
Employers are rethinking open-plan office design - SamWhited
https://www.citylab.com/life/2020/05/open-office-design-coronavirus-risk-safe-workplace-health/611299/
======
hpoe
So one thing that bothers me about this is they talk about not going back to
cubicles and creating transparent dividers. I do not like this not one bit, I
enjoy the privacy and distraction blocking of a cubicle, an office would be
optimal but a cubicle is preferable to the open office hellscape that was
looming before Corona stopped it.

But going from open office to plexiglass dividers seems to be far worse than a
cubicle in every conceivable way.

~~~
baron_harkonnen
Open offices are, and have always been about, control. Not about productivity,
but exclusively about control (well maybe with a touch of thrift thrown in
there).

We say this all the time but act as if it's some secret, or just a cynical
remark, but it's not either of these. As a general rule your boss likes that
you can feel their perpetual gaze as you work, even if in practice it means
you are working less.

Because of course you aren't working all the time, and of course you are not
100% being productive. Everyone knows this. It is not a secret that even the
most productive engineer spends a huge amount of office time doing nothing.

No worker (as I general rule, I know there are exceptions) prefers open
offices to either cubicles or real offices (I wonder how many HN have ever had
these?). Nobody feels that they work their best when someone is watching them.
Everyone knows that part of working in an open office is figuring out how to
create the illusion that you are working.

The only reason to have an open office is because the people making the
decision for how the office should be, and the people reporting to them, do in
fact like to watch you work, because they like the control that they feel when
they do this.

Please let's stop pretending that we don't all understand exactly what open
offices are about.

~~~
mattlutze
I hear where you're coming from, but have you been a part of a real estate
search process for office space?

Open offices are crazy cheaper, and most retail developers don't build real
offices anymore (and or when they renovate a commercial property pull all
these walls out).

It is about cost, for anywhere I've worked or any clients I worked for. I
haven't ever known a manager that wanted an open office to control or oppress
their staff.

This is (mostly) why new occupancy tech exists as well btw -- the "crotch
sensors". Not usually for specific employee surveillance, but to map occupancy
trends and determine what parts of a space can be hot-desked or otherwise
over-assigned to further reduce space requirements.

~~~
rhizome
_I haven 't ever known a manager that wanted an open office to control or
oppress their staff._

The way it works is similar to attitudes toward remote work (until a few
months ago): barriers help people waste time and get away with stuff.

Control is not all about what an authority can do (which is actually the least
efficient form of control), it's also about what other people are prevented
from doing, sometimes structurally so, as in the context of office layout and
design.

~~~
mirimir
There's a simple solution. Just give up on the idea that we can expect people
to work many hours ~continuously, on a regular basis.

Sure, there must be times when ~everyone is available to talk. But otherwise,
just let people work when they're ready to work. And let them self report
their work time.

~~~
rainyMammoth
you hit the nail on the head. The main issue here is also that MOST
employers/managers don't really know how to measure your productivity,
especially in modern software engineering.

That's why "Busyness" and "Butts in Seat Per Hour" are seen as proxy for
productivity. That's also why politics play such a big role.

Until we find a GOOD way to measure productivity, Control and "Busyness" (the
illusion of productivity) is unfortunately not going to go away.

~~~
Shorn
"Busyness"

I thought to myself: "what if that _was_ the etymology of the word, how
ironic".

[https://www.google.com/search?q=etymology+business](https://www.google.com/search?q=etymology+business)

Oh wow.

~~~
mirimir
I've always kinda "known" that, in a joking way. And never bothered to
actually check. So thanks :)

------
0fcf8d3559a64c
I would take a vertical coffin of office space if it came with a door.
Something to block out the audio and visual noise and supported whatever
horizontal space was needed to host my monitors.

I realize some people could not handle the claustrophobia, but for those that
can this seems like an easy win to minimize footprints while isolating those
who are bothered by the distractions of others.

