Hacker News Reader

Comment by that_guy_iain | Hacker News Reader

When people say "no space in the building to allocate a desk” they mean "No space to neatly put a desk." Companies have often shown repeatedly they can force desks into rooms when needed.

Anyways, they can and will buy office space to put the desks when needed.

View on HN

Lol. I can confirm that a motivated company can Tetris a lot more desks into a room than you’d expect. My first job… ah, memories.

LAN parties have been fitting a surprising number of people onto 8' folding tables for decades.

An even duct tape them to places.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/kvgtok/lan_party_ga...

OTOH LAN parties do not generally persist long enough to need to worry about fire codes etc.

I don't know how we didn't trip all the breakers. Running a crapload of CRTs, and multiple 500+ watt power supplies on one circuit?! Plus 2 projectors? I wonder how hot that breaker panel got lol.

Putting someone in a hallway might technically meet the requirement of having a desk, but not the spirit of having a desk.

And while I know everyone is into breaking regulations, both fire codes (for density and exit corridors) and OSHA (for number of employees per toilet) limit the number of desks in an office.

Enter: Open plan offices!

I love how now they are justifiably out of fashion when just a few years ago only staid companies had cubicles or offices!

A wild COVID variant has appeared!

Don’t be silly, covid is over. Pay no attention to the 3,250 people hospitalized per day, or the 280 deaths, behind the curtain!

Disruption!

And am I the only person who has been in a startup going through a "two people per desk" period when growing rapidly?

For a time, the Niantic office in Bellevue was a tiny room with four desks and five people. The manager would sit on a swivel chair in the middle and try to work on a laptop on his knee.

Later we upgraded to a room with twelve people in it where you had to ask at least two other people to stand up and move their chairs out of the way if you needed to get up for any reason.

Are we considering Tesla a startup now?

Sounds like a luxury still, I got to the "elbows touching" stage. You couldn't put a hand between my screen and the screens of my coworkers. For quiet time I'd go to the kitchen table...

Summer was a challenge because the A/C couldn't keep up at all.

Nope.

And the desks were doors on sawhorses.

I had to walk uphill both ways to my desk. With my smaller co-workers on my back.

I wish! Our desks were made out of tinfoil and old ramen boxes.

Luxury. We used less senior employees as desks.

Tesla, the 15 year old "startup".

I once spent a summer internship working at desk and computer they put in the nook next to soda and chip vending machines. Got to say hi to everyone at snack time.

Oh man I'd definitely buy large headphones and a baseball cap with a huuuge bill!

The Fremont factory has like a square mile of unused space. Not defending or apologizing, but they can find the room. That being said it’s not uncommon for Elon to declare shit that’s totally unreasonable and impossible and then leave it to other people to and something work.

what about occupancy/fire code limits?

Fire codes and occupancy limits are set by how many people can evacuate the building in a set amount of time. I worked at a place in an antique building and they had to limit how many classrooms were allowed in the building because they had to stay under these limits. Also, yearly, there were fire drills where they'd verify they could get everyone out.

So in tesla's case, they'd just fire all the people who leave their desks in a fire?

Elon will plead to the fire marshal to arrest only him, and force his workers to come in anyways

As if Musk would fall on his own sword let alone anyone else's. To much wasted time to be able to poke fun of Bezos or make some other bone headed tweet.

https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-to-county-health-officials-arr...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com