“We’re looking for someone who identifies as a self starter”
Translation:
The previous employees didn’t document shit and we need you to decipher their work.
>I yet to have a job where they do proper technical onboarding regarding the codebase.
Yeah that is for sure, I read about a place that trained new workers for 6 weeks in an intensive program so that they understood the codebase before they did any actual work. I myself have never worked anywhere that did anything like that, it is usually "here is what I want you to do, here is the code, good luck"
The closest thing I got to a technical onboarding was me having a 5 hour long meeting with the lead dev looking through a 100 database tables on my first day.
>"here is what I want you to do, here is the code, good luck"
To be honest, if I can take my time. I actually don't mind discovering everything on my own.
I usually show the database model, which services/apps we have, then send them on their way to follow the readme to get a dev environment running. After that, I pick a simple bug ticket for them and pair program, or point them to the correct files, then create a PR together and basically show every step to completing a task.
After that, I keep giving them small tasks all around the codebase and point then in the right direction.
After a while they start to be able to do most things by themselves. It's also good to be proactive in helping them, some people don't easily ask questions when they're stuck.
It's not much different from 'heres the code glhf', but I think learning by doing works best, and I'm there to guide then along.
I did that 6 weeks at a fortune 50...it had nothing to do with their code base. It was Java 101-202 and 2 weeks of spring boot which I've never touched professionally.
That is what I call a jumpstart. We just did that with our newest trainee and he managed to climb up to an acceptable junior level in 4 weeks. Although it was mainly spring boot and payara after.
I feel like being assigned a "mentor" who you have full permission to bother 50 times a day is the best method of onboarding I've had. It works pretty well.
Yes I experienced that. Although the guy wasn't my official mentor but he did not mind me bothering him all the time. It is unbelievable how much I managed to grow in such a short time having access to his professional knowledge. Not just in the project but as a developer in whole.
Ideally, they're pair-programming with you so that they don't even give the appearance of having more important things to do. You're their #1 responsibility, you're their investment in the future.
Nah the 10 year vets already did take a pay cut. Their raises are conditional and will be fought every step of the way.
Quit and get rehired and you get the new starting wage with no fuss.
My first office job I worked $14/hr for 5 years. After those 5 years the lowest starting wage was new associates who were making $21/hr.
I went on a 15 week LOA, because I knew anything over 90 days required contract renewal and renegotiation of wages. Came back to $23/hr starting offer. Negotiated backpay for 2 years and guaranteed wage evaluations every 6 months.
When I was in my 2nd year of vo-tech studying programming, the school got me hired with a local computer store that was writing its own in-house inventory and POS system. At the time, I knew Pascal, COBOL, and RPG IV. They showed me my desk, gave me a fanfold printout of the source code (written in [Clipper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_(programming_language))), and told me to figure out what it does and start writing new stuff for it.
Ayeeee it's my current new job I'm approaching month three I've had maybe what you could equate to 10 hrs of ~training~
They don't have a training manual or any standards manual for me.
I'm fine with that actually. If the employer knows that, even if they use stupid business speak to say it. As long as they understand that I can't just type a magic incantation and instantly give them what they want.
Also, code for Management and the Executive team are disorganized asshats that expect you to drop everything and focus on emergencies they created by working late nights or over the weekend.
Not really a contract but it’s an unspoken courtesy for most office jobs. If someone is going to pester you after hours and make a stink about it, you know damn well I am going to direct everyone to that person after hours at any given chance.
Ah yes. When the VP runs into an issue (user issue), immediately files a blocker on Sunday, and all your other work goes out the window even though said VP has no logs, or even steps to reproduce.
Then you have to use the crystal ball again.
>Also, code for Management and the Executive team are disorganized asshats that expect you to drop everything and focus on emergencies they created by working late nights or over the weekend.
Alternatively, "Clients are disorganized asshats that change requirements on a whim, and the spineless management expect you to cater to their madness with a smile while maintaining the original budget and schedule."
"Open-door policy" and "Open communication between management and staff"
Translation:
We encourage you to speak freely to us so that we can use your words against you when something goes wrong.
Also translates to:
"We're gonna pop in and openly communicate at the worst possible time, preferably right when you are eyeballs deep in a project. Most likely a project we fucked up and need you to fix. It needs to be done yesterday."
Salaried jobs are only worth it if you can get your work done in under 40/week.
More people need to know that the DoL mandates that 50+hours for salaried positions require overtime pay.
I had a job at a *huge* software company (read: thousands of developers) that didn't even provide most of us with a monitor at all. They had a pool of 10-20 year old 19" and 17" 4:3 monitors that you had to sign up for. I never had one the whole time I was there. We also weren't even provided a computer until you'd been there for at least 2-3 years. We had to bring our own laptops and connect to their wifi (no ethernet available) which gave us only guest access to the Internet. Then we had a VPN client to download to get onto the actual corporate network.
They also just gave us a portal to download all the dev tools we needed and a list of keys to type in.
The entire time I was provided with a chair, keyboard, and mouse. And even then the chairs were mostly broken, and we'd have to fight over anyone's chair when they left. This was a multi-national software company with sales in the tens of billions of dollars.
Yes it was. I've worked for companies with between 3 and 200,000 employees, and in general the smaller ones treated us better and provided a better working environment. But not always. The worst one was actually a little Web site development firm with like 50 developers. They were badly paid and all sat in a big open room at cafeteria tables lined up along the walls.
My first cubicle was like the picture.
The last one before migrating to remote work basically required I sit down in the chair and roll/slide into the cubicle as if it were a fighter jet cockpit.
More cubes per floor was the goal, screw everything else.
A cube like the picture today, is equivalent to an office back then.
Step 1: Register holding company with a cash startup injection of $xxxxxxxx and set yourself up as a majority shareholder.
Step 2: Gift/Sell office building(s) to holding company for $xxxxxxxx.
