The best way to prevent spreading diseases at the office is to not require your employees to go to the office - assuming WFH is compatible with the company's business.
I work at a FAANG company which was aggressively opposed to WFH before the covid-19 crisis. As matter of fact, I recently changed teams within said company and during the informational interview I asked about the team's policy on WFH - the answer was that "our team has a strong 'collaborative in-the-office' culture, so we don't encourage WFH"
I am not kidding, we're talking about one of the most advanced companies in history and they required domestic travel+hotel for trivial half-day, mostly passive interview training that could have been done easily over teleconference, that's how much this company values physical presence.
Fast forward a few months, everybody is WFH in the company and the sky hasn't fallen. Actually, my productivity vastly increased because I'm fortunate to have a solid WFH environment at home (despite kids/wife around).
While I'm not proposing mandatory WFH for tech companies, neither saying that it works for everybody, I believe our top companies could lead and finally allow people who demonstrate that they can be productive at home to just stay home - permanently.
This is a problem with incompetent managers. They failed to understand the different between productivity and sitting.
Last company I worked for, the CEO said to me he doesn't care where anyone work as long as the work get done well. However, this was not the case with my own manager. He micro managed everything. He had an office manager sitting with the engineers reporting to him multiple times a day on if the engineers were sitting on the desk. You can feel you are being watch the moment you step into the office. It was an absolute shit place to work for.
> He micro managed everything. He had an office manager sitting with the engineers reporting to him multiple times a day on if the engineers were sitting on the desk.
I really related to this in my last role. It's the butts-in-chairs method vs output because let's be real... most of the people promoted to middle-management can't measure actual output.
I've always been on the edge of being a manager vs. being IC and the times I've bled over into management I have this style: you're expected to be here early by 30 minutes for meetings, and if you wanna leave directly after to go work from your home office I could care less. I expect workers to be highly available via chat and phone during normal business hours (adjusted to the timezone), and generally flexible if something comes up where I need 'em in the mothership.
To measure output and success, whelp I just get on the corporate GitLab and read everyone's commits daily. Not only do I learn a TON working with solid talent... I also know who's jerkin' me around. Does this work for every WFH-type employee? Nope. Managing devs gives you a ton of black-and-white paper trails to ensure people are working the right direction.
In contrast, throughout my IC career none of my managers have managed ME this way which blows my mind. I know I'm not the most talented leader but I don't understand why dev management doesn't look at real metrics to gauge success outside of "I don't know how to read code"... =|
The way I managed also bought loyalty... like a lot of loyalty. When you get out of the way of people's lives and say, "I'm willing to make this career work with you as a person" you get an insane amount of forgiveness for being a poop manager in other areas.
Did people take advantage of me giving them this slack? Yep. Did I fire 'em for poor output? Yep - at will state sucka. IMO you'll get people taking advantage of the system regardless of how you wanna lead so the best way to hedge that risk is looking at metrics + engaging consistently with your team. Bad apples tend to stick out in a few months and you just gotta learn to fire fast to maintain the integrity of the team vs pumping your staff numbers.
I've often been tempted to show my less-technical manager our commit log, but have always avoided it because I can't see any way it wouldn't turn into some stupid game about commits and lines of code changed.
I'd say about 70-80% of managers I've had couldn't build or work on the product that they're tasked with managing. And... I resent that.
The truth is you need near-100% understanding of the code going into the product to really gauge someone's participation accurately. Looking at LOC, # of commits, etc. is all fluid so while they describe properties of the story, they're not the actual story itself.
Also, there's up and down weeks. I've watched my top performers have poop weeks where they've only been able to crank out a couple of small features, or maybe just resolved one issue, etc. I feel like if micro-managers saw this they'd put the hurt on em... for me it literally never came up because within 1-2 weeks they'd be back on the rails. I was always like "huh - musta been some human stuff." Or, heck... sometimes I could tell they just moved a bit slower on more mundane tasks. When I put myself in a position to relate to that I find that I have the same lulls, lack of motivation for mundane work, etc.
People NOT getting back on the rails after 1-2 weeks of meh was the exception! I also felt like I could demand more of my team during the 2-3 crank-it-out periods that inevitably occurred throughout the year because I had respected their time leading up to that... IDK.
All-in-all if specs were being respected, code was clean/reasonably PR'd, deadlines were hit, and meetings were well prep'd for + attended I felt that we were being successful.
I feel the urge to commend your approach to manage your team.
When I'm having off-weeks, I'm painfully aware of them. It causes me a lot of personal stress and anxiety. My manager is like you and never calls me out of it during our standups. He may ping me and ask how I'm doing, etc. I'm glad he doesn't call me out on it because that would just amplify my anxiety and probably make things worse.
You're right, after a week, maybe two, I get right back on the horse and manage to catch up.
People wanna feel safe... And go figure, when they do their output usually goes from being minimal effort to above and beyond. Also feeling safe has sooooo many more institutional benefits etc. Errors are identified + corrected quicker, people don't play politics near as much, things just get "easier"... hard to explain.
But yea - definitely give that guy some positive feedback in your 1:1's. That was one thing that helped me really design a system that people wanted to work within, solid feedback when things work/didn't work =)
Lol - old graybeard ... it was Bill freakin' Atkinson. Author of HyperCard and one of my heroes!
This story came up often when I said I read the commits daily. I would just roll my eyes and say "I read code, I don't look at arbitrary LOC".
If the story is true it shows incompetence with the managers to pick such an arbitrary metric to measure with. Plus, when you start policing people like this you can damn-near guarantee motivation goes in the trashcan because now it's a "me vs. you" thing... and eww who wants to come to work with THAT?!
Does anyone have any theories about why this is the case about middle management? How does this happen? I've seen this almost everywhere I've worked. I have my own theories, but I'd really like to hear what others think about this.
Maybe it's that if people can do the job you want to keep them doing it. If they can't you move them, and often moving people up is the easiest thing to do.
where there are dips in productivity it can also be that they're getting up to speed on an area of the codebase they are not familiar with. Ramp-up time is always difficult to account for but is absolutely something everyone needs when looking at new code.
Yep! Or even just people documenting could look weird on metrics/etc. I'd admit I was in the dark a lot, and that many times I would be perceiving a "productivity dip" when it was a situation like you're describing.
I learned quick to not make assumptions, and to hire/retain people who I could trust... I also requested informal reports ever 48hrs or so with links to what you'd been working on, PR's, documentation, etc. Reports were sent to a distro list of all team members and replaced traditional stand-ups. So generally if I was in the dark it would all be figured out in due time without having to get up someone's butt. I feel like it kept everyone accountable and transparent when everything was in writing.
Also with ramp-up specifically... since I was paying attention to the hard metrics I started to get a feel for when something was difficult vs. easy. Projects that would kick people down for simple tasks would get priority for refactor, difficult onboarding was usually met with aggressive documentation, etc. Over time you got a taste of what these beasts were without even being an IC on them.
