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by SteveNuts 2954 days ago
Whether or not the office is an open floorplan.
2 comments

Yea, would love to know if they have an open office floor plan before going through the whole interview process and without having to ask.
Honest question: do you ever come across companies that aren't open floor plans? I don't, so it isn't a very useful question.
My employer has a cube farm.

Even though it may be technically accurate, I don't really see that as an "open floor plan". To me, "open floor plan" means a bunch of desks strewn all over with no dividers.

I love cube farms (and I generally prefer conservative, enterprisey companies), and I refuse to work at a company that uses open offices like I described above, so it matters to me.

Software development positions, no -- but I'm not limiting myself to that. People (on both sides of the table) are way too locked into the mindset that people can only do what they've done in the past. I'm good at lots of kinds of jobs.

If someone wants to hire me but their software development position happens to be in an environment that we know I'll do poorly in, then let's talk about what else is available.

Learning new technologies quickly, being able to pick up details from context, dealing with imprecise or conflicting requests, working backwards from a problem to find the root cause, designing future-proof systems, working in a fast-paced environment? I can segue these skills into almost anything.

I don't want to be shoehorned into "$(lang) developer", or even "developer", especially if it means I have to work in an open floor plan. Nobody should want to hire me for that, either, because it's the worst environment for me to do that work.

There are separate rooms (usually hosting about 3 to 10 devs) at the place where I'm at right now.

The previous company where I worked eventually ended up with open floors - once they grew and moved to a new building - but also provided closed rooms in the location before that.

I also happened to worked at our client's office, a large IT company based in Berlin, they had rooms again.

YMMV - depending on your location perhaps - but based on my experience it's not extraordinary at all.

Worth looking at: Adobe, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Cisco, Esri, Fog Creek, Garmin, HP, Mathworks, Microsoft Research, Panel, SAS, Stack Overflow, VMWare, XTime