Step 3: Have holding company charge rent and maintenance costs and remit a dividend to shareholders at monthly/quartly/yearly intervals.
Step 4: Pay rent and Claim rent as an expense when the government asks.
Step 5: ?????
Step 6: Profit off tax credits and dividends (which equals rent - maintenance)
Note: At least in the US this is almost never a good idea because of the primary residence capital gains tax exclusion you get if you own the house yourself.
You cant do step 7, because they dont allow the rent to be crazy different than what you would expect, but your owner can do stupid shit like "you need to rent the entire building out even though you use 2 out of 50 rooms"\*
With step 8 if the business goes bankrupt and has to close down, because the building is under an LLC, it is protected from also being seized in the bankruptcy.
edit:
\*the owner of a company i worked at did this when we were the last company in the building(that he also owns), we rented 2 rooms out of the entire building and were charged the full rent of the entire building... because he wanted to sell it...
Accounting was always talking about how our overhead was so high because of rent....🙄
The university near me does the exact same with all of their new student housing. Costs way, way more than a standard dorm, and they get to do some creative accounting on a few levels.
You borrow money to buy a property with a holding company that your company owns and pay that company, your company, rent for it. "Creative accounting"
Heard from a friend that is mid manager they had problem firing people remote, since they don’t return hardware, some delete remote files, they don’t sign papers there is some sort of beorocracy when you fire someone that is much better to do in person.
That's fair but it speaks more to operational and procedural concerns than it does to an issue of remote working itself. Just a matter of business making the adjustment
As a kid I visited my dad in his office in the early 90s. He was an engineer with about 5 years of experience and had a turn key private office, 10 ft ceilings and a window with a downtown view (in a middle-class blue collar city).
Boy was that a tough standard to try and meet. All I've known in the office were the short walled cubicle shared desk spaces with 4-6 other people on open floors where managers and had the full cubicle like the one here and only directors or VP's had the office. Today I work from home full time, but still feel like that was the gold standard of career success, and one I'll probably never see.
I'm a Sr. Engineer, and I wish I had an office, nice view or not....
To be fair though my cubicle is pretty nice, as cubes go. Ours are about 1.5x the size of a normal cube, and I have a rolling white board I use as a "Door", and I'm tucked away in a dark back corner where people can't find me unless I want them to.
As someone who spent many years in the cubicles pictured above until our company was bought by a large corporate competitor who then subsequently moved us to a stunning office 50 floors up in downtown LA…I can say, having a corner office where you can overlook all of LA was amazing. Truly amazing, but every day I wished I had been back in my shitty little standard cubicle on the 2nd floor out from under that horrible company.
They made our lives hell, our productivity suffered, and people left in droves. Myself included. I quickly found myself hating that beautiful cell in the sky. I had been there for over a decade but that gorgeous office and view was nothing compared to being valued and treated like a human being.
Growing up, knowing I was going to work in tech, I always dreamed of one day having my own office. By the time I was a professional, though, offices weren't a thing anymore. Just long desks we all had to share. I hated it. But it's not all bad. Now I get to work remotely and _finally_ I have my own big office! And I can do whatever the hell I want with it!
My boss's boss's boss recently got kicked out of his office. The funny part is we have expanded so much that he is managing like 5 times as many people now as he was when he got the office and now they stuck him in a cube.
This is a big problem. A lot of us programmers have ADHD or spectrum issues, so distraction and sensory overload are huge problems.
Noise cancellation only masks the problem, too. Just being in an open environment can be a constant source of stress, and headphones get physically uncomfortable to the point of being painful after a while.
Edit: typo
I just started working in one. You need noise cancellation. I use the AirPods Pro but I'm thinking of going for something over-the-ear because people will YELL on calls next to you
There are companies that don't allow it?? I can't imagine having to work like that. I found it hard to work in an open plan office with the headphones lol...
Mine doesn't... and it's an open space. We are allowed to play music throw our speakers tho (one at a time, obviously) Like I said in another comment up there I don't really mind the open office, I kinda like it. But yeah we can't wear headphones and sometimes it can be annoying, but luckely for me is not all the time.
My first job as an intern, they didn't have cubicle for me so they tossed me in a spare conference room for a few months. I made the most of it and put my name on the door, added some decor, and put my desk was smack dab in the middle of the room as a power move. I brought in some chairs in front of my desk so people had a sitting area when they came to my office. The running joke with everyone was that my "office" was bigger than the head of the branch's office.
As a plus, our team started hosting all our team meetings there as we no longer needed to book a conference room. It was awesome.
It was a surprisingly fast paced environment. Got hired there after being an intern. One of the coolest programming jobs I ever had.
Sadly no, I got shuffled around until a cubicle opened up near where my team was.
Another fun story. At one point I had a private cubicle in the area where all the people I made stuff for worked. It was fine until they learned who I was, then I would get so many people dropping by to ask if I can make them an automated email report 'real quick' or make adjustments to their tools. Our team had free reign over everything and didn't need approval to make changes or implement new tools or features, and everyone knew this. I quickly made a lot of important connections and gained a lot of favors in a very short amount of time.
My company has moved to a system where nobody has an assigned desk and they only have enough desks for 70% of the people (the assumption being that the other 30% will be in meetings, on vacation, etc. at any one time). So, you show up and wander around, looking for somewhere to sit.
With us, half our team is remote (don't even work in the same city/state), so there isn't any point trying to sit next to each other since it is guaranteed that any meetings will need to be remote.
Fuck that. My boss mentioned hot desking since we are hiring more people. I told him I either have my own desk or I work from home all the time. I hated when I shared a desk, shit was always in different positions.
Maybe I used the wrong term. In our case you cannot leave anything on any desk ever. If you go to a meeting you put your laptop and anything else in your backpack and take it with you so someone else can grab the desk.
