[mulmen]

There's another problem in that the modern office is not optimized for the really valuable interactions. There is some idea way up in the clouds about free communication and sharing ideas that manifests as open floor plans. What we really need are small quiet areas to focus and do work and separate large areas for socialization and collaboration. The modern office doesn't actually facilitate any of this.

When I was a newbie I sat in a cube across the hall from my boss' private office and next to the kitchen. It was actually really nice. I was in a quiet corner of the office and had full height cube walls with bookshelves and a big whiteboard all to myself. But I could turn around and ask my boss a question or walk less than 30 feet to talk to any of the senior engineers, who all had private offices which doubled as collaboration spaces. The spontaneous interactions happened around the espresso machine. In hindsight it was wonderful but if you looked at that building from the outside you might think it was an outdated dump. We got bought out by a company in silicon valley and they moved us to a new building with an open floorplan and sat us next to the sales team. It was big and bright but we lost all our collaboration space.

[sefrost]

I would love a private office. It wouldn't need to be very big - and it wouldn't even need a door. Just a door frame without a door on it would be fine. I guess it's not even private in that sense, I just don't like people standing behind me.

Quite often in online discussions I notice people mention the move to open plan offices. I'm 31 and I've never known anything but open plan offices (apart from WFH).

When did the switch to open plan offices happen? Did people have private offices before that or was it only cubicles?

[mulmen]

I actually had a private office with walls and a door for about a month. We moved to a new building and picked our own seats in a pre-determined area in order of seniority. Being a former boy scout I oriented myself to the map before making my selection. For whatever reason the map was oriented with north to the left. None of the people in front of me noticed this and picked desks on an undesirable side of the building. That left an office available to me, a junior engineer. My manager was unhappy with his window looking at a brick wall instead of the lake and was especially unhappy with me having an office and not him. So he put in a maintenance request and had my office walls torn down and converted to a open cube.

[sefrost]

Wow, a similar thing happened to me in one of my first jobs as a junior. We moved office and could choose our seats. Because I hate having people behind me (mentioned above) I chose a seat with my back to the wall.

The managers clicked on to what had happened on the first day and moved me. Infuriating! I am much more confident now but I just accepted it at that time.

[Moissanite]

> Because I hate having people behind me

Anyone who has read Dune should feel this way - leaving your back to the room/door is how the Harkonnens get you!

[patrick451]

My first job out of undergrad was doing CAD stuff making like $12/hour and I had an office. I don't remember if it had a door that shut, but it definitely had 4 real walls. I didn't know it then, but that was the best work environment I've ever had. That was about 20 years ago.

[sokoloff]

From 1993-1994 and 1997-2002, I had private offices, one person [a few doubles] with a real, solid door. I’m class of ‘93, so this was most of my first decade with everyone having them.

I then went back to private offices for most of 2009-2016, but that was as a Director/plus with devs in cubes. After 2016, even VPs went into cubes, which I hated.

[mulmen]

I would love to know more about this trend. It fascinates me that we have settled on something that is so widely hated.

It seems correlated with the decline in UI design. 30 years ago we had ideas of how people interact with computers which we had built up over decades. What appear to be dated UIs like Windows 3.1 or even XP actually had a lot of thought and care put into them, with sound reasoning. The modern take seems fixated on minor details without any holistic vision or even reason.

How did we get so bad at decision making? It seems like we stopped valuing insight in favor of data. But without insight we just chase the data we have.

[sokoloff]

Something which is hated by the not-decision-makers but costs 25-40% as much of a big number will be overwhelmingly chosen by the are-decision-makers.

[mulmen]

Yeah, this reinforces another perception I have. Which is that we have lost any concept of opportunity cost. We might save on commercial real estate but what is the cost in productivity, innovation, and ultimately profit?

[piva00]

Those metrics demand a much deeper and proper investigation of data to materialise into a quantifiable way for management, management is pretty blind to anything that isn't easy-to-crunch numbers. Probably due to education in most MBA curricula.

Everyone who has worked in an open plan office knows the pains, the constant interruptions, not only from chatter or shoulder taps but the incessant movement of people around, the alertness of being aware of people behind you, so on and so forth, but those are not easily quantifiable. Much like UX, to build a case for something that empirically most of us know is better takes a lot more effort than some bean counters/MBAs pointing to a number in a spreadsheet.

