I've never understood the price issue. Class A in midtown Manhattan is $80 per square foot. That's $8,000 per year for a developer that probably makes well over six figures. Put two in an office that's only $4,000 per year.
I really don't buy it considering how much money companies spend on office space. Like why he hell would you have offices in Greenwich Village (http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-new-york-office-tour...) instead of say FiDi. It's not only be much cheaper, but an easier commute to places peopled live, like Brooklyn.
Law firms are relatively static sized, sign leases of epic duration, and can thus remodel. Startups need to move once a year because they're growing and they keep filling up their space. When you move once a year you're really looking for a sublet, probably already furnished, and choosing from what's on the market.
So at the core, the cause of open floor plans is too many open floor plans. And the more people that switch their space to offices, the more spaces will be available on the market for 1 year sublets. But that's not what's available now, anywhere.
I totally get that there are non-cost reasons, like being able to rapidly expand. I was addressing just the "cost per person" angle. (I basically worked in that scenario before. We started with our own offices, then as we grew we reconfigured to space into large rooms with 4-6 cubes. It worked okay, especially because starting with individual offices enforced a "quiet" culture.)
Construction sucks and is both a time and money sink. You can literally have a crew show up and build a big cube farm in 1-5 days.
It's really the same argument as "why would anyone pay outrageous fees to Amazon for slow, shitty VMs?". The answer is that when you factor in the cost of a data center facility and the people to build and run it, it turns out that AWS is a good deal after all.
I think in this thread people are kind of conflating office construction vs. cubicle construction. It's true that cubicle construction is pretty comparable to open plan in terms of cost and speed, but cubicles have a bad rep. If you're trying to do real offices, individual or small group, the cost goes up quite a bit.
For example, at least in NYC, the fire code dictates you need sprinklers and annunciators in every space, which increases the cost and complexity of the fire system. Plus, HVAC is much more complicated in office setups, as you can't rely on a large mass of air mixing to normalize temperatures, and have to manage longer vent runs with more exit points.
Then there's the problem that in a lot of buildings, particularly in urban areas, there's a relative paucity of windows, and people find windowless offices less desirable, making it harder to design office plans that don't shortchange big chunks of the employee base. One benefit of open plans is its a lot easier to give employees some view of sunlight and the outside.
I know for a fact that dropbox, and all other large tech companies, spend a fortune on office buildouts. Offices don't add significant construction expense; it's purely a matter of how many people you can cram in per square foot.
Well, I don't think that for large tech companies that its only about the money it costs to build the office, probably at least equally about the productivity of employees, their creativity and employee satisfaction. (full disclosure, I work at Dropbox)
Sure, but it's clear that privacy and quiet are amongst the most important qualities in an office, yet companies continue to strain to find "creative" new ways of avoiding private offices.
Call me cynical, but it's obvious that per-person cost reduction is the driver of this logic.
Probably depends on the company, I'm sure for some that's the main driver and some of those companies may not even agree that a more open and creative workspace improves collaboration and individual productivity. Each to their own.
What do you mean by "base" here? From what I've read on this avg square footage per employee has been declining for some time, but from low 200s to high 100s. That includes hallways and conference rooms, but those are generally a necessity for supporting open offices I would assume.
Office design is different budgets than products and salary. And very different people and reporting lines. The office facilitators job is to save money by e.g. open planning and hot desking and is not measured at all on the productivity of the teams.
It's been over a decade since I had so much as a semi-private office (shared with just one quiet teammate) so I have to say the death of the open office is exaggerated. And all of their workarounds assume a laptop could ever substitute for a desktop with an ergonomic keyboard and a large screen.
It's amazing that the escalating competition in pay and perks never seem to include space to get into the zone.
It's amazing when you look at software engineers' value in dollars. If you measured our value in square feet of local real estate, it would be blindingly obvious.
A tech company in a prosperous city can buy you all the 4k Dell Ultrasharps and Macbook Pros a person could want without breaking a sweat. Another couple feet of desk, on the other hand, could turn you from a net creator of value to a net destroyer of value. It's as unaffordable to the company as the salary bump that could put homeownership within reach.
I'd love it if someone would offer me a private office, parking space, and ability to live in a market with closer to median home prices, but the industry is very clearly trending in the opposite direction.
Don't know of anything public. At my company, we have ~5' slices of long communal tables. The figure I got from one of our facilities people two years ago was that these cost $20,000/year each. I'm sure the market is up since then, but I don't know how far.
I think you could fit about four of these workstations into one of our conference rooms. So giving people private offices the size of our conference rooms (any smaller would probably be a code violation, and at least inhumane) would cost about $60k/head extra. Maybe less, since some fixed costs like bathrooms and kitchens wouldn't necessarily grow.
Regardless of how the fixed costs play out, it looks like each 3-5 offices could buy a whole additional programmer. We chose the extra headcount rather than the offices.
That value would put the price per square foot (5" by 5", or 25"sq) at somewhere around $800 annually, around 10x the general office prices for SF or NY. I'm guessing the $20,000 figure is the up-front cost of the entire office, plus furniture, technology, and any building out they did, divided by the number of employees. Which is misleading, since that cost is usually amortized over 5-8 years.
Probably because the area to pull out your chair wouldn't double as a hallway to access other people's desks anymore. The walls aren't what's at a premium, the floor space is.
I'm lazy today, so I just grabbed this article which describes office space in the bay area for startups [0]. Their talking all the way up to about $70 per square foot. Peopleware says 100 sq ft per person, so that's up to about $700 per month per employee (or $8400).
I honestly don't think that's crazy money, but you also have to plan for growth. This makes things a lot harder. If you think you are going to grow from 4 developers to 20 in the next couple of years, then you need to make sure you have access to space. Moving offices is usually traumatic, so it's a cost you need to balance.
TBH, I've only ever experienced that much space once in my career. Normally I've had about 60 sq ft and I've had much less in some jobs. My experience is that the extra space is definitely worth it. There shouldn't even be a question about it.
I think the problem is more that it is hard for the people-with-purchasing-power to understand that productivity in knowledge workers can very dramatically. Spending $10K per year on working conditions can easily save you $100K in salary (given current SV salaries) -- you can go with a lower head count and achieve the same amount of work.
But it's not just that. I'm a big proponent of small head count. The communication overhead for large teams can be crippling. When you look at trying to increase production by improving code quality -- it's practically impossible with large teams. If you never speak to half your team mates, there is no way to reach consensus on design approaches. There are ways to mitigate these kinds of problems, but I have to stress that I have never seen successful mitigation strategies in non-open source projects. In fact I've never even seen them attempted because the overwhelming bias is that more programmers == more productivity (amongst people-with-purchasing-power).
But even as I type this, I can see how it is scary to spend money on working conditions. Let's say you are bleeding cash (like most startups), or you are eeking out low single digit percent profit (like most establish companies). You've got some cash to invest and so you think, "We need to raise revenue. To do that, we need the product to have more capability". It's a pretty gigantic leap of faith to conclude "Instead of growing the dev staff by 10%, I'm going to spend that money on improving working conditions". And even if you do, you have to repress the very next thought, "Hmmm... dev staff comprises 10% of my workforce. WTF am I going to do when the sales people demand the same working conditions? If I refuse, all the best ones are likely to quit in a huff".
> Their [sic] talking all the way up to about $70 per square foot. Peopleware says 100 sq ft per person, so that's up to about $700 per month per employee (or $8400).
Some more traditional companies allocate offices according to the need to have confidential conversations, which usually means management/authority/involved in other people's problems, yes.
I've been at my current company (satellite of a larger company) for a year and a half, we have 8 people in the office, max, every day. There are a couple people who usually work from home, some days it's only one or two people in the office. Our office is 4,200 sq ft and it's an "open office." We're not growing, we didn't just shrink from a massive size -- the company just picked an office and that was that.
I get paid well above market rate, I own a home just outside Boston, my macbook pro had an issue a few months ago and the company just issued me a new one without blinking. The company just doesn't give a crap. Open offices are cool and just what programmers do these days, right?
My last company was very similar. 5 people, > 2,000 sq ft, great salaries, open office. The CEO talked about how awesome it was all the time, and actually said he wanted MORE talking in the office. Annoying as hell.
I don't think it's a money issue. I really think it's a culture issue. The only company I ever worked at that had cubicles was my first job out of college and they were actually relatively strapped for cash. The difference is the founder was in his 60's and they were in business consulting, not software specifically.
I basically live your last paragraph right now. Home prices are lower here than in the rest of the country, but I probably also get paid a lot less than you. So yes, all of the perks, affordable housing, private parking, but lower wages.
It's funny how you classify "space to get into the zone" as an employee benefit, while all that does is increase your productivity. But I guess that could mean going home earlier...
It's an employee benefit because it makes work more enjoyable. Being stuck in a problem that you can normally tackle with relative ease when "in the zone" is extremely frustrating.
Sure, but to the employer the primary benefit of this is that people don't get stuck in problems that they can normally tackle with relative ease; the main effect (to the employer) is the fact that they're much more productive, not that they're a bit more happier.
"Enjoying your job" is a perk most people don't get. To them, larger monitors, better laptops, offices with doors, etc are simply tools people use to feel better than you.
Software engineers get to enjoy their jobs, at least in 2017. Until humanity either produces way more developers or makes us obsolete, we're basically free to enjoy our position of demanding work be enjoyable.
Well, some people do like the work they do. Doing work you enjoy is even better when you can focus on it without distractions, and frustrating when you can't.
A laptop is a great substitute for a desktop if you have a dock. I just place my laptop on the dock, it clicks into place and I have a couple of big screens, a full size keyboard and a mouse on my desk. No different than a desktop.
The article is discussing mobile desks, so to get the benefit you are describing you'd have to have docks, monitors, and peripherals at every workstation.
I'd bring my own keyboard and mouse. I'd probably also spend the first few minutes of my day cleaning the screen and the desk. The last thing I want to do is use somebody else's nasty keyboard and stare at fingerprints on the screen.
The office I work in, everybody gets a door. With all the arguments about economics, I think some people don't experience the same value to closing the door and working uninterrupted for three or four hours every day. I'm certain whatever the walls cost here, it's small compared to the productivity gains.
This will get even better with USB-C and/or Thunderbolt. Just sit down and with a single cable, get monitor, power, network and peripherals. (Almost) regardless of laptop make & model.
No it won't get better. On a dock, you have to connect exactly zero cables. Just place the laptop on the dock. That's it. No cables. No connectors. The bottom of the laptop has a connection which touches the pins on the top of the dock surface.
The office I work in has a number of the options mentioned - privacy pods, and a mixture of zoning and some dedicated desks. All the work spaces have nice monitors but you'll need to bring your own ergonomic keyboard and mouse.
That sounds incredibly unfriendly to differently abled employees. What if you need a desk that is significantly taller or shorter than normal? What if you need a non-traditional keyboard while recovering from surgery?
The desks can adjust in height. Also everyone is welcome to have a permanent desk if they prefer which can be customized to their desires. People bring their own keyboard.
Please please please no. Having "personal" space at the office is just as important as having "quiet" space. I do not want to feel like a drifter, a student in the library, or a tenant in a co-working space, unless I am actually one of those things.
Until someone more senior than you comes along and takes your seat. Typically someone from outside the office who just wants to sit next to their "friends". Nothing quite reminds you how junior you are than to have to find another desk.
It's another one of those "wins" for the corporation - why set up guest stations throughout the business when you can just say "there are no assigned desks"? It even re-inforces the "we are a family, not a company" meme.
I used to insist on designated desks and hated offices with hot swap desks, clean desks policy etc. I had drawers full of crap, my own "special" monitors, kit bags underneath my desk, lots of cans of pepsi max etc and dreaded moving desks. And sometimes I often had managed to get the back-to-the-wall/window far-from-corridor lots-of-privacy desk and did not want to surrender the desks...
But then in the last few years I have always been on projects with 100% pairing so I rarely sit at my "own" desk anyway. And though people's habbits does still lead to defaulting to certain desks, some teams I have helped have started to rotate people's desks on purpose every week so people wouldn't get too attached.
This has lead me to appreciate no designated desks. Though also insisting desk areas belongs to a team and has enough capacity, and even allocating developer desk areas so the desk specs are not missmatched. Outsiders taking up space is still frowned upon. :)
I also have a more lighter office presence. As long as each desks has very decent monitor(s) and a charger, I just move my laptop, my ergonomic keyboard, and maybe the chair if it is good. Takes 1 minute in the morning when pairs change. Also having a good locker near your desk area means I stove my crap in there instead of moving a drawer unit around like a hobo. (Though "drawer jousting" can be fun).
The only issue is where the company has gone cheap on the desks and they are not all height adjustable so people can not opt to stand at them. So people bring in their own monstrous (but good) sit-stand desktop risers by e.g Varidesk, Ergotron, Ergo Desktop, etc which are not that movable.
Hopefully, we are not long away from that being a ubiquitous option in the office.
I left my last company in large part because there was no designated desks. Even worse, the office was overcrowded and some days I wouldn't be able to find a seat at all. Honestly, to me, it's insulting that a company would not value it's employees enough to provide them with the most basic tools like a desk.
At my current job, they plan to move office and to change the organisation from "open office layout" to what they call "dynamic layout", including no designated desks.
And they made some studies stating that an average of X% of the company workforce time is spent in meeting rooms, so they can cut off the number of desks by X% (minus a small delta).
People will even have lockers to store personal stuff...
I'm looking forward to see how that will work, have a good laugh and quit.
> And they made some studies stating that an average of X% of the company workforce time is spent in meeting rooms, so they can cut off the number of desks by X% (minus a small delta).
I never understood that logic. These kinds of calculations usually completely ignore the most relevant thing for desks: the (regular) peak number of people that want to use a desk.
At a place I worked for they had 10 people from a company we worked with come in every monday and tuesday. No more desks needed, because "most of the time there are more than enough desks". People just called in sick on monday and tuesday, because there were 20 people in a room that could maybe fit 8-10.
