[davidmr]

I think we've lost the war. I was even asked to meet with my company's architects and designers about a new space we were building out. I basically spent an hour telling them in every different form I could that what I wanted was a place I could go where people could find me, but they would have to knock on a door and open it to talk to me, and these people looked at me like I was from fucking Mars. They'd never heard anything so absurd in their whole life. I even pleaded for cubicles. I can't even remember what it was like to have dignity.

"What about a health clinic? Or a coffee bar instead?"

I found as many studies as I could about how awful these open office plans are, and printed them all out, and left them there. At the end of the day, on a whim I checked the recycle bin in the conference room they were in. Anyone want to guess what I found?

When I die and get to hell, there will be a Hermann Miller chair in an open office waiting for me. With free snacks and drinks in the kitchen.

[cryptica]

I had my own office once for a contract role I did. It was great. It makes employees feel more valued and reduces stress levels.

I find that when you're constantly around people, you are less reflective/creative and more prone to getting caught up in hype cycles and group-think.

My biggest problem with open offices is the constant stress that comes with people walking behind my back every few minutes. It's paranoia-inducing.

[randycupertino]

Workers cortisol levels raise when they don't face the door: http://cheryljanisdesigns.com/why-sitting-with-your-back-to-...

[cyberferret]

It's totally bad Feng Shui. I always ensure that I face, or am side on with the door in any office I have worked in. Plus I guess it also goes back to our primal nature - you don't want to have your back to the only point of access for potential enemies or carnivores looking for lunch...

[eli_gottlieb]

>When I die and get to hell, there will be a Hermann Miller chair in an open office waiting for me. With free snacks and drinks in the kitchen.

You'll be allowed to wear headphones, and Hell will have a Slack channel, but instead of using the Slack channel, everyone will just walk over to your desk and talk to you.

While you're debugging.

[donw]

The good news is, you'll only end up there if you are guilty of the sin of writing unreadable code.

[prewett]

Uh oh. Is there forgiveness available? When I was a kid, I tried to write all kinds of games in BASIC (including an ASCII version of Super Mario Bros, a distinct disappointment). Thing was, I had only ever seen one letter variables. So all my variables were the first letter of what they stood for, and if that letter was taken, I used the next available letter. I never finished any of the games, because at some point I'd run into a bug, or have not worked on it for a few weeks, and I had no idea what anything was doing. It was only after getting a Peter Norton book for my birthday that I discovered variables could be more than one letter. I found the programs really annoying to type out, because of all the long variables, but it was a whole lot more readable...

Although, I kind of like open office plans. Definitely better than cubicles, which have relational isolation but no sound isolation. So you feel disconnected with everyone, but you have to hear them anyway.

[ams6110]

What kind of space was planned for the managers/executives? Offices? Would not be surprised. That's how it went with the open office plans I've worked in. Managers and directors all get offices. Everyone else gets a desk in a fishbowl, maybe with some "focus rooms" that are supposed to make up for it.

[closeparen]

At my employer, even the highest-level executives don't get offices. They just have a suspicious number of consecutive meetings in the same conference room.

Mid-level executives waste a massive amount of time "commuting" between conference rooms on the hour every hour.

[wtbob]

> I was even asked to meet with my company's architects and designers about a new space we were building out. I basically spent an hour telling them in every different form I could that what I wanted was a place I could go where people could find me, but they would have to knock on a door and open it to talk to me, and these people looked at me like I was from fucking Mars.

I had to check your username to see if a) you're me or b) you're one of my co-workers. This exact same thing happened to me. I'll admit that our new office looks quite nice, but it is more-or-less impossible to actually get any work done there. Every conversation destroys the entire focus of the entire team; every personal tic annoys dozens of people and destroys their focus. There's no peace, no quiet and precious little productivity.

I honestly don't know why they bothered having those meetings. Did other folks say, 'I'd love something pretty, but I don't want to ever complete any actual work'? Did someone request an office which looks great in a brochure? Did someone say, 'I want something which makes an awesome gallery — don't worry about making it an office'? Enquiring minds want to know.

[dethswatch]

The kitchen will be about 1 meter away from your workspace. You'll enjoy the overly loud conversations, beeping of microwaves, coffee makers, dishwashing, and the delightful smells of bkreafast, brunch, lunch, and the rest.

[accountface]

My office has a kitchen adjacent to a auditorium. No doors.

