Comment by PietdeVries | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PietdeVries | Hacker News Reader

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The thing is that this working-from-home people significantly impact the efficiency of your office. It's a trend (could be the open-office space started it) but resulted in people easily working 2 or more days from home. That implies that any desk you have is empty about 40% of the time. Or: your entire office is not being used for 40%...

So when bosses realised they were throwing money away, they came up with the open office with flex-desks: no-one has a fixed place, you can sit whereever you want. And there are less desks than people.

That can work out quite well (I work in such an office) but it depends greatly on ehtics or rules: no TVs with soccer games, no speaker-phone (but only headset) and rooms available for discussions or phone calls. And there is a general area (quite large) where you can drink your coffee and discuss the soccer matches or Tour de France results...

For me it works, but I can imagine that without the requirements listed above it can be a cumbersome workenvironment.

“flexdesks” or “hot desking” is just about the most juvenile reaction to working from home I can imagine.

If a company believes it will gain more from “saving money” on open plan offices or hot desking than it will from just paying more to facilitate more and better work from employees through buying the best tools (a private office is a tool like a keyboard or ergonomic chair), it’s self-evidently a company to get far, far away from.

Consider “flex keyboards.” Management realizes that not all keyboards are in use all day, because people are in meetings, at lunch, etc.

So nobody gets their own keyboard. You have to locate an unused keyboard at the times when you need to type.

This is no different than “flex desks.” In both cases (keyboards, desks), the unit cost of providing the dedicated resource to the employee is trivial compared to far more pressing concerns, like producing working software to increase revenue, or bullshit executive compensation.

Even real estate costs for private offices in dense urban areas are trivial by comparison.

It really depends.

I work mostly from home but I do have a cube in the local office. If we got tight for space, it would absolutely make sense to give away my space to someone who would use it more and have me just grab an open chair for those times I have meetings or other reasons to be in the office.

If I had a private office, I would still work from home most of the time. A private office doesn't eliminate a commute.

> “If we got tight for space, it would absolutely make sense to give away my space to someone who would use it more and have me just grab an open chair for those times I have meetings or other reasons to be in the office.”

Why would this make more sense than moving to a bigger office or building more space for the new employee to have a desk without taking yours? Cost is absolutely not an answer.

Because moving to a bigger office has a whole bunch of costs beyond rent. Costs which negatively affect revenue!

But the original hypothetical situation has the baked-in presumption that the company wants to and is able to hire more people. If they can afford to do this via space expansion, they should (for purposes of the bottom line).

If they can afford to hire more but not to expand and give each worker adequate space, it suggests the company is just wrong. They actually can’t afford to hire more and would be creating problems if they do. Rather, reinvest what would have been spent on crammed headcount into the ability to expand spatially and later increase headcount with adequate space.

If a company, even a sink-or-swim growth mode start-up, believes it needs to hire people faster than it can provide minimally adequate space for them, then the company is just wrong. That is just not a thing.

Costs which negatively affect revenue!

Costs do not affect revenue. Perhaps you mean profit?

Cost is absolutely an answer. If I'm not really using space and am completely indifferent to whether I have a permanent desk or not, why on earth would it be rational for the company to spend the money, time, and disruption associated with adding additional real estate?

I'm not arguing for hot-desking as a standard approach, which indeed likely negates any benefits to teams being co-located. But for people who are allocated space that they rarely use? Why not?

See my other comment, < https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17519080 >.

Why is cost not an answer?

Because the costs involved are tiny compared to lost productivity based on developer salaries and, more obviously, because these same companies spend millions on coffee stations, roof decks, alcohol-focused parties, etc.

People who think cost drives open plan office choices seem to think corporate management are too stupid to ask, what is 10% of our total salary base for these workers. It makes no sense. People have been measuring productivity and morale in knowledge work for a hundred years. Of course they can directly compare cost savings on floor space with metrics correlated with productivity lost to worse workspace, and tie it to the bottom line.

The observable spending habits of companies suggest cost utterly cannot be a driving factor here.

By your logic, the flight school I'm currently attending should have one helicopter per student/instructor pair since we could get more flying done without having to schedule helicopters. From the point of view of the instructor and student this is a fantastic idea. From a business standpoint it really doesn't make much sense. They do, however, give each student their own headset and view-limiting devices. We could share those, too, they're only used when the helicopter is used.

Can you think of reasons why maybe each student doesn't have their own helicopter but does have their own headset (assuming they were cleaned properly after each use and hygiene wasn't a concern)? Those same reasons apply to the office/keyboard situation.

Providing one helicopter per student would be cost-ineffective for flight schools.

Providing one office per knowledge worker would be cost-effective for companies.

Flight schools have a hard time surviving if they make grossly wasteful or negligent expenditures for the sake of politics and optics, because they are low-capitalized businesses with often much lower revenue per employee and less growth opportunity than highly capitalized tech companies.

A high capitalized tech company, on the other hand, can piss away money on dipshit open floor plan offices, roof decks, $500,000 Christmas parties, etc., and the executive committee doesn’t care. They have very little incentive to optimize that spending and often make spending choices based on the capricious and whimsical desires of an adult-baby CEO who is more like Veruca Salt than a competent business person.

I don't think that's their logic at all.

The logic is that, compared to the salaries of software engineers and revenues of many tech companies, desks and keyboards are extremely cheap.

