Open Offices Are a Capitalist Dead End (nytimes.com) 143
Strudelkugel shares an op-ed: What was We thinking? That's the only question worth asking now about the clowncar start-up known as The We Company, the money-burning, co-working behemoth whose best-known brand is WeWork. What's a WeWork? What WeWork works on is work. The We Company takes out long-term leases on in-demand office buildings in more than 100 cities across the globe (lately, it's even been buying its own buildings). [...] I've been hung up on how all this happened: How did so many people put so much money into something so many were warning would end up so badly? What was We thinking? And then it hit me: We wasn't thinking. WeWork? Not really. WeCan't! We'reTooDistracted! Much will be written in the coming weeks about how WeWork failed investors and employees. But I want to spotlight another constituency. WeWork's fundamental business idea -- to cram as many people as possible into swank, high-dollar office space, and then shower them with snacks and foosball-type perks so they overlook the distraction-carnival of their desks -- fails office workers, too.
The model fails you even if you don't work at a WeWork, because WeWork's underlying idea has been an inspiration for a range of workplaces, possibly even your own. As urban rents crept up and the economy reached full employment over the last decade, American offices got more and more stuffed. On average, workers now get about 194 square feet of office space per person, down about 8 percent since 2009, according to a report by the real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield. WeWork has been accelerating the trend. At its newest offices, the company can more than double the density of most other offices, giving each worker less than 50 square feet of space. As a socially anxious introvert with a lot of bespoke workplace rituals, I used to think I was simply a weirdo for finding modern offices insufferable. I've been working from my cozy home office for more than a decade, and now, when I go to the Times' headquarters in New York -- where, for financial reasons, desks were recently converted from cubicles into open office benches -- I cannot for the life of me get anything done. But after chatting with colleagues, I realized it's not just me, and not just the Times: Modern offices aren't designed for deep work.
The model fails you even if you don't work at a WeWork, because WeWork's underlying idea has been an inspiration for a range of workplaces, possibly even your own. As urban rents crept up and the economy reached full employment over the last decade, American offices got more and more stuffed. On average, workers now get about 194 square feet of office space per person, down about 8 percent since 2009, according to a report by the real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield. WeWork has been accelerating the trend. At its newest offices, the company can more than double the density of most other offices, giving each worker less than 50 square feet of space. As a socially anxious introvert with a lot of bespoke workplace rituals, I used to think I was simply a weirdo for finding modern offices insufferable. I've been working from my cozy home office for more than a decade, and now, when I go to the Times' headquarters in New York -- where, for financial reasons, desks were recently converted from cubicles into open office benches -- I cannot for the life of me get anything done. But after chatting with colleagues, I realized it's not just me, and not just the Times: Modern offices aren't designed for deep work.
Thank you captain obvious. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Thank you captain obvious. (Score:3, Informative)
Captain Obvious, meet Major Malfunction (Score:5, Insightful)
Cheap, yes; inexpensive, not so much. A (software) company I worked for back in the mid-1990s opened up a new office building on their campus. They'd previously had nearly everybody in 1- or 2-person offices with doors that closed, and full-height partitions between desks of shared offices. The new building might as well have been a warehouse; it was 10 floors of absolutely open, unpartitioned space. They moved eight groups from the existing buildings into the top floors of the new one (and everybody in the old buildings had solo offices again) as guinea pigs for the new building and work environment. Now, the top managers in this company were sticklers for measurement and detail; some even (quietly) called it a fetish of theirs.
But that turned out to be a bit of a blessing for the workers, especially those of us whod been moved. The company had several years worth of data on productivity and error rates for each division and department, down to the work team level (4-10 people). They could, and did, compare the data they acquired from the teams in the new building to the data from those same teams in the old buildings, and they found something profoundly disturbing. The top-performing group after the move was 6% as productive and had over 18x the error rate in production as that same group had been when theyd all had solo (or a few duo) offices. No other team had higher productivity or lower error rates. Not one.
