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The hilarious thing is that the reason why open office spaces are popular in expensive real estate markets holds no water in the Midwest where there's ample spa

The hilarious thing is that the reason why open office spaces are popular in expensive real estate markets holds no water in the Midwest where there's ample space. People just do it to cargo cult the woo-magic ideology of open office spaces without realizing that the marketing hoopla around that just exists to avoid saying "we do open office spaces to cram more people into less space and save money on furniture."

p4wnc6 11y ago
Actually, a lot of the book Peopleware was devoted to showing that even in dense urban areas it is still cost-effective to provide private office space for knowledge workers. What you spend on extra real-estate is easily more than made up for with increased productivity, less sick time, fewer superficial conversations, etc., even over times spans as short as 1 year. I think even in large cities, open-plan madness is still cargo cult and more about fashion and subtle ageism than it is about the economic costs of real estate. There's also some weird patriarchal aspects of it too, especially in financial companies where the offices and workflow are almost engineered to be like a Panopticon. I always enjoyed reading Joel Spolsky on his choice to commit to having private offices even in Manhattan, both for Fog Creek and later for Stack Exchange. I'm sure there are cases where a company is strapped for cash, or where they need to be located in an extremely expensive part of SF/Manhattan/London/etc. If someone really used hard numbers to justify it, I'd have no problem with it. But the problem is nobody's using numbers. It's about fashion, signalling, and control. I worked for an established education technology company that had offices all over. They bought a fancy new loft space in the Boston area and decked it out just like a SV stereotype: glass whiteboards everywhere, bean bag chairs, video games, gourmet coffee. The open seating was awful -- you had about 4 lateral feet of personal space, and your computer monitor practically bumped into the monitor of your neighbor on either side. There was effectively zero privacy. It was even hard just put a notepad of paper on my desk-slice and try to draw some ideas or take notes. The company actually spent money, like > $10MM, to renovate their Columbus, OH, office to look the same. They didn't even have an engineering presence in Columbus. The people there were all veteran employees mostly within the HR, business, and regional sales departments. They all had private offices for years and were extremely productive with them, and also felt they had earned the right to work in offices given that many of them had long tenures with the company. And the company paid money to remodel the whole office. They actively destroyed privacy features that directly created productive and happy workers, and spent money to do so. When I did my exit interview at the company, I spoke with one of those HR reps in Columbus and talked a lot about my frustration with the Boston office's open layout. She shared my sentiment and lamented how, at her age and her rank in the firm, it was extremely frustrating to be placed back into a fully open-plan office and have no privacy to conduct calls or spread out her work materials and get things done. I asked her why the company chose to do it, and all she could say was that they had recently hired a new CTO for a major sub-division in the firm, and that CTO brought in sweeping changes that were meant to "modernize" the company, and specifically he decreed that all of the offices needed to be remodeled to have open-plan layouts because "that's what engineers want." And this was in a huge company, where presumably these kind of remodeling choices would have to be debated by committees, face political opposition from other parts of the company, etc. It was just insane.
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  > Actually, a lot of the book Peopleware was devoted to showing that even in dense urban areas it is still cost-effective to provide private office space for knowledge workers. What you spend on extra real-estate is easily more than made up for with increased productivity, less sick time, fewer superficial conversations, etc., even over times spans as short as 1 year. The typical retort to that around here is that group productivity matters more than individual productivity. I agree that the productivity of the group can be greater than the sum of the individual productivities of its members. No one has yet explained to me how lowering the sum of individual productivities leads to an increase in group productivity, though.
  - p4wnc6 11y ago
    I hear this a lot too. All the research I've ever been able to find on the topic suggests the opposite. Teams become less productive when using open-plan style offices, not more productive. But you'll never win that argument with a manager in a company that has decided to double down on open-plan layouts. If someone higher up is dogmatic about open-plan, then managers can't talk bad about open-plan or else they face career roadblocks. This gets funneled to HR, so then they create bullshit codewords like "team player" or "good cultural fit" that really just mean "someone who agrees to sublimate their natural need for privacy for no other reason than that we told them to." The only thing you can do is rejection-sample employers until you find one of the rare ones where the upper management just happen to already share your views about offices and productivity.
    - jchewitt 11y ago
      It's also possible that employee productivity doesn't matter as much as the speculative price of the company's shares. If the company's office plan looks like Google's, then surely they're going to generate earnings like Google one day. I don't think the analysis necessarily goes that much deeper than that. We've gone from managerial pseudoscience of the early 20th century that attempted to measure and optimize productivity into full on mysticism that rests on vague notions of 'increasing opportunities for collaboration.' At least scientific management attempted to use quantitative analysis and empiricism to make employees more productive. In the new age, we just need vague slogans, beanbags, and chi consultants.

