Now I imagine Gary Cole reprising his Bill Lumbergh role but he's shaved twenty years off his resume. He has a man bun he has to dye, rides a scooter to work (which he despises) and woefully misuses modern platform terms and "may mays" in typical /r/fellowkids style.

The main characters are rehired as part of a lawsuit settlement against Silcon Valley's rampant ageism. fRAGILe has taken over (we must acknowledge our weakness to transcend it) and each day is started with a scrimmage that includes mandatory hugs, incense and mediation. No one is allowed to discuss development progress because it brings too much negative energy.

Completely ignored by their coworkers the old gang invent something that makes the company a takeover target. Rather than acknowledge their worth and shatter SV group think about anyone over 25 having a good idea much less give up equity, management gives them all awful reviews and fires them, returning their shares to the firing manager. (It's assumed if you got rid of dead weight you did the company some good and should be rewarded.)

https://fragilemanifesto.net/

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0425326/

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1593756/

"But vaccines make you sick."

I figure the gang has to do something useful to set them up for a Kafkaesque evaluation where we learn that they failed to meet zero expectations by exceeding them. Everyone's fired and SV's sterotypes about older workers are reinforced as they couldn't even do nothing properly.

Good heuristic on these trends. "Will everyone absolutely hate it?" If so, it'll get really popular.

Hotdesking. Oh yeah! It'll drive everyone nuts!

What else you got?

Though globally remote is worse. You're expected to be able to jump on cam at all hours. Have your cap nearby to cover up the bedhead.

I think that's the price you pay for being globally remote. We have some overseas support staff, and they knew before they took the job when they'd need to be expected to dial-in for team meetings, and they all seem to be fine with it.

My boss originally wanted people to use their webcam when joining those meetings when we first went fully remote. That initiative lasted about two weeks before no one did it anymore, including him.

I just wear a headset, and half the time I can leave it on mute anyway (especially if the puppy decides now is the time to chew on her squeakiest toy, or bark at some people running down the path beyond our back yard).

However, in my previous company every remote developer had a Polycom phone in their home office and the main office ran a PBX for them. I found that an order of magnitude better, because the phones had much much better sound quality, they were physically on the desk so there was a feeling of "this device connects me to my coworkers" associated with them, and they just lowered the barrier of calling someone by a ton.

They were so good, that we'd routinely just call each other up and keep a line open while we worked, so we could chat about work, what we were doing or just generally about our lives, and we really felt like we were sitting next to each other in a way that Zoom doesn't.

I still miss the phone on my desk, and I've been considering to buy one for years, as a gate with an asterisk multiple choice menu in between :)

Is it really that hard to put on a shirt for your meetings?

Screen sharing?

If the goal is to match the level of communication of being local, then webcams are a must.

It would take a lot for me to give it up for an office of any kind.

I can always do the social part of my job standing up, away from my desk; but if I have no permanent desk and corner, then I can not benefit from it.

Well holy shit, I did not expect that.

What have we learned?

There isn't a configuration that is good, productive and cost effective.

Pick any two.

…But nobody is buying a new MacBook every quarter.

I think you meant cheap. It's quite possible to have expensive, cost-effective configurations.

This is my claim. However you arrange it there exists some suckiness which people inevitably complain about that is a trade-off of having it in that specific configuration.

Yes, people will complain. But there's a huge difference between "John, could you please turn the volume of your headphones down" and "study after study has proven that open-floor plans are detrimental to productivity and health".

Sweet spot for me does not depend on the number of people. I used to work for a company in a huge open space with 25+ devs who understood the need for silence.

Now I'm in an open space with 8 people who do not understand the need for silence.

One guy's been on a diet for the past year and eats only raw carrots for lunch. The crunching is so loud I can hear it through my Bose QC15 headphones.

It starts with the screeching carrot peeler, I want to hang myself. The same guy spends all day making obnoxious snorting sounds and doesn't know what a Kleenex is.

Then another colleague decides to go on the same raw carrot diet. Is this a candid camera episode?

