Hacker News Reader

Comment by ath3nd | Hacker News Reader

Who would win:

- literally 100s of publications showing how disruptive and destructive to focus it is to be working in an open office work and how much distractions it brings:

https://theconversation.com/returning-to-the-workplace-heres...

https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-truth-about-open-offices

https://www.businessdit.com/distraction-work-statistics/

https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/minds-business/eve...

https://juliety.com/effects-of-distractions-at-work

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/11/why-open-offi...

- A bunch of extroverts who just can't wait to tell you what they did over the weekend. Backed, of course, by C-level dudes who simply can't bring themselves to believe work can be done if they PERSONALLY can't see you at your desk working.

View on HN

Who wins? The CFO and corp real estate people (correctly) saying how much more expensive (and less flexible to changing team size) a building with enough private offices is.

Good news! They can let the coders work from home and massively cut down the amount spent on insurance, office space, and furniture!

Weirdly, that's not popular with the decision making extroverts either...

Or the friends of the C-suites who own all that real estate for some reason

They don't necessarily need to be big offices. It's just that corporations generally do seating based on seniority and status, not need. They have tiny cubes for worker bees and giant private offices for the queens.

Even small offices require more costly building materials than large cubicles. So even a high density might still be somewhat expensive. Fortunately, there are opportunities for cheaper commercial real estate these days, so someone has the opportunity to try something new.

> They have tiny cubes for worker bees [...]

Not sure if you're on the same page as this conversation.

Open offices don't really have cubicles.

Cube farms aren't really much better for programming work than true open-plan offices.

The article is about the split between "office with door" and "not that", not specifically open-plan offices, so talking about cube farms is absolutely valid.

What on earth are you talking about. No one is debating true offices are superior but a full height cube is about infinitely better than open office. Cubes are sound insulating, they're quiet, they're more spacious than open office. You have storage and three to three and a half walls. The only physical distraction is caused by people walking past the opening. It's not just possible, but quite likely to eliminate outside movement from your field of view.

I'll admit that plenty of cube farms are really just open offices in lipstick but true cube farms are far superior to open offices.

I worked for a few years in the full-height kind, and a few years in the lipstick kind. The full-height cube was awesome, I had as much privacy as I really needed but the barrier to interruption was just low enough that people weren’t afraid to come ask a question.

I think cube farms are substantially better than open office plans. I simply cannot function in an open office layout, but I can in a cube farm, albeit at the cost of productivity and the level of thinking I can accomplish.

Open plans have visual and auditory distractions. Cubicles with decent walls at least eliminate the visual distractions. On the other hand, glass-walled offices might have decent soundproofing but have the distraction of people constantly walking by.

There's also the question of form vs. function. A lot of people in leadership care a great deal about the workspace looking "modern" and care less about it being effective for the people working in it.

cubes have all the disadvantages of open plan offices and none of the advantages of private rooms. i prefer open-plan offices over cubes.

Having worked in both environments, cubicles are quieter. They also have much less visual distraction.

We have a floorplan with offices of all sizes. (Ok, the biggest ones are like a mini open space - mostly used by flexdesk people who come in only from time to time).

It was more expensive, but we have zero issues with seat allocation. We don't force it and make teams always sit together. People are free to choose and switch their places, so often a project is spread across several offices and mixed with other projects.

I think it's certainly superior to having an open space.

So you're saying programmers' time is not expensive enough?

It's probably closer to the outputs (and differences in output) not being measurable enough.

I had a private office setup in one place. It was phenomenal and by far the best work environment (physical and otherwise) I've ever had.

The biggest problem was: we couldn't double the size of the team without it being a half-year leasing and construction project. So, we'd sawtooth among "far too much space and lots of pent-up hiring; a Goldilocks zone; out of space; hiring freeze; lease/construct offices; loop".

My office now is whatever I want to do with my house. That's also good for heads-down work (and obviously for the commute), but terrible for collaborative whiteboard design work.

> but terrible for collaborative whiteboard design work.

Not at all.

If you think so, maybe try switching jobs to non-remote and let someone fine with virtual whiteboarding take your role on.

In my experience, there is nothing like being in a room with a team. There is something about the physicality of presence, the way the communication has both lower latency (because it is not intermediated by electronics) and higher bandwidth (because in person even things like the way someone shifts in his shoes or his eyelid quivers is information).

I have worked remotely for a significant portion of the past few decades. I work remotely. I anticipate working remotely for the remainder of my career. I enjoy working remotely. But working in-person has some real advantages. I just don’t believe that they outweigh the disadvantages.

Similar here. I expected to hate working remotely when my company decided to switch. It turns out that I love it overall once through the adaptation period (for individuals and for the company).

