10 ms·

The answer is really simple, and has been well-known at least since the time of the book Peopleware and the studies it cited. Provide a real office environment

by p4wnc6 11y ago

The answer is really simple, and has been well-known at least since the time of the book Peopleware and the studies it cited. Provide a real office environment for every knowledge worker. You know ... a door that shuts ... a window ... space to allow your gaze to adjust. Things that are ... human. It's really simple. And before you say it costs too much, it doesn't. The problem is that you're in denial about how much your current offices with open floor plans are costing you. You merely think the cost is equal to the rent. It's much greater than the rent, though, because of lowered productivity, lowered morale, increased superficiality of important inter-worker communication, incessant interruptions disrupting developer flow, more sick time, etc. etc. If you didn't pretend like those aren't affecting you, and you actually counted their cost, you'd see that the extra cost in real estate for offices is well worth it even in short-term scenarios like 1-year where you're using your start-up runway to pay for it. Even in San Francisco. Even in Manhattan.

usaphp 11y ago
I don't know but for me working in an open office is a positive experience, I feel joy talking to coworkers from time to time, sitting in a separate room is quite depressing and might drop the productivity for some people even further then time you lose chatting with coworkers
- workitout 11y ago
  Have you considered a line of work more suited to an extrovert personality?
  - ams6110 11y ago
    The funny thing is, in my experience the most extroverted people (the sales team) all have offices, and the introverted programmers are all stuck in a bullpen.
    - p4wnc6 11y ago
      Status once again. There's actually quite a lot of formal research on this, such as here: < http://homepages.se.edu/cvonbergen/files/2013/01/Reversing-the-Extraverted-Leadership-Advantage_The-Role-of-Employee-Proactivity.pdf http://homepages.se.edu/cvonbergen/files/2013/01/Reversing-t... >
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago
  Someone coming up to me and talking to me interrupts whatever I was doing and makes it hard to get back into that original context. In general the research is showing open spaces is less productive. Obviously there will be edge cases here but in general it's usually much worse.
- p4wnc6 11y ago
  It's totally possible for people who are more extroverted to find an interactive setting more pleasant. You could round up all such folks and let them sit together, since they get energy from that. But clearly for the people with more introverted working styles it won't work. So let people pick. Want to sit in the communal workspace? OK, do so. Want your own office? OK done. From time to time you'll need to intermix. Sometimes a social butterfly needs to tune out the distractions. Provide a place for it. Sometimes a hermit crab needs to sit with the team for 1/2 day and pair program. As Picard says, make it so. This is not rocket science. The important part is that company management has to recognize that getting this right is one of the most important financial investments they will make. Instead of seeing space as a cost sink ... something to be standardized, minimized, and papered over with free lunch and dumbass "team building" shit, they need to recognize that of all the places to spend money, spending it on compensation for rewarding hard working employees is number one, and spending it on creating a humanity-affirming physical work environment is number 2. In visibly healthy companies, everything else hinges massively on those two things. Companies that have been so distorted away from humanity that they grind out success (generally for senior level people only) despite humanity-disaffirming workplaces ought to be seen as the frightening panopticons they are.
  - pbreit 11y ago
    The thing is, open plans can be extremely non-interactive. I've been in several where it was almost always silent, everyone with headphones on, could not hear a pin drop, zero "collaboration" environments.
    - p4wnc6 11y ago
      Plenty of collaboration happens in quiet environments. It's just often digital collaboration. In a lot of software settings, that is precisely how you want it to be. You don't want people using their meat flaps to hit your head with acoustical vibrations, except in certain scenarios where our meatputers still process things better that way. Like if emotions need to be considered, or if there are aspects of creative expression being lost in digital translation. Sometimes it's the opposite, and you definitely do want meat flap acoustics often, and silent digital communication less so. For any given company, you need to understand this. You can't just assert that an open floor plan "is collaborative." It is one kind of collaborative. It may not be the right kind for you. And worst of all will be to assert that it definitely is the necessary kind merely as an excuse when your real motivation is to minimize financial investment into physical space.
- tetraodonpuffer 11y ago
  different strokes for different folks, the ideal "office environment" for me would be being able to teleport to a cabin in the middle of nowhere with just trees / nature to look at all day, and all work-related communication over email or IM. It's really easy to find an extrovert-friendly workspace, much harder to find an introvert-friendly one, because pretty much all managers are extroverts (they have to be, to succeed at management) and they are the ones that decide the office layout. Makes me wonder sometimes how deaf people can manage in today's vocal-collaboration oriented workplace, which is sad as the type of work we do lends itself extremely well to text-based communication.
- bphogan 11y ago
  I've seen my share of open floor plans where everyone has headphones on and is typing in Hipchat / Slack rooms sharing memes.
- taurath 11y ago
  Having an office doesn't mean you don't talk to coworkers. It means you get to control when you talk to coworkers. You can easily have 1-1 meetings in your office, talk about personal things and actually really hash out problems without worrying about annoying or distracting the poor sap 2 seats down. All office areas have shared space as well - thats why people meet up around the water cooler. If you want to spend no time socializing in an open office, its better to have your own office. If you want to spend lots of time socializing, its better to have an office since you won't be annoying the people who don't want to or don't have the time to socialize.