I've been reading The Psychology of Computer Programming recently and enjoying it quite a bit. One fun bit is each chapter ends with some questions for reflection -- both for programmers, and for managers. I laughed a bit at the end of the first chapter, where the first question for managers is: "If you are a first-line manager, are you capable of reading the programs written by your programmers? ... If you are capable, do you read them? If you don't, why not try it and see what you find?"
The next set of questions: "If you are a higher-level manager, are your first-line managers capable of reading programs ... ? ... Our surveys indicate that nine-tenths do not ... Do you think it is possible for a first-line manager to know how good his programmers are or how well they are doing without occasionally reading their programs?"
I'm glad to read your report to know that at least somewhere out there exist software managers that seem to 'get' that code is (or should be) the central artifact in all the crap we programmers produce. Not that the other stuff isn't valuable, but things can still work without it, whereas without the code nothing works. My remaining fantasy is to encounter a software manager who is familiar with Deming's work and has thought about how to apply it to software management.
> My remaining fantasy is to encounter a software manager who is familiar with Deming's work and has thought about how to apply it to software management.
Am familiar and in my experience TQM is just as cargo-cult as Six Sigma, Waterfall, Agile, etc etc. You get these highly-stylized idealist models, often which have books and courses, then the consultants... Ugh. IDK - all of this crap is noise to me. I found Deming's work super thick, and honestly I'm probably too much of a simpleton to really "get it"... =|
In contrast, my personal commandments are near-100% inspired from the two lists:
* Tom Sach's "10 Bullets" (how to work)
* Joel Spolsky's "The Joel Test" (how to run an effective software company)
Haven't come across Tom Sach's list, I'll give them a look and reflect. I still like Spolsky's list though. It's always fun to think about which points the industry (or one's own employer) has consolidated on by now and which it hasn't -- hard to imagine there exist many 12s on the prevalence of this item's open offices topic alone, and even Microsoft isn't a 12 anymore as far as I know. (Maybe parts are.)
It doesn't surprise me to hear there's a ton of BS around Deming's work (it's had even longer to build itself up) but I still think there are valuable things there that software companies, especially larger ones, are missing... And we seem to have the existence proof of there being something to it (i.e. Japan's rise, and later on US companies adopting things... though as Jobs once noted (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kib6uXQsxBA) customers won't think highly of your quality if you keep shipping garbage despite winning a Deming Award or having all sorts of advertising that claims high quality).
Even starting from the surface root level with Deming's "System of Profound Knowledge" -- his 4 key components -- I see a total lack of "Knowledge about variation" all over the place. Without some intuition of variation you can't even appreciate what you mentioned about how programmers sometimes just seem to have "off weeks", and from what I've read Deming wanted the understanding to be more deep than a basic "yeah things vary" instinct, and to know it applies not only to individuals or individual units of work (e.g. red beans experiment) but to larger scopes as well. Ultimately the knowledge needs mathematical grounding (specifically in probability and statistics), which is something else sorely lacking in management trees (and even more and more on the programming side). If there are things like TQM certifications out there that don't imply a holder has a certain level of mathematical sophistication with statistics, that's all the more damning to the certificates and bodies of work around them, but not I don't think to the importance of such knowledge...
I've been thinking since yesterday and I think I'm going to jump back into Deming's work... do you have a good starting point? I had the realization that I hadn't read "Out of the Crisis" since my early 20's, and I've had a few bad run-ins with super-corporate weirdos slinging his theory like snake oil after that.
> Ultimately the knowledge needs mathematical grounding (specifically in probability and statistics), which is something else sorely lacking in management trees (and even more and more on the programming side)
This is one of the biggest struggles of my career... dealing with quantifying something that's incredibly difficult to quantify.
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Glad you're checking out Tom Sachs' list! It's an odd one for sure - weird artsy video and all. It's about an art studio in NY and how it manages it's people/process. It's sorta hokey I'll admit, but I find the simplicity of it helps me get back on the rails myself during those times of variation =)
This. You need to be able to constantly and quickly cull the weakest from your team. After a while you’ll recognize the best ones and run a Tier 1 top-talent team supported by metrics, and the weak will move on. The strong will have room to grow without micromanagement.
Managers can contribute to this but in my opinion it's a cultural inclination and we've all been thrust into it due to the pandemic. The forced move to WFH will be eye opening to everyone, managers included, and will also give credit to subordinates with cut and dry experience.
> The forced move to WFH will be eye opening to everyone, managers included
I think you're overly optimistic about this, most just see Covid as a temporary inconvenience and will go back to business as usual when this ends. Sure, some smart managers may see the value, but I'd wager most of them are set in their ways.
This is also a problem with incompetent engineers. They fail to understand the difference between building relationships and transmitting technical information.
This is something I’ve seen called “butts-in-seats management”, and yes, I’ve seen it in practice.
Many years ago I had a new skip-level manager who emailed me one day saying that he had dropped by my office a few times to introduce himself but I was never around and he was really concerned with the fact that I never seemed to be in my office working. I am relatively certain every time he dropped by I was either in a colleagues office discussing a work issue or had run down to grab a coffee. But to him this was “concerning”.
He didn’t last long. I believe he moved on in 8-12 months.
Human beings are irrational, social animals. Showing up for work at the office, on time, early in the morning, is a strong social signal that you are committed to work. These signals matter almost as much as whether the work gets done.
Ultimately you will be judged on how well the work gets done -- but the social signals are table stakes.
When I was in law school I was fortunate enough to have a paid internship at an investment company that came with a small office. Since it wasn’t too far from school I started to use my office to study even when I wasn’t working. It was a quiet place to get things done and when I was on-site I would occasionally get pulled in to cool projects. It seemed like a good way to get a few more opportunities at work and also get my homework done without all the gossiping that happened at the library.
That meant I spent most of the work week “at work” even though I was only actually working some of that time. I did all of my work and I did a good job but at the end of the year I was the only intern to get a bonus checks. Interns weren’t even eligible for bonuses but my bosses were so blown away by my dedication they decided to reward it. The craziest part is they knew I was doing homework half the time. I had gotten the okay to use my office as a study spot first and they were getting my timesheets every week. They were well aware that I wasn’t some sort full-time super intern.
I think the whole concept of “facetime” pretty silly but it definitely matters even if we like to think it doesn’t.
Maybe they were impressed by your consistency. Whether you’re studying or working, showing up every day on a consistent schedule is quite impressive especially for a college kid.
In my experience it’s consistency, more than anything else, that separates the best performers from average performers.
One of the hardest parts about remote work is that you don't get that signal anymore.
Grinding away and doing nothing can look like the same thing from your coworkers'/managers' point of view. Or, on days where you just aren't feeling it or can't be productive, you can't just look productive by sitting in your office chair. Instead you basically burn a day and it's easy to start having thoughts like "wow, they must think I'm useless."
