"To me it beggars belief that companies spend so much on humans only to put them in an environment where it’s impossible to concentrate."

But "collaboration"....

Those hallway conversations where the real magic happens, man.

At least you have hallways, man. Our collaboration happens in the space between desks where the power strips go. It's not so bad if we reorient the monitors just right so they don't hit our heads.

Bathrooms are best for quick discussions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUdRhB_M7qk (safe for work)

Anecdotally I think a a lot of the IT work that requires extreme focus has become commodified. That is, it's either done by some open source library or a SaaS or something.

I had a lot more of the stuff that required focus at the beginning of my career. In my last few jobs it's been more about hooking together subsystems from 11 different teams/companies in six different timezones.

Most bugs seem to happen because of misalignments or miscommunication. Intense focus just isnt as important any more.

If my job involved integrating 11 subsystems I’d need some pretty intense focus!

We can tell this isn't Reddit because you don't have a top reply to your post stating, "this is what happens when we let the neurotypical into the tech industry."

Did you mean "commoditized", like work that used to be hard and custom is now generic? If so, totally agreed... we've moved up the ladder of abstractions quite a bit and there's less of a need to build up from the ground these days.

To me, though, that calls less for private offices and more for effective async collaboration. With 11 teams, nothing is going to get done over meetings except some basic alignments. The actual work of integration needs to be fully documented and agreed upon in writing in a way where provider and consumer can look at while actively developing, like a living API spec with specific schema, response and error codes etc. all laid out. If any team fails to adhere to the spec, well, the spec is right (as of any given version).

Even if we were all in person in the same conference room talking for hours one afternoon, none of that is going to stick around more than a week or two before some detail diverges.

The meetings are perhaps good for managers to walk away with some basic summary of a decision, but the actual engineering and IT work can't happen in them. I wish more managers would realize that and give teams more time to actually collaborate through individual async contributions, not just sitting together in a room -- there's a big difference.

Because we just came out of two or three decades of Google and Yahoo offices splashed across the business pages, filled with bean bags and beer taps and foosball tables, making us all think that these playgrounds created massive streams of revenue for their companies.

Turns out, it was just advertising that made the cash all along. The silly "collaborative" environment had nothing to do with it.

Microsoft used to do this. Famously, they had private offices for a long time while all the competition was open-office plans. They've scaled this way back in recent years though (to much complaining, albeit totally ignored, from employees). Whether this means the brainworms got to them too or they actually have the numbers to prove that private offices aren't worth the expense, I don't know.

In my first job after college, I worked at a federal agency where people had cubicles carved out of traditional large offices. It was actually kind of nice, because you worked with people in your office, but had some separation from them as well.

The peons all had desktop computers, while middle management had clunky laptops with docking stations. You knew who the executives were by their small laptops that were clearly designed for traveling by the jet setting class.

I’ve come to think that the ultimate power move for the movers and shakers at a company, would be to have a traditional office with a desktop computer that they cannot take with them. I remember being excited the first time I was issued a corporate laptop. I felt like I had finally arrived, and finally was one of the powerful and privileged. Now, I look back on those days of desktop computing, where I could not take my computer home, and where there was no expectation that I would randomly work from home as the very height of luxury.

Same. Got a laptop and Blackberry at my first job out of college. Didn't take too long for me to realize that it actually sucked.

Later worked as a govt contractor and could leave my laptop at the office 90% of the time. Never realized how good that was until I switched back to a job with an on-call rotation.

Is it sad that I miss cubicles? even semi-cubes.

I had them from 2001-2014, 2017-2018.

Nope, cubes were reviled back in the 90s because they were a pale shadow of what knowledge workers had lost in terms of offices. Management heard our lamentations about cubicles and sent us to a deeper, colder level of hell—the open plan.

To contrast this, I’d say that the “few cubicles in an office” is my least favorite approach. It makes every little noise much more noticeable, and if you get stuck with a loud talker, their voice on on virtual meetings is going to echo a lot more off of the office walls. I’d prefer a regular cubicle in a large floor where the background noise all just kinda blends together.

In my case, the cubes were in large-ish rooms with doors. This was kind of great in that if things got loud you were either shutting the door or asking two or three office mates to pipe down. There was no cut-through traffic or hallway conversation. Not as excellent as the one time in my career where I had a traditional private office, but definitely the runner-up.

Just leave your laptop at work, I’ve done that plenty of times

Sun used to assign offices to two people.

I personally don't mind sharing office space with less than about four coworkers. In a small(!), shared office there is enough social pressure to keep concentration periods quiet, or agree on shared music choices, &c. and still maintain the advantages of having what amounts to a team meeting space for collaboration in the same footprint.

Heh. If there's anything worse than an open office in my mind, it's being locked in a small room with someone else. At least the pervasive need to self monitor due to constant surveillance is somewhat diffuse in an open office. In a small room, nothing can escape attention.

Knowledge workers are nominally expensive but compared to real estate? The company’s actual liquid cash outlay to a highly-paid knowledge worker barely covers the mortgage payment on a mediocre house an hour away. Tech workers are rich in many things, but not square feet. The company renting palatial amounts of class A space on their behalf could be tantamount to doubling wages, and I bet most people would take the wages.