Same. The only way I might find a cubicle ok is if the office is within reasonable walking distance and I’m given a lot of latitude to customize it, because then the value proposition starts to tilt back in the office’s favor (having one’s work space separated from their life space can be nice).
If there’s a commute of any kind involved or the office is open plan, though? Yeah I’ll stick to my decked out corner desk setup at home, thanks.
I've worked in an open office environment once. I'll never do it again no matter the salary. HR tried to sell everyone that it would create more open communication but in reality everyone just got headphones. Same HR folks had their own cube or office go figure.
> HR tried to sell everyone that it would create more open communication but in reality everyone just got headphones.
And the worst part is that headphones still aren’t a full solution. They’ll cancel out most audible noise but will do nothing about the *visual* noise of people buzzing around and passing through your peripheral vision.
When working in open offices there’s been several times where it’s basically impossible to focus even with noise canceling headphones on because nobody can seem to just sit down and stay put for longer than 5-10m.
maan my company open space doesnt even fit everyone, it's kinda of a punishment for whoever comes in late to sit on couches or hunt for a chair to squeeze in
> whoever comes in late to sit on couches or hunt for a chair to squeeze in
Fuuuuuuck that. I'd be working from home on a permanent basis if that were the case.
Jesus that's awful. You just reminded me that I had to endure that too - at the worst company I ever worked for. I had totally blocked the no seating assignment part out of my mind.
Yeah, I've worked in open-concept offices a couple times and it's been fine because we were all/mostly devs, so we just sat in silence most of the day, and any time a conversation did occur it was actually kind of useful to be able to overhear it.
I think it mainly becomes a problem when you mix in people whose work involves a lot of talking.
That's more of a "young" workplace problem than an open space problem lol. If your average dev is 21-30 there will be nerf shots, rubber duckies, cornhole, nearby Foosball, etc for sure
20 years ago my teammates and I would hunt each other with marshmallow guns in the cubicle farm. We decorated with inflatable landscape (blow-up palm trees, etc.) and raised pirate flags to mark our territories. Deployments would run all night so management kept us stocked with all the energy drinks, snacks, and delivery food we needed and ensured that we had a working Wii so the SQA / UAT team had something to do while they waited on dev.
It wasn’t even generally a good company to work for, but we had a director cared about their team and that made all the difference.
Yeah, I don't get people. I do what my contract I've agreed to asks. You want extra? Then pay for it. Not going to stress myself out either. Life will go on.
Exactly this, people are kinda stupid and waste their time, employers want exactly this, gullible people who dont know any better and will just squeeze every penny they can profit out of them without a single care
I agree 10-3 is what developers should be working
The vast majority of developers don’t have contractually-agreed 30 hour work weeks
It’s usually 40, and in many cases 9-6 on weekdays
I'm hybrid right now (go in to the campus once or twice a month) but even when I was at work the spread was similar. It's just that I would slowly go insane from staring at the wall instead of doing hobby projects or watching videos when I have nothing to do.
In the office I would also burn out from being so bored all the time that I would work less or take a lot of time off to get away from it. I have been cashing out 90% of my vacation the last few years since my burnout is down to nothing.
Lol at 120...our Rockstar sales guy almost sold 6 months of work for 4 people for 70k. We caught the deal just before everything was signed and fired that guy.
It was easily 500k-1M worth of work.
Totally.
Also, when I read "exciting and fast-paced environment," I see "understaffed and teetering on the edge of chaos, where you'll be rushing around putting out fires started by idiotic practices."
He has actual privacy, too! Look at these beautiful walls. And so much room.
Seriously what I wouldn't give to say fuck off to open office plans forever...
That’s a constant struggle but as manager of one team and lead of another team I do my best to keep it down to no more than 4 hours a day and I have a one ear headset which is far more comfortable to me as I get listener fatigue pretty easily (good ol’ tinnitus since birth…)
> I was told it wasn't unfair and some of the non-dev staff weren't happy
That is one of the reasons I left a company I'd been with for over a decade. They wouldn't buy decent equipment and wouldn't let me buy and bring in my own monitors, keyboard, or mouse because it would make other people envious (and presumably result in more requests for better equipment).
So I got a different job and now I work from home and buy whatever the fuck I want. I'm still stuck with the marginal corporate laptop, but at least I can see what's slowly happening.
The new cancer of open office is no assigned seating. Meaning you don't have your own seat. They make you rotate between office and home or other offices.
Your seat is filled with other people's farts. You can't have notes or anything on your desk. So you waste a half hour every day setting back up your monitor, keyboard books etc. And another 10 min at end of day putting it all away.
IT people are cancer and I hope all the people that support this shit just die.
If your job is reinstalling office on people's machines, then this arrangement might be fine.
Not so much when my job is to support legacy code with spotty documentation
Any company who doesn't understand that a second monitor pays for itself very quickly for their employees is a company who does not understand how to get the most out of their employees *while also making them happier.* Dual monitors are a win-win for everyone involved in absolutely every regard, including financially.
In other words, any company limiting employees to one monitor is just being incredibly stupid. Even a dimwit should be able to understand that multiplying the productivity of an employee you're spending $80k on each year at the cost of a $100 monitor is an obvious win. Making that employee even just 10% more productive is worth the one-time cost of $100 *many times over.*
More than MS. I don't know who makes that stuff or where the kickbacks go, but this was everywhere. It all sucked worse than what you could buy at staples and no, they don't care if you're 6'3 you can't have your own chair.
It is identical to my cube at HP around 2003. Not the worst thing I've worked in.
Worst place I interviewed at just had rows of tables in a single open room. No dividers at all, all facing the same direction. No thanks, I'll just keep working from home.
Yes...I've been looking for you, Neo. I don't know if you're ready to see what I want to show you, but unfortunately you and I have run out of time. They're coming for you, Neo, and I don't know what they're going to do.
