13 ms·

Office rents are based on floor space. Open offices require less floor space than closed offices, which means they’re cheaper. They’re also more scalable and ag

Office rents are based on floor space. Open offices require less floor space than closed offices, which means they’re cheaper. They’re also more scalable and agile. You can rearrange desks and even cram in more employees per desk when you need to quickly ramp up. Increasing collaboration is just the bullshit excuse. Everywhere I work is an open office and we all wear our noise cancelling headphones, playing whatever music doesn’t break our concentration, and communicate via Slack.

myspy 8y ago
In Germany there are laws dictating the minimum size an office work space must have. Is there something similar at your place?
- CamTin 8y ago
  In the US we mainly just have fire codes, usually set locally, which dictate the number of people that can be in a building, but this is more about how fast the building can be evacuated in the case of an emergency than how much space each person has to work in. It's possible some local zoning laws dictate the density of the office, but again that's mainly about traffic and parking, not about workers' wellbeing.
- RyJones 8y ago
  Microsoft used to classify a- contractors as one half head, v- as one quarter head, to get around occupancy requirements
  - mikestew 8y ago
    No, no, it's because contractors being contractors, they aren't in the office half the time. And vendors are in the office even less. Though try working as a contractor at Microsoft without your ass in that chair eight hours/day and see what happens.
afandian 8y ago
I would dearly love to see some class action lawsuits for hearing damage due to coerced headphone wearing. This is an occupational health hazard as much as anything else. (and yes, noise cancelling headphones is still sound, even if it's out of phase! I even wonder if it's worse, as the effect might be constant sound pressure on the eardrum -- does anyone have the science on this?)
- jdbernard 8y ago
  The reason noise cancelling headphones work is that, by being out of phase, the two sound sources sum to zero (or closer to it). It's not just a trick of the brain making you ignore the sound because an out of pass signal is also present. The out of phase signal causes the actual sound pressure level to decrease by cancellation. So yes, there is less sound pressure.
  - afandian 8y ago
    The fact that noise cancelling headphones cause me pain made me question that. I wonder if the wave interference does indeed sum to zero, or to a constant DC offset. Obviously there's no such thing as a constant pressure in acoustics, but something's happening...
    - Traubenfuchs 8y ago
      Have you tried ear plugs? You can even combine them with headphones for ultimate cancelling.
      - afandian 8y ago
        I have a pair in my pocket now!
      - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
        In two separate jobs, I had managers tell me it was “rude” for me to wear ear plugs, even after I explained to them that the office noise was unbearable and noise-cancelling headphones are painful for me to use. It’s 100% about virtue signalling to management. Headphones fit the visual stereotype of a hacker, so it’s OK. Ear plugs carry a connotation that the stuff generating noise is somehow “a bother” or “a nuisance” ... which of course is true, but you’re not allowed to actually acknowledge that truth.
orev 8y ago
Employees are still more expensive by far than floor space. It seems crazy to have all that investment in people and then not optimize the environment they work in.
- kps 8y ago
  In Silly Valley, employees are a Veblen good. The whole point is to display as many as possible without actually doing anything useful.
  - beamatronic 8y ago
    Or sequester then from your competitors, like so much carbon
- brixon 8y ago
  They are different budgets (different buckets of money). I worked at one company that had no money for new computers, but had plenty of money to fix a broken computer... so... my computer happen to break one day so bad all the internals needed to be replaced. The case was old, but all the internals were brand new. Companies are often short sighted and don't look at the whole picture.
- jonhendry18 8y ago
  Especially at a place like Apple. Depressing to see them, of all companies, moving toward more open workspaces.
ryanianian 8y ago
Cheaper rent is definitely the driving factor in cities like NYC and SFO. But I think small private offices like those at Stack Overflow [1] don't really eat up that much more floorspace (maybe 1.5x-2x but then you need far fewer small conf rooms). [1]: https://stackoverflow.blog/2015/01/16/why-we-still-believe-in-private-offices/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2015/01/16/why-we-still-believe-i... Saying "toughen up and use headphones" is such a dismissive response to noise that employers use. I'm extremely sensitive to noise distractions, and music is, for me, just as bad as coworker chatter. Even white-noise apps make me feel like I'm getting barraged with sound. I want "library quiet." It's amazing that "open office" workplaces don't generally have a policy to keep the space as quiet as possible so people can get real work done.
- SandwichTeeth 8y ago
