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Comment by erobbins | Hacker News Reader

I worked at a company where there was a combination of team rooms and offices... but all the walls were glass. You had the benefit of being able to see if Julie was at her desk so you could go ask her a question, but not hear Bob next door arguing with his wife again.

It was fantastic.

Now, I'm at FB... and I wouldn't work on a team in the new "warehouse" building. It's terrible over there, frankly.

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Haha I used to be at Microsoft in a building like you described: a combination of open space with offices and break-out areas. They're trying to renovate all their buildings to follow this hybrid approach as they did with building 16 which is just incredibly gorgeous (https://news.microsoft.com/stories/b16/). Now I'm at a startup in the bay are that adopted the generic open-space/warehouse design and although I'm happy with the move career-wise, I really do miss being able to concentrate...

I'm fairly certain Microsoft is like the gold standard when it comes to office spaces. I have always been super impressed when visiting any Microsoft campus.

As I understand it, they went so far as to build office buildings that could efficiently house as many private offices as possible. So rather than a volume efficient cube, they would build long, thin buildings with offices around the perimeter and shared services in the center.

So on the plus side of working for Microsoft is that you get windows in your office. Which compensates for the minus side, which is that you get Windows in your office.

Hahaha too true, too true. My lingering loyalty to MS obliges me to defend this though. There were custom shells, dev tools, and compilers for almost every major project combined with Visual Studio and C-family languages (which is an extremely overpowered editor btw - I mean you can even do 3D editing with it, proof: https://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Visual-Studio-3D-StarterKit) so, to be honest you didn't really miss Linux/Mac OS X that much.

Right. There's a running joke that building 36 (the main Office building) looks like the mothership (or jail, depending on who you ask) because of this criteria.

Its very interesting that they only have one shot or two of the actual offices that people work, and the rest being the architecture.

Yeah, I think it's due to their paranoia of taking a picture of anything work related: monitors, whiteboards with notes, papers, etc.

I've worked in open areas. You hit on the biggest issue - sitting next to people with spousal issues. Just too much detail!

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