Four months after we'd moved into the new building, they called an all-hands meeting for the entire campus. The CEO and CFO got up, explained the problem, explained why they'd fallen into the trap (basically "we screwed up; everybody's doing it and so we thought it was probably a good thing"), and announced a schedule for the groups in the new building to temporarily move down to the bottom two floors while the top half of the building was remodelled with floor-to-ceiling partitions, noise-absorbing and -diffusing fabrics and materials, and so on. In the all-hands, they pointed out that doing the entire building this way was going to make it significantly more expensive than if they'd simply built offices as in the old buildings, but that they expected to make up that difference within less than two years from recovering lost productivity and reducing the preternaturally high error rates.
The CFO also mentioned something he said he'd found in his research. The open-office plan in tech basically originated with defence contractors during WW2. They were being paid on contracts by the staff-hour, and some "misguidedly bright spark" had had the idea to push for a study on how they could maximise billed hours while still (more or less) meeting agreed deadlines, and the study found that the more (skilled or knowledge) workers were sharing a common work area, especially when mixed with support- or admin-type workers, the lower the productivity. Many contractors quickly standardised on this; it was made more plausible by the claim that "hey, we have to put up these working spaces quickly, so no time for fancy details". Since Sili Valley started with semiconductor companies (e.g., Fairchild) staffed with engineers who'd previously worked for such contractors, they (largely unknowingly) carried the warehouse-as-office-space mentality forward because that's all they'd ever really known. Half a century later, you get us crunching the numbers (and, I later found out, several other companies at about the same time with similar experiences).
Open offices are, at best, cancer for productivity and for mental health. They should be abolished, if not explicitly banned under workplace-safety-and-health laws and treaties.
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Open office (sans cubicles) plans go back way farther than that. Secretarial pools, accountants, newspaper reporters. Look at any movie from the 20s or 30s with those and you're likely to find open plan offices. "Tech", as such, wasn't a thing back then.
Re:Thank you captain obvious. (Score:4, Interesting)
I can't come up with any other explanation that makes sense from any perspective.
Re:Thank you captain obvious. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, that doesn't make sense either. Because the first people who leave are the talented productive ones who know they can get a job somewhere else quickly and easily. So they see the open office plan, say "Hell No!" and submit the resume and get hired before the day is out.
Thus, the productive and profitable employees end up leaving. The people who stay behind either know they can't easily find a job, or have a good thing going so just stick around (think Wally from Dilbert).
So no, it doesn't work because the employees that the employer wants to get rid of are the ones who end up sticking around, while the employees who they wanted to stick around have left.
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Yeah, perfect. When a company is starting up it needs talent. As it gets bigger, it needs more phone sanitizers to make it look legit. Once it's well-established, it's pretty much all phone sanitizers, maybe with a couple of people who do actual work.
Those talented people are expensive. And giving everyone offices is expensive. Two birds with one stone.
Re:Thank you captain obvious. (Score:4, Insightful)
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"No, that doesn't make sense either. Because the first people who leave are the talented productive ones who know they can get a job somewhere else quickly and easily. So they see the open office plan, say "Hell No!" and submit the resume and get hired before the day is out."
"Thus, the productive and profitable employees end up leaving. The people who stay behind either know they can't easily find a job, or have a good thing going so just stick around (think Wally from Dilbert)."
You are confused. This is E
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They are not just getting rid of actual graybeards, but those forty year olds who can still remember the first generation of open offices, the ones that had cube walls that went halfway to the ceiling, and dog-bone desks that seated two people rather than four.
Re:Thank you captain oblivious. (Score:3)
I have never worked at a company that concerned itself with the loss of their "most productive" employees (at least at the bullpen level).
In my observations, the people who remain are more likely to kowtow to what the company and bosses want to shove down their throats. That is, the remaining employees are more docile (and have fewer resources) than the ones who leave. Companies/Bosses love docile, compliant, "trappe
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actual long-term businesses.
But it does apply in the other 99% of cases.
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While that is that is happening whenever employees are treated badly, "management" is almost universally in deep denial about this effect.
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Open offices are rarely totally open. Some people get individual offices: those high up in the hierarchy whether they need privacy or not, those doing wage negotiations and interviews, brown-nosers and other favorites of the boss. Occasionally somebody who's noisy and offensive will get a private office if too many other people complain.