  - ams6110 11y ago
    Biggest hint: the door. Open? Come on in and chat. Closed? Send me an email or come back later.
    - robotresearcher 11y ago
      Many of the older Oxford and Cambridge colleges have two doors in one doorway: the external one for the 'interruptible/not' signal, and the internal one to keep the heat in when the outer is open. We have a term for it: 'sporting one's oak'. http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2008/02/sporting-the-oak.html http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2008/02/sporting-the-oak.h... This was a great system in medieval buildings where most doors opened directly to the outdoors, which in itself is a great privacy feature.
    - edgyswingset 11y ago
      Except for when someone doesn't use that model. I work with people who keep their door closed all the time, but they're not in a "don't bother me" mood.
      - taurath 11y ago
        Then they suffer the concequences of people not going up to them. That, or they want people "to know" that the door closed means they can come in - those who they haven't told will shy away. Its kinda a way of filtering, or they're socially inept.
- InclinedPlane 11y ago
  Do you have an equivalent experience of working in offices to compare with? When I worked in offices I never had a problem talking with coworkers (about work or personal life).
funkaster 11y ago
Completely agree with you. It's been ages since Peopleware and management still thinks cheaper office rent == win $$$. I keep trying to find quite spaces and booking conference rooms in my current job just to find some quite, nice space. Btw, any manager out there that has not read Peopleware, please make yourself and your team a favour and get yourself a copy (and read it, of course).
- rokhayakebe 11y ago
  Bought!
- mclovinit 11y ago
  I just was recently offered a day a week work from home just for the same reasons you mentioned. I may capitalize on that soon. I think it was a smart suggestion and believe it saves both me and the employer in a number of ways. Less liability insurance? Not sure, but if I happen to be less at risk and I get my work done, then it's a win-win in my book.
dragonwriter 11y ago
> And before you say it costs too much, it doesn't. The problem is that you're in denial about how much your current offices with open floor plans are costing you. The problem is that rent is easy to measure, and the productivity your staff would have, once things were settled in, with an appropriate work environment is less easy to measure specifically (there may be studies which provide an approximate basis for estimating it, but that's different than a direct and company-specific measure.)
- vehementi 11y ago
  Yeah, so like other bad employees, bad managers hide from metrics that are hard to measure, and report metrics that are easy to measure and hope nobody calls bullshit on them.
cubano 11y ago
I've never believed it's about cost, but about distrust and, more importantly, control. IMO, most managers are paid very nicely to babysit employees and use unspoken threats and coercion to make them feel scared and threatened enough for their livelihoods where they will sit rather quietly and produce work at a measurable-yet-uninspired rate. Much like elementary school. I know I'm older then most of the IT workers here are and due to that, my personal experiences and insights may not reflect the current realities of many here, but they have been real to me over my 30 year career. I have been working remotely now, for myself, for the past 3 years. It was difficult in the beginning to have the discipline to actually keep my head "at work" for the required 8 hours, but now...I couldn't really imagine ever wanting to go back to an onsite gig. My boss could not be happier with the arrangement as he is realizing significant cost saving as well...it's a real win-win but both sides have to be willing to do their parts for it to work.
- p4wnc6 11y ago
  It is absolutely about status. "Programming" is a low status activity. "Inking mega fucking cash dealz" is a high status activity. If I ink mega fucking cash dealz all day, then of course I deserve a better physical status symbol than some schmuck who just types code all day, right? What? The schmucks are not happy with coding in the human equivalent of a bucket of crabs? Did you try giving them coffee? Did you try saying the phrase "unlimited vacation"? Did you jingle your keys?
  - tedks 11y ago
    I hear this a lot on HN, and while I understand how it would work at bank or at IBM, how does this attitude translate into startups, founded by technical people, competing to hire "rock-star" "ninja" developers?
    - dogecoinbase 11y ago
      The language around perceived high-ability developers is important -- "rock stars" are admired. "Ninja" are feared. Neither are respected by the people who actually have money and power -- producers, daimyo, investors, management. Even "guru" implies asceticism and a willingness to provide expertise without appropriate compensation, and more importantly all three of these terms imply an independence from existing power structures that means they cannot move or advance within those structures.
tetraodonpuffer 11y ago
how are you going to put this in a way where you can make a strong case for spending more on facilities? you can easily make a case for saving money with open plan and showing how much you can save, what about the reverse? how can you justify spending 2x what your competitors spend on rent? how can you quantify "lost productivity due to constant interruptions" or "more bugs due to developers not being able to focus" in an accountable way? Also, are the people that make the budget decisions the type of people that thrive on collaboration and open plans, or the type of people that prefer quiet and isolation? if they are the type of people that thrive on open plans they might feel negatively about private offices period, which leads to making your case about their positives even harder. On one hand you have hard data, open offices cost x, open plan costs x/2, on the other hand you have "engineers say they could be more productive with offices" against "do you remember when we were small and working in a single room, that was awesome, we were so agile and communicative" (whether or not that is applicable at your particular company size or stage, burning the midnight oil on your stack to cobble together a demo for a pitch is not the same as writing production level tricky security code)