Whenever next someone is going to suggest something like this, I now enthusiastically propose to also cut parking by 50% since the lot is nearly empty 18:00 to 7:00 anyway (adjusted to whatever calculation they are using)
But wait, I have a matlab license and VS installed. So I need to be at my desktop PC or reinstall everything every day. Oh, and to debug some parts of this legacy code, I'll need local admin or it crashes.
No, I don't want to switch to a laptop.
Oh, you can permanently book my desk for me in 6 monthly blocks? Works for me...
At my current job I was moved to 3 different desks before officially being told I didn't have one. It was fantastic news! I'm not categorized as remote and have little obligation to sit in the office when I can work from home at a much better setup.
I hate hot desking. I know it's very subjective but when I come into an office for eight hours a day, five days a week, I like to personalise my workspace. I don't drive, I take public transport and walk, and hate carting my laptop and charger around with me. I want my own space, with meeting rooms and collaboration spaces for when I need those things.
I may be alone in saying so, but I'd happily take a modest drop in pay for a private office.
We've recently moved into new offices in Frankfurt/Germany and being the CTO of our 40 Person Startup gave me an in-depth look at all the calculations involved. It's simply horrible how expensive it would be to give private offices even to >3 people in our company.
I've fought tooth and nail to keep everyone in small team offices(< 5 people) and even sacrificed my own STO to gain an extra room for this, allowing our company to make the best possible use of the new (relatively lavish) space.
We've got two small rooms set aside as flex-desks(complete with 2 4K Monitors & Gigabit Ethernet via a TB3 Dock) to give everyone the possibility to work in a 1 person office when its critical, but that combined with our lax home-office rules is more of a best we can do approach than a real solution to the office plan/distraction problem.
The problem stems from there being simply no officespaces available that have a default layout that permits many small rooms while retaining quick access to group/meeting and social areas. This seems to be a result of different design goals of other professions that need to maximise for the most amount of butts in seat per square meter, without factoring in the losses that distractions can cause.
If you want to redraw the floorplan, you have to sign rental contracts upwards of 5 years, something no sensible startup would do and even if, the whole investment is relatively large and needs a lot of focus from the company management to ensure its worthwhile. The expensive part is not the additional room the company would need to rent for each employee, it's the amount of empty space(hallways and large rooms) a company would need to rent to have more small rooms available up front.
> It's simply horrible how expensive it would be to give private offices even to >3 people in our company.
And how much does it cost to have your entire engineering team audibly and visually distracted and annoyed 100% of the time?
Environmental factors that decrease engineer productivity may not show up on a balance sheet, but the cost is massive. Can you get an engineer an office for less than $40k/year? Then it's probably worth it. Seriously what is so hard about this?
I work in an open office right now and every day is like sitting in a high school cafeteria trying to get work done. I work at 1/3rd capacity all day, make up 1/3rd in unpaid overtime at home, and my employer is just eating the cost on the other 1/3rd. Making me work in an open office is costing them at least $70k/yr in just my productivity.
My work satisfaction is through the floor, I'm stressed and exhausted all the time and preparing to interview for other jobs. When I start interviewing and eventually move, then they'll also be eating the cost of having to recruit and train a replacement (probably another $50-100k).
For the life of me I cannot understand the degree to which large companies will take huge piles of cash and just piss them right down the drain without a single thought, and yet be so incredibly resistant to giving offices to engineers.
My current theory is that they don't want engineers to have offices because keeping engineers crowded together like livestock in stables serves as a visual indicator of the inherent superiority of their managers and executives.
Editing to add an additional note: My employer thinks I like open office plans, my employer thinks I'm working at 100% capacity and am one of the most productive engineers, and my coworkers think their talking doesn't annoy me.
There is nothing in this world for me to gain by admitting my loss in productivity, complaining about open offices, or being the reason my coworkers can't have fun talking to each other all day. Those options have only downsides.
So again, the costs don't show up on your balance sheet, and every person on your team could fucking hate this open office shit and work at half capacity, and you would never have any idea.
I would really encourage you to move on the interviewing as soon as you can. I was in your position, desperately unhappy with the working conditions, and now I'm in a small quiet office with 4 to 5 other people and I have never been happier in my work.
In the meantime, get yourself a set of Bose Quiet Comfort 35s. An absolutely life changing piece of equipment for me at least. If nothing else you will comfortable enjoy the movies on the next flight you catch instead of having to crank the volume to the maximum to barely hear it over the constant background roar of the engines.
That's only if you like to listen to music while you work. If you just want quiet, get yourself a pair of the earmuffs that the airport ground crews wear out on the tarmac. I had a coworker who wore those and the only real downside was that he'd get horribly startled when people were trying to get his attention because they'd have to come up and touch him on the shoulder. Even basically yelling in the vicinity of his ears, he'd have no idea people were right behind him.
I have an older noise-cancelling model, the QC 15s, and they do a decent job at noise cancelling even without music. I listen to https://www.brain.fm/ (paid, but lifetime license is cheap) at a low volume to drown out any remaining noise. It's consistent background "white" noise that drowns out even the loudest co-workers. Wear them for 6-10 hours / day, best productivity investment I've ever made.
Can't you just use a pair of noise-canceling cans without piping audio through them? Is there a drawback to turning on the noise-canceling feature without coming through the speakers? It won't be completely quiet (on basic models), but it is probably comfortably quiet for most.
Only the new ones. I have the previous model (Quiet Comfort 25), and they're really nice and dumb. Only a 3.5 jack and a battery compartment, no other interfaces.
> And how much does it cost to have your entire engineering team audibly and visually distracted and annoyed 100% of the time?
No one has any idea, because that isnt a cost which is tracked by the accounting department...
therefore it has zero cost, right?
Right?
> So again, the costs don't show up on your balance sheet, and every person on your team could fucking hate this open office shit and work at half capacity, and you would never have any idea.
If only the managers could... I don't know... manage ? And pay attention to what's going on in their company?
Nah... a good percentage of managers I've worked for spend 75% of their time doing management politics / make-work. Getting things done is a low, low, priority.
That 1/3rd stuff is my life exactly. I've basically stopped trying to get serious work done at the office - it's for meetings and that's it. The rest I have to wait until nighttime when I'm nowhere near peak performance and my productivity overall is easily 1/3 less than it would be if I could work in the office
I don't understand how it can be so expensive, I can rent a serviced office for two people locally for £400/month. This is without the economies of scale of an organisation.
This is the part that makes the least sense to me, too. They talk about cost in terms that don't even take into account the reason for wanting offices.
You don't want offices because of feng shui, you want them because of the positive impact they're going to have on productivity / retention / talent acquisition. And yet their rationalizations rarely include anything but real estate costs.
I just don't get it. If a private office would improve an engineer's productivity by 5%, that's over $1k/month in payroll savings they could put toward their 8x8 square with a door.
Now consider that the actual improvement to productivity vs open offices is probably more like 20%, and that an 8x8 square with a door in commercial zoning isn't even close to 1k/month, and that you're also improving your ability to attract and retain top talent.
But don't worry, we have plenty of room for nap pods and massage chairs.
It'd be about £400/month where I am as well, and I'm guessing you're not in London/Cambridge/Oxford.
Also since you're in the UK don't forget about rates (local property taxes that businesses pay in the UK). Once you're beyond a certain size this tax will jump from £50 a month to over £1000.
In London it's more like 600-700 for good quality places in a co-working space (Wework or similar), up to 1k+ for particularly central locations. But then if you can afford the salaries here, the 300-400/month increase per team member compared to a desk in a co-working space doesn't need to cause a particularly big performance bump to be worth it.
You're painting open offices in a completely negative light without seeing that they also have upsides.
I'm in the same position as the CTO above and giving everyone a private office in my company is not even remotely close to being financially feasible. What's more, a lot of engineers actually voiced a preference for open space plans over individual offices.
Cubicles are on the table as an acceptable compromise but given the growth at which we're hiring and growing, it's just not physically feasible.
I don't understand how nobody here can compromise. Build quiet spaces into your office floorplan and eat the cost up front. If you can't afford to provide a place to work quietly for those that want it you can't afford space in that office building. Or you can't afford that number of employees. It's getting ridiculous, If you're going to keep saying it's expensive take the cost from somewhere else, like payroll. Provide a great workspace for your employees and in return you'll get great work. Poor planning upfront is going to cost you so much more on the back end.
The issue is that people who prefer open offices can make use of open areas, while people who need closed spaces actually need them in order to work.
One is a preference, the other is an outright necessity.
You have not mentioned any upsides of open offices for the percentage of the workforce which require isolation. Please, give their needs equal weight and consideration.
> I'm in the same position as the CTO above and giving everyone a private office in my company is not even remotely close to being financially feasible.
Yet somehow most organizations can swing this for management.
> This seems to be a result of different design goals of other professions that need to maximise for the most amount of butts in seat per square meter, without factoring in the losses that distractions can cause.
Many other professions factor in distractions in their office space set up. I don't think I've been to a decent attorney or CPA office setup where they were in a shared space or hotdesk situation. Offices layouts can definitely be built for this approach - perhaps you're just noting that nothing's available? Or nothing's available at a price management wants to pay?
> If you want to redraw the floorplan, you have to sign rental contracts upwards of 5 years, something no sensible startup would do ...
If it was a nicely done space, I've little doubt the space owner would have trouble leasing it out again, either to one large org, or to smaller orgs who all want private space. I run a coworking space, and most people who contact me are still really just looking for individual office space.
Landlords won't generally let you make structural/material changes to a floorplan without a longterm lease to justify it. However, you can make some pretty snazzy temporary office space that doesn't require permanent modifications to the space using privacy walls and glass partitions[1].
From a structural standpoint, they're basically fancy cubicles, and made by the same companies as standard cubicles. The most damaging thing they do to the structure is mount the tracks for the glass into the floor and ceiling. But that's usually considered normal wear and tear since it's easily fixable on move-out.
From an aesthetics perspective, they're effectively mini offices and can be done very well, making a space look nice and chic and making employees a lot happier. All with what amounts to some fancy cubicles.
What do they actually do for noise mitigation though? If people can't take calls in them without disrupting others, and if someone could theoretically still shout at their neighbor when they need to have a discussion it sounds less than ideal.
Depends entirely on the type you get and how you install them. If you get floor to ceiling types with appropriate glass, it provides just as much sound isolating properties as a traditional office.
And with appropriate sound dampeners (either on the ceiling, as artwork or whatever on the walls, or a non-glass side), you keep the sound within one from echoing or sounding hollow. A few setups I've seen involved using opaque glass as a side/separator between alcoves, and hanging sound dampeners disguised as artwork on those walls. Another used faux-walls made out of the same material as traditional cubicles to separate each micro-office, and that material is designed expressly for sound dampening. And works really well if it's floor to ceiling.
The entire article offers as much evidence for their claims as I do: none.
Have you visited the offices at Google? Yahoo? Facebook? Tesla? Square? Twitter?
They are all bursting at the seams and are fighting on a daily basis with each other to find new space to expand, which is very hard to find here. Same for pretty much all the companies in the Bay Area, actually.
The mere idea of switching these companies from an open floor plan to individual offices will get you laughed at for proposing something completely nonsensical.
Really? Who did the quantification? Citation needed.
Probably you missed the "increasing body of research" mentioned in TFA then...
"According to a study on the cost of interrupted work, a typical office worker is interrupted every 11 minutes. Even worse, people often take up to 25 minutes to refocus on the original task."
"Researchers have found that the loss of productivity due to noise distraction doubles in open office layouts compared to private offices, and open office noise reduces the ability to recall information, and even to do basic arithmetic."
"In a 2013 study about the privacy-communication trade-off in open offices, 60% of cubicle workers and half of all employees in partitionless offices said the lack of sound privacy was a significant problem."
" A study on the association between sick days and open office plans found that people working in open offices took 62% more sick days than those in private offices. And remember all those interruptions that workers experience in open offices? In a survey in the International Journal of Stress Management, employees who were frequently interrupted reported 9% higher rates of exhaustion."
"Clearly, open office layouts aren’t the hotbeds of creativity designers originally hoped they would be. And with office space at a premium, private offices for everyone isn’t a realistic alternative, nor is it ideal. The ebb and flow of effective collaboration requires several types of spaces. As workplace experts outlined in the Harvard Business Review, employees tend to generate ideas and process information alone or in pairs, then come together in a larger group to build on those ideas, and then disperse again to take the next steps."
> "According to a study on the cost of interrupted work, a typical office worker is interrupted every 11 minutes. Even worse, people often take up to 25 minutes to refocus on the original task."
So they're interrupted more frequently that the time it takes to refocus and therefore never complete any task?
This might seem like a naive question but could you buy a child's play house with door and windows that is big enough for a desk and use those instead?
I feel like the aversion toward cubicles is more psychological and association-based than really makes sense. A cubicle is (as a sibling poster pointed out) just an office without a door. Sure, the walls don't always go all the way to the ceiling, and they're thinner than real walls, but they serve a similar purpose.
I think we just grew up through the Dilbert-esque "cubicle farm" revolt, and we have negative associations that aren't entirely deserved.
If cubicles are a way to cram more people into a space because offices take up too much room, and open office plan is a way to cram more people into a space because cubicles take up too much room. And yet there's still the sentiment among open-office-plan workers that they wouldn't want to go back to cubicles, when most of the reasons they don't like the open office plan would be solved by cubicles.
I pretty much agree. They also feel like shantytowns in a way since they are flimsy pieces of material. I'd imagine that a nicer looking quality framework of wood without the ghastly florescent lighting would go a long way to improve perception.
It's funny, since I see restaurants that generate only $70 per meal (around 2 hours or so?) build super elegant wooden partitions that accomplish the exact same thing that cubicles do in an office environment.
It seems like it shouldn't be too expensive to do that...
Compared to no walls at all? Fuck yeah. When I was at IBM, they had us (~60 people) in one big room, with no walls, no noise-dampening, right next-door to a server room (with the accompanying server hum coming through the walls). I used to go downstairs to the "cubicle hell" area and just walk around and dream about how nice it would be to work down there. There was a point I'd have paid money to move to the cube-farms, compared to the hell-hole we were in.
