
Is the open office layout dead? - Antrikshy
https://blogs.dropbox.com/dropbox/2017/08/open-office-layouts
======
rayiner
I've never understood the price issue. Class A in midtown Manhattan is $80 per
square foot. That's $8,000 per year for a developer that probably makes well
over six figures. Put two in an office that's only $4,000 per year.

I _really_ don't buy it considering how much money companies spend on office
space. Like why he hell would you have offices in Greenwich Village
([http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-new-york-office-
tour...](http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-new-york-office-
tour-2016-11)) instead of say FiDi. It's not only be much cheaper, but an
easier commute to places peopled live, like Brooklyn.

~~~
Spooky23
Have you ever had a bathroom remodeled?

Construction sucks and is both a time and money sink. You can literally have a
crew show up and build a big cube farm in 1-5 days.

It's really the same argument as "why would anyone pay outrageous fees to
Amazon for slow, shitty VMs?". The answer is that when you factor in the cost
of a data center facility and the people to build and run it, it turns out
that AWS is a good deal after all.

~~~
gm-conspiracy
Are we running new sewer and water lines?

Installing a drain pan? Retiling?

I thought for an office, you need to frame w/ some metal studs and drywall,
doors, and maybe blown-in insulation to abate sound.

Not nearly as complex or skilled an endeavor.

~~~
regularfry
Not _as_ complex, but: electrics, lighting, networking, phone, smoke alarms,
sprinkler system, ventilation, security... it does all add up.

~~~
nerdponx
None of which costs more in cubes vs tables.

~~~
regularfry
It's not cubes vs tables, it's offices vs cubes.

------
concede_pluto
It's been over a decade since I had so much as a semi-private office (shared
with just one quiet teammate) so I have to say the death of the open office is
exaggerated. And all of their workarounds assume a laptop could ever
substitute for a desktop with an ergonomic keyboard and a large screen.

It's amazing that the escalating competition in pay and perks never seem to
include space to get into the zone.

~~~
closeparen
It's amazing when you look at software engineers' value in dollars. If you
measured our value in square feet of local real estate, it would be blindingly
obvious.

A tech company in a prosperous city can buy you all the 4k Dell Ultrasharps
and Macbook Pros a person could want without breaking a sweat. Another couple
feet of desk, on the other hand, could turn you from a net creator of value to
a net destroyer of value. It's as unaffordable to the company as the salary
bump that could put homeownership within reach.

I'd _love_ it if someone would offer me a private office, parking space, and
ability to live in a market with closer to median home prices, but the
industry is very clearly trending in the opposite direction.

~~~
gerbilly
Really, citation please?

I see companies was so much money all over the place that it's a bit hard to
believe that assigned desks would be such a hardship for them.

~~~
closeparen
Don't know of anything public. At my company, we have ~5' slices of long
communal tables. The figure I got from one of our facilities people two years
ago was that these cost $20,000/year each. I'm sure the market is up since
then, but I don't know how far.

I think you could fit about four of these workstations into one of our
conference rooms. So giving people private offices the size of our conference
rooms (any smaller would probably be a code violation, and at least inhumane)
would cost about $60k/head extra. Maybe less, since some fixed costs like
bathrooms and kitchens wouldn't necessarily grow.

Regardless of how the fixed costs play out, it looks like each 3-5 offices
could buy a whole additional programmer. We chose the extra headcount rather
than the offices.

~~~
concede_pluto
Office pods seem to be less than $10k, why can't we get those rather than
five-foot slices of purgatory?

~~~
closeparen
Probably because the area to pull out your chair wouldn't double as a hallway
to access other people's desks anymore. The walls aren't what's at a premium,
the floor space is.

------
nerdponx
_No designated desks._

Please please please no. Having "personal" space at the office is just as
important as having "quiet" space. I do not want to feel like a drifter, a
student in the library, or a tenant in a co-working space, unless I am
actually one of those things.

~~~
jchampem
At my current job, they plan to move office and to change the organisation
from "open office layout" to what they call "dynamic layout", including no
designated desks.

And they made some studies stating that an average of X% of the company
workforce time is spent in meeting rooms, so they can cut off the number of
desks by X% (minus a small delta).

People will even have lockers to store personal stuff...

I'm looking forward to see how that will work, have a good laugh and quit.