- Negitivefrags 11y ago
  A multiplier of only 2x to go from open plan to offices is ridiculously optimistic. You can't make people work in a box. 5x is probably getting closer to reality but I bet that it's actually even higher than that. That doesn't even count the cost of renovation to make all these offices.
- st3v3r 11y ago
  "On one hand you have hard data, open offices cost x, open plan costs x/2, on the other hand you have "engineers say they could be more productive with offices" against "do you remember when we were small and working in a single room, that was awesome, we were so agile and communicative" (whether or not that is applicable at your particular company size or stage, burning the midnight oil on your stack to cobble together a demo for a pitch is not the same as writing production level tricky security code)" Not to mention that part of why you do that then is so you don't have to do that anymore.
pbreit 11y ago
I'm mostly with you. I'm astounded that the "open plan" is the current "state of the art" in silicon valley considering we are supposedly so creative and innovative and meritocratic. My only misgiving about pure enclosed office is that it does seem a little solitary for 8+ hours/day, 5 days/week. I remember Fogcreek came up with an interesting design that used angles and transparency to get some good light, etc: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html
- maxxxxx 11y ago
  I like offices with 2 to 4 people. They don't even need to work on the same things. I have developed lots of good friendships with people in such environments. In open office I rarely talk to people because it's so loud.
  - pbreit 11y ago
    That actually sounds kind of interesting, especially the not necessarily grouping same teams. What do you think of rotating every so often?
    - maxxxxx 11y ago
      I think it's a bad idea. Stability is good.
      - bcassedy 11y ago
        Change is nice too. We've got an open office and we change desks 2 to 4 times a year. So far we're grouped only with other engineers, but even with a small team you get much more comfortable with the people you work in close proximity to.
        mclovinit 11y ago
        I think if the team is small and synergy is good, then this could work well. Sometimes a bad apple in the bunch (aka The Talker) can really be a drag on productivity.
InclinedPlane 11y ago
One thing I've noticed, there's the "coolness factor". Open offices are just more photogenic than closed offices, almost no matter how you do them. That's a big factor in startups and gamedev where coolness factor is actually important. Edit: to be clear by "important" I don't mean that it's a good thing, I mean that it has an unfortunately big impact on PR, hiring, and it's something that the people in charge take seriously. Personally I prefer individual offices, regardless of the coolness factor.
- p4wnc6 11y ago
  Yes, tech workers often are just pieces of office furniture these days, and so getting to be cool rustic armoir is better than being a lame ottoman. This is an important lesson for undergrad CS majors. Instead of working really hard to master dynamic programming or taking that extra course on programming language concepts, you should instead just watch Michael Bay's Transformers movie so that you know when to say "Furrier Transform" at the right moment. Seriously. Go right now and buy a pair of purely decorative eye glasses. At work tomorrow, got stand by the coffee machine and let your glasses slide slightly down your nose. Wait for an important-seeming person to walk by and then push your glasses up and say "Furrier Transform" -- this is a much faster way to a promotion than coding at your desk. Be wearing a slim-fitting hoodie if at all possible. If your MacBook doesn't already have stickers reflecting which causes you SJW on reddit, get some now!!!!11
  - skewart 11y ago
    > "Furrier Transform" Lol. I can't quite tell if you're mocking InclinedPlane's comment or the mentality it points out. Sad though it is, there is a lot of cargo culting around startup office management in SF these days - and presumably elsewhere too. I doubt people really think deep down that having the cliche startup office - tightly packed open plan desks, plenty of microbrews in the fridge, a few bottles of expensive whisky, a wall of snacks, a hoverboard or two - will make or break the success of their compamy. But no one wants to be the first to try not doing it and find out.
    - 11y ago
Spooky23 11y ago
I've heard that offices aren't more expensive cited here many times, but haven't found that to be true. Also consider that despite Peopleware, literally nobody builds offices for programmers as if they were attorneys. And yet we muddle through. Having been involved in office planning to support moves 4-5 times... Costs were 5x-7x more for build out for a fixed office design vs. modular and would take much much longer. Just in terms of labor, you're talking about dramatically higher costs for drywall, electricians, and carpenters. If you're retrofitting, construction triggers full code compliance ($$$), and in major cities you often run into labor/prevailing wage problem.
- p4wnc6 11y ago
  Office rent is more expensive than open-plan rent. Nobody disagrees. Office productivity, morale, collaboration, and communication are higher than open-plan. The degree to which those things are higher is enough to more than make up for the higher rent, even over relatively short periods of time. If you're building from scratch, up-front costs are higher, and long-term gains from productivity, etc., are also much higher, once again more than offsetting the higher up-front costs and making private offices a winner from a net-present-value perspective.
  - Spooky23 11y ago
    I think time to market matters. Higher rent + long, time and attention consuming build outs + accounting nightmares are more expensive than you think. Look at Joel Spolsky's story. 4x rent plus $500k in extra buildout. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/12/29.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/12/29.html
    - p4wnc6 11y ago
      And just look how successful Joel's endeavors have been. It's almost like there's something to this idea of really investing in your employees... Do you think Joel would not attribute a significant amount of the financial returns his companies have seen to his cultural choices about providing the best workplaces, even when it cost him a lot to do so?
spacehome 11y ago
