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> When can this fad end It's not a fad, businesses aren't doing this just because it's trendy and cool and they think people will like it, they're doing it bec

• VRay 7y ago
  It saves a fortune, but the companies are spending a fortune on their employees' salary and benefits too I think we're talking the difference between $300/month on open desk space vs $1000/month on an office. It's a lot of money and it adds up, but these people are costing the company a total of $10k-$40k a month My theory is that open space is extremely helpful to certain types of people, and those traits coincidentally overlap with the people calling the shots at a lot of companies. Sociable upper managerial-types probably value being able to collaborate more easily in open space more than being able to concentrate in private offices. Plus it's harder to get away with blatantly goofing off if anyone can look over and see your screen at any time, but I dunno how big a deal that is when people are setting their own hours and picking the projects they're working on. At least in my case, I don't give a crap if my teammates have Facebook and Netflix onscreen at all times so long as they're getting their jobs done
  • bovermyer 7y ago
    Salary and benefits come out of a different bucket than office equipment and installations.
    • chrisseaton 7y ago
      So what?
      • bovermyer 7y ago
        It matters in this case because the discussion took a turn towards comparing the compensation of staff to the provisioning of the office environment. In that context, companies' consideration of expenditures will take into account capital versus operational categories.
        • chrisseaton 7y ago
          Why does it matter? It's all the same money no matter which budget it comes out of.
          • bovermyer 7y ago
            No, it's not. Capital expenditures are reported differently and held to different standards and strategies.
            • chrisseaton 7y ago
              But if you have a million in funding, then who does it matter to if you spend it on infrastructure or operational expenses? You're still burning the same amount of cash.
              • deleted 7y ago
                [deleted]
              • athriren 7y ago
                It matters a lot to your board, your creditors and investors, the government. If you’re publicly held, it matters to a significantly larger number of investors and changes your legal obligations somewhat. If you’ve ever heard someone talking about “the color of money” in a business context in regards to different types of incoming and outgoing accounts, this is what they’re talking about. Whether capex is better or worse than opex from any particular vantage point is so heavily context dependent that I’m unsuited to provide a general overview, but it is easy to see how it could matter when you compare expenses attributable to salary vs expenses attributable to the purchase of real property in much the same way it matters to you as an individual whether you used your finances to buy a house or pay someone to mow your lawn.
              • outworlder 7y ago
                You are trying to rationalize this. Don't. Companies work under their own rules and are not rational actors.
  • saalweachter 7y ago
    I would also guess that kind of hip architectural firms that get hired to design the offices of giant successful tech firms are 10-20 person companies who may have equally open offices but don't have the visceral understanding of the differences between an open 20-person office and an open 1000-person office.
    • hinkley 7y ago
      Even 20 can be a problem if you go from 2 chatty people to 3 chatty people. At any point in time, you can count on one chatty person to either not engage, or to disengage once they have. Then everyone brings headphones and it's harder to ask people questions than being in cubicles.
  • magduf 7y ago
    >My theory is that open space is extremely helpful to certain types of people, and those traits coincidentally overlap with the people calling the shots at a lot of companies. Sociable upper managerial-types probably value being able to collaborate more easily in open space more than being able to concentrate in private offices. Yes, and in addition, sociable developers value being able to collaborate more easily in open space. I don't know what your coworkers are like or what age range they are, but over my career, I've absolutely seen that engineers in their 20s absolutely prefer open spaces, and are extremely sociable. I haven't seen this so much with older generations. The type of people entering this profession has really changed over the decades.
    • oblio 7y ago
      In 1990 there were probably 1 million developers. Now it's probably closer to 100 million. Developers are close to a representative sample of the whole population, and the general populace is not introverted :-)
    • thrower123 7y ago
      If your developers skew towards those in their 20s, many of them have never experienced working in solitude. University culture is dominated by study groups and camping out in the library, so it's no great stretch to go from that to an open-office layout, or even one where you are forced to hot-desk. And laptops have been the norm. It's a little different when you were accustomed to go back to your dorm room where you had your desktop setup to get anything done.
      • magduf 7y ago
        >And laptops have been the norm. It's a little different when you were accustomed to go back to your dorm room where you had your desktop setup to get anything done. This isn't quite right: before having your desktop computer in your dorm room was normal, you had to go to a computer lab to get anything done, and those had no privacy whatsoever. Computer labs with PCs were quite common until colleges started requiring students to buy their own PCs, and before this, the computer labs had terminals (like VT100) which connected to VAX servers or mainframes. Anyone who went to college up until the mid-1990s should be familiar with computer labs.
  • alistairSH 7y ago
    Sociable upper managerial-types probably value being able to collaborate more easily in open space more than being able to concentrate in private offices. This is not my experience. Most of the upper management at my employer spend their days wandering the halls looking for open "huddle rooms". Or, they just camp out semi-permanently in one of those spaces. They absolutely do not collaborate in public. In fact, they can't - too much of what they do involves information that, if not strictly confidential, is at least somewhat need-to-know.