~~~
Ntrails
They did this at my last place.

But wait, I have a matlab license and VS installed. So I need to be at _my_
desktop PC or reinstall everything every day. Oh, and to debug some parts of
this legacy code, I'll need local admin or it crashes.

No, I don't want to switch to a laptop.

Oh, you can permanently book my desk for me in 6 monthly blocks? Works for
me...

~~~
jchampem
Well, they already planned that all of us will have a laptop + a cell phone.
(We don't get to choose our hardware so desktop PC is not an option...)

------
davb
> No designated desks

I hate hot desking. I know it's very subjective but when I come into an office
for eight hours a day, five days a week, I like to personalise my workspace. I
don't drive, I take public transport and walk, and hate carting my laptop and
charger around with me. I want my own space, with meeting rooms and
collaboration spaces for when I need those things.

I may be alone in saying so, but I'd happily take a modest drop in pay for a
private office.

~~~
Roritharr
We've recently moved into new offices in Frankfurt/Germany and being the CTO
of our 40 Person Startup gave me an in-depth look at all the calculations
involved. It's simply horrible how expensive it would be to give private
offices even to >3 people in our company.

I've fought tooth and nail to keep everyone in small team offices(< 5 people)
and even sacrificed my own STO to gain an extra room for this, allowing our
company to make the best possible use of the new (relatively lavish) space.

We've got two small rooms set aside as flex-desks(complete with 2 4K Monitors
& Gigabit Ethernet via a TB3 Dock) to give everyone the possibility to work in
a 1 person office when its critical, but that combined with our lax home-
office rules is more of a best we can do approach than a real solution to the
office plan/distraction problem.

The problem stems from there being simply no officespaces available that have
a default layout that permits many small rooms while retaining quick access to
group/meeting and social areas. This seems to be a result of different design
goals of other professions that need to maximise for the most amount of butts
in seat per square meter, without factoring in the losses that distractions
can cause.

If you want to redraw the floorplan, you have to sign rental contracts upwards
of 5 years, something no sensible startup would do and even if, the whole
investment is relatively large and needs a lot of focus from the company
management to ensure its worthwhile. The expensive part is not the additional
room the company would need to rent for each employee, it's the amount of
empty space(hallways and large rooms) a company would need to rent to have
more small rooms available up front.

~~~
throwaway0255
> It's simply horrible how expensive it would be to give private offices even
> to >3 people in our company.

And how much does it cost to have your entire engineering team audibly and
visually distracted and annoyed 100% of the time?

Environmental factors that decrease engineer productivity may not show up on a
balance sheet, but the cost is massive. Can you get an engineer an office for
less than $40k/year? Then it's probably worth it. Seriously what is so hard
about this?

I work in an open office right now and every day is like sitting in a high
school cafeteria trying to get work done. I work at 1/3rd capacity all day,
make up 1/3rd in unpaid overtime at home, and my employer is just eating the
cost on the other 1/3rd. Making me work in an open office is costing them at
least $70k/yr in just my productivity.

My work satisfaction is through the floor, I'm stressed and exhausted all the
time and preparing to interview for other jobs. When I start interviewing and
eventually move, then they'll also be eating the cost of having to recruit and
train a replacement (probably another $50-100k).

For the life of me I cannot understand the degree to which large companies
will take huge piles of cash and just piss them right down the drain without a
single thought, and yet be so incredibly resistant to giving offices to
engineers.

My current theory is that they don't want engineers to have offices because
keeping engineers crowded together like livestock in stables serves as a
visual indicator of the inherent superiority of their managers and executives.

 _Editing to add an additional note_ : My employer thinks I like open office
plans, my employer thinks I'm working at 100% capacity and am one of the most
productive engineers, and my coworkers think their talking doesn't annoy me.

There is nothing in this world for me to gain by admitting my loss in
productivity, complaining about open offices, or being the reason my coworkers
can't have fun talking to each other all day. Those options have only
downsides.

So again, the costs don't show up on your balance sheet, and every person on
your team could fucking hate this open office shit and work at half capacity,
and you would never have any idea.

