WFM is the greatest thing of my life.
The Birth and Death of the Office
11–20 of 130 posts
Re: The Birth and Death of the Office
#12WFM is the greatest thing of my life.
Whole Foods Market?
Re: The Birth and Death of the Office
#13Re: The Birth and Death of the Office
#14The Office won't die but flexibility where it makes sense will take over. I'm glad such possibilities are presenting themselves. One of the silver-linings of covid.
Re: The Birth and Death of the Office
#15WFM is the greatest thing of my life.
As someone with lots of weird quirks, and who is very likely on the autism spectrum, working from home may have literally saved my career.
Re: The Birth and Death of the Office
#16I miss the office.
Once remote working has been around long enough we'll probably see the rise of new social constructs that fill the void the office as the "second place" is leaving behind. The office was a crappy "second place" anyways.
Before office work was the norm, what was this "second place?"
Churches, probably? Taverns?
Re: The Birth and Death of the Office
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Once remote working has been around long enough we'll probably see the rise of new social constructs that fill the void the office as the "second place" is leaving behind. The office was a crappy "second place" anyways.
Before office work was the norm, what was this "second place?" Churches, probably? Taverns?
Churches, pubs, town squares
Re: The Birth and Death of the Office
#18I miss the office.
I miss offices in reasonable locations. Instead they're all in the same 6-8 cities that all have increasingly bad homeless populations. No, I don't want to live in the Bay, New York City, Boston, Austin, or Denver. Please create small satellite offices in reasonable cities instead of mega campuses in towns that all seem to have public libraries that are now defacto homeless shelters. Tech imports most of the talent t…
> I miss offices in reasonable locations. Instead they're all in the same 6-8 cities...
The majority of the US population lives in the same 6-8 metro areas; so it's "reasonable" to put offices in those metro areas. I've worked at places with offices in downtown areas (short public transit ride or walk), in close suburbs (the extent to where public transit goes), and in remote suburbs (that require driving to get there), and the further away from city centers they are, the more brutal going to them is unless you already live in or relocate to the sleepy suburb the office is in (and then you still need to spend a not-insignificant amount of time driving, even for going places that are not your office, because suburbs are not, almost by definition, navigable without a car).
> Please create small satellite offices in reasonable cities instead of mega campuses
Do a lot of large companies have "mega campuses" in city centers? That doesn't make much sense, a campus requires a significant amount of land, land which is not available in city centers. Google's "mega campus" in the Bay Area is in the suburban part of the Bay Area (in as much as the Bay Area is mostly suburban sprawl anyway), and has "satellite offices" in downtown areas because that's where a lot of the employees live. I suppose Salesforce Tower could count as a "campus" if it's heavily populated with Salesforce employees, although I don't think one thinks of Salesforce Tower when the term "campus" comes up. Maybe the handful of buildings around Salesforce Tower that contained Salesforce employees could be considered a campus in aggregate (generally, a single building does not make a "campus").
Going into a small satellite office and interacting with most coworkers remotely is not really much different than working from home and interacting with coworkers remotely. You get the burden of going into an office without any advantages of in-person interaction. However, one of the reasons I miss having a dedicated office is that I have found that having a different place to work than my house does wonders for my general heads-down productivity and work-life balance, but that's independent of the many other advantages and disadvantages of having a communal, shared space where people working on the same thing can congregate.
Re: The Birth and Death of the Office
#19I miss the office.
Once remote working has been around long enough we'll probably see the rise of new social constructs that fill the void the office as the "second place" is leaving behind. The office was a crappy "second place" anyways.
I already can imagine some versions. For example, the journeyman were one visits various "experts" to become a better craftmans - traveling from home to home.
The forming of conference-clusters, were digital nomadic workers meet up at some place by tradition to jam and work on something, like a conference without the conference hall.
I can also imagine community, who specialize in a particular field. Like a suburb, dedicated to database optimization.
Or have some programming group in the park or on a train. If you are free from social constraints and locations- all it takes is good internet.
Re: The Birth and Death of the Office
#20Office sucks.
Let me list a few things:
- Hot desks
- People laughing and constantly talking while you are trying to focus
- Unstable temperature making you freeze or boil
- Uncomfortable and unhealthy desks/chairs
- Often lack of proper screens/equipment
- Getting squeezed in trains to commute - spending at best an extra hour per day
- Unhealthy and expensive dietary options around work
- Contamination of diseases
- Useless meetings and team activities that usually produce zero value
Not to mention how bad this is for the environment. And no, a ping-pong or foosball table doesn't make the office cool. It's like adding chocolate syrup on a rotten fruit to make it edible.