http://iansommerville.com/software-engineering-book/web/work...
TLDR: 100 square feet of personal space is optimal. The highest I've ever had in tech was 81. I miss those days and I end up working from home a lot because of the current open floor plan. But square feet cost $$$ and switching to an open floor plan is an immediate cost cutter. Never mind what it's doing to overall productivity and future earnings, the analysts love $h!+ like this.
Fortunately, executives are not all idiots, so once the more insightful of them realize how much more they get done in private spaces, one or more of them will push back on this. And if employers start treating cubes and offices as a perk, I suspect they'll see lots of converts.
So, we're in a suburb now, $/sqft is less, 2 devs in a quiet room, 2 sales in a different room.
I will not get open plan for my team. 2 persons per 144sqft office seems a good fit to me
The actual offices on the other hand, had almost no sound deadening between them, the hallways way too narrow and it was all-party, all-the-time. People from other companies getting absolutely smashed on keg beer starting at noon was a daily problem. At the one building I went to that had entire floors of conference rooms, you could hear everything from 3 conference rooms over, making phone calls impossible.
It doesn't matter how innocuous the comment is. It can come back to bite you. Example:
You: "I don't like open floor plans."
HR: "Add a note to his file that he's anti-social. If he ever comes back here it'll be recorded already."
Jobs aren't scarce, but talent is. I've never gone for want of employment and Google blind-allocated me into a boring gig I hated. And yes, I'm very anti-social when I'm coding. I wouldn't want to work for a company that considered that a negative trait.
Is that something like "Quit my job at Google, middle fingers in the air," or what?
This is not my experience.
Maybe you've worked with better companies than I have.
HR is driven by perceptions
I feel that a 2 person private office is quite optimal, since we are talking about teams. It's easier to pair program or discuss and even maintain silence when required. Office designers will have to pay attention to acoustics and ensure that there is not much echoing or significant noise transmission across walls or glass panels.
No "Duke" mascots were harmed in the process, though :-)
Lovely park on the roof, great amenities, but cluttered open-plan hell at every desk area.
So if I envision a floor, do you just have rows of 2-person offices with hallways in between?
Requires a decent amount of space to do correctly, though.
I've experienced that kind of environment and it is slightly better than the sea of tables filling a floor but is still very bad. A few of the things I've noticed:
- Collaboration inside an individual team was never a problem with individual offices and so it isn't noticeably improved
- Unless the programming/debugging work is very simple, it will often require intense concentration. With distractions an engineer is less productive
- People waste a lot of time looking for an area to have a private conversation, talk to their Dr on the phone, etc.
- When we had offices, people would tend to decorate them with pictures of their kids, awards, etc. With an open floor plan, the place looks very sterile and it seems like overall morale and interest in the company is lower than it used to be.
- The big issue with any organization (with more than say 10 people) is communication BETWEEN teams, not inside the team. This design of isolating each individual team has led to a lot of inefficiency as the sort of ad-hoc conversations people would have with others on other teams basically stops.
Small call rooms were available throughout to address the private call issue, so there was never any sort of hunt.
When I started work at the company, they had hired a couple of other guys as well, but they didn't have as much experience in software development for an employer (one had done mainly contract work alone, the other was fresh outta college but earned a compsci masters). They didn't have a cubical to put us each in (they were planning to move), so we three (plus one of their more experienced devs as a lead) stuck us in what we eventually termed "The Oven".
It used to be their "conference room" - maybe 10 feet or so on a side, one side glass with a door, the other three walls, no windows. In fact, it was where we each were interviewed. They set up a desk system, put two of us on one side, and two on the other. There wasn't a vent to the a/c system, unfortunately. Four computers blasting hot air, no air circulation save for some desk fans, and four guys in there hacking on code - well, you see where the name came from...
...but we did some amazing work inside that small room, and had a pretty damn good time doing it. We eventually got a portable A/C unit that we stuck in the corner and vented to the ceiling plenum. That helped immensely. Our lead had a weird spotify playlist - that became our music to listen to by day. The lights in the room were kept off, so we only had the glow of our monitors to light our way. In effect, it was a perfect development environment.
About a year passed, and the company moved to better digs. While the new location had certain amenities and such that made it more appealing, at the same time, it had horrible downsides:
Open office floor plan, concrete flooring, lights that were always one, west and south facing windows that guaranteed to pan the sun thru the blinds (which the managers and c-level guys always wanted to have open) and blind you. Massive echoing. Most of us took to using headphones all the time. While we got some good work done, nothing was ever the same, ultimately. The goofy thing is that half the office space was wasted; there was a good chunk that wasn't being used for anything, and we tried to make a case for moving the dev team over there, and spreading things out more so we could have a space to our own (and not have us bothering sales and customer support and vice-versa - who were also in the same space, of course). No dice, no moving on that.
