There are lots of reasons why offices tend towards bad rather than good. If I sat and thought about it I could probably list a dozen systematic biases towards crappy office spaces. Here are just a few off the top of my head:
- Open-plan offices, hot-desking, and other negative patterns are more cost-effective for a given amount of space.
- Cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all spaces are "easier" to manage from a personnel/HR point of view. Less griping about who gets the "good office," as there is no good office. No need to think about differences between people, we can just treat them as fungible "human resources."
- Similar race to the bottom regarding amenities (coffee, break rooms, etc.). Just look in the other comments of this thread. It's easier to target the least common denominator than provide personalized/individualized benefits in a manner that's fair to everyone.
- Insecure, distrusting managers promote bad office spaces like open plans, hot desking, etc. in order to better micro-manage their teams. Good managers can push back, but in practice the bad managers tend to be the squeaky wheels and get the grease.
I've worked for 10 different companies so far in my career. All but one I would consider a good company. But of those nine "good" companies, I have had one good office space. That's why I've been remote for the last 6 years. For me personally it was either go remote or leave the industry. I'm never making a open-plan or even cube-farm layout my primary working space again.
This isn't restricted to "offices." It's also why it's difficult to live with other people and housemates often end up in conflict. The more people you need to share a space with, the more contention each shared resource gets, and fewer individuals get what they actually want when they want it most of the time. There's tradeoffs to make, of course. We have societies and communities precisely because groups tend to accomplish more than individuals thanks to specialization and division of labor, but there's a reason humans tend to live in roughly family-sized units when given the choice, not open dorms with hundreds of other people.
Says anyone who has spent more than a decade in the workforce.
> There's no more reason for an office space to be bad rather than good. And there's no reason to think that having a good one is based on luck.
By “no reason”, you mean no logical reason. That might be true. Unfortunately a crafted reality controlled by sociopaths isn’t required to be logically consistent at every layer. Hence our current reality, where this is very much a case of luck.
> If office space dynamics and setup are important to you, then put it in your job search mental list and find a job that matches that.
Thanks for the advice. That’s /exactly/ what all the folks working remotely have done. That’s also why we are agitated by shitty management trying to take it away.
Yea I can’t help but realize after my career in offices then seeing mass wfh, the sociopath layer depended deeply on a perceived panopticon of working in the office. The panopticon was a negative motivator for workers, but also a common experience that standardized the culture and expectations.
WFH was like setting rats in a maze to free range and noticing they can be more productive but at the expense of common purpose. This brings a new dimension to the notion of “productive” that the sociopath layer is uncomfortable with. I think because it implies workforce instability.
Even Google, a company that purported to be about worker freedom to harvest productivity if top workers, has retreated to this position.
It’s a bit shocking to me still nearly 4 years later.
> Even Google, a company that purported to be about worker freedom to harvest productivity if top workers, has retreated to this position.
If you take the approach of "watch what they do, not what they say", Google is one of the clearest examples of pro-RTO: they invest in so many perks because they want to make the panopticon feel comfy.
There are other companies that don't give you a darn thing and just dangle the loss of one's job as a threat (Amazon), but I think top performers are more swayed by the "free food" approach than the "let's have a big public dashboard with the entire team's attendance" approach (again, Amazon).
> Says anyone who has spent more than a decade in the workforce.
Well, no. I have worked almost double that, and I don't feel that way.
I tend to think there is mainly an echo chamber of somewhat entitled young north americans incorrectly correlating high compensation in a decade long hyped industry (tech) with social status.
> a crafted reality controlled by sociopaths
Well if that is your definition of reality, maybe you should consider whether you could be part of your issue with office spaces...
> shitty management trying to take it away
Definitely, that kind of remark reinforces my opinion that you should reflect on whether your look at the situation is biased.
Anecdotally, I am aware of people who seem to truly believe that. I used to think it is a question of age, but even that quickly got corrected as from within my professional circle there was no clear way to determine a good predictor for office/no office preference. It seems oddly almost evenly split, which seems very weird to me.
That said, the 'entitled young Americans' thing appears to be a common talking point I see on linkedin and other corporate safe spaces.
"Have you considered the increased opportunities for synergies in the office? We should punt on this until next quarter's all hands when we can utilize our increased office presence to actualize our OKRs."
Says who?
There's no more reason for an office space to be bad rather than good. And there's no reason to think that having a good one is based on luck.
If office space dynamics and setup are important to you, then put it in your job search mental list and find a job that matches that.