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0 pointsmananaysiempre1y ago0 comments

You unintentionally strike at the heart of why I’m never completely on board with these anti-office discussions.

Commute sucks, cubicles are worse than useless; you won’t get any argument from me on either of these.

But I also know how crucial it is for academia to talk with colleagues. Email kind of works. Video calls kind of work a bit more. But nothing beats knocking on the door of the office next to you. (Whether it’s polite to announce yourself by e.g. email first depends on the country; even if you just show up and you’re turned away, that’ll be until lunch or at worst until the next day.) And the post-seminar atmosphere of everybody talking chaotically to each other with their minds buzzing as others put away their papers, chairs, etc., thus far stays unreplicated by any technological means.

I guess what I want to say is, the more speculative your ideas are, the more important it becomes to bounce them off people in spontaneous conversation. And any friction (scheduling, calls, etc.) you add will significantly reduce the amount of spontaneous conversation you are going to have. So far, we haven’t figured out a better way than roughly everybody involved being in roughly the same place roughly all the time. That saddens me, given how much I hate commuting.

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5 comments · 3 top-level

mjburgess1y ago· 2 in thread

I suspect if office workers had offices, we'd be in quite a different situation.

There's a certain sort of knowledge worker who wants to impress upon the others how communal, conversational, and social their job "really is!" --- but these are people who are likewise not empathetic with the managerial class. All you're really saying is in 20 hours of thinking a week, and 20 hours of typing --- some 2 with others might really help. I don't disagree.

The problem is the "social work" class do not have very much to think about -- their job is to align very rudimentary thoughts from a pool of people who need to negotiate their positions. The Grand Plan of an executive-type is a search through a paddling pool of combinatorial options. This isn't to trivialise the work, so much to point out its an operational and socio-logistical task.

Yes, conversing with one's knowledge-worker peers can speed things up a lot, advance ideas and the like. I am here only analysing where the gap in empathy lies -- I do not really think it's people who can well-afford maids (pretending they cannot) being misunderstood by people with private jets

milesrout1y ago

Approaching this from the perspective that other people only care about socially signalling how social their job is will not get you anywhere. It might feel good and make good rhetoric to make such wide generalisations but it doesn't get you any closer to the truth and cuts you off from seeing things through others' perspectives.

20 houes of thinking, 20 hours of typing, and 2 hours of collaborating is just a bizarre numericalisation of something that probably cannot be quantified. How much time you spend on something doesn't tell you it is more or less important anyway. What percentage of the time do you spend coding vs committing and pushing? Yet if you didnt do the latter, the former would be a total waste of time.

The small amount of time (even conceding it is small, which it isnt necessarily) you spend on collaboration might be a force multiplier that makes the rest of your time far more valuable.

>The problem is the "social work" class do not have very much to think about -- their job is to align very rudimentary thoughts from a pool of people who need to negotiate their positions.

This is frankly insane. You don't actually think this, surely? Surely this is just rhetoric?

This has nothing to do with maids or private jets. Plenty of businesses want their workers in the office including those where the business owners and managers cannot afford private jets or maids.

mjburgess1y ago

I wasn't accusing my interlocutor of merely engaging in social signally. I gave an explanation of the position, which I can be more explicit about: it is an intra-knowledge-worker point. Its the point of a person who, quite rightly, goes around people who neglect to be social at all and impress the importance of it. This is a non-sequiteur when i'm addressing a hypersocial group.

The dialectic of this thread -- the OP beings with effectively a class analysis of why executives misunderstand office-worker employees. My reply is the origins lie in a different distribution of at-work activities in which executives require massive amounts of in-person communication to do their jobs, whilst knowledge-workers do not (and are often harmed by an excess).

> This has nothing to do with maids or private jets.

So you agree with me. It's important not to substitute a position I am opposing for one that I'm not.

As for my slight exaggerations around how I characterise the kinds of people, and work involved -- it is hyperboilic and hoperfully amusing characterisation -- but not one which I think is far off.

The "deep thought" of executive work is shallow, for those who prise complexity and such, no doubt this seems derogatory. But it's not. If you thinking can be readily terminated by the speech of another person, your own thinking process is not that deep. Sure, that of The Group's might be -- and much more so than any person's, but each individual is not engaged in deep thought.

If you can farm out depth to a group discussion, great -- that's one sort of work. It is not the work of a progammer, say, who is tracing execution flow in their own head -- this cannot be half-realised in one person's head and half-realised in another.

dumbledoren1y ago

> But nothing beats knocking on the door of the office next to you. (Whether it’s polite to announce yourself by e.g. email first depends on the country; even if you just show up and you’re turned away

Oh boy. What you are saying is akin to kicking an IC in the balls while he was concentrating on something. I don't think it would be any different in academia for researchers who are concentrating on something.

mrguyorama1y ago

>But I also know how crucial it is for academia to talk with colleagues.

Pretty much all of physics was collaborated on with snail mail and a couple times a year in the busiest years in person conferences to have what were essentially war rooms.

We still regularly get cross earth papers published, with explicit collaboration between labs on the opposite side of the world.

A significant amount of science collaboration happens with work that is translated!

If software development were to emulate such a system, it would be small teams of like 2-7 people working together in a small office with a hundred such offices all over coordinating when they need to.

Of course, none of those scientists ever needed change management!

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