Need privacy? Small meeting rooms are scattered all over. Or slip on headphones....It's impossible to imagine what working in that environment would feel like. I would need to experience how cheery or harsh the sunlight is, how brittle or white-noisy the aural ambiance, how irritating or comfortable the voices. And how "stunning" are views of salt marshes?
What Facebook implemented goes a step further and, for now, remains rare: No walls inside an entire building engineered to facilitate a new way of doing work.... It is set up to encourage collaboration and speed. Natural light pours in through skylights and massive windows as if to point out the passing of time. Building 20’s unfinished look – exposed steel girders, concrete floors and wires dangling from the soaring ceiling to desks below -- recalls a fledgling startup instead of the world’s largest online social network....
The lack of offices for Zuckerberg and the rest of his management team is seen by many Facebook employees as proof of the company's openness. They don't even occupy the best office real estate, such as near the soaring windows with stunning views of nearby salt marshes....
One of the commenters at the link says:
I work in an environment much like this. It actually creates barriers between people. Everyone wears headphones to allow them to focus. It is extremely inconvenient whenever you want to make a personal phone call or receive one which creates resentment of all the prying ears. And if you need to take a break from your work and look at something else on the internet - you better be prepared for anyone who walks by to be looking over your shoulder as you do so.That made me wonder how private the bathrooms are.
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93 comments:
I like my salt marshes.
They will eventually have to put up walls. Working in this type of environment wears you out.
I like my salt marshes.
It takes a village to create fascism.
Introverts hate,hate, hate this.
We were given low cubicle walls to help "break down the silos". Now, when someone moves to either side of me, even all the way across the room, it distracts me. And as the comment says, everyone started using ear buds to block out the noise.
They need Frank Gehry to design that? I've worked in a few buildings that have that industrial feel. Providence, RI has a lot of reclaimed warehouse space. But there, the ad hoc look was a result of cash-strapped tenants and landlords too cheap to hire Frank Gehry.
I currently work in an open office. It works fine because everyone is pleasant and quiet. It is nice to be able to look out the windows from almost any spot in the room. There are small glass-walled rooms for meetings and phone calls. One of the worst work environments I've ever experienced was the opposite: a cable-car-sized room in a historical building that I shared with a gratingly overtalkative co-worker. Perhaps an open office would have discouraged constant chatter, I don't know.
That was a long time ago. Since then I've mostly worked in open offices. Before my group moved into the open office where I work now the architects invited us workers to try out the cubicle setups. The furniture vendors were giddy with open office pseudoscience. Cross-team collaboration! Out-of-the-box solutions! Pushing the envelope! "Just think how you're working on a problem and someone else could be passing by and see your screen and they have a unique take. They can sit here on your file cabinet and share with you! That's why it has padding on top! So people can sit down!"
And the programmers gazed upon the padded butt-height filing cabinets with loathing and despair.
Why does an IT company encourage in-person work habits? Wouldn't it be better for their sales if they had a tiny building with hardly any workstations or meeting rooms - and then showed you a montage of their workforce happily telecommuting? "We do it - so can you!"
30-some years into this, I fail to understand why the companies so responsible for de-centralizing our lifestyles keep insisting on a centralized campus workplace....
JSM
Like the commenters above, I like salt marshes too.
I disagree with the dissenters. If everyone is an introvert (software developer), open offices are really nice.
Looking again at the picture in the article there's one thing that strikes me: no task lighting. That's not so good.
No walls inside an entire building engineered to facilitate a new way of doing work.... It is set up to encourage collaboration and speed.
If you look closely at those photos you can see a guy squeezed into a ball behind a steel beam furiously tapping out "down with big brother" over and over again on his laptop.
I'm pretty sure there's an extant mass of sociological literature that could have told these brilliant workplace design innovators that this is a hellish environment for workers. But I suspect that the control-freak pleasure of crushing the souls of your worker ants in your "innovative" panopticon is the real impetus for building like this, not ignorance of humane design. And forcing them to pretend that they loooooooove "speedily collaborating" like this is the icing on the cake.