I've suffered in open office environments, and I really want to believe that a private office would benefit the company as well as me, but I'm afraid that might just be wishful thinking on my part. Can you back up these assertions with references?
rajacombinator 11y ago
So you would rather have a real office with a door and window and all those other holier-than-thou emphasized goodies that is still in a corporate gulag where you have to worry about face time and butts in seats, instead of working from the comfort of your own home or wherever else you choose? Why pay absurd rent for an office designed to optimally isolate you from your colleagues? Did you even read the article and understand they work remotely? Shameful that this is the top ranked comment.
- p4wnc6 11y ago
  My personal belief, after having had a 100% remote job, is that there is a lot of value in having people physically co-located at the same physical office. This isn't always true and I would never want to enforce it dogmatically. For some people / teams / companies, significant remote working is very successful. I just don't believe it's always or even frequently better than a physical office with adequately private and quiet working conditions. I do believe fully remote working is probably better than the shambolic open-plan disasters that are common these days, so if someone makes you believe in a false dilemma pitting fully open-plan versus fully-remote, then fully-remote is probably the lesser of two evils. I did read the parent article. I responded as I did because I am dumbfounded that the idea of paying for the cost-effective extra benefits of private offices is not really even considered -- we've come so far on the path to destructive workspaces that we don't even think about it any more.
  - rajacombinator 11y ago
    Ok that is a valid argument against remote work. I still don't agree. In my experience, the added productivity gains from working in a Peopleware-ideal office, where I could occasionally stop by a colleague's office to ask a question, were not much greater than what could be accomplished through video and chat. The personal "comradery" gains were slim to nil as well. The negatives are tremendous. Wasting time traveling to the office. Wasting time appearing to work, which is probably 50% of the average office workers day if we're being honest. Having to arrange your life around work instead of the other way around. If nothing else, I think a fully broken-down cost analysis of your office layout plus the higher cost-of-living expenses built into employee wages when hiring in a big city would convince you that remote is the way. Probably looking at 30-50k per employee savings for hiring remote vs SF, and getting happier, more productive employees.
timv 11y ago
One of the startups I worked for moved office a few times as we grew and leases expired etc. The engineering team pushed for "quiet private space". We avoided asking for "offices" so that the focus was on what sort of environment we needed, and didn't jump straight into the status and/or cost issues. It never happened. The main reason wasn't cost savings (though that was definitely a factor) or management paranoia (which wasn't too bad) or status/ego. It was simply a total failure to understand the process of software engineering, despite being told by the people who were employed to do that job. The people planning the offices were from a sales background. They were extroverts. They hated quiet spaces. They'd walk into the office and immediately start up some useless conversation that broke everyone's concentration. No matter how many times we tried to explain to them that we got far more work done if they'd just shut the f* up (we'd usually put it more politely than that), they'd keep on thinking that he most important thing was to have a "cool", "vibrant" space and, to them, that meant open-plan and loud.
- rokhayakebe 11y ago
  You were making a great point until They'd walk into the office and immediately start up some useless conversation and they'd just shut the f up. They both illustrate you suffer from the same condition they are: that neither one of you respects the way the other is. What silence is to you (an me perhaps) social interaction and "pointless chat" is to them. If your productivity went up by them not talking, theirs will go down for the same reason.
  - timv 11y ago
    I realise my post was a little unclear. Yes, often they'd carry on a conversation between themselves, which was an interruption, but was a symptom of the poorly designed office space. It's hardly their fault that their job and/or personality thrives on conversation. That was why the engineering team wanted a separate quiet work space for our team, so they could do their thing without breaking the productivity of the dev team. But what I meant with They'd walk into the office and immediately start up some useless conversation was that they'd start it with us. Partly because they wanted conversation but also because they thought it was good for us. That the office was too quiet and we needed to liven it up a bit. That the reason we weren't talking is because we needed someone to break the ice for us. That failure to understand what makes an engineering team productive led them to try and do things that were totally counter-productive, but they just didn't see it. It's in that context that they really needed to just stop.
dexterdog 11y ago
But in SF and NYC you are not only paying a ton for rent but you are paying a lot more in salaries. Most people are willing to work for less from home especially if they don't have to commute to an expensive place. You can also hire from much further away.
sytse 11y ago
At GitLab we're always been completely distributed. Even though most people like working from home some prefer an office. For them we hire a (co)working space. Our team call https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/#team-call https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/#team-call is also pretty important.
- cpeterso 11y ago
  Thanks for sharing the GitLab team handbook! It's a very interesting read. :)
Animats 11y ago
I'm waiting to see how Facebook's giant bullpen works out. They built, at great expense, one of the largest bullpens in North America. The largest single open office in the world may be be the call center of C-Trip, China's largest travel agency.[1]. They at least give everybody a sound partition. [1] http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/regional/2010-05/01/content_9808374.htm http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/regional/2010-05/01/content_980...