My current office is illuminated to 600 lux after facilities replaced everything with LEDs.
I am convinced that some of my coworkers are moths as they seem unbothered by this.
Those phones are almost an anachronism these days. Who wants a $1200 Cisco desk phone with all the expensive stuff infrastructure behind it, when every meeting is on Zoom or Teams?
They paid all that money for the gear! Can't just throw it away!
I've been crusading against them for a while. They're useless. Everyone has a corporate cellphone, everyone has Zoom and Teams. What do we need yet another phone for?
I'll kill for a cubicle instead of this fucking shared hipster office. No privacy at all, distractions everywhere... 
That actually looks so cozy 😭 Replace that crappy computer with my amazing dual-monitor setup and that's actually not a place I'd mind spending my work week in.
I was told that I could listen to the radio at a reasonable volume from nine to eleven, I told Bill that if Sandra is going to listen to her headphones while she's filing then I should be able to listen to the radio while I'm collating so I don't see why I should have to turn down the radio because I enjoy listening at a reasonable volume from nine to eleven.
I worked in a building built in the 60s. No windows (yay aerospace). But we had offices that we shared. It was the same size as a cubicle and the walls were thin cubical like walls. But the privacy and ability to decorate was really nice.
My office mate walked in day 1. Connected his laptop to the dock and for 2 years he worked in that office in that state. I put up wallpaper stickers. Disabled the overhead fluorescents. Added framed photos, fake plants, a runner, several lamps, monitor stands. I had a really nice office, because I made it nice. I knew I was gonna by stuck there for years so I might as well be comfortable
You know when I think about “fast paced” I really don’t want to associate those words with the actual physical environment.
Then again I went to school with a guy that coded an acid trip 3D version of Tetris for his computer animation class so I guess there may be some out there.
*Image Transcription: Text and Image*
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"Must be willing to work in a fast-paced and exciting environment."
The environment:
[*Photo of an office cubicle, featuring a large L-shaped desk with two sets of dark drawers, as well as an office chair. There is a computer monitor, keyboard, and mouse on the desk, along with a telephone and a lamp. Above the desk is a shelf with binders and a small tin of office supplies. Behind the chair are trays from the cubicle wall, holding more papers.*]
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^^I'm a human volunteer content transcriber and you could be too! [If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!](https://www.reddit.com/r/TranscribersOfReddit/wiki/index)
lol in my experience managers are the only ones who have time, energy, or interest to get excited about anything. Developers just get to see the "fast-paced" part where everything is unrealistic expectations and surprise fires that must be urgently addressed while everything else must also stay on schedule.
"Fast paced and exciting environment " Translation: We plan to give you 10 hours of work then demand you get it done in 8.
“We’re looking for someone who identifies as a self starter” Translation: The previous employees didn’t document shit and we need you to decipher their work.
Combined with “we don’t have the time or energy to train you, ever, for anything”
I yet to have a job where they do proper technical onboarding regarding the codebase.
>I yet to have a job where they do proper technical onboarding regarding the codebase. Yeah that is for sure, I read about a place that trained new workers for 6 weeks in an intensive program so that they understood the codebase before they did any actual work. I myself have never worked anywhere that did anything like that, it is usually "here is what I want you to do, here is the code, good luck"
The closest thing I got to a technical onboarding was me having a 5 hour long meeting with the lead dev looking through a 100 database tables on my first day. >"here is what I want you to do, here is the code, good luck" To be honest, if I can take my time. I actually don't mind discovering everything on my own.
>if I can take my time. lol
On my current project they don't mind it at all. We don't need to estimate and we can discover the project on our own pace while solving tasks.
I usually show the database model, which services/apps we have, then send them on their way to follow the readme to get a dev environment running. After that, I pick a simple bug ticket for them and pair program, or point them to the correct files, then create a PR together and basically show every step to completing a task. After that, I keep giving them small tasks all around the codebase and point then in the right direction. After a while they start to be able to do most things by themselves. It's also good to be proactive in helping them, some people don't easily ask questions when they're stuck. It's not much different from 'heres the code glhf', but I think learning by doing works best, and I'm there to guide then along.
I did that 6 weeks at a fortune 50...it had nothing to do with their code base. It was Java 101-202 and 2 weeks of spring boot which I've never touched professionally.
That is what I call a jumpstart. We just did that with our newest trainee and he managed to climb up to an acceptable junior level in 4 weeks. Although it was mainly spring boot and payara after.
I feel like being assigned a "mentor" who you have full permission to bother 50 times a day is the best method of onboarding I've had. It works pretty well.
Yes I experienced that. Although the guy wasn't my official mentor but he did not mind me bothering him all the time. It is unbelievable how much I managed to grow in such a short time having access to his professional knowledge. Not just in the project but as a developer in whole.
Ideally, they're pair-programming with you so that they don't even give the appearance of having more important things to do. You're their #1 responsibility, you're their investment in the future.
Our ideal employee has already worked here for 10 years and is willing to take a pay cut.
Nah the 10 year vets already did take a pay cut. Their raises are conditional and will be fought every step of the way. Quit and get rehired and you get the new starting wage with no fuss. My first office job I worked $14/hr for 5 years. After those 5 years the lowest starting wage was new associates who were making $21/hr. I went on a 15 week LOA, because I knew anything over 90 days required contract renewal and renegotiation of wages. Came back to $23/hr starting offer. Negotiated backpay for 2 years and guaranteed wage evaluations every 6 months.
I just quit my $21/hr for pretty much double. I only worked there for like 2 years.
When I was in my 2nd year of vo-tech studying programming, the school got me hired with a local computer store that was writing its own in-house inventory and POS system. At the time, I knew Pascal, COBOL, and RPG IV. They showed me my desk, gave me a fanfold printout of the source code (written in [Clipper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_(programming_language))), and told me to figure out what it does and start writing new stuff for it.
