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Comment by willyt | Hacker News Reader

Architect here. Distraction is an issue for us as well. My ideal office would be along these lines too. Mostly it's just construction and rental cost that prevents it; open plan offices use much less floor space and are simpler for things like HVAC and fire evacuation. If you want to change this to an enclosed layout you need to reconfigure all these systems. Most office space is built speculatively by developers and will be designed to be fitted out as open plan because of this. Most office space that is built for a specific company is also built to this standard because it improves the resale value of the building if it can be sold as generic office space.

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Yes, that is exactly my point.

We have shitty offices, because they are build to suit the real estate market not productivity.

But there are examples which are horrible by design, and not because the property value was important: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/11/30... (first pic)

The employer's financial cost of the lost productivity of an average developer in an open space office is much lower than developers like to think, and much, much lower than the cost of the office with private rooms. By placing people in the open space, companies pay almost three times less in office rental costs (https://www.mikhanov.com/2015/06/08/open-plan-offices-creati...).

In other words, unless you're Sebastian Thrun, Chris Lattner, Lars Rasmussen, Cliff Click or Guido van Rossum, your company doesn't care (and rightly so) about your lost productivity because it just simply doesn't matter.

Gentlemen whose names listed above, I am certain, can have any office they want.

That article only states that having individual office use three times as much space as open plan offices.

It offers no insight in studies how much a single office improves productivity and how that affects overall revenue of the business. I'm convinced it's more then three times of the lease for office space.

And keep in mind that open-plan offices are turning away candidates (see comments in this thread). They are losing talent for optimizing for real estate usage. This needs to be factored in as well.

I think I might honestly prefer to work for someplace that was remote first (only?), and maybe had a day or two out of the week when employees would actually go in to the office if there were planned meetings / group training / team time / etc.

Clarifying my point: the office is time shared within the company. Different teams would have different days /in/ the office.

Linked post entry is complete bullshit:

1. the author's estimate for non-commoditized software development is ridiculously low (0.1%)

2. even then, those 0.1% are at the risk of not getting private/shared offices. Do you want that for people working on medical devices or other fun critical stuff now embedded in your everyday life? Well, too late. They are working in shitty environment right now, I know that because I'm one of them. Maybe one of the reason they are, is because a "manager" read that kind of blog post which comfort them to be happy to do absurd economies.

3. you can have shared office room with multiple people per room. Even somehow big shared office room, if some trade-off are needed (although around 10 people should be a real max, otherwise above that there is no real difference with a big open-office floor.

4. if you want to do an economic analysis, even if the surface hypothetically needs to triple (which I don't believe for a sec, see above), you need to compare lost revenue per developer (or other interesting figures in case of not yet profitable) -- and think about non-linear factors -- to the cost of extra space renting (mostly linear). "Pay[ing] almost three times less in office rental costs" (which again, I don't believe) is not a business goal.

> your company doesn't care (and rightly so) about your lost productivity because it just simply doesn't matter.

The lost productivity of a single person might indeed not matter much if the corp is big enough, but since everyone is sitting in the open-plan office, we're actually talking about maybe 10-20% productivity loss across all employees, which even for a big corp is quite massive.

Open plan

Say about 12m2 (130sqft) per person. In London roughly £50-£100/sqft/annum. £6500-£13000 rent per person. So for e.g. Google in london are pretty central and are probably paying >£10000 per employee in rent assuming they are open plan.

Closed plan

Another article quotes triple the area. Sounds about right. So £19000 to £39000 per person per annum for the closed plan office.

Obviously this is going to be different if you set up in a new campus in a rural location, but tech companies seem to converge on areas with very expensive real estate SF, NY etc.

How do these numbers stack up with the productivity gains you would expect to make?

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