Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Open-office Trap

m.newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 161 posts

Re: The Open-office Trap

#141

Post by fred_durst »

marcosdumay wrote: post #90
randallsquared wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had this for meeting rooms at a previous job. It worked quite poorly, since it took a long time to pull in your profile. Meeting runners learned to get to the thirty-minute meeting ten minutes early so that there was some hope of being able to use the computer for part of the meeting. Also, the Windows profiles we were using didn't include applications, so there was the fun of each person who needed, say, Skype, o…

The university I went on used a similar setup, and pulling the profile took no time. I don't know what's wrong with corporate enviroments, that Windows profiles take so long to roam. That seems to be true to all of them. Also, corporate IT has an extremely irrational aversion to simply installing the software on all the computers for once. Even when it's free software, or things that everybody uses. That also repeats…

I remember from the old days when I used to deal with this. It was most often a case of people putting a lot of big files on their Windows desktops.

Certain people refused to put their big files on the network share because they said it took to long to load and then complained that their roaming profiles took to long to load because they had those big files on their desktop.

Re: The Open-office Trap

#142

Post by sheepmullet »

bluedino wrote: post #56

I can't believe we're still having this debate, how many years has it been? You can't simply take a closed-office environment and just knock the walls down, pass out headphones and cram everyone in one room. You need to change the work culture so that open offices work. You have to adapt things like pair programming and remove things like phones and email. Put everyone on a certain project at the same table. Switch p…

I suspect a lot of the productivity we get from peer programming comes from the ability it gives us to focus better in a noisy environment.

I've found when working from home I'm significantly more productive on my own than two of us peer programming in the office.

Re: The Open-office Trap

#143

Post by gabriel34 »

VLM wrote: post #72
InclinedPlane wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely. And that's still the culture in some places (Microsoft being a good example). Generally many devs will establish a rapport with folks on their team and in other parts of the company to a degree where occasional visits won't translate into wondering what needs fixing ASAP. Also, if everyone has an office then you can schedule meetings with other folks in their office, or your office. As long as it's not mor…

WRT "Though if someone has their door closed they probably don't want to be disturbed." there was some cultural variation but every place I worked at, as opposed to heard about, it was a huge gossip worthy social faux pas to close an office door unless there was a private managerial activity going on in the office at that moment (yelled at, review, interview, etc). You closed the door at night or when unoccupied beca…

Why was it a faux pas? Did people assume closed doors meant slacking off? Or was it considered rude to call/knock on someones' door, therefore rendering them inaccessible?

PS: Loved the dorm room/barracks analogy

Re: The Open-office Trap

#144

Post by dredmorbius »

matwood wrote: post #49
aeberbach wrote: post #35

Why stop at having an office merely "open"? Hot desking is the new thing - it's nothing to do with cost saving, it's all about "flexibility". Except that your organisation might also have a policy against working from home. There's no implicit message that you are simply a replaceable functional unit, not at all. You might even find there's no desk left when you arrive at work - who doesn't love the suspense of arriv…

Hot desking is the new thing I visited a place that was a giant room of ~100 people working. No one had their own computer, instead you just sat down and whatever computer was there and started working. The guy running this insanity said they re-image all the machines all time taking settings from one of the machines that has been in use. His theory was that over time everyones preferences would merge. It was interes…

Some years back I walked into a startup for an interview.

First impression: no lobby, no receptionist. I had to interrupt someone at a "desk" to announce myself.

Second impression: the "desks" were in fact folding Costco tables, arranged in ranks of around 10 and about 6-8 files through a cavernous space, edge-to-edge.

Third impression: site had some exceptionally poor security practices (and is among the more notable password disclosure case histories), which constituted a considerable part of my own interview content. The expressed interest in changing procedures was near nil.

I phoned the recruiter as I walked out (early) telling her that this was my new reference point for the worst interview experience ever.

No, I wasn't in the least interested.

Re: The Open-office Trap

#145

Post by dredmorbius »

eloisant wrote: post #59
matwood wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hot desking is the new thing I visited a place that was a giant room of ~100 people working. No one had their own computer, instead you just sat down and whatever computer was there and started working. The guy running this insanity said they re-image all the machines all time taking settings from one of the machines that has been in use. His theory was that over time everyones preferences would merge. It was interes…

At my university, 15 years ago, we had network profiles. So you would log to any machine in the university, your home directory would be your own. That worked with dual boot Windows and Linux, so you'd get the same files on either platform. The machines were pretty much stateless. When you booted a machine you could choose between Windows, Linux, or reset the whole machine. The third one was what you did when the mac…

That works pretty well on Linux systems, where you can simply remote mount (usually NFS) your home directory.

For Windows, what's actually happening is that your user profile is getting copied to the system. Which is why logging off takes so long -- the profile is getting copied back to the server.

Do this on an underprovisioned and busy network, or worse, one on which work cycles are highly synchronized (e.g., students, in standard class blocks, over the course of a day), and where account profiles can grow without limit (at one point I had tools to ID and prune large profiles), and things go all to hell.