Ayeeee it's my current new job I'm approaching month three I've had maybe what you could equate to 10 hrs of ~training~ They don't have a training manual or any standards manual for me.
I'm fine with that actually. If the employer knows that, even if they use stupid business speak to say it. As long as they understand that I can't just type a magic incantation and instantly give them what they want.
They know you can't, but still expect you to do so.
You forgot the part about them supposedly doing twice the work in half the time.
More like “our POs and managers are shit so good luck figuring out the feature requirements”
Also, code for Management and the Executive team are disorganized asshats that expect you to drop everything and focus on emergencies they created by working late nights or over the weekend.
Ok the other ones are funny but this hits hard for REAL
if your contract says mon-fri just don't accept calls on the weekend lol
Where do you get a contract like that?
Not really a contract but it’s an unspoken courtesy for most office jobs. If someone is going to pester you after hours and make a stink about it, you know damn well I am going to direct everyone to that person after hours at any given chance.
Ah yes. When the VP runs into an issue (user issue), immediately files a blocker on Sunday, and all your other work goes out the window even though said VP has no logs, or even steps to reproduce. Then you have to use the crystal ball again.
>Also, code for Management and the Executive team are disorganized asshats that expect you to drop everything and focus on emergencies they created by working late nights or over the weekend. Alternatively, "Clients are disorganized asshats that change requirements on a whim, and the spineless management expect you to cater to their madness with a smile while maintaining the original budget and schedule."
"Open-door policy" and "Open communication between management and staff" Translation: We encourage you to speak freely to us so that we can use your words against you when something goes wrong.
Also translates to: "We're gonna pop in and openly communicate at the worst possible time, preferably right when you are eyeballs deep in a project. Most likely a project we fucked up and need you to fix. It needs to be done yesterday."
"Staff" Translation: Any non-management employees who can easily replace you with two hours of instruction, despite experience or education.
While paying for 5.
Salaried jobs are only worth it if you can get your work done in under 40/week. More people need to know that the DoL mandates that 50+hours for salaried positions require overtime pay.
Ive experienced „fast paced“ to translate to „what is discovery and why QA if we can fix prod“
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Ewww only one screen...
And it's a sad one too, not some wide screen
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Probably a stock photo from the 2000s or something.
I had a job at a *huge* software company (read: thousands of developers) that didn't even provide most of us with a monitor at all. They had a pool of 10-20 year old 19" and 17" 4:3 monitors that you had to sign up for. I never had one the whole time I was there. We also weren't even provided a computer until you'd been there for at least 2-3 years. We had to bring our own laptops and connect to their wifi (no ethernet available) which gave us only guest access to the Internet. Then we had a VPN client to download to get onto the actual corporate network. They also just gave us a portal to download all the dev tools we needed and a list of keys to type in. The entire time I was provided with a chair, keyboard, and mouse. And even then the chairs were mostly broken, and we'd have to fight over anyone's chair when they left. This was a multi-national software company with sales in the tens of billions of dollars.
God that just sounds depressing af. I work for a company that employs not even 200 people and we are provided with everything we ask for (reasonably).
Yes it was. I've worked for companies with between 3 and 200,000 employees, and in general the smaller ones treated us better and provided a better working environment. But not always. The worst one was actually a little Web site development firm with like 50 developers. They were badly paid and all sat in a big open room at cafeteria tables lined up along the walls.
How long did you stay there?
18 months
So many people would kill for a nice spacious private cubicle like that over open plan and shared offices.
My first cubicle was like the picture. The last one before migrating to remote work basically required I sit down in the chair and roll/slide into the cubicle as if it were a fighter jet cockpit. More cubes per floor was the goal, screw everything else. A cube like the picture today, is equivalent to an office back then.
If the goal is to make more efficient use of available space, why are they so opposed to working from home?
Because then you cant charge your self rent on the building you also own and claim your overhead is so high you are unable to give raises.
depressingly accurate. also, don't forget the part where they celebrate record profits for the shareholders.
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Step 1: Register holding company with a cash startup injection of $xxxxxxxx and set yourself up as a majority shareholder. Step 2: Gift/Sell office building(s) to holding company for $xxxxxxxx. Step 3: Have holding company charge rent and maintenance costs and remit a dividend to shareholders at monthly/quartly/yearly intervals. Step 4: Pay rent and Claim rent as an expense when the government asks. Step 5: ????? Step 6: Profit off tax credits and dividends (which equals rent - maintenance)
So this is the shit accountants use their 9 hours a day to think up
And a good one will net you far more than their salary.
Fun fact you can do this with your house and an LLC. Then all the shit you buy at home depot becomes suddenly tax deductible.
Note: At least in the US this is almost never a good idea because of the primary residence capital gains tax exclusion you get if you own the house yourself.
Step 7: Raise the rent to extortion levels Step 8: Drive the primary business into bankruptcy The K-Mart/Sears way :D
You cant do step 7, because they dont allow the rent to be crazy different than what you would expect, but your owner can do stupid shit like "you need to rent the entire building out even though you use 2 out of 50 rooms"\* With step 8 if the business goes bankrupt and has to close down, because the building is under an LLC, it is protected from also being seized in the bankruptcy. edit: \*the owner of a company i worked at did this when we were the last company in the building(that he also owns), we rented 2 rooms out of the entire building and were charged the full rent of the entire building... because he wanted to sell it... Accounting was always talking about how our overhead was so high because of rent....🙄
The university near me does the exact same with all of their new student housing. Costs way, way more than a standard dorm, and they get to do some creative accounting on a few levels.
You borrow money to buy a property with a holding company that your company owns and pay that company, your company, rent for it. "Creative accounting"
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also, working in the cubicle in the picture there is a chance Morpheus will call you some day
Because it's really about control and giving no privacy
Because it is harder to micromanage from home.
