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This feels close to satire. How did WSJ neglect to mention that Facebook deliberately designed their main office building as the world's largest open office, a

This feels close to satire. How did WSJ neglect to mention that Facebook deliberately designed their main office building as the world's largest open office, a "soaring fishbowl, a contiguous 434,000 square feet on one floor" per their own coverage: https://archive.ph/XKaWJ https://archive.ph/XKaWJ

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
My thoughts exactly. Facebook was the pioneer in the "Hey, everyone loves open office spaces! We can all collaborate!" bandwagon, to the point where other companies started going more towards that route years ago because "Big Silicon Valley companies are doing it!" Yes, I speak from bitter experience.
ojbyrne 4y ago
My understanding is that the campus they took over from Sun was all offices until Facebook ripped them out.
- binarycrusader 4y ago
  It was almost. I used to work in MPK17 for Sun. There were some cubicles here and there but it was mostly offices from what I recall. It was a far cry from the open air cafeteria style seating when I interviewed there later in 2017 for Facebook. It was the same at the Santa Clara Sun campus even after the Oracle acquisition (referred to by some as “Snoracle”). Mostly offices and some cubicles here and there.
  - bitL 4y ago
    Santa Clara had 1-person offices IIRC. Small, transparent, but 1-person.
    - binarycrusader 4y ago
      It wasn’t all 1-person offices. At least after the Oracle acquisition there were cubicles in some of the hallway areas. You’re right there were many smallish one person offices but some of those were doubled up. I was lucky enough to have had a one person office with a window even.
chaostheory 4y ago
These headsets are cheaper than a cubicle. Tell me the incentives and I can tell you the outcome. VR makes more sense in the office now.
ChuckMcM 4y ago
I don't think of it as satire exactly, more like talking "exploring ways to change the surface tension of water to keep from getting wet while standing out in the rain." When I was at IBM, post acquisition, they were trying to move a company into open space from their existing offices and the former CEO presented them with incontrovertible evidence of work productivity vs offices vs cubes vs openspace vs individuals. To explain that to maximize work done per unit time they needed a mix of offices and open space, just open space would harm the productivity of the team. The VP on the line kept falling back to "but everyone else has to do this" and "you aren't seeing the big picture" kinds of arguments. It was really sad. The truth is that "office space", which is to say the number of square feet (or meters) of office space you need per employee is a "cost." And that cost is computable, whereas the cost of less productivity, or inability to attract the best talent, are not. And when you run your company with accountants they go for the "known savings" over the "potential gains" every, single, time. You can put more employees in a building that is "open plan" than you can in one with cubicles, and much more than in a building with offices. So the accounts force this on the company and senior leadership doesn't have the stones to contradict them.
- mvdwoord 4y ago
  This, a thousand times over. I get that unlimited spending is not the way, but the complete lack of at least trying to understand productivity and related cost/profit.. Until it becomes quantifiable, cost does not exist for some people.
- windthrown 4y ago
  I agree with your overall point, but it sounds to me like the former CEO's "incontrovertible evidence" was not quite as strong as you felt, given that you go on say that these factors are not qualifiable. Numeric metrics are certainly not the only way to bolster an argument but I'd be curious to hear more about the type of evidence the CEO used to make their case.
  - ChuckMcM 4y ago
    Over the period of their existence as a startup they kept stats on productivity, very agile process, lots of history tracking feature requests, time to implement, bugs found post implementation, individual code/documentation change rates, defect exposure (when bug is fixed, where did it come from, how could it have been stopped, etc) and while doing this they ended up moving twice (growing startup kind of thing) and had groups and individuals in offices/open plan/cubicle setups. Basically this guy was really (and I mean really) analytical about characterizing as many things as possible to understand whether or not they had impact on the overall ability of his company to produce quality products and support. What struck me though was IBM was completely unwilling to engage on the facts. And that is largely because IBM is run by their finance group. And the CEO here wasn't trying to tell IBM that every facility should be run that way, just that they felt justified in demanding that their facility be run that way. Anyway, IBM couldn't (or wouldn't which is expressed externally in the same way) see it and proceeded with their plan. The entire time I was there helping to integrate our startup (Blekko) I saw IBM make stupid choices like this again and again. I see this pattern as the biggest contributing factor to IBM never getting out of the starting gate with machine learning as a product enhancer. Trapped in their own complexes and being unable to step outside of them in a controlled way left them unable to execute against what could have been a really good strategy for them.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