Cubicles were maligned as passé ("cubicle farms") and staid so that managers and facilities could present open office spaces as au courant, forward and entrepreneurial so that in turn they could save in area per employee expenses.
If they can call cubicles "farms" (echoing sharecropping, drudgery), then we could just as easily and aptly call open office layouts "sardine cans" with all the earned baggage that comes with.
I find even half walls to be as bad as open layouts.
I hated the cube for years until 2012 when I had my first open workspace job. It was a small shop and space was limited. The next two shops I worked at were also in open floor plan layouts. At least with the most recent one I could work from home 3 to 4 days out of the week.
I have to admit, I started to miss the cube. I don't want to see other people pick their noses. I don't want other people to see me pick my nose if I'm not thinking about it. I hate having another person in my peripheral.
In both cubes and open work spaces, I wear headphones for most of the day. Sometimes the music is paused but I keep them on anyway. Music is really the only thing that keeps me sane in IT jobs.
Agreed on all points. One thing that cubes protect against is visual distractions. In an open plan, even when I'm able to focus on my work, I'll always be catching something out of the corner of my eye.
I need a wall in front of me. It's really distracting to have things move in my peripheral vision while trying to focus on a screen. I just built a wall out of monitors and cabinets to block out the front of my desk and wear noise cancelling headphones.
I like cubicles because, frankly, my only experience actually working in them was when I was delegated to work for Genentech for a bit (I don't usually work in the US). The cubicles they had were large enough to have a second seat and a whiteboard — you could hold a face-to-face meeting with them, no problem. Oh, and they were designed in such a way that you had to get into one to look at someone's screen. As a bonus, mine actually had a window (I guess guest privilege?), but even the inner ones were fairly roomy.
On the other hand, I've seen places where I (I'm 6"2') just wouldn't fit so I'd have permanent leg pain. Oh, and the screens are easily visible to passers by. Just the pain itself would be enough to hate those.
Cubicles are better for all the reasons other people mentioned.
They seem to have been replaced by cheaper long tables in offices that are genuinely paperless, since all any employee needs is a computer, monitor and chair. In my experience, cubicles usually have a file cabinet and other paper storage, utensil drawer, desk phone, wall calendar and other stuff I seldom see in modern tech offices.
And when it doesn't matter which computer is used by which employee, or everyone carries a laptop and phone with them, enter hotdesking.
It's simply horrible how expensive it would be to give private offices even to >3 people in our company.
Great, your company made a poor decision from a planning / facilities / real-estate standpoint. Quit and go find a job with a company that didn't choose as poorly.
>It's simply horrible how expensive it would be to give private offices even to >3 people in our company.
100 square feet per year is $7K/year in SF. It is pennies compare to how open office kills productivity. People who haven't worked in offices or even good cubes may probably don't even know what good programmer productivity looks like or feels like :)
Definitely. I've consistently told recruiters I'm not interested when I hear there's hot-desking involved, and even (politely) declined mid-interview once when I didn't know up-front it was a thing at that particular company.
If your teams have no need to be together physically, then THEY HAVE NO NEED TO COME INTO THE OFFICE.
It's funny, I work in a coworking space, and we technically have hot desks, but everyone always ends up sitting in the same place every day. It really throws me if someone takes my seat, usually it's someone new, who hasn't figured out the seating plan yet.
It's almost like high school, where you don't have a designated lunch table, but you always sit at the same table. Or at least that's what the movies show, we didn't have a cafeteria.
Had the same experience working a consulting job one time. Awful, dirty rows of terrible monitors and keyboards, fluorescent lighting, chintzy chairs.
Hotdesking sends to me the pretty degrading message that people are entirely fungible (probably also called "resources" at these places). I'm opposed to it.
And yes, everyone just sat in the same spot everyday.
I would say if you were to go for the most efficient method, you would have everyone take the farthest desk away from the door when they got in each morning.
Me too. In my first job out of college I worked for Sun (2002-2005). After we were moved to consolidate real estate, most of us were forced into hot desking. On one hand we were in a building which was built during their all-employees-are-given-offices era, so you'd usually be in an office, but having just a locker for storage sucked. Also, once I ended up being reorg-ed so my boss and half my team were 2500 miles away, there was little motivation for me to go into the office, which for someone early in their career who could use good mentoring and doesn't have the good sense to ask for it enough, sucks.
I agree with your points if hot desking is forced on you, but I won't mind it being an optional thing(in addition to private office), can definitely use occasional change of environment to fight boredom.
I definitely get the point about personalising (it's not for me, but I know many people like it), but having to cart your laptop + charger can easily be solved with lockers. The place I currently work at does hot desks, but everyone has lockers for their personal belongings and things they don't want to lug around which, so far, has been striking a happy balance.
You have to set it up every day though? I hate having to plug in everything after every time I take my laptop out somewhere. I'd much rather have a fixed computer that just stays there.
But a private office is very very expensive. People might think I'm trolling but I honestly think that until "engineer > real estate" there will be no real progress. All this talk about "open space", "hot desks", etc. is because costs of private office space just does not make sense to any CTO or CEO.
Obviously it doesn't have as much in terms of sound dampening effects but the cost nearly isn't as high and there's a psychological effect
Though... cubicles do make it so that you're working in a "pit". So people... start wanting to remove the barriers..... and we end up in open office plans again. Hard to figure out how a smaller company can manage this (since private offices _are_ expensive)
Some buildings in Microsoft still do. In my building, most people SDE2 level and up has their own, and below that most seem two-to-an-office (there are counterexamples on both sides though, as well as a number of empty offices). Oddly they're refurbing existing buildings to remove the private offices though. It doesn't seem like a space problem, nor a money problem. Apparently there's just a desire to get rid of them for who knows what reason, spending a lot of money and morale (employees have to relocate to temp offices in downtown Bellevue for a year while they refurb a building on campus) to do so.
When I was moved from single offices to open plan (Microsoft 2012) we were told that we had asked for it(!)
But the architecture firm who designed the space did give a really good walk through of how they designed the space. All their stupid decisions had justifications. One tidbit that fell out of that was that they couldn't put more people on a floor with open plan because the width of emergency stairwells dictates the floor occupancy rating.
So we lost offices, whiteboards, bookshelves, couches, and privacy. There didn't seem to be much gain
Actually remembered that my university had this two, though most people were two to an office so you coordinated to do meetings. And the PhD students were more like 4-6 to a room.
Is it really? In some of the past threads people have posted estimates that the increased floor space would cost a small fraction of salary even in SF. I haven't checked this because I'm not in a position to decide (except by turning down open-office jobs). It seems plausible that the real expense is in converting to a real-office setup instead of any raw packing inefficiency.
A colleague had another problem with hot desks - a visitor would arrive at his floor and ask "Is Bob here?" => "I don't know". Without hot desks, you know where Bob sits and have a good chance of finding him. With hot desks, the visitor now has to work to find Bob, as does the person receiving the visitor.
If a face-to-face conversation is important, one of us will spend two minutes finding a good time and booking a meeting. If it's an emergency, my team has a pagerduty rotation. Showing up at my desk is not the best way to do anything.
One argument: For many kinds of knowledge work, unnecessary unplanned distractions are a huge drain on productivity. Tapping someone on the shoulder is far more damaging than sending them a message they can reply to asynchronously, even if you're defining expected response time in minutes rather than hours. If there's something that really does require face-to-face time, great, plan a meeting.
Another argument: face-to-face communication is so much higher bandwidth than voice or text chat that it's worth prioritizing. Tapping someone on the shoulder and hashing something out over two minutes can save an hour of online back-and-forth.
Both of these are totally true! It's really about how an individual, and a team, work together best. To me, the frustration is that most modern team environments tend to implicitly choose the latter value system without it being a conscious choice.
> hashing something out over two minutes can save an hour of online back-and-forth
I should hope so, since the cost of a two-minute conversation is at least one engineer-hour for two people to each get back into the zone and start being useful.
The fact that everyone is always moving around within the company
makes people hard to find. That’s why we have http://user—check it
out. We know where you are based on where your machine is plugged
in, so use this site to see a map of where everyone is right now.
If permanent desks then having a somewhat recognisable but standardised photo and name on the wall or screen will let some people find the right desk without asking.
Though to be honest people still asks as that is what humans do. Even though it interrupts flow of others.
I've happily brought equipment purchased at my own expense to work. It amortizes down to very little over the lifetime of the hardware (even a $1600 workstation laptop amounts to roughly $0.25 per hour over 3 years at 40 hours a week) and makes work so much more efficient (always a plus at performance review time) and just plain more pleasant.
> I've happily brought equipment purchased at my own expense to work.
How do you make sure that everyone understand that that equipment belongs to you and not The Company? I'm currently resorting to printed labels of my name or initials, but I can't help but consider that that's a tissue defence.
> How do you make sure that everyone understand that that equipment belongs to you and not The Company?
For BYOD laptops/PCs, keep the receipt (which will usually include the serial number) and store a photocopy at the office in a place where you can easily keep track of it. If it's something shipped direct from the manufacturer, keep the box with the shipping label on it as additional evidence. You can also let your manager know that you have equipment that you personally own on-premises and give him an itemized list with serial numbers. For small items like mice, keyboards, etc., they're generally not worth enough to lose sleep over if lost.
Beyond that, the general rule of never bringing anything to work you're not willing to lose applies. Just like any other kind of BYOD device, your employer is not going to reimburse you if your personal hardware is stolen or accidentally damaged, so take appropriate precautions.
Lastly, make sure that you secure _and_ backup data on your hardware at least as well as your IT team does for company issued hardware. Your manager is not going to be at all sympathetic if you lose work due to a hardware failure on your BYOD device or due to malware.
In the companies I've worked in, they did not permit personal computers in the office (they were okay with mice/monitors etc.) The logic was that it posed too great a security risk. In one instance for a high profile project I wasn't allowed to even enter the office area with my phone (to prevent people from taking screenshots)
I've always brought my own headphones or mechanical keyboards and they're pretty obviously not-company. I've never purchased any actual machines though. If I need equipment, I get the shop or contracting/staffing company to buy it. No reason to spend money on that stuff. We're not auto mechanics.
I've been using my own mechanical keyboards forever. You make a lot of friends with a model M in an open office (suffice it to say, use quieter switches now).
The U3415W is the monitor I finally got at work. It's a nice monitor.
At home I have a Benq bl3201pt, which is a 4k 16:9 monitor. It's nice as well, but does have a flickering issue (one side of the screen will flash every 4-8 hours or even 1-2 days).
I use an X34 at home, aside from quality issues (needed a warantee repair after 6 weeks, nontrivial shipping and hassle), it's a fantastic monitor for every task.
I've never understood the tendency towards multiple monitors over one larger monitor.
I find multiple monitors easier to manage with a tiling window manager and offer a better "separation of concerns" in terms of grouping of active applications I want to see. But my home set up includes 3 28in displays so I may just have a problem, ymmv.
1440 vertical pixels in a 34" 21:9 monitor means you usually don't have to worry about whether your software can adapt to a non-standard DPI. At about 109 DPI, it's the same as a typical 27" 16:9 panel, just with more pixels off to the side. The density is a bit higher than the typical ~94 DPI of a 24" 16:10 display, but the difference can be tolerated by most users. Jumping up to 140 DPI (32" 4k 16:9) is enough that you either need exceptionally good vision, or you need to compensate through software scaling adjustments or major ergonomic changes.
27" iMac has been 2560×1440 from 2009 until they went retina in 2014 (and they're now double in both dimensions, so same logical resolution).
At arm's length, on a 27" screen, 1440p is very practical. Getting more screen space than 1080p is what bumped me from 21-24" screens, and it fills my vision enough that if I jumped to 4k I'd either be moving my head back and forth with a 40" screen, dealing with even smaller UI elements, or wrestling with OS scaling.
For development I take screen real estate over PPI. The idea is to run it at native resolution while being very readable, and to be able to work on multiple documents side by side.
(And for coding you actually need height more than width, if you think of a typical layout of a code file)
I agree with you. I'd love to try a 4k screen, and was even considering it - however in the end I took my home U3415W to work and bought the X34 for home (I might game 30 minutes a week or something; the extra hz are certainly nice for that, otherwise they are pretty much identical).
I value actual real estate over PPI, preferring to run at 100% / unscaled which looks much nicer in Win10. The 109PPI (3440x1440) is decent enough, and I don't have to squint. Furthermore the DPI matches those of the surrounding 16:10 24s (1920x1200) well enough for it not to be an issue.
I am trying not to cargo cult here but I think if I need to scroll a file with 9 font on a 32"+ screen with 4k display it might be a sign of code smell (again, this should definitely not be a hard rule just saying it might be nice to stop and think why it is so long)?
I would be happy to pay out of my own pocket for a better hardware than the POS I am forced to work with. All the machines are connected with 100Mbit, and we only just switched from Windows XP...
Well, it's a large company with lots of in-house software, so that's the official reason for the delayed roll out of Windows 7. But I think it has more to do with bureaucracy and inefficiency.
For not bringing my own hardware, security (it's a bank).
I have trouble coding while people are looking at me. It is distracting and prevents me from getting in the zone. Unless I can wheel my desk into a private office it still sounds terrible.
Would it really not work to just be able to ask a coworker to help with your desk if you needed that? It seems like even having a small group of volunteers be on-call for such a thing wouldn't be much of a hassle, assuming the right pieces were in place (everything plugs in through 1 power plug, desk and chair only (mount storage to desk etc))
So now you are advocating increasing the social burden for any employee who has an (possibly unknown to you or coworkers) reason for not being able to move their desk.
This is something that it is worth being a little careful about,
My previous company (https://smarkets.com/about/careers/) had desks on wheels. It was cool but moderately pointless after we moved into team offices. Still - the brownian motion of desks as we formed pairs was quite interesting. (And occasionally seeing someone switch rooms attempting to control both a giant desk & a chair was hilarious)
I kind of miss the liberation of being able to just flip my desk 180 and stare out of the window when I needed to work on something though.
I wish someone who works at Pixar could comment in this thread. They've had private offices ever since the steve jobs building, and often you hear that private, customized offices is one of the things that they love about their workplace.