p4wnc6 11y ago

Actually, a lot of the book Peopleware was devoted to showing that even in dense urban areas it is still cost-effective to provide private office space for knowledge workers. What you spend on extra real-estate is easily more than made up for with increased productivity, less sick time, fewer superficial conversations, etc., even over times spans as short as 1 year. I think even in large cities, open-plan madness is still cargo cult and more about fashion and subtle ageism than it is about the economic costs of real estate. There's also some weird patriarchal aspects of it too, especially in financial companies where the offices and workflow are almost engineered to be like a Panopticon. I always enjoyed reading Joel Spolsky on his choice to commit to having private offices even in Manhattan, both for Fog Creek and later for Stack Exchange. I'm sure there are cases where a company is strapped for cash, or where they need to be located in an extremely expensive part of SF/Manhattan/London/etc. If someone really used hard numbers to justify it, I'd have no problem with it. But the problem is nobody's using numbers. It's about fashion, signalling, and control. I worked for an established education technology company that had offices all over. They bought a fancy new loft space in the Boston area and decked it out just like a SV stereotype: glass whiteboards everywhere, bean bag chairs, video games, gourmet coffee. The open seating was awful -- you had about 4 lateral feet of personal space, and your computer monitor practically bumped into the monitor of your neighbor on either side. There was effectively zero privacy. It was even hard just put a notepad of paper on my desk-slice and try to draw some ideas or take notes. The company actually spent money, like > $10MM, to renovate their Columbus, OH, office to look the same. They didn't even have an engineering presence in Columbus. The people there were all veteran employees mostly within the HR, business, and regional sales departments. They all had private offices for years and were extremely productive with them, and also felt they had earned the right to work in offices given that many of them had long tenures with the company. And the company paid money to remodel the whole office. They actively destroyed privacy features that directly created productive and happy workers, and spent money to do so. When I did my exit interview at the company, I spoke with one of those HR reps in Columbus and talked a lot about my frustration with the Boston office's open layout. She shared my sentiment and lamented how, at her age and her rank in the firm, it was extremely frustrating to be placed back into a fully open-plan office and have no privacy to conduct calls or spread out her work materials and get things done. I asked her why the company chose to do it, and all she could say was that they had recently hired a new CTO for a major sub-division in the firm, and that CTO brought in sweeping changes that were meant to "modernize" the company, and specifically he decreed that all of the offices needed to be remodeled to have open-plan layouts because "that's what engineers want." And this was in a huge company, where presumably these kind of remodeling choices would have to be debated by committees, face political opposition from other parts of the company, etc. It was just insane.

vonmoltke 11y ago
> Actually, a lot of the book Peopleware was devoted to showing that even in dense urban areas it is still cost-effective to provide private office space for knowledge workers. What you spend on extra real-estate is easily more than made up for with increased productivity, less sick time, fewer superficial conversations, etc., even over times spans as short as 1 year. The typical retort to that around here is that group productivity matters more than individual productivity. I agree that the productivity of the group can be greater than the sum of the individual productivities of its members. No one has yet explained to me how lowering the sum of individual productivities leads to an increase in group productivity, though.
- p4wnc6 11y ago
  I hear this a lot too. All the research I've ever been able to find on the topic suggests the opposite. Teams become less productive when using open-plan style offices, not more productive. But you'll never win that argument with a manager in a company that has decided to double down on open-plan layouts. If someone higher up is dogmatic about open-plan, then managers can't talk bad about open-plan or else they face career roadblocks. This gets funneled to HR, so then they create bullshit codewords like "team player" or "good cultural fit" that really just mean "someone who agrees to sublimate their natural need for privacy for no other reason than that we told them to." The only thing you can do is rejection-sample employers until you find one of the rare ones where the upper management just happen to already share your views about offices and productivity.
  - jchewitt 11y ago
    It's also possible that employee productivity doesn't matter as much as the speculative price of the company's shares. If the company's office plan looks like Google's, then surely they're going to generate earnings like Google one day. I don't think the analysis necessarily goes that much deeper than that. We've gone from managerial pseudoscience of the early 20th century that attempted to measure and optimize productivity into full on mysticism that rests on vague notions of 'increasing opportunities for collaboration.' At least scientific management attempted to use quantitative analysis and empiricism to make employees more productive. In the new age, we just need vague slogans, beanbags, and chi consultants.