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Is the open office layout dead?
- concede_pluto 9y agoIt's been over a decade since I had so much as a semi-private office (shared with just one quiet teammate) so I have to say the death of the open office is exaggerated. And all of their workarounds assume a laptop could ever substitute for a desktop with an ergonomic keyboard and a large screen. It's amazing that the escalating competition in pay and perks never seem to include space to get into the zone.
- banach 9y agoIt's funny how you classify "space to get into the zone" as an employee benefit, while all that does is increase your productivity. But I guess that could mean going home earlier...
- mixedCase 9y agoIt's an employee benefit because it makes work more enjoyable. Being stuck in a problem that you can normally tackle with relative ease when "in the zone" is extremely frustrating.
- stephengillie 9y ago"Enjoying your job" is a perk most people don't get. To them, larger monitors, better laptops, offices with doors, etc are simply tools people use to feel better than you.
- flukus 9y agoEven when you hate the work, getting in the zone and coding makes the time pass quicker.
- PeterisP 9y agoSure, but to the employer the primary benefit of this is that people don't get stuck in problems that they can normally tackle with relative ease; the main effect (to the employer) is the fact that they're much more productive, not that they're a bit more happier.
- fiblye 9y agoWell, some people do like the work they do. Doing work you enjoy is even better when you can focus on it without distractions, and frustrating when you can't.
- chank 9y ago> "space to get into the zone" as an employee benefit. A thing that used to be standard is now a benefit. Don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining.
- sleet 9y agoA large screen typically isn't a problem. The office I work in has a number of the options mentioned - privacy pods, and a mixture of zoning and some dedicated desks. All the work spaces have nice monitors but you'll need to bring your own ergonomic keyboard and mouse.
- giaour 9y agoThat sounds incredibly unfriendly to differently abled employees. What if you need a desk that is significantly taller or shorter than normal? What if you need a non-traditional keyboard while recovering from surgery?
- sleet 9y agoThe desks can adjust in height. Also everyone is welcome to have a permanent desk if they prefer which can be customized to their desires. People bring their own keyboard.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- closeparen 9y agoIt's amazing when you look at software engineers' value in dollars. If you measured our value in square feet of local real estate, it would be blindingly obvious. A tech company in a prosperous city can buy you all the 4k Dell Ultrasharps and Macbook Pros a person could want without breaking a sweat. Another couple feet of desk, on the other hand, could turn you from a net creator of value to a net destroyer of value. It's as unaffordable to the company as the salary bump that could put homeownership within reach. I'd love it if someone would offer me a private office, parking space, and ability to live in a market with closer to median home prices, but the industry is very clearly trending in the opposite direction.
- gerbilly 9y agoReally, citation please? I see companies was so much money all over the place that it's a bit hard to believe that assigned desks would be such a hardship for them.
- closeparen 9y agoDon't know of anything public. At my company, we have ~5' slices of long communal tables. The figure I got from one of our facilities people two years ago was that these cost $20,000/year each. I'm sure the market is up since then, but I don't know how far. I think you could fit about four of these workstations into one of our conference rooms. So giving people private offices the size of our conference rooms (any smaller would probably be a code violation, and at least inhumane) would cost about $60k/head extra. Maybe less, since some fixed costs like bathrooms and kitchens wouldn't necessarily grow. Regardless of how the fixed costs play out, it looks like each 3-5 offices could buy a whole additional programmer. We chose the extra headcount rather than the offices.
- concede_pluto 9y agoOffice pods seem to be less than $10k, why can't we get those rather than five-foot slices of purgatory?
- dingo_bat 9y agoA laptop is a great substitute for a desktop if you have a dock. I just place my laptop on the dock, it clicks into place and I have a couple of big screens, a full size keyboard and a mouse on my desk. No different than a desktop.
- jdbernard 9y agoThe article is discussing mobile desks, so to get the benefit you are describing you'd have to have docks, monitors, and peripherals at every workstation.
- criddell 9y agoI'd bring my own keyboard and mouse. I'd probably also spend the first few minutes of my day cleaning the screen and the desk. The last thing I want to do is use somebody else's nasty keyboard and stare at fingerprints on the screen. The office I work in, everybody gets a door. With all the arguments about economics, I think some people don't experience the same value to closing the door and working uninterrupted for three or four hours every day. I'm certain whatever the walls cost here, it's small compared to the productivity gains.
- regularfry 9y agoSome offices do exactly that. Thinkpad docks everywhere.
- dingo_bat 9y agoYup, same at my office.
- cerberusss 9y agoThis will get even better with USB-C and/or Thunderbolt. Just sit down and with a single cable, get monitor, power, network and peripherals. (Almost) regardless of laptop make & model.
- 9y ago
- jasonjei 9y agoHow open is Dropbox to remote work? A lot of places of work "allow" or "tolerate it," but it feels hard to use this working mode for a consistent period. Working from home often has the same stigma as unlimited vacation days--you can do it, but it's often frowned upon...
