Open offices are the literal reason (after commuting/traffic) that I no longer want to go into the office. My work doesn't require a ton of person:person engagement and it's much easier for me to just zone out in my own headspace to do it.

When I was required in the office, I would just wear headphones to avoid distractions, but I would have to deal with 2-3hrs of driving/day on top of it. This meant that my employer generally only got those 8hrs out of me, period; because I had none of my personal time to spare. Working from home, on the other hand, gives me more flexibility for meetings, to work at different hours, to be on later in the evening, to put in more time (when needed), etc; and I'm happier.

The headphones thing reminds me of a big events ticketing company I worked for that, when people complained about noise, distractions, etc they came up with the amazing solution of using your health and wellness budget to buy noise cancelling headphones.

Most full of bullshit company I’ve ever worked for.

I’d be outraged.

Reminds me of one job, my boss was looking to leave, and was handing over portions of her job to the rest of us. I said I don't have time to do more additional work... she said they can send me on a course to better manage my time. haha.

You guys had a health and wellness budget?

Yeah, used for noise cancelling headphones and therapy. :thisisfine:

Hahahaha same as my work - they said we understand concerns you have about coming back to the office - as a solution to these concerns we decided to buy everyone noise cancelling headphones.

>they came up with the amazing solution of using your health and wellness budget to buy noise cancelling headphones. >Most full of bullshit company I’ve ever worked for.

At least they bought you NC headphones; that's a LOT more than I can say about most companies. And the fact that you had a "health and wellness" budget at all.

> When I was required in the office, I would just wear headphones to avoid distractions

That doesn't work for everyone. Some offices are louder than headphones and some people come around tapping your shoulders regardless.

> That doesn't work for everyone. Some offices are louder than headphones

Depending on your budget, you can block out anything short of jackhammers with either IEMs or earbuds+noise reduction earmuffs.

> and some people come around tapping your shoulders regardless

Do they expect to continue living? What monsters.

> Depending on your budget, you can block out anything short of jackhammers with either IEMs or earbuds+noise reduction earmuffs.

Perhaps more a personal thing but it induces a dizziness/ drowsiness with extended use. It’s fine when watching say a movie but I could never work for long periods with my ears blocked. Wonder if I’m the only 1 but I have heard of similar cases.

I wear them all day during work and also then a couple hours in the evening without any issue. Pure bliss

I get pain from the hears not being in their natural position.

That problem went away for me once I found headphones that are actually over-ear and not only marketed as such. I can wear them all day every day because they're large enough to not even touch my ears, very light because of a plastic case and open headphones so they don't feel as "pressurized". Bad for noisy environments, though.

My hears are perpendicular from my head

It’s quite common. I own only open headphones due to this

Totally agree. It is also bad for your hearing to have to wear loud headphones all the time to drown out a loud work environment. Your ears do wear out.

Good active noise cancelling headphones mean you can listen to music at quieter volumes than you normally would.

Open offices are terrible. Management knows they are as well because Sr. leadership almost always have their own offices. The peons sit in the pit. Until the CEO is sitting next to everyone else they are all speaking lies when preaching the benefits of an open office. The only benefit is that its cheaper and they can keep an eye on you.

Ahh my employer does this. The founding CEO had his desk over by the front door, and back in those days we all sat in the same big room.

We have multiple big rooms now but the current CEO still has his desk out in the open. Last time I was in the office we talked about anime lol.

There is one model even worse: when leadership claims that they too sit in the open office like everyone else … only to take up a big meeting room all day as if it is their personal office, causing the actual meetings booked there to have to move to the middle of the open space, making everyone an unwilling meeting participant.

There is an exception to this observation about senior management: Andy Grove used to sit in a cubicle. It was a big cubicle in a labyrinth of his assistants' cubicles.

It didn't make cubicle farms any better though.