~~~
northwest65
I would really encourage you to move on the interviewing as soon as you can. I
was in your position, desperately unhappy with the working conditions, and now
I'm in a small quiet office with 4 to 5 other people and I have never been
happier in my work.

In the meantime, get yourself a set of Bose Quiet Comfort 35s. An absolutely
life changing piece of equipment for me at least. If nothing else you will
comfortable enjoy the movies on the next flight you catch instead of having to
crank the volume to the maximum to barely hear it over the constant background
roar of the engines.

~~~
curun1r
> get yourself a set of Bose Quiet Comfort 35s

That's only if you like to listen to music while you work. If you just want
quiet, get yourself a pair of the earmuffs that the airport ground crews wear
out on the tarmac. I had a coworker who wore those and the only real downside
was that he'd get horribly startled when people were trying to get his
attention because they'd have to come up and touch him on the shoulder. Even
basically yelling in the vicinity of his ears, he'd have no idea people were
right behind him.

~~~
vbuwivbiu
that's if you can tolerate having hot earmuffs pressing on your head all day,
which I cannot. It hurts and gives me earache.

~~~
emj
That depends on the model for me, some work good others do not. But I don't
know about daily use I've only worn them for two days max.

------
AriaMinaei
I wish someone who works at Pixar could comment in this thread. They've had
private offices ever since the steve jobs building, and often you hear that
private, customized offices is one of the things that they love about their
workplace.

The Steve Jobs building is designed to increase chance of random encounters
between people to stimulate collaboration, but these encounters happen in the
hallways and the designated collaborative spaces, rather than in people's
private offices.

Some pictures: [https://officesnapshots.com/2007/07/16/pixar-
hq/](https://officesnapshots.com/2007/07/16/pixar-hq/)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CX9OV43o4Ac](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CX9OV43o4Ac)

Edit: Private offices were first introduced since the Steve Jobs building

~~~
moogly
Someone did in an earlier thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14963985](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14963985)

~~~
AriaMinaei
> As a current Pixar employee, the open office trend has unfortunately spread
> to our admittedly beautiful campus. You have to be fairly senior to get an
> office around here, lowlifes like me get stuck in shared open hallways and
> the like.

Well that's a shame..

------
protomyth
_And with office space at a premium, private offices for everyone isn’t a
realistic alternative, nor is it ideal._

I disagree. Privacy pods make me claustrophobic, and since I have some ear
issues, noise canceling headphones are painful. Offices are only unaffordable
if you don’t properly account for the cost of distracted developers.

I do agree proper meeting rooms are needed also.

~~~
pasbesoin
It also externalizes the longer term health care costs.

Chronic stress is generally and scientifically recognized as a significant
negative health factor.

And then there is the longer term lost productivity of those negatively
impacted by it. All the way up to premature aging and death.

------
0xbear
>> No designated desks

I don't know about anyone else, but for me that would tank the productivity
even worse than the open plan.

I have to be at a particular place in order to get anywhere close to "the
flow". There are currently two such places: my desk at work, and my desk in my
man cave at home.

