Office space is leasing at a discount, making this a good time for employers to give workers individual offices, complete with desks and doors that close.
I can identify with this. I went on early retirement (5 years ahead of time) because I was sick and tired of an open-plan office that kept distracting me constantly. If I had to get something done seriously quickly, like consolidated month reports etc, I had to do it from home. My productivity was at 50% or less at an office because of constant interruptions, or colleagues talking at the desk next to mine.
And of course senior managers would have their own offices, so they could get work done.
The rule should be, if open-plan offices make so much sense for collaboration etc, then everyone gets an open-plan office, including HR and the CEO. They can also go meet in a meeting room for private conversations.
It’s easy to make decisions for employees when you don’t have to follow those decisions yourself… want employees back at work, yes then make it better for them.
Yeah, this take reads like some corpo shit. The advantages of remote work are many, as you mention. It’s a red herring to say people don’t want to come back because they don’t have their own space.
No commute is a giant plus and pretty much makes any return a deal-breaker.
Being in your own space (not space given to you by your company) is another giant plus.
The fact that I can be in the shower 20 mins before that morning meeting is huge.
There’s an attack on remote work right now, funded by all those middle managers who feel like they’ve lost some of the little power they had. Don’t buy into the smear campaign. There’s never been a clearer benefit to workers. Hell, many of them even designed the systems in place to make it possible (yes, looking at you Zoom – now you’re a joke).
I would consider working in an office if I could commute in less than 10 minutes (may consider up to 20 if it’s a 20 minute walk rather than driving), and I could either have my own office or share one with a maximum of 2 people that I get along with well.
I was very ambivalent about WFH all through the pandemic. But I had a job which involved hardware development. When I was forced home due to the pandemic, I had to bring half my lab home. When we were contemplating going back and being hybrid, I told my boss that I had too much physical shit to interact with on a daily basis to be in two places. I either had to stay home, or move all my shit back to the office and stayed there. But I had an actual cubicle and a lab there. If I needed privacy to get stuff done, I could sort of get it.
Meanwhile, I got a fully remote job offer and took it. It is more of a systems role, and I can do much more of it remotely, so it works well. I still make several trips a year to the home office though, in an extremely HCOL area. Their office is one of the super-open-floorplan offices. Before the Pandemic, I was told it was packed and nobody liked it at all. But during the pandemic, people literally got days of their life back because they no longer had to spend 2+ hours a day commuting.
They’ve been trying to get folks back to the office at least once a week, but they’re not forcing the issue. If anything, the managers end up there more often than the workers. When I go there, I have the advantage of being able to expense my travel, so I can stay close. And with the exception of that one day a week, the office itself is a ghost town. There might be a few dozen people in a place that can “hold” hundreds (like sardines). But on that one day, there are so many people talking that if I have a critical meeting, I just stay in my hotel instead. Plus, so many meetings are with offsite people anyway (the company has employees around the world) that even with so many people on site you’re still doing the meeting over the Internet anyway.
Open floorplans are an absolute joke. They need to die.
I’m an embedded software developer, I WFH since pandemic and in my basement I set up a small desk with power supply, soldering iron, oscilloscope, etc so I can continue to work with HW that company send me, it’s the best :)
I never want to commute 2h again
Any tips on breaking into that kind of industry? It is a dream of mine to be an embedded software developer but my skills are very hobby-level and I don’t have a degree or anything.
I’ve worked with a couple “senior technicians” (companies will probably be goofy with titles without a degree) who were indistinguishable from some of the software engineers, other than the title. Some were hired off the bat as a software technician, and other started on the hardware test side and moved over.
Probably the outlier here, but my work office is much nicer, and I enjoy my peeps. I’ve recently gone 100% back, but have the flexibility to do whatever the f I want.
I fully agree with this article. Some years back I even left an employer for a lesser position specifically because they went from cubicles to open office. That kind of caused the company some problems as they were under contract with a tight delivery date, I was then the center of some engineering developments and they didn’t actually have anyone else at the time capable of stepping into those particular developments. I literally couldn’t think straight while crowded in the open with 40 other engineers and felt constantly exhausted. Some people just don’t do well in crowds, and management that treats employees like Lego blocks isn’t going to keep any competitive edge it might have.
I have zero interest in going back beyond possible a big meeting type thing or something. Open office plans are one of my personal hellscapes. I can’t hardly focus on what I’m doing for all the movement and noise. I do get it for certain types of jobs but I’m a dev and can collab online with less distractions and get my stuff done. My stress level is less and my boss is still happy.