In the absence of an actual need, an open office gives free reign to allow favoritism to influence the decision of who escapes the open office, emphasizing prestige and powe
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Oh. So ... if I'm noisy, obnoxious and fart frequently, I get rewarded?
Yeah, that sounds like corporate logic...
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It makes sense because it saves space and money. So in the next quarter meeting you can claim that you saved $10M on the renovation project by going to an open space. It doesn't matter that you hate it or that your productivity goes down, in many cases (eg. artists of any kind) individual productivity doesn't really matter, as long as you crank out anything at all. The company will enter a slow spiral of demise in the long run but nobody will know why, perhaps your company will have to make cuts or break up
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I'm not sure everyone agrees that open office sucks. Micromanaging Managers love open office spaces, because it makes it much easier for them to constantly monitor their employees and make sure they are constantly busy. Workers who just want to socialize all day without getting anything done love open office spaces. Penny-pinching executives love open office spaces because they are cheaper and can pack more people into the same space. Finally, recruiters love open office spaces because they look cool wh
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And yet, it’s still the predominant type of office, even new offices are still being built like this. The question isn’t why or if the open plan office is bad, the question is how do we get rid of it.
Is it really the predominant type?
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Open office plan with cubicles is really the predominant type. I've been designing HVAC, Plumbing and Fire Protection for almost 40 years, and almost every office buildout I've worked on was mostly open offices with very few private offices. Also, almost all of the open office areas included cubicles. Sometimes the cubicles were shared but more than one employee, but, except in call centers, they were usually single-occupant cubicles.
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There are some workers who like that sort of trimmed down office (first come first serve for a chair and room for a laptop). But those workers very often tend to be somewhat shallow workers, they don't need more than their laptop since they're not realy doing much, and they could actually take that laptop anywahere if they wanted. They don't need lab space, they don't need extra equipment, they don't need collaboration except online (maybe these are all people who grew up on social media?), whiteboards ar
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And there were already established companies filling that need without the flamboyance of WeWork, and without the self-serving leases profiting the head of the company that WeWork was saddled with. WeWork cannot compete profitably with them.
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I was there when "open offices" became a trend. One place I was at they moved us from offices to another building with an "open concept" and everybody stopped getting work done. They were looking at Agile to fix the open-office problem. I promptly quit that place.
Anyway, the point wasn't ever productivity in most businesses. It was that managers were to have offices while their underlings were not. It was a pure power play, especially among managers who /had/ to hire underlings of higher intelligence t
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Because sheep are sheep, even if they sport an MBA, a $2000 suit, drive a BMW and get paid $800k a year for...something.
Look, I truly don't know why these companies have the pay scales they do, but somehow it doesn't matter if you're a complete moron, as long as you spout the right dogma - you're in.
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My solution? Book meeting rooms 24/7, presto instant own office.
If more people have that idea, yeah, the meeting rooms get kinda scarce...
Look around, you are wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
If open offices are so unusable, how come so many people work at Starbucks, or other shared working spaces?
For a company I agree open spaces are bad. But pretty obviously lots of people are OK with using open spaces because they make a choice of free will to go work in them.
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Physical labor is not the same as mental labor. The more you cram in, the more you are distracted, which impacts mentally intensive tasks, which desk jobs tend to be, more than physical jobs like Starbucks.
Here, by the way, they seemed to be trying to corner the market on office space. Cornering the maket is very risky and has a tendency to flop because there are always other people trying to increase production to satisfy rising prices.
Tbh they had help from the government, who makes it difficult for inv
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Um...I think he's talking about the people who do their work at a Starbucks--not people who work for Starbucks.
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You show me a person who works regularly at a Starbucks, and I'll show you a person who does nothing of value.
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This. Once upon a time, I was the network admin at a museum. Policies were very loose with the understanding that we were all grownups and I was so low in the hierarchy that I couldn't have enforced a sane policy anyways. Exhibitions staff had laptops because they would shuttle between the main building and a gallery space across town. One young man liked to work at a coffee shop that had wi-fi. He f'd up the machine several times by downloading stuff he had to have (which near as I can tell was not work re
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A lot of startups can work this way - all the work is online, some web page or the cloud or some such. They don't have money for their own office space so everyone is making do with what they're comfortable with; kitchen table, home office, office in the shed, Starbucks, etc.