My thoughts exactly. Facebook was the pioneer in the "Hey, everyone loves open office spaces! We can all collaborate!" bandwagon, to the point where other companies started going more towards that route years ago because "Big Silicon Valley companies are doing it!" Yes, I speak from bitter experience.

ojbyrne 4y ago

My understanding is that the campus they took over from Sun was all offices until Facebook ripped them out.

binarycrusader 4y ago
It was almost. I used to work in MPK17 for Sun. There were some cubicles here and there but it was mostly offices from what I recall. It was a far cry from the open air cafeteria style seating when I interviewed there later in 2017 for Facebook. It was the same at the Santa Clara Sun campus even after the Oracle acquisition (referred to by some as “Snoracle”). Mostly offices and some cubicles here and there.
- bitL 4y ago
  Santa Clara had 1-person offices IIRC. Small, transparent, but 1-person.
  - binarycrusader 4y ago
    It wasn’t all 1-person offices. At least after the Oracle acquisition there were cubicles in some of the hallway areas. You’re right there were many smallish one person offices but some of those were doubled up. I was lucky enough to have had a one person office with a window even.

chaostheory 4y ago

These headsets are cheaper than a cubicle. Tell me the incentives and I can tell you the outcome. VR makes more sense in the office now.

ChuckMcM 4y ago

I don't think of it as satire exactly, more like talking "exploring ways to change the surface tension of water to keep from getting wet while standing out in the rain." When I was at IBM, post acquisition, they were trying to move a company into open space from their existing offices and the former CEO presented them with incontrovertible evidence of work productivity vs offices vs cubes vs openspace vs individuals. To explain that to maximize work done per unit time they needed a mix of offices and open space, just open space would harm the productivity of the team. The VP on the line kept falling back to "but everyone else has to do this" and "you aren't seeing the big picture" kinds of arguments. It was really sad. The truth is that "office space", which is to say the number of square feet (or meters) of office space you need per employee is a "cost." And that cost is computable, whereas the cost of less productivity, or inability to attract the best talent, are not. And when you run your company with accountants they go for the "known savings" over the "potential gains" every, single, time. You can put more employees in a building that is "open plan" than you can in one with cubicles, and much more than in a building with offices. So the accounts force this on the company and senior leadership doesn't have the stones to contradict them.

mvdwoord 4y ago
This, a thousand times over. I get that unlimited spending is not the way, but the complete lack of at least trying to understand productivity and related cost/profit.. Until it becomes quantifiable, cost does not exist for some people.
windthrown 4y ago
I agree with your overall point, but it sounds to me like the former CEO's "incontrovertible evidence" was not quite as strong as you felt, given that you go on say that these factors are not qualifiable. Numeric metrics are certainly not the only way to bolster an argument but I'd be curious to hear more about the type of evidence the CEO used to make their case.
- ChuckMcM 4y ago
  Over the period of their existence as a startup they kept stats on productivity, very agile process, lots of history tracking feature requests, time to implement, bugs found post implementation, individual code/documentation change rates, defect exposure (when bug is fixed, where did it come from, how could it have been stopped, etc) and while doing this they ended up moving twice (growing startup kind of thing) and had groups and individuals in offices/open plan/cubicle setups. Basically this guy was really (and I mean really) analytical about characterizing as many things as possible to understand whether or not they had impact on the overall ability of his company to produce quality products and support. What struck me though was IBM was completely unwilling to engage on the facts. And that is largely because IBM is run by their finance group. And the CEO here wasn't trying to tell IBM that every facility should be run that way, just that they felt justified in demanding that their facility be run that way. Anyway, IBM couldn't (or wouldn't which is expressed externally in the same way) see it and proceeded with their plan. The entire time I was there helping to integrate our startup (Blekko) I saw IBM make stupid choices like this again and again. I see this pattern as the biggest contributing factor to IBM never getting out of the starting gate with machine learning as a product enhancer. Trapped in their own complexes and being unable to step outside of them in a controlled way left them unable to execute against what could have been a really good strategy for them.