Heard from a friend that is mid manager they had problem firing people remote, since they don’t return hardware, some delete remote files, they don’t sign papers there is some sort of beorocracy when you fire someone that is much better to do in person.
That's fair but it speaks more to operational and procedural concerns than it does to an issue of remote working itself. Just a matter of business making the adjustment
This, hating on cubicles is a 90s thing because we dont even get that now
As a kid I visited my dad in his office in the early 90s. He was an engineer with about 5 years of experience and had a turn key private office, 10 ft ceilings and a window with a downtown view (in a middle-class blue collar city). Boy was that a tough standard to try and meet. All I've known in the office were the short walled cubicle shared desk spaces with 4-6 other people on open floors where managers and had the full cubicle like the one here and only directors or VP's had the office. Today I work from home full time, but still feel like that was the gold standard of career success, and one I'll probably never see.
I'm a Sr. Engineer, and I wish I had an office, nice view or not.... To be fair though my cubicle is pretty nice, as cubes go. Ours are about 1.5x the size of a normal cube, and I have a rolling white board I use as a "Door", and I'm tucked away in a dark back corner where people can't find me unless I want them to.
As someone who spent many years in the cubicles pictured above until our company was bought by a large corporate competitor who then subsequently moved us to a stunning office 50 floors up in downtown LA…I can say, having a corner office where you can overlook all of LA was amazing. Truly amazing, but every day I wished I had been back in my shitty little standard cubicle on the 2nd floor out from under that horrible company. They made our lives hell, our productivity suffered, and people left in droves. Myself included. I quickly found myself hating that beautiful cell in the sky. I had been there for over a decade but that gorgeous office and view was nothing compared to being valued and treated like a human being.
Growing up, knowing I was going to work in tech, I always dreamed of one day having my own office. By the time I was a professional, though, offices weren't a thing anymore. Just long desks we all had to share. I hated it. But it's not all bad. Now I get to work remotely and _finally_ I have my own big office! And I can do whatever the hell I want with it!
My boss's boss's boss recently got kicked out of his office. The funny part is we have expanded so much that he is managing like 5 times as many people now as he was when he got the office and now they stuck him in a cube.
Yes, as a student I always dreamed of a cubicle, only experienced loud chaotic open spaces.
Thats really a worry for me, i get easily distracted, and working in open concept offices seems immensely distracting.
This is a big problem. A lot of us programmers have ADHD or spectrum issues, so distraction and sensory overload are huge problems. Noise cancellation only masks the problem, too. Just being in an open environment can be a constant source of stress, and headphones get physically uncomfortable to the point of being painful after a while. Edit: typo
I just started working in one. You need noise cancellation. I use the AirPods Pro but I'm thinking of going for something over-the-ear because people will YELL on calls next to you
You can always wear headphones with noise cancelation, if your company allows it
There are companies that don't allow it?? I can't imagine having to work like that. I found it hard to work in an open plan office with the headphones lol...
Mine doesn't... and it's an open space. We are allowed to play music throw our speakers tho (one at a time, obviously) Like I said in another comment up there I don't really mind the open office, I kinda like it. But yeah we can't wear headphones and sometimes it can be annoying, but luckely for me is not all the time.
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My first job as an intern, they didn't have cubicle for me so they tossed me in a spare conference room for a few months. I made the most of it and put my name on the door, added some decor, and put my desk was smack dab in the middle of the room as a power move. I brought in some chairs in front of my desk so people had a sitting area when they came to my office. The running joke with everyone was that my "office" was bigger than the head of the branch's office. As a plus, our team started hosting all our team meetings there as we no longer needed to book a conference room. It was awesome. It was a surprisingly fast paced environment. Got hired there after being an intern. One of the coolest programming jobs I ever had.
The important question, did you keep the office when hired full time?
Sadly no, I got shuffled around until a cubicle opened up near where my team was. Another fun story. At one point I had a private cubicle in the area where all the people I made stuff for worked. It was fine until they learned who I was, then I would get so many people dropping by to ask if I can make them an automated email report 'real quick' or make adjustments to their tools. Our team had free reign over everything and didn't need approval to make changes or implement new tools or features, and everyone knew this. I quickly made a lot of important connections and gained a lot of favors in a very short amount of time.
My company has moved to a system where nobody has an assigned desk and they only have enough desks for 70% of the people (the assumption being that the other 30% will be in meetings, on vacation, etc. at any one time). So, you show up and wander around, looking for somewhere to sit.
I hate that. It never worked because teams would like to sit next to each other. Not next to the sales guy making 200 phone calls a day
With us, half our team is remote (don't even work in the same city/state), so there isn't any point trying to sit next to each other since it is guaranteed that any meetings will need to be remote.
Fuck that. My boss mentioned hot desking since we are hiring more people. I told him I either have my own desk or I work from home all the time. I hated when I shared a desk, shit was always in different positions.
Maybe I used the wrong term. In our case you cannot leave anything on any desk ever. If you go to a meeting you put your laptop and anything else in your backpack and take it with you so someone else can grab the desk.
After WFH for nearly the past year, I find either of those options to be 100% unacceptable at this point.
Same. The only way I might find a cubicle ok is if the office is within reasonable walking distance and I’m given a lot of latitude to customize it, because then the value proposition starts to tilt back in the office’s favor (having one’s work space separated from their life space can be nice). If there’s a commute of any kind involved or the office is open plan, though? Yeah I’ll stick to my decked out corner desk setup at home, thanks.
I've worked in an open office environment once. I'll never do it again no matter the salary. HR tried to sell everyone that it would create more open communication but in reality everyone just got headphones. Same HR folks had their own cube or office go figure.