The Steve Jobs building is designed to increase chance of random encounters between people to stimulate collaboration, but these encounters happen in the hallways and the designated collaborative spaces, rather than in people's private offices.
> As a current Pixar employee, the open office trend has unfortunately spread to our admittedly beautiful campus. You have to be fairly senior to get an office around here, lowlifes like me get stuck in shared open hallways and the like.
And with office space at a premium, private offices for everyone isn’t a realistic alternative, nor is it ideal.
I disagree. Privacy pods make me claustrophobic, and since I have some ear issues, noise canceling headphones are painful. Offices are only unaffordable if you don’t properly account for the cost of distracted developers.
Perhaps the most powerful and popular trend in the
move away from open offices is an increased number
of small private spaces
My company upgraded our offices last year and "privacy pods + informal open spaces" has been a huge success. I don't have any hardcore productivity metrics but the reaction among our developers, including me, has been unanimously favorable.
Although, it must be said, we still prefer to work from home quite a bit. This is mostly due to our large number of remote employees in other countries. If I am working with remote people I don't typically commute to the office.
I'm not a fan of a binary "open office or not" distinction: both can be done well. Dropbox's old office was the best open office I've worked in. Large desks, low employee per sq. ft. density, sound-absorbing foam on the (high) ceilings, teams spaced relatively far apart. The new Dropbox office was a slight regression. Smaller desks, slightly higher employee density, no sound-absorbing material. But it was still mostly fine.
IMVU's open offices back in 2012 or so sucked. Employees were packed together to the point that it was sometimes even hard to walk from point A to point B.
I feel like the most important office quality metrics are employee density and how well sound carries.
Whether or not there are useful collaboration surfaces matters too: cubicle walls are great for stickies and note cards. But that's solvable with easy access to dry-erase walls or dry-erase boards on wheels.
For fun, let's slippery slope this trend into the setting for a story.
At some point the workplace will just end up an unlivable hellscape where people have to walk to work 20 miles from their triple bunked dorms, and then stand inches from each other for 16 hour double shifts wearing nothing but VR goggles and chord boards. The 12th floor walkup, non-temperature controlled "office" warehouse will smell like fear and sweaty humanity, the only "perk" will be the government mandated yearly flea and louse spray that will rain down from the ceiling and the monthly cleaning of the shared feeding tubes.
During enforced sleeping periods, employees will spend precious sleep time sending tap-code (error corrected of course) to each other the workings of a conspiracy wherein they'll demand 60cmx30cm standing desks, a 12" CRT monitor, 12 hour shifts and 1 day off of work a quarter and a decent burial instead of being shoved off into a nameless mass grave.
As long as an office is considered a status symbol by management, then the open plan environment will stay. In a general sense, offices for any reason related to productivity is a non-starter today (has been so for a number of decades).
Offices are considered a reward for climbing the hierarchy not for actual work by the plebs (you know, those who would actually need it or benefit from it for work purposes).
And certainly, if the senior bods don't have offices then the junior workers will never get them.
If the day comes that my $DAYJOB employer goes this route, that's the exact day I quit. Hot desking is some of the most idiotic, brain-dead stupid shit I can imagine. I have desk drawers for a reason... so I don't have to lug around every single item I use at my desk, everywhere I go. Not to mention the books on my desk, which I am definitely not hauling back and forth every day.
No designated desks is the Agile of floor planning. Everyone's the same, anyone can do the same job, you can hotswap spaces and people as you replace hard drives.
While I agree with your overall point, I would add that anybody who thinks that "Agile" prescribes that people be considered fungible, has been misled. Somebody's specific implementation of "agile" might prescribe that, but nothing in the Agile Manifesto says anything like that.
In fact, I'd argue that, to a first approximation, anytime anybody makes a statement along the lines of "Agile says you do X", you can safely assume that they don't know WTF they are talking about, and/or they are confusing Agile with "Foobar Inc. Fucked-up Agile".
I didn't work in in one, but worked in a cubicle as an intern, then in an office with 3 other people focusing on the same project, then in my own office with a door, now at home. But I can only imagine the sensory distraction and just can't see why anyone thought it was a good idea for software development.
Sure I can see the photo-op image appeal for PR purposes "Oh look at our dynamic startup, working in an exposed brick re-purposed warehouse. So much collaboration, all the time, with everyone...". But then after the picture is taken everyone should have the option to grab an office or an isolated area to do actual work, or separate white-boarding conference room if they are talking or designing something".
I also find it interesting that these large tech companies at the bleeding edge of technology like Amazon, Google, Facebook are selling digital connectivity (ads, social connections, office suites, email, video chat, messengers, cloud infrastructure) -- and still require their employees to be physically present in the same building to do work.
Wonder if remote work in the next revolution in how our economy works. The more things are digitized, hopefully the less we'll be tied to a physical tech hub area. That could have pretty large effects on real estate, traffic, taxes, how developed various areas get (smaller towns might see some development) etc.
Unless you work on a project alone, office work would still beat remote when it comes to communication.
Surely, the tools for remote communication are getting more and more efficient, and as a remote worker your success heavily depends on your communication skills.
Still being able to brainstorm ideas with your colleagues face to face is invaluable, and is one of the biggest things I miss working remotely.
If you're a newbie and need to get up to speed, having an experienced person you can ask questions of every 5 to 10 minutes is a big help. And if you can design your software so that the team members are replaceable, being able to easily replacing engineers is more important than keeping them happy.
IMO it only works on a certain complexity level of software, and up to a particular skill level of engineer. Beyond that, you need more specialized engineers that need more code ownership, and will be replaced less often. They'll cost more too.
> experienced person you can ask questions of every 5 to 10 minutes
Please don't abuse your peers' goodwill this way. Write down your questions as you go, meet about stuff too abstruse to straighten out over email, and add what you learn to the docs so the next newbie will be less of a burden.
> having an experienced person you can ask questions of every 5 to 10 minutes is a big help
That is orthogonal (independent) of the office layout.
I have been both the person who needed to be brought up to speed and the one who helped others get up to speed and I can't think in either case how an open office layout would have made it better.
Just randomly interrupting people every 5 to 10 minutes is not the best approach and that's exactly the what's one of the problems with the open office layout -- they invite those kind of interruptions.
It's because the large tech companies' offices have expensive real estate and just don't have the square footage to give everyone an office. I actually think that in some cases they could pull off micro-offices if they engineered ventilation and virtual windows or something, but basically it comes down to space and without some high-tech micro-offices which is not actually a thing, there is just not enough space. I mean square footage in downtown SF is at a premium.
Now if they were sensible and had optional offices in less expensive areas closer to where people could get nice affordable homes, they could get a deal for the real estate and have lots of offices. Also they would need less offices because they allowed remote. But there is a distinct lack of being sensible in general. The execs have fancy offices in downtown SF so demand everyone commutes there and sits at communal tables of whatever.
Is the problem hiring people to work in Fremont or is the problem transferring people who already work in Palo Alto to work in Fremont?
Transferring people can often mean their commute time increases 30-40 minutes. That sucks basically regardless of whether you currently have a walking commute or hour long one. And it's not like you usually have an entire team staffed only by east-bay residents: do you split the team into two offices? Force someone to suck it up? Rotate teams through offices? All of these options will basically be traumatic for some portion of your team.
What a stupid clickbait headline. Obviously it's not dead. Research that shows it's terrible has been around longer than open offices have been popular. If management cared about the evidence they wouldn't have done it in the first place.
Let me fix their conclusion with the cheapest, most employee friendly way to solve the problem.
> Luckily, the solution is fairly simple— allow everyone to work remote.
If you want me to work remote full time, I need a raise to cover the cost of getting an apartment or house equivalent to my own but with an additional room to turn into a dedicated private office.
Otherwise, I'll take an appropriately designed office.
I agree there's a need to separate work and life. I really struggled with WFH until I got some designated space to do it. I'd imagine that's not uncommon.
That said, whether it's worth it depends on how you value your time. Not sitting in traffic an hour each day ~20 days/month, if you value your time at even $30/hr (entry-level contractor in midwest, say), it should cover the cost of the extra space.
If not, well, you also have to factor in being able to use your own kitchen and especially bathroom. Ever since working from home for the previous few years, it's so awkward now having to go shit and piss in grungy toilets a foot away from my coworkers and managers. Would definitely pay some big money to avoid that.
the people pushing hotdesking seem to be manager types that spend their days talking to various groups of people.
but it fails completely for some dev types. oh sure you can churn out some css while balancing your laptop on the edge of a table at the local cafe but just try that with a desktop workstation plugged into various bits of hardware while doing hour+ compiles.
Funny, the quoted Architecture Firm in the article is Gensler, who designed my last company's office space. Which included 6 rows of desks[1], each row seating 8 people with no separation left and right, and only a low divider between the person in front of you. And they designed it in 2015, 3 years after the PDF the quote was taken from was published. Sounds like even they aren't buying into the "open offices are dead" narrative.
Unrealistic suggestions for a dev with 2+ monitors or a desktop. Managers might be able to leverage focus rooms because they are more mobile, but average devs are not.
Often it's the average manager who has time to talk and likes to talk loud, so a more reasonable middle ground is to avoid cross-functional rooms/clusters.
How open is Dropbox to remote work? A lot of places of work "allow" or "tolerate it," but it feels hard to use this working mode for a consistent period. Working from home often has the same stigma as unlimited vacation days--you can do it, but it's often frowned upon...
I think that stems from the many people that "work from home" only to take their cat to the vet, get their car washed, go to the dentist, and pick up their dry-cleaning. Most of the time whenever I hear the term "working from home" I immediately assume they will not be home and will not be working.
I think it varies considerably depending on the company culture- in particular, how remote-oriented the company is. (Yeah, I know that sounds buzzwordy, but hear me out.)
At "remote friendly" companies I've worked at in the past, most people were in the office at least 80% of the time- and because of that, there was sort of a general mindset that if someone wasn't in the office, they "weren't there"... which lead to the same sorta assumption that you mentioned.
On the other hand, at the place I'm at now, I would guess that less than half the company are in the office on any given day. This leads to an amusing inversion of what you're talking about, because if a normally-remote colleague needs to come into the office, it usually means they won't get as much done that day, because of the overhead of travel time! :P
This confuses working from home with work-on-your-own-schedule/core working hours.
At my current company, when I work from home, I'm expected to be working and available from 9 to 5. At a previous company, you only need to be available for a specific time interval during the day, otherwise you can work anytime you want.
The open office layout won't be dead in the U.S. until tax laws offer accelerated depreciation for building office walls. Right now the depreciation schedule for commercial building construction is something like 39 years, meaning that expenses incurred this year to renovate an office won't be recouped for almost four decades. Meanwhile, cubicles are considered furniture, which has a depreciation schedule of 7 years. (Note: I didn't look up the actual numbers, so I might be off a little.)
If companies got the same tax benefits for building walls that they do for buying cubicles, we'd see more walls, since everyone knows they're better for productivity and office harmony.
As far as I am concerned the Office is dead, open or not in the tech field. I mean an office which you travel to, and work all day. No way am I going back to that for less than another 70k a year on top. It isn't 1930.
I'd think many companies would disagree with you. Slack and Skype still cannot replace face2face meetings so that working remotely (full time) is a non-starter for many jobs.
We are having major issues with an open office. It appears to be sort of like remote work: some can handle it fine, while others can't. It just gets deafeningly loud and distracting even with only 10 people nearby.
I dont think we'll ever get private office spaces back. I personally like the openness of the open-plan office, but struggle with the noise.
What would help enormously though would just be full-high glass partitions between banks of desks - e.g. put each group of 4+4 desks inside a glass "fish tank" so that noise does not propagate as easily outside of that group, no need for doors although that would be a bonus.
You'd not need to radically alter the layout of the offices too much - just a thin sheet of toughened/safety/whatever glass between the banks. Bonus points for making it modular so that the tanks can be enlarged to put 4 banks in one batch rather than just 2 etc. Surely this sort of thing would not consume too much space/money?
I would be concerned about echos within these glass-walled partitions, but then on the other hand I've never struggled with echos in the glass-walled meeting rooms so I guess it might be ok.
> The open office layout is meant to foster an egalitarian work environment that inspires creativity and spontaneous collaboration among colleagues.
Wait what? I thought that collaboration was the minor benefit to what is otherwise just a way of making more people fit in less space.
The biggest actual benefit of the open office is that it can be situated in a much better location than an office where developers have private rooms. Ask 10 developers whether they want private offices (or at least not large shared spaces) and they'll probably say yes.
But ask the same 10 developers in an office in a nice location in SF, London, Berlin, Stockholm... whether they'd want private offices at the expense of ending up in an office park where the rent would be the same for the larger office - and they probably don't.
I'm currently working on a 1 year old subsidiary that tries very hard to be modern (Spotify organisation, brand new offices…), and as part of that modernity went full Open Plan™.
It's not a full blown boiler room, but we do have zero privacy and a good deal of noise.
I wonder why so few are talking about the in-between. There seems to be only open offices or everyone has their private room. The first is my personal nightmare, the second is very expensive and hinders quick collaboration with colleagues.
At my workplace we have a mix of both. We have project rooms (my current one has 6 people) where people are working on the same or similar things. This keeps the noise and visual distractions to a minimum (we have small cubicle-like walls attached to our desks that rise with the desk if you raise it up) while still allowing us to ask the quick question or look at things together if required (of course you need to limit that so that you don't bug them all the time). In my experience this is the best compromise if you are working in a project with a few other people.
The removal of personal desks would be terrible IMO. Many people have said they just like having a desk, but I also have notepads, things attached to the desk "walls", stuff for fidgeting when I'm thinking, 2 monitors attached to my laptop, keyboard, mouse, headphones... I can take my laptop to go sit wherever else, but why would I? I would have to carry around so much stuff or forgo these productivity tools I have. Sometimes I do write with just my laptop in the common areas somewhere, but it's only for a short while. Sure, you could put standardised desks everywhere with the same setup, but then it would probably not match _my_ preferences anymore and thus would be worse for my working.
