Nonsense. He is complaining that everything is drab and no window view. I work under similar circumstances and I feel more and more that these two things are slowly eating me up. this has nothing to do with productivity.
The way desktop and other UIs are getting worse, I sometimes think SV also doesn't understand productivity. A lot of the productivity hype is just productivity theater, a mere illusion of productiveness.
Fuck it, the entire work environment seems designed to decrease productivity (open plan offices, meetings scattered thought the day, constant changing of task priorities, half arsed documentation of our product).
Why should I bother about making myself more productive when so many factor outside of my control are doing the opposite?
The point was that conventional work structure, in offices, with lots of meetings and other distractions that are mostly irrelevant are a huge productivity killer.
I felt the same way. I actually used the similar words to describe my office workplace "nothing real happens here". I quit though and thank god, it was miserable. You're absolutely right that people aren't meant to sit and stare at screens all day.
Oh but your psychological wellbeing means nothing to the dimwit who loves open offices and thinks he can still do "deep work" (most likely trivial crap like stitching together some libraries to make the front end of a CRUD application) while spending half the day disturbing others with endless non productive talk ("team work").
Or even worse, someone whose job is to talk on the phone and use the stupid CRUD app, and who has never done anything cognitively demanding in their entire life, literally.
reply