If you're an engineer and you think the way you make money is by writing code, and there's no need to leave your house to write code, why aren't you working for yourself? Serious question.
Software engineering is fundamentally a collaborative, team effort. Team efforts work best when the team is "gelled", and people enjoy working with each other.
Half the opposition I read here about going into the office, y'all are rationalizing to avoid the simple conclusion that you just don't like the people you work with. Maybe your teammates make you shitty coffee and expect you to drink it. Maybe your manager doesn't care about your feelings about the value of quiet, heads-down time. Maybe your teammates pressure you into grabbing lunch from somewhere unhealthy and they don't respect your boundaries. Maybe your manager thinks everything is hunky-dory, and you're upset, and they're not emotionally intelligent enough to understand that or to work with you to deal with what's upsetting you.
These are not problems with open offices, and having an office with a door will not solve them. These are people problems. A word of advice: life is too short to work with people who don't respect you. Spend your energy instead looking for people who will. Before trying to fix your office, fix yourself first, by not forcing yourself to be at a company you dislike so much.
> If you're an engineer and you think the way you make money is by writing code, and there's no need to leave your house to write code, why aren't you working for yourself? Serious question.
I _loathe_ the sales process.
Being my own boss is fun and all, but then I'd need to have a roster of clients to keep myself employed at all times - and bill enough to afford vacation days for my mental health. I would also need to be healthy, a two-week COVID infection is really bad if you're a contractor with deadlines.
I've had much better experience working for good companies that recognise that their employees are the thing keeping them successful.
Yea, I'm perfectly fine sitting in on a meeting with the actual professional sales person and answer technical questions the client may have. I can also provide estimates for projects if they have the specs.
It's the cold-calling clients, schmoozing with them, keeping up the rolodex and all that I don't want to do to the point that I'm perfectly happy working for someone who does all that - even though I would make twice the money if I went into business for myself.
> perfectly fine sitting in on a meeting with the actual professional sales person and answer technical questions the client may have
Fair enough. How do you think the salesperson should initiate meeting requests with you?
From the salesperson's perspective, if he's got the client on the phone, and the client asks a question that the salesperson doesn't know how to answer, it's much better for him if he can say "one moment, let me loop in the engineer", tap you on the shoulder, and bring you into the call while it's on-going. Being able to do this sort of thing can help close sales loops much faster. Every follow-up call that needs to be scheduled reduces the chances of closing the sale; it's best not to need to schedule follow-up calls.
Now, the disruption is, to put it kindly, not ideal from an engineering perspective. Still, the impulse from the salesperson remains. If you get a private office, a "naive good" salesperson would still, in the middle of the sales call, get up and knock on your door, cell phone in hand, and ask if you can join the call. Private offices vs. open offices is irrelevant to the matter at hand. As the engineer, you still need to be the one to set boundaries and say listen, I need space to concentrate and not be disturbed, if the client has a question then you need to schedule a follow-up call. A workplace you like will respect your boundaries; a workplace you don't will expect you to be available to talk to the salesperson whenever it darn well pleases them because Revenue Is King.
Ironically, I would point out that if you work for yourself, and if you're successful, then you have far more financial stability than any company you would ever work for. You will never fire yourself from your own company, but if you work for Corporate, then Corporate will make its own layoff decisions, and oftentimes they have little to do with how valuable your contributions are and far more to do with internal politics. Working for yourself, ironically, is what actually allows you to decide the most optimal way to live your life - you get to decide what business you want to build, in which industry, serving which customers, when to close your laptop for the day.
I'd just say that the "federated" model works just as well for work as it does for government. People have boundaries and they're universally respected, but interactions between people still need to happen. Hence the "common" spaces mentioned in the comments in the article.
As for not liking the people you work with: there is NO group of 20 or more without someone you hate. Unless you're more bland and agreeable than most HN'ers. From what I can tell, every academic department is composed of people who hate each other.
> As for not liking the people you work with: there is NO group of 20 or more without someone you hate. Unless you're more bland and agreeable than most HN'ers.
I appreciate where this is coming from, but I'm not entirely sure I agree.
Startups with healthy culture (for their size) will be tight-knit. I'm not arguing that everyone in such a group will be equally close to each other, but more likely that there will be people who you're just not as close to, but that's not the same as hating them.
As companies grow, they need to adopt more formal cultures, precisely because the headcount no longer supports only hiring people you naturally get along with and you need a way to smooth over the differences between people who don't get along with each other so that they can still work together as professionals. In this case, you don't have to like the person as a holistic whole (which is hidden from you because formality), just their work, which is a far more realistic expectation of the people you work with.
I've worked for two startups. Having a tight-knit culture was essential to the success of both of them. If you're not willing to bleed for your teammates, go work for a BigCo. The notion that people would have needed or benefited from private offices in either place was laughable.
A door might solve many of these problems in such a way which do not require you to ask people to be quiet and respect your need to concentrate. You can still ask people to do so. You can ask management to do so. If there isn't a, shall we call it "library" culture, where people are reading in a great big open space together together quietly, then it sounds like a bad culture fit to me, not a problem with the open space itself. A door might not solve these problems if people barge in whenever they feel like it; if you lock the door, if people knock incessantly until you answer.
> Also private offices are way more social, as you can have meetings, chat and cooperate without ruining everyone elses day.
> But they don't. Even when your door is open, they stand outside and knock.
I'm not arguing that can't happen in environments with offices that lock. I'm arguing that what causes someone to stand outside and knock is cultural, and culture is stronger than the architecture of your surroundings. Architectural choices can certainly encourage certain cultures, but ultimately they do not determine culture, leadership does.
> "Going to a conference room" is inherently a bigger deal than just hanging out with someone in their office.
It's not if there are enough conference rooms, and hanging out with someone in their office is not easy if you can't rely upon being able to find them in their office, because they're too frequently going from conference room to conference room.
Once again, you are arguing from a place of no experience.
> what causes someone to stand outside and knock is cultural
The point being... ? When people have private offices, they naturally grok that the office is a private space, not a public one. If they're not there, you have multiple ways of saying "I want to talk to you."
What is the point of having a shared space if you're not allowed to talk in it? This is how the Google office was and I hated it. This is coming from an introvert. I can have quiet at home. I do not see the point of commuting to a shared space and then having it be taboo to speak because everyone is in the same room.
One of the major problem in open offices for me are the acoustic and visual distractions of people talking and moving around. Noise canceling headphones help a bit, but only so much. So private offices absolutely help with that.
Honestly it sounds like you agree with me. My position isn't that open offices are great for everyone; it's that people who don't like open offices should look for work that doesn't require coming into an open office instead of taking a "woe is me" kind of attitude. If you work primarily remote, then you're someone who already took my advice
Software engineering is fundamentally a collaborative, team effort. Team efforts work best when the team is "gelled", and people enjoy working with each other.
Half the opposition I read here about going into the office, y'all are rationalizing to avoid the simple conclusion that you just don't like the people you work with. Maybe your teammates make you shitty coffee and expect you to drink it. Maybe your manager doesn't care about your feelings about the value of quiet, heads-down time. Maybe your teammates pressure you into grabbing lunch from somewhere unhealthy and they don't respect your boundaries. Maybe your manager thinks everything is hunky-dory, and you're upset, and they're not emotionally intelligent enough to understand that or to work with you to deal with what's upsetting you.
These are not problems with open offices, and having an office with a door will not solve them. These are people problems. A word of advice: life is too short to work with people who don't respect you. Spend your energy instead looking for people who will. Before trying to fix your office, fix yourself first, by not forcing yourself to be at a company you dislike so much.