open office – Cosmic Reflections

I’ll be 63 in a couple of months. My the years go fast, faster still of late.

Naturally, I’m beginning to look toward retirement when I can finally devote nearly all my time and energy to astronomy, preservation and restoration of our nighttime environment, and classical music. These three avocations have been my primary interests all of my adult life.

I’m in need of some retirement advice by someone who is not trying to sell me a financial product. I’d like to semi-retire as soon as possible, but want to wait until age 70 to collect Social Security when the monthly benefit reaches a maximum. So, I guess that means gradually cutting back work hours and supplementing the lost income with some retirement benefits.

I’m in a good position in terms of having a marketable work skill for the semi-retirement years. You’d be hard pressed to find a better SAS programmer. I’ll be at SAS Global Forum 2019 in Dallas this spring if you want to talk.

Honestly, I’ve been in a bit of a funk since I started this blog back in December 2016. First, Trump got elected, and that made me realize how bad things have gotten in this country. That someone so boorish and with zero job skills as a public servant got elected as President of the United States is both frightening and depressing. And the national nightmare continues. Then, last fall, my employer moved everyone except for management into an open office environment, which I hate. Throughout my work career, I’ve always had my own office or a cubicle and now I’m in a big open room with lots of distractions and a desk half the size of what I had just a few months ago, and no place to put my books, so I had to bring them all home. No one wants to learn SAS at my company anymore, even though I do amazing things with it every day. I’m in high demand, but they’re not hiring anybody anymore with SAS skills. That’s depressing, because it is a great language and a great company and SAS Institute most definitely continues to innovate. But open source is the name of the game where I work now.

It is easy to feel isolated living in a small town. As my friend Jeff Dilks once said when he was a physics teacher in Shenandoah, Iowa, the chances of finding anyone else in a small town (or rural area) with similar interests and abilities are vanishingly small if you have “big city” interests and a specialized education. That’s true, but where else are you going to live if you want to do observational astronomy and ride a bicycle to and from work? Quality of life issues like that, you know. But loneliness, yes, and I imagine that gets to be more of a challenge in our later years.

For something like 30 years, I’ve wanted to help develop and nurture a science-oriented and education-oriented intentional community where astronomy is a major focus. I even have a name for it: Mirador Astronomy Village. Can’t think of a better way to spend my retirement years, but it takes serious money to get something like this off the ground, and money I don’t have.

With open office and all (which is pretty much ubiquitous nowadays), I’ve soured on the idea of working for “Corporate America” any longer. I’d be much happier as a public servant, trying to make the world a better place and helping to solve the many problems for which Corporate America is not the answer, and has no answers.

I’ve been in the work force for 38 years, and I have always had a cubicle with full-height partitions or an office of my own. As a computer programmer, I’ve always needed to concentrate intensely for most of the work day. That requires a certain amount of freedom from visual and auditory distractions. I need to focus.

This week, the work environment I have had throughout my career is being taken away from me, forcibly, as it is for all of us where I work. We had no input. No explanation was given. The decision was made at the highest levels of our company’s management. We are moving to open office.

We still have cubicles—if you want to call them that—but no partition is higher than eye level when sitting in an office chair. No more upper shelves, no more book shelves. Only a work surface and a meager amount of drawer storage underneath. No more physical barriers between rows. Just one big, noisy, overilluminated room. Everything and everyone exposed for all to see from anywhere in the room.

Speaking of illumination, as part of the office “improvements” they have also replaced the warm white fluorescent lights we have used for decades—with a correlated color temperature (CCT) around 3000 to 4000 K—with significantly brighter and bluer LED lights having a CCT of 4000 to 5000K or higher. It provides a cold, harsh, clinical illumination, not at all like the natural daylight they are trying to emulate. LEDs are, of course, readily available in the warmer color temperatures of 2700K to 4000K.

I am not alone. Many of my coworkers—some much younger than me—do not like open office nor the bluer, brighter lights we now have to endure.

This just adds additional stress to an already stressful job. When is management going to learn that one size does not fit all?

Anyone need a top-flight SAS programmer with good communication, mentoring, and teaching skills?

Tag: open office

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