3 ms·

Private offices and cubicles with high walls are the best if we are excluding remote. Microsoft used to give most employees a private office in the late 90s to

Private offices and cubicles with high walls are the best if we are excluding remote. Microsoft used to give most employees a private office in the late 90s to roughly the mid 2010s - and that was heaven. Collaboration was great because you could go to your coworker's private office or even bring people along for the much-vaunted in-person whiteboarding. It happened a lot. The only thing that was frowned upon was to leave your office door closed 100% of the time, but some people did just that anyway; that was similar to the remote experience, but at the office.

danaris 3y ago
> Private offices and cubicles with high walls are the best if we are excluding remote. I really wish people would stop conflating these, as if they were meaningfully equivalent. Like, yes: compared to open-plan, high-walled cubes are obviously much better. But I've been in high-walled cubes, and I've been in (and now have) a private office. There's really no comparison when it comes to privacy, customizability, and just overall the feeling of it being your space.
- glimshe 3y ago
  To be clear, I agree they are not meaningfully equivalent. I just meant to say that they are the best options other than remote, especially if you consider that private offices haven't been common for software developers for over 30 years. Private offices are awesome and cubicles are tolerable to fine depending on your coworkers. Open offices are almost invariably terrible for employees - although I have to say that I was once in a large room with a (often closed) door along 5 other engineers as a sort of "private open office" and that was actually okay.
FooBarBizBazz 3y ago
> you could go to your coworker's private office or even bring people along for the much-vaunted in-person whiteboarding. I was at one company; it had private offices, and this is exactly what would happen. You'd go to someone's office; you could share ideas back and forth, often on the whiteboard; it was low-judgment -- just you, the other person, and maybe a third -- so people spoke freely. I was at another company; it had a SV-style open office and a SV-style interview which, in pre-COVID days, used a whiteboard. It was competitive; people were from top schools. You could tell nobody wanted to use the "you can write on this glass surface" whiteboards scattered around the open office, because they knew there'd be a dozen sets of eyes able to see their vulnerable thought processes and silently judge them; it'd be a show; and they were slightly traumatized by the interview that had gotten them in. I think large open offices change things from, "I'm interacting with another person", to "I'm putting on a show." And nobody wants to put on a show, quite understandably. I think open offices are really about reducing employees' feelings of being sheltered or safe. It comes out of the same mindset that speaks of employees "hiding" and not doing work. I found that I was spending too much mental energy scanning the horizon for predators, and not enough thinking about the ostensible technical problem.

danaris 3y ago

> Private offices and cubicles with high walls are the best if we are excluding remote. I really wish people would stop conflating these, as if they were meaningfully equivalent. Like, yes: compared to open-plan, high-walled cubes are obviously much better. But I've been in high-walled cubes, and I've been in (and now have) a private office. There's really no comparison when it comes to privacy, customizability, and just overall the feeling of it being your space.

glimshe 3y ago
To be clear, I agree they are not meaningfully equivalent. I just meant to say that they are the best options other than remote, especially if you consider that private offices haven't been common for software developers for over 30 years. Private offices are awesome and cubicles are tolerable to fine depending on your coworkers. Open offices are almost invariably terrible for employees - although I have to say that I was once in a large room with a (often closed) door along 5 other engineers as a sort of "private open office" and that was actually okay.

FooBarBizBazz 3y ago

> you could go to your coworker's private office or even bring people along for the much-vaunted in-person whiteboarding. I was at one company; it had private offices, and this is exactly what would happen. You'd go to someone's office; you could share ideas back and forth, often on the whiteboard; it was low-judgment -- just you, the other person, and maybe a third -- so people spoke freely. I was at another company; it had a SV-style open office and a SV-style interview which, in pre-COVID days, used a whiteboard. It was competitive; people were from top schools. You could tell nobody wanted to use the "you can write on this glass surface" whiteboards scattered around the open office, because they knew there'd be a dozen sets of eyes able to see their vulnerable thought processes and silently judge them; it'd be a show; and they were slightly traumatized by the interview that had gotten them in. I think large open offices change things from, "I'm interacting with another person", to "I'm putting on a show." And nobody wants to put on a show, quite understandably. I think open offices are really about reducing employees' feelings of being sheltered or safe. It comes out of the same mindset that speaks of employees "hiding" and not doing work. I found that I was spending too much mental energy scanning the horizon for predators, and not enough thinking about the ostensible technical problem.