There's an exception to almost everything. Intel was a famous exception on cubicles for upper management; the CEO had a cubicle just like normal employees (except the CEO's was bigger and not accessible from the aisle of course). The CEO also didn't have his own special floor, special bathroom, special elevator, etc.

it's a millennial thing. they grew up working on laptops and their dream office is to make the workplace look like starbucks. Open seating, no cubicles, a barista. It's a knee-jerk reaction to the old office place standard of 'cubes'. Managers hire out to consultants that hype this type of office layout because it will supposedly attract a talent.

To be fair, cubes weren't any better. I remember having a guy slerping tea sitting across from me. I couldn't see him but I could sure hear him and there was no way for me to get up and move.

I don't know. I'm certainly not a millennial and I've never had any real issue with ambient coffee shop or equivalent background when reading/working/etc. and I'm rarely putting earphones/headphones on or playing music in general. People probably just have different tolerances and types of tolerances for distraction--not sure how generational it is.

As I've said before, people here pine for private offices a lot but, in my experience, typical workplace private offices have tended to be door open by default absent private meetings/phone calls/some urgent deadline thing.

Even with the door open, it still blocks a lot of ambient sound. Sound also isn’t the only problem with open offices. The other problem is with visual distractions. It’s hard not to interrupt your work whenever the constant stream of people pass by, especially when they greet you

It’s more a new way to cut costs further. Plenty of boomer leadership hopped on the open office trend despite plummeting employee productivity and satisfaction

Rigghht... It's the millenials, not like corpos haven't been doing this for decades. As soon as there were cubicles, there were people rejecting them.

See SC Johnson HQ for one of the most famous versions of this. (https://youtu.be/yb-kYt1lpnI)

For sure, and like he says near the beginning of that video, "Most employees have moved to other buildings." I've been in some of those other buildings and guess what, they're almost entirely private offices... no open office plan.

They learned their lesson from the Frank Lloyd Wright building. It's a wonderful piece of architectural history, but it's not wonderful for productivity.

He doesn't mention one of the most interesting things about that building -- the building has no square corners, everything is round (even the elevator).

> To be fair, cubes weren't any better.

Cubes, with hot-desking, is pretty great actually. IBM has it in their drop-in “business centers” for WFH employees.

I unironically miss my cube. They were natural sound breaks and sound absorbing so you could talk and not intrude horrifically on people adjacent. I had a place for my things so I didn't have to shuttle them in and out every day. I had a phone that worked, an Ethernet jack that was not temperamental, and a whiteboard that was ready to go. I also had a few different ways I could sit at my cube so I wouldn't get the same pains I get sitting in an open office plan because there is no way to customize anything for comfort in many cases. I have seriously considered packing a drill and a set of bits to tear off idiot things like keyboard trays (when nobody has an external keyboard) but I am resisting only just.

Speaking as a millennial: open offices were there when we got there! If we did anything it was to keep hybrid/WFH arrangements where we could.

It has absolutely nothing to do with millennials.

I would definitely prefer good cubicles over open assigned desks. (I mean, with open desks or cubicles, I would ask the other person to stop slurping loudly.)

But "good" is the key there. I worked at an office in 2001 which had a cubicle system that was probably only a year or two old. The desks were wood (probably veneer) with nice big keyboard shelves, as was the style at the time. The panels were either grey metal or red fabric, and they stepped up and down so that beside your close coworker there might be only a 4' wall, and then a 6' wall to the "hallway".

Immediately after that, through an acquisition, we were in an office whose cubicles were probably from the 80s, and they were all 6' well-worn beige fabric panels, which despite being private and relatively quiet were just so ugly and energy-draining.

Hmm, I think it’s more a managerial thing than a millennial thing. I don’t know a single millennial that wants to sit in open floorplan offices. Just because something happened when our generation entered the workforce doesn’t mean we were the driving force for it. Maybe millennials also caused climate change, as far as I know that started becoming a recognized problem around the time we were born. Expensive housing is on us too.

The open office trend happened before millennials started having careers, open offices are always an economic choice. It's cheaper to cram more people into less space.

