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Comment by Macha | Hacker News Reader

> “In the old days of office working, people realised that if you put everyone in the same room with no sound-proofing, it was all unpleasant and you didn’t have a very productive workforce,” he said.

Did they? The trend I've seen my entire career has been finding new ways to pack more people into less space, damn the drawbacks. To the point that a common theme on here is lamenting the death of cubicles.

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> lamenting the death of cubicles.

I’m too young to have worked in cublicles but man, each time I see pictures of them, I don’t get why they were so unpopular. I’ve never had so much room for my stuff and so much privacy during my career in open-spaces (except of course WFH).

I’m amazed at how nobody understands that open-spaces are awful to do a job that requires focusing.

I think the reaction is in comparison to having a private office. Though truth be told, everywhere I've worked with offices, the norm has always been open door policy unless you were on the phone or otherwise needed some privacy or maybe heads down time. It was never typical for people to go the day with their door shut and would have been remarked on.

From 1997-2001 I worked in a glorious place where everyone had an office with a door and a window. Indeed, the doors were mostly open, but they opened onto corridors, meaning it was [by overwhelming] default quiet in the offices.

I worked for a very small company for almost 10 years. For about half that time I had a spacious office that overlooked a river. From a scenery perspective even better than my home office which is nicely appointed but doesn't have much of a view although it's in the country.

I have the same experience. Where I worked the offices were 2-person offices, and this worked very good for mentor-student environment, or when 2 ppl had to crack a really tough nut. The doors were also mostly open, and the corridors were quiet and peaceful. If you wanted to chitchat etc you would walk to the social area with a coffee machine, the lunch setup etc.

It was really nice, and if I ever have to go back to an office, this is how I would like it to be again. Otherwise I continue my working from home.

I think at the time they were mostly perceived as a downgrade from individual or duo offices that office workers may have expected at the time. Coming from the bullpen offices we have now cubicles are great, coming from having a room with a door you can close and window to outside they are strictly worse.

A lot of this is obviously perceived prestige too, but degrees of (mostly unstated) prestige have always been part of the compensation packages of white collar professionals.

As someone who worked in old fashioned cubicles for over 10 years, I think the prestige was definitely part of it. Outside of executive suite, as I recall it, very few offices had windows. In fact, more cubicles probably had some natural light than most offices did.

> nobody understands that open-spaces are awful to do a job that requires focusing.

The people making the decisions don’t have jobs that require this level of focus, and can’t even imagine what a job like that is like (or at worst, they just want the geeks to stop complaining and deal with it, because if you really were that smart you’d be the boss making the decisions).

> The people making the decisions don’t have jobs that require this level of focus

Most of the time they either have their own office, or work from home. Thus not feeling the pain of the open floorplan setup.

You’re missing the point. It’s that the type of work they do does not require hours of deep focus. They’re doing things like having calls, sending emails, and making PowerPoints. All of that are things that happen in short bursts and aren’t affected by lack of prolonged focus.

If there’s one thing people on HN need to realize about this topic, it’s that not everyone has the same type of job and therefore the impact of RTO is very different depending on the job.

The great irony is that open-space offices (or cubicle'd spaces) were to preserve flexibility in case one wanted to use the space for something other than offices in the future. Now that we actually need that flexibility to convert those offices into residential space, we're told it's impossible so none of the flexibility ever mattered anyway.

They know this quite well.

What you are arguing about is if they care enough to do something about it.

At some point our society-breaking universal presence of principal agent problems is going to break our society. It's absurd that it didn't already, and people have been observing that absurdity been absurd for some good 50 years at minimum. But assuming the problem doesn't exist this late on the game is hard-core cognitive dissonance.

Things have gone through cycles. In the early 80s when I interviewed with Boeing everyone except managers were in big open rooms with desks. The company I ended up working for, everyone had offices.

Then there was the high-wall cubicle phase. More recently things have gone through variants of open and semi-open plan.

The nice thing about cubicles were their abilities to absorb sound. That made headphones optional. Conversations in the next cube could be had that kept the noise down to a minimum for the neighbors.

But also, and you had a semi-permanent place to do work. So you could effectively show some personality on the walls, if you wanted. One person was learning Mandarin at the time and had a poster of common characters -- which was cool.

I went to work for an open concept that exposed concrete for a couple of years. It was very anti worker. Conversations 2 rows over were heard clearly as it would reflect off the concrete. There was always a constant level of noise in the environment. Most people just brought in headphones when they wanted to buckle down and work.

They did and it's been known for a while. That wasn't lost on the productivity side of the equation. The other side is the cost side. The cost side often won out.

Peopleware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Project... was first published back in '87 and had a long list of references back then on previous studies.

> The cost side often won out.

I was in two offices in the past decade where they renovated an office to make it more open. Other than burning down a budget in one case, the renovations had no purpose other than opening up the office. They didn’t even make room for more people

Workers did. Management didn’t. Or maybe they did, because they kept their private offices.

There was no suggestion that anything was done about it. Had to consider the cost of space vs headcount growth vs loss of productivity. Anecdotally, I never had a problem with open office environments, but understand why they suck.

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