Comment by p4wnc6 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by p4wnc6 | Hacker News Reader

I've been facing the opposite problem. I've been in a lengthy job search and despite being in a situation where I really need a job, I've been forced to reject all the offers that have been made -- because the working conditions are just too unhealthy.

The article mentions that a side effect of exploding offers is that you don't get to see the full landscape of opportunities and trade-offs you're facing before you make your decision.

On the other hand, after a year of job searching, hundreds of technical phone interviews, dozens of take-home & interactive code tests, and a significant number of job offers that I have turned down, what I can say is that I think I have a pretty good picture of the overall tech job market, and it is exceedingly depressing.

For instance, I have a mild case of misophonia, and so being seated in an open-plan office layout is simply not doable for me, physiologically, and listening to headphones obviously doesn't make sense if the problem is misophonia.

Many companies have been excited about my skills, experience, work ethic, and my ability to communicate.

But they have been 100% no-questions-asked outright indignant at the idea of a candidate negotiating the ability to work in a private office.

Even if I explain that it is related to misophonia, and the extreme aversion I have to ambient noises, conversations, small movements, and so forth, they don't seem to care. In all previous jobs, my teamwork ability and my effort spent collaborating was always praised as one of my best attributes. But in today's job market, collaboration == sitting in an open-plan office.

Far from worrying about exploding offers, I am worried about the overall industry shift that has happened to make it so that it is effectively impossible to work in a private space as a developer.

I feel bad for all of the intrinsically introverted people who are nonetheless excellent collaborators and developers -- the very nature of physical workspaces is harmful to their cognitive health, yet employers outright, under all circumstances, refuse to negotiate about it.

I've never been very interested in the idea of a software union. But the egregious lack of privacy in the workspace has made me start to feel like a union would be truly the only possible solution.

How about consulting? Since consultants contract for the work they produce and not their availability to do the boss's bidding, most companies that hire them are much more amenable to remote work. It seems tailor-made for your situation - someone with good development and communication skills who doesn't want to work in an office.

I actually very much do want to work in an office. I worked remotely in one position, and while that solved the privacy and noise issues, I did not like being away from my colleagues.

Working with adequate privacy and quiet does not mean the same thing as holing up away from everyone. I still enjoyed talking shop over lunch, jumping up from my desk to go and assist someone with a bug, attending research and tech presentations, and all the other good stuff of being in the office.

I also feel I am not well-suited to consulting because I significantly prefer to work with a more or less stable technology stack, in which we invest time to properly refactor, write tests, and design things so that the system we maintain and grow over time can easily adjust and expand for new business needs and new functionality.

With a lot of consulting, especially in my area (machine learning and scientific computing) you are always at the mercy of whatever technology stack you walk into, and whatever state of disrepair that code base is in.

In a lot of consulting, there can also be unforeseen traps. Sometimes you can get into a situation where a client can require you to come to their office, or work in some other sort of field site situation that is insanely horrible, and you can't get out of it without basically quitting and thereby burning a bridge and negatively affecting your consulting reputation.

Just because I happen to have a strong preference for mental health affirmation through adequate privacy and quiet doesn't mean I am looking to bottomlessly compromise on all the other working standards I have too, such as quality of the work, adequate pay and benefits, and so forth.

Unfortunately, no one has even offered me these other compromises. No one has said they would consider a private office if I accepted less pay, fewer vacation days, etc. They just simply say it is in principle impossible.

I'm not defending the companies per se, but perhaps they are worried you will be particular and awkward to work with beyond the points you discussed with them. Simply because truly difficult people rarely advertise this up front, they may feel they'd rather avoid the risk.

I am certain that at least some of them feel this way, especially given how many tech candidates are willing to work in an open-plan setting without even batting an eyelash about it.

But I don't know of any other way to ensure that I can have the adequate privacy and quiet that truly is physically necessary for me. I've just come to accept the fact that this means extremely lengthy job searches for me, and a need to do the really hard thing and reject some otherwise pretty good job offers if they can't provide an office.