  Honestly I think the noise and chaos of open offices are positives to executives because it creates the appearance of work. I follow some of the executives of the company I work at (we have an open office) and they are constantly posting pictures of "teamwork and collaboration" that just have a bunch of people standing around each others desks talking. They see all the movement and noise and they love that it seems like everybody is hard at work, collaborating and discussing problems etc. But if you look a little closer, the people doing actual work are hunched over their desks with huge headphones on, and everybody standing around are either not talking about anything related to work or they are rehashing discussions that have already happened over IM/email/meetings. I expressed to my manager that I had a hard time working in this environment and would like the chance to work from home a more often but was dismissed because he "likes the open office" and our management has the view that if you are working from home you probably aren't working.
  - dbattaglia 8y ago
    Funny anecdote about that: I briefly worked in one of those "startup inside a megacorp" companies, which had the typical trendy NYC startup look, open floor plan, free snacks and lunch, etc. Fairly often, you would see upper management types from the headquarters walking investors around. One of my coworkers, who worked for the company for many years, believed that we were basically just a zoo to look exciting for the investors compared to the stuffy corporate office. Good developer, here's a banana! Of course I don't think that's necessarily 100% true, but it always stuck with me.
JoachimS 8y ago
I wish employers could realize that they employ grownups and could at least be honest to them.
- 52-6F-62 8y ago
  Oh that can go so much larger, too. But yeah, spot on.
- tachudda 8y ago
  Where are you working that everyones a grown up?
- sametmax 8y ago
  If you expect people to do the right thing, you are going to live in a world of disappointment. The only way to avoid this is to have the chance (e.g financial and social opportunity) and to use the chance (e.g by working and choosing) to set yourself in the right environment for you. Wanting the environment you are in to change does not work. Just like you don't get more money by negotiating with your current boss, but by negotiating with bosses in other companies. You can, and my, decide it's your mission to change your environment. It's possible. But you usually can only one mission in life, so choose carefully.
  - emodendroket 8y ago
    Yeah, just apply to work at one of the many companies that hasn't gone to an open floor plan (?).
    - sametmax 8y ago
      Like everything in life, that comes down to: - can you pull it off ? - does the cost outweigh the benefit In that particular case, some people can't pull it off. They need the job or don't have that many opportunities. Some, like as both the chance to be able to, and have the mean to. That's a combination of luck and the result of your previous choices. Now, does the cost outweigh the benefit is a personal evaluation. Personally I will decline working for a company with an open floor plan unless I can work remotely. It's on of my important items. For some people, the prestige, the project, the team or the money can override this. It's not rocket science really.
josho 8y ago
I’m angered that this trend saves the company money by creating new costs that employees are now more likely to pay. Eg. Headphones.
- jonhendry18 8y ago
  "new costs that employees are now more likely to pay. Eg. Headphones" More importantly: Stress.
emodendroket 8y ago
Do cubicles really take up that much more space?
- cimmanom 8y ago
  Given that some open plan employees sit shoulder-to-shoulder (as in, roughly 4 feet between chairs), yes, absolutely. I've also seen open offices with employees seated at 3-foot intervals around glorified dining room tables.
  - ryandrake 8y ago
    I’ve seen places where developers were nearly literally shoulder to shoulder and back to back. As in, the distance between people was determined by monitor width. With a normal sized keyboard, a 27inch monitor gives you about 6 inches of mouse space before you hit the next guy’s keyboard.
    - cimmanom 8y ago
      <shudder>
mc32 8y ago
I completely agree that cost is the driving force, absolutely, be it floor, reconfig, density, etc. BUT, why the elaborate dance around that fact? It’s always dressed up as something else? It comes across as a sham explanation when anything but cost is attributed.
- Bartweiss 8y ago
  I'm not really convinced cost is the driving force. A lot of tech companies with open-plan offices throw around money pretty lavishly, and programmers feel so strongly about focus that I suspect many would accept a direct offer of "no raises this year, but you all get cubes/offices instead". If you're taking the whole company on an international vacation, or paying to do their laundry and offer daycare, or offering whatever other widely-mocked perk you care to name, it's hard to imagine that worsening employee experience to cut costs is the goal. (Especially when you see open-plan offices even at non-urban companies.) I think a lot of people really do believe the hype about open plan being better, especially if they're the boss and don't have to actually experience it.
  - mc32 8y ago
