Bring back private offices
albertcory50.substack.com
albertcory50.substack.com
To be fair, it did seem like the artists did get some benefit, but it was definitely a net negative for most of the developers.
I’ve been in private offices, and cubes, and open office, and honestly the most productive environment was when I was in a set of cubicles that had sliding doors, around a bullpen with multiple tables. When you needed to go head-down to get some code down you could, but otherwise you hung out at the tables in the middle.
In the last open office I worked in, I could not find headphones that allowed me to focus, not even construction-grade earmuffs; if someone's chewing food within 10 ft, I'll hear it, and that's all I'll hear.
For literal constant music listening to actually help, it needs to be a choice, otherwise it just makes me tire of music and I don't get nearly as much out of my mental energy.
That's interesting. I have the same exact issue and whenever I tell people about it they think I am crazy. I don't have a problem with people chewing food when it's lunch break and we sit in the cafeteria, but man, when I try to focus it kills my brain. Just last week the guy next to me started eating kind of late in the day (where my brain was almost empty). I then tried to cancel it out with headphones, but that just wasn't possible anymore.
And I still don't know how to deal with it. Sometimes I try to take a walk for 5 minutes and it helps, but not always. On some days I get a full mental breakdown because I get angry at myself getting angry on somebody just making noises any normal human being does while eating
Can you elaborate a little on "listening to violent noises" approach? When do you do this, for how long? Is it graduated in intensity, like exposure therapy?
Thanks!
The therapy, unrelated to this coping approach, was focused on figuring out why I got sensitive to some noises in the first place during childhood. Very individual, but to give an example, appearance of stepfather in my life, whose eating habits were conflicting with the way I was raised before.
It consumed my consciousness in a way that literally dropped my productivity to near zero, and I couldn't catch up, and got fired. Thankfully my boss didn't do a damn thing except scold me for being slow, otherwise I'd still be making PDF editing software.
I'd just go to a cafe down the street for a few hours, which reflected poorly on me, but I had no choice. Not only was the coffee laughably better than the shit in the office, but my ability to focus there vs the office was like night and day.
Sometimes it's drum and bass, mostly some synthwave/chill beats.
Edit: But the problem here is. If I am already exhausted and got distracted by those noises, then getting into focus with just music often does not work. I do have adhd and it could be that misophonia is playing into it too. Still trying to figure out my best work environment, but it's hard
I feel like Concerta marginally helps with this, but it's tough to remember the last time I've had to test it.
I used to listen to particular bands which I felt "defined my identity" or something, which I still occasionally do, but I've since realized that when I'm working it's "distracting" to me and I now listen to things like generic "trailer" / epic music or "upbeat" music for workouts.
- Two Steps from Hell
- Sultan + Shephard
- Tom Player
- Matias Puumala
Some other random playlists:
- https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1E8PiJpaZ8rWVi?si=...
- https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1E35ecXdUS92X1?si=...
- https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1E36Le7GAznRHV?si=...
- https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1E366Mpiqxs399?si=...
I don't really curate my stuff, I occasionally "like" songs or start radios off songs I'm enjoying in the moment.
...if you're the type of person who can listen to music while working, that is.
I used to like working to the Hotline Miami soundtrack myself, which worked great for coding menial stuff but sucked for troubleshooting.
The Unreal Tournament '99 OST is way better in that it's fast, low-key, and repetitive. I put on a 3-hour megamix and I'm crushing it until lunch.
It's intense, upbeat music.
3M Peltor Premium Plus Earmuffs X3A https://www.3m.co.uk/3M/en_GB/p/d/v101190004/
in my opinion they're really good, though, to be honest, I haven't tried them in an open space env. I'm also a sufferer of misophonia, it's beeping noises and random notifications for me.
I also noticed they make getting into the flow a lot more easy; and, surprisingly, they also reduce the activation energy of getting into work. I suspect that's because our envs are EXTREMELY noisy (compared with the mythical natural state) and the brain always keeps track (subconsciously) of all the noises which leads to mental energy depletion
When I'm hearing someone else's thump thump music and my ear buds aren't sufficient to block it, that's the only thing I've found to work.
It's real rain noise - if you pay attention to it, you can hear the drops - but it's overall a nice white noise that isn't the "boring" white noise.
> ... Our recording has been performed in the silence of the night, in a huge space - namely the Harau Valley in Sumatra - and in the absence of any wind, as to produce the most even noise one can get.
Related / previous HN posts
https://rain.today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9908909
https://mynoise.net https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32366075
I find the 'bass rumble' and brown noise particularly useful for masking external noise, which I guess is pretty similar to a thunderstorm frequency-wise
The reason is trivial - if you are not around half of the time rest of the team is, teamwork suffers quite a bit (which is cca constant situation with distant remote places like India, ie if you have any questions in the afternoon you are blocked and they need to wait till next day)
Those aren't the only companies that exist.
No significant numbers of people - in Zurich at least - are starting work in offices at 6am.
The vast majority of useful work I ever did was between the hours of 6-9am.
I agree with your sentiment but I think in this case, it's misplaced.
I do 6:30am - 3pm and have done for years, it fits my day well. Others I work with might not start till 10am. Thats the great thing about working from home, you get more flexability in your start/end time. As long as you get your working hours done it's a total non issue.
Personally I appreciated the flexibility to work and leave early.
The most ludicrous thing is that those managers are usually sitting in their own offices and not with the rest in open office chaos.
The CEO and directs should have a similar work situation to all the other office managers and their directs.
I would call this kind of dogfooding a necessary but insufficient condition for accepting what they say about open-plan offices.
After all, just because an open-plan office is better for people whose job (often) literally consists of talking to people all day doesn't mean it is better for people whose job is to focus all day on code, spreadsheets, or other kinds of individual work.
