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bitwize

What the hell?!

Give. Developers. Offices. With. Doors.

It's conceptually simple, and will probably cost less than this novelty shit in the long run.

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Microsoft once ran ads for programmers, offering an office with a door.

My experience over the past 6 years with offices at MS was being doubled up in an office meant for one person, then moving to team rooms where we're at the fire safety limit for number of occupants.

If there's one thing I've learned in the tech industry it's that no matter how much you think your work is worth, real estate is worth more.

We're not getting private offices any more than we're getting family homes. Both are understandable expectations given our nominal wages, but they are also gross misapprehensions of our place in the pecking order. You may be able to afford all the cars and iPhones and vacations in the world, but that will never hold a candle to land. Land owns you.

Some people like that, some people don't.

The worst physical office environment I've ever worked in was one where I had an individual office with a door. It was an interior office with no windows, effectively a large closet, and it was pretty depressing and alienating.

Maybe you could argue that you should give all developers offices with doors and exterior windows. But the dimensions of most buildings don't make that practical.

There's definitely a culture associated with offices. I worked at a place for over a decade that had offices (for some) and the norm was doors open unless there was some reason doors weren't open. So you were free to drop in if the door was open and not so if the door wasn't. And doors were usually open.

If I recall correctly, the unusual cross shaped design of Microsoft's earliest office buildings (1-10, recently demolished) was to maximize the number of offices with windows. It did make them somewhat confusing to navigate though.

My worst work environment was also my own office with a door, in a former HP building with no windows, and I hadn't learned about vitamin D supplements yet.

Of course, the main problem was the thermostat was in the empty office next door so I couldn't close the door without it getting hot.

That doesn't make the engineers feel clever, though.

Not everyone want that, if I need my own private space I don't need to go to office.

The reason I may want to go to office is to see my coworkers.

Doors/private cubicle defeat the purpose.

Not everyone wants a loud, bustling bullpen where you can barely hear yourself think and your productivity is crippled as a consequence.

But yet that's what most everybody in our field gets.

Nothing about having a private office precludes seeing coworkers. In the heady days of my long-lost youth when I still had an office, I stepped outside of it when I wanted to see my coworkers and went back inside and locked the door when I didn't.

And you were likely much less efficient because of less interaction with your more knowledgeable colleagues. You don't know what you don't know.

Efficiency is an attribute of doing the work. If you're always interacting then you're never doing the work; neither efficiency nor inefficiency can exist at all.

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