Ask HN: Are there any tech companies in the Bay Area that offer private offices? I’m wondering if there are any tech companies in the Bay Area that offer private offices to individual non-executive-level employees. I find that I am extremely unproductive in open office workspaces. I can never concentrate due to all the noise and visual distractions. Putting on headphones isn’t an option. Are they any places that offer something like this? Are private offices really such a rarity now? |
All employees at SmugMug get a space like this with a door. They aren't totally enclosed offices per se...the front wall is a metal mesh covered with giant gorgeous photos on the outside, and they stop about 1' short of the ceiling, so they might not meet your headphone requirement, but in general things are quiet. One of my walls has whiteboard paint covering it.
Throughout the day I switch between my chaise and the double monitors on my desk when I need the screen space. But there's nothing quite like kicking back with my shoes off after lunch with a cappuccino and knocking things off my list. I don't think I could ever work in an open floor plan after this.
I usually don't close my door, but if I did I'd have zero visual distractions. To the contrary, thanks to a helpful decorating budget all new employees receive, you can make your own zen space (textured wood print wallpaper is both inexpensive and amazing). We have several open spaces of varying sizes with couches and such if that is what you'd prefer. Convertible standing desks are also available for anyone that wants one.
This is the first company I've worked at that seems to get that different people have different work environment needs, and that focused, complex work often is best done in a private space you can be comfortable in.
Hope it's alright to plug given the nature of the post but...we're hiring [2].
Anyway, we're a quick walk from the Mountain View Caltrain stop on Evelyn[1]. We also have a parking lot and bike storage.
For the record, I don't normally listen to music when programming - I like a quiet environment. Interruptions are a bane. I have a private office, but as soon as anyone enters - even quietly, my flow state is broken.
Plus on the flipside, while waiting for a long compile or download, I will grab one of the guitars sitting in my office and randomly jam away. I am sure in an open office environment, my co-workers would not appreciate that either.
That's how a team I used to be on was arranged. There was the outside office, then what was termed the "developer cave", which was a large section of the office (closed off, with a door!) that housed 5 developers and 3 QA people all working on the same product.
That's better than private offices (it encourages collaboration), but, doesn't have most of the downsides of a traditional "open office" (having to overhear the sales guy making calls all day, and people don't just pop in to ask a question. A room full of working developers is intimidating. Best to send an email instead.).
On top of that, we had separate booths (with doors) that were kind of like phone booths, just enough space for two people, that developers would snag if they needed to focus.
Now I'm sitting in a cube farm, sharing a cube, and listening to administrative assistants chatter about their children and their health issues and what they had for lunch all day long. I started coming in hours late and leaving hours late just so I have a few hours of peace at the end of the day to get some focused work done. And that's on an 'easier to ask forgiveness than permission' basis.
I'd kill for a setup like the top comment by shostack, but just getting back to a cave would be lovely.
Plus a lot of claims, some of them coming from practising software developers, that you shouldn't trust the output of the lone hacker holed up in her own office.
No, I don't buy it either.
This was all before the dot com boom IIRC. At one stage, a few years ago there seemed to be a movement towards private developer offices, but it seems to have been overturned somewhat of late.
Joel Spolsky may have tried but his companies (Fog Creek, Stackexchange) are not big enough nor influential enough to convince the industry.
Microsoft in 1990s was one of the few companies that deliberately provided private offices with a door for every programmer. However, that ideology later morphed into putting 2 or more developers to share one room and then relocating a large group onto open floor plans[1]. It shows that even a company that originally prided itself on private offices eventually deviated towards open offices. (They still have lots of private offices.)
As a counterpoint to offices with doors, there was billionaire Gordon Moore (CEO Intel) in 1996 without a private office.[2]
The issue is that the touted benefits of private offices are not obvious slam dunks to observers. For example, if open floor plans with their distractions kill productivity, Google (open cubicles) should have lost to Microsoft Bing. Amazon and their AWS programmers distracted by open offices should be losing to Microsoft's Azure programmers. (Of course, there are multiple other factors at play besides office layout but that may also prove that open-vs-private doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things -- i.e. it's statistical noise.)
There are no slam dunk business case studies that definitively proves that private offices produce superior business results. The narrative for private offices needs spectacular headlines of success in Harvard Business Review or Techcrunch articles about YC companies with private offices defeating every competitor. So far, the proponents like Spolsky (not big enough) and Microsoft (not considered a trendsetter in the tech world) is not enough.