Microsoft used to give most employees a private office in the late 90s to roughly the mid 2010s - and that was heaven. Collaboration was great because you could go to your coworker's private office or even bring people along for the much-vaunted in-person whiteboarding. It happened a lot. The only thing that was frowned upon was to leave your office door closed 100% of the time, but some people did just that anyway; that was similar to the remote experience, but at the office.
I really wish people would stop conflating these, as if they were meaningfully equivalent.
Like, yes: compared to open-plan, high-walled cubes are obviously much better.
But I've been in high-walled cubes, and I've been in (and now have) a private office.
There's really no comparison when it comes to privacy, customizability, and just overall the feeling of it being your space.
Open offices are almost invariably terrible for employees - although I have to say that I was once in a large room with a (often closed) door along 5 other engineers as a sort of "private open office" and that was actually okay.
I was at one company; it had private offices, and this is exactly what would happen. You'd go to someone's office; you could share ideas back and forth, often on the whiteboard; it was low-judgment -- just you, the other person, and maybe a third -- so people spoke freely.
I was at another company; it had a SV-style open office and a SV-style interview which, in pre-COVID days, used a whiteboard. It was competitive; people were from top schools. You could tell nobody wanted to use the "you can write on this glass surface" whiteboards scattered around the open office, because they knew there'd be a dozen sets of eyes able to see their vulnerable thought processes and silently judge them; it'd be a show; and they were slightly traumatized by the interview that had gotten them in.
I think large open offices change things from, "I'm interacting with another person", to "I'm putting on a show." And nobody wants to put on a show, quite understandably.
I think open offices are really about reducing employees' feelings of being sheltered or safe. It comes out of the same mindset that speaks of employees "hiding" and not doing work.
I found that I was spending too much mental energy scanning the horizon for predators, and not enough thinking about the ostensible technical problem.
Also, building owners are getting so desperate for tenants they'd probably cut you a good deal if you needed more space instead of less.
The productivity multiplier does not have to be constant over the entire employee base to make it worth it. Also good direction / avoiding bad direction is one of the biggest productivity modifiers but it is harder to measure since it may look like people are productive but what they are producing is not beneficial.
If you want employees to be happier about work, assign fewer tasks. "Welp I'm done with everything this sprint, guess I'll not come in for 3 days."
As an aside, I propose a new Olympic sport called "software engineering". We take the world's best 100m dash runners, and have them run 421.6 100m dashes one after another! If you're a sprinter, why can't you also be a distance runner!
We can’t afford to move to an apartment with two extra rooms, so wfh full time would require a raise for both of us.
The home office I have shoved into a corner is better than what any employer will provide.
I too wish for a raise, and the financial ability to afford an entire room to dedicate to work, and the crazy things I might be able to put in there, like a whiteboard.
> And then when you're off work, your office is right there looking you in the face from the webcam when you're trying to relax in your living room.
Post-It that webcam. But I agree, here, it does make it harder to disconnect.
But "the commute" is such a heavy negative, I think it outweighs it, still. Having so many weeks per year of my life back is wonderful.
> I too wish for a raise, and the financial ability to afford an entire room to dedicate to work, and the crazy things I might be able to put in there, like a whiteboard.
How can you claim that your home office is better than your employer's when it doesn't even have a whiteboard? To bring it back to the point of the article, bring back private offices. Employers that want employees in the office should invest in offices to the point that it is a better office than a corner of your home. It won't be able to complete with your commute, as you pointed out, but why do you claim that the home office you have shoved into a corner is better than what any employer will provide?
Yeah, I really like my home office setup, with a curved ultra wide screen monitor and my special chair. I don't think that it's unreasonable that, if they want me in the office, that I have the same sort of set up there.
Because "better" is a function with multiple inputs. The whiteboard was better, true, but by comparison the commute sucks, the noise sucks, the desk sucks, the chair sucks. The whiteboard is a pretty minor thing, in the scoring of it all.
(I actually do have a whiteboard at home, but it's ~8x11". Pen and paper, and Krita, make up the difference, I suppose.)
> Employers that want employees in the office should invest in offices to the point that it is a better office than a corner of your home.
… they should… but they don't? I've worked the majority? all? of my career in offices on 4ft desks, most of it on open office floorplans. The "best" in half-height cubical. Best I ever got was a summer internship with a full-height shared cube.
> but why do you claim that the home office you have shoved into a corner is better than what any employer will provide?
Larger desk area, quieter environment, better view, better equipment.
> I don't think that it's unreasonable that, if they want me in the office, that I have the same sort of set up there.
I agree. Employers, in my experience, don't.
And yet, they typically do not…
Anyway, my daughter has a “gaming” setup at the wall next to it and it’s build into a bookcase with a folding table. When she’s not using it you genuinely can’t tell it’s there. It did require some woodworking and some creative furniture “hacking”, but neither my spouse or I are great craftspeople and I think most people would be able to do it. We found our inspiration on YouTube and some actual woodworking help for how to integrate a folding table into a bookshelf on DIY web sites.
It’s not for everyone, but you can do it.
I don’t work from home more than maybe once a week myself. I don’t really want to. I use it ti work shorter days and then do the rest of my hours at nights/weekends.
It does get a little hectic if there are two of us, and we both try to take a meeting overlapping each other. But the same is true of the "real" office, too, only balanced by meeting room availability. (But that only works for meetings where one can forego the rest of their computer, since you have to disconnect to move…)
Those who want to be in cities because of what you listed will pay the premium and stay and deal with the crowding constraints and workarounds such as open offices and high rent. People are sensitive to prices differently and crowding is not too big of a deal since they like people generally.
Those who want space and privacy will move out and work remotely and somewhat ease the crowding.
Personally I can only "enjoy" a city for a couple days before being drained, then it's back to life as a hermit.
But it doesn't look good for those who like in-office w/ private offices. I see no trend to bring that back.
Sad because that's the only way I would work in-office.
