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Comment by ashtonkem | Hacker News Reader

Now this is interesting.

All of the reasons provided for open plan offices have been disingenuous; the reason why open plan offices are a thing is that it drastically lowers the land cost per employee. This is why they were popularized in NYC and SF; two cities with famously high land costs.

But of course, abandoning the open plan office is expensive. Companies will need more space, driving up the cost per employee. One can’t help but wonder if this’ll push for more permanently remote positions.

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If that were the only reason, then cubicles would be equally popular. For some reason companies want floor plans that do not allow your back to the wall, no partitions higher than sitting shoulder level, minimal sound or sight blocks. I think there must be some psychological effect they're taking advantage of when workers feel like they're being constantly watched from all angles.

You'd think, if it were so univerally taken-advantage-of, there'd be some studies in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_and_organizational_... that can be pointed to as the source of all this.

Cubicles cost more and take up more space than just rows of desks.

Open office seems to me to be even more space-efficient than cubicles. In an open office, I have 2-4 coworkers within arms reach. In a cubicle, everyone at least has a few feet of "bubble" in their cube.

Consistency space.

> All of the reasons provided for open plan offices have been disingenuous; the reason why open plan offices are a thing is that it drastically lowers the land cost per employee.

Then why not make those rationales explicit and have the same norms around noise and distractions as you'd find in a library reading room. Keep a reduced number of separate private offices, small meeting rooms, cubicles etc. in case people need to do something that would annoy or distract others. Being disingenuous about these things is pointless, it just keeps people from reaching good compromise solutions.

There are a small number of companies that do that, including 37signals. I think that few companies do that because setting cultural norms and rules like that is very hard, especially when companies are growing.

I would add the caveat that "when companies are growing" only applies to startups, and not traditional new businesses. If you are doubling your headcount every 3 months, then of course you can't set cultural norms, because there isn't enough time. If you have a lower rate of growth, then you can teach new hires the culture as they come in, and it gets passed on.

"Library rules" are difficult in a lot of situations. Many job functions require a lot of time on the phone; it's not practical to be constantly seeking out conference rooms/alcoves for calls. Or, indeed, every time you want a word with someone. Companies can (and do) try to isolate different functions but it's always going to be an issue with more open environments.

>the reason why open plan offices are a thing is that it drastically lowers the land cost per employee

This argument never made sense. How is open office cheaper than WFH? Answer, it's not.

It's just the cheaper option that also allows you to retain your illusion of control.

It’s not being compared to WFH. It’s being compared to employees having private offices. You’re making a straw man argument.

Intentionally in order to point out that such an argument is a false dilemma. There are more options than [private office, open office]

The jump from one office type to another is far less extreme than going from an in-person office to WFH. In the absence of strong external motivators, minor changes will be more preferred due to inertia effects.

> One can’t help but wonder if this’ll push for more permanently remote positions.

I think that's right. Currently these companies are learning to effectively remote work under the duress of COVID-19. How long until they start to ask themselves "what do I do with all this expensive office space." Returning to pre-COVID-19 life requires a vaccine, of which there is no guarantee. But a path forward with dramatically reduced office space requirements will look sure -- and offer value to employees who like the flexibility.

There are some really good reasons to want to have an office and face to face interactions; but right now they all look pretty fragile.

Cubicles were an especial hypocrisy. They cost more per office than carpentered walls. In which case they made no sense at all.

I suspect that cubicles were more about social stratification than anything else. But cubicles were well out of fashion before I joined the work force, so that’s just speculation on my part.

The advantage of cubicles over offices is rearranging work groups on a semi-regular bases. You can create a new work group, assign a third of your employees to it, and then rearrange all of the cubes on the floor so that all of the work groups are together over a weekend.

Rearranging serious cubicles, costs more than recarpentering offices. It might be faster, but not cheaper.

And how many times do the cubicles get moved, at all? Short of a move-out to another space, I'd guess the median cubicle is never moved.

You want some flexible space, plan for it. But the 'open office plan' was always a hoax.

Re-arranging cubicles at my office took a couple of people in the office a couple of hours to move a few cubicles around. Unplug the few cords going to the built-in power strips in the cubicles, unplug the cubicle switch, plug it all in at the new space. Cubicles snap apart and together without much effort.

