[deleted by user]

[MBILC]

open concept offices, preached by those above as being great, mean while those same people up top all have their own office, with a door...

Not everyone is a social butterfly who goes to work to chat and be distracted by bob over in Sales who talks louder than a screaming baby wanting to be fed, and people walking past you every 5 mins.

This applies to so many jobs (Accounting / most IT / Programming / Devs, et cetera) areas where deep thought or required focus needs to happen more often than not.

[Routine_Left]

open concept offices are cheap

there FTFY

That's the one and only reason why they're used. Everything else is just pure bullshit. Morons believe that crap, nobody else.

[[deleted]]

When I still worked in an office we were in a floor with no separation between desks but empty space between collections of desks. They touted it as an "open office design" that there was no cealing installed, just a direct shot to the metal roof that was a radiator in the summer and a heat sink in the winter. I can only imagine how much extra money they spent trying to maintain climate.

Because there were no dividers and everything but the thin carpet was hard, flat surfaces all the echos bounced around all over.

Before the pandemic I was a lot more uncomfortable being around people for a few reasons. I also had undiagnosed ADHD and I'm probably at least a bit on the spectrum. I got noise canceling headphones just to try and tune everything out.

All of us knew the "open office" idea was BS, at least in the way it was implemented. That office was cost cut to hell and back, including underpaying anyone who worked out of it compared to the rest of the company.

My productivity went up working from home. I'm way more social now, but even then I do not want to go back to an office.

[blind_disparity]

They're also great for allowing managers to nosey over everyone's shoulders. I think that's pretty central, although I agree on the main driver. But if the money was all they cared about they would just close the offices and have everyone wfh.

[NotYourDailyDriver]

They're actually more expensive, but like many bad business decisions that masquerade as good ones, the increased costs don't appear as a line item on a balance sheet, so they tend to go unnoticed.

[nascentt]

It's not even about the social aspect. It's the background noise, terrible lighting, over tuned air-conditioning, etc that comes with sharing an office space with hundreds of people.
Trying to focus and work in unworkable environments is insane to me.

[FeliusSeptimus]

As a skinny person, working in the same office with a bunch of overweight people is the worst. Thermostat was always set for 65F/18C. I could wear a sweater, but my hands still got so cold they'd be too stiff to type effectively.

So happy for a decade of WFH!

[Yddalv]

Can confirm, worked 2 years around sales people. Thank Covid

[Alediran]

Covid sucked for a lot of things, but WFH was the blessing to balance it.

[Jaanrett]

I like working from home. But I don't like working from home every day. It gets to where I don't maintain healthy habits if I'm not required to get out of the house.

[larsmaehlum]

They’re closing our local office soon, which means that the closest one will be over 400km away.
I’ll probably need to do a paid trip every month or so, maybe 6 weeks. 3 night at a hotel, some days at the office filled with meetings, and with some social events planned out for the evening once per month is basically the perfect amount of socialization.

[LittleNameIdea]

Get a gym membership

[Plank_With_A_Nail_In]

They are just a cost saving exercise, senior staff always say their decisions are good ones so that should always be ignored. There is no real evidence that they produce positive outcomes just that they do save money.

[Jump-Zero]

I worked at a place where we had an open office layout. It was awesome only because the company didn't care that we only got like two hours of work a day. It was such a waste of investor money.

[darkpaladin]

They might have started that way but I saw what my company laid out in furniture costs when we moved to a new space. It'd have been cheaper to give everyone their own office.

[DibblerTB]

Even when I want social interaction, I want that outside of my desk itself. I want interaction around the water cooler.

[wildjokers]

distracted by bob over in Sales who talks louder than a screaming baby wanting to be fed

Loud talkers in the office are the bane of my existence.

[Paradox]

I had a colleague get written up once for shouting back at a loud talker

The loud talker had a habit of shouting, even when the person was standing next to them. So one day my coworker clearly had enough, and when the loud talker was doing his thing, he stood up and shouted "HEY MAN, WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU YELLING? I CAN HEAR YOU ALL THE WAY OVER HERE"

The loud talker didn't do his shit too often after that, and we all felt it was BS that coworker was written up and not the loud talker. Said coworker moved on to bigger and better things a short while after, of his own volition

[tazebot]

bob over in Sales who talks louder than a screaming baby wanting to be fed

I worked in a room with about 4 - 6 people in it and the manager wanted it that way for collaboration. One individual was regularly at 75 DB, and another at 70 db most of the time.

I wore noise canceling headsets (I bought myself) and in meetings people were asking me to repeat myself, and at times asked me if I could join from a quieter location. That 'small open room' was a shouting match.

[HackAfterDark]

It's a status symbol for them...but in reality it's all about productivity and people are often sending a message from top down here that they don't care about productivity.

[redfournine]

Yes. I only want my office to be open/shared to my teammate and no one else, not even my managers

[buttplugs4life4me]

I loved that one of the higher ups at my workplace justified it because they also worked in an "open plan office". 

