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Is the open office layout dead?

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Re: Is the open office layout dead?

#141

Post by Spooky23 »

rayiner wrote: post #123

I've never understood the price issue. Class A in midtown Manhattan is $80 per square foot. That's $8,000 per year for a developer that probably makes well over six figures. Put two in an office that's only $4,000 per year. I really don't buy it considering how much money companies spend on office space. Like why he hell would you have offices in Greenwich Village ( http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-new-york-of…

Have you ever had a bathroom remodeled?

Construction sucks and is both a time and money sink. You can literally have a crew show up and build a big cube farm in 1-5 days.

It's really the same argument as "why would anyone pay outrageous fees to Amazon for slow, shitty VMs?". The answer is that when you factor in the cost of a data center facility and the people to build and run it, it turns out that AWS is a good deal after all.

Re: Is the open office layout dead?

#142

Post by linkmotif »

stephengillie wrote: post #68
mixedCase wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an employee benefit because it makes work more enjoyable. Being stuck in a problem that you can normally tackle with relative ease when "in the zone" is extremely frustrating.

"Enjoying your job" is a perk most people don't get. To them, larger monitors, better laptops, offices with doors, etc are simply tools people use to feel better than you.

Software engineers get to enjoy their jobs, at least in 2017. Until humanity either produces way more developers or makes us obsolete, we're basically free to enjoy our position of demanding work be enjoyable.

Re: Is the open office layout dead?

#143

Post by mindcrime »

> No designated desks

If the day comes that my $DAYJOB employer goes this route, that's the exact day I quit. Hot desking is some of the most idiotic, brain-dead stupid shit I can imagine. I have desk drawers for a reason... so I don't have to lug around every single item I use at my desk, everywhere I go. Not to mention the books on my desk, which I am definitely not hauling back and forth every day.

Re: Is the open office layout dead?

#144

Post by wtallis »

bsder wrote: post #135
sundvor wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have my own personal U3415W for my Visual Studio programming. I have brought it up in interviews, if any issues to my bringing it in. (At home I have the Acer X34 Predator. The Dell came first; when I realised how good it was for programming I knew I needed one at work.)

Why a 1440 vertical pixel monitor? Real 4K monitors are effectively the same price and have a lot more pixels. And you can get them in 27", 32" and 34" sizes. Sure, I understand why the manufacturers want these odd kinds of resolutions so that they can take defective panels and carve them up differently. However, why would the users want these instead of more resolution? What am I missing?

1440 vertical pixels in a 34" 21:9 monitor means you usually don't have to worry about whether your software can adapt to a non-standard DPI. At about 109 DPI, it's the same as a typical 27" 16:9 panel, just with more pixels off to the side. The density is a bit higher than the typical ~94 DPI of a 24" 16:10 display, but the difference can be tolerated by most users. Jumping up to 140 DPI (32" 4k 16:9) is enough that you either need exceptionally good vision, or you need to compensate through software scaling adjustments or major ergonomic changes.

Re: Is the open office layout dead?

#145

Post by mindcrime »

Roritharr wrote: post #64
davb wrote: post #7

> No designated desks I hate hot desking. I know it's very subjective but when I come into an office for eight hours a day, five days a week, I like to personalise my workspace. I don't drive, I take public transport and walk, and hate carting my laptop and charger around with me. I want my own space, with meeting rooms and collaboration spaces for when I need those things. I may be alone in saying so, but I'd happil…

We've recently moved into new offices in Frankfurt/Germany and being the CTO of our 40 Person Startup gave me an in-depth look at all the calculations involved. It's simply horrible how expensive it would be to give private offices even to >3 people in our company. I've fought tooth and nail to keep everyone in small team offices( We've got two small rooms set aside as flex-desks(complete with 2 4K Monitors & Gigabit…

It's simply horrible how expensive it would be to give private offices even to >3 people in our company.

Great, your company made a poor decision from a planning / facilities / real-estate standpoint. Quit and go find a job with a company that didn't choose as poorly.

Re: Is the open office layout dead?

