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The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea

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Re: The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea

#201

Post by notacoward »

Cyph0n wrote: post #79
ghosterrific wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I've been waiting for years for a bunch of new Anime releases and other shows. Should they just give me a break to watch TV at work?

Not really, because it's probably just you. Quite a few people in this thread really don't understand how big of an event thr World Cup is...

It doesn't matter how big a deal it is. It's not work. Even if it's a natural disaster or a war, if it's not work you go watch it in a break room or you take PTO and stay home or you do whatever you need to ensure that it's not disruptive to others. The level of entitlement necessary to believe that your company and everyone in it should accommodate your personal non-work video watching boggles my mind.

Re: The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea

#202

Post by ghaff »

magduf wrote: post #189
ghaff wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personal preferences vary but, yeah, a lot of overall preferences are probably age-related. I remember in a long-ago job I had for quite a few years (with an old-style high cubicle arrangement), we had a lot of walking the hallways F2F informal catchups, ate lunch together, had sports teams, etc. These days I mostly work remote by choice and am good with that. Some of it is better tech to work remote; I didn't even h…

I'm not claiming that it's age-related, but that it's generational . The people who are going into programming these days are not the same type of people who went into it a generation ago. In the 80s, these people would have gone into a different career field.

And I'm not sure I agree with that in general. If I look back at the engineers of the computer company I worked for in the late 80s, I would say there were more women and it was whiter. Certainly, more were from traditional EE disciplines given how relatively new CS was.

But I'm not sure that new engineers at that company were fundamentally different from new engineers joining, say, Facebook today.

Re: The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea

#203

Post by watwut »

tombert wrote: post #185
watwut wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gotcha, thanks. > people are running/playing around and yelling like children at the office. It's not too uncommon for startups to have Nerf guns or something. I hate this sort of environment combined with expectation to stay late. It always seems to me that if people would work instead of playing, we might not have to stay late. And that we are not working as much as we brag about, because people play a lot.

I agree. I typically come in at about 9:15am, leave anywhere from 7pm-8pm, and it's not because I'm some great worker. It's because I need to finish up the sprint and too much crap is happening around the office. I don't know that I wouldn't work late even if I had a private office, but I do think that I'd be able to accomplish more.

I found that when I am really working and focus on producing quickly, I get tired much sooner. As if, there us some max I can achieve during day, faster or slower.

Of course then, I am tired also in the evening and that limits what I can do in the evening. (If I am too tired to code, I am also too tired to play logical game or learn something.)

Re: The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea

#204

Post by ConceptJunkie »

tombert wrote: post #6

The argument of "increased collaboration" that I keep hearing is kind of negated when people have the soccer game on and you're bombarded with constant cheering, which is my current situation. Even when soccer is over, you have to contend with people playing grab-ass all over the office, or jerks (like me) with annoyingly loud keyboards. The modicum of utility of me "jumping into a conversation" really goes out the w…

I don't think any manager who chooses and open office plan because it's cheaper (and I'm betting that that is almost all of them) has considered, or cares about, the cost of reduced productivity. Otherwise it wouldn't be so common.

But that's just my experience. I've found it's difficult to underestimate management.

Re: The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea

#205

Post by s-shellfish »

mwcampbell wrote: post #180
s-shellfish wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Audio in a business environment, at least from my experience, is more predictable and algorithmic, so my sensitivity to that has reduced significantly. Every face to face interaction in my organization routinely feels like a disaster I can't understand in entirety, during or locally near the experience. Reasoning out of it (grounding) is often challenging, I prefer focusing on inanimate objects to ground myself as th…

Do you think you would be happy in an environment where all business and technical communication was text? Do you think that could even be productive? Or is some amount of spoken communication practically necessary? This whole exchange has been interesting. Thanks again.

I'm not sure honestly. I think generally I do better not confined to total isolation, but life is a process. There's always going to be challenges regardless of how able someone appears to be.

I do think having diversity in all things is important, they push one's boundaries and allow oneself to redefine oneself. Taking care to reflect on the moment and the big picture, that's important.

