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Comment by dpark | Hacker News Reader

Cubes still suck. They have most of the same noise issues as open floor plans. Assholes on speakerphone conference calls...

Also your plan requires that everyone work primarily on laptops (unless you expect to lug your desktop and monitors to a cube when you need to concentrate). And you've basically allocated double the space (cubes for half the team plus a room big enough for the whole team). Why not just cut the space up more efficiently and give everyone a private space?

This seems like a bad deal for everyone. Workers still feel like they have no privacy and are constantly distracted, and the company is paying for a lot of extra space.

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> Why not just cut the space up more efficiently and give everyone a private space? ... Workers still feel like they have no privacy and are constantly distracted

Maybe it's just me, but for me it's not just about the privacy, it's about having a place for my things.

Having a desk and some drawers, some desktop space that is mine to leave papers on, etc. makes me feel a lot more at home and productive. Having to keep everything in a bag I can tote around leaves me feeling kind of uneasy and like the situation is impermanent, much like staying somewhere and living out of a duffel bag.

I'm a lot more inclined to do good work if it's for a company I feel like I'm at home at, that I'm going to stay at, than one that feels like I'll be gone from any moment now.

>> Also your plan requires that everyone work primarily on laptops

That's not a bad idea either way. Then you take your computer home if you want to work from home, or after hours.

Assuming you have a working VPN. We have one from a long dead company that barely works on PCs and for Macs we had to hack a solution ourselves.

Only if you have a laptop that's beefy enough to replace a desktop and you also have monitors to connect it to when you're at work. A single 13" screen is decidedly nonoptimal.

Does anybody work for a software company that doesn't issue laptops as the primary PC? I haven't had a desktop in 10 years and just assumed that was the norm.

Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo all provide a desktop and two monitors (or one 30" one), or did the last time I worked for or interviewed at these companies. They might also provide laptops, but they aren't the primary device for dev work. I seem to recall the same for Amazon, but am not certain.

I actually don't understand this belief that a laptop should be the primary device given the body of research that shows the usefulness of multiple large monitors (unless you're just docking the laptop).

Of course you're "docking" it. Nobody sane hunches over a laptop all day every day.

The advantage to the laptop is you can have your core machine with you everywhere -- home, office, or traveling. But when you're in the two places you spend the most time -- the office or at home -- you plug it into an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse.

Where I work (a software company), only people who travel a lot have laptops as their primary PCs. People can easily connect to their desktop machines from home using the VPN.

I couldn't see myself working on a laptop all day unless it had an external monitor, keyboard and mouse. It would just be too physically painful.

> People can easily connect to their desktop machines from home using the VPN.

And use what to interact with it? VNC? I'd lose my mind. That's not an efficient user experience, it's slow and finicky and fucks up keyboard shortcuts.

> I couldn't see myself working on a laptop all day unless it had an external monitor, keyboard and mouse.

Which is exactly what we do. What lunatics do you work with that use laptops as primary work machines without doing this?

I've never worked for a company which didn't issue desktops as primary development machines, and I haven't used a single-display desktop machine since 2007.

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