> Luckily, the solution is fairly simple—design offices with a variety of areas to suit different kinds of work
Putting aside the expense of the space for this -- let's just say it's all worth it if you're building a unicorn company and want maximum productivity on both the individual and team level.
My question is, what's the best way to implement the equipment side of things? It's also really important, I imagine, to offer the best computing equipment, for engineers and designers in particular. Does this "variety of areas" and "no designated desks" approach force us to use laptops and external monitors? Do we not get to use those beautiful 5K iMacs or a souped-up tower? Do you get one and also have a laptop??
Believe it or not this is my main concern. I am ok with designating zones that are "library rules" for focus even if they are not full offices, alongside chattier collaborative areas, a more social cross-team cafe space, etc. It's moving equipment among them I'm worried about -- you can't stick to library rules if you need to cluster around someone's computer to do a code review.
We just give everyone top-tier laptops (MBPs or Surface Books) and set up a docking station plugged into two big monitors, a keyboard, and a mouse at each desk. This seems to be the best of both worlds. You have the mobility of a laptop, but a full workstation wherever you decide to sit down.
In our case, everyone has an assigned desk in the open office which they can customize however they want, but we also have standing desks and private offices that people can use whenever they want, and those have the same docking station setup.
I guess if you need a really powerful desktop for some reason this wouldn't work, but I think a $2k laptop should be powerful enough for almost everyone. Certainly no one at my company (13 people) seems limited by their equipment.
I doubt it. Although I think a quiet private office is the best environment for those times when you need hours of uninterrupted concentration, other changes make open offices tolerable. My 4k screen occupies almost all of my field of view. I like ambient music for the coding trance.
Instead I predict the death of the office. Remote work in dispersed co-working spaces is even more cost-efficient than an open office.
I co-own a co-working space where most of us are in one open-plan room of around 10 people.
While home offices are more cost- and time-efficient (no commute, no office cost to employers), I still come into the office despite having a decent set up at home. I'm more productive here even with the open plan, the time lost commuting, etc. And we have had steady enquiries from prospective tenants, all in a similar situation.
Going by HN, not everyone loves open plan, but for me, the advantages of a shared, open office are: people being able to see my screen from afar mean I'm more likely to stay on task rather than get distracted and research holidays non-stop, I enjoy the social interactions with colleagues, and face-to-face is best for collaborating.
I think we'll see dispersed co-working spaces for a while, at least until VR is strong enough to emulate the benefits of working with peers.
Remote working may be fine for software development, but for professions where most of the day is spent interacting with people one way or another (for instance in my line of business - banking) it's a massive drop in efficiency.
That being said the trend I am seeing among banks is to favour cost savings over the efficiency of the business. For instance by moving departments to cities where few people want to go. Lots of people leaving, banks struggling to recruit there, but they seem to go ahead anyway.
Last time I switched jobs, I moved from a 3-person office (engineering managers) to a hot-desking "culture" (consulting & sales) where we all sit around large tables (power sockets only, all wireless).
Everyone spends time with customers, so hot-desking makes complete sense (and we have a mix of differently sized glass cubes for solo work and meetings, with extra monitors and conferencing gear).
As a direct result, I now do most of my actual work at home, keep in touch via Skype, and go to the office only for internal meetings. It's completely impossible to do any sort of focus work in an open plan office.
The upside of being able to work anywhere, anyhow is, however, completely offset by office politics. You have to literally waste a couple of days a week for the sake of face time and trying to herd things through a miasma of constant interruptions and overly excited interactions (everyone is low on time and concentration, so conversations are hurried and often unfocused).
I wish it was. Since our management decided to test the open office/hot desk layout, we mostly deal with docking station issues non-stop.
Most of our equipment is Dell, and those docking station connectors seems to be even more fragile now. I guess (and hope) this will get better when all our laptops will support USB-C docking station..
I think it depends a lot on the culture of the organization. Currently my team is highly distributed and my local colleages only meet in person in the office about twice a week, with the support from the very top of our BU. In our case, I feel that having my own space that sits empty 5 days out of 7 is highly wasteful. Currently my own desk is spartan: 2 monitors and the necessary cables; that's it.
When working from home becomes the norm, I think change in the office setup is inevitable and I welcome that tradeoff. I would love a modern shared desk setup, as long as all of desks have good monitors to go with them. Heck, group them in pods of 4/8/12 desks and make them bookable just like conference rooms (but for a day).
It seems to me, inn Sydney, open offices are being used even more. If they are such shite, who is making the decisions? As far as I can see, from this thread, many others and talking to people, anecdotally, the most minor set of people actually like them.
Who is making the decisions? What will change this? Refusal, mutiny? I have been told, if I don't like open offices I would not be a suitable employee because everyone else does. In my current firm I went as far as organising the place for us to move. A mix of rooms, some large, some small. It rocks compared to the open office in the last place.
Being someone who's always worked in open offices (for almost ten years now), I can't even think of what an alternative would be. Single offices per developer, kinda like lawyers? It seems that would take up a chunk of space, and would be pretty much the same as working from home.
Honestly, I think open offices are mostly here to stay. Those who dislike it and want isolation, privacy, and less distractions, can always pick to work at home (I know I do multiple days a week).
I'll throw in my 2 cents and say I've worked in "open" floorplans I didn't mind--but these were always at on ghost-town-empty offices for companies that were living on investor life support in spaces that could have housed 3x more people without being crowded
I rented a private office in Manhattan for $900/month. i.e., <10% of my salary. This is a no-brainer... Why not just rent each individual engineer a private office? Why the need to own the office space? Company identity/"cult"ure?
You can't seriously expect me to also rent my own office space as an employee. What is next? Have to buy my own gear out of my own money? The very reason I am an employee of a company and not self-employed is to not have to worry about these things.
Unless you can somehow provide each employee an additional budget. But what I have seen so far is that that "extra" budget comes out of the pay roll.
>> Propst himself accused companies of manipulating his original idea into “hellholes.”
Ironic.
This so-called visionary had no idea his futuristic ideals would be twisted by the drive to increase profit by cutting corners in an economy where people are seen as milking cattle.
I am curious why this is on the dropbox blog, did they solve this in their own offices with the recommendations outlined? Maybe someone from that works there can chime in?
We had an office where they tried this as an experiment. Each desk was sit-stand, had one or two 24inch monitors, a chromebox + mouse + keyboard, plenty of wall sockets easily accessible at the top of the desk and powered-USB port for charging etc. People either plugged their laptop in, or just logged in on the chromebox and were away.
And it was awful.
* People started to have "their" desk where they "always" sit, and left things like coats on the chair, running shoes under the desk, folding bikes (you name it) at the desk. This had the effect of taking the desk "out of circulation" meaning when the "usual" occupier wasn't there for a day people still didn't use the desk, or someone did use it but the usual occupier came in late and someone else was there it was a super-awkward moment of either the first person packing up and moving elsewhere, or the usual occupant getting in a huff with someone in "their desk" and/or continually interrupting the other person when they come over to collect their notebook or headphones or something.
* There were less desks than people. 90% of the time this was fine as usually enough people were on vacation/at clients/on training etc. Occasionally though it meant there was no space and people roamed the office for 15 minutes before having to go and work from Starbucks (if they had brought their laptop with them)
* If you were at meetings or otherwise away from your desk, you would often come back to your desk to find that someone else was now sat at the desk you were sitting at before.
* Even if you found a desk, you were often not near your team. Cue constant "Where are you sitting?" instant messages and people wandering around trying to find each other.
* Desks often had missing cables and stuff - so even if you did get a desk sometimes it was on that one desk where the monitors dont work, or someone had taken the power cable, or the keyboard had a "sticky H key" or something. Because no one "owned" the desks, no one bothered to report the faults to the people managing the facilities and just moved to another desk or stole the cable/keyboard/mouse/whatever from another nearby desk.
* Engineers could not use desktops (since they would have to move them every day, and company policy is no source code stored on laptops) so the computers got given a fixed location, and the nomad engineers had to find a desk to remote desktop into the desktop each day. This is fine for short periods, but day-in, day-out 8+ hours a day looking at remote desktops leads to sea-sickness due to the small lag. So even if the receptionist or admins or spreadsheet jockeys could go and sit in the cool-zones for their work, the engineers were stuck at a dekstop because they need the monitors and stuff to do their job.
After about 9 months or so we moved to a different building due to growing out of the experimental building and went back to assigned-desks in an open plan office which was hugely improved.
Please, for anyone reading this, please please please do not instigate non-designated desks for your workers.
tl;dr - non-designed desks had all of the same problems as an open office, but with extra additional micro-stresses every day that really add up over time to make your working day a misery.
I think the line of thinking was to try and reduce the number of desks/space needed.
The idea I think - and it is perfectly valid idea - is that most of the time only ever about 70-90% of people based in an office are actually physically there. The rest of the time they are on vacation/training/client-meetings/working from another office/working from home etc.
So there are a LOT of empty desks any day of the week, so why pay for office space to accommodate all of your staff when it is very, very rare for 100% of people to be there?
I understand the rationale, but in practice it really sucked.
Some suggestions for improving non-designated seating would be:
* Run things at a more generous margin (e.g. space for 90% of employees rather than 75% - made up numbers but you get the idea)
* Sort out issues with equipment - either through daily checks of everything or a more stream-lined approach to getting faults fixed (i.e. dont go through "raising a ticket" ball-ache, but something like put a rubber-duck on the desk or something then someone comes and checks out everything, or have floor-walkers who can be grabbed ad hoc)
* Have a STRICT no-camping policy, and clear the desks Every. Single. Day. so that anything left behind is put into lost property bins at the end of the day, then given to charity at the end of the month if not claimed.
* Clean & Tidy the desks up every day so it doesn't look like an explosion in a hacker's bedroom every morning.
* Anchor specific teams in specific area - i.e. allow people to go anywhere if they want, but give some teams designated spaces where they get priority - e.g. "This is the QA team area", or "This is the test team area".
* Allow people who need specialist equipment (e.g. developers) to have fixed desks with their equipment.
I don't know about anyone else, but for me that would tank the productivity even worse than the open plan.
I have to be at a particular place in order to get anywhere close to "the flow". There are currently two such places: my desk at work, and my desk in my man cave at home.
Whenever we move offices, it takes me weeks to get back to 100% again. I suspect I'm not the only one. Simply put, with no designated desk I would never reach peak productivity at work.
This. "No designated desks" is even more retarded than open plan offices.
I want my dual-screen setup. I want my mechanical keyboard. I want my optical mouse with high precision. I want my Herman-Miller chair. I want my tea pot and my mug. I want my notebook and my pens. I want my bluetooth audio headphone with the charger. I want my phone QI wireless charger where I just put my smartphone.
I don't care about open plan: yes, you're being interrupted, but that's the rule, and this does improve communication, even if I hate being interrupted.
Stay tuned, folks. In ten years, we'll have a "Is the no designated desks layout dead?" article on HN.
I saw long back in a Microsoft job ad in some computer magazine that one of the perks they offered devs was "a door" or "a room with a door" :)
Some years later, I visited an MS development center in Hyderabad, and was invited to the offices of a few devs - they actually did have a decently large room each as their office, with enough space for more than one desk, many computers, space for many books, etc., and still some free space in the middle, plus a whiteboard each, etc.
Did anyone ever actually believe this nonsense about open offices "fostering creative and egalitarian work environments"? Ive worked in my share of open office environments and not once was there even any pretense of high ideals behind it. It was pretty much "yep, we're a startup/penny-pinching corp and we're not going to spend a nickel more on office space than we have to". And so open office it is.
Many people at Apple don’t have private offices today. I think this may only be true in some of the main IL buildings. I’ve been in open plan for two years now since moving to Sunnyvale and still dislike it.
I think you're right - I interviewed with 3 groups onsite at Apple, and two groups seemed to have cubicles. I ended up choosing a group in IL1, which turned out to have private offices/offices of two. At the least, I know this is true of IL1 & 2.
I really don't buy it considering how much money companies spend on office space. Like why he hell would you have offices in Greenwich Village (http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-new-york-office-tour...) instead of say FiDi. It's not only be much cheaper, but an easier commute to places peopled live, like Brooklyn.
So at the core, the cause of open floor plans is too many open floor plans. And the more people that switch their space to offices, the more spaces will be available on the market for 1 year sublets. But that's not what's available now, anywhere.
"A startup is a company designed to grow fast" http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html
Construction sucks and is both a time and money sink. You can literally have a crew show up and build a big cube farm in 1-5 days.
It's really the same argument as "why would anyone pay outrageous fees to Amazon for slow, shitty VMs?". The answer is that when you factor in the cost of a data center facility and the people to build and run it, it turns out that AWS is a good deal after all.
Installing a drain pan? Retiling?
I thought for an office, you need to frame w/ some metal studs and drywall, doors, and maybe blown-in insulation to abate sound.
Not nearly as complex or skilled an endeavor.
For example, at least in NYC, the fire code dictates you need sprinklers and annunciators in every space, which increases the cost and complexity of the fire system. Plus, HVAC is much more complicated in office setups, as you can't rely on a large mass of air mixing to normalize temperatures, and have to manage longer vent runs with more exit points.
Then there's the problem that in a lot of buildings, particularly in urban areas, there's a relative paucity of windows, and people find windowless offices less desirable, making it harder to design office plans that don't shortchange big chunks of the employee base. One benefit of open plans is its a lot easier to give employees some view of sunlight and the outside.
Your budget gets wacky when you're stiffed paying $75/linear foot for bullshit like plastic wire moulding.
Call me cynical, but it's obvious that per-person cost reduction is the driver of this logic.
Especially when you consider the base square footage per person in an open office plan is around 60 square feet.
It's amazing that the escalating competition in pay and perks never seem to include space to get into the zone.
A tech company in a prosperous city can buy you all the 4k Dell Ultrasharps and Macbook Pros a person could want without breaking a sweat. Another couple feet of desk, on the other hand, could turn you from a net creator of value to a net destroyer of value. It's as unaffordable to the company as the salary bump that could put homeownership within reach.
I'd love it if someone would offer me a private office, parking space, and ability to live in a market with closer to median home prices, but the industry is very clearly trending in the opposite direction.
