For all the work that gets done in offices there's a corresponding lack of self-awareness related to the impact that it has. As an Information Worker it seems to me that there isn't nearly enough diversity in approach.
The Typewriter Revolution article is a real beauty. It covers a nice history lesson as well as making some good points.
One thing I take offense to is this statement:
> Opening multiple windows on a computer screen doesn't work for back-and-forth cross-referencing of other material during authoring work, both because of slow visual navigation and because of the limited space on the computer screen.
That's a problem that's easily solved with a half decent window manager.
Yeah, I recently changed my main dev environment to be a 27" 2560x1440 monitor (Asus PB278, if anyone's curious) attached to a Mac Mini. There's enough space to happily keep a browser, evernote, and a terminal side-by-side (three vertical pillars); this has had very noticeable impacts on, if not my efficiency, at least my feeling of "not having to context switch". Everything's just right there and I just need to shift my eyes left and right.
I'm rocking a 46" 4K tv at 4096x2160, using xmonad in split-screen mode so I have two viewable displays and 9 virtual displays. The hardest part was finding a 4K videocard with HDMI 2.0 output. I got the video card and TV for under $1k total and I'm very happy with it.
it works fine for software dev. there's some tearing when playing videos, not sure if it's the card (most likely) but it doesn't bother me at all. I dont do gaming, but I've heard the lag can get bad with tv's.
As am I. I found some expensive hardware solutions that do eye tracking but can't justify the expense to see if they work. Other systems include mounting a dot in the middle of your forehead and moving your head around...impractical for most cases.
I've always found focus-follows-mouse to be a detriment rather than a boon. If I'm going to mouse over a window, it's trivial for me to just click the window, but using your mouse cursor to change window focus seems vastly less efficient than using the keyboard.
What time savings do you find that you can't key with keyboard shortcuts?
The awesome thing about focus-follows-mouse is that it doesn't raise the window that gets the focus (which clicking in it usually does). So I can type into a partially hidden window, while keeping another window on top.
For example because the window on top is a web browser and I'm referencing some API, or the window on top is another emacs window with another module I'm working on that I'm using, etc...
So I can tell the window manager where I want to type, decoupled from what windows I want to be stacked on top of each other in what order...
And, for example, right now, I have 6 emacs windows open for the project I'm working on, plus a few terminals to run the code, plus firefox. I don't see an efficient way to quickly shift focus to what I want, without tab-ing through all the windows looking for the one I need, potentially messing up the order I have the windows in...
Also, for me personally, using the mouse to tell the computer what I'm looking at, while the keyboard tells the computer what to do there is almost instinctive...
The result of more hours spent playing FPS games and the like than I care to think about. At one point, sitting down at a computer, without thinking about it, my left hand would automatically land on wasd and my right on the mouse XD
The behavior I like is more mouse-wheel-follows-mouse so you can move the mouse over to a web browser and scroll. Especially with a touch pad. Windows still treats the mouse wheel as part of the keyboard.
Cmd+backtick only works if you're switching between windows of the same application; if you are, it works well. However, I find more often the case is that you're not. (In my case, it's usually between the terminal, the browser, and the editor, or some subset thereof.)
Cmd+Tab switches only between different apps, and brings to the foreground all windows of that app, even if only one is required, sometimes obscuring way more of the now-backgrounded window than desired.
I really miss having a key to switch to the next window in the Z-stack, ala Alt+Tab on Windows/Linux.
Unfortunately kwm cannot do real focus-follows-mouse, it can only raise windows to the top. That works okay if you're using tiling mode exclusively, but with floating windows it's unusable.
Coming from i3, I tried Amethyst for a while when I had to use a Mac at my previous job. It seems like the best solution within the constraints of OS X, but it always seemed like enough of a hack that I ended up battling both it and the real window manager, so I ended up disabling it after a few months. The focus-follows-mouse never came close to working as expected for me.
Fighting with window size, positioning, and focus is such a productivity killer. Now I'm glad to be back in a real tiling window manager.
Your average office worker does not get decent screens. Even if the Windows default settings for the desktop have been kind of acceptable for many years, it does you little good if you are looking at it through a 9"-by-5" rectangle.
Multiple monitors are beyond any discussion for most, even if we programmers have gotten used to those and find'em indispensable.