- chairmanwow 9y agoI think that stems from the many people that "work from home" only to take their cat to the vet, get their car washed, go to the dentist, and pick up their dry-cleaning. Most of the time whenever I hear the term "working from home" I immediately assume they will not be home and will not be working.
- mhink 9y agoI think it varies considerably depending on the company culture- in particular, how remote-oriented the company is. (Yeah, I know that sounds buzzwordy, but hear me out.) At "remote friendly" companies I've worked at in the past, most people were in the office at least 80% of the time- and because of that, there was sort of a general mindset that if someone wasn't in the office, they "weren't there"... which lead to the same sorta assumption that you mentioned. On the other hand, at the place I'm at now, I would guess that less than half the company are in the office on any given day. This leads to an amusing inversion of what you're talking about, because if a normally-remote colleague needs to come into the office, it usually means they won't get as much done that day, because of the overhead of travel time! :P
- lawnchair_larry 9y agoThat's a pretty silly assumption. Is that what you do when you work from home? If not, what makes you think everyone else does?
- chairmanwow 9y agoIt wasn't my assumption as much as my empirical findings. I like being in the office, so I never worked from home.
- adamnemecek 9y agoCouldn't have come sooner.
- davb 9y ago> No designated desks I hate hot desking. I know it's very subjective but when I come into an office for eight hours a day, five days a week, I like to personalise my workspace. I don't drive, I take public transport and walk, and hate carting my laptop and charger around with me. I want my own space, with meeting rooms and collaboration spaces for when I need those things. I may be alone in saying so, but I'd happily take a modest drop in pay for a private office.
- cm2187 9y agoYou are not alone!
- thesmallestcat 9y agoDon't give them any ideas, or things will go the other way: Want an external monitor? That'll be $50/month. Access to the supply closet is $10/month.
- maxaf 9y agoI'm afraid it's too late.
- strictnein 9y agoI've brought my own monitor into work before. Was about to do it with my current role until they finally got me a decent one.
- booleandilemma 9y agoAs someone who currently works in a company with an open office layout, I have to say it's alive and well.
- Zigurd 9y agoI doubt it. Although I think a quiet private office is the best environment for those times when you need hours of uninterrupted concentration, other changes make open offices tolerable. My 4k screen occupies almost all of my field of view. I like ambient music for the coding trance. Instead I predict the death of the office. Remote work in dispersed co-working spaces is even more cost-efficient than an open office.
- cm2187 9y agoRemote working may be fine for software development, but for professions where most of the day is spent interacting with people one way or another (for instance in my line of business - banking) it's a massive drop in efficiency. That being said the trend I am seeing among banks is to favour cost savings over the efficiency of the business. For instance by moving departments to cities where few people want to go. Lots of people leaving, banks struggling to recruit there, but they seem to go ahead anyway.
- prawn 9y agoI co-own a co-working space where most of us are in one open-plan room of around 10 people. While home offices are more cost- and time-efficient (no commute, no office cost to employers), I still come into the office despite having a decent set up at home. I'm more productive here even with the open plan, the time lost commuting, etc. And we have had steady enquiries from prospective tenants, all in a similar situation. Going by HN, not everyone loves open plan, but for me, the advantages of a shared, open office are: people being able to see my screen from afar mean I'm more likely to stay on task rather than get distracted and research holidays non-stop, I enjoy the social interactions with colleagues, and face-to-face is best for collaborating. I think we'll see dispersed co-working spaces for a while, at least until VR is strong enough to emulate the benefits of working with peers.
- mahyarm 9y agoYeah home offices do have the cabin fever effect. Stay home all day and night because thats where everything is.
- rdtsc 9y agoI hope so. I didn't work in in one, but worked in a cubicle as an intern, then in an office with 3 other people focusing on the same project, then in my own office with a door, now at home. But I can only imagine the sensory distraction and just can't see why anyone thought it was a good idea for software development. Sure I can see the photo-op image appeal for PR purposes "Oh look at our dynamic startup, working in an exposed brick re-purposed warehouse. So much collaboration, all the time, with everyone...". But then after the picture is taken everyone should have the option to grab an office or an isolated area to do actual work, or separate white-boarding conference room if they are talking or designing something". I also find it interesting that these large tech companies at the bleeding edge of technology like Amazon, Google, Facebook are selling digital connectivity (ads, social connections, office suites, email, video chat, messengers, cloud infrastructure) -- and still require their employees to be physically present in the same building to do work. Wonder if remote work in the next revolution in how our economy works. The more things are digitized, hopefully the less we'll be tied to a physical tech hub area. That could have pretty large effects on real estate, traffic, taxes, how developed various areas get (smaller towns might see some development) etc.