Check out that "cute dog with donuts" painting in the third photo down. Creepy as hell, but it actually fits in well with the whole infantilized atmosphere.
So much pathology on display in that article.
these images stressed me out and made me realize i'm either too old or way too uncool (or both) to work there.
no task lighting.
That'd be a huge problem for me. I like to read things -- on paper (I know, I know, how 20th century) -- and no lighting would make that very hard.
I worked in one of these in the UK for a while. It was not pleasant. The noise was a constant thrum and it was like one of those new dairy barns you see around here, where instead of having cows in the pasture all day, they are packed by the hundreds in barns where they don't move.
: no task lighting. That's not so good.
Do you need task lighting for your computer screen?
One of the interviewees says "I can't imagine any other work environment."
That sounds like the beginning of the decline to me.
When success comes early do you come to believe every idea you have is original...and great? A very old idea this is, there are few places that have tried this to success. Mike Bloomberg or some hedge fund managers perhaps? There it's less about collaboration and openness than a dictator keeping in touch with his charges. The Trays at Gund Hall were supposed to foster collaboration but inevitably everyone cordoned off personal space. Looks like that's already happening at Facebook with the whiteboards.
john mosby said...
Why does an IT company encourage in-person work habits?
Because only a small fraction of the population has sufficient self-discipline without supervision.
Telecommuting won't become universal until we develop a way to integrate remote space. At some point every home & apartment will include one or two "offices" which will include ceiling to floor video screens. When you change employment your screen will be integrated with others on your team and the experience will be similar to being in the office. When this happens centralized office space will become obsolete. Until then "working from home" will be considered suspect for all but a few.
Well look at the upside, no one is forced to work there. If the work conditions suck that badly, the workers can always find employment elsewhere. If enough people do that, management may get the hint and change the environment.
On the other hand, in a year or two they will likely hire a high-priced efficiency expert or a productivity improvement consultant that will tell them to put up some walls...
The most productive space is a private desk and a guest chair with one of the front legs missing.
I love my door and full length window view of the Hancock and Prudential buildings..
I prefer not to collaborate.
A number of public schools went through a phase like this about 20 years ago. The so-called open floor plan was just another name for chaos. As far as I know, they all went back to individual classrooms, with walls and doors, and hallways, within about two years.
What Facebook implemented goes a step further and, for now, remains rare: No walls inside an entire building engineered to facilitate a new way of doing work.... It is set up to encourage collaboration and speed. Natural light pours in through skylights and massive windows as if to point out the passing of time. Building 20’s unfinished look – exposed steel girders, concrete floors and wires dangling from the soaring ceiling to desks below
I suspect it looks just like the an insurance claims office in 1935. Or recalling the scene after D-Day in "Saving Private Ryan" where hundreds of women sat in open office space at desks typing away at casualty notification letters...
what is old is new again...
The office space as imagined by Hieronymus Bosch.
Denial of privacy is what I see in this workplace arrangement. It is one step up from the Japanese "overseer's office" model - managers up front, with their desks looking down rows of workers side-by-side at desks.
Both setups encourage complete and total dedication to work - or else everyone, especially managers knows who is slacking off.
What it does is breed the type of driven workplace that was captured in The Social Network, where inability to be distracted was a key requirement of new coders for Facebook.
As soon as Indian programming is up to American standards, expect Facebook's factory floor to empty out to the less expensive foreign alternative.
Not a new idea, nor a very good one. Chiat-Day tried it years ago and it was a disaster:
https://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/7.02/chiat_pr.html
Everything old is new again.
I am also old enough to remember typing pools. You might have 20-30 desks, all in the open, side by side, each with a typist banging away.
https://figuringoutfulfillment.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/secretarial-pool.jpg?w=803&h=572
I already shun Facebook like the plague (Do they really have the right to look at and use all the photos on your computer? It seems to change from week to week with the constantly flexible EULA). Now I know that if they offer me a job to run like Hell.
JOhn Henry
I would think this would be an impediment to obtaining and retaining talent. Zuckerberg is a control freak.
