81–90 of 237 posts
// ok, that's not the only - or even primary - reason, but it is probably a larger factor than we realize
this article has very little to do with the apache project. I think most of us are using libre office anyway...
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…
Nothing says we don't value you like being lined up in rows with no walls. They might as well elevate the manager offices like guard towers to complete the look in that photo. Do these companies get payoffs from head phone manufactures?
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.
My office is switching to an open design. And none of the people who work there are happy about it. It was decided by the folks who own the company, several thousand miles away. I think the real allure of open offices is how they look. Open offices look modern . They look like the kind of working area a hip, young, collaborative, industry-disrupting company would favor. But that's all bullshit. It's just a fairy tale…
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…
My office is switching to an open design. And none of the people who work there are happy about it. It was decided by the folks who own the company, several thousand miles away. I think the real allure of open offices is how they look. Open offices look modern . They look like the kind of working area a hip, young, collaborative, industry-disrupting company would favor. But that's all bullshit. It's just a fairy tale…
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…
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> 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.
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I too think it's great* *Owns shares in headphone company
I'd like to specify: Own shares in Bose* *Empowering open offices with $300 noise cancelling headphones since 1964.
And those who still object to wearing those are considered as retarded by the headphone crew: just look at any Reddit thread about this matter, and you'll see hundreds of guys who think that it is the normal situation and will thrash anyone dares say otherwise. And they truly believe that's cool and they're cool... Perhaps battery cattle think they're cool too, dunno.
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Why pay $300k+ a year for a developer then just to go and save a few hundred a month on real estate costs, sacrificing some percentage of productivity?
Those numbers don't add up, but there are others that do: thousands a month for more space + less productivity loss after an initial shock period could be a potential equilibrium.
I know I got used to a lower productivity after spending some time in open offices. Then one day I was sitting in a private office again and felt my productivity surge and felt: "WOW! This is the way programming should feel like!"