Even with that, I think there is an optimal number of times per year to get the team together in one physical space and that number is probably somewhere in the one to three range, but by my estimation it sure isn't zero.

I agree communication is better when everyone is present. If a remote team was required to be available that would solve most of the problems. It’s about the culture of WFH which currently assumes slow async responses.

That's a cultural thing. All my remote colleagues are present and responsive. I certainly do not think it's a healthy assumption.

WFH does not imply async.

Timezones do.

Ive always been very surprised at companies that want in-office but then spread the workforce across a handful of timezones

My new year resolution is to never do remote work at my next job. I wanna be that guy known for being always there, at his job, doing what he's paid to do.

This has seriously diminishing returns.

If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is around to hear it, did it fall?

If your the only one at work, did you work? Are you going to optimize to others view of your work habits or are you going to optimize to outcomes?

outcomes trumps all, however, I learned the hard way, as most of us do, that optics play a role.

You can be known for always being there, at your job, doing what you're paid to do, and still work remote. Just be there, at your job, doing what you're paid to do.

Fair enough. But I just can't replace real human interaction with remote communication. I just can't. Same way I could never get in a long distance relationship with someone. I need to be in the same room as them and look them in the eye when I'm explaining something to them. I actually like the 2-5 minutes of chit chat in the common kitchen every morning, talking about where my colleague went skiing that weekend.

And I am an introvert.

> But I just can't replace real human interaction with remote communication. I just can't.

That's entirely fair. You work best in a particular sort of arrangement, just as others work best in other sorts of arrangements. Nobody is wrong here.

For sure, I was just describing it the way I frame it for myself. I'm not gonna judge people who prefer to do nothing but remote

Honest question because I'm curious. What is your definition of an introvert and how do you know you are one?

Since GP has replied, I'll now add: I think of the divide as "extroverts gain energy from group social interactions; introverts lose energy during group social interactions".

IMO, it's not shy vs open, as my wife is on the shy side but clearly extroverted, while I'm more visibly/apparently comfortable but I find it exhausting to be in groups for a long period of time.

I don't care to be in the center of attention I guess and I'm very comfortable with silence.

When I socialize with friends typically 1h is enough.

I don't "collect" friends. I only get close to people when it makes sense. I am not socially inept however, just selective

Not sure why this is down voted. A decent virtual whiteboard can be better than physical. No more chicken-scratch text labels, plenty of pre-drawn widgets to drop in, easily shuffle things around, sticky arrows, everyone can have a different color pointer, etc. The learning curve is a bit higher than physical, yet worth the pain.

Also, no judgement about attire, eye contact, stance, or demands to stay during a fire alarm ("it's just a drill!").

Shame that Slack killed Screen Hero. Perhaps the founder's Pop.com effort will catch on.

I've been working remotely for most of my career and I intend to keep doing so, but if a "decent" virtual whiteboard can do that, I've yet to see it. FigJam, Miro, etc. all seem to be technically fine but unable to come up with flows that are as clearly obvious for collaboration as "two people standing there at a whiteboard". I can use all these tools quite effectively (I've got a LucidChart tab open right now) for solo use or semi-independently with close colleagues on the same board, but attempting to add other people creates chaos and a mess over the conference bridge because the affordances are so different from what people want out of rapid, high-bandwidth low-worrying-about-the-color-of-the-rectangle idea swapping.

Though I disagree with them and with you--I downvoted that post for its writer being a jerk, not for being subjectively wrong. "If you think virtual whiteboards maybe aren't very good you should give somebody else your remote job" is "man, shut up" territory.

When people are in a room you can have multiple voice conversations at once. When you are remote, you cannot. I know you can replace voice side channels with text, but this is a lossy proposition.

Turn-taking in general is better in person due to high bandwidth channels for nonverbal communication.

I say all of that as an autistic person who has trouble with all kinds of tacit communication (it may be that I have studied it so much in order to fit in that I really notice it), so yes there are downsides to being in person (I can pretend to make eye contact on a video), but I'm talking here about why the average developer or product person might have good reason to prefer in-person for a two pizza meeting.

Nice whiteboarding app affordances are great, but the low effort of onboarding to a physical whiteboard also encourages broader participation.

> A decent virtual whiteboard can be better than physical.

Interesting. I honestly assumed that virtual whiteboarding was universally considered worse than physical whiteboarding, purely because it is amongst everyone I've worked with.

It's interesting to learn otherwise.

> Not at all

The arrogance required to tell someone that their experience is false is something I have trouble wrapping my head around.

> The arrogance required to tell someone that their experience is false is something I have trouble wrapping my head around.

It's my least favorite thing about HN, but it's one of the opiates of the internet. Alternate phrasing like "not in my experience" might be slightly better.

I still think "downvote to grey" is a regression vs. simply letting popular comments be voted higher.

