'High energy fast paced environment' basically translates to 'our management is totally incompetent and cannot form or stick to a plan that makes any sensr, but our company culture has normalized that to such a degree that we will shame and neg you untill you accept this as nornal, go insane, or quit.'
I seem to have found a unicorn. My company is fast-paced because we are building out like mad. Unpredictable because we are delivering things no one else has done before. And high energy because the employees are rapidly promoted up through the company.
On the other hand, I've seen a LOT of the other, normal kind of companies described above.
Oof, my company is doing only 1 or 1.5 of those things, I am great at back end engineering and delivering in the face of fuckery of all kinds, can I plz haz job
It only seems to get worse. I wonder what hellish workplace setup they'll come up with that'll have us wishing to have open offices again. I'd say that open offices are the worst it can get, but I've been surprised by how worse work can get in the past.
Fucking hell this resonates with so many of us. A few employers ago, I had my own office in the original building, when they decided to build a new office, they moved to an open floor plan for it...sneeze guards....it was fucking shit, bosses got nice new offices though. What's worse was when they had constant complaints from everyone in the fish bowl, their solution was to put in a white noise generator. So you'd leave work and hear static for hours after.
Yeah it's funny how when I was a kid, the idea of a cubicle was used to describe the hellish experience of office life, but by the time I was in an office (had other jobs first), it was all open plans and a cubicle like in the picture would've been heaven on earth for me and my introverted ass.
This would be an upgrade to the open office hell I am currently in with no assigned seating and only built out to support 70% of workers assigned to the building. Parking is only able to hold about 40%. If you get in too late first you struggle to find a place to park only to park on the street a half mile away then you can't find a seat. Oh, and they track badge-ins as well as the times your computer is on the local network. If your computer isn't logged in long enough you get in trouble. This same company treated us like adults for many years before the RTO Mind Virus creeped into our executives brains. Many of my colleagues were fully remote going back to the early 90s.
It makes no sense. If the wanted to lose people it would be cheaper to just fire us and pay severance than to have a bunch of unmotivated employees giving no fucks about the work and screwing things up left and right. I've never seen the workplace so miserable and I hear similar stories from people at other companies as well.
I used to work in an office with an open floorplan. You could throw a ball and not reach the other end. You could see everyone in the room by spinning in your chair. It really sucked. These kinds of cubicles would have been amazing.
I used to work in cubicles before the open floor plan was so popular. It used to be a joke about how sad cubicles were and how open concepts were more high energy and fun.
After being interrupted all day I can't believe cubicles were so much better than I thought. I even remember reading Joel Spolskys blog about how he paid for expensive floor to ceiling cubicles to make it similar to people having their own office and stuff.
If only companies would care about actual studies, science, and sustainability rather than quarterly profits and hypercapitalist growth. If that was the case we'd probably have cubicles in that style, 4 day work weeks, companies encouraging unions and working with them for employee retention, pensions and the like. And this is only the first step in moving from capitalism to socialism. But the machine needs meat to grind into pretend 2x money for the next quarter so the billionaires can masturbate to "line go up"
I loved the time when I had a cubicle like the one in the pic. Had my own private space that I could personalize to make my own. When the office got "modernized" for a more open-space look, it was a downgrade in my view. Now I work from home, so the biggest cubicle of them all
It is better working in a factory with no protections. I long for what you hate yet no matter what you do in this system you are still exploited. Mandatory over time all the time. Forget your families we are working all weekend.