
Office Space turns 20: How the film changed the way we work - iamben
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20190205-office-space-turns-20-how-the-film-changed-work
======
StevePerkins
> _" Instead of personality-stripping cubicles, organisations would go on to
> favour open-air office plans..._"

Absolutely nothing fundamental has changed. I feel like if "Office Space" were
being re-made today, open floor plans would be one of the horrors that it
would lampoon.

Not so much the open floor plans themselves, mind you. But rather the surreal
absurdism of which they're just an example. Twenty years ago, we understood
that "Hawaiian Shirt Day" was superficially supposed to be a morale booster,
but was actually a morale sink in practice. Today, open floor plans were
initially pitched as "collaboration" aids, but most people have to come to
realize that they're really about cost savings, and are counter-productive to
actually getting focused work done.

Most white collar humor comes from shining a cynical spotlight on the
disconnect between what business leaders say, and what business workers
actually experience. And the Kafkaesque situation of most people feeling this
way, yet us not being able to openly say so in the workplace itself.

The superficial examples may change, but that underlying theme is still
central to white collar office work. Perhaps it always will be.

~~~
jMyles
I rarely see a comment on HN whose assessment and opinion are more foreign to
my personal experience than this one.

Open plans are _much_ better than cubicles. The transition to open plans and
standing desks _has_ been a boon for social interaction in teams, more role-
crossover, and just more physical movement in general.

Office Space is a timeless and incredible film, but one aspect of it that
seems almost like fantasy is the idea that people primarily working on
software might sit down in cramped cubicles and prefer fake privacy to real
social interaction.

edit: Look, I know that some people like cubicles. If you do, that's fine. But
if you actually seriously like small, cramped, stuffed cubicles in Office
Space (or The Matrix) - which absolutely existed in the late 90s and early
2000s in IT and seem to have largely disappeared - I'd really like to hear
why. If you do like cubicles: how do you _move_? Do you really have the
discipline to get up and walk around every once in a while? Or do you end up
having much less body movement than open plan participants?

~~~
nathanaldensr
If you're an extravert. I'm not; I hate open plans. Give me a cubicle any day.

~~~
thatswrong0
You can be an extrovert and also hate open plans because they are incredibly
distracting 90% of the time.

~~~
baddox
You can also be an introvert with good “distraction management” skills who
prefers an open office.

------
gilbetron
I worked for a small tech company that, like many, was valued extremely highly
in 1999, but the owner didn't listen to advisors and so we fell down the cliff
with the other tech companies. He was dejected, along with most of the
company, for most of 2000/2001\. The company still had steady revenue from
government stuff, though, and those of us left kinda did what we want for
several months with no guidance. I watched Office Space nearly daily (the
owners stayed home watching whatever and rarely showed up) during that time.
It was a weird, shared misery. I wasn't the only one. We even ordered some red
staplers and had them floating around for a while. We also, for whatever
reason, printed out tons of Jeff Goldblum face shots and hid them all around
the company. 10 years later and the owner was still swearing whenever he'd
find one.

------
pseudolus
I'd certainly give credit to Mike Judge for "Office Space" and "Silicon
Valley" but he well and truly hit the nail on the head with the prescient
"Idiocracy".

~~~
skrebbel
I've wondered about its premise, actually. Anecdotally where I live (the
Netherlands) I don't feel that "smarter" people get fewer kids than "dumber"
people do. Is there any data about this? Say, #kids vs education level?

~~~
auiya
Lots of interesting reading here -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence)
I believe long-term fertility is largely eugenic, favoring those with
desirable genes. Whether or not intelligence is viewed as desirable long-term,
or if there is a shift, or short-term course-correction; that's going to take
many generations to discern. In the US at least there is a perception that in
the short term fertility and intelligence are negatively correlated. This is
likely due to them erroneously viewing poverty as a proxy for intelligence,
and there is a positive correlation between poverty and birth rate -
[https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-
fam...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-
income-in-the-us/)