It's human nature to think that our personal experience and worldview is representative of the general population, even though it almost never actually is. It's a thing we have to consciously be on guard about.

"We tend to mistake the limits of our vision for the limits of the world."

If you allow the misperception to take hold, it's a short step to concluding that anyone who isn't like you is weird or wrong in some way.

When the execs of tech companies are still able to make several orders of magnitude more money than any of the programmers they employ, and their companies are able to make profits in the trillions, with a t, no; programmers' time is not priced appropriately for the amount of productivity we enable.

This doesn’t follow, at least not without a lot more analysis. The biggest tech companies have tens of thousands of engineers make anything from low 6-figures to low 7-figures. That’s a huge salary burden that dwarfs exec compensation. Systematically paying more could easily outstrip revenues if leadership is wrong about predicting the future, which would lead to either salary cuts or layoffs, neither of which is well received. And are you saying engineers deserve most of the value because they wrote the code? What about other functions, what do they deserve? These aren’t easy questions to answer. But the reality is we don’t have to because hiring is a market. You get paid what you negotiate. This is the same for execs as it is for worker bees, the only difference is the value of your skills according to whoever is holding the purse strings.

Thankfully there is nothing at all but entrenched competition preventing you from leaving and becoming one of those execs on your own.

This very website is here to help you achieve this dream.

The delta in your compensation to theirs is the effective price that you are willing to pay to not bother with that hassle.

It's not unusual if it takes 20 years for a software developer in the Bay Area to produce output equal in value to a 2-bedroom condo. Skimping on office space is not some kind of miserly bean-counting. Software development is just not all that valuable compared to Tier 1 urban real estate.

Real estate in the Bay Area is high valued because of it being a downstream stop on the trickle down of VC money being blasted everywhere by idiots in to a captive market.

AI does not need real estate, I wonder how hard they will battle it.

Well it needs server rooms but it is not office space in the city centers, maybe office space in city centers will be turned all out into server rooms.

Last time I checked, the data on offices vs cubes came down as offices being the same price or even slightly cheaper.

Cubes and open offices enable communication with people which companies value more than absolute productivity. Sure your best people get less done, but they often enable someone else to get more work down - or that is their claim.

That claim is dubious at best. I'm old enough to remember when devs had actual offices, and the amount of communication (even serendipitous communication) was the same as with any other sort of arrangement.

Second this. To be more concise the groups I was in had a norm where you'd leave your door open if you were down to chat or BS. Cubes take that choice away.

A lot of the popularity of open plans is driven by rapid hiring. When you are already large (think 2015 google/meta) and growing 50%/year it is very hard to manage the space for teams. Fixed offices make it nearly impossible.

“I can’t back it up with data, I just know I’m right “ of course

Yet people still make arguments based off the conceit that a profit motive means businesses act like rational hive minds.

You can actually act rationally on fake, imagined and fraudulent data.

I have an office with a nice, heavy door. I don't often close it, but just knowing that it's there and that I can close if I want to is a comforting thought. That said, I think if I did always close it, I'd be more productive by a significant margin....

idk who wins, but I'd assume extroverts need a quiet environment to be able to focus as much as anyone else.

Blaming extroverts/introverts is a red herring - it’s down to the nature of the work.

Whether they’re introverts or extroverts a programmer’s job tends to require a lot of solo focus. There’s collaborative aspects of course but it always requires windows of deep work that are deeply frustrated by distraction, introvert or not.

Many other areas of work (including much work in upper management) don’t require that focus. The work is often deeply collaborative and communicative, and it‘s work that can be dropped and picked up on a dime and iterated on without much loss of productivity. In a way it’s work that actively benefits from a “distracting” environment, because it’s often full of rapid-fire blockers best resolved by grabbing someone nearby.

The friction comes from the fact that the people who do either type of work don’t understand the other type if their whole career has only involved one type.

Most programmers understand the aspects of upper management work you described in my experience. And most upper managers choose to work in separate offices.

I wonder why...

Not if they have people facing roles. In that case their job IS talking to other people. Sure, they need to prepare, but the higher up they are, the more of that preparation is done by assistants.

The extroverts are always struggling to get conference room bookings. They'd be able to converse a lot more freely by just inviting people to their always-available offices.

The asshats holding the bags of money, obviously

Bingo!

> A bunch of extroverts who just can't wait to tell you what they did over the weekend and a bunch of C-level dudes who can't believe work can be done if they PERSONALLY can't see you at your desk working.

The sight of people in an open office plan is merely an expensive therapy session for these guys

Nothing more therapeutic than the sight of your worker bees, stuffed together in the noisy hive, making you dough.

Lord knows many of them hate their families.

Workaholism is a self soothe for those who should consider divorce.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com