I don't thing I'd want to do an open-office situation ever again, even if the money was better. For me, it just doesn't work.
Third, and I may not like to admit this, but I'd complain quite a lot about the setup in a place nicknamed "The Oven". It might start grating on other people, and ruining the atmosphere.
I guess maybe the key to making this work is actually having teammates that like each other. A lot of devs seem to really hate working near other people, and are very particular about their setup, so I guess for them, individual offices are much better. But if you like your teammates, I'd much rather work in the same room with them than in a room all by myself.
Another great environment was inside an old bank vault. Me and one other developer. No windows, two doors, lights down low, thumping techno music. Ah, bliss...
There is a bit of social chat also, but whenever someone complains, it is immediately stopped - local culture is that way. I find it better then own office, because I would end up isolated there and it is not happening here.
Most of the day there is a silence.
You might be able to convince me that it's e 2.71828...
You want your cube to be just slightly smaller than could uncomfortably fit two people. Otherwise, someday it will be uncomfortably fitting two people.
Wait, that peaked? That hasn't been my perception. I'm curious where you are seeing that.
Then again, I'm someone who's threatened to enact the 6 mph standup meeting wherein the second anyone drops below 6 mph on foot, the meeting's over because how can we practice Agile if we aren't agile? That wasn't received well.
Yeah, you guessed it. An agile meeting.
That said: a lot of places don't do it correctly and really do deserve being called cargo cults.
Still, some process is better than no process.
Versus:
>That said: a lot of places don't do it correctly and really do deserve being called cargo cults.
That's how it always goes, right? Company after company implements some kind of Scrum process, and when it doesn't work the problem is never Scrum itself.
I'd contend that the reason things like Scrum are popular is that it gives non-technical managers things to play with: things like burndown charts, that gives them metrics to measure and show to their own managers. Devs aren't measured by lines of code generated per day anymore. Now it is all about "velocity" and burndown. Old wine in new bottles.
https://www.smartsheet.com/comprehensive-guide-values-princi...
Combine these with Joel Spolsky's 12 steps to better code and I'd call that a winning culture.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...
But that's never how it turns out so "you're doing it wrong" is (and I hate to admit this) a valid objection. Sigh...
The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
No, not mandating stand ups and open offices, but it's used to justify those things...
And of course, the manager of that team has not been promoted in over 1.5 decades.
With Scrum (for example) that turns into a much more sane, smaller, easier to predict and adapt with metric. Which is due to smaller units of work and shorter turnaround times.
Scrum (and agile in general) isn't magic. It's just sane process improvements.
It's also not an all-in-one philosophy. You can take parts from it and still get benefits (usually ends up showing why you should be more agile however).
Simple daily standups, short sprints, and grooming+planning meetings each sprint will help most software companies a lot, even if they don't go full scrum/kaban/etc
I tend to think that the entire concept of waterfall is a great strawman. At some point, "rapid iteration" runs into the cold, hard reality of how companies tend to work. There are definitely still deadlines, even if no one wants to come out and call them that.
I don't want to suggest that I'm dismissing everything coming out of Scrum (and its cousins) out of hand. But I also think that there's sometimes too much salesmanship pushing it. This represents the commidifying of Agile itself, where now there is money to be made in coaching teams, and selling certifications, regardless of what the end result is.
The point of the manifesto and of training is to present the idealized form. All decent Scrum training will point out that, when the rubber meets the road, there are going to be compromises.
The idea is that it's more a frame of mind than a rigid system. If you approach the "cold, hard reality" with that frame of mind you'll still see improvement.
I'll give you a common real world example: having simple timeboxed sprints and daily 10 min standups is all many companies end up doing.
That's a shame but at the same time now that team has better team communication and better tracking of progress.
Will it be as good as it could be? No. Is it as bad as it could be? Also no.
It's a trade off.
The salesmanship that pisses off so many devs is because a truly Agile workplace requires buy in from all levels and know what helps get buy in from management? Certification, training, webinars, and enterprise-y biz-dev seminars.
There's a tendency of developers to think that every part of something that applies to them should be for them, but that's not true. That salesmanship is not aimed at you, it's useful training for you (I'm doing CSD training this summer for example), but that part is aimed at other parts of the company.