- ilaksh 9y agoIt's because the large tech companies' offices have expensive real estate and just don't have the square footage to give everyone an office. I actually think that in some cases they could pull off micro-offices if they engineered ventilation and virtual windows or something, but basically it comes down to space and without some high-tech micro-offices which is not actually a thing, there is just not enough space. I mean square footage in downtown SF is at a premium. Now if they were sensible and had optional offices in less expensive areas closer to where people could get nice affordable homes, they could get a deal for the real estate and have lots of offices. Also they would need less offices because they allowed remote. But there is a distinct lack of being sensible in general. The execs have fancy offices in downtown SF so demand everyone commutes there and sits at communal tables of whatever.
- mahyarm 9y agoIt can actually be harder to hire people to work in the east bay at union city or fremont than palo alto sometimes. Tesla recently had a problem with it when they were trying to transfer eng offices from PA to fremont for example.
- strictnein 9y agoYou know what are great? Cubes. Cubes are great. Arrange them in pods of 6-8 with one common entrance to the space and put a dev team in one (and windows at the end, ideally). Easy as that.
- protomyth 9y agoAnd with office space at a premium, private offices for everyone isn’t a realistic alternative, nor is it ideal. I disagree. Privacy pods make me claustrophobic, and since I have some ear issues, noise canceling headphones are painful. Offices are only unaffordable if you don’t properly account for the cost of distracted developers. I do agree proper meeting rooms are needed also.
- pasbesoin 9y agoIt also externalizes the longer term health care costs. Chronic stress is generally and scientifically recognized as a significant negative health factor. And then there is the longer term lost productivity of those negatively impacted by it. All the way up to premature aging and death.
- bigdubs 9y agoI would be ok with our current trends in office planning if there was a better work from home policy. Let me work one or two days a week from home where I have a decent desktop setup.
- jgh 9y agowow they took the open office concept and somehow made it worse. Kudos, Dropbox.
- oldandtired 9y agoAs long as an office is considered a status symbol by management, then the open plan environment will stay. In a general sense, offices for any reason related to productivity is a non-starter today (has been so for a number of decades). Offices are considered a reward for climbing the hierarchy not for actual work by the plebs (you know, those who would actually need it or benefit from it for work purposes). And certainly, if the senior bods don't have offices then the junior workers will never get them.
- briandear 9y agoUnless you’re at Apple where everyone seems to have a private office with a locking door.
- junkculture 9y agoUsed to. Their new flying saucer is open office. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-small-business/wp/2017/08/16/some-apple-employees-may-quit-over-new-open-office-floor-plan/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-small-business/wp/201...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- drunkenmonkey 9y agoNeeds quiet to focus => superior Bad signals being sent here by any management that adopts this line.
- chadaustin 9y ago(Disclaimer: I used to work at Dropbox) I'm not a fan of a binary "open office or not" distinction: both can be done well. Dropbox's old office was the best open office I've worked in. Large desks, low employee per sq. ft. density, sound-absorbing foam on the (high) ceilings, teams spaced relatively far apart. The new Dropbox office was a slight regression. Smaller desks, slightly higher employee density, no sound-absorbing material. But it was still mostly fine. IMVU's open offices back in 2012 or so sucked. Employees were packed together to the point that it was sometimes even hard to walk from point A to point B. I feel like the most important office quality metrics are employee density and how well sound carries. Whether or not there are useful collaboration surfaces matters too: cubicle walls are great for stickies and note cards. But that's solvable with easy access to dry-erase walls or dry-erase boards on wheels.
- nkkollaw 9y agoNot at Apple, apparently.
- briandear 9y agoThat’s correct. Everyone has a private office.
- Clubber 9y agoI believe I read their new campus, the spaceship, is open floor plan.
- nkkollaw 9y agoI've seen this picture from Wired: http://creativebits.org/sites/default/files/applrend7.jpg http://creativebits.org/sites/default/files/applrend7.jpg (source: http://creativebits.org/inside_apples_spaceship_headquarters http://creativebits.org/inside_apples_spaceship_headquarters)
- jack_kc 9y agoThe first photo looks more like a dining room than an office. I can't imagine using a computer while sitting at one of those tables.
- userbinator 9y agoThat looks like a cafeteria or food court in a mall. Definitely not an office.
- nkkollaw 9y agoMmm... Have you read this and similar: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-small-business/wp/2017/08/16/some-apple-employees-may-quit-over-new-open-office-floor-plan/?utm_term=.c2097b91ebe8 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-small-business/wp/201... ?
- 9y ago
- driverdan 9y agoWhat a stupid clickbait headline. Obviously it's not dead. Research that shows it's terrible has been around longer than open offices have been popular. If management cared about the evidence they wouldn't have done it in the first place. Let me fix their conclusion with the cheapest, most employee friendly way to solve the problem. > Luckily, the solution is fairly simple— allow everyone to work remote.
- kemitche 9y agoIf you want me to work remote full time, I need a raise to cover the cost of getting an apartment or house equivalent to my own but with an additional room to turn into a dedicated private office. Otherwise, I'll take an appropriately designed office.
