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Comment by sevensor | Hacker News Reader

What amazes me about this phenomenon and so many others is just how long the executive class are willing to stick with a counterproductive trend. RTO, open offices, development methodologies that disempower the developers, devops without people who understand ops, databases without dbas, Business Intelligence in basically every flavor. The unoriginality and lack of independent thought are striking. It’s as if they would rather fail doing the conventional thing than risk failure by doing something different.

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>What amazes me about this phenomenon and so many others is just how long the executive class are willing to stick with a counterproductive trend. RTO, open offices,

The issue is that executives and managers don't see it as counterproductive because there's no compelling business evidence out there to change their mind.

Instead, here's what people actually see...

Microsoft of 1990s brags about their programmers having real offices with a door. But the later Google startup with "counterproductive" open offices beats them on a search engine and mobile phone. Microsoft's newer campuses are now open office.

Fog Creek Trello had blogs with photographs of their offices for the developers explaining all the great benefits... but they also stumble and eventually get acquired by the open-office Atlassian.

Where are all the business cases of the closed-office-with-doors beating out the unproductive-distraction-chaos-open-offices?!? Can't think of one? There lies your problem.

The person who wrote this thread's article, Maria Konnikova -- is a journalist and book author -- and not a tech CEO who bet her company's productivity on a running a dev shop with private offices. That is why executives don't listen to her and are not swayed by articles like this.

If we want to get rid of open offices, it has to be done with real businesses and not magazine articles.

Microsoft was tearing apart competitors (many of whom used cubicles for the lack of open landscape trend then) for good first couple decades. Reason they were sidelined by GOOG is being oblivious to the Web. Which is honestly more a leadership problem than office space problem.

This just reinforces that most business leaders follow what the lucky top end does and don't actually have anything else to contribute. It sounds like ample evidence to get rid of most of them, or at least move their pay/bonuses lower.

Google fooled everyone. We all thought the bean bag chairs and foosball tables and 5-gallon pails of M&Ms caused massive surges in creativity and productivity. In reality, it was a firehose of advertising money that paid for it all.

> But the later Google startup with "counterproductive" open offices

Following your own logic Google execs would have surely read "compelling business evidence" available at that time, and implemented real offices

GP isn't saying that there is evidence that open offices work. GP is saying that execs want such evidence. Way back when Google was young its execs thought outside the box, so it's no surprise that they didn't copy what MSFT was doing.

Wait, so now there are thinking-outside-the-box-execs who don’t need any evidence, and regular-gimme-evidence-execs who do?

Yes, but only in young startups. Once the companies earnings go beyond a certain point they get MBAs for executives.

Management performance measurement depends on KPIs. KPIs that don't look vague depend on measurability and/or visibility. Code isn't measurable. Functionality sort of is but it's too vague. Visibility often amounts to having a room full of people that you can see working. As a technical product manager, who uses a set of tools that make my work measurable, I don't have much incentive to make the team visible by putting them in a room with tables and no dividers. Managers who were never coders, and who therefore are flying blind when they say progress is being made are the ones that need a KPI dashboard and an open office.

The quest for measurability is also driving fake agile. The real measurement of agile is right in the manifesto, but if you can't read the code, you can't measure.

This. It's not (at least mostly) a power trip. It's mostly about control. They don't know how to control what they can't measure, and they don't want to have to trust people who can see what the manager cannot.

Agile... I've seen a good agile environment ruined in exactly that way. There is an "impedance mismatch" with upper management, because upper management wants their usual progress reports and burn-down charts, and wants them in the normal terms, and agile doesn't produce those... unless there's someone who has that as a part of their job on the agile team.

Devs are expensive. Of course management wants to measure what they produce. It's a hard problem. There are no magic solutions yet.

Many of those executives believe in the trend because they would like the noisy office environment. You can tell those executives because they are never in their office except for private meetings - if they are not in a private meeting they are wandering the halls looking for someone to talk to. These people don't need an office, they need a private meeting room that can be booked on demand.

There are also executives who hate open offices. You will find them in their office with the door closed, and they don't want you to knock on the door if it isn't urgent.

It is about personality. However few people are willing to admit that others are different and that it is okay.