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I have to admit that I was very skeptical about them generally, until I bought them. They aren’t perfect, but they make so many noises disappear that it is hard to describe. You really could do work in a Starbucks, assuming that you
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Scotch tape and a piece of paper... I agree though, the concept of windows on cubicle walls is really stupid, and it isn't even saving money.
Re: Look around, you are wrong (Score:2)
Re: Look around, you are wrong (Score:2)
Visual distractions are just as big of a deal as auditory ones, and noise cancelling headphones don't help there. I find the background noise of conversations easier to tune out than people walking past my desk.
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Nobody ever talks to you at Starbucks. With a good set of headphones you're in your own little world (a little world that goes for a *lot* cheaper than a WeWork desk). If the hot barista distracts you, take the chair on the other side of the table.
People in offices like to chat. You can't ignore them nearly as easily.
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i'm surprised people don't get kicked out of cafes for overstaying their welcome, or at least charging $5/hr for rent. Maybe they're all caffeine addicts who have to have expensive coffee with faux Italian names and are spending half their income keeping Starbucks in business?
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I've seen people booted out of a coffee shop. It was Montreal though, so you know.
I suspect Starbucks makes their money from the grab and go types. They probably don't care much who's sitting. Might even be good, makes the place look busier.
Years ago there used to be a coffee shop where I got maintenance done on my car. I used to go in and sit and work while I was waiting. I was usually the only one there, with lots of paramedics and firefighters passing through to grab takeout. Not only didn't they mind m
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So long as the space usage doesn't get out of hand and you buy something every couple of hours, coffee places like hosting a certain number of laptop workers. Gives the place that lived-in look.
Re:Look around, you are wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
If open offices are so unusable, how come so many people work at Starbucks, or other shared working spaces?
What the hell makes you think the average Starbucks-lurking junkie is actually working on anything of value? That was your first mistake.
For a company I agree open spaces are bad. But pretty obviously lots of people are OK with using open spaces because they make a choice of free will to go work in them.
Those that choose to go work from a free "office" using their free WiFi service, are not exactly struggling with tons of other choices to go off and do. They would much prefer to sit in the comfort of their own homes with a dedicated WiFi link, but no one is interested in paying them to do that, hence their actual value becomes rather obvious.
And for those who think I'm unfairly stereotyping, I'd love to see the stats that prove me wrong.
Re:Look around, you are wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
I've worked from home or "starbucks", managing a development team and writing code, for many years now.
Working at a coffee shop is very different from working in an open office because you don't have the constant distractions of 30 people you know. You can go to a coffee shop and be surrounded by people but still focus on the task you're working on.
I find that my productivity goes down significantly when I actually go into the office and am surrounded by coworkers that are in the same big room together every day.
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I've worked from home or "starbucks", managing a development team and writing code, for many years now.
Working at a coffee shop is very different from working in an open office because you don't have the constant distractions of 30 people you know. You can go to a coffee shop and be surrounded by people but still focus on the task you're working on.
I find that my productivity goes down significantly when I actually go into the office and am surrounded by coworkers that are in the same big room together every day.
So, you prefer a noisy environment filled with pretentious bean suckers who could care less about your work needs, and this is your environment of choice for writing code on a single monitor?
What's next, telling me you do all this without headphones?
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So, you prefer a noisy environment filled with pretentious bean suckers who could care less about your work needs, and this is your environment of choice for writing code on a single monitor?
What's next, telling me you do all this without headphones?
It's easier to tune out people you don't know than it is to tune out the worker who is hovering in your cube trying to get your attention and will bitch to management that you're ignoring them if you do tune them out successfully.
The only place a coffee shop becomes an issue is when trying to get on conference calls. Then a quieter environment is obviously preferred but otherwise coffee shops are easy to work at because 99% of the time everyone leaves everyone else alone.
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Working from Starbucks sounds miserable. The only time I spend in Starbucks is if my car's in the shop and I'm waiting for it to be fixed.