~~~
flanbiscuit
I'd even take something like those offices in Terry Gilliam's film "Brazil"
[https://media3.giphy.com/media/phV9pLhPDUb3a/source.gif](https://media3.giphy.com/media/phV9pLhPDUb3a/source.gif)

Looks actually kind of roomy in that gif

edit: here's a video
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr3eIAIFyo8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr3eIAIFyo8)

~~~
hedora
The Zero Theorem has a brilliant treatment of open seating toward the
beginning.

It’s really worth watching the film (that one scene is worth it on its own)
but you can get a glimpse of the seating arrangement and the manager after “We
is stressed” in the trailer:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fkHrQ30oT9o](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fkHrQ30oT9o)

I see now that there are plexiglass dividers between the desks. Terry Gilliam
is a visionary.

------
cosmodisk
It is unrealistic to expect that everyone could have a private office with
leather chair and fish tank behind it, however it would be great if people
could have smaller spaces,lets say 2-4 people per room ,which would have a
door and etc. Open plan office,the way it is now, it's just a one level up
from a hen battery.

~~~
eeZah7Ux
> It is unrealistic

It was absolutely the norm in the '70 and '80 and before. How comes that
technology improves and worker's rights regress?

~~~
BurningFrog
One reason is we stopped building buildings.

So now we have to squeeze into and share the space already built.

I also wonder how many people _really_ had private offices 30-40 years ago.

~~~
bsder
> I also wonder how many people really had private offices 30-40 years ago.

IBM (and presumably any other company of that ilk) certainly had one person
per office up through 1990.

One thing that people forget is that you had a _land line phone_. And you
spent a lot of time on it. And haranguing people was considered a negotiation
tactic. So, being able to close your door to not bother others was important.

~~~
WWLink
Programming teams almost certainly talked over IRC back then though?

~~~
bsder
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Wait, why am I laughing? Oh, God, it's to keep from crying
from how old I am ...

In 1990 corporations? Goodness, no. Most companies didn't even have a
_corporate email system_. IBM was probably one of the few exceptions. And
_external_ network access required signatures from 3 VP's (one senior), your
firstborn, and probably your left ovary/testicle--it basically just _didn 't_
happen.

Programming teams were colocated or _they didn 't communicate_. CVS was an
advanced idea. C and UNIX were those toys from academia--real programmers used
mainframes and COBOL or FORTRAN. If you had a forward thinking team, they
might circulate useful technical articles and ideas via inter-/intra-office
memos. Otherwise, you bought a book or went down to the corporate library and
borrowed a book. At IBM you could pull up old issues of the IBM Journal of
Research and Development (which were _gold_ \--and still are).

A 128Kbps (yeah, that's 12 _kilobytes_ ) dedicated leased line was considered
pretty fast and was pretty expensive. A 250MB SCSI drive was considered pretty
big and local networking at 16Mbps (Token Ring) was _godly and ferociously
expensive_.

I can go on and on ... but we're already well into "Back in my day, we walked
uphill to school--both ways. And we counted our bits by hand." territory.

Even in universities, 1988-89-ish was _just_ at the point where using ftp to
pull a .tgz from somewhere might actually be faster than sending a physical
letter through the mail and having them mail you a magtape in return. And you
sent a physical letter because _very_ few people in a university at the time
had an email address that was generally accessible. For God's sake, in 1988
/etc/hosts could still enumerate in an actual file _every single host on the
ARPAnet_.

The amount of technical change from 1990 to 1999 was _ENORMOUS_.

~~~
binarysneaker
Thanks for the memories :)

------
gregkerzhner
While I would prefer a private office with a window to an open office seat, I
much prefer an open office to a cubicle. Not being able to see any windows and
being in a small, depressing space alone for 40 hours a week sounds terrible.

But above all, I like working from home, where I can have a nice space with
windows and no distractions. Of course, I am lucky because not everyone has a
space like this in their home.