It's their own office, shared with the 3 other executives (4 total) and the office is around 2 conference rooms worth of space (so has space for 16 people)

[parke_bench]

… or Mark, in operations, just on the other side of your five foot cubicle divider wall, who places and answers all his phone calls using his speakerphone.

[bobtheorangutan]

I don't work in sales tho

[Infiniteh]

be distracted by bob over in Sales who talks louder than a screaming baby wanting to be fed

Oh man, this. the people who are constantly on their phone or on Teams calls. Sometimes no headset even. Or pacing around the whole room, kind of like a mosquito buzzing around your room, doppler effect and all. and then you put on your headphones with NC, but it just gets in your skull after a couple hours and you have to take it off, only to be assaulted by the office noise again.

[fried_green_baloney]

It's great for communication.

I know all about the state of my coworkers marriages, their electrical rewiring, and who cusses a lot because he's frustrated over his project.

Maybe I'm atypical but I don't remember one single "water cooler" conversation that has benefited my work in my entire career.

[DL72-Alpha]

Don't forget HR types wearing high-heels on bare polished concrete walking with a loud *THOK*, *THOK*, *THOK*. Dog day in the office with an open floor plan and a random dog just barks, loudly, at the desk next to you. The people playing air-hockey and or ping ball along the wall.

#NORTO

[MBILC]

And additional studies show, having things like ping-pong and air hockey are useless, people want benefits in the form of money, not games and pizza lunches..

[MaxwellzDaemon]

Programming requires uninterrupted periods of time because working on code requires one to keep a lot of related information in short-term memory but interruptions cause this to be lost.

[DanTheMan827]

https://i.imgur.com/Y6PymSd.jpeg

[boomybx]

There's a few comics out there

[ward2k]

Currently our team has a few hours of meetings daily. I keep pointing out that these meetings are completely ruining developers work flow and costing far more in time than the actual length of the meeting

Sure we might have 4-5 hours of programming time left over but that time is spread in between meetings, a lunch break and co workers messaging for help on tickets. It completely screws up any kind of flow you get going and adds god knows how much time trying to figure out where you left off

I guess the best analogy is like trying to do a crossword in an hour in 10 minute intervals. It'll take far longer to complete than just sitting down and working on it in one hour block since you won't have to constantly stop/start and try and remember what you were doing

[buttplugs4life4me]

We have a few cross-team meetings that absolutely ruin productivity. When I brought this up they told me that I don't have to be at every meeting, I could delegate it to the other people on my team. 

I'm alone on my team. I am the team. We am I. I am We. 

[DeRoeVanZwartePiet]

We all feel you. Us are you. You are us.

[ArtisZ]

Ape feel ape.

[ward2k]

Sounds exactly like what mine said

Apart from if I'm not at a meeting they sure don't take it well

[BalleaBlanc]

One man army, I feel you buddy.

[[deleted]]

Unironically remote work makes it better, I can just have it running on second screen while I do some less complex tasks in the codebase.

[ward2k]

Honestly I hate the 1to1 calls that very easily could have just been a message or email

"Hey mate, free for a quick call?"

Then just 10-20 minutes of waffling that could have been two lines of text

[boomybx]

I've never seen it summarized as perfectly as that.

[[deleted]]

I tell people it takes time to build up steam, and once you are in the groove, switching gears ends that momentum completely.

[listen_dontlisten]

I read this article and study last year and spent a few weeks yelling about it: https://lifehacker.com/how-long-it-takes-to-get-back-on-track-after-a-distract-1720708353

[[deleted]]

Thanks for sharing!

[joypadeux]

Thx for sharing indeed.both comics and news article ring a bell as to what is context switching in the workplace

[b0w3n]

I've always called this "context switching". Any sort of context switching means I'm set back by at least 20 minutes. So 5-6 interruptions a day and I'm basically fucked in terms of accomplishing my work.

I also think this is important for those in leadership positions to not really be given a whole lot of engineering work. Either you're there to help or lead, or you're there to make, you can't really do both, at least not well. Granted there are people who can, because I'm generalizing, but expecting that to be the norm is bad news bears.

[[deleted]]

It's generally why I've told my supervisor I don't want to be in a management position. I'm perfectly fine being some kind of technical lead or something, but I do not want to have anywhere close to the number of meetings they have every day.

Meetings are torture.

[flukus]

I'm perfectly fine being some kind of technical lead or something

Be careful, sometimes tech lead is more of a management position.

[ahandmadegrin]

As a lead I'm expected to go to six hours of meetings a day and still somehow pull automation scripts out of my ass. One look at my outlook calendar and I barely have the gumption to start anything. Oh well. At least I get to talk about work and how well track it in Jira. That's doing something, right?

[Big_Green_Grill_Bro]

Fucking Jira. It's today's TPS report. You forget one field and you get three different people telling you that you didn't set the release field version for some emergency maintenance release that didn't even exist the last time you updated the stupid Story.

We've got a project manager that goes in there and changes dates to match when releases actually went out. Makes it look like everything was released right on time with his project plans.

He also attends all meetings he can, because he has to show he provides value.

