Pissed me off. Dude is the CEO and partial owner, so it's completely different. If they want to pretend to be Elon Musk and want me to as well, they better at least pay like it to justify the lack of work/life balance. I am a human being whose existence is entirely indepedent of whatever job I currently have. Crazy thought, I know.
I am only a bit salty because having consulted across a wide array of industries and been the miracle worker one man show in some of them, I have seen it everywhere.
Oh, and back on subject, of course at this place I was shoved into an open office with the devs...
It's a great relief to be here and see a different mindset outside that of the "all work no holiday" cultures you can find in the states.
In this day and age I feel like all many people want is retired-style life but then they entangle themselves in debt and job quagmires they don't excape till they are 65. I also highly disagree with the characterization that retirement is sitting around doing nothing. Retirement to me is the chance to pursue your true passions and interests unencumbered by an unrelated need for finances supplied by a wage-slavery job.
Come on over man. :)
I kid, I kiiid... no really that was both sarcastic and joking.
Is the "all work no holiday" necessary for successful tech startups on the order of those?
You can underpay and underwork, and have low turnover and medium-high return on talent, or you can overpay and overwork, with a high turnover but a high return on talent, but to underpay and overwork is a recipe for hemmoraging talent.
1 - have a plan 2 - FOCUS for 8 hours during the workday 3 - go home and play/rest
Seems to me that doing this would create a good company, but it's damned hard to find any examples.
Drives me effing nuts! Salaried exempt doesn't mean slave labor. It means the work I do requires thinking and since I am always thinking it makes more sense to just pay me a predetermined amount instead of going hourly and trying to figure out if I should be compensated for the commute to and from the office when some of my greatest ideas and innovations occur. God forbid my idea comes while not on the clock! I might not choose to assign the IP over to you! I still only anticipate implementing ideas and performing tasks for approximately 40 hours per week. You're paying for my brains not my key pushing skills.
You'd be rich before the end of the day just from the revenue off of HN readers alone!
:)
The best part is our 5 person IT team will be right next to 25 people who work phones for customer service.
Because everyone likes to be the CoA.
> The best part is our 5 person IT team will be right next to 25 people who work phones for customer service.
Time to polish that resume.
Lemme guess, your company is the type of company that thinks the entirety of IT equals help desk, and therefore will be on the phone all day fielding tickets, so to whoever made this god awful decision, sticking IT right next to CS "just makes sense".
I'm with the other guy here, run.
I get that for a startup money is tight. Instead of telling employees:
"You folks really deserve a your own offices but we just can't afford it."
Instead they tell you the big lie; that they are doing it because it "increases collaboration".
Everyone I know who went on to an industry position is working in an open plan office... and it is not unusual to hear stories about people putting in a few days of home office to get some actual work done.
This is obviously anecdotal, but based on other responses in this thread and elsewhere there is more than enough evidence to justify doing a real study. It is not difficult to measure changes in productivity over time accross a sufficiently large population and the amount of money being spent on engineers means that even a marginal increase in productivity will be worth the cost.
The best permutation of open spaces and privacy that I've seen is a wide open space with quiet rooms and sharable offices. Work in the open space when you want, or work in the quiet room when you need some privacy.
I wish that more companies would adopt this.
Assume you mean private office. Isn't that a pretty compelling argument that the majority don't see big advantages to open plan?
That's a one time cost. Amortize that out over a 5 year office lease and it is peanuts compared to the productivity gains and lower turnover.
Also once you go with a private or semi private office you won't want to go back. Any employee from there interviewing at places with open offices will probably think how much they will hate it there.
I know the occasional person will pop up with the "I love hearing other people jibber jabber throughout the day!" But 9 out of 10 people I talk with would rather not.
Quiet rooms don't help, not everyone has a laptop, nor wants one. You end up with a crappy, un-ergonomic desktop environments. And there are only so many quiet rooms possible. If you use one continually, you get marked as the social deviant.
Shareable offices? How is that any different than the old "hoteling" concept? Sharing an office is going to be first come first served, same as your quiet rooms. No diff.
If managers, directors, and VPs are willing to use this type of setup, I'd be more tolerant. But in our latest update, they all have dedicated offices. They can't mingle with the hoi polloi, having an office is a signal of their power and prestige.
I recommend private offices for engineers so they can get heads down and do their work, but sadly that suggestion tends to get ignored :( .
When I had a review, my supervisor told me that people didn't find me approachable because I head my headphones on.
When I mentioned I need a quiet space, he told me to "deal with it". When I questioned him on whether he had worked in an open space, he said he had, because he had been a NOC manager.
Different worlds, I soon left. That was the moment I realized I hated traditional corporate culture. Improved to startup, which I loved, until the "CEO" proved he was incompentent and furloughed us...
"If we build this as an open office, it's cheaper AND better? That's a slam dunk!"
6 years later ...
"Turns out it's only cheaper, not better. Hey, cheaper is better right?"
Well, the decisions about these things are made by upper management (who probably get an office, and sit in meetings all day anyway) and/or facilities (who walk around a lot of the day dealing with various facility issues).
I know I'm generalizing and not all managers lack empathy, but this seems like a reasonable explanation for the pervasiveness of arrangements that waste resources and hinder higher levels of productivity--maybe they just don't get it.
I could never understand the cost argument since lower productivity means either more employees to do the same thing and/or a shittier product, which can translate into lost sales, more infrastructure, etc. (This might not apply to early stage startups and the like; I'm thinking of established organizations here.)
https://salfreudenberg.wordpress.com/2016/05/12/the-case-for...
http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/cucumber-podcast/cucumber/e/...
Do we need to? Sure, many projects need multiple people, but few end up needing the whole organisation. So with a little flexibility on project assignments I feel most organisations can accommodate a range of working styles -- if they want to.
This article mentions high performance employees - but most knowledge workers (designers, programmers etc.) that I know all struggle with open plan office environments irrespective of their performance level. If anything, an open plan office is maybe less worrisome to the more executive people I know - their core work processes of communication & meetings are less negatively impacted by the inability to regularly get large blocks of quiet productive space.
Some companies obviously get this need (e.g. FogCreek) but it really feels like sugar consumption or smoking. Once people really interrogate the status quo they are quick to realise how negative it is - but despite this the sub-optimal default approach has an unbelievable amount of momentum.
My condolences to all the 'high performance people' surveyed who are desperately wishing for less disturbed work spaces!