I Want an Honest Office | Hacker News Reader

I Want an Honest Office

schistad.net

10 pointshucker8 comments

Very, very well said.

When I see a young company that has lavish offices, I see a company that I want to avoid, for pretty much the reasons the author points out. It's a company that's wasting their resources on things that don't matter. An established and very profitable company can get away with this (although it's still not a great look), but a young company? At best, it's a sign that the company isn't going to be around for all that long.

It also triggers the "chandelier rule" (when being pitched something, the bigger the chandelier in the room the worse the deal is for you). It's not quite the same thing, but it's in a similar ballpark.

On the other hand when I see an office like the one in the article I think what a bunch of cheapskates, working there must be miserable. That seems to be born out by Amazon's reputation as a somewhat difficult employer.

Years ago I did a number of short contracts for distribution companies. Without exception they were terrible places to work. They operate on wafer thin margins so have to watch costs like a hawk. The trouble is they don't know when to turn that off so they inevitably turn into abusive employers.

There is a whole spectrum between those two extremes. It's not necessary to accept one extreme just because the other extreme exists.

That said, the most pleasant places I've worked have been in nondescript, no-frills (but not crappy) office spaces and the least pleasant places I've worked have been in luxurious office spaces.

I'm interested to see the responses to this, because my reaction is that I rarely as an employee feel as connected to a company as its founder, so the idea of coming into a potentially dangerous office for the sake of saving money for strangers is not high on my priority list for the one life I have available to me. I don't yearn for the luxury offices of Google, but encountering crime scenes is nowhere on my bingo card.

Same. I want an office that feels safe, clean, and comfortable. I don’t think blood stains from a dead body motivate me to do anything other than look elsewhere.

Well, I don't think the article argues for employees sitting on needles during their working hours, but rather a push back on the very real and opposite trend where excessively fancy and comfortable offices makes employees detached from the actual finances of the business.

I am not sure if I agree.

In turn this would mean that if a company is profitable, it can have a nice office and spend more money into "unnecessary" things?

Wouldn't it be better to reinvest that profit into the business to make it even more profitable and grow it?

Doesn't the story somehow imply that as soon as you are profitable you can rest on your success? For me that could mean the beginning of the end.

I think you should provide a decent office to your employees to be productive without unnecessary luxuries and it doesn't really matter if the company is profitable or not.

If a company is profitable they have an earned sense of where it makes sense to spend the profits for betterment of the company. The (I could take this as company earnings to my pocket but choose to spend it on employees) signals maturity while (I am spending someone else’s money on luxuries) signals lack of understanding what’s important for the business.

The difference isn’t the actual luxuries, it’s the amount of skin in the game from the founder.

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