The open-office trend is destroying the workplace (2014) • Hacker News Board

Re: The open-office trend is destroying the workplace (2014)

#131

Post by iaw » Sun, Feb 05, 2017, 10:25 PM UTC

6nf wrote: post #122

YZF wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work from a home office with a family. You close the door and as long as the boundaries are clear there's no problem. If you want to take a break and go shopping you can do that... It's doable.

Yes definitely, the problem is more with the perception of those in the office. All they see is you are working from home with your family and they might assume you're not able to give it your full attention.

At a previous job my manager complained incessantly about my arrival and leave times but could not find an instance where I wasn't responsive, available, and getting done everything that needed to be.

The reason I wasn't more responsive to his complaints was that I'd watch him spend his entire day at his computer either browsing facebook or reading sports blogs.

It feels so backwards.

Re: The open-office trend is destroying the workplace (2014)

#132

Post by arjie » Sun, Feb 05, 2017, 10:29 PM UTC

Hmm, interesting. For many people, it looks like their open office has people taking phone calls at their desk. We take phone calls in rooms (which you book on Google Calendar). If there are no rooms available when you book you reschedule or take the call in the Team Room (which has no expectation of noise-level).

If people are loud, you talk to them about it. It almost never happens since your coworkers are respectful and since you've obviously kept the more noisy jobs in a different part of the office from the engineers.

It seems to me that single person offices will suffer heavily from Conway's law.

But we'll see. It looks to me like where I've just moved to has no call rooms and no separation between engineering and the rest, so I'll see if those factors alone will change me from pro-open-office to anti-open-office.

Re: The open-office trend is destroying the workplace (2014)

#133

Post by m1sta_ » Sun, Feb 05, 2017, 10:32 PM UTC

I see the value in an old-school workplace where everyone has an office. Cubical variations, no matter how pretty, just always feel a bit wrong unless everyone is working on the same project.

Re: The open-office trend is destroying the workplace (2014)

#134

Post by MaulingMonkey » Sun, Feb 05, 2017, 10:34 PM UTC

ende wrote: post #71

tetraodonpuffer wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I can also grab my own room for an entire afternoon to crank out some heads-down work. that might work for people that work only on laptops, but it's not going to work if you have multiple monitors and towers, and ergo keyboard and so on

The way around that is that nobody owns their peripherals. Monitors, keyboards, etc are part of the work station, not part of the worker's personal environment. Of course there's still opportunity for customization of individual stations, and if someone prefers the more private spaces they can lobby to have one customized to their taste.

This isn't always a solution. I've often been tied to 'my' devkits, for example. Or 'my' tower of tablets I'm trying to port to and support. I've gone as far as buying a cheapo extra desk out of my own pocket because I was running out of space in my spacious L shaped cubical, and needed the extra surface area by forming a U. I've also had nontrivial amounts of dead tree documents.

Basically, I often labor under constraints that make it unreasonably expensive and difficult to make workstation hardware interchangeable like that.

My dev environment would be difficult to virtualize as well. I've dealt with pre-release software, pre-release OSes, and any VM based solution would need to give me proper GPU access. I'd need to develop tooling to help manage constantly reconfiguring my tools to point to whatever devkits are local as well. Syncing data is another problem - right now I often abuse symbolic links to move 'cold' projects and tools off of my SSDs, as 2TB SSDs only recently became affordable.

Re: The open-office trend is destroying the workplace (2014)

#135

Post by dalbasal » Sun, Feb 05, 2017, 10:35 PM UTC

nayuki wrote: post #22

On a related note, I noticed that cubicle offices are hardly better than open offices. The cubicle walls are tall enough to completely obscure the faces and bodies of your neighbors, but do nothing to block the sound. With no eye contact or awareness of your neighbors, it's easy to mistakenly believe that no one else can hear your sounds. As a result, on a typical day at the office I would hear one coworker yap on pe…

Cubicles keep the talking down.

Re: The open-office trend is destroying the workplace (2014)

#136

Post by obstacle1 » Sun, Feb 05, 2017, 10:37 PM UTC

radicalbyte wrote: post #88

ende wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way around that is that nobody owns their peripherals. Monitors, keyboards, etc are part of the work station, not part of the worker's personal environment. Of course there's still opportunity for customization of individual stations, and if someone prefers the more private spaces they can lobby to have one customized to their taste.

I don't want to touch a keyboard that someone has painted with ketchup and knows what else.

Carry Lysol wipes.

Or have the employee keep a container of them at each station (if they don't already, which IME many do).

Re: The open-office trend is destroying the workplace (2014)

#137

Post by x1798DE » Sun, Feb 05, 2017, 10:38 PM UTC

romanovcode wrote: post #99

kchoudhu wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then put those people in open office plan, and give developers offices.

Then it's unfair to the others :)

If you're worried about fairness why pay the developers $300k and pay the other people some much smaller fraction of that?

Re: The open-office trend is destroying the workplace (2014)

#138

Post by randcraw » Sun, Feb 05, 2017, 10:39 PM UTC

Ralfp wrote: post #103

facepalm wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The place you are looking for exists: it is called home :-)

That may fly if you are single. Otherwise everybody will assume that if you are at home, you are here to go shopping, take care of kids, let in guests, cook meals, do cleaning, take out trash, etc. ect, and lets not start about other household members distracting you with loud noises.

Working from home doesn't work for us singles either. I don't want to spend my days working alone. What fun is that? And for those of us who aren't married, that solitude extends to being solo 24x7. That's even worse that the nightmare of an open office. There has to be a balance somewhere between the isolation of Home Alone and open office chaos.

But if those are my only choices, after 30 years in the biz, I'll give up on software. That's no way to live.

Re: The open-office trend is destroying the workplace (2014)

#139

Post by obstacle1 » Sun, Feb 05, 2017, 10:40 PM UTC

shams93 wrote: post #67

Founders want to see what you're doing at all times, they know that you have to out in remote double time to actual get anything done. I can't solve incredible engineering problems with 5 people talking at the same time for 6 hours, I wind up having to work 18 hour days with 8 hours of face time sitting and chatting to make the crew of kids happy. As a senior dev my workload is triple the juniors so it's not unusual…

>As a senior dev my workload is triple the juniors so it's not unusual for me to have to do 80-120 hours a week for 40 hours pay to not lose my gig.

Your workload is triple the juniors and it takes you triple the time as them to get your work done?

That's exactly equivalent to the productivity of the juniors. You just grind more hours. Maybe you need to look for a more junior role.

Re: The open-office trend is destroying the workplace (2014)

#140

Post by nitemice » Sun, Feb 05, 2017, 10:48 PM UTC

rm999 wrote: post #32

The best work setup I've ever had by far was not private offices or cubicles (and definitely not an open office); it was a hybrid where our team of 3-5 people sat in a large private office. This increased collaboration while enforcing respect. It allowed our team to create a work culture democratically (how do we arrange seating? what noise levels are ok?) that simply isn't possible in an open seating arrangement. I…

I love this idea and it immediately reminds me of the Crystal Clear methodology [1]. A whole team being isolated together means you get more collaboration, cross-pollination and natural communication. It's not perfect either though if you've got annoying people in your team.

[1] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Clear_(software_develo...)