Because who wouldn't want to work next to his boss inside a visual hellscape.
"The office space as imagined by Hieronymus Bosch."
No. Jeremy Bentham.
The top picture of the office looks like the storage room of another, better office.
The out-houses are to the rear of the chief stable.
@Ken in Tx. We had an 'open space' school in the early 70s. It was great for socializing......for education, not so much. I called it a giant adolescent cocktail party.
They eventually put up walls.
At Siemens AG of Munich, where I worked as an engineer some years ago, only the boss of our department had a private office, but the rules were that every worker was entitled to a window view, beer and wine and hard liquor were sold at the lunch cafeteria, Weisswurst and beer were delivered twice weekly to the desk for breakfast, Friday afternoons were relaxed with shared Cognac and Schnaps, a Bierhalle table was reserved at Oktoberfest and Pfingsten, and every worker got 4 to 5 weeks paid vacation.
That was civilized. The only negative was that smoking was allowed, if uncommon.
The salt marshes in north Florida are absolutely gorgeous. From Jacksonville to Charleston in particular. Beaufort, South Carolina is beyond beautiful situated in the Low Country.
Henry said...
And the programmers gazed upon the padded butt-height filing cabinets with loathing and despair.
I had a manager who pushed us to use pair programming back when it was a new thing. My thought at the time: I didn't spend four years in college learning to program just so I could spend my days interacting with people!
Ha. These kinds of workspaces have been around for decades. Sadly the open outcry commodity auctions at the exchanges in Chicago have gone dark and digital. Observing the rapid fire bidding and the chaos of those trading pits would make any dweeb in Facebook's space feel like he was in a corner office with a vault door. The trading floors of investment banks are vast and noisy. And focused.
Trammel Crow's offices were/are like this. Milken's trading desk was like this though in a much smaller room.
"Salt marshes" just need a better name. The ones located by the Bay are quite nice. Plenty of (nice) hotels and offices are set right next to them.
Oddly enough the more people you have crammed into a space, the less social they become.
To do your own experiment on this, travel to New York City and great people on the streets as they go about their day.
Then, travel south to just about any southern state and go into a small town. Walk in the downtown portion and greet people there.
The difference will be night and day.
They will eventually have to put up walls. Working in this type of environment wears you out.
Well, some companies don't. Not exactly the same, but I interviewed with HP a couple decades ago for a patent attorney gig. They had everyone in cubicles. Turned the job down precisely because of the cubicles. Maybe a decade later, had one of their spinoffs as a client, and still using cubicles for everyone. Apparently been that way since forever in that company. Except that when I was with the Sperry side of what is now Unisys, we didn't even get full cubicles, but rather just an X of walls, with four people in each. Stupid, Stupid, Stupid. When I did software development, I did best with my own room. Sharing with even one other person notably affected my performance. It was even worse when I was a federal employee, and we had three to a room, with the junior member (me) in the front, and progressively more senior employees behind. Luckily, the last 10 years that I worked in software development, and the 25 as a patent attorney have been mostly alone in an office. (Which is why I wasn't going to work for HP).
The problem I see with software development there is that to do a good job, you need to be able to concentrate. Sure, you can network all you like, but if you can't concentrate sufficiently, you are going to produce shitty software. I almost have to figure that the managers setting this up never spent much time in serious software development, or they weren't all that good at it. Something like that.
I worked in a high bay office space at the Boeing Co. The power, and phone lines hung down from the ceiling. The first level managers had small offices around the periphery of the bay. Everyone hated it.
The high bay had catwalks near the ceiling. It was wise to watch the catwalks for maintenance workers because they always seemed to drop their tools.
Of course, the electrical panels were right there in the office space. Sparky, the electrician, managed to draw an arc, and a piece of burning metal singed a woman's hair.
One of the managers was an obvious case of heart disease. After lunch, he would fall asleep in his chair. Unfortunately, I could see him. When I saw his head fall onto his chest, I'd ring his phone. His head would pop up like a marionette, and he'd answer the phone just as I hung up. I could entertain, distract about 15 engineers all afternoon.
