Don’t Get Too Comfortable at That Desk | Hacker News Reader

Don’t Get Too Comfortable at That Desk

nytimes.com

17 pointsSREinSF11 comments

I just want a fucking office. I don't want to listen to my coworker with volume control issues. I don't want to hear every last word wrung out on a video chat. I don't want to hear every loud presentation. I want four goddamn walls and a door and a minute alone with my thoughts. I'm begging; no, PLEADING for it. I promise, you can have as much of my labor and productivity as you want if you just give me some fucking peace and quiet.

Hahahaha, you basically said what I came here to say.

Being old enough to have lived the "old school" days of actually having walls, I've never liked the "open office" concept. I wonder if it wasn't management's version of how JavaScript devs are always super quick to adopt the next framework. In this case management had to be the adoption hipsters jumping on the latest bandwagon. That or the cynical part of me thinks perhaps management buys in because it gives them more visibility and control into what people are doing, not for "collaboration" and things like that...

This is one of the main reasons that I work from home / remote entirely. The worst office configuration I ever saw was a San Francisco open plan environment in a loft style office where all the engineering desks had their back to a floor to ceiling window shining bright sun on every engineer's screen for roughly 1/2 the day. I don't think that company (Kleiner funded) was ever profitable.

Every single engineer had eye strain as well the normal noise distractions.

What if we had mandatory “flexible living space” arrangements for the executives behind this? You know, Millennials aren’t into houses, cars, having children, or owning stuff these days anyway. Isn’t it so much better to have the flexibility and freedom of choice to decide each night whether you will sleep under a bridge, in a tent camp, or on a park bench? Think of the synergistic efficiencies. The idea of each person having a fixed apartment is so outmoded.

If an employer has so much contempt for you that they don’t think you even rate a permanent slot on a workbench, kick them in the shins and run far, far away.

How much money do these new office layouts save?

Office space in Santa Clara County is about $34/sq. ft./year, though it's been increasing at a rate of 16% per year. The article says offices have, on average, about 150 sq. ft. per person. So that's $5100 per year per worker. It was about 225 sq. ft. in 2010, so an extra $2550 per year.

The average software engineer salary in the area is about $125k per year. (The actual cost is more, because of benefits and taxes.) So these new offices only cost 4% of the salary, compared to 6%.

From a beancounter's perspective, that's a pretty easy, quantifiable savings. The change in developer productivity as a result probably isn't nearly as easy to measure.

I've tried the "roving" lifestyle and I have to say, dual monitors are hugely helpful when developing. We took a downgrade by losing offices for open spaces. I hope we don't take another downgrade by losing our desks too.

For a few years I used a 34" ultrawide next to a 27" monitor (they're exactly the same height).

Recently I switched to a single 38" ultrawide (a xr382cqk) and I've taken down the second monitor.

Windows and OS X both have good enough tiling that I can use the single monitor without the distraction of bezels, and there's much less ceremony to hooking up one monitor

I think the same thing would work with a ~40" TV, and I e seen people do it, I just prefer the space efficiency of the ultrawide

I have a 32inch single monitor and that is good enough for me. I'm ADD and dyslexic and more would overload me. I'm on Mac so I have desktops setup. I hate open spaces. I have an office now and my team of two share a collaborative space and respect each other's need for quiet. Our FE devs work in a big open space and hate it.

At my last employer I was a roaming employee. No desk. Just a file drawer. I was not a dev then. But I hated it. I had to wander 4 buildings to find space to work. I hated it.

Having tiny rooms to get peace and quiet for head-down work time is important but most people don’t need to use them often. For 20 years I have worked from a home office, except now I work in an open style office at Capital One and a few years ago I also worked in an open office at Google.

My way of dealing with open offices is to start work very early in the morning so I always get a large block of time for quiet head-down work each day. It also helps to roam around, find a quiet place to sit for a while, and not always work at my desk.

In the first photo, the 'isolation room' kind of looks like an 'office'. I suppose the difference is that it doesn't belong to a particular worker?

I got claustrophobia chills from the phone booth model.

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