Whenever we move offices, it takes me weeks to get back to 100% again. I
suspect I'm not the only one. Simply put, with no designated desk I would
never reach peak productivity at work.

~~~
xroche
This. "No designated desks" is even more retarded than open plan offices.

I want my dual-screen setup. I want my mechanical keyboard. I want my optical
mouse with high precision. I want my Herman-Miller chair. I want my tea pot
and my mug. I want my notebook and my pens. I want my bluetooth audio
headphone with the charger. I want my phone QI wireless charger where I just
put my smartphone.

I don't care about open plan: yes, you're being interrupted, but that's the
rule, and this does improve communication, even if I hate being interrupted.

Stay tuned, folks. In ten years, we'll have a "Is the no designated desks
layout dead?" article on HN.

------
JohnBooty

        Perhaps the most powerful and popular trend in the 
        move away from open offices is an increased number 
        of small private spaces
    

My company upgraded our offices last year and "privacy pods + informal open
spaces" has been a huge success. I don't have any hardcore productivity
metrics but the reaction among our developers, including me, has been
unanimously favorable.

Although, it must be said, we still prefer to work from home quite a bit. This
is mostly due to our large number of remote employees in other countries. If I
am working with remote people I don't typically commute to the office.

------
chadaustin
(Disclaimer: I used to work at Dropbox)

I'm not a fan of a binary "open office or not" distinction: both can be done
well. Dropbox's old office was the best open office I've worked in. Large
desks, low employee per sq. ft. density, sound-absorbing foam on the (high)
ceilings, teams spaced relatively far apart. The new Dropbox office was a
slight regression. Smaller desks, slightly higher employee density, no sound-
absorbing material. But it was still mostly fine.

IMVU's open offices back in 2012 or so sucked. Employees were packed together
to the point that it was sometimes even hard to walk from point A to point B.

I feel like the most important office quality metrics are employee density and
how well sound carries.

Whether or not there are useful collaboration surfaces matters too: cubicle
walls are great for stickies and note cards. But that's solvable with easy
access to dry-erase walls or dry-erase boards on wheels.

------
bane
For fun, let's slippery slope this trend into the setting for a story.

 _At some point the workplace will just end up an unlivable hellscape where
people have to walk to work 20 miles from their triple bunked dorms, and then
stand inches from each other for 16 hour double shifts wearing nothing but VR
goggles and chord boards. The 12th floor walkup, non-temperature controlled
"office" warehouse will smell like fear and sweaty humanity, the only "perk"
will be the government mandated yearly flea and louse spray that will rain
down from the ceiling and the monthly cleaning of the shared feeding tubes.

During enforced sleeping periods, employees will spend precious sleep time
sending tap-code (error corrected of course) to each other the workings of a
conspiracy wherein they'll demand 60cmx30cm standing desks, a 12" CRT monitor,
12 hour shifts and 1 day off of work a quarter and a decent burial instead of
being shoved off into a nameless mass grave._

I call this book, Apathy Shrugged

~~~
JetSpiegel
Set this in Shibuya good extra sci-fi goodness.

Or Frisco, if you want to sell to Hollywood. Mike Judge coulf buy this as a
spin-off to Silicon Valley.

------
oldandtired
As long as an office is considered a status symbol by management, then the
open plan environment will stay. In a general sense, offices for any reason
related to productivity is a non-starter today (has been so for a number of
decades).

Offices are considered a reward for climbing the hierarchy not for actual work
by the plebs (you know, those who would actually need it or benefit from it
for work purposes).

And certainly, if the senior bods don't have offices then the junior workers
will never get them.

~~~
briandear
Unless you’re at Apple where everyone seems to have a private office with a
locking door.

~~~
junkculture
Used to. Their new flying saucer is open office.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-small-
business/wp/201...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-small-
business/wp/2017/08/16/some-apple-employees-may-quit-over-new-open-office-
floor-plan/)

------
mindcrime
> No designated desks

If the day comes that my $DAYJOB employer goes this route, that's the exact
day I quit. Hot desking is some of the most idiotic, brain-dead stupid shit I
can imagine. I have desk drawers for a reason... so I don't have to lug around
every single item I use at my desk, everywhere I go. Not to mention the books
on my desk, which I am _definitely_ not hauling back and forth every day.

~~~
bassman9000
No designated desks is the Agile of floor planning. Everyone's the same,
anyone can do the same job, you can hotswap spaces and people as you replace
hard drives.

~~~
mindcrime
While I agree with your overall point, I would add that anybody who thinks
that "Agile" prescribes that people be considered fungible, has been misled.
Somebody's specific implementation of "agile" might prescribe that, but
nothing in the Agile Manifesto says anything like that.

