Very simple: does c suite use open offices? No, because they freaking suck lol. If you think collaboration is benefitted from open office layouts, provide more offices or dedicated meeting rooms instead. In a private office i can put an air filter, control the temp completely, take a nap, and so on.
In the '80s when my dad was a C-level at a major Canadian telcom the first thing he did was move the knowledge workers to the edge of the building where the private offices were and moved his setup to the middle of the floor. His reasoning was that he'd constantly need to talk to different people anyway and the people with more technical roles would benefit from the silence. It kinda blew peoples minds at the time, though I can't say I know how well it really worked in practice.
About 15 years ago my boss got promoted from VP of Engineering to CEO. It was a weird move for him, and one of the ways he handled it was to move out of his private office and onto a desk right in the middle of the R&D lab floor. He did his CEO work right in the midst of smelly chemical experiments and random hardware prototyping work. It must have worked for him, because he's been tremendously successful in the years since.
The people who believe in it are extroverts. They are never in the office, they are walking around looking for people to talk to. The only time they are in their office is when they are have a conversation that truly does need to be private.
The introverts in the mean time need time away from people to recharge. They don't want you interrupting if it isn't an emergency.
Nothing like the CEO telling everyone that we have an "open door culture" and to feel free to come to him when they have concerns for the well-being of the business.
The CEO actually wants a FEW people to do that though. He wants feedback, the bigger isn't isn't the number of people is too much (though that could be a problem), the bigger issue it is that the few who do come to him skew his thinking to their biases instead of the real thing.
Thus open door for the CEO needs to be replaced with something that gets more general feedback. I'm not sure what that might be though.
Not just more general feedback, but honest feedback.
Whether acknowledged or not, there is a power discrepancy between executives (especially C-suite execs) and everyone else. That discrepancy means that executives can't expect to get the real picture by relying on workers to tell them.
Personally, I’m capable of deep focus but also easily distracted. In some sense it almost physically hurts to be pulled out of that focus. When it happens too often, I’m “scared” to try and get back in.
Putting me in an open floor (as has happened repeatedly in the last decade) is certainly not the key to maximizing my impact.
It's like if you tried to bend over and pick something up and right before you picked it up, someone kicked it away a little. And then you tried again, so they kick it again. Over and over. Eventually you stop reaching for it.
In my experience, upper management like that tends to listen to those people that know what they're talking about. They understand that they hired these people to be experts, why would you ignore their opinion when that's literally what you're paying them for.
A previous place I worked at had open plans and lots of "Audio Privacy Rooms". Open plan was like a library, things hushed and almost no talking. For any call or conference to be joined, it was done from the APRs, which had a comfy seat, a phone (redundant with video collab software), a door and some sound proofing.
I have been a C-Level at a (medium sized) company before, I had a go at using an open-plan desk (which I strongly prefer), but it’s not practical. The reason it can’t really work, is C-Levels spend a lot of their time in meetings discussing confidential information. An open-plan desk is a bit of a waste if you can only spend 1-2 hours a day sitting at it, and you need to spend the rest in a meeting room.
I’ve also worked at a company that considered offering private offices to anybody who wanted them, but the numbers on it suck. For our office sites it was going to cost an extra $20-30,000 annually per employee in floor space. Salary is very important to employees, but the total cost of employing somebody is more important to an employer. If it costs an extra $20-30,000 to employ somebody, that money has to come from somewhere. Most people wouldn’t choose to take a pay cut of that size in return for a private office. The extra money could come from increased productivity, but even if you believe you’d be more productive in a private office, you’re not going to be 15-30% more productive. In this case most people spent 1 or 2 days a week WFH, so to cover the cost the change would more realistically have to increase productivity by upwards of 50%.
I know they’re “notoriously unpopular” but if you did a survey I’m sure you find waking up to go to work in the morning is pretty unpopular too. The alternative is to increase the cost of employing you in a way that doesn’t result in any form of compensation, which if you think it through is likely not a very good idea.