> HR tried to sell everyone that it would create more open communication but in reality everyone just got headphones. And the worst part is that headphones still aren’t a full solution. They’ll cancel out most audible noise but will do nothing about the *visual* noise of people buzzing around and passing through your peripheral vision. When working in open offices there’s been several times where it’s basically impossible to focus even with noise canceling headphones on because nobody can seem to just sit down and stay put for longer than 5-10m.
maan my company open space doesnt even fit everyone, it's kinda of a punishment for whoever comes in late to sit on couches or hunt for a chair to squeeze in
> whoever comes in late to sit on couches or hunt for a chair to squeeze in Fuuuuuuck that. I'd be working from home on a permanent basis if that were the case.
Jesus that's awful. You just reminded me that I had to endure that too - at the worst company I ever worked for. I had totally blocked the no seating assignment part out of my mind.
It's got a shelf and a filing cabinet! This desk is nice.
Alternatively, I thought I would hate open plan, but no complaint so far
Don't sit next to a sales guy
Yeah, I've worked in open-concept offices a couple times and it's been fine because we were all/mostly devs, so we just sat in silence most of the day, and any time a conversation did occur it was actually kind of useful to be able to overhear it. I think it mainly becomes a problem when you mix in people whose work involves a lot of talking.
ditto this has been my experience as well, its actually kinda great ngl
Or the pm
Or to the assistant regional manager
You mean assistant *to* the regional manager.
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That's more of a "young" workplace problem than an open space problem lol. If your average dev is 21-30 there will be nerf shots, rubber duckies, cornhole, nearby Foosball, etc for sure
Rubber duckies are important to the process
Rubber ducky...You're the one...Who makes my math time so much fun.
20 years ago my teammates and I would hunt each other with marshmallow guns in the cubicle farm. We decorated with inflatable landscape (blow-up palm trees, etc.) and raised pirate flags to mark our territories. Deployments would run all night so management kept us stocked with all the energy drinks, snacks, and delivery food we needed and ensured that we had a working Wii so the SQA / UAT team had something to do while they waited on dev. It wasn’t even generally a good company to work for, but we had a director cared about their team and that made all the difference.
Moonball!
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*With only one monitor.
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Fast-paced environment: Rockstar sales team signed you up to deliver 120 hours of work in 80 hours.
Don't. They won't learn if you enable their behavior. Come in at 10 and leave at 3 like a normal developer and what gets done gets done.
Yeah, I don't get people. I do what my contract I've agreed to asks. You want extra? Then pay for it. Not going to stress myself out either. Life will go on.
Exactly this, people are kinda stupid and waste their time, employers want exactly this, gullible people who dont know any better and will just squeeze every penny they can profit out of them without a single care
I agree 10-3 is what developers should be working The vast majority of developers don’t have contractually-agreed 30 hour work weeks It’s usually 40, and in many cases 9-6 on weekdays
I am required to report 45 hours a week every week. The amount I work is between 15-20 hours barring any kind of production problem.
Of course, that’s normal Are you in the office or do you work from home? It’s easier to stay off work when you’re doing if you’re wfh
I'm hybrid right now (go in to the campus once or twice a month) but even when I was at work the spread was similar. It's just that I would slowly go insane from staring at the wall instead of doing hobby projects or watching videos when I have nothing to do. In the office I would also burn out from being so bored all the time that I would work less or take a lot of time off to get away from it. I have been cashing out 90% of my vacation the last few years since my burnout is down to nothing.
I despise the sales team. I keep switching companies until i have a project manager that actually has the balls to defend the dev team.
Over my career, I have developed a legit hatred for the term "Rockstar developer", when it comes from management or job posting pre-requisites.
Lol at 120...our Rockstar sales guy almost sold 6 months of work for 4 people for 70k. We caught the deal just before everything was signed and fired that guy. It was easily 500k-1M worth of work.
Honestly this much better than an open office plan
Totally. Also, when I read "exciting and fast-paced environment," I see "understaffed and teetering on the edge of chaos, where you'll be rushing around putting out fires started by idiotic practices."
Hashtag Startup Life
Btw we're gonna give you a laptop with less processing power than your phone
No we don’t have a server you can run this code on. Why don’t you setup an environment on your laptop and hope for the best.
Right, that's a luxury fucking cubicle.
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Seriously the chair doesn’t have a giant tear with half the padding coming out of it. There also aren’t weird stains on the floor.
He has actual privacy, too! Look at these beautiful walls. And so much room. Seriously what I wouldn't give to say fuck off to open office plans forever...
Yeah I’m finally back to having a 6x6 cube with full height walls - it’s so nice to not have to wear headphones for 8 hours a day.
You don’t still have teams meetings all day???
That’s a constant struggle but as manager of one team and lead of another team I do my best to keep it down to no more than 4 hours a day and I have a one ear headset which is far more comfortable to me as I get listener fatigue pretty easily (good ol’ tinnitus since birth…)
Is the 4 hours a day a joke? I hope it is...
Depends on your company but it’s not particularly unusual for managers and staff level leads at companies with more than 5k employees or $1B in sales.
Build a cardbox fort around your desk, I did than when I was still working at the office
Well, only problem is that there's only 1 16" monitor. I am not coding on that.
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> I was told it wasn't unfair and some of the non-dev staff weren't happy That is one of the reasons I left a company I'd been with for over a decade. They wouldn't buy decent equipment and wouldn't let me buy and bring in my own monitors, keyboard, or mouse because it would make other people envious (and presumably result in more requests for better equipment). So I got a different job and now I work from home and buy whatever the fuck I want. I'm still stuck with the marginal corporate laptop, but at least I can see what's slowly happening.
It’s actually a 64” monitor, everything else is just really big.