Do you bring this up before you get the offer? You need to wait to get the offer and then negotiate an office for yourself. It is as much a benefit as salary is, though it is sad to have to call it a benefit. Once they go through the red tape and legwork to get you an offer, only then is the leverage in your favor.

Edit: sorry, it sounds like that's what you're doing already. Just re-read your post more carefully. Anyway, I wish you good luck in your search and I hope you're able to find a suitable job situation. Maybe it would help to classify this as a disability somehow? I think they have to provide "reasonable accommodation" under the ADA act but that could mean a pair of noise cancelling headphones.

I'd guess most are more concerned that if they give you a private office, others will request one and they aren't equipped to give lots of private offices. And if they give just you one, it will cause resentment in the team that isn't worth it.

I think that's very true, but it makes the situation even more frustrating. Going all the way back to books like Peopleware, it's been well-known for a long time that even in dense urban areas like Manhattan or San Francisco, it is more cost-effective to provide private and quiet space for knowledge workers than to attempt to "save" short-term money by buying open-plan office space and increasing worker density.

There's a ton of quantitative evidence supporting this. Yet employers persist in only ever buying open-plan space. Established companies that already had private offices sometimes even spend money to tear down the privacy features and remodel the office to function as a type of fashion signalling that they are "cool" like what they perceive start-ups to be. So they actually pay money to destroy productivity, so they pay money to move their business into a state in which the business makes less money.

Then you also see firms spending money on needlessly opulent lifestyle masturbation, like moving their office to some expensive downtown location with a roof deck. Or building a rock climbing wall in the office.

So you know it's not an issue of lacking the money for buying real estate that would support private working conditions. It's just a lot of issues about status and opulence.

So while you're correct that given their current office layout they might be unable to accommodate giving someone privacy, it's disheartening that they were ever in that situation to begin with since it would have been demonstrably more cost-effective for them to have built privacy features into the workplace from the beginning.

It has really caused me to see office space as a major red flag about a company. It says a lot about what the management of that company cares about.

You should apply to Facebook, when I was there special accommodations were made for people who required an office.

That is a mind-boggling comment. I've mostly avoided applying there because they are so over the top with advertising their extreme investment into huge open-plan spaces. It was such a huge cultural turn off that I figured there was no way they would even consider someone like me.

Do you have any links to anything they've written about this?

Sorry, I do not. But the option was twofold when I was there:

1. Engineers have a choice of open plan or a shared (2 person) office depending on preference. 2. Engineers who have special circumstances can request their own office.

I'm also starting a job search soon and also concerned about finding an actual office these days, or even a cubicle. Maybe I'll end up working remotely, but there ought to be a better answer.

I don't think a union is the way to go. More like a professional association like the American Bar Association, American Medical Association, AICPA, etc.

Have those organizations successfully negotiated working conditions? I mean we do have things like IEEE, ACM, various societies. Membership in them pretty much doesn't mean anything.

Do noise-cancelling headphones not work for you?

Not even close. For one, listening to actual sound like music or a podcast is even worse for me than the dull ambient backdrop noise. On rare occasion I can listen to music for a brief period of time, maybe 1 hour. But any sustained sounds longer than an hour and I start to feel the type of tiredness you feel when you pull an all-nighter. That's just how sound affects me. I can't "tune it out" like most people can ... it just grates on me and, whether I choose it or not, induces me to be hyper attentive to it, especially to human voices.

Noise-cancelling headphones can take away dull background chatter that's far away. But in open-plan offices, usually without even so much as differentiated desks or cubicles, when the person sitting next to you decides it's cool to bring a remote controlled helicopter to work and his friends are all laughing about it with him 2 feet behind you (true story), it just doesn't help.

But even in less extreme places, where it's just normal, good-intentioned colleagues chatting about their weekend plans or something, it's still a huge disruption for me, and noise-cancelling headphones don't solve it.