Everyone had a phone at their desk, but there was no answering machine. If someone's phone rang too many times, then you just kindly lifted the handset, and immediately hung up. One day, I had to disconnect the same phone repeatedly. I'd hang up, and the phone would start to ring again.
Finally, I was fed up. I picked up the phone, and said....
"HE'S NOT FUCKING HERE".
A small voice at the other end of the line said "The house has been robbed."
I said "Do you know who I am?"
"No"
.....and I hung up again.
I only lasted 10 years at the Boeing Co. If you work more than 30 years at Boeing, then your retirement is only 18 months long.
jimbino: "At Siemens AG of Munich, where I worked as an engineer some years ago..."
I spent some time with Siemens-Westinghouse and thus, spent quite a lot of time in Munich at the Siemens headquarters spaces.
My biggest complaint? The European style breakfasts (which was to be expected, certainly). I'm really not in the mood for that much seafood at breakfast.
And would it kill them to make bottled water and diet pepsi available in addition to fruit juices?
They create the impression of a holding pen. At least it's not a sardine can.
Like sitting in coach on a fully loaded 747.With lots of screaming babies!
Where's the "Safe Space"?
Back in the heady days when Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) was going to revolutionize the programming & systems analysis world (late 80's, & no it didn't), I kept up with all the structured programming gurus (e.g Larry Constantine).
One of them did a study as to what sort of setting was the most productive in terms of software production. Their finding: one or at most two people per office, with thick walls & a door, and a phone that can be programmed to either turn off the ringer or to automatically switch to voice mail. Programming is one of those skills like composing or writing, that one has to get one's mind "into the flow". If anything interrupts that "flow", you don't just lose the time of the interruption, you also lose the time it takes to get back into the frame of mind.
So, FB's setting is, for their software engineers, appalling. I'm sure they told him that many times, but I don't think Zuckerberg is in the habit of listening to too many people.
In high school I worked for a short time as a temp at a very large corporation. (Anyone who knows the area where I live can guess which one.) In the building to which I was assigned, they had cubicles. Sometimes I could faintly hear organized cheering in some far away place. I learned that the company had a special cheer that employees would sometimes have to perform. I was thankful that as a mere temp, I would not be asked to join in.
I would need to experience how cheery or harsh the sunlight is
Ah. Spoken as someone who has sunlight where she is now. Not a fan of open concept, but open concept without windows is its own circle of hell.
Perhaps they could also pipe in some "cheerful, upbeat" music, for completeness?
It's a challenge to build something that costs a lot yet appears to be bottom-of-the-market space. Not just any architect can do that.
I was going to point out that for quite some time these open-floor plans have been standard in a lot of newsrooms--some of you may even be able to picture some of the longshots in All the President's Men, the Woodward/Bernstein/Watergate movie--that's a replica of the Washington Post's newsroom and from the one time I was in it, a fairly accurate one.
This can work in the news biz (or did, I've been out of it for awhile) where collaboration on the moving targets of deadlines can be really useful, and this may account for the author's generally positive spin.
But man the spaces pictured in the story are hideous. Way too busy visually and overwhelming. The top photo looks like the kind of place you set up as an emergency after your actual office got swept away by the flood, or bombed.
I love my door and full length window view of the Hancock and Prudential buildings..
I prefer not to collaborate. - Titus
Where I worked in an environment like this, HR were the only ones with enclosed offices.
I'm reminded of an office scene from the Jack Lemmon movie, "The Apartment". An insurance company floor and a sea of desks. This basically thumbs their nose at all those high-tech office designers. After all how much creativity does it take to basically populate a gymnasium with a bunch of cheap tables and chairs?
I've been on the "inside" of some corporate decisions to go with this type of floor plan. In every case, it was sold to staff as a way to "break down silos," to "foster collaboration," and to "improve productivity." I think some of the management folks even believed the pitch. Underlying everything, however, is the fact that such spaces typically are less expensive to build and maintain than traditional spaces, and they are far easier to reconfigure and/or to sell after layoffs and reorganizations.