~~~
OrangeMango
My office is in a ~95 year old skyscraper, so even when we used cubicles
everyone was close to a window. Instead of the current style in which office
buildings have huge rectangular floor plates with elevators in the center, new
office tower construction can take design cues from the old days with H shapes
or central light shafts.

~~~
flukus
> nstead of the current style in which office buildings have huge rectangular
> floor plates with elevators in the center

I think you hit the nail on the head, this is why cubicles were hated, it
wasn't the cubicle, it was the sprawling cubicle farm that was hated. Even a
private office in the middle of that farm is not pleasant, so the the private
offices went around the outside and made things even worse in the inner
cubicles. Hopefully this campus style building dies.

At least around me the trend has been towards much thinner but taller office
buildings for a while now, partly out of necessity as city plots of land get
smaller. These accommodate cubicles and/or offices with natural light really
well. The often derided glass and steel architecture also helps because you
get floor to ceiling natural light.

------
rodiger
I guess I'm in the minority. Whenever this discussion pops up everyone laments
the horrors of the open office, but I have no difficulty focusing in that
environment and find it more lively and attractive when compared to
alternatives. I don't need a black box to focus, and the feeling of being
social (even when I'm not) really helps my morale.

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
The focus in an open floorplan feels fragile, sitting in one I have a constant
low level anxiety. I hate feeling constantly watched, as someone can see
everything I do. Any time I sneeze I'm bothering a couple of dozen people. My
monitors are open for display. If I eat at my desk everyone needs to suffer
through that. My only sense of any sort of privacy are my headphones, which
people are constantly talking over, or I'm taking off because someone is
talking to me. There's no office door to close and never any promise of any
sort of flow.

~~~
rodiger
I'm sure it varies based on place of employment and personal preference. I
understand many people have some level of social anxiety that may be
exacerbated by the open floor plan. I just personally enjoy it and hope to not
see its demise. Glad we get to pick our employer!

~~~
ken
Unfortunately, that doesn't help, since 100% of software employers with
offices use open floor plan offices, or some variant of the same.

I always ask people in the industry what company has private offices for
programmers. The only answers I've ever heard are "Fog Creek" and "maybe
Microsoft?", but my friends at Microsoft say that's not so common any more.

~~~
pertymcpert
Apple still has 2 person or completely private offices.

~~~
fzzzy
Not in the spaceship.

------
nugget
If the tech giants are truly ready to embrace permanent wfh for a large % of
their employees I think we could see a land rush of innovation around wfh
collaboration tools on the horizon, including some AR/VR applications. That is
what I'm most excited about.

~~~
karatestomp
I suspect the main thing we'll get, tech-wise, if WFH expands substantially,
is more and more normalized spying.

~~~
jrs235
*"productivity tracking"

~~~
airstrike
*Coding APM

------
Simulacra
"What, exactly, is so valuable about working together in the same physical
space? "

EXACTLY. The open office plan has never achieved the spontaneous productivity
companies had hoped for. Instead it's led to misery, lower productivity, and
mental and social health.

------
monadic2
Honestly as someone who grew up with "office space" on the TV and then went to
work in an open office, I am dying for cubicles.

~~~
alatkins
Same! They tried to make the Initech office look as bland and dispiriting as
possible, but by 2020 standards it looks pretty good :)

------
renewiltord
I like open offices. Very pleasant spaces. I also like working from home, but
I like socialization too.

~~~
ken
Liking an activity doesn't mean it needs to be an integral part of your
workplace every minute of the day. I like playing the drums, but I would never
do it in the same room as my coworkers while they're trying to write software.

I want to work at work. When I want to socialize (or do anything else which
might distract others), I wait for a break and go outside.

~~~
renewiltord
Sure, sure. I like an environment where I can socialize at work. I still work
fine. Fortunately, I find it easy to find companies like that.