Actually, I can remember one of the most insane attention triggers I had to deal with was when I actually worked in a cubicle setting and the person in the cubicle next to me had some kind of smart phone that must have doubled as a sex toy or something because when it vibrated it was insane. I could feel his phone vibrating in my forearms resting on my desk while I was typing.

That one drove me absolutely insane.

There's also a huge component of this that is just based on natural human fight vs flight reflexes.

If you have a bunch of vague, large mammals kind of walking around right behind you where you can't see them all day, it just causes anxiety. Some people (especially many extroverts) can deal with this without a problem, and it can even be comforting to them.

But for others (especially introverts) the constant triggering of the "what's that, who is walking behind me" reflex is extremely exhausting, and it gets stimulated by pretty much everything, noise, casual movement, ping pong, whatever, going on in an open plan office. The office layout in and of itself is just intrinsically unhealthy for these people.

And I fall very, very far on that spectrum towards the introverted side. It doesn't mean I'm shy (I actually love public speaking) ... what it means is that little unplanned social interactions or hints of social interactions are a huge, constant energy drain for me.

I talked to one former boss about this and his immediate reaction was something like, "Look, you are really good at getting your work done. You don't have to worry if someone's walking by and they see you've got ESPN pulled up on your monitor or something ... we know you're getting your work done."

And I'm just like, "umm ... it doesn't work that way. I don't give a shit if you see me playing Minecraft on my computer during work hours. It has nothing to do with that. It's a physiological response to the environment itself. I can't just "switch it off" because you try to assuage my anxiety."

When it comes to this introvert/extrovert spectrum, I think it truly represents a component of workplace discrimination that really damages a lot of people, but for extroverts and managers, it just never even crosses their mind that it could even be happening at all.

One thousands times, that. Noisy office layouts are a non-starter for me. Fortunately I've been working at home, or in a small office of friends for 20 years now. But back in the day I had to have the most remote, unpopular cubicle by the fire escape to get anything done at all. Just to have some peace to think.

As someone with a similar issue, I have settled on a combination of brown noise and indistinct human-like voices. (I use babelbabble on iOS but would like to find a webapp equivalent. I hope you can hold out for the right job.

This is remarkably similar to the set up that David Byrne describes in his book How Music Works.

I had a colleague who used the kind of ear protection that airport employees wear out on the tarmac. In order to get his attention, you'd literally have to tap him on the shoulder. I tried it myself and it was eerily quiet...you couldn't even sense when someone was standing behind you.

Have you tried these? Combined with a desk that faces a wall, I'd bet you'd find yourself in your own little world, oblivious to all that was going on behind you.

How many tarmac earmuff people do you see getting promoted to a senior position?

This sort of thing, even if it's unfair, absolutely lowers your status in the company.

In one previous job with a noisy open-plan office, I actually tried wearing some factory-grade ear plugs, small little yellow ear plugs that you couldn't see unless you came up close.

They weren't perfect, but the ambient noise was so distracting that I gave them a try.

Within a week, my boss had a 1-1 meeting with me to tell me that some people thought it was very rude that I was wearing earplugs, and that it made it seem like I was unwilling to participate.

I was actually training an intern and helping a team of three others with a software tool I wrote for them, so I was far from not participating, and all of my peers were vocally supportive of me wearing the ear plugs if they helped.

I learned later that one of the C-level executives had made a walk through of the research work space and he just simply "didn't like" seeing someone with ear plugs.

Headphones == acceptable, possibly even sexy cool start-up geek.

Ear plugs == tacky, borderline Aspbergery nerd who isn't being good enough office eye candy

I'm a big supporter of wearing the ear plugs. They're better at blocking noise, and turning the volume up on headphones to drown out background noise will leave you deaf.

But, you do look like both a tool and a jerk if you're wearing earplugs in an office.

I started putting headphones on over earplugs. All the benefits of earplugs, none of the drawbacks.

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