Amongst my little group of peers, the consensus is that when a company builds a hip, new headquarters that gets featured in glitzy articles like this one, it's time to short the stock. While that method hasn't been 100% foolproof, in my experience it has been right much more often than it has been wrong.
I am familiar with this FB office and have done similar ones in the bay area for not just techies but other businesses. This open plan movement has taken over design for the last 8 years. I have worked in an open plan environment and would say it's a mixed blessing at best. You can cram twice the amount of people into the same square footage, but you spend more time trying to find a "huddle space" or conference rooms because there is no privacy or even acoustical privacy. I presume what will eventually kill this movement will because leadership will still want the perk of a private office so they have privacy to chew out subordinates or otherwise plot behind closed doors.
If the pay is good, I'll work anywhere. For the right price, I'll work in hell. Provided I get dental.
"Do you need task lighting for your computer screen?"
No, I need it for study. When I'm reading a paper (for example) I print it out and spread it out on the desk so I can roam around. Reading a paper is nonlinear. Reading documents off a computer screen is like reading through a soda straw. It sucks.
@Roughcoat,
Hell's Dental Plan.
When did this vogue usage of "silo" get started?
Mark Zuckerberg famously said that "Privacy is no longer a social norm."
I guess he structures his company to reflect his philosophy.
tim in vermont wrote: Do you need task lighting for your computer screen?
No, but overhead lighting is often both insufficient for reading off paper and too bright for computer monitors.
"If you’ve ever worked for a large organization, you’ve probably had some version of the following experience: A project you’ve been working on for months is now going to be canceled because some other part of the organization was also working on a similar project, and apparently no one in your department even knew. Or: You find out some crucial piece of information or equipment you’ve been desperately searching for actually exists within your company, secretly hoarded by some rival internal faction that wanted to make sure no one else got to play with their proverbial toys. The experience is so common, there are lots of ways to describe it — the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, turf battles — but the term the financial journalist Gillian Tett chooses in her new book is “silos.” In the past decade “silo-busting” has become one of those buzzy management ideas you find everywhere from start-ups to lefty nonprofits, and in a series of case studies, from the Bank of England to the Chicago Police Department to Facebook, Tett attempts to show us how silos can undermine organizations and how they can be overcome."
"‘The Silo Effect,’ by Gillian Tett."
From the same link:
"All of this is interesting enough, but for a book about “silos,” the concept itself is not sufficiently defined or theorized. We’re never given any new language or analytical framework to help us think about when silos are useful and when they’re not, how to identify them, how we might sort them into types. We only hear examples of when they’re bad and when they’ve been transcended or “busted,” in the book’s preferred lingo. Part of the problem is that the core concept itself is so amorphous. “The word ‘silo’ does not just refer to a physical structure or organization (such as a department),” Tett writes. “It can also be a state of mind. Silos exist in structures. But they exist in our minds and social groups too. Silos breed tribalism. But they also go hand in hand with tunnel vision.” A concept this expansive makes for a weak mechanism of explanation; it’s so comprehensive it threatens to bend toward tautology, like saying “studiousness” makes for a good student."
I emit a low sigh.
YoungHegelian:
LOL! You know what happened to that guy, the Mouth of Sauron, after the One Ring was destroyed? His head was sewed back on and he subsequently got a job as Executive Editor at the publishing company I worked at.
He was my boss.
It would look better with lathes or looms on the factory floor and lava soap in the bathrooms.
This reminds me of William James comment about Hegel's "absolute idealism."
He said it was like a large seaside boarding house with no private bedroom in which one could take refuge from the society of the place.
The lack of offices for Zuckerberg and the rest of his management team is seen by many Facebook employees as proof of the company's openness.
The choice of "many" rather than "most" is rather telling. Although, personally, I consider "many" to be a notch above "some". As in "some might say..."
One of the tech companies in town just adopted this format for their new headquarters. The younger crowd has been very supportive of it; the over-forty crowd is less inclined to accept it.
I don't think I'd care for it. Thankfully my office has eighteen holes.
