Employees are expected to work 2 days a week out of the office, and will swap the desk with another employee. They will not sit at the same desk at the same time.
Doing anything less is wasteful, and if Google was doing this before it was robbing investors.
Overton window keeps moving in the direction of fuck the employees to benefit the shareholders I guess. Having a personalized space used to not be considered a perk but table stacks for working at a company not too long ago. I get that the employees aren’t in office all week but that’s kinda on google for not having enough desks given that they mandated a return to office.
1.) Bosses loved the feeling of superiority they had by having their own office but everyone else is sitting out in the open where they can easily see them all and bother them at a moment's notice.
2.) Fresh out of college grads would see them and get this feeling of a cool, buzzing, hypersocial hive that made them feel all good inside.
Companies: please come back to the office
Employees: why? Why have them at all? I don't have an "office" I have a small section of table. At home I have an office.
Companies: we invested money in these work spaces and want them to be used
Employees: you mean the shitty open space you moved to in order to save money rather than real "offices"? the ones that make us provably/demonstrably less productive than being at our home offices? If its about money, get rid of them entirely.
Companies: Um, yes. It helps build interaction and community
Employees: No, being shoved together like cattle breeds resentment and irritation and distraction and a feeling of no privacy or ability to think.
Companies: Just come back to the office. It's about buy-in
Employees: You mean the buy-in you refuse to provide for reasonable work spaces?
Similar to how professors at university usually have such an office.
With how much remote work has taken off and how much companies want to bring at least some people, this is certainly a perk that I would consider.
5 days a week, yes, everyone gets their own desk. You don't want them having their productivity hurt by being crammed in like sardines. But in this case, let's be real. Nobody but the most OCD germophobe is going to have lower productivity because they are sitting in a desk that someone else was in a day before.
>Nobody but the most OCD germophobe is going to have lower productivity because they are sitting in a desk that someone else was in a day before.
I wouldn't expect germaphobia to be the issue, it's the constant change that prevents employees from getting into a routine. We all already know that software engineers need to get into the zone to be productive, which takes time and becoming comfortable with what they are working on. How easy is that going to be when you have to adapt to a new environment everytime you go to work and reset up your workstation in the manner that works for the engineer?
The ADA legally mandates that accommodations be made for people that need them and if you're not in that category you're being ridiculous and if you are this doesn't even apply to you.
You are being ableist right now.
Actually I'm going to lay into you for this. Do you have any fucking idea what its like to not be able to get an erection? Not to feel your legs, shoulders, or hips for days? To not be able to tell when you have to poop? And all it takes is a fucking $200 chair that they leave the fuck alone to be just fine? I don't need the goddamn ada. All I need is a little trial and error to get my spine aligned right so I can sit for 8 hours without "SUPRISE you cant feel your DICK" and then to have that chair left the fuck alone.
Dude you will be so fucked when you hit 60. You have no idea how much you will hate the world for the lack of consideration it shows you.
maybe, at the end of the day, the cleaning crew does a deep clean of the surfaces etc..
I'm quite used to spending part of my paycheck on things like renting my own toilet, my own bathroom, kitchen with my own coffee maker and while it is used for a much larger part of the day my bedroom is only used < 1/3 of the day.
I have no idea why we are doing this!
> Would you pay to rent a car for 5 days if you were only going to drive it for 2 days? You wouldn't, because you care about your own money.
No man! People actually BUY cars so that they can keep them all to themselves!
It gets more absurd I assure you. The justification for most of them is to drive to work!
I think investors know we are doing this with their money?
I’m a cofounder at my current startup so I guess I think differently about a business paying for things that are needlessly idle for no reason, but you do you. We don’t think paying for office space makes sense at all and don’t. But if we did, no way are we flushing cash down the toilet for overly indulged devs when that cash can go to raises and bonuses for top performers (morale). And if a top performer wants a dedicated, non shared desk, well ok. We will offer them a choice between a salary boost or the desk.
You walk it back slightly by saying that you offer the choice between the cost savings or the desk to the worker, but somehow I doubt that the worker's are getting the whole cost savings or that you wouldn't start bucketing them as no longer a top performer for making what you view as a sub optimal choice.
Everything is about work. We allow people to have a home and a car... wait for it... so that they can work! If salaries are to small to survive people stop working, if they are to big they also stop working. We've tailored the salary to squeeze out maximum productivity. Where homes and/or food are cheap employees are also cheap and visa versa.
This is no accident!
I applaud that you are not renting office space, your programmers already have a desk and a computer and their salary is such that they can and will replace it. You are going to pay for that. You have to or they will go work some place else where the salaries are more calibrated.
If you will ever do offices you will need a good excuse for it. What that might be we don't know but you will need something in return for sacrificing productivity. As everything is about work that what the proverbial top performer wants is probably related to work too! If they are more productive if you give them their own office you would have to figure out if it is worth it.
It would have to be some office if they are to feel at home there. Or actually, if they are to be more comfortable than at home.
The whole premise is absurd, the product they make (if not interrupted) is 1's and 0's it can easily be shipped all over the world. 2 desks will make it slower and needlessly complex.
Maybe the migrants are right and we are wrong. Maybe the show should be about living not about working. One time a coworker who barely speaks the language was asked if he could do a 7 day work week again. He reluctantly agreed and asked "but when do I live?"
Yeah, the old ways deserve every bit of mockery. The revolution has to happen now or it wont happen at all.
I get the value of quiet time, I just don't feel like it's lost. Still plenty of places to hide. Maybe I'm an outlier.
hmm... disagree. strongly. have you seen the quality of some publications? surely the line between garbage and not-garbage is lower than this.
unless you are someone who considers something extremely political to be the only good publication or something; I hope not
I used to like arstechnica but it's degraded into what I am complaining about. The title of the article implies that people are crammed in desks next to each other by being purposefully vague.
maybe the headline put a different picture in your mind than what the article said, but the headline seems ok to me.
if you wrote the headline for that article, what would it say?
100% this.
I think they were good about 10 years ago. Now they are just garbage
The problem is that the clickbaity stuff becomes viral.
Which is why the clickbaity stuff exists.
The real issue is that readers like you and me are garbage and reward publications for the garbage they write. The good stuff won’t even get a fraction of the views.
This article sums it up:
https://medium.com/@pravse/the-maze-is-in-the-mouse-980c57cf...
Startups that don’t suck. But if you want a big, safe company…… hmmm, maybe MSFT, Salesforce, Netflix…. Honestly I hate big companies so wish I could recommend better.