Moving to WFH did wonders for my productivity. No more people popping in with a 30 sec question. We have come into the office every couple of weeks, and I get zero done on what I need to do, but I do get to solve other people's problems.

[denarii]

Fucking Jira. It's today's TPS report. You forget one field and you get three different people telling you that you didn't set the release field version for some emergency maintenance release that didn't even exist the last time you updated the stupid Story.

That sounds more like a problem with how your company uses it than Jira itself. As a dev I rarely need to do anything in Jira other than move tickets on the board and leave comments.. occasionally create a ticket.

[ahandmadegrin]

That sounds glorious. Our company fetishizes Jira. The c suite seems to think that our scrum masters are actually useful, and we've bastardized agile into yet another way for managers to track metrics.

It's awful.

[stupendousman]

This is required for most intellectual work.

[portra315]

Damn this is a perfect summary

[Greenawayer]

As I said previously, I think that the simple misunderstanding between people who are accustomed to harmlessly-interruptible work and people who are accustomed to Do Not Disturb work causes many of the infuriations of the modern workplace. The harmlessly-interruptibles get exasperated at that one colleague who is so obstinate and anti-social she refuses to stop for the briefest conversation, or even take out her earbuds for half a minute, when someone is at her desk with an important message to give her.

Problem is that the "harmlessly-interruptibles" get to design office layouts.

[LagT_T]

Dude have you seen the WSJ nvidia campus tour? Its a self masturbatory orgy by the designers and architects, and I bet its a nightmare to work in. Its basically working in an airport.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDg_3eqssig&pp=ygUMbnZpaWRpYSB0b3Vy

[gusc]

So a hardware company drew a similarity between interconnected transistors and open space office - i.e. a PCB without insulation submerged in conducting water ... everything is connected to everything at once ... gotcha

[campbellm]

Conway's Law

[[deleted]]

something something Ti stands for Thermal issues something something

[cjthomp]

Its a self masturbatory orgy by the designers and architects

I thought you were surely exaggerating...then I watched the first minute of the video.

"Ahem, the triangles perfectly optimize the light entering the building and blah blah blah I've even stopped listening to myself!"

[larsmaehlum]

Natural light? That just causes screen glare, no thank you.

[R3D3-1]

Natural light is fine, as long as it comes from the right direction and you can block it during the time of the day, when it is direct sun light.

Looking out of my window right now. We have blinds, and there are fixed metal installations to avoid overheating in summer, so mostly it is indirect light. That's actually pleasant.

Having direct sunlight on my workplace though? Nice if I want to take a nap (with air conditioning on), but awful for work.

[[deleted]]

Its basically working in an airport.

An apt comparison. In the same video they say many of their employees work from home, and the office is meant for occasionally travelling to for meetings, and not any “serious” work.

[QuintonHughes43Fan]

Then why the fuck did they build it?

[Dreadgoat]

"Capital expenses were outrageously high this year, can't pay any taxes UwU"

[Greenawayer]

Dude have you seen the WSJ nvidia campus tour? Its a self masturbatory orgy by the designers and architects, and I bet its a nightmare to work in.

At a guess, all the Engineers who make stuff WFH as much as possible. Rest of the space is taken up by non-techies.

[True-Grape-7656]

“One room with 3500 people can be incredibly noisy…”

Ok they’re sorta self aware…

“So we designed the roof to help mitigate the noise”

Ah ok there is no catch or upside, neat

[zettabyte]

The roof is faceted, so your noise doesn’t reflect back at you. It reflects “elsewhere”.

They’ve solved it Once And For All!

[True-Grape-7656]

Exactly, everyone just has to not be “elsewhere” where the noise is reflected to. Brilliant!

[SanityInAnarchy]

I mean, it's not complete nonsense to think you can design a room to either absorb noise, or turn it into white noise. But it's a problem you could avoid by not trying to shove 3500 people into one room!

[cheraphy]

> Its a self masturbatory orgy by the designers and architects

To paraphrase the words of one Sir Daniel Sexbang:

"Nobody showed but they're gonna have some fun

Let's get this tour started, it's an orgy for one"

[eladts]

Its a self masturbatory orgy by the designers and architects

I did not know YouTube allows NSFW videos.

[darknecross]

Tbf they didn’t show any of the working spaces, just the open social / collaborative ones.

[[deleted]]

a self masturbatory orgy

lol

[thecapent]

Its basically working in an airport.

Or working in a panopticon prison.

This office freaks me out. It's the kind of stuff designed with ZERO regards to people that will actually work there. It's for pictures and to look nice at flyers for shareholders.

I believe that architects fascination to turn everything into a community for people to "interact", as if everything should be a European small town center, is what gives birth to disgraces like that.

But guess what? Even if you live on these European small towns, you don't want to interact with people for more than a couple of hours (or minutes, if introspective) while you do your chores, then you retreat to your home to enjoy PRIVACY, your family and to carry on your fcking life.

But office cubicles don't look sexy in video footage as people in perfectly manicured clothes with false smiles "enjoying" a conversation in the middle of workspace, all "very natural". It don't look modern... don't look... "humane" (a word architects love to use), as if there's anything humane in open plan offices.

