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The biggest problem with this argument is that the output of the system as a whole is not improved by open offices. It has all of the same problems that apply to productivity of individuals, with virtually no advantages. It’s a myth that communication is hindered by private offices, as much as managers or PMs want us to believe otherwise.

If devs are burning through tickets yet building the wrong thing, it’s not the office layout that is the problem. So having an open office environment while changing nothing else in that example simply means they are going to build the wrong thing much more slowly.

You are correct that it’s hard to come back to open space after having an office, but it isn’t for the reasons you mention. The reason is simply because open offices suck.

" It’s a myth that communication is hindered by private offices, as much as managers or PMs want us to believe otherwise."

I don't like open offices either but I don't know if you can throw that out there. Private offices offers a degree of separation (so does working from home) that will probably reduce certain types of both beneficial and nonbeneficial communication.

They also often enable meaningful communication because you can have a quiet and focused conversation. From my experience open offices and cubicles are terrible for communication and collaboration.

The people who strongarm every conversation always win in an open office plan because they can 'overrule' people when they are still trying to figure out what they mean.

Those people are ecstatic because everything is working for them.

Many people choose to suffer in silence. So if the office plan is part of their problem they won't complain very loudly. The conversations you see on the internet won't have their input and so what you witness in these threads seems pretty split.

Anyone like me, who tries to play ombudsman, goes around and tries to figure out what people actually think and make sure they get what they need. This is fairly effectively hamstrung by an open office plan because you can't express your fears and doubts in a one-on-one situation. You can't negotiate and coach them to something actionable.

The usual response at this point is "so get a meeting room". Yeah, the thing is that when you take out private offices and put in group work areas, you need to more than double your meeting rooms because you just nearly doubled the number of people you can fit in the building. But that totally ruins your pie chart showing how much cheaper you made your developers, so nobody does the right thing.

(Also, the next time someone increases density at your offices, I highly encourage you to check out the OSHA laws governing the number of people allowed per bathroom stall per gender. It's a good bet your company is violating the rules, or will if they fill all those cubicles)

Both of these ignore the obvious - you don't optimise on productivity locally you need to optimise on output of the system as a whole.

True, but in many cases, one good way to optimise the productivity of the system as a whole is exactly to optimize productivity locally.

Productivity of the system as a whole is significantly improved by communication.

Yes, but being in an office doesn't mean "no communication". Neither does being in an open environment guarantee effective, efficient communication.

Devs in offices may burn through a ton of tickets very productively achieving failure by building the wrong thing.

Same for devs in an open plan environment.

Doesn't sound like you've ever been a good employee.

"Productivity of the system as a whole is significantly improved by communication."

That's an overly-generalized statement. Communication is sometimes helpful, when the people involved are good communicators. Often it's a source of distraction, e.g. email chains with multiple people replying-all to a topic that is at best tangential to what you're working on. There's also an equivalent that occurs with meetings in which people invite everyone they can imagine having any interest in a topic. This strategy has a wonderful way of bringing together a large number of people, most of whom have no valuable input, or interest, in the topic at hand.

The more detailed a job is, the more uninterrupted time it requires. So, if you want quality work and don't want to push the due date, give the person doing the work some uninterrupted time.

I've been a developer for 26 years professionally and, outside IT, I ran a 501(c)(3) of several hundred people. Yes, you can leave people alone to get work done without compromising organizational goals.

And most importantly, open space is cheap. None of the reasons you listed explain an open space containing 40 people working in different roles and teams, some of whom will never ever have a work related conversation.

dev-output-per-sq-ft is one thing that seems not to get mentioned very often. If you can put 4 devs together and get .3 productivity out of each, but with 1/10 the sq-ft for each, the idea is that the company is coming out ahead on ROI.

This is a trope argument. You don't have to be connected at the hip with the rest of the company all the fucking time to make sure you are building the right thing. We are people, not cattle. You can instead do daily standups to make sure people are going in a direction you want. People (Management esp) who never get in the zone, don't fucking get it.

Status, envy, screen size - this is all bullshit. You have never been a good dev.

> Status, envy, screen size - this is all bullshit. You have never been a good dev.

And in one line you've summarised WHY general office workers often think tech people are blinkered and entitled with poor social skills. The personal attack wasn't warranted when someone was trying to explain another perspectives.

I agree with what you are writing but the last sentence should have been omitted. It doesn't help your case.

