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CEOs Want Their Offices Back

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Re: CEOs Want Their Offices Back

#151

Post by varelse »

blhack wrote: post #143
varelse wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you would prefer your coworkers develop RSI symptoms from straining to use a laptop keyboard? Not all of us can use laptops for extended periods of time. Now if I could type with my brain (and I don't mean by smashing my head repeatedly on the keyboard), that's Sam Altman status quo shattering next-level stuff, but I don't think we're there yet. As others have replied, the problem isn't my typing, it's <40 square…

The standard keyboard layout, which every mechanical keyboard I've ever seen (including my beloved model M) is terrible for your wrists. The people using mechanical keyboards are not saving themselves anything. Get a proper ergonomic keyboard like the microsoft sculpt if you actually care about the health of you hands. Mechanical keyboards are cool, which is why I own one, and when I had an office why I used one ever…

I've been down this route many times. And after Dvorak, Kinesis, and a wide assortment of supposedly ergonomic keyboards, El-cheapo $15 Kensington USB keyboards and $20 Logitech trac-balls turn out to work best with my wrists, occasionally aided by Imax smartgloves.

I have a veritable museum of failed keyboards and pointing devices in my closet. IMO there is no silver bullet here. Also to extend your automotive metaphor, my nephew's late model diesel pickup gets 30+ mpg. Appearances and brand new shiny can be deceiving.

Re: CEOs Want Their Offices Back

#152

Post by arkitaip »

novia wrote: post #6

He has since moved to a 5-by-8-foot pod in the company’s innovation center. He retreats to it when he needs to focus or switch mental gears between meetings. [...] “It’s not about status or privilege,” he says of the pod, a prototype with still-exposed two-by-fours. “This is a space where you do certain kinds of work.” Yeah, sure. Ok.

Which is so very weird because you would think that the genius CEO would want his people to work as efficiently as possible, like himself. But no, open offices are a must so productivity be damned.

How do CEOs become this blind to obvious organizational cruft?

Re: CEOs Want Their Offices Back

#153

Post by koolba »

varelse wrote: post #139
LoSboccacc wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many large company will do but the large brunt of codetariat working for cash strapped business living and dying according to investors and customers will be keept in the open spaces: they looks cool in photos, convey a reassuring sense of "working bees" and sells well to visiting customers, so I fear the open plan it's here to stay.

HR is driven by data. To kill open floor plans, start citing the floor plan as the primary reason for leaving. If that becomes a theme, IMO open floor plans will become cancer. It just takes time.

That violates rule number one of dealing with HR: Don't talk to HR.

It doesn't matter how innocuous the comment is. It can come back to bite you. Example:

You: "I don't like open floor plans."

HR: "Add a note to his file that he's anti-social. If he ever comes back here it'll be recorded already."

Re: CEOs Want Their Offices Back

#154

Post by yourapostasy »

StevePerkins wrote: post #133
yourapostasy wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The purpose is for management to save money, period. Is saving money the real purpose, or the fig leaf for the actual purpose? If saving money is the real purpose, then Work From Home (WFH) drops putative facilities costs to zero . Forget shaving a square foot here or a tenth of a square meter there: send everyone to their home offices, drop it to zero, call it a day, and collect the bonus check on your way out. No…

Well yes, there are also elements of power and control. Management worries that employees will do less work if they are not present and under observation (sad truth: for the bottom 90% of employees, they're probably correct). And open floor plans, as the high-tech sweatshop model that they are, provide the lowest cost and maximum observation. But to my point about the degree to which fads and fashion come into play..…

I suspect what is happening is no management team of a category killer company exists that comes out and says, "we treat our developers right, that is our key to success", or even a softer version of that, sufficiently to develop cargo culting by management in other companies. I don't think quantification will help in this situation, and thus even higher quality on-prem workplaces lose out, as the productivity metrics are confounded by too many factors, and are not simple to communicate to finance.

