The Birth and Death of the Office

I don't think there is anything else more illogical in modern society than waking up in building A, hopping in a car and fighting traffic for an hour to get to building B just to sit in front of a computer for 8 hours (perhaps with a few minimally productive meetings here and there), then commute back to building A 8 hours later.

Building B sits empty for 16 hours a day while Building A sits empty for 10 with both being heated/cooled for 24 hours. The employee wastes 2 of their 16 available waking hours in the non-productive commute while incurring significant financial costs (lease/insurance/fuel/energy) in order to support this patently absurd activity. Similarly the employer wastes time and energy negotiating leases, re-arranging offices, purchasing AV equipment for meeting rooms in building B, etc.,etc., in addition to paying the likely enormously expensive lease itself.

The impacts on the environment, the number of hours of human life wasted in commute, the pointless buildings and associated costs to employers as well as the public infrastructure to support it (roads, trains, busses, etc.) are all incredibly wasteful. Surely, all of this could only be justified if physical presence had a dramatic impact on productivity. Yet, we cannot tell one way or the other if it actually improves outcomes.

Coffeehouses, clubs (the kind Victorian gentlemen spent all day in), workshops for craftsmen

I had an office with a door for 12 years. I switched jobs 3 years ago and everyone has a cubicle even the managers.

Constant distractions with people talking loudly on conference calls. Then someone else talks even louder on their call.

Before covid our site was mostly working on the same project. There was some fun collaboration in the conference room around white boards etc.

We had a reorg to pool resources across projects across the country so now only 3 out of 10 people on my project are at my site.

Most of us bought our own 40" 4K monitors so if I go in a conference room I can't even share my remote Linux desktop session properly because I'm scrolling within the window to find my applications to share.

Because of that I just stay at my cubicle to share my screen and end up disturbing everyone else around me with my own conference call.

Everything would be fine with offices and doors but instead we get stupid surveys about whether we want an open floorplan which is even worse.

We are supposed to go in the office 3 days a week. The reality is most people at my site show up once or twice a week for half a day for the free lunch once a week and then go home by 3pm to get work done.

We have 30 job openings and we hire about 1 person every 2 months. We lose 1 person about every 4 months. Management hasn't said anything about people not showing up probably because they don't want to push people to leave.

From the article:

  "He constructs an office in his flat and whiles away his days copying and amending letters – he even ‘commutes’ via a walk around the block every morning. He dies ‘happy’: at his desk, halfway through penning a final document."

I've worked from home for the last 5 years (startup founder). It bled into everything at home. At one point during covid, half of the upstairs of this house was filled with equipment, spare parts, workbenches and servers.

Now that it's been mothballed I found a job that was advertised as "work from home" but I've been going into the office instead. Not sure if it is just the mental break of what I was doing before or something else, but I found it both refreshing and frustrating.

It's nice to "dress up" a bit to go to work instead of just rolling out of bed and sit at a desk in whatever I grabbed. It's nice to interact with people outside the family.

The downside is that I forgot just how intrusive/noisy other people can be. I think there is are a lot of people who thrive on that distraction (or distracting others) whose jobs might not require the concentration of a programmer. I guess a set of headphones might sort that out but that also seems kind of rude in an environment that is supposed to encourage interaction.

I do like leaving it all at work when I come home. That is better in terms of mental health at least.

The office + factory duo have been around for so long that many societal constructs don't exist anymore.

I think the most common "second place" would be called "the neighborhood" nowadays.