Open office look great! Just like TV. I don't think I've ever seen an office environment that has not been open on TV. A TV show with everyone in a private office would not work, no drama!

But to work in them is a noisy hell. I had a lawyer friend talk about how great these open offices must be to work in. So productive and dynamic he would say. But of course this is coming from a profession where having a private office is an absolute requirement.

> When I was required in the office, I would just wear headphones to avoid distractions

Sometimes I just want silence. Not music, not $color noise. I also get itchy ears after wearing headphones for hours on end, and noise canceling headphones give me a headache… or, you know, I could work wherever I prefer, with little to no commute, and an office arranged how I like it.

Yup, this too. Half the time I had headphones on, I didn't even have them playing anything. I just had ANC turned on to muffle the background noise (and deter people who didn't actually needy assistance with anything). But I definitely had ear stink/itch at the end of most days.

Ear stink... I never knew my ears smelled so bad before I started using airpod pros!

Started getting chronic ear infections after using headphones for long hours.

In my anecdotal experience, it’s important to take of headphones every now and then to prevent moisture from accumulating in the ear canal. That moisture is unnatural and id probably very nice for various germs.

The worst place I worked I needed industrial earplugs, then chuck white noise on top of that to get almost distraction free. The way to get the desired peace was to leave

I used to do that but then every 15 minutes some coworker would tap me on the shoulder to ask some inane question, and I would spend 5 minutes taking things out of my ears before I could hear them. Fun (not).

I see it as a fairness and reasonableness issue. It’s unfair and unreasonable that the ones polluting the space with noise are the ones that get to enjoy the freedom to use the space without restrictions, while the victims of the noise are the ones that suffer the restriction of the full use of the same space. The same with smoking, which fortunately has been recognised to some extent in recent years.

Cheaper noise cancelling headphones would make me nauseous, however I got the Sony WH-1000XM5 headphones with 8 external mics to sample the surrounding noise and it was a game changer, super high quality, no more nausea.

I tried the Bose something something and it gave me pressure headaches and a feeling of having a clogged nose.

I think specific problem is high density open plan offices. At about 20sqm per person, and keeping quiet and noisy professionals in separate rooms, it is not too bad.

I remember the first time I was in an open office. I was flabbergasted. We'd all get on a call so we could talk to some remote vendor. Other people would have their mics on, so I'd hear my own voice repeated and delayed through the Zoom call. I could barely talk, and barely hear anyone. It was a self-evidently terrible decision that everyone was just going along with. Sometime later we were moved to a different open office space. It was deafeningly loud in there, and I eventually discovered that there was a white noise machine on the ceiling above every single employees head. Apparently this was meant to help with the open office design, but it did the opposite: much like a busy cafeteria, everyone had to shout over top the all the extra noise in the room. (the combined sound of about 100 white noise speakers + the sound of about 100 employees talking or working) Again, such a stupid decision I can barely understand how someone could set it up this way. I eventually just waited 'til no one was around and unplugged most of the speakers. It was a huge improvement, and no one complained.

This is both hilarious and terrifying at the same time. Thanks for being a hero.

Paradoxically the only person thanking the parent for going through this shit might be an anonymous commenter on an Internet forum...

>> Open offices are the literal reason

Bumping this up a notch, I have co-workers who work together 4hrs/day on the same meeting but cannot sit together because our Zoom calls all collide when any one person is speaking. Core issue is the lack of conf rooms in a zoom-centric organization.

The only real reason for open offices is cost saving. Everything else is just an excuse to make it not seem like it is.

And you know what's a bigger cost savings than open office? No office!

Actually, the employers should really pay us rent for WFH because they are using our own facilities to make profits.

My last job did give me a stipend that more or less covered my internet bill. That was nice.

Same here, add to that some office equipment at a huge discount, when they had to close the office during the pandemic, a one-time fair amount of cash for spending in home office equipment, and a smaller but nice yearly amount for the same.

In Germany you can tax deduct your rent for an office room with a door and a proportion of your utilities for the office

Only if you don't use the room for anything except work.

