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Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

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Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

#621

Post by pseudalopex »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #184
btbuildem wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't. The push for open-plan spaces was motivated by cost-cutting. Layouts with many closed offices would cost far more to build, and take up more square footage to host the same number of employees. At a time where savvy businesses have dropped their commercial leases / gone full remote, and the more conservative / less accepting of change ones are left holding the bag, I would not expect anyone to make big inve…

See, "shared team spaces" aren't too bad; most development work I've done has been in teams of 2 - 8 people in a SCRUM setting, for that kind of work I think small team sized office spaces are ideal. I've also worked in a big open space where, while all five teams worked on the same product, each individual team had their own section. But for that one, you could hear the next desk block over talk about football and a…

They wanted individual offices around team spaces. Not team offices. 8 person rooms are as bad in my experience as many open floors.

Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

#622

Post by jasonkester »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #30

People who like WFH will never want to return to the office unless perhaps the office is a 5 minute walk from home (they may be forced to, but they won't want to). For many people the time and cost savings of avoiding a daily commute cannot be offset by a nicer office. Those who are happy to return to the office in general are those who do not like WFH and prefer more contacts and a change of scenery. A nicer office…

More to the point, The Office is in one place, whereas my workplace can by anywhere.

So no matter how nice a place it is, and how close to my house you put it, it's never going to be right on that good right point break in Oaxaca where I like to spend my winters and also at the AirBnB next to Green Lake where I can visit my friends and family in the summer.

It's also not in any of the other places I choose to set up shop at for a few months at a time to do my thing.

So it doesn't matter that it has free food, a masseuse, and is in a really cool neighborhood where I'd actually like to spend some time. I still don't want to commit to living there 50 weeks a year.

That's why I'm remote.

Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

#624

Post by giantrobot »

reaperducer wrote: post #254
rayiner wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My vaguely populist take is that the pandemic, WFH/remote and hybrid gave the mass white collar class a taste of what the C-suite has had for years.. flexibility. That’s not populist at all. It’s just another example of the white collar class enjoying the benefits of technology and globalization while everyone else gets left behind: https://www.epi.org/blog/wage-inequality-continued-to-increa... . Before the pandem…

It’s just another example of the white collar class enjoying the benefits of technology and globalization while everyone else gets left behind There's a lot more to it than that. WFH has been a godsend for a millions of people who work full-time, but are also poor. I drove for Uber for a while when I was between jobs. The majority of the people I carted around were people who thought Uber was a godsend because they w…

Don't forget it can obviate the need for extremely expensive child care. Someone working 9-5 in an office doing the work you describe needs at least 2 hours of day care with 4 hours being closer to the average. That's tens of thousands of dollars in day care costs a year.

Working from home means a parent can be home when their kids are home, available if they need to be picked up from school, and can just generally be more present for their kids. This is all especially helpful for single parents. They can't not work but day care costs keep the family destitute unless that parent makes very good money.

Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

#625

Post by NetOpWibby »

Tokkemon wrote: post #589
NetOpWibby wrote: post #138

For the first time in my life, I have space and energy to work on my fitness goals. I wouldn't be able to do that if I had to go into the office. Ironically, I moved to California because I was told we'd be working onsite...three years later and I _still_ don't have a badge because the back to office mandate never came. I use my lunch hour to workout because I can just eat at my desk. I wish I could afford a bigger h…

Congrats. Not all of us are so lucky.

True luck is rare, most luck comes with hard work and dedication (as is my case).

Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

#626

Post by esafak »

notyourwork wrote: post #592
steveBK123 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My vaguely populist take is that the pandemic, WFH/remote and hybrid gave the mass white collar class a taste of what the C-suite has had for years.. flexibility. Sure, these guys might go into the office but they do so from their pied-a-terre / 3rd home / whatever within a 5 minute chauffeured drive. They do this while maintaining a nearby suburban/exurban estate and maybe a lake/beach/ski houses where they spend th…

This is a really good take. I have some experience with it though I'm not a C-Suite person. Over my 15 years of software engineering I've always had a job that had flexibility to let me work the way I wanted. Some offices and some buildings were worse than others but in general I was always able to set my hours, work from home or from a random place (i.e. coffee shop, park, mall, whatever) as I saw fit. There were al…

That's because it's the worst of both worlds. If you have to go into a particular office you are still geographically chained. Hybrid only makes sense if you can go to an office that is near you; e.g., a coworking space.

Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

#627

Post by rayiner »

kevinventullo wrote: post #612
rayiner wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This recent (and self-serving) tendency of reducing “class” to only the extremely wealthy and everyone else is reductive and obscures important economic dynamics. It’s ridiculous to treat a master plumber that owns a plumbing business as “bourgeoise” while treating an Amazon engineer who has tremendous human capital as being a “proletariat.” Even in Marx’s time, there was substantial debate about how to classify the…

You think software engineers aren’t fungible? Facebook hires SWE’s based on generic technical interviews and doesn’t even assign them a team until week six.

That just means they’re not literally irreplaceable, not that they’re fungible. The pool of people who could do the job, even with training, is a tiny fraction of the overall population.

Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

#628

Post by hibikir »

yogthos wrote: post #454
FredPret wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everything is a class dynamic. “Analyst at GS hanging out in the Hamptons” doesn’t scream working class. The CEO and analyst are both upper class, just different levels of power and seniority. That CEO is just a power-tripping asshole.

The only meaningful way to look at class is by looking at class interests. On the one hand, you have the capitalist class who own significant amount of capital and use this capital to further their wealth. On the other hand, you have working class people for whom selling their labour is the primary source of their income. These two classes have largely contradictory interests. People who own companies want to cut the…

It's still more complicated than that, as ultimately a non trivial number of people end up making more from investments than labor, just from savings and time. Basically every 45 year old developer in the US that tried to save at all is a capitalist in your book.

If capital gains hand someone 300k a year, they aren't quite workers, but they aren't playing the same game as someone who is still playing the accumulation game. It's the best trick the late 20th century played: Defined contribution workers are all also capitalists, just like everyone relying on an ever more valuable house.

Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

#629

Post by BluePen7 »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #252
mytailorisrich wrote: post #30

People who like WFH will never want to return to the office unless perhaps the office is a 5 minute walk from home (they may be forced to, but they won't want to). For many people the time and cost savings of avoiding a daily commute cannot be offset by a nicer office. Those who are happy to return to the office in general are those who do not like WFH and prefer more contacts and a change of scenery. A nicer office…

It's not the commute that stops me- it's the "being on". At home I don't have to dress a certain way, sit a certain way, eat a certain way, etc At home I'm either working or not working. I don't have to wear my public face. Wearing a public face is, if not tiring, at least irritating, like a mild itch you're not allowed to scratch, even though you could, but you shouldn't.

For me I'm the exact opposite.

Didn't mind working in the office, it was nice enough, coworkers are all friendly.

But having to live anywhere near my office in a high COL area means I was priced out of affording even a 500 square foot apartment. Going remote meant that same salary bought me a newly built detached 6 bedroom house.

I didn't mind the office, I minded being a poor renter instead of upper middle class. Office inconveniences pale in comparison.

Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

#630

Post by danaris »

ghaff wrote: post #453
danaris wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm massively in favor of WFH—but I think this is a bit of an absolutist take. I can see plenty of people who are enjoying WFH, but would be willing to return to the office if they no longer had to work in a cube farm, but could have their own private office, that they could decorate to their taste, and where they could play their own music. And, perhaps most importantly, have a door that they could keep closed so th…

>And, perhaps most importantly, have a door that they could keep closed so that if anyone wants to interrupt them, they actually have to knock first. In my experience with offices at a couple of different companies (of much different sizes), the social convention was door open unless you were on a private call/meeting or really needed to go heads down on something. It would actually have been considered rude to knock…

My office was in an academic building, right on a hallway. Keeping the door open would have meant letting all the bustle and noise of students changing classes in to interrupt me frequently, not to mention significantly increasing the number of confused students who would try to walk in thinking my office was a classroom.

Frankly, I consider the expectation of constant availability to be another abusive part of work culture, very closely related to the "everyone must return to the office so I can see for myself that they are in their seats (which means they must be working)" mindset. Let people keep their doors closed to promote focus.

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