I love remote work because I love the freedom to live where I please, but this is one aspect of it that gives me some anxiety. The subconscious "I see you in the office so you must be productive" signal really is strong.
I worked from home two days a week before this, and moving to working from home every day has hurt my productivity. I've found it much more difficult to collaborate with colleagues remotely compared to being in the same space for most of the day. Before I used my WFH days for head-down focused work and my in-office days for collaboration. That worked really well for me.
Yep. I routinely work 2-3 days from home every week. Full time WFH sucks. There are times when I just need to be at the office. There are times when the distractions at home are too much.
Now I've had jobs where 100% WFH was fine, but that's when I was in a real home with a real office, not my tiny SiValley apartment.
Fulltime WFH means you can live somewhere where the housing prices are less insane. So you can have a desicated work place (either seperate room or seperate desk somewhere). Thets the whole thing!
How is your productivity now that the rest of the office is also WFH? I imagine there is an asymmetry in perceived productivity if you’re the only one WFH, but it could be a different ballgame when it is more common. This could easily carry to post-pandemic e.g. weekly WFH days for everyone.
The FAANG's overwhelmingly employ younger folks, give them the college atmosphere - free food, drinks, laundry on site, foosball table. And they spend their entire day at work for these so-called "benefits". I met one guy who was so happy that his company provided breakfast, lunch, and dinner at work, thought it was the greatest thing, he felt bad that he could not have the same arrangement for the weekend. I was like, dude, you live once, get a fuckin life!
Not in the Bay Area, but a more affordable area of the US, it's possible. And if you plan on retiring early, there's no need to live in a housing market around lots of profitable tech businesses that make housing expensive.
I support the meals in the office as a real meaningful perk. It's usually not a taxable perk, and Covid has shown me that with snacks (crisps, chocate,soft drinks, a cookid with a coffee), breakfast top ups (I bring oats to work and use fruit from the office), office coffee (im going through a bag a week rather than a bag a month right now), my food spend has at least doubled.
The food isn't amazing but it's usually pretty good, there's little to no clean up (giving me back an hour or so a week of prep and cleaning time), it forces me into a routine of lunch at 12:30, and nobody is forcing me into it so sometimes I bring my own.
> I was like, dude, you live once, get a fuckin life!
Work is a big part of life (in terms of time spent), even if you stick strictly to a 9-5. Its not unreasonable to try and make it comfortable, or possibly even pleasant or enjoyable at times.
3 healthy meals provided a day for free with someone else cleaning for you is a huge benefit if you're young. Many places have breakfast until 10 and dinner starting at 6, so it's not even a big departure from a normal workday
Breakfast and lunch is ok, once you start talking "free dinner" it gets suspicious. Also, there is a huge problem where the "young" never truly become adults and learn some life skills. I quite enjoy making a meal, while I work my way through a nice craft cocktail, while there is a good track playing in the background. I zealously guard my time after work for sports, hobbies and for people near and dear to me.
>I'm fortunate to have a solid WFH environment at home
I feel this is pretty important. I am only renting a room (not making FAANG money) and as such quarantine has me spending nearly 24 hours a day in my bedroom. I can't follow the standard advice of maintaining a separate space for work
I feel you on this. I live in a studio loft, so I've only got one room total really. Time has no meaning, days bleed together and my work/live ballence has gone to shit.
I had a remote job for seven years, most of which I spent living in a couple of studio apartments, so - as you're experiencing - there was no way to separate work space from living space. In order to keep from having time become a blur, I had to develop some artificial rituals around beginning and especially ending the work day.
At one apartment I slept on a folding futon couch. I would "go to work" by folding it up and putting all the pillows away. Ta-da, now I'm "in the office", time to work. Done with work? Close the laptop, leave the apartment, walk around the block, maybe get a snack, come back home. Hey! I just came home from work, time to relax. Leaving the apartment and re-entering it, even if I was only gone a few minutes, was a really useful signal.
Later on I decided to strictly separate personal computing from work computing. No personal website logins on the work computer; no company code or email accouts on the personal computer. I also tried putting DNS blocks on my favorite recreational web sites on the work computer, so I'd be forced to swivel my chair around and use the personal computer. This way, I could carry on with email, browsing the web, and writing code on personal projects after work hours, using my personal machine, without feeling like I was still "at work" on my work machine.
I don't know what will work for you, but perhaps choosing to create some artificial barriers like these will help.
I've been having the same issue. One thing I noticed that helps is to at least make sure work is done on a different laptop that gets shutdown and put away after 5 PM.
Something I still find fascinating is how much GAFAM/FAANG invested in remote work software for their customers (all but Apple and Netflix) but never had a good handle on using those same tools internally because they didn't have strong remote work policies/cultures. Good for the goose, but the gander doesn't care to dog food. (To badly mix metaphors.)
I very much hope all of GAFAM/FAANG are paying attention and learning from this situation.
(I've asked about remote work policies every time I've ever interviewed with GAFAM/FAANG. I've seen such a fascinating mix of hypocrisy about remote work in such interviews.)
I’m curious which FAANG you worked at that strongly discouraged WFH. I’ve worked at two now, including the one that’s sort of notorious for treating employees terribly, and both of them were fine with WFH when necessary. I sort of got the sense that they were all more or less OK with it.
I work at a FAANG. They’re OK with you working from home 1-2 days/week to run errands, etc, but not OK with 100% WFH except rare exceptions (usually people who have been at the company a while before moving). That may be what OP means. I’ll be curious to see if fully remote becomes more of a possibility based on how the next few months go.
That changes wildly from team to team. I worked for one team where there was a set WFH day of the week. I had another team where 11am standup meetings were held everyday, and this was mostly for the benefit of the people manage who was very technically disinterested in what’s going on but wanted to enforce “coherence”, needless to say WFH was impossible. In another team, manager wasn’t comfortable allowing WFH because “it would create inequality between engineers” i.e he was just afraid of making a judgement call. Finally, had a team where manager would WFH 1-3 times a week himself and was actually the best manager of all in terms of being on top of things.
The sentiment that this is heavily dependent on manager competence is correct IMHO.
People only say FAANG instead of FANG if it's Apple. Otherwise I could only see it as Amazon. But Amazon had people WFH almost immediately, since being here in Seattle it was the start of the outbreak in the US.
I'm partial to "MAGA" as the initialism for the top 4 tech companies by market cap (Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple). Facebook and Netflix are a tier below in market cap and size, and it also makes it clear who's really making America great again...
I've seen GAFAM a lot, and that's the one I tend to favor.
MAFANG (maybe?) if you really want to get Netflix in there? I know some people especially in the Bay Area think Netflix is important in the acronym not necessarily by market cap, but overall head count versus turnover and thus cultural swing (policies like "unlimited vacation" that started at Netflix and then in turn influenced a lot of other surrounding Bay Area companies).
