7 ms·

I would love a private office. It wouldn't need to be very big - and it wouldn't even need a door. Just a door frame without a door on it would be fine. I guess

I would love a private office. It wouldn't need to be very big - and it wouldn't even need a door. Just a door frame without a door on it would be fine. I guess it's not even private in that sense, I just don't like people standing behind me. Quite often in online discussions I notice people mention the move to open plan offices. I'm 31 and I've never known anything but open plan offices (apart from WFH). When did the switch to open plan offices happen? Did people have private offices before that or was it only cubicles?

sokoloff 3y ago
From 1993-1994 and 1997-2002, I had private offices, one person [a few doubles] with a real, solid door. I’m class of ‘93, so this was most of my first decade with everyone having them. I then went back to private offices for most of 2009-2016, but that was as a Director/plus with devs in cubes. After 2016, even VPs went into cubes, which I hated.
- oblio 3y ago
  Cubes are a luxury. Now all you get is a 1.5m tall panel in front of you, if you're lucky, and rows with 4-6 coworkers next to you and the same number behind you, and probably 30+ people in the same open space. I would have killed for actual cubicles at my past... 5 jobs.
  - mulmen 3y ago
    Yeah. At the beginning of my career I had full height cubes. Now I don't even have an assigned desk. It's all first-come-first-serve "hotel" desks with short partitions on the desk itself in an otherwise open workspace. Strangely we also have lockers for personal items, like I am going to pack up and redeploy my pencil cup and succulents every day.
    - amalcon 3y ago
      Those lockers are great for ergonomic keyboards, but I don't think I've ever heard of someone using one for anything else.
    - WWLink 3y ago
      > It's all first-come-first-serve "hotel" desks with short partitions on the desk itself in an otherwise open workspace. Honestly I hate those 'partitions'. Why bother? They're so stupid and pointless. It's ironic because they actually hinder collaboration and pair programming since they're never removable lol. If we're going to all sit together at a big table we might as well see each other lol.
      - oblio 3y ago
        I like them because I don't like people seeing my screen all the time. I like the sensation of privacy.
      - sokoloff 3y ago
        They are usually removable by loosening some clamping bolts that are hidden somewhere. Where there’s a will and tools, there’s a way…
        oblio 3y ago
        Many companies don't look kindly to unauthorized changes to their office infrastructure, even more so for agile desks. And even if the relevant people are ok with you, you might piss off a power hungry middle manager that doesn't like someone standing out (had that happen to me).
        mulmen 3y ago
        As a peer please don’t fuck with our shared environment. You’re just going to make it worse.
  - midasuni 3y ago
    Do you have a dedicated desk? When I stopped office work in 2012 that had pretty much gone. First come first serve
    - oblio 3y ago
      I used to have one up until the last company, in 2020. But I did have an episode of about 1 year of flex desk before that.
- mulmen 3y ago
  I would love to know more about this trend. It fascinates me that we have settled on something that is so widely hated. It seems correlated with the decline in UI design. 30 years ago we had ideas of how people interact with computers which we had built up over decades. What appear to be dated UIs like Windows 3.1 or even XP actually had a lot of thought and care put into them, with sound reasoning. The modern take seems fixated on minor details without any holistic vision or even reason. How did we get so bad at decision making? It seems like we stopped valuing insight in favor of data. But without insight we just chase the data we have.
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    Something which is hated by the not-decision-makers but costs 25-40% as much of a big number will be overwhelmingly chosen by the are-decision-makers.
    - mulmen 3y ago
      Yeah, this reinforces another perception I have. Which is that we have lost any concept of opportunity cost. We might save on commercial real estate but what is the cost in productivity, innovation, and ultimately profit?
      - JPws_Prntr_Fngr 3y ago
        Opportunity cost is a concept from microeconomics, a field completely alien to the vast majority of the managerial strata, in my experience; any lingering principles from microecon 101 having been long since replaced by MBA dogma.
      - piva00 3y ago
        Those metrics demand a much deeper and proper investigation of data to materialise into a quantifiable way for management, management is pretty blind to anything that isn't easy-to-crunch numbers. Probably due to education in most MBA curricula. Everyone who has worked in an open plan office knows the pains, the constant interruptions, not only from chatter or shoulder taps but the incessant movement of people around, the alertness of being aware of people behind you, so on and so forth, but those are not easily quantifiable. Much like UX, to build a case for something that empirically most of us know is better takes a lot more effort than some bean counters/MBAs pointing to a number in a spreadsheet.
mulmen 3y ago
I actually had a private office with walls and a door for about a month. We moved to a new building and picked our own seats in a pre-determined area in order of seniority. Being a former boy scout I oriented myself to the map before making my selection. For whatever reason the map was oriented with north to the left. None of the people in front of me noticed this and picked desks on an undesirable side of the building. That left an office available to me, a junior engineer. My manager was unhappy with his window looking at a brick wall instead of the lake and was especially unhappy with me having an office and not him. So he put in a maintenance request and had my office walls torn down and converted to a open cube.
- sefrost 3y ago
  Wow, a similar thing happened to me in one of my first jobs as a junior. We moved office and could choose our seats. Because I hate having people behind me (mentioned above) I chose a seat with my back to the wall. The managers clicked on to what had happened on the first day and moved me. Infuriating! I am much more confident now but I just accepted it at that time.
  - Moissanite 3y ago
    > Because I hate having people behind me Anyone who has read Dune should feel this way - leaving your back to the room/door is how the Harkonnens get you!
patrick451 3y ago
My first job out of undergrad was doing CAD stuff making like $12/hour and I had an office. I don't remember if it had a door that shut, but it definitely had 4 real walls. I didn't know it then, but that was the best work environment I've ever had. That was about 20 years ago.

