Wow! And I thought cubicles were depressing!
I have an office now, but the last job where I had a cubicle also had a great deal of talk about best practices.
And they elected a Republican governor who drove an ice-ax into the office where I used to work.
Everything old is new again... A few companies (including IIRC Sun) tried this in the late '90s. It was a dumb idea then, it's a dumb idea now. (Sometimes I feel like one of the few people in the industry with a functioning memory.)
He didn't even replace it with an office that worked on semi-adequate practices. Just shut the whole fucker down.
5: I remember Dilbert strips about it back when I read the newspaper on paper.
The few places I know where this "works" essentially moved to home offices, with the office/docking stations being the exception when someone has to come into the office. Also relatively small offices.
Yes, generally sales/sales support/tech support etc.
After a few months, everyone will have the same microbiome as that smelly guy in Contracts and Purchasing.
My company has been this way for 2+ years. It is, in fact, the worst. Not only do you have to haul your papers around like a nomad, you are next to new people every day, so you don't talk to your coworkers and can't find anyone. It's super depressing.
2: Getting my own office is the closest thing I have to an ambition in my work-life. But I suppose if I ever did get one, I would goof off even more and get fired. I'm good at talking myself out of ambitions.
You can goof off just fine in a cubicle if you applied yourself.
12 makes me realize it's worse than I was picturing. What about your filing cabinet, for god's sake? What about a certain chair if you have back problems?
My chair smells like my butt. I don't want to sit on a chair that doesn't smell like my butt.
You can goof off just fine in a cubicle if you applied yourself.
Of course, and obviously I do. But, the possibility that somebody could sneak up behind me any moment means I need to always keep at least one work-related window open, and it also forces me to remain somewhat alert.
Sounds like a 'solution' dreamed up by people who never actually did the job. I keep all kinds of useful lists, phone extensions, etc, pinned up above my desk, not to mention stuff in the drawers like a phone charger, headphones, mints, tote bags for when I have to carry flyers to outreach events, a spare folding umbrella, the office supplies I buy myself....what, do they think you're going to cart this stuff around from cube to cube? Or they don't think you should have it?
(I'm ignoring the 8-foot filing cabinet with my reports and notes, because I'm an anomaly even in my own office with that.)
Plus - no way for your colleagues to leave a Post-It on your monitor if they're trying to reach you, or stop by your desk to see if you are there.
It's a way to eviscerate teamwork. And I haven't yet seen a job that didn't require some degree of teamwork, if only around common sharing of space.
the possibility that somebody could sneak up behind me any moment
I don't know what I would do without an office where I can sit facing the door. How would I keep people from knowing when I'm reading Unfogged?
(At the moment, I'm doing it by sitting in the back row of a conference room.)
The other upside to sitting in the back is you can see what the other people at the conference are reading on their laptops. Back in the glory days of our math blog, it was fun to spot people reading it during talks.
not to mention stuff in the drawers like a phone charger, headphones, mints, tote bags, grappling hooks, shuriken, blowguns, daggers.... (You are a ninja librarian, right?)
Plus - no way for your colleagues to ... stop by your desk to see if you are there.
I'm suddenly starting to like this idea.
I need my whiteboards. You can't even have whiteboards with a cubicle because people will steal the markers.
This has been widespread in the UK forever. Everybody hates it, but that cuts no ice with the bean counters. It's exactly as Becks describes, sometimes with the added bonus that they estimate the number of work stations needed over the summer when the bean counters have nothing else to do, but also when the maximum number of people are on holiday. So they underestimate to an insane degree. People are left standing around.
At least in London one can see the argument that space is so insanely expensive that insane behavior might be justified. Texas, not so much.
22: ssshhhh! It's better if people just assume all my stuff is innocuous junk they wouldn't want, like gold-colored paper clips and Martha Stewart Post-Its.
We had that, because we were supposed to be doing outreach. I got my own seat, because I had tendonitis and needed an ergonomic chair and footstool so that I could reach the desk height. (filing cabinets with doors on top).
My BF used to have a double cubicle spot, then a cubicle and now he has a touch station. He, for complicated reasons, has almost a whole lab to himself, so he set up a desk set up in there and rarely goes to his touch station.
At least in London one can see the argument that space is so insanely expensive that insane behavior might be justified.
But in London they make these decisions knowing that there's perfectly good office space sitting empty 150 miles away. In Texas I'm guessing not so much.
Jammies also reports an insane amount of germophobia at tech companies - apparently outside the bathrooms, balled up paper towels accumulate on the floor because people are unwilling to touch the door handles. They added extra trash cans to address the problem, but they put them inside the bathroom, next to the door, and the people must throw the paper towels out in the hallway.
Anyway, apparently one of the biggest grievances at this point is all the germ-swapping of the keyboards at the docking stations.
(This isn't happening at Jammies' company, but at Intel.)