If I were to WFH "permanently", for years and years, I'd like my employer to share some of the savings from not having an office with me.
I would spend it on renting a bigger apartment with an extra room to use as my office.
Don't get me wrong: I love my wife and kids dearly. But having anything done requires concentration and some moderate insulation from distractions. Achieving this from a coach in the living room is hard. Grabbing my kid's room only works as long as the school day isn't over, and not at all during a recess, like, say, the whole summer. My wife already works from home, so our bedroom doubles as her office.
I didn't need a proper workplace as long as my employers provided me with (a piece of) an office. Now that they stopped due to the quarantine, its lack becomes a significant problem.
Obviously, some would say: leave your expensive city, move to somewhere really cheap, in the middle of (almost) nowhere! Two problems. (1) What about schools there? (2) When enough people move into a cheap and convenient place, it quickly ceases to be as cheap.
The longest meetings I've ever been in were while working remote. Major sev 1 outage bridges with 200+ attendees where it takes 6+ hours (My longest was 27 hours, and that was after demanding to my boss I finally take a break to get some sleep, and the problem still wasn't resolved for another two hours. Beat my previous longest Sev 1 by 3 hours). to get the right people to join / figure out what's going on / get someone's attention long enough to work on your problems instead of other departments? So fun. /s
I was at a FAANG for years. I was the ONLY ONE on my team in the office - the rest of my team was in London. So I would literally drive to the multi-million dollar office on multi-million dollar real estate then dial up some people in London from my laptop.
During my exit interview after I resigned, I told my director I was leaving partially because I wanted to work remotely more and that they should either encourage or at least allow more WFH. She laughed, said they don't do that there, and told me that I'd be back.
Now they're all working from home and I'm with a new remote-friendly company with no plans on ever going back to the FAANG world. Good riddance.
There's bunch of things other than productivity that make companies (especially for those multinational giants) hesitant to allow full WFH + remote, like tax/visa/regulatory issues. It's not impossible, but the cost adds up.
I guess the benefits outweigh the costs now, so I hope those companies will more proactively consider more WFH friendy employment options.
It’s easier to micromanage staff, and much more convenient for playing office politics when on site - hence management is usually against wfh. It boggles the mind.
Something has to change. There is no reason why every tech company shouldn’t have a permanent WFH policy. Let people live further out from cities. It’s 2020, why are we still working like it’s the 1950s?
I'm firmly in the camp of hating open office plans. My first job out of college making $50k per year in Washington DC, I had my own office.
It was all downhill from there.
In my career (I'm 45 now), there is literally a direct negative correlation between how much money I make and the quality of my office surroundings (specifically, the privacy and quiet all go down as my pay goes up).
I used to rail against it but I figured that's how the world works and always insisted on enough money to make up for the crappy office space.
I would be THRILLED if COVID reverses this (IMO) awful trend.
Open floor plans make concentration nearly impossible. Headphones and music is a must. It's also deeply unsettling to have people walking behind you 24/7. I think human evolution makes you not happy about this.
A coworker of mine left for a company where all employees have offices and according to him the gain in productivity was wild.
There's also health effects. There is subconscious anxiety from being observed and from having someone walking behind you. There is stress from trying to listen--or not to listen--to other conversations. There is stress from needing to maintain a facade for management's panopticon. It all takes a toll on cube farm crops.
Cube farm is nowadays a premium. We are just sitting in rows. Like school class. No walls, nothing. Managers sit in corners, so they can observe others. Upper management has private offices. With increasing pay office quality drops dramatically.
About 8 years ago I changed jobs and went from a big semi-open office space to my own cubicle in a small department of a smaller building. I was so happy about that, I had to take a picture and send it to some people.
Having intentional collaborative workspaces, while maintaining private space for concentration or just personal retreat, is optimal. Forced collaboration is suboptimal.
Yes. I worked at a company for many years that was offices (mostly for managers) and cubicles. Collaboration was fine. Culture was open door unless you specifically didn't want to be disturbed/overheard for some reason. I imagine it's different at other places but private office shouldn't be equated to private office with always shut door.
You shouldn't have to retreat to personal space. You should retreat to collaborative space. If personal privacy is not the default, then social expectations will have you rarely able to take advantage of it.
We do not have enough collaborative spaces to accommodate this, so we end up having crucial conversations and impromptu problem-solving meetings out in open space, wrecking the productivity of everyone else who is trying to meet a deadline.
I see it less as forced collaboration and more as a vehicle for high frequency interruption, which is a core tool of what I call panic or chaos management.
At most places I've been, team management and inter-team cooperation are both so poor that it's pure chaos. Every day there's panic - necessary or otherwise - and the fastest way to put out the current fire is to to storm across the floor and presume to interrupt everyone who might help.
Open plan offices work to make this the norm rather than the exception. They're a cover for no improvement to organization or management.
When someone does an overhaul and introduces role-based areas, the library (where you really are allowed to tell people to shut up) are immediately more popular than the few stand-up desks on the floor.
At one place I worked (big bus. w/ offices all over) my floor was full of fake alphas who were always talking to their laptops on video conferencing. I'd take the internal stairs up a floor where it was crickets and productivity bliss.
And I'm guilty of being the annoying person in the area (ok, one of the annoying people). Sorry everyone! I've learnt and promise not to be that guy again.
The human element of some open office spaces is also (IMHO) a little dehumanizing when you're required to carry your headset and any personal effects from a locker to your desk in a plastic tub and then login to your phone.
Although if those who are predicting a lot more WFH (but with companies still maintaining some level of physical offices), I would expect hoteling to become much more common whatever the physical space looks like. If many/most people are only coming in a couple days a week, it doesn't make sense for employees to have a dedicated space in general.
I'm not a fan of open office either, but then what's the point of having an office if employees are isolated and it's the same as working from home anyway.
Had an office with wrap around white board for my first developer job. I don't think I have ever absolutely crushed that much work since -- up until COVID. Working from my home office has been a wake up call. I like the office, chatting with people over breaks, building personal relationships, and I genuinely love interacting face-to-face with almost all my coworkers, but the drop in productivity due to the open office is immense. Would love to stay home after this since I know no company in a tech hub can afford offices for everyone.
I'm older than you and have run the entire gamut of office types. Single office, shared office, cubicles, half cubicles and open office.
Open office is my favorite by far. I'm a programmer and I'm not easily distracted and I find the environment a lot more social and enjoyable.
My least favorite was the shared office and cubicle. I found offices isolating, but at least you had privacy unless you shared your office. Cubicles were the worst of both worlds, which is a lack of privacy but you're still isolated.
> Open office is my favorite by far. I'm a programmer and I'm not easily distracted and I find the environment a lot more social and enjoyable....My least favorite was the shared office and cubicle. I found offices isolating, but at least you had privacy unless you shared your office. Cubicles were the worst of both worlds, which is a lack of privacy but you're still isolated.