In fact, I'd argue that, to a first approximation, anytime anybody makes a
statement along the lines of "Agile says you do X", you can safely assume that
they don't know WTF they are talking about, and/or they are confusing Agile
with "Foobar Inc. Fucked-up Agile".

~~~
bassman9000
Sadly, the Agile manifesto is, on purpose, lacking. Yes, it contains sound
ideas. But it has to be implemented. And that's where the problem lies.

To be fair, I should have stated Scrum as Agile implementation, instead of
Agile itself. My bad.

------
rdtsc
I hope so.

I didn't work in in one, but worked in a cubicle as an intern, then in an
office with 3 other people focusing on the same project, then in my own office
with a door, now at home. But I can only imagine the sensory distraction and
just can't see why anyone thought it was a good idea for software development.

Sure I can see the photo-op image appeal for PR purposes "Oh look at our
dynamic startup, working in an exposed brick re-purposed warehouse. So much
collaboration, all the time, with everyone...". But then after the picture is
taken everyone should have the option to grab an office or an isolated area to
do actual work, or separate white-boarding conference room if they are talking
or designing something".

I also find it interesting that these large tech companies at the bleeding
edge of technology like Amazon, Google, Facebook are selling digital
connectivity (ads, social connections, office suites, email, video chat,
messengers, cloud infrastructure) -- and still require their employees to be
physically present in the same building to do work.

Wonder if remote work in the next revolution in how our economy works. The
more things are digitized, hopefully the less we'll be tied to a physical tech
hub area. That could have pretty large effects on real estate, traffic, taxes,
how developed various areas get (smaller towns might see some development)
etc.

~~~
barrkel
If you're a newbie and need to get up to speed, having an experienced person
you can ask questions of every 5 to 10 minutes is a big help. And if you can
design your software so that the team members are replaceable, being able to
easily replacing engineers is more important than keeping them happy.

IMO it only works on a certain complexity level of software, and up to a
particular skill level of engineer. Beyond that, you need more specialized
engineers that need more code ownership, and will be replaced less often.
They'll cost more too.

~~~
concede_pluto
> experienced person you can ask questions of every 5 to 10 minutes

Please don't abuse your peers' goodwill this way. Write down your questions as
you go, meet about stuff too abstruse to straighten out over email, and add
what you learn to the docs so the next newbie will be less of a burden.

------
driverdan
What a stupid clickbait headline. Obviously it's not dead. Research that shows
it's terrible has been around longer than open offices have been popular. If
management cared about the evidence they wouldn't have done it in the first
place.

Let me fix their conclusion with the cheapest, most employee friendly way to
solve the problem.

> Luckily, the solution is fairly simple— _allow everyone to work remote._

~~~
kemitche
If you want me to work remote full time, I need a raise to cover the cost of
getting an apartment or house equivalent to my own but with an additional room
to turn into a dedicated private office.

Otherwise, I'll take an appropriately designed office.

~~~
daxfohl
I agree there's a need to separate work and life. I really struggled with WFH
until I got some designated space to do it. I'd imagine that's not uncommon.

That said, whether it's worth it depends on how you value your time. Not
sitting in traffic an hour each day ~20 days/month, if you value your time at
even $30/hr (entry-level contractor in midwest, say), it should cover the cost
of the extra space.

If not, well, you also have to factor in being able to use your own kitchen
and especially bathroom. Ever since working from home for the previous few
years, it's so awkward now having to go shit and piss in grungy toilets a foot
away from my coworkers and managers. Would definitely pay some big money to
avoid that.

