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I was always a fan of cubicles, and never got the FAANG fascination with open plan workspaces, that the entire industry seems to have adopted. As the article sa

• rjh29 4y ago
  Why can't FAANG companies use their budget to make cubicles with sound proofing and a closable door behind you? Similar to Japanese manga cafe booths. All the advantages of a private office but you can cram more of them in per square metre. Keep the door open to be social, close it and be fully isolated when you need to concentrate.
  • baby 4y ago
    I slept in one of these manga kissa and I remember waking up in the middle of the night and looking at the ceiling and seeing my neighbor's head popping and looking at me from above. I didn't say anything, and he slowly retracted his head when he saw that I was looking straight at him. Didn't prevent me sleeping because I had ingested alcohol that night, but I wouldn't be surprised if this is typical manga kissa weirdness.
    • rjh29 4y ago
      It's not typical. At least the ones I've been to are completely sealed. Sometimes there is a window built into the door, mostly so people can check you're not doing naughty things in there. edit: some manga kissa are designed for people to watch porn, obviously those don't have windows.
      • booleandilemma 4y ago
        Oh, Japan...
        • rjh29 4y ago
          Yeah. Maybe this is beyond HN but I wanted to try VR porn back when VR headsets weren't a thing so I rented one. You literally pay like $5 for the booth and have free reign over renting a few DVDs from their 10k+ DVD collection, plus a vending machine than dispenses lube and sex toys, and unlimited videos in VR. The booth itself was totally sealed in and sound proof. The whole facility is open 24 hours. Having small cramped houses creates a need for this sort of business I guess!
  • drowsspa 4y ago
    I hope they have good ventilation and air conditioning
  • adhesive_wombat 4y ago
    My university library had these. Big enough for 2 or 3 people to co-operate, small enough to use solo in quiet times without being a egregious space hog, and translucent acoustic panels that went from about 6 inches from the floor to about 2.5 metres (easy to see occupancy without being a fish-bowl).
  • mFixman 4y ago
    That sounds like hell. People need sunlight to live. The solution is not cubicles, or even closed offices. Just open offices with ~1/3 of the regular density of people per square metre would be good. It also gets you the promised "seamless collaboration" of open offices.
    • rjh29 4y ago
      Cubicles are already a thing, my suggestion just allows you to close the door when you need to focus. I personally don't need sunlight though, or any kind of view, maybe other people are different. That's one of the great things about the remote work boom, if you want to have a work environment full of natural sunlight, you can just work from home!
• papito 4y ago
  Just like the FAANG interview process, which is basically completely arbitrary based on what's hot (puzzles, leetcode), they can afford the waste. "An army of engineers who get maybe 20 minutes of focus per day? We gots the money to burn!" Smaller companies follow these trends because they think it will make them successful. It's like reading the latest article on "Ten morning routines of billionaires", following that, and believing that it will make you rich. It's the other way around.
  • baby 4y ago
    I noticed that my Google interview process was way more involved in reverse engineering (read this code and figure out what it does, or what's wrong with it), whereas Facebook was much more leetcody. I've been thinking that reverse engineering skills are much more useful than puzzle solving.
    • yodsanklai 4y ago
      > I noticed that my Google interview process was way more involved in reverse engineering I had such a question at Google. I guessed what was the problem they were trying to solve as it was a classic leetcode question (linking nodes in a tree while traversing it). So while the format is a bit different than typical leetcode solving, I'd say it's still the same type of skills and preparation involved (at least in my case).
  • woadwarrior01 4y ago
    There's value in white board interviews. Candidates can't cheat their way through them. I realised the value in them during the lockdowns when interviews went online and I found that a few candidates were cheating. Sadly the interviewer guidelines at the company I was working at that time, explicitly forbade me from writing anything about candidates cheating in the interview feedback, and instead required you to just "notify" the recruiter about it. The gradient of the falling hiring bar, only got steeper. Also, the bit about puzzles, leetcode is somewhat of a myth, mostly perpetuated by salty candidates who couldn't pass tech interview loops, for whatever reason. Puzzles were explicitly banned at Meta and Google, when I worked there, and if a question is found on leetcode or a similar site (as they eventually do), they'd get banned too. The idea isn't to make candidates jump through a series of pointless hoops, but to concretely evaluate their coding and reasoning abilities. It's certainly not perfect, but it's a lot more BS proof that just having a chat or take home assignments. Also, needless to say, more senior candidates are expected to successfully grapple with harder problems.
• kristiandupont 4y ago
  Cubicles seem like the worst of both worlds to me: the noise of the open workspace, but the limited view of the private office. I have never worked in one so I am only imagining here, but I think I would prefer either of the two other options to cubicles.
  • throwanem 4y ago
    The partitions are covered with fabric in considerable part to muffle noise, and the presence of the partitions themselves also helps with that. Too, cubicles have a larger footprint than open-plan desks do, so fewer people fit in a given space. I have worked in both, and an open plan is vastly noisier and more distracting than a cubicle.
    • ghaff 4y ago
      Private offices are of course better, and anywhere I've worked the norm has been to be open door unless there's some specific reason to close it. But, yeah, cubicles > open office though I've been pretty much remote for years now even if I theoretically had a desk in an office.
      • Spooky23 4y ago
        Another model that I personally found ideal was the small open office. One place I worked had 4-8 people in an open setup in rooms that were conference room type sizes. It was a great setup as you’d build nice team dynamics and easily talk, but didn’t need assistive technology like headphones and white noise machines to function. 15 years later, I’m probably skill in regular contact with about 50% of the people I worked with in that environment.