Everyone who gives presentations around lunchtime inevitably has to apologize to the audience for the beeping microwaves and chatty employees.

This building is like 3 years old and cost tens of millions of dollars to build.

[YokoZar]

That happened to a VP giving a presentation at my company on a Friday. By Monday there was a new wall.

[facepalm]

The place you are looking for exists: it is called home :-)

[Ralfp]

That may fly if you are single. Otherwise everybody will assume that if you are at home, you are here to go shopping, take care of kids, let in guests, cook meals, do cleaning, take out trash, etc. ect, and lets not start about other household members distracting you with loud noises.

[randcraw]

Working from home doesn't work for us singles either. I don't want to spend my days working alone. What fun is that? And for those of us who aren't married, that solitude extends to being solo 24x7. That's even worse that the nightmare of an open office. There has to be a balance somewhere between the isolation of Home Alone and open office chaos.

But if those are my only choices, after 30 years in the biz, I'll give up on software. That's no way to live.

[tbyehl]

The same week my job went from mostly to fully remote, I split up with my ex-wife-to-be and a large chunk of my social network went with her. I'm an introverted person who enjoys a fair amount of alone time but being alone 24x7 quickly had me craving social interaction.

The cure for that was pretty straightforward: Leave the damned house.

All those annoying chatty people you encounter during everyday errands? Far less annoying when you're starved for social interaction, engage them. Have interests? Turns out there are meetups for all sorts of interests. I walk into one, find a small cluster of people, and introduce myself. "Hi, I'm tbyehl, crowds of strangers are about my least favorite thing so I need to make a couple of fast friends" is quite effective.

Need more, uh, intimate social encounters? Treat yourself to a couple nice outfits, find a nice barber, and read up on /r/seduction. I'm obese and my personality is something of an acquired taste but I've hardly spent any days alone that I didn't want to.

There are +/- 72 waking hours a week that you aren't scheduled to work. That's plenty of time to build a social life that isn't dependent on commuting to a crappy office environment 5 days a week.

[VLM]

Depends how close you live to operations / devops / pager rotation. If the boss trusts you not to have both of you drive in at 2am for every little problem (you to work and him to hover over you to make sure you work), they'll trust you to also actually work at 2pm from home on a normal day.

You also have to be realistic about slacking. I can let in service people and rotate the laundry and cook dinner in less time than my (few) smoking coworkers spend on smoke breaks. Also the world is full of people who take an entire sick day to let the cable guy in or something like that, so a work at home dude stealing 5 minutes is 7 hours and 55 minutes more productive than the fake sick day slacker.

I guarantee my coworkers are going to waste at least two hours tomorrow talking about the superbowl. Working at home, I have no one to talk to, and if instead I post for an hour on HN I'll still be ahead of the office grinders.

[pdimitar]

Very much this.

Many people don't understand that everybody is slacking. In general though, the good remote workers spend less time slacking than everybody else. And that's what makes the difference. They are more productive because of the freedom.

[twothamendment]

Working from home with a family can be great - it takes a little training. I'm 100% remote at home in a spare bedroom. My youngest is 5 and even he knows not to burst in the room and start talking without waiting for me to talk to him first. Maybe I'm just in the middle of a thought or more often working with another dev, but family can be taught to respect the work space in a home. "Goodbye, I'm going to work" seems to kick it off well.

I also had to explain money to my kids. All that stuff they enjoy - we only have it because I can sit here and work. Once they understood there was a reason I wouldn't drop everything to play Mario Kart all day - life is good. That doesn't mean I can't take a break to have lunch with the family and take a break for a few laps of racin.

I find that it is easier to control the distractions at home than it is at work. People at work have work related things that they think are important, but aren't really. It is much harder to train them than it is my family.

[snuxoll]

> That doesn't mean I can't take a break to have lunch with the family and take a break for a few laps of racin.

My favorite part of working from home. Take my morning break and cuddle with my daughter on the couch before she heads out to the park/YMCA with mom and play 15 minutes of Minecraft or see what art project she's been working on.

I honestly thought I'd miss having a more defined separation between work and personal life, but being able to blend them together has made me a lot happier, especially getting an extra 40-60 minutes a day with my family from not having to commute.

[tastythrowaway2]

this... is solid advice. I don't know that I could pull it off but you make excellent points.