There's the key right there. You're an extrovert.
Half the world isn't. And there's more introverts in tech. Your isolation is our happy solitude in getting shit done.
You might want to reevaluate that. The words you're using to describe open offices and cubicles is definitely more of an extrovert trend. Very few are 100% one or the other, but the words (isolating, social, enjoyable) show extrovert.
You're going to evaluate my introvert/extrovert status based on two sentences? That's a delusional level of confidence you have in yourself. Also, you need to reevaluate your definitions of what introvert and extrovert mean, not all introverts are like you. Educate yourself before making widesweeping assumptions.
All of the reasons provided for open plan offices have been disingenuous; the reason why open plan offices are a thing is that it drastically lowers the land cost per employee. This is why they were popularized in NYC and SF; two cities with famously high land costs.
But of course, abandoning the open plan office is expensive. Companies will need more space, driving up the cost per employee. One can’t help but wonder if this’ll push for more permanently remote positions.
If that were the only reason, then cubicles would be equally popular. For some reason companies want floor plans that do not allow your back to the wall, no partitions higher than sitting shoulder level, minimal sound or sight blocks. I think there must be some psychological effect they're taking advantage of when workers feel like they're being constantly watched from all angles.
Open office seems to me to be even more space-efficient than cubicles. In an open office, I have 2-4 coworkers within arms reach. In a cubicle, everyone at least has a few feet of "bubble" in their cube.
> All of the reasons provided for open plan offices have been disingenuous; the reason why open plan offices are a thing is that it drastically lowers the land cost per employee.
Then why not make those rationales explicit and have the same norms around noise and distractions as you'd find in a library reading room. Keep a reduced number of separate private offices, small meeting rooms, cubicles etc. in case people need to do something that would annoy or distract others. Being disingenuous about these things is pointless, it just keeps people from reaching good compromise solutions.
There are a small number of companies that do that, including 37signals. I think that few companies do that because setting cultural norms and rules like that is very hard, especially when companies are growing.
"Library rules" are difficult in a lot of situations. Many job functions require a lot of time on the phone; it's not practical to be constantly seeking out conference rooms/alcoves for calls. Or, indeed, every time you want a word with someone. Companies can (and do) try to isolate different functions but it's always going to be an issue with more open environments.
I would add the caveat that "when companies are growing" only applies to startups, and not traditional new businesses. If you are doubling your headcount every 3 months, then of course you can't set cultural norms, because there isn't enough time. If you have a lower rate of growth, then you can teach new hires the culture as they come in, and it gets passed on.
The jump from one office type to another is far less extreme than going from an in-person office to WFH. In the absence of strong external motivators, minor changes will be more preferred due to inertia effects.
> One can’t help but wonder if this’ll push for more permanently remote positions.
I think that's right. Currently these companies are learning to effectively remote work under the duress of COVID-19. How long until they start to ask themselves "what do I do with all this expensive office space." Returning to pre-COVID-19 life requires a vaccine, of which there is no guarantee. But a path forward with dramatically reduced office space requirements will look sure -- and offer value to employees who like the flexibility.
There are some really good reasons to want to have an office and face to face interactions; but right now they all look pretty fragile.
Offices cost more than cubes. An office needs a door, ceiling, lights, lighting control, sometimes a sidelight (window), floor/wall finishes, HVAC, along with a couple receptacles and a data opening. This costs more than an 8x8 cube.
It cost $150 to have an office framed, dry walled, taped and muddled, and painted? Please explain how this is possible, the 5/8th drywall for both sides of the wall is practically that much for materials alone.
That stuff doesn’t exist when a space is being completely remodeled either. I work in construction doing tenant improvements, so I see a lot of construction drawings.
That's non-trade price, probably something like $US42 each. So, couple hundred bucks for that, then the rest (taping, joining, painting). Then the electrical.
But you understand, there's not a lot of difference in the lighting and power. Not fair to add that to the cost of offices, and then pretend its free for cubicles.
My office buildout was 10 years ago. Prices change. Do we really think drywall in bulk is going to exceed $5000 per cube?
Cubicle groups are either fed from a whip coming out of the wall, or the whip coming out of a poke-thru device. It’s a single connection point, and the devices can be snap-in for ease of installation.
Power poles are less common, but still used sometimes. It costs less for open area lighting vs lighting an office.
You can buy decent cubes for $2000, with full-height walls.
I’m not a fan of working in an open office layout, fwiw.
They are also dead-simple to install. It's like IKEA furniture levels of complication.
At my old job, we devised a way to make an "office door" out of a section of cube wall that was only attached on one side with a rubber sheath used to hide the seams. It actually worked out pretty well.
The cubes I've assembled use solid core cable whips that are rated for 40 amps (like you'd hook up an hot water heater with) and serve four units. We never had power issues even though we all used pretty beefy hardware (think Xeons and Quadro RTXs) with dual monitors, a UPS, cube lights, etc.
Many offices are full of only laptops - those are drawing ~200 Watts peak, and then may another 100 for a couple of monitors and peripherals. That's many more users. My office has literally that - boxes with 4 sockets each in the middle of a shared space which we all run our power-bars to.
Sure, the open-plan ones of today are amenable to a low degree of wiring. The types of employees made to sit in those offices are amenable to a low degree of wiring.
The average office that has cubicles, though, is also one that’s wired for per-employee power delivery.
Or, I could say it as the reverse: if you know you’re setting up an office to have fixed workstations (e.g. a CG art department in a video game studio; or any department in a company with a pipeline whose main software is a hog, like desktop publishing), then you’ll likely set up with cubicles rather than open-plan, because a workstation kind of implies gradual personalization with bunch of surrounding cruft that needs floors and walls and shelving.
(I have a feeling that even in FAANG, the people who use workstations aren’t sitting in open-plan areas. Anyone care to speak to that?)
And, because of this, the “standard” kind of cubicle partitions are expensive, because they’re also expected to work to handle part of the wiring requirements for power delivery. If they were just plyboard, they’d be cheap; but they’re not just plyboard.
You're all missing the biggest expense: real estate.
The space required by that door could add 25-50% to your total space requirements compared to cubes of the same size.
And that's before we add human perception as an element... offices the size of a cube are a horrible experience. They need to be considerably larger to feel like the same amount of space.
I've only seen the full-height cubicle in American films, but most of the stuff -- desk, shelves and so on -- is still required in an individual office. They don't require a real door or doorframe, and electricity and network connections can be run fairly cheaply under the floor.
Ironically, cubicle furniture was first billed as cheaper than arranging/rearranging drywall. It's almost funny that drywall construction is cheaper than cube wall construction (again).