My ultimate programming environment is at my desk at home, sitting in my comfy office chair, with my tactile keyboard and 43" Dell monitor sitting two feet from my face, while I'm enjoying the Ballmer Peak [xkcd.com].
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Not even a monitor, a laptop screen which is far worse. They probably dread the day that the optometrist tells them that they need a bigger screen.
You do not understand how people work (Score:2)
What the hell makes you think the average Starbucks-lurking junkie is actually working on anything of value? That was your first mistake.
This appears to be your error, not mine.
Look, I don't get it myself, because I don't like working at Starbucks or shared working spaces.
But I know a LOT of people who work remotely now. And quite a few of those people go very often toward a whole day at Starbucks (or some other coffee shop) or a shared working space at a table.
Some people I know go in pretty much every da
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Like you I don't really like being around other people, but you need to understand that most people are not like this.
Ah, so that's why so many professionals are sitting in Starbucks wearing earbuds to drown out the human existence? Yes, I can really tell they like being around other people. It's almost as convincing as watching a group of twenty-somethings eat an entire dinner together without ever making eye contact.
Take a closer look around you. A lot of people are like this. We've normalized ignoring the shit out of each other so much that we cater to it. In planes, trains, automobiles, schools, restaurants, bars,
Re: Look around, you are wrong (Score:3)
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Not statistics, but at least a datapoint.
For the last 5 years I have been working from home. My company does have an office space with conference rooms, but it's about 30 miles away from my house and not always convenient. As a result, I built myself a proper home office with a nice big desk, minimal distractions and a good working environment. As is normal, I have upgraded parts of this over the years to improve my comfort and/or workflow.
Now, a good chunk of my job is also to be in front of clients and cu
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I for one would like to see the stats which prove you right. While I somewhat agree on their likely lack of 'productivity', even if, like you, I can't prove it, I'm sure that most have other sources of internet access. If I were to take a guess, most 'do work' in such places just to get out of the house.
Obtain the anonymized internet history of a Starbucks WiFi hotspot? Yeah, that's probably for sale somewhere. Legal or otherwise.
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I call Poe's Law. You can't be this dumb.
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Re:Look around, you are wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
Funny thing about "free will" as postulated by capitalists. You can operate under threat of death, and still be exercising your free will. Need food to live? The free market has you covered, you can, of your own free will, choose to purchase that food, or you can choose to die of starvation.
Not to put too fine a point on it but not every choice you make "of your own free will" indicates you are "okay" with that choice. Just about anything is better than dying. Doesn't mean it's "okay" and just because someone made "a choice" doesn't mean coercion was not involved. I fact that's how all confidence games work, the victim "chooses" to part with their money. And yet, we still try and convict con-men.
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This is exactly why Basic Income will be sabotaged all the way to hell and back. (Not going into the other aspects of Basic Income for now)
When everyone gets enough 'to live' so doing work for someone else instead of spending time on a hobby is a choice you make to earn something extra... do you still think cleaning toilets will be a job that goes for just $5/hour?
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Because as bad as Starbucks is, there's always somewhere worse to be working. It's also essential for times of no wi-fi as a semi-comfortable place to park your butt for extended periods of time.
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A lot of those people often don't have offices to go to. Sometimes startups assume everyone is working from home anyway. The jobs where open spaces work I would think are the same jobs that you can do from a corner table at a cafe, which means you don't need anything other than a place to sit and put your laptop.
Been around since the 19th century (Score:2)
Large open office layouts have been a part of business since the 19th century. They aren't new. They are here to stay. Just get some ear plugs and deal with it.
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If open offices are so unusable, how come so many people work at Starbucks, or other shared working spaces?
Because it's quieter than the open office. I wish I was kidding.
What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Are we insinuating that this would succeed in a socialist economy? And, if so, why would you want that anyway as "in a capitalist society" nobody wanted this. Would a socialist economy force this on its laborers to be productive? Wouldn't they just work from home (as the capitalist ones did)?
It's not even a business dead end. I've worked for several companies that leased out their office space on a per room/per area basis even when times were good because they weren't using that spare floor. I've also worked for a company that was about to lease space from our competitor (until their CEO saw it and promptly shut it down - never figured out how that one even got past the starting gate)
Even AirBNB sounded like an incredibly stupid idea (hey, I'll rent out my house to strangers for a weekend - that can't go wrong/bug my neighbors) - until people took to it and now it's a mega corp
You try things - some work - some fail.