This is the guy who is in cahoots with US government and democrat administrations efforts to use the information his company possesses as a political weapon, right? This is the guy who asks the Chinese premier what he can do to help his government, right? Privacy must be an adversarial concept to this guy- when it comes to "others", that is.
Biff said: "Amongst my little group of peers, the consensus is that when a company builds a hip, new headquarters that gets featured in glitzy articles like this one, it's time to short the stock. While that method hasn't been 100% foolproof, in my experience it has been right much more often than it has been wrong."
Agreed. Also, if the CEO publishes a book about what a great job he has done and you can be successful if you follow his model, short the stock.
My company is opening a new headquarters early in 2016 and it will have more open offices than the current building. Fortunately, I am not moving there and I plan to retire in February or March anyway. It has all the buzzwords - LEED, open office, tear down silos, collaboration spaces, etc. I also do system design and software development and I have had a private office for the past 25 years. Don't think I would have been nearly as successful without it. You have to be able to think and shut out the clutter. I always work with my door closed.
As for salt marshes - they are beautiful. The coast of SC, GA, and into north FL have beautiful salt marshes. My wife and I go to Hilton Head once or twice a year and I much prefer the marsh side to the beach side of the island. Beautiful, quiet, lots of wildlife. Wonderful place to relax and read. If I had a home along the coast it would be on a salt marsh, not the beach.
eric said...
Oddly enough the more people you have crammed into a space, the less social they become...
11/30/15, 2:52 PM
I wouldn't generalize on locale alone. I've found the city of Los Angeles to be a far friendlier place than rural Vermont or suburban Boston, where if you say hello to a stranger you are more likely to be insulted or assaulted than receive a simple hello in reply. Massachusetts is full of belligerent assholes, from the Cape to the Berkshires. Vermont is full of hostile xenophobes with inferiority complexes.
That's a lot of waste to say, "Facebook moved into a warehouse".
Open offices are hellish places to work.
I spent way too much time in one. Perhaps, the worst part is having to listen to your co-workers making doctor's appointments and arguing with their spouses.
This is yet another corporate fad. One that I hope will soon be abandoned.
Ann Althouse said...'When did this vogue usage of "silo" get started?'
I've been hearing it since the mid '90s, at least. I'm pretty sure I first encountered the usage in the context of developing a new biology building at a university. The university had high hopes of blending architecture and organizational theory to break down normal departmental strictures and to create a new, multi-disciplinary research center. It failed pretty miserably, despite all sorts of inducements (including financial ones) to get people from different fields to collaborate with each other.
My new workspace is a bit like this. I agree about it being actually isolating and creepy. The real model is the panopticon.
Sun Micro tried this in some locations.
One of many reasons Sun is where it is today.
(chirp)
People on conference calls were the worst. For some reason a non-trivial number of people are unaware that a telephone mic will pick-up sotto voce comments just fine.
"The younger crowd has been very supportive of it; the over-forty crowd is less inclined to accept it."
Nothing says "safe space" like an office.
I remember hearing about silos in a similar context while an undergrad back in the 70's. At that time the concept was information getting siloed meaning that everyone in the direct chain of command from top to bottom might know something.
It was siloed if nobody outside of the chain of command knew it.
For example, everyone in accounting from controller to clerk might know something but nobody in maintenance had heard of it.
John Henry
I got the impression from the Social Network (the movie) that Zuckerberg didn't like others' privacy but did try to keep his intentions private from different people he worked with (which is how he ended up where he is). The idea that this shows the "openness" of Facebook sounds Orwellian. People desire privacy for many reasons, including being able to think about ways to question "the system". Facebook is always messing with privacy settings and confusing users about what is and is not private. I'm sure this open setting can be useful in doses, but wearing headphones does not fully enable privacy. It simply creates a little space to hear things privately, not to speak in private. Maybe the workers can listen to the sayings of chairman Mark in private. He'll create a little blue mp3 file for every worker.
This place looks like a warehouse.
It's probably not all hat bad to work in a warehouse.
