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Comment by Apocryphon | Hacker News Reader

Economically speaking, aren’t open offices a necessity for a startup in Silicon Valley? I can’t fathom the rent for an office with personal offices for each employee.

The solution that should make everyone happy, of course, is to just make everything remote.

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Small team rooms for up to 8 people who work on the same project -- promotes collaboration, no pointless distractions, and cost-effective real estate. Add a library room for people who want complete silence, and enough conference rooms for meetings that don't fit in the team room for whatever reason.

This is an amazingly effective setup; I've worked at a company that has this by accident, and nothing compared to it in terms of productivity

Also so much fun. Sometimes working alone is more productive than working in a team of 5 (8 is too much for me), but having 5 people in a room is the best way to learn from others and build something together while not slowing others down too much.

I would never leave the library room, except for meetings. I can't work when people are talking around me.

Edit: What is it about this statement that earned it a downvote?

Not trying to be snarky, but you can't or you won't? At some point do you wonder if it's a problem you should look at addressing?

I'm all about optimizing the work environment, but saying you can't work with talking around you comes across as entitled.

It's not entitled, I just have serious issues focusing when there's other noise around me. I also have trouble hearing when there's background noise (I can't understand what's being said on the tv when the dishwasher is running in the next room, but I can understand it fine without the background noise; same volume).

You can’t or you won’t work standing in a ditch with mud up to your knees?

You can’t or you won’t work in a chair that gives you a mild electric shock every 49 seconds?

Here’s a question: when your work environment is hostile to focusing on work that needs focus, what exactly is the point of distinguishing between can’t and won’t?

The difference is that very few people work in those environments. Many have worked in noisy office environments for at least the past century.

I'm sympathetic to someone who can't/won't work in those conditions. The good news is that, if they're in tech, they probably have alternatives--something which many don't have. Insisting on remote work or other conditions that allow them to work in peace and quiet may not optimize for salary or career. But everyone should at least consider what's important for them.

Keep in mind the person I commented to said they cannot work with any talking going on (and later said any noise). In what world is hearing people talk considered hostile?

I'm in an office today and can hear people talking nearby, is that too loud? At some point it becomes my problem if I'm bothered by something.

Not really, most office space is constantly renovated and reused as companies cycle and grow. Cubicles and rooms are easy to build once and amortize, and they can be very lightweight these days.

Construction doesn't have to be heavy permanent walls either and many places have fully configurable wall construction that is more than good enough to offer privacy and sound insulation.

How big would these rooms be? Because while I don't agree with the cold accounting calculations that lead to startup mgmt. preferring open office plans, I understand that it truly maximizes empty space. To guarantee an office for each employee- I'm not sure how it can be sustainable unless you're working in an office park with enough cheap space.

Doesn't need to be 1 per individual, can group together small groups. Most "open plans" tend to waste lots of space on excessively wide desks, meeting areas, decorations, etc.

It's not so much the cost of construction as the cost of real estate -- it's hard to build an office as small as single desks or (yuck) bench-style side by side seating. Offices have tighter constraints on egress/ingress than rows of desks so you can't use space as efficiently.

Plus, offices/cubes are not flexible at all -- when you start to outgrow your building full of offices (or even cubes), you can't easily squeeze desks together to make room while you seek additional space.

We have some small "phone rooms" that are about as small as you can build an office, and they are super cramped and uncomfortable, I wouldn't want to spend a full work-day in one.

It doesn't have to be an office per person. Small groups up to 8 people can work well and very doable without a big loss in usable square feet.

I suspect most companies that absolutely need every inch of continuous desk space have bigger problems. Organic growth isn't difficult to manage, it's the crazy VC fueled hiring sprees that create real estate issues.

What downsides of a large open office are eliminated with an 8-person room? 8 seems like a lot of people if you really want the peace and quiet of an isolated office, and it doesn’t seem like a 50-person open office is going to be much louder or worse than an 8-person office.

Up to 8, that's more of an upper limit.

Sound levels rise with the size of the crowd. More people making noise, more conversations more of the time, more space to spread the sound, and less individual accountability means people talk louder to be heard and are less considerate of their neighbors, creating a feedback cycle that ends up in a very rough environment.

1. 8 people make less noise than 80 people.

2. Physical security and confidentiality is much better.

3. If teams hold 'stand up meetings' or suchlike without using meeting rooms, they won't disrupt other teams.

4. People who have to make calls all the time (customer support, sales etc) don't disrupt other people.

5. Fixed walls remove the temptation to salami-slice square-footage-per-employee, protecting good working conditions.

6. Climate control becomes simpler and has a better chance of working.

I don't know how true this is for others, but on-task discussion doesn't grate on my nerves like random off topic conversations. If someone is talking about some aspect of the project I am working on right next to me, I can handle that MUCH better than someone in another department 4 cubes away bloviating about what their kid wore to prom or who the Piggers beat the previous night ("YOU SHOULDA SEEN IT MAN!!").

I know that isn't the case for everybody, but I think I'd be quite comfortable in an 8 person war room as long as folks were actually working on stuff.

> they can be very lightweight these days

You mean "noisy".

Someone should start a business renting shoulder-high partitions that you put between desks.

How would they help?

I've been at companies whose answer to complaints about open space was exactly this: shoulder high partitions. Yay, the cubicles are back.

They’re still preferable to full openness.

We used to macgyver particians out of white boards and project posters.

> The solution that should make everyone happy, of course, is to just make everything remote.

Except there exist a set of people who enjoy the camaraderie of talking shit with their colleagues in the office while they go about their worker bee lives.

You will inevitably make those people unhappy with that move and then they will come here on HN and categorically declare how terrible working remote is (for them, but they will omit that detail).

> Except there exist a set of people who enjoy the camaraderie of talking shit with their colleagues in the office while they go about their worker bee lives.

We are working through this right now. Our current office lease is up and the new space is not done yet. We let people also be fully remote, so we decided to go fully remote until the other space is completed. Quite a few people are very unhappy about even this short couple months of being forced remote.

I'm pretty much fully remote these days. But looking back to the long-term job in the computer industry I first had after school, I would not have liked or probably particularly flourished in being stuck in my apartment all day. (To be sure, I'd probably have moved into the city and found different patterns but it's still a bit hard for me to imagine.)

I'd also note that I've known lots of people who basically had jobs that didn't require a lot of in-person interactions but still preferred to come into the office. Of course, that can be largely solved by paying for rental office space for them.

>The solution that should make everyone happy, of course, is to just make everything remote.

http://conferencecall.biz/

Adding cubicle walls to a row of desks barely increases the footprint.

And I'd rather have cubicles than open-plan. Give me at least a smidgen of privacy.

If that was legitimately a concern then why not just have everyone telecommute? Then you get an office for every employee and $0 in rent.

That's... exactly what I was suggesting.

Last time I dealt with this, 20 years ago. The cost of an office for a tech worker appeared to be basically nil. Less than 5% of wages, benefits, insurance. Place I'm in is a 1500sqft warren. Costs $300/month per tech monkey.

Gonna pay $12000/mo for a code monkey? Costs $300-500/mo for him to have an office? The extravagance!

I'm back to an old observation by Scott Adams; Ask yourself why the secretaries chair doesn't have armrests. Cost isn't an issue, the price difference is $50. This is all about status and class not money.

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