by p4wnc6 11y ago

usaphp 11y ago

I don't know but for me working in an open office is a positive experience, I feel joy talking to coworkers from time to time, sitting in a separate room is quite depressing and might drop the productivity for some people even further then time you lose chatting with coworkers

workitout 11y ago
Have you considered a line of work more suited to an extrovert personality?
- ams6110 11y ago
  The funny thing is, in my experience the most extroverted people (the sales team) all have offices, and the introverted programmers are all stuck in a bullpen.
  - p4wnc6 11y ago
    Status once again. There's actually quite a lot of formal research on this, such as here: < http://homepages.se.edu/cvonbergen/files/2013/01/Reversing-the-Extraverted-Leadership-Advantage_The-Role-of-Employee-Proactivity.pdf http://homepages.se.edu/cvonbergen/files/2013/01/Reversing-t... >
BinaryIdiot 11y ago
Someone coming up to me and talking to me interrupts whatever I was doing and makes it hard to get back into that original context. In general the research is showing open spaces is less productive. Obviously there will be edge cases here but in general it's usually much worse.
p4wnc6 11y ago
It's totally possible for people who are more extroverted to find an interactive setting more pleasant. You could round up all such folks and let them sit together, since they get energy from that. But clearly for the people with more introverted working styles it won't work. So let people pick. Want to sit in the communal workspace? OK, do so. Want your own office? OK done. From time to time you'll need to intermix. Sometimes a social butterfly needs to tune out the distractions. Provide a place for it. Sometimes a hermit crab needs to sit with the team for 1/2 day and pair program. As Picard says, make it so. This is not rocket science. The important part is that company management has to recognize that getting this right is one of the most important financial investments they will make. Instead of seeing space as a cost sink ... something to be standardized, minimized, and papered over with free lunch and dumbass "team building" shit, they need to recognize that of all the places to spend money, spending it on compensation for rewarding hard working employees is number one, and spending it on creating a humanity-affirming physical work environment is number 2. In visibly healthy companies, everything else hinges massively on those two things. Companies that have been so distorted away from humanity that they grind out success (generally for senior level people only) despite humanity-disaffirming workplaces ought to be seen as the frightening panopticons they are.
- pbreit 11y ago
  The thing is, open plans can be extremely non-interactive. I've been in several where it was almost always silent, everyone with headphones on, could not hear a pin drop, zero "collaboration" environments.
  - p4wnc6 11y ago
    Plenty of collaboration happens in quiet environments. It's just often digital collaboration. In a lot of software settings, that is precisely how you want it to be. You don't want people using their meat flaps to hit your head with acoustical vibrations, except in certain scenarios where our meatputers still process things better that way. Like if emotions need to be considered, or if there are aspects of creative expression being lost in digital translation. Sometimes it's the opposite, and you definitely do want meat flap acoustics often, and silent digital communication less so. For any given company, you need to understand this. You can't just assert that an open floor plan "is collaborative." It is one kind of collaborative. It may not be the right kind for you. And worst of all will be to assert that it definitely is the necessary kind merely as an excuse when your real motivation is to minimize financial investment into physical space.
tetraodonpuffer 11y ago
different strokes for different folks, the ideal "office environment" for me would be being able to teleport to a cabin in the middle of nowhere with just trees / nature to look at all day, and all work-related communication over email or IM. It's really easy to find an extrovert-friendly workspace, much harder to find an introvert-friendly one, because pretty much all managers are extroverts (they have to be, to succeed at management) and they are the ones that decide the office layout. Makes me wonder sometimes how deaf people can manage in today's vocal-collaboration oriented workplace, which is sad as the type of work we do lends itself extremely well to text-based communication.
bphogan 11y ago
I've seen my share of open floor plans where everyone has headphones on and is typing in Hipchat / Slack rooms sharing memes.
taurath 11y ago
Having an office doesn't mean you don't talk to coworkers. It means you get to control when you talk to coworkers. You can easily have 1-1 meetings in your office, talk about personal things and actually really hash out problems without worrying about annoying or distracting the poor sap 2 seats down. All office areas have shared space as well - thats why people meet up around the water cooler. If you want to spend no time socializing in an open office, its better to have your own office. If you want to spend lots of time socializing, its better to have an office since you won't be annoying the people who don't want to or don't have the time to socialize.
- ams6110 11y ago
  Biggest hint: the door. Open? Come on in and chat. Closed? Send me an email or come back later.
  - robotresearcher 11y ago
    Many of the older Oxford and Cambridge colleges have two doors in one doorway: the external one for the 'interruptible/not' signal, and the internal one to keep the heat in when the outer is open. We have a term for it: 'sporting one's oak'. http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2008/02/sporting-the-oak.html http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2008/02/sporting-the-oak.h... This was a great system in medieval buildings where most doors opened directly to the outdoors, which in itself is a great privacy feature.
  - edgyswingset 11y ago
    Except for when someone doesn't use that model. I work with people who keep their door closed all the time, but they're not in a "don't bother me" mood.
    - taurath 11y ago
      Then they suffer the concequences of people not going up to them. That, or they want people "to know" that the door closed means they can come in - those who they haven't told will shy away. Its kinda a way of filtering, or they're socially inept.
InclinedPlane 11y ago
Do you have an equivalent experience of working in offices to compare with? When I worked in offices I never had a problem talking with coworkers (about work or personal life).

