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Ask HN: What companies have private offices for programmers?

23 points by Aeolun ↗ HN
I found this earlier thread asking the same thing (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7676377) 10 years ago, and I was wondering how things have changed in the past 10 years. Did the practice entirely die out over time?

Anecdotally every office I see these days is filled with noise and open space.

13 comments

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kingkongjaffa
The best way to get this in 2024 is to find a remote role and work from your home office (bliss)
muzani
Yeah, we have open offices at work because, well, people go there to talk to others. The rest of the time we're just in flow from home.

I don't actually mind it this way. The peeps at work are great to hang out with, and working 100% remote has a mental hit. But on some days you actually want to be paid to get work done. So I feel like this hybrid mode will be it for a while.

the_only_law
Sadly this seems to be getting much more difficult. I was out of work for a year, but I would have found something much sooner if I had compromised on remote (which I ended up having to do anyway).
gtirloni
None. I've never seen it in decades. The closest I've seen was a room with 4-6 people in a team and that was the most isolated option. Everything else is open space offices.

Like others have said, if you want a private space, it's better to work from home anyway.

rdist
I don't know if they still do or not, but Microsoft did for FTEs in 2010.
giaour
They do not. Most Microsoft FTEs (at least in my org) don't even get a permanent desk assignment since facilities have largely shifted to "hotelling" desks. Last week, I even learned that my boss's boss's boss (partner-level) lost his office recently and is now just assigned a desk in an open area.
cableshaft
The only time I've ever had a private office -- outside of working from home at least -- is when I worked for a small company and at one point they bought and built out a much larger office in an industrial center (I think it was for $1.5 million, IIRC).

It was a large building and only about 20 employees, so pretty much everyone with a computer got their own private office (like 12 of the people, some people worked on printing machines or the shipping and receiving area).

Haven't had that since. I've worked in rooms with just 1-2 other people since, and those were startups. Any corporations I've worked at have been wide open rooms with lots of chatter and distractions, and probably contributed to me developing tinnitus (especially since I had music on to drown out 5+ conversations happening around me at once so I could concentrate).

billconan
Adobe has some for very senior people.
Zelphyr
In a nearly 30-year career I've never worked for a company that offered private offices for all programmers. The closest I got was sharing an office with one other person and that was in the 90's.

Now, I have a large private office with an amazing view and has an incredibly short commute.

lfciv
I feel like work from home is the modern version of this. If I need to go heads down I'll just let the team know and work from home.
kaaaate
In my first dev job, it was practically a private office just for the devs.

When I started it was only myself and the one accountant, and near the end of my time there it was just myself and another dev (that got hired shortly after I started) since the accountant got their own office.

At my 2nd role, it was terrible. The devs were smushed in-between the Accounting and HR department, which made it absolute hell to talk to my co-workers about issues and to actually do some development without interruption. Oh, and it was strictly no WFH/Hybrid. 2hr on public transport one way, every day.

Now I work for the government and it's lovely being able to do hybrid, and the office is actually somewhat quiet since the whole floor is for the developers.

supportengineer
If there's truly a glut of unleased office space in downtown San Francisco, it should be available for cheap (eventually). This could usher in a whole new wave of startups who could offer individual offices as a perk. It would send a strong signal to prospective employees that they are valued. A company could use this signal to attract people who are a good match in terms of shared values.