But in London they make these decisions knowing that there's perfectly good office space sitting empty 150 miles away. In Texas I'm guessing not so much.
I'm not sure how to parse this. You don't think there's empty space 150 miles away?
I think the claim is that in the empty space 150 miles away no one has built an office building for them to move to?
If you used the towel to open the door, shouldn't you be able to hold it open with your foot or something and then throw the towel away even though the trash can is inside the bathroom.
No assigned seats, although people had a spot that they liked. Everyone had a filing cabinet.
Now I have a desk, but I am not supposed to sit at it.
God, I hope I get that job I interviewed for.
Empty space, yes, but not empty office space. Just desert.
My company is also planning to do this, coupled with encouraging people to work from home.
You don't think there's empty space 150 miles away?
Is there? I was basing it on the observation that a lot of Americans I've met seem to feel that 150 miles is just around the corner.
I think roaches are not your only misconception about Texas.
Even though I'm not a real germophobe I've perfected the art of opening the bathroom door with a paper towel, turning and throwing the balled up towel into the trash, and exiting before the door swings shut. It's very elegant and graceful.
It's a big state with lots and lots of wide open spaces.
Right, so all the more reason for them to behave insanely in London: there's no space in London, and Englishmen don't travel. There's no justification for this in Texas, where land is cheap and people will drive two hours for a good steak.
It's a big state with lots and lots of wide open spaces.
Yes, I know. My standard misconception of the place is of a state the size of western Europe with three major cities and a howling desert. But my point was that from London you could relocate to e.g. Leicester, which has excellent communications with London, and which has already got thousands of square feet of offices sitting empty where you could give everybody two desks of their own and still pay a third of the rent you pay for a glorified cupboard in London. But people won't do it because they're obsessed with the address.
I've perfected the art of opening the bathroom door with a paper towel, turning and throwing the balled up towel into the trash, and exiting before the door swings shut. It's very elegant and graceful.
And not difficult. The behavior described in 30 just sounds passive aggressive.
My standard misconception of the place is of a state the size of western Europe with three major cities and a howling desert.
Yep, this is about right. Four major cities.
But the cities are expansively suburban, so there's office space in lots of directions.
Four major cities.
What's the fourth one?
But my point was that from London you could relocate to e.g. Leicester, which has excellent communications with London, and which has already got thousands of square feet of offices sitting empty where you could give everybody two desks of their own and still pay a third of the rent you pay for a glorified cupboard in London.
This is basically the logic behind urban sprawl, here. You don't need to go all the way to Luling (real town nearby, not just the twangiest name for a town ever conceived, but obv I chose it for that reason), just to the outskirts of Austin, and then you can pretend you've got the Austin lifestyle with your own hourlong commute without leaving development.
Pronounced like "lulling," or loo-ling?
I mean, not when I say it. But when some do.
And...wait for it...Luling is home of the Watermelon Thump.
I voted for orange-meated watermellon, out of a mixture of curiosity and pity.
A mere 45 miles from Austin! You too can go back in time fifty years.
The thing about London is everyone is there. I know several companies that have been forced to move to London Towne because they just can't find good people out in the provinces once they want to expand.
Our plan is to skip all that bullshit and go 100% remote for software development, should we ever be in the position to do so. The current company has about 260 miles between us and it's working fine.
I was recently going down the wiki rabbit hole of minor slavic languages, and it turns out that 50 miles from Austin there's a town called Serbin (which also probably gets a great pronunciation) which was Sorbian speaking. (No, not Serbian, Sorbian. It's a western Slavic language spoken in parts of eastern Germany.)
I briefly worked in a 24-hour tech support center that worked this way. Face-to-face interaction was limited. All intra-company communication took place through a chat client.
57. Good plan. Unless you're actually making physical stuff everybody should do this.
When I lived in Florida, the rednecks didn't seem to have any cultural memory of a homeland in Europe, so it was unexpected to see so much Czech and German stuff going on in Texas.
I like sitting down with my colleagues and talking about stuff, which is better than conference calling or e-conferencing or whatever. But the honest truth is that for the non-'people' bits of my job, I was much more productive from home. Our place lets people work from home occasionally, and I used to usually do 1 day a week at home, sometimes 2, and 3 or 4 in the office.
These days I need to go into the office to get anything done, as having a spouse at home [with baby] who doesn't really understand working from home isn't compatible with getting any shit done.
The hot desking arrangement described would certainly lead me to make strenuous efforts to leave a company, though.
I thought the rednecks in Florida had cultural memories of a homeland in Cuba.
If you have trouble understanding Texas, you'll find Florida even more complicated.
The upshot of looking into all those slavic languages was that RWM's late grandmother almost certainly spoke Rusyn, not Russian.