funkaster 11y ago

Completely agree with you. It's been ages since Peopleware and management still thinks cheaper office rent == win $$$. I keep trying to find quite spaces and booking conference rooms in my current job just to find some quite, nice space. Btw, any manager out there that has not read Peopleware, please make yourself and your team a favour and get yourself a copy (and read it, of course).

rokhayakebe 11y ago
Bought!
mclovinit 11y ago
I just was recently offered a day a week work from home just for the same reasons you mentioned. I may capitalize on that soon. I think it was a smart suggestion and believe it saves both me and the employer in a number of ways. Less liability insurance? Not sure, but if I happen to be less at risk and I get my work done, then it's a win-win in my book.

dragonwriter 11y ago

> And before you say it costs too much, it doesn't. The problem is that you're in denial about how much your current offices with open floor plans are costing you. The problem is that rent is easy to measure, and the productivity your staff would have, once things were settled in, with an appropriate work environment is less easy to measure specifically (there may be studies which provide an approximate basis for estimating it, but that's different than a direct and company-specific measure.)

vehementi 11y ago
Yeah, so like other bad employees, bad managers hide from metrics that are hard to measure, and report metrics that are easy to measure and hope nobody calls bullshit on them.

cubano 11y ago

I've never believed it's about cost, but about distrust and, more importantly, control. IMO, most managers are paid very nicely to babysit employees and use unspoken threats and coercion to make them feel scared and threatened enough for their livelihoods where they will sit rather quietly and produce work at a measurable-yet-uninspired rate. Much like elementary school. I know I'm older then most of the IT workers here are and due to that, my personal experiences and insights may not reflect the current realities of many here, but they have been real to me over my 30 year career. I have been working remotely now, for myself, for the past 3 years. It was difficult in the beginning to have the discipline to actually keep my head "at work" for the required 8 hours, but now...I couldn't really imagine ever wanting to go back to an onsite gig. My boss could not be happier with the arrangement as he is realizing significant cost saving as well...it's a real win-win but both sides have to be willing to do their parts for it to work.

p4wnc6 11y ago
It is absolutely about status. "Programming" is a low status activity. "Inking mega fucking cash dealz" is a high status activity. If I ink mega fucking cash dealz all day, then of course I deserve a better physical status symbol than some schmuck who just types code all day, right? What? The schmucks are not happy with coding in the human equivalent of a bucket of crabs? Did you try giving them coffee? Did you try saying the phrase "unlimited vacation"? Did you jingle your keys?
- tedks 11y ago
  I hear this a lot on HN, and while I understand how it would work at bank or at IBM, how does this attitude translate into startups, founded by technical people, competing to hire "rock-star" "ninja" developers?
  - dogecoinbase 11y ago
    The language around perceived high-ability developers is important -- "rock stars" are admired. "Ninja" are feared. Neither are respected by the people who actually have money and power -- producers, daimyo, investors, management. Even "guru" implies asceticism and a willingness to provide expertise without appropriate compensation, and more importantly all three of these terms imply an independence from existing power structures that means they cannot move or advance within those structures.

tetraodonpuffer 11y ago

how are you going to put this in a way where you can make a strong case for spending more on facilities? you can easily make a case for saving money with open plan and showing how much you can save, what about the reverse? how can you justify spending 2x what your competitors spend on rent? how can you quantify "lost productivity due to constant interruptions" or "more bugs due to developers not being able to focus" in an accountable way? Also, are the people that make the budget decisions the type of people that thrive on collaboration and open plans, or the type of people that prefer quiet and isolation? if they are the type of people that thrive on open plans they might feel negatively about private offices period, which leads to making your case about their positives even harder. On one hand you have hard data, open offices cost x, open plan costs x/2, on the other hand you have "engineers say they could be more productive with offices" against "do you remember when we were small and working in a single room, that was awesome, we were so agile and communicative" (whether or not that is applicable at your particular company size or stage, burning the midnight oil on your stack to cobble together a demo for a pitch is not the same as writing production level tricky security code)

