This is unfortunate. I think it could not be more on-topic. It is as much about the legacy impact of his choices as the parent comment onto which I made it, and it seems exceedingly hypocritical to detach it.
But nonetheless I accept your choice. What other option do I have.
Bunking with the troops sounds a hell of a lot nicer as a gesture than what the usual exec in a company would have done: give himself a corner office with a nice view while the rest of the company spends their time in windowless cubicles.
He wasn't promoting it per se, he was merely using it. Also, I think it is in poor taste to use this moment to attempt to draw attention away from the matter at hand to make it seem like he purposefully did something negative.
I don't see how it's a nice gesture. Not only does it fail to improve what is bad about the conditions, but also it creates an unspoken rule that you're not even allowed to complain, not even allowed to hope, for something better.
Wearing tattered shoes and claiming they are "good enough" isn't a nice gesture nor is it helpful for the person who badly needs better shoes. Instead it's a message: deal with the bad stuff because I am dealing with it.
As for whether it's poor taste, I guess, I don't know. I'm responding to a comment on an internet thread, a comment that could be misinterpreted as supportive of open-plan offices, and I see the effect of that as socially bad. I mean no disrespect, but I'm also going to speak up for what I believe matters.
You're taking a sympathetic act and you're twisting it out of proportion just so you can promote your hobby horse. I don't personally like cubicles either but I'd far prefer the managers of the company to dogfood what they believe is best for their employees rather than that they create a better situation for themselves. If you don't understand why if every manager did that you might actually achieve your goal then that's just too bad.
Bloomberg, a company famous for an executive who expressed this same "down in the trenches" preference for cubicles, famously does not have offices.
Far from their "egalitarian" culture leading to acceptable working conditions over time, it has only enshrined the idea that no one, ever, may have an office.
It is much better that some people have offices even if not all do, for then at least there can be a path to earning the chance to work in one. Some hope. When they are all taken away under the guise of egalitarian conditions, you can bet they are not coming back.
I think you're missing the point with Bloomberg. The whole idea with that place is that they don't like offices: they don't want anyone to have one because they think offices are a bad thing. They think people work better in one big giant, open, noisy room. A bunch of companies these days have bought into this philosophy, and a bunch of young hipsters think it's great.
So Blooomberg hasn't eliminated offices to try to oppress people as you're implying, or because of any egalitarian ideals, they've done it because they genuinely think it improves productivity. You and I probably agree that this is incorrect, but we're not Michael Bloomberg. I know that I would hate working in that environment, but I know about it so I don't apply for any jobs at Bloomberg. Many of the people who work there probably actually like it that way; extroverted people like very different environments than introverts.
I used to work at Intel back when we had 8x9 cubicles, and now, after various different jobs and different working conditions, I now think it was one of the best work environments I've ever had. I briefly had a walled office at one place and that was nice too. But the 8x9 cubicles were pretty good; we had "do not disturb" signs we could hang across the entrance to keep people from bothering us, and things were generally pretty quiet and I could concentrate and work and not have to see people all the time. After that, things went downhill: cubicles got smaller, then the walls got shorter, they went away altogether, as companies jumped on the "open plan work space" concept to various degrees.
I agree with your description of Bloomberg's beliefs and motivation for it, and I agree that many other organizations, especially start-ups, cargo cult on the back of this.
Since the belief that offices are bad in terms of cost or productivity (e.g. Bloomberg's belief that people work better in noisy, open spaces) is demonstrably and quantitatively incorrect, and inflicts undeniable mental and physical health problems, it's all the more important to vocally argue for private working conditions as a social issues.
This isn't about my specific preference. It's about what the data says, and has said for decades.
By comparison, if some company said that workers worked better in a room filled with second-hand smoke, we wouldn't care whether or not they believed this. It's simply a wrong and harmful belief that ought to be stopped. In other words, we should not allow Bloomberg's management to impose a demonstrably unhealthy working condition (violent lack of privacy) regardless of whatever incorrect fictions they happen to use to justify it.
There's a problem with your analysis: you're assuming that people are all the same, and that work is all the same. Do you have any evidence to support your assertion that noisy, open spaces inflict "undeniable mental and physical health problems", or is that just your personal belief? This isn't like smoking: there is zero evidence that smoking is good for your health, and all kinds of evidence that it causes health problems, because our shared basic biology is consistent enough that this is true.