Any job that can’t be WFH that requires sitting at a desk all day should give each person an individual office. The open office plan has been an absolute nightmare, and only benefits micromanagers. It’s a productivity disaster, and makes for a miserable experience, and only exists for the sake of surveillance. However, I doubt there are many jobs that can’t be WFH that require such a situation.
The real issue here is an intentional mis-framing, imo. Why must people get back to a traditional office setting? The only people who want this are employers who think that Butts In Seats = Productivity, and the only way to ensure it is to intensely surveil your employees. I also don’t give two shits if some real estate company goes bankrupt because business tenants stop renting their properties. Boo fucking hoo.
I’ve been working for a remote-first company now for over a year, and I won’t ever got back to working in an office. There is literally nothing about what I do that needs me to be physically present in any specific place. The problem isn’t “productivity” or “collaboration”, the problem is entirely based around a work culture that is fundamentally punitive, puritanical, and antithetical to life balance.
Ehhh. I wouldn’t say the only people who want an office setting are managers. There are definitely some bonuses to going in to work for some people - a very “to each their own” situation.
But I think the distinction there becomes the “traditional” office setting, because, yeah, no one likes that corporate bull.
I’m very much WFH a huge percentage of the time. I don’t think I’m ever going to willingly go back daily or even weekly. There’s little to no point. Our society also should want to encourage WFH as much as possible just for environmental benefits.
There’s a lot of psychological benefits to having much smaller communities. It’s been shown that after about 150 people, we tend to not do so well. Seems like the technology is there. The psychology is sound. And our mental health is critical.
The intent and WFH could mean we all live better. Nicer places. Less commuting. Everyone just, happier.
I go to the office a few times a year, mostly for all-hands meetings that are often also parties. Any more than that, and I’m looking for a new job. Recently, the company mentioned something about making the office more enticing. That went over like a lead balloon. There are a lot of other companies in the same city with better pay for in-office and hybrid work, and many of us live 1.5+ hours away.
I mean, if they want to make it more enticing, go for it. Just leave me the option to not be enticed.
My workplace lets everyone work from home or an office as they see fit. Some people need different things to work best. Some people miss the face-to-face that they used to get in the office, so management put together monthly “we’re catering lunch, and teams are encouraged to plan whatever activities they think might work better in office for this day, but make sure it’s optional”.
So once a month I go and get some free food, and we do some face to face planning which benefits a bit from being together, and last month the team hung out and chatted for a bit after work, which was nice.
If management wants people in office, I’d much rather they try to make that happen by making being in office worth it, as opposed to telling people they have to or else. Carrot > stick.
Yeah working from home I already have my own office, just a few steps from my bedroom, with no manager looking over my shoulder, a fully stocked kitchen just downstairs, and 0 distractions while I work
Stop trying to make return to office happen, it won’t for anyone with negotiating power, and those are the most valuable employees. Try to make your employees go back to office and the best ones will just go work for someone else
It’s extremely telling that hardly anyone asked “how can we make the office more attractive?” and instead focused on pressure and threats.
I would really like an office nearby, a proper desk setup eats up a lot of space in my apartment. But my employer’s office is 200km away and the local companies pay 30% less. I’m staying at home.
I left a job once because at the old job I had to share an office and at the new job I found and landed (because I wanted a new office) I got my own office. It’s kind of like a no-duh. I felt like I was the Jeffersons. Motivating factor for changing jobs not caring I didn’t last a year at the old job where I had to share an office: Having my own friggin’ office. I even asked in the interview, “can I have my own office, or do I have to share?” They said I got my own office. I hummed “movin’ on up” after.
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I can identify with this. I went on early retirement (5 years ahead of time) because I was sick and tired of an open-plan office that kept distracting me constantly. If I had to get something done seriously quickly, like consolidated month reports etc, I had to do it from home. My productivity was at 50% or less at an office because of constant interruptions, or colleagues talking at the desk next to mine.
And of course senior managers would have their own offices, so they could get work done.
The rule should be, if open-plan offices make so much sense for collaboration etc, then everyone gets an open-plan office, including HR and the CEO. They can also go meet in a meeting room for private conversations.
It’s easy to make decisions for employees when you don’t have to follow those decisions yourself… want employees back at work, yes then make it better for them.
Can I bring my dog to that office? Will it have my fridge there, and my kitchen? I’d also want a teleporter so that there’s zero commute time.