You've got a computer in there that you're also using for private stuff? Not tax-deductible anymore.

Private books on the bookshelf? Not tax-deductible anymore.

You've got a wardrobe with some clothes you're only accessing once per season (to store off-season clothes)? Not tax-deductible anymore.

Like you will declare those...

Sure, many don't. And many people have found that the tax office does inspections from time to time. That's not a pandemic issue, the laws and the jurisprudence have been in place for decades.

But you just have to love how HN endorses tax fraud.

It is not nearly handled so strictly anymore, in my experience. Of course, it could vary by tax office.

This is correct and I'm not sure why it's been downvoted. In Germany, you'd better only every use the work-room for work only. As people have pointed out, you're not likely to get audited for this but often, with apartments, it can be quite obvious that you're using the space for non-work stuff too (for eg, if you're living in a 50 sqm apartment, it's pretty easy to say that you can't possibly have a dedicated work only room).

In the US, my accountant always (and as I understand it, the rules have gotten stricter) recommended against taking a home office deduction unless you really had dedicated space for equipment etc. The way more typical "office space you often use for doing work" was long seen as a red flag for a deduction and, in the typical case, as you say, truly dedicated space is rare absent a large place and/or specialized needs.

I could make a room a dedicated day-job office but it would cost me way more to do so than I would ever get as a deduction and it would almost certainly be inferior to the mixed-use setup I use.

This is such a perverse rule. You don't have enough living space? You can't possibly claim compensation for being forced to also use that as a workspace.

Depending on the state they allow to deduce a room partially and during corona they were a lot more tolerant.

That might work if the job is fully remote and doesn't have a physical office for you to work at, as most companies will simply say "you can come to the office and use the facilities there for free".

Most decent companies will give you some money though for WFH or let you borrow stuff from the office like chairs and monitors.

While I'd love to have the financial burden of commuting/WFH be imposed on the employer instead on the workforce, that would require another labor revolution, so far I'd just be happy to have 100% WFH possibly. Internet I use anyway, and I can pay for the extra water, energy and heating by myself, the extra difference is insignificant compared to the time I save commuting to the office.

Why not just 1099 everyone at that point? Oh because then you can't bullshit people with career carrots and establish sunk costs and healthcare anxiety to retain people.

Some sort of do. Mine pays for my wifi and cell bill.

Debatable, a full HQ brings sizeable direct and transitive economic influence over city politics that typically cannot be countered by residents.

Empire builders love to see and display their footsodiers. Nothing like sweeping a gaze over a big plateau with a few 100 serves to affirm your confidence.

Yeah, I think people often underestimate the role of ego in this kind of stuff. Hell, it can even be used as a philosophical razor: Never attribute to necessity that which is adequately explained by egomania.

Trouble is, one's superior's egomania is one's necessity. By the time it reaches lowly me, it's a bunch of arbitrary stuff I had to conform to that I can't even understand fully.

It do be like that sometimes :)

That makes sense but the ultimate in cost savings is… WFH, which they hate.

When we returned to the office, my boss decided even a single day WFH was frowned upon. Having to beg to stay home for a dentist appointment became a big ordeal. But my boss was a bit unhinged before covid.

I found it funny that my lockdown productivity suddenly counted for nothing.

I have friends at other companies who have been 3 days per week WFH for 2 years and really appreciate the flexibility.

I hope the past tense means you're not working at that hell hole anymore

Yeah I did in fact quit that place.

My main gripe was that my manager seemed to be having mental health issues (manic over-talking and occasional hints of psychosis). WFH was what helped me last through the covid years as I could avoid her being sat near me.

I was good friends with many people there, some of us still occasionally meetup. And I hear of a steady stream of other developers leavings because they can't work from home any more. Usually it's the younger guys who just had a kid or people with long commutes.

Our team is still fully WFH even tho the corp expects us to come in 3 days min. My manager (and his manager) know we are waaaayyy more productive at home and don’t want to upset the apple cart so we don’t need to come in.