Open plan offices are unpopular partly because the C-level suite tries to sell the idea that they are somehow superior to offices. Everyone knows it's a way for the company to save money. Being lied to, on top of feeling miserable in an open plan office, is what really gets people's skin boiling.
Personally, I worked in a cubicle for most of my career, but when I switched to an office, it took a good year for me to get used to not turning around to look who's behind me when I heard an ambient sound. Not because I'm doing something I shouldn't be doing, but simply because I hate the idea of somebody being behind me (I even sit in restaurants with my back to wall when I can).
> I know they’re “notoriously unpopular” but if you did a survey I’m sure you find waking up to go to work in the morning is pretty unpopular too. The alternative is to increase the cost of employing you in a way that doesn’t result in any form of compensation, which if you think it through is likely not a very good idea.
People also hate sitting cramped in an airplane, yet they still fly. But given the choice to drive, they would. Meaning that morale will be low and people will take the first opportunity to find something more comfortable. I understand that it's a balance between cost and morale, but there's a point at which you cannot recover morale by other means.
The proliferation of work-from-home policies is the best thing to come out of the pandemic, in workplaces where it is possible. If you took this survey now, and divided it among wfh and wfo employees, I suspect you would find a big discrepancy.
The cost of providing open plan office facilities is already priced in to most office-working people’s salaries, whether they’re aware of it or not. If it turns out that office facilities are cut back over the long term, you would expect that to apply some upwards pressure on wages. WFH is complicated by a number of other factors though, there’s lots of things that will also be providing downwards pressure. Like all of a sudden having to compete on expected compensation with somebody who lives in rural Ohio, or Manila, or any other place with a lower cost of living than the place you currently live.
Long term effects are yet to be seen, and anybody who thinks they know what they’ll be is just guessing.
Do you think it’s 2-3x averaged for the entire year?
I’m way more effective at writing complex code in an office. I’m not any more effective at random administrative tasks (due to procrastination tendencies, I might even be less effective at them). I’m modestly more effective at reading emails or design docs, but not integer factors more productive.
I’m a huge supporter of offices and was extremely salty when we got kicked out of them (for cost reasons). It’s why I love remote working now.
It's not that people are more productive with private offices, it's that some (many) people are extremely unproductive with open floor plans. So that 2-3x figure is realistic, no matter how you average it.
The problem with extraordinary claims like this, is that you’re much more likely to be estimating your own productivity incorrectly than you are to be correctly. There’s no doubt that most people would write more LoCs sitting a in quiet room undisturbed, but that’s likely a rather poor measurement of your ability to productively provide value to your employer.
I worked with a guy recently who was a notoriously poor communicator. He’d spend 4 days/week WFH, would barely give any updates on what he was doing, and was in general incredibly hard to get a hold of. He did write a lot of code, and most of it was very high quality. But almost none of it was ever used. His excellent code would almost never end up solving the problems we needed it to solve, or provide the functionality we needed it to provide, and nobody ever learned anything from working with him and his very senior-level skill set.
In my experience, people who make extraordinary estimates about how much more productive they’d be if left to work on problems alone are much more likely to be similar to that guy rather than the person you’re describing. This person was a rather extreme case, but I’ve worked with plenty of people like him.
> The problem with extraordinary claims like this, is that you’re much more likely to be estimating your own productivity incorrectly than you are to be correctly. There’s no doubt that most people would write more LoCs sitting a in quiet room undisturbed, but that’s likely a rather poor metric of your ability to productively provide value to your employer.
It’s not an extraordinarily claim. You are making assumptions you have no insight into.
> In my experience, people who make extraordinary estimates about how much more productive they’d be if left to work on problems alone are much more likely to be similar to that guy rather than the person you’re describing.
This is an extraordinary claim.
You are making the generalization that the large majority of people who have high productivity gains when working in a private office are poor communicators who don’t contribute usefully.
The extraordinary claim is that your experience has given you access to the large number of people, their productivity, and their work habits to understand this phenomenon objectively.
If you are a researcher who has done field work and published papers in this field, please feel free to link to one.
But people are notoriously terrible at estimating their own productivity and how they spend their time. Almost everyone I know who has tried time tracking and life logging is shocked at how different reality is from their expectations (mostly that they do less and work less than they think).
