Ask HN: How to challenge trends without appearing like a luddite?
Like others say, pick your battles.  The key to being productive is knowing what decisions you have to make, and what decisions you can delegate.  The thing with delegation is, it&#x27;s not micro-management.  The people you delegate to are not going to do things exactly as you would.  If you can&#x27;t accept that, don&#x27;t delegate, and suffer the productivity loss.<p>For example, say you&#x27;re a software engineer that really wants to run your own servers, but don&#x27;t personally want to maintain that infrastructure, and the person&#x2F;team you delegate to wants to run everything in the cloud.  You don&#x27;t need to step in and say &quot;that&#x27;s terrible, I hate you, do it my way.&quot;  What you need to do is make sure your needs are taken care of by the team with the responsibility for building and maintaining the production environment; you need to be able to connect the special FPGA you developed, you need to be able to deploy a release within 30 seconds of checking the code in, etc.  If they take care of your needs, you shouldn&#x27;t care how it&#x27;s implemented.<p>On the other hand, you can be in a position of power and decide &quot;the person I&#x27;ve delegated to has done it completely wrong, and we will be out of business in 30 days if they continue.&quot;  In that case, you just shut it down with no reason.  The team that you did that to is not going to be pleased; half of them will leave your company, the other half will be sad and do nothing for 12 months... but that&#x27;s the cost of micromanagement.<p>As for open offices, they&#x27;re cheap.  If you don&#x27;t like them, the way you talk someone out of them is to suggest a cheaper alternative.  Good luck.  Your other option is to accept less salary -- that $5000 a year they gave you to outbid their competitor came directly out of the budget for walls around your desk.  As engineers, we certainly want to be productive, but ultimately the benefit is not tangible enough.  It&#x27;s quite likely that we would use all the extra productivity to make a once-a-month process 3x faster, which provides no benefit to anyone except our once-a-month selves.  The company does not care.  People do _enough_ work in cheap offices to make the company money, and that is really all they need.  You doing more work would probably be great, but that&#x27;s a difficult-to-see benefit and the cost of more real estate is an easy-to-see cost center.  Nobody thinks open offices are good for productivity, morale, or whatever... they&#x27;re cheap.  Any argument against them must be an easy-to-see monetary argument, or you&#x27;ll never win the argument.  (Compare Joel Spolsky&#x27;s company to the king of open offices, Google.  Google makes more money per engineer.  Now that&#x27;s probably because they picked a better industry, but if giving people their own offices is worth the huge financial hit... they should be doing better than someone.  But they&#x27;re not, they&#x27;re the same.  That&#x27;s why the &quot;better productivity&quot; argument is not going to get you a private office.)<p>You can always start your own company predicated on giving every employee a giant office.  If you do well, I&#x27;ll join you!  But I do require a salary increase as well ;)