Then there's the daily chatter about last night's football game, incessant complaining about whatever the latest company announcement was, other people coming in to the room to yak about their code. Other people fart and stink out the whole room.

I understand the need people to be able to have a chat behind their desk, for professional or personal reasons. But that also bothers others. Conclusion is, open plan doesn't work.

I'm now on the verge of quitting my job for this reason and it's the same reason I quit my previous job.

When I start interviewing for other jobs, how can I ask "do people here understand the need to shut up" without appearing like an asshole?

If I didn't have kids I'd move to outer Mongolia and farm sheep.

Honestly? I don't think you can. If you're at the point of regularly quitting jobs over people eating and chatting in an office, you may just have to prioritize a private office or remote work. That will limit your options of course but it may be a tradeoff worth making.

I once walked into an office for an interview and it was too quiet for the number of devs in there. I knew it wasn't right for me.

I guess listen for the background noise?

You just have to pray you don't get stuck with people quite capable of generating a lot of extremely irritating internal (to the office) noise.

Probably so. Billy Wilder's The Apartment executed a very similar lampooning of white-collar office culture 40 years earlier (if you haven't seen it, see it! It's probably Wilder's best film).

The solution that should make everyone happy, of course, is to just make everything remote.

Edit: What is it about this statement that earned it a downvote?

I'm all about optimizing the work environment, but saying you can't work with talking around you comes across as entitled.

You can’t or you won’t work in a chair that gives you a mild electric shock every 49 seconds?

Here’s a question: when your work environment is hostile to focusing on work that needs focus, what exactly is the point of distinguishing between can’t and won’t?

I'm sympathetic to someone who can't/won't work in those conditions. The good news is that, if they're in tech, they probably have alternatives--something which many don't have. Insisting on remote work or other conditions that allow them to work in peace and quiet may not optimize for salary or career. But everyone should at least consider what's important for them.

I'm in an office today and can hear people talking nearby, is that too loud? At some point it becomes my problem if I'm bothered by something.

Construction doesn't have to be heavy permanent walls either and many places have fully configurable wall construction that is more than good enough to offer privacy and sound insulation.

Plus, offices/cubes are not flexible at all -- when you start to outgrow your building full of offices (or even cubes), you can't easily squeeze desks together to make room while you seek additional space.

We have some small "phone rooms" that are about as small as you can build an office, and they are super cramped and uncomfortable, I wouldn't want to spend a full work-day in one.

I suspect most companies that absolutely need every inch of continuous desk space have bigger problems. Organic growth isn't difficult to manage, it's the crazy VC fueled hiring sprees that create real estate issues.

2. Physical security and confidentiality is much better.

3. If teams hold 'stand up meetings' or suchlike without using meeting rooms, they won't disrupt other teams.

4. People who have to make calls all the time (customer support, sales etc) don't disrupt other people.

5. Fixed walls remove the temptation to salami-slice square-footage-per-employee, protecting good working conditions.

6. Climate control becomes simpler and has a better chance of working.

Sound levels rise with the size of the crowd. More people making noise, more conversations more of the time, more space to spread the sound, and less individual accountability means people talk louder to be heard and are less considerate of their neighbors, creating a feedback cycle that ends up in a very rough environment.

I know that isn't the case for everybody, but I think I'd be quite comfortable in an 8 person war room as long as folks were actually working on stuff.

You mean "noisy".

I've been at companies whose answer to complaints about open space was exactly this: shoulder high partitions. Yay, the cubicles are back.

Except there exist a set of people who enjoy the camaraderie of talking shit with their colleagues in the office while they go about their worker bee lives.

You will inevitably make those people unhappy with that move and then they will come here on HN and categorically declare how terrible working remote is (for them, but they will omit that detail).

We are working through this right now. Our current office lease is up and the new space is not done yet. We let people also be fully remote, so we decided to go fully remote until the other space is completed. Quite a few people are very unhappy about even this short couple months of being forced remote.

