> I don't want to get stuck in a comfortable rut. (And Google certainly is comfortable, except for open floor plans.)
It's oddly comforting that even programmers of Brad's caliber are forced to cope with open offices. When can this fad end.
It's not a fad, businesses aren't doing this just because it's trendy and cool and they think people will like it, they're doing it because it saves them a fortune and they care more about their bottom line than their employees well being.
I think we're talking the difference between $300/month on open desk space vs $1000/month on an office. It's a lot of money and it adds up, but these people are costing the company a total of $10k-$40k a month
My theory is that open space is extremely helpful to certain types of people, and those traits coincidentally overlap with the people calling the shots at a lot of companies. Sociable upper managerial-types probably value being able to collaborate more easily in open space more than being able to concentrate in private offices.
Plus it's harder to get away with blatantly goofing off if anyone can look over and see your screen at any time, but I dunno how big a deal that is when people are setting their own hours and picking the projects they're working on. At least in my case, I don't give a crap if my teammates have Facebook and Netflix onscreen at all times so long as they're getting their jobs done
In that context, companies' consideration of expenditures will take into account capital versus operational categories.
If you’ve ever heard someone talking about “the color of money” in a business context in regards to different types of incoming and outgoing accounts, this is what they’re talking about.
Whether capex is better or worse than opex from any particular vantage point is so heavily context dependent that I’m unsuited to provide a general overview, but it is easy to see how it could matter when you compare expenses attributable to salary vs expenses attributable to the purchase of real property in much the same way it matters to you as an individual whether you used your finances to buy a house or pay someone to mow your lawn.
Have you ever tracked your time as a salaried software developer? I used to, and used to think it was a stupid exercise. Then I learned that my payroll costs were being capitalized against the project in development. Two years later when the project launched, it hit the books and started deprecating over seven years. That meant my company essentially had two years where my salary wasn’t on their books; when it hit, those two years were skewed over seven.
Have you ever had to differentiate between tracking time spent doing development and time doing support? Support is an ongoing operational expense that can’t be capitalized.
Same pot of money, vastly different ways to split it up.
Would it make you feel better to consider that those dollars aren't really coming from their bank account in any meaningful sense? They're almost always from a large creditor who extended a line of credit, or from the sale of unsecured debt against the company if you're big and bad enough. And that their "bank account" is almost entirely divorced from cash on hand, and it's built up from money other businesses and customers owe them for services?
We assume that businesses are going to be in business for the foreseeable future, that they'll pay their debts and collect profit on their assets and the world keeps moving. In that sense, corporate accounting isn't the smoke and mirrors; it's the way we give that assumption some basis in reality. We assume that your business will stay in operation and sell the product you helped build, so why penalize them for not being able to get money before the asset is built?
Organizations aren't rational; they're a product of their structure and incentives.
At any point in time, you can count on one chatty person to either not engage, or to disengage once they have.
Then everyone brings headphones and it's harder to ask people questions than being in cubicles.
Yes, and in addition, sociable developers value being able to collaborate more easily in open space. I don't know what your coworkers are like or what age range they are, but over my career, I've absolutely seen that engineers in their 20s absolutely prefer open spaces, and are extremely sociable. I haven't seen this so much with older generations. The type of people entering this profession has really changed over the decades.
Developers are close to a representative sample of the whole population, and the general populace is not introverted :-)
And laptops have been the norm. It's a little different when you were accustomed to go back to your dorm room where you had your desktop setup to get anything done.
This isn't quite right: before having your desktop computer in your dorm room was normal, you had to go to a computer lab to get anything done, and those had no privacy whatsoever. Computer labs with PCs were quite common until colleges started requiring students to buy their own PCs, and before this, the computer labs had terminals (like VT100) which connected to VAX servers or mainframes.
Anyone who went to college up until the mid-1990s should be familiar with computer labs.
My computer lab in college had a lab monitor who enforced the "library quiet" culture. It was nice.
Virtually every university library has quiet areas and collaborative areas now. Most of my peers go to the library to concentrate (work in solitude) and visit the loud area of the library when they want to be more social or meet in groups. Also it's not like people are constantly talking in the loud area either, most people are by themselves focusing on work but will be interrupted by friends occasionally whereas in the quiet area interruptions don't happen at all. You sometimes end up texting your friend next to you because you don't wanna disturb others.
There was a post a few months ago on HN saying that librarians are rethinking how libraries should be structured because people are using them to go and focus rather than for books.
