51–60 of 307 posts
In the four years at my current company we went full cubes -> half cubes (you get like 2-3 regular walls and one baby wall) -> open office -> open office no assigned desks. I can't wait to see the next iteration on this.
If I could craft the perfect job for me, the one I work at would be it - an intelligent straightforward manager who will speak his mind bluntly and can take it just as well as he can dish it out. He’s mostly concerned with results not whether you kiss his ring. - small company without a lot of bureaucracy -- I have full access to our entire AWS infrastructure - relatively generous PTO - a decent free family health pl…
Do you own noise cancelling headphones? Mine are worth their weight in gold to me (Sony W-something 1000x Mk2).
They wanted to support the ability of others to be able to come up to you without feeling like they were interrupting.
In the four years at my current company we went full cubes -> half cubes (you get like 2-3 regular walls and one baby wall) -> open office -> open office no assigned desks. I can't wait to see the next iteration on this.
Cubes are worse than open office IMHO. You get roughly the same noise and distraction but it's also harder to actually talk to or collaborate with your neighbors.
In the four years at my current company we went full cubes -> half cubes (you get like 2-3 regular walls and one baby wall) -> open office -> open office no assigned desks. I can't wait to see the next iteration on this.
Cubes are worse than open office IMHO. You get roughly the same noise and distraction but it's also harder to actually talk to or collaborate with your neighbors.
If I can work from anywhere, then I don't see the advantage to renting an office for the day. The real appeal for an office is that you can leave stuff there and use it for a multitude of things. We-Work type places seem to be good for one thing, giving a desk to remote workers that don't like working at coffee shops or libraries?
Do sales people like them?
What exactly are the type of professionals that like We-Work type offices?
I don't have an issue with open offices per se but the person in front of me is from another culture and is literally 24/7 in skype calls which distracts me to no end, and the worst part is the he/she is literally /burping and farting/ without any shame. And I don't mean once a day, no, constantly burping and farting, it's honestly disgusting. /rant
Sounds like you do. An open office would be just fine if I was the only one in there, but that is what is intrinsically bad ( or at least the main thing) about them. You aren't alone in there.
The article even mentions how they're "sold to workers as a boon to collaboration — liberated from barriers, stuffed in like sardines, people would chat more and, supposedly, come up with lots of brilliant new ideas". Thankfully the author also quickly refuted that. Yet the insanity remains, and people (often times the Agile evangelist types companies hire) continue to try to convince developers that open offices are good.
I could buy into it if the rational is it's far cheaper to fit more employees in less space. That's a fine reason. It sucks to work in, but I can at least hear that without rolling my eyes and dismissing everything else that person says as incredulous.
The headline photo looks claustrophobic -- we aren't sardines -- but I'm a fan of the "team pod" setup.
The primary alternative--the high walled land of cubicles--is a depressing, lonely world. Yes, I get pulled out of flow more often than I would if I had an office or a cube, and I'm occasionally annoyed by chatter, but I'd rather have some humans to coexist with and occasionally interrupted than depressed and flowing.
I think offices are a dead end. With 4G, Slack, Zoom, and Google Docs we're able to work from anywhere. No need to commute anymore. And no need to constrain your team to the city you have an office in. The only thing is that remote should not be an afterthought but you should organize for it https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/ just like you invest time to run an office.