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Comment by fezfight | Hacker News Reader

Very few people get to actually try out the cell. Cubicles aren't offices. They're wire cages for moneys at the zoo.

We should try having more actual offices before we declare it equal but different to the elementrary school recess that are open office plans.

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In my context cubicals are considered to be "open plan". We had some cubical dividers in our first office, way back in the day, but it's an interim stage at best.

Of course we had that because we didn't have space for walls. When we moved we got a lot more space, made offices, but monthly rent went up about 6 fold. It's a very real cost.

In fact, after salaries, it's our biggest cost by a long way. Given that most people are happy working from home we'll likely downscale our space a lot at our next lease renewal.

> Very few people get to actually try out the cell. Cubicles aren't offices. They're wire cages for moneys at the zoo.

Never having worked in a cubicle, I wonder: don't those dividers actually help a bit with noise? Sure, I don't expect them to be individual-office level quiet, but still better than fully open.

I used to work in a building where one "open-office" had dividers mounted on the desks, reaching about the screen height, with carpeted floors and some kind of sound absorbing panels on the ceilings. It was extremely quiet compared to the other "regular" offices that only had the carpets.

They don't give any respite from the noise. At most they give you a bit of privacy from people staring at your screen. And most mini-cubicles these days don't even help with keeping someone from staring at your screen from behind. It's downright creepy. I very much agree with the wire-cages for monkeys at a zoo comment.

These days everyone spends their in-office time on zoom calls with their coworkers, and no amount of blankets dividing the workspace is able to absorb the constant "You're on mute Bob" that fills the office air.

What's the rational behind coming in at that point?

When I was in an office, my team was co-located, so we rarely needed a call. Currently my team is mutually remote without an office, so we zoom our preferred environment.

Sometimes a bunch of us meet at the office to work together on something that needs a lot of back and forth, like a brainstorm session. And to socialize during lunch. If independent work is needed then we’re all at home.

A lot of people do a combination of working with people locally and having with calls with people, possibly in different groups, who are elsewhere. When I was a product manager I met with many people who were in the office and we'd typically do that in person. (At that time, anyone local came in.) But I probably also spent hours every day on the phone with field people and others who weren't in the same location.

I think quiet is a proxy measure for “safe and secluded”. In every actual office I’ve been fortunate enough to have, I arranged my desk to face the door and, with the door closed, not only did I get quiet but I also got “cannot be snuck up upon”.

I think there’s a primal aspect to how deeply you are willing to block out your local environment and let your mind go deep on a problem that relates to how safe/secure that environment feels.

Noise is just the most obvious annoyance to talk about, but I don’t think it’s primarily about the noise.

Tall-walled cubicles did give you some separation. While managers (generally) had offices they were mostly for 1.) status, 2.) a bit more space, and 3.) to give them somewhere they could easily have a private conversation. The cultural expectation was doors open unless there was some specific reason not to. In practice the focus difference between offices and cubes wasn't all that great.

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