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Open offices are a line-item cost cutting measure and nothing more than that. While they destroy the ability to write code and ergo engineering productivity, t

by varelse 13y ago

Open offices are a line-item cost cutting measure and nothing more than that. While they destroy the ability to write code and ergo engineering productivity, they are providing important data on the minimal environment from which productive results can be obtained. Call this the Sweatshop Event Horizon. I'd ask why oh why should anyone have to wear noise-cancelling headphones and/or install white noise generators just to get work done, but why bother? This is an intangible loss so the MBAs and management consultants behind this can claim they saved big bucks and then blame you for your lost productivity at your next review. Finally, the worst part is when the HR department starts citing this morale-mashing pox as a perk: http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_24032940/old-school-tech-companies-changing-times http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_24032940/old-school-t... That said, if all you want to do is play foosball and talk to your co-workers all day whilst whittling away someone else's VC money, it seems like an excellent approach to doing so.

greenyoda 13y ago
It's ironic that the same companies who pay high salaries to attract top talent then go on to fritter away that talent through distracting work conditions, in an effort to save a few bucks on office space. Salary plus benefits are a much bigger yearly cost than office space for expensive employees like developers, so it seems like they're trying to optimize the wrong thing: if your employees are working at 50% productivity due to distractions, you'll never make up that amount of wasted expense on office space savings. Also, the companies that complain about how hard it is to find qualified employees might consider that many of the most qualified people might not want to work for them because of their working conditions.
- ds9 13y ago
  Well said. I think part of the problem is that the people who specify the office conditions just have no idea of what conditions are best for productivity of software developers or engineers, or the importance of factors like noise, or even that different jobs need different physical surroundings.
- Joeri 13y ago
  What also really gets me are employers trying to save money on laptops for knowledge workers (not just programmers, but desk workers in general). They are OK with wasting a week of cumulative time per year because of slow and inadequate hardware, just to save $500 on the purchase price of something that is written off across 3 years. Incredible. I've been trying to get my own employer to get SSD's for everyone and they're still dragging their feet. It's so frustrating because I know this is costing the business money.
  - caw 13y ago
    Laptops are more expensive than desktops, assuming you buy a business laptop with the normal enterprise features. They also take more abuse and need replaced a lot. However, companies reap the benefit in allow you to take work home with you (you work more), and in that you can be placed anywhere in an office and still productive. I actually don't do any of my work locally, except for office stuff (mails, docs, ppt). All of my real work is on a server with big beefy hardware and enterprise level SLAs. I can reboot my laptop all day long for security patches and not interrupt my most important work. All of the laptops have SSDs (albeit with full disk encryption). No it's not a thin client, it's a full Windows install.
  - JohnBooty 13y ago
    I've been trying to get my own employer to get SSD's for everyone and they're still dragging their feet. It's so frustrating because I know this is costing the business money. Amazingly, I had good success "converting" my company to SSDs /because/ they're cheap and drag their feet on tech upgrades. They're a very traditional and somewhat penny-pinching company in an industry that has been slowly shrinking and consolidating in the past few decades. Once I showed my boss how fast my SSD-equipped laptop booted, he was a convert. These days, he's using SSD upgrades to squeeze fresh life out of old desktops and laptops. A 128GB SSD doesn't cost much more than $100, and dropping one into a 5 year-old laptop or desktop makes it feel fast as hell again. Management likes spending $100 on a new drive better than spending $700 on a new machine, and users like the fact that the don't have to reinstall all their stuff.
- silverlake 13y ago
  Investment banks pay their traders, bankers and salesmen 10X the average programmer. Yet they work in dense, open, loud environments like this: http://69.195.124.122/~rotmanfi/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/ubst.jpg http://69.195.124.122/~rotmanfi/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/u... Also, doesn't Google have open floor plans? They have good-sized cubicles, but the walls are very low IIRC. You'd think Google would be all about maximizing programmer productivity. Ironically, only at Microsoft did devs get a nice office with a thick wood door.
  - varelse 13y ago
    Google has both offices and cubes arranged around collaborative groups of 4-6 workers. It's not an open floor plan, but it's not individual cubes either.
  - mmatants 13y ago
    I think that focus requirements for a trader or a banker are different than for a programmer. I.e. there's less need for stretches of uninterrupted deep focused thinking.
tlb 13y ago
You're thinking about a company that started off with all private offices, then an MBA decided to cut costs and moved everyone to an open plan. But that's not how it happens in startups. Startup companies start off as 2-3 people, who are all good friends and don't mind working in a room. Then they hire another person, and it still works fine in one room. Then they get a bigger room, and hire a couple more. And so on. At any point, moving to separate offices would be a big change in company culture with negative effects on morale and communication as well as positive. I need quiet and privacy and uninterrupted 4-hour coding sessions to be productive. Yet, I myself ended up putting 10 people in a room I once had to myself. It was a slippery slope.
- varelse 13y ago
  Yours is an honest mistake. Just don't do it again. Or at least consider breaking it up into separate collaborative groups. My personal experiences with open offices have all been at large organizations bending over backwards to explain how they would make us more productive. No engineers bought into it.
- consultant23522 13y ago
  I recently worked a gig where the company was a medium sized international business with I think a few thousand employees but did not yet have a local office. They found a place with old, "conventional" offices with real walls and doors. The place had more than enough space for all of the current local employees with room to grow for several years through the lease. They decided instead of letting people have offices they'd spend a ton of money on construction to knock out all of those walls and put in an open cube farm. The level of WTF from the employees was palpable.
  - JohnBooty 13y ago
    They decided instead of letting people have offices they'd spend a ton of money on construction to knock out all of those walls and put in an open cube farm. The level of WTF from the employees was palpable. The "level of WTF" is something I can't understand. How was this even decided in the first place, without talking things over with the employees? Oh, I can easily believe that they decided that without talking to employees; I just can't understand it. Even if I was purely trying to wring productivity out of my workers and didn't give a crap about my workers' happiness, seems like pure selfishness would drive me to at least consider their feedback and find out what they needed.
Joeri 13y ago
They're not so much a cost-cutting instrument as a power instrument. Open plan offices let the management see that work is happening. It makes them feel in charge of a vibrant business, and in control of how that business is run.