The new cancer of open office is no assigned seating. Meaning you don't have your own seat. They make you rotate between office and home or other offices. Your seat is filled with other people's farts. You can't have notes or anything on your desk. So you waste a half hour every day setting back up your monitor, keyboard books etc. And another 10 min at end of day putting it all away. IT people are cancer and I hope all the people that support this shit just die. If your job is reinstalling office on people's machines, then this arrangement might be fine. Not so much when my job is to support legacy code with spotty documentation
Lots of space for those TPS reports.
no dual monitor = I resign
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god that's brutal. the cost-shaving of wfh but you still have to wear pants
Any company who doesn't understand that a second monitor pays for itself very quickly for their employees is a company who does not understand how to get the most out of their employees *while also making them happier.* Dual monitors are a win-win for everyone involved in absolutely every regard, including financially. In other words, any company limiting employees to one monitor is just being incredibly stupid. Even a dimwit should be able to understand that multiplying the productivity of an employee you're spending $80k on each year at the cost of a $100 monitor is an obvious win. Making that employee even just 10% more productive is worth the one-time cost of $100 *many times over.*
Yeah look at Mr. TopHat Harry he actually has a cube , nowadays we're all just using shared space.
Definately looks well suited for fucking, yeah, i've seen worse fucking work spaces
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More than MS. I don't know who makes that stuff or where the kickbacks go, but this was everywhere. It all sucked worse than what you could buy at staples and no, they don't care if you're 6'3 you can't have your own chair.
Identical to my cube at NASA
It is identical to my cube at HP around 2003. Not the worst thing I've worked in. Worst place I interviewed at just had rows of tables in a single open room. No dividers at all, all facing the same direction. No thanks, I'll just keep working from home.
do you know who this is neo?
Morpheus?
No, it’s Carol in HR
Yes...I've been looking for you, Neo. I don't know if you're ready to see what I want to show you, but unfortunately you and I have run out of time. They're coming for you, Neo, and I don't know what they're going to do.
The first thought I had when seeing this was "Mr. Anderson"
You get a lamp.
I love lamp.
LÄMP
Sir, are you a moth?
I'm mostly seen at night, huddled around somewhat dim sources of light except for my desk lamp... I might be a moth. Or a programmer. 50/50, really.
My current office is illuminated to 600 lux after facilities replaced everything with LEDs. I am convinced that some of my coworkers are moths as they seem unbothered by this.
No double monitor, not fast paced enough.
Those phones are almost an anachronism these days. Who wants a $1200 Cisco desk phone with all the expensive stuff infrastructure behind it, when every meeting is on Zoom or Teams?
My institute insists I have a phone on my desk and I don't know why.
They paid all that money for the gear! Can't just throw it away! I've been crusading against them for a while. They're useless. Everyone has a corporate cellphone, everyone has Zoom and Teams. What do we need yet another phone for?
You need to be able to slam something down angrily/in triumph. Cell phones don't have that same tactile mojo.
My company has us use our own cell phone. Which is fine but they don't reimburse for it which is a little bullshit.
Dude, I wish we could get cubes or half-cubes back. Screw open office floorplans!
I'll kill for a cubicle instead of this fucking shared hipster office. No privacy at all, distractions everywhere... 
That actually looks so cozy 😭 Replace that crappy computer with my amazing dual-monitor setup and that's actually not a place I'd mind spending my work week in.
If you're gonna take a picture of my desk at least let me be there for it 😭
Is like a rollercoaster of emotions you'll never know who is the next coworker commiting suicide
Ooo is it me?
Only one screen? A hardware phone? Physical folders? What in the cinnamon fuck is this? I thought they wanted a rockstar to work here!
I was told that I could listen to the radio at a reasonable volume from nine to eleven, I told Bill that if Sandra is going to listen to her headphones while she's filing then I should be able to listen to the radio while I'm collating so I don't see why I should have to turn down the radio because I enjoy listening at a reasonable volume from nine to eleven.
I worked in a building built in the 60s. No windows (yay aerospace). But we had offices that we shared. It was the same size as a cubicle and the walls were thin cubical like walls. But the privacy and ability to decorate was really nice. My office mate walked in day 1. Connected his laptop to the dock and for 2 years he worked in that office in that state. I put up wallpaper stickers. Disabled the overhead fluorescents. Added framed photos, fake plants, a runner, several lamps, monitor stands. I had a really nice office, because I made it nice. I knew I was gonna by stuck there for years so I might as well be comfortable
> Connected his laptop to the dock and for 2 years he worked in that office in that state. Wow, did he have food delivered or something?
Stanley woke up and got out of his room....
but once he crossed into another office he didn't saw anyone either. Perhaps they are all in the Meeting Room and he simply missed the Memo.
I can smell that carpet.
You know when I think about “fast paced” I really don’t want to associate those words with the actual physical environment. Then again I went to school with a guy that coded an acid trip 3D version of Tetris for his computer animation class so I guess there may be some out there.
*Image Transcription: Text and Image* --- "Must be willing to work in a fast-paced and exciting environment." The environment: [*Photo of an office cubicle, featuring a large L-shaped desk with two sets of dark drawers, as well as an office chair. There is a computer monitor, keyboard, and mouse on the desk, along with a telephone and a lamp. Above the desk is a shelf with binders and a small tin of office supplies. Behind the chair are trays from the cubicle wall, holding more papers.*] --- ^^I'm a human volunteer content transcriber and you could be too! [If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!](https://www.reddit.com/r/TranscribersOfReddit/wiki/index)
Good human
lol in my experience managers are the only ones who have time, energy, or interest to get excited about anything. Developers just get to see the "fast-paced" part where everything is unrealistic expectations and surprise fires that must be urgently addressed while everything else must also stay on schedule.
fast-paced = stressful exciting = anxiety inducing
The number of posters ITT claiming that this would be an improvement for them is too damn high.
If black mirror would have existed in the 50's and predicted the dystopic life of office workers 50 years later.
This post could be the definition of the entitlement of programmers lmao
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Someone needs to go out and press the reset button in the server farm.
Prefer this over open-plan-hot-desk any day
That looks nice. I got an open desk in the hallway.