5 ms·

Open plan offices and general lack of a quiet, contemplative, professional working environment is the hugest con to me, even huger than the compensation issues

by mlthoughts2018 8y ago

Open plan offices and general lack of a quiet, contemplative, professional working environment is the hugest con to me, even huger than the compensation issues pointed out by other commentors. I would look to start-ups to be leading the effort to improve industry practices for software development ergonomy and human-centric working spaces (i.e. focus on privacy, quiet and individual customizability). But instead, start-ups often try to conflate “collaborative spirit” with some shallow and false idea that collaboration is equal to being continuously embedded in a real-time stream of preemptible audio and chatter. Headphones, jabberboxes, telephone rooms, limited freedom to be remote — none of these are useful and none address the underlying privacy and human centric ergonomy points. Practically the only thing left that can convince me to take the risk of a startup, with its lowered compensation, poor insurance, and the poor risk characteristics of equity, is giving me my own private office, and making sure everyone on the team who wants one also has one, from the summer intern on up to executives. If a start-up cannot offer a private office, then the start-up has to offer me the same market rate salary, bonuses, insurance and work-life balance that any other company would have to offer me.

Jach 8y ago
I review the Joel Test occasionally, even if some of the items are kinda dated. It's amusing how both big companies and startups consistently fail two of them (and the test says if you're at 10/12 or lower there are serious problems). 8. Do programmers have quiet working conditions? 9. Do you use the best tools money can buy? Startups could out-compete larger companies here by providing both shared working space and private space, but they don't. Similarly for one of the tools, development hardware, if all you're providing is a macbook pro and maybe a monitor... well I'm sure Apple will significantly upgrade it any year now. Meanwhile those of us who like Linux distros (or, god forbid, Windows after disabling all the crap) can have quite a bit of power on the go. My current (big) co gives everyone a desktop and a laptop, it's nice to have both. You might quibble if they fully pass #9, but at least they make an attempt. "... programmers are easily bribed by giving them the coolest, latest stuff. This is a far cheaper way to get them to work for you than actually paying competitive salaries!" Salaries are such a hot topic, startups unable to match need to differentiate from what the big players are doing in a better way across many dimensions at once, not solely the nebulous "more control of the product direction". https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-steps-to-better-code/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  I was just writing a comment on here the other day about whether there should be a “Paul Graham test” based mostly on the essays “Great Hackers” and “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule.” The unequivocal importance of private offices is mentioned in both (in the latter, it’s focused on how meetings swiss-cheesify the day, but the point is obviously the same as that of private offices vs. open plan interruptions.) So it remains a mystery why Y Combinator and YC-backed companies, so informed by many of Graham’s viewpoints, aren’t more proactive about this.
- hello_moto 8y ago
  "... programmers are easily bribed by giving them the coolest, latest stuff. This is a far cheaper way to get them to work for you than actually paying competitive salaries!" Past time (20 years ago) programmers yes. Today's programmers? No. The Math is very simple: if a company throws a lot of money, I can buy the latest coolest stuff for the next 10 years. I doubt programmer is that gullible (otherwise they're probably a "Yes" man).
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    You'd be surprised. Many programmers don't negotiate, don't ask for severance or bonuses or better acceleration/vesting terms etc., feel afraid to be rejected after completing interviews, and a lot of people end up working for far lower pay than they could have otherwise gotten. I've known a lot of people who joined start-ups because they were promised various things (freedom to work on X, guarantee of publishing research, attending conferences, etc.) and then 6 months later they feel miserable that they accepted lower pay and none of the promises turned out to be true (sometimes through no intentional fault of the start-up founders, but sometimes through complete bait and switch shenanigans). The risk that start-ups won't follow through on ambiguous work promises is super high, yet people keep falling for it year after year.
  - gaius 8y ago
    Past time (20 years ago) programmers yes. Today's programmers? No. The economics of hardware are very different now. In the 90s you might have a SPARCstation or an SGI on your desk at work, amazing gear you could never have afforded for yourself. Now you can easily buy a home PC that’s better than any corporate model. I’m sure it’s still true in some industries, 3D printing maybe, but not in software anymore.
eismcc 8y ago
Private offices are great, sort of. I haven’t had one in the last 15yrs in both big and small companies. I find it surprising that you have had access to this “benefit.”
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  Between 2008 and 2012 I worked in 3 different places where all developers and researchers had their own offices (interns were paired usually). It wasn’t even a second thought, it was just baked into the culture that obviously the work requires huge blocks of hours spent alone, privately engaged in contemplative work. One was a defense research lab, one was a boutique company that makes computational fluid dynamics software, and one was an education technology company. The ed tech company went through a huge remodeling effort to rebrand as more of a straight up tech company, spending bonkers amounts of money to tear down offices in favor of open plan designs, despite outrage, protests and resignations from longterm staff, especially in some of the offices where there was no planned headcount increase and no engineering presence (like the Columbus, Ohio, office). I ended up leaving the final place to take a more lucrative job in finance in a company with high-walled cubicles, and couldn’t believe how distracting and frustrating the ambient noise and discomfort from headphones was. These days I would give my left arm to have even just high-walled cubicles. Since then I took jobs in two places with fully open-plan shared desk areas and I flat out will never do it again. It’s just too unhealthy and too counterproductive to even bother with it at all. Whatever my next job is, it has to give private offices, end of story.
  - borplk 8y ago
    > Whatever my next job is, it has to give private offices, end of story. Given how incredibly rare private offices seem to be these days I can't imagine what kind of leverage you must have to be able to stick to such a requirement. Especially since unlike salary and other benefits it's not something that any company can decide to give you. Either they have private office culture or not. If they are an open office company like most of them are you just have to exclude them, severely limiting the type and number of companies you can work for.
mancerayder 8y ago
I think part of that is the high cost of office space in places like SV and Manhattan (the SV startup little brother). Small companies end up in post War art deco buildings with flimsy elevators that open up to a mess of open plan tables, cables over the floor and pillars in strange places. Some of them have the audacity of handing out laptops and making a group sit in a conference room around a table all day (and days are long in startups). That's what I've observed in Manhattan at least. The problem is exacerbated by rapid hiring growth and the inelasticity of physical office building plans.