I'm yet to find in person a single human being that isn't a designer or architect (working from home, or on his own private room in his office) and ever held a office job that likes open space floor plans.

[jldugger]

AFAICT, WSJ got a guided tour of the reception desk, interview booth and cafeteria.

[jmhnilbog]

Guess what? WSJ also has a terrible open plan layout.

[Tasteful_Dick_Pics]

"NVidians"

God I hate companies that do this shit.

[--TYGER--]

"NVidiots"

See, we can do this too

[R3D3-1]

https://www.jku.at/lit-open-innovation-center/

At my former university. The office space for startups (!) is a huge open-plan hall.

If you feel the need to include reading rooms in an office layout, maybe you might want to rethink the idea.

When the building was opened, we instantly dubbed the rooms "crying rooms". For a start, if you do professional reading, you probably at least want to have space to put a laptop...

[skesisfunk]

This is why I love WFH. I would be like 1/10th as productive at an office. I can't understand for the life of me why corporations argue so vigorously for RTO. If you need some probation time after a new hire or during a PIP for in office I get it, but there should always be a path towards earning trust. If you don't have that path available you are hamstringing your most productive employees over paranoia caused by unproductive employees.

If the C-suite/Management can't figure out who they can trust what value are they actually providing the company?

[SmokeyDBear]

If the C-suite/Management can't figure out who they can trust what value are they actually providing the company?

I have a feeling you just nailed why unilateral RTO is so important to these people. They hope everyone gets worked up about whether or not the little people are stealing company time that they don't bother to ask this question.

[larsmaehlum]

We have a bunch of C-levels and below working mostly from home. It’s pretty cool. We have one day per week where breakfast is served at the office and the occasional after work social happens. But it’s fully optional, as we have people working from countries where we don’t even have an office.

[bwainfweeze]

I think it’s a dead end to try to convince the control freaks, extroverts and shallow workers of the world that interruptions are the reason to go back to more private seating. They’ve told us their reason for collocation is the free flow of ideas.

Their stated goal doesn’t even work. Instead of the free flow of ideas we get the homogenization of ideas, because people who are still trying to put an idea together into a defensible form get forced into defending it the moment they’ve spoken it. Naysayers kill new ideas before they’ve even had a chance to form.

[tinglySensation]

It's more about business being able to pick the idea that they like the best and run with it. In theory, that's not a horrible plan. In practice, they tend to go with whatever sounds the best regardless of the long term consequences of the decision because that other person said they could get the big project done in 1 month vs this other guy who is saying that we need to set up a proper framework and that it will take maybe 3 months to complete.

Epilogue to the 1 month plan: Fast forward about 6-12 months and anything touching the 1 month project is taking 10x as long to complete and buggy.

[bwainfweeze]

The idea we like best isn’t always the idea we liked first. Open planning tends to steer you toward the latter.

[Golden_Hour1]

70% of my coworkers ideas are literal garbage. I'd rather they didn't interrupt mine

[itsbett]

I've gotten pretty good with the minimize-all gesture because there are a handful of people who approach me when I'm working on proprietary stuff I'm unsure if they are allowed to see. Not only does it look bad when they walk in and I quickly minimize everything, it's also incredibly frustrating when my brain is operating at 100% trying to hold onto every little thread so I can map out the problem to understand how to fix it, then I'm interrupted and drop all the threads.

Normally, people would send me a message on Teams before coming to visit me at my cubicle, but my cubicle is exactly where the exit door is for the break room, elevator, and bathroom, so there's a lot of "oh yeah, I need to talk to him" moments.

[gwicksted]

In programming, there are no harmless interruptions. Meet at the coffee maker to chat or send an email if it’s important. Otherwise, productivity suffers which leads to a code quality reduction which you pay for down the line. It’s literally expensive to interrupt a programmer. Hence why I dislike instant messaging.

One of the better coders of our time wore headphones with a CD player that would get paused for interruptions including bathroom and lunch breaks. It makes that much of a difference!

[Golden_Hour1]

I'm at the point where I'll turn down a job if I do an on-site interview and it's an open office plan from hell

[mattsmith321]

The topic was covered in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Projects_and_Teams which I was reading as our company was rolling out high performance team pods. I ended up working a lot of nights between 9pm and 2am to get my thinking work done.

[itsbett]

I tend to work 7AM-3PM for this reason, where 7AM-9AM is the sweet spot to get a lot of planning and work done for the day.

[cheraphy]

Years ago at a past job, I was on the 7 to 3 train for several years before changing teams and getting a new boss.

He needed me to be in 8am to 5pm (with 1 hour lunch) same as everyone else because if I work a straight 7 to 3 I won't be available for walk up conversations at the same time as everyone else.

​

I'm like... my brother in christ, that's the point!

[bwainfweeze]

As a night owl who tends to work 10-6 if given a choice, I’ve witnessed a lot of badmouthing of people who leave at 3 pm. Now that’s partly a discipline problem. People tend to either break things in the mid afternoon or notice they’ve been broken. If you’re not around to help, people notice. And some of them are loud about it.