    If there is another force behind this, I’ll take a stab at it and guess it’s conditioning against the idea of privacy. If you can get a community of people who work together to ignore the basic human idea of privacy by cramming people together such that they are forced to live out in the open without privacy, it then becomes easier for them to ignore questions about privacy when creating privacy violating services.
    - daemin 8y ago
      I think the reason is simpler than that: fashion. Big successful new companies started out scraping by being built in garages with just a computer, table, chair to use, no private offices. When they grew up they saw no reason to change because it worked for them. So now the company is big and successful and believes that part of its success was the open plan office. So now other companies try to emulate the new young fresh hip fashionable company and so everyone gets open plan, even if its worse than offices.
bachmeier 8y ago
The cost argument makes sense until you look at the numbers. Giving closed, private offices to each employee is expensive, but there are other options. You can surround each employee with portable walls eight feet high for $2000 or less. If the lifetime of the wall is ten years, that's $200/employee a year. If you're working for a company that is so strapped for cash that it can't afford that, you should be looking for a new job, because your next paycheck isn't going to clear.
- madeofpalk 8y ago
  Somehow I don't think putting up eight feet walls around these "open plan" desks is not going to solve any problems.
  - DoofusOfDeath 8y ago
    It might not solve all problems, but wouldn't you expect it to at least help dampen ambient noise from conversations, and visual distractions as well?
  - bachmeier 8y ago
    They eliminate all visual distractions, provide privacy, block some noise, prevent others from talking to you directly, and force others to move discussions to a more appropriate place. And they have an advantage over a private office - others don't knock on your door to see if you're available.
  - jpindar 8y ago
    >You can surround each employee Refers to cubicles which in my experience DID solve a lot of problems. People talk less when they don't see other people around them.
- Bartweiss 8y ago
  I wonder how much of a pay cut the average programmer would accept for different working conditions? I suspect cubicles effectively cost more than $200/year because they eat more space than open-plan desks, which forms the real cost. But even so, I suspect you could find a lot of people who would give up $1000/year of salary for that benefit. And even closed offices could probably be offset on a salary level. I think a lot of mid-career or later devs would probably give up an annual raise in return for a private office if they were offered an explicit choice. I could be wrong about specifics, maybe it's not cost effective to offer. But I seriously doubt that's how the choice is being made - I think a lot of people really do believe the hype about 'better collaboration', or just want to look like other companies.
technofiend 8y ago
Well that and the people who make "open office" decisions are often immune from them. It's rare to see someone like Gordon Moore actually sitting on the floor in an open cube with everyone else. Making ED or MD (depending on location) in my company means getting an office, even in buildings that are otherwise strictly hoteling setups with no assigned desks. The higher up you go, the more dedicated resources you get.
scrooched_moose 8y ago
You'd be surprised. Somehow we actually lost 2 desks after going open and our personal workspaces shrunk to about half. The architect insisted on 8ft aisles and cramming in so many completely unused "collaboration" spaces we couldn't get enough desks in.
- Game_Ender 8y ago
  We soon filled the collaboration spaces with desks. The large isles though help put people farther apart so it’s slightly harder to here conversations of people nearby.
madengr 8y ago
They tried to cram in 30% more at my employer by turning U shaped desks into L shaped, and adding more rows. They were stopped by fire code and OSHA bathroom/employee requirements.
s73v3r_ 8y ago
"They’re also more scalable and agile." Considering everyone is wearing noise cancelling headphones, and everyone is on Slack anyway, I don't believe this claim.
e12e 8y ago
> Office rents are based on floor space. Open offices require less floor space than closed offices, which means they’re cheaper. Just note that the kind of "open space" that's designed to both maintain/boost individual "deep concentration"/research work and boost collaboration requires more space pr worker than individual offices. In the typical "cramped open" setup; either any one on one conversation will disturb everyone, so people are polite and don't collaborate that way as easily as dropping by an office with an open door; Or people gets lots of collaboration done, but no "deep work" done.
ken 8y ago
That doesn't fit with my experience. 100% of managers who have tried to push me to an open office have tried to claim (among other things) that the company couldn't afford private offices for programmers -- but when I asked how much it was and offered to take it out of my salary, they all admitted it wasn't really about money at all. Increasing collaboration is a bullshit excuse, but so is cost.
banku_brougham 8y ago
Aka a terrible configuration for encouraging collaboration. Which is the conclusion of the linked study.