Jach 8y ago

I review the Joel Test occasionally, even if some of the items are kinda dated. It's amusing how both big companies and startups consistently fail two of them (and the test says if you're at 10/12 or lower there are serious problems). 8. Do programmers have quiet working conditions? 9. Do you use the best tools money can buy? Startups could out-compete larger companies here by providing both shared working space and private space, but they don't. Similarly for one of the tools, development hardware, if all you're providing is a macbook pro and maybe a monitor... well I'm sure Apple will significantly upgrade it any year now. Meanwhile those of us who like Linux distros (or, god forbid, Windows after disabling all the crap) can have quite a bit of power on the go. My current (big) co gives everyone a desktop and a laptop, it's nice to have both. You might quibble if they fully pass #9, but at least they make an attempt. "... programmers are easily bribed by giving them the coolest, latest stuff. This is a far cheaper way to get them to work for you than actually paying competitive salaries!" Salaries are such a hot topic, startups unable to match need to differentiate from what the big players are doing in a better way across many dimensions at once, not solely the nebulous "more control of the product direction". https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-steps-to-better-code/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...

mlthoughts2018 8y ago
I was just writing a comment on here the other day about whether there should be a “Paul Graham test” based mostly on the essays “Great Hackers” and “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule.” The unequivocal importance of private offices is mentioned in both (in the latter, it’s focused on how meetings swiss-cheesify the day, but the point is obviously the same as that of private offices vs. open plan interruptions.) So it remains a mystery why Y Combinator and YC-backed companies, so informed by many of Graham’s viewpoints, aren’t more proactive about this.
hello_moto 8y ago
"... programmers are easily bribed by giving them the coolest, latest stuff. This is a far cheaper way to get them to work for you than actually paying competitive salaries!" Past time (20 years ago) programmers yes. Today's programmers? No. The Math is very simple: if a company throws a lot of money, I can buy the latest coolest stuff for the next 10 years. I doubt programmer is that gullible (otherwise they're probably a "Yes" man).
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  You'd be surprised. Many programmers don't negotiate, don't ask for severance or bonuses or better acceleration/vesting terms etc., feel afraid to be rejected after completing interviews, and a lot of people end up working for far lower pay than they could have otherwise gotten. I've known a lot of people who joined start-ups because they were promised various things (freedom to work on X, guarantee of publishing research, attending conferences, etc.) and then 6 months later they feel miserable that they accepted lower pay and none of the promises turned out to be true (sometimes through no intentional fault of the start-up founders, but sometimes through complete bait and switch shenanigans). The risk that start-ups won't follow through on ambiguous work promises is super high, yet people keep falling for it year after year.
- gaius 8y ago
  Past time (20 years ago) programmers yes. Today's programmers? No. The economics of hardware are very different now. In the 90s you might have a SPARCstation or an SGI on your desk at work, amazing gear you could never have afforded for yourself. Now you can easily buy a home PC that’s better than any corporate model. I’m sure it’s still true in some industries, 3D printing maybe, but not in software anymore.

eismcc 8y ago

Private offices are great, sort of. I haven’t had one in the last 15yrs in both big and small companies. I find it surprising that you have had access to this “benefit.”

mlthoughts2018 8y ago
Between 2008 and 2012 I worked in 3 different places where all developers and researchers had their own offices (interns were paired usually). It wasn’t even a second thought, it was just baked into the culture that obviously the work requires huge blocks of hours spent alone, privately engaged in contemplative work. One was a defense research lab, one was a boutique company that makes computational fluid dynamics software, and one was an education technology company. The ed tech company went through a huge remodeling effort to rebrand as more of a straight up tech company, spending bonkers amounts of money to tear down offices in favor of open plan designs, despite outrage, protests and resignations from longterm staff, especially in some of the offices where there was no planned headcount increase and no engineering presence (like the Columbus, Ohio, office). I ended up leaving the final place to take a more lucrative job in finance in a company with high-walled cubicles, and couldn’t believe how distracting and frustrating the ambient noise and discomfort from headphones was. These days I would give my left arm to have even just high-walled cubicles. Since then I took jobs in two places with fully open-plan shared desk areas and I flat out will never do it again. It’s just too unhealthy and too counterproductive to even bother with it at all. Whatever my next job is, it has to give private offices, end of story.
- borplk 8y ago
  > Whatever my next job is, it has to give private offices, end of story. Given how incredibly rare private offices seem to be these days I can't imagine what kind of leverage you must have to be able to stick to such a requirement. Especially since unlike salary and other benefits it's not something that any company can decide to give you. Either they have private office culture or not. If they are an open office company like most of them are you just have to exclude them, severely limiting the type and number of companies you can work for.

mancerayder 8y ago

I think part of that is the high cost of office space in places like SV and Manhattan (the SV startup little brother). Small companies end up in post War art deco buildings with flimsy elevators that open up to a mess of open plan tables, cables over the floor and pillars in strange places. Some of them have the audacity of handing out laptops and making a group sit in a conference room around a table all day (and days are long in startups). That's what I've observed in Manhattan at least. The problem is exacerbated by rapid hiring growth and the inelasticity of physical office building plans.