"However the "collaboration" that takes place in these types of offices is just wheel spinning and time wasting."

I enjoyed how you phrased that. I work at a giant multinational and yes yes I know all about the stereotype that innovation only comes from the tiny little startups on HN, but innovation flows both ways, like it or not, and over the last decade one megacorp major cultural shift I've seen is collaboration only happens in email because its documented and highly accountable. If you really want to share opinions or idea or requirements or demands in a verifiable documented backed up permanent fashion then you put it in email. You don't have a "real" opinion until its written down and sent in email.

If you just want to talk about sports or the weather or gossip about colleagues or lie to someones face about a due date or product change or a spec, you exclusively do that verbally on the phone or in a meeting or text. Non email based collaboration is seen as a fake waste of time, because, lets face it, it is. If you're too much of a coward or crook to put your name to a statement, then its not worth reading. If someone refuses to document what they're saying in email or a bug ticket they are pretty much treated as liars or ignored. Its an interesting cultural shift. I have one older boss (yeah office space style I have a couple bosses, informally) who is all about the "personal" nature of a phone call or meeting, but its always super ineffective. He's still a nice guy and overall a good manager, but "old people thinking" is holding him back compared to the other mgmt who have moved on with the times.

It seems to work extremely well, especially with multi-office, multi-timezone, multi-national, multi-company teams. (edited to add, and this factors into the "scalability" mantra heard so often on HN... don't set yourself up to fail, operate like a big company from the start) And violating the "new way" by only communicating verbally or in meetings seems to dismally fail fairly often.

This large company innovation will probably spread to the smaller companies sooner or later.

This is interesting to me, because I work at a large company and I've found it to be orchestrated slightly differently. If you want/need something done here, the fastest way is to set up a face to face appointment and put yourself in someone else's calendar. If you don't, things will drag on for months of email back and forth. If you do, things might last two hours, you'll probably leave with a solid plan, and then usually someone sends a 'summary' email that lists every commitment made in that meeting (which keeps everyone honest) along with the dates people agreed to get them done by. If there's disputes about that, they're then handled there, but if you seem to always get the wrong idea from meetings (or always dispute what you said in them), it'd probably reflect badly on you.

I've worked with plenty of people who seem to believe that. It's really frustrating when someone derails an informative, productive, asynchronous email discussion with "let's just have a meeting" or "here, let me just call you" as though dropping everything and sitting around waiting for people to finish their sentences will somehow make the underlying problems easier to reason about.

I guess it must work for them, and I have gathered over the years that I must be something of an outlier in my comfort with and preference for communication via writing, but god I wish we could just cancel all meetings forever and just solve things simply and quickly via email.

This is one of the reasons working for Microsoft was an exercise in misery. People who haven't worked there have trouble believing me when I describe the amount of time people there routinely waste in bullshit status meetings. It was maddening.

I've worked at small to medium companies for the last couple of decades and your experience matches mine.

Oh God, yes. I'm freelance working 100% remotely. I hate phone call meetings. For one, I am half-deaf in one ear from years of wearing headphones to block out noise in open-office floor plans in my previous life as an employee, and often I can't even hear what is being said. A bunch of people are sitting too far away from someone's smartphone set on speakerphone, and the timid mouse in the corner won't speak up. No matter how many times you ask, they go right back to whispering.

They'll ask me questions about how things work and I just don't think well on-the-spot like that about code I wrote 2 years ago. I remember it well enough that I could look it up and get them an answer in an email in 15 minutes, but they had to call to ask, so they want the answer NOW. They'll call at 7:30 at night and complain they couldn't get a hold of me. They won't leave a message. They could have sent an email and I would have an answer for them first thing in the morning. But they would rather call during off-hours, then wait until nearly the end of the next day to call back.

Then, they will say a bunch of stuff, nobody will write it down (except me, IFF I actually hear it). If they are bad ideas, I'll argue a little, but not having the time to research the pros and cons, I can't provide a good recommendation with alternatives (and I hate complaining without alternatives). So everyone will "agree" that it's the direction we (meaning I) should go. I'll bust my ass to get it done, present the changes, and they'll question why I would do things in such "confusing" ways, when what makes it confusing is what I complained about in the first place.

"Just brute force it!" They'll say, like it's somehow a magical incantation to turn a programmer from architecture astronaut to a pragmatic realist "like them". "No, we can't brute force it, because the problem is exponential and runtime explodes when we apply it to real data." "Don't quote that math mumbo jumbo to me, we just need to get it done, I don't care how good it is." Then later, "wow, this is really slow, maybe we should find someone else to be working on this."

Sorry, getting a little off topic there. But basically, I hate not working with people who know how to communicate properly, but I've learned to work within the system (or lack thereof, rather). I've just taken to agreeing to everything they say, then doing whatever the hell I want. I know what their goals are better than they do. I can make a better project then they know how to, and they never remember what they actually told me to do. I just tell them it was all their idea, and they don't have the documentation to contradict me, so it works great.

You should record your calls. (Assuming you live in a jurisdiction where only 1 party (you) need to know the conversation is recorded.)

I'm much more open to receiving phone calls now, because even if it's much harder to search an audio file, at least I have something to search. If I'm not sure if I forgot something, I can just open up the file and listen to it again. I would still rather get an email, but some people just NEED to take a phone for whatever reason.

Given that you have some trouble hearing, you can take the time you want to re-listen to a conversation with the volume as you like it.

As a bonus, it's also helpful to get a hold of a certain kind of people that thinks they can say anything and are not accountable because it's not in writing.

I work remotely. I'm pretty sure that no company has as cool an office as mine. My office looks out onto a private garden. The office is a new wooden building, climate controlled, reasonably spacious, with my own paintings on the walls, and a desk with two large monitors. When I want to chat with my colleagues, I turn to IRC or fire up a video conference on a dedicated extra screen (the 80 Mbps line to the office is more than enough for a high-quality video conference worldwide).

What you describe is a systemic lack of leadership.

It stems from a lack of understanding of systems and the way people fit into them and work together toward a genuine goal. This lack of understanding comes from beliefs in individual aptitude and attribution bias, among other things.

It doesn't have to be that way. Deming's system of profound knowledge provides a good start to undermine politics and ineffective work cultures.

What you're seeing is not a problem of office layout or design, is what I'm saying.