Comment by p4wnc6 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by p4wnc6 | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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