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Office rent is more expensive than open-plan rent. Nobody disagrees. Office productivity, morale, collaboration, and communication are higher than open-plan. T
by 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 agoI 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 agoAnd 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?
- Spooky23 11y agoI do, but I don't think that most places have the margin to do it.
- p4wnc6 11y agoI agree that some places do not. If you've bootstrapped yourself entirely and have been based in Boulder, CO, and now you're opening up an office in SF, yeah, it might be a while before you can give everyone an office. Of course, since you can treat programmers as adults, you can just explain that to them. And, with whatever funds and free variables that you can work with, you can focus on providing the healthiest workplace available at your budget. I don't see a lot of companies running into this issue though. If you're at the point of receiving VC funding, then you can afford to give everyone an office. 4x rent + $500k up front is round off error for a lot of firms, and even for some firms where that would be feasible-but-expensive, it's probably worth it. What I don't see, though, is a bunch of firms actually running the numbers here. No one is pragmatically checking whether they can give their employees this thing that would be super great for the employees and for the company. Instead, I see a lot of people looking for excuses, a priori, to not invest in it, and to instead put the money towards over-the-top, opulent expenses, and designing a workplace that functions more like peacock feathers than as a workplace. I would totally agree with you if I looked around and saw a bunch of VC firms or founders going "shit, I'd really like to make a healthy and productive workplace for my employees, but the budget is just too tight." But I don't see that. I see people who a priori place more value on the status aspects of workplaces than the functional or humanity-affirming aspects, and as a result want to confirmation-bias their way into rationalizing decisions to make every wall a transparent soap marker surface cuz it looked cool in A Beautiful Mind.
- st3v3r 11y ago"I think time to market matters." That is not being impacted here. And in most cases, an extra month or so does not make a difference.