291–300 of 373 posts
No designated desks. Please please please no. Having "personal" space at the office is just as important as having "quiet" space. I do not want to feel like a drifter, a student in the library, or a tenant in a co-working space, unless I am actually one of those things.
If it's the former, then yeah, I'm bailing, that's tremendously dumb. If it's the latter, then whatever, it's hardly even a selling point.
No designated desks. Please please please no. Having "personal" space at the office is just as important as having "quiet" space. I do not want to feel like a drifter, a student in the library, or a tenant in a co-working space, unless I am actually one of those things.
I read more along the lines of you having the liberty to decide where that personal space is.
No designated desks. Please please please no. Having "personal" space at the office is just as important as having "quiet" space. I do not want to feel like a drifter, a student in the library, or a tenant in a co-working space, unless I am actually one of those things.
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Compared to no walls at all? Fuck yeah. When I was at IBM, they had us (~60 people) in one big room, with no walls, no noise-dampening, right next-door to a server room (with the accompanying server hum coming through the walls). I used to go downstairs to the "cubicle hell" area and just walk around and dream about how nice it would be to work down there. There was a point I'd have paid money to move to the cube-far…
They say hell will make you dream of heaven.
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I don't understand how it can be so expensive, I can rent a serviced office for two people locally for £400/month. This is without the economies of scale of an organisation.
It'd be about £400/month where I am as well, and I'm guessing you're not in London/Cambridge/Oxford. Also since you're in the UK don't forget about rates (local property taxes that businesses pay in the UK). Once you're beyond a certain size this tax will jump from £50 a month to over £1000.
I did have an office in Oxford for £200/month although this was ten years ago and it was a bit of a dump.
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Have you ever had a bathroom remodeled? Construction sucks and is both a time and money sink. You can literally have a crew show up and build a big cube farm in 1-5 days. It's really the same argument as "why would anyone pay outrageous fees to Amazon for slow, shitty VMs?". The answer is that when you factor in the cost of a data center facility and the people to build and run it, it turns out that AWS is a good dea…
Are we running new sewer and water lines? Installing a drain pan? Retiling? I thought for an office, you need to frame w/ some metal studs and drywall, doors, and maybe blown-in insulation to abate sound. Not nearly as complex or skilled an endeavor.
For example, at least in NYC, the fire code dictates you need sprinklers and annunciators in every space, which increases the cost and complexity of the fire system. Plus, HVAC is much more complicated in office setups, as you can't rely on a large mass of air mixing to normalize temperatures, and have to manage longer vent runs with more exit points.
Then there's the problem that in a lot of buildings, particularly in urban areas, there's a relative paucity of windows, and people find windowless offices less desirable, making it harder to design office plans that don't shortchange big chunks of the employee base. One benefit of open plans is its a lot easier to give employees some view of sunlight and the outside.
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I would really encourage you to move on the interviewing as soon as you can. I was in your position, desperately unhappy with the working conditions, and now I'm in a small quiet office with 4 to 5 other people and I have never been happier in my work. In the meantime, get yourself a set of Bose Quiet Comfort 35s. An absolutely life changing piece of equipment for me at least. If nothing else you will comfortable enj…
Are they robust enough for everyday use? The Sony equivalent is plagued with problems I've read in reviews.
Wait what? I thought that collaboration was the minor benefit to what is otherwise just a way of making more people fit in less space.
The biggest actual benefit of the open office is that it can be situated in a much better location than an office where developers have private rooms. Ask 10 developers whether they want private offices (or at least not large shared spaces) and they'll probably say yes.
But ask the same 10 developers in an office in a nice location in SF, London, Berlin, Stockholm... whether they'd want private offices at the expense of ending up in an office park where the rent would be the same for the larger office - and they probably don't.
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I would really encourage you to move on the interviewing as soon as you can. I was in your position, desperately unhappy with the working conditions, and now I'm in a small quiet office with 4 to 5 other people and I have never been happier in my work. In the meantime, get yourself a set of Bose Quiet Comfort 35s. An absolutely life changing piece of equipment for me at least. If nothing else you will comfortable enj…
> get yourself a set of Bose Quiet Comfort 35s That's only if you like to listen to music while you work. If you just want quiet, get yourself a pair of the earmuffs that the airport ground crews wear out on the tarmac. I had a coworker who wore those and the only real downside was that he'd get horribly startled when people were trying to get his attention because they'd have to come up and touch him on the shoulder…