Somebody put a picture and the address of his childhood home on the wikipedia page. I have it on good information that if you go there, you'll get threatened by a pissed-off old lady who is probably Italian.
The thing about London is everyone is there. I know several companies that have been forced to move to London Towne because they just can't find good people out in the provinces once they want to expand.
These problems really have a lot to do with job security (the lack of). You could encourage people to move to Leicester for this job. They would probably do it. Or even stay there instead of moving to London. But what if they lose the job? They have to move to London to get another one.
I thought the rednecks in Florida had cultural memories of a homeland in Cuba.
No no, the Cubans are south of Disneyworld. The rednecks are north of Disneyworld.
The thing about Florida: The farther north you go, the deeper into The South you are.
Also, if the ice age is coming and the sun is zooming in, apparently London is the place to be.
I don't want to sit on a chair that doesn't smell like my butt.
Moby, you ... are my Oprah.
The cockroaches, on the other hand, are everywhere.
58: Sorbian has come up a couple of times here. I originally heard of it as Wendish, but per a comment in one of those threads, that seems to be deprecated as something of a slur.
72: Climate change threatens the Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic Drift; London may not remain the drizzly, overcoated Doctor Who set of awkward teenage fantasies, but become something more like the backdrop of all those Scandinavian murder-in-the-social-welfare-state novels.
Also, if the ice age is coming and the sun is zooming in, apparently London is the place to be.
When it re-emerges from the depths to which global warming will have consigned it.
71: And the coasts are full of elderly Yankees and Canadians of the sort that managed to grow to old age without forming any greater desire than to be warm in February.
Except the Gulf Coast is redneckier, I hear.
75. Why is "Wendish" deprecated? The Wends were known under that name to Tacitus (the Roman historian, not the idiot blogger). They're the oldest known Slavic ethnicity.
After the Wendigo, only the Wendish remain.
Wittgenstein wends his woeful windy way towards Vienna.
71.2, 78: That is one thing that the dialect maps tend to show quite well. And let me tell you about the West Palm/Boynton/Delray Beach deli scene--4:30 to 5:30 PM peak hour, your aged relative's shamefully obnoxious behavior only mitigated by it being replicated by half of the other patrons, which certainly does not improve the overall experience, but does make it less personally embarrassing.
80: Not sure. But via Sir Kraab: While the old German-derived labels "Wend" and "Wendish," which once denoted "Slav(ic)" generally . . . they are today mostly unusual in place of "Sorb" and "Sorbian" with reference to Sorbian communities in Germany, because many Sorbs consider such words to be offensive. (A search reveals that is from the Wikipedia entry.)
Its totally unclear that the Tacitus "Wends" we're the same as the Sorbs, or indeed that they were Slavs at all, or even that people who were Slavs who also got the term Wendish were also Sorbs.
You could try singing a fuck chorale, to lift the spirits.
If you don't arrange your office seating like this, you run the risk of having employees develop a persistent identity over time instead of being containerized interchangeable labor-hours available for extraction from a number of different standardized exchange ports.
You could try singing a fuck chorale, to lift the spirits.
Steeple full of swallows, but they can never ring the bell.
Stable seating makes it possible to discuss Sorb studies at the office.
but they can never ring the bell
I've been reading The Nine Tailors and it is filling me with yearnings to go to England and ring church bells or murder some guy.
If you have trouble understanding Texas, you'll find Florida even more complicated.
I've seen Sunshine State and Lone Star, so I'm pretty much an expert on those two states.
On the other hand The Return of the Secaucus Seven tells you almost nothing useful about New Jersey.
I really think that Waits' "Train Song" is a magnificent tune, and that that line in particular is great.
fuck chorale
Ein' feste Burg ist unser Nosflow,
So reizend und geschickt;
Von Schöneberg bis zu Pankow
Mit Ernst hat er gefickt.
your aged relative's shamefully obnoxious behavior
I had an aged relative carry mix up a drink and take it in the car to a restaurant. It was a very short drive and she still hadn't finished it when we walked into the place. The waiter told her she couldn't bring in outside liquor, so she downed it in one. She's kind of my model for aging.
84: via Sir Kraab
That was most definitely not via me. I've never heard of Wendish or Sorbian. (Unless you have some sort of documentary evidence, in which case my memory is even more terrible than I realized.)
95 has words I don't understand. And I can't make up plausible misreadings. (Today I was puzzling over "Bitte freihalten", which I should have been able to figure out, but I kept getting stuck thinking "Please stop freely".)
99: Comment 65 in the linked thread.
"Urteilskraft" had too many syllables.
Though with patience he stands waiting, with exactness fucks he all.
See, now there's one to misread. Clearly that's "Ur-" as in "the earliest" just like in English, "teil" as in "part", and "kraft" as in making, so it has something to do with particle colliders, making the fundamental building blocks.