> But people are notoriously terrible at estimating their own productivity and how they spend their time.
That’s true.
> Almost everyone I know who has tried time tracking and life logging is shocked at how different their expectations are from the reality (mostly that they do less and work less than they think).
Right, and time tracking and life logging are now widespread practices, so people who do these things can do a pretty good job of estimating their productivity. Also we have things like the Pomodoro method, commit histories, etc. to give indications.
I completely agree that guessing your own productivity difference without doing anything to measure it will not yield good data.
Now look at what the GP is doing - they are using an anecdote of one person’s productivity to make a claim about the productivity of a wide range of people.
My point is that their experience is very unlikely to give them the data and insight needed to make such a generalization because they aren’t measuring anyone’s productivity - they are just using an anecdote.
True but irrelevant to the fact that this guy is rationalizing the reduction in performance (as independently measured by researchers) by ~%70 in favor of reducing costs %~%15.
And then he blames the victim and you fell for it.
I didn't fall for anything. And, quite frankly, I have only an academic interest in the topic. I haven't set foot in an office as an employee for twenty years. I work from home as a freelance contractor. I'd immediately quit any job that did try to make me work in an office.
> GP explicitly states that it is their experience.
GP states that their experience gives them enough insight into other people’s productivity to make a detailed assessment.
> They do not need a peer reviewed paper to describe their experience.
They aren’t describing their experience. That’s the point. They are adding the words ‘in my experience’ to a generalization that they almost certainly don’t have the experience to make.
What would make their claim plausible would be if they were a researcher.
I love it, you dismiss long established, well researched logical conclusions based on understanding of software development and backed by studies…in favor of your anecdote about an engineer you failed to manage properly.
In my experience people who make extraordinary claims about how bad the “guru” employee is are just ignoring his actual contributions because he is focused on getting things done rather than shouting “yes sir” to their arbitrary and clueless demands.
Worse they think this anecdote justifies destroying the productivity of the entire company.
Where is this study you keep mentioning that shows a private office will provide a 2-3x boost to productivity? We both know this doesn’t exist.
Do you really think your corporate overlords could get the same productivity from 1/3rd the payroll, but choose not to because they’d rather torture you with an open-plan office?
Who’s more likely to be wrong about this? You, or the majority of businesses in the world?
(Also, I didn’t manage that person I was talking about. Him and I were both managed by the same person, and she was one of the most compassionate and patient managers I’ve ever worked with).
Added other post now. It's good to be curious, and asking questions.
I don't say that you are, and online person could be anyone saying anything (ie. to troll). For educational purposes, test can be tried to learn about oneself: https://www.idrlabs.com/psychopathy/test.php
In your first post above, you claim open office doesn't work for you, since you need confidential meetings and then would need to be away from open plan anyway. This is asinine reasoning, as your phoning and meetings would disrupt everybody around you doing knowledge work. If it's not you, then it's all the other people. With open plan, there's in fact less collaboration, as there's less space. Even pairing makes too much noise. This, while gossiping and all the other distractions are much worse than in an office. So it's a failure on all accounts, which research do confirm.
This second post is a bit unfairly judged. We all know LoC don't matter. In fact, your point of someone doing irrelevant work is spot on. You know what would help? Actual technical leadership, being included, having a say and a tight feedback loop.
That would require actually seeing people, collaboration and building an organization. Exactly the opposite of the past 20 years tear-down of workplace culture.
It's understandable to take this perspective; it's the perspective a CFO might need to take, but it leaves out a bunch of things.
At one company I was at we had a lack of computer storage for our developers to work. They were constantly deleting work they'd produced in order to make more room. - I won't say the work product to safe the company some face). The employees begged me (the sys-admin) to buy more storage for them, so I planned out a nice storage array that would handle their needs, be reliable, network available, easy for me to manage, backup, etc.
I took it to the CEO and he and the CFO wanted to know how many more work units the developers would produce if we got them this. The CEO went further, saying he didn't care how long it took for developers to develop- they were paid a salary.