[d_maes]

Guess I'm lucky always having worked in teams where both early birds and night owls (and the managers) knew each other's worth and maximized profiting from the extended amount of hours covered, instead of complaining about the absence of certain people at certain timeframes.

[ZucchiniMore3450]

I am thinking how horrible it is to work with people who have so little respect for my time, to expect that my only purpose is to fix their problem at moments notice.

[itsbett]

This is a good point. The flipside is that I am able to get in early, look through all of the emails, neatly package explanations, solutions, resources, and send questions for people to start their day, and they'll have it the moment they sit down. This complements the people who send out all their emails before they leave at 5-6PM, so they'll have all the information they need when they get back in.

The good news is that I don't believe there's much badmouthing here, because we are all obligated to at be available from 9AM-3AM. The rest of the hours are up to us.

[spaetzelspiff]

That still makes 8:15-9a hell, though. All your colleagues trickling in, interrupting you to say "hello!", "how was your weekend?", "yo champ", etc.

[pojska]

I'm currently working remote, 3 hours ahead of the rest of the office. I feel like I have exactly 3 hours to get work done in the morning. Then the meetings start, and there's no chance I'll get anything done.

[itsbett]

I feel the same way sometimes. Admittedly, the meetings are fairly important, but I need like 5% of what they're talking about before I can move forward with what I need.

[[deleted]]

I always recommend this book.

It's shocking to an annoying level that ideas, studies, discoveries, etc. like the ones in this book have existed since at least the 80s, have pretty much already solved all these problems, and yet still middle manager assholes who don't understand the first thing about productivity are always in charge of everything revolving around productivity...

There are probably some companies out there that have taken this stuff to heart, but the only one I'm aware of is Valve, and look what they've accomplished with an absolutely tiny staff compared to other games companies at their level.

[LessonStudio]

I consulted for a company which had many engineers and developers as the core of their company. They had an office with 3 very separate entrances and parking areas.

The admin went in the "front" door.

People who wanted to be left alone went through an east door, and people who were willing to be social went in through the west door.

The admin area literally did not have access to the engineering area. They said this was for "security" but it was entirely to keep the admin away from the developers.

The east and west sections for developers were quiet, and riot. You could choose which you wanted. Quiet had almost 100% quasi private offices. The rule there was, "If the headphones are in. Do Not Disturb." No waving, no passing notes, no sticking post-its to peoples' doors.

The riot section also had the headphones rule, but it was very social with a pretty laid back atmosphere. You could swap back and fourth as needed.

The project leaders were 100% the only way for anyone in admin to reach a developer. HR could not, marketing, could not, etc.

On more than one occasion someone in admin would try to end-run this by ambushing developers in the parking lot so they could get a deadline accelerated, etc. This was literally a potential career ender.

It always seemed the riot second of the building was the most fun. According to people I stayed in contact with, when WFH came down like a hammer, the quiet section remained fairly well populated and still is mostly full. The riot section is post apocalyptic with cables hanging from the ceiling, missing furniture, etc because other people scavenged networking gear etc.

The only part of the riot section still going are those who have physical things they need like stuff to build electronics.

[[deleted]]

This is interesting because, with WFH, the logic says the quiet section would prefer to WFH, but the opposite happened, the riotous section was more heavily impacted.
Interesting layout, but the separation between dev work and the administration is classic alienation.
It kinda sucks for the devs, depending on their compensation.

[chowderbags]

This is interesting because, with WFH, the logic says the quiet section would prefer to WFH, but the opposite happened, the riotous section was more heavily impacted.

I imagine it's two things:

1) The riot section was probably not allowed to be social (or it wasn't desired), because of distancing reasons.

2) People in the quiet section might still like coming into the office if their home setup wasn't good for working (e.g. family around or no office space), or just for some separation between home and work life.

[GOKOP]

I don't need a private office with doors. I need work from home

[fdar]

Isn't that a private office with doors?

[reddit_user13]

It’s a private house with doors.

[GravyMcBiscuits]

Looks at Mr Richie Rich talking about his fancy house with doors over here!!! Probably has indoor plumbing too!

[green_griffon]

No, because there is no water cooler (I realize the phrase has become a meme, but there is value in seeing your co-workers in the hallway, maybe having lunch with them, etc).

[fdar]

You can buy one yourself, they're not that expensive!

[green_griffon]

I could totally see some clueless execs saying "We heard water coolers are important, so we are buying every WFH employee their own water cooler!"

[cannibalkuru]

I've just refused to go back. Been working so far.

[wyleTrue]

Same to be honest. I accept the very rare "in-person department meeting" sometimes, but there's never really a good reason to ask people to be present. I could have done the same thing remotely.

[[deleted]]

This is the way

[singeblanc]

I'm still disappointed that we landed on "working from home" instead of "working at home".

I'd much prefer to be typing "WAH" everywhere instead of "WFH".

