Private offices are great, sort of. I haven’t had one in the last 15yrs in both big and small companies. I find it surprising that you have had access to this “benefit.”
Between 2008 and 2012 I worked in 3 different places where all developers and researchers had their own offices (interns were paired usually). It wasn’t even a second thought, it was just baked into the culture that obviously the work requires huge blocks of hours spent alone, privately engaged in contemplative work.
One was a defense research lab, one was a boutique company that makes computational fluid dynamics software, and one was an education technology company.
The ed tech company went through a huge remodeling effort to rebrand as more of a straight up tech company, spending bonkers amounts of money to tear down offices in favor of open plan designs, despite outrage, protests and resignations from longterm staff, especially in some of the offices where there was no planned headcount increase and no engineering presence (like the Columbus, Ohio, office).
I ended up leaving the final place to take a more lucrative job in finance in a company with high-walled cubicles, and couldn’t believe how distracting and frustrating the ambient noise and discomfort from headphones was. These days I would give my left arm to have even just high-walled cubicles.
Since then I took jobs in two places with fully open-plan shared desk areas and I flat out will never do it again. It’s just too unhealthy and too counterproductive to even bother with it at all.
Whatever my next job is, it has to give private offices, end of story.
> Whatever my next job is, it has to give private offices, end of story.
Given how incredibly rare private offices seem to be these days I can't imagine what kind of leverage you must have to be able to stick to such a requirement.
Especially since unlike salary and other benefits it's not something that any company can decide to give you.
Either they have private office culture or not. If they are an open office company like most of them are you just have to exclude them, severely limiting the type and number of companies you can work for.
The most important leverage is to just say no if they won’t agree. It doesn’t matter what level or specialization or education or experience you have. The only way to win a negotiation is to just genuinely not want what the other party is offering if it doesn’t meet your criteria, and turn it down.
Obviously, if you are desperate for a job due to other factors, you may be literally unable to turn down a suboptimal offer. It’s unfortunate that companies bank on this, and sometimes even angle their search criteria to specifically find classes of candidates they can exploit with low offers, inadequate workspace, etc. But it’s a fact of life.
When you’re not in that situation and you are free to turn a place down, then you just have to decide what matters to you and ruthlessly stick to it.
To your other points, I think they are not actually big deals. Relative to other costs, building private space on an existing floor is not that bad. Of course, companies are mostly not worried about the cost but are worried about the anger and reaction from existing staff who hate the open plan space they are stuck in.
If a company has a top-down “no office” culture, like “not even our CEO has an office!” then just walk away. Those people are so far gone it’s not worth it. You know from day one that insincere corporate evangelism matters more to them than your actual work. You are more office furniture and less engineer at that point.
It doesn’t matter if this is ~70% of all IT jobs. They are bad jobs. Ok to take them if you’re in a pinch, but why would anyone choose them? They’ll never be forced to reform their habits to recruit adequate staff that way.
Another big option is to ask the company to rent a dedicated office for you from a co-working space. So you’ll be “remote” except working from a single office that they lease for you (or you could lease it yourself and be reimbursed or grossed up for it). This is exceedingly cheap for well-capitalized companies and if they are serious about your productivity and ability to actually collaborate, they’ll do it (as opposed to only being concerned if it superficially looks like people are collaborating because of the open plan layout).
There are plenty of solutions for a motivated company. Existing office build out is not a serious barrier, only cultural unwillingness to be adaptable to people whose jobs require private space to work.
I get it. But what you are describing is quite optimistic/idealistic.
Most companies will say "no thanks" and move on to the next candidate in their list.
There are much smaller things that companies treat as deal breakers, let alone asking for a private office. The dynamics of it just doesn't work if there is a open office plan with 20 people working in it, then there's one lone snowflake demanding their own office. Even if they agreed to that you wouldn't want that nightmare.
Your practical options would be limiting your choice to companies that have private offices baked into their culture or remote jobs.
Most people can't realistically afford to exclude that many job opportunities from their pool.
> "Most companies will say "no thanks" and move on to the next candidate in their list."
I don't see why this makes any part of it idealistic or how it is connected.
I view it as pragmatic.
Consider an employer who feels so entitled to workers that just take whatever unproductive office space they give that they would just say, "no thanks" to a qualified candidate and move on. Never mind the fact that in many domains, it's extremely hard to find good engineers, and 'just moving on to the next candidate' is not really a thing. Beyond that, this employer would be telling me how entitled they believe they are, and inflexible about a top-down mandated open floor plan design.
It's not idealism to want to avoid that sort of employer, it's just pragmatism. Like I mentioned, unless you're in dire straits and you have to compromise to take a job right away, then just say no. In other situations, you can by definition afford to just search longer and longer until an employer meets these standards.
I agree it would require patience for a very long job search, but I don't agree that it is optimistic or idealistic. Rather, it's pragmatic and being patient to reject all the bad employers who won't care about your ergonomic health is important and worthwhile, even at the cost of a slow job search where you turn people down for failing to provide private offices.
