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I think a book that cites sources is immediately more trustworthy, to me, than companies following fashionable trends in office design without a critical eye to

by zzalpha 10y ago

I think a book that cites sources is immediately more trustworthy, to me, than companies following fashionable trends in office design without a critical eye toward impacts on employee performance. Show me one, just one, example of a company moving to open office space only after evaluating performance impact (or, conversely, immediately evaluating the impact after such a change), and that would be something to look at. But AFAICT, these decisions aren't being made based on facts. They're being made based on gut, fashion, and when it comes right down to it, cold hard cash (open space is cheaper).

Swizec 10y ago
Maybe they do all those studies and decide that the hit in productivity is worth the cheaper open space? Maybe individual performance just doesn't matter that much? I'd bet that the bigger the company, the less it matters how effective individuals are and the more it matters how effective teams are. As much as I love working from home or an office or whatever, team productivity is better when people who work together share physical space.
- mtviewdave 10y ago
  I've worked for several big companies (though not Facebook, Google, Apple, or others in that class). None of them showed any interest in analyzing developer productivity, much less looking for ways to increase it. My gut instinct is that developer productivity is hard to measure, real estate costs are easy to measure, so you end up with 500 people in a noisy environment doing the work that 100 could do in a quiet environment. I also suspect there's a status thing going on. People working on the floor are lower status than people with offices, and I suspect some execs find status signaling more desirable than productivity.
  - Swizec 10y ago
    Exactly! This isn't a problem of one office design or another. It's a problem of misaligned incentives between individual workers and the people making these decisions. I don't think there's a solution for that.
  - brazzledazzle 10y ago
    I think that hard to measure consequences vs easy to measure financial impacts are why so many companies go down the path of mediocrity one small change at a time. "If we make people jump through all of these hoops for software/hardware/whatever we save $X per year." HR, finance, corp IT and facility management in big companies rarely factor in employee happiness because you can't put that as a line item in the budget. Their priorities become aligned with their own interests. HR is starting to wise up as evidenced by improving benefits packages and various industry publications. And while that's good that's probably a consequence of being held directly accountable for recruiting and retention which doesn't translate readily to other departments. There's still a dramatic disconnect between various departments and what benefits the company as a whole.
- zzalpha 10y ago
  As much as I love working from home or an office or whatever, team productivity is better when people who work together share physical space. Define "team". I fully believe that a co-located 5-9 person team in an open space can be a good thing. I also fully believe that a co-located 20-30 person department composed of 4-6 teams, all in a single open space is a complete disaster. And don't get me started on the travesty that is the new Facebook space. To me, the perfect solution is neither individual offices nor open plans, but rather 5-9 person team spaces with floor-to-ceiling walls and a door, plus breakout rooms.
  - dasmoth 10y ago
    > To me, the perfect solution is neither individual offices nor open plans, but rather 5-9 person team spaces with floor-to-ceiling walls and a door, plus breakout rooms. This can be a pretty good solution for a well-gelled 5-9 person team. But I don't buy into the mindset that this is always the natural unit of software development. Some problems need larger groups -- that probably don't fit the "gelled team" model as well -- while others are perfectly amenable to one or two people coding away behind closed doors. Why is there so much focus on "teams" at the moment?
  - a_imho 10y ago
    >And don't get me started on the travesty that is the new Facebook space. I have similar observations about their UI. Maybe a consequence of Conway's law, that the office plan is implicitily reflected in the software?

by zzalpha 10y ago

Swizec 10y ago

Maybe they do all those studies and decide that the hit in productivity is worth the cheaper open space? Maybe individual performance just doesn't matter that much? I'd bet that the bigger the company, the less it matters how effective individuals are and the more it matters how effective teams are. As much as I love working from home or an office or whatever, team productivity is better when people who work together share physical space.

mtviewdave 10y ago
I've worked for several big companies (though not Facebook, Google, Apple, or others in that class). None of them showed any interest in analyzing developer productivity, much less looking for ways to increase it. My gut instinct is that developer productivity is hard to measure, real estate costs are easy to measure, so you end up with 500 people in a noisy environment doing the work that 100 could do in a quiet environment. I also suspect there's a status thing going on. People working on the floor are lower status than people with offices, and I suspect some execs find status signaling more desirable than productivity.
- Swizec 10y ago
  Exactly! This isn't a problem of one office design or another. It's a problem of misaligned incentives between individual workers and the people making these decisions. I don't think there's a solution for that.
- brazzledazzle 10y ago
  I think that hard to measure consequences vs easy to measure financial impacts are why so many companies go down the path of mediocrity one small change at a time. "If we make people jump through all of these hoops for software/hardware/whatever we save $X per year." HR, finance, corp IT and facility management in big companies rarely factor in employee happiness because you can't put that as a line item in the budget. Their priorities become aligned with their own interests. HR is starting to wise up as evidenced by improving benefits packages and various industry publications. And while that's good that's probably a consequence of being held directly accountable for recruiting and retention which doesn't translate readily to other departments. There's still a dramatic disconnect between various departments and what benefits the company as a whole.
zzalpha 10y ago
As much as I love working from home or an office or whatever, team productivity is better when people who work together share physical space. Define "team". I fully believe that a co-located 5-9 person team in an open space can be a good thing. I also fully believe that a co-located 20-30 person department composed of 4-6 teams, all in a single open space is a complete disaster. And don't get me started on the travesty that is the new Facebook space. To me, the perfect solution is neither individual offices nor open plans, but rather 5-9 person team spaces with floor-to-ceiling walls and a door, plus breakout rooms.
- dasmoth 10y ago
  > To me, the perfect solution is neither individual offices nor open plans, but rather 5-9 person team spaces with floor-to-ceiling walls and a door, plus breakout rooms. This can be a pretty good solution for a well-gelled 5-9 person team. But I don't buy into the mindset that this is always the natural unit of software development. Some problems need larger groups -- that probably don't fit the "gelled team" model as well -- while others are perfectly amenable to one or two people coding away behind closed doors. Why is there so much focus on "teams" at the moment?
- a_imho 10y ago
  >And don't get me started on the travesty that is the new Facebook space. I have similar observations about their UI. Maybe a consequence of Conway's law, that the office plan is implicitily reflected in the software?