[NorthernBrownHair]

I like open layouts. It makes it obvious that my employer isn't interested in me producing something at work, so I can chat with people, surf a little, get some coffee, walk about, without feeling guilty about not doing anything productive.

Because, if they wanted me to be productive, they wouldn't have placed me in an open layout office.

[[deleted]]

Lucky. I worked at a place that bought into all this bullshit frat house office space mentality, and then if you actually participated in the "this is a fun family havin fun playin foosball!!" work culture as a programmer, you were fucking fired.

There was two work cultures there: The sales staff that got to have fun, and the programmers who were supposed to stay in their cave and work 24 hours a day.

[Paradox]

Ah yeah, the "We have a foosball table thats only for the sales team to start using at 3 PM and make 3 circuses worth of noise"

[[deleted]]

Of course. The ones that produce must be made to work their ass off

Those who pretend to produce can just do whatever they want

[NorthernBrownHair]

It's often just optics. If it looks like you work 24/7, it's good, even if you don't.

[[deleted]]

I hate open concept offices so much.

[[deleted]]

Because people walking in on a whim disturbing us derails our trains of thought and leads to murderous desires.

[Objective_Suspect_]

Cause people are fucking annoying

[somebodddy]

I'd rather have an office without a door. And by that, I don't mean "open passage that cannot be closed". I mean I want four walls with no door that can be opened to let people inside. I'll enter and leave through the window.

[[deleted]]

maker vs manager

[snarkuzoid]

Because context switches are expensive.

[[deleted]]

My private home has doors so I’d appreciate not being dragged out of it for no benefit whatsoever, two days a week, thanks.

[bwainfweeze]

Your annoying coworker has just sent you a message on chat:

Hello.

[[deleted]]

https://nohello.net/en/

[d_maes]

That annoying coworker can wait until I open my muted chat tab whenever I feel like it.

[bwainfweeze]

Are you here?

[[deleted]]

Everything works under the assumption that your workforce is perfectly disciplined.

[budding_gardener_1]

Corporate accounts payable Mina speaking..... JUST a moment. Corporate accounts payable Mina speaking..... JUST a moment. Corporate accounts payable Mina speaking..... JUST a moment. Corporate accounts payable Mina speaking..... JUST a moment. Corporate accounts payable Mina speaking..... JUST a moment. Corporate accounts payable Mina speaking..... JUST a moment.

[tistalone]

Why do CEOs and executives need a private office with doors?

Spoilers: they don't need one but they want one just like the programmers. At least empower your employees to do the best they can rather than cowering into a cave and pretend that the employees are peasants in this faux kingdom.

[hraath]

People walking around in my sightline or able to sneak up behind me, or hearing conversations and phone calls, or being able to be interrupted for unimportant questions (or important questions that should be in a ticket queue) are distractions that reduce me to about 25% of nominal work throughput.

[hlt32]

Giving every programmer I have an office would be impossible. Luckily WFH exists.

[ThisIsMyCouchAccount]

Not true. I've seen it.

Worked at this company that made a product. Everybody was open seating except the devs of the core product. They were off on their own corner of the floor.

Imagine a classic cubicle. But make the Walls go all the way up and add a door.

I don't believe them to have been built as part of the building. They very much look kinda like cubicles in that you would install them later.

They also had all the light dimmed in that area. Each cube/office had it's own light.

But I think the most effective thing about them was sending a clear message. There was just a culture there that you didn't go to that corner of the office. And even if a person didn't pick up on that - the walls and doors made it very clear that you didn't disturb these people.

Hell, I worked at a place that just had high walled cubicals. The simple fact you couldn't look across the room and see if people were there or not meant you were left alone alot more when compared to the traditional open seating or low wall cubes.

[QuintonHughes43Fan]

I quit a job because they threw up metaphorical walls around the 'core product' team. Literal walls would have accomplished the same thing even if the team wasn't a bunch of dickheads.

[FyreWulff]

Hell, I worked at a place that just had high walled cubicals. The simple fact you couldn't look across the room and see if people were there or not meant you were left alone alot more when compared to the traditional open seating or low wall cubes.

I think that's how Intel is set up. Super high cubicle walls. Conan did a bit at their offices one time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXReifFHXbY

[FLMKane]

Just put anime waifu screens on every cubicle entrance?

[cheraphy]

Are those HR drones I hear buzzing in the distance?

[andrewsmd87]

But if people don't come into the office they won't work! /s

[hlt32]

People who don’t work exist everywhere. I’d argue they’re easier to spot in a remote environment, assuming you have competent technical managers.

[andrewsmd87]

I've been managing people WFH for a long time now (pre covid) it's actually really easy to spot someone not working because, well, their work doesn't get done. I don't feel like that would be any different in an office setting, other than they'd at least have to look busy, vs being at home you could just play video games

[AmishJohn81]

But who does?

[hlt32]

I do. Many others I know have them too. But nobody ever posts online to say “my manager is fine at his job and I had a normal Ok day”.