For one example of a work environment where noisy, open spaces seem to work well, just look at stock traders at NYSE on the trading floor. That whole environment works by people being close to each other and able to turn around and talk to each other at a moment's notice. I sure as hell wouldn't want to work there, but there are people who seem to like that environment.
I don't like open-plan offices either, but I'm not going to assume that what works for me works for everyone else. From what I've seen, the type of people getting involved in programming in recent years are not the same type of people who got involved in it back in the 70s and 80s, so it's quite possible these offices really do improve productivity overall. It's also possible that certain personality types gravitate toward certain industries, so certain workplaces work better in those industries than in others. The people interested in finance are probably not the same kind of people interested in, say, programming Arduinos. Maybe Bloomberg's office really does work out well for them. I don't have any data to disprove their beliefs, other than my own personal bias, but I can't claim to speak for all programmers.
I'm hardly assuming people are all the same -- that's the very thing that places like Bloomberg, which standardize on a one-size-fits-all model for the sake of cheapness yet come up with political stories to plausibly defend it, are doing.
I'm saying don't make all seating open-plan. Don't allow mandates for one-size-fits-all seating. For those who require privacy to be productive, spend the money required to give it to them. For those who thrive in a constant communication stream, spend the money to give it to them.
I'm not going to Google the pile of evidence mounting against open plan offices for you.
But I will say that I worked in quant finance for a while and the idea that an open trading floor is needed, even at the exchange, is a big lie. It's about status and showmanship, and functions as nothing but a hindrance to completing actual job duties.
Open-plan fire-drill quant finance was the first work environment that actually showed me how much of a lie it is. Every single person hated it, and at least in part the bonuses and inflated compensation was required just to get people to engage in the Sisyphean task of trying to get their work done in that environment. It was like hiring Usain Bolt and asking him to break the world record for a 100m sprint -- but to do it in your swimming pool.
There are many high frequency shops and quant hedge funds where they need real-time audio links between traders, and yet they still organize into private offices and use teleconferencing and workplace chat, and it ends up being far more effective than having them physically colocated. In one case, I even remember one of the primary researchers was given special permission to live in San Francisco even though the entire rest of trading team worked on the East Coast, simply because he had family reasons that required him to be on the West Coast. It didn't degrade communication or knowledge sharing, even in rapid trading situations, at all.
That all sounds great, except that if every single person hates these environments, and there are "many" shops that have private offices, why aren't the places like Bloomberg failing because they can't find qualified people to work there (and/or their productivity is lousy compared to their competitors with private offices)?
This is a fallacy of presuming the market (in this case labor) has to be efficient, and that any irrationalities would be arbitraged away (better employer swoops in and eats Bloomberg's lunch by providing better workspace) and so therefore whatever we do happen to observe must be the rational, efficient, market clearing condition.
This is absurd of course. If true, then literally every aspect of employment in every company would be the 100% optimal condition as expressed via preference negotiation between employers and candidates and there would be no components of working life that are systematically worse off for the employee. Surely you can't be claiming that? If employment is efficient, why are there things like Occupy Wall St? Not that Occupy is right or wrong, but why would it exist? Why wouldn't those companies, with policies people find socially toxic, fail to find enough applicants and be forced to change policies in response to the market?
Their ability to find workers and make money is not very related to whether their practices are unhealthy or destructive, as is the case with open-plan nonsense too.
Why do any market irrationalities persist? Often there is an aspect of market manipulation. In the labor market this can occur by focusing on hiring visa-based workers and using their visa status as discreet leverage to force them to never complain about conditions. Many companies also do actively illegal things, like threaten employees with retaliation if they discuss their salary, in efforts to prevent collective bargaining and depress employee negotiation power over attributes like workspace.
The more disconcerting thing is the way that younger generations of programmers, basically my generation and younger, have been psychologically manipulated into believing that "dynamic" and "collaborative" are synonymous with open-plan, and they are afraid to express any dissatisfaction lest they are downgraded to "not a team player." It breeds what Michael O. Church described as "macho subordination" -- a desire to compete to be seen as most "loyal" by making a public display of willingness to bottomlessly compromise even basic dignity in the work place, so that anyone who stands up for realistic, humanity-affirming conditions is immediately labeled "toxic" and exiled. The workers enacting this don't even know any better, and few of them have had to take a phone call during the work day about a family tragedy, or discuss an awkward medical condition as they schedule a doctor's appointment, or something, and they place low value on such privacy mostly from a position of naïveté.
