[hawaiian]

>For instance, if you’re working on an important project but feel constrained or unmotivated by your office setting, initiate a grand gesture by asking your manager to let you work from home for an entire week to get it done.

I'm not surprised this conclusion was reached so quickly. I find it a bit dysfunctional that working from home has become the go-to solution for distraction-filled workplaces.

How about we make work more like home instead? Companies will see the value of a beautiful, effective workplace in the form of increased productivity. Tech parks should offer restaurants, a gym with a sauna, a shower, pods for taking naps. Expecting the employee to keep a distraction-free home office seems strangely feudal, unless you really need the tax deduction.

[geddy]

All of those things are nice, until they become reasons that the employer expects you to live at the office. At what point does _that_ become strangely feudal? You're practically living at work at that point. I want to leave my office when I'm done, not have it be my designated place for eating, sleeping, lifting, and working.

Heck, add a few video game systems, a keg, and a pool table and require 16 hour office days. Why not? You're already doing it anyway. How about a play room for the kids with babysitting services? At that point, why even have a home?

[thrower123]

A week off to actually get some significant work done without distraction is blissful. Some of the best work I've ever done has been when the rest of the office took off to trade shows and I stayed home to hold down the fort.

There's so much less busywork generated when there are less people around.

[bitwize]

Tech companies do this already, still organize their offices like seas of desks at best, and still have distracted workers. I would much rather have a standard-issue office with full-height cubicles. I could get a lot more work done there than in today's trendy startup, Google, and WeWork inspired zoos.

[sneakernets]

Why hasn't there been a backlash yet? Everyone hates the seas of desks layout.

[bitwize]

Executives and management consultants love them. Of course these people usually have nice offices of their own, making open-plan truly enterprise. (I define a thing as enterprise if its customers are different from, and usually higher on the org chart than, its actual users.)

Factors involved in why these offices are preferred include:

1) Low cost. Yes, yes, I know, productivity loss from battery-farmed knowledge workers as compared to free-range knowledge workers is arguably much greater. But that's not quantifiable. An accountant can point to cost savings of open-plan offices as a number in a spreadsheet and show how it directly impacts the bottom line.

2) Adaptability. It's much easier to move people around and reconfigure office space for different uses if you do not commit to building walls (even cubicle walls). This is especially true if an org is being "right-sized", but is also true of e.g., startups. An actual office may be prohibitive given the pittance in A-round funding you got, but if you can cram your guys into a corner of WeWork you can make the numbers work.

3) Increased workforce visibility. This means a couple of things: a) open plan is a cheap, easy-to-implement panopticon, allowing management to keep tabs on you at all times -- every time you go to the loo, everyone in the office will see you leave and come back. b) Visibility means availability -- specifically, availability to be interrupted at any time for any reason. Do not underestimate the importance of visibility. Microsoft had a company culture that strongly favored giving offices to individual programmers, until in the 90s the management consultant Jim McCarthy said "Beware of a guy in a room, and I mean that literally." He thought developers should NOT have private space of their own as it made them less accountable.

[commandlinefan]

There has been a backlash, but only by people whose opinions don't matter.

[xfitm3]

My home office is distraction free and it's amazing. I'm extremely sensitive to sound - mastication, burping, talking, music. I need dead silence.

I'll never work in an office again, unless I have to.

[spraak]

Don't compromise! Hold your ideals :) A recruiter asked me recently if I'm willing to relocate and I shared that I only work remotely. They then followed up with a different company that is remote.