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Comment by ttkeil | Hacker News Reader

While the open-office debate has been a recurring meme on HN for some time, it seems that offering a variety of options as well as unfettered personal choice is key.

For example, my current employer has wide-open office space with pods of desks, but they also offer numerous privacy rooms for escape. As a mild to mid introvert myself, this allows for the best of both worlds the majority of the time: I can benefit from those casual, spontaneous conversations that pop up in the open space, but I can also grab my own room for an entire afternoon to crank out some heads-down work.

I think what's most important is for companies to acknowledge and respect the variety of working styles of their employees, along with the trust that--regardless of how chatting in a pod or hiding away from others might appear--more often than not they're getting shit done.

edit: words

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> but I can also grab my own room for an entire afternoon to crank out some heads-down work.

that might work for people that work only on laptops, but it's not going to work if you have multiple monitors and towers, and ergo keyboard and so on

Desks with wheels (like valve).

The way around that is that nobody owns their peripherals. Monitors, keyboards, etc are part of the work station, not part of the worker's personal environment. Of course there's still opportunity for customization of individual stations, and if someone prefers the more private spaces they can lobby to have one customized to their taste.

I don't want to touch a keyboard that someone has painted with ketchup and knows what else.

Carry Lysol wipes.

Or have the employee keep a container of them at each station (if they don't already, which IME many do).

That's a shitty solution for a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place.

If it is really such a 'shitty problem' to someone, they can easily solve the problem by optimizing their job search for a high private:shared equipment ratio.

People share equipment in every office everywhere. Germaphobes will need to disinfect some stuff, they can't have private everything, and they can't demand that people stop sharing things. Oh well, them's the breaks!

That's a horrible solution for a couple of reasons: #1 - Ewww (yes, I know most people are sanitary... most) #2 - Straight keyboards vs curved (and similar for mouse, etc). Both for working effectiveness and RSI.

This isn't always a solution. I've often been tied to 'my' devkits, for example. Or 'my' tower of tablets I'm trying to port to and support. I've gone as far as buying a cheapo extra desk out of my own pocket because I was running out of space in my spacious L shaped cubical, and needed the extra surface area by forming a U. I've also had nontrivial amounts of dead tree documents.

Basically, I often labor under constraints that make it unreasonably expensive and difficult to make workstation hardware interchangeable like that.

My dev environment would be difficult to virtualize as well. I've dealt with pre-release software, pre-release OSes, and any VM based solution would need to give me proper GPU access. I'd need to develop tooling to help manage constantly reconfiguring my tools to point to whatever devkits are local as well. Syncing data is another problem - right now I often abuse symbolic links to move 'cold' projects and tools off of my SSDs, as 2TB SSDs only recently became affordable.

congratulations, you made the problem worse

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