Anyway, the circular logic of saying markets must be efficient, therefore whatever we observe in markets must be proving their efficiency is patently ridiculous.
You're right that markets are not 100% efficient. However you have some faulty logic here.
>If employment is efficient, why are there things like Occupy Wall St? Not that Occupy is right or wrong, but why would it exist? Why wouldn't those companies, with policies people find socially toxic, fail to find enough applicants and be forced to change policies in response to the market?
Your assumption here is that the entire population agrees with OWS. They don't. The people who work at those companies are perfectly happy to work there, and are not the same people who were in OWS. OWS wasn't even about employment, it was about Wall Street doing things which wrecked the economy, and getting away with it, and with the economy as a whole not working for many sectors of the population.
The economy is working just fine for people on Wall Street. Why would they complain about it? People working on Wall Street are getting paid well. They're not complaining. The complainers at OWS were people who were not working on Wall Street, and they certainly weren't protesting work environments in Wall Street companies.
You do have good points about H1-B visa abuse and prevention of collective bargaining. But this is still orthogonal to open-plan offices. Right now, the employment market for software developers is very strong, probably one of the healthiest employment markets in the American economy right now. Companies are competing with each other to hire talented employees in this market. If a work environment were really that bad, they'd have a hard time keeping people around. This is, in fact, exactly what the US government is complaining about right now with IT workers; they can't keep good one around because the pay is so much better in industry and you don't have to wait around for months for a background check.
>The more disconcerting thing is the way that younger generations of programmers, basically my generation and younger, have been psychologically manipulated into believing that "dynamic" and "collaborative" are synonymous with open-plan
Now this is hitting the nail on the head. Younger people actually believe this kind of environment is better, more "fun", etc. So employees are willingly signing up to work in these places because they're drunk the Kool-Aid.
Then go work for a company that provides offices. As an employee, that's your choice and you are welcome to subjectively value egalitarianism exemplified in this way versus hierarchical "perks" that manifest in personal offices.
My goal is to lobby for broad social change, not merely to locate one single private workspace for just me. Complaining about what is wrong with it is a good way to help others, who might not have even considered that workspace should be treated as a negotiable option for them and reflect their personal work style and needs, and potentially create more momentum among the crowd that reads HN, to help set the trend that it ought to be considered unreasonable when an employer whitewashes over human variation when it's actually more cost-effective to provide offices to any knowledge worker who prefers one.
Paul Graham expressed this much more strongly than I have, and he wrote about it over 10 years ago:
"After software, the most important tool to a hacker is probably his office. Big companies think the function of office space is to express rank. But hackers use their offices for more than that: they use their office as a place to think in. And if you're a technology company, their thoughts are your product. So making hackers work in a noisy, distracting environment is like having a paint factory where the air is full of soot.
The cartoon strip Dilbert has a lot to say about cubicles, and with good reason. All the hackers I know despise them. The mere prospect of being interrupted is enough to prevent hackers from working on hard problems. If you want to get real work done in an office with cubicles, you have two options: work at home, or come in early or late or on a weekend, when no one else is there. Don't companies realize this is a sign that something is broken? An office environment is supposed to be something that helps you work, not something you work despite.
Companies like Cisco are proud that everyone there has a cubicle, even the CEO. But they're not so advanced as they think; obviously they still view office space as a badge of rank. Note too that Cisco is famous for doing very little product development in house. They get new technology by buying the startups that created it-- where presumably the hackers did have somewhere quiet to work.
One big company that understands what hackers need is Microsoft. I once saw a recruiting ad for Microsoft with a big picture of a door. Work for us, the premise was, and we'll give you a place to work where you can actually get work done. And you know, Microsoft is remarkable among big companies in that they are able to develop software in house. Not well, perhaps, but well enough."
from Great Hackers section called "The Final Frontier"
I agree that open plan is the worst, but cubes are a close second, and both types of space are not as cost effective as private offices (even in dense urban areas).
If the executives want to be "egalitarian" about it, then raise the conditions of everyone up. Don't act like a proud martyr and lower your own conditions. It's patronizing and solves none of the problems. Plus, executives who do this will always find other status games to play if they want to feel superior, so it's never really egalitarian anyway.
We never delete comments outright unless the author asks us to. We do kill comments as part of banning a user (killed comments aren't deleted because anyone with 'showdead' turned on can read them), but going offtopic and getting a bit overheated isn't something we ban people for.