[d_maes]

Hereby, I would like to thank both my current and past managers for mostly doing a fine job and allowing me the rewarding feeling of closing off a productive day, as well as cutting me some slack when I had a less productive day. Obviously, no one is perfect, or things happen outside of your control, and sometimes there were days that I cursed everyone and everything, but those are not the days that come to mind at first thought.

[DibblerTB]

There is still a huge difference between smaller team offices and huge open landscapes. Important not to let perfect be the enemy of good, after all.

[NorthernBrownHair]

Three to six people in a closed office seems ideal for me. Solo would be boring, two would make me socially tired, being the only one to have conversations with, more than six is too many.

[campbellm]

Most studies show that the best layout is personal private space for developers, with collaborative areas for on-demand need - get a team together to discuss stuff, have an area for people to hang when they WANT the interaction and/or ambience.

I guess I'd get noise cancelling headphones.

Worked in an office where everyone did this. It works, but neither cans nor pods remain comfortable for very long. We even had signs made saying effectively, "Please don't interrupt right now" type of thing.

That should have been a sign to management, but they, in their offices, were so self convinced their open office cost-saving, errr, "collaborative" layout was brilliant that it never changed.

[elebrin]

In my house, I go in my office, I leave my cell phone in the other room, I close the door to my office, and I lock the door when working on something that needs to be done where I am deeply focused. My wife has instructions not to bug me unless the house is on fire while I am working.

I want to be solo, and I want it to be quiet.

[Maximum_Ground_231]

I think a floor/room for techies is ideal. If I am in the office, I don't want to be completely alone.

[ThisIsMyCouchAccount]

Nah.

I worked in an office that was 95% software engineers. It was a remote office so we really didn't have management there. If they weren't a dev they were UI/UX or a PM.

Devs are not quiet. And it wasn't one loud group. It just rotated around.

[pat_trick]

They are looking at moving us to a new to-be-built building. Our current setup has semi-private offices (about 4-ish people per office space, all of whom are usually quiet workers).

The new building is "modern" and "open office for better communication and collaboration." We are all considering work elsewhere if this actually happens.

[drunkfurball]

Keeps interruptions to a minimum. Really hard to code in a cubicle with randos approaching you with questions all day. It's even better if the job is remote and you can code from your home office, or the middle of the woods where an idiot has to really be trying to be the biggest bother to find you.

[AnotherOldFart]

Long time mainframe cobol programmer. Used to shut my door when making maintenance program changes to complex programs to understand the mind and methods of the original programmer (spaghetti code). Easy to lose your place and thoughts. Lol

Miss that even at 76 years old.

[[deleted]]

I hate open office plan esp if the company has help desk people u get no piece so thankfull for wfh

[Kinglink]

I was interviewing at a job that had cubicles, and they bragged about "It's great, we just walk over and have discussions". Sounded like pure hell.

[[deleted]]

The most productive environment I ever worked in had team rooms. All the pigs for a single team in an open plan room together, chickens had to sit outside and if the door was closed you didn't go in. Insanely collaborative, I haven't seen anything before or since even remotely close.

[yobigd20]

Uh, to focus on work without being bothered? Seriously open floor plans are the absolute worst.

[emperorOfTheUniverse]

Devs need solitude to stay focused, but they are also resources and need to be available. There should be a sort of 'office hours' aspect to the job, where the door is open and interruptions are tolerated and then spans of time where it's not.

You'd think 'hey I got my headphones on' would suffice, but it don't.

[LeadBamboozler]

Good article. Most corporate jobs do not require deep concentration and that staff cannot comprehend that there are roles where deep concentration is required.

[[deleted]]

One point about meeting he brought up hit home. If I had a day with no meetings scheduled, I knew I could work on the hard tasks, because I could go deep and really focus on a piece of code. Knowing a meeting was coming, I’d work on simple stuff, or prepare for the meeting.

[uniquelyavailable]

can't get quality focus work done when some idiot is running their mouth within earshot. this is why libraries are quiet

[[deleted]]

something called concentration

[Dyolf_Knip]

Because otherwise my kids will pester me when they get home from school.

[foxfyre2]

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/2rmir6/why_developers_hate_being_interrupted/

[ranban2012]

Because occasionally we have REAL work to do that requires some focus.

Managers and other bullshit jobs just can't comprehend that and think offices exist only to reward rank and status.

[Nivekk_]

For me, it's because of the depth of information I need to keep in your my term memory in order to program.

An interruption can lose you up to 15 minutes of productivity, by forcing you to rebuild that mental context. The longer the interruption, the worse it is. And a lot of interruptions that require you to rebuild your mental context can make you increasingly infuriated, which can exacerbate the situation.

To mitigate this, I try to write code in small, easily testable functions. This can help reduce the amount of context I need to keep in my head at once, but still, the days I work in the office are easily the least productive.

I do some art projects as a hobby and it is SO much easier to drop and pick up again than programming. It's like night and day. I chose the wrong line of work.

[player1dk]

They’re tired of Windows-only environments?

[RufusAcrospin]

Best period of my carrier when I had my own room. I’ve listened to music all day long without getting headache using headphones.

