4 ms·

Need private offices with UV-C lamps sterilizing the air going into each office. Less sick days will pay for the private office floor space, plus productivity

Need private offices with UV-C lamps sterilizing the air going into each office. Less sick days will pay for the private office floor space, plus productivity increases.

mlthoughts2018 6y ago
Don’t know why this is getting downvotes. It’s uncontroversially just fact that open-plan layouts do not save money, not even in the short term and not in high density urban centers. This has been written about so exhaustively for decades that at this point it’s not even worth engaging with people who say “citation needed” or “in 5 seconds of Googling I found this confirmation bias article” because it lends way too much legitimacy to the false idea that it’s even a close call at all or that there is any part of it left open for serious debate. Open plan office designs are chosen so that executives can treat their office spaces like works of art - lots of signaling and often very little practical value. They are often built at huge costs (way beyond outfitting the same space with offices or cubicles for the same number of people), often actively paying a lot of money to destroy existing privacy features, and they not only include but are completely oriented around opulent roof decks, party spaces, kitchens, game rooms, massage areas, and on and on. It’s 100% about infantilizing the workforce and swindling them to accept greater degrees of counter-productive surveillance and total lack of privacy. It is not about cost reduction, flat out.
- karatestomp 6y ago
  There's a consistent and strong tendency of companies, owners, and managers to avoid giving their professional-class-wage-earning software developers professional-class perks & (especially) signs of status. I'm not entirely sure why that is, but it does seem to be the case. Like they're all, consciously or not, just determined on some fundamental level not to let that happen. On the flip side software folks tend not to exactly embody a professional-class aesthetic or attitude, but I think that behavior'd flip around damn fast if elevated social status became more easily available to those who did. But maybe that's not worth having private offices and assistants and deference to our professional judgement, and so on. [EDIT] relevance being, open plan offices are notable for not just avoiding giving status, but for swinging way the opposite direction. Almost like passive-aggressive compensation for having to pay developers so much. "Well, at least I can seat them like minimum-wage call center employees, since for some reason that's considered fairly normal".
  - cosmodisk 6y ago
    I've been telling this for years: an equivalent of a software developer in a different industry would be driven around in a company's car, dine on company's card and get fat bonuses every year.The problem is that developers,to most people,are well, the IT people. It doesn't matter if your code saves Netflix gazillion of money,to most people you on the same level as the guy who can connect the printer.Also sometimes almost cynical approach to anything financial or sales related doesn't help it either.
    - Hamuko 6y ago
      >an equivalent of a software developer in a different industry would be driven around in a company's car, dine on company's card and get fat bonuses every year As a software developer, this statement feel like hubris.
    - devmunchies 6y ago
      I was a growth engineer for 5+ years and even though i worked closer with marketing and sales optimizing metrics, I was still an "outsider" because I'm so technical. It's a very strange and nuanced social barrier. I'm a co-founder now (and only developer) at a small company that makes 7 figures and i still feel like a code monkey at times, though in a much better position than most.
      - karatestomp 6y ago
        It can, truly, be business-socially elevating in many companies (even "tech" ones!), to pretend to know less about technology than you do. The weird thing is it's not even like the "the CEO using bad grammar in curt emails is a power move" kind of deal, because it kicks in way down the org chart. Basically if the interview for your position isn't leetcode there's a good chance betraying you know too much about technology will lose you some status. [EDIT] It just occurred to me that this is because programming is, so far as social pecking order, perceived as blue-collar.
        cosmodisk 6y ago
- alkonaut 6y ago
  > do not save money, not even in the short term Well if you put more people in a smaller space that saves money on rent. If you start using "productivity" or "output" or "net savings" that's effectively economic voodoo in comparison to "the rent is $10k per month vs $20k per month".
- jpm_sd 6y ago
  I wish I could upvote this ten times over. I worked at Google X from 2013-2015. During this time, we transitioned into a shiny tremendously expensively updated building at "The Rails" (a converted shopping mall off San Antonio Rd). You have described it perfectly. All signaling, no substance, tons of useless recreational space, engineers packed in cheek-by-jowl. I used to hide in the EE lab with my laptop so I could think. Couldn't stand sitting at my 5-foot-wide desk where my nice desktop CAD workstation was parked. Other people would just camp out in (and fight over) one of the hundreds of conference rooms, because there were zero private offices in the entire building. A building that used to contain AN ENTIRE SHOPPING MALL.
shostack 6y ago
This. Isn't a divider useless if the HVAC system is recirculating and pumping virus-laden air everywhere? This has already been shown to cause some outbreaks.

