I am on a distributed team with no in-person interaction, and I love commuting even though I don’t see anyone I work with. But, I hate the physical space.
But "collaboration"....
I had a lot more of the stuff that required focus at the beginning of my career. In my last few jobs it's been more about hooking together subsystems from 11 different teams/companies in six different timezones.
Most bugs seem to happen because of misalignments or miscommunication. Intense focus just isnt as important any more.
To me, though, that calls less for private offices and more for effective async collaboration. With 11 teams, nothing is going to get done over meetings except some basic alignments. The actual work of integration needs to be fully documented and agreed upon in writing in a way where provider and consumer can look at while actively developing, like a living API spec with specific schema, response and error codes etc. all laid out. If any team fails to adhere to the spec, well, the spec is right (as of any given version).
Even if we were all in person in the same conference room talking for hours one afternoon, none of that is going to stick around more than a week or two before some detail diverges.
The meetings are perhaps good for managers to walk away with some basic summary of a decision, but the actual engineering and IT work can't happen in them. I wish more managers would realize that and give teams more time to actually collaborate through individual async contributions, not just sitting together in a room -- there's a big difference.
Turns out, it was just advertising that made the cash all along. The silly "collaborative" environment had nothing to do with it.
The peons all had desktop computers, while middle management had clunky laptops with docking stations. You knew who the executives were by their small laptops that were clearly designed for traveling by the jet setting class.
I’ve come to think that the ultimate power move for the movers and shakers at a company, would be to have a traditional office with a desktop computer that they cannot take with them. I remember being excited the first time I was issued a corporate laptop. I felt like I had finally arrived, and finally was one of the powerful and privileged. Now, I look back on those days of desktop computing, where I could not take my computer home, and where there was no expectation that I would randomly work from home as the very height of luxury.
I had them from 2001-2014, 2017-2018.
Later worked as a govt contractor and could leave my laptop at the office 90% of the time. Never realized how good that was until I switched back to a job with an on-call rotation.
I personally don't mind sharing office space with less than about four coworkers. In a small(!), shared office there is enough social pressure to keep concentration periods quiet, or agree on shared music choices, &c. and still maintain the advantages of having what amounts to a team meeting space for collaboration in the same footprint.
Wall Street tech it's pretty typical to do your own SRE/L3 and honestly even L2/L1. Everything from business user "hey how do I.." customer service questions down to "the server is on fire, alerts are coming in .. ".
Open floorplans mean even if you have an agreed PagerDuty type rotation, everyone gets sucked into or distracted by it. It's hard not to want to lend a hand when you see your buddy getting blown up by some difficult user or your inbox/slack is getting filled up with alerts.
We had in sequential rows - Level1 support, R&D, Development. Sat like this for years.
So R&D was sandwiched between the team that was constantly on contentious urgent calls, and the dev team they ran over to ask for help.
Best open floorplan seat I ever had was in a far corner way off from most dev, sat near a trader who spent all day on the phone yakking. Just like a total storyteller kind of guy, incredible yarns were spun .. kind faded into interesting background music for me. Like leaving the History Channel on in the back. Philosophy, science, history, movies, politics.. etc.
If you hire explicit 20% staff to do operational tasks, and also wall off a fixed rotating 5% of your dev team to assist them.. then you've made a conscious decision on resource allocation of 25%. If the other 95% of the dev team is getting interrupted every 30minutes by "questions" then your operational staff/rotation is not resulting in better runbooks, etc.
If you want better SLA and your operational staffing is not sufficient, then you should see your SLA breach, make staffing/process changes, etc.
When development just papers over these issues you end up with great operational metrics and bad development metrics, so then everyone can be even more upset at dev!
If the oncalls don't have the knowledge to solve the issues they encounter, they need to escalate them and somebody needs to put more time in developing a more comprehensive knowledge base for them to reference, not just "steal" time from other company functions.
If you want to be metric driven, it's important that the processes be allowed to fail. Otherwise you are robbing Peter to pay Paul, and the KPI that looks BAD is not where the process is failing necessarily, but where the time got stolen from.
You are saying that people will be blamed for taking too much time to an example saying it would took 10h of someone's time instead of 5 minutes. Why the company will value more "your" deadline than "the operation" deadline? You are basically saying you are okay with "operation" being the target of people unhappy as long as they are not unhappy with you.
You are saying people should escalate. But on the example, the person who has the solution is the person you say should not be disturbed. So you are just asking to disturb uselessly people who cannot help, so your solution is even worse.