I think we’re a bit beyond just rebelling against the “open office” concept.
I would settle for just the teleporter, so home is still seconds away. Then I would have a fridge, and private bathroom, and access to my dog.
Can it be like the doors in Monsters Inc? I’ve got wall space for a door.
(Teleporters, even linked teleporters would be such a game changer)
I practically would love teleporters. The philosophical issues would keep me from just diving right in though.
+1 for monster’s inc doors, I’d like one of those to visit my family more easily
I want my door randomized to keep things interesting.
Fuck that, I don’t want my boss coming into my house through a teleporter.
So many employers act like they own their employees as it is.
teleporters will have keys like vehicles and buildings, to prevent unauthorized access.
Maybe if there was a controllable delay on the teleporter…
NOTIFICATION: Your boss has entered the teleporter buffer. Allow materialization? [YES] [NO] [ASK ME AGAIN LATER]
[FACTORY RESET] selected, are you sure? Please do not power off while occupants are in the chamber.
Hey @entropicdrift, I’m sorry to wake you–you looked so peaceful–but do you have the cover page for this TPS report?
Yeah, this take reads like some corpo shit. The advantages of remote work are many, as you mention. It’s a red herring to say people don’t want to come back because they don’t have their own space.
No commute is a giant plus and pretty much makes any return a deal-breaker.
Being in your own space (not space given to you by your company) is another giant plus.
The fact that I can be in the shower 20 mins before that morning meeting is huge.
There’s an attack on remote work right now, funded by all those middle managers who feel like they’ve lost some of the little power they had. Don’t buy into the smear campaign. There’s never been a clearer benefit to workers. Hell, many of them even designed the systems in place to make it possible (yes, looking at you Zoom – now you’re a joke).
I would consider working in an office if I could commute in less than 10 minutes (may consider up to 20 if it’s a 20 minute walk rather than driving), and I could either have my own office or share one with a maximum of 2 people that I get along with well.
I was very ambivalent about WFH all through the pandemic. But I had a job which involved hardware development. When I was forced home due to the pandemic, I had to bring half my lab home. When we were contemplating going back and being hybrid, I told my boss that I had too much physical shit to interact with on a daily basis to be in two places. I either had to stay home, or move all my shit back to the office and stayed there. But I had an actual cubicle and a lab there. If I needed privacy to get stuff done, I could sort of get it.
Meanwhile, I got a fully remote job offer and took it. It is more of a systems role, and I can do much more of it remotely, so it works well. I still make several trips a year to the home office though, in an extremely HCOL area. Their office is one of the super-open-floorplan offices. Before the Pandemic, I was told it was packed and nobody liked it at all. But during the pandemic, people literally got days of their life back because they no longer had to spend 2+ hours a day commuting.
They’ve been trying to get folks back to the office at least once a week, but they’re not forcing the issue. If anything, the managers end up there more often than the workers. When I go there, I have the advantage of being able to expense my travel, so I can stay close. And with the exception of that one day a week, the office itself is a ghost town. There might be a few dozen people in a place that can “hold” hundreds (like sardines). But on that one day, there are so many people talking that if I have a critical meeting, I just stay in my hotel instead. Plus, so many meetings are with offsite people anyway (the company has employees around the world) that even with so many people on site you’re still doing the meeting over the Internet anyway.
Open floorplans are an absolute joke. They need to die.
I’m an embedded software developer, I WFH since pandemic and in my basement I set up a small desk with power supply, soldering iron, oscilloscope, etc so I can continue to work with HW that company send me, it’s the best :) I never want to commute 2h again
Any tips on breaking into that kind of industry? It is a dream of mine to be an embedded software developer but my skills are very hobby-level and I don’t have a degree or anything.
I’ve worked with a couple “senior technicians” (companies will probably be goofy with titles without a degree) who were indistinguishable from some of the software engineers, other than the title. Some were hired off the bat as a software technician, and other started on the hardware test side and moved over.
Probably the outlier here, but my work office is much nicer, and I enjoy my peeps. I’ve recently gone 100% back, but have the flexibility to do whatever the f I want.
I fully agree with this article. Some years back I even left an employer for a lesser position specifically because they went from cubicles to open office. That kind of caused the company some problems as they were under contract with a tight delivery date, I was then the center of some engineering developments and they didn’t actually have anyone else at the time capable of stepping into those particular developments. I literally couldn’t think straight while crowded in the open with 40 other engineers and felt constantly exhausted. Some people just don’t do well in crowds, and management that treats employees like Lego blocks isn’t going to keep any competitive edge it might have.
