5 ms·

Who wins? The CFO and corp real estate people (correctly) saying how much more expensive (and less flexible to changing team size) a building with enough privat

Who wins? The CFO and corp real estate people (correctly) saying how much more expensive (and less flexible to changing team size) a building with enough private offices is.

yreg 3y ago
We have a floorplan with offices of all sizes. (Ok, the biggest ones are like a mini open space - mostly used by flexdesk people who come in only from time to time). It was more expensive, but we have zero issues with seat allocation. We don't force it and make teams always sit together. People are free to choose and switch their places, so often a project is spread across several offices and mixed with other projects. I think it's certainly superior to having an open space.
mratsim 3y ago
So you're saying programmers' time is not expensive enough?
- sokoloff 3y ago
  It's probably closer to the outputs (and differences in output) not being measurable enough. I had a private office setup in one place. It was phenomenal and by far the best work environment (physical and otherwise) I've ever had. The biggest problem was: we couldn't double the size of the team without it being a half-year leasing and construction project. So, we'd sawtooth among "far too much space and lots of pent-up hiring; a Goldilocks zone; out of space; hiring freeze; lease/construct offices; loop". My office now is whatever I want to do with my house. That's also good for heads-down work (and obviously for the commute), but terrible for collaborative whiteboard design work.
  - otteromkram 3y ago
    > but terrible for collaborative whiteboard design work. Not at all. If you think so, maybe try switching jobs to non-remote and let someone fine with virtual whiteboarding take your role on.
    - eadmund 3y ago
      In my experience, there is nothing like being in a room with a team. There is something about the physicality of presence, the way the communication has both lower latency (because it is not intermediated by electronics) and higher bandwidth (because in person even things like the way someone shifts in his shoes or his eyelid quivers is information). I have worked remotely for a significant portion of the past few decades. I work remotely. I anticipate working remotely for the remainder of my career. I enjoy working remotely. But working in-person has some real advantages. I just don’t believe that they outweigh the disadvantages.
      - sokoloff 3y ago
        Similar here. I expected to hate working remotely when my company decided to switch. It turns out that I love it overall once through the adaptation period (for individuals and for the company). Even with that, I think there is an optimal number of times per year to get the team together in one physical space and that number is probably somewhere in the one to three range, but by my estimation it sure isn't zero.
      - silverlake 3y ago
        I agree communication is better when everyone is present. If a remote team was required to be available that would solve most of the problems. It’s about the culture of WFH which currently assumes slow async responses.
        xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
        That's a cultural thing. All my remote colleagues are present and responsive. I certainly do not think it's a healthy assumption. WFH does not imply async. Timezones do.
        photonbeam 3y ago
        Ive always been very surprised at companies that want in-office but then spread the workforce across a handful of timezones
- danaris 3y ago
  When the execs of tech companies are still able to make several orders of magnitude more money than any of the programmers they employ, and their companies are able to make profits in the trillions, with a t, no; programmers' time is not priced appropriately for the amount of productivity we enable.
  - kridsdale1 3y ago
    Thankfully there is nothing at all but entrenched competition preventing you from leaving and becoming one of those execs on your own. This very website is here to help you achieve this dream. The delta in your compensation to theirs is the effective price that you are willing to pay to not bother with that hassle.
  - dasil003 3y ago
    This doesn’t follow, at least not without a lot more analysis. The biggest tech companies have tens of thousands of engineers make anything from low 6-figures to low 7-figures. That’s a huge salary burden that dwarfs exec compensation. Systematically paying more could easily outstrip revenues if leadership is wrong about predicting the future, which would lead to either salary cuts or layoffs, neither of which is well received. And are you saying engineers deserve most of the value because they wrote the code? What about other functions, what do they deserve? These aren’t easy questions to answer. But the reality is we don’t have to because hiring is a market. You get paid what you negotiate. This is the same for execs as it is for worker bees, the only difference is the value of your skills according to whoever is holding the purse strings.
frameset 3y ago
Good news! They can let the coders work from home and massively cut down the amount spent on insurance, office space, and furniture! Weirdly, that's not popular with the decision making extroverts either...
- IntelMiner 3y ago
  Or the friends of the C-suites who own all that real estate for some reason
dmatech 3y ago
They don't necessarily need to be big offices. It's just that corporations generally do seating based on seniority and status, not need. They have tiny cubes for worker bees and giant private offices for the queens. Even small offices require more costly building materials than large cubicles. So even a high density might still be somewhat expensive. Fortunately, there are opportunities for cheaper commercial real estate these days, so someone has the opportunity to try something new.
- otteromkram 3y ago
  > They have tiny cubes for worker bees [...] Not sure if you're on the same page as this conversation. Open offices don't really have cubicles.
  - danaris 3y ago
    Cube farms aren't really much better for programming work than true open-plan offices. The article is about the split between "office with door" and "not that", not specifically open-plan offices, so talking about cube farms is absolutely valid.
    - xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
      What on earth are you talking about. No one is debating true offices are superior but a full height cube is about infinitely better than open office. Cubes are sound insulating, they're quiet, they're more spacious than open office. You have storage and three to three and a half walls. The only physical distraction is caused by people walking past the opening. It's not just possible, but quite likely to eliminate outside movement from your field of view. I'll admit that plenty of cube farms are really just open offices in lipstick but true cube farms are far superior to open offices.
      - biztos 3y ago
        I worked for a few years in the full-height kind, and a few years in the lipstick kind. The full-height cube was awesome, I had as much privacy as I really needed but the barrier to interruption was just low enough that people weren’t afraid to come ask a question.
bluGill 3y ago
Last time I checked, the data on offices vs cubes came down as offices being the same price or even slightly cheaper. Cubes and open offices enable communication with people which companies value more than absolute productivity. Sure your best people get less done, but they often enable someone else to get more work down - or that is their claim.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  That claim is dubious at best. I'm old enough to remember when devs had actual offices, and the amount of communication (even serendipitous communication) was the same as with any other sort of arrangement.
  - oooyay 3y ago
    Second this. To be more concise the groups I was in had a norm where you'd leave your door open if you were down to chat or BS. Cubes take that choice away.
- lokar 3y ago
  A lot of the popularity of open plans is driven by rapid hiring. When you are already large (think 2015 google/meta) and growing 50%/year it is very hard to manage the space for teams. Fixed offices make it nearly impossible.
closeparen 3y ago
It's not unusual if it takes 20 years for a software developer in the Bay Area to produce output equal in value to a 2-bedroom condo. Skimping on office space is not some kind of miserly bean-counting. Software development is just not all that valuable compared to Tier 1 urban real estate.
- kridsdale1 3y ago
  Real estate in the Bay Area is high valued because of it being a downstream stop on the trickle down of VC money being blasted everywhere by idiots in to a captive market.
ozim 3y ago
AI does not need real estate, I wonder how hard they will battle it. Well it needs server rooms but it is not office space in the city centers, maybe office space in city centers will be turned all out into server rooms.