[1]http://www.geekwire.com/2014/microsoft-developer-division/
[2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sX5g0kidk3Y&feature=youtu.be...
It's worth noting that when Microsoft was at its peak was when they had private offices. Correlation is not causation, but it's hardly a glowing recommendation for open offices.
> As a counterpoint to offices with doors, there was billionaire Gordon Moore (CEO Intel) in 1996 without a private office.[2]
That's not a serious counterpoint. We're talking about private offices for engineers who are on the maker schedule, where interruptions are harmful. CEOs run on a manager's schedule where interruptions are less harmful.
- It is a form of compensation. Cash/stock is preferred form here. To get other benefits (private office, remote) look at different place.
- Office space is at premium, private offices are expensive. Again look somewhere else.
- Startup culture is associated with open office. Large corporations are better with this :-(
- 'Extremely unproductive' is not an argument. Managers believe that programmers are equivalent/interchangeable cogs. There is no such thing as 10x ;-)
I would recommend:
- Block visual distractions as much as possible, 3x30" screen in pivot mode should do.
- Move into corner.
- Invest into big closed studio headphones with amplifier. Not active noise cancellation, but passive which covers entire ear. I got DT 770 PRO, best investment I ever did.
- Get ready for starting your own business and working remotely. I am afraid it is the only way :-(
In 2011 the company I was working for (not in the Bay Area) moved to its new building. Most of the offices were tailor made for the teams, with plenty of space left to expand. It was my favourite place to work by far. Then a few years later some of the managers became obsessed with startup culture and decided to break down the walls to implement an open plan. It was a massive step back (which cost a lot to boot) which caused quite a bit of tension with the engineers and eventually only set back the company.
[I realize the OP mentioned that headphones were not an option though.]
This is why I work from home. Amazing private office that my dog can be in.
Recently, I heard of the "cave and commons" approach, which sounds more like it could be adopted by hip startups: https://hbr.org/2013/03/give-workers-the-power-to-choose-cav...
(anecdote: i am currently sitting in low cubicles in the middle of a huge open plan space, with a couple of neighbouring developers, we're surrounded by about two rings of people whose jobs involve talking all day. this is okay for days that descend into endless meetings / firefighting, but pretty nightmarish for work that involves thinking hard about anything)
The doors unfortunately aren't the best at blocking loud conversations, but it's still better than trying to concentrate in a loud cubicle farm.
Private offices really do make developers more insular. It discourages communication to a degree I wouldn't have thought it would.
Another aspect which might not be obvious at first is that offices come in difference sizes, so when somebody comes to your office--or you go to theirs--you both immediately know your relative positions on the pecking order.
This induces an unwelcome power dynamic. Good ideas come from everywhere, but its human nature to buy into these symbols of status. "You know how I know I'm right and you are wrong? My office (and salary) is bigger than yours." Not necessarily said in as explicit terms as those, but the effect is real and pervasive.
The panopticon was a design developed to ensure constant surveillance of prisoners. It doesn't say good things about the status of employees when you make their workplace functionally equivalent.
Eitherway, I'm trying to push the idea of working from home- people aren't very receptive but after I've shown them I'm a good worker they'll be surprised when I finally get my wish and suddenly become significantly more productive.
the alternative of course is smaller offices for 3-6 people, I've only seen that in one place in my professional life and that was Nokia R&D in Helsinki where isolating teams was necessary for security reasons.
That was actually really nice.
Really? In my experience a small office with more than 1 person is worse than a complete open space (while an office for 1, with a door, is the best).
To be productive I need to not see and not be seen; I feel more anonymous in a big loud crowd than in a small office with 2 other people who can still speak to one another or to me, or on the phone, etc.
Average for bay area is $40/sqft/yr https://42floors.com/office-space/us/ca/san-francisco-bay-ar...
Office size data (small office ~100 sqft) https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-average-square-footage-of-...
CBRE will have more details with registration: https://researchgateway.cbre.com/PublicationListing.aspx?PUB...
Most places I've worked since, even the CEO didn't have an office so it was more of an egalitarian thing. (By that I mean the false egalitarianism that's prevalent nowadays where your boss is your friend, not just your boss.) When they don't do that, and it's a situation where execs get one and peons don't, that's pretty tacky and indicative of a company that will be shitty in other ways IMO.