I'd also note that I've known lots of people who basically had jobs that didn't require a lot of in-person interactions but still preferred to come into the office. Of course, that can be largely solved by paying for rental office space for them.

http://conferencecall.biz/

And I'd rather have cubicles than open-plan. Give me at least a smidgen of privacy.

Gonna pay $12000/mo for a code monkey? Costs $300-500/mo for him to have an office? The extravagance!

I'm back to an old observation by Scott Adams; Ask yourself why the secretaries chair doesn't have armrests. Cost isn't an issue, the price difference is $50. This is all about status and class not money.

Oddly enough, I think in some cases it has gone too far in the other direction. When I see people barefoot in a public restroom wearing a t-shirt full of holes I don't think about getting work done.

Why not?

Why isn't it?

The only better thing I can imagine is a single office. Closely followed by home office.

An office with a door is IMO clearly the best option for most employees. I don't even really buy the collaboration argument. Every place I've worked that had offices had at least an informal open door by default policy. You shut the door if you needed to really focus on something or have a private conversation. But otherwise people felt free to wander by.

There is just one person you need to tell to be quiet in a small 2 person office. There are countless people you want to tell to shut up in an open office. This is also the reason so many people work with their headphones on. For some time I had those massive over ear headphones with me while I traveled through our offices. I didn't even listen to anything. Just put them on so I didn't have to listen to the environment. It's hell...

This can't get enough drama to become recognized as a problem.

Maybe slide-able walls could be a way to be able to focus when needed, but also interact heavily when needed. I haven't tried sliders myself. Any opinions on them?

The boss in the movie is average, not "toxic" as the article claims. While he is annoying, he's not loud or blatantly abusive. It's relatively subtle "abuse", and common behavior.

I've had much worse bosses, included a Trump-like boss who had one foot in marketing and one foot in tech. He was technically clueless, rash, ADHD, embellisher, media-savvy, forgetful, termination-happy, etc. Crazy days. (Even if you personally believe T is a great President, working for him may not be. Compare it to Steve Jobs: rough on employees although {arguably} he produced great results.)

It was remade, essentially into Silicon Valley.

If you work in an office, then by definition, you work an office job.

I watched the movie much later than most people on this website and was most shocked by the fact that he was neighbors with a construction worker. That sort of class co-mingling seems vanishingly rare in my social circle.

Accountants absolutely have lavish perks bestowed upon them by the "Big 4" - annual week abroad in foreign destinations for team building.

> doctor-level paychecks though

Neither do devs. In Europe, accountants are paid better than devs. With better hours(except at quarter end) and a straightforward career path..and no-BS job interviews.

Chartered accountants (still talking about company employed- not sole practice) earn even more - like 30% more than a senior dev.

Though it is possible to make more money as an accountant, there are far fewer directors and partners than there are senior devs.

All my other UK friends at low-profile companies are paid a fraction of that (certainly less than half, arguably for the same work, even in London).

The only explanation I have for it is entrenched low salary expectations and also knowing you’re competing with India, whereas on the US West Coast (which is where I live now, though I graduated in the UK) employers have already decided to hire local instead of elsewhere so you don’t feel an unstated pressure to compete on-price with others. The fact Amazon and Microsoft are local also helps.

Regarding class co mingling, really? Your statement seems like a projection. Where does it come from? I doubt you have spoken to many of your neighbors, much less asked what they do.

My neighbor is literally a construction worker.

Ditto. Which is very handy from time to time. :-)

I live in a building with lawyers, bankers, sales people, construction workers, paramedics, and so on.

Enterprise Java and .NET shops are all over the US, and those are much more like Office Space. In fact, I'm fairly sure Office Space was filmed in Texas, not California.

I think with trends like cubical farms, open plan offices and hotdesking software development companies lag behind other industries.

Open plans are much better than cubicles. The transition to open plans and standing desks has been a boon for social interaction in teams, more role-crossover, and just more physical movement in general.