When I hear the above argument, I'm reminded of the Protestants versus Catholics scene in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.
It's the only place I've ever worked in which the customer never registered a single bug. They even asked us if we could take over from a different supplier since they'd never managed to deliver anything that worked. When the tests were signed off (and they literally were; the tester signed their name against each test, data records were archived, the paper test steps and signatures were sealed in envelopes for customer inspection on demand) that software did its job from delivery day one.
Waterfall is really demanding and really hard to do well (and it also requires a high quality of customer; if your customers don't know what they want and simply cannot be guided into telling you, I suspect it's impossible), but it sure can deliver. I've never worked anywhere else that managed such high quality.
What sort of pseudocode were you using for this?
That said, I think in the programming world, remote work will eventually become the new office because it's the ultimate cost cutter and greatly opens up the pool of applicants.
IMO a dorm suite like layout would be great... have a pod of offices supporting 20 people with a shared common area.
Leadership got called out at a recent company meeting by someone who commented that noise-cancelling headphone were critical. One of the C-suite evangelists was like "haha, yeah you're right next to my office aren't you." In other words, "I'm so oblivious, I think it's amusing that my loud conversations are negatively impacting my subordinates' ability to concentrate in this 'collaborative' environment'".
My team does not need a collaborative atmosphere. We're not marketers. We're quiet, introverted, methodical folks who need a quiet atmosphere where they can concentrate on writing ops code that won't bring down a production server in the middle of the day. We don't want to have to listen to overheard gossip, ostensibly private phone calls, etc. while we're trying to figure triage a complex issue. But more than anything, it's offensive that they won't just come out and admit that this is being done for financial reasons. We're all adults in a capitalist economy; we know the score.
A lot of my conversations go like this:
Person A: Hey, have you decided what you want to do with [x] thing?
Person B: No, I was thinking [y], but I got stuck with [z].
Person A: That makes sense, what happens if we do [w]?
Person B: That's a good idea, but [v] might be a problem. I'll think about it and get back to you.
Person B sits down and works for a few more hours
If you have individual offices, that conversation might take ten minutes, and it only occupies 20 man-minutes. If you have an open-office with your entire marketing department, the conversation will probably take a full-man hour between all the people who get distracted and the other people who need to chime in.
Honestly, I think easy collaboration works better for programming/IT than it does for sales/marketing/communication, because the problems in IT are more concrete. So I think you are more likely to be able to chime in with a useful comment when the problem is "I'm getting this weird error" than when the problem is "does this have the tone we are looking for?"
In both cases, I think open offices are terrible. 2-3 people per office seems about right to me.
The only place where that worked well was the old-timey trading floor, as seen in Gary Cooper-era movies.
I'm sure trading is way more productive now that it's done from a desk in an office, in the same way that auctions done online are probably more productive than auctions conducted in-person.
Systemically keeping their tastes and station "lower" than that is probably part of what's going on, especially with the bigger companies. Developer pay may (sometimes) approach or match upper-middle, professional-class level, but (self-)respect for developers can't be permitted to reach those heights. Better their conditions are kept closer to, say, mid-20th-century secretary pools.
(This has nothing to do with FB -- I've hated it everywhere I've worked.)
This is mostly false, and to the extent that it is true, it turns out that people much prefer to have the ability to retreat into ambiguity around management's thought process and incentives when it suits them, rather than for the executives to be explicit about it.
The most infamous example of an executive revealing something everyone already knew to be true is Gerald Ratner [0]. After jokingly stating that his company was able to sell things for such low prices because it was "total crap", they plummeted to the brink of collapse. The company was saved only after firing Ratner and changing its name.
Companies where ill-advised executive candor has turned fortunes downward are now said to be experiencing the "Ratner Effect".
Executives are, first and foremost, performers. Dropping the illusion is offensive to the audience. We like pretending.
This reminds me of the time companies used to try to save money by buying low powered computers. They didn't realize that carbon is more expensive than silicon.
There's a big manufacturing plant in town that's been around for decades. One day, a new company comes in and buys them out. The new managers look at the books, and say "Wow! Look at these crazy labor costs! There are way too many senior people here. Let's replace them with new guys, and we'll save a bundle."
So, they do that, and save a lot in labor costs.
After the first year, though, they run into a problem. The plant isn't working like it should. Output is down, and everyone's running around with their hair on fire, trying to figure out what the heck is wrong.
