[AmericanChopper]

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.

[mirkules]

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.

[AmericanChopper]

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.

[zepto]

> but even if you believe you’d be more productive in a private office, you’re not going to be 15-30% more productive.

15-30% is probably low for quite a few individuals. It could be as much as 2-3x. I have experimented with it and it certainly is for me.

The problem is that on average you may be right, since there are also a lot of people who barely benefit from it.

[sokoloff]

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.

[cyphertruck]

The 2-3X factor includes the lower return from administrative tasks. For code writing it is probably 10X - 15X.

[himinlomax]

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.

[AmericanChopper]

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.

[zepto]

> 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.

If not, what you are saying seems like bullshit.

[Veen]

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).

[zepto]

> 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.

[cyphertruck]

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.

[Veen]

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.

[lucumo]

GP explicitly states that it is their experience. They do not need a peer reviewed paper to describe their experience. That's ridiculous.

[zepto]

> 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.

> That's ridiculous.

No it isn’t.

[cyphertruck]

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.

And yet here you are repeating this exact cliche.

It is still not logical.

[AmericanChopper]

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).

[_y5hn]

How about 3,5 (72%) less time having face-to-face interactions with each other in the open-plan office:

https://www.managers.org.uk/knowledge-and-insights/article/t...

Would it kill you to just do a search?

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=research+productivity+open+pl...

[AmericanChopper]

As interesting as that is, it is not a measurement of productivity.

I did suspect that’s the only piece of data that “2-3x” person keeps posting about all over this thread though.

[_y5hn]

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.

[emacsen]

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.

[BoxOfRain]

>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.

[AmericanChopper]

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.

[emacsen]

> 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".

[AmericanChopper]

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.

[spost]

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".

[AmericanChopper]

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”.

[teakettle42]

Autism isn’t a disability.

[cyphertruck]

An environment that lets you focus is literally a tool you need to do the job. Focus is literally the job.

That you think this is about whether people like some floor plan or not tells me you are speaking from uninformed opinion lacking experience.

[wwweston]

> 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.

[hobs]

30 grand a year for 1 office means you are paying upwards of 10 dollars per square foot of space, your office space is waaay too expensive.

[dataqat]

"Average office rent in San Francisco rested at $87.18 per square foot in 2020."

https://www.commercialcafe.com/office-market-trends/us/ca/sa...

[vel0city]

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!

[JohnFen]

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.

[vel0city]

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.

https://www.commercialcafe.com/office-market-trends/us/al/hu... https://www.commercialcafe.com/office-market-trends/us/oh/ci...

[vel0city]

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.

[JohnFen]

Yes, I'm talking monthly.

The residential prices in my area are MUCH higher. A 1000sqft apartment goes for around $1200/mo.

[vel0city]

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.

[hobs]

fwiw the commercial asset management product I did data stuff for always quoted it by month so that's what I was talking.

[AmericanChopper]

> your office space is waaay too expensive

I think a lot of people who rent office space (especially in expensive cities) would agree with you here.

[scottLobster]

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.

[mirkules]

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.

[mandelbrotwurst]

> 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.

[1123581321]

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.

[dudul]

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.

[sokoloff]

Did very many people ever believe it was about those things?

[AmericanChopper]

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).

[JohnFen]

> They undoubtedly lead to more efficient collaboration

They do? That's not been my experience. Is there data on this?

[Veen]

Is that true post-COVID? There's an awful lot of empty office space now.

[AmericanChopper]

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.

[cyphertruck]

You undoubtedly have a habit of claiming your uninformed opinion is fact and ignoring decades of research to the contrary.

Cutting performance by %70 to save %15 in costs is never going to be economical.

[dragonwriter]

> The reason it can’t really work, is C-Levels spend a lot of their time in meetings discussing confidential information

So do managers down to the first-line, everyone in HR, and in many organizations lots of other people.

Most of those people use shared meeting rooms for the purpose.

[loco5niner]

Honestly though, I went from loving my company to hating my company when they moved us to the new open office plan.

I'll tell you, that has about an 80% efficiency drop.

I love my coworkers though, that's why I stayed. And they are revisiting remote work, so I'm hopeful.

[JohnFen]

> if it costs an extra $20-30,000 to employ somebody, that money has to come from somewhere.

Maybe by using office space somewhere that isn't insanely expensive?

[cyphertruck]

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.