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It's apparently in vogue these days to blame anything that fails or goes wrong in the corporate world on "capitalism", as though under a different system idiots, scumbags, and other failures would not exist.
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Under a better system, said failures would still exist. They just would not be allowed (even encouraged) to harm the general public.
Re:What? (Score:5, Interesting)
Under a better system, said failures would still exist. They just would not be allowed (even encouraged) to harm the general public.
I can assure you that bad decisions on office arrangements, or any other repeated bad decision, can occur under any economic or political system of government.
However, I'm currently in Vietnam and the indoor courtyard style office building seems to be somewhat popular in 2-4 story office blocks. Offices, conference rooms, and cubicle rooms all around a central atrium with plants, fake grass, maybe a water feature for some background noise. Everybody works in a room with a window.
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It's a socialist idea, shoehorned into capitalism, where it then fails even faster.
Consultant: "Workers are all the same, and should have the same environment, and the same perks."
Actual worker: "Um.... nope."
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In what open office plan does the boss sit in the pit like every other employee? Socialist, my ass. This is pure short-sighted, greed-headed capitalism.
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In what open office plan does the boss sit in the pit like every other employee? Socialist, my ass. This is pure short-sighted, greed-headed capitalism.
It depends on what type of working is being done. Anyone who is on the phone more than 10 minutes an hour should have an office. People who routinely discuss sensitive information (financials, HR, etc) by phone or with people who drop by to chat really should have an office. The boss usually fulfills all of these.
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You want to put every call center agent in their own office?
Good luck getting this through management...
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I've worked on several open offices (with cubicles) where the "bosses", i.e. the managers, sat in the pit like every other employee. The general managers typically got their own office, but it was in the middle of "the pit" with windows looking out into the open office.. The windows looking outside were in the open office area. (However, the CEO still got their own corner office with windows, a private workout room, and a pr
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Well, he's using a "capialist" dead end to describe a business model that is successfully able to generate large capital investments (to the tune of billions) in spite of scientific studies showing that their product is detrimental and failing in the market.
AirBnBs in fact do bug your "neighbors", but since it's most used for a hotel property (just like Uber/Lyft are really taxis, not rideshares), you don't care about hurting the neighbors.
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what the hell is a "capitalist" dead end? Are we insinuating that this would succeed in a socialist economy?
Of course it would. You'd get one choice and it's that or nothing. Worse still if the SJWs hear you complaining instead of appreciating their carbon footprint lowering invention. Then you get blacklisted or sent for re-education.
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Capitalism and socialism aren't the only two things out there, and extremist versions of either aren the only varieties.
I think the point being that "capitalist" means profits trump everything and screw the workers because they should be happy that they're employed by a digitial sweathouse.
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
The way most Americans use the words "capitalism" and "socialism" is pretty half-assed. The issue in this case is not one of socialism vs. capitalism in the strict economic sense. You might call the issue here one of "social democracy".
How much control should workers have over the conditions and circumstances of their labor? It's a fairly mainstream position in the contemporary United States to say "little or none". The employer sets the conditions of work and if they're not outrageously dangerous the employee can take it or leave it. But this view is not universal across societies that are capitalist in the strict economic sense. The US attitude toward employees isn't shared by countries like Norway, Germany or Finland, for example, which are market economies like the US is, but have different norms and laws.
Americans often use "capitalism" to mean "capitalism as practiced here", and "socialism" to to refer to capitalism as practiced in the Nordic model. Ask a young American "socialist" about "production for use" or the labor theory of value, and he'll likely give you a blank stare.
So this is an issue with capitalism as it is practiced in the United States, where worker welfare and autonomy is a low priority.
Hire better people, not more people housed cheaply (Score:5, Interesting)
At least in software development, if you can't cost justify private offices for at least mid and senior level developers, you're not hiring the right people because their time and productivity isn't very valuable to you.