Working off of paper without a search function is worse than a "soda straw." Two screens is the way to go. Before I went to multiple screens I felt the need for paper sometimes.
I see it a bit differently. Programmers are used to management either "distributing" or "consolidating". Every 10-15 years the new guys come in and "use a new broom" to reverse was the previous "failed" group was doing. Open offices are used in the "distributing" phase to convince the business staff that the programmers are trying to do things "the business way". Interestingly, most of the projects I have seen it used for are one where the managers are going to do a 2 year project in 9 months.... Which always ends with another 1 year and 3 month project to implement the things done wrong or regretted....
Freeman worked at Wal-Mart.
Many years ago, I worked at a large tech employer. They made a big deal about how everyone, up to the CEO, worked in a cubicle.
Less emphasized was the fact that he also had a conference room that was set aside for his exclusive use.
Angelyne beat me to "panopticon", which is what this faux-equality is.
No one is going to walk by Zuckerberg and fire him for what's on his screen. He has privacy when he wants it and however much he wants, and maybe so do the Inner Party immediately under him, but the Outer Party can't turn off the telescreens.
Only the proles who clean up the place are free, no on cares what they think.
Dude is at least 5 years behind the crest of this wave. Even my idiot company did their "me-too" version of this distracting setup. Everybody except a couple of high up idiots hates it. High up idiots don't find it distracting because people within earshot of the high-ups are mindful of where they are, and don't go into their drawn-out itemization of last weekend's particulars. Outside of the twenty yard radius around a moronic executive, you won't find such respectful reticence.
When I was in college I naively thought everyone in business had a private office. What a shock, when I got assigned to a cube. The open space environment seems even worse.
I can't imagine an introvert being happy at Facebook, but maybe they're all extroverts.
As office spaces go, it's a nightmare. While I fully recognize that the feeling is mutual, I'm damn glad I don't work there.
You can find pictures of the 30's and 40's where 1000's of desks with typewriters blazing away, was the modern office.
The best environment for computer programmers is a room with space for five people. Beyond that, no one gets anything done.
In my last job we had cubicles, but they were too low, so everyone could see everyone else, and all we did was bullshit all day. With nothing getting done, they fired us all, and abandoned the project.
@tim in vermont -- I'm often working from design comps, so having one or two prints of the designs is useful. Working between an IDE, several browser windows, several terminal windows, and Adobe Creative Suite uses up two screens pretty fast. So the printed reference essential gives me one more "screen".
"Working off of paper without a search function is worse than a "soda straw." Two screens is the way to go. Before I went to multiple screens I felt the need for paper sometimes."
Reading off paper does not preclude you from also having the document up on the monitor. I had two screens and a big work surface to spread the paper out. Worked well.
When did this vogue usage of "silo" get started?
This is a very familiar concept to those of us in the private sector.
Althouse says,
"That made me wonder how private the bathrooms are."
You mean, do they let the trannies use the ladies' room? You betcha. You won't believe the sounds they make.
Software Engineer here who has worked in just about every office setup possible, but mostly cubicles.
The entire department of my current company just moved from a large, low wall cubicle are to a new building with large rooms for each team, but no cubicles within. We work with large hardware. The team next door, put their desks in the middle of the room and the hardware along the walls. my team put our desks along the walls and the hardware in the middle of the room (to be fair, we have three times as much hardware--so much so that two racks of test boxes are still in the hallway, the third being right behind me.)
I actually like the more open stuff since you learn a lot of important stuff overhearing things. I can't count the times someone has overheard a conversation and realized that there is a connection between the problem that person is working on and the problem the people conversing are working on.
The only big problem I've had is that there seems to always be one nosy prick who reprimands everyone else for being loud (and then had loud conversations on his phone or with his manager.)
(One funny thing when we worked in our huge open area is that if someone messed up or was praised, we all applauded and/or jeered. Then again, we're like a big family, including the nosy prick.)
David, yes, the home office, but for a very short time because I got a different job somewhere else. I was supposed to organize things in computer files as I recall.
I just found a book in my house called, "A Day in the Salt Marsh." Ha!
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