Office Space is a timeless and incredible film, but one aspect of it that seems almost like fantasy is the idea that people primarily working on software might sit down in cramped cubicles and prefer fake privacy to real social interaction.

edit: Look, I know that some people like cubicles. If you do, that's fine. But if you actually seriously like small, cramped, stuffed cubicles in Office Space (or The Matrix) - which absolutely existed in the late 90s and early 2000s in IT and seem to have largely disappeared - I'd really like to hear why. If you do like cubicles: how do you move? Do you really have the discipline to get up and walk around every once in a while? Or do you end up having much less body movement than open plan participants?

I'm certainly happy that I have my office, and if I need to talk to people, their offices (or their open plan, unfortunately) is usually not very far. But a lot of the time, I just need and want to focus a lot, and for that open plan is absolute cancer. My office seats two people, but it actually helps that the other person is not directly in my team.

I don't see what standing desks have to do with it, as offices can have standing desks as well, and ours do.

The last time I sat in open plan, I felt like an animal in a cage, to choose a seemingly paradoxical wording. It wasn't the walls closing in, but the distractions.

My $DAYJOB is for a big multinational corp that has embraced this insanity... my floor is all "open plan" except for a smattering of offices that are reserved for the elite VP level folks. But some of the other floors are cubicle based - sometimes I go down there and just wander around and dream of how nice it would be to have one of those cubicles.

"What cruel twist of fate", I wonder to myself, "led to me being banished to the eldritch and grotesque horrors of the land of endless noise, constant distractions, free-roaming viruses and germs, and - most terrifying of all - sheer and utter hours of non-productivity?"

Me? I don't want "role-crossover". I'm a coder, who wants to occasionally enter a state of flow by getting to code uninterrupted for longer than 3 minutes.

Perhaps you're right. But I will say this: when I tell people about (or show them) the bus, nearly everybody - I'm talking 90%+, say something like, "oh, I've always wanted to do that!" So maybe buses are more popular than cubicles. I don't know. :-)

> Me? I don't want "role-crossover". I'm a coder

I mean, OK. But much of the world has long since moved on to a DevOps style of engagement. I find it much more difficult to have awareness of the entire operation without frequent (even forced) social interaction with colleagues.

Of course I could be wrong, but you could be too. Don't cite anecdotal statistics with such an air of uncertainty.

The social interaction results in less work. Most of a programmers job is staring at a wall of text and trying to concentrate, anything that distracts has a serious impact on productivity. As for role crossover, I've got enough on my plate without being concerned about what other people are dealing with. Some cross-over might be good but there are many areas of a company that are completely disconnected and crossover is just noise.

> but one aspect of it that seems almost like fantasy is the idea that people primarily working on software might sit down in cramped cubicles and prefer fake privacy to real social interaction.

It's not so much fantasy as a portrayal of the time, the cramped cubicles are presented as bad because they replaced actual offices.

That is an extreme overgeneralization. For instance, plenty of programming jobs involve a significant amount of time spent on collaboration and communication with designers, other programmers, customers, and stakeholders. That’s perfectly normal, and I would argue that in many cases those are the product development teams that will make the best products.

Unless all of those people just happen to sit next to each other or they're shouting across the room then an open plan office does nothing to help that anyway, you'll have to organize meetings to collaborate or do it in other formats. For customers and stakeholders you'd be lucky if they worked in the same building at all.

Face to face communication is not the only form of collaborations and IMHO it's the worst and least scaleable one for technical fields. And when you're collaborating through a mailing list or something similar (that doesn't involve interrupting each other) that's just another wall of text.

You do realise that these people will disrupt the work of the 15 people around them?

That's what daily life is in an open office.

The health benefits of standing desks are speculative and unproven. What's healthy is walking away from yout sit-or-stand desk. https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/the-truth-behind-standin...

Why would a cubicle be more cramped than a seat at a cramped table?

Why is a cubicle privacy "fake" but a bullpen office "real" social interaction -- where you can't speak freely because dozens of people are eavesdropping on all your conversations?

