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Comment by AlexandrB | Hacker News Reader

I think this is correct. It's why, before the pandemic normalized remote work, offices were popular.

What's disheartening is that a lot of "return to office" plans I've heard of from friends involve conditions even worse than what was there before. For example, hot-desking replacing the previous (also terrible) open office.

I'm too young to have lived through the golden age of engineers actually having an office to work in. But my best experience (besides WFH) was at my first job out of school, in a cube farm - at least you had a little bit of privacy and space to put your stuff. Every office trend since then has been for the worse.

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I am old enough to remember when cubicles and offices were the norm. Cubicle companies studied and improved the cubicles spaces to make them more efficient using science. Yes they actually studied what would make us happier and more proficient at work.

Then came the stupid trend of organic seating. Cubicle’s ? Thing of the past they said, yet our productivity suffered. Great for sprints but quickly diminished due to constant distractions forcing engineers to invest in noise canceling headphones.

The WFH movement is because water flows downhill. We learned that we made the office an incredibly inefficient place to work, because we didn’t follow the science and threw away decades of research because of a new ‘fad’ that the CEO’s liked. Too bad CEO’s, I have been WFH ever since corporate America thought organic seating was cool.

I will never go back, in fact us programmers should unite and unionize to solidify this benefit before they try and take this away for good and make our jobs more difficult.

Re: "'fad' that CEO's liked." My previous CEO: "We all have to be in an open office every day to enhance productivity." Also my previous CEO: "I'll be working from my house in the Hamptons during July and August." :-)

> Yes they actually studied what would make us happier and more proficient at work.

And they utterly failed.

But I'm willing to put up with cubes for the right job. There is no job that would be worth putting up with an open office layout or, worse, hot-desking.

I would think that if companies want people back in the office so badly, they would be willing to do something to make working in the office pleasant and productive. But I guess that's not how they think.

I keep saying—if you want me to return to the office, give me an office. Or even a cubicle. Why even enforce a hot-desking setup when the space is 20% full? It makes no sense at all!

For all the memes about cubicles the one time I had it was actually pleasant. You could have a small meeting in the cubicle. The walls were tall enough to hang up reference diagrams. Those same walls meant that sound didn't travel when your PM was on yet another call. Not being able to see a window was a downside. As was there oppressive grey-beige monotony, but I imagine with the Google colour palette they'd be much more bearable.

Here, however, I can make more working remotely than I can in office for one of the few local companies. I mean it's an obvious choice.

Compared to open plan, cubicles are pleasant.

A coworker took one of his scenic photos from a weekend trip and printed it out in quadrants. This was done as a cheap way of enlarging the print, but it also gave the sense of looking out a four pane window. It was later upgraded to have an actual frame to complete the look. He was the only one to have a window in his cubicle.

The walls have another benefit: they act like noise canceling headphones for your eyes.

That’s one of the issues I have with open floor plan offices: people buzzing around in my peripheral vision can be incredibly distracting and detrimental to productivity depending on the day and my mental state, and there’s almost nothing that can be done to mitigate that.

In the same vein, I also find it distracting to have people sitting or walking behind me–like my brain tries to maintain some awareness of them, which in turn makes me cognizant that people can see my screen, which itself is kind of distracting.

In an open office this is largely a no-win situation as well: if you get a position with your back to the wall, you see people milling about everywhere, and if you face a wall, the whole office sees your screen.

Yeah I get that hair raising on the back of my neck feeling when I'm trying to focus and there's a constant train of people moving behind me, its really unbearable.

> That’s one of the issues I have with open floor plan offices: people buzzing around in my peripheral vision can be incredibly distracting and detrimental to productivity depending on the day and my mental state, and there’s almost nothing that can be done to mitigate that.

Don't worry, the office-lords have solved that! You can book a focus room for no more than 60 minutes when you need to focus. PROBLEM SOLVED!!!! /s

People who complained about cubicles were probably mourning the loss of an enclosed office (which I imagine is far superior). As we are learning, it can always get worse, and what was once bad is now good by comparison to what we're getting now.

The funny thing is that way back in the beforetimes (about the 1940s, I think), regular office workers were typically in an open office layout. When cubicles were invented, office workers absolutely loved them because they mitigated a lot of the horrors of an open office layout.

I'm semi interested in the Meta "Cube" cubical, using a sound absorbing adjustable soft 4th partition walls. Made of recycled PET. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35118315

There's various sound absorbing partitions one can buy online that seem kind of neat. But many seem to start at $1000, which suuucckkkss. I wonder what the bulk rate is for material like recycled pet. Not that I have any idea how to turn it into a soft-ish adjustable sound absorbing wall...

From that picture[1] they look _tiny_! My cubicle was at least 30 sqft. Had an extra chair for a coworker to sit down during a consult and could hold upto to 4 people standing. It was a small office, not a phonebooth.