If I was on a management team of a category killer that figured out doing the opposite of what everyone else was doing was helping my company, then I wouldn't be broadcasting that. In this case, if I figured out that high quality workplaces (whether at home or on-prem) conferred substantial competitive advantages, then I sure wouldn't be telling my competitors that.

If it came out that Apple for example, consistently put in high quality workplaces for the teams that developed their category-killing products, and took steps to hide that fact from the world because they recognized its competitive advantage, then there might be some recognition and cargo culting. Much of management is a social activity as much as an analytical activity.

Re: CEOs Want Their Offices Back

#155

Post by evadne »

meddlepal wrote: post #118
LoSboccacc wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many large company will do but the large brunt of codetariat working for cash strapped business living and dying according to investors and customers will be keept in the open spaces: they looks cool in photos, convey a reassuring sense of "working bees" and sells well to visiting customers, so I fear the open plan it's here to stay.

I think we can have our cake and eat it too. The all-glass office style at We Work could be adopted. I wish the glass was a bit thicker but the small shared office or bullpen model is ideal IMO.

I am currently working from a WeWork location and can provide a data point, that all-glass offices are terrible with soundproofing. The other downside of having glass partitions is that you could see what your neighbours were doing (and vice versa), which in my opinion is no different from visual pollution.

Re: CEOs Want Their Offices Back

#156

Post by hotsauceror »

varelse wrote: post #51
coffeeski wrote: post #8

Why do CEO's think they're alone in the need for quiet spaces where they can focus? Sure some people can work in the noisy space where interruptions abound. The only thing in my office that works well with interruptions is my CPU. I'd rather have a Cube farm, but better yet, a small tiny phone booth as an office.

Just like the cargo cult Agile pandemic peaked a few years ago, I suspect we're reaching peak open floor plans right now. The overall negative effects of an open floor plan for a significant fraction of engineers (though not all) is self-evident and backed up by reams of data stretching back nearly 40 years: http://iansommerville.com/software-engineering-book/web/work... TLDR: 100 square feet of personal space is opt…

Cargo Cult is exactly right. Our organization is selling us this right now. "We're creating a more collaborative atmosphere! Facebook does it, this must be what IT people want." (Any discussion of paying IT staff like FB, though, is "well, we're not an IT company, and besides we're mission driven!") Because they don't think we're mature enough to accept that they want to squeeze more bodies unto a smaller space, for purely financial reasons.

Leadership got called out at a recent company meeting by someone who commented that noise-cancelling headphone were critical. One of the C-suite evangelists was like "haha, yeah you're right next to my office aren't you." In other words, "I'm so oblivious, I think it's amusing that my loud conversations are negatively impacting my subordinates' ability to concentrate in this 'collaborative' environment'".

My team does not need a collaborative atmosphere. We're not marketers. We're quiet, introverted, methodical folks who need a quiet atmosphere where they can concentrate on writing ops code that won't bring down a production server in the middle of the day. We don't want to have to listen to overheard gossip, ostensibly private phone calls, etc. while we're trying to figure triage a complex issue. But more than anything, it's offensive that they won't just come out and admit that this is being done for financial reasons. We're all adults in a capitalist economy; we know the score.

Re: CEOs Want Their Offices Back

#157

Post by tpeo »

jdc0589 wrote: post #87
jesseryoung wrote: post #50

It seems like when "Open Office" articles come out there seem to be quite a few people talking ill of them. I recently switched jobs and with it switched from an open concept (large room with whiteboards separating teams) to an office (shared with one other coworker.) Maybe I was conditioned to like it (I certainly didn't like it at first) but I really did prefer the open concept when working on a team of 8 or 9 peop…

This is why I actually like cubicles. you are physically close to your team, if your space is organized well you are on a common isle with people you work with, but you still have at least a little bit of isolation in your personal workspace. I DO NOT understand why cubes get so much hate.