- daxfohl 9y agoI agree there's a need to separate work and life. I really struggled with WFH until I got some designated space to do it. I'd imagine that's not uncommon. That said, whether it's worth it depends on how you value your time. Not sitting in traffic an hour each day ~20 days/month, if you value your time at even $30/hr (entry-level contractor in midwest, say), it should cover the cost of the extra space. If not, well, you also have to factor in being able to use your own kitchen and especially bathroom. Ever since working from home for the previous few years, it's so awkward now having to go shit and piss in grungy toilets a foot away from my coworkers and managers. Would definitely pay some big money to avoid that.
- stctgion 9y agoWithin a month of engineering moving into a office previously used by management they had removed the luxury toilet paper
- daxfohl 9y agoI was going to try to say something witty, but as the saying goes, reality is stranger than fiction. Picture executives hording it for themselves. http://clark.com/shopping-retail/high-quality-toilet-paper-comes-cheap/ http://clark.com/shopping-retail/high-quality-toilet-paper-c...
- zitterbewegung 9y agoSo, why isn't one of the solutions at the bottom something like : "Have traditional offices?" or is this implied?
- jimjimjim 9y agoNo hot desking. please. the people pushing hotdesking seem to be manager types that spend their days talking to various groups of people. but it fails completely for some dev types. oh sure you can churn out some css while balancing your laptop on the edge of a table at the local cafe but just try that with a desktop workstation plugged into various bits of hardware while doing hour+ compiles.
- h3h4 9y agoIf only it had died before it was forced upon all M$ employees. Can't stand the random chit chat from people around me, missing private offices :(
- ahhhhhhhhhh 9y agoApple is spending something like $5bn on an office with open floorplans... I don't think it's going anywhere.
- sakabasataka 9y agoDid anyone ever actually believe this nonsense about open offices "fostering creative and egalitarian work environments"? Ive worked in my share of open office environments and not once was there even any pretense of high ideals behind it. It was pretty much "yep, we're a startup/penny-pinching corp and we're not going to spend a nickel more on office space than we have to". And so open office it is.
- Raynak 9y agoYou mean I have to use the keyboard that some sticky asshole has used? Fuck off.
- sctb 9y agoCould you please comment civilly and substantively or not at all? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- kps 9y agoHe might have used a naughty word but he's on-topic for the hot-desking the article mentions, and not wrong. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7377002.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7377002.stm
- dboreham 9y agoHow many decades since research conclusively showed that the best productivity enhancer you can provide to a developer is : A Door ?
- dewiz 9y agoUnrealistic suggestions for a dev with 2+ monitors or a desktop. Managers might be able to leverage focus rooms because they are more mobile, but average devs are not. Often it's the average manager who has time to talk and likes to talk loud, so a more reasonable middle ground is to avoid cross-functional rooms/clusters.
- abalone 9y ago> Luckily, the solution is fairly simple—design offices with a variety of areas to suit different kinds of work Putting aside the expense of the space for this -- let's just say it's all worth it if you're building a unicorn company and want maximum productivity on both the individual and team level. My question is, what's the best way to implement the equipment side of things? It's also really important, I imagine, to offer the best computing equipment, for engineers and designers in particular. Does this "variety of areas" and "no designated desks" approach force us to use laptops and external monitors? Do we not get to use those beautiful 5K iMacs or a souped-up tower? Do you get one and also have a laptop?? Believe it or not this is my main concern. I am ok with designating zones that are "library rules" for focus even if they are not full offices, alongside chattier collaborative areas, a more social cross-team cafe space, etc. It's moving equipment among them I'm worried about -- you can't stick to library rules if you need to cluster around someone's computer to do a code review.
- the_bear 9y agoWe just give everyone top-tier laptops (MBPs or Surface Books) and set up a docking station plugged into two big monitors, a keyboard, and a mouse at each desk. This seems to be the best of both worlds. You have the mobility of a laptop, but a full workstation wherever you decide to sit down. In our case, everyone has an assigned desk in the open office which they can customize however they want, but we also have standing desks and private offices that people can use whenever they want, and those have the same docking station setup. I guess if you need a really powerful desktop for some reason this wouldn't work, but I think a $2k laptop should be powerful enough for almost everyone. Certainly no one at my company (13 people) seems limited by their equipment.
- 0xbear 9y ago>> No designated desks I don't know about anyone else, but for me that would tank the productivity even worse than the open plan. I have to be at a particular place in order to get anywhere close to "the flow". There are currently two such places: my desk at work, and my desk in my man cave at home. Whenever we move offices, it takes me weeks to get back to 100% again. I suspect I'm not the only one. Simply put, with no designated desk I would never reach peak productivity at work.
- xroche 9y agoThis. "No designated desks" is even more retarded than open plan offices. I want my dual-screen setup. I want my mechanical keyboard. I want my optical mouse with high precision. I want my Herman-Miller chair. I want my tea pot and my mug. I want my notebook and my pens. I want my bluetooth audio headphone with the charger. I want my phone QI wireless charger where I just put my smartphone. I don't care about open plan: yes, you're being interrupted, but that's the rule, and this does improve communication, even if I hate being interrupted. Stay tuned, folks. In ten years, we'll have a "Is the no designated desks layout dead?" article on HN.
