21–30 of 56 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>It always amuses me to read these lofty articles from academics and journalists about how multi-billion-dollar companies are doing it wrong. What are you trying to say here? Are you suggesting that if someone has a multi-billion dollars company, they are clearly "doing it right?"
Well, they're doing something right...
It seems like the author is mixing the idea of an open floor workspace with a casual atmosphere at work. I'll be the first to rail against a lot of contemporary Silicon Valley/tech culture, but running your business like 1950s IBM has nothing to do with producing a quality software/hardware product. If you don't have a public facing job, then does it matter if you wear a t-shirt and jeans to work, and have video game…
I think it can. I've had a couple of jobs where I needed to wear a suit to work (or at minimum, dress shirt, tie, and slacks) even though my job was not customer-facing. It had its annoyances but in some ways I think I took everything a little bit more seriously when I was at the office. Probably for the same reasons that uniforms are found to decrease behavior problems in schools that require them. There's sort of a mental switch that is thrown when you put on your suit, you switch into "work mode" and then when you take it off at the end of the day you switch to "not at work mode" and it actually can help with work/life balancing.
We're open plan at Blekko and it has its plusses and minuses. Rich (our CEO) had the experience of taking an open plan group to a mix of offices and open plan that went very badly as communication dried up. At Google quad cubes were the norm, doubles were the minimum (even for VPs who in theory would need to be talking at times about material things). The benefit is it is easier to communicate, and the downside is th…
"We give everyone a pair of noise cancelling headphones as a way of shutting out the office noise." Can't you just rent a 1950s vintage office building somewhere cheap and give your people the option? C.F. Claude Shannon (who stayed in a city centre building when his employer moved to the suburbs)[1]. I agree with others that the OA is confusing several issues (office layout and corporate goofiness). [1] http://aroun…
I really wonder if we've lost something by not having more spaces in our life like libraries where the cultural norm is to be silent and to enforce silence in the space so it may remain a sanctuary from noise.
[0] ironically, I've also made more as the models I bought appreciated in value significantly, so yay!
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"If black swans were farmable there would be no significance to the black swan" - this statement does not make sense to me. It seems reasonable to think that they are both significant and can also be sought after more effectively than through random chance. If you mean to imply that if it were possible, it would be happening already then I would just say the experiments need to run another decade before we'll have go…
Taleb's "black swan" is by definition not a repeatable -- or even predictable -- event. The metaphor loses all novel meaning if stripped of that quality.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"We give everyone a pair of noise cancelling headphones as a way of shutting out the office noise." Can't you just rent a 1950s vintage office building somewhere cheap and give your people the option? C.F. Claude Shannon (who stayed in a city centre building when his employer moved to the suburbs)[1]. I agree with others that the OA is confusing several issues (office layout and corporate goofiness). [1] http://aroun…
Options are key. I love headphones. I've spent more money on headphones than most[0], but a lot of the time when I'm working on some types of problems, I don't want to listen to anything and I don't want distractions or anything sitting on my head. Not everyone works well with headphones, so it is reasonable that there should be places you can get away to. Lacking a space like that, you oftentimes seek out a third pl…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Options are key. I love headphones. I've spent more money on headphones than most[0], but a lot of the time when I'm working on some types of problems, I don't want to listen to anything and I don't want distractions or anything sitting on my head. Not everyone works well with headphones, so it is reasonable that there should be places you can get away to. Lacking a space like that, you oftentimes seek out a third pl…
can you elaborate on the types of headphones that appreciate in value?
My (non-tech) workplace has individual offices for the engineers. Every engineer, even fresh grads, gets an office with a door (though windows are reserved for the senior guys). It sounds like a privilege at first, but with our lack of email it's pretty isolating. We can always get up and walk to each other to talk one-on-one, but sometimes I miss the collegial feel of 3-4 people hashing things out while at their des…
What?! An office of the size for 1 person, without a window? That sounds awful. Is it like a big closet with bright-lighting?[1] How many people on HN would like to work in the room pictured in the below link?:
http://jonnyh.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/kar-server-room-pa...
I don't... like the author of this piece. He writes like he doesn't really understand what he is discussing. For instance, he conflates the move to open plan offices, which is seen as increasing communication within teams, but also enables an almost oppressive level of employee monitoring, with googles propensity to space hoppers. These are quite different things, coming from quite different places. Open plan offices…
Keeping that in mind helps to contextualize nonsense like this.
It's also why the Economist operates the way they do.
It seems like the author is mixing the idea of an open floor workspace with a casual atmosphere at work. I'll be the first to rail against a lot of contemporary Silicon Valley/tech culture, but running your business like 1950s IBM has nothing to do with producing a quality software/hardware product. If you don't have a public facing job, then does it matter if you wear a t-shirt and jeans to work, and have video game…
