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> which most companies can't afford I'm not sure that's the case. Most companies lease their floors space. The offices themselves are built to a standard he

> which most companies can't afford I'm not sure that's the case. Most companies lease their floors space. The offices themselves are built to a standard height or code, so the actual walls needed for internal offices are easy to procure, and manufactured en-masse. Sure, there's a sunk cost to it, but once you're past start up size, your company is probably wasting more money on many other things (entertainment, lunch, free merch, and so on) than a one-off floor reconfiguration to accommodate offices. At the other extreme, I worked for Megabank. They had a couple of buildings, with a total floor count of around 70, in the basement they had not hundreds, but thousands of partition walls stacked up and ready for use, so they could reconfigure the offices as needed. But, of course, only for senior management. Everyone else had to work in open plan offices.

Denvercoder9 4y ago
The cost of private offices isn't in the construction, it's in the increased square footage you need to lease because they take more space per worker than an open floor plan or cubicles.
- DrBazza 4y ago
  As I said in reply to another comment that suggested that you'd lose 50% or require 2x the space: A typical 'cubicle' has a wide desk and space to move you chair in and out of, plus a 'corridor' between all the cubicles. Change cubicle walls to office walls and have doors open into the existing corridor, and it's no different in size. Building codes might require some changes but I don't think it will anywhere near as much as 2x. The literature (Spolsky lists it one of his articles) implies that increased productivity of the existing employees in their own offices more than compensates for the slight decrease in the number of people you can pack into a fixed area. The difference with start-ups vs non-start-ups, is that in that first 6-12 months, it is typically a small group of people completely focused on getting the business up and running, and writing greenfield code. My point is that the environment, both the physical open plan office, and the 'coding environment' are totally different it's quite dynamic for start ups where it's just getting new code up and running and iterating quickly on ideas, vs. much more 'static' when the company has an existing product and code base.

Denvercoder9 4y ago

The cost of private offices isn't in the construction, it's in the increased square footage you need to lease because they take more space per worker than an open floor plan or cubicles.

DrBazza 4y ago
As I said in reply to another comment that suggested that you'd lose 50% or require 2x the space: A typical 'cubicle' has a wide desk and space to move you chair in and out of, plus a 'corridor' between all the cubicles. Change cubicle walls to office walls and have doors open into the existing corridor, and it's no different in size. Building codes might require some changes but I don't think it will anywhere near as much as 2x. The literature (Spolsky lists it one of his articles) implies that increased productivity of the existing employees in their own offices more than compensates for the slight decrease in the number of people you can pack into a fixed area. The difference with start-ups vs non-start-ups, is that in that first 6-12 months, it is typically a small group of people completely focused on getting the business up and running, and writing greenfield code. My point is that the environment, both the physical open plan office, and the 'coding environment' are totally different it's quite dynamic for start ups where it's just getting new code up and running and iterating quickly on ideas, vs. much more 'static' when the company has an existing product and code base.