5 ms·

I've been facing the opposite problem. I've been in a lengthy job search and despite being in a situation where I really need a job, I've been forced to reject

by p4wnc6 11y ago

I've been facing the opposite problem. I've been in a lengthy job search and despite being in a situation where I really need a job, I've been forced to reject all the offers that have been made -- because the working conditions are just too unhealthy. The article mentions that a side effect of exploding offers is that you don't get to see the full landscape of opportunities and trade-offs you're facing before you make your decision. On the other hand, after a year of job searching, hundreds of technical phone interviews, dozens of take-home & interactive code tests, and a significant number of job offers that I have turned down, what I can say is that I think I have a pretty good picture of the overall tech job market, and it is exceedingly depressing. For instance, I have a mild case of misophonia, and so being seated in an open-plan office layout is simply not doable for me, physiologically, and listening to headphones obviously doesn't make sense if the problem is misophonia. Many companies have been excited about my skills, experience, work ethic, and my ability to communicate. But they have been 100% no-questions-asked outright indignant at the idea of a candidate negotiating the ability to work in a private office. Even if I explain that it is related to misophonia, and the extreme aversion I have to ambient noises, conversations, small movements, and so forth, they don't seem to care. In all previous jobs, my teamwork ability and my effort spent collaborating was always praised as one of my best attributes. But in today's job market, collaboration == sitting in an open-plan office. Far from worrying about exploding offers, I am worried about the overall industry shift that has happened to make it so that it is effectively impossible to work in a private space as a developer. I feel bad for all of the intrinsically introverted people who are nonetheless excellent collaborators and developers -- the very nature of physical workspaces is harmful to their cognitive health, yet employers outright, under all circumstances, refuse to negotiate about it. I've never been very interested in the idea of a software union. But the egregious lack of privacy in the workspace has made me start to feel like a union would be truly the only possible solution.