myspy 8y ago

In Germany there are laws dictating the minimum size an office work space must have. Is there something similar at your place?

CamTin 8y ago
In the US we mainly just have fire codes, usually set locally, which dictate the number of people that can be in a building, but this is more about how fast the building can be evacuated in the case of an emergency than how much space each person has to work in. It's possible some local zoning laws dictate the density of the office, but again that's mainly about traffic and parking, not about workers' wellbeing.
RyJones 8y ago
Microsoft used to classify a- contractors as one half head, v- as one quarter head, to get around occupancy requirements
- mikestew 8y ago
  No, no, it's because contractors being contractors, they aren't in the office half the time. And vendors are in the office even less. Though try working as a contractor at Microsoft without your ass in that chair eight hours/day and see what happens.

afandian 8y ago

I would dearly love to see some class action lawsuits for hearing damage due to coerced headphone wearing. This is an occupational health hazard as much as anything else. (and yes, noise cancelling headphones is still sound, even if it's out of phase! I even wonder if it's worse, as the effect might be constant sound pressure on the eardrum -- does anyone have the science on this?)

jdbernard 8y ago
The reason noise cancelling headphones work is that, by being out of phase, the two sound sources sum to zero (or closer to it). It's not just a trick of the brain making you ignore the sound because an out of pass signal is also present. The out of phase signal causes the actual sound pressure level to decrease by cancellation. So yes, there is less sound pressure.
- afandian 8y ago
  The fact that noise cancelling headphones cause me pain made me question that. I wonder if the wave interference does indeed sum to zero, or to a constant DC offset. Obviously there's no such thing as a constant pressure in acoustics, but something's happening...
  - Traubenfuchs 8y ago
    Have you tried ear plugs? You can even combine them with headphones for ultimate cancelling.
    - afandian 8y ago
      I have a pair in my pocket now!
    - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
      In two separate jobs, I had managers tell me it was “rude” for me to wear ear plugs, even after I explained to them that the office noise was unbearable and noise-cancelling headphones are painful for me to use. It’s 100% about virtue signalling to management. Headphones fit the visual stereotype of a hacker, so it’s OK. Ear plugs carry a connotation that the stuff generating noise is somehow “a bother” or “a nuisance” ... which of course is true, but you’re not allowed to actually acknowledge that truth.

orev 8y ago

Employees are still more expensive by far than floor space. It seems crazy to have all that investment in people and then not optimize the environment they work in.

kps 8y ago
In Silly Valley, employees are a Veblen good. The whole point is to display as many as possible without actually doing anything useful.
- beamatronic 8y ago
  Or sequester then from your competitors, like so much carbon
brixon 8y ago
They are different budgets (different buckets of money). I worked at one company that had no money for new computers, but had plenty of money to fix a broken computer... so... my computer happen to break one day so bad all the internals needed to be replaced. The case was old, but all the internals were brand new. Companies are often short sighted and don't look at the whole picture.
jonhendry18 8y ago
Especially at a place like Apple. Depressing to see them, of all companies, moving toward more open workspaces.

ryanianian 8y ago

Cheaper rent is definitely the driving factor in cities like NYC and SFO. But I think small private offices like those at Stack Overflow [1] don't really eat up that much more floorspace (maybe 1.5x-2x but then you need far fewer small conf rooms). [1]: https://stackoverflow.blog/2015/01/16/why-we-still-believe-in-private-offices/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2015/01/16/why-we-still-believe-i... Saying "toughen up and use headphones" is such a dismissive response to noise that employers use. I'm extremely sensitive to noise distractions, and music is, for me, just as bad as coworker chatter. Even white-noise apps make me feel like I'm getting barraged with sound. I want "library quiet." It's amazing that "open office" workplaces don't generally have a policy to keep the space as quiet as possible so people can get real work done.