Accountants often have 3 screens. Perfect for doing tax work - the form your working on, the customer's documents, and any relevant instructions/legal presidents for whatever they are doing.
That one's covered in the article, wastes too much energy. I submitted this article yesterday and it went by with no upvotes because people probably thought it suggest we return to typewriters and paper piles, which it doesn't (I could've editorialised the title but guidelines say not to). It basically describes how energy inefficient today's offices are and how we can fix them.
Edit: Driving just one mile further to work is significantly more energy than a huge monitor and nobody thinks a 11 mile commute is vastly worse than a 10 mile one.
Modern monitors are very low energy usage. The lights above you likely use more power than two 27" LED monitors, especially as overhead lights are often on more than your ~25-50w monitors are. Note, monitor brightness does impact usage.
My main monitor at work is a 34" ultrawide, marginal increase in power consumption, but with Spectacles for OSX I'm able to use it as 2 monitors (I have secondary monitors but I hardly need to use them
Nuclear is ~20% of our electricity gen, so 1/4th of that is 1/20th or 5% of US electricity aka not really that big a deal. Energy wise getting to an office is generally far more expensive.
Further they talk about BTU for heating ignoring heat pumps generally being over 100% efficient and running on electricity.
Because efficiency is measured by how much heat you get compared to the electricity you put in, and heat pumps cheat by moving heat in from outside. So you get more heat than you could from the energy input.
200 words per minute is kind of average, but for this kind of content it's easy to beat. I would practice a little as hitting 350-400+ as a fairly comfortable pace. It should be easy for most people and it really does add up.
As to actual content I kind of skipped over 2/3rds of it as it's really repetitive.
IBM did a study on work spaces and how they affect productivity. It would be nice if universities did the same as a joint project of the Architecture and Computer Science departments but everyone seems to be interested in coding to get a job rather than studying these issues that are faced daily by millions of devs.
I live near downtown New York with a beautiful view of the financial district. Most of the towers stay fully illuminated throughout the night every night. Some turn off some floor at times but a majority do not (e.g all floors of the Goldman Sachs building stay constantly brightly illuminated). It always puzzles me, I can't help thinking that it's an obvious energy waste.
Money handlers, that's what these enormous buildings were for. And at this point in time with our use of a fiat currency, money is just a digital construct. So what is the need for having a physical space to house all of these people booting up their computers and networking and playing around with these numbers in a virtual environment? Perhaps at one time when computers were not a thing it would be necessary to collect those types into a consolidated area for the purpose of communication and organization, but we are no longer at the mercy of physical proximity being necessary for that. We continue to utilize these structures and maintain this method of worker placement and organization past their relevance, for seemingly no other reason than perpetuating an archetype of the "business building". Why else would there be a need to have these monuments to the conquerors of finance?
Goldman Sachs maintains them as monuments so that we continue to look upon them as monuments, and the institutions they represent as being deserving of such reverence. They never turn off the lights because they can, not because they need to.
This reminds me of an idiom I particular liked by Ralph Waldo Emmerson from Self Reliance
"You see great works — statues, buildings, machines, books, and you feel belittled by them, put in your place, puny, unworthy. But you're looking at it all wrong. Their greatness awaits your judgment. Emerson wrote, "The picture waits for my verdict; it is not to command me, but I am to settled its claims to praise."
I don't know if this is a strange perspective for software engineers or what, but the building doesn't just exist to facilitate the work being done within it.
Networking, knowledge sharing, consensus building and control are all indispensable to running a business like that. Having a physical shared space is indispensable for them. I'd argue that it's necessary to maintain a company culture at a certain scale as well.
In the last two large NYC buildings I've worked in, the lights are on at all times. Even the "all off" switches leave about 1/3 of the lights on. The reason provided by the building owners has usually been fire safety regulation related.
I believe the issue is that fluorescent bulbs last longer if they are left on, so you would actually spend more money/energy (factoring in the cost to produce and humans to replace the bulbs) if you're switching them off regularly. They can be dimmed to increase the life even more.
I think you're not getting the value of the assets vs energy cost.
People on $200,000 left a 5 cent light on pp? Meh.
You could work on using that $200,000 more efficiently if you want to save money.
I think you are falling for the stupid marketing. Wow we pulled 100 cars worth off the road by turning lights off at night! (as a one million car per year organization)
Price of 24 hour lighting is about £1 - £2 per watt year (standard overhead fluorescents). For typical office building lighting intensity, that's around £15 - £50 per m^3. Assuming the high end of that scale, for the building you mentioned, the yearly lighting bill would be £5 million.
