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Comment by Futurebot | Hacker News Reader

I've worked in a private office, small shared-office, cube farms, open plan, and remote. What I've always thought was a good mix was:

- Developers (and sometimes others that need quietude, like art/graphics people) get either a private office each or a shared, developer-only office

- Marketing and sales that need constant communication / thrive on motion and energy get open plans

- A mix of full-on conference rooms and small, private phone/meeting rooms

- Account managers, finance, managers get their own space, which can be cubes or shared offices.

Putting people who need to concentrate in with people whose job is to constantly talk and/or socialize is a recipe for (asymmetrically) poor productivity. The fact that office designs are sometimes dictated by the vicissitudes of management fads and a misguided desire to save money by just building one-size-fits-all layouts, even though a good design will pay for itself many times over, is very unfortunate.

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And yet, most places I've seen inside, it's the opposite on those top two points.

Dev/creative folks are in bullpen/open areas Marketing/sales get private offices

Justification I got a couple times was the sales people need to talk numbers, and that needs to be private. Cynically, I think they don't want anyone else (like devs) overhearing the (over)promising that's done, or hear/witness some of the desperation when things are going bad. Also, was told once that having your sales guy talk on a phone in an open office will make it sound like they're in a boiler-room situation, and lose credibility.

Fine - give everyone private/closed spaces, and give shared workspaces available to those who need it when they need it.

Still amazes me that people will pay $100k+ for 'jr-mid' level folks in some areas, but cram them in bullpens because "cost".

I'm late to this thread, and just kind of thinking out loud, but I wonder if this would work:

Give programmers tiny private offices -- enough to physically do the computer-interaction part of programming in comfort -- and have a big central open space with big tables and some of the normal lounge stuff.

Ergo: you can "go off to code" and have privacy; but you would have a physical as well as social incentive to also spend time with your colleagues.

Isn't that Google's model with their little developer sheds? Or do they not do that anymore?

I don't know, I've never heard anything about that. Guess I'll have to ask a Googler, since when I tried googling it I just found a lot of brogrammers in open-plan cult settings. :-/

I saw something a lot like this in a coworking space in Santa Monica once but of course the goal was very different.

Difficulty with this is that it assumes laptops, or requires laptops + desktops. While we're on the subject of choice, some folks are very particular about double monitors, specific keyboards, physical arrangement of all that stuff, etc. The switching back and forth between different rooms... either requires multiple machines or ignores some of the beefier setups some people want/need.

That said, I'm fine with one 16g laptop and I move around with it a lot, but I also know a lot of folks who could not be terribly productive on any laptop vs their current setup.

I find it very hard to make sales calls when somebody non-sales is in the room. The rejection is enough for me without adding judgment :)

thanks for that extra view point, and I totally understand that angle!

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