Your hot-desk point is true though, my peers at the office and at school are more accustomed to carrying around a laptop and setting up wherever rather than setting up a personal workspace with pictures of family and the sort.
Then, they should separately have buildings (or separate spaces within that building maybe, for existing structures) that are dedicated entirely to studying, with both quiet areas with cubicles (there were things like this at the library when I went to college), and more open areas where talking is acceptable. Then, the university can put a cafe there to sell overpriced coffee drinks and snacks, and the building should be very profitable.
I'm also thinking that you might not want lots of food and drink around the stacks of books. But in an open study area, why not?
Finally, if I go to the library to look at stacks of books, the last thing I want is for the bookcases to be surrounded by a somewhat noisy study area with groups of people talking. It should be as quiet as a tomb.
This is not my experience. Most of the upper management at my employer spend their days wandering the halls looking for open "huddle rooms". Or, they just camp out semi-permanently in one of those spaces. They absolutely do not collaborate in public. In fact, they can't - too much of what they do involves information that, if not strictly confidential, is at least somewhat need-to-know.
This is possibly the only place I've ever worked where they made even a half-assed attempt to maintain the ratio of employees to meeting spaces. And you're right. Post densification, managers are constantly having to schedule meeting hours or days later or settle for two smaller meetings because everything is full. And if you screw up the room reservation, you have to just cancel the meeting because there is nowhere to go.
But a lot of that pain trickles down onto the people doing the work, so I don't think it's fair to look at it as getting what they deserve. It sucks for them, it's debilitating for us, and we always have to make it up by cutting corners or working later.
I used to just go home when I couldn't find an available bathroom. Fuck that company
This is the opposite of my experience. One thing that shocked me about a move to an open plan office after a life with offices was how stifling to discussion.
It's so disruptive to have a conversation at someone's workspace, that to discuss anything nontrivial (or even slightly sensitive) all participants go somewhere else. This greater cost subtly means that people don't really discuss as much.
When people do, it's more often in formal meetings (though of course people can go find a whiteboard together for a chat here and there). These meetings tend to fill their timeslots whether they need to or not, a known problem with meetings.
Random, "What have you been working on" do not rise to the point of happening as often, since chitchat at someone's desk is disruptive. Obviously this still happens sometimes at people's desks, as well as in shared areas, between activities, etc., but it's decreased. A culture of more regular 1:1s tries to help make up for this, I think, but the formal nature of scheduled 1:1s makes it hard to have the same organic discussions.
Even fairly mid-level management (and certainly upper management) and the large open-plan office company I currently work for claims conference rooms 24/7. This is clearly not about the ability to concentrate, but about the increased ability to collaborate.
But one observation I have made is that open offices force me to bring work home. I can sometimes accomplish more coding in one night at home than in 1 week in an open office. One time I kept a log of every 6 mins at work and found that <40% of the time was actually spent coding in an open office vs 95% working at home and communicating over slack (I don‘t think I need to tell anyone here one 8 hour coding session is not equivalent to eight 1 hour sessions).
I think do not disturb private desks with open office hot desks or an open office with telecommuting is ideal.
Some people are much better at thinking on their feet and out loud (I'm one of them). Ideas are fragile, and if you're trying to verbalize, for the first time, why something bugs you or how you think you fix a problem, and there's a bunch of fast-talkers around you they're going to kill your idea before they even get a chance.
I used to meet with these people privately, sort out what really bugged them, poke at their idea and come up with a compromise they'd still accept, then I'd go into meetings and try to out-talk the other fast-talkers.
Now you get one shot a day to do that, maybe, if we're both going out to lunch, going together, and don't bring the wrong people along.
I've worried sometimes that my soft skills were a little lacking. But I'm finding over time that my soft skills were actually pretty great, they just needed doors.
Then reduces meetings. As Jeff Bezos says "communication is terrible"
Perhaps all that chit chat and meeting time is put to good use instead.
I'd be very surprised if that were the extent of the difference. Are these numbers based on any data, or guesses?
It works great for us and lets certain personalities control the level of interaction based on their tolerance. The sales guys love to chat naturally. For the employees who cross both sales/support + dev roles where we keep 1-2 "free" desks in the grouping which you can just pull your chair too.
Multi-person office rooms is really the ideal solution. For us we could scale it up as the company grows by building a 3rd wall creating 3 offices of equal size capped at 4-6 people each.
The hard part of course is scaling beyond that as almost every office property has been previously designed for with the open-concept in mind. Building your own walls or tearing down others isn't the easiest thing to do (or get approval for) in plenty of buildings, especially older ones. But as others have mentioned it's worth its weight in gold.