I see companies was so much money all over the place that it's a bit hard to believe that assigned desks would be such a hardship for them.
I think you could fit about four of these workstations into one of our conference rooms. So giving people private offices the size of our conference rooms (any smaller would probably be a code violation, and at least inhumane) would cost about $60k/head extra. Maybe less, since some fixed costs like bathrooms and kitchens wouldn't necessarily grow.
Regardless of how the fixed costs play out, it looks like each 3-5 offices could buy a whole additional programmer. We chose the extra headcount rather than the offices.
Or your company is really getting screwed.
I honestly don't think that's crazy money, but you also have to plan for growth. This makes things a lot harder. If you think you are going to grow from 4 developers to 20 in the next couple of years, then you need to make sure you have access to space. Moving offices is usually traumatic, so it's a cost you need to balance.
TBH, I've only ever experienced that much space once in my career. Normally I've had about 60 sq ft and I've had much less in some jobs. My experience is that the extra space is definitely worth it. There shouldn't even be a question about it.
I think the problem is more that it is hard for the people-with-purchasing-power to understand that productivity in knowledge workers can very dramatically. Spending $10K per year on working conditions can easily save you $100K in salary (given current SV salaries) -- you can go with a lower head count and achieve the same amount of work.
But it's not just that. I'm a big proponent of small head count. The communication overhead for large teams can be crippling. When you look at trying to increase production by improving code quality -- it's practically impossible with large teams. If you never speak to half your team mates, there is no way to reach consensus on design approaches. There are ways to mitigate these kinds of problems, but I have to stress that I have never seen successful mitigation strategies in non-open source projects. In fact I've never even seen them attempted because the overwhelming bias is that more programmers == more productivity (amongst people-with-purchasing-power).
But even as I type this, I can see how it is scary to spend money on working conditions. Let's say you are bleeding cash (like most startups), or you are eeking out low single digit percent profit (like most establish companies). You've got some cash to invest and so you think, "We need to raise revenue. To do that, we need the product to have more capability". It's a pretty gigantic leap of faith to conclude "Instead of growing the dev staff by 10%, I'm going to spend that money on improving working conditions". And even if you do, you have to repress the very next thought, "Hmmm... dev staff comprises 10% of my workforce. WTF am I going to do when the sales people demand the same working conditions? If I refuse, all the best ones are likely to quit in a huff".
[0] - https://medium.com/initialized-capital/the-outlook-for-bay-a...
$7000 per month, not $700. $84k/year.
I get paid well above market rate, I own a home just outside Boston, my macbook pro had an issue a few months ago and the company just issued me a new one without blinking. The company just doesn't give a crap. Open offices are cool and just what programmers do these days, right?
My last company was very similar. 5 people, > 2,000 sq ft, great salaries, open office. The CEO talked about how awesome it was all the time, and actually said he wanted MORE talking in the office. Annoying as hell.
I don't think it's a money issue. I really think it's a culture issue. The only company I ever worked at that had cubicles was my first job out of college and they were actually relatively strapped for cash. The difference is the founder was in his 60's and they were in business consulting, not software specifically.
A thing that used to be standard is now a benefit. Don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining.
The office I work in, everybody gets a door. With all the arguments about economics, I think some people don't experience the same value to closing the door and working uninterrupted for three or four hours every day. I'm certain whatever the walls cost here, it's small compared to the productivity gains.
The office I work in has a number of the options mentioned - privacy pods, and a mixture of zoning and some dedicated desks. All the work spaces have nice monitors but you'll need to bring your own ergonomic keyboard and mouse.
Please please please no. Having "personal" space at the office is just as important as having "quiet" space. I do not want to feel like a drifter, a student in the library, or a tenant in a co-working space, unless I am actually one of those things.
There are designated desks. It turns into high school lunch hour, where everyone has "their seat" and god forbid the ignoramus who trespasses.
It's another one of those "wins" for the corporation - why set up guest stations throughout the business when you can just say "there are no assigned desks"? It even re-inforces the "we are a family, not a company" meme.
But then in the last few years I have always been on projects with 100% pairing so I rarely sit at my "own" desk anyway. And though people's habbits does still lead to defaulting to certain desks, some teams I have helped have started to rotate people's desks on purpose every week so people wouldn't get too attached.
This has lead me to appreciate no designated desks. Though also insisting desk areas belongs to a team and has enough capacity, and even allocating developer desk areas so the desk specs are not missmatched. Outsiders taking up space is still frowned upon. :)
I also have a more lighter office presence. As long as each desks has very decent monitor(s) and a charger, I just move my laptop, my ergonomic keyboard, and maybe the chair if it is good. Takes 1 minute in the morning when pairs change. Also having a good locker near your desk area means I stove my crap in there instead of moving a drawer unit around like a hobo. (Though "drawer jousting" can be fun).
Hopefully, we are not long away from that being a ubiquitous option in the office.
And they made some studies stating that an average of X% of the company workforce time is spent in meeting rooms, so they can cut off the number of desks by X% (minus a small delta).
People will even have lockers to store personal stuff...
I'm looking forward to see how that will work, have a good laugh and quit.
I never understood that logic. These kinds of calculations usually completely ignore the most relevant thing for desks: the (regular) peak number of people that want to use a desk.
At a place I worked for they had 10 people from a company we worked with come in every monday and tuesday. No more desks needed, because "most of the time there are more than enough desks". People just called in sick on monday and tuesday, because there were 20 people in a room that could maybe fit 8-10.
Whenever next someone is going to suggest something like this, I now enthusiastically propose to also cut parking by 50% since the lot is nearly empty 18:00 to 7:00 anyway (adjusted to whatever calculation they are using)
But wait, I have a matlab license and VS installed. So I need to be at my desktop PC or reinstall everything every day. Oh, and to debug some parts of this legacy code, I'll need local admin or it crashes.
No, I don't want to switch to a laptop.
Oh, you can permanently book my desk for me in 6 monthly blocks? Works for me...
It is fun to watch uppity personnel of the SV companies to realize the companies would gladly treat them as the blue collar throw away technicians.
If it's the former, then yeah, I'm bailing, that's tremendously dumb. If it's the latter, then whatever, it's hardly even a selling point.
I hate hot desking. I know it's very subjective but when I come into an office for eight hours a day, five days a week, I like to personalise my workspace. I don't drive, I take public transport and walk, and hate carting my laptop and charger around with me. I want my own space, with meeting rooms and collaboration spaces for when I need those things.
I may be alone in saying so, but I'd happily take a modest drop in pay for a private office.
I've fought tooth and nail to keep everyone in small team offices(< 5 people) and even sacrificed my own STO to gain an extra room for this, allowing our company to make the best possible use of the new (relatively lavish) space.
We've got two small rooms set aside as flex-desks(complete with 2 4K Monitors & Gigabit Ethernet via a TB3 Dock) to give everyone the possibility to work in a 1 person office when its critical, but that combined with our lax home-office rules is more of a best we can do approach than a real solution to the office plan/distraction problem.
The problem stems from there being simply no officespaces available that have a default layout that permits many small rooms while retaining quick access to group/meeting and social areas. This seems to be a result of different design goals of other professions that need to maximise for the most amount of butts in seat per square meter, without factoring in the losses that distractions can cause.
If you want to redraw the floorplan, you have to sign rental contracts upwards of 5 years, something no sensible startup would do and even if, the whole investment is relatively large and needs a lot of focus from the company management to ensure its worthwhile. The expensive part is not the additional room the company would need to rent for each employee, it's the amount of empty space(hallways and large rooms) a company would need to rent to have more small rooms available up front.
And how much does it cost to have your entire engineering team audibly and visually distracted and annoyed 100% of the time?
Environmental factors that decrease engineer productivity may not show up on a balance sheet, but the cost is massive. Can you get an engineer an office for less than $40k/year? Then it's probably worth it. Seriously what is so hard about this?
I work in an open office right now and every day is like sitting in a high school cafeteria trying to get work done. I work at 1/3rd capacity all day, make up 1/3rd in unpaid overtime at home, and my employer is just eating the cost on the other 1/3rd. Making me work in an open office is costing them at least $70k/yr in just my productivity.
My work satisfaction is through the floor, I'm stressed and exhausted all the time and preparing to interview for other jobs. When I start interviewing and eventually move, then they'll also be eating the cost of having to recruit and train a replacement (probably another $50-100k).
For the life of me I cannot understand the degree to which large companies will take huge piles of cash and just piss them right down the drain without a single thought, and yet be so incredibly resistant to giving offices to engineers.
My current theory is that they don't want engineers to have offices because keeping engineers crowded together like livestock in stables serves as a visual indicator of the inherent superiority of their managers and executives.
Editing to add an additional note: My employer thinks I like open office plans, my employer thinks I'm working at 100% capacity and am one of the most productive engineers, and my coworkers think their talking doesn't annoy me.
There is nothing in this world for me to gain by admitting my loss in productivity, complaining about open offices, or being the reason my coworkers can't have fun talking to each other all day. Those options have only downsides.
So again, the costs don't show up on your balance sheet, and every person on your team could fucking hate this open office shit and work at half capacity, and you would never have any idea.
In the meantime, get yourself a set of Bose Quiet Comfort 35s. An absolutely life changing piece of equipment for me at least. If nothing else you will comfortable enjoy the movies on the next flight you catch instead of having to crank the volume to the maximum to barely hear it over the constant background roar of the engines.
That's only if you like to listen to music while you work. If you just want quiet, get yourself a pair of the earmuffs that the airport ground crews wear out on the tarmac. I had a coworker who wore those and the only real downside was that he'd get horribly startled when people were trying to get his attention because they'd have to come up and touch him on the shoulder. Even basically yelling in the vicinity of his ears, he'd have no idea people were right behind him.
No one has any idea, because that isnt a cost which is tracked by the accounting department...
therefore it has zero cost, right?
Right?
> So again, the costs don't show up on your balance sheet, and every person on your team could fucking hate this open office shit and work at half capacity, and you would never have any idea.
If only the managers could... I don't know... manage ? And pay attention to what's going on in their company?
Nah... a good percentage of managers I've worked for spend 75% of their time doing management politics / make-work. Getting things done is a low, low, priority.
Bad management and a sign the company is toxic.
You don't want offices because of feng shui, you want them because of the positive impact they're going to have on productivity / retention / talent acquisition. And yet their rationalizations rarely include anything but real estate costs.
I just don't get it. If a private office would improve an engineer's productivity by 5%, that's over $1k/month in payroll savings they could put toward their 8x8 square with a door.
Now consider that the actual improvement to productivity vs open offices is probably more like 20%, and that an 8x8 square with a door in commercial zoning isn't even close to 1k/month, and that you're also improving your ability to attract and retain top talent.
But don't worry, we have plenty of room for nap pods and massage chairs.
Also since you're in the UK don't forget about rates (local property taxes that businesses pay in the UK). Once you're beyond a certain size this tax will jump from £50 a month to over £1000.
I did have an office in Oxford for £200/month although this was ten years ago and it was a bit of a dump.
I'm in the same position as the CTO above and giving everyone a private office in my company is not even remotely close to being financially feasible. What's more, a lot of engineers actually voiced a preference for open space plans over individual offices.
Cubicles are on the table as an acceptable compromise but given the growth at which we're hiring and growing, it's just not physically feasible.
One is a preference, the other is an outright necessity.
You have not mentioned any upsides of open offices for the percentage of the workforce which require isolation. Please, give their needs equal weight and consideration.
Yet somehow most organizations can swing this for management.
Many other professions factor in distractions in their office space set up. I don't think I've been to a decent attorney or CPA office setup where they were in a shared space or hotdesk situation. Offices layouts can definitely be built for this approach - perhaps you're just noting that nothing's available? Or nothing's available at a price management wants to pay?
> If you want to redraw the floorplan, you have to sign rental contracts upwards of 5 years, something no sensible startup would do ...
If it was a nicely done space, I've little doubt the space owner would have trouble leasing it out again, either to one large org, or to smaller orgs who all want private space. I run a coworking space, and most people who contact me are still really just looking for individual office space.
From a structural standpoint, they're basically fancy cubicles, and made by the same companies as standard cubicles. The most damaging thing they do to the structure is mount the tracks for the glass into the floor and ceiling. But that's usually considered normal wear and tear since it's easily fixable on move-out.
From an aesthetics perspective, they're effectively mini offices and can be done very well, making a space look nice and chic and making employees a lot happier. All with what amounts to some fancy cubicles.
[1]http://spaceplus.com/products/glass-office-partitions/
And with appropriate sound dampeners (either on the ceiling, as artwork or whatever on the walls, or a non-glass side), you keep the sound within one from echoing or sounding hollow. A few setups I've seen involved using opaque glass as a side/separator between alcoves, and hanging sound dampeners disguised as artwork on those walls. Another used faux-walls made out of the same material as traditional cubicles to separate each micro-office, and that material is designed expressly for sound dampening. And works really well if it's floor to ceiling.
How do you quantify the loss in productivity and quality that could be associated with a noisy work environment?
Individual offices are simply not worth it, financially, culturally and physically.
Don't fight the transition to closed-offices too hard, or you'll be remembered for advocating to make engineers' lives difficult.
Have you visited the offices at Google? Yahoo? Facebook? Tesla? Square? Twitter?
They are all bursting at the seams and are fighting on a daily basis with each other to find new space to expand, which is very hard to find here. Same for pretty much all the companies in the Bay Area, actually.
The mere idea of switching these companies from an open floor plan to individual offices will get you laughed at for proposing something completely nonsensical.
Open floor plans are here to stay.
The article links studies, you do not.
Probably you missed the "increasing body of research" mentioned in TFA then...
"According to a study on the cost of interrupted work, a typical office worker is interrupted every 11 minutes. Even worse, people often take up to 25 minutes to refocus on the original task."
"Researchers have found that the loss of productivity due to noise distraction doubles in open office layouts compared to private offices, and open office noise reduces the ability to recall information, and even to do basic arithmetic."
"In a 2013 study about the privacy-communication trade-off in open offices, 60% of cubicle workers and half of all employees in partitionless offices said the lack of sound privacy was a significant problem."
