And yet, nothing can possibly get done without someone doing it.
I see lots of insistence that without open offices people woild spemd so much more time on wrong things that the lost productivity is more than made up for by better focus. I also see no evidence for these claims.
We've seen how requirements for entry level jobs have risen, colleges work with businesses to try and produce workforce ready graduates but are met with ever increasing minimums.
This is companies deciding that personal productivity isnt something they need to worry about. If someone is not personally productive, then they aren't a good fit.
Why should the business spend resources trying to facilitate a productive environment when they can just hire people who will work in a disruptive environment? Just as, why should a business spend resources training employees when they can demand only employees with very specific experience.
With outsourcing, visas, and remote working a company has very little restrictions on the level of employee they can seek and find with little difficulty - especially when you include a weak economy in this whole mix.
I dont know, not something i've thought a lot about i could be totally off base, but seems like it could be part of a wider trend to me
Secondly, the goal of a company is rarely to maximize aggregate employee productivity. If you can realize the same profits with fewer LOF, stories delivered, or whatever your employees "produce", why not?
Then again, where we might disagree is to what degree the same P can and should be applied to both individual employees and to companies. So often individuals project what they (like to) do onto the team as its primary purpose. "I make widgets, and there are less widgets at the end of the day than there could be, so the company must not be optimized." It might be, or you may overvalue widgets.
We have to use a more broad and nuanced perspective on the value we provide when we talk about how that value is affected by our work environment.
This sounds like "leveraging synergies". If it was possible to explain any tangible benefit to such an environment, the conversation would move forward. Really, with the Very Rare Case? Developers don't have enough work to do where they don't need to stop and talk every 10 minutes?
I think that's a questionable assumption.
If you do not even address the long-term value you provide to the company, then you can't possibly make a reasonable argument that open-offices are a detriment to that long-term value. For the record, I believe they probably are a detriment, so I have an incentive for the discourse and arguments to improve.
This is touched upon only slightly here when she considers replaceability.
I'm not saying that I think open offices are or are not great. But the issue of personal productivity simply has to go away in the discussion for me to take it seriously. Otherwise, you just sound like most software engineers I've known who love to write gobs and gobs of code at the expense of everything else.