[HN Gopher] The Birth and Death of the Office
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The Birth and Death of the Office
Author : Caiero
Score : 22 points
Date : 2022-06-11 05:10 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.historytoday.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.historytoday.com)
| ultim8k wrote:
| Office sucks. Let me list a few things: - Hot desks - People
| laughing and constantly talking while you are trying to focus -
| Unstable temperature making you freeze or boil - Uncomfortable
| and unhealthy desks/chairs - Often lack of proper
| screens/equipment - Getting squeezed in trains to commute -
| spending at best an extra hour per day - Unhealthy and expensive
| dietary options around work - Contamination of diseases - Useless
| meetings and team activities that usually produce zero value
|
| Not to mention how bad this is for the environment. And no, a
| ping-pong or foosball table doesn't make the office cool. It's
| like adding chocolate syrup on a rotten fruit to make it edible.
| lizknope wrote:
| I had an office with a door for 12 years. I switched jobs 3 years
| ago and everyone has a cubicle even the managers.
|
| Constant distractions with people talking loudly on conference
| calls. Then someone else talks even louder on their call.
|
| Before covid our site was mostly working on the same project.
| There was some fun collaboration in the conference room around
| white boards etc.
|
| We had a reorg to pool resources across projects across the
| country so now only 3 out of 10 people on my project are at my
| site.
|
| Most of us bought our own 40" 4K monitors so if I go in a
| conference room I can't even share my remote Linux desktop
| session properly because I'm scrolling within the window to find
| my applications to share.
|
| Because of that I just stay at my cubicle to share my screen and
| end up disturbing everyone else around me with my own conference
| call.
|
| Everything would be fine with offices and doors but instead we
| get stupid surveys about whether we want an open floorplan which
| is even worse.
|
| We are supposed to go in the office 3 days a week. The reality is
| most people at my site show up once or twice a week for half a
| day for the free lunch once a week and then go home by 3pm to get
| work done.
|
| We have 30 job openings and we hire about 1 person every 2
| months. We lose 1 person about every 4 months. Management hasn't
| said anything about people not showing up probably because they
| don't want to push people to leave.
| osigurdson wrote:
| I don't think there is anything else more illogical in modern
| society than waking up in building A, hopping in a car and
| fighting traffic for an hour to get to building B just to sit in
| front of a computer for 8 hours (perhaps with a few minimally
| productive meetings here and there), then commute back to
| building A 8 hours later.
|
| Building B sits empty for 16 hours a day while Building A sits
| empty for 10 with both being heated/cooled for 24 hours. The
| employee wastes 2 of their 16 available waking hours in the non-
| productive commute while incurring significant financial costs
| (lease/insurance/fuel/energy) in order to support this patently
| absurd activity. Similarly the employer wastes time and energy
| negotiating leases, re-arranging offices, purchasing AV equipment
| for meeting rooms in building B, etc.,etc., in addition to paying
| the likely enormously expensive lease itself.
|
| The impacts on the environment, the number of hours of human life
| wasted in commute, the pointless buildings and associated costs
| to employers as well as the public infrastructure to support it
| (roads, trains, busses, etc.) are all incredibly wasteful.
| Surely, all of this could only be justified if physical presence
| had a dramatic impact on productivity. Yet, we cannot tell one
| way or the other if it actually improves outcomes.
| esotericsean wrote:
| WFM is the greatest thing of my life.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| Whole Foods Market?
| [deleted]
| burade wrote:
| As someone with lots of weird quirks, and who is very likely on
| the autism spectrum, working from home may have literally saved
| my career.
| dnndev wrote:
| I miss the office.
| spicyusername wrote:
| Once remote working has been around long enough we'll probably
| see the rise of new social constructs that fill the void the
| office as the "second place" is leaving behind.
|
| The office was a crappy "second place" anyways.
| throwaways85989 wrote:
| I already can imagine some versions. For example, the
| journeyman were one visits various "experts" to become a
| better craftmans - traveling from home to home.
|
| The forming of conference-clusters, were digital nomadic
| workers meet up at some place by tradition to jam and work on
| something, like a conference without the conference hall.
|
| I can also imagine community, who specialize in a particular
| field. Like a suburb, dedicated to database optimization.
|
| Or have some programming group in the park or on a train. If
| you are free from social constraints and locations- all it
| takes is good internet.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Before office work was the norm, what was this "second
| place?"