1: https://calnewport.com/meta-rediscovers-the-cubicle/

cubicle walls or not, windows are often blocked by office walls

My previous office was like that. The individual offices were around the exterior wall. The cubes were in the interior. Only managers got to see daylight. It was fucking depressing.

Wife's previous office was better. Offices were around the interior, so cubes go light from the windows. Those offices had windows, so they too could get some natural light during the day.

Current office is open plan, which is kinda dumb. Seating chart has me and another middle manager next to each other. Of the people who come in regularly (no forced RTO), we're the most frequently there AND the most frequently on calls. Le Sigh.

Heh. My previous workplace had a similar setup-- executives got perimeter offices with windows, everyone else got the bullpen.

Thankfully, the executives were rarely there and their doors were left open, so sunlight still got through.

Nothing is as bleak as security offices and SCIFs. Even the Soviets painted bunker interiors. Americans are too cheap.

Oh yeah, thankfully never had a SCIF job. I suppose it could be worse, there's always missile silos in the Midwest. Or a submarine. :)

Executive offices (and the attendant parking spots) that are occupied maybe 15% of the time are a huge peeve for me, a lowly bullpen resident.

Especially if we constantly have little break-off meetings or get togethers in the otherwise unoccupied office for sensitive things that we don't want overheard by the gossip mill. Maybe just give the office to someone who is 1) always here and 2) needs the space?

That was one thing my employer got right when they built out the current HQ. Lots of small huddle rooms and conference rooms. Anything with <5 seats doesn’t require a reservation. Anything with 5+ needs a reservation, but there are enough that they’re easily found (even pre-COVID).

The CEO and CFO still have real offices. But the other C-suite are open plan (sort of, different walls and a couple of C-only conference rooms).

As far as open office goes, it’s probably as good as it gets. I don’t love it but I don’t hate it. I could stay home, but go in 3x week.

> Those same walls meant that sound didn't travel when your PM was on yet another call.

In about 20 years of cubicle work, that was never my experience. It might be better than open plan for that (never had to suffer through that outside of exceedingly small offices, up to ~5 total people in a bullpen), but sound from calls in a cubicle environment (especially one shared with non-technical-IC staff) can be pretty bad.

I'm lucky enough to work at a place that gives us actual offices. Some offices are larger with two desks (so some people share) but I have my own office. There's apparently some plan to improve our site and I'm really hoping they don't move us to an open plan or something.

It makes sense if your employer views your position as commodity, like a warehouse worker. "Here is your labor area we carved out for you to do your commoditized work units, one size fits all". The same reason JIRA is popular with management. Gives them visibility and "metrics" to improve. A less-charitable interpretation of hot-desking is that it's a constant reminder that your job is not secure, and that new people can come and replace you instantly, vs your own personal place in a cubicle or private office signals some amount of commitment that you have "your spot" at the company.

My personal beef that resulted in an email exchange was RTO preceded by an email saying we gotta hotdesk, because we don't have enough space for everyone. I just questioned whether it is a good idea to call people back into the office if you don't have space for them.

It was not received well. But it is not about logic.

> I keep saying—if you want me to return to the office, give me an office. Or even a cubicle. Why even enforce a hot-desking setup when the space is 20% full? It makes no sense at all!

Cynically, it makes layoffs a lot more opaque. When everyone gets to express their individuality by sitting in an identical, constantly-shifting workspace; you can't "walk by" someone's desk and notice it's cleaned out and their gone.

I don't think that's the main reason (the main reason is trying to cheap out on office rent and ape corporate fads), but it's probably a happy added perk for those who are pushing these things.

This. Very "don't startle the cattle."

You know offices are not in a good place when people wistfully wish for the office situation of the workers in office space and the matrix.

The stupid idea is your value creation should come from internal/external prostitution works and radiating positive energies and importantly not from self playing on computers, because too much in software is measured subjectively and this mindset works for those that can game the system. This shouldn't go on forever, but kind of continue to spread until going against this trends becomes differentiation(and positive outlook in it is there's no way such trend is continuing, or perhaps even happening at at all at this point where random grumpy idiot like I am is rambling about it)

I loved my cube at my first job. We even had a biometric door that separated engineering from the rest of the company. Only engineers behind the door. Juniors and mid levels working in cubes. A few tenured engineers, the primary engineering manager, VP of engineering, and CTO working in offices. Only two meetings per week — all other time was head down programming and ad hoc discussions. The median volume of the room was silence.

I was in focus heaven and I didn’t even know it. Miss that job.

Indeed, I loved my cube too. Many people complained about the sea of cubicles, but they don't realize how much worse it could get lol.

> For example, hot-desking replacing the previous (also terrible) open office.

I doesn't actually replace it. It's an additional horror on top of all the old ones.

Another issue I think is that pre-covid there were people that had been working from home for years.. a decade even.

Now I think those people are getting the same back to office spiel.

My first job I was in medium sized room. With an individual desk. A handful of other peoples, and a door that close.

The team was large. Like 50+ devs easily. All scatter in different rooms.

Bliss

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