Redoing walls requires paying architects to get plans, getting bids from contractors, getting approvals from building management and potentially opening our lease up to negotiations regarding tenant improvements, getting contractor's insurance vetted, getting walls demo'd, paying to get everything disposed of, paying for new materials and installation, repainting, getting electricians to redo electricity and lighting for the space, potentially doing new low voltage runs (don't want to run cat6 out the door) and getting proper permitting to do all of this.

I don't know how moving a cubicle gets to be more expensive when comparing how many more people are involved to rebuild and that one requires a couple of hours while the other takes days at best.

No attached cubicle furniture? No drops from the ceiling to install for network/power? No issues with tradesmen? No worries about injury or liability? Those cords- they just laying on the floor? That'd be a violation.

Sure you can horse some cubicles around in a tiny shop with no oversight. But to move a department on a floor is an extended effort either way - move out, teardown, rewiring, maintenance (cubicles wear out and parts are expensive), cleaning and reassembly including built-in furniture.

My point is simply, drywall is a tiny fraction of the cost of expensive portable reusable modular units. In an office movein I took part in, the drywall and doors took a week. Took longer to order, get delivery and drop power/network to the 4 cubicles in the back room later when we expanded there . And the cubicles cost as much for 4, as the entire buildout for the front 20 people.

The cubicles just branch off from a wall where they get their power and networking from. As long as one cubicle is close to another, all of them will have power and networking. All the parts of the cubicle are pretty light including the tabletops and cabinets so there wasn't much concern about injury and liability regarding handling those. Either way, furniture moving would be a concern with either move.

One way requires getting permits, bringing in tons of contractors, throws away a ton of old materials to be replaced with identical new materials, having insurance compared and validated, have new installations inspected and permitted by governments, and carries far more liability for the property management. One requires us to just unsnap some parts, carry over the light parts to another area, and snap it all together. Which seems like the obviously cheaper one?

Sure, I'll agree to some extent that upon an initial buildout the cost for individual offices versus high-end cubicle equipment may be a wash. However, the whole point of going with the cubicle equipment is that its then cheap to reconfigure. You don't need architects to draw plans to get certified by the city for how you snap together the cubicles. You do when you're making new offices.

Note: this is mostly about re-arranging in an already occupied space. Sure, if you're having to do a fresh build out where you're moving to things can definitely be up in the air. But I was just in an instance of re-arranging an existing space where we moved cubicles around and split offices with new walls/doors. Moving cubicles around was done in a couple of hours with $0 worth of new materials. Splitting the offices cost >$800/ea (not including employee productivity time towards managing this project) involving three different outside contractors, lease negotiations, permit requirements, and took a couple of weeks.

If you actually rearrange often cubicals make sense. I haven't seen that in my experience, but that is me.

How many decades ago?

I knew a guy in college in the early '90s that had a summer job in the facilities department at State Farm's corporate headquarters. According to him, they would get work orders to upsize/downsize people's cubes overnight. He said that people would come in the next day either delighted or pissed. It sounds Orwellian enough to be true but I have no idea if it was.

Our teams are about the same size no matter what they are. You could have a standard “team area” template, say 8 offices and a collaboration area, repeated ad infinitum. In a re-org, just transplant teams to different team areas. The same layout still works.

Offices cost more than cubes. An office needs a door, ceiling, lights, lighting control, sometimes a sidelight (window), floor/wall finishes, HVAC, along with a couple receptacles and a data opening. This costs more than an 8x8 cube.

Ceiling, lights, windows, HVAC already exist. Wiring is already needed (data,power) The difference is some wallboard and a hollow-core door.

Don't underestimate the cost of that 8x8 cube, Its astronomical. Up to $10,000 though of course you can get crap for $500.

When I built our office out, it cost $150 per walled-off office plus door.

It cost $150 to have an office framed, dry walled, taped and muddled, and painted? Please explain how this is possible, the 5/8th drywall for both sides of the wall is practically that much for materials alone.

That stuff doesn’t exist when a space is being completely remodeled either. I work in construction doing tenant improvements, so I see a lot of construction drawings.

But you understand, there's not a lot of difference in the lighting and power. Not fair to add that to the cost of offices, and then pretend its free for cubicles.

My office buildout was 10 years ago. Prices change. Do we really think drywall in bulk is going to exceed $5000 per cube?

With cubicles you can run the cords to centralized sockets somewhere near the cubes - do you run the cords out the door of your office?

If you assume everyone has a full workstation drawing 1500w peak, you really can't share sockets.