A good way to ease into it is moving somewhere where it’s a 5 minute bike ride instead of a 5 minute walk to bars and restaurants. You’ll save money, get more fit, and get a dopamine detox.
I didn't read their comment as a problem to be solved in the slightest. The great thing about living in the city is that one can also walk 5 min to their gym, then see people they might know from the gym on their way to the grocery store, and occasionally invite them to a drink within walking distance to their home if they want.
Or alternatively you can get on your bike and go wherever you want too, like many city people also do.
Living near options doesn't mean you're constantly engaging in those options, but if you are engaging in those too much, ya maybe move a bit further away.
Problem with many suburbs is that they're basically only a place to live in isolation, with a few exceptions. You see maybe a few scant people who walk their dog, everyone else is either at work, inside, in their backyard, or they've driven somewhere else.
Small towns are a great option, you can bike literally everywhere and meet people very easily. Only two gyms, but not crowded!
The suburbs really only serve a purpose to house people near a city to commute to, which is moot if you're working remotely.
There's no perks of a city or a town living in a suburb. People live in them because of their jobs.
The difference between a small town and a neighborhood though that favors my disposition, is that there's generally more variety and specialization available in the local economy and community, as well as less of a dependence on a vehicle for visiting anywhere outside the neighborhood. There's not just 1 gym, there's 4, there's not just one physical therapy office, there's 5, there's not just one dentist or coffee shop, there's 13. Of course, I'm not visiting even 2 of these places at any given time, but others are, and it's nice to know that there are alternatives.
And it's not just meeting people for the sake of socializing, it's also a platform for a broader exposure to diverse cultures and a hypothetically larger dating pool, more education opportunities, access to an international airport, more telecom providers (in theory) that can provide better services if that's important to you.
Small towns however seem great if you've already done all that and just want a quiet place to putter around and maybe have access to the mountains or enjoy farming. There's a certain serenity you might not get near/in a city, and there's absolutely a lack of space that small town wouldn't have. People in that small town might be welcoming and friendly as opposed to cold and hard to pin down in the nearby city, but the reverse could also be true depending on where you've chosen. It's a perfectly valid choice, it just depends what you're into I suppose, and if there's train access that would be even better.
In a town w/ a pop. of 6,500 I have:
- 1 gig internet (+ starlink, but I only use when traveling now)
- 2 dentist offices
- 4 local coffee shops + 1 starbucks
- 2 grocery stores + 1 walmart supercenter
- 3 gyms (but one is a curves so essentially 2) but none are crowded ever.
As far as international airports, I can either drive to the nearest city, about 45mins - 1hr but I have flown to a big airport from the town's airfield in a small aircraft.
You can find many small towns with many amenities and most of the times you have at least 2 options.
There's no denying there's more variety in the city, but often it's really not the drastic limitations you're imagining.
I will say, with what we do have there's no crowding, everything is very friendly, there's a lot of local options and people will go out of their way to help you.
But God forbid you live in the town 15 minutes from me, it barely has cell service.
You really can't lump small towns together, there's such a wide range.
Having traveled across the U.S a bit by road, there are plenty of great places like Olympia, WA that sort of sound like what you're describing, and seem pretty livable.
The airport thing is just a matter of reducing the overhead and increasing the accessibility of me travelling elsewhere and others visiting me without a car. When my Mom visited last time, she asked me to pick her up somehow so she could avoid an Uber or taxi, to which I just said "Just swipe your credit card and get on the train, then swap to bus". Back in my home city though, each relative lives in some suburban corner that's only served by a rickety bus system, and people are pretty used to just paying for a taxi or long-term parking during the entire time they're away. If I had the car, it would only take 45 min to get to them from the airport, but without one it takes almost as long as the flight did across half the damn country. Clearly, even among cities, things vary quite a bit, but I'm glad that there do exist viable and desirable options for both of us, and hope more open up in the future.
Concentrating in one spot will be more efficient but cause more damage than dispersing.
The efficiency you gain in centralizing is irrelevant since you lowered the total but concentrated it so it can grow instead of disperse.
Which is worse, dumping a ton of salt in one spot in the ocean or dumping 1.2 tons throughout a large area?
There's a reason cities generally have smog and towns generally don't.
Dilution is the solution to pollution.
It certainly is, especially for SLCPs.
That long debate aside, today we can see the palpable smog in big cities vs the clean air in rural areas, small towns, and small cities.
You also risk ozone depletion in areas with concentrated aerosol emissions, these are short lived and would disperse, but they cause the most damage of all pollutants in concentration.
> The earth could likely only support a fraction of the current human population if they all lived rural lifestyles.
I'm not suggesting that, I'm suggesting people live where they want to and don't fall for that inaccurate guilt-trip talking point.
But there's still a lot of activities that people like to do on site. Shopping, restaurants, meetings, concerts, exhibitions, etc.
There's also a difference in lifestyle; some prefer an apartment (less maintenance), or not owning a car.
An average couple will use about $5-$12k annually in terms of needing 2 cars, gas, maintenance etc not to mention spending collectively nearly 500 hours commuting over the course of the year.
Details matter for instance your commute may be very favorable or the cost of changing apartments very expensive if you already have a good deal but on average WFH is a financial gain and a pretty big one at that.
That said I've lived with 2 people in a shoe box of a studio and still enjoyed working from home from it although I did have customers from time to time commenting on what was on the news across the way or my cat. I understand that the equation is different for others but I'm definitely firmly committed to this lifestyle.
There's also no such thing as a free lunch. If your employer is buying you an office, then that comes right out of your take-home pay. Or, you're underpaid. Ultimately you provide $X value to the business, your salary and rent for an office don't increase the value, so they directly compete with each other. That's why open offices are so popular, people only compare offers with the $ that they take home. So, they don't put anything else into the other buckets. (I watched Google gradually remove all the perks in order to give people higher total comp. Part of it was taxing snacks and health insurance like income, but part of it was people leaving for the other FAANGs that had less benefits but paid more. The market decided they didn't want private offices at work.)
