[HN Gopher] Lars Tunbjork documented the rise of alienating offi...
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Lars Tunbjork documented the rise of alienating office work
Author : marban
Score : 54 points
Date : 2024-10-23 16:50 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| benterix wrote:
| The progress we've made thanks to WFH is immense and will be
| clear to the future generations only in hindsight, just like
| 5-day work week.
| percentcer wrote:
| I don't find remote work alienating at all. Even when I'm in the
| office most of my meetings are over VC with other sites anyway.
|
| So... no thanks! Would rather work in comfort, silence, and near
| my dog.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Your dog probably is more fun to talk to than your co workers!
|
| I work in exchange for currency I can then trade for goods and
| services. Employment serves no other purpose.
|
| I don't work to make friends. I have a variety of other options
| for socializing.
| soupfordummies wrote:
| while I 100% agree with you, it seems this article is about the
| rise of working "online" in general with email etc around the
| turn of the Millenium
| dang wrote:
| I'm not sure what the least baity title for this article could
| be. Have made a third attempt now
| earnesti wrote:
| Remote working is like veganism or crossfit, people have to
| come to announce them doing it at every possible possibility.
| myhf wrote:
| Ahh, all of these offices look so cool! I love the "success" sign
| that has fallen down. I love the powered-off machine labeled "do
| not turn this machine off".
| marban wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:First_Web_Server.jpg
| lbeckman314 wrote:
| https://archive.ph/u3qjy
| ErikAugust wrote:
| " Judge and Tunbjork were depicting the same kinds of spaces, but
| Tunbjork's work proved the more perceptive. Part of what
| separates them are their respective theories for why the office
| had become hostile. In "Office Space," Judge suggests that the
| problem is managerial; in a pivotal scene, Ron Livingston's
| character complains that he has eight different bosses. This was
| hardly a new complaint, however: people had been making fun of
| middle managers for decades. Tunbjork's photos in "Office," by
| contrast, point to a more contemporary culprit: technology."
|
| Uh, as if Office Space doesn't have the iconic "PC LOAD LETTER?
| What the... does that mean?"
| ghaff wrote:
| Latterly I increasingly worked remotely. But once, for various
| reasons, it got to the point of VCs with people I had never met
| and was never going to meet in person, engagement pretty much
| fell off a cliff.
| neilv wrote:
| My nerd side objected to the artistic license there. The
| computer programmer character should know it's instructions to
| the user (necessarily terse on a very small character display),
| to load more blank US Letter size paper into the Paper
| Cartridge.
|
| What a programmer would more likely be complaining about with a
| corporate workgroup page printer is someone spooling a huge job
| that DoSes it, piles of other people's printouts that they
| never picked up, toner out (and it's not in a sealed cartridge,
| so you're risking staining your clothes and hands as well as
| the carpet), paper jams (including paper that must be ripped
| out, and job reconstructed, after backlog of others' jobs),
| failing pickup rollers, some software they have to use that
| sometimes overloads the renderer RAM, the smell of ozone from
| heavy printing with no openable windows, etc.
| wrs wrote:
| Well, I've been a nerd and programmer for many decades and
| just now found out PC stands for Paper Cartridge. Thank you.
| neilv wrote:
| I've worked in a ~6'-height cube farm more dense and plain than
| any of these photos, but actually more pleasant than most of
| these look, and better than most open-plan offices I've seen.
|
| With cubes, most of the engineers didn't need headphones nor
| medication to focus, unlike open-plan. And there was a lot of
| stopping in others' cube doorways for quick meetings, and
| temporarily wheeling chairs into the hall.
|
| The cube partitions were finished in a coarse weave of gray
| cloth, and there were copious T-shaped pins, which people weren't
| shy about using to hang project artifacts, decorations, and
| amusements on the insides and outsides of their cubes.
|
| No motivational posters, and I don't recall any soul-sucking
| corporate art.
|
| A clearing had some small round tables that people sometimes used
| for meetings. And for "Friday at 4" socializing, the tables were
| pushed out of the way, and someone brought in big galvanized tubs
| of ice and beverages.