~~~
stctgion
Within a month of engineering moving into a office previously used by
management they had removed the luxury toilet paper

~~~
daxfohl
I was going to try to say something witty, but as the saying goes, reality is
stranger than fiction. Picture executives hording it for themselves.
[http://clark.com/shopping-retail/high-quality-toilet-
paper-c...](http://clark.com/shopping-retail/high-quality-toilet-paper-comes-
cheap/)

------
strictnein
You know what are great? Cubes. Cubes are great.

Arrange them in pods of 6-8 with one common entrance to the space and put a
dev team in one (and windows at the end, ideally).

Easy as that.

------
jimjimjim
No hot desking. please.

the people pushing hotdesking seem to be manager types that spend their days
talking to various groups of people.

but it fails completely for some dev types. oh sure you can churn out some css
while balancing your laptop on the edge of a table at the local cafe but just
try that with a desktop workstation plugged into various bits of hardware
while doing hour+ compiles.

------
Jeremy1026
Funny, the quoted Architecture Firm in the article is Gensler, who designed my
last company's office space. Which included 6 rows of desks[1], each row
seating 8 people with no separation left and right, and only a low divider
between the person in front of you. And they designed it in 2015, 3 years
after the PDF the quote was taken from was published. Sounds like even they
aren't buying into the "open offices are dead" narrative.

[1][https://www.google.com/maps/uv?hl=en&pb=!1s0x89c803629c02a71...](https://www.google.com/maps/uv?hl=en&pb=!1s0x89c803629c02a719:0x855ed517a092a7c8!2m22!2m2!1i80!2i80!3m1!2i20!16m16!1b1!2m2!1m1!1e1!2m2!1m1!1e3!2m2!1m1!1e5!2m2!1m1!1e4!2m2!1m1!1e6!3m1!7e115!4s/maps/place/planit%2Bagency/@39.2735008,-76.6026092,3a,75y,197.87h,90t/data%3D*213m4*211e1*213m2*211sXmvPHaq4b4kAAAQ2tADHwQ*212e0*214m2*213m1*211s0x89c803629c02a719:0x855ed517a092a7c8!5splanit+agency+-+Google+Search&imagekey=!1e2!2sXmvPHaq4b4kAAAQ2tADHwQ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjQxo3XxOjVAhWDyoMKHafbAnYQoB8IfzAM)

------
dewiz
Unrealistic suggestions for a dev with 2+ monitors or a desktop. Managers
might be able to leverage focus rooms because they are more mobile, but
average devs are not.

Often it's the average manager who has time to talk and likes to talk loud, so
a more reasonable middle ground is to avoid cross-functional rooms/clusters.

------
jasonjei
How open is Dropbox to remote work? A lot of places of work "allow" or
"tolerate it," but it feels hard to use this working mode for a consistent
period. Working from home often has the same stigma as unlimited vacation days
--you can do it, but it's often frowned upon...

~~~
chairmanwow
I think that stems from the many people that "work from home" only to take
their cat to the vet, get their car washed, go to the dentist, and pick up
their dry-cleaning. Most of the time whenever I hear the term "working from
home" I immediately assume they will not be home and will not be working.

~~~
lawnchair_larry
That's a pretty silly assumption. Is that what you do when you work from home?
If not, what makes you think everyone else does?

~~~
chairmanwow
It wasn't my assumption as much as my empirical findings. I like being in the
office, so I never worked from home.

~~~
lawnchair_larry
Ah, you're one of those people.

------
bdowling
The open office layout won't be dead in the U.S. until tax laws offer
accelerated depreciation for building office walls. Right now the depreciation
schedule for commercial building construction is something like 39 years,
meaning that expenses incurred this year to renovate an office won't be
recouped for almost four decades. Meanwhile, cubicles are considered
furniture, which has a depreciation schedule of 7 years. (Note: I didn't look
up the actual numbers, so I might be off a little.)

If companies got the same tax benefits for building walls that they do for
buying cubicles, we'd see more walls, since everyone knows they're better for
productivity and office harmony.

------
Fifer82
As far as I am concerned the Office is dead, open or not in the tech field. I
mean an office which you travel to, and work all day. No way am I going back
to that for less than another 70k a year on top. It isn't 1930.

