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by Bartweiss
3662 days ago
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I've certainly never seen a large organization that is consistently good about this. What I have seen, and valued enormously, are side-channel concessions to this need. One of the better formulations is having lots of small conferences rooms (or corner chairs, or anything isolated) that anyone can grab, with bonus points for doors. It's not a complete replacement for respecting flow, but it's a great way to let people with some urgent, complicated code task get a truly isolated setting to get things done. A lot of everyday code can be written passably in counterproductive settings, so even occasional, high-urgency access to good workspaces seems to be a huge step up. |
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It also leads to problems where you receive status penalties in the eyes of peers and managers if you are the weird guy who always books conference rooms. It also creates problems if you work in a situation where you cannot move your workspace. For example, I also consider it to be absolutely basic to have at least two 24-inch monitors, my ergonomic keyboard, ergonomic desk chair, and trackball. Why should I be forced to use poorer tools, like a crappy laptop screen, portable mouse, crappy conference room chair, etc., just to get quiet or private space. It's unreasonable to give up either adequate equipment or adequate privacy.
In some jobs, I've also worked with large workstations and needed to be physically present at them, remotely logging in to them was not always feasible for some tasks.
Finally, you end up running into booking conflicts all the time. And anyone with more seniority or status than you gets to kick you out (thus interrupting you hugely and ruining your plans) and anyone with a meeting gets to kick you out. And it also leads to artificial scarcity -- there's no need for coworkers presumably working towards the same goal to be competing with each other for the scarce resource of blocks of spacetime in conference rooms. It's outrageously cheap and easy for the company to provide all of them with adequately private conditions.
Allowing a super generous work-from-home option is maybe a better solution -- as long as the company is also willing to pay for you to have equipment in your home office that is equally as ergonomic as what you get in the company office. But then you're contending with different kinds of status issues for not being physically present, some jobs still require a physical presence for various reasons, etc.
The minimal acceptable solution is for companies to simply spend the money that it costs to provide healthy amounts of private working space and give employees more autonomy in structuring how they work with regards to private time. No half-assed compromise should be given even the slightest legitimacy as a workable alternative and no company should get any credit for anything other than the minimally healthy option of actually providing access to private conditions.