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I hear where you're coming from, but have you been a part of a real estate search process for office space?

Open offices are crazy cheaper, and most retail developers don't build real offices anymore (and or when they renovate a commercial property pull all these walls out).

It is about cost, for anywhere I've worked or any clients I worked for. I haven't ever known a manager that wanted an open office to control or oppress their staff.

This is (mostly) why new occupancy tech exists as well btw -- the "crotch sensors". Not usually for specific employee surveillance, but to map occupancy trends and determine what parts of a space can be hot-desked or otherwise over-assigned to further reduce space requirements.

I haven't ever known a manager that wanted an open office to control or oppress their staff.

The way it works is similar to attitudes toward remote work (until a few months ago): barriers help people waste time and get away with stuff.

Control is not all about what an authority can do (which is actually the least efficient form of control), it's also about what other people are prevented from doing, sometimes structurally so, as in the context of office layout and design.

There's a simple solution. Just give up on the idea that we can expect people to work many hours ~continuously, on a regular basis.

Sure, there must be times when ~everyone is available to talk. But otherwise, just let people work when they're ready to work. And let them self report their work time.

if you are flipping burgers, sure, you are expected to work continiously every hour. but for salaried people - it doesnt make sense, sometimes you just need to sit on a problem for some time to solve it, or just sit and think about it. Salaried people arent paid by the hour, so why control them? this I dont understand

I consider thinking to be "work".

You say that salaried people aren't paid by the hour, but that's arguably a fiction. There's always a defined work day. Some employees end up "working" for inordinate amounts of time. And some employers do push employees to be more productive.

So if the standard is 40 hours per week, I'm just saying that you do the work whenever, not eight continuous hours per day, for five days per week. That decreases control of employees by employers.

Just give up on the idea that we can expect people to work many hours ~continuously, on a regular basis

This conflicts with the much, much stronger profit motive.

How is that?

The easiest business metric for measurement is profit per worker hour. What do you mean, "How is that?"

It's also relatively useless as a measurement, so you'd expect the profit motive to drive people away from it.

> It's also relatively useless as a measurement

It is not. It's specifically used because of the utility in the simplest tasks. Factories are designed around throughput and efficiency of workers.

Fair enough. I was mostly talking about professional staff, such as engineers, and some trades. Most traditionally, for example, lawyers and plumbers.

What would you do with it in an office, though? It's well known that you can't just throw man-hours at cognitive tasks and expect linear or even monotonic returns.

I asked "How is that?" because relying on worker-reported hours is no less consistent with the profit motive than are current standards for salaried employees.

Employers can still calculate "profit per worker hour". And it's arguably more accurate when based on reported work time, rather than just days worked.

you hit the nail on the head. The main issue here is also that MOST employers/managers don't really know how to measure your productivity, especially in modern software engineering.

That's why "Busyness" and "Butts in Seat Per Hour" are seen as proxy for productivity. That's also why politics play such a big role.

Until we find a GOOD way to measure productivity, Control and "Busyness" (the illusion of productivity) is unfortunately not going to go away.

"Busyness"

I thought to myself: "what if that was the etymology of the word, how ironic".

https://www.google.com/search?q=etymology+business

Oh wow.

I've always kinda "known" that, in a joking way. And never bothered to actually check. So thanks :)

I think the common counter-argument is to ask whether it's cheaper when purported productivity drops are factored in. A lot of people work more poorly with distraction but it's dressed up as collaboration.

Even if the floor space itself is open, that doesn't mean that decently high cubicles (or even floor to ceiling dividers) had to go along with it. How much is it really saving to shave 1-2 feet off cubicles for your six-figure staff? Smart workplaces don't think twice about $400 for a second monitor.

This!

Say occupancy costs (all in) are $60 psf. Now assume occupancy is around 1 employee per 200 sf (inclusive of indirect circulation space). That means occupancy cost per employee is $60 x 200 = $12,000. Now make some assumptions about the total labour cost (salary, bonus, benefits, etc) - say $200k - and look at how little the occupancy costs are relative to that - 6% with these examples.

Jam more people in so you get it down to 1 employee per 150 sf, and you've saved $3,000 per employee, or 1.5% occupancy to labour, which can easily be lost in terms of decreased productivity with people shoulder to shoulder.

Lesson: You need only a very, very small change in productivity to counter any savings in relation to occupancy. And not just in terms of productivity of existing employees, but also the cost of lost productivity due to lower retention, or lost productivity due to more sick days given the closer proximity. This is why I've never understood why companies go anywhere but the best locations with the nicest office space... People really are the major cost and the only asset a company has. Do everything you can to make them love every second at work. The added cost of free food, nicer office, better location, etc is insignificant.

The space argument is sort of understandable -- how many people can you get in a space.

But they also lower cube walls, or make them transparent, which goes completely against this theory.