by varelse 13y ago

greenyoda 13y ago

It's ironic that the same companies who pay high salaries to attract top talent then go on to fritter away that talent through distracting work conditions, in an effort to save a few bucks on office space. Salary plus benefits are a much bigger yearly cost than office space for expensive employees like developers, so it seems like they're trying to optimize the wrong thing: if your employees are working at 50% productivity due to distractions, you'll never make up that amount of wasted expense on office space savings. Also, the companies that complain about how hard it is to find qualified employees might consider that many of the most qualified people might not want to work for them because of their working conditions.

ds9 13y ago
Well said. I think part of the problem is that the people who specify the office conditions just have no idea of what conditions are best for productivity of software developers or engineers, or the importance of factors like noise, or even that different jobs need different physical surroundings.
Joeri 13y ago
What also really gets me are employers trying to save money on laptops for knowledge workers (not just programmers, but desk workers in general). They are OK with wasting a week of cumulative time per year because of slow and inadequate hardware, just to save $500 on the purchase price of something that is written off across 3 years. Incredible. I've been trying to get my own employer to get SSD's for everyone and they're still dragging their feet. It's so frustrating because I know this is costing the business money.
- caw 13y ago
  Laptops are more expensive than desktops, assuming you buy a business laptop with the normal enterprise features. They also take more abuse and need replaced a lot. However, companies reap the benefit in allow you to take work home with you (you work more), and in that you can be placed anywhere in an office and still productive. I actually don't do any of my work locally, except for office stuff (mails, docs, ppt). All of my real work is on a server with big beefy hardware and enterprise level SLAs. I can reboot my laptop all day long for security patches and not interrupt my most important work. All of the laptops have SSDs (albeit with full disk encryption). No it's not a thin client, it's a full Windows install.
- JohnBooty 13y ago
  I've been trying to get my own employer to get SSD's for everyone and they're still dragging their feet. It's so frustrating because I know this is costing the business money. Amazingly, I had good success "converting" my company to SSDs /because/ they're cheap and drag their feet on tech upgrades. They're a very traditional and somewhat penny-pinching company in an industry that has been slowly shrinking and consolidating in the past few decades. Once I showed my boss how fast my SSD-equipped laptop booted, he was a convert. These days, he's using SSD upgrades to squeeze fresh life out of old desktops and laptops. A 128GB SSD doesn't cost much more than $100, and dropping one into a 5 year-old laptop or desktop makes it feel fast as hell again. Management likes spending $100 on a new drive better than spending $700 on a new machine, and users like the fact that the don't have to reinstall all their stuff.
silverlake 13y ago
Investment banks pay their traders, bankers and salesmen 10X the average programmer. Yet they work in dense, open, loud environments like this: http://69.195.124.122/~rotmanfi/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/ubst.jpg http://69.195.124.122/~rotmanfi/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/u... Also, doesn't Google have open floor plans? They have good-sized cubicles, but the walls are very low IIRC. You'd think Google would be all about maximizing programmer productivity. Ironically, only at Microsoft did devs get a nice office with a thick wood door.
- varelse 13y ago
  Google has both offices and cubes arranged around collaborative groups of 4-6 workers. It's not an open floor plan, but it's not individual cubes either.
- mmatants 13y ago
  I think that focus requirements for a trader or a banker are different than for a programmer. I.e. there's less need for stretches of uninterrupted deep focused thinking.

tlb 13y ago

You're thinking about a company that started off with all private offices, then an MBA decided to cut costs and moved everyone to an open plan. But that's not how it happens in startups. Startup companies start off as 2-3 people, who are all good friends and don't mind working in a room. Then they hire another person, and it still works fine in one room. Then they get a bigger room, and hire a couple more. And so on. At any point, moving to separate offices would be a big change in company culture with negative effects on morale and communication as well as positive. I need quiet and privacy and uninterrupted 4-hour coding sessions to be productive. Yet, I myself ended up putting 10 people in a room I once had to myself. It was a slippery slope.

varelse 13y ago
Yours is an honest mistake. Just don't do it again. Or at least consider breaking it up into separate collaborative groups. My personal experiences with open offices have all been at large organizations bending over backwards to explain how they would make us more productive. No engineers bought into it.
consultant23522 13y ago
I recently worked a gig where the company was a medium sized international business with I think a few thousand employees but did not yet have a local office. They found a place with old, "conventional" offices with real walls and doors. The place had more than enough space for all of the current local employees with room to grow for several years through the lease. They decided instead of letting people have offices they'd spend a ton of money on construction to knock out all of those walls and put in an open cube farm. The level of WTF from the employees was palpable.
- JohnBooty 13y ago
  They decided instead of letting people have offices they'd spend a ton of money on construction to knock out all of those walls and put in an open cube farm. The level of WTF from the employees was palpable. The "level of WTF" is something I can't understand. How was this even decided in the first place, without talking things over with the employees? Oh, I can easily believe that they decided that without talking to employees; I just can't understand it. Even if I was purely trying to wring productivity out of my workers and didn't give a crap about my workers' happiness, seems like pure selfishness would drive me to at least consider their feedback and find out what they needed.

Joeri 13y ago

They're not so much a cost-cutting instrument as a power instrument. Open plan offices let the management see that work is happening. It makes them feel in charge of a vibrant business, and in control of how that business is run.