Who wins? The CFO and corp real estate people (correctly) saying how much more expensive (and less flexible to changing team size) a building with enough private offices is.

yreg 3y ago

We have a floorplan with offices of all sizes. (Ok, the biggest ones are like a mini open space - mostly used by flexdesk people who come in only from time to time). It was more expensive, but we have zero issues with seat allocation. We don't force it and make teams always sit together. People are free to choose and switch their places, so often a project is spread across several offices and mixed with other projects. I think it's certainly superior to having an open space.

mratsim 3y ago

So you're saying programmers' time is not expensive enough?

sokoloff 3y ago
It's probably closer to the outputs (and differences in output) not being measurable enough. I had a private office setup in one place. It was phenomenal and by far the best work environment (physical and otherwise) I've ever had. The biggest problem was: we couldn't double the size of the team without it being a half-year leasing and construction project. So, we'd sawtooth among "far too much space and lots of pent-up hiring; a Goldilocks zone; out of space; hiring freeze; lease/construct offices; loop". My office now is whatever I want to do with my house. That's also good for heads-down work (and obviously for the commute), but terrible for collaborative whiteboard design work.
- otteromkram 3y ago
  > but terrible for collaborative whiteboard design work. Not at all. If you think so, maybe try switching jobs to non-remote and let someone fine with virtual whiteboarding take your role on.
  - eadmund 3y ago
    In my experience, there is nothing like being in a room with a team. There is something about the physicality of presence, the way the communication has both lower latency (because it is not intermediated by electronics) and higher bandwidth (because in person even things like the way someone shifts in his shoes or his eyelid quivers is information). I have worked remotely for a significant portion of the past few decades. I work remotely. I anticipate working remotely for the remainder of my career. I enjoy working remotely. But working in-person has some real advantages. I just don’t believe that they outweigh the disadvantages.
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      Similar here. I expected to hate working remotely when my company decided to switch. It turns out that I love it overall once through the adaptation period (for individuals and for the company). Even with that, I think there is an optimal number of times per year to get the team together in one physical space and that number is probably somewhere in the one to three range, but by my estimation it sure isn't zero.
    - silverlake 3y ago
      I agree communication is better when everyone is present. If a remote team was required to be available that would solve most of the problems. It’s about the culture of WFH which currently assumes slow async responses.
      - xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
        That's a cultural thing. All my remote colleagues are present and responsive. I certainly do not think it's a healthy assumption. WFH does not imply async. Timezones do.
        photonbeam 3y ago
        Ive always been very surprised at companies that want in-office but then spread the workforce across a handful of timezones
danaris 3y ago
When the execs of tech companies are still able to make several orders of magnitude more money than any of the programmers they employ, and their companies are able to make profits in the trillions, with a t, no; programmers' time is not priced appropriately for the amount of productivity we enable.
- kridsdale1 3y ago
  Thankfully there is nothing at all but entrenched competition preventing you from leaving and becoming one of those execs on your own. This very website is here to help you achieve this dream. The delta in your compensation to theirs is the effective price that you are willing to pay to not bother with that hassle.
- dasil003 3y ago
  This doesn’t follow, at least not without a lot more analysis. The biggest tech companies have tens of thousands of engineers make anything from low 6-figures to low 7-figures. That’s a huge salary burden that dwarfs exec compensation. Systematically paying more could easily outstrip revenues if leadership is wrong about predicting the future, which would lead to either salary cuts or layoffs, neither of which is well received. And are you saying engineers deserve most of the value because they wrote the code? What about other functions, what do they deserve? These aren’t easy questions to answer. But the reality is we don’t have to because hiring is a market. You get paid what you negotiate. This is the same for execs as it is for worker bees, the only difference is the value of your skills according to whoever is holding the purse strings.