You are saying more time is needed to develop a more comprehensive knowledge base. But who should take the time to fill up the knowledge base if not the people who have the answers, which, in this example, is the people you say don't have time. (and moreover, funnily, those people complaining to be distracted are also very very often not doing any effort to share their knowledge somewhere accessible).
I'm slowly getting very irritated by the whole WFH debate: there is way too much arguments that boils down to "the problem is that _I_ am the one that people distract, so let's do my solution that is sooooo much smarter, let's do something where _I_ am happy even if it makes the situation worse for everyone else". That slowly creates this impression that a lot of pro-WFH are just little kids.
Having proper knowledge bases and procedures, including how the ask "the team"/seniors "ad-hoc" questions and get feedback reasonable fast is what you want to have to solve that problems IMHO. Because that also tends to work if e.g. some people are sick or gone (knowledge bases) or can't come to the office (e.g. sick kids at home).
Through most important I would say is that communication in remote work is very different to office work and "just throwing slack into the mix" and doing the rest like before isn't going to cut it.
And yes that needs proper tooling, too and yes most of the tooling marked for this purpose today is .... pretty bad, sometimes utter garbage creating more work then they save time. Similar the part of procedures is often completely ignored, too.
It's very easy to say "hey, can you share your screen" on a remote conversation. While in person that will require moving at minimum 2 people (often more) into a compressed setting with bad visibility at some random place of the building.
Layouts with many closed offices would cost far more to build, and take up more square footage to host the same number of employees.
At a time where savvy businesses have dropped their commercial leases / gone full remote, and the more conservative / less accepting of change ones are left holding the bag, I would not expect anyone to make big investments into office space.
The in-office days are social collaboration days so it doesn't make sense to keep people in separate boxes for them. Then people's home office setups are their cubes if they want them, which most people seem to.
This doesn’t sound like a stable equilibrium to me; more like a transition to full remote that you do when you’re waiting for your lease to run out. Not even having your own permanent desk sounds like utter hell.
Even ignoring increased happiness, this enables giving employees their own tools: keyboards, chairs, monitors, workstations, tea, oscilloscopes, papers, etc.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90285582/everyone-hates-open-pla...
I've also worked in a big open space where, while all five teams worked on the same product, each individual team had their own section. But for that one, you could hear the next desk block over talk about football and another block talk about what THEY're working on, which is highly distracting.
Another one was an open office across three floors with a central auditorium (that is, big open central space cutting across all floors), which in theory would be bad but they had enough noise padding and ceiling-high walls / whiteboards between the blocks to not be an issue.
Another one was one where we were asked for input; they initially wanted to make it an open space, but we convinced them to divide it up into rooms instead. They ended up being rooms with glass walls, some matt glass, but that was enough for team privacy and limited noise.
My current spot has a mostly open plan space, but they have heaps of noise padding; felted panels on walls and dividers, in between rows of desks, and desks arranged in groups of 6-8. It's manageable, although unfortunately the walkways are in between the desks so people passing by having conversations is annoying, and the meeting rooms' noise insulation is inadequate. That said, we're only there two days a week so it's manageable.
It's either going to be working from home or a new employer for me.
It seems downright trivial to me that giving employees 4' desks packed side to side, back to back in rows requires less square footage and no walls, vs. an office.
(And thus, the race for short-term gains in terms of less real estate trumped the long-term gains of SWE being able to think, and the race to the bottom began. It seems to me the costs of open-office are all after the build out: lower morale, higher noise, lower productivity, faster disease transmission, etc.…)
Are you even reading the comments about studies showing the lost productivity (and therefore revenue) caused by open office spaces?
I didn't say it wouldn't cost one penny more than an open office, I said it wasn't wildly different. So many buildouts go halfway already with the tiny "phone rooms"; it's not in any way a budget buster to keep that idea going, except around a central shared space where meetings can take place.
I.e., the claim, as I read it, is that construction of an open office is more expensive than a non-open floorplan, per employee.
(If you consider that, yes, I think open office is the long-term worse option, and the parenthetical in my comment pretty clearly denotes that.)
> I didn't say it wouldn't cost one penny more than an open office, I said it wasn't wildly different.
This still isn't clear to me. An office is probably, what, 10' square, at least? Google thinks, "The North American office size average is currently 150-175 square feet per employee. Open office spaces for tech companies typically use even less at 125-175 square feet per person". That's considerably more room than an open office floorplan, which is probably closer to 4'x4', maybe 4'x5'.
