Is the open office layout dead?
blogs.dropbox.com
blogs.dropbox.com
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.
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.
Call me cynical, but it's obvious that per-person cost reduction is the driver of this logic.
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.
Your budget gets wacky when you're stiffed paying $75/linear foot for bullshit like plastic wire moulding.
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.
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
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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)
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.
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.
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.
(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.)
(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.
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.
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.
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.
I've considered monitors as well but those provided work well enough for my needs right now.
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?
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.
http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...
Page 6: 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,
Something like this. Sturdy, office-looking versions were common in my school:
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.
If your teams have no need to be together physically, then THEY HAVE NO NEED TO COME INTO THE OFFICE.
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.
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.
Though to be honest people still asks as that is what humans do. Even though it interrupts flow of others.
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.
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.
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.
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 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...
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
More seriously though, that "every 11 minutes" figure is most likely an average, so there will be intervals much longer than that.
No, they just never complete any task while FOCUSED.
They still complete tasks, but distracted, and thus in a sub-par and slower way.
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.
Don't fight the transition to closed-offices too hard, or you'll be remembered for advocating to make engineers' lives difficult.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps the most powerful and popular trend in the
move away from open offices is an increased number
of small private spaces
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
----
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.