If you rearrange often cubicals are cheaper. However most places replace the cubes (gotta have the latest shade of neutral off white) when the do the every 5 year rearrange... Offices tend to feel more permanent and so are less often changed. Once again making them cheaper. (though they will repaint offices once in a while)
I understand the concept behind rearranging the people in offices from time to time as a sort of human resources "crop rotation" attempting to get coworkers that otherwise don't interact on projects to perhaps cross-pollinate ideas that can benefit the company (though arguably are there good scientific studies on how much that has actually worked?). But I've always been skeptical of rearranging office layouts themselves. It seems counter-productive, to me at least, because constant environment changes contributes to a low level unease and alert/anxiety/suspicion at the very least in low level tribal/social brain parts, if not bubbling up into very literal distrust in the stability of the company.
But I'm not a highly paid office furniture consultant, nor a sociologist/anthropologist, so what do I know.
The real problem is there are only so many things possible. You can do full open space, or private office (might not have a door). Someplace in between falls team pods. Each promotes a different culture (that is how you communicate) so you can't really swich unless you are willing to change culture. Thus rearrangement doesn't really make sense until the current setup is wore out.
I suspect that cubicles were more about social stratification than anything else. But cubicles were well out of fashion before I joined the work force, so that’s just speculation on my part.
The advantage of cubicles over offices is rearranging work groups on a semi-regular bases. You can create a new work group, assign a third of your employees to it, and then rearrange all of the cubes on the floor so that all of the work groups are together over a weekend.
Re-arranging cubicles at my office took a couple of people in the office a couple of hours to move a few cubicles around. Unplug the few cords going to the built-in power strips in the cubicles, unplug the cubicle switch, plug it all in at the new space. Cubicles snap apart and together without much effort.
Redoing walls requires paying architects to get plans, getting bids from contractors, getting approvals from building management and potentially opening our lease up to negotiations regarding tenant improvements, getting contractor's insurance vetted, getting walls demo'd, paying to get everything disposed of, paying for new materials and installation, repainting, getting electricians to redo electricity and lighting for the space, potentially doing new low voltage runs (don't want to run cat6 out the door) and getting proper permitting to do all of this.
I don't know how moving a cubicle gets to be more expensive when comparing how many more people are involved to rebuild and that one requires a couple of hours while the other takes days at best.
No attached cubicle furniture? No drops from the ceiling to install for network/power? No issues with tradesmen? No worries about injury or liability? Those cords- they just laying on the floor? That'd be a violation.
Sure you can horse some cubicles around in a tiny shop with no oversight. But to move a department on a floor is an extended effort either way - move out, teardown, rewiring, maintenance (cubicles wear out and parts are expensive), cleaning and reassembly including built-in furniture.
My point is simply, drywall is a tiny fraction of the cost of expensive portable reusable modular units. In an office movein I took part in, the drywall and doors took a week. Took longer to order, get delivery and drop power/network to the 4 cubicles in the back room later when we expanded there . And the cubicles cost as much for 4, as the entire buildout for the front 20 people.
The cubicles just branch off from a wall where they get their power and networking from. As long as one cubicle is close to another, all of them will have power and networking. All the parts of the cubicle are pretty light including the tabletops and cabinets so there wasn't much concern about injury and liability regarding handling those. Either way, furniture moving would be a concern with either move.
One way requires getting permits, bringing in tons of contractors, throws away a ton of old materials to be replaced with identical new materials, having insurance compared and validated, have new installations inspected and permitted by governments, and carries far more liability for the property management. One requires us to just unsnap some parts, carry over the light parts to another area, and snap it all together. Which seems like the obviously cheaper one?
Sure, I'll agree to some extent that upon an initial buildout the cost for individual offices versus high-end cubicle equipment may be a wash. However, the whole point of going with the cubicle equipment is that its then cheap to reconfigure. You don't need architects to draw plans to get certified by the city for how you snap together the cubicles. You do when you're making new offices.
Note: this is mostly about re-arranging in an already occupied space. Sure, if you're having to do a fresh build out where you're moving to things can definitely be up in the air. But I was just in an instance of re-arranging an existing space where we moved cubicles around and split offices with new walls/doors. Moving cubicles around was done in a couple of hours with $0 worth of new materials. Splitting the offices cost >$800/ea (not including employee productivity time towards managing this project) involving three different outside contractors, lease negotiations, permit requirements, and took a couple of weeks.
I knew a guy in college in the early '90s that had a summer job in the facilities department at State Farm's corporate headquarters. According to him, they would get work orders to upsize/downsize people's cubes overnight. He said that people would come in the next day either delighted or pissed. It sounds Orwellian enough to be true but I have no idea if it was.
Our teams are about the same size no matter what they are. You could have a standard “team area” template, say 8 offices and a collaboration area, repeated ad infinitum. In a re-org, just transplant teams to different team areas. The same layout still works.
I'm always amazed that in discussions about offices vs open floor plans there is no mention of sunlight. To me offices buildings are always associated with 24h fluorescent-only lights for all but the best offices (usually top managers/senior engineers), whereas most open offices have ample sunlight, regardless of whether you have a sit by the window or are working in the center.
Not to say that there aren't all sorts of disadvantages to open offices, but I still feel sunlight counts for a lot.
I would echo the sibling comment (save_ferris) that in many places open offices do not encourage sunlight - especially those places where the offices are on the outer perimeter (capturing the sunlight) and the interior is stuck with fluorescent lighting (a previous experience of mine).
To add to your sunlight comment, though, is I also rarely, if ever, see notes about ventilation. Converting an open-space office into a private-space office (or potentially even cubicles) is non-trivial as far as ventilation is concerned. Not that I think it is an excuse for an open office, but it isn't as simple as throwing up some temporary walls in an open space.
Do I believe it is worth it? yes. Would most places see the work required and want to deal with the hassle of coordinating everything with the building owner to get the work done? probably not.
Eh, I’ve only had solid sunlight in about 50% of my open office layouts. I agree that it’s super important, but open office != guaranteed sunlight in my experience.
Unless you have self washing surfaces, filtered air systems and a single office for each of the employees I don't see how this would help for something like the current virus.
They're all most likely going to eat in the same areas, use the same bathrooms, doors, elevators, meeting rooms, use public transports to come to the office, &c.
You know what's a good way to prevent disease spread ? Paid sick leaves
> Other research shows that one of the best ways to reduce transmission in the workplace is to provide paid sick leave that encourages ill employees to stay home.
Yes but that's not their concern. It never was. We can now clearly see what the threshold is for management making such decisions. Workers complaining of work conditions? Research showing decreased productivity? Nope. Not going to do anything until there's live video on the 5 o'clock news showing body bags being loaded onto refrigerator trucks.
The saying goes, "Safety regulations are written in blood". This is one of the many reasons unions are useful even if you make a great salary. It gives you someone on site whose job is to look out for you, and it gives you a lever with which to institute necessary workplace changes.