- m3kw9 9y agoOpen office is alive and well, there are always gonna be certain office cultures that likes it
- darrmit 9y agoWe are having major issues with an open office. It appears to be sort of like remote work: some can handle it fine, while others can't. It just gets deafeningly loud and distracting even with only 10 people nearby.
- quickthrower2 9y agoAnother data point for Betteridge's law of headlines
- rayiner 9y agoI've never understood the price issue. Class A in midtown Manhattan is $80 per square foot. That's $8,000 per year for a developer that probably makes well over six figures. Put two in an office that's only $4,000 per year. I really don't buy it considering how much money companies spend on office space. Like why he hell would you have offices in Greenwich Village (http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-new-york-office-tour-2016-11 http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-new-york-office-tour...) instead of say FiDi. It's not only be much cheaper, but an easier commute to places peopled live, like Brooklyn.
- Spooky23 9y agoHave you ever had a bathroom remodeled? Construction sucks and is both a time and money sink. You can literally have a crew show up and build a big cube farm in 1-5 days. It's really the same argument as "why would anyone pay outrageous fees to Amazon for slow, shitty VMs?". The answer is that when you factor in the cost of a data center facility and the people to build and run it, it turns out that AWS is a good deal after all.
- irq11 9y agoI know for a fact that dropbox, and all other large tech companies, spend a fortune on office buildouts. Offices don't add significant construction expense; it's purely a matter of how many people you can cram in per square foot.
- daniel_iversen 9y agoWell, I don't think that for large tech companies that its only about the money it costs to build the office, probably at least equally about the productivity of employees, their creativity and employee satisfaction. (full disclosure, I work at Dropbox)
- irq11 9y agoSure, but it's clear that privacy and quiet are amongst the most important qualities in an office, yet companies continue to strain to find "creative" new ways of avoiding private offices. Call me cynical, but it's obvious that per-person cost reduction is the driver of this logic.
- tlogan 9y agoAll this talk reminds me of my father's drunken talk: real estate is the king - if you want to get rich be in real estate. Sadly... it is true. ---- P.S. For readers who are a little slow, the point is that if office space is not a cost center then everybody would have an office.
- loup-vaillant 9y agoI wish. I'm currently working on a 1 year old subsidiary that tries very hard to be modern (Spotify organisation, brand new offices…), and as part of that modernity went full Open Plan™. It's not a full blown boiler room, but we do have zero privacy and a good deal of noise.
- mindcrime 9y ago> No designated desks If the day comes that my $DAYJOB employer goes this route, that's the exact day I quit. Hot desking is some of the most idiotic, brain-dead stupid shit I can imagine. I have desk drawers for a reason... so I don't have to lug around every single item I use at my desk, everywhere I go. Not to mention the books on my desk, which I am definitely not hauling back and forth every day.
- bassman9000 9y agoNo designated desks is the Agile of floor planning. Everyone's the same, anyone can do the same job, you can hotswap spaces and people as you replace hard drives.
- mindcrime 9y agoWhile I agree with your overall point, I would add that anybody who thinks that "Agile" prescribes that people be considered fungible, has been misled. Somebody's specific implementation of "agile" might prescribe that, but nothing in the Agile Manifesto says anything like that. In fact, I'd argue that, to a first approximation, anytime anybody makes a statement along the lines of "Agile says you do X", you can safely assume that they don't know WTF they are talking about, and/or they are confusing Agile with "Foobar Inc. Fucked-up Agile".
- bassman9000 9y agoSadly, the Agile manifesto is, on purpose, lacking. Yes, it contains sound ideas. But it has to be implemented. And that's where the problem lies. To be fair, I should have stated Scrum as Agile implementation, instead of Agile itself. My bad.
- LeicaLatte 9y agoGreat work was never done in offices. Mines, workshops and studios >> offices.
- bane 9y agoFor fun, let's slippery slope this trend into the setting for a story. At some point the workplace will just end up an unlivable hellscape where people have to walk to work 20 miles from their triple bunked dorms, and then stand inches from each other for 16 hour double shifts wearing nothing but VR goggles and chord boards. The 12th floor walkup, non-temperature controlled "office" warehouse will smell like fear and sweaty humanity, the only "perk" will be the government mandated yearly flea and louse spray that will rain down from the ceiling and the monthly cleaning of the shared feeding tubes. During enforced sleeping periods, employees will spend precious sleep time sending tap-code (error corrected of course) to each other the workings of a conspiracy wherein they'll demand 60cmx30cm standing desks, a 12" CRT monitor, 12 hour shifts and 1 day off of work a quarter and a decent burial instead of being shoved off into a nameless mass grave. I call this book, Apathy Shrugged
- JetSpiegel 9y agoSet this in Shibuya good extra sci-fi goodness. Or Frisco, if you want to sell to Hollywood. Mike Judge coulf buy this as a spin-off to Silicon Valley.