The reboot of office space would have everyone in an open office, that is for certain.

And strategic positioning of computer screens (+ books and fillers) to kill line-of-sight to other people. My last open-office job, almost everyone did that quite naturally, probably even unconsciously. Not always possible, and were we sitting in the ridiculous shoulder-to-shoulder setting I see in photos of some hip software houses, I'm not sure how long I would last there.

Yes! I'm so glad you took the time to acknowledge that your personal lived experiences aren't necessarily representative of the experiences and perspectives of office employees as a who-

>seems almost like fantasy is the idea that people primarily working on software might sit down in cramped cubicles and prefer fake privacy to real social interaction.

Oh. Erm... I hate to break it to you, but a lot of us _do_ prefer this!

Literally the cubicles from Office Space?

Different people have different preferences.

I worked in the high cubicles like that once and they were not that bad. A full wrap around desk allowed me to have a PC, Sparc Station, and some test servers in my space. It was fairly quiet, but someone could get your attention by calling your name.

Meanwhile the majority of people, and certainly the majority of the executives and sales guys, are extraverts and simply can't understand why programmers hate open plan.

Also I think there is an asymmetry.

I think introverts can easily 'get' what extraverts prefer, because honestly extraverts are the majority[1], so when you are an introvert, you get to know extraverts pretty well because you live in an extravert world.

I don't think the reverse is true. Extraverts don't 'get' what introverts like because they don't have to, they are the majority and their preferences dictate how everything is built. Their preferences are the default, and are what is considered 'right.'

[1] They used to say the split was 75% extravert/25% introvert. Later studies report a 50/50 split but extraverts are more outgoing and vocal, so they may still be overrepresented in public debate/discourse.

There is a time and a place for social interaction in the office. But when I'm coding, I need to concentrate. People talking to me, talking to each other, walking behind me or around me, every bit pushes me further off the rails and takes me longer to get back into flow state. Cubicles aren't perfect, but they're a fuckload better than open plan.

Are you really naive enough to think that because in your small sphere of experience, people don't seem to like open plan, there aren't millions of people who love open plan? For an engineer that doesn't seem like logical thinking.

Your anecdote isn't data. I'm an engineer, I love my standing desk and open plan space. I know many engineers at our company who feel likewise, it's a huge improvement.

> Your anecdote isn't data. I'm an engineer, I love my standing desk and open plan space. I know many engineers at our company who feel likewise, it's a huge improvement.

You go off on him for stating what his experience is (backed by almost everyone else on this site, by the way) and then turn right around and do the same, just from your minority perspective, with the added idiocy of essentially stating you're somehow stating facts. Do you realize how hypocritical that seems?

You should take the downvotes to heart, honestly. Normally I think they don't really signal that much, but in this case (and all your other arrogant comments) they clearly signal that your view is the clear minority and your comments are very out of touch with reality.

Also, you don't seem to understand data or statistics yourself. The amount of people who would A) Be using HS, and B) Choose to comment on a post like this:

Is clearly not representative of engineers/programmers across the world. Most engineers at my company don't use HN period, and out of those that do, most won't comment.

I work at a company where standing desks were greeted with excitement across 90% of the engineering population and there was even friction between engineers because some people got them first and others had to wait. Again, just because you think HN represents the whole engineering world, doesn't make it the case, it's a bubble here.

Again, if you actually read my comment again I never said I was stating a fact. I'd love for you to show me where I said that! My point was that there are clearly engineers who prefer standing desks and open plan spaces, unless you're somehow asserting that I'm the only guy in the world that likes this...

"He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.[...] But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame."

--Richard Hamming, "You and Your Research " http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

Even though, an "open-door" office is still infinitely better than no office. You get to focus in between visits, and the visits are less frequent simply because the other party needs to lift their butt and walk to your office.

Two thirds of these qualities (social interaction/role crossover) are exactly what I don't want when trying to program.

In my experience, companies where social interaction/role crossover are required aren't working on any complex problems.