And I gotta say stuff like that gets me even more motivated to do work cuz I know they’re catching heat from the higher ups but we’re just producing too much work for them to really complain too much.

100%. And don‘t forget about the useless standup meetings which are nothing more than a complete waste of time.

Why do you think standup meetings are useless? Maybe they are not run properly? I find them to be a pillar of our workday, within our team.

Just my experience. A work culture where people approach each other without somebody telling them to do so is much better. Respect of each others time is also crucial. Get the motivating factors right and you dont need to bore the x out of everyone.

Indeed, and I would even say that this applies to any meeting you can think of.

However if you get the purpose of the meeting straight and somehow manage for everyone to properly collaborate, you'll get a 3-5min daily meeting that easily enables efficient collaboration and awareness.

depends on the place of work. mine is also useless. the manager is clueless so some team members just tells every single thing they did for 15 minutes for clout with the manager.

Discussions that should be 1:1 become 1:N, wasting the time of (N-1) people.

Discussions, yes, but discussions aren't for the standup meeting. Those are for informally updating everybody on what you're working on and whether you're stuck on anything. They lead to 1 on 1 meetings to solve those issues.

That’s the problem. Most teams don’t have stand-ups. They have gigantic status meetings on a daily basis, which is rarely valuable.

Give me a meeting every day to get people to talk about blockers, but it should be 15-30 seconds per person at most, and it should be scheduled outside of productive hours (easier said than done).

Anyone who cares what you’re working on can look at Jira. And if you’re stuck you shouldn’t be waiting for a meeting to tell people this. Standup are a total waste of time.

Many are. But I've been in more than a few that resulted in discussion that ultimately saved many many hours of time that would otherwise have been spent on something that wasn't necessary.

Actually the only thing I dislike about stand-up is struggling to remember everything I did the previous day, then realising I've forgotten to mention one or two key things after the meeting's ended, and wondering what everyone thought about the fact I apparently did so little... (which is silly, I know, but we're all human).

Jira never tells the entire story. And of course you can also reach out to people outside of the standup meeting, but that doesn't make them a waste of time. They can be quite effective, and they really do not take much time.

> Discussions, yes, but discussions aren't for the standup meeting.

What actually happens in a standup meeting tends to be a mix of:

(1) What theoretically belongs in a standup meeting, which is a meeting that should have been a kanban board plus identification of blockers that have been deferred for the standup rather than properly addressed when encountered and,

(2) tangents into discussions which should be 1:1 (this especially happens when blockers are discussed, because people want to help get them unstuck.)

As others have pointed out, that's not what a standup should be for. Any tool, process or structure that is not being used properly tends to be annoying and useless.

The problem is therefore not with the concept of a standup, but rather with how they are usually run.

Running efficient standups, or any sort of meeting at that, is a skill.

I don’t find mine useless, but I focus a lot on prioritizing and un-blocking people. The tasks we have are usually very different between engineers though so I can see why someone would find that useless time.

Mine are also useless. Communicating with your team is super important but the mandatory status checkin when team members are working on unrelated things is pointless and draining.

That's a definition of "team" I've never heard before - "people working on unrelated things".

Pretty common in “DevOps” teams, in my experience. Some people are working on some autoscaling CI runner server initiative, some are working on writing code, some are fixing issues in CI pipelines, some are hardening the security of kubernetes clusters, etc. Their goals are completely unrelated to the others but is all work that falls under their team’s umbrella, and needs doing.

Equally common in operations roles for the same reasons. Lots of servers and networking gear. You might be changing failed hard drives in a RAID array while someone else is patching servers while somebody else is upgrading some 20 year old Cisco firewall. None of these three people rely on the work the other is doing. Especially if they’re working in different server cabinets.

Why even call it a team then, and what would be the point of stand-ups for such a group?

Because it is a team. And, exactly, now tell that to our managers.

Exactly. I work in a team that has multiple products so different team member can be working on different products, different priorities, different deadlines and for different stakeholders.