Some of this has to do with people feeling qualitatively better by being in a small space that feels like it is part of a bigger space. Compare an American hotel room to a tiny Japanese hotel room. If you can't give actual space, make things transparent or cut down the size of the walls so there is openness when you stand up. It's a balance between openness and privacy.

Manager here: keeping a physical eye on my directs screens seems like a lot of work that’s above and beyond my actual responsibilities. The thought of it tires me out. I’ve always assumed that it’s about land cost, especially in expensive urban areas.

The principal of the Panopticon Prison design is economic. Because the Guard can always, theoretically, be watching the prisoners assume themselves watched. It's economical because the Guard need only be plausibly watching at any time, and not actually watching.

The Open Floorplan operates a lot like that.

> well maybe with a touch of thrift thrown in there

In my experience thrift is the overriding factor. The cost difference between an open office plan and individual offices is staggering. It can be an order-of-magnitude difference, especially if you factor in the additional cost to build individual offices into a typical open floor plan. Few companies choose to put their money there. Many could not afford it at all.

In leadership teams at many companies I've heard very little talk about control in this way, explicit or covert. Open office plans aren't necessary for control. Doors are not a shield from control. People in individual offices can be controlled in similar ways.

I don't like the feeling of being observed all day, either. I think it's damaging to some/many people's ability to work. It can turn into an artificial hegemony; it certainly can be used for control. But so can many things, from salary to coffee supplies to bullying. Control will always find a way to control. Open offices are about the money.

"In my experience thrift is the overriding factor."

It sure is. It's like the idiotic startup I worked at for 6 months that gave everyone i7 laptops with 32gb ram and 5400rpm 500gb hard drives to save $100/laptop. True fucking story. The dude who ordered them told me it himself.

I think companies will do some stupid shit to save some cash sometimes.

Besides, all this talk about productivity and stuff? It might be true, it might not. It's a lot easier to just add air conditioning to an old warehouse than it is to build out a divided up office. Right? They're not going to spend all that money to see if they're more productive.

Well, control and cost.

However, back when Apple's Infinite Loop buildings were constructed (in the early 1990s) they were mostly full-sized offices. I was told that Apple had done a cost study and determined that hard-walled offices were cheaper than cubicles in the long term because divisions were always incurring costs by re-arranging the cubical walls every few years, and you just don't do that to sheetrock.

One thing that makes open environments manageable for employees is to make the desks movable. At Valve, the desks are on wheels, and the culture is to move next to the people you are working with. Just shut down your computer, unhook power and network wires and wheel your desk over. Those little wheels make a huge difference.

Closeable offices also work well with Apple’s culture of secrecy. You might not be allowed to know about the project the guy in the next room over is working on.

Open office has a feeling of a lab, the research lab, where undergrads do whatever, while grads are suffering their way to Master/Ph.D. and those that do research as a paid job get some privacy to make sure the grant money keeps on coming.

You can't force a research result, so watching that everyone is "busy" just doesn't make sense practically. If the undergrads don't learn how to convert their time into an expected result, they just wasted _their own_ time.

Taking an open office without this sort of research mentality is simply making everyone uncomfortable, and is setting up unrealistic expectations.

If a team is result-oriented, then it doesn't matter if one didn't type N number of lines, or closed X number of tickets in a day. At the end of all, one reports to the team, not just a boss. You trust your team for the result, not for their not reading HN instead of resolving another bug.

I understand how you feel but I think 99% of the time its just about cost. Of course the problem is it's hard to measure the cost to productivity and very easy to measure the cost of real estate, and usually whoever has solid numbers tends to win the argument.

I think this is also why programmers don't get paid like salespeople and upper management. It's hard to measure impact with some code.

"Open offices are, and have always been about, control. Not about productivity, but exclusively about control"

No, it was not about 'control' it was just about money.

Your comment is cynical enough that I think you might maybe have a problem.

Your Ops and Accounting people can present Plan A - open, and Plan B - cubicles ... Plan A is always cheaper and the benefits of Plan B are hard to justify.

Now 'others are doing it' ... so it's Plan A.

It's cost, it's that simple.

"Nobody feels that they work their best when someone is watching them."

This is usually not a problem - after 10 minutes, you're working, everyone else is and nobody cares.

"Everyone knows that part of working in an open office is figuring out how to create the illusion that you are working."

If you think this then maybe you're in real trouble!

Yes, it does suck that you 'can't check Facebook' as often, fine, but why would you need to 'create the illusion that you are working ... at work'?

If you need to 'create the illusion that you are working' literally when you are supposed to be working ... then ... this is not good!

"Please let's stop pretending that we don't all understand exactly what open offices are about."

You're mostly on your own here.

I much prefer offices and cubicles, it's much quieter, less distracting, and yes, I feel slightly more comfortable checking Facebook once in a blue moon but that's not really important.

Overall it sounds more like you're justifying it rather than saying it doesen't happen

>This is usually not a problem - after 10 minutes, you're working, everyone else is and nobody cares.

This is very cultural. I live in a world where anyone's productivity positively tanks when they're actively watched.