|
| WFH (with occasional in-person) is best overall, but cube farms
| can be better than they're made out to be.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| When I was IT at Galyan's corporate, they used an old
| supermarket as an office building. There wasn't even cubicle
| walls. My "office" had taped lines on the floor to delineate my
| "boundaries".
|
| It was loud and distracting... one of the only jobs I ever quit
| without another job to go because I hated it so much.
| WhatIsDukkha wrote:
| I agree cubicles are highly underrated to what came after.
|
| I've leased a small office in a coworking space to alleviate
| the workfromhomeitis.
|
| Its nice enough but wow... the people having to work at tables
| in an open room, mini fake living room, and open kitchen.
|
| It's social but totally unsuitable for concentration.
|
| The book here actually encited a bit of nostalgia in me and I
| bought a copy.
|
| I can actually show people what life was like for us since I
| don't really have my own pictures of office life of the era.
| danaris wrote:
| I remain of the firm opinion that the only reason people think
| 6' cube farms are even acceptable is because they're being
| compared to the hell of fully-open-plan offices.
|
| Every office worker should have the ability to close a door to
| preserve their privacy and productivity, even if it's on a
| space no larger than the cube would be.
|
| (It is not at all improbable that my vehemence in this matter
| is related to my mild-to-moderate ADHD, which made my stint in
| a 6' cube farm extremely frustrating due to the constant
| distractions.)
| Veserv wrote:
| Cubicles were invented in the 1960s to provide a superior and
| more private alternative to open plan (bullpen) offices of
| the 1950s [1].
|
| The silly part of all this is the people arguing for open
| plan offices in the present/recent past as a "superior" and
| more humanizing and collaborative environment when cubicles
| were literally invented as a more humane option.
|
| [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/a-brief-history-of-how-
| the-c...
| jyap wrote:
| If you want to watch a film similar to these themes, check out
| Playtime from 1967 by Jacques Tati. Something I watched recently.
|
| Playtime works wonderfully as a cinematic satire of contemporary
| society and our roles.
|
| The film's office scenes are particularly striking because they
| visualize the dehumanizing aspects of modern office design that
| cubicle farms would later become notorious for - the uniformity,
| the loss of privacy despite physical separation, and the way
| architecture can make people behave more like components in a
| machine than individuals.
|
| The thing about Playtime is the constant onslaught of appropriate
| explorations on the theme of an increasingly technical life.
|
| By the time the end of Playtime rolls by, what you get is an
| examination of what it is like to be human and hopefully you feel
| a sense of joy in being a part of the human race.
| tpm wrote:
| What I got by the end was the unyielding anxiety and
| nervousness caused by the (dehumanizing, as you mention) modern
| society. It's a masterful movie in evoking those emotions. I
| watched it several times, so this is a positive endorsement.
| Grandeculio wrote:
| Why are paywalled articles allowed on HN?
| wrs wrote:
| (a) Why wouldn't they be? (2) Someone usually posts an
| archive.ph workaround within minutes after posting.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| which has already been posted, and doesn't work, as is the
| custom
| lysace wrote:
| Because people eager to please will post mirrors/copies and
| YC's very pragmatic in-house legal team has (likely) decided
| that those people bear the legal responsibility of doing that,
| or at least that YC's exposure is limited under certain
| circumstances.
|
| That would likely mean that they will give out the poster's
| email/IP given just a credible _threat_ of a lawsuit.
|
| So maybe don't post these if you live in a country where
| copyright is actively enforced.
|
| Newspapers/magazines generally don't go after copyright
| infringements on an article level, I think, but who knows what
| might happen in the current economic downturn.
|
| I think it's (likely) unethical of YC to routinely and
| obviously allow these links, for the reasons outlined above.
| Not because I care for the publishers, but because of the
| potential harm YC exposes its users to by normalizing this.
| lysace wrote:
| Sorry to everyone for relegating this post to page 2 by
| posting this comment.
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