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Comment by wkat4242 | Hacker News Reader

Personally it's also because the office has become such a horrible place to work since the pandemic.

We've gone from fixed desks and floors divided by department to stupid flex desks where you have to drag your stuff from a locker and are sitting mixed with people you have nothing to do with whatsoever. Often noisy sales people besides ones that need to concentrate.

I used to enjoy going to the office 3 times a week. Now I officially should go 2 days but I hate it so much I rarely actually do. It's really a fancy place for management to see butts in the seats and the needs of the employees are a total afterthought.

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> We've gone from fixed desks and floors divided by department to stupid flex desks

I've also felt quite discouraged by this. Before the pandemic, our projects had a specific area in the building. Now, it's about arriving early to find a spot somewhere in the building, often far from team members. But it's a catch-22 because the whole team agrees to work from the office, to prove space isn't wasted.

> you have to drag your stuff from a locker

I (fixed desk) only get notices with a picture of how my desk should look like, and in that picture it looks like nobody works there. Granted, I'm a bit messy, but the standard I'm expected to follow is just bleak and sterile.

are you expected to pack everything at the end of the day and ... unpack when you arrive?

Funny how we keep inventing more terrible ways to work. I remember when walled cubicles were seen as hopeless, dreary work existence compared to those nice private offices. No way it could be worse than cubicles! Then wall-less cubicles were invented and there was no way it could be worse than that. Then we moved to the open-office hell where we had to work in an environment similar to a Wall Street trading pit, and surely at that point, we hit rock bottom. Now we have hot-desking where you don't even get your own seat. I'm sure this is the worst possible way to work that will ever be invited....

Agreed. Although it does not have to be that way. We could have a physical, post-pandemic office that addresses your concerns (e.g. quiet zones, pods for calls, etc)

Oh we have quiet desks with huge cubicle walls and pods for calls.

But what's the point in coming to the office to sit in a pod or isolation cubicle all day?

What I liked was that our floor had its own atmosphere. Where people understood the needs of IT work and respected our conversations (eg headset on = leave me alone). That's all gone now with these hippie flex offices.

I don't see how the office could be made productive again with flex desking. It wasn't like the old office was perfect, there was already a huge reduced productivity from the late 90s when people had actual offices where you could close the door. It was already pretty poor with the large open spaces but it's now been ruined completely.

I am offended. How is this hippie? Hippie would be respecting solitude and trying to give everyone what they want. This is just some kind of neoliberal bullshit that fits the narrative of "leaders".

A bunch of hippies opened my public high school in the 70s. There were no interior walls, just classroom areas. It was reportedly a giant mess. Thankfully walls were installed by the time I went, but many classrooms didn’t have doors, and some classrooms needed to use other classrooms to get to them. It was quite distracting at times.

I won't say that it's impossible, but I will say that I'm skeptical.

Let's say I'm in the quiet zone and someone wants to have an online meeting with me. What do I do now? Run to the nearest pod? What if they are all taken, do I take the call in the hallway? Do I go to the not-quiet zone and have my meeting surrounded by people participating in other meetings, or even worse, participating in the same meeting introducing a sub-second delay? And how comfortable are these pods anyway, are they good enough for meeting back-to-back? Because if I'll stay in the pod all day I might as well stay home.

I believe you can have comfortable working places (essentially offices with doors that close) that will be expensive OR cheap shared desks that optimize space but accentuate distractions. I don't think you can have a cheap, distraction-free environment, but I'm open to be proven wrong.

They have focus rooms at my work and they are almost always taken by someone for a whole day. There are other non-reservable office type rooms but crappy people sit in them all day too…despite signs saying not to.

I despise flex desk policies. Not being able to feel like it's "my" spot, that I can organize how I want, is giving me anxiety. Sharing dirty keyboards and mouses, and not finding back my chair adjustments also gives me anxiety!

Yeah, if I had my own seat in small office with my teammates like pre-COVID, I would probably visit the office at least 3 days a week. But what we have instead is a massive open office full of flex desks. There is absolutely nothing attractive about the whole place, not even fancy coffee machines. I would just waste 30 mins of my life getting there.

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