That's not really how this works. At all.
If it was the case, big tech wouldn't push for return to office.
FWIW, I WFH so I can eat my pizza in peace, instead of dealing with bullshit salad and fruit and fitness parties that have been a staple of the tech industry in the past decade.
That's what kids are for.
> cooking fish in the microwave down the hall
That's what in-laws are for.
i'd rather rto
I still remember the office I was assigned as a graduate student. It was far nicer than any I had in private industry. It had a window with a view of the campus and I could actually lock the door.
The worst office experience I ever had was when I was rubbing elbows with my teammates and wearing noise canceling headphones the entire time. To get away from that gerbil in a cage claustrophobia, I took to walks in the parking garage which was the most humane space in the entire building.
That was: an office with a door, and a big open space where people from a kind but competitive group had free-wheeling discussions.
The main thing was that we together were shaping the product; if you convinced others, you could have an impact. And to convince others, you needed to do your homework (in your office).
So it's not really the office or the desk but the rhythm of coming up with an idea and seeing it take root in your peers (or not) -- the opportunity to contribute.
Nowadays, it's open desks or cubes and product managers, and any collective discussion is shot through with politics. When initiative is squelched and mutual respect is replaced by influence, the only thing to maximize is slack -- which makes working from home the absolute best.
The problem with what you describe is it still requires either coordinated interruption of your peers or working effectively remotely anyway.
There is an inverse relationship to the people available for arbitrary “free-wheeling discussions” and how busy they are actually working. Getting a bunch of do-nothing flap-jaws to give you quick feedback seems productive but it’s actually worse than no meeting at all.
Or, alternatively, some people work better from home and some work better in an office. And basing "all truth" off your anecdata isn't really reasonable (the same is true of those that say everyone would be better off working from home).
The biggest problem is that the people that work better in an office tend to see that benefit because there are co-workers there. And if half the people are working from home, the co-workers aren't there. So you can really only make one group optimal, and the other one suffers.
That is exactly what I noticed in 2020 mostly. The people who kept going to the office were almost screaming and crying on the internet about working in an empty office and basically begging everyone to come back and keep them company.
All this time we'd accepted that as the norm. Dare I say it, the world favored extroverts. And in 2020 for a brief few months, it didn't. It was interesting seeing the table flipped.
Of course that's kinda exaggerating. Lots of people are "fine" in either situation. Lots of places were closed for a while and even after, there was still a spooky vibe to it, so WFH wasn't quite as nice.
I love socializing and stuff. TO me there are other reasons I prefer WFH - for example, the business district my company HQ is in, is very VERY pedestrian unfriendly. It's basically a corner of 2 super busy 6-lane streets. Walking to get lunch is impossible. Getting parking is a nightmare. The commute to/from the office is awful. I don't even like the town the office is in lol.
This is a crazy generalisation. I am fortunate enough to have a job doing something I enjoy, and I try hard to be a productive and reliable part of my team. But work is still just a means to an end for me. If I won the lottery tomorrow my notice would be in before I even cashed the cheque. I’m dedicated to working at home because it minimises the impact work has on my life in so many ways.
I agree.
> The main thing was that we together were shaping the product; if you convinced others, you could have an impact. And to convince others, you needed to do your homework (in your office).
This is not. Shaping a product is not a collaborative work. Thus, product is something different, we talk about the real work environment.
> So it's not really the office or the desk but the rhythm of coming up with an idea and seeing it take root in your peers (or not) -- the opportunity to contribute.
This is another not. Office has nothing to do with that topic.
> Nowadays, it's open desks or cubes and product managers, and any collective discussion is shot through with politics. When initiative is squelched and mutual respect is replaced by influence, the only thing to maximize is slack -- which makes working from home the absolute best.
This is office chatting. Product development is done inside the computer. You don't need an office for that.
I enjoy working in a team, but in more enclosed spaces. In my current job I share a room with two other people and it's just right (apart from when all of us are in remote meetings at the same time, but you win some and you lose some).
While it is not new to have a study or a workshop, commuting is a modern phenomenon.
For nearly every job, some work is much better done in a focused, quiet, environment, and some work is best done in a highly collaborative setting.
Give permanent offices to anyone who wants one (and actually uses it 3 or 4 days/week), reservable offices for anyone else who wants to pop in for a day, tear out all the cubicles, and create great collaborative spaces in their place.
It's because offices are now a status symbol and the manager who works in an office and forces their employees to work in a pit feels those employees are below them. Not only that, he wants them to know they are below him. This is also the reason your salary ceiling is usually less than whatever your manager makes.
It's an example of office political bullshit and another reason many/most people prefer WFH.
Managerial jobs seem to now be a thing of the past. In the past year, I haven't felt the need for a manager. Even while executing projects that need some form of central collaboration.
At this point in time manager largely feels like some sort of legacy aristocratic position, which a big fat salary all to do nothing. And in most cases, add negative value.
Before pandemic we had open-ish layout with my teams desks all together (8 desks, four side-by-side in two rows with our backs to the other row) with ~1.5 meter separating noise/sight walls between us and the next team(s).
To me it was good. It helped me learn much faster when I could just ask a question out loud and get help. Same with bouncing ideas. Also rotating and wheeling over to help someone was easy. And when you needed someone from another team you could just stand up and see if they were at their table or not.
That lasted few years then came "smart" office of flexible seating. We had two desks side by side with separating sight walls in multiple rows and you had to reserve your seat the day before or risk someone removing you during the day. Here we could still somewhat maintain our teams cohesion, but no longer could you just ask questions and have it be heard by everyone nor could you just stand up and see if someone was at the office or not.
Now it is just random teams chats and meetings. No idea if anyone is present or reading any chats. I can shout into the void and have no responses. Of course the upside is that I can dick around all day, like now I am writing this stupid post instead of working and there isn't even a risk someone might shoulder surf me and question if I am doing my work or not.