The CEO of Hewlett-Packard just mandated that there would be no more working from home. H-P has been circling the bowl for a long time, and I understand the compulsion to try to get people working together better, but I think policies like this frequently have the effect of driving off the good people in your organization.
My fuck morale is low :(
That's not what you said last month.
"Wend" was just a Germanic word meaning "people to the east" which was also and later mildly derogatory. There's no evidence that Tacitus' "Wends" (Veneti) were even a proto-Slavic speaking people at all, much less that they have anything to do with the modern Sorbs.
105: I wouldn't swear that's not in Gravity's Rainbow somewhere.
"kraft" as in making? Essear, even you know that's wrong.
Let's see if we can devise a bullshit etymology along similar lines that nevertheless points to the correct meaning. Now, we know from Kraftwerk that "kraft" means "power", so it's got something to do with power. Let's say it's a power, in the sense of a capacity to do something. Again, "teil" is "part" and "ur" is "original" or "primeval".
What is this power that relates to primeval parts, then? Well, in any task, whether one of creation or appreciation, being able to take in and discriminate the essential from the nonessential, to notice where the dividing lines between the components are (or should be), rather than agglomerating unrelated things together, is of vital importance; from there one can ascend to the relations among the parts (or starting from an appreciation of the whole, descend into the natures of the individual parts). That, I think, is a good candidate for this power, which we shall call "discernment" or "judgment".
102: Damn. No one should ever call on me to be a witness on anything ever.
Essear, even you know that's wrong.
At least I didn't go with "kraft" as in "mac & cheese".
Apparently, Nosflow's bullshit is plausible enough bullshit to have taken in Hölderlin and Hegel as well. Suckers.
As I was writing I started to take myself in. This is one of the essential characteristics of bullshitting.
1107: Try to keep up, Nick.
Thanks for the reminder, Nick.
Oh, sorry, seriously.
I have been a little spotty in keeping up, the last couple of weeks, but I hadn't noticed any announcement. But now I feel like a cad.
That would remove the last barrier to the NSA monitoring your pee.
NSA pee-monitoring sounds like something that's probably already on Craigslist.
Here is an article of the virtual office being a complete failure in the mid nineties:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.02/chiat_pr.html
Dammit, I am editing a report that was prepared for our office by a consultant. There are little plagiarism bombs all over this thing.
Seriously! Plagiarizing motherfucker is cribbing Wikipedia! He stole the first paragraph of this article on the Internet.. Like anyone who is reading a reasonably technical report needs to read the Wikipedia definition of the Internet!
I understand the need for filler, but this is insulting.
Ah, never mind, its not plagiarism. I just found his footnote:
"5 More information is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet"
125/126: Clearly, he wrote that part of the Wikipedia article, so it's not plagiarism. More seriously, I read a story recently where something like that that actually happened: guy writes paper for a class, notices in the process that the Wikipedia article for the topic could be improved, does so, gets accused of plagiarism by the teacher, and defends himself by pointing out the timestamp and user name of the Wikipedia edits.
As for the OP, my office is in a similar situation. About six weeks ago (wow, that long already?) my office moved to a new building.
In the old place, the department (about 50 or so people) was in four or so different rooms, each with about a dozen cubicles. The room I was in had a fairly open floor plan, but everyone around me could work together and get along fine, so that wasn't a problem. People in other rooms with less open floor plans had it even better, with a little privacy. In the new place, there's just one large room with an open floor plan. Except for three or four supervisors with offices on either side, everyone's in the same space. Worse, the cubicle walls are two feet lower. When you are standing up, whether walking to the kitchen or to a meeting or chatting with someone, you can see everyone else who is standing up, and there's even less noise reduction between cubes than there used to be.
That sounds kind of like the "best practices" horribleness the OP is talking about, but I've actually heard people saying like it more, because it's now easier to find people and we have more natural light.
I think this attitude is a mix of three things: sour grapes, an honest assessment of how bad the old place was, and keeping the problems with the next place in perspective, because there really are several much worse problems here.
125: Stolen phrases make weak cases?
Funny thing is, at work we have the same practise and turns out the only people who have to scrounge for a space every day are those who start late -- everybody else claims their own consistent spot.
It is very much a fad and a not very productive one, as most people hate it.
Also, ironically, I'm currently working as part of a scrum team, which does need to have its members kept close together, so the floor we're on is off limits to anybody else anyway.
Plagiarizing motherfucker is also deeply dedicated to the use of the passive voice. That is something that needs to be stopped.
The passive voice is something to which plagiarizing motherfucker is deeply dedicated.
129 is true about hot desking in general I believe. But it does penalise people who have responsibilities out of work- carers, etc., who can't get in early because they have to do other stuff.
Mrs y has a permanent desk, because she can play the "keyboard adaptation" card, having RSI. If she hot desked she'd have to get a BOFH to reconfigure her docking station every day (don't ask).