    • hinkley 7y ago
      I know when Amazon was increasing density in some of their offices, they also built a few more meeting rooms (they did not, however, increase bathroom size, and I strongly suspect they were violating OSHA rules, if only due to gender inequality). This is possibly the only place I've ever worked where they made even a half-assed attempt to maintain the ratio of employees to meeting spaces. And you're right. Post densification, managers are constantly having to schedule meeting hours or days later or settle for two smaller meetings because everything is full. And if you screw up the room reservation, you have to just cancel the meeting because there is nowhere to go. But a lot of that pain trickles down onto the people doing the work, so I don't think it's fair to look at it as getting what they deserve. It sucks for them, it's debilitating for us, and we always have to make it up by cutting corners or working later.
      • VRay 7y ago
        Haha, dude, I remember that. They were definitely breaking OSHA rules. They had something like 3x the dudes per bathroom allowed I used to just go home when I couldn't find an available bathroom. Fuck that company
  • staristari 7y ago
    > Sociable upper managerial-types probably value being able to collaborate more easily in open space more than being able to concentrate in private offices. This is the opposite of my experience. One thing that shocked me about a move to an open plan office after a life with offices was how stifling to discussion. It's so disruptive to have a conversation at someone's workspace, that to discuss anything nontrivial (or even slightly sensitive) all participants go somewhere else. This greater cost subtly means that people don't really discuss as much. When people do, it's more often in formal meetings (though of course people can go find a whiteboard together for a chat here and there). These meetings tend to fill their timeslots whether they need to or not, a known problem with meetings. Random, "What have you been working on" do not rise to the point of happening as often, since chitchat at someone's desk is disruptive. Obviously this still happens sometimes at people's desks, as well as in shared areas, between activities, etc., but it's decreased. A culture of more regular 1:1s tries to help make up for this, I think, but the formal nature of scheduled 1:1s makes it hard to have the same organic discussions. Even fairly mid-level management (and certainly upper management) and the large open-plan office company I currently work for claims conference rooms 24/7. This is clearly not about the ability to concentrate, but about the increased ability to collaborate.
    • faizshah 7y ago
      So I’m on the fence I like the social aspects of open offices but I find them highly disruptive to work. But one observation I have made is that open offices force me to bring work home. I can sometimes accomplish more coding in one night at home than in 1 week in an open office. One time I kept a log of every 6 mins at work and found that <40% of the time was actually spent coding in an open office vs 95% working at home and communicating over slack (I don‘t think I need to tell anyone here one 8 hour coding session is not equivalent to eight 1 hour sessions). I think do not disturb private desks with open office hot desks or an open office with telecommuting is ideal.
    • hinkley 7y ago
      And the hits just keep coming. Some people are much better at thinking on their feet and out loud (I'm one of them). Ideas are fragile, and if you're trying to verbalize, for the first time, why something bugs you or how you think you fix a problem, and there's a bunch of fast-talkers around you they're going to kill your idea before they even get a chance. I used to meet with these people privately, sort out what really bugged them, poke at their idea and come up with a compromise they'd still accept, then I'd go into meetings and try to out-talk the other fast-talkers. Now you get one shot a day to do that, maybe, if we're both going out to lunch, going together, and don't bring the wrong people along. I've worried sometimes that my soft skills were a little lacking. But I'm finding over time that my soft skills were actually pretty great, they just needed doors.
  • anarazel 7y ago
    > I think we're talking the difference between $300/month on open desk space vs $1000/month on an office I'd be very surprised if that were the extent of the difference. Are these numbers based on any data, or guesses?
    • dexterdog 7y ago
      I would assume that in open space you have somewhere around 100 sq ft per person (room for a 10x10 desk and access) and for a closed-in space they would have about 3x that.
      • xani_ 7y ago
        Right but it usually isn't really between "open space" and "everyone gets their private office", but between "open space" vs "offices of few people in each, usually working on same stuff"
  • dmix 7y ago
    Even sharing an office with 2-4 people isn't that bad compared to open floor. You get used to each other's quirks pretty fast and keep the door closed when serious work is going on... it doesn't have to be solo offices for every person which would dramatically increase costs.
    • bcrosby95 7y ago
      Working at a table with my small team (4-6 people) in a small office was my favorite working environment. Any discussions are likely at least somewhat relevant to everyone. Interruptions are not constant. Quiet environment. Yet still helps enable knowledge transfer among team members.