The cost of a ~$100k engineer spending 10m per day looking for a desk, with 8h day and 200k total employee cost to employer, is ~4k/yr. Paired with the cost the company pays in developer annoyance potentially causing higher turnover or lower productivity , buying more desks and office space is likely the cheaper option. One helicopter per student is obviously not so...

The cost of an helicopter seems like an obvious reason.

As much as I share your sentiment, fact is that these trivial savings show up nicely on someone's target and the deteriorating effect shows up somewhere else, if at all.

The open office I am in ATM is one such places where a handfull of people (loud, discussing totally not related to work, factually completly idiotic conversations) spoil it for all others. There is nothing to be done about these people since they've been with the company forever and a day and are thus basically exempt from all rules (be it noice or dresscode).

5 Years ago I have actively stoped working from home to segrate work from family. Now I have found myself to do at least 1, often 2 days from home again and planning to change employer. No I will not tell them the reason since I can not affort to burn that bridge.

TL;DR Manager A makes a good impression by saving some office space, Manager B looses employees but will never find out why.

I don't understand why you can't tell them the reason you're leaving without burning a bridge - "I don't work well in an open-office environment, I found I was constantly distracted and inefficient. It's just not the right environment for me to thrive" isn't untrue or pointing fingers, and it's valuable feedback for your employer.

I think perhaps bigger than the open office problem is grand parent point seems obvious to me in our current society. Either you are 110% on board with what the company wants, or you aren't a team player (and implied a bad person/worker/resource). It is daring to question them, daring to say they did something imperfect.

Or more simply, if he wants to return to this employer in the future and they have the same or similar office space, they will surely ask him why he thinks that he will now, somehow, be able to work well in in that environment that was so problematic for him in the past.

Not criticizing this person, I despise my open office environment too. I also wouldn't (and didn't) tell tell my employer about this when I left for a few years in the past for the same reason.

There's a risk the word gets out that you don't work well in team, can't adapt to a new environment or can't focus under the simple stress of office life.

Communal keyboards are worse than communal toilet seats.

Especially when some people eat at their desks.

Mice too. I'm left-handed with long slim hands; the mouse I love most is no longer being made (damn it Logitech! get me that G3 mouse back!). Any generic mouse is torture. Right-handed mice are torture.

Generic rubber dome keyboards are torture — chiclet style keyboards surely violate a bunch of Geneva conventions.

Never mind the filth and grime.

I will keep a mouse and keyboard in the office under lock and key somewhere if I end up in that situation.

We used flexible desks for years as a consultant shop, but where given actual offices and could easily reserve meeting rooms. That's a much better cost / productivity trade-off.

Really though the cost of office space vs people making 100k/year means you don't actually need top optimize it that hard. The core problem is they tend to come out of separate budgets, so some middle manager can write down they saved x million on a review / resume while costing the company 3x that indirectly.

PS: Used Model S's are also something to keep an eye on.

Too many people work from home who don't need to. Some people have reasonable commutes and don't bother showing up in the office most of the week. While working from home may help your productivity since you don't have to worry about commute time, it has a negative impact on the rest of your team who walks into a half-empty office.

It's just unfortunate that the commute here in the Bay Area has gotten so bad that a lot of people end up working from home.

I'm sorry, what criterion other than the commute time do you use to determine who "needs to" work from home? Increased productivity while working from home does not simply stem from lack of commute. It's all in the article.

Why bother with offices at all then? Why are companies paying tons of money for office space on prime real estate in SF, or dishing out free lunches and dinners, if people are more productive working from home? Google and Facebook should just mandate that people work from home.

Covered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17506044

I didn't say that commute was the only factor, but it is a major factor. Give each person a private room and eliminate the commute, people will still work from home. It's comfortable, you don't need to deal with your manager or colleague in person, and everything's async so you can focus without getting interrupted by a knock on your private office door.

I have heard that argument before, mostly its by people for whom the office is some sort of social life replacement/ bro club experience. Also there are sun-king-middle-managers who only get that power feeling when a huge crowd of admirers tours the hallways with them.

All of it is completely unrelated with work. And sort of sad, although its a good thing, that no matter what happens, humans will needs humans.

I've worked with teams big and small, mostly as an individual contributor, and the issue with not having a good team culture is you get churn. You can't have good team culture when half of your teammates are just at home most of the time, or if you're at home and the rest of your team is in the office. People jump around companies too often because they get jaded, bored, enticed by better offers elsewhere, and without team camaraderie and connections that bind the team together personally, you're going to get a high churn rate.

>You can't have good team culture

There is no need in this.

Well, churn is just capitalism at work. The only stock you gain for loyalty is the laughing-stock, of everyone else who gets rewarded for double-jumping every ship.

This is the world they wanted, when they dissolved unions and other pillars of stability, one mans grape-vine over "Unreliable mercenaries" is another mans freedom of choice.

Here's to Sienna and Florence, their high towers may stand a thousand year or crumble under the siege tomorrow, no-one cares only the chests in the deep cellars are whats important.

All those walls build to create synthetic loyalty- be it out of fear of being law suited for knowledge transfer, or cartels to avoid the rising prices of mercenary's - if history tells us one thing - in the end the war always wins.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Wars

"Wes Brot ich ess, des Lied ich sing, wes Gold ich trag, des Tod ich bring."

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