Sure, my own team work on multiple products, but it's all the same codebase and all of us share the work for all products between ourselves. There is another team in the company that works on an entirely separate product with a very different codebase (different tech stack entirely) and upper management seem to have this idea we would work better as one big "team" - thankfully so far we've managed to persuade them it would make little sense. I'd probably be looking for alternative job options if we had to do daily stand-ups with that many other coworkers, half of whom I'd never have reason to engage in actual teamwork with.

Because it is a team in the sense that it made no difference (or little difference) who on the team picked up a specific work item off the kanban board. Theoretically, we should all be able to fill in for each other if we’re absent. But most of the time we’re all present and working on our individual tasks that don’t rely on other individual tasks. It might be hard to imagine if you’ve never been in devops or a traditional operations role, I suppose.

And exactly, ask that to our managers.

If you're all picking unrelated tasks off the same kanban board I would think a quick daily stand-up would still be worthwhile then. Just needs to be sensibly run so individuals don't get bogged down in describing every little detail of what they'd been working on.

Group of people == team because all report to same manager.

Manager in charge of multiple different projects because "success in organisation" == "number of people managed" regardless of whether they are being managed well or not.

Manager needs daily updates of all things going on his "team", because otherwise not have fucking clue about what manager is "managing" and clearly far too difficult for manager to read JIRA board, look at commit histories etc. Much more efficient for everyone to sit around for an hour during which they maybe have ten minutes of productive discussion.

> team because all report to same manager

That's actually not been the case in many teams I've worked on - but we have all been working on the same set of related products (or subset of a product). Actually the managers often weren't even in the teams. I foolishly assumed that's how most people used the term "team"...

I have to admit I like these meetings. Yes, today I work on an autoscaling runner but tomorrow I'll be working on CI pipelines so it's (mildly) interesting to hear what is going on and specifically what kind of problems my colleagues are dealing with. And, last but not least, usually I can cover a few miles on my stationary bike before the meeting ends.

Oh, l@@k:

"Meta ditches open plan office structure to bring back cubicles"

https://www.chargedretail.co.uk/2023/02/21/meta-office-space...

What's old is new again. From your link:

>Mark Zuckerberg’s firm says it is attempting to avoid returning to the cubicle culture of the 70s and 80s by introducing its own design.

>The Cube helps to asorb sound instead of reflecting and echoing it around colleague’s workspaces.

>Meta claims that its new design reduces sound levels by approximately 20 decibels.

This is BS. Either Meta is actively lying, or they really are SO clueless they've never seen cubicles in the 90s and 00s (when they were really phased out, not the 80s), and really believe somehow that cubicles were made of sound-reflecting materials. They weren't. They were made of cloth, with what I think was cardboard behind it. The cloth worked very well to absorb sound and keep the ambient noise level down. (The cardboard was to give some structure, and also so you could use push-pins/thumbtacks on them to hold things in place.)

The only thing "new" here is maybe using some kind of recycled plastic material to make the cloth. BFD.

90s/00s cubicles were a dream to work in, compared to the open offices of today. Everyone complained about them at the time because they sucked compared to walled offices with doors, but in reality, most workers never had those in the decades before. You can see photos online of engineers working in the 1950s: it was all open offices with a bunch of big desks in a grid.

I worked in cubicles up until 2011. Then I joined "trendy" startups. I only started hearing about open-plan offices around that time. In the 90s it wasn't even remotely a thing.

It's so frequent and so bizarre that people are getting paid by an employer, and they spend their work hours constantly thinking "I wish this employer would allow me to do the job they pay me to do".

It feels like I'm thinking the Earth is the center of the universe, then watching Mars go retrograde. Something's profoundly wrong with my understanding of the world. I see two options:

1. Graeber's Bullshit Jobs. Which says that a lot of jobs are in large part about making the boss feel important, not about the assigned work.

2. Communication between leaders and workers is so bad that leaders have no idea what workers really experience in their working conditions.