[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”.

[_y5hn]

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.

[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.