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

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

#191

Post by sidlls »

adrienne wrote: post #182

Women who put up with this aren't "saints", they're just being exploited by their partners.

My wife chooses to have a job that she does full time from home. We are very much of means to provide a full time live-in nanny or day care for our children on our current income. If she chose she could get a much better paying "butt in the seat" job and we'd have even more means. She doesn't "put up" with anything in the pejorative sense you mean, and is most certainly not being exploited by me. Shame on you.

However we are extraordinarily lucky. My mother, for example, was a single mom who sometimes had three jobs just to make ends meet. She didn't have any real choice. She was exploited by the system and her ex-husband both.

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

#192

Post by ci5er »

perseusprime11 wrote: post #98
zebraflask wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked in that kind of arrangement, too, but it only works well if all the people put into that office are predisposed to it or otherwise able to develop that team atmosphere. Everyone has to be able to get along. That doesn't happen for every group out there. If it doesn't work out, it can quickly develop the same appeal as a holding cell in a jail - all of the drawbacks of an open office plan in a confined spa…

Have you looked into caves and commons approach? https://hbr.org/2013/03/give-workers-the-power-to-choose-cav...

That one is good. It cut down on the body count of a too rapidly growing startup I was at about almost decades ago.

In theory, I like working at an office, quite a lot, but the open-office does not work at all for me. Cubes are even fine, but that open elbow-to-elbow thing? Nope.

Ideally (for me), we'd have 2~3 person offices, relatively plentiful small (5~8 person) rooms scattered through, and a large gathering space with white-boards all around (and not dominated by ping-pong).

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

#193

Post by ci5er »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #111

I was re-reading Snowcrash (a novel by Neal Stephenson). In this book there is a tangent about how aweful it is in the future to work for the government. He goes over how horrible the work conditions were, with open offices, bosses always watching you, no fixed assigned spacing, first come first serve everything being tracked by computers. If you are late everyone knows it because your sit in the boonies. When I read…

> At my company they have, /on purpose/ too few spaces for the number of employees. So early birds get all the spaces with powerplugs, monitors, network etc. The rest must fight it out on bench seats with no power etc.

They had a weird back-story vignette told by a character in a novel called "Market Forces" by Richard Morgan like this. There was an economic downturn, and the bosses decided that instead of picking who got fired, to just reduce the number of desks from 10 to 8 and let the workers race into work for them. Too late, too many time, and you're out. The races to work for those last desks soon got fairly bloody...

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

#194

Post by thearn4 »

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…

This is our setup in my gov't agency (NASA): 3-4 engineers per room, typically grouped by either project or functional area. We have a couple of regular conference rooms, and also have a few breakout/collaboration rooms that can't be reserved for meetings as well.

Apparently, it's how it worked in the 1960s too. My group just never went through the various workspace fads because we never had enough money to move or reconfigure the building. I guess that's one upside to moving as slow as the gov't sometimes does.

I did have a cubicle while working with another division, but they were still fairly private.

The downsides: infrastructure is equally as slow to get updated...

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

#195

Post by tastythrowaway2 »

twothamendment wrote: post #171
Ralfp wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 with a family can be great - it takes a little training. I'm 100% remote at home in a spare bedroom. My youngest is 5 and even he knows not to burst in the room and start talking without waiting for me to talk to him first. Maybe I'm just in the middle of a thought or more often working with another dev, but family can be taught to respect the work space in a home. "Goodbye, I'm going to work" seems…

this... is solid advice. I don't know that I could pull it off but you make excellent points.

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

#196

Post by accountface »

dethswatch wrote: post #173
davidmr wrote: post #55

I think we've lost the war. I was even asked to meet with my company's architects and designers about a new space we were building out. I basically spent an hour telling them in every different form I could that what I wanted was a place I could go where people could find me, but they would have to knock on a door and open it to talk to me, and these people looked at me like I was from fucking Mars. They'd never hear…

The kitchen will be about 1 meter away from your workspace. You'll enjoy the overly loud conversations, beeping of microwaves, coffee makers, dishwashing, and the delightful smells of bkreafast, brunch, lunch, and the rest.

My office has a kitchen adjacent to a auditorium. No doors.

Everyone who gives presentations around lunchtime inevitably has to apologize to the audience for the beeping microwaves and chatty employees.

This building is like 3 years old and cost tens of millions of dollars to build.

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

#197

Post by mistersquid »

rocqua wrote: post #97
coldcode wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me open offices remind me of factories or cattle pens, where people are forced into acting like machines. Unlike many you I cannot code while listening to music as being a musician, my brain winds up analyzing what I am hearing instead of concentrating on work. The worst thing of all is having music piped into a huge room making it impossible to even use headphones if you don't like the tunes. You may as well shoo…

Try something like noisli. It still has that masking background-noise effect without being music (i.e. without drawing your attention). It basically allows you to play a configurable mix of background noises; e.g. Wind blowing, rain faling, white noise, train tracks. Heck, writing this makes me want to try it tomorrow again.

As someone who is sensitive to sound quality, I've been using a combination of mid-range Shure 315 earbuds with custom ear sleeves which is low-fatigue compared to over-the-ear.

Noise-cancelling equipment isn't as effective for human voices, so I've used low-to-high volume music to mute out my coworker's voices. This works great until early afternoon when. I. am. Just. Acoustically. Exhausted.

I'm susceptible to music and can only use it as background for 2-3 hours at a time.

The other day I came across HN user's grahamburger's suggestion to "add in some white noise on top of" using over-the-ear noise-cancelling headphones. [0]

So, I did some research/shopping and am going to experiment with audio tracks from "The Very Best Sound of Nature - Birds, Waves, Rain (with Forest, Creek, Wind, Thunder) [Sound for Relaxation, Meditation, Healing, Massage, Deep Sleep, Yoga]".

Also, as a result of your suggestion for Noisli, I'm going to try a background-noise generating application. Thank you for the suggestion.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13564539

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

#198

Post by accountface »

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.

congratulations, you made the problem worse

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

#199

Post by kabdib »

I work in a place that has an open plan, but our desks are on wheels and we can move them as we see fit. So people working on related projects can find a spare room and move a project there. And if you really need an office, or just a quiet corner, those are available.

It's not always super great, but it's way better than having an open plan where you're told where to sit, or an open plan where you don't have any continuity, just a bin of stuff, like you had in grade school.

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

#200

Post by closeparen »

protomyth wrote: post #94
arctangent wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They might as well elevate the manager offices I worked in a call centre a long time ago. At the end of each row of desks was an elevated desk where the team managers sat, precisely to enable them to watch each person on their team.

I'm reminded of a phrase my Dad used on me as a youth "I am amazed and appalled. I am amazed you even thought of it, and appalled you did it." It says a lot about folks desperation for a job to deal with a boss with that mindset. Sure, I'm fine with observation posts if I'm in danger and might need help pronto. By all means, have an observation desk if I'm feeding crocodiles, but not to monitor my daily work. I thoug…

Call center is a customer service job, where the customers happen to not be in the room.

I feel the same way about this as McDonalds managers directly observing the kitchen and cashiers: nothing at all.

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