The search for the most useless office perk | Hacker News Reader

The search for the most useless office perk

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30 pointsmacbookaries30 comments

The amazing thing about this is that it is from a company that sells sound deadening booths for companies that have adopted open floor plan offices. I have to imagine their pitch where they line them up and basically create traditional walled offices, except each office is the size of a telephone booth and has no place to store anything.

> I have to imagine their pitch where they line them up and basically create traditional walled offices

Despite how they're advertised, they're presumably mostly used for phone calls and audio recording, no?

What we used to call a phone booth, then.

I wish... we've had these at my current and previous job, and they're busy all day with people joining remote meetings. This was true even pre-pandemic. The last time I went in to the office I was stuck in one for 4 hours of back to back calls. Wondering why I made the commute...

Yep, we have them in our office and I used them a ton for phone calls pre-pandemic. I always jokingly called them "screaming shacks" but never saw anyone realize their stress reducing potential.

As a manager of a distributed team at a non-central office in a large company, this is most of my day. Yet, I still need to be in the office three days a week...

If you want to debug nginx internals without listening to sales all day, and your office has some of these pods, they seem like a good place to go.

My old office had a few similar pods. They were awful. Yes you could see out on two sides, but the result was that it managed to feel claustrophobic and exposed at the same time.

When I first saw them, I thought of the scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey where he astronauts are in the pods plotting against HAL, who is reading their lips,

Our office has one of these pods, and I like them a lot for short calls. Yes, they're tiny, but that doesn't bother me very much and it means the space cost of installing one is also tiny.

On a couple of occasions, I’ve had to work with one particularly poor SaaS provider. Every time this has happened, my colleagues and I have wondered exactly how bad it has to be there that we were seeing… those results.

One day, somebody looked them up on Glassdoor. There were multiple reviews stating directly “working there made me suicidal”. Not in a hyperbolic way.

The strangest thing about it was that all of the reviews, including the ones mentioning suicide, listed “provides free fruit” as their favourite perk.

I've met a lot of people who have never considered the oxygen levels of small spaces. You can purchase Co2 meters to check small bedrooms or tight spaces to make sure you're not using up the available oxygen and ending up tired and with headaches.

This pod looks like you would start to reach 1000/pm Co2 levels within 30 minutes or less.

I remember that Google Warsaw office had CO2 meters in every conference room, and they’d actually beep when it got high.

Do you have any small / economical CO2 meters you recommend?

I picked up one of these recently, and it seems to work quite well. https://www.amazon.ca/Detector-Quality-Monitor-Lightweight-A...

I don't have it on all the time or anything, but is certainly interesting to spot-check my indoor air quality.

> This pod looks like you would start to reach 1000/pm Co2 levels within 30 minutes or less.

We have one at work; I'll bring in a CO2 monitor tomorrow and check!

Measured it: https://www.jefftk.com/p/framery-phone-booth-co2-accumulatio...

It uses mechanical ventilation, and is fine as long as you don't unplug it.

I don't think they are sealed that well. Lots of leakage around the doors.

They're actually very well sealed: if you turn off the ventilation it gets up to ~2700 PPM CO2: https://www.jefftk.com/p/framery-phone-booth-co2-accumulatio...

> 30 minutes or less.

Aren't they just intended for short-ish calls/meetings anyway? I don't think the expectation is that one is consistently in one for longer than 30 minutes anyway.

The link that shows entries: https://www.frameryacoustics.com/en/campaign/perks-for-pods/

There is no content here

Our department changed to new-work open space as well including those phone booths.

After just 15 minutes it gets uncomfortably warm in these but the worst thing is feeling of being in an aquarium. Coworkers watching from the side through the clear glass feels ultimately dystopian and exposed.

Other funny perks in the video won't stop me getting out there ASAP. Remote from home is liberating as I don't want to partake in any social experiments but just do my job. Sometimes I wish back the lockdowns of the pandemic to evade any nightmarish "office concepts".

These pods were good for pre-covid (in-office) virtual interviews. You step away from your desk, hop in a pod and do a virtual interview or phone screen.

Or if you just needed a quiet moment away.

But yes, they get very hot and suffocating after 1 hr. Worse yet, some people would eat in them (instead of "just" eating at their desk) and so they would smell like the inside of an office microwave.

The irony burns. I should commute to an office so that the only way I can achieve the quiet I have at some is to climb into a booth smaller than any closet in my home, and somehow that's not a completely-useless office perk?

Last time I was looking for work as a software engineer, I saw one req that listed, as a perk, using "my choice of IDE".

I didn't apply to that job, and it took some self-discipline not to flame them too.

I don't understand, but would like to. What about that "perk" resonated poorly with you? (I mean, it's kind of thin for a perk, but some places do mandate tooling, so saying that you don't seems reasonable.)

...Some places mandate tooling?

I guess that answers your question, probably.

I guess, thinking about it some more, I find it kind of insulting. In the end, the source we write is text in ordinary files, and all the fancy tooling you can put in your IDE/editor only improves your odds of writing the _correct_ text, it doesn't change the fundamental nature of the task. You wouldn't tell a carpenter that they can use whatever hammer they think best for a given task (well, I wouldn't, anyway), so why would it be OK to tell an engineer how to put the bytes on the disk?

Now granted what they are saying here is the opposite, that you can pick your own tool, but that still implies that that choice is a privilege that they extend and could presumably retract if they wanted. Arguably it is in itself a small thing, but to me that still says unflattering things about their attitude towards their engineers.

This is pretty rich coming from the purveyors of miniature office prison cells

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