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Better this than an open plan office.
I loved when I worked in an open-plan office! Of course though the people around me hated it as I was a bit of a distraction.
After I moved to 100% HO I now realize that some CEOs main task is to make peoples lifes more and more miserable.
Office panopticon.
∞ly better
Yeah I was going to say the same. This is actually decent. My old office before they renovated to open plan looked a lot like this. I think I had that chair! And that ceiling! Hey, wait a minute! This IS my old office!!
Well turn one of those monitors to portrait and that could actually be a functional workspace.
Portrait? Are you coding something?
When I was doing tech support that’s exactly what I did!
I came to say this. And that’s one reason why I left my last post.
But it was more a symptom than an actual problem. The new boss really had no idea what he was doing, and it just became clear when he instituted a return to office to a new cramped bright hot loud environment after we’d all done really well working remote for about 2 years at that point.
The Dead Sea effect was felt long before it was my turn.
Fast-paced
“We’re going to give you a lot of tasks, but not enough time to complete them.”
Unpredictable
“We will randomly drop new tasks on you without warning.”
High-energy
“We use a lot of electricity.”
High-energy is more like, most of us are assholes and/or expect you to maintain a fake positive attitude regardless of the aforementioned circumstances
“In between the 10 half hour virtual meetings each day that only serve to take up time and give you more tasks, we would like you to complete 12 hours of work, in the idealistic sense of 8 hours, since that’s your normal working hours, while we also give you more tasks, and ping you for additional requests in your remaining 3 hours that are aside of your 5 hours of meetings. If you need anything at all, just escalate the issue and we will make sure to ignore you, as we are also bogged down by the same system. It’s perfectly ok to stop what you’re doing entirely if you aren’t sure that you’re completing it correctly, so just escalate it and we will make sure to give you an answer at some point this year. Just make sure you have it all done by the time table we have laid out, and make sure to take your lunch break! By the way, if anyone needs the overtime, we need 6 more people to gargle shit covered balls at 5:00 am Christmas morning. There’s too much shit on too many balls for any of us managers to step up and gargle. Our kids are sick with ear infections and our Tesla’s have doctors appointments so it’s not possible that we can make it to the shit ball gargling decathlon. If you have any questions be sure to ask a non-superior so that we don’t have to dock your pay increase. Have a wonderful shit covered ballsack gargling day!”
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News flash: the open plan office is actually seen as sexist, according to at least one article in the BBC. Go see!
Not quite. The Beeb aren’t in the business of studies (outside special reports). If I am thinking about the same article as you, Anglia Ruskin interviewed thousands of workers and found that while most people got over the sense of surveillance, a much higher percentage of women than men didn’t. This was because, seemingly, women were in fact more surveilled by their male colleagues.
So open plans aren’t “sexist” in the sands they were designed in oppression of women; they are sexist in the sense that their design and rationale failed to predict or account for the disproportionate negative impact on women.
They’re actually trying to solve the calls thing, but in the worst way: super fucking loud “white noise machines”. Basically a tiny speaker in every other ceiling tile that makes it sound like the most oppressive AC setup in the world.
We put tape over those. Other people, too lazy to do the same, we’re jealous of our cube farm!
God I didn’t even consider packing tape, our office is extremely open but I bet I could stay late and sabotage every other speaker to try and reduce the noise a bit.
We used regular tape. Take a disposable coffee cup, flip it over. Make a roundish star of tape on it, sticky side up, then put the cup on a broom handle and press it against the speaker on the ceiling. No climbing needed ;)
Might not work for other models of speakers I guess, ours were just about perfectly sized for the disposable cup!
The calls yeah. But I worked in an open plan engineering office. The work waa solitary and immersive enough that most days everyone waa heads down in work. But it was awesome for office banter and razzing each other.
Fast-paced unpredictable high-energy
That’s a lot of words to say you don’t know how to run a business
It’s run by a group of entitled toddlers, guided by running kittens.
I love your comment, but it overlooked the drinking
Be an IT guru and reset Jennifer’s password 20 times a month.
Also we didn’t consult you and have got all our stuff iPad pros for some reason, which in no way will interface with any of our software. Somehow that’s your fault.
why didn’t you warn them? pfftt. oh and the owner’s cousin has some kind of firewall thing they want the company to test, you don’t mind a giant hole in the infosec just do it and stop complaining.
My last office job was QA at a game studio. They kept our whole team in a stuffy windowless room full of partitions. Three screens took up the one desk that was only a bit wider than your chair.
When feeding time happened you could hear everyone’s lips smacking.
I would have killed for a cubicle like this.
The devs out in the civilized part of the office had open plan, but they had L desks and 4-6 screens. Some had mini fridges and drawers.
I played Phantasmagoria 2 and knew it was supposed to take place in a brutally oppressive corporate hellscape, but each characters cubicle seemed expansive and cozy.
First thing I thought when I saw that picture… “Not too bad.That’s a big cube.”
Whoa a personal cubicle? What are you, a CEO?
Ok but the snazzy office spaces don’t mean better conditions. All this shit means is corpo speak for "we’re asking 3 people to do the job of 15 until we decided that having someone crack periodically costs more than adding FTEs.
My favourite workspace was when I was just stuffed under a stairwell. There were very few interruptions because the only way to talk to me was to stand in the hallway blocking traffic.
I showed up, got my work done, dicked around with research projects, wandered the halls talking to people about the kinds of issues they were having and offering ad-hoc training, went home. It was more like a hobby than work.
I loved my Harry Potter office when I had it. The door was actually on the back side of the staircase instead of the side, so lots of people didn’t even know I was there.
Years ago I worked at a brewery.
They had offices but no spaces available in that part of the facility when I started, so they “made an office” for me in a spare storage room off of a tiny hallway that connected the finishing cellars with the filter room and hop storage room.
It was so out of the way that over a year into the job there were still people who had no idea how to find my office.
Granted there were no windows, and most of the day, the hop centrifuge and filter pumps meant I was immersed in loud droning noise…but until I started working from home in the pandemic, it was the best office I ever had.
Dual monitors, though.
That’s the high-energy, they aren’t energy star compliant
100% more productivity!
Dual monitors are the minimum to actually do any work
We don’t do anything too complicated on our PCs but we all have 2 monitors (plus the one built in to our laptops)
Is that Neo’s office?
They were the 3/4 height walls sans sneeze guard.
“CorporateAccountsPayableNinaspeaking… JUSTamoment.”
I don’t want to be an IT guru for my real family…
“I see you’ve missed a lot of work, Peter.”
“Well, I wouldn’t say I’ve been ‘missing it’ Bob.”
Those TPS reports aren’t gonna write themselves!
