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Comment by oddthink | Hacker News Reader

Does the "standard office" even exist? I have never seen one in my working years. I don't even know what to imagine. The closest I got was a shared office in grad school in the late 90s, but after that it's been cubes at best, long slabs of desk in an open room at worst.

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I worked in one in 2008-09. Reception area and then a bunch of hallways with 20-30 individual offices and conference rooms. It was nice.

In my very first job as a software developer, in 1989 at the tender age of 19, I had my own office, with a door, which I could and would close when I needed to concentrate. It was beautiful. I had a side chair, and other devs would drop in and discuss designs and code. I also had an office at my next job, in 1993. It wasn't until I took a contract job in 1994 that I experienced cubicle life, but the walls were high and I could do some midnight construction to add a bit of privacy. I even had an office at a Seattle startup in 2001. It was afterward that things started to slide toward the open-office morass. Fortunately, I've worked only out of my home office since 2022, and it's been beautiful.

I still miss the old days: We had offices, we actually did design before we started implementing, we didn't do stand-ups but everyone still knew what was going on. I think I'll go yell at a cloud now.

I find myself yelling at AWS pretty often, does that make me old?

The old men yell at physical (bare metal even) clouds, not AWS :)

Anecdotes:

I had what seemed to me a standard office, door but no window, in 2008 at my first job out of school at IBM in Austin. Some folks in that same hallway were doubled up but I was lucky to have one to myself while there.

A few jobs later in 2011 I also had one with a door, wall was a half-frosted window onto the hallway, was doubled up with another new hire eventually, this in SoCal, Ventura County.

Then in grad school from 2012 in NYC, also had a closet-scale office I shared with one of a rotating cast of officemates, that had an exterior window, nice view of 1 WTC as it was going up.

Since then (2016 on) it's been open offices, but at least with individual (if joined) desks, then WFH.

At a former job, for quite some time, there were separated offices with about 3 devs per room. It wasn't quite "one room per dev", but much, much better than the regular open office setups.

I'm in one right now :)

10'x10' office with a door and window out to the hall, and a light switch.

There's probably about 30 other offices like mine, a cube area with another 8-10 cubes, and a few conference rooms, but most of the building is a shop floor.

But I don't work near a major city, and I'm not a software engineer, just a regular one.

I've seen them, but they were rare already by late 1990s when I started work. I recall my dad having on in the 1970s, and I remember when I started they were tearing some out to put in cubes. Back then they told me offices were cheaper than cube (cube walls need to be stronger than regular walls because they cannot tie into the ceiling for support thus increasing costs), but they believed in the cube plan and so were willing to pay that price.

Cube walls are one off expense, while office square footage is a monthly expense, so if you can fit more people in the same size office by putting up some cubes it makes sense (so long as you ignore the lost productivity).

An office or a cube takes up similar amounts of floor space - you have a lot of options for both. My current building is an open office plan which gives everybody more square footage than any cube or office walls plan I've seen. Building walls are a one-off expense just like installing cubes.

One place I worked, till 1992 at least, had offices with doors for all the engineers. I loved it but, if I kept my door closed for too long, I often felt others thought I was hiding or goofing off.

If I kept my door open, I would still get distracted by people walking by. Even if they didn't say anything, they'd look in which would catch my eye.

Visiting my dad's work in the 1980's, what I distinctly remember is not only office doors, but that everyone had a busy light outside that they could toggle from a switch on their desk. Presumably so they could close the door but still let others know they were fine with interruptions. The lights probably did not ONLY exist for visiting kids to have something to play with.

Zoomer here, I too have never seen a "standard office" outside of TV in the 4+ companies I have worked. All had open offices.

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