Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

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The once mandatory "visitors chair" in every workspace and most people had two or three.

Folks younger than a certain age miss out knowing the social etiquette relating to visitors chairs, such as stacking "stuff" or coats on your visitor chair is anti-social and very strongly frowned upon. Also it was socially acceptable, standard even, to simply walk into someone's cube and sit down in their (visitor) chair and wait till they could talk, especially if you were (currently) working together on something.

Also "back in the old days" we had intentionally unreservable conference rooms scattered about. So if you needed 6 people on the spur of the moment you simply walked in to the nearest empty room, confident no one reserved it because it was un reservable.

This is pretty much how things were in the early 90s or so. Honestly I don't think I could handle the constant interruption and infinite distraction of an open office, which makes me think about a startup or something; I just can't imagine working in a "modern" office environment. It just sounds horrifying to productivity, like a prison yard or a doctor waiting room or something. Creeeepy.

As a parent when I need to get stuff done at home, like if I'm working at home, I kick everyone out of the room and work in peace and quiet. I never, ever, invite seven neighbor kids over and hand out toy whistles as a gift and nerf toys and then sit in the center of the maelstrom and try to concentrate. Nobody who "works at home" sneaks into a day care center with their laptop to concentrate on their finest work. There's a time and place for that kind of stuff, and its not the workplace.

Precisely. And that's still the culture in some places (Microsoft being a good example). Generally many devs will establish a rapport with folks on their team and in other parts of the company to a degree where occasional visits won't translate into wondering what needs fixing ASAP. Also, if everyone has an office then you can schedule meetings with other folks in their office, or your office. As long as it's not more than like 3 or 4 people. Or, if you're working on something and need to ruminate you go wander into a friend's office and talk about it or whatever. Though if someone has their door closed they probably don't want to be disturbed.

People who don't have experience with offices have these bizarre notions about office etiquette and collaboration. They also easily fall into post hoc / confirmation bias fallacies, where they see some positive result of collaborating in an open plan office and imagine that they would be forced to live in a world without the benefit of that spontaneous collaboration in an environment with offices. But they ignore the fact that such things very much do occur with offices, and they also ignore the opportunity cost of open plan layouts. Of conversations which don't happen because the work space is deathly quiet due to everyone trying to work, and you can't just hop into a friend's office space and close the door so you don't bother other people, as just one of many examples.

WRT "Though if someone has their door closed they probably don't want to be disturbed." there was some cultural variation but every place I worked at, as opposed to heard about, it was a huge gossip worthy social faux pas to close an office door unless there was a private managerial activity going on in the office at that moment (yelled at, review, interview, etc). You closed the door at night or when unoccupied because you had $200K of hardware prototypes and protocol analyzers and laptops literally laying around unsecured. And it was a major social faux pas to open a closed door unless you were a resident of that room. Even if you were best friends you don't just walk in, any more than you'd dig thru their filing cabinet or wallet without them present.

90s office work reminded me a lot of dorm room life and culture. Dorm culture probably hasn't changed in the past couple decades, and having dorm rooms with doors hardly eliminates all social activity; if anything it encourages it and military basic training style barracks are not considered a requirement of socialization.

Why was it a faux pas? Did people assume closed doors meant slacking off? Or was it considered rude to call/knock on someones' door, therefore rendering them inaccessible?

PS: Loved the dorm room/barracks analogy

I don't think its a generational thing so much as a self inflicted culture thing. I was in college in the mid/late 00s and being social/collaborating never suffered for us having offices (two grads to a lab/office usually). We used computer labs or the common areas instead of conference rooms but same same.

That said in addition to a mandatory visitors chair, white boards everywhere. Just fucking everywhere. Nothing seemed to help collaboration like being able to start water cooler level talk about a problem and with out even noticing transition to hashing it out on a whiteboard.

I think there is a generational gap in that some youth in general don't seem to realize most offices were not a broom closet with precisely one desk and one chair. Usually we had at least one spare table (maybe a cheap lunchroom class table, but still..) and piles of extra chairs and often a desk for the guy who quit last month and hasn't been replaced yet.

So the "old timers" get very strange questions like "what if you're in an office and need to talk to someone" where the younger people don't understand the architecture and the older people don't understand the younger people's lack of experience.

In 1995 the office I worked in had 4 desks (usually 3 empty because of flex time/remote work, meetings, collaboration, etc) and 4 chairs (again, usually 3 empty) and two big lunchroom sized folding tables and I believe six chairs crowded around the lunchroom tables. Admittedly mostly covered with these new fangled (at that time) "cisco multiprotocol router" things. So if someone walked into my office and wanted to talk, or even a moderately large team appeared at my door with pitchforks or whatever, I could and did occasionally host parties of ten plus people, like if there was an emergency and we had to config and ship out like an entire data center of routers at the same time. And yet most of the time my office was ALSO blissfully empty and silent so I could concentrate on studying release notes and design new configurations and test network designs using routers set up all over the conference tables. It was extremely flexible, and therefore extremely productive, unlike an open office.

"Back in the old days" we had huge cubes with plenty of desk space and cabinets. One time, way before all this "collab-friendly" stuff hit, some guys put masking tape on the floor of a fellow coworkers cube, with corners outlining a fairly small rectangle. When he came back and saw the tapes, he's like "What is this? Why is this tape on the floor?"

"Oh, some guys from floor support were doing that, something about the new cubicles."

"WHAT!! Where the hell am I going to put my books! This isn't enough space, blah blah blah". He was a hot head and immediately flew off the handle, much to our pleasure. Well, a year or two later, we did actually go to smaller cubes, and then a few more years later to the "open" floor plan (un-ergonomic tables with no kind of adjustments). People way to close to each other. While it does come in handy when we are discussing problems and bringing new people up to speed, I definitely think the negatives outweigh the positives. Sometimes I just don't want to be around people!

That's how interaction works with my boss. He has a couple chairs and a small bench, and I'll often go in and sit quietly until he's ready to talk. It's a good system, and without it I don't think he would be able to get anything done.

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