nostrademons 11y ago
How about consulting? Since consultants contract for the work they produce and not their availability to do the boss's bidding, most companies that hire them are much more amenable to remote work. It seems tailor-made for your situation - someone with good development and communication skills who doesn't want to work in an office.
- p4wnc6 11y ago
  I actually very much do want to work in an office. I worked remotely in one position, and while that solved the privacy and noise issues, I did not like being away from my colleagues. Working with adequate privacy and quiet does not mean the same thing as holing up away from everyone. I still enjoyed talking shop over lunch, jumping up from my desk to go and assist someone with a bug, attending research and tech presentations, and all the other good stuff of being in the office. I also feel I am not well-suited to consulting because I significantly prefer to work with a more or less stable technology stack, in which we invest time to properly refactor, write tests, and design things so that the system we maintain and grow over time can easily adjust and expand for new business needs and new functionality. With a lot of consulting, especially in my area (machine learning and scientific computing) you are always at the mercy of whatever technology stack you walk into, and whatever state of disrepair that code base is in. In a lot of consulting, there can also be unforeseen traps. Sometimes you can get into a situation where a client can require you to come to their office, or work in some other sort of field site situation that is insanely horrible, and you can't get out of it without basically quitting and thereby burning a bridge and negatively affecting your consulting reputation. Just because I happen to have a strong preference for mental health affirmation through adequate privacy and quiet doesn't mean I am looking to bottomlessly compromise on all the other working standards I have too, such as quality of the work, adequate pay and benefits, and so forth. Unfortunately, no one has even offered me these other compromises. No one has said they would consider a private office if I accepted less pay, fewer vacation days, etc. They just simply say it is in principle impossible.
  - gedy 11y ago
    I'm not defending the companies per se, but perhaps they are worried you will be particular and awkward to work with beyond the points you discussed with them. Simply because truly difficult people rarely advertise this up front, they may feel they'd rather avoid the risk.
    - p4wnc6 11y ago
      I am certain that at least some of them feel this way, especially given how many tech candidates are willing to work in an open-plan setting without even batting an eyelash about it. But I don't know of any other way to ensure that I can have the adequate privacy and quiet that truly is physically necessary for me. I've just come to accept the fact that this means extremely lengthy job searches for me, and a need to do the really hard thing and reject some otherwise pretty good job offers if they can't provide an office.
littletimmy 11y ago
Do noise-cancelling headphones not work for you?
- p4wnc6 11y ago
  Not even close. For one, listening to actual sound like music or a podcast is even worse for me than the dull ambient backdrop noise. On rare occasion I can listen to music for a brief period of time, maybe 1 hour. But any sustained sounds longer than an hour and I start to feel the type of tiredness you feel when you pull an all-nighter. That's just how sound affects me. I can't "tune it out" like most people can ... it just grates on me and, whether I choose it or not, induces me to be hyper attentive to it, especially to human voices. Noise-cancelling headphones can take away dull background chatter that's far away. But in open-plan offices, usually without even so much as differentiated desks or cubicles, when the person sitting next to you decides it's cool to bring a remote controlled helicopter to work and his friends are all laughing about it with him 2 feet behind you (true story), it just doesn't help. But even in less extreme places, where it's just normal, good-intentioned colleagues chatting about their weekend plans or something, it's still a huge disruption for me, and noise-cancelling headphones don't solve it. Actually, I can remember one of the most insane attention triggers I had to deal with was when I actually worked in a cubicle setting and the person in the cubicle next to me had some kind of smart phone that must have doubled as a sex toy or something because when it vibrated it was insane. I could feel his phone vibrating in my forearms resting on my desk while I was typing. That one drove me absolutely insane. There's also a huge component of this that is just based on natural human fight vs flight reflexes. If you have a bunch of vague, large mammals kind of walking around right behind you where you can't see them all day, it just causes anxiety. Some people (especially many extroverts) can deal with this without a problem, and it can even be comforting to them. But for others (especially introverts) the constant triggering of the "what's that, who is walking behind me" reflex is extremely exhausting, and it gets stimulated by pretty much everything, noise, casual movement, ping pong, whatever, going on in an open plan office. The office layout in and of itself is just intrinsically unhealthy for these people. And I fall very, very far on that spectrum towards the introverted side. It doesn't mean I'm shy (I actually love public speaking) ... what it means is that little unplanned social interactions or hints of social interactions are a huge, constant energy drain for me. I talked to one former boss about this and his immediate reaction was something like, "Look, you are really good at getting your work done. You don't have to worry if someone's walking by and they see you've got ESPN pulled up on your monitor or something ... we know you're getting your work done." And I'm just like, "umm ... it doesn't work that way. I don't give a shit if you see me playing Minecraft on my computer during work hours. It has nothing to do with that. It's a physiological response to the environment itself. I can't just "switch it off" because you try to assuage my anxiety." When it comes to this introvert/extrovert spectrum, I think it truly represents a component of workplace discrimination that really damages a lot of people, but for extroverts and managers, it just never even crosses their mind that it could even be happening at all.
nikhizzle 11y ago
You should apply to Facebook, when I was there special accommodations were made for people who required an office.
- p4wnc6 11y ago
  That is a mind-boggling comment. I've mostly avoided applying there because they are so over the top with advertising their extreme investment into huge open-plan spaces. It was such a huge cultural turn off that I figured there was no way they would even consider someone like me. Do you have any links to anything they've written about this?
  - nikhizzle 11y ago
    Sorry, I do not. But the option was twofold when I was there: 1. Engineers have a choice of open plan or a shared (2 person) office depending on preference. 2. Engineers who have special circumstances can request their own office.
tryitnow 11y ago
I don't think a union is the way to go. More like a professional association like the American Bar Association, American Medical Association, AICPA, etc.
- p4wnc6 11y ago
  Have those organizations successfully negotiated working conditions? I mean we do have things like IEEE, ACM, various societies. Membership in them pretty much doesn't mean anything.
abecedarius 11y ago
I'm also starting a job search soon and also concerned about finding an actual office these days, or even a cubicle. Maybe I'll end up working remotely, but there ought to be a better answer.

by p4wnc6 11y ago

nostrademons 11y ago

How about consulting? Since consultants contract for the work they produce and not their availability to do the boss's bidding, most companies that hire them are much more amenable to remote work. It seems tailor-made for your situation - someone with good development and communication skills who doesn't want to work in an office.

p4wnc6 11y ago
I actually very much do want to work in an office. I worked remotely in one position, and while that solved the privacy and noise issues, I did not like being away from my colleagues. Working with adequate privacy and quiet does not mean the same thing as holing up away from everyone. I still enjoyed talking shop over lunch, jumping up from my desk to go and assist someone with a bug, attending research and tech presentations, and all the other good stuff of being in the office. I also feel I am not well-suited to consulting because I significantly prefer to work with a more or less stable technology stack, in which we invest time to properly refactor, write tests, and design things so that the system we maintain and grow over time can easily adjust and expand for new business needs and new functionality. With a lot of consulting, especially in my area (machine learning and scientific computing) you are always at the mercy of whatever technology stack you walk into, and whatever state of disrepair that code base is in. In a lot of consulting, there can also be unforeseen traps. Sometimes you can get into a situation where a client can require you to come to their office, or work in some other sort of field site situation that is insanely horrible, and you can't get out of it without basically quitting and thereby burning a bridge and negatively affecting your consulting reputation. Just because I happen to have a strong preference for mental health affirmation through adequate privacy and quiet doesn't mean I am looking to bottomlessly compromise on all the other working standards I have too, such as quality of the work, adequate pay and benefits, and so forth. Unfortunately, no one has even offered me these other compromises. No one has said they would consider a private office if I accepted less pay, fewer vacation days, etc. They just simply say it is in principle impossible.
- gedy 11y ago
  I'm not defending the companies per se, but perhaps they are worried you will be particular and awkward to work with beyond the points you discussed with them. Simply because truly difficult people rarely advertise this up front, they may feel they'd rather avoid the risk.
  - p4wnc6 11y ago
    I am certain that at least some of them feel this way, especially given how many tech candidates are willing to work in an open-plan setting without even batting an eyelash about it. But I don't know of any other way to ensure that I can have the adequate privacy and quiet that truly is physically necessary for me. I've just come to accept the fact that this means extremely lengthy job searches for me, and a need to do the really hard thing and reject some otherwise pretty good job offers if they can't provide an office.