This is what causes car accidents close to police cars

Every open office I've worked in has been about cost, not productivity or control

Maybe, but I think for an awful lot of businesses it's also just about simplicity. It's easy and cheap to set up an open office, which is why startups did it first.

lol. open office existed before startups were ever a thing.

https://k2space.co.uk/knowledge/history-of-office-design/

Good points, however is still think it's mostly about cost and the added increase in supervision potential is just a huge bonus.

I also had the felling that it was somewhat a US tradition.

Open offices a much rarer in e.g. Germany. Through then Germany also has more strict labor protection laws wrt. office "safety/healthiness" so it might just not be as profitable to do an open office? (Note that I'm mainly referring to regulations about chairs, desks, light and noise in offices. Which exists but are in practice hardly if at all enforced on small companies. But from time to time in larger ones.)

I'm not high up the ladder, but like many others here, I am a boss myself. I don't think all of us have such terrible motives. I know my boss doesn't.

And yes, we also were in an open office before all being sent home. Though I may be missinterpretting, and you may mean more high level c-suite types. But even then, my impression of them is more busy than anything else.

I don't think you can reduce it to one factor. A lot of people bought into the idea they could create a new Bell Labs for their advertising/CRUD app/whatever by using open offices. And as many others have mentioned it was cheaper. I don't think your argument is wrong but it comes across a bit myopic.

like a lot of people buy into the idea that unlimited vacation is actually unlimited? Only the truly naive would believe that company BS. Don't get started on company "culture".

Having worked with competent and incompetent managers. I can tell you a competent manager increases my productivity by a significant fold.

By shielding the team away from dumb political games, providing technical / architecture / design input, and controlling meetings and direction for meeting. Ex: one of the competent managers I knew could always “win” the argument for our team, I saw them convince an otherwise unshakable team to make changes by themselves (convincing an entire team to make a necessary change).

The best managers I worked with were less about control, they trusted you, and ensured no one got in your way, and they were also skilled at architecture / coding themselves.

Control is a huge part for some companies, yes. Those companies are actively evil, IMO.

I believe that most companies are just cheap-ass bastards that don’t know any better. They do it because everyone else is doing it, and they believe the lies they’ve told themselves about how everyone loves it.

Welcome to the jungle.

> No worker (as I general rule, I know there are exceptions) prefers open offices to either cubicles or real offices (I wonder how many HN have ever had these?).

I guess I’m the exception then. I had an office to myself with a closeable door once and I HATED it. So quiet and lonely. Everyone around me had closeable offices too so you had to get up and deliberately make an effort for human interaction, or you’d spend all day without seeing another soul.

Occasionally as we would staff up and down I’d end up sharing the office with someone else and that helped tremendously. But when I had the room to myself it was awful.

It drove my so loony that I basically abandoned it and set up a makeshift workspace in the break room where there were always people coming and going. You’d have to put a gun to my head to go back to a traditional office room.

“Ah I would like a cup of coffee but that weirdo will talk at me”

I've worked in an office where one of the managers was truly interested in seeing what everybody was doing all the time. He managed tech support, and he drove them like someone would drive cattle. He never sat down, but constantly paced the aisles. He setup cameras so he could watch the night shifts. I wouldn't have been able to work in that kind of environment for 5 minutes.

That's what control looks like. Arguing that the typical manager is like that man is like arguing that Obama or Trump are dictators. Only people who have never lived under a dictator would say that.

IME with all the managers I've ever had, and with what little managing I've done myself, few people care what you're doing at your desk as long as you're getting your work done on a weekly or monthly basis, and are responsive to your coworkers. Most of the anxiety you feel is imagined, though in no way does that diminish the anxiety. (I hate open office plans, too.) The reasons for open offices are obvious: cost and convenience. Not only cost and convenience for the employer, but also cost and convenience of the building owner and the next tenant.

Put yourself in the shoes of the property manager. If it's a big tech company, organizations are constantly growing and shrinking. If you're a leasing office, you may have to deal with any particular office space turning over every 2 or 3 years, and spending weeks or months trying to find a new tenant, who will have quirky requirements about how many groups they have and how they want to arrange them. At some point you'll just say, "fsck it", tear down all walls, ban new walls, and make management of the physical working space somebody else's problem once and for all. Bonus points if there's pseudo-scientific research circulating that makes your solution seem like a brilliant, pro-worker innovation; but you truly couldn't care one way or another because your fundamental motivations are entirely different, driven by simple economics. Again, you couldn't care less what people are doing; the whole point is taking yourself out of the equation and making it their problem.

>He setup cameras so he could watch the night shifts.

You know, I've always envied US salaries but at least stuff like this is illegal in Europe.

Not that we have a shortage of autocratic and incompetent managers/seniors who try to spend the better part of their day micromanaging you and staring over your shoulder, at lest they can't use tech to make this easier for them.

Well control and air conditioning, because it's cheaper to control the environment in a single open space than in multiple rooms

Well said.