Negitivefrags 11y ago
A multiplier of only 2x to go from open plan to offices is ridiculously optimistic. You can't make people work in a box. 5x is probably getting closer to reality but I bet that it's actually even higher than that. That doesn't even count the cost of renovation to make all these offices.
st3v3r 11y ago
"On one hand you have hard data, open offices cost x, open plan costs x/2, on the other hand you have "engineers say they could be more productive with offices" against "do you remember when we were small and working in a single room, that was awesome, we were so agile and communicative" (whether or not that is applicable at your particular company size or stage, burning the midnight oil on your stack to cobble together a demo for a pitch is not the same as writing production level tricky security code)" Not to mention that part of why you do that then is so you don't have to do that anymore.

pbreit 11y ago

I'm mostly with you. I'm astounded that the "open plan" is the current "state of the art" in silicon valley considering we are supposedly so creative and innovative and meritocratic. My only misgiving about pure enclosed office is that it does seem a little solitary for 8+ hours/day, 5 days/week. I remember Fogcreek came up with an interesting design that used angles and transparency to get some good light, etc: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html

maxxxxx 11y ago
I like offices with 2 to 4 people. They don't even need to work on the same things. I have developed lots of good friendships with people in such environments. In open office I rarely talk to people because it's so loud.
- pbreit 11y ago
  That actually sounds kind of interesting, especially the not necessarily grouping same teams. What do you think of rotating every so often?
  - maxxxxx 11y ago
    I think it's a bad idea. Stability is good.
    - bcassedy 11y ago
      Change is nice too. We've got an open office and we change desks 2 to 4 times a year. So far we're grouped only with other engineers, but even with a small team you get much more comfortable with the people you work in close proximity to.
      - mclovinit 11y ago
        I think if the team is small and synergy is good, then this could work well. Sometimes a bad apple in the bunch (aka The Talker) can really be a drag on productivity.

InclinedPlane 11y ago

One thing I've noticed, there's the "coolness factor". Open offices are just more photogenic than closed offices, almost no matter how you do them. That's a big factor in startups and gamedev where coolness factor is actually important. Edit: to be clear by "important" I don't mean that it's a good thing, I mean that it has an unfortunately big impact on PR, hiring, and it's something that the people in charge take seriously. Personally I prefer individual offices, regardless of the coolness factor.

p4wnc6 11y ago
Yes, tech workers often are just pieces of office furniture these days, and so getting to be cool rustic armoir is better than being a lame ottoman. This is an important lesson for undergrad CS majors. Instead of working really hard to master dynamic programming or taking that extra course on programming language concepts, you should instead just watch Michael Bay's Transformers movie so that you know when to say "Furrier Transform" at the right moment. Seriously. Go right now and buy a pair of purely decorative eye glasses. At work tomorrow, got stand by the coffee machine and let your glasses slide slightly down your nose. Wait for an important-seeming person to walk by and then push your glasses up and say "Furrier Transform" -- this is a much faster way to a promotion than coding at your desk. Be wearing a slim-fitting hoodie if at all possible. If your MacBook doesn't already have stickers reflecting which causes you SJW on reddit, get some now!!!!11
- skewart 11y ago
  > "Furrier Transform" Lol. I can't quite tell if you're mocking InclinedPlane's comment or the mentality it points out. Sad though it is, there is a lot of cargo culting around startup office management in SF these days - and presumably elsewhere too. I doubt people really think deep down that having the cliche startup office - tightly packed open plan desks, plenty of microbrews in the fridge, a few bottles of expensive whisky, a wall of snacks, a hoverboard or two - will make or break the success of their compamy. But no one wants to be the first to try not doing it and find out.
  - 11y ago

Spooky23 11y ago

I've heard that offices aren't more expensive cited here many times, but haven't found that to be true. Also consider that despite Peopleware, literally nobody builds offices for programmers as if they were attorneys. And yet we muddle through. Having been involved in office planning to support moves 4-5 times... Costs were 5x-7x more for build out for a fixed office design vs. modular and would take much much longer. Just in terms of labor, you're talking about dramatically higher costs for drywall, electricians, and carpenters. If you're retrofitting, construction triggers full code compliance ($$$), and in major cities you often run into labor/prevailing wage problem.

p4wnc6 11y ago
Office rent is more expensive than open-plan rent. Nobody disagrees. Office productivity, morale, collaboration, and communication are higher than open-plan. The degree to which those things are higher is enough to more than make up for the higher rent, even over relatively short periods of time. If you're building from scratch, up-front costs are higher, and long-term gains from productivity, etc., are also much higher, once again more than offsetting the higher up-front costs and making private offices a winner from a net-present-value perspective.
- Spooky23 11y ago
  I think time to market matters. Higher rent + long, time and attention consuming build outs + accounting nightmares are more expensive than you think. Look at Joel Spolsky's story. 4x rent plus $500k in extra buildout. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/12/29.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/12/29.html
  - p4wnc6 11y ago
    And just look how successful Joel's endeavors have been. It's almost like there's something to this idea of really investing in your employees... Do you think Joel would not attribute a significant amount of the financial returns his companies have seen to his cultural choices about providing the best workplaces, even when it cost him a lot to do so?