- unixhero 9y agoIt is not dead. It has invested every living corner of this earth. Does it suck and ruin my productivity and drain my work happiness? Yes.
- nurettin 9y ago>> Propst himself accused companies of manipulating his original idea into “hellholes.” Ironic. This so-called visionary had no idea his futuristic ideals would be twisted by the drive to increase profit by cutting corners in an economy where people are seen as milking cattle.
- gargarplex 9y agoI rented a private office in Manhattan for $900/month. i.e., <10% of my salary. This is a no-brainer... Why not just rent each individual engineer a private office? Why the need to own the office space? Company identity/"cult"ure?
- chrisper 9y agoYou can't seriously expect me to also rent my own office space as an employee. What is next? Have to buy my own gear out of my own money? The very reason I am an employee of a company and not self-employed is to not have to worry about these things. Unless you can somehow provide each employee an additional budget. But what I have seen so far is that that "extra" budget comes out of the pay roll.
- pbreit 9y agoIf open offices are so bad wouldn't it be easy to create a competitive advantage by going with some other layout?
- bdowling 9y agoThe open office layout won't be dead in the U.S. until tax laws offer accelerated depreciation for building office walls. Right now the depreciation schedule for commercial building construction is something like 39 years, meaning that expenses incurred this year to renovate an office won't be recouped for almost four decades. Meanwhile, cubicles are considered furniture, which has a depreciation schedule of 7 years. (Note: I didn't look up the actual numbers, so I might be off a little.) If companies got the same tax benefits for building walls that they do for buying cubicles, we'd see more walls, since everyone knows they're better for productivity and office harmony.
- ge96 9y agoNot related, I think it would be cool if tech company offices had VR headset for seeing forests/deserts/other scenery. Holodeck haha
- mattlondon 9y ago> No designated desks We had an office where they tried this as an experiment. Each desk was sit-stand, had one or two 24inch monitors, a chromebox + mouse + keyboard, plenty of wall sockets easily accessible at the top of the desk and powered-USB port for charging etc. People either plugged their laptop in, or just logged in on the chromebox and were away. And it was awful. * People started to have "their" desk where they "always" sit, and left things like coats on the chair, running shoes under the desk, folding bikes (you name it) at the desk. This had the effect of taking the desk "out of circulation" meaning when the "usual" occupier wasn't there for a day people still didn't use the desk, or someone did use it but the usual occupier came in late and someone else was there it was a super-awkward moment of either the first person packing up and moving elsewhere, or the usual occupant getting in a huff with someone in "their desk" and/or continually interrupting the other person when they come over to collect their notebook or headphones or something. * There were less desks than people. 90% of the time this was fine as usually enough people were on vacation/at clients/on training etc. Occasionally though it meant there was no space and people roamed the office for 15 minutes before having to go and work from Starbucks (if they had brought their laptop with them) * If you were at meetings or otherwise away from your desk, you would often come back to your desk to find that someone else was now sat at the desk you were sitting at before. * Even if you found a desk, you were often not near your team. Cue constant "Where are you sitting?" instant messages and people wandering around trying to find each other. * Desks often had missing cables and stuff - so even if you did get a desk sometimes it was on that one desk where the monitors dont work, or someone had taken the power cable, or the keyboard had a "sticky H key" or something. Because no one "owned" the desks, no one bothered to report the faults to the people managing the facilities and just moved to another desk or stole the cable/keyboard/mouse/whatever from another nearby desk. * Engineers could not use desktops (since they would have to move them every day, and company policy is no source code stored on laptops) so the computers got given a fixed location, and the nomad engineers had to find a desk to remote desktop into the desktop each day. This is fine for short periods, but day-in, day-out 8+ hours a day looking at remote desktops leads to sea-sickness due to the small lag. So even if the receptionist or admins or spreadsheet jockeys could go and sit in the cool-zones for their work, the engineers were stuck at a dekstop because they need the monitors and stuff to do their job. After about 9 months or so we moved to a different building due to growing out of the experimental building and went back to assigned-desks in an open plan office which was hugely improved. Please, for anyone reading this, please please please do not instigate non-designated desks for your workers. tl;dr - non-designed desks had all of the same problems as an open office, but with extra additional micro-stresses every day that really add up over time to make your working day a misery.
- Fifer82 9y agoAs far as I am concerned the Office is dead, open or not in the tech field. I mean an office which you travel to, and work all day. No way am I going back to that for less than another 70k a year on top. It isn't 1930.