frameset 3y ago

Good news! They can let the coders work from home and massively cut down the amount spent on insurance, office space, and furniture! Weirdly, that's not popular with the decision making extroverts either...

IntelMiner 3y ago
Or the friends of the C-suites who own all that real estate for some reason

dmatech 3y ago

They don't necessarily need to be big offices. It's just that corporations generally do seating based on seniority and status, not need. They have tiny cubes for worker bees and giant private offices for the queens. Even small offices require more costly building materials than large cubicles. So even a high density might still be somewhat expensive. Fortunately, there are opportunities for cheaper commercial real estate these days, so someone has the opportunity to try something new.

otteromkram 3y ago
> They have tiny cubes for worker bees [...] Not sure if you're on the same page as this conversation. Open offices don't really have cubicles.
- danaris 3y ago
  Cube farms aren't really much better for programming work than true open-plan offices. The article is about the split between "office with door" and "not that", not specifically open-plan offices, so talking about cube farms is absolutely valid.
  - xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
    What on earth are you talking about. No one is debating true offices are superior but a full height cube is about infinitely better than open office. Cubes are sound insulating, they're quiet, they're more spacious than open office. You have storage and three to three and a half walls. The only physical distraction is caused by people walking past the opening. It's not just possible, but quite likely to eliminate outside movement from your field of view. I'll admit that plenty of cube farms are really just open offices in lipstick but true cube farms are far superior to open offices.
    - biztos 3y ago
      I worked for a few years in the full-height kind, and a few years in the lipstick kind. The full-height cube was awesome, I had as much privacy as I really needed but the barrier to interruption was just low enough that people weren’t afraid to come ask a question.

bluGill 3y ago

Last time I checked, the data on offices vs cubes came down as offices being the same price or even slightly cheaper. Cubes and open offices enable communication with people which companies value more than absolute productivity. Sure your best people get less done, but they often enable someone else to get more work down - or that is their claim.

JohnFen 3y ago
That claim is dubious at best. I'm old enough to remember when devs had actual offices, and the amount of communication (even serendipitous communication) was the same as with any other sort of arrangement.
- oooyay 3y ago
  Second this. To be more concise the groups I was in had a norm where you'd leave your door open if you were down to chat or BS. Cubes take that choice away.
lokar 3y ago
A lot of the popularity of open plans is driven by rapid hiring. When you are already large (think 2015 google/meta) and growing 50%/year it is very hard to manage the space for teams. Fixed offices make it nearly impossible.

closeparen 3y ago

It's not unusual if it takes 20 years for a software developer in the Bay Area to produce output equal in value to a 2-bedroom condo. Skimping on office space is not some kind of miserly bean-counting. Software development is just not all that valuable compared to Tier 1 urban real estate.

kridsdale1 3y ago
Real estate in the Bay Area is high valued because of it being a downstream stop on the trickle down of VC money being blasted everywhere by idiots in to a captive market.

ozim 3y ago

AI does not need real estate, I wonder how hard they will battle it. Well it needs server rooms but it is not office space in the city centers, maybe office space in city centers will be turned all out into server rooms.