Inexperienced developers may actually benefit from more open office setups (I suspect this varies a lot from person to person) as, like a baby in a playpen, random distractions are a way of learning from those more experienced or with different (perhaps lame) viewpoints and that can outweigh immediate productivity improvements that a less physically open environment would offer.
Re:Hire better people, not more people housed chea (Score:5, Insightful)
Inexperienced developers may actually benefit from more open office setups (I suspect this varies a lot from person to person) as, like a baby in a playpen, random distractions are a way of learning from those more experienced or with different (perhaps lame) viewpoints and that can outweigh immediate productivity improvements that a less physically open environment would offer.
I would put it differently: When ambiguity is low, then just putting head down and getting to it with fewer distractions will probably improve productivity. When ambiguity is high, then lowering the barrier to asking questions and noticing what your co-worker is flailing at can have tremendous benefits.
Now, a bunch of newbs is a reason you might have rampant ambiguity no matter what, because they are learning the ropes. The senior people helping them become productive is a good thing, and as long as the frequency of distractions is kept within reason, even an hour or two a day for some weeks getting other people more productive is a good investment over the long haul.
Several times I have seen very intelligent and technically capable people basically disappear and be superproductive somewhere only to reappear with a bunch of work that nobody wants or turns out to be useless. The cost of higher barriers to noticing what co-worker are actually doing can be very high.
The funny thing here is a single individual is often not so accurate at gauging the ambiguities associated with what they are working on. Their work can thus apparently succeed at a technical level, yet fail because someone else had different expectations somewhere on down the line.
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I do see your point. In much of my career, I've worked in environments with good developers and that utilized some variant of a modified waterfall model so there was less ambiguity than seems to arise in (allegedly) agile environments I've worked in. Of course, this reduction in ambiguity does come at an upfront cost -- but then anyone, even those not originally on the project, who is interested or needs to know can usually answer most of their own questions by looking at the work products from the earlier
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The problem here is classical bureaucracy: In a bureaucracy, the more people work for you, the more "important" you are. This mind-set is deeply entrenched. Of course, the idea has no reality to it unless the work itself is of low mental demand. And hence so many managers falsely believe that writing software is a low-skill task, when in actual reality it is exactly the opposite and low-skill people doing it are very expensive.
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This is consistent with my experience.
Given a developer who is able to deliver high quality work (thereby eliminating about 90% of those who are available), quality seems to be the first thing to go when distractions abound. This is especially true in low level software (storage systems, operating systems, DBMS kernels, etc) where performance and robustness (error/failure handling/recovery etc) are very important. These systems often are highly concurrent and optimized for performance and error/failure reco
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... my mind doesn't at all think that well.
/agreed
Pass it on to the Kardashians (Score:3)
If you care about saving time and money as an organization, don't be the a guinea pig for trends/fads that come along. Let another similar organization or team try it out for a few years. Then interview a cross sections of employees/users, including low-level employees who actually use it without their boss around to hear.
Occasionally you will miss out on something with legitimate staying power, but you'll save a lot on the majority that just suck up resources and attention. Spend the difference to catch up on those that were legitimate, and you'll still come out ahead.
This includes clouds, edges, microservices, functional, distributed, noSql, quantum, AI, etc. etc. etc. etc.
(Note that I'm okay with pilot projects, just don't do it for large production projects until road tested.)
May the Math Be With You.
Bureaucracy (Score:2)
This has nothing to do with capitalism or free enterprise and a lot to do with bureaucracy, the plague of all large organizations.
And maybe a bit of "there is a sucker born every minute!"
work (Score:2)
It really is simple: You want I work? Provide me the environment. You put me in a shared space with 20 people, half of which are on the phone a good part of the day? Obviously you don't want that I do any work that requires concentration and focus.
Anyone who doesn't put his brainworkers into 2 or max 4 people offices with walls that are reasonably sound proof doesn't have brainworkers.
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I never had problems concentrating in an open office. It may be that we have different abilities to focus. The world does not exist when I'm coding.
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I never had problems concentrating in an open office. It may be that we have different abilities to focus. The world does not exist when I'm coding.
Sounds like you would be just fine working from a Starbucks.