" A study on the association between sick days and open office plans found that people working in open offices took 62% more sick days than those in private offices. And remember all those interruptions that workers experience in open offices? In a survey in the International Journal of Stress Management, employees who were frequently interrupted reported 9% higher rates of exhaustion."
"Clearly, open office layouts aren’t the hotbeds of creativity designers originally hoped they would be. And with office space at a premium, private offices for everyone isn’t a realistic alternative, nor is it ideal. The ebb and flow of effective collaboration requires several types of spaces. As workplace experts outlined in the Harvard Business Review, employees tend to generate ideas and process information alone or in pairs, then come together in a larger group to build on those ideas, and then disperse again to take the next steps."
https://hbr.org/2013/11/research-cubicles-are-the-absolute-w...
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272494413...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21528171
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-biggest-office-interruption...
https://hbr.org/2014/10/balancing-we-and-me-the-best-collabo...
So they're interrupted more frequently that the time it takes to refocus and therefore never complete any task?
No, they just never complete any task while FOCUSED.
They still complete tasks, but distracted, and thus in a sub-par and slower way.
More seriously though, that "every 11 minutes" figure is most likely an average, so there will be intervals much longer than that.
I think we just grew up through the Dilbert-esque "cubicle farm" revolt, and we have negative associations that aren't entirely deserved.
If cubicles are a way to cram more people into a space because offices take up too much room, and open office plan is a way to cram more people into a space because cubicles take up too much room. And yet there's still the sentiment among open-office-plan workers that they wouldn't want to go back to cubicles, when most of the reasons they don't like the open office plan would be solved by cubicles.
It seems like it shouldn't be too expensive to do that...
If they can call cubicles "farms" (echoing sharecropping, drudgery), then we could just as easily and aptly call open office layouts "sardine cans" with all the earned baggage that comes with.
"Open cans"
"Sweat farms"
"Sweat cans"
"Headphones farms"
I hated the cube for years until 2012 when I had my first open workspace job. It was a small shop and space was limited. The next two shops I worked at were also in open floor plan layouts. At least with the most recent one I could work from home 3 to 4 days out of the week.
I have to admit, I started to miss the cube. I don't want to see other people pick their noses. I don't want other people to see me pick my nose if I'm not thinking about it. I hate having another person in my peripheral.
In both cubes and open work spaces, I wear headphones for most of the day. Sometimes the music is paused but I keep them on anyway. Music is really the only thing that keeps me sane in IT jobs.
The taller the walls the more it's like a mini office.
I still get way more work done at home.
I like cubicles because, frankly, my only experience actually working in them was when I was delegated to work for Genentech for a bit (I don't usually work in the US). The cubicles they had were large enough to have a second seat and a whiteboard — you could hold a face-to-face meeting with them, no problem. Oh, and they were designed in such a way that you had to get into one to look at someone's screen. As a bonus, mine actually had a window (I guess guest privilege?), but even the inner ones were fairly roomy.
On the other hand, I've seen places where I (I'm 6"2') just wouldn't fit so I'd have permanent leg pain. Oh, and the screens are easily visible to passers by. Just the pain itself would be enough to hate those.
They seem to have been replaced by cheaper long tables in offices that are genuinely paperless, since all any employee needs is a computer, monitor and chair. In my experience, cubicles usually have a file cabinet and other paper storage, utensil drawer, desk phone, wall calendar and other stuff I seldom see in modern tech offices.
And when it doesn't matter which computer is used by which employee, or everyone carries a laptop and phone with them, enter hotdesking.
Great, your company made a poor decision from a planning / facilities / real-estate standpoint. Quit and go find a job with a company that didn't choose as poorly.
100 square feet per year is $7K/year in SF. It is pennies compare to how open office kills productivity. People who haven't worked in offices or even good cubes may probably don't even know what good programmer productivity looks like or feels like :)
If your teams have no need to be together physically, then THEY HAVE NO NEED TO COME INTO THE OFFICE.
My friend felt this so strongly that he actually rents a private office (that he pays for himself) right next to his employer's office.
It's almost like high school, where you don't have a designated lunch table, but you always sit at the same table. Or at least that's what the movies show, we didn't have a cafeteria.
Hotdesking sends to me the pretty degrading message that people are entirely fungible (probably also called "resources" at these places). I'm opposed to it.
And yes, everyone just sat in the same spot everyday.
Obviously it doesn't have as much in terms of sound dampening effects but the cost nearly isn't as high and there's a psychological effect
Though... cubicles do make it so that you're working in a "pit". So people... start wanting to remove the barriers..... and we end up in open office plans again. Hard to figure out how a smaller company can manage this (since private offices _are_ expensive)
But the architecture firm who designed the space did give a really good walk through of how they designed the space. All their stupid decisions had justifications. One tidbit that fell out of that was that they couldn't put more people on a floor with open plan because the width of emergency stairwells dictates the floor occupancy rating.
So we lost offices, whiteboards, bookshelves, couches, and privacy. There didn't seem to be much gain
A lot of us drive but it doesn't stop having to lug a laptop into the office because you're always on some kind of on call roster for emergencies.
That said that most places that hot desk will also have docks, so, no charger at least.
You're excessively reducing productivity if you require each face to face to require a meeting booking.
One argument: For many kinds of knowledge work, unnecessary unplanned distractions are a huge drain on productivity. Tapping someone on the shoulder is far more damaging than sending them a message they can reply to asynchronously, even if you're defining expected response time in minutes rather than hours. If there's something that really does require face-to-face time, great, plan a meeting.
Another argument: face-to-face communication is so much higher bandwidth than voice or text chat that it's worth prioritizing. Tapping someone on the shoulder and hashing something out over two minutes can save an hour of online back-and-forth.
Both of these are totally true! It's really about how an individual, and a team, work together best. To me, the frustration is that most modern team environments tend to implicitly choose the latter value system without it being a conscious choice.
I should hope so, since the cost of a two-minute conversation is at least one engineer-hour for two people to each get back into the zone and start being useful.
Though to be honest people still asks as that is what humans do. Even though it interrupts flow of others.
How do you make sure that everyone understand that that equipment belongs to you and not The Company? I'm currently resorting to printed labels of my name or initials, but I can't help but consider that that's a tissue defence.
For BYOD laptops/PCs, keep the receipt (which will usually include the serial number) and store a photocopy at the office in a place where you can easily keep track of it. If it's something shipped direct from the manufacturer, keep the box with the shipping label on it as additional evidence. You can also let your manager know that you have equipment that you personally own on-premises and give him an itemized list with serial numbers. For small items like mice, keyboards, etc., they're generally not worth enough to lose sleep over if lost.
Beyond that, the general rule of never bringing anything to work you're not willing to lose applies. Just like any other kind of BYOD device, your employer is not going to reimburse you if your personal hardware is stolen or accidentally damaged, so take appropriate precautions.
Lastly, make sure that you secure _and_ backup data on your hardware at least as well as your IT team does for company issued hardware. Your manager is not going to be at all sympathetic if you lose work due to a hardware failure on your BYOD device or due to malware.
I've considered monitors as well but those provided work well enough for my needs right now.
(At home I have the Acer X34 Predator. The Dell came first; when I realised how good it was for programming I knew I needed one at work.)
At home I have a Benq bl3201pt, which is a 4k 16:9 monitor. It's nice as well, but does have a flickering issue (one side of the screen will flash every 4-8 hours or even 1-2 days).
I've never understood the tendency towards multiple monitors over one larger monitor.
I surround my home X34 with two U2412Ms on an Ergotech stand.
It's a pretty neat setup.
Real 4K monitors are effectively the same price and have a lot more pixels. And you can get them in 27", 32" and 34" sizes.
Sure, I understand why the manufacturers want these odd kinds of resolutions so that they can take defective panels and carve them up differently.
However, why would the users want these instead of more resolution? What am I missing?
At arm's length, on a 27" screen, 1440p is very practical. Getting more screen space than 1080p is what bumped me from 21-24" screens, and it fills my vision enough that if I jumped to 4k I'd either be moving my head back and forth with a 40" screen, dealing with even smaller UI elements, or wrestling with OS scaling.
(And for coding you actually need height more than width, if you think of a typical layout of a code file)
I still have more than enough room for a few buffers on screen.
I value actual real estate over PPI, preferring to run at 100% / unscaled which looks much nicer in Win10. The 109PPI (3440x1440) is decent enough, and I don't have to squint. Furthermore the DPI matches those of the surrounding 16:10 24s (1920x1200) well enough for it not to be an issue.
The ultrawide allows for this nicely; tests on the left, two actual editors, solution explorer on right, and output at the bottom under the editors.
On a 34" 3440x1440 screen I keep IntelliJ at 14px (10.5pt). On a 32" 4k screen I keep it at 15px-16px (~11pt).
You're still only talking ~100 lines of code on the screen at any one time. Maybe ~130 with a smaller font.
Apart from those two issues, the loss of productivity should so obviously outweigh any possible savings. There must be some explanation.
For not bringing my own hardware, security (it's a bank).
> delayed roll out of Windows 7
Is your bank located in Kazakhstan?
Page 6: http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...
http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...
It's a cute idea, but making it OSHA-compliant sounds expensive.
This is something that it is worth being a little careful about,
I kind of miss the liberation of being able to just flip my desk 180 and stare out of the window when I needed to work on something though.
Something like this. Sturdy, office-looking versions were common in my school:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B0119UDUSI
The Steve Jobs building is designed to increase chance of random encounters between people to stimulate collaboration, but these encounters happen in the hallways and the designated collaborative spaces, rather than in people's private offices.
Some pictures: https://officesnapshots.com/2007/07/16/pixar-hq/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CX9OV43o4Ac
Edit: Private offices were first introduced since the Steve Jobs building
Well that's a shame..
I disagree. Privacy pods make me claustrophobic, and since I have some ear issues, noise canceling headphones are painful. Offices are only unaffordable if you don’t properly account for the cost of distracted developers.
I do agree proper meeting rooms are needed also.
Chronic stress is generally and scientifically recognized as a significant negative health factor.
And then there is the longer term lost productivity of those negatively impacted by it. All the way up to premature aging and death.
Although, it must be said, we still prefer to work from home quite a bit. This is mostly due to our large number of remote employees in other countries. If I am working with remote people I don't typically commute to the office.
I'm not a fan of a binary "open office or not" distinction: both can be done well. Dropbox's old office was the best open office I've worked in. Large desks, low employee per sq. ft. density, sound-absorbing foam on the (high) ceilings, teams spaced relatively far apart. The new Dropbox office was a slight regression. Smaller desks, slightly higher employee density, no sound-absorbing material. But it was still mostly fine.
IMVU's open offices back in 2012 or so sucked. Employees were packed together to the point that it was sometimes even hard to walk from point A to point B.
I feel like the most important office quality metrics are employee density and how well sound carries.
Whether or not there are useful collaboration surfaces matters too: cubicle walls are great for stickies and note cards. But that's solvable with easy access to dry-erase walls or dry-erase boards on wheels.
At some point the workplace will just end up an unlivable hellscape where people have to walk to work 20 miles from their triple bunked dorms, and then stand inches from each other for 16 hour double shifts wearing nothing but VR goggles and chord boards. The 12th floor walkup, non-temperature controlled "office" warehouse will smell like fear and sweaty humanity, the only "perk" will be the government mandated yearly flea and louse spray that will rain down from the ceiling and the monthly cleaning of the shared feeding tubes.
During enforced sleeping periods, employees will spend precious sleep time sending tap-code (error corrected of course) to each other the workings of a conspiracy wherein they'll demand 60cmx30cm standing desks, a 12" CRT monitor, 12 hour shifts and 1 day off of work a quarter and a decent burial instead of being shoved off into a nameless mass grave.
I call this book, Apathy Shrugged
Or Frisco, if you want to sell to Hollywood. Mike Judge coulf buy this as a spin-off to Silicon Valley.
Offices are considered a reward for climbing the hierarchy not for actual work by the plebs (you know, those who would actually need it or benefit from it for work purposes).
And certainly, if the senior bods don't have offices then the junior workers will never get them.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-small-business/wp/201...
Bad signals being sent here by any management that adopts this line.
If the day comes that my $DAYJOB employer goes this route, that's the exact day I quit. Hot desking is some of the most idiotic, brain-dead stupid shit I can imagine. I have desk drawers for a reason... so I don't have to lug around every single item I use at my desk, everywhere I go. Not to mention the books on my desk, which I am definitely not hauling back and forth every day.
In fact, I'd argue that, to a first approximation, anytime anybody makes a statement along the lines of "Agile says you do X", you can safely assume that they don't know WTF they are talking about, and/or they are confusing Agile with "Foobar Inc. Fucked-up Agile".
To be fair, I should have stated Scrum as Agile implementation, instead of Agile itself. My bad.
I didn't work in in one, but worked in a cubicle as an intern, then in an office with 3 other people focusing on the same project, then in my own office with a door, now at home. But I can only imagine the sensory distraction and just can't see why anyone thought it was a good idea for software development.
Sure I can see the photo-op image appeal for PR purposes "Oh look at our dynamic startup, working in an exposed brick re-purposed warehouse. So much collaboration, all the time, with everyone...". But then after the picture is taken everyone should have the option to grab an office or an isolated area to do actual work, or separate white-boarding conference room if they are talking or designing something".
I also find it interesting that these large tech companies at the bleeding edge of technology like Amazon, Google, Facebook are selling digital connectivity (ads, social connections, office suites, email, video chat, messengers, cloud infrastructure) -- and still require their employees to be physically present in the same building to do work.
Wonder if remote work in the next revolution in how our economy works. The more things are digitized, hopefully the less we'll be tied to a physical tech hub area. That could have pretty large effects on real estate, traffic, taxes, how developed various areas get (smaller towns might see some development) etc.
Surely, the tools for remote communication are getting more and more efficient, and as a remote worker your success heavily depends on your communication skills.
Still being able to brainstorm ideas with your colleagues face to face is invaluable, and is one of the biggest things I miss working remotely.
IMO it only works on a certain complexity level of software, and up to a particular skill level of engineer. Beyond that, you need more specialized engineers that need more code ownership, and will be replaced less often. They'll cost more too.