After two days of this, someone finally gets a bright idea: "Hey, why don't we bring in one of those old guys that we laid off?" So, they hunt down the most experienced guy they could find, and bring him in to take a look.
He shows up, and starts walking around the plant. He slowly walks up and down the whole plant, with a gaggle of concerned managers following his every move. Finally, he stops at a pipe at the back of the plant, and pulls out a hammer.
He lifts the hammer up, and whacks one joint really hard. Suddenly, the plant starts working again, and everyone is rejoicing.
The CEO is smiling, and pats the old-timer on the back, and tells him to send a bill for his work.
Well, the next day, the bill shows up. $10,000. "What!" he exclaims, pounding his desk. "Send me an itemized bill!"
The day after after that, a new bill arrives:
Hitting pipe with hammer: $5 Knowing which pipe to hit: $9,995
- Some kind of informed consent (because quitting)
- Separation of space (to prevent jealousy)
- A good way to measure programmer skill (this one's harder)
- A lack of unquestioned dogma that open plan is better
It's not as easy as you make it out to be, but either big G or Fbook could probably do it, given the will (which i suspect is the actual problem).
EDIT: parentheses are hard to match
For example:
>...In 2011, the organizational psychologist Matthew Davis reviewed more than a hundred studies about office environments. He found that, though open offices often fostered a symbolic sense of organizational mission, making employees feel like part of a more laid-back, innovative enterprise, they were damaging to the workers’ attention spans, productivity, creative thinking, and satisfaction.
http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-open-office-t...
Of course writing out programs by hand is also a long obsolete and useless skill — except for interviews at all the top companies, where it's vital.
I doubt it simply because it's way way cheaper to have open floor plans than rooms. Savings on materials, easier compliance with fire safety, way higher density.
One day someone will look up and notice that whole unused third dimension in the office.
I used to joke that Ikea sold queen sized bunk beds (I dunno if they still do, but they did then), and that we could totally get a desk up on top of one of those...
Open floor plans are simply a cost saving measure combined with a way to enforce the internal hierarchy.
Part of that early agile movement was Extreme Programming, which I'm pretty sure advocated for office space per-team and a communal working area with private office space around it.
I use Topre anyway.
This is easy to do and only a little time-consuming. It's easier and faster when you take a cheap Bic pen, pull out the tip and ink tube, and use the body tube to press the spacers down on the stems - it's just the right diameter, and makes the job much faster.
The spacers are cheap, too, being simple silicone rubber O-rings, and as an extra benefit, the rubber eats up a lot of the bottoming-out force that'd otherwise be transmitted up the key into your fingers, which means you type more comfortably as well as more quietly.
I'm not sure where the cultural norm of beating up a keyboard comes from but it's a very inefficient way to type.
Not with my Model M!
/buckling springs ftw...
So I'd say the problem is with both. The open office is the ultimate source of the issue, but it can be compounded by workers who make choices that exacerbate the situation. The reality is that an open office can be quite pleasant if the people working in it collectively make effective choices that take into account the well-being of the group.
I have a mechanical keyboard at home (Corsair Gaming K95 RGB), but at work I use a Mac wired keyboard (on a PC). Super quiet and probably the best performing scissor switch keyboard.
edit: proper Mac keyboard type
There are mech keyboards with more quiet switches. At least use one of those.
It doesn't bother my coworkers, but I also have an actual cube, so there's at least a little bit of fabric-covered foam inbetween us.
He was offended. I kept my board.
Again, the root problem is the veal-fattening pens.
Also way louder than a MBP keyboard, for example.
> they're still louder than most decent non-mechanical.
No, that just shows tacit acceptance of the situation and exacerbates the problem over time. If you work in an open plan environment, the best thing to do is use the noisiest keyboard you can find, wear headphones that intentionally leak noise and listen to your music loud, do as many personal phone calls as you can from your desk, etc. And then, when people complain, point out that you didn't ask for an open plan office, and ask them to go to their manager and explain how horrible open plan is.
Worst case, you get fired. Big deal, now you have a chance to look for a place to work that isn't brain dead.
I agree with you that open office plans are the problem, but your keyboard makes that problem worse.
My E-mails are pretty short :-). However, I don't enjoy you telling your coworkers about your weekend every Monday morning.
Open offices are just stupid. They cause conflict where there shouldn't be.
> Open offices are just stupid. They cause conflict where there shouldn't be.
Yes.
I would kill someone for a walled office, even if there was a high risk of life imprisonment, as long as there was some assurance that the prison cell would have walls.