Possibly because having cubicles for each employee creates the expectation that each employee will stay at their cubicle. Walking up to a colleague's cubicle to chat about a work-related project can be misconstrued by an uninformed observer as "not working". This incentivizes employees to stay in their own cubicles.

That is the simplest way I can think of by which we might come to the usual "cubicle hell" scenario where workers are stuck from 9 to 5 in their cubicles while being occasionally nagged by management (as in Office Space).

Re: CEOs Want Their Offices Back

#158

Post by hajile »

jesseryoung wrote: post #103
valuearb wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was your role on the team? Did your team-members enjoy you turning around and interrupting them? Is it really that hard to get up and walk to another office so you don't disturb 8 other people with a question they don't care about? Walking around occasionally in the day is actually good for us. And two person offices are a mild improvement over cubicles, which are a significant improvement over open offices. But…

I was a team lead/solutions architect. > Did your team-members enjoy you turning around and interrupting them? I don't think it's fair to call all conversations "interruptions" and my co-workers were all very conscious of causing any unwanted interruptions. > Is it really that hard to get up and walk to another office so you don't disturb 8 other people with a question they don't care about? It wasn't, and I often di…

Sounds like you haven't been on the other side often enough. Most of a programmer's added value to a company happens in the 4 hours (give or take) that they are "zoned in" to what they're doing. As tech lead, when you knock them out of the zone early, you cost your company a lot of money because it's usually going to be a while before things ramp up again.

Lots (most?) of developers don't like having their focus interrupted. You assume because they are cordial that they were fine with the interruption. As their team lead and SA, they don't really have a choice.

As a side note, we're all idiots fresh out of college. We hear about things that seem good, but don't have the experience to make a proper value judgement. Lots of college kids have group study sessions and think they are great. The reality is that they are great for socializing, but generally terrible for studying. Open offices appeal for the same social reasons (with the same kind if issues). With no real life/work experience, its little wonder that this is preferred.

Re: CEOs Want Their Offices Back

#159

Post by hotsauceror »

varelse wrote: post #139
LoSboccacc wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many large company will do but the large brunt of codetariat working for cash strapped business living and dying according to investors and customers will be keept in the open spaces: they looks cool in photos, convey a reassuring sense of "working bees" and sells well to visiting customers, so I fear the open plan it's here to stay.

HR is driven by data. To kill open floor plans, start citing the floor plan as the primary reason for leaving. If that becomes a theme, IMO open floor plans will become cancer. It just takes time.

Yeah, but by then you, and all the others, have already left. Plus, the costs of a re-remodel can be quite persuasive. Time is on the side of the folks who made the original decision to commit to the open floorplan concept in the first place.

Re: CEOs Want Their Offices Back

#160

Post by _jal »

blhack wrote: post #143
varelse wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you would prefer your coworkers develop RSI symptoms from straining to use a laptop keyboard? Not all of us can use laptops for extended periods of time. Now if I could type with my brain (and I don't mean by smashing my head repeatedly on the keyboard), that's Sam Altman status quo shattering next-level stuff, but I don't think we're there yet. As others have replied, the problem isn't my typing, it's <40 square…

The standard keyboard layout, which every mechanical keyboard I've ever seen (including my beloved model M) is terrible for your wrists. The people using mechanical keyboards are not saving themselves anything. Get a proper ergonomic keyboard like the microsoft sculpt if you actually care about the health of you hands. Mechanical keyboards are cool, which is why I own one, and when I had an office why I used one ever…

You appear to think that mechanical boards cannot be ergonomic. I agree that the Model M and friends are terrible, but that's hardly[1] the end[2] of the mechanical[3] ergo[4] story[5].

[1] https://ergodox-ez.com/ [2] https://atreus.technomancy.us/ [3] https://trulyergonomic.com/store/index.php [4] https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/649yo0... [5] http://matias.ca/ergopro/pc/

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