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Comment by tlb | Hacker News Reader

You're thinking about a company that started off with all private offices, then an MBA decided to cut costs and moved everyone to an open plan. But that's not how it happens in startups.

Startup companies start off as 2-3 people, who are all good friends and don't mind working in a room. Then they hire another person, and it still works fine in one room. Then they get a bigger room, and hire a couple more. And so on. At any point, moving to separate offices would be a big change in company culture with negative effects on morale and communication as well as positive.

I need quiet and privacy and uninterrupted 4-hour coding sessions to be productive. Yet, I myself ended up putting 10 people in a room I once had to myself. It was a slippery slope.

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I recently worked a gig where the company was a medium sized international business with I think a few thousand employees but did not yet have a local office. They found a place with old, "conventional" offices with real walls and doors. The place had more than enough space for all of the current local employees with room to grow for several years through the lease. They decided instead of letting people have offices they'd spend a ton of money on construction to knock out all of those walls and put in an open cube farm. The level of WTF from the employees was palpable.

  They decided instead of letting people have offices
  they'd spend a ton of money on construction to knock
  out all of those walls and put in an open cube farm. 
  The level of WTF from the employees was palpable.

The "level of WTF" is something I can't understand. How was this even decided in the first place, without talking things over with the employees?

Oh, I can easily believe that they decided that without talking to employees; I just can't understand it.

Even if I was purely trying to wring productivity out of my workers and didn't give a crap about my workers' happiness, seems like pure selfishness would drive me to at least consider their feedback and find out what they needed.

Yours is an honest mistake. Just don't do it again. Or at least consider breaking it up into separate collaborative groups.

My personal experiences with open offices have all been at large organizations bending over backwards to explain how they would make us more productive. No engineers bought into it.

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