|
| Churches, probably? Taverns?
| yosito wrote:
| Churches, pubs, town squares
| giaour wrote:
| Coffeehouses, clubs (the kind Victorian gentlemen spent all
| day in), workshops for craftsmen
| acchow wrote:
| same
| rhexs wrote:
| I miss offices in reasonable locations. Instead they're all in
| the same 6-8 cities that all have increasingly bad homeless
| populations.
|
| No, I don't want to live in the Bay, New York City, Boston,
| Austin, or Denver. Please create small satellite offices in
| reasonable cities instead of mega campuses in towns that all
| seem to have public libraries that are now defacto homeless
| shelters.
|
| Tech imports most of the talent these days anyway, so I don't
| buy the "talent only wants to move to the Bay!" argument.
| thwarted wrote:
| > I miss offices in reasonable locations. Instead they're all
| in the same 6-8 cities...
|
| The majority of the US population lives in the same 6-8 metro
| areas; so it's "reasonable" to put offices in those metro
| areas. I've worked at places with offices in downtown areas
| (short public transit ride or walk), in close suburbs (the
| extent to where public transit goes), and in remote suburbs
| (that require driving to get there), and the further away
| from city centers they are, the more brutal going to them is
| unless you already live in or relocate to the sleepy suburb
| the office is in (and then you still need to spend a not-
| insignificant amount of time driving, even for going places
| that are not your office, because suburbs are not, almost by
| definition, navigable without a car).
|
| > Please create small satellite offices in reasonable cities
| instead of mega campuses
|
| Do a lot of large companies have "mega campuses" in city
| centers? That doesn't make much sense, a campus requires a
| significant amount of land, land which is not available in
| city centers. Google's "mega campus" in the Bay Area is in
| the suburban part of the Bay Area (in as much as the Bay Area
| is mostly suburban sprawl anyway), and has "satellite
| offices" in downtown areas because that's where a lot of the
| employees live. I suppose Salesforce Tower could count as a
| "campus" if it's heavily populated with Salesforce employees,
| although I don't think one thinks of Salesforce Tower when
| the term "campus" comes up. Maybe the handful of buildings
| around Salesforce Tower that contained Salesforce employees
| could be considered a campus in aggregate (generally, a
| single building does not make a "campus").
|
| Going into a small satellite office and interacting with most
| coworkers remotely is not really much different than working
| from home and interacting with coworkers remotely. You get
| the burden of going into an office without any advantages of
| in-person interaction. However, _one of the reasons_ I miss
| having a dedicated office is that I have found that having a
| different place to work than my house does wonders for my
| general heads-down productivity and work-life balance, but
| that 's independent of the many other advantages and
| disadvantages of having a communal, shared space where people
| working on the same thing can congregate.
| mertd wrote:
| The US tried the suburban office park model. It's horrible.
| rhexs wrote:
| Do I have to walk over feces and needles to get to work at
| a suburban office park model? Can I afford housing?
|
| Sure, sounds lame if I'm 23. What if -- crazy idea -- we
| have a variety of both options?
| mertd wrote:
| Urban areas don't have to have lots of petty crime and
| homelessness. Let's not assume they come as a package.
|
| Certain sectors clustering together in a geographic
| region has nice advantages even for non-23yo non-single
| folk. One can hop jobs without uprooting the rest of the
| family.
| lizknope wrote:
| I've worked in suburban office parks for 23 of my 25 years
| of professional work. They're fine. Nothing great, nothing
| bad. Just fine.
| jollybean wrote:
| Horrible ? It works _extremely_ well. It 's one of the
| reasons America is so rich.
|
| It's 'horrible' from the '3rd space' perspective, in that
| it doesn't make for quaint high street shopping ... but it
| works really well for teams that want to get together every
| day and do stuff without the fuss of complicated little
| villages and twisty roads, no space for parking.
|
| Kind of like major highways, they're good at what they were
| designed to do. They just have externalizations. Bad one's
| depending on how you measure.
| UberFly wrote:
| The Office won't die but flexibility where it makes sense will
| take over. I'm glad such possibilities are presenting themselves.
| One of the silver-linings of covid.
| awsrocks wrote:
| It is less the death of the office and more the death of work. We
| just haven't come to admit that. Death of work and "cold"
| relationships and the retreat to home, emotional connection,
| nurturing, caring. Once employers know it's more about that and
| less about work then we will see things turn around.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| Found the manager.
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