I was so flabbergasted that they didn't care about productivity or about employee comfort.
Back to this conversation... 20-30k is a lot of money certainly, but let's look at the full comparison. I don't know how much you pay your knowledge workers, but let's assume a round number of $100k, so then yes, we need them to be 15-30% more productive. I actually do think you can get them to be at least 20% more productive, and then you have some secondary benefits of employees feeling better, etc.
But that's also talking in extremes.. Private offices vs Open-Plan. What about cubicles? Cubicles where you have at least 3 walls are not private offices, but give you more of the benefits of one than open space.
You might find that cubicles cost, say 5-7% in lost floorspace, but that's paltry compared to private offices.
> if you did a survey I’m sure you find waking up to go to work in the morning is pretty unpopular too.
Yes, and many companies are moving to remote work for knowledge workers, and many don't have set work hours, for just this reason. Some people are morning people, but others aren't.
The modern office is designed around a type of person: A morning person, an extrovert, and someone with no kinds of sensory or attention issues.
>The modern office is designed around a type of person: A morning person, an extrovert, and someone with no kinds of sensory or attention issues.
As someone with a sensory disorder, I'm literally looking for a new job now to avoid getting dragged back to the office full time. WFH has been a real blessing to me, my morale is far better as I can completely eliminate the horribly harsh lighting and endless churning soundscape of noises that all offices seem to have. Add that to my being very much not a morning person I genuinely think I'll never set foot in an office again, certainly not on the traditional schedule.
Companies will have to adapt or die to the new reality that many people who aren't morning people, aren't extroverts, and/or have sensory disorders find offices shitty environments to spend a third or more of their life in. The future is giving employees a choice of environment that suits their quality-of-life needs I think.
Not having the tools to perform your job is something that very directly effects your productivity though, the case for applying that same rationale to sitting in a floor plan you don’t like is much less convincing. I’m sure it would increase productivity for some people, but I’m also sure it would decrease it for others. People who are widely relied upon by other people would surely show an increase in productivity by some measurements if interrupted less. But people who who widely rely upon others to get their tasks done would surely take a hit. I’m not convinced that the aggregate productivity change would be significant, and I’m quite certain that it wouldn’t be significant enough to justify the costs.
The other area we considered it to be beneficial (which I forgot to mention), was that we hypothesised it would decrease turnover (and all the costs associated with that). We never got to measure that, so I can’t tell you how much you might reasonably expect it to change things. But our estimates put the number as being rather trivial overall.
> the case for applying that same rationale to sitting in a floor plan you don’t like is much less convincing
I have ADHD, and with it a son of sensitivities to noise, to smells and other things. A person who wears too strong a perfume can effect me in a major way.
My former fiancee is Autistic and she is affected by light- light that's too bright, things that move in her field of vision, etc. She's doing her Ph.D in computational biology.
My reason for pointing this out is to help shift your thinking from "they don't like" to, imagine someone put a thumbtack on your chair and when you said "Wow this chair is really uncomfortable" they said "We determined that your productivity would need to be 30% higher for us to not have these thumbtacks here and since that's not possible, the tack stays."
It's probably true-ish that the productivity won't be affected that much...
I've met programmers who can power through any distractions, but they're by far not the norm in my experience. Many programmers are neuro-non-typical, either by being ADHD, or Autistic, or something else, and sensory issues and distractions work against them.
The one open plan office I worked at, where I could see other employees at eye level, it was having like tinnitus- the stress was a constant monkey on my back, from 8am until I left at 6pm.
You might be thinking "Well that's just him, or people who are weird like him." but it turns out that other people often benefit from the same accommodations as disabled people, only less so. You can look up the term "curb cuts".
I'm not saying you made the wrong decision, but I do think for people who don't have these experiences, it can be hard to differentiate "don't like" with "is like an unceasing low level pain".
You’ve raised some valid points here, but your argument has changed from being about the productivity of the general workforce, to being about the productivity of people with a particular type of disability. Ensuring disabled employees can participate properly is obviously very important, but this is a very different topic from the one we were initially talking about.
