3 ms·

Is there no good way to collectively apply some reverse pressure back towards the job market? I often wonder as I see this, and even worse trends spreading.

RickS 9y ago
I'm not sure exactly how big the per-employee pay cut would have to be in the bay area (or elsewhere) to offset the increase in square footage costs, but I expect that it's monumental. Which is one of my pet peeves about open offices: how much it's phrased as "about collaboration". If open offices and private/pair/hub&spoke had identical costs, how many CEOs would choose to sit in the chaos? I expect the number is not the 80% that it is today. And to your point... 80% is a BIG number. Offices are slow moving things, and today, there are contractors building offices for use in the coming decade according to the whims of the day. Big lofty spaces with exposed ceilings and no damn walls. Much as I hate to say it, this is unlikely to improve on a time scale smaller than 5 years.
- abecedarius 9y ago
  Let's see, a search turns up "price per square foot for office space in San Francisco reached $72.26 in the fourth quarter of 2015". (Per year, right?) Say a small private office takes 200 ft.^2 more than your share of a cattle pen would -- by my memory of Xerox PARC, many of the researchers' offices were smaller than that in total. Extrapolate to $100/ft^2 in the future and it's still $20k, a fraction of your salary. (If it's a monthly figure, than yeah, you need to move out of SF.)
  - valuearb 9y ago
    A private office shouldn’t be bigger than 100 SF, for a typical Frisco engineer that’s less than 5% of carrying cost. Being able to only need three engineers instead of four because of the greater productivity of private offices makes it a no brainer.
dredmorbius 9y ago
If only there were some concept of, I don't know, a sort of collective bargaining between labour and management, including the issue of working conditions? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_union https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_union

RickS 9y ago

I'm not sure exactly how big the per-employee pay cut would have to be in the bay area (or elsewhere) to offset the increase in square footage costs, but I expect that it's monumental. Which is one of my pet peeves about open offices: how much it's phrased as "about collaboration". If open offices and private/pair/hub&spoke had identical costs, how many CEOs would choose to sit in the chaos? I expect the number is not the 80% that it is today. And to your point... 80% is a BIG number. Offices are slow moving things, and today, there are contractors building offices for use in the coming decade according to the whims of the day. Big lofty spaces with exposed ceilings and no damn walls. Much as I hate to say it, this is unlikely to improve on a time scale smaller than 5 years.

abecedarius 9y ago
Let's see, a search turns up "price per square foot for office space in San Francisco reached $72.26 in the fourth quarter of 2015". (Per year, right?) Say a small private office takes 200 ft.^2 more than your share of a cattle pen would -- by my memory of Xerox PARC, many of the researchers' offices were smaller than that in total. Extrapolate to $100/ft^2 in the future and it's still $20k, a fraction of your salary. (If it's a monthly figure, than yeah, you need to move out of SF.)
- valuearb 9y ago
  A private office shouldn’t be bigger than 100 SF, for a typical Frisco engineer that’s less than 5% of carrying cost. Being able to only need three engineers instead of four because of the greater productivity of private offices makes it a no brainer.

dredmorbius 9y ago

If only there were some concept of, I don't know, a sort of collective bargaining between labour and management, including the issue of working conditions? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_union https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_union