~~~
turbulentic
I like socializing too. Heck, i can talk all day, every day. It's just that no
work gets done, which might put some employers off

------
nine_k
Can't help to remind: each such cell would need proper ventilation.

Open offices circulate air in broad strokes of huge air ducts on the ceiling.
This is not going to easily map to a grid of smaller cells where horizontal
streams are impossible. This of course can be addressed, but it _seriously_
more expensive than just plastic walls.

If you don't solve the ventilation, the workers will suffer from high CO₂ and
overheating, lowering productivity and morale.

If you don't separate the cells enough to block the air flow between them
(that is, leave them as cubicles), then the whole point of separation as an
infection-resisting measure is lost.

------
29athrowaway
As a software engineer, I don't see offices as something necessary.

Everything you do leaves a digital footprint: issue trackers, version control,
instant messaging, e-mail. Everything is timestamped, everything leaves
multiple copies.

If you want to check if someone is working, it is not necessary to see if
someone is at their desk. If you want to grab someone's attention, you can
have a meeting that does not distract people in adjacent desks.

You can still gather and have IRL activities. That is OK. But I don't need to
that every day. Most days I need to get things done, and focus.

During meetings, the most important thing I need to get from that meeting is
information in order to make decisions. I need to focus my attention on what's
being presented, not on how people dress, their haircut, their age, weight,
stature and other superficial aspects that have no impact on the product
whatsoever. Likewise, I don't want the meeting to be interrupted by someone
commenting about someone's haircut.

Then, there's non-verbal communication. Some will claim you need body language
to perform sentiment analysis or to cross-validate what's being said, etc. But
those activities take away attention from the points being discussed.

Then, there's legal liability. If you want to go "off the record", then you
will not like things being recorded. If you are a honest person acting within
the law, you don't have strong reasons to go off the record. If your modus
operandi is to gaslight people, you won't like meetings that are potentially
recorded. Overall, visibility is accountability, and accountability is key to
keep things healthy and legal.

People's appearance and other superficial aspects of a contributor should have
very little importance when compared to their deliveries. A remote culture
helps people to focus on what's important.

~~~
krapht
I have seen many arguments like this, as if software engineers are automata
that take requirements as input and produce software code. However an
important part of being in a company is developing a shared team relationship
where individuals feel accountable to each other and take some interest in the
welfare of their co-workers and company above their own short-term interests.

Since we are humans this necessarily involves some socialization and shared
experiences. I don't believe in 100% remote work - maybe we can do remote 3
times a week, and that might work. The idea that workers will replace their
social interactions on their own is naive. There is an epidemic of loneliness
among many once they are no longer forced to socialize via school or church.

(In terms of productivity, I feel like remote optimizes individual throughput
over system throughput, due to degraded avenues of cross-communication.)

I hope that this cheering for remote dies. Many managers read Hacker News and
they might actually take it seriously. The less tightly the team is bound via
social connections the more likely the job function can simply be outsourced
to an external contractor.

Also, speaking purely of my own self-interest, I like where my job is located
and don't want to move so I can equalize my standard of living with similarly
smart and dedicated developers in eastern Europe, Asia, or even the deep south
or rural midwest.

~~~
29athrowaway
Some people treat engineers as automata even if they're in the same office.
Even if they work at an adjacent desk. That does not have anything to do with
offices, it has to do with personality traits like lack of empathy and
excessive ego. If you are not a jerk and were not raised by jerks, you will
have respect not only for the engineers, but for everyone, even people in
modest occupations.

Then, working remote is not the same as working remote from a different
timezone. The latter can make collaboration more difficult.

I have worked with remote engineers, and over time, I have learned to
appreciate and respect their work. I know many of their names, especially the
brilliant ones that I can trust 100%. I know from their deliverables that
they're dedicated and reliable and I would write them a recommendation letter
any day if they asked for it, have lunch with them if they're in town, and I
am honestly interested in learning about their backgrounds and perspectives on
life.

