What amazes me about this phenomenon and so many others is just how long the executive class are willing to stick with a counterproductive trend. RTO, open offices, development methodologies that disempower the developers, devops without people who understand ops, databases without dbas, Business Intelligence in basically every flavor. The unoriginality and lack of independent thought are striking. It’s as if they would rather fail doing the conventional thing than risk failure by doing something different.

>What amazes me about this phenomenon and so many others is just how long the executive class are willing to stick with a counterproductive trend. RTO, open offices,

The issue is that executives and managers don't see it as counterproductive because there's no compelling business evidence out there to change their mind.

Instead, here's what people actually see...

Microsoft of 1990s brags about their programmers having real offices with a door. But the later Google startup with "counterproductive" open offices beats them on a search engine and mobile phone. Microsoft's newer campuses are now open office.

Fog Creek Trello had blogs with photographs of their offices for the developers explaining all the great benefits... but they also stumble and eventually get acquired by the open-office Atlassian.

Where are all the business cases of the closed-office-with-doors beating out the unproductive-distraction-chaos-open-offices?!? Can't think of one? There lies your problem.

The person who wrote this thread's article, Maria Konnikova -- is a journalist and book author -- and not a tech CEO who bet her company's productivity on a running a dev shop with private offices. That is why executives don't listen to her and are not swayed by articles like this.

If we want to get rid of open offices, it has to be done with real businesses and not magazine articles.

Management performance measurement depends on KPIs. KPIs that don't look vague depend on measurability and/or visibility. Code isn't measurable. Functionality sort of is but it's too vague. Visibility often amounts to having a room full of people that you can see working. As a technical product manager, who uses a set of tools that make my work measurable, I don't have much incentive to make the team visible by putting them in a room with tables and no dividers. Managers who were never coders, and who therefore are flying blind when they say progress is being made are the ones that need a KPI dashboard and an open office.

The quest for measurability is also driving fake agile. The real measurement of agile is right in the manifesto, but if you can't read the code, you can't measure.

Many of those executives believe in the trend because they would like the noisy office environment. You can tell those executives because they are never in their office except for private meetings - if they are not in a private meeting they are wandering the halls looking for someone to talk to. These people don't need an office, they need a private meeting room that can be booked on demand.

There are also executives who hate open offices. You will find them in their office with the door closed, and they don't want you to knock on the door if it isn't urgent.

It is about personality. However few people are willing to admit that others are different and that it is okay.

You misunderstand their purpose. They would rather be in power in a failed company than see a company succeed without them having power.

“ It’s as if they would rather fail doing the conventional thing than risk failure by doing something different.”

There is the old saying “nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft/IBM”. Most people, including executives, are just following the accepted wisdom with some slight variations.

> It’s as if they would rather fail doing the conventional thing

Doing conventional thing is often expensive, requires skill, or requires organisational power to change the way things work.

Many of these counter-productive trends are the ways executives "deliver visible results" and maintain good optics after committing to something they have no means, in terms of resources, power or skill, to deliver by the book.

For example RTO is used as a short-term downsizing strategy as organisations often lack ways to monitor actual long-term impact from squeezing workers like that. BI bandaids are often applied to create visibility around certain issues (the easy part), and by extension build perception these issues are manageable, without actually solving any of them (which is the hard part).

Consider that the executive class' goals might be different from ours. They might even be in opposition to our goals.

> executive class are willing to stick with a counterproductive trend. RTO, open offices,

What makes you think they actually care about productivity? It's pure narcissistic traits, they want to be able to easily waltz in and watch their wage slaves.

> development methodologies that disempower the developers, devops without people who understand ops, databases without dbas, Business Intelligence in basically every flavor.

Again, it's control. Us, with our MBAs will make far more than you, even though we contribute less than an LLM

You, with your decades of learning that we've demanded, are expendable and honestly we don't need anyone with skill doing your job.

> It’s as if they would rather fail doing the conventional thing than risk failure by doing something different.

The business just wasn't ready for their radical idea. See Adam Neumann. The difference between you and them, is that you are looking at this as work. A way to make money.

For most of these folks, they already have money. This is a game, a gamble, a way to pass the time, and to gain influence. If the company fails it's not good, but it's not the end of the world. They don't have to work and when they are bored then they can always start a new business.

I wonder what mal-incentives drive the behavior? Any system follows its reward function. Somehow, executives and managers are personally incentivized to that behavior, despite it being apparently illogical from a strategic perspective.

Yep. It's the ancient "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" and "pick your battles" ideas. Everyone has always been amazed how powerful those can be.

Agreed, often enough these stupid "imperatives" are bad for profits, and even bad for the career of the top person who's kind of driving them.

Catch-22 is a good book to read, if you want to understand how large organizations work. You'd think it might be dated, but I'm not so sure. It's also funny.