      • ericmay 4y ago
        The thing I don’t get is why go to work for privacy when I can get that at home in my own office? I am interested to see how work habits change and evolve. For me personally mostly working from home and then heading in to something of an open office with conference rooms is ideal because on the in-office day the only reason for me to be there is peer collaboration anyway so I wouldn’t need an office.
• DrBazza 4y ago
  > which most companies can't afford I'm not sure that's the case. Most companies lease their floors space. The offices themselves are built to a standard height or code, so the actual walls needed for internal offices are easy to procure, and manufactured en-masse. Sure, there's a sunk cost to it, but once you're past start up size, your company is probably wasting more money on many other things (entertainment, lunch, free merch, and so on) than a one-off floor reconfiguration to accommodate offices. At the other extreme, I worked for Megabank. They had a couple of buildings, with a total floor count of around 70, in the basement they had not hundreds, but thousands of partition walls stacked up and ready for use, so they could reconfigure the offices as needed. But, of course, only for senior management. Everyone else had to work in open plan offices.
  • Denvercoder9 4y ago
    The cost of private offices isn't in the construction, it's in the increased square footage you need to lease because they take more space per worker than an open floor plan or cubicles.
    • DrBazza 4y ago
      As I said in reply to another comment that suggested that you'd lose 50% or require 2x the space: A typical 'cubicle' has a wide desk and space to move you chair in and out of, plus a 'corridor' between all the cubicles. Change cubicle walls to office walls and have doors open into the existing corridor, and it's no different in size. Building codes might require some changes but I don't think it will anywhere near as much as 2x. The literature (Spolsky lists it one of his articles) implies that increased productivity of the existing employees in their own offices more than compensates for the slight decrease in the number of people you can pack into a fixed area. The difference with start-ups vs non-start-ups, is that in that first 6-12 months, it is typically a small group of people completely focused on getting the business up and running, and writing greenfield code. My point is that the environment, both the physical open plan office, and the 'coding environment' are totally different it's quite dynamic for start ups where it's just getting new code up and running and iterating quickly on ideas, vs. much more 'static' when the company has an existing product and code base.
• Jare 4y ago
  > the false narrative of how they promote collaboration I think they promote collaboration, but the price oh the price of that can so often be way higher than the value.
• mcculley 4y ago
  > personal space with a door, which most companies can't afford A company that cannot afford proper offices is probably not creating much value. Big tech companies can afford offices. They choose to allocate capital differently. When I ran a consultancy, I spent a lot of rent of making sure my employees had both proper offices where they could think and common areas where they could collaborate. Doing otherwise is foolish.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • rootsudo 4y ago
    >When I ran a consultancy, I spent a lot of rent of making sure my employees had both proper offices where they could think and common areas where they could collaborate. Doing otherwise is foolish. Looking back, wouldn't it have made more sense to not spend alot on rent and let the employees work at home? Granted, no common areas to collaborate.
    • trenchgun 4y ago
      It is very impartant to have live collaboration possibility. Also working from home is not as productive.
      • devjab 4y ago
        > Also working from home is not as productive. I'd like to see your data on that. When covid hit and sent everyone home I was working in the Danish public sector and we saw an increase in productivity. People worked less hours, or at least, they were using their computers for less hours, but they delivered more. It probably would've lead to reforms if it wasn't because the employee satisfaction didn't do equally well. As you might imagine, covid was hard on middle managers, but it also turned out that quite a lot of employees (public sector might be very different than tech) got very lonely while working from home every day.
        • 4y ago
• hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
  > I was always a fan of cubicles What on Earth is wrong with traditional offices with normal doors? Cubicles always make me think of cattle, they are like open space but you have limited view so someone can stalk you without you noticing that or surprise you etc. Thank goodness we can easily work remotely these days.
• smrtinsert 4y ago
  I for one welcome back the days of napping at my neo cubicle
• ElfinTrousers 4y ago
  > I was always a fan of cubicles, and never got the FAANG fascination with open plan workspaces, that the entire industry seems to have adopted I can explain this in three words: * money * money * money Open-plan is much cheaper.
• joseftexas 4y ago
  Open spaces allow easier monitoring and easier allocation (hot seats). This cubicle wont last long before they rediscover the need of management which is easier management (easy monitor+easy allocation). I give it 3 years at most.
• coldtea 4y ago
  >I was always a fan of cubicles, and never got the FAANG fascination with open plan workspaces, that the entire industry seems to have adopted I agree. It's like how cells with bars on three sides and a window on the wall side, are so much better than isolation cells closed all over.
• flashgordon 4y ago
  Amen amen amen. I had always hated open offices. I was even ridiculed for my hatred for them. Heck il take offices if I could but I know I can't get too greedy! How did we ever start buying into it as developers? Was it just Stockholm syndrome. "Tech is the savior so everything we do must be the greatest"? Hope this trend continues to other companies too. I do wonder what startups are gonna do here. They do have cost issues and they didn't mind copying the fangs so it worked out back then.
• slowmovintarget 4y ago
  The fad of open work spaces, and the associated rationalizations, were about lower cost, not increased productivity.
  • red-iron-pine 4y ago
    This is true for most business fads. "We love new paradigm X" is because there are cost savings, or at least were for one company.