| HN Mirror

Executives and management consultants love them. Of course these people usually have nice offices of their own, making open-plan truly enterprise. (I define a thing as enterprise if its customers are different from, and usually higher on the org chart than, its actual users.)

Factors involved in why these offices are preferred include:

1) Low cost. Yes, yes, I know, productivity loss from battery-farmed knowledge workers as compared to free-range knowledge workers is arguably much greater. But that's not quantifiable. An accountant can point to cost savings of open-plan offices as a number in a spreadsheet and show how it directly impacts the bottom line.

2) Adaptability. It's much easier to move people around and reconfigure office space for different uses if you do not commit to building walls (even cubicle walls). This is especially true if an org is being "right-sized", but is also true of e.g., startups. An actual office may be prohibitive given the pittance in A-round funding you got, but if you can cram your guys into a corner of WeWork you can make the numbers work.

3) Increased workforce visibility. This means a couple of things: a) open plan is a cheap, easy-to-implement panopticon, allowing management to keep tabs on you at all times -- every time you go to the loo, everyone in the office will see you leave and come back. b) Visibility means availability -- specifically, availability to be interrupted at any time for any reason. Do not underestimate the importance of visibility. Microsoft had a company culture that strongly favored giving offices to individual programmers, until in the 90s the management consultant Jim McCarthy said "Beware of a guy in a room, and I mean that literally." He thought developers should NOT have private space of their own as it made them less accountable.