[snuxoll]

It's a lot easier when you have a spouse/partner willing to be the homemaker while you support the family financially. I would have a hard time working from home if I had to take care of my four year old myself, but since my wife is a stay-at-home mom she's able to take care of the kiddo and making sure the house doesn't fall apart (I won't blame any woman for not wanting to fit the gender stereotype, but I feel kids these days are missing out a lot on not having a parent - dad OR mom - that doesn't have to work and can spend time with them beyond what their work schedule allows).

If you aren't in a situation where you have someone home with you or they can't comprehend that WFH doesn't mean you have to work your 40 a week then sometimes you have no choice but to just put the kids in daycare - which stinks because it robs you of a valuable perk of not having to commute when you have a family.

[YZF]

I work from a home office with a family. You close the door and as long as the boundaries are clear there's no problem. If you want to take a break and go shopping you can do that... It's doable.

[6nf]

Yes definitely, the problem is more with the perception of those in the office. All they see is you are working from home with your family and they might assume you're not able to give it your full attention.

[iaw]

At a previous job my manager complained incessantly about my arrival and leave times but could not find an instance where I wasn't responsive, available, and getting done everything that needed to be.

The reason I wasn't more responsive to his complaints was that I'd watch him spend his entire day at his computer either browsing facebook or reading sports blogs.

It feels so backwards.

[YZF]

In my first ever job my manager would always sort of deliberately look at his watch when I got in, which was anything between 9am and 1pm :) But otherwise we got along great. I think it was just his way of trying to teach me some of his values which unfortunately I didn't share ;) Usually if I came in at 1pm it's because I was at work until 1am the last night... Other than that job my other managers never cared. I've always worked long hours but never fixed hours. When I managed other people, unless there are some other problems, I couldn't care less about arrival and leave times. I think these days it's unusual to find managers in tech who are about these things but YMMV.

[PaulKeeble]

Ironic really considering you are actually the only one who is actually able to give your work full attention as they are constantly being distracted by each other. The perception of work != actual work.

[stmfreak]

This.

WFH always seems appealing from my open office station with my back to twenty other people and a walkway next to my desk.

Then I work from home and in the middle of presenting during a conference call, one of the kids gets home and starts ringing the doorbell incessantly, the dog starts barking and my spouse doesn't come answer because they know I am home.

The only time I can get work done if from 8am until 10am in either location.

[UweSchmidt]

It's on you explain, set boundaries and manage expectations.

[enraged_camel]

I do all of those things when I work from home.

Just like people at the office dick around in a hundred different ways while they work.

[SomeStupidPoint]

I think the point was family would expect that from you, because you're home, not that it takes too much away from work.

I had to have that talk with my roommates when I worked from home. No, I won't be solely responsible for the dishes because I'm "home all day" when Im working 50-60 hours a week and you're working 40.

[kylehotchkiss]

Beats having a roommate who keeps the tv on all day, loudly laughs constantly and walks around the house making car sounds

[sidlls]

No, it just isn't. When I work from home it invariably ends up being a free-for-all from my wife (who works from home full-time and suffers this daily when I'm at the office, the saint that she is) and kids making demands on my time. In order to work "from home" what actually happens is I find a nice, low-traffic coffee shop where 95% of the other patrons are doing the same thing, work odd hours and take an extra long period in the mid-morning to mid-afternoon to take care of appointments and domestic issues.

[brianwawok]

Sounds like you need to check office environment during your interview. Some places still are good.

[HillaryBriss]

one of the best HN comments i've ever read, especially the last line.

i know it wouldn't have helped, but did you point anyone at Joel Spolsky's old blog post about designing an office for software development?

[profalseidol]

We're fighting the symptoms. The right war is against capital.

[oneshot908]

Absolutely, the increase in productivity away from an open office is intangible and uncertain. In contrast, the decrease in office space expense from switching to open office is very tangible.

Also, some people cough mostly millennials cough really do thrive in these spaces, and some truly enjoy a social dimension like this for their engineering. I don't thrive in it, I loathe it, and I spew profanity like a WWII sailor trying to work in that environment.

So I try to work from home the most I can. I acknowledge some people cannot motivate themselves to do so and I recognize that's why they're resistant to letting people work from home.

But since open office isn't a 100% harmful thing to do, I agree the war is over and we lost. Start your own shop or go do something that doesn't make you miserable like this does.