Once a week we go to the office and work in one of the few "team rooms" which brings back the old effectiveness and we get a lot of shit done during those days. Also I have noticed that many newer employees are lacking a lot of knowledge about processes and operations that were common knowledge before pandemic and big part of it the lack of coffee/watercooler/desk/lunch talk. There is no way to just casually over hear or stumble upon or just ask about random stuff.
Part of me wishes we could go back to the office, but also the benefits of being able to start working an hour late and quit and hour early and just not do the work you are paid to do is too much to give up on. I held strong for couple years, but after seeing how everyone else was abusing WFH to take care of their kids or run errands during work day I also gave in.
That sounds like a serious win for your colleagues.
> newer employees are lacking a lot of knowledge about processes and operations that were common knowledge before pandemic
Sounds like you should fix your documentation, automation and onboarding problems then?
I guess if you consider being ignorant a win or purposefully wanting to hinder your co-workers your goal
>Sounds like you should fix your documentation, automation and onboarding problems then?
Good luck with that. You can document all you want, but there is no way to document everything relative and keep it up to date and have it in a format where it is easily accessible.
Sounds to me you have never been part of a bigger project. These are the naive things newbies think will solve things.
For every person who says, "I don't mind open offices", I meet ten more who hate them. I know, statistics like this are just made up, but everyone I know would rather work in a closed office.
Software engineering is fundamentally a collaborative, team effort. Team efforts work best when the team is "gelled", and people enjoy working with each other.
Half the opposition I read here about going into the office, y'all are rationalizing to avoid the simple conclusion that you just don't like the people you work with. Maybe your teammates make you shitty coffee and expect you to drink it. Maybe your manager doesn't care about your feelings about the value of quiet, heads-down time. Maybe your teammates pressure you into grabbing lunch from somewhere unhealthy and they don't respect your boundaries. Maybe your manager thinks everything is hunky-dory, and you're upset, and they're not emotionally intelligent enough to understand that or to work with you to deal with what's upsetting you.
These are not problems with open offices, and having an office with a door will not solve them. These are people problems. A word of advice: life is too short to work with people who don't respect you. Spend your energy instead looking for people who will. Before trying to fix your office, fix yourself first, by not forcing yourself to be at a company you dislike so much.
I _loathe_ the sales process.
Being my own boss is fun and all, but then I'd need to have a roster of clients to keep myself employed at all times - and bill enough to afford vacation days for my mental health. I would also need to be healthy, a two-week COVID infection is really bad if you're a contractor with deadlines.
I've had much better experience working for good companies that recognise that their employees are the thing keeping them successful.
Do you not agree then, nevertheless, that the sales process is necessary, and you need to collaborate with the people running the sales process?
It's the cold-calling clients, schmoozing with them, keeping up the rolodex and all that I don't want to do to the point that I'm perfectly happy working for someone who does all that - even though I would make twice the money if I went into business for myself.
Fair enough. How do you think the salesperson should initiate meeting requests with you?
From the salesperson's perspective, if he's got the client on the phone, and the client asks a question that the salesperson doesn't know how to answer, it's much better for him if he can say "one moment, let me loop in the engineer", tap you on the shoulder, and bring you into the call while it's on-going. Being able to do this sort of thing can help close sales loops much faster. Every follow-up call that needs to be scheduled reduces the chances of closing the sale; it's best not to need to schedule follow-up calls.
Now, the disruption is, to put it kindly, not ideal from an engineering perspective. Still, the impulse from the salesperson remains. If you get a private office, a "naive good" salesperson would still, in the middle of the sales call, get up and knock on your door, cell phone in hand, and ask if you can join the call. Private offices vs. open offices is irrelevant to the matter at hand. As the engineer, you still need to be the one to set boundaries and say listen, I need space to concentrate and not be disturbed, if the client has a question then you need to schedule a follow-up call. A workplace you like will respect your boundaries; a workplace you don't will expect you to be available to talk to the salesperson whenever it darn well pleases them because Revenue Is King.
Stability
I don't care what's the most optimal way to write code for my boss and my team, I care about what's the most optimal way to _live_ my _life_
I'd just say that the "federated" model works just as well for work as it does for government. People have boundaries and they're universally respected, but interactions between people still need to happen. Hence the "common" spaces mentioned in the comments in the article.
As for not liking the people you work with: there is NO group of 20 or more without someone you hate. Unless you're more bland and agreeable than most HN'ers. From what I can tell, every academic department is composed of people who hate each other.
I appreciate where this is coming from, but I'm not entirely sure I agree.
Startups with healthy culture (for their size) will be tight-knit. I'm not arguing that everyone in such a group will be equally close to each other, but more likely that there will be people who you're just not as close to, but that's not the same as hating them.
As companies grow, they need to adopt more formal cultures, precisely because the headcount no longer supports only hiring people you naturally get along with and you need a way to smooth over the differences between people who don't get along with each other so that they can still work together as professionals. In this case, you don't have to like the person as a holistic whole (which is hidden from you because formality), just their work, which is a far more realistic expectation of the people you work with.
The need to get a product out and go public overrides your personal feelings. Once that's happened, human nature sets in.
And no one, including me, ever claimed that startups needed private offices. That's your "issue."
But for me the door do solve many of those problems. Most problems are non of my concern in the first place.
Also private offices are way more social, as you can have meetings, chat and cooperate without ruining everyone elses day.
A door might solve many of these problems in such a way which do not require you to ask people to be quiet and respect your need to concentrate. You can still ask people to do so. You can ask management to do so. If there isn't a, shall we call it "library" culture, where people are reading in a great big open space together together quietly, then it sounds like a bad culture fit to me, not a problem with the open space itself. A door might not solve these problems if people barge in whenever they feel like it; if you lock the door, if people knock incessantly until you answer.