SandwichTeeth 8y ago
Honestly I think the noise and chaos of open offices are positives to executives because it creates the appearance of work. I follow some of the executives of the company I work at (we have an open office) and they are constantly posting pictures of "teamwork and collaboration" that just have a bunch of people standing around each others desks talking. They see all the movement and noise and they love that it seems like everybody is hard at work, collaborating and discussing problems etc. But if you look a little closer, the people doing actual work are hunched over their desks with huge headphones on, and everybody standing around are either not talking about anything related to work or they are rehashing discussions that have already happened over IM/email/meetings. I expressed to my manager that I had a hard time working in this environment and would like the chance to work from home a more often but was dismissed because he "likes the open office" and our management has the view that if you are working from home you probably aren't working.
- dbattaglia 8y ago
  Funny anecdote about that: I briefly worked in one of those "startup inside a megacorp" companies, which had the typical trendy NYC startup look, open floor plan, free snacks and lunch, etc. Fairly often, you would see upper management types from the headquarters walking investors around. One of my coworkers, who worked for the company for many years, believed that we were basically just a zoo to look exciting for the investors compared to the stuffy corporate office. Good developer, here's a banana! Of course I don't think that's necessarily 100% true, but it always stuck with me.

JoachimS 8y ago

I wish employers could realize that they employ grownups and could at least be honest to them.

52-6F-62 8y ago
Oh that can go so much larger, too. But yeah, spot on.
tachudda 8y ago
Where are you working that everyones a grown up?
sametmax 8y ago
If you expect people to do the right thing, you are going to live in a world of disappointment. The only way to avoid this is to have the chance (e.g financial and social opportunity) and to use the chance (e.g by working and choosing) to set yourself in the right environment for you. Wanting the environment you are in to change does not work. Just like you don't get more money by negotiating with your current boss, but by negotiating with bosses in other companies. You can, and my, decide it's your mission to change your environment. It's possible. But you usually can only one mission in life, so choose carefully.
- emodendroket 8y ago
  Yeah, just apply to work at one of the many companies that hasn't gone to an open floor plan (?).
  - sametmax 8y ago
    Like everything in life, that comes down to: - can you pull it off ? - does the cost outweigh the benefit In that particular case, some people can't pull it off. They need the job or don't have that many opportunities. Some, like as both the chance to be able to, and have the mean to. That's a combination of luck and the result of your previous choices. Now, does the cost outweigh the benefit is a personal evaluation. Personally I will decline working for a company with an open floor plan unless I can work remotely. It's on of my important items. For some people, the prestige, the project, the team or the money can override this. It's not rocket science really.

josho 8y ago

I’m angered that this trend saves the company money by creating new costs that employees are now more likely to pay. Eg. Headphones.

jonhendry18 8y ago
"new costs that employees are now more likely to pay. Eg. Headphones" More importantly: Stress.

emodendroket 8y ago

Do cubicles really take up that much more space?

cimmanom 8y ago
Given that some open plan employees sit shoulder-to-shoulder (as in, roughly 4 feet between chairs), yes, absolutely. I've also seen open offices with employees seated at 3-foot intervals around glorified dining room tables.
- ryandrake 8y ago
  I’ve seen places where developers were nearly literally shoulder to shoulder and back to back. As in, the distance between people was determined by monitor width. With a normal sized keyboard, a 27inch monitor gives you about 6 inches of mouse space before you hit the next guy’s keyboard.
  - cimmanom 8y ago
    <shudder>

mc32 8y ago

I completely agree that cost is the driving force, absolutely, be it floor, reconfig, density, etc. BUT, why the elaborate dance around that fact? It’s always dressed up as something else? It comes across as a sham explanation when anything but cost is attributed.

Bartweiss 8y ago
I'm not really convinced cost is the driving force. A lot of tech companies with open-plan offices throw around money pretty lavishly, and programmers feel so strongly about focus that I suspect many would accept a direct offer of "no raises this year, but you all get cubes/offices instead". If you're taking the whole company on an international vacation, or paying to do their laundry and offer daycare, or offering whatever other widely-mocked perk you care to name, it's hard to imagine that worsening employee experience to cut costs is the goal. (Especially when you see open-plan offices even at non-urban companies.) I think a lot of people really do believe the hype about open plan being better, especially if they're the boss and don't have to actually experience it.
- mc32 8y ago
  If there is another force behind this, I’ll take a stab at it and guess it’s conditioning against the idea of privacy. If you can get a community of people who work together to ignore the basic human idea of privacy by cramming people together such that they are forced to live out in the open without privacy, it then becomes easier for them to ignore questions about privacy when creating privacy violating services.
  - daemin 8y ago
    I think the reason is simpler than that: fashion. Big successful new companies started out scraping by being built in garages with just a computer, table, chair to use, no private offices. When they grew up they saw no reason to change because it worked for them. So now the company is big and successful and believes that part of its success was the open plan office. So now other companies try to emulate the new young fresh hip fashionable company and so everyone gets open plan, even if its worse than offices.

