I follow some of the executives of the company I work at (we have an open office) and they are constantly posting pictures of "teamwork and collaboration" that just have a bunch of people standing around each others desks talking. They see all the movement and noise and they love that it seems like everybody is hard at work, collaborating and discussing problems etc. But if you look a little closer, the people doing actual work are hunched over their desks with huge headphones on, and everybody standing around are either not talking about anything related to work or they are rehashing discussions that have already happened over IM/email/meetings. I expressed to my manager that I had a hard time working in this environment and would like the chance to work from home a more often but was dismissed because he "likes the open office" and our management has the view that if you are working from home you probably aren't working.

The executives tend to be extroverted and at the top of the primate social-power higherarchy. Much of this is unconscious, or at least un-admitted, but the people in charge of our offices get a rush when their subordinates visably do the work. They enjoy people gathering around them and telling them about the issue of the day. To an extrovert at the top of the ladder, that power wouldn't feel as good if it was manifested solely as Jira tickets, slack pings, and performance dashboards in a home office. They would not feel nearly as important.

One open office I worked regularly flew in parent company executives from around the world so they could watch all that geeky brainpower under their command grinding away at our Macbooks.

I think this psychology has had a cumulative effect on creating our work culture. Did an individual executive decide to build your office based on how it made them feel? No probablly not, but when you take the psychological profiles of all business leaders together you get the open office, the business trip, and the all day meeting.

It made me think of another: perhaps executives wrongly assume that what's a productive environment for them and their tasks is appropriate for everyone in the organization.

Might as well put you all behind a big glass wall, with a placard underneath that says “Developers” and toss a few bananas in every once in a while.

I don't hear that phrase much lately. Which makes me quite happy.

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The book "Managing Humans" is worth a read if you're so cynical about managers. Though the actual problem is corporate culture in my experience.

The ones that aren't are worth their weight in gold, though.

Of course I don't think that's necessarily 100% true, but it always stuck with me.

/r/IBM is an IBM-controlled sub, and the original was deleted by the IBM-employed mod, hence the screencap.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/ajC1kNk.jpg

It doesn't even need to really show anything, just say it does. Kind of like the Connection Machine's random blinkenlights "activity mode".

I work in a similar dystopian open office panopticon, and I'm shocked, every day, that this isn't something that everybody is intrinsically aware of. But where I work, there are some Important People who have offices with doors - who leave the doors wide open, put their phones on speaker, and shout into conference calls all day, every day. The inconsiderateness of some people is really mind boggling.

The middle ground I have is noise-cancelling headphones (bose qc20) with white noise app playing a low volume mix of grey noise and... maybe brown. The grey gives a low feeling, and helps mask out some frequencies that the noise cancelling headphones miss. It's not perfect, and it's not "library quiet", but I've found the combination is relatively calming most of the time.

Just a guess: some extroverts find "library day" just as unpleasant as others find non-library days?

I really like the way Amtrak handles this: At least on the Northeast Corridor, most of their trains have a "quiet car". Whether or not you sit in it is optional.

extroverts work at the office

introverts work from home.