Turns out maybe there are people doing real work from Starbucks , and not just waste of space hacks like another recent thread would have us believe.
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It really is simple: You want I work?
Is that a new product from Apple?
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You can use Apple products to do some meaningful work now?
That would be a new product, indeed.
Now tell the management consultants (Score:2)
Management consultants are still selling the "DevOps Digital Transformation Starter Kit" to latecomer companies. Larger companies don't do anything McKinsey, BAH, Boston Consulting Group, Accenture or others don't tell them to do. Part of this kit is always an office remodel...bright white walls, loft ceilings, fishbowl glass-windowed conference rooms, cafeteria tables with monitor mounts, and bright preschool color accents strategically placed. These bigger companies are basically saying, "All right McKins
194 feet^2? (Score:3)
Worst place? Had to share a cube with 3 other low level worker bees in the early 80s. What happened was whenever someone came to talk to anyone in that cube, they talked to all of us. It always turned into a big BS session. I don't remember what the criteria was for getting a cube of your own was, but whatever.
In 2000 I worked at a place that had 2 engineers in an office. I happened to get placed with the company gossip. Guess what? Whenever someone came in to talk to him, I always got sucked into it. Productivity went down the toilet.
Open office? If I was interviewing and saw an open office I'd cut that interview short with a "yeah, not working here, thankuveryuch". If I was working somewhere and got moved to an open office my priority would immediately shift from making schedule to getting another job.
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Worst job I ever had was also the only one where I had a private office with a window. But that was mostly because they company had a ton of money (very little of it shared with me) and more offices than they had local employees.
Then we must shift ot Libre Offices (Score:2)
Sorry, could not ressit the lame joke.
Ah, the California open office! (Score:3)
Is cleaning your cubemate's pit bull poop off your keyboard losing its novelty allure? When that overly hearty sosh at midmorning beer break misjudged a high jump on the trampoline and landed on your monitor, were you in the middle of an intricate section of code that you are now never going to remember accurately?
If complaining about such things already has you labeled as the office curmudgeon, it's time to consider a home office. According to my accountant there is a little-known provision of California law by which if you file a Declaration of Intent To Regender (you don't actually have to go through with it until the tenth tax year after filing, by which time you can file for a medical complication exemption), you can deduct the costs of a home office from your Excess Whiteness Tax.
Go to the local library (Score:3)
I can read in a coffee place, but it is hard to code. Coding in a library is sometimes better then in a home office. Less distraction.
It is hell (Score:3)
The moment we moved into an open office, people doing operations incidents process fewer and people who did development and research almost halted. :)
Everyone works from home when they need to get work done. Then that was frowned upon and not allowed.
Personally I started to grab my laptop and find a corner somewhere, a small available meeting room or anywhere with a bit of quiet. Even though I had 3 24â screens on my desk and a good chair, I prefer to work on my laptop with a small screen and a touch pad in a place where I can focus.
Of course that is now also frowned upon because our boss âoelikes to see everyone sitting at their desk in this awful office spaceâ.
So it is micromanagement and zero trust and yet I have always got my projects done in time.
The sooner I have saved money up for retirement the better.
"decade"? (Score:2)
and the economy reached full employment over the last decade
The last decade?
So 2012 was a banner year? 2014?
It's almost as if there's something that you don't want to acknowledge, lol ...
Seating is a way to reward or punish employees (Score:2)
Seating is a way to reward an employee. Why do you think the C-level executives have such nice offices, culminating in the corner office? There are better and worse cubes and offices. Ignoring this fact is ignoring an important manager's lever.
"I can’t write without aromatherapy" (Score:2)
And that's where I stopped reading.
WeWork might work better in more rural settings? (Score:2)
I live in a small town (6,000-ish people, with approximately half in a new subdivision built on the outskirts of the original city). One of the downtown buildings that went up for lease was converted into a WeWork facility by a local realtor who decided to take it on as an investment idea.
I'm not really sure how successful it is or isn't, financially? But it seems like it adds value for the community. One reason is the fact that it's a "Plan B" for some of the people who would have been working from home
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Lemme guess: The deaf guy gets to define what's 'reasonable'? Much like the woman in menopause gets to set the thermostat?