It's amazing that it takes a deadly global pandemic for companies to finally abandon this very poor organizational tactic, not years of reduced productivity, increased worker stress, and (in environments where it wouldn't endanger workers' careers) constant complaints.
It was never about productivity or the worker. It's a well studied thing that there's a steep drop in productivity when moving from closed-offices to open plans.
I think it's a foggy cloud of reasons this came to be such a fad, from cost savings in floorspace/etc., to managers wanting to micro-manage butts-in-chairs, to the cargo-cult-esque promotion of it, etc.
In America, color me "not surprised" that it takes something outstanding like COVID to move the needle in the corporate sector.
Open Office space never was smart except for saving rent. Open Office space causes more distractions lower productivity and less cooperation. Diseases spread more easily too.
The only good thing I can think of is startups where costs needs to be saved.
To be honest, I think the true innovation is WFH. Bypass all these things and make a full-mixed city where folks can work without commuting and walk to their diner spots and everything. It's what they made the future look like in sci-fi. I can't wait.
Combine that with my personally highest desired innovation: work times. In California, the most beautiful time of day is right now morning to noon, and afternoon to evening. I want to be out. Fortunately, I can be, but so many people are missing out on this.
With WFH will come a competitive advantage - the worktime shift. And we will live our best lives.
And this right here is why I've been working remotely with american companies while living in Asia. I can go, take advantage of the beautiful weather in the afternoon and hike or feel refreshed, then get to work until the middle of the night.
> Some companies have begun mentioning a return to one of history’s more derided office-design concepts: the cubicle. There is talk also of the cubicle’s see-through cousin, known as the sneeze guard.
So we will replace open office layouts with transparent single person cubicles.
We have sneezeguard cubicles where I work. So when I return to the office, I'll have three people within about 4ft of my face, breathing, sneezing, coughing in my direction. The cubicle walls aren't even the old school high ones, these are 60" high. Then I have three people actually in my cube with me. Oh, we're also in an enclosed "secure" NOC so we all rebreathe the same stale air. I'm thrilled to return to the office...
That would be a welcome improvement in my workspace. A glass cube would grant me a little extra space, a bit more peace and quiet, and protect me from all of my neighbours breathing on me constantly.
I much prefer having a private area to work efficiently without distraction (rather minimal distraction) vs a large shared desk where the weakest attention-span “link” at the table would take everyone off task frequently.
We have a pretty optimal layout, imho. We have several "pods" which are an open 30'x30'x14' room that opens to the main corridor, which get divided into up to 7 cubes via 7' dividers (very modern and colorful, not the vertical carpets of yore). The center usually has whiteboards and chairs for collabs.
So you get interaction with coworkers, but can bury yourself in work readily (also everyone has noise cancelling headphones).
Kinda miss it, it's way nicer than my home office.
There's definitely way less structure now and I am suffering for it.
That sounds relatively fantastic. I interviewed with a few larger companies many years ago that had a similar thing. Each "pod" (or scrum team, or what have you) had an office with a door that closed, semi-private cubes within, their own collaboration space, and autonomy over much of their environment.
Interestingly, all of these companies ran outmoded spec and dev waterfall processes. And every truly agile place I've worked at or experienced has been everyone in an open room on each other's nerves. Weird correlation!
I truly do not miss the HVAC at work, where the thermostat is controlled by a company in another city, and I have to layer up in winter clothes all summer, some of us wear coats and gloves at our desks in the summer, and then randomly the entire system dies, leaving us to suddenly roast in a building where none of the windows can be opened. Sometimes my supervisor has to leave her painfully frigidly cold office and go stand in the restroom (always far too warm) for a few minutes in order to thaw out.
And in the winter, 80F+ degrees, making sure to weaken the already weak systems people have in winter and ensuring that people get sick. The one job like that, I quit after two weeks, but not before getting the worst flu I've ever had as an adult. I'm sure this will work out wonderfully this winter with coronavirus.
Frankly, companies asking employees that can wfh to return before a vaccine or cure exists are nothing short of committing murder. I doubt anyone will stop them though. I've never had a job I was willing to die for and I'm certain I never will. Better fired on unemployment than dead.
Lunch rooms! Don't get me started. My son got exposed in the lunch room at work. Masks and gloves everywhere in the plant, except of course that doesn't work in the lunch room.
His co-worker he was closely confined with (small plant; small lunch room) has tested positive and is hospitalized. The plant was closed, and some massive sterilization procedure underway.
And of course my son the line Engineer was called in to help close the plant (stop all the machines since the operators were sent home; unload and purge the materials; pickle the storage and computer systems). So his exposure there was 100X everybody else's as he had to visit every machine and every place in the plant.
And that was probably it. The language from credible authorities is typically that surface transmission is much less of a factor than breathing in what someone else just breathed out. E.g., "Transmission of coronavirus occurs much more commonly through respiratory droplets than through fomites." (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-si...)
Sorry for the weasel words, but there's so much the science isn't clear on that they remain necessary.
Oh my the chills I have when I get into the office, I walk to work & sweat, so I have walk in a light t-shirt & wear a coat indoors. But then eventually the coat's circulation is bad & I'm sweating more
So glad to be working from home now, get my own private bathroom & can manage my heat dressed in a blanket
Open office plans are so disrespectful of employees. It was always a brazen move to save money on commercial real estate. Not being able to poop because your building is overcrowded was maddening to the point that I contemplated revolt.
Funny... for all the points against open office layouts that have been previously raised (and ignored), now it’s infectious disease that has finally struck a cord against the office paradigm.
I have seen movies from the 80's were each private office had a bathroom and often wondered if that was a real thing. Anyone who have worked a place with both a private office and bathroom?
Private bathrooms were rare, but individual offices very normal. I’d point to Mad Men as the model of the typical company office through the early eighties. (Note that there was still an open floor plan, the "secretarial pool," where they put most of the women)
By the end of the eighties, the set of _Office Space_ was the norm.
So I was last in the office in early March. First it was a week of recommended WFH followed by a predictable shift to mandatory WFH but I'd already decided that NYC was not the place where I wanted to be when this all played out so I exiled myself.
I honestly don't know what going back to the office looks like at this point, both in timing and the logistics. The fact of the matter is that we have open plan layouts with minimal space per employee (basically a desk plus chair) because of cost. An office per employee simply doesn't scale for the size of the big tech companies if they want to have offices in coastal urban areas.
I haven't run the numbers on this but I'd guess it averages out at about 60sq ft per employee in the desk area and probably twice that once you factor in all the meeting rooms. It may even be as high as 150sq ft.
As an example since there are public numbers on this, Google's building on 111 8th Ave is, I believe, 2.1 million square feet of rentable space divided over 16 floors. Higher floors have smaller footprints so for the lower floors that's probably around 160,000 sq ft. I don't know the number of employees per floor but I believe it's around 1500 give or take so this would fit the estimate of 120-150sq ft per employee.