This counterpoint is also explicitly called out in GP's post:
> You might be thinking "Well that's just him, or people who are weird like him." but it turns out that other people often benefit from the same accommodations as disabled people, only less so. You can look up the term "curb cuts".
You can Google the “curb cut effect” as much as you like. The entire body of evidence in support of this “effect” is that curb cuts (which weren’t originally designed for disabled people) and closed captions are useful to more people than just disabled people. It’s essentially a design philosophy that disability advocates promote. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s not at all evidence that accomodations made to support disabled people will always be universally useful. Especially when the issue at hand is “basic social interactions are harmful”, rather than a more universally shared experience like “getting over this curb is challenging”.
What makes your arguments weak, isn't the slightly condescending tone or tonedeaf, endless rhetorics about other peoples lives and experiences. No, it's the stunning absence of facts and evidences.
I described quite explicitly what the numbers looked like when I did a real analysis of the associated costs. The productivity gain required for that change to make sense is significant. There is no study that suggests the change would result in anything approaching the level of required productivity.
There’s a couple of people repeating several times ITT that private offices are proven to result in a 2-3x increase in productivity. There is no such study, and they’re most likely talking about the study that you posted in another comment that reports a measurement that is most certainly not productivity.
There is also no academic study of the “cut curb effect”. If you Google it, all you’ll find is a collection of thought leader style blogs that all reference the same few instances of accessibility features primarily implemented to benefit disabled people, that have been found to have a wider benefit for the general population. The outrageous claims about productivity ITT are entirely unfounded, and the fact that non-hearing impaired people also find closed captions useful sometimes doesn’t change that.
In reality this is just one of the topics that the HN user base seems to be passionately irrational about.
It's funny because I don't think you're lacking citations in your argument; but I think that people aren't asking you the right questions either.
Different work environments would certainly facilitate different kinds of needs. For example if you worked in an office that was primarily sales or human interfacing, such as an insurance broker, then you'd certainly see no measurable performance benefits from private offices.
On the other hand, if you were working in an office whose primary product was science research or deep engineering, you might.
Big companies like Google were early proponents of open plan, but have begun reintroducing walls because they've seen the productivity benefits for their employees.
As for 2-3x increases, or even 15-30% increases, I think this belies the fact that so much of what knowledge workers do is challenging to measure.
I've met people who think that a programmer must be producing lines of code, or be typing away, but some of the best development I've seen doesn't involve programming at a computer at all, but writing things down on a whiteboard, time spent thinking, reading, absorbing knowledge and producing high quality solutions.
This makes the job of quantifying output very challenging.
The people who are complaining that you're not producing concrete numbers are simply asking you the wrong question- and you may simply not have the answer.
As to my curb cuts mention, I mentioned something else that I think got lost in the shuffle, which is that so many people who work in technology are neuro-atypical, whether or not they're officially diagnosed.
Ultimately these are business decisions. The CEO I mentioned who said that he didn't care about employee efficiency because the employees were salaried (and thus fixed cost) was making a business decision.
Similarly, you looked at the cost of private offices, which was calculable and contrasted it against output- measured however you felt it was appropriate, and decided it wasn't worth it.
For all I know, maybe employee output itself wasn't even a constraint in your system! If that was the case then slowdowns in employee time would actually be just fine, since they weren't your resource constraint.
Too many people are making assumptions; I just wanted to bring up the issue of neurodiversity playing a role in these decisions and why these may be hidden issues for many employees.
I left the sociopathic world several years ago. I came back, but now everyone is at that stage where they're ready to ditch the sociopathic behaviours of past 20 years. At that stage you go through with it, as there is nothing left to lose.
Someone not familiar with your excellent points aren't competent to make the judgement. We don't care about their preconceived biases and domination techniques.
Also not for the lies that it was about better collaboration, and not just to cut costs, as confirmed above.
Of course what's discussed here is about impacts on deep knowledge work.
My assertion is that this kind optimizes for less productivity and creativity in others. We all know why, but perhaps this needs more open discussion now.
