61–70 of 409 posts
It all seems so backwards. Instead of having collaborative working spaces with private rooms for meetings, doesn't it make more sense to have private rooms for working and collaborative meeting spaces?
My company recently switched to an open floor plan. It's done nothing but increase distractions and office gossip. Everyone I know tries to get away from their desk as often as possible. Ducking into side rooms, attempting to work from home, and just plain using any excuse to escape the zoo. Management loves open plans because it's the cheapest seating arrangement. They claim that it will increase collaboration while…
And notice how managers always arrange to have their screens hidden from others view, while most people feel a constant sense that someone is looking at their screen.
Open offices diminish workers to cattle status. Most work, even the kind many developers would not think of as being so, in tech companies requires thoughtfulness often and collaboration less often. I consider open office plans to be disrespectful and an indicator of second-class status.
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I don't think that was the intent. My guess is that this was planned in an era (sadly now) where open space is portrayed as the "cool" way to work.
I'm sure Jony Ive has an office.
Working in open office plans is simply awful. Personally I believe remote work, for any tech-enabled employer, makes the most sense. The impact on infrastructure by removing commuting alone could maybe help save the planet. And our collective sanity. Wouldn't it be nice to have ISPs that can provide an infrastructure that could actually support that? I think so. The hideous effects of cluster-fucking hundreds of thou…
It seems a lot of managers live in that phantasy world where people do nothing but collaborate. Do they really think that code gets written that way?
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The WSJ story has some pictures of what it looks like [1]. There seems to be offices with doors, but they look like it seats about 20 people. There are also common areas with long tables between them. https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-UF776_0817CO_1... https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-UF775_0817CO_1... https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-UF777_0817CO_1... [1] https://www.wsj.com/art…
I don't get the complaints, that looks very cozy even if you have to share with what looks like a total of 4 engineers per room which is a reasonable number for collaboration. The second picture makes it look greater than 4, however. Assuming the cubicles are walled off, it'll just feel like a college library meeting room.
1. No separators -- you see everyone, everyone sees you. All the time.
2. No separators between neighboring desks, thus every flinch your colleague next to you makes distracts you.
3. No shelves and drawers. Where do you put all your papers, books?
4. At least based on the pictures, reflections of light, coming from every single angle.
5. The tables are way too small. There is just no space for multiple monitors to be put at a reasonable distance, which fucks up the eyes really fast.
I now find it highly amusing that at Apple, form over function won out yet again.
Man, I remember in college when we would be working long hours in the library on a computer lined up in a row of computers. Every one would be intensely working on what they needed to. Sometimes two would work together. This was especially true before presentations when we were trying to put our stuff together. It was neat. It was collaborative. It was fun. And we were happy. Open floor plan is reminiscent of those d…
But I think it also helps that most of the other people in the library are probably strangers, and if a couple of them are talking it's probably about something quite different from what you're working on.
"Team" conversations that might possibly be relevant to your stuff are the worst distractions.
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I suspect it's much simpler than that. Open floor plans give less square footage per person so you get more people per building. It's just cheaper to build open floor plans.
The "it's cheaper" argument for open-plan offices only really works when the company hasn't spent $5bn+ on the building. They could probably have quadrupled the floor space for the same price.