> So many buildouts go halfway already with the tiny "phone rooms"
My company had 3 of those, back to back to back, occupying what like 30–40 sq ft total? That's hardly "halfway".
You asked me to justify it, I did, and you replied with a generic moan. Alright?
That figure absurd in the context of an open office floorplan, and I suspect they're doing some "damned lies" statistics to arrive at it, such as amortizing the common area across the occupancy. I think every open office floorplan I've been in has had 4' desks. The next desk is flush against mine, and there was someone sitting directly behind me. At best, that's 16 sq ft. Generously 20. I have no idea how you arrive at ~150 sq. ft.
(Still don't think it will happen - but that shift occurred when leases on commercial real estate were at all time high)
I think that it was just as motivated by the way you can walk a potential investor (or a worried current investor) through them, and make grand gestures with your arm indicating all of the busy beavers working on making things happen. Then the group can be walked from rockstar ninja to rockstar ninja, looking over shoulders at unintelligible screens, while having smoke blown up their asses.
An open-plan office is primarily a theatrically staged office. 20 years ago I was paid as a temp to sit in one and type random numbers into a noisy electric printing calculator while a random spreadsheet was on the screen. After a few hours, a small group walked in, led by a man who was obviously giving a presentation, with wide gestures of his arms. They were in the room for two or three minutes before being led out. Twenty minutes after they left the room, we were mostly dismissed, except for the younger guys (like me) who were offered a few hours more work moving boxes.
The end of free money might make open plan offices more popular among a certain type of company.
https://news.yahoo.com/activate-space-wework-founder-adam-18...
I’ve tuned out the entire wfh debate for this reason. We just need some patience and we’ll have an answer. There’s no need for all the angry debates.
That probably sidesteps a lot of the guesswork about what makes a person most productive.
Its common sense that for work requiring deep periods of concentration, eliminating distractions is key. Easiest way to eliminate distractions in an office environment is being in a room behind a closed door. Cheapest way to do that these days is WFH, assuming people have that space where they live.
I don't think single person rooms are necessary (but better), but open office is definitely not grate and without noise canceling headphones completely unbearable.
With rooms with small number of people (2 or much worse 4) it also depends _a massive lot_ on the layout. But also the other person, i.e. do they constantly click their pens, do they interrupt you all the time, do they have ad-hoc meetings with other people at their desk etc. etc. The problem is such factors are hard to "control"/estimate/plan with.
Through similar considerations apply to home office too, i.e. people need room in their home which can become office space. E.g. working in you bedroom comes with a huge number of problem, which can be overcome, sometimes, but it's IMHO not as simple as "just" having a proper desk and chair.
Where does this come from? It's something that sounds right, but then I look back at my parent's office jobs and pop culture from 20+ years ago and it doesn't line up. Open office spaces have been extremely common for a very very long time, with private offices reserved for higher level people.
In the first case I shard a closed door office with one other person. Each of us had a large desk, bookcase and great space.
In the second case I had my own office with my own desk and even a table with two chairs for receiving people.
I was pretty low in the institute food chain. Only the PhD students were lower, and they shared 2 or at most 3 person closed door offices .
Its perfectly doable.
Companies can't fit enough of those in as it stands. How would they do it for every employee? The square footage needs would be huge.
Open office floorplans take ~75 sqft per employee. An office would take ~150.
I vaguely remember IBM cubicle farms from visiting their offices as a child. They took up a ton of space, requiring huge office towers. That means lots of elevator trips and conference room needs.
Elsewhere boiled frog and class have both been mooted with regards to office. That's definitely my experience from working the last few decades. I started my career having an office for almost every job. But that slowly fell away as corporations discovered cubes save money and is now completely gone where I work now unless you are very senior indeed. We're talking there are only a handful of offices per floor vs nothing but offices on every floor.
Class comes in to play because at least where I work the people setting policy for the average worker to sit at a cube not only have their own offices, they have their own building! One that you don't get access to by default. Yet, as cost-saving-measures we've enabled people to collaborate across regions and timezones to the point that coming in to work in a cube farm is actually counterproductive. Very few people are customer facing and need to get face time with clients to do deals. The rest of us can happily WFH. Perhaps as Wall Street slowly weans itself from CRE, that will in fact be the next benefit that's pulled back: sorry, you need to be really senior to come into the office / square footage is for closers. I can hardly wait.