> Also private offices are way more social, as you can have meetings, chat and cooperate without ruining everyone elses day.
This is literally what conference rooms are for.
> if people barge in whenever they feel like it
But they don't. Even when your door is open, they stand outside and knock.
> This is literally what conference rooms are for.
Again, naivete here. "Going to a conference room" is inherently a bigger deal than just hanging out with someone in their office.
I'm not arguing that can't happen in environments with offices that lock. I'm arguing that what causes someone to stand outside and knock is cultural, and culture is stronger than the architecture of your surroundings. Architectural choices can certainly encourage certain cultures, but ultimately they do not determine culture, leadership does.
> "Going to a conference room" is inherently a bigger deal than just hanging out with someone in their office.
It's not if there are enough conference rooms, and hanging out with someone in their office is not easy if you can't rely upon being able to find them in their office, because they're too frequently going from conference room to conference room.
> what causes someone to stand outside and knock is cultural
The point being... ? When people have private offices, they naturally grok that the office is a private space, not a public one. If they're not there, you have multiple ways of saying "I want to talk to you."
> Architectural choices can certainly encourage certain cultures, but ultimately they do not determine culture, leadership does.
There was no "leadership" that said "knock before entering." Order can arise without anyone giving orders.
My point was to say that at least some of the problems with open offices are actually the open offices - not that I don't like the people.
I love my wife, but I'm still getting disrupted when she comes into the office (at home) and talks to me.
And purely remote also has its downsides. The best mix would be something like remote and private offices.
I see open space hate dominate HN but in gaming open space can be amazing for cross-discipline communication and collaboration, especially on smaller teams.
Having a few people from a smaller team in the same room is certainly not what people mean when they say open office. IMHO If you only had to share it with your team it wouldn’t be half as bad
Optional full remote is better for the environment, better for decentralisation of cities (sustainability), better for quality of life and money and time saved. Whoever doesn't like it can still go to an office. It also easily allows for cross region teams which happen anyway, even with return to the office mandates, where the move is so clearly arbitrary that people must go to join remote calls alone in the office and have no one from their own team with them.
Don't just fold, is my advice. Corporations will just save costs and peddle BS HR like propaganda. If the office is so good that it's better than home then people will naturally go, if not, then so be it. Mandates show that it's not about employees or productivity but about real estate. Manager types also might prefer it due to their own situations and ease of going to the office but notice that higher levels will often be exempt from mandates.
Again, get full remote jobs if you have a bit of leeway and slowly change the course. It's akin to game theory. The more people do it, the more common it'll be.
Office has shit food. Shit coffee. In an open office, there’s a high risk of catching a virus from your co-worker. People love to tap your shoulder, interrupt your thought process (clearly I’m in the zone, asshole), and ask you mundane shit that could have been resolved over IM.
Even worse, the idiot asshole that can’t be bothered to read documentation and asks you to go over it with him/her in a 1:1 session. Fuck off.
It's not that complicated to bring food from home for lunch, grab something on the way in, or go out for lunch -- I doubt you're working in a food desert after all.
Ditto for coffee and even coffee shops.
Catching a virus thing, sure that's a real concern. For personal experience though I've found I've gotten sick more often since COVID and 100% WFH than when I used to work out of the office 2-3 days a week, including public transit.
As far as interruptions, a lot of offices have conference rooms engineers can use whenever they want. Even one person rooms or the newer telephone booths. Usually all soundproofed. You don't even have to tell coworkers which one you're working from and you can switch rooms throughout the day. I guess that's not feasible in like a 10-20 person office but I've been in offices for up to 75-100 people and it wasn't that difficult.
Most of the problems you've cited have relatively simple solutions in my opinion.
… you understand 2 coffee shop lattes are like the same price as the entire bag of ground beans, right? But the bag will make 10-15 times the coffee; the price difference is phenomenal. Its only saving grace is that my budget is dominated by rent, really.
There are cheaper shops, yes … but the coffee is terrible. I can do far better myself.
> As far as interruptions, a lot of offices have conference rooms engineers can use whenever they want
If any significant number of people even attempted this, it'd be ended immediately. There's not enough to go around.
> the newer telephone booths. Usually all soundproofed.
… so lug keyboard and monitor into a phone booth, and proceed to hog it for the day?
> I guess that's not feasible in like a 10-20 person office but I've been in offices for up to 75-100 people and it wasn't that difficult.
It's not feasible in any office of any size that I've ever been in, because the resources you're talking about are can only simultaneously serve like 2–5% of the office's population at a time.
And you can't bring in a small bag of beans/pre-ground beans from your favorite roaster?
Every office I've worked in had a coffee maker or espresso machine or both, and if you prefer to brew with say a Hario V60 it's not that big a deal to keep one at your desk and just bring a bag of beans lol.
You don't even have to lug it to work every day with all the easy ways to order beans these days. And if you're buying your own bags and using those beans you're not spending any more than you would otherwise.
This is really just moving the goal posts.
Everything thats mentioned as a counter point is a compromise to working from home, almost like a "well you could work from home, and save money, and have your own coffee...but why do that when you can come to work and bring coffee with you".
I'm sure some thrive in a typical open plan office. Most in technical roles however do not, and find it extremely counter productive.
I'm not sure what personal costs are, if you're referring to my comment? DIY coffee is considerably cheaper. As for time … because it's mostly a wash? While I think the coffee shop will win out, you still have to walk there, wait to order, order, wait for them to make it, and walk back. It definitely takes me less time to make coffee myself; it's the washing of the equipment where the coffee shop might then come out ahead.
I should time the two.
Literally no? I've basically had a mix of … industrial coffee vats, managed by the office? IDK what they're really called; and machines that make jarring noises & reconstitute coffee from what feels like freeze dried ingredients (touch screen interface, constantly breaking due to clogs).