> C-Levels spend a lot of their time in meetings discussing confidential information
“Confidential information” is presumably a concern because (a) at a certain point broad enough knowledge you’d rather keep internal leaks outside the organization and (b) some of it is about managing internal tensions and focus, so you keep information quiet that could disrupt the directed focus of employees on their roles and business goals
When it comes to (a), it’s easy to see how open office plans can become at least a marginal liability: anything discussed privately in C-levels that has external strategic value is absolutely going to get discussed “on the floor” as execution even appears on the horizon. And if (b) is a concern, why not other impacts on focus and productivity?
I’d guess, personally, that office setup costs are highly legible and therefore easy targets for someone looking for a marginal win. Productivity has more inputs and is less legible which makes it easy to imagine the org can make it up elsewhere (or make up stories about how it was made up elsewhere). Assuming orgs value margins of individual productivity in the first place, of course, and it’s not always clear that’s the case.
The offices I work out of in a suburb of DFW are >$20/sqft and its not really that fancy of an office building. My wife works commercial property management in the suburbs of DFW, most of the properties she manages have rents >$30/sqft. And real estate is considered cheap in Texas!
Where I live and work, the average cost of high-quality office space is around $5/sqft (the average cost overall is $2). And no, I don't live in the boonies. I live in a city with a considerable tech presence.
Even cities like Cincinnati or Huntsville are nearly $20/sqft average for rent, $5/sqft for an office space in a city is seems absurdly cheap in the US. Its extremely outside the norm for most offices in the US.
Average cost $2?! You must be thinking monthly, not yearly. Most of the time you hear commercial $/sqft it's the yearly rate, as 5 year leases are pretty common in commerical leases while extraordinary rare in residential.
To put that number into perspective for those used to thinking residential leases, that would mean a 900sqft apartment would rent for $150/mo. Normally commercial leases are slightly more expensive per square foot in literally every market I've ever looked at.
Please, do tell me market in the US where I can rent a 2,000sqft apartment for $333/mo and live in a decent metro area.
Ah, that's where the disconnect is. $2/sqft/mo works out to $24/mo yearly (obviously) which is definitely more in line with the numbers I was talking before. ~$20/mo seems to make sense to me, much higher than that and I just don't understand paying those rates. There's plenty of wonderful places to live and work with commercial real estate in the $20's.
Sounds like that company was considering some luxurious offices. I'd be satisfied with my cubicle walls going to the ceiling and a simple door. The goal is privacy/focus. Hell if I was allowed I would get some plywood and hinges from home depot and install them myself over the weekend.
Unfortunately, you can't just erect 4 walls and a door, and call it a day. The problem you quickly run into are building codes.
You need to think about electrical codes, HVAC, accessibility, fire codes (sprinklers, flammability of materials, etc), evacuation planning, etc. In California, there's even a rule that at least half the outlets in an office area must be motion controlled.
Not saying I don't agree with you, just more things to consider about the complexity and, ofc, the cost of doing things like that.
> Salary is very important to employees, but the total cost of employing somebody is more important to an employer.
Salary is arguably more important to an employee than the total cost of employing them is to the employer because for the typical employee their salary is close to 100% of their income, while labor expense is less than that for nearly all corporations.
The productivity estimate from focus is off, especially for employees who do more than solve immediate, light problems (you were already taken to task for essentially claiming there is no such thing as a highly productive employee.) The additional cost also isn’t typical everywhere. Going by your math, you should be recommending full offices in much of the country.
Finally would note you don’t have a monopoly on executive perspective in this thread. It’s to the credit of others that they can understand why they perhaps should eschew a traditional visual indicator of power disparity that would favor them.
So you confirm that all these talks about "innovation" and "stimulating collaboration" and all is just BS. It all comes down to cost to cram as many workers as possible in the available space.
They undoubtedly lead to more efficient collaboration, just as they also undoubtedly lead to less efficient focused work. The reason you don’t really get a choice these days in how you want to tune the floor layout is undoubtedly down to economics. Office space costs more than it used to, and as the service sector grows, so does the demand for skilled labor performed in front of a desk (along with demand for places to put those desks).