> I can't help thinking that it's an obvious energy waste.
Probably depends on who pays the power bill. Maybe some commercial leases include power ? Also, in NYC a lot of people work insane hours, so even one person staying till 9 or 10pm pretty much requires all the lights to be on. The housekeeping staff usually start about 7-8pm and assuming an 8 hour shift, thats 2-3am at least that they'll be there.
Overall I bet lights are a very small fraction of a building's electrical bill. Think of an elevator and how many amps it requires to power a motor the size of small car lifting 900+lbs of people 30+ stories all day. One guy going to the top floor probably uses enough power to light the building for half a day.
"There is something patently insane about all the typewriters sleeping with all the beautiful plumbing in the beautiful office buildings — and all the people sleeping in the slums." -- Buckminster Fuller
> For one thing, supporters of the sustainable information society ignore the fact that we have moved most of our manufacturing industries (and our waste) to low wage countries.
This is a common myth about the US economy, probably spread because it's useful to both the right and the left. In fact, the US manufacturing sector produces $6.2 trillion/year, exports $1.1 trillion, and imports $1.9 trillion. So about 11% of our net manufacturing "footprint" is overseas.
Why haven't we hit "peak office workers" yet? The US hit peak factory workers in 1979. We have all this information technology and yet we still have all these people in offices.
Does the article say that large buildings are more expensive to heat? It seemed to me its point was that other energy uses far exceed the costs of heating.
Furthermore these scaling laws don't necessarily hold when there is a paradigm difference. E.g. you don't worry about scaling laws when comparing a building that can be lighted mostly (or entirely) from natural sources to one that can't; in fact the smaller scale is more efficient from this perspective.
"Many office buildings had window accomodating H-, T-, and L-shaped footprints to encourage natural lighting, ventilation, and cooling"
All that is mechanical in big square blobs.
Also, at the scale of large office buildings, and given that those more slender buildings would have an optimal orientation, I am not sure building shape matters that much in heating costs.
The article also states "While heating was the main energy use in pre-1950s office buildings, today cooling, lighting and electronic equipment (all operated by electricity), use 70% of all energy on-site.", but that's not a strong argument, as slender buildings would have the electronic equipment, too.
Yes, typically large buildings are cooled year round, especially when they are cubic (not sure how this effects tall, skinny skyscrapers). Usually when you see "smoke" coming from the top of a building in the dead of winter, that's from the cooling units. Much heat does come electronics, lighting, humans, but there are still heating units to have precision control as temperature will not necessarily distribute evenly.
There are, as one might guess, a lot of factors at play and no universal solutions. Certainly the pure form office buildings of the International Style are almost completely naïve to these considerations.
The biggest tragedy is the air controlled paradigm of hvac. Air is so not dense relative to water! Doesn't hold energy and very hard to push around (push a column of air up 20, 50, 100 stories? Not happening). This is directly related to the early success of the Carrier ac company.
The biggest problem is not heating, but cooling. Ironically, on very cold days that design does not keep heat very well. From the article:
"The US Modernist office building, a cube with a steel skeleton and glass curtain walls, is essentially a massive greenhouse that would be unbearable for most of the year without artificial cooling. Because glazed façades don't insulate well, energy use for heating is also high."
And to add insult to injury, there's lighting. Yay for the cube farm!!!
"In spite of all the glass, most US office buildings require artificial lighting throughout the day because many office workers are too far from a window to receive enough natural light."
My personal psychology: I've been working in cube farms for so long, that the constant fluorescent light level is a cue that means "you're in work mode." I don't think I would like only natural light at work. For example, a dark overcast day would make me sleepy and lazy.
Conversely, at home it's natural, varying light all the time, until night fall. It's my cue for "you're at home and can pursue whatever interests you. Or take a nap"
I've collected two other posts that seem to overlap http://rudenoise.uk/low-tech-minimal-computing.html
Covering: Why the Office Needs a Typewriter Revolution http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2016/11/why-the-office-needs-...
The Analog Spaces in Digital Companies http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-analog-spaces...
For all the work that gets done in offices there's a corresponding lack of self-awareness related to the impact that it has. As an Information Worker it seems to me that there isn't nearly enough diversity in approach.