- mattlondon 9y agoI dont think we'll ever get private office spaces back. I personally like the openness of the open-plan office, but struggle with the noise. What would help enormously though would just be full-high glass partitions between banks of desks - e.g. put each group of 4+4 desks inside a glass "fish tank" so that noise does not propagate as easily outside of that group, no need for doors although that would be a bonus. You'd not need to radically alter the layout of the offices too much - just a thin sheet of toughened/safety/whatever glass between the banks. Bonus points for making it modular so that the tanks can be enlarged to put 4 banks in one batch rather than just 2 etc. Surely this sort of thing would not consume too much space/money? I would be concerned about echos within these glass-walled partitions, but then on the other hand I've never struggled with echos in the glass-walled meeting rooms so I guess it might be ok.
- rcarmo 9y agoLast time I switched jobs, I moved from a 3-person office (engineering managers) to a hot-desking "culture" (consulting & sales) where we all sit around large tables (power sockets only, all wireless). Everyone spends time with customers, so hot-desking makes complete sense (and we have a mix of differently sized glass cubes for solo work and meetings, with extra monitors and conferencing gear). As a direct result, I now do most of my actual work at home, keep in touch via Skype, and go to the office only for internal meetings. It's completely impossible to do any sort of focus work in an open plan office. The upside of being able to work anywhere, anyhow is, however, completely offset by office politics. You have to literally waste a couple of days a week for the sake of face time and trying to herd things through a miasma of constant interruptions and overly excited interactions (everyone is low on time and concentration, so conversations are hurried and often unfocused). (Edit: typos)
- AriaMinaei 9y agoI wish someone who works at Pixar could comment in this thread. They've had private offices ever since the steve jobs building, and often you hear that private, customized offices is one of the things that they love about their workplace. The Steve Jobs building is designed to increase chance of random encounters between people to stimulate collaboration, but these encounters happen in the hallways and the designated collaborative spaces, rather than in people's private offices. Some pictures: https://officesnapshots.com/2007/07/16/pixar-hq/ https://officesnapshots.com/2007/07/16/pixar-hq/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CX9OV43o4Ac https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CX9OV43o4Ac Edit: Private offices were first introduced since the Steve Jobs building
- moogly 9y agoSomeone did in an earlier thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14963985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14963985
- AriaMinaei 9y ago> As a current Pixar employee, the open office trend has unfortunately spread to our admittedly beautiful campus. You have to be fairly senior to get an office around here, lowlifes like me get stuck in shared open hallways and the like. Well that's a shame..
- mianos 9y agoIt seems to me, inn Sydney, open offices are being used even more. If they are such shite, who is making the decisions? As far as I can see, from this thread, many others and talking to people, anecdotally, the most minor set of people actually like them. Who is making the decisions? What will change this? Refusal, mutiny? I have been told, if I don't like open offices I would not be a suitable employee because everyone else does. In my current firm I went as far as organising the place for us to move. A mix of rooms, some large, some small. It rocks compared to the open office in the last place.
- bogomipz 9y agoI am curious why this is on the dropbox blog, did they solve this in their own offices with the recommendations outlined? Maybe someone from that works there can chime in?
- JohnBooty 9y agoPerhaps the most powerful and popular trend in the move away from open offices is an increased number of small private spaces My company upgraded our offices last year and "privacy pods + informal open spaces" has been a huge success. I don't have any hardcore productivity metrics but the reaction among our developers, including me, has been unanimously favorable. Although, it must be said, we still prefer to work from home quite a bit. This is mostly due to our large number of remote employees in other countries. If I am working with remote people I don't typically commute to the office.
- m-p-3 9y agoI wish it was. Since our management decided to test the open office/hot desk layout, we mostly deal with docking station issues non-stop. Most of our equipment is Dell, and those docking station connectors seems to be even more fragile now. I guess (and hope) this will get better when all our laptops will support USB-C docking station..
- nerdponx 9y agoNo designated desks. Please please please no. Having "personal" space at the office is just as important as having "quiet" space. I do not want to feel like a drifter, a student in the library, or a tenant in a co-working space, unless I am actually one of those things.
- pennaMan 9y agoI read more along the lines of you having the liberty to decide where that personal space is.
- nerdponx 9y agoIf given the choice in an office like that, I am pretty sure I would choose "at home".
- yflu 9y agoNo designated desks, or no predesignated desks? If it's the former, then yeah, I'm bailing, that's tremendously dumb. If it's the latter, then whatever, it's hardly even a selling point.
- mmcconnell1618 9y agoAt my current job I was moved to 3 different desks before officially being told I didn't have one. It was fantastic news! I'm not categorized as remote and have little obligation to sit in the office when I can work from home at a much better setup.
- basseq 9y agoI worked in a "hoteling" environment as a consultant for more than a year, so let me tell you what happens when there are no designated desks: There are designated desks. It turns into high school lunch hour, where everyone has "their seat" and god forbid the ignoramus who trespasses.
- falcolas 9y agoUntil someone more senior than you comes along and takes your seat. Typically someone from outside the office who just wants to sit next to their "friends". Nothing quite reminds you how junior you are than to have to find another desk. It's another one of those "wins" for the corporation - why set up guest stations throughout the business when you can just say "there are no assigned desks"? It even re-inforces the "we are a family, not a company" meme.
