Better this than an open plan office.
this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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I loved when I worked in an open-plan office! Of course though the people around me hated it as I was a bit of a distraction.
βly better
After I moved to 100% HO I now realize that some CEOs main task is to make peoples lifes more and more miserable.
Office panopticon.
Honestly, I'd love a cubicle if I ever had to stop being remote
Yeah I was going to say the same. This is actually decent. My old office before they renovated to open plan looked a lot like this. I think I had that chair! And that ceiling! Hey, wait a minute! This IS my old office!!
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I came to say this. And that's one reason why I left my last post.
But it was more a symptom than an actual problem. The new boss really had no idea what he was doing, and it just became clear when he instituted a return to office to a new cramped bright hot loud environment after we'd all done really well working remote for about 2 years at that point.
The Dead Sea effect was felt long before it was my turn.
Fast-paced
"We're going to give you a lot of tasks, but not enough time to complete them."
Unpredictable
"We will randomly drop new tasks on you without warning."
High-energy
"We use a lot of electricity."
High-energy is more like, most of us are assholes and/or expect you to maintain a fake positive attitude regardless of the aforementioned circumstances
"In between the 10 half hour virtual meetings each day that only serve to take up time and give you more tasks, we would like you to complete 12 hours of work, in the idealistic sense of 8 hours, since that's your normal working hours, while we also give you more tasks, and ping you for additional requests in your remaining 3 hours that are aside of your 5 hours of meetings. If you need anything at all, just escalate the issue and we will make sure to ignore you, as we are also bogged down by the same system. It's perfectly ok to stop what you're doing entirely if you aren't sure that you're completing it correctly, so just escalate it and we will make sure to give you an answer at some point this year. Just make sure you have it all done by the time table we have laid out, and make sure to take your lunch break! By the way, if anyone needs the overtime, we need 6 more people to gargle shit covered balls at 5:00 am Christmas morning. There's too much shit on too many balls for any of us managers to step up and gargle. Our kids are sick with ear infections and our Tesla's have doctors appointments so it's not possible that we can make it to the shit ball gargling decathlon. If you have any questions be sure to ask a non-superior so that we don't have to dock your pay increase. Have a wonderful shit covered ballsack gargling day!"
If only that was the environment. Nowadays it's all open office designs everywhere. Can't get any work done especially if you've got people around you on calls all day.
News flash: the open plan office is actually seen as sexist, according to at least one article in the BBC. Go see!
Not quite. The Beeb arenβt in the business of studies (outside special reports). If I am thinking about the same article as you, Anglia Ruskin interviewed thousands of workers and found that while most people got over the sense of surveillance, a much higher percentage of women than men didnβt. This was because, seemingly, women were in fact more surveilled by their male colleagues.
So open plans arenβt βsexistβ in the sands they were designed in oppression of women; they are sexist in the sense that their design and rationale failed to predict or account for the disproportionate negative impact on women.
They're actually trying to solve the calls thing, but in the worst way: super fucking loud "white noise machines". Basically a tiny speaker in every other ceiling tile that makes it sound like the most oppressive AC setup in the world.
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Fast-paced unpredictable high-energy
That's a lot of words to say you don't know how to run a business
It's run by a group of entitled toddlers, guided by running kittens.
I love your comment, but it overlooked the drinking
Be an IT guru and reset Jennifer's password 20 times a month.
Also we didn't consult you and have got all our stuff iPad pros for some reason, which in no way will interface with any of our software. Somehow that's your fault.
why didn't you warn them? pfftt. oh and the owner's cousin has some kind of firewall thing they want the company to test, you don't mind a giant hole in the infosec just do it and stop complaining.
My last office job was QA at a game studio. They kept our whole team in a stuffy windowless room full of partitions. Three screens took up the one desk that was only a bit wider than your chair.
When feeding time happened you could hear everyone's lips smacking.
I would have killed for a cubicle like this.
The devs out in the civilized part of the office had open plan, but they had L desks and 4-6 screens. Some had mini fridges and drawers.
I played Phantasmagoria 2 and knew it was supposed to take place in a brutally oppressive corporate hellscape, but each characters cubicle seemed expansive and cozy.
Bruh, thanks for the reminder. Gotta go listen to the OG Phantasmagoria theme
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Whoa a personal cubicle? What are you, a CEO?