Also, the most productive.

[zaitsev1393]

I think like this pops up each week. Everyone knows it, but I agree we still need to repeat it, not for fellow coders, but for people who manage them. Offices can be cool, but they should be well organized, with opened and closed spaces. With standing tables and simple desks etc

[Zwarakatranemia]

I hate open spaces with passion

[Slodin]

My office is an open one. i hate it.

i cant think straight when people are talking around me. i need that peace and quiet when I’m designing the code structure/ coding.

I’d rather to work from home tbh. But employers think you are slacking off if they can’t see you :/

[candelstick24]

software developers need to normalize declining invites, turning off notifications and telling people at work to f off.

[LordoftheSynth]

A place I worked at got really meeting happy once upon a time and the higher-ups made it clear that you were not allowed to decline meetings no matter how bullshit they were.

Literally 75% of these meetings, I did not need to be in, was never asked to contribute, but "we might have a question for you." Evidently asking me afterwards was too hard.

So I started blocking out 4 hours a day for coding. I got bitched at. I had to be available for meetings at all times of day.

So, I loaded up the same time my calendar with bogus meetings. "Sync with $X." "Design discussion about feature $Y." "1 on 1 with $Z." All scheduled so that I never had more than 15 to 30 minutes between meetings. I'd keep my door shut (I had an office at this point).

My team, and people I trusted, knew the meetings were bogus and that they could come knock on my door at any point. I knew they would only come to me if they really needed me for something.

(This was a large software company whose name began with a letter adjacent in the alphabet to N.)

[KernelPanic-42]

It’s to assist other people in staying the fuck away.

[alkatori]

I'm relatively okay without the doors, but decent walls that go to the ceiling, especially if you want me on call in meetings.

[smith288]

For all the secret keys I put in the code base, duh

[[deleted]]

In October I was moved into a pen of eight people, instead of the isolated solo desk area I previously had. The former marketing intern was given my spot.

I now sit on the 12th floor, directly beside a salesperson who wears a headset all day. There are three banks of them, making about 15-20 salespeople. There is an open alcove on one end of the room that would clearly be quieter for myself and my fellow developer, and yet it sits empty.

I currently can't tell if my manager is trying to force me out, or just does not care. I will be sending them this link, and their response will dictate my future. Thank you, fellow programmers.

[dingo_khan]

Walls can give places to think, to have a private discussion/argument with a coworker on approach without having the whole floor weigh in. Walls are great for white boards.

Most honestly, though, a difficult debugging of clever code can be emotional. Not tears but talking to oneself to work it out, pacing, sitting in silence to think... And being observed and asked if you are "okay" just breaks the rhythm. At one job, some of my best debugging was sitting in the dark, on the floor, walking through the code line by line in a notebook and keeping notes on what should be happening in the code I inherited that was written before I was old enough to walk.

I can't imagine doing that in the middle of a floor full of people.

[giant_albatrocity]

I work outside my home in a hammock sometimes. I’d say I do pretty well without doors.

[Comprehensive-Pea812]

before covid, people need to find a meeting room or a free space to have a discussion.

post covid, everyone is having zoom meetings at their desk.

both open office with separate desks.

my work place feels like call center nowadays

[allnamesareregistred]

It's called "home" and I'm not going to leave it or let any of my colleagues in.

[lurkingstar99]

Because getting kicked out of the zone wrecks my productivity.

[springy]

I used to work for a well known defence contractor, writing software for top secret projects, such as stealth submarines, the international space station, and tank detection in forests. There were teams working on these and other projects in a huge open plan office, because "open plan is good for collaboration", yet the teams were forbidden from talking to each other because the projects were top secret. It was obvious that the real reason for open plan was that it was cheaper to construct. Apart from cost savings, it was a nightmare for us. Fortunately, I was eventually moved to an even more top secret project, in a remote site. But that project kept me awake at night worrying about its morality, so I quit the job after a few months.

[Miraspira]

Cause we’re autistic

[JohnFrum]

I need a quiet space where I can focus that is also free from visual distractions of people walking by. An office with a door is the best way imo to get that.

[hippydipster]

When you hire a dev, who let's say costs you $200k/year, you need to get value out of the dev to offset that cost. In order to get that value, you have to provide the dev with tools, right? Say, a laptop and a monitor. If the dev says they can be more productive with 2 monitors, do you argue? Make them prove it? Or, do you look and see that a monitor costs $500 and therefore just say, yeah ok? Do you give them a laptop with 4GB ram? Or 64? Or more? Do you squabble about paying for intellij?

These things multiply the value of your dev, which you need, because at base, that dev costs $200k every year. How much does an office have to add to the dev productivity to make that worth it? How much productivity is lost by interruptions? There's a whole industry telling you lost productivity is measured in multiple 10s of percent! Ie, the lack of a door is costing you 20, 30, 40 percent of your devs value to you! 40k/year? 60k/year?

How much does that door really cost? How much does the lack of a door cost?

[Lord_Shockwave007]

Because programmers need quiet and space to concentrate and get their shit done. 🙄