      • dmix 7y ago
        For startups it's really not a significant expense if you do it right. We're a small team and have multiple developers in the original private office, which I'm assuming the prior occupant CEO previously used solo, and then the sales/support guy share the larger main office area. Plus all food is eaten in a common kitchen area (keeping various smells contained, which matters more in smaller offices, is quite easy via perfumes/scent policies and simply not eating at your desk). It works great for us and lets certain personalities control the level of interaction based on their tolerance. The sales guys love to chat naturally. For the employees who cross both sales/support + dev roles where we keep 1-2 "free" desks in the grouping which you can just pull your chair too. Multi-person office rooms is really the ideal solution. For us we could scale it up as the company grows by building a 3rd wall creating 3 offices of equal size capped at 4-6 people each. The hard part of course is scaling beyond that as almost every office property has been previously designed for with the open-concept in mind. Building your own walls or tearing down others isn't the easiest thing to do (or get approval for) in plenty of buildings, especially older ones. But as others have mentioned it's worth its weight in gold.
    • hinkley 7y ago
      When this whole process was just starting to hit my radar I realized that there was such a thing as 'too big of a cubicle'. As cube size goes up, eventually there's enough space for three people in a two person cube, or two people in a one person cube. You want exactly enough space for someone to be able to bring a chair and comfortably look over your shoulder, and not one iota more.
• falcolas 7y ago
  That fortune's pretty small, really. About $5,100 per employee, per year. It would take a lot of employees for that to even be a noticeable line item for a company with profits in the billions. It saves an average of 40 square feet (65 for open office, 100 for an individual office), plus a couple of thousand in construction costs. So, at around $100 per square foot per year (figures vary wildly, but I saw a couple of concrete values in the $75 range for the bay area), plus a one time cost of $25 per square feet for construction, that's less than $5,000 a year per employee, plus an additional one-time $1,000 amortized over about 10 years.
  • tills13 7y ago
    According to Google, they employ over 100k people. Suddenly that "pretty small fortune" is half a billion dollars.
    • tristor 7y ago
      Which is peanuts for Google.
    • falcolas 7y ago
      It’s less than half a billion dollars investment to maximize the output from in excess of $15 Billion worth of human capital.
• johnyzee 7y ago
  Google just lost a top percentile developer over their open floor plan. Literally irreplaceable. But they saved a few dollars on space. That is being penny wise and pound foolish, particularly for a company like Google who is not capital constrained. (He may not have quit directly because of the open office plan, but given that it's one of the few complaints he makes, it obviously is a factor.)
  • solipsism 7y ago
    given that it's one of the few complaints he make It's not though. It's merely a qualification to the "Google is comfortable" comment. He says clearly the reason he's leaving is he's a bit bored. And that he doesn't want to be stuck in a comfortable rut. How would making him more comfortable with a private office address those issues?
  • oblio 7y ago
    The thing is, it doesn't matter. To make a parallel with Microsoft in the early 00's and IBM before that: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost-the-api-war/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost... > Although there is some truth to the fact that Linux is a huge threat to Microsoft, predictions of the Redmond company’s demise are, to say the least, premature. Microsoft has an incredible amount of cash money in the bank and is still incredibly profitable. It has a long way to fall. It could do everything wrong for a decade before it started to be in remote danger, and you never know… they could reinvent themselves as a shaved-ice company at the last minute. So don’t be so quick to write them off. In the early 90s everyone thought IBM was completely over: mainframes were history! Back then, Robert X. Cringely predicted that the era of the mainframe would end on January 1, 2000 when all the applications written in COBOL would seize up, and rather than fix those applications, for which, allegedly, the source code had long since been lost, everybody would rewrite those applications for client-server platforms. Google has more money than Microsoft had back then and Google's product-market fit has been amazing since day 1. Any 1 individual (or even 100 individuals, 1000 individuals) could mess up royally and Google would still be around in 2050 :-)
    • mntmoss 7y ago
• deleted 7y ago
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• AlexCoventry 7y ago
  I'm curious whether Google's decision to stick to open floor plans was data-driven.
  • dboreham 7y ago
    CFO-driven.
  • pvarangot 7y ago
    Data: we can't get our shit together about who works on what and how many people we need where and when so our office needs to be an open canvass for our amazing executive creativity. Yeah totally data driven.
    • skunkpocalypse 7y ago
      Why does hacker news display the best comments in such hard-to-read light gray?
• mlthoughts2018 7y ago
  Companies absolutely are doing it because it’s trendy. Lost productivity and increase of communicable diseases / sick time have been shown over and over to outweigh any superficial real estate savings, even just in a bottom line basis, and it’s not even factoring in effect on morale, superficial “collaboration” and other sources of additional lost productivity. Many companies spend huge, huge sums of money on open plan offices. Like, not just renting them but tricking them out with super expensive desk units, fountains, game areas, etc. They even pay money to tear down privacy features and replace them with functionless decorations like exposed ductwork or glass whiteboard walls, even when they have no plan at all to increase worker density.
• hinkley 7y ago
  I had a coworker years ago when developers were averaging about 1.25 monitors per capita who slapped his own hard drive and video card into his work machine so he could get two spindles and two monitors. BYOD, long before tablets and smartphones. In a world where SV is paying a third of a million dollars to developers, are you really saving money? As a fraction of the cost of your developers this is tiny. Maybe developers should start Bringing Your Own Cubicle...