Our Open-Plan Office Failed, So We’re Moving to a Towering Panopticon | Hacker News Reader

Our Open-Plan Office Failed, So We’re Moving to a Towering Panopticon

mcsweeneys.net

79 pointssmacktoward27 comments

There are probably jobs where there's someone watching a split-screen display showing the webcam images of all their subordinates.

(IoT idea: Desktop USB activated food reward dispenser. Boss-controlled.)

(Just checked. It's available. Pavlov Treat Dispenser $69.95 [1])

[1] http://pavlovdogmonitor.com/treat-dispenser/pavlov-treat-dis...)

You could mandate Pavloks be worn at work to receive compensation. Then just hook them up to a punishment API!

(groan)

Why give out expensive and forgettable treats, when you could use the much more persistent memory of a painful shock, using the sense of pain that comes built-into the employee?

There are probably jobs where there's someone watching a split-screen display showing the webcam images of all their subordinates.

A whole lot of daycares do this. A proper security system will keep the footage for a month.

At least the treat dispenser is advertised for use with the dog, but I bet if someone handed you this document cold with actual letterhead, it might take a bit of reading to realize the parody.

If someone handed you the device, you'd think it was for humans. It looks more like a desktop device than a dog feeder.

Maybe it was originally designed for the education market.

Probably works best when combined with other pavlovian employee management tools:

https://goo.gl/f9iNVN

And of course, there may be complaints. Luckily that too can be solved by management innovations !

https://goo.gl/wrKDke

Every accepted pull request gets you a chocolate... hooked up to Github webhooks.

You know what is worse then the open office plan?

The fact that large numbers of people loathe it and yet do nothing about it except moan on the internet.

People don't organize themselves and their coworkers to even ask for better things.

Open office is bad for general productivity of all, but organizing against it is bad specifically for your own career and salary. Good negotiators tend to go for their own salaries, interesting projects, better positions etc etc etc while pushing against open office (or other popular corporate must have) makes their position for the above weaker. Anonymous venting is safer and feels good.

Now you know.

"Good negotiators tend to go for their own salaries, interesting projects" is a general rule in life too right?

I can work in an open office plan when i set my own hours and work remotely or in a private space (i'll be using this space for 4 hours every day seems to work for me)

As long as you establish this upfront and it is written down into your contract.

You ever try organizing a bunch of 20-somethings who make $90,000 per year and buy food from robot bodegas? You'd have better luck getting RMS to use Windows.

This one would be pretty vile, but I bet we have folks who seen just as bad.

I once worked at a place that once powered their campus by an oil burning generator. They stored the oil in a large underground bunker. The bunker was a concrete affair. Eventually the oil plant was decommissioned and the bunker was cleaned up.

Some [censored] person decided they needed more office space and this bunker would be great. They completed the tunnel from a nearby building (they had a large underground) and proceeded to build a false floor and put in a box for offices. Now, concrete will "bleed" oil for a while even if sealed, so the solution to that was install fans that would push fresh air between the office area wall and the concrete wall. Inside their new space, they put a cube farm. Sadly, cellphones and radios didn't work in the new space as it was underground with a nice reinforced (rebar) concrete roof. Having a constant wind noise in a cube underground is a bit surreal.

Honestly, I think I'd prefer the physical structure of a Panopticon to the "Warehouse" style open offices that exist today (it would certainly be quieter).

Some of these were actually built - here's a neat overview of some in Cuba - http://weburbanist.com/2014/05/15/real-life-panopticons-dese...

That is what I was thinking. The quietness and difficulty of distraction alone would be a monumental improvement. Overall, of course, I think it is a recipe for disaster, but simply going down a checklist of various factors, at least the panopticon model would avoid many of the situations open floor plan offices promote that are a cancer to any business where mental work is important. Our existing office plans were optimized for repetitive clerical work and manufacturing-driven work. That mental work requires a different office environment really shouldn't surprise anyone, and since there are 1000+ studies now showing how badly open floor plans destroy productivity, it's becoming a real test of how much do companies value the superstitions of the managers over actual profit.

As the open-floor plan is already basically a Panopticon - with the director in his office with a glass wall through which he directly overlooks us in the open-floor area, and the manager just at the strategic table (his back to the window, face overlooking our team) adding any "cell" walls would be a vast improvement (which also would result in improvement for lighting (limiting direct Sun hitting eyes/monitor), AC and ventilation (better turbulence/mixing before cold/fresh air just rivers away like it does in the open-floor) and thus less virus spreading effects, etc...) The new Apple "spaceship" building would have "pods" so depending on how field of view is organized there it may be kind of Panopticon.

Banks used to do that explicitly. The managers sat on a raised platform, in the open, overlooking the tellers and banking floor. Some bank branches still have a raised platform.

It should be noted these panopticons were built by Machado, the dictator who Castro rebelled against.

Weirdly it feels like it would be more embarrassing sitting in the tower rather than one of the cells.

The person in the tower can only look at a few cells at a time but hundreds of people in the cells will be staring at the tower all the time.

>The person in the tower can only look at a few cells at a time but hundreds of people in the cells will be staring at the tower all the time.

Naah, it was taken care of, of course in the new project, and it's not a tower anymore, it's the Nest:

>Will I be able to see you in Nest, watching me work? No. Nest will be coated in one-way mirrored glass. And we are not “watching you,” we are compassionately evaluating your flow state. Mr. Bentham was very clear that, for objectivity, team members shouldn’t know when they are being evaluated by “the all-seeing, hundred-eyed giant.”

> Will I be able to see you in Nest, watching me work? > No. Nest will be coated in one-way mirrored glass.

With polarised filters you can see through such glasses. How do you make it polarfilter-proof?

Bentham didn't want the people in the outside structure to ever know whether they were being observed or not at any particular time, this was a key part of the way it was supposed to work, so the people in the tower cannot be seen by the people in the cells.

Probably would actually be marginally less destructive to productivity than open floor plan offices. But still a childish fit to throw just to avoid saving mountains of money by cancelling the office lease and having everyone work from home.

What's a good way to make an open office more tolerable? My lab is a large rectangular room filled with desks and computers. I don't really have enough space to make cubicles, and I can't get more space. I'd love to improve the work space for my researchers.

Right now my lab is basically 3 rows of desks in an open office plan, with probably 6 people there on average, but closer to 10 during summers.

Poor Daniel Finch.

>So Synergon is really better than the current open-plan office?

Sadly, it really is.

Thanks for posting this! What a great and fun read!

Our Incredibly Self-Regarding Smugness Is Also Available In Dead Tree Format In A Way That Looks Like An Inheritance Being Burned.

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