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> Sociable upper managerial-types probably value being able to collaborate more easily in open space more than being able to concentrate in private offices.

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.

So I’m on the fence I like the social aspects of open offices but I find them highly disruptive to work.

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.

And the hits just keep coming.

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.

If it's that disruptive to chat. Perhaps the extra effort of going elsewhere.

Then reduces meetings. As Jeff Bezos says "communication is terrible"

Perhaps all that chit chat and meeting time is put to good use instead.

Sociable upper managerial-types probably value being able to collaborate more easily in open space more than being able to concentrate in private offices.

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.

I know when Amazon was increasing density in some of their offices, they also built a few more meeting rooms (they did not, however, increase bathroom size, and I strongly suspect they were violating OSHA rules, if only due to gender inequality).

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.

Haha, dude, I remember that. They were definitely breaking OSHA rules. They had something like 3x the dudes per bathroom allowed

I used to just go home when I couldn't find an available bathroom. Fuck that company

>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.

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.

In 1990 there were probably 1 million developers. Now it's probably closer to 100 million.

Developers are close to a representative sample of the whole population, and the general populace is not introverted :-)

If your developers skew towards those in their 20s, many of them have never experienced working in solitude. University culture is dominated by study groups and camping out in the library, so it's no great stretch to go from that to an open-office layout, or even one where you are forced to hot-desk.

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.

>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.

> computer lab to get anything done, and those had no privacy whatsoever.

My computer lab in college had a lab monitor who enforced the "library quiet" culture. It was nice.

This theory doesn't pass the smell test.

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.

It sounds to me like universities should just stop wasting space in the library on study areas, and downsize the library a lot so it only has rooms for books and nothing else.

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.

Why does it matter if it is a single building or multiple buildings? My university has a library that has book space, quiet study areas, group study areas and multiple overpriced food/drink vendors.

It doesn't really matter that much, and it really doesn't matter at all if it's different wings of the same building. But separating these things for future construction might make some sense: for instance, you could put the study building in a really convenient part of campus, and stick the library off the side in a less-convenient location, since people don't use that as much.

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.

Even sharing an office with 2-4 people isn't that bad compared to open floor. You get used to each other's quirks pretty fast and keep the door closed when serious work is going on... it doesn't have to be solo offices for every person which would dramatically increase costs.

Working at a table with my small team (4-6 people) in a small office was my favorite working environment. Any discussions are likely at least somewhat relevant to everyone. Interruptions are not constant. Quiet environment. Yet still helps enable knowledge transfer among team members.

For startups it's really not a significant expense if you do it right. We're a small team and have multiple developers in the original private office, which I'm assuming the prior occupant CEO previously used solo, and then the sales/support guy share the larger main office area. Plus all food is eaten in a common kitchen area (keeping various smells contained, which matters more in smaller offices, is quite easy via perfumes/scent policies and simply not eating at your desk).

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.

When this whole process was just starting to hit my radar I realized that there was such a thing as 'too big of a cubicle'.

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.

I would also guess that kind of hip architectural firms that get hired to design the offices of giant successful tech firms are 10-20 person companies who may have equally open offices but don't have the visceral understanding of the differences between an open 20-person office and an open 1000-person office.

Even 20 can be a problem if you go from 2 chatty people to 3 chatty people.

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.

> I think we're talking the difference between $300/month on open desk space vs $1000/month on an office

I'd be very surprised if that were the extent of the difference. Are these numbers based on any data, or guesses?

I would assume that in open space you have somewhere around 100 sq ft per person (room for a 10x10 desk and access) and for a closed-in space they would have about 3x that.

Right but it usually isn't really between "open space" and "everyone gets their private office", but between "open space" vs "offices of few people in each, usually working on same stuff"

Salary and benefits come out of a different bucket than office equipment and installations.

So what?

It matters in this case because the discussion took a turn towards comparing the compensation of staff to the provisioning of the office environment.

In that context, companies' consideration of expenditures will take into account capital versus operational categories.

Why does it matter? It's all the same money no matter which budget it comes out of.

No, it's not. Capital expenditures are reported differently and held to different standards and strategies.

But if you have a million in funding, then who does it matter to if you spend it on infrastructure or operational expenses? You're still burning the same amount of cash.

It matters a lot to your board, your creditors and investors, the government. If you’re publicly held, it matters to a significantly larger number of investors and changes your legal obligations somewhat.

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.

You are trying to rationalize this. Don't. Companies work under their own rules and are not rational actors.

Salary and benefits aren’t treated exactly the same as capital expenditures. That’s how your purchase of a ten thousand dollar piece of electronics becomes a thousand dollar charge every ten years, no matter when the check clears. Which looks better on your companies balance sheet?

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.

I am a salaried software developer, and my employer requires me to track my time, for precisely the reason you describe. And I still think it's stupid, despite having heard this very explanation at least twice (or thrice, if you count your comment). It doesn't make it make any more sense; it just makes corporate accounting sound like so much smoke and mirrors that accountants and investors willfully participate in. Maybe I'm focusing too much on the fact that those dollars are coming out of their bank account into mine every two weeks like clockwork regardless of the fact that they're pretending that they're trickling two years' worth of salary out to me slowly over a period of seven years or whatever, but it just seems so arbitrary and nonsensical to pretend that they're not spending that money to pay me right now.

> those dollars are coming out of their bank account into mine every two weeks like clockwork

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?

Ah, yes. I always forget that the entire global economy is built on debt. That actually makes it worse, in a way, but at least it makes sense in context.

He's explaining why it matters organizationally.

Organizations aren't rational; they're a product of their structure and incentives.

It matters in this conversation because it's NOT the same pile of money to the people making decisions about the office space, nor to the people in charge of hiring. Those people are allotted certain budget for the buildout of their roles and expected to justify budget increases, irrespective of other piles of money.