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Comment by arohner | Hacker News Reader

[Disclaimer: I'm cofounders with OP]

One other thing to note is that office space, while expensive, is much cheaper than your developers. You can easily get 10-20% more productivity with a better working environment.

Also, that "collaboration" that people value? None of that is getting written down. Circle's team is already half remote, so placing a strong emphasis on 'library voices' means more communication happens over hipchat and email. More things get written down, and the remote employees are able to collaborate more, and there's a written record of "oh yeah, on Friday 2013/01/03, Paul and Allen thought it was a good idea to try X.

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Amen brother - At one agency I interviewed at everyone was crammed on long tables with less than 2 foot of space per person all on laptops no docking stations all hardwood floors.

I mentioned that the layout woudl impact their productivity I got marked down as not a culture fit according to the agent.

Is it true that Microsoft is doing two devs per office these days? I just thought back on all the places I sat at Microsoft and out of 9 different offices (ok, two were cubicles), I never shared once. They do make you move around a lot, obviously.

I was only in one building (maybe building 39, probably 6 years ago) and every office I saw had 2 people. My bad! I'm also generalizing about Google - I only saw building 43.

Google's Boulder office definitely has a more open plan. Fairly large cubicle areas, but still not private offices.

Classic Microsoft in its high-productivity period was strictly private offices for everyone, solid doors and almost all with outside windows, soundproofed so each office could have its own music without requiring headphones, with deskspace and network connections in each office for several computers and seating for at least three people in each office so that people could work together privately when they wanted to. If that standard has been eroded in recent years, then we might understand why MS is now relatively unproductive.

Microsoft has, in typical fashion, gotten very confused about this. Some teams are still one person per office (some more junior (measured by tenure, not level) team members probably share, all interns typically share), other teams are using open work environments... sometimes pushing the limits of what the fire code permits for number of people in a building.

The trend when I left (4/13) was towards open offices

Internally, for teams that use offices, there is something known as the "pain index" which is the person/office ratio. As a rule of thumb, you might be expected to share an office upto about two years, and by about 5 years might expect to have a window office - but it was very dependent on team

[Edit - added pain index]

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