------
cabaalis
I fail to see how the "nah-gonna-work-here-anyway" joke is a racist
microaggression. Being unable to pronounce a name and making a joke about it
could happen just as easily with a name like "Tom Snuffaluffagus." I see a
distinct difference between joking about a difficult name and joking about the
physical attributes or ethnic history of a person of color.

~~~
jasonshen
I think you're asking a genuine question so I'll give a genuine answer -
because people do not control their names _, just as they don 't control their
physical features or ethnic history. The names that are "easy" are typically
names that stem from the English language.

Just as saying you feel "uncomfortable" around a person of color or someone
wearing religious headgear is a microaggression, so is making fun of someone's
name because you find it difficult to pronounce. It is likely easy to
pronounce in that person's culture, just not for you. And they've probably
heard a million jokes about it so are unlikely to find it funny. Therefore
your "joke" provides humor to you and others who feel like you, at that
person's expense.

_ Yes, you can legally change your name but it takes a lot of time and effort
and could cause you a lot of grief with your family and professional
confusion.

~~~
stevenjohns
> Yes, you can legally change your name but it takes a lot of time and effort
> and could cause you a lot of grief with your family and professional
> confusion.

It took me 45 minutes at the Births/Deaths/Marriages office. If I recall, it
cost $60.

~~~
rspeer
And it took me 3 months, $180, and being ordered to publish a notice in the
local newspaper who was really uninterested in following through and then
charged me another $170 for it.

It's different everywhere and it's usually not easy.

~~~
bschwindHN
Did you publish your name change in the Diarrhea Times?

[https://sludgefeed.com/full-first-issue-diarrhea-times-
natha...](https://sludgefeed.com/full-first-issue-diarrhea-times-nathan/)

~~~
rspeer
okay what

And if I had gotten to choose the newspaper, I would have chosen one that is
more friendly and more representative of the local community than the
glorified blog operated out of another state that I was ordered to use

------
Alex3917
It does seem like one could make a plausible case that Office Space has had
the biggest impact on real world life of any movie of all time. Just skimming
down the list, it doesn't look like there's anything on the AFI or BFI top 100
even comes close. Maybe 12 angry men has had a real influence on juries in
some unseen way, or maybe The Social Network has also had a big influence on
what careers people choose, but there's nothing that immediately seems super
obvious as surpassing it.

~~~
dylan604
Just today read an article on The Social Network being nearly 10 years old
now. Of course it's a Sorkin script (with the commentary that's to be
expected) _, but the article mentions how much more sleazy Facebook is
perceived today than it was even at that time. How much different would the
script be in the light of what we know now? Can 't find the link

_I like Sorkin's work and even tend to agree with his points, he just gets a
bit self-righteous and preachy in some of it.

~~~
Alex3917
Ten years ago everyone criticized Facebook for being a walled garden. Today
everyone is criticizing Facebook because the walls around its garden aren't
high enough. Go figure.

~~~
dijit
What? I don’t buy that. Apple is criticised for being a walled garden, I don’t
think I’ve ever seen strong criticism toward Facebook for that; I assume
you’re conflating them somehow.

Facebook was criticised for a few things; constantly changing the UI, selling
personal data (although this was mostly opaque and treated as a rumour that
wouldn’t harm _you_ really) and being a monopoly.

Now it’s criticised for aggressive targetted advertising, which may have had a
hand in polarising people and even allowing some companies to highten fear and
aggression to the point where it subverted democracy in some nations.

It’s also criticised for stifling free speech and siding with governments de
jour in heavily censored countries like Iran.

I mean. I was an adult using Facebook before “the social network” movie came
out; but maybe I misremember?

~~~
shrimpx
I can see the analogy: in the early days Facebook was invite only and at some
point a lot of people were curious and wanted to get in. Now we want it to
stop spilling out onto us.