I have zero interest in going back beyond possible a big meeting type thing or something. Open office plans are one of my personal hellscapes. I can’t hardly focus on what I’m doing for all the movement and noise. I do get it for certain types of jobs but I’m a dev and can collab online with less distractions and get my stuff done. My stress level is less and my boss is still happy.
I don’t need an office, I already have quite a nice office at home to work from.
Any job that can be WFH should be WFH.
Any job that can’t be WFH that requires sitting at a desk all day should give each person an individual office. The open office plan has been an absolute nightmare, and only benefits micromanagers. It’s a productivity disaster, and makes for a miserable experience, and only exists for the sake of surveillance. However, I doubt there are many jobs that can’t be WFH that require such a situation.
The real issue here is an intentional mis-framing, imo. Why must people get back to a traditional office setting? The only people who want this are employers who think that Butts In Seats = Productivity, and the only way to ensure it is to intensely surveil your employees. I also don’t give two shits if some real estate company goes bankrupt because business tenants stop renting their properties. Boo fucking hoo.
I’ve been working for a remote-first company now for over a year, and I won’t ever got back to working in an office. There is literally nothing about what I do that needs me to be physically present in any specific place. The problem isn’t “productivity” or “collaboration”, the problem is entirely based around a work culture that is fundamentally punitive, puritanical, and antithetical to life balance.
Ehhh. I wouldn’t say the only people who want an office setting are managers. There are definitely some bonuses to going in to work for some people - a very “to each their own” situation.
But I think the distinction there becomes the “traditional” office setting, because, yeah, no one likes that corporate bull.
I’m very much WFH a huge percentage of the time. I don’t think I’m ever going to willingly go back daily or even weekly. There’s little to no point. Our society also should want to encourage WFH as much as possible just for environmental benefits.
There’s a lot of psychological benefits to having much smaller communities. It’s been shown that after about 150 people, we tend to not do so well. Seems like the technology is there. The psychology is sound. And our mental health is critical.
The intent and WFH could mean we all live better. Nicer places. Less commuting. Everyone just, happier.
Sooooo…… 💁♂️
I go to the office a few times a year, mostly for all-hands meetings that are often also parties. Any more than that, and I’m looking for a new job. Recently, the company mentioned something about making the office more enticing. That went over like a lead balloon. There are a lot of other companies in the same city with better pay for in-office and hybrid work, and many of us live 1.5+ hours away.
I mean, if they want to make it more enticing, go for it. Just leave me the option to not be enticed.
My workplace lets everyone work from home or an office as they see fit. Some people need different things to work best. Some people miss the face-to-face that they used to get in the office, so management put together monthly “we’re catering lunch, and teams are encouraged to plan whatever activities they think might work better in office for this day, but make sure it’s optional”.
So once a month I go and get some free food, and we do some face to face planning which benefits a bit from being together, and last month the team hung out and chatted for a bit after work, which was nice.
If management wants people in office, I’d much rather they try to make that happen by making being in office worth it, as opposed to telling people they have to or else. Carrot > stick.
No thanks.
Yeah working from home I already have my own office, just a few steps from my bedroom, with no manager looking over my shoulder, a fully stocked kitchen just downstairs, and 0 distractions while I work
Stop trying to make return to office happen, it won’t for anyone with negotiating power, and those are the most valuable employees. Try to make your employees go back to office and the best ones will just go work for someone else
It’s extremely telling that hardly anyone asked “how can we make the office more attractive?” and instead focused on pressure and threats.
I would really like an office nearby, a proper desk setup eats up a lot of space in my apartment. But my employer’s office is 200km away and the local companies pay 30% less. I’m staying at home.
Why would i want employees to return to the office? Convert to housing.
Which benefits all local businesses, too. Instead of only having a lunchtime rush, they can have critical mass throughout the day.
Fuck that. I already have an office at home.
I had my own office for a couple of years. The commute, and the rest-of-the-office environment, isn’t worth it.
I left a job once because at the old job I had to share an office and at the new job I found and landed (because I wanted a new office) I got my own office. It’s kind of like a no-duh. I felt like I was the Jeffersons. Motivating factor for changing jobs not caring I didn’t last a year at the old job where I had to share an office: Having my own friggin’ office. I even asked in the interview, “can I have my own office, or do I have to share?” They said I got my own office. I hummed “movin’ on up” after.