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Comment by waheoo | Hacker News Reader

Im still waiting for the rebound back to a cubicle.

Fuck open plan.

I really wish people would get it through their damned thick skulls that their heads are not the same as my head. And my head is not the same as her head. And her head is not the same as their head.

We all need our own accomidations. Some people like open plan, some people hate it. Some people thrive in an office environment, some people thrive at home.

These things arent mutually exlcusive. Someone isnt wrong. You can have both things be true.

Yes, in the real world you cant cater to everything everyone demands, but that also doesnt follow that you should just give up and cater only to the lowest common denominator - what some schlep in middle management thinks they know about productivity and psychology.

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How about actual offices? You know, rooms with walls and doors.

My yearly salary could build a comfortable home for a family of 4 every single year in some of the cheaper places in this country, I'm pretty sure my company laptop at several of my employers has retailed > $4000, yet 4 feet of desk space and a chair that seemed to have lived a hard life on the streets has been my most common accommodation. Surely an office and a parking space for every employee isn't an impossibility. And if it is then you can't afford to be in the market you're trying to operate in.

I can guarantee that I would have been a happier more productive employee if I were given a private space, near colleagues but by default separated from them away from home.

Growing up on hundreds of acres where the nearest human was often more than a mile away, having the experience of daily being obligated to board public transit for 90 minutes and then spend 8 hours in an open office in the middle of a downtown area was subtly but deeply unsettling. Being constantly so far away from the ability to have any private space or space which was mine in any way, and worse the only way to get to a space which was was by being jostled on a packed train for up to two hours was simply bad for my mental health.

Because you attract talent by high salaries, so try to save elsewhere (especially when office rental prices are astronomical).

You yourself are yet another proof of this - you changed whatever rural environment you had to go into cramped office with very high salary. Clearly, the money was more important to you than vast open plains and remoteness. Most folks work this way.

You ask for private space near colleagues - that's a premium anywhere. I presume you don't mean tiny cubicle but actual quiet room. Almost nobody has these in corporate environment for various reasons, certainly not regular employees.

Aye, this. I need to fit 250 people in a single floor in a big city. One floor is already expensive as hell, and I'm not going to pick up 2-3 more. Hell, even my managers don't get offices.

Ah, a fellow sardine fan!

People near the senior levels of management spend a lot of time worrying about dollars, to the exclusion of everything else. And since they tend to do a pretty piss-poor job of quantifying employee morale as it relates to productivity, that gets ignored. My company saved a half million dollars a year by making the lease smaller. Great, right? Except that in our building we have hundreds of developers. Let's say ~100M in fully loaded costs. So if moving them all from cubicles into six-foot bench seating (no, not kidding) knocked down their productivity by 10%, then the open office was a net loss. But they can't quantify that, so it's not even considered. Well, until we lost about 10% of our developers in a single year, but I'm not sure if even then senior management got a clue.

My last company tried to end their practice of providing plastic spoons in the break area. Probably spent more money in wages to write the email than it costs to buy a box of spoons that'll last the better part of a year. That one actually got people riled up enough to complain, because it was both inconvenient and incredibly petty. We were just going to buy a box of spoons from Webstaurant Store and expense it. LOL. Silly managers trying to impress their own managers by saving every penny.

Your revealed preference is for this job and not one of the remote jobs or any of the private-office jobs. Perhaps employers are responding to your revealed preference over your stated preference.

I work from home. Have for 3 years. Its great.

I like working in a team room - several developers working on the same product. Great for collaboration. Almost without fail, proponents of remote work like to compare remote to open plan offices only. There are other ways of working too.

During the pandemic I have been working from home for three months. Mostly it has worked pretty well. However, I do think you miss some aspects of collaboration when you do. I hardly ever see anybody touch on this. Probably because many people see getting rid of the commute as such a big plus. I sympathise with that view.

But I tried to touch on what I think we lose here: https://henrikwarne.com/2020/06/09/working-from-home-cons-an...

I totally support team rooms. I have had great success with those. I'd happily take a cube over an open office, but I'd take a conference room for each team (with real desks, though, not a big table ;-)) over any other option.

The place I'm at now has six-foot bench seating for everyone below VP. The dividers between rows aren't even tall enough to block your vision when you're sitting. It's a terrible arrangement, very noisy.

Open office is great for covid world!

You're holding contradictory positions. Everybody has a valid preference, but you can't wait for companies to implement yours (cubicle)?

I think they’re saying that cubicle is less restrictive than open-plan for accomodating different personalities.

Hyperbole.. what are you ten?

Oh no i did it again, somebody stop me.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21990253 - "Personal cubicle is going to be a new dream of many software engineers. People will start hating open space."

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