As cube size goes up, eventually there's enough space for three people in a two person cube, or two people in a one person cube. You want exactly enough space for someone to be able to bring a chair and comfortably look over your shoulder, and not one iota more.
It saves an average of 40 square feet (65 for open office, 100 for an individual office), plus a couple of thousand in construction costs.
So, at around $100 per square foot per year (figures vary wildly, but I saw a couple of concrete values in the $75 range for the bay area), plus a one time cost of $25 per square feet for construction, that's less than $5,000 a year per employee, plus an additional one-time $1,000 amortized over about 10 years.
(He may not have quit directly because of the open office plan, but given that it's one of the few complaints he makes, it obviously is a factor.)
It's not though. It's merely a qualification to the "Google is comfortable" comment. He says clearly the reason he's leaving is he's a bit bored. And that he doesn't want to be stuck in a comfortable rut. How would making him more comfortable with a private office address those issues?
To make a parallel with Microsoft in the early 00's and IBM before that:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
> Although there is some truth to the fact that Linux is a huge threat to Microsoft, predictions of the Redmond company’s demise are, to say the least, premature. Microsoft has an incredible amount of cash money in the bank and is still incredibly profitable. It has a long way to fall. It could do everything wrong for a decade before it started to be in remote danger, and you never know… they could reinvent themselves as a shaved-ice company at the last minute. So don’t be so quick to write them off. In the early 90s everyone thought IBM was completely over: mainframes were history! Back then, Robert X. Cringely predicted that the era of the mainframe would end on January 1, 2000 when all the applications written in COBOL would seize up, and rather than fix those applications, for which, allegedly, the source code had long since been lost, everybody would rewrite those applications for client-server platforms.
Google has more money than Microsoft had back then and Google's product-market fit has been amazing since day 1. Any 1 individual (or even 100 individuals, 1000 individuals) could mess up royally and Google would still be around in 2050 :-)
In an imagined hyper-accelerated future market where the trend continues, companies will be born, grow large, be disrupted and die in a figurative eyeblink. And Google's lifespan would be cut considerably shorter in such a circumstance, if for example something like Brave's business model were to hockey-stick and disrupt their golden goose.
However, the counterfactual to that is that there surely is some kind of end to accelerating turnover in the markets. And it's a statistical rule; individual companies can be hardy survivors given the right circumstances and management, and companies with longstanding platform monopolies, like IBM, MS, Oracle, and now Google tend to have a lot more freedom to redefine themselves; it's the customers that get screwed, not the company. All the company has to do is find a way to move its customers to the next-gen platform, and even when they start failing at that, like IBM, they have a lengthy fall.
Yeah totally data driven.
Many companies spend huge, huge sums of money on open plan offices. Like, not just renting them but tricking them out with super expensive desk units, fountains, game areas, etc. They even pay money to tear down privacy features and replace them with functionless decorations like exposed ductwork or glass whiteboard walls, even when they have no plan at all to increase worker density.
In a world where SV is paying a third of a million dollars to developers, are you really saving money? As a fraction of the cost of your developers this is tiny.
Maybe developers should start Bringing Your Own Cubicle...
When the monetary and other incentives change.
Open plan offices are currently the cheapest way to cram bodies into office space, and the loss in productivity, quality of life, privacy and sanity doesn't factor into the facilities cost equation, which considers facility capital and operational expenses and ignores everything else.
As others have noted, the executives who make decisions also enjoy easy surveillance, which is facilitated by open plan offices.
https://i0.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/...
For anyone reading this: if you ever find yourself placed in a "PIP", leave. That's like being inside a black hole's event horizon, you'll never come back.
That said, I have seen people come back from a PIP and kill it, to the point where on their next review they get all of the equity they lost in the prior cycle plus the comp from the new cycle. Obviously this is rare, but I have seen it.
If you have an hostile manager or HR department then yes it's time to move on.
I find movement to be distracting as well (esp. if I'm sitting next to a high-traffic aisle as I was in one short-lived position). However, what's even worse for me is when several different conversations all start up at the same time, in the same space. Americans are already extremely loud talkers, but then stick a bunch of them together in one room, having 2-5 different conversations simultaneously, and I truly don't understand how anyone can take it, or even understand whichever conversation they're part of.
Sometimes you have to vote with your feet.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/07/30/private-offices-re...
Sure they save 10% on real estate due to absences, but I wonder if it's to sell a cool look. GM just changed to open floor plan.