I don’t know about every market, but in the places I’m familiar with, generally yes. Commercial rent didn’t change much at first, now it’s dipped a little bit. If it keeps this downward pace long term, then the economics of office floor space could change significantly. But that’s highly speculative territory.
You’re right, you’re not going to be %30 more productive in a private office. You will be %100 more productive.
In some cases, %300.
That you are willing to sacrifice %70-%80 of an employee’s productivity to save %15 of their salary shows the problem.
That you don’t realize it is because “management” is no longer drawn from those that do. Instead “management” has become clueless MBAs who can't do either job.
The real question that one should ask the higher ups is how much time do they expect us to be collaborating. The only way you can justify open floor spaces is if the collaboration is the most important element of the majority of the people's time and effort and the majority of the people need to be both aware of and contributing to that collaboration. I very much doubt that leaders believes that developers should be involved in every conversation in the space for the majority of the day.
> I very much doubt that leaders believes that developers should be involved in every conversation in the space for the majority of the day.
The funny thing is for software/tech companies they probably should be. The people who will be doing the work should probably have input into the work to be done at every stage of the process. Tech companies should value the informed input of the actual people who build their company.
But most leaders who value open plan offices see developers as unimportant ticket robots who take in JIRA tickets and output code and who need to know nothing about what exactly they're building.
You're right, teams should collaborate, but I've never been in a place-where only one team was in the space. It's a handful of teams from a bunch of practices all taking the same space.
I've never been in a company where the couple dozen people all on the floor are on the same project. I'd imagine even if they were there would be subdivisions there - do 30 people all effectively work on the same stuff?
I've been on projects of 100 developers all on the same floor. However the only way to sanely manage such a thing it break things into smaller parts. You then have a a bunch of small teams (around 10 people) that need to work together. When one person on your team says/asks something you should pay attention because it will affect you, but if someone on a different team says something ignore it.
Given that at any one time that means that at least 90% of the developers will be trying to ignore one or more conversations (while trying to work or having their own) it comes back to the question the intent of that space and if that's actually helping productivity.
Is that team of 10 collaborating and trying to ignore everyone else while doing so more productive in that space than they would be in their own team office or sets of offices? And are the other non-talking developers not being less productive because of the distraction? It doesn't take a lot of distraction for a team of 10 to drag down the productivity of the other 90 people into a net loss for the room.
LOL. Unfortunately what people say that you can hear can affect your team because of product interactions. And people tend to talk about other things than work. Additionally, they are often wrong which requires correction.
> Unfortunately what people say that you can hear can affect your team because of product interactions.
Absolutely. However that is a lot less common than things that you hear that don't affect you. If you want everyone to know everything than you can't have more than 10 developers - a team of this size (or slightly smaller) will be far more productive than larger teams because they know all the interactions - but the larger team because of the larger numbers gets more done at the end of the day anyway (and good architecture will minimize the interactions and thus help productivity)
> Unfortunately what people say that you can hear can affect your team because of product interactions.
When it is only a small number of people those non-work conversations make your teammates more human and thus gel your team and so are worth thee cost. However if the number of people is too large it is a distraction.
> they are often wrong which requires correction.
If they are your teammates you should be correcting each other. If they are not - you shouldn't be the expert in the subject and so you won't know they are wrong in the first place.
The problem with the model where everybody is inputting all the time, is that nobody is actually doing any of the work to turn that noise into product. It's not a sustainable model for actually accomplishing anything, unless you've got engineers taking things off-the-clock and turning that discussioning into code in the late night or early morning hours.
Been there, done that, it's not any fun, and a good way to get resentful and burned out. It's really helpful to formalize communication to a greater degree.
Isn't collaboration the primary role of the executive? If the open office had benefits you would expect them to be the most pronounced among management, wouldn't you? Since salaries in the executive are so high and according to them the open office has massive efficiency benefits doesn't that mean that the cost of executives having private offices is unacceptable as it is hindering the efficiency of a very high cost role?