On the other hand, at the office, there are people working some few feet away
that I have never talked to. I don't know anything about them, or their lives.
Some of them even work on my team :)

So, no. Offices are not magical facilitators of friendship and cohesion. And
when two people decide that they don't get along it can become quite miserable
to be present in a tense environment.

I have no problems working with people living far away. If they're good, I
want to work with them and assimilate what I can from their knowledge and
problem solving skills. Also, secret santas with them are the best, try it.

If you are concerned with jobs going away, or wages being depressed, these are
a list of things you have to worry about in addition to outsourcing: lower
entry barriers to programming, coding camps, AI. In the end, the only
effective way to protect your job is to acquire and polish your skills, and
the best way to do it is by working with as many strong engineers as you can
no matter where they are from.

------
qwerty456127
Open-space offices are bullshit. Everybody should be given a separate room.
Whoever is not worth a room should work from home. Nevertheless an office
should have a number of places where people can meet and communicate freely in
groups of whatever size they want.

~~~
turbulentic
Meeting rooms can actually be great for collaborative work, it' judt that
they're often used for that rigid status-update manner that makes it seem
unappealing

------
itronitron
It would be nice if the article did the math on cost per sq. ft. of 'usable'
open office space vs. cost for individual offices. When an open office can
only be filled to P% capacity then private offices start to make a lot more
sense.

~~~
alkonaut
Yeah the question should be "do you want an open office in this attractive
location with easy access to public transit, or do you want your own office in
this office park 10km outside the city that you have to drive to every day?"

------
holidayacct
The open office plan is only there so that employers can control their
employees. There is literally no other reason for it, it removes psychological
safety which most people need in order to think while they are working. It
allows obnoxious employees to create distractions in order to slow productive
employees down. It allows clever employees to waste the executive function of
people they don't like by flooding them with behavioral cues, gestures and
body languages that has inherent meaning (This is particularly dangerous and
devastating if done in a targeted fashion). I'm sure if you talked to a
psychologist they could give you a million more fun games you can play with
people in open office environments. They were never good for people to begin
with or for getting work done. In small startups they are perfectly fine but
in medium to large sized corporations they are only abused.

(BTW, none of the above bothers me in particular but I know this happens on
all the time and I've watched people in large corporations play psychological
games with extremely good employees just to make them miserable in open office
environments.)

~~~
29athrowaway
As soon as wages get depressed and people start talking about unions, remote
work will be the new hot thing.

------
ashtonkem
What’s very interesting is that in an era where we’ve all been shown exactly
how many businesses could operate remotely, we also now have a situation where
the value proposition of returning to the office is rapidly dropping at the
exact same time. A lot of these more pandemic friendly offices appear to have
the worst of both worlds; a total lack of privacy on top of extra restrictions
on movement.

My company is setting up rules for how we’ll return to the office once the
govt. says its okay, and it involves basically pretending that we’re working
remotely from the office, plus the need to Lysol down conference rooms once
you’re done with them. A few months ago I’d be happy to return to the office,
but now I’m genuinely wondering why we should bother.

~~~
Consultant32452
I work at a fortune 500 financial company (the boring conservative kind).
They're not even considering coming back into the office this calendar year.

Speaking only about my own department, I find the little awkward home
distractions lovely. The other day in the middle of a conf call someone's kid
popped into the video and asked about potato chips. It was _really_ important
because the other parent had informed them there were no chips, but they had
to get a second opinion. These things are really humanizing. Instead of "Chuck
from the integrations team" it's "Chuck whose kid loves chips." For what it's
worth, our time to market for new integrations has improved by almost 30% with
everyone working from home. And we're not the kind of shop where work from
home means working all day.

------
whytaka
I hate having to wear anything on my face, much less a pair of screens beaming
the simulacrum directly into my eyes. To me, there is so little gained in
visually looking at others in presentations I find it shocking people care so
much. With people I’ve never met, I do one introductory video chat to show I’m
a real person. Anytime after it’s purely voice or screen sharing.