I had to invest in a pair of Bose noise cancellation headphone a long time ago.
But typing on a model M is pure sex.
If you don't like them, complain to your manager that you need walled offices.
The anecdotes are correct: with a proper mechanical keyboard, you don't have to bottom out on the keys, and only have to press enough to make them click. Once you retrain yourself to do that, then you're putting a lot less stress on your fingers, compared to rubber-dome keyboards where you're forced to mash the keys down until they bottom out.
As others have replied, the problem isn't my typing, it's <40 square feet of personal space and no noise partitioning whatsoever.
Get a proper ergonomic keyboard like the microsoft sculpt if you actually care about the health of you hands.
Mechanical keyboards are cool, which is why I own one, and when I had an office why I used one every day. But mechanical keyboards are like the loud exhaust that people put on their cars. Yeah, there is a reason that some cars have loud exhausts, but that isn't why you put that on your honda civic.
If you type a lot over a prolonged period of time, yes. If you type in short bursts (like most programmers), no, mechanicals are actually useful.
> Get a proper ergonomic keyboard like the microsoft sculpt if you actually care about the health of you hands.
Again, if you are an old fashioned typist working on memos, this advice holds, otherwise....
Is this really how most programmers work, though? When I'm learning a new language or tool, sure, but after that it's mostly just the activity of writing the code.
Yes, well, I guess it depends on how mundane the coding is. It is possible that a programmer spends a lot of time typing and not a lot of time thinking, but then it is probably brain dead boilerplate that should have been automated somehow.
> When I'm learning a new language or tool, sure, but after that it's mostly just the activity of writing the code.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "writing code".
1) You are not an authority on all programmers, or even most programmers.
2) The primary way that programmers express their work is by typing. The idea that programmers don't do very much typing, or that typing comfort/safety isn't relevant to programers is demonstrably absurd.
>"it is probably brain dead boilerplate that should have been automated somehow."
3) This thinly veiled derision is, imho, not constructive/rude. Do you consider the linux kernal "brain dead boilerplate"? Just some quick googling shows that the per developer code contribution is about 11,000 loc per release. That is code that was in the release, and doesn't even account for code that was typed, then removed, then retyped, etc.
Believe whatever you want, but I find the idea that programmers somehow don't need to care about ergonomics extremely shortsighted.
You can write 11K lines of code without continuously typing a lot, especially over a few weeks.
I have a veritable museum of failed keyboards and pointing devices in my closet. IMO there is no silver bullet here. Also to extend your automotive metaphor, my nephew's late model diesel pickup gets 30+ mpg. Appearances and brand new shiny can be deceiving.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CYX54C0/ref=oh_aui_deta...
If someone were to lend me this combo for a couple weeks, I'd be happy to evaluate it, and if it worked, I'd buy a bunch of them. But I have a working solution right now so I'm not really in the market for an upgrade.
You may have to be logged in to see it?
Cheapest I'm seeing now is $80 :( -- bummer!
(My order: http://imgur.com/fUyKeIC)
I haven't found a larger traditional mouse yet.
[1] https://ergodox-ez.com/ [2] https://atreus.technomancy.us/ [3] https://trulyergonomic.com/store/index.php [4] https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/649yo0... [5] http://matias.ca/ergopro/pc/
Which are beautiful, and make wonderful noises, but are certainly not built to prevent the type of RSI that comes with typing.
I had this conversation with my coworker a few minutes ago who uses an ergonomic keyboard. I believe that the amount of stress you're going to have from a non-ergonomic keyboard is directly related to your posture, which is directly related to your anatomy. For instance my coworker is very wide and he prefers to spread his elbows out while typing.
I, on the other hand don't spread out my elbows that far out, so I don't really feel that must stress while typing for long hours.
One thing which I do notice is that I type by moving my right wrist around (and most people do that to keep their wrists free for grabbing mouse and other things). But if I try doing touch typing where I keep my fingers on the homerow, then my wrists hurt.
Maybe I'm going to give ergo-dox a shot to see what am I missing.
I've definitely been on a bit of a kick lately trying to make my work setup as healthy as possible.
I think out of all of those, having the monitor at the right height, vertical mouse, kinesis advantage and then using a pomodoro timer are the best bang for buck. The standing desk is nice but not really essential in my opinion. Just getting up and walking after a 25-30m pomodoro session is good enough.