spacehome 11y ago

I've suffered in open office environments, and I really want to believe that a private office would benefit the company as well as me, but I'm afraid that might just be wishful thinking on my part. Can you back up these assertions with references?

rajacombinator 11y ago

So you would rather have a real office with a door and window and all those other holier-than-thou emphasized goodies that is still in a corporate gulag where you have to worry about face time and butts in seats, instead of working from the comfort of your own home or wherever else you choose? Why pay absurd rent for an office designed to optimally isolate you from your colleagues? Did you even read the article and understand they work remotely? Shameful that this is the top ranked comment.

p4wnc6 11y ago
My personal belief, after having had a 100% remote job, is that there is a lot of value in having people physically co-located at the same physical office. This isn't always true and I would never want to enforce it dogmatically. For some people / teams / companies, significant remote working is very successful. I just don't believe it's always or even frequently better than a physical office with adequately private and quiet working conditions. I do believe fully remote working is probably better than the shambolic open-plan disasters that are common these days, so if someone makes you believe in a false dilemma pitting fully open-plan versus fully-remote, then fully-remote is probably the lesser of two evils. I did read the parent article. I responded as I did because I am dumbfounded that the idea of paying for the cost-effective extra benefits of private offices is not really even considered -- we've come so far on the path to destructive workspaces that we don't even think about it any more.
- rajacombinator 11y ago
  Ok that is a valid argument against remote work. I still don't agree. In my experience, the added productivity gains from working in a Peopleware-ideal office, where I could occasionally stop by a colleague's office to ask a question, were not much greater than what could be accomplished through video and chat. The personal "comradery" gains were slim to nil as well. The negatives are tremendous. Wasting time traveling to the office. Wasting time appearing to work, which is probably 50% of the average office workers day if we're being honest. Having to arrange your life around work instead of the other way around. If nothing else, I think a fully broken-down cost analysis of your office layout plus the higher cost-of-living expenses built into employee wages when hiring in a big city would convince you that remote is the way. Probably looking at 30-50k per employee savings for hiring remote vs SF, and getting happier, more productive employees.

timv 11y ago

One of the startups I worked for moved office a few times as we grew and leases expired etc. The engineering team pushed for "quiet private space". We avoided asking for "offices" so that the focus was on what sort of environment we needed, and didn't jump straight into the status and/or cost issues. It never happened. The main reason wasn't cost savings (though that was definitely a factor) or management paranoia (which wasn't too bad) or status/ego. It was simply a total failure to understand the process of software engineering, despite being told by the people who were employed to do that job. The people planning the offices were from a sales background. They were extroverts. They hated quiet spaces. They'd walk into the office and immediately start up some useless conversation that broke everyone's concentration. No matter how many times we tried to explain to them that we got far more work done if they'd just shut the f* up (we'd usually put it more politely than that), they'd keep on thinking that he most important thing was to have a "cool", "vibrant" space and, to them, that meant open-plan and loud.

rokhayakebe 11y ago
You were making a great point until They'd walk into the office and immediately start up some useless conversation and they'd just shut the f up. They both illustrate you suffer from the same condition they are: that neither one of you respects the way the other is. What silence is to you (an me perhaps) social interaction and "pointless chat" is to them. If your productivity went up by them not talking, theirs will go down for the same reason.
- timv 11y ago
  I realise my post was a little unclear. Yes, often they'd carry on a conversation between themselves, which was an interruption, but was a symptom of the poorly designed office space. It's hardly their fault that their job and/or personality thrives on conversation. That was why the engineering team wanted a separate quiet work space for our team, so they could do their thing without breaking the productivity of the dev team. But what I meant with They'd walk into the office and immediately start up some useless conversation was that they'd start it with us. Partly because they wanted conversation but also because they thought it was good for us. That the office was too quiet and we needed to liven it up a bit. That the reason we weren't talking is because we needed someone to break the ice for us. That failure to understand what makes an engineering team productive led them to try and do things that were totally counter-productive, but they just didn't see it. It's in that context that they really needed to just stop.

dexterdog 11y ago

But in SF and NYC you are not only paying a ton for rent but you are paying a lot more in salaries. Most people are willing to work for less from home especially if they don't have to commute to an expensive place. You can also hire from much further away.

sytse 11y ago

At GitLab we're always been completely distributed. Even though most people like working from home some prefer an office. For them we hire a (co)working space. Our team call https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/#team-call https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/#team-call is also pretty important.

cpeterso 11y ago
Thanks for sharing the GitLab team handbook! It's a very interesting read. :)

Animats 11y ago

I'm waiting to see how Facebook's giant bullpen works out. They built, at great expense, one of the largest bullpens in North America. The largest single open office in the world may be be the call center of C-Trip, China's largest travel agency.[1]. They at least give everybody a sound partition. [1] http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/regional/2010-05/01/content_9808374.htm http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/regional/2010-05/01/content_980...