~~~
wtetzner
Was it really still invite-only in 2009? I thought it opened up well before
that.

~~~
wardbradt
It became available to the public in late 2006.
[https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook/welcome-to-
facebook-...](https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook/welcome-to-facebook-
everyone/2210227130/)

------
noahl
A coworker at a previous company had a red Swingline stapler on his desk. He
told me that at one point, the company was giving them out to any employee who
had to change desks more than some number of times in a single year.

They eventually stopped this practice when they moved so many people that they
ran out of stapler budget. (But they didn't run out of moving budget!)

------
cmiles74
I'm a little disappointed that the piece highlights unusual work environments
like Google and Facebook and cites them as examples that things have changed
in the last twenty years. A big part of what made the film work for me was
that it took on the common case, not the exceptional. I understand that a lot
of developers work for these top-tier companies but I suspect the majority
work in environments that, even today, still look a lot like Office Space.

The gist of the article is that little has changed and I am tempted to agree.
My work environment is better, but not everyones. My partner reports to an
ineffective manager and a VP who emails over the weekend, expecting to see
work product early the next Monday morning; there is a clear implication they
should be working during the weekend. A friend of mine was complaining
recently about a manager asking them if it was "good for the company" to be
upgrading various software products on a schedule or if it was more about
making their own job easier. And so on.

------
maire
The thing I remember most about Office Space is how the questions asked in
Contextual Inquiries sound exactly the same as the questions asked by "the two
Bobs".

In the winter of 2008 (the real estate crash) I was in charge of designing a
new UI. I sent a UI/UX team to do a contextual inquiry of our biggest users.
Unfortunately our Finance customers freaked out at the contextual inquiries
because they thought we were getting rid of their jobs!

You tell me if this sounds like a Contextual Inquiry:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkmuI5W694o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkmuI5W694o)

~~~
bitwize
One time I proposed shadowing one of my company's data analysts to get a
better handle on what their job is so I could write code with better knowledge
of how the software is actually used.

The business analyst, whose job it was to bring the requirements from the DAs
to the software engineers, started acting very threatened...

------
synesso
There's a great between-the-lines take in this movie. Bill Lumbergh is dating
Peter's girlfriend on the Saturday. That's why he forces him into work ... and
why the girlfriend also leaves a message.

~~~
dlbucci
Wasn't it a different Bill Lumbergh that she had actually seen?

~~~
sevensor
Yeah, there was another Lumbergh at a similarly named company. Intertrode?

~~~
synesso
Not Jennifer Anniston's character. The original girlfriend whom he went to the
hypnotist with. She was cheating on him.

~~~
sevensor
Right you are!

------
4thaccount
Office Space is similar to Dilbert in how well it describes certain aspects of
cubicle life. I'm lucky to work for a good company, but they all have aspects
of these worlds that describe them too well.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
Frankly, open plan offices exhibit far worse versions of all the same things
found in cubicle life. Really it’s just companies that respect basic human
needs enough to foot the bill for private offices.. and everyone else who
either engages in rationalized cost cutting or cargo cult bandwagoning.

~~~
4thaccount
My buddy recently left for another job where they have offices and it looks so
much nicer. I'm sure he can concentrate much better.

------
amatecha
"How the film changed the way we work" \-- Printers don't use the error
message "PC LOAD LETTER" anymore? ;)

~~~
LeoPanthera
It's actually a great example of a user-unfriendly UI. Most people still don't
know what it means. PC does not stand for Personal Computer.

The error message comprises three parts. "PC" is an abbreviation for "paper
cassette", the tray which holds blank paper for the printer to use. These two-
character codes are a legacy feature carried over from the first LaserJet
printers, which could only use a two-character display for all printer status
and error messages. "Load", in this context, is an instruction to refill the
paper tray. "Letter" is the standard paper size (8.5 × 11 in.) used in the
United States and Canada. Thus, the error is instructing the user to refill
the paper tray with letter-sized paper. Variants are "PC LOAD LEGAL", meaning
that the printer needs more legal size (8.5 × 14 in.) paper, and "MP LOAD
[paper size]" meaning the printer needs paper in the "MP" (multi-purpose)
tray, and "[paper size]" is the name of the size of paper specified for the
print job.

~~~
ceejayoz
We discovered these displays could be updated via a curl command at one of my
previous jobs and they quickly started saying things like "FEED ME KITTENS".

~~~
LyndsySimon
I had a boss that absolutely freaked out when he saw that the printer was set
to scroll “SELF DESTRUCT IN”, “3...”, “2...”, “1...”, “MAYBE NEXT TIME!” every
few minutes. I had a cron job set up to run a Python script every minute with
a 1:10 chance of displaying it.