I am easily distracted by sensory stimuli. It ruins my concentration. At home I have some nice in ear noise isolating ear buds and some of those ear muffs designed for yard work. My children can, and do, reenact world wars on the hard woods above me and I can't hear it.
If I ever were in an open office, when I do deep work, those things would stay on.
So I sympathize, but the open office puts knowledge workers who need to concentrate and type in a lose / lose environment.
I've had a friend on the wrong floor at one company who had to switch to MX Browns with o-ring dampeners.
If a company banned me from using a mech keyboard entirely, I'd start looking for another job.
Personally I'd rather listen to mechanical keyboards rather than people having meetings at their desks, I can fairly easily tune out non-human sounds... Unfortunately not many people seem to have them despite my office being the 'geekiest' in the Seattle region. sigh
Still I like the newer quietened version, so I'm considering buying some more for my home keyboard (it is an identical model).
I'd recommend to get used blue and try it out.
I use green switches with o-rings in a semi-open office layout and the only people who have ever noticed it are other mech enthusiasts. Browns with o-rings would be even quieter than greens.
People in the office are still using old-school typewriters for certain official documents, so I expect I can get away with it. If I can't concentrate due to existing office noise, I may as well have some fun. Thanks!
Because markets. In sales you learn fairly quickly that price isn't determined by cost or value added but exclusively by what the market will bear. Since US labour has little negotiating power even a programmer will have to buy quiet space.
I'm so glad I did it. If I can get just a few more hours of productivity each month then the upgrade pays for itself.
You certainly have never tried to write interruption handling code...
Slight tangent:
This isn't even true, context switch time has not scaled (equally) with improvements in processing power (IPC, freq and functional-unit parallelism). A PIII in 1999 spent proportionally less of its operating wall time performing a context switch compared to modern processing. Turns out flushing TLBs and the like is not fast. This is why managing interrupts properly is very important on server class hardware.
Cubes cost money, but Silly Valley CEOs have done such a great job convincing gullible young workers that they actually like open offices.
No, they just think they're more deserving of it.
But an office and the opportunity to live somewhere I can spend less than 50% of my income on a reasonable apartment, I'd take that offer in a heartbeat.
Cubes can be setup properly. They don't need to be row after row after row of cubes. We have them setup in pods that hold 6-8 people, one pod for each dev team. Only one way in or out, so there's no traffic moving through, with a small table in the middle that's mainly used to eat lunch or store treats that people bring in.
It's just a matter of fads and fashion. Cubicles are "so 90's", while crappy tables thrown together in a loud frat house romper room is "2000's".
I understand that each generation has an impulse to differentiate themselves from the previous one. But in this specific case, it is absolutely a productivity and quality-of-life downgrade. The purpose is for management to save money, period.
Is saving money the real purpose, or the fig leaf for the actual purpose?
If saving money is the real purpose, then Work From Home (WFH) drops putative facilities costs to zero. Forget shaving a square foot here or a tenth of a square meter there: send everyone to their home offices, drop it to zero, call it a day, and collect the bonus check on your way out. No leadership recognition of the valuation assigned to the negative productivity impact of open offices signals that there is no quantified impact for WFH either, despite claims to the contrary. One can't have it both ways, claiming one can measure the productivity impact of WFH and not open offices. In the absence of actual quantification, if saving money on physical plant/facilities was the real purpose, WFH would win.
But to my point about the degree to which fads and fashion come into play... it's bizarre that so many peers either:
(1) argue in favor of open floor plans ("More collaborative! More fun! Not all old and stuffy like cubes!"), or
(2) argue in favor of work-from-home ("More productive! Less distractions! Not all old and stuffy like cubes!"), or
(3) both, from one sentence to the next.
Open floor plans and work from home are POLAR OPPOSITES. The only thing they have in common is that they're both "not cubes". So it's bizarre to me that there aren't more moderate voices calling for on-prem workplaces of higher quality.
If I was on a management team of a category killer that figured out doing the opposite of what everyone else was doing was helping my company, then I wouldn't be broadcasting that. In this case, if I figured out that high quality workplaces (whether at home or on-prem) conferred substantial competitive advantages, then I sure wouldn't be telling my competitors that.
If it came out that Apple for example, consistently put in high quality workplaces for the teams that developed their category-killing products, and took steps to hide that fact from the world because they recognized its competitive advantage, then there might be some recognition and cargo culting. Much of management is a social activity as much as an analytical activity.
Have you been in a cube? You don't have to watch other's pick their noses. It's way better than open workspaces.
~a CEO