Ok but the snazzy office spaces don't mean better conditions. All this shit means is corpo speak for "we're asking 3 people to do the job of 15 until we decided that having someone crack periodically costs more than adding FTEs.
Dual monitors, though.
Thatβs the high-energy, they arenβt energy star compliant
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My favourite workspace was when I was just stuffed under a stairwell. There were very few interruptions because the only way to talk to me was to stand in the hallway blocking traffic.
I showed up, got my work done, dicked around with research projects, wandered the halls talking to people about the kinds of issues they were having and offering ad-hoc training, went home. It was more like a hobby than work.
I loved my Harry Potter office when I had it. The door was actually on the back side of the staircase instead of the side, so lots of people didn't even know I was there.
Years ago I worked at a brewery.
They had offices but no spaces available in that part of the facility when I started, so they "made an office" for me in a spare storage room off of a tiny hallway that connected the finishing cellars with the filter room and hop storage room.
It was so out of the way that over a year into the job there were still people who had no idea how to find my office.
Granted there were no windows, and most of the day, the hop centrifuge and filter pumps meant I was immersed in loud droning noise...but until I started working from home in the pandemic, it was the best office I ever had.
Is that Neo's office?
They were the 3/4 height walls sans sneeze guard.
"CorporateAccountsPayableNinaspeaking... JUSTamoment."
I don't want to be an IT guru for my real family...
Those TPS reports arenβt gonna write themselves!
I'm genuinely curious as to whether people actually work in these things.
I've worked in 9 roles across 3 companies.
Never got my own cubicle
They stuck me alone in the server room. 10/10
honestly... sounds heavenly
Been great except that time the AC went out. No one bothers you unless they need something fixed.
No AC in the server room sounds like a recipe for cooked servers hot and fresh.
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Being in a room with 15,000 fans spinning at 10,000 rpm is like being trapped inside a vacuum cleaner. Mandatory hearing protection. Alternating rows of 70 degrees and 100+ degrees.
It's not always so fun, but being better than a cubicle is a low bar.
Mandatory hearing protection.
Can confirm. That's what did it. Ideally, in just a few decades, my age will catch up with my hearing, though.
I had a cubicle in my first job out of college, but most workspaces Iβve been in have been open
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I work remote, but the in-office guys in my department have cubicles. They like them pretty well, but they might also not be the best judges, because when they go into the office, they're usually totally alone
Beats the shit out of being on your feet 8 hours a day in an Amazon warehouse, stuck at a front desk dealing with the public, or having literal passers by tattling to your boss that what they saw on your screen didn't look work related because they don't respect your department as a whole and find you subservient. Point is that there's a hell of a lot worse.
Man, that last one. It's a miracle I never throttled the exec who was the biggest offender. He was one of the people that gave that department so much more work to do than take calls, yet every time he walked by he had some comment about work ethic to make to whoever wasn't on the phone. We have the numbers you chode! Check that work logging system you fucking bought us the last time you weren't convinced we were doing our jobs!
Anyway.
I find the whole idea of how telecommuting allows you to work in different surroundings also cuts the other way.
When I'm working in the office, I'm usually focused on my work enough that my surroundings don't matter. After that, I'm likely conversing with my co-workers and that's also enjoyable regardless of surroundings. If neither of those are the case, I have just enough privacy that I don't get random passers by glancing over my shoulder at me on my phone.
Additionally, I can do whatever the hell I want in my cubical space (within reason) without needing anyone's approval. It's my space.
That all said, if I didn't have an engaging job, if the people with view of my screens were nosy, if I was bound by restrictive rules about how I could use the space... in short, it wouldn't take much to turn cubeville into hell.
But in my opinion, a lot of that stuff would make working in the prettiest office hell too.
EE - I have a cubicle but don't even use it bc I'm at a workbench elsewhere 90% of the time
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"I see you've missed a lot of work, Peter."
"Well, I wouldn't say I've been 'missing it' Bob."
Looks calm as fuck right? Because they cleaned up the mass murder scene left by the previous IT guy going bonkers trying to deal with the company's legacy bullshit and shit security culture.
Iβd actually go back to the office if I had a cubicle
looks like the cubicles of my users.
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