Please don't abuse your peers' goodwill this way. Write down your questions as you go, meet about stuff too abstruse to straighten out over email, and add what you learn to the docs so the next newbie will be less of a burden.
That is orthogonal (independent) of the office layout.
I have been both the person who needed to be brought up to speed and the one who helped others get up to speed and I can't think in either case how an open office layout would have made it better.
Just randomly interrupting people every 5 to 10 minutes is not the best approach and that's exactly the what's one of the problems with the open office layout -- they invite those kind of interruptions.
Now if they were sensible and had optional offices in less expensive areas closer to where people could get nice affordable homes, they could get a deal for the real estate and have lots of offices. Also they would need less offices because they allowed remote. But there is a distinct lack of being sensible in general. The execs have fancy offices in downtown SF so demand everyone commutes there and sits at communal tables of whatever.
Tesla recently had a problem with it when they were trying to transfer eng offices from PA to fremont for example.
Transferring people can often mean their commute time increases 30-40 minutes. That sucks basically regardless of whether you currently have a walking commute or hour long one. And it's not like you usually have an entire team staffed only by east-bay residents: do you split the team into two offices? Force someone to suck it up? Rotate teams through offices? All of these options will basically be traumatic for some portion of your team.
Let me fix their conclusion with the cheapest, most employee friendly way to solve the problem.
> Luckily, the solution is fairly simple— allow everyone to work remote.
Otherwise, I'll take an appropriately designed office.
That said, whether it's worth it depends on how you value your time. Not sitting in traffic an hour each day ~20 days/month, if you value your time at even $30/hr (entry-level contractor in midwest, say), it should cover the cost of the extra space.
If not, well, you also have to factor in being able to use your own kitchen and especially bathroom. Ever since working from home for the previous few years, it's so awkward now having to go shit and piss in grungy toilets a foot away from my coworkers and managers. Would definitely pay some big money to avoid that.
Arrange them in pods of 6-8 with one common entrance to the space and put a dev team in one (and windows at the end, ideally).
Easy as that.
the people pushing hotdesking seem to be manager types that spend their days talking to various groups of people.
but it fails completely for some dev types. oh sure you can churn out some css while balancing your laptop on the edge of a table at the local cafe but just try that with a desktop workstation plugged into various bits of hardware while doing hour+ compiles.
[1]https://www.google.com/maps/uv?hl=en&pb=!1s0x89c803629c02a71...
Often it's the average manager who has time to talk and likes to talk loud, so a more reasonable middle ground is to avoid cross-functional rooms/clusters.
At "remote friendly" companies I've worked at in the past, most people were in the office at least 80% of the time- and because of that, there was sort of a general mindset that if someone wasn't in the office, they "weren't there"... which lead to the same sorta assumption that you mentioned.
On the other hand, at the place I'm at now, I would guess that less than half the company are in the office on any given day. This leads to an amusing inversion of what you're talking about, because if a normally-remote colleague needs to come into the office, it usually means they won't get as much done that day, because of the overhead of travel time! :P
At my current company, when I work from home, I'm expected to be working and available from 9 to 5. At a previous company, you only need to be available for a specific time interval during the day, otherwise you can work anytime you want.
If companies got the same tax benefits for building walls that they do for buying cubicles, we'd see more walls, since everyone knows they're better for productivity and office harmony.
What would help enormously though would just be full-high glass partitions between banks of desks - e.g. put each group of 4+4 desks inside a glass "fish tank" so that noise does not propagate as easily outside of that group, no need for doors although that would be a bonus.
You'd not need to radically alter the layout of the offices too much - just a thin sheet of toughened/safety/whatever glass between the banks. Bonus points for making it modular so that the tanks can be enlarged to put 4 banks in one batch rather than just 2 etc. Surely this sort of thing would not consume too much space/money?
I would be concerned about echos within these glass-walled partitions, but then on the other hand I've never struggled with echos in the glass-walled meeting rooms so I guess it might be ok.
Wait what? I thought that collaboration was the minor benefit to what is otherwise just a way of making more people fit in less space.
The biggest actual benefit of the open office is that it can be situated in a much better location than an office where developers have private rooms. Ask 10 developers whether they want private offices (or at least not large shared spaces) and they'll probably say yes.
But ask the same 10 developers in an office in a nice location in SF, London, Berlin, Stockholm... whether they'd want private offices at the expense of ending up in an office park where the rent would be the same for the larger office - and they probably don't.
I'm currently working on a 1 year old subsidiary that tries very hard to be modern (Spotify organisation, brand new offices…), and as part of that modernity went full Open Plan™.
It's not a full blown boiler room, but we do have zero privacy and a good deal of noise.
At my workplace we have a mix of both. We have project rooms (my current one has 6 people) where people are working on the same or similar things. This keeps the noise and visual distractions to a minimum (we have small cubicle-like walls attached to our desks that rise with the desk if you raise it up) while still allowing us to ask the quick question or look at things together if required (of course you need to limit that so that you don't bug them all the time). In my experience this is the best compromise if you are working in a project with a few other people.
The removal of personal desks would be terrible IMO. Many people have said they just like having a desk, but I also have notepads, things attached to the desk "walls", stuff for fidgeting when I'm thinking, 2 monitors attached to my laptop, keyboard, mouse, headphones... I can take my laptop to go sit wherever else, but why would I? I would have to carry around so much stuff or forgo these productivity tools I have. Sometimes I do write with just my laptop in the common areas somewhere, but it's only for a short while. Sure, you could put standardised desks everywhere with the same setup, but then it would probably not match _my_ preferences anymore and thus would be worse for my working.
Putting aside the expense of the space for this -- let's just say it's all worth it if you're building a unicorn company and want maximum productivity on both the individual and team level.
My question is, what's the best way to implement the equipment side of things? It's also really important, I imagine, to offer the best computing equipment, for engineers and designers in particular. Does this "variety of areas" and "no designated desks" approach force us to use laptops and external monitors? Do we not get to use those beautiful 5K iMacs or a souped-up tower? Do you get one and also have a laptop??
Believe it or not this is my main concern. I am ok with designating zones that are "library rules" for focus even if they are not full offices, alongside chattier collaborative areas, a more social cross-team cafe space, etc. It's moving equipment among them I'm worried about -- you can't stick to library rules if you need to cluster around someone's computer to do a code review.
In our case, everyone has an assigned desk in the open office which they can customize however they want, but we also have standing desks and private offices that people can use whenever they want, and those have the same docking station setup.
I guess if you need a really powerful desktop for some reason this wouldn't work, but I think a $2k laptop should be powerful enough for almost everyone. Certainly no one at my company (13 people) seems limited by their equipment.
Instead I predict the death of the office. Remote work in dispersed co-working spaces is even more cost-efficient than an open office.
While home offices are more cost- and time-efficient (no commute, no office cost to employers), I still come into the office despite having a decent set up at home. I'm more productive here even with the open plan, the time lost commuting, etc. And we have had steady enquiries from prospective tenants, all in a similar situation.
Going by HN, not everyone loves open plan, but for me, the advantages of a shared, open office are: people being able to see my screen from afar mean I'm more likely to stay on task rather than get distracted and research holidays non-stop, I enjoy the social interactions with colleagues, and face-to-face is best for collaborating.
I think we'll see dispersed co-working spaces for a while, at least until VR is strong enough to emulate the benefits of working with peers.
That being said the trend I am seeing among banks is to favour cost savings over the efficiency of the business. For instance by moving departments to cities where few people want to go. Lots of people leaving, banks struggling to recruit there, but they seem to go ahead anyway.
Everyone spends time with customers, so hot-desking makes complete sense (and we have a mix of differently sized glass cubes for solo work and meetings, with extra monitors and conferencing gear).
As a direct result, I now do most of my actual work at home, keep in touch via Skype, and go to the office only for internal meetings. It's completely impossible to do any sort of focus work in an open plan office.
The upside of being able to work anywhere, anyhow is, however, completely offset by office politics. You have to literally waste a couple of days a week for the sake of face time and trying to herd things through a miasma of constant interruptions and overly excited interactions (everyone is low on time and concentration, so conversations are hurried and often unfocused).
(Edit: typos)
Most of our equipment is Dell, and those docking station connectors seems to be even more fragile now. I guess (and hope) this will get better when all our laptops will support USB-C docking station..
When working from home becomes the norm, I think change in the office setup is inevitable and I welcome that tradeoff. I would love a modern shared desk setup, as long as all of desks have good monitors to go with them. Heck, group them in pods of 4/8/12 desks and make them bookable just like conference rooms (but for a day).
Honestly, I think open offices are mostly here to stay. Those who dislike it and want isolation, privacy, and less distractions, can always pick to work at home (I know I do multiple days a week).
Unless you can somehow provide each employee an additional budget. But what I have seen so far is that that "extra" budget comes out of the pay roll.
Ironic.
This so-called visionary had no idea his futuristic ideals would be twisted by the drive to increase profit by cutting corners in an economy where people are seen as milking cattle.
Let me work one or two days a week from home where I have a decent desktop setup.
Does it suck and ruin my productivity and drain my work happiness? Yes.
Sadly... it is true.
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P.S. For readers who are a little slow, the point is that if office space is not a cost center then everybody would have an office.
We had an office where they tried this as an experiment. Each desk was sit-stand, had one or two 24inch monitors, a chromebox + mouse + keyboard, plenty of wall sockets easily accessible at the top of the desk and powered-USB port for charging etc. People either plugged their laptop in, or just logged in on the chromebox and were away.
And it was awful.
* People started to have "their" desk where they "always" sit, and left things like coats on the chair, running shoes under the desk, folding bikes (you name it) at the desk. This had the effect of taking the desk "out of circulation" meaning when the "usual" occupier wasn't there for a day people still didn't use the desk, or someone did use it but the usual occupier came in late and someone else was there it was a super-awkward moment of either the first person packing up and moving elsewhere, or the usual occupant getting in a huff with someone in "their desk" and/or continually interrupting the other person when they come over to collect their notebook or headphones or something.
* There were less desks than people. 90% of the time this was fine as usually enough people were on vacation/at clients/on training etc. Occasionally though it meant there was no space and people roamed the office for 15 minutes before having to go and work from Starbucks (if they had brought their laptop with them)
* If you were at meetings or otherwise away from your desk, you would often come back to your desk to find that someone else was now sat at the desk you were sitting at before.
* Even if you found a desk, you were often not near your team. Cue constant "Where are you sitting?" instant messages and people wandering around trying to find each other.
* Desks often had missing cables and stuff - so even if you did get a desk sometimes it was on that one desk where the monitors dont work, or someone had taken the power cable, or the keyboard had a "sticky H key" or something. Because no one "owned" the desks, no one bothered to report the faults to the people managing the facilities and just moved to another desk or stole the cable/keyboard/mouse/whatever from another nearby desk.
* Engineers could not use desktops (since they would have to move them every day, and company policy is no source code stored on laptops) so the computers got given a fixed location, and the nomad engineers had to find a desk to remote desktop into the desktop each day. This is fine for short periods, but day-in, day-out 8+ hours a day looking at remote desktops leads to sea-sickness due to the small lag. So even if the receptionist or admins or spreadsheet jockeys could go and sit in the cool-zones for their work, the engineers were stuck at a dekstop because they need the monitors and stuff to do their job.
After about 9 months or so we moved to a different building due to growing out of the experimental building and went back to assigned-desks in an open plan office which was hugely improved.
Please, for anyone reading this, please please please do not instigate non-designated desks for your workers.
tl;dr - non-designed desks had all of the same problems as an open office, but with extra additional micro-stresses every day that really add up over time to make your working day a misery.
The idea I think - and it is perfectly valid idea - is that most of the time only ever about 70-90% of people based in an office are actually physically there. The rest of the time they are on vacation/training/client-meetings/working from another office/working from home etc.
So there are a LOT of empty desks any day of the week, so why pay for office space to accommodate all of your staff when it is very, very rare for 100% of people to be there?
I understand the rationale, but in practice it really sucked.
Some suggestions for improving non-designated seating would be:
* Run things at a more generous margin (e.g. space for 90% of employees rather than 75% - made up numbers but you get the idea)
* Sort out issues with equipment - either through daily checks of everything or a more stream-lined approach to getting faults fixed (i.e. dont go through "raising a ticket" ball-ache, but something like put a rubber-duck on the desk or something then someone comes and checks out everything, or have floor-walkers who can be grabbed ad hoc)
* Have a STRICT no-camping policy, and clear the desks Every. Single. Day. so that anything left behind is put into lost property bins at the end of the day, then given to charity at the end of the month if not claimed.
* Clean & Tidy the desks up every day so it doesn't look like an explosion in a hacker's bedroom every morning.
* Anchor specific teams in specific area - i.e. allow people to go anywhere if they want, but give some teams designated spaces where they get priority - e.g. "This is the QA team area", or "This is the test team area".
* Allow people who need specialist equipment (e.g. developers) to have fixed desks with their equipment.
I don't know about anyone else, but for me that would tank the productivity even worse than the open plan.
I have to be at a particular place in order to get anywhere close to "the flow". There are currently two such places: my desk at work, and my desk in my man cave at home.
Whenever we move offices, it takes me weeks to get back to 100% again. I suspect I'm not the only one. Simply put, with no designated desk I would never reach peak productivity at work.
I want my dual-screen setup. I want my mechanical keyboard. I want my optical mouse with high precision. I want my Herman-Miller chair. I want my tea pot and my mug. I want my notebook and my pens. I want my bluetooth audio headphone with the charger. I want my phone QI wireless charger where I just put my smartphone.
I don't care about open plan: yes, you're being interrupted, but that's the rule, and this does improve communication, even if I hate being interrupted.
Stay tuned, folks. In ten years, we'll have a "Is the no designated desks layout dead?" article on HN.
Some years later, I visited an MS development center in Hyderabad, and was invited to the offices of a few devs - they actually did have a decently large room each as their office, with enough space for more than one desk, many computers, space for many books, etc., and still some free space in the middle, plus a whiteboard each, etc.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html