bachmeier 8y ago

The cost argument makes sense until you look at the numbers. Giving closed, private offices to each employee is expensive, but there are other options. You can surround each employee with portable walls eight feet high for $2000 or less. If the lifetime of the wall is ten years, that's $200/employee a year. If you're working for a company that is so strapped for cash that it can't afford that, you should be looking for a new job, because your next paycheck isn't going to clear.

madeofpalk 8y ago
Somehow I don't think putting up eight feet walls around these "open plan" desks is not going to solve any problems.
- DoofusOfDeath 8y ago
  It might not solve all problems, but wouldn't you expect it to at least help dampen ambient noise from conversations, and visual distractions as well?
- bachmeier 8y ago
  They eliminate all visual distractions, provide privacy, block some noise, prevent others from talking to you directly, and force others to move discussions to a more appropriate place. And they have an advantage over a private office - others don't knock on your door to see if you're available.
- jpindar 8y ago
  >You can surround each employee Refers to cubicles which in my experience DID solve a lot of problems. People talk less when they don't see other people around them.
Bartweiss 8y ago
I wonder how much of a pay cut the average programmer would accept for different working conditions? I suspect cubicles effectively cost more than $200/year because they eat more space than open-plan desks, which forms the real cost. But even so, I suspect you could find a lot of people who would give up $1000/year of salary for that benefit. And even closed offices could probably be offset on a salary level. I think a lot of mid-career or later devs would probably give up an annual raise in return for a private office if they were offered an explicit choice. I could be wrong about specifics, maybe it's not cost effective to offer. But I seriously doubt that's how the choice is being made - I think a lot of people really do believe the hype about 'better collaboration', or just want to look like other companies.

technofiend 8y ago

Well that and the people who make "open office" decisions are often immune from them. It's rare to see someone like Gordon Moore actually sitting on the floor in an open cube with everyone else. Making ED or MD (depending on location) in my company means getting an office, even in buildings that are otherwise strictly hoteling setups with no assigned desks. The higher up you go, the more dedicated resources you get.

scrooched_moose 8y ago

You'd be surprised. Somehow we actually lost 2 desks after going open and our personal workspaces shrunk to about half. The architect insisted on 8ft aisles and cramming in so many completely unused "collaboration" spaces we couldn't get enough desks in.

Game_Ender 8y ago
We soon filled the collaboration spaces with desks. The large isles though help put people farther apart so it’s slightly harder to here conversations of people nearby.

madengr 8y ago

They tried to cram in 30% more at my employer by turning U shaped desks into L shaped, and adding more rows. They were stopped by fire code and OSHA bathroom/employee requirements.

s73v3r_ 8y ago

"They’re also more scalable and agile." Considering everyone is wearing noise cancelling headphones, and everyone is on Slack anyway, I don't believe this claim.

e12e 8y ago

> Office rents are based on floor space. Open offices require less floor space than closed offices, which means they’re cheaper. Just note that the kind of "open space" that's designed to both maintain/boost individual "deep concentration"/research work and boost collaboration requires more space pr worker than individual offices. In the typical "cramped open" setup; either any one on one conversation will disturb everyone, so people are polite and don't collaborate that way as easily as dropping by an office with an open door; Or people gets lots of collaboration done, but no "deep work" done.

ken 8y ago

That doesn't fit with my experience. 100% of managers who have tried to push me to an open office have tried to claim (among other things) that the company couldn't afford private offices for programmers -- but when I asked how much it was and offered to take it out of my salary, they all admitted it wasn't really about money at all. Increasing collaboration is a bullshit excuse, but so is cost.

banku_brougham 8y ago

Aka a terrible configuration for encouraging collaboration. Which is the conclusion of the linked study.