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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

The amazing thing about this is that it is from a company that sells sound deadening booths for companies that have adopted open floor plan offices. I have to imagine their pitch where they line them up and basically create traditional walled offices, except each office is the size of a telephone booth and has no place to store anything.

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My old office had a few similar pods. They were awful. Yes you could see out on two sides, but the result was that it managed to feel claustrophobic and exposed at the same time.

When I first saw them, I thought of the scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey where he astronauts are in the pods plotting against HAL, who is reading their lips,

> I have to imagine their pitch where they line them up and basically create traditional walled offices

Despite how they're advertised, they're presumably mostly used for phone calls and audio recording, no?

I wish... we've had these at my current and previous job, and they're busy all day with people joining remote meetings. This was true even pre-pandemic. The last time I went in to the office I was stuck in one for 4 hours of back to back calls. Wondering why I made the commute...

Yep, we have them in our office and I used them a ton for phone calls pre-pandemic. I always jokingly called them "screaming shacks" but never saw anyone realize their stress reducing potential.

As a manager of a distributed team at a non-central office in a large company, this is most of my day. Yet, I still need to be in the office three days a week...

If you want to debug nginx internals without listening to sales all day, and your office has some of these pods, they seem like a good place to go.

What we used to call a phone booth, then.

Our office has one of these pods, and I like them a lot for short calls. Yes, they're tiny, but that doesn't bother me very much and it means the space cost of installing one is also tiny.

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