#146

Post by nnd »

rdtsc wrote: post #14

I hope so. I didn't work in in one, but worked in a cubicle as an intern, then in an office with 3 other people focusing on the same project, then in my own office with a door, now at home. But I can only imagine the sensory distraction and just can't see why anyone thought it was a good idea for software development. Sure I can see the photo-op image appeal for PR purposes "Oh look at our dynamic startup, working in…

Unless you work on a project alone, office work would still beat remote when it comes to communication.

Surely, the tools for remote communication are getting more and more efficient, and as a remote worker your success heavily depends on your communication skills.

Still being able to brainstorm ideas with your colleagues face to face is invaluable, and is one of the biggest things I miss working remotely.

Re: Is the open office layout dead?

#147

Post by strictnein »

mcny wrote: post #118
sundvor wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you. I'd love to try a 4k screen, and was even considering it - however in the end I took my home U3415W to work and bought the X34 for home (I might game 30 minutes a week or something; the extra hz are certainly nice for that, otherwise they are pretty much identical). I value actual real estate over PPI, preferring to run at 100% / unscaled which looks much nicer in Win10. The 109PPI (3440x1440) is de…

I am trying not to cargo cult here but I think if I need to scroll a file with 9 font on a 32"+ screen with 4k display it might be a sign of code smell (again, this should definitely not be a hard rule just saying it might be nice to stop and think why it is so long)?

Do you mean 9pt or 9px font? Either way, that's not comfortably readable on a 32" 4k screen.

On a 34" 3440x1440 screen I keep IntelliJ at 14px (10.5pt). On a 32" 4k screen I keep it at 15px-16px (~11pt).

You're still only talking ~100 lines of code on the screen at any one time. Maybe ~130 with a smaller font.

Re: Is the open office layout dead?

#148

Post by mindcrime »

emerged wrote: post #111
LambdaComplex wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about cubicles?

I would honestly rather change careers than work in a cubicle. They give me a feeling of deep existential dread. Do some actually prefer them?

Compared to no walls at all? Fuck yeah. When I was at IBM, they had us (~60 people) in one big room, with no walls, no noise-dampening, right next-door to a server room (with the accompanying server hum coming through the walls). I used to go downstairs to the "cubicle hell" area and just walk around and dream about how nice it would be to work down there. There was a point I'd have paid money to move to the cube-farms, compared to the hell-hole we were in.

Re: Is the open office layout dead?

#149

Post by rtpg »

tlogan wrote: post #130
rtpg wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why cubicles are a thing though right? Obviously it doesn't have as much in terms of sound dampening effects but the cost nearly isn't as high and there's a psychological effect Though... cubicles do make it so that you're working in a "pit". So people... start wanting to remove the barriers..... and we end up in open office plans again. Hard to figure out how a smaller company can manage this (since private…

Back in days, each engineer in Microsoft had a private office. Oracle too... Good days...

Actually remembered that my university had this two, though most people were two to an office so you coordinated to do meetings. And the PhD students were more like 4-6 to a room.

Re: Is the open office layout dead?

#150

Post by dgcoffman »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #79
davb wrote: post #7

> No designated desks I hate hot desking. I know it's very subjective but when I come into an office for eight hours a day, five days a week, I like to personalise my workspace. I don't drive, I take public transport and walk, and hate carting my laptop and charger around with me. I want my own space, with meeting rooms and collaboration spaces for when I need those things. I may be alone in saying so, but I'd happil…

It's funny, I work in a coworking space, and we technically have hot desks, but everyone always ends up sitting in the same place every day. It really throws me if someone takes my seat, usually it's someone new, who hasn't figured out the seating plan yet. It's almost like high school, where you don't have a designated lunch table, but you always sit at the same table. Or at least that's what the movies show, we did…

Had the same experience working a consulting job one time. Awful, dirty rows of terrible monitors and keyboards, fluorescent lighting, chintzy chairs.

Hotdesking sends to me the pretty degrading message that people are entirely fungible (probably also called "resources" at these places). I'm opposed to it.

And yes, everyone just sat in the same spot everyday.

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