The decades of evidence that open office plans are utter shit for productivity already proved that the emperor wears no clothes and they have no idea what makes for better productivity.
When I was required in the office, I would just wear headphones to avoid distractions, but I would have to deal with 2-3hrs of driving/day on top of it. This meant that my employer generally only got those 8hrs out of me, period; because I had none of my personal time to spare. Working from home, on the other hand, gives me more flexibility for meetings, to work at different hours, to be on later in the evening, to put in more time (when needed), etc; and I'm happier.
Most full of bullshit company I’ve ever worked for.
At least they bought you NC headphones; that's a LOT more than I can say about most companies. And the fact that you had a "health and wellness" budget at all.
That doesn't work for everyone. Some offices are louder than headphones and some people come around tapping your shoulders regardless.
Depending on your budget, you can block out anything short of jackhammers with either IEMs or earbuds+noise reduction earmuffs.
> and some people come around tapping your shoulders regardless
Do they expect to continue living? What monsters.
Perhaps more a personal thing but it induces a dizziness/ drowsiness with extended use. It’s fine when watching say a movie but I could never work for long periods with my ears blocked. Wonder if I’m the only 1 but I have heard of similar cases.
We have multiple big rooms now but the current CEO still has his desk out in the open. Last time I was in the office we talked about anime lol.
It didn't make cubicle farms any better though.
To be fair, cubes weren't any better. I remember having a guy slerping tea sitting across from me. I couldn't see him but I could sure hear him and there was no way for me to get up and move.
As I've said before, people here pine for private offices a lot but, in my experience, typical workplace private offices have tended to be door open by default absent private meetings/phone calls/some urgent deadline thing.
See SC Johnson HQ for one of the most famous versions of this. (https://youtu.be/yb-kYt1lpnI)
They learned their lesson from the Frank Lloyd Wright building. It's a wonderful piece of architectural history, but it's not wonderful for productivity.
He doesn't mention one of the most interesting things about that building -- the building has no square corners, everything is round (even the elevator).
Cubes, with hot-desking, is pretty great actually. IBM has it in their drop-in “business centers” for WFH employees.
In a moment of clarity the real thing about open office plans is that most times when you show up it has the vibe of a floor being fired and everyone's desk wiped clean. There are no remnants of those who are there, no photos of family or the odd dollar store fun thing that kicks around a desk, every desk is wiped clean more austere than a hospital room.
But "good" is the key there. I worked at an office in 2001 which had a cubicle system that was probably only a year or two old. The desks were wood (probably veneer) with nice big keyboard shelves, as was the style at the time. The panels were either grey metal or red fabric, and they stepped up and down so that beside your close coworker there might be only a 4' wall, and then a 6' wall to the "hallway".
Immediately after that, through an acquisition, we were in an office whose cubicles were probably from the 80s, and they were all 6' well-worn beige fabric panels, which despite being private and relatively quiet were just so ugly and energy-draining.
But to work in them is a noisy hell. I had a lawyer friend talk about how great these open offices must be to work in. So productive and dynamic he would say. But of course this is coming from a profession where having a private office is an absolute requirement.
Sometimes I just want silence. Not music, not $color noise. I also get itchy ears after wearing headphones for hours on end, and noise canceling headphones give me a headache… or, you know, I could work wherever I prefer, with little to no commute, and an office arranged how I like it.
Bumping this up a notch, I have co-workers who work together 4hrs/day on the same meeting but cannot sit together because our Zoom calls all collide when any one person is speaking. Core issue is the lack of conf rooms in a zoom-centric organization.
You've got a computer in there that you're also using for private stuff? Not tax-deductible anymore.
Private books on the bookshelf? Not tax-deductible anymore.
You've got a wardrobe with some clothes you're only accessing once per season (to store off-season clothes)? Not tax-deductible anymore.
But you just have to love how HN endorses tax fraud.
I could make a room a dedicated day-job office but it would cost me way more to do so than I would ever get as a deduction and it would almost certainly be inferior to the mixed-use setup I use.
Most decent companies will give you some money though for WFH or let you borrow stuff from the office like chairs and monitors.
While I'd love to have the financial burden of commuting/WFH be imposed on the employer instead on the workforce, that would require another labor revolution, so far I'd just be happy to have 100% WFH possibly. Internet I use anyway, and I can pay for the extra water, energy and heating by myself, the extra difference is insignificant compared to the time I save commuting to the office.