Need private offices with UV-C lamps sterilizing the air going into each office. Less sick days will pay for the private office floor space, plus productivity increases.

mlthoughts2018 6y ago

Don’t know why this is getting downvotes. It’s uncontroversially just fact that open-plan layouts do not save money, not even in the short term and not in high density urban centers. This has been written about so exhaustively for decades that at this point it’s not even worth engaging with people who say “citation needed” or “in 5 seconds of Googling I found this confirmation bias article” because it lends way too much legitimacy to the false idea that it’s even a close call at all or that there is any part of it left open for serious debate. Open plan office designs are chosen so that executives can treat their office spaces like works of art - lots of signaling and often very little practical value. They are often built at huge costs (way beyond outfitting the same space with offices or cubicles for the same number of people), often actively paying a lot of money to destroy existing privacy features, and they not only include but are completely oriented around opulent roof decks, party spaces, kitchens, game rooms, massage areas, and on and on. It’s 100% about infantilizing the workforce and swindling them to accept greater degrees of counter-productive surveillance and total lack of privacy. It is not about cost reduction, flat out.

karatestomp 6y ago
There's a consistent and strong tendency of companies, owners, and managers to avoid giving their professional-class-wage-earning software developers professional-class perks & (especially) signs of status. I'm not entirely sure why that is, but it does seem to be the case. Like they're all, consciously or not, just determined on some fundamental level not to let that happen. On the flip side software folks tend not to exactly embody a professional-class aesthetic or attitude, but I think that behavior'd flip around damn fast if elevated social status became more easily available to those who did. But maybe that's not worth having private offices and assistants and deference to our professional judgement, and so on. [EDIT] relevance being, open plan offices are notable for not just avoiding giving status, but for swinging way the opposite direction. Almost like passive-aggressive compensation for having to pay developers so much. "Well, at least I can seat them like minimum-wage call center employees, since for some reason that's considered fairly normal".
- cosmodisk 6y ago
  I've been telling this for years: an equivalent of a software developer in a different industry would be driven around in a company's car, dine on company's card and get fat bonuses every year.The problem is that developers,to most people,are well, the IT people. It doesn't matter if your code saves Netflix gazillion of money,to most people you on the same level as the guy who can connect the printer.Also sometimes almost cynical approach to anything financial or sales related doesn't help it either.
  - Hamuko 6y ago
    >an equivalent of a software developer in a different industry would be driven around in a company's car, dine on company's card and get fat bonuses every year As a software developer, this statement feel like hubris.
  - devmunchies 6y ago
    I was a growth engineer for 5+ years and even though i worked closer with marketing and sales optimizing metrics, I was still an "outsider" because I'm so technical. It's a very strange and nuanced social barrier. I'm a co-founder now (and only developer) at a small company that makes 7 figures and i still feel like a code monkey at times, though in a much better position than most.
    - karatestomp 6y ago
      It can, truly, be business-socially elevating in many companies (even "tech" ones!), to pretend to know less about technology than you do. The weird thing is it's not even like the "the CEO using bad grammar in curt emails is a power move" kind of deal, because it kicks in way down the org chart. Basically if the interview for your position isn't leetcode there's a good chance betraying you know too much about technology will lose you some status. [EDIT] It just occurred to me that this is because programming is, so far as social pecking order, perceived as blue-collar.
      - cosmodisk 6y ago
alkonaut 6y ago
> do not save money, not even in the short term Well if you put more people in a smaller space that saves money on rent. If you start using "productivity" or "output" or "net savings" that's effectively economic voodoo in comparison to "the rent is $10k per month vs $20k per month".
jpm_sd 6y ago
I wish I could upvote this ten times over. I worked at Google X from 2013-2015. During this time, we transitioned into a shiny tremendously expensively updated building at "The Rails" (a converted shopping mall off San Antonio Rd). You have described it perfectly. All signaling, no substance, tons of useless recreational space, engineers packed in cheek-by-jowl. I used to hide in the EE lab with my laptop so I could think. Couldn't stand sitting at my 5-foot-wide desk where my nice desktop CAD workstation was parked. Other people would just camp out in (and fight over) one of the hundreds of conference rooms, because there were zero private offices in the entire building. A building that used to contain AN ENTIRE SHOPPING MALL.

shostack 6y ago

This. Isn't a divider useless if the HVAC system is recirculating and pumping virus-laden air everywhere? This has already been shown to cause some outbreaks.