> Every office I've worked in had a coffee maker or espresso machine or both,
I've had an espresso machine exactly once, but that's sort of the thing, it is the exception, not the rule. (I did like the coffee, then.)
When we had the espresso machine, the beans in use were a very low key office politics thing? (In a friendly way.) There was one guy who liked a particular brand that the rest of us pretty much didn't, but the rest of us weren't too picky otherwise. Just … not that one. Nobody much minded, since it's really not that big of a deal, of course.
Our espresso machine had a hopper, so you're not realistically grinding "your" beans. You can bring in some, but you're sharing, and it'd be until the next time the hopper needs a fill. Easier to just get it on the office shopping list.
I'm not sure this is making a solid case for office work.
Or, try to stay with me here, I'm just at my fucking house and I can pop into the kitchen whenever I want to get food. I can even take my laptop into the kitchen and be on a meeting while I'm cooking or eating.
I can make fresh coffee whenever I want. If I'm lazy I can order DoorDash and hot food just shows up at my door.
The idea conference rooms are places to get work done is ludicrous. Conference rooms are perennially booked, often overbooked, and at best you might get an hour of uninterrupted work done in one. Woe be unto the poor engineer that's found in a conference room by a middle manager. They'll get no end of shit for *reasons*.
Offices have only gotten worse over the past few decades. If my work doesn't involve physically touching hardware (all my shit deploys to The Cloud) there's no reason I can't work from my house. I've been working remote for several years now and it's been amazing for my mental health and productivity. Not to mention I've saved thousands of dollars a year not having to commute.
Obviously those defeat the point of the article and the very subjective stated problems that have very simple solutions.
>The idea conference rooms are places to get work done is ludicrous. Conference rooms are perennially booked, often overbooked, and at best you might get an hour of uninterrupted work done in one. Woe be unto the poor engineer that's found in a conference room by a middle manager. They'll get no end of shit for reasons.
I never had this problem across jobs at three different companies, working out of multiple locations that each had quite varying differences in office culture. Maybe it's a company-specific work culture thing?
Someone who has never been in a suburban business park, I see!
> Ditto for coffee and even coffee shops.
ESPECIALLY for acceptable coffee!
> You don't even have to tell coworkers which one you're working from and you can switch rooms throughout the day.
So - and I mean this in a very real way - WTF is the point of this?
Actually I have, and the comment about going out nearby work was like the last option out of the three I listed. Now you're just cherry-picking.
>So - and I mean this in a very real way - WTF is the point of this?
I never said for the entire day? The idea is if you want to be heads down on important work with zero interruptions you can duck into a room for a couple hours at some point in the day, and if you need another hour or so you can do the same thing. Assuming 6-8 hour work days that's nowhere close to hiding all day, which you're implying I said.
Most people going to an office spend their whole day on video calls, and have the temerity to shush people around them who are actually collaborating. They do this while drinking shit coffee from an awful machine (at best) or mediocre coffee from an expensive coffee bar (at best).
If people want offices to work out, they have to be downtown, near amenities, not stuck out in a suburban hell-hole because "parking".
I’ve found I detest the noise of the open plan office so much that I end up using one of the spare meeting rooms instead because it’s quieter.
Many evenings and weekends, and especially around public holidays, it can sometimes feel like you're the only one who wants to get stuff done. Finding a similarly minded community is very cool. Maybe you could make it into a global 'nightowls' facebook group or something (similar to how there are similar groups for nomads).
i work from home and miss the social environment of the office, but hate office politics. i also do my best work at night.
I noticed this is getting downvoted; you might want to do a post specifically for this.
I think that quoted person has the right idea of some of the better ways to do things. But in partial defense of that Gehry building (the Stata Center, which houses the merger of the AI Lab and LCS into CSAIL)...
The floors included some of the elements they describe. I shared a nice window office with a postdoc, but ended up working most of the time from a laptop on the moveable tables in a common area of our floor in front of the elevators. That space got used for lunches, random meetings, the occasional laptop worker, after-hours social events, and chance encounters with people passing through.
There's also patterns that I'm not sure Tech Square had, like cutouts between floors, wide open staircases that people can pause upon for conversation, big windows, outdoor space, the main street first floor.
(I only got to visit 545 Tech Square once before people moved to Stata, and Building 20 right before it was torn down. Both had obvious merits, and all three buildings were very different from each other.)
FWIW, cubicles can work better than that.
My first software engineering job, we had cubicles, and you could walk past and see what people were doing, knock (if they hadn't configured their cube to have the opening in view), wheel your chair to the opening and talk across the hallway, wave someone into your cube to see something on your screen, etc. People actually did all that often. And on occasion you could get some focus time.
But when I visited one of the Google satellites, there was this big area of dystopian open office layout, with people clustered densely around these grotesque insectoid pods of desktop. I don't blame them for needing headphones. I recall the mere sight of the pods making me anxious, and thinking that I would have to find a way to work there without becoming a pod person.
Anyway, I wouldn't take Eric Schmidt seriously, on the proper care and feeding of tech workers, after his involvement in screwing over all tech workers (at certain illegally colluding big companies, but also with presumed cascading market effects for everyone else): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt#Role_in_illegal_n...
People know what they need to be productive. Everything else just gets in the way.
Ultimately this has very little to do with “the right office layout” and far more to do with how much trust your employer affords to its employees to manage themselves by default.
You don't have to convince me. You can just beat me in the market.
2-3 people in a real office was the best years of my working life really.
For my third jog I went to Google, where I was in open seating for about 10 years until the pandemic. The open seating was a big adjustment, but my brain was still young enough to filter out distractions well enough to get things done. My most productive work was accomplished as an individual task outside of any team effort.
My job after Google was with a company that had cubicles with low walls, but this was before the vaccines and so nobody was going in. I struggled to really integrate with any other teams as there was literally no face-to-face interaction. I never even met my boss in person. Again, I did accomplish some significant technical work, but they were lone projects.