I had an office once at a small place but it had no windows. It eventually drove me a bit crazy, as did working from home one summer where I had windows but no AC and I'd stick to my chair half the time.
It's tough to find perfection but a mixture of commons plus private works well for me and may be what you need.
Being kicked out of a room just as something is about to click is... not so good.
The worst part about open office: meeting rooms next to desks. I used to sit in an area with lots of meeting rooms and people talking on their way in/out of these meetings constantly was killer.
Open offices have a similar effect on me, and not infrequently I've been exposed to both at the same time.
Von Neumann did some of his best work in noisy, chaotic environments, and once admonished his wife for preparing a quiet study for him to work in. He never used it, preferring the couple's living room with its television playing loudly.
My experience is that I seem to prefer a mix of available options. For example, my current office is about 30 miles away from home, and I sometimes work form home and like it, but then I go to the office and like it too. After several days of working in the same environment I welcome the change of scenery.
Also, for the first time in many years, I got a private office, having moved there from a cubicle. It may be a status symbol more than a convenience, but it is a convenience for sure. No problem mixing private and public space as long as I have a choice of both.
Based on my experience in a very similar situation I'd recommend finding a way to overcome any barriers to using headphones, then using a pair w/ good noise-cancelling, and listening to brain.fm. It's remarkably effective.
It's not to the level anywhere near some sort of phobia, it's just that when I'm in a big room with a lot of activity a portion of my brain is dedicated to concern for what's happening in the room. In an office, it's a space that I own and control. That level of comfort leads to more productivity and happiness.
I don't want to be alone in an office all the time or even necessarily most of the time, but without that cave to return to when I need to focus, life is just plain worse.
They'll come up behind you and tap you on the shoulder or, even worse, stand quietly just outside your visual focus until you break concentration and acknowledge them.
Short of police tape across your cubicle door, nothing will send them the message.
Does anyone else remember WKRP in Cincinnati?
I'm glad we have lots of small meeting rooms around. When the vibe is energetic or distracting (e.g. Party/large gathering) and I need to focus I grab a room.
Sometimes the rooms are booked but often that means the open-plan area is less noisy.
Also I wfh 1-2 days a week as needed.
A better question would be - why aren't "library rules" an option? The default should be quiet, headphones cannot recreate that, only different noise. If people wish to introduce noise, they may of course do this with headphones!
I've worked in places where teams have created "war rooms", basically a commandeered conference room where everyone hunkers down around the table and gets the project done (this was when I worked on a mechanical device and we needed to mess with parts and tools).
The benefit of the pod to me is that you can make the closable offices way smaller (desk, small table, couple of chairs) when the doors are open the offices become part of the larger project room. The entire project room can also be closed off for noise, privacy, meetings, stealth, etc.
Faster for you, not for the poor slob who has to answer your questions.
To be clear, I'm not "recommending" open offices. Microsoft still has private offices and I believe it's still the majority configuration of their Seattle campus (MS employee can chime in to confirm this.)
>We're talking about private offices for engineers who are on the maker schedule, where interruptions are harmful.
The Intel programmers don't have private offices either. (The ideology was that the CEO's open cubicle was copied down to the engineers as well.)
Also, the problem is that "harmful" open layout has not been proven to lead to business failure nor has "beneficial" private offices proven to lead to business success. We need a company with private offices to beat Facebook/Google/Apple/Intel who all have open offices without doors for their engineers. Instead, what we have is a bunch of articles that do surveys and of course the employees will respond "open offices suck!"
What influences the industry is concrete business success and not employee satisfaction surveys that preaches to the choir. If people don't understand that distinction, they are being naive about what it takes to sway the industry.
I know at least two of those four companies have very liberal working policies.
If I want to work on a problem with a team member we can take over a meeting room for a few days.
If I want to work from home for a couple of days that's ok as well.
Sometimes I'll go work from a cafe.
Hell, sometimes I'll have an intense meeting then play a couple of hours of table tennis to relax.
Basically if I want quiet time I can easily get it. It's not really like that for most software development jobs at normal companies.
I definitely know about Joel's insistence on private offices for his developers at the (then) new FogBugz offices, but stand corrected on my other statements.