Google bought that building for $1.9B. It's probably appreciated some since then but probably not hugely, being commercial. Let's say it's $3B. That's a value of $1400/sq ft. Assume an 8% gross yield then 140sq ft of space costs ~$2M and has an opportunity cost of almost $160,000.
Doubling that space gets real expensive. Even if you're prepared to pay it, having room for the ~8000 employees you have gets impractical. 111 8th Ave is already one of the largest buildings in NYC (by rentable square feet). Google have already overflown to Chelsea Market and 85 10th Ave and probably more by now (I left ~3 years ago).
Social distancing is going to be a thing for the foreseeable future. People have this weirdly optimistic view that we can just develop a vaccine or an effective treatment for this. There are many diseases that have killed millions and been around for decades that still have no vaccine (eg HIV, malaria, dengue fever).
In fact, no coronavirus to date has had a vaccine developed for it.
It's unclear what will happen with Covid-19. will it mutate and become something you seasonally just "get" like the flu? We have flu vaccines but they're partially effective and the virus mutates such that you need a different vaccine every year.
Generally speaking, viruses tend to get less deadly over time (eg Spanish flu evolved into H1N1 eventually) but it doesn't seem like Covid-19 is particularly deadly now. You might point to the number of deaths in each country but the number of infections in almost all cases is underreported. Some don't even realize they've had it.
Or will herd immunity kick in at some point?
But I look at all this and wonder if I'll get back into the office this year.
Even when I do, I just don't think more space or private offices are in my future. I also don't foresee a WFH revolution. So it's going to be interesting to see how this plays out.
I think google has one of the most dense layouts for professional employees of the big companies. Whenever I see reports about SF’s largest employers in the real estate trade press, they always back out a number for google by dividing their gross floor area by some kind of industry average space per employee, and they are always low by a large factor. I deduce from this that google packs employees in a lot tighter than the rest of the industry.
This belief was reinforced when Twitter was marketing a building they didn’t need any more. It was such and such space including so many workstations, and the ratio of desks to floor space was only half what I had expected based on my experience at google SF. So it seems that even failing businesses like Twitter give their engineers more space than google does.
I could believe it. Google in the Bay Area in particular had a lot of variance just based on if there was a space crunch or not. I know at times in the core Googleplex they had long periods where they had the smaller (4 foot?) desks although this was partly space crunch and partly PAs not wanting to move out into the boonies (like Charleston; this was even before Sunnyvale).
But it wouldn't surprise me. Scale is an issue. Even for as large as Twitter is, it's still a drop in the bucket compared to Google. And just like in computing, scale makes everything more difficult.
Like Google in NYC realistically over the next few years will require a total of ~10M square feet. I'm guessing they're 6-7M now. You just can't manufacture that kind of space in Manhattan. Even in South Bay it's already a sprawling mass over office parks, essentially. Applying the term "campus" is a stretch.
Even if you can get that much space, you have to consider efficiency. Like how far does each employee need to go internally to get to their meetings, to cafes, to the parking lot or subway or bus or whatever and so on.
Parking is a big waste of space in South Bay but (sadly) a necessary one. Even if you could solve that (eg by building over it and having underground parking) you're still essentially at the limit of what the I-101 ramps can support traffic-wise. I know Google is expanding into San Jose at this point. It's crazy.
> The fact of the matter is that we have open plan layouts with minimal space per employee (basically a desk plus chair) because of cost.
This claim is repeated in every HN post about open floor plans. I'm sure there are some cases where it's true (Manhattan!), but in every case where a manager forced me into an open plan layout, I pushed back, and they admitted it wasn't really about the money.
Open plan offices started for cost reasons in areas with very high land cost, largely NYC and SF. However it was never stated as a cost cutting measure, instead it was dressed up as a “collaboration” tool. Of course since SF and NYC sets trends, tons of other companies have been cargo culting this layout, since that’s how google does it.
Also, most managers don’t actually know what their facility space costs. I don’t.
For startups and other companies that might bring sales/investment prospects through it's the "developer zoo" effect and fear that looking different will turn people off. Add in marketing photos and videos using these as backdrops, now.
There also seems to be a huge resistance to giving software developers professional-tier perks or social standing, as with lawyers, doctors, and (to some extent—at least they want/think it to be so, and are insecure over the fact that it's really not) managers, even if their pay (in a handful of major markets) rivals or exceeds those.
> There are many diseases that have killed millions and been around for decades that still have no vaccine (eg HIV, malaria, dengue fever).
Dengue does have a vaccine, but like many vaccines, it isn't 100% effective. While it does reduce the chances of being infected, it also increases the likeyhood of a severe infection (similar to the risk increase from a previous dengue infection) and thus is only recommended for those who have already been been infected once.
Malaria also has a vaccine. It also is not 100% effective but it does reduce infection rates.
In fact, many vaccines are like this and confere some level of resistance rather than full immunity. This further illustrates your point that vaccines and immunity have a wider range of forms than commonly understood and we don't really know what form of vaccine is possible for Covid-19.
Edit: Another example is the typhoid vaccine I got last fall, it is only 50-80% effective.
>Dengue does have a vaccine, but like many vaccines, it isn't 100% effective. While it does reduce the chances of being infected, it also increases the likeyhood of a severe infection (similar to the risk increase from a previous dengue infection) and thus is only recommended for those who have already been been infected once.
Yeah, it's quite new. One of the issues with Dengue is that there are multiple types of the virus. If you get Dengue once, you're mostly protected against getting the same type again. But if you get one of the other types, you're at significant risk of severe complications (e.g. hemorrhagic fever). (ADDED: Hence, why you get the vaccine if you have had Dengue before.)
> In fact, no coronavirus to date has had a vaccine developed for it.
A small nitpick that doesn't take away from your overall point, just mentioning it because it's interesting: we've developed two widely-used coronavirus vaccines to date.
They aren't used in humans, though. They target feline and bovine coronaviruses.
Covid-19 may be only 10-50x more deadly than the flu. But long term damage to lungs and financial toll of hospitalization during record unemployment are nothing to sneeze at
I work at a FAANG company which was aggressively opposed to WFH before the covid-19 crisis. As matter of fact, I recently changed teams within said company and during the informational interview I asked about the team's policy on WFH - the answer was that "our team has a strong 'collaborative in-the-office' culture, so we don't encourage WFH"
I am not kidding, we're talking about one of the most advanced companies in history and they required domestic travel+hotel for trivial half-day, mostly passive interview training that could have been done easily over teleconference, that's how much this company values physical presence.
Fast forward a few months, everybody is WFH in the company and the sky hasn't fallen. Actually, my productivity vastly increased because I'm fortunate to have a solid WFH environment at home (despite kids/wife around).
While I'm not proposing mandatory WFH for tech companies, neither saying that it works for everybody, I believe our top companies could lead and finally allow people who demonstrate that they can be productive at home to just stay home - permanently.