[JPws_Prntr_Fngr]

Opportunity cost is a concept from microeconomics, a field completely alien to the vast majority of the managerial strata, in my experience; any lingering principles from microecon 101 having been long since replaced by MBA dogma.

[thaumasiotes]

> It fascinates me that we have settled on something that is so widely hated.

It's not obvious that it is widely hated. You can find people who hate it. But that's true of everything.

[int_19h]

I've seen the transition from offices to open space in Microsoft first hand. The management basically made this same argument - "sure, you might not like it, but we did studies and most employees who participated in them think it's better! give it a chance!"

Somehow, those happy employees were never in my circles. Or in my colleagues' circles. Like, pretty much every time this subject come up in any context, the overwhelming sentiment was that there's no way the purported upsides are worth the obvious and unavoidable major downsides.

They moved ahead with it anyway, of course. And it sucked as much as everybody was expecting. Out of several dozen colleagues, I think there was a grand total of two who didn't mind it, and they were already doing the whole "roam around with a laptop" thing anyway.

[mulmen]

I don’t know anyone who likes it. Where are the people who love open offices? They probably exist but I have never met one.

[rightbyte]

They exist. They want to feel the pulse. The same persons that like bars where you have to scream to have a conversation I guess.

[snapcaster]

I like them personally, or at least don't dislike them. I don't have the issues others talk about because I can just put airpods on

[oblio]

Cubes are a luxury. Now all you get is a 1.5m tall panel in front of you, if you're lucky, and rows with 4-6 coworkers next to you and the same number behind you, and probably 30+ people in the same open space.

I would have killed for actual cubicles at my past... 5 jobs.

[mulmen]

Yeah. At the beginning of my career I had full height cubes. Now I don't even have an assigned desk. It's all first-come-first-serve "hotel" desks with short partitions on the desk itself in an otherwise open workspace. Strangely we also have lockers for personal items, like I am going to pack up and redeploy my pencil cup and succulents every day.

[WWLink]

> It's all first-come-first-serve "hotel" desks with short partitions on the desk itself in an otherwise open workspace.

Honestly I hate those 'partitions'. Why bother? They're so stupid and pointless. It's ironic because they actually hinder collaboration and pair programming since they're never removable lol.

If we're going to all sit together at a big table we might as well see each other lol.

[sokoloff]

They are usually removable by loosening some clamping bolts that are hidden somewhere. Where there’s a will and tools, there’s a way…

[oblio]

I like them because I don't like people seeing my screen all the time. I like the sensation of privacy.

[amalcon]

Those lockers are great for ergonomic keyboards, but I don't think I've ever heard of someone using one for anything else.

[midasuni]

Do you have a dedicated desk? When I stopped office work in 2012 that had pretty much gone. First come first serve

[oblio]

I used to have one up until the last company, in 2020.

But I did have an episode of about 1 year of flex desk before that.

[oblio]

> There is some idea way up in the clouds about free communication and sharing ideas that manifests as open floor plans.

It's just bullshit covering cost cutting. Same for flexible/agile desks.

[mulmen]

That seems incredibly short-sighted given the price in (ironically) lost productivity.

Is there some new school of philosophy among the management class that doesn't believe in spending money to make money? How exactly do we create value without investment? I think there's an enormous opportunity out there for a company that actually treats their employees with respect and pays attention to their needs. That includes saying "we are big enough".

[6510]

> Is there some new school of philosophy among the management class that doesn't believe in spending money to make money?

Yeah! Your salary scales with the number of underlings you command while the number of underlings depends on what task was assigned to the department. You can't add in some fully unproductive people nor can you assign someone to be unproductive thus therefore and so on the hip choice is to gradually lower everyone's productivity. You might see a pattern of counter productive measures if you look for it.

[mulmen]

Woah. This… actually makes sense.

[PeterisP]

I work in an environment which has rooms for 3-4 desks, maybe 2 or 5 in some. This results in good communication and collaboration within a project team without the excessive noise of a full pen office, and if you have just a couple colleagues there then you also get a "feel" for when they need to focus and when a discussion would be good.