Too much of anything is not a good thing, so there is always a need to balance. This allows one to translate skills from one interface to another. The big picture / in the moment reflection / introspection is important because it allows for self direction, instead of just getting caught up in all this mapping of skill set to skill set towards some ideal of being 'well rounded'.

I generally just prefer my base to be text because I code a lot and that's the headspace I need to stay in. Some communication, sparsely distributed in other forms is fine, but too much can direct away from the focus, which in my preference is produce good code, and solve problems in ways that get the closest to perfect I can get, without tipping the balance of losing sight of all the other code information, retaining structure and direction, uniformity, solutions for problems.

I don't enjoy living in a text vacuum as that can get severely isolating when done to excess, but sometimes having that space is necessary for me to continue laying out my own foundation of structure, preference, and direction, as I continue to learn new stuff.

Thank you for your interest and questions.

Re: The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea

#206

Post by logfromblammo »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #76
PietdeVries wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is that this working-from-home people significantly impact the efficiency of your office. It's a trend (could be the open-office space started it) but resulted in people easily working 2 or more days from home. That implies that any desk you have is empty about 40% of the time. Or: your entire office is not being used for 40%... So when bosses realised they were throwing money away, they came up with the op…

“flexdesks” or “hot desking” is just about the most juvenile reaction to working from home I can imagine. If a company believes it will gain more from “saving money” on open plan offices or hot desking than it will from just paying more to facilitate more and better work from employees through buying the best tools (a private office is a tool like a keyboard or ergonomic chair), it’s self-evidently a company to get f…

Communal keyboards are worse than communal toilet seats.

Especially when some people eat at their desks.

Re: The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea

#207

Post by cullenking »

fblp wrote: post #120
collinf wrote: post #19

My biggest issue with my open floor office is that it seems like everyone just takes calls at their seats. We have private spaces and enclaves for that, but I am just bombarded with 4 people within 10 feet of my workspace on their phone. To counteract I throw on some Ambient music on my headphones, which sort of works but I still find I prefer to work in silence. Does it not seem like open-office etiquette to take a…

ask for some Zenbooths and create rule that calls must be taken in them. It makes the open office workable. www.zenbooth.net (I'm a founder there)

[edited].

For anyone who doesn't want to drop their email into their webpage to see pricing (yes, I received an outreach email within 15 minutes of doing so) their pricing starts at $4.5k and $14k "on sale". Bit steep for my blood, but, there's obviously some bigger spenders out there!

Re: The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea

#208

Post by thatfrenchguy »

ConceptJunkie wrote: post #204
tombert wrote: post #6

The argument of "increased collaboration" that I keep hearing is kind of negated when people have the soccer game on and you're bombarded with constant cheering, which is my current situation. Even when soccer is over, you have to contend with people playing grab-ass all over the office, or jerks (like me) with annoyingly loud keyboards. The modicum of utility of me "jumping into a conversation" really goes out the w…

I don't think any manager who chooses and open office plan because it's cheaper (and I'm betting that that is almost all of them) has considered, or cares about, the cost of reduced productivity. Otherwise it wouldn't be so common. But that's just my experience. I've found it's difficult to underestimate management.

It's impossible to measure, and thus isn't data that is taken into consideration.

Re: The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea

#210

Post by beaconstudios »

tombert wrote: post #20
zeveb wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The argument of "increased collaboration" that I keep hearing is kind of negated when people have the soccer game on and you're bombarded with constant cheering Is there anything less professional than watching a game at work? I really don't get why people do this, and why they think it's okay. Granted, I don't like sports — but I like TV, and I wouldn't watch TV at work. I like computer games, but I wouldn't play…

I agree. When I suggested putting on a low-budget 50's monster movie on as background noise (e.g. Gamera, Godzilla, The Giant Claw, something that's amusing to look at for thirty seconds, laugh a bit, but not overly distracting), people act almost offended that I would waste company time like that. But if the TV has some form of ball on it, drop everything.

the important people in the office both get to dictate what's allowed, and are in my experience more likely to be extroverted/sports-watchy types. Thus they exploit their position to watch sports with the other important people and who cares what the nerds think/want.
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