I've never seen anyone who is a line manager or higher with enough free time to "wander the halls looking for someone to talk to". They talk to people they pass in the hallway because building social connections is good. But their calendars are usually so fully booked they have little time to wandering.

That observation is not in conflict with anything I wrote...

You misunderstand their purpose. They would rather be in power in a failed company than see a company succeed without them having power.

This reminds me something. Ah yes, Congress. They'd rather be in power in a failed country.

“ It’s as if they would rather fail doing the conventional thing than risk failure by doing something different.”

There is the old saying “nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft/IBM”. Most people, including executives, are just following the accepted wisdom with some slight variations.

> It’s as if they would rather fail doing the conventional thing

Doing conventional thing is often expensive, requires skill, or requires organisational power to change the way things work.

Many of these counter-productive trends are the ways executives "deliver visible results" and maintain good optics after committing to something they have no means, in terms of resources, power or skill, to deliver by the book.

For example RTO is used as a short-term downsizing strategy as organisations often lack ways to monitor actual long-term impact from squeezing workers like that. BI bandaids are often applied to create visibility around certain issues (the easy part), and by extension build perception these issues are manageable, without actually solving any of them (which is the hard part).

Consider that the executive class' goals might be different from ours. They might even be in opposition to our goals.

It’s an interesting thought, and it would explain a lot, if middle management and individual contributors were much better aligned with corporate success than the executives. If whatever game they’re playing isn’t won by driving the company to success, but they’re keeping score some other way, that would explain a lot of dysfunction.

> executive class are willing to stick with a counterproductive trend. RTO, open offices,

What makes you think they actually care about productivity? It's pure narcissistic traits, they want to be able to easily waltz in and watch their wage slaves.

> development methodologies that disempower the developers, devops without people who understand ops, databases without dbas, Business Intelligence in basically every flavor.

Again, it's control. Us, with our MBAs will make far more than you, even though we contribute less than an LLM

You, with your decades of learning that we've demanded, are expendable and honestly we don't need anyone with skill doing your job.

> It’s as if they would rather fail doing the conventional thing than risk failure by doing something different.

The business just wasn't ready for their radical idea. See Adam Neumann. The difference between you and them, is that you are looking at this as work. A way to make money.

For most of these folks, they already have money. This is a game, a gamble, a way to pass the time, and to gain influence. If the company fails it's not good, but it's not the end of the world. They don't have to work and when they are bored then they can always start a new business.

> What makes you think they actually care about productivity?

I've seen at least a few economists suggest we've been living in the "post-productivity" world for a while now. Some companies are too divorced and abstracted from actual, specific products to care about marginal productivity or track it. Other companies have scaled to absurd sizes that productivity is enough guaranteed that marginal productivity boosts/detriments rarely are noticeable anywhere close to the bottom line. Employee happiness from closed door offices is a productivity rain drop against the ocean of too-easy productivity from modern software and tools and processes and abstractions and shareholder-oriented quarterly reports cultures.

> wage slaves

In the knowledge worker space, the wages are pretty nice. It's a stretch to call out "wage slaves".

If you can't quit your job because you have to pay your mortgage, then you are.

There is no middleclass. Wage slave is the correct description.

I wonder what mal-incentives drive the behavior? Any system follows its reward function. Somehow, executives and managers are personally incentivized to that behavior, despite it being apparently illogical from a strategic perspective.

> ...Business Intelligence in basically every flavor.

Ouch! That's precisely[1] what I've been working with for a quarter-century now. And for the most part, my colleagues and I have been suffering from the exact same ills. It's not as if we are the ones coming up with all this shit and inflicting it on everyone.

(For a few fleeting moments -- maybe months, at most -- I've worked in one/two/three-person offices, or in actually Agile ways, or with eager and responsive ops people or competent and cooperative DBAs... Almost never all at once, though.)

___

[1]: Well, almost precisely. Mostly DW and ETL, really, but I'm guessing to most people it's all one and the same.

Yep. It's the ancient "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" and "pick your battles" ideas. Everyone has always been amazed how powerful those can be.

Agreed, often enough these stupid "imperatives" are bad for profits, and even bad for the career of the top person who's kind of driving them.

Catch-22 is a good book to read, if you want to understand how large organizations work. You'd think it might be dated, but I'm not so sure. It's also funny.

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