>Status, envy, screen size - this is all bullshit. You have never been a good dev.

These are all serious people-management challenges that require competent people-managers working in cooperation to deal with effectively.

Sorry, but no. You don't deliver 'the wrong thing' because you're not interrupted constantly. One status check per day is enough to insure that. All the urgent communication that can't wait a day is ego-driven not results-driven.

Therefore once someone has an office, it's practically impossible to get them to not have one any more, even if circumstances have significantly changed.

What sort of change are you imagining which means someone should stop having an office?

Wanting them to be on the floor with others

No room?

That’s the one kind-of solid reason (albeit one which implies bad planning and/or inflexibility on someone’s part). But if so, you’d damned well better be giving anyone doing desk work flexible options for working remotely.

Change in job or responsibilities, when offices are allocated based on status or job description. E.g you’re a manager so you rate an office, and you move to product manager and suddenly the rules say you should be in an open space. Or space pressure gradually ups the threshold for a single office (initial rule is for managers, then managers of teams larger than X, than department heads only...) and your career progresssion fails to keep up. Or change in HR policies...

"E.g you’re a manager so you rate an office, and you move to product manager and suddenly the rules say you should be in an open space"

That already shows the problem. Why are offices by rank and not by need? From a rational point of view the big guys probably dodn't even need an office because they are either in meeting rooms or traveling. I don't want an office as status symbol but as a place where I can actually think clearly.

Well in this particular example, I would argue that a team manager with honest-to-goodness managerial tasks(1-on-1s with members of the team, discussing personal issues, doing evaluations and negotiating bonus & compensation, etc.) is entitled to a private space in which to do it. (to clarify, I was talking about a line manager)

As for the rest, you can argue all you want about status symbols and proxies, but once they're entrenched in the company culture it's next to impossible to change them. Rationality doesn't enter this picture... Or when it does it's through cost-cutting initiatives, and we all know how those are great for morale and boosting productivity.

I know you're speaking hyperbolically, but the fact is: probably everyone needs an office. Thus, there has to be some method of distributing them-- which like every other distribution system in the history of man, will be undermined.

Here’s a quick experiment. Tell your devs what you want. Get the hell out of their way. Identify the people and rituals that are ‘interrupting’ by nature and put in huge road blocks and obstacles between them and your devs. See and measure the difference in output. You will stay amazed.

Man, if programmers ever do unionize in the face of callous management, the managers will really have nobody to blame except themselves.

You aren’t wrong about it being difficult to allocate resources so I can understand where you are coming from.

If it is a money problem, don’t lie to developers and tell them that it is “to encourage collaboration” i.e. don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining.

If management truly believes in the collaboration meme, I fully expect them to share a big office. After all, what could be more important than having the gears of management fully meshed?

Either hire low skilled cooks to make your product and control them rigidly (like McDanals) or hire chefs. You can imaging how unhappy (!) a chef would be if you treated them like a Mcdonalds worker.

There are lots of roles where 'collaboration' improves the outcome. I would cite HR and sales as examples of this.

Overall, engineers think they are Chefs but we all know that this view isn't shared by senior management in many organisations. So to get an exception for developers to share offices while everyone works in open plan would need special evidence. I don't think the evidence for productivity problems for developers is decisive. None of the tech behemoths made it into a big issue - so there's no PR sale of "do it like Google". It doesn't feel like you could tell a CEO that it's _obvious_ that offices are better - it would just sound like special pleading.

You're right that offices are very expensive: the cost savings can be pretty significant. Even industries where it's traditional to have offices (legal) are moving away from it.

Um, I think Microsoft made a point of mentioning that developers had a door.

It will never be “obvious” to CEO’s that limiting interruptions to developers makes a difference if their mental model won't allow them to consider it.

It’s a bit like the use of torture, studies show that it isn’t effective but that doesn’t stop people from employing it and believing it is effective.

A company with big shared tables for developers is sending the message that the company doesn’t think of devs as “chefs” but as “code monkeys”. Developers should consider this when choosing who they work for.

All true. And yet, management has to keep an eye on individual productivity, for at least two reasons. First, optimizing global productivity requires at least reasonable local productivity. And second, local productivity affects morale. You can lose your best people if they consistently feel unproductive.

> Therefore once someone has an office, it's practically impossible to get them to not have one any more

Oh 2002 kicked quite a few asses out of offices and back into cubes.