sokoloff 3y ago

From 1993-1994 and 1997-2002, I had private offices, one person [a few doubles] with a real, solid door. I’m class of ‘93, so this was most of my first decade with everyone having them. I then went back to private offices for most of 2009-2016, but that was as a Director/plus with devs in cubes. After 2016, even VPs went into cubes, which I hated.

oblio 3y ago
Cubes are a luxury. Now all you get is a 1.5m tall panel in front of you, if you're lucky, and rows with 4-6 coworkers next to you and the same number behind you, and probably 30+ people in the same open space. I would have killed for actual cubicles at my past... 5 jobs.
- mulmen 3y ago
  Yeah. At the beginning of my career I had full height cubes. Now I don't even have an assigned desk. It's all first-come-first-serve "hotel" desks with short partitions on the desk itself in an otherwise open workspace. Strangely we also have lockers for personal items, like I am going to pack up and redeploy my pencil cup and succulents every day.
  - amalcon 3y ago
    Those lockers are great for ergonomic keyboards, but I don't think I've ever heard of someone using one for anything else.
  - WWLink 3y ago
    > It's all first-come-first-serve "hotel" desks with short partitions on the desk itself in an otherwise open workspace. Honestly I hate those 'partitions'. Why bother? They're so stupid and pointless. It's ironic because they actually hinder collaboration and pair programming since they're never removable lol. If we're going to all sit together at a big table we might as well see each other lol.
    - oblio 3y ago
      I like them because I don't like people seeing my screen all the time. I like the sensation of privacy.
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      They are usually removable by loosening some clamping bolts that are hidden somewhere. Where there’s a will and tools, there’s a way…
      - oblio 3y ago
        Many companies don't look kindly to unauthorized changes to their office infrastructure, even more so for agile desks. And even if the relevant people are ok with you, you might piss off a power hungry middle manager that doesn't like someone standing out (had that happen to me).
      - mulmen 3y ago
        As a peer please don’t fuck with our shared environment. You’re just going to make it worse.
- midasuni 3y ago
  Do you have a dedicated desk? When I stopped office work in 2012 that had pretty much gone. First come first serve
  - oblio 3y ago
    I used to have one up until the last company, in 2020. But I did have an episode of about 1 year of flex desk before that.
mulmen 3y ago
I would love to know more about this trend. It fascinates me that we have settled on something that is so widely hated. It seems correlated with the decline in UI design. 30 years ago we had ideas of how people interact with computers which we had built up over decades. What appear to be dated UIs like Windows 3.1 or even XP actually had a lot of thought and care put into them, with sound reasoning. The modern take seems fixated on minor details without any holistic vision or even reason. How did we get so bad at decision making? It seems like we stopped valuing insight in favor of data. But without insight we just chase the data we have.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  Something which is hated by the not-decision-makers but costs 25-40% as much of a big number will be overwhelmingly chosen by the are-decision-makers.
  - mulmen 3y ago
    Yeah, this reinforces another perception I have. Which is that we have lost any concept of opportunity cost. We might save on commercial real estate but what is the cost in productivity, innovation, and ultimately profit?
    - JPws_Prntr_Fngr 3y ago
      Opportunity cost is a concept from microeconomics, a field completely alien to the vast majority of the managerial strata, in my experience; any lingering principles from microecon 101 having been long since replaced by MBA dogma.
    - piva00 3y ago
      Those metrics demand a much deeper and proper investigation of data to materialise into a quantifiable way for management, management is pretty blind to anything that isn't easy-to-crunch numbers. Probably due to education in most MBA curricula. Everyone who has worked in an open plan office knows the pains, the constant interruptions, not only from chatter or shoulder taps but the incessant movement of people around, the alertness of being aware of people behind you, so on and so forth, but those are not easily quantifiable. Much like UX, to build a case for something that empirically most of us know is better takes a lot more effort than some bean counters/MBAs pointing to a number in a spreadsheet.

mulmen 3y ago

I actually had a private office with walls and a door for about a month. We moved to a new building and picked our own seats in a pre-determined area in order of seniority. Being a former boy scout I oriented myself to the map before making my selection. For whatever reason the map was oriented with north to the left. None of the people in front of me noticed this and picked desks on an undesirable side of the building. That left an office available to me, a junior engineer. My manager was unhappy with his window looking at a brick wall instead of the lake and was especially unhappy with me having an office and not him. So he put in a maintenance request and had my office walls torn down and converted to a open cube.

sefrost 3y ago
Wow, a similar thing happened to me in one of my first jobs as a junior. We moved office and could choose our seats. Because I hate having people behind me (mentioned above) I chose a seat with my back to the wall. The managers clicked on to what had happened on the first day and moved me. Infuriating! I am much more confident now but I just accepted it at that time.
- Moissanite 3y ago
  > Because I hate having people behind me Anyone who has read Dune should feel this way - leaving your back to the room/door is how the Harkonnens get you!

patrick451 3y ago

My first job out of undergrad was doing CAD stuff making like $12/hour and I had an office. I don't remember if it had a door that shut, but it definitely had 4 real walls. I didn't know it then, but that was the best work environment I've ever had. That was about 20 years ago.