The Linux / Unix model actually can be quite useful, and it isn't too dissimilar from my own initial experience: console logins to the campus Unix network from dumb serial terminals (precisely zero local state).

Sun Microsystems did some work with this (in conjunction with their own hotdesking workplace experiments) as well.

The downside is when you're doing highly compute- or data-intensive work, in which case the amount of information transferred across even NFS links becomes problematic, and/or you need to provision some really beefy servers. At that point you likely want some sort of shared batch compute resource. Again, more easily accomplished under Linux/Unix than other platforms.

Re: The Open-office Trap

#146

Post by dredmorbius »

randallsquared wrote: post #74
eloisant wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At my university, 15 years ago, we had network profiles. So you would log to any machine in the university, your home directory would be your own. That worked with dual boot Windows and Linux, so you'd get the same files on either platform. The machines were pretty much stateless. When you booted a machine you could choose between Windows, Linux, or reset the whole machine. The third one was what you did when the mac…

We had this for meeting rooms at a previous job. It worked quite poorly, since it took a long time to pull in your profile. Meeting runners learned to get to the thirty-minute meeting ten minutes early so that there was some hope of being able to use the computer for part of the meeting. Also, the Windows profiles we were using didn't include applications, so there was the fun of each person who needed, say, Skype, o…

The fact that MS platform management separates user capabilities (profiles) from platform capabilities (applications, installed and managed per-host) results in some particularly painful characteristics.

This is where the ability to have automatically configured (puppet / chef / ansible / cfengine) clusters of servers for 'Nix hosts, or NFS-mounted /usr, so much more powerful.

Re: The Open-office Trap

#147

Post by seizethecheese »

emsy wrote: post #82
seizethecheese wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it relevant that he is Indian?

You're right, it's not relevant at all, it may only evoke bad sentiments. I'll edit it. Edit: forgot I can't edit it -.- Remembered why it was relevant: Since tuberculoses is still a problem in India, they already assumed that he may have tuberculoses before the diagnosis (he was coughing heavily and had signs of an ulcer). But not only did they keep him working, he was still in a tightly packed office with all the o…

On second thought, this should have been obvious! Sorry for the snark, and I'm glad that you followed up with this.

Re: The Open-office Trap

#148

Post by Fuzzwah »

dredmorbius wrote: post #145
eloisant wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At my university, 15 years ago, we had network profiles. So you would log to any machine in the university, your home directory would be your own. That worked with dual boot Windows and Linux, so you'd get the same files on either platform. The machines were pretty much stateless. When you booted a machine you could choose between Windows, Linux, or reset the whole machine. The third one was what you did when the mac…

That works pretty well on Linux systems, where you can simply remote mount (usually NFS) your home directory. For Windows, what's actually happening is that your user profile is getting copied to the system . Which is why logging off takes so long -- the profile is getting copied back to the server. Do this on an underprovisioned and busy network, or worse, one on which work cycles are highly synchronized (e.g., stud…

I've configured a number of student labs exactly as eloisant explained. In windows we've used folder redirection which has options to disable the "offline files" type features such that it doesn't do any copying of profile files to the local drive.

Re: The Open-office Trap

#149

Post by dredmorbius »

Fuzzwah wrote: post #148
dredmorbius wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That works pretty well on Linux systems, where you can simply remote mount (usually NFS) your home directory. For Windows, what's actually happening is that your user profile is getting copied to the system . Which is why logging off takes so long -- the profile is getting copied back to the server. Do this on an underprovisioned and busy network, or worse, one on which work cycles are highly synchronized (e.g., stud…

I've configured a number of student labs exactly as eloisant explained. In windows we've used folder redirection which has options to disable the "offline files" type features such that it doesn't do any copying of profile files to the local drive.

I'll admit to 1) avoiding Windows admin work to the maximal extent possible and 2) wow, it's been ten years since I've had to do any.

So my information may be somewhat dated. Still generally harder to do this under Windows than Linux.

Re: The Open-office Trap

#150

Post by t_pascal »

YTowOnt9 wrote: post #111
aeberbach wrote: post #35

Why stop at having an office merely "open"? Hot desking is the new thing - it's nothing to do with cost saving, it's all about "flexibility". Except that your organisation might also have a policy against working from home. There's no implicit message that you are simply a replaceable functional unit, not at all. You might even find there's no desk left when you arrive at work - who doesn't love the suspense of arriv…

> So when you plan your next office, leave the kitchen > open too - the scrape of chairs on the tiles, the > sound of the dishwasher being unloaded, the happy > PING of the microwave - not to mention the aromas of > hot food - all these things will make employees feel > right at home. This is an accurate description of lunchtime at the digital shitshow where I work. An open plan kitchen really is the handiwork of the…

When I was in prison, we had open plan shitting. It was very morale-boosting synergy.
Post reply on HN