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Comment by ProxCoques | Hacker News Reader

On the meeting room thing: I worked in an office a number of years ago where the name of the person who booked the meeting (and its time/duration) was shown on a small touch screen by the door.

To start the meeting, that person (or their proxy) had to swipe the screen with their badge. If the swipe had not been completed after 10mins, the room would become free and accept anyone's swipe to start that meeting. Their name would then be displayed for the same duration as the original.

The kicker was that after the 10mins (and if no swipe), the system would send an email to ALL EMPLOYEES saying "Room XYZ, booked by [name of culprit], is now free".

To this day I still fondly think of the genius of the person who got that system approved!

View on HN

"Room XYZ, booked by [name of culprit], is now free"

"Dear All, there will be a 5 minute silence to commemorate the untimely passing of [name of culprit] over the weekend"

Room XYZ was innocent!

Personally the local coffee shop has always been the best meeting room. Don't have a local coffee shop? Move offices

haha, many years ago when I worked in a large office the three meeting rooms where constantly busy so my team would grab a laptop and pop down the road to the pub for our meetings.

Much harder to justify on the expenses claims report :-)

these days

The pub lunch is the thing I miss most about my first job.

Every Friday almost the entire office would decamp down to a local pub for lunch and a pint or two.

The quality of the food was always very hit-or-miss (unless we went down the king's arms*, but that was seen as a bit pricey and fancy), and for many places if there were too many of us would get arsey for not booking ahead.

But it was a great opportunity to just hear what everyone was up to and have a good chat in an unstructured way.

I don't know if it's changing attitudes over the past 20 years, the particular companies I found myself at, the price of going to the pub, but it hasn't really been a thing at any of my places since.

Now with WFH of course there is a complete absence of unstructured conversation. Every meeting has a purpose, every interaction there's something someone has in mind they want from the conversation.

And while it's not impossible to chit chat still, it is impossible to overhear chit-chat, which is an underappreciated thing.

Overheard conversations are a gold mine of knowledge sharing, many an interesting idea has come about because, "I couldn't help but overhear...".

Now don't get me wrong, I don't want to suffer an hour long commute for that benefit, the cost-benefit skews all wrong. But I would like if everyone lived a 5 minute walk from the office.

* might have been the king's head, memory plays tricks.

I am Deaf. I never ever have overheard anything. That's a serious handicap if there are many people thinking random unstructured conversation is important.

I'm sure most people would agree that deafness is a serious handicap.

> a complete absence of unstructured conversation

So you replaced "watercooler talk" with "beercooler" talk. Sounds enlightened.

It's the lack of "watercooler talk" due to WFH that I'm referring to. The whole post wasn't just about the pub, it segued into what's missing from WFH.

Sorry if I sounded sarcastic. That was not my intention.

Living a 5 minute walk from the office is how most humans have lived throughout history, and what most of Europe’s most pleasant cities to live in were designed to support.

I know tech changes things, but if I had to guess, the era we just lived through was the weird one, and living a 5 minute walk away from work and amenities is the norm we’ll revert back to the moment that tech adequately supports it.

> Overheard conversations are a gold mine of knowledge sharing, many an interesting idea has come about because, "I couldn't help but overhear...".

Not only that, but looking back on my early career I feel I learned a shedload just by sitting in an office surrounded by people older than me talking about work, about life, etc. I learned what was acceptable, what not, how people handled issues that arose, how to basically operate in the world of "work" in a wider sense. None of that would be possible now. Not that I'm pro working from offices - but something will change because of it long-term.

BTW this also reminds me about office printers back in the day (circa 1998 this was). They ALWAYS had a massive pile of uncollected printouts around them. I learned so much from just rifling through stuff there. Emails, always emails (who prints emails? loads of people apparently) with stuff about other employees, clients, costs, money, opinions. Then there was PowerPoint printouts too - projects you didn't know where happening, kite flying of all kinds. I know the words "gold mine" are a cliche, but until they had "secure printing" systems, this was my world.

If you use Slack, occasionally take a look at the channel list sorted by "most recently created".

If you're an admin on Slack, you'll know that upwards of 75% of all channels on a given system are private.

While I love working from coffee shops, one thing I really get grumpy about is people taking meetings out loud. If you're taking a meeting from a quiet corner while not disturbing others, it's fine. What drives me up the wall is people sitting at a large community table or sitting in the vicinity of many others and speaking loudly. It's elementary common sense to not do that. Mercifully, it doesn't happen too many times. (I'm located in Belgium; so the real-estate is usually small in coffee shops.)

Most of the officers I’ve been in in Melbourne I like that. But you know what’s even better? Not having meetings in an office at all.

Meetings on video calls are a hell twice as bad as meeting rooms.

Not a chance! Maybe you need a better setup? Or perhaps you haven’t had to commute? Or deal with office aircon? Or hot desking?

I much prefer video meetings. Being face-blind, logging onto a meeting has the added benefit of seeing people's names under their little images - no more trying to guess who's saying what! [1]

[1] Except for those people who go to a meeting room and (eventually!) join the meeting as a group; those people remain the bane of my working life.

> [1] Except for those people who go to a meeting room and (eventually!) join the meeting as a group; those people remain the bane of my working life.

That and the crappy microphone in the meeting room preventing me from understanding half of what the in-office group is saying.

Meta has more or less had this for many years -- besides the public shaming aspect.

I would immediately book all available rooms. How was that not instantly abused? It only works for people capable of feeling shame.

Because most people are trying to uphold some baseline of professionalism and aren't actively seeking to make the lives of the people around them harder?

Counterpoint: they're making everyone come into the office. That seems like the definition of making people's lives harder.

That’s the overly wealthy CEOs, and they aren’t most people, and yes, they do make people’s lives harder to a large degree.

https://xkcd.com/1499/

I'll admit, this is a great example of a workplace i'd rather be tortured than work at myself.

I imagine the email was intended as a shaming tactic.

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