He stood there watching it for probably an hour, before running to his office
and making a panicked call to PC Services about how our network had been
hacked.

I messaged a friend in that department and owned up to it. He later told me he
logged an hour “solving” that problem and requested a copy of my script.

------
rjain15
>"inept managers, mind-numbing bureaucracy, forced office parties, repetitive
busywork and jargon-filled memos read by none."

till date, I have to read jargon-filled memos and watch mind numbing training
videos. Nothing has changed.

~~~
Consultant32452
I've actively avoided learning and using my current employer's
jargin/TLAs/etc. Every review I get high praise for communication, how well I
work with teams of different skillsets/expertise. I can't help but believe
that I'm considered a good communicator because I use "real" words to describe
things instead of the made up nonsensical "official" terminology.

~~~
gerbilly
At my wife's job a manager uses the word "efforting", for example: "We are are
efforting a change to last night's ..."

------
rb808
Jira. Even though the movie predates it, I feel like it should have been in
there.

~~~
robterrell
In the new modern version of Office Space, we'll take Jira into the field with
a baseball bat...

~~~
mirceal
what if jira bring the grasshopper plugin? grasshopper? field? grass? hopper?
you’re kind of f’d

------
wtmt
> “But as a piece of commentary, the film’s damning portrayal of bad
> management and inefficient workplaces holds up today.”

I’d say that tech workplaces have gotten worse in many ways after this movie’s
time. Office plans are now usually not very conducive to getting work done
without a noise canceling headset (which many companies won’t pay for), and
the greed at the CxO levels for higher pay/compensation for themselves at the
cost of thousands or even hundreds of thousands below their levels could be
appalling in many larger companies.

If anything, we need an Office Space 2.0 to be made with contemporary
observations and critiques.

~~~
commandlinefan
> noise canceling headset (which many companies won’t pay for)

I'm trapped in an open-office dystopia too - by the end of the day, my ears
hurt from wearing these damned headphones all day. And I have some really
expensive ones.

------
DevX101
I was going into college around when this film came out. I loved the movie,
but it also made me adamant that I never wanted to work in a work environment
depicted in the movie.

This movie was definitely a part of the reason why I never majored in Comp Sci
even though I loved the subject in high school. I assumed all tech employees
would inevitably live the life of a cynical corporate drone in IT overwhelmed
by bureaucracy and office politics.

Fortunately many different companies emerged since then which had different
approaches to work culture, but this movie probably changed my life!

~~~
sigfubar
What did you major in, and how did that turn out for you?

------
knorker
> personality-stripping cubicles

Oh, if only we could have cubicles! Now tech companies are instead taking
after boiler room call centers.

They didn't know how good they had it.

------
bellerose
I remember reading a comment on youtube about the ending of the movie.
Supposedly who ever wrote the script wanted something to happen where Peter
would detest his new job in construction. The director didn't want it and so
the ending is a happy one.

~~~
WaltPurvis
Mike Judge was both the director and sole screenwriter of _Office Space_.

~~~
bellerose
It might have been whoever was funding the movie then. found the ending:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK43Ureuiqc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK43Ureuiqc)

~~~
rhcom2
That does seem to fit with the "all bosses are idiots" theme of the movie.

------
nikisweeting
Another interesting part of that movie is the salami slicing plot line. Salami
slicing is the name for collecting factional cents off thousands of
transactions to accumulate a big payout without people noticing. It's featured
in a bunch of movies:

\- Superman III

\- Hackers

\- I love you Philip Morris

\- Office Space

I mention it in my talk about how to program database systems safely when
handling money to avoid situations like that. It can also happen by accident
when converting between floats and Decimals incorrectly while programming.

[https://github.com/pirate/django-concurrency-
talk](https://github.com/pirate/django-concurrency-talk)

------
jim_bailie
I always felt that there should have been a sequel where Peter, Michael and
Samir eventually reunited and started that company Penetrode.

------
sifoobar
Funny story: I had just started working at a SV-based startup with mandatory
surfing lessons and a fivefinger-wearing transhumanist CEO when Silicon Valley
started.

Watching it was very painful, to say the least. Having to go through it is one
thing, having your nose rubbed in it another.

------
DrScump
I'm surprised that neither the article nor comments here to date point out
that the original setting was the cartoon shorts series "Milton"[0], where
Milton and Lumbergh are the central characters. The film's climax with
Milton's breakdown is foreshadowed in the Milton series ("I could put
strychnine in the guacamole...")

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_(cartoon)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_\(cartoon\))

I think Gary Cole was underrated; he was awesome in "American Gothic".

------
foreigner
This movie had a big effect on my personally. I quit my job of 5 years in no
small part because of watching it.