It feels like I'm thinking the Earth is the center of the universe, then watching Mars go retrograde. Something's profoundly wrong with my understanding of the world. I see two options:
1. Graeber's Bullshit Jobs. Which says that a lot of jobs are in large part about making the boss feel important, not about the assigned work.
2. Communication between leaders and workers is so bad that leaders have no idea what workers really experience in their working conditions.
I found it funny that my lockdown productivity suddenly counted for nothing.
I have friends at other companies who have been 3 days per week WFH for 2 years and really appreciate the flexibility.
My main gripe was that my manager seemed to be having mental health issues (manic over-talking and occasional hints of psychosis). WFH was what helped me last through the covid years as I could avoid her being sat near me.
I was good friends with many people there, some of us still occasionally meetup. And I hear of a steady stream of other developers leavings because they can't work from home any more. Usually it's the younger guys who just had a kid or people with long commutes.
And I gotta say stuff like that gets me even more motivated to do work cuz I know they’re catching heat from the higher ups but we’re just producing too much work for them to really complain too much.
However if you get the purpose of the meeting straight and somehow manage for everyone to properly collaborate, you'll get a 3-5min daily meeting that easily enables efficient collaboration and awareness.
Give me a meeting every day to get people to talk about blockers, but it should be 15-30 seconds per person at most, and it should be scheduled outside of productive hours (easier said than done).
Actually the only thing I dislike about stand-up is struggling to remember everything I did the previous day, then realising I've forgotten to mention one or two key things after the meeting's ended, and wondering what everyone thought about the fact I apparently did so little... (which is silly, I know, but we're all human).
What actually happens in a standup meeting tends to be a mix of:
(1) What theoretically belongs in a standup meeting, which is a meeting that should have been a kanban board plus identification of blockers that have been deferred for the standup rather than properly addressed when encountered and,
(2) tangents into discussions which should be 1:1 (this especially happens when blockers are discussed, because people want to help get them unstuck.)
The problem is therefore not with the concept of a standup, but rather with how they are usually run.
Running efficient standups, or any sort of meeting at that, is a skill.
Equally common in operations roles for the same reasons. Lots of servers and networking gear. You might be changing failed hard drives in a RAID array while someone else is patching servers while somebody else is upgrading some 20 year old Cisco firewall. None of these three people rely on the work the other is doing. Especially if they’re working in different server cabinets.
And exactly, ask that to our managers.
Manager in charge of multiple different projects because "success in organisation" == "number of people managed" regardless of whether they are being managed well or not.
Manager needs daily updates of all things going on his "team", because otherwise not have fucking clue about what manager is "managing" and clearly far too difficult for manager to read JIRA board, look at commit histories etc. Much more efficient for everyone to sit around for an hour during which they maybe have ten minutes of productive discussion.
That's actually not been the case in many teams I've worked on - but we have all been working on the same set of related products (or subset of a product). Actually the managers often weren't even in the teams. I foolishly assumed that's how most people used the term "team"...
"Meta ditches open plan office structure to bring back cubicles"
https://www.chargedretail.co.uk/2023/02/21/meta-office-space...
>Mark Zuckerberg’s firm says it is attempting to avoid returning to the cubicle culture of the 70s and 80s by introducing its own design.
>The Cube helps to asorb sound instead of reflecting and echoing it around colleague’s workspaces.
>Meta claims that its new design reduces sound levels by approximately 20 decibels.
This is BS. Either Meta is actively lying, or they really are SO clueless they've never seen cubicles in the 90s and 00s (when they were really phased out, not the 80s), and really believe somehow that cubicles were made of sound-reflecting materials. They weren't. They were made of cloth, with what I think was cardboard behind it. The cloth worked very well to absorb sound and keep the ambient noise level down. (The cardboard was to give some structure, and also so you could use push-pins/thumbtacks on them to hold things in place.)
The only thing "new" here is maybe using some kind of recycled plastic material to make the cloth. BFD.
90s/00s cubicles were a dream to work in, compared to the open offices of today. Everyone complained about them at the time because they sucked compared to walled offices with doors, but in reality, most workers never had those in the decades before. You can see photos online of engineers working in the 1950s: it was all open offices with a bunch of big desks in a grid.