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Re: IBM is having a Yahoo moment: No more working from home
Subject:Re: IBM is having a Yahoo moment: No more working from home From:"Meryl R. Cohen" <merylster -at- gmail -dot- com> To:Techwr-l <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>, Stuart Burnfield <slb -at- westnet -dot- com -dot- au> Date:Fri, 10 Feb 2017 23:10:30 -0500
My personal preference is for a private or semi-private office. Second is
open-plan with pods divided by low (3 ft) walls. I find traditional cubies
to be the worst: No sound privacy, but felt cut off from people. I
interviewed once at a place where everyone had their own private office,
but the walls were all glass. Not sure how I would have liked that.
Meryl
On Fri, Feb 10, 2017 at 10:56 PM, Stuart Burnfield <slb -at- westnet -dot- com -dot- au>
wrote:
> There's a classic book that goes over exactly this ground:
>
> Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, by Tom DeMarco and Timothy
> Lister
> <https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/67825.Peopleware>
>
> It's short, highly relevant to IT teams, very readable, hugely enjoyable.
> It says exactly what Lin and Chris say below. The sad thing is that it was
> first published in 1987. This stuff was known 30 years ago.
>
> If you've ever had an uneasy feeling about a workplace, Peopleware
> probably describes your nameless fear. As I skim the TOC it's clear how
> many of their concepts I've internalised: flow time, "make a cheeseburger,
> sell a cheeseburger", no such thing as overtime, the high cost of turnover,
> "hiring a juggler", "Paging Paul Portulaca!"... it's so vivid, once you've
> read it you can never go back to not knowing.
>
> IIRC they say that there never was any evidence to show that "open plan"
> was good for productivity. Literally the only benefits are:
>
> 1. It's cheaper.
> 2. It's more flexible (easier to move partitions than walls--in other
> words, cheaper).
>
> In larger organizations the person who decides to go open plan probably
> has zero experience working in IT or engineering teams. They decide it's
> worth saving $X on fit out even at the expense of $Y in lost productivity.
> They do this without knowing what "Y" is. /It's possible they don't even
> know there is a Y./
>
> Stuart
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> *From*: *Lin Sims <ljsims -dot- ml -at- gmail -dot- com>*
> *To*: *"salt -dot- morton -at- gmail -dot- com" <salt -dot- morton -at-
> gmail -dot- com>*
> *Date*: *Fri, 10 Feb 2017 10:39:44 -0500*
>
> There's been at least one study that suggests that the "open work space
> environment" (I had to look that up; yech!) doesn't inspire any more
> collaboration than having private offices; however, people who have private
> or semi-private offices seem to have far lower levels of stress.
>
>http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidburkus/2016/06/21/why-your-
> open-office-workspace-doesnt-work/#4f89804216d0
>
> I miss working at Telcordia. Managers had private offices, and everyone
> else had semi-private (2 people per room) offices. Solid cinder block walls
> and a solid door. Ah, peace.
>
> On Fri, Feb 10, 2017 at 9:31 AM, Chris Morton <salt -dot- morton -at-
> gmail -dot- com> wrote:
> > ...
> >/Further, I just read in the local edition of the Business Review that
> yet/
> >/another company has bought a building and is going to create an open/
> >/workspace environment. No thanks./
> >
> >/At least my HP cubicle afforded some degree of privacy, and it was
> common/
> >/to let team members know when one was "on critical path" (read: don't
> bug/
> >/me right now). From what I've read, all the open workspace does is
> promote/
> >/more slacking off, not desired "team building" (unless that definition
> has/
> >/come to mean playing fraternity house pranks)./
>
>
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