littletimmy 11y ago

Do noise-cancelling headphones not work for you?

p4wnc6 11y ago
Not even close. For one, listening to actual sound like music or a podcast is even worse for me than the dull ambient backdrop noise. On rare occasion I can listen to music for a brief period of time, maybe 1 hour. But any sustained sounds longer than an hour and I start to feel the type of tiredness you feel when you pull an all-nighter. That's just how sound affects me. I can't "tune it out" like most people can ... it just grates on me and, whether I choose it or not, induces me to be hyper attentive to it, especially to human voices. Noise-cancelling headphones can take away dull background chatter that's far away. But in open-plan offices, usually without even so much as differentiated desks or cubicles, when the person sitting next to you decides it's cool to bring a remote controlled helicopter to work and his friends are all laughing about it with him 2 feet behind you (true story), it just doesn't help. But even in less extreme places, where it's just normal, good-intentioned colleagues chatting about their weekend plans or something, it's still a huge disruption for me, and noise-cancelling headphones don't solve it. Actually, I can remember one of the most insane attention triggers I had to deal with was when I actually worked in a cubicle setting and the person in the cubicle next to me had some kind of smart phone that must have doubled as a sex toy or something because when it vibrated it was insane. I could feel his phone vibrating in my forearms resting on my desk while I was typing. That one drove me absolutely insane. There's also a huge component of this that is just based on natural human fight vs flight reflexes. If you have a bunch of vague, large mammals kind of walking around right behind you where you can't see them all day, it just causes anxiety. Some people (especially many extroverts) can deal with this without a problem, and it can even be comforting to them. But for others (especially introverts) the constant triggering of the "what's that, who is walking behind me" reflex is extremely exhausting, and it gets stimulated by pretty much everything, noise, casual movement, ping pong, whatever, going on in an open plan office. The office layout in and of itself is just intrinsically unhealthy for these people. And I fall very, very far on that spectrum towards the introverted side. It doesn't mean I'm shy (I actually love public speaking) ... what it means is that little unplanned social interactions or hints of social interactions are a huge, constant energy drain for me. I talked to one former boss about this and his immediate reaction was something like, "Look, you are really good at getting your work done. You don't have to worry if someone's walking by and they see you've got ESPN pulled up on your monitor or something ... we know you're getting your work done." And I'm just like, "umm ... it doesn't work that way. I don't give a shit if you see me playing Minecraft on my computer during work hours. It has nothing to do with that. It's a physiological response to the environment itself. I can't just "switch it off" because you try to assuage my anxiety." When it comes to this introvert/extrovert spectrum, I think it truly represents a component of workplace discrimination that really damages a lot of people, but for extroverts and managers, it just never even crosses their mind that it could even be happening at all.

nikhizzle 11y ago

You should apply to Facebook, when I was there special accommodations were made for people who required an office.

p4wnc6 11y ago
That is a mind-boggling comment. I've mostly avoided applying there because they are so over the top with advertising their extreme investment into huge open-plan spaces. It was such a huge cultural turn off that I figured there was no way they would even consider someone like me. Do you have any links to anything they've written about this?
- nikhizzle 11y ago
  Sorry, I do not. But the option was twofold when I was there: 1. Engineers have a choice of open plan or a shared (2 person) office depending on preference. 2. Engineers who have special circumstances can request their own office.

tryitnow 11y ago

I don't think a union is the way to go. More like a professional association like the American Bar Association, American Medical Association, AICPA, etc.

p4wnc6 11y ago
Have those organizations successfully negotiated working conditions? I mean we do have things like IEEE, ACM, various societies. Membership in them pretty much doesn't mean anything.

abecedarius 11y ago

I'm also starting a job search soon and also concerned about finding an actual office these days, or even a cubicle. Maybe I'll end up working remotely, but there ought to be a better answer.