- horusthecat 9y agoI'll throw in my 2 cents and say I've worked in "open" floorplans I didn't mind--but these were always at on ghost-town-empty offices for companies that were living on investor life support in spaces that could have housed 3x more people without being crowded
- alkonaut 9y ago> The open office layout is meant to foster an egalitarian work environment that inspires creativity and spontaneous collaboration among colleagues. Wait what? I thought that collaboration was the minor benefit to what is otherwise just a way of making more people fit in less space. The biggest actual benefit of the open office is that it can be situated in a much better location than an office where developers have private rooms. Ask 10 developers whether they want private offices (or at least not large shared spaces) and they'll probably say yes. But ask the same 10 developers in an office in a nice location in SF, London, Berlin, Stockholm... whether they'd want private offices at the expense of ending up in an office park where the rent would be the same for the larger office - and they probably don't.
- Ndymium 9y agoI wonder why so few are talking about the in-between. There seems to be only open offices or everyone has their private room. The first is my personal nightmare, the second is very expensive and hinders quick collaboration with colleagues. At my workplace we have a mix of both. We have project rooms (my current one has 6 people) where people are working on the same or similar things. This keeps the noise and visual distractions to a minimum (we have small cubicle-like walls attached to our desks that rise with the desk if you raise it up) while still allowing us to ask the quick question or look at things together if required (of course you need to limit that so that you don't bug them all the time). In my experience this is the best compromise if you are working in a project with a few other people. The removal of personal desks would be terrible IMO. Many people have said they just like having a desk, but I also have notepads, things attached to the desk "walls", stuff for fidgeting when I'm thinking, 2 monitors attached to my laptop, keyboard, mouse, headphones... I can take my laptop to go sit wherever else, but why would I? I would have to carry around so much stuff or forgo these productivity tools I have. Sometimes I do write with just my laptop in the common areas somewhere, but it's only for a short while. Sure, you could put standardised desks everywhere with the same setup, but then it would probably not match _my_ preferences anymore and thus would be worse for my working.
- athenot 9y agoI think it depends a lot on the culture of the organization. Currently my team is highly distributed and my local colleages only meet in person in the office about twice a week, with the support from the very top of our BU. In our case, I feel that having my own space that sits empty 5 days out of 7 is highly wasteful. Currently my own desk is spartan: 2 monitors and the necessary cables; that's it. When working from home becomes the norm, I think change in the office setup is inevitable and I welcome that tradeoff. I would love a modern shared desk setup, as long as all of desks have good monitors to go with them. Heck, group them in pods of 4/8/12 desks and make them bookable just like conference rooms (but for a day).
- mikhailfranco 9y agohome > office > cubicle > hell (9th circle) > open plan
- vram22 9y agoI saw long back in a Microsoft job ad in some computer magazine that one of the perks they offered devs was "a door" or "a room with a door" :) Some years later, I visited an MS development center in Hyderabad, and was invited to the offices of a few devs - they actually did have a decently large room each as their office, with enough space for more than one desk, many computers, space for many books, etc., and still some free space in the middle, plus a whiteboard each, etc.
- Jeremy1026 9y agoFunny, the quoted Architecture Firm in the article is Gensler, who designed my last company's office space. Which included 6 rows of desks[1], each row seating 8 people with no separation left and right, and only a low divider between the person in front of you. And they designed it in 2015, 3 years after the PDF the quote was taken from was published. Sounds like even they aren't buying into the "open offices are dead" narrative. [1]https://www.google.com/maps/uv?hl=en&pb=!1s0x89c803629c02a719:0x855ed517a092a7c8!2m22!2m2!1i80!2i80!3m1!2i20!16m16!1b1!2m2!1m1!1e1!2m2!1m1!1e3!2m2!1m1!1e5!2m2!1m1!1e4!2m2!1m1!1e6!3m1!7e115!4s/maps/place/planit%2Bagency/@39.2735008,-76.6026092,3a,75y,197.87h,90t/data%3D*213m4*211e1*213m2*211sXmvPHaq4b4kAAAQ2tADHwQ*212e0*214m2*213m1*211s0x89c803629c02a719:0x855ed517a092a7c8!5splanit+agency+-+Google+Search&imagekey=!1e2!2sXmvPHaq4b4kAAAQ2tADHwQ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjQxo3XxOjVAhWDyoMKHafbAnYQoB8IfzAM https://www.google.com/maps/uv?hl=en&pb=!1s0x89c803629c02a71...
- Shikadi 9y agoBefore reading the article I was prepared to talk poop about the libre office interface :(
- hobarrera 9y agoBeing someone who's always worked in open offices (for almost ten years now), I can't even think of what an alternative would be. Single offices per developer, kinda like lawyers? It seems that would take up a chunk of space, and would be pretty much the same as working from home. Honestly, I think open offices are mostly here to stay. Those who dislike it and want isolation, privacy, and less distractions, can always pick to work at home (I know I do multiple days a week).