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pfarrell

I’ve had a good number of jobs in 20+ years in software. I have had a private office four times.

Once when the business unit was failing and my room only had me in it.

Once when I worked for a small old school family company.

Once when I made principal engineer after years of work in a large-ish company.

And finally now that I’m working from home.

One job I had was really noisy and distracting. Rather than install sound mitigation, I found out the CEO liked it that way. “So it sounded like things were happening.”

It’s going to take a lot to get me back to a cube farm or open office.

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I've been working from home for almost a decade, two thirds of my career to date. Prior to that I was in either open bullpen-style offices (everyone in a room facing out) or sharing an office with two or three other people. I will never* sign up for an in-office job again.

* unless, you know, I need to feed my family or whatever

Totally agree and exactly the same asterisk I was thinking of with my pronouncement.

Now it clicks why cube farms are popular: it is an easy way for managers / owners to feel the excitement of the agora but being up in the box seats they don’t have to live or think in it.

To be honest, I don't mind cube farms per se as much as densification.

As long as you have a certain number of square feet and things aren't bolted down, you can still exercise a certain amount of control over your environment. You can rotate your desk to face a different way, put up pictures or a coat rack, what have you.

It's when you start getting squeezed in the minimal legal square footage that all the options start to go away -- you literally can't move your desk without disrupting the entire floor, you can't add a bookshelf and any plants or pictures need to fit on your suspiciously narrow desk.

Sure, cube farms have many of the other problems of noise pollution, minimal privacy, and bad lighting, but as long as you have your own cube, or a cube with few enough people to haggle over rearranging, and a few extra square feet it's still possible to put your stamp on it.

My desk is bolted to the floor along with six other desks. If I get much fatter, I'll pretty much be sat on top of my neighbour. At this point, I would gladly get a cubicle, at least they pay lip service to concentration. The open plan office I'm currently in doesn't even manage that.

The next level of hell is hotdesking aka flex desk (flexible desk), when every day you come to work you're in a different place.

Yeah, $employer is currently trying to force that on everyone. I have so much stuff on my desk that I'm currently exempt from that nonsense. It's a great way to waste everyone's time, because apparently everyone's time is a lot cheaper than a bit of extra office space.

Our official "return to the office" date is very soon. Our second work site has been folded into the main site, and the cubicles in the main site have been reduced to half the size (in terms of square feet) they used to be, to more or less double the density.

Implementation of the changes had already started when COVID hit. People who have been to the office recently say things like, don't hit your knees where the PC is mounted.

I was fine with our (pretty standard sized) cubes before COVID. But I'm so glad we have the option to continue working from home now.

About 5 years ago our company shifted from a more traditional private offices to a wide open “european/tech style” office environment to “to improve collaboration”.

I hated it. Too noisy. To much distraction and now the culture of the company seemed to encourage distraction and interruption. I managed to maneuver my way into one of the few private offices just so I could have a door to close. Even then I had to put up a sign that basically said “if the door is closed and the building isn’t on fire, don’t open it.”

In some regards for me the pandemic was a blessing. Fully remote now, company decided to shut down the office in our location and rely on rentable conference space if we need a day together. It’s just my wife, dog, and I in a shared office with each of us respectful of distractions. It’s bliss. It would be nearly impossible for me to return to an office again. I’ll opt to retire first.

I hate open office spaces too.

My method of dealing was to eliminate noise with earplugs and headphones.

But visual distraction was more destructive and depended on the orientation of the desk - depending more on luck.

noise pollution, same as regular pollution... it's an indicator of activity but not healthy for you

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