All the emotional cues are there in the voice and with less lag from not
having video hog up all the bandwidth, I find the smaller latency aids in
smoother conversations.

~~~
cheerlessbog
I am not able to fully pick up on emotional cues without video. There is a
reason we use facial expressions when talking in person. For a technical
discussion it doesn't matter - for a personal connection it does. Another
advantage of video is you can distinguish "thinking" from "frozen". Plus, you
can tell when they're confused, or have a question.

------
carapace
I've said for years now that I'm willing to take a $20,000 reduction in salary
for an office with a door that closes.

------
mirimir
That's a hilarious title :) I can't imagine how anyone (without a death wish)
would be OK now in an open-plan office. We'll know more this fall, but
COVID-19 may be around indefinitely. And even if it peters out, another
coronavirus or whatever could pop up at any time. Given that zoonotic events
have become far more likely.

------
jimbob45
My workplace has a white noise generator built in to the ceiling (we track how
long it takes new hires to figure out that it's not a really loud fan). During
blackouts, it shuts off and we're amazed at the difference.

Long story short, talk to your boss about investing in one of these. It helps
me a lot personally.

~~~
jsilence
White noise makes me tired quickly. So YMMV.

~~~
RonanTheGrey
Omg I'm not the only one. I've tried and tried and tried white noise and brown
noise and pink noise and yellow noise and every kind of noise people can come
up with, and I can't stand them. After 10 minutes my brain is screaming for
silence, it's exhausting.

I've found rain sounds and ocean sounds to work alot better but of course
they're easier to puncture.

------
KingTen
I wouldn’t mind open workspaces as much if I was given more space... I feel
like cubicles are much bigger

~~~
ken
Here's what IBM was giving programmers in 1978, thanks to the work of
architect Gerald McCue: [https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/IBM's-Santa-
Teresa-Lab...](https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/IBM's-Santa-Teresa-
Laboratory-Architectural-Design-
McCue/f473363b09dad1fb5e423ec1781adfe481069218/figure/5)

------
lowbloodsugar
What if we could design a space such that it areas to accommodate those who
prefer individual spaces and those who prefer group spaces?

