures of people crowded together in coffee shops, sitting elbow to elbow at their laptops, sparked the reaction: "Those people can't really be working, or maybe they're not really techies."
I personally think that what the new normal looks like is still unknown, if one even emerges.
Coffee shops are, in my experience, quite a bit quieter then open offices and less distracting too.
I would honestly prefer going to a coffee shop to work then a "open office", but also I am really thankful that I don't have to do either.
1. In a coffee shop almost no-one comes to me uninvited to ask a question about my work or our product that will create a 30 minute interruption
2. The background noise in a coffee shop has not relation to the product/company I work for this it becomes much more similar with the wind or rain - our brains can really adapt and ignore it
While in open office the flow can be interrupted by a friendly face passing by and waving, by someone speaking out loud about a project related to what you are working on or by someone drawing a diagram of something you know. In a sense all these are picking your attention as they are related to your interest.
But more important is that in a coffee place 99% of time you pick your interruption: ordering something or chatting with someone while in an open office the distraction comes at random times.
!? I've been working in offices for 40 years and "a door" has always been the gold standard. For a long time it was one of the reasons to work at Microsoft.
But since around 1992 if I wanted a door I had to work at home.
Doors are super high value, especially when used properly. And that often means managing door state:
Open = available, come on in!
Closed = while others can knock, or say a quiet word to interrupt.
Wearing headphones for decades all the time isn't great for your ears. Plus your ears can sweat, headphones are one more thing you need to keep track of, especially with the agile desk/flexible desk penny pinching spreading like wildfire.
There are many valid reasons to want offices.
So I have to dedicate a whole room..
Open offices can be implemented in sensible ways. Some companies had gorgeous open plans with people in decently large islands still having space for themselves while being not so far from colleagues, with enough space between the islands to not hear everything the neighboring islands are doing. And then you had all other areas where you'd find a quiet corner to isolate if you really need to. I think that was the original pitch for the idea ?
But of course those were super expensive, the luxurious space became cramped as more employees join and the offices aren't getting bigger, people wanting quiet places moved to emergency stairs and archival rooms etc.
All things considered, I don't think people argue against the fundamental idea of open spaces, they just don't believe companies care enough or would resist cost cutting, making them horrible call center level hellscapes in the long run.
I would even blame cities before companies, but these feels like blaming both all companies and none of them. the cities fault would be horrible traffic and delays moving from home to work, cause by all the companies having similar working hours
If the employees seriously think they've been wronged they can sue for damages.
Being in a suboptimal situation is no excuse for not getting out of it.
Of course, whoever control the office space probably thinks least space per developer is optimal.
Um - not all. A number of people use public transportation. Some walk to the office. I chose a home location close to a subway station that gets me downtown with a 25-minute commute if necessary - not that I have needed it since I do work from home :)