Well yeah, but that collaboration is also often done via phone/videoconference, and some of the things discussed may not be for everyone's ears, so I can understand them wanting a private office. The logic behind cramming developers into open-space offices is more along the lines of "their job is more or less silent, and they don't have as many calls that could disturb the others, so we can put them all in a big room and save money, yay!".
Walls are cheap. Depending on who you ask the HVAC is enough cheaper as to be worth it. (open offices are a nightmare to heat/cool: there are always temperature gradient across large rooms)
Walls and HVAC are cheap. What’s not cheap is all the additional square footage of floor plate to make offices work (additional space in the office itself, additional space for corridors, laying out architecture to allow sight lines to natural light, etc)
While executives primarily do collaboration work, they also do a lot of confidence work. I think there are legitimate reasons for a lot of strategic planning and feedback to happen behind a door.
The typical move I've seen is C-level execs permanently booking one of the conference rooms. I've seen one who had no problem doing his work in a 20-person conference room all day.
> Very simple: does c suite use open offices? No, because they freaking suck lol.
Sure they do. I worked at a FTSE-100 company that had the CEO and full director team working in an open office. You could walk right up to the CEO no matter who you were. In fact, I would say that CEO's being in the open office is increasingly popular.
They did have access to pre-booked meeting rooms they could use for private conversations which would not be appropriate to hold in an open office.
When top leaders are in the same open plan: How inviting is it to come on over and chat up? It's wide open to misinterpretations and unintended skip-levels.
In the company I worked at, it depended on the seniority:
* CEO - He was in the open office but had his team of PA's and assistants around him, so if they didn't recognise you they would triage it first (and everyone knew not to just walk up in reality - open office at that scale means you can technically walk up to them and start talking but it doesn't mean that you should). The CEO in this particular company was a public figure too (i.e. the kind of CEO where reporters would follow them and would be recognised on the street), so again it's kinda like walking up to a celebrity in a cafe - you can but it's not always polite.
* Board/Exec Directors - They usually had 1 or 2 PA's sitting next to them but would be very approachable. Typically would have the desk against a wall to discourage disturbance slightly (i.e. it meant you had to walk past the PA desk). If you are in their department usually you could just walk over and chat. If you weren't in the department, the PA's would probably chat to you first and suggest speaking to one of the directors that reported into them first, although if they had done that already then they probably would either have a quick chat (director is in ear-shot anyway) or schedule a meeting if it needs a longer discussion.
* Non-Exec Directors - Were in the full open office, typically with one PA but they could be remote. You could walk up and start chatting openly.
For reference it was a company with over 100k employees, and 5 levels of hierarchy below director level. To be honest the whole setup worked really well, and I personally didn't feel like there was any barrier between management and everyone else.
The offices I've worked in gave private offices to roles that need to discuss confidential concerns. Which means all people managers, which in turns means all executives. I also have had a private office as an individual tech contributor, but most places just gave us cubes.
I agree that open offices suck, btw. I'd much more readily go back to an office if I got my own space.
That's usually just an excuse. For example, that issue can be addressed in a more budget-friendly way by simply adding a few temporary meeting rooms. Need to discuss a confidential concern? Just book it.
The real reason is that it's harder to find quality c-suite candidates who would accept an open office. Since stockholders care so much about the quality of leadership (rightly), companies usually spare no expense in enticing the best candidates.
There's usually some excuse along the line of "Oh, the C-suite is constantly on the phone" / "Oh, the C-suite has to conduct business that cannot yet be shared with all the employees" / "Oh, the C-suite has to conduct private HR business" that makes it necessary for the C-suite to have a private office.
Yeah? How often are they at their places in that open office doing work vs traveling or in conference rooms? I betcha for most of them it's 'not often'
I mean they’re in meeting rooms pretty often, but they’re not special fancy conference rooms. Just used for meetings like everyone else, and they have a lot of meetings because they run the company.
I could use the meeting rooms just as much if I wanted. I don’t see them having very special facilities.
My point being c-level executives don't need comfortable, low-distraction work stations to perform their work, so its not like their work life alters much in the open-office fad.
Their work is done primarily in conference rooms and in meetings.
Engineers, for the most part, do.