We always got to this "open" vs "closed" space opinion-match.

~~~
commandlinefan
They could try, but everybody except for one guy would pick the individual
spaces and that one guy would be stuck in the group space by himself.

------
zitterbewegung
I wonder if we will see the return of actual offices or even cubicles.

------
gigatexal
It’s about time. The open office sucks.

------
Balgair
Terry's back hurt.

PrezsHub's entrance was that old 'Apple Store' style, but somehow more
brutalist. Just glass, but at that angle that just reflects and doesn't let
you see in. Faux-invitational, Terry called it. The front door was frosted
glass. It was that special kind that would be clear when you put a voltage to
it. The giant windows directly next to the door were like that too. Or so
Terry heard. He'd never seen them frosted all at once. Some would be, some
wouldn't. Faulty wiring, he guessed.

Terry stood in line to get into PrezsHub. There was always a line. They got
rid of the badge scanners, too unsanitary. His turn. He waited as some scanner
somewhere read his face. At first Terry had smiled every time he stood in
front of the door. The massive door of plate glass on tiny little hinges with
a tiny little motor to swing the thing. The smiling stopped soon enough
though. Terry had thought his boss actually cared to see the smile, or that
maybe someone did. Nope. The scanner took it's time, you never could tell how
long it would take. Terry shifted his face this way and that. Finally, the
door defrosted and tried to open. Slowly, inch by inch, all the way open.
Terry ducked inside long before it had taken the full three minute twenty-two
seconds to complete a cycle of opening, pausing, and then closing and
refrosting.

After passing by the Wellness-Entrepreneur-And-Sanctuary-Expert team's front
desk, the cavern opened up. PrezsHub was ultra cutting edge. The CEO was one
of those unicorn people that really believed he wasn't going to die. He had
escaped taxes, so why not death too? So, slowly at first, he had gotten rid of
almost everything at PrezsHub.

First it was the cubes. That move was nice at first, a bit more air. Long
tables sure. Then the noise, the chattering, the gossip, the microwaved fish.
Ghastly. After covid21 subsided, everyone came back to the office to find,
well, nothing.

The CEO had ripped up the floor, put in charging ports and wifi, and then
covered the whole thing in hardwood. No desks, no chairs, nothing. Even the
toilets had been replaced with Japanese ones, bidet and all. The walls slowly
sloped up to the roof too, it made a great half pipe, but there was nowhere to
put a back against. The whole company was now 'floor gang'. The CEO said it
was great for your body, just you and the hardwood. He sat there for three
hours in a yoga position that first day back. By the end of the week, he was
working from home for a bit. He almost never came in anymore.

Terry's butt had gone numb before the first 15 minutes had gone by. Everyone's
had. People started bringing in camping chairs and card table desks. Then one
day the Wellness-Entrepreneur-And-Sanctuary-Expert-Team said no more camping
chairs. The CEO was concerned about them scrumming up the hardwood floors they
had paid for. People started to bring in cushions and even more low budget
camping equipment. Again, the Wellness-Entrepreneur-And-Sanctuary-Expert-Team
stopped people after getting past the door. Those were creating dust and some
were staining the flooring. The CEO was 'wigged out' about it. As his video
address echoed off the walls of the empty building, he said everyone needed to
be health conscious and just sit. So for the rest of the week, thats all Terry
and the rest of PrezsHub did, they just sat. The CEO was adamant that no work
be done, so that the chakras could align with Mars or something. Of course,
half the company got put on a PIP for failing to meet deadlines.

So Terry went to find a working outlet on the floor and sat down with his bag
and personal laptop, a perk. He plugged in, saw that it wasn't working and had
to go get up and hunt around the room for a working outlet. Like at the
airport, but more cliquey. He found a group, the Support And Development team;
they weren't too Slack-y. He could get those tickets closed, maybe. He put on
his carpal tunnel splints, opened his laptop, changed his password in the
system yet again, hunched over, and got to work.

Terry's back hurt.

------
SlipperySlope
Need private offices with UV-C lamps sterilizing the air going into each
office.

Less sick days will pay for the private office floor space, plus productivity
increases.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
Don’t know why this is getting downvotes. It’s uncontroversially just fact
that open-plan layouts do not save money, not even in the short term and not
in high density urban centers. This has been written about so exhaustively for
decades that at this point it’s not even worth engaging with people who say
“citation needed” or “in 5 seconds of Googling I found this confirmation bias
article” because it lends way too much legitimacy to the false idea that it’s
even a close call at all or that there is any part of it left open for serious
debate.

Open plan office designs are chosen so that executives can treat their office
spaces like works of art - lots of signaling and often very little practical
value.

They are often built at huge costs (way beyond outfitting the same space with
offices or cubicles for the same number of people), often actively paying a
lot of money to destroy existing privacy features, and they not only include
but are completely oriented around opulent roof decks, party spaces, kitchens,
game rooms, massage areas, and on and on.

It’s 100% about infantilizing the workforce and swindling them to accept
greater degrees of counter-productive surveillance and total lack of privacy.
It is not about cost reduction, flat out.

~~~
karatestomp
There's a consistent and strong tendency of companies, owners, and managers to
avoid giving their professional-class-wage-earning software developers
professional-class perks & (especially) signs of status. I'm not entirely sure
why that is, but it does seem to be the case. Like they're all, consciously or
not, just _determined_ on some fundamental level not to let that happen.

On the flip side software folks tend not to exactly embody a professional-
class aesthetic or attitude, but I think that behavior'd flip around damn fast
if elevated social status became more easily available to those who did. But
maybe that's not worth having private offices and assistants and deference to
our professional judgement, and so on.