~~~
yhoiseth
How did that turn out?

~~~
foreigner
At the time it made me deliriously happy. After I was at my new job for a
month I amused my new coworkers by commenting "It still feels like I'm on
vacation from my previous job. I just can't get it in to my head that I don't
have to go back there!"

Looking back on it 20 years later, still one of the best moves I've ever done.

------
purplezooey
Notice there are no open plan offices in the movie.

~~~
jandrese
Only because it was made before open plan offices were really a thing.

~~~
Zelphyr
And the “cube farms” as we called them back them were almost as bad. Worse in
some ways. They gave a false sense of privacy and people could be louder than
they otherwise might have been because they thought those fake 3” walls were
sound proof somehow. I remember one co-worker drumming his desk in his cube
opposite me all day. It was unbelievably distracting.

~~~
purplezooey
Yes, those were horrible. Filled with some kind of tissue paper or just air.

------
jugg1es
Mike Judge is a prescient person.

------
btilly
True story. I know a company that did a major layoff in by showing office
space. As the movie progressed, HR walked around and tapped people on the
shoulder. If you were still there for the end of the movie, you were still
there...

~~~
flukus
I spent 15 months as "the glitch".

Started on a 3 month contract to cover someone on maternity leave. After 3
months nothing was said, after 6 months the woman on leave came back and
nothing was said, after 12 months still nothing. Eventually after 18 months
they told me they would not be renewing my non-existent 12 month contract.

~~~
cableshaft
I spent 12 months as "the glitch" myself. It was my first office job, in data
entry, at a business office for Verizon. Me and two other people were hired as
temps for a project that was just supposed to last three months.

Those three months pass, and my supervisor didn't hear anything about letting
us go, and wanted to keep us as long as possible, so he just had us keep
filling out our timesheets. 12 months after our job was supposed to have
ended, someone finally realized it and he let us know he had to end our
contract.

It was also a wake-up call that people that work in these offices can really
struggle with working with proprietary enterprise systems. I was practically a
star in the office because I could work around all the various bugs that some
enterprise Java application had so we could order all the things we needed to
for other business units (I had to do some seriously janky stuff to get it to
work, like close and reopen windows at certain points to keep it from
crashing, choose unintuitive options, interpret what weird and unexplained
acronyms mean, etc).

------
austincheney
If Office Space were remade today it would be all about hyper-sensitivity,
worship of popular developers by name, walk outs, and Dunning-Kruger people.
Unfortunately, a key target audience would likely take this as a serious
personal attack.

~~~
xenospn
And Code-Bro Libertarians. Don't forget those.

~~~
kentrado
I don't know what code bro mean, but what's wrong with believing in liberty?

~~~
24gttghh
Some people believe their personal liberty gives them the right to infringe on
_other people 's_ personal liberty. Those people sometimes call themselves
"libertarians" in the US, when in reality they are anarcho-capitalists.

~~~
kentrado
I think that's a gross misrepresentation of what they believe. I have talked
to several of them and this is false.

I lean more towards the socialist libertarian side, so I disagree with them on
some things but your kind of discourse I don't think is very helpful.

~~~
24gttghh
I think the problem is people in the US co-opted the term Libertarianism from
its traditional use for those on the "left" end of the political spectrum.
Please see what I mean here:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism#Prominent_curre...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism#Prominent_currents)

In my experience, libertarians in the US are of the "right" variety, and not
so much the "left"

