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Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

A totally different reason, I think, actually. If your job is to manage people, that sometimes might involve conversations where you provide one-on-one feedback. This is sometimes negative, and the recipient might not want to share that, so it is good to have the option to make it private.

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As you say it yourself it happens sometimes. So they can have these one-on-ones in a conference room, can't they? And yet, somehow they need their private offices at all times. Strange.. :)

I think it is easier to give everyone a door. I get that people treat offices as a special sign of prestige or something, it is dumb.

But really it does seem useful to have a door. Bad news might be rare, but unless you want to have the conference room imply bad news, you also have to schedule good news meeting in the conference room. Now all the meetings are in the conference room. Managers’ whole job is to go to meetings as far as I can tell, so we might as well give them the conference room I guess, haha.

In my experience, managers (particularly VP and up) tend to camp out in, and effectively claim, conference rooms.

I can't speak for all managers but I did some analysis on this because, when we came back from COVID, we were trying to keep the number of used offices to a minimum as they took a lot longer to daily deep clean.

For me personally, over a period of about 6 weeks, I needed a private room for a sensitive conversations on at least 3 days in each of those weeks. 2 of the weeks were for all 5 days.

3-4 of the conversation were related to employee's health so probably more than a typical period. But the period didn't cover any of the usual high sensitivity events, like appraisals or comp, so it's a bit of a wash.

Now that doesn't mean that I need exclusive access to an office (and I don't) but it is frequent enough that it makes an important part of my job very hard without easy access.

But that all obviously depends on details as to how many people you manage, org's views on management responsibility etc.

The frequency is probably the key factor. Also being able to have their many meetings without adding to the general noise of the office.

I advocate for most employees having offices, but we can still acknowledge that the reasons you probably want your managers to have them are very different than the reasons for engineers.

True, but the answer to that is to use conference rooms — either existing ones or special, smaller ones intended specifically for two or three people to use. It’s what non-managers have to do whenever there’s a need to speak freely.

That could be done for sure.

I think it would require a bit of “opsec” type thinking on the part of managers, maybe? If you always take meetings in your office, it is pretty easy to close the door discreetly.

If you book a conference room for one-on-one meetings, you have to do all your one-on-one meetings in the conference room. Otherwise, obviously, booking the conference room implies negative feedback. And if someone wants to do an impromptu talk that goes in a confidential direction, there’s some impedance added… none of this is to say it is impossible or unworkable, but it seems easier to just give everyone a door.

People can and do have their conferences and calls and 1:1s in conference rooms. We are definitely not inventing the wheel now, this kind of setup I'm sure can be seen everywhere, and long before covid. I won't even blame the NIH syndrome, but can't stress enough: there ARE solutions to everything, and they can be (re)applied once there's a will.

When I was a manager meetings were darn close to my whole job. Sure there was some quiet work, but when if I'm going to be spending 6 of my 8 hours in the conference room, you might as well save space and just make the conference room my office instead of giving me a cube.

Also I think the focus on private conversations is a bit of a red herring. I can assure you, none of the engineers or sysadmins that reported to me wanted me in the middle of the cubes, constantly on the phone or having a conversation.

To be clear I think most employees should have offices.

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