Many offices are full of only laptops - those are drawing ~200 Watts peak, and then may another 100 for a couple of monitors and peripherals. That's many more users. My office has literally that - boxes with 4 sockets each in the middle of a shared space which we all run our power-bars to.

Sure, the open-plan ones of today are amenable to a low degree of wiring. The types of employees made to sit in those offices are amenable to a low degree of wiring.

The average office that has cubicles, though, is also one that’s wired for per-employee power delivery.

Or, I could say it as the reverse: if you know you’re setting up an office to have fixed workstations (e.g. a CG art department in a video game studio; or any department in a company with a pipeline whose main software is a hog, like desktop publishing), then you’ll likely set up with cubicles rather than open-plan, because a workstation kind of implies gradual personalization with bunch of surrounding cruft that needs floors and walls and shelving.

(I have a feeling that even in FAANG, the people who use workstations aren’t sitting in open-plan areas. Anyone care to speak to that?)

And, because of this, the “standard” kind of cubicle partitions are expensive, because they’re also expected to work to handle part of the wiring requirements for power delivery. If they were just plyboard, they’d be cheap; but they’re not just plyboard.

The cubes I've assembled use solid core cable whips that are rated for 40 amps (like you'd hook up an hot water heater with) and serve four units. We never had power issues even though we all used pretty beefy hardware (think Xeons and Quadro RTXs) with dual monitors, a UPS, cube lights, etc.

Cubicle groups are either fed from a whip coming out of the wall, or the whip coming out of a poke-thru device. It’s a single connection point, and the devices can be snap-in for ease of installation.

Power poles are less common, but still used sometimes. It costs less for open area lighting vs lighting an office.

You can buy decent cubes for $2000, with full-height walls.

I’m not a fan of working in an open office layout, fwiw.

They are also dead-simple to install. It's like IKEA furniture levels of complication.

At my old job, we devised a way to make an "office door" out of a section of cube wall that was only attached on one side with a rubber sheath used to hide the seams. It actually worked out pretty well.

Yeah. Looking here in Aust, this seems like the right kind of plasterboard (from a local hardware chain):

https://www.bunnings.com.au/gyrprock-csr-3600-x-1200-x-16mm-...

That's non-trade price, probably something like $US42 each. So, couple hundred bucks for that, then the rest (taping, joining, painting). Then the electrical.

That's without labour costs.

That doesn't make sense. Material costs alone are more than $150 for an 8x8 office with a door. Was that cost subsidized by the building owner?

You're all missing the biggest expense: real estate.

The space required by that door could add 25-50% to your total space requirements compared to cubes of the same size.

And that's before we add human perception as an element... offices the size of a cube are a horrible experience. They need to be considerably larger to feel like the same amount of space.

How would they cost more?

I've only seen the full-height cubicle in American films, but most of the stuff -- desk, shelves and so on -- is still required in an individual office. They don't require a real door or doorframe, and electricity and network connections can be run fairly cheaply under the floor.

What am I missing?

Cubicle furniture is astronomical. The cube walls themselves are astronomical. Some studs, wallboard and a hollow-core door are cheap.

The wiring etc are needed for both. Folks keep trying to refactor stuff into office costs, but that's all needed for both.

Ironically, cubicle furniture was first billed as cheaper than arranging/rearranging drywall. It's almost funny that drywall construction is cheaper than cube wall construction (again).

If you rearrange often cubicals are cheaper. However most places replace the cubes (gotta have the latest shade of neutral off white) when the do the every 5 year rearrange... Offices tend to feel more permanent and so are less often changed. Once again making them cheaper. (though they will repaint offices once in a while)

I understand the concept behind rearranging the people in offices from time to time as a sort of human resources "crop rotation" attempting to get coworkers that otherwise don't interact on projects to perhaps cross-pollinate ideas that can benefit the company (though arguably are there good scientific studies on how much that has actually worked?). But I've always been skeptical of rearranging office layouts themselves. It seems counter-productive, to me at least, because constant environment changes contributes to a low level unease and alert/anxiety/suspicion at the very least in low level tribal/social brain parts, if not bubbling up into very literal distrust in the stability of the company.

But I'm not a highly paid office furniture consultant, nor a sociologist/anthropologist, so what do I know.

The real problem is there are only so many things possible. You can do full open space, or private office (might not have a door). Someplace in between falls team pods. Each promotes a different culture (that is how you communicate) so you can't really swich unless you are willing to change culture. Thus rearrangement doesn't really make sense until the current setup is wore out.

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