My job after that again has open seating, Google-style. They've also started hot desking, so I have to reserve a desk for the days I go in. I get whatever monitor and chair are at that desk. Let's just say that the condition of the equipment is about what you would expect if it were rented on a day-to-day basis.
As I've gotten older I've found my ability to filter out distractions has suffered. I've read about some studies that suggest that this is common, perhaps even normal as the brain ages. In order to get into a deep state of concentration in an open office I need to put in noise-canceling headphones, turn on a film score, and pull the monitor close to my face so as to minimize movement in my peripheral vision. Whatever spontaneous collaboration is supposed to happen in the office isn't happening, and I consider interrupting me while I have headphones in and am zeroed-in on a task to be actually pretty rude. That doesn't stop some people (usually TPMs putting together a status report) from interrupting me anyway.
So I'm only happy coming into the office when I have a cluster of in-person meetings scheduled. I'll jump into meeting rooms and catch people in the hallway or the micro-kitchen to sync up on one or two things that I may not get as much traction on via random Slack messages. Then I GTFO of there and back to my private office that I customized at home during the pandemic to get any real heads-down work done. Even then I am only really productive when I close Slack and email for a couple of hours.
Meanwhile everyone is always complaining about lack of conference or phone rooms, and so they're trying to set up a bunch of pods throughout the office for people who need some degree of isolation for uninterrupted coding sessions or Zoom meetings. This whole thing seems really farcical to me. I joked with a co-worker, "Oh, I know! We could build 'pods' into the structure of the building with rectangular panes of glass and planks of wood mounted on hinges with a latch. That would make it more easy to get HVAC and sprinklers set up in the 'pods' too!"
I'd definitely come into the office for more full days if I had a private office again. As it stands I'll come into the office as infrequently as I can and for as little time as possible. It's just miserable compared to my workspace at home.
That said, if it's at all feasible, I will refuse to take another job ever again that has mandatory office attendance policies unless they can provide me a private office.
Well, now… hold on a minute. It was entirely practical. I did it … my whole team did it. We didn't do it 100% of the week, since the expectation was that we worked in the office, but we had an informal "work from home Wednesdays" that permitted us to collectively accomplish the various chores that life requires must be done inside working business hours (i.e., mostly visiting other businesses).
The tradeoff is pretty straight-forward: I'm going to trade the commute hours for a mix of "work, not work, and getting stuff done", and my employer gets effectively the same real work out of me. That we collaborated (all took the same day) made is simpler since we knew to avoid scheduling each other for meetings that day.
But there was nothing that stopped that from being 5d/wk, and I was glad I did it when the pandemic hit, since I knew that it was quiet possible to work remotely.
> Be honest now: would you want to work in that?
…but yeah, nobody. My home "office" (i.e., the living room) is (especially now; upgrades were made in the pandemic once it became obvious how much I'd be home) the nicest office I've ever worked in. Because I've never had an office.
> And the concept of a completely customizable workspace didn’t sit well with executives who didn’t value the individuality of their workers.
Some things never change.
> Extroverts always think, “We need more communication!
One of the things I witnessed even prior to the pandemic was that some people are truly incapable of effective communication. I had a coworker who was utterly terrible at Slack, and real difficult to handle when remote … but it wasn't much different if you were sitting there talking to them face to face either. Bad, faulty logic, spewed as fast as the fingers would go, and often with less than a sentence per message.
Orgs are mostly terrible at Slack. (And email. And meetings.) Things lobbed into n-way DMs is terrible. If it has a topic, put it in a channel. People act like there's a shortage of channels & user groups, and they must be rationed. Same with email DLs. IT is of no help here: for whatever reason, I'm forbidden from creating new email DLs or channels, so it is no real wonder to find my coworkers cramming things into n-way DMs. (Thankfully Slack finally added a "copy the history" to DMs. So clearly Slack sort of sees the problem … just not an effective solution.)
And if only people could stop with the "Hi." followed by line silence.
Meeting tech is still terrible, though. Bloated and slow, and features like {draw on screen, not banning multiple people from screen sharing, etc.} just aren't widely available. Teams is utterly terrible, only loading successfully like half the time, and the one third-party we have to deal with, however they're sending invites, they often don't include a URL in the invite body, only in a non-standard (i.e., invisible in any Calendar program aside from I presume Outlook) attribute called "x-skype-something-something" which is a quite the tell as to Team's roots. And I only have to use it when some other org forces me to. Even calls with Microsoft themselves will run into technical issues.
… and it seems like some orgs (users of Zendesk in particular, maybe?) expect one to auth by sending from the contact email on the account. Except that it's a DL, such that emails can reach my whole team, and sending from a DL is utter black magic. (But possible, it turns out!)
And like, one wonders … y'all know you can edit messages in Slack and correct your typos, …right? The amount of politely worded "parse error in English, line 1" replies I have to send is kinda ridiculous. There's "they made a typo" and then there's me, cocking my head, trying to find a parse that even remotely makes any sense at all. That XKCD YT feature of reading your comment back to you could make a comeback.
We need people to work on their writing skills. I don't know how, though.
Private offices facilitate sexual harassment and some other undesirable behaviors.
This is why we cant have nice things.
the risk of being an office worker used to be tripping on the stairs, car crash while commuting, or sitting too much. now it means contracting a deadly virus multiple times a year.
it's too bad OSHA doesn't set minimum standards here.
I have never any workplace to protect against any disease other than covid. Covid is here to stay and we will have yearly out breaks just like we have flu season. It isn't any more deadly than any other disease you might commonly encounter in your life.
We are very privileged to live in the 1980s-2019 when most serious infectious diseases with workplace implications in America had been conquered. That's why no one took it seriously. You wouldn't be talking this way about malaria, dengue, etc. The seriousness of the disease matters.
Just being able to work from home for a couple of days as soon as you feel like you might be coming down with something is a clear win for overall public health.