[EDIT] relevance being, open plan offices are notable for not just avoiding
giving status, but for swinging _way_ the opposite direction. Almost like
passive-aggressive compensation for having to pay developers so much. "Well,
at least I can seat them like minimum-wage call center employees, since for
some reason that's considered fairly normal".

~~~
cosmodisk
I've been telling this for years: an equivalent of a software developer in a
different industry would be driven around in a company's car, dine on
company's card and get fat bonuses every year.The problem is that
developers,to most people,are well, the IT people. It doesn't matter if your
code saves Netflix gazillion of money,to most people you on the same level as
the guy who can connect the printer.Also sometimes almost cynical approach to
anything financial or sales related doesn't help it either.

~~~
manuelabeledo
I believe the issue relies mostly on how value is _quantified_ by company
managers. It seems to me that any relatively modern practice or methodology
aimed to organize and value work, especially in software engineering, is not
focused on the added value of the work itself, but increasing middle
management visibility - another way to "infantilize" the workforce, if you ask
me.

Take a finance guy, for instance. You give him a set of rules and objectives,
and there is no need to define what "success" is like, based on the output.
Success is his ability to make money.

A software engineer may implement features A, B, and C in the product. She may
even increase the performance of the pipeline two fold. But there is no way to
objectively quantify the impact of such changes _within_ the current work
organization frameworks. These are tools for middle management to quantify a
team's output, nothing more. Thus a good software engineer would get a nice
bonus at the end of the year, and a compulsory, but meaningless, promotion.

Now, I'm not saying that promoting individualism is the way to go, nothing
further from the truth. I understand that there are intrinsic differences
between finance and software. Yet I believe that there are very few companies
out there with the right tools to evaluate the output of software engineers,
and recognize it accordingly.

~~~
cosmodisk
My job is quite interesting in this aspect: I'm a manager,who has to
set,monitor,and ultimately award results. Only one direct report is technical
and it is quite challenging to quantify his outcomes. I also do development,as
part of my role, and it's just so freaking hard to assign values to the work
that'd been done. For instance, I did create an orders portal of sorts,which
our corporate clients quite like and none of the competitors have anything
like that.Our head of sales going from one company to another selling this
portal as part of the offering and the execs love it. Sales get revenue,
everything is nice and easy. Now what do I get for this portal? Would they
have sold if it wasn't there? Did it help to close or was it just icing on the
cake? The contribution is clearly there,but how much? 1%, 10%,maybe 0? And
that's pretty much the same for most devs. What's the contribution of that
logging feature? What's the value of some smart function?

~~~
karatestomp
Sometimes measuring someone's effectiveness is as easy as "I sold that, here's
the check, that's my effectiveness" but I've also noticed that measurement is
often _incredibly_ sloppy in business, and people rarely seem to get called on
it. Making a serious effort to eliminate confounders is unusual. I think a lot
of folks in non-programming jobs do, to a fairly high degree, just _make shit
up_ , pretending that they can measure the effect of various initiatives much
better than they can, and for whatever reason this is rarely considered a
problem or questioned.

Some of them surely realize they're just slinging barely-if-at-all-justified
BS, but I also think lots and lots of people are just terrible at reasoning
about that kind of thing and don't _realize_ how meaningless the numbers
they're generating are. They're trying, they just suck at it and no-one's
bothered to tell them (or seems to care).

Possibly programmers are more sensitive to this than most, and are reluctant
to put forward "bullshit" numbers that would, if they did, in fact be accepted
as reality by the folks "above" them. Meanwhile someone down the hall's being
promoted for numbers that are even more a work of fantasy than those, and may
not even be intentionally deceiving anyone.

Note that the sales folks don't sweat over how much of their numbers can be
attributed to the people making the thing they're selling. Those numbers are
_theirs_ , period. "Did _I_ sell that or did Feature X put it over the top?"
fretted no salesperson ever.