~~~
dx034
I'd think many companies would disagree with you. Slack and Skype still cannot
replace face2face meetings so that working remotely (full time) is a non-
starter for many jobs.

~~~
Fifer82
Let them disagree, I won't be working there anyway so it isn't a concern.

------
booleandilemma
As someone who currently works in a company with an open office layout, I have
to say it's alive and well.

------
dboreham
How many decades since research conclusively showed that the best productivity
enhancer you can provide to a developer is : A Door ?

------
darrmit
We are having major issues with an open office. It appears to be sort of like
remote work: some can handle it fine, while others can't. It just gets
deafeningly loud and distracting even with only 10 people nearby.

------
mattlondon
I dont think we'll ever get private office spaces back. I personally like the
openness of the open-plan office, but struggle with the noise.

What would help enormously though would just be full-high glass partitions
between banks of desks - e.g. put each group of 4+4 desks inside a glass "fish
tank" so that noise does not propagate as easily outside of that group, no
need for doors although that would be a bonus.

You'd not need to radically alter the layout of the offices too much - just a
thin sheet of toughened/safety/whatever glass between the banks. Bonus points
for making it modular so that the tanks can be enlarged to put 4 banks in one
batch rather than just 2 etc. Surely this sort of thing would not consume too
much space/money?

I would be concerned about echos within these glass-walled partitions, but
then on the other hand I've never struggled with echos in the glass-walled
meeting rooms so I guess it might be ok.

------
alkonaut
> The open office layout is meant to foster an egalitarian work environment
> that inspires creativity and spontaneous collaboration among colleagues.

Wait what? I thought that collaboration was the minor benefit to what is
otherwise just a way of making more people fit in less space.

The biggest actual benefit of the open office is that it can be situated in a
much better location than an office where developers have private rooms. Ask
10 developers whether they want private offices (or at least not large shared
spaces) and they'll probably say yes.

But ask the same 10 developers in an office in a nice location in SF, London,
Berlin, Stockholm... whether they'd want private offices at the expense of
ending up in an office park where the rent would be the same for the larger
office - and they probably don't.

------
loup-vaillant
I wish.

I'm currently working on a 1 year old subsidiary that tries very hard to be
modern (Spotify organisation, brand new offices…), and as part of that
modernity went full Open Plan™.

It's not a full blown boiler room, but we do have zero privacy and a good deal
of noise.

------
Ndymium
I wonder why so few are talking about the in-between. There seems to be only
open offices or everyone has their private room. The first is my personal
nightmare, the second is very expensive and hinders quick collaboration with
colleagues.

At my workplace we have a mix of both. We have project rooms (my current one
has 6 people) where people are working on the same or similar things. This
keeps the noise and visual distractions to a minimum (we have small cubicle-
like walls attached to our desks that rise with the desk if you raise it up)
while still allowing us to ask the quick question or look at things together
if required (of course you need to limit that so that you don't bug them all
the time). In my experience this is the best compromise if you are working in
a project with a few other people.

The removal of personal desks would be terrible IMO. Many people have said
they just like having a desk, but I also have notepads, things attached to the
desk "walls", stuff for fidgeting when I'm thinking, 2 monitors attached to my
laptop, keyboard, mouse, headphones... I can take my laptop to go sit wherever
else, but why would I? I would have to carry around so much stuff or forgo
these productivity tools I have. Sometimes I do write with just my laptop in
the common areas somewhere, but it's only for a short while. Sure, you could
put standardised desks everywhere with the same setup, but then it would
probably not match _my_ preferences anymore and thus would be worse for my
working.

------
vram22
I saw long back in a Microsoft job ad in some computer magazine that one of
the perks they offered devs was "a door" or "a room with a door" :)

Some years later, I visited an MS development center in Hyderabad, and was
invited to the offices of a few devs - they actually did have a decently large
room each as their office, with enough space for more than one desk, many
computers, space for many books, etc., and still some free space in the
middle, plus a whiteboard each, etc.

------
abalone
_> Luckily, the solution is fairly simple—design offices with a variety of
areas to suit different kinds of work_

Putting aside the expense of the space for this -- let's just say it's all
worth it if you're building a unicorn company and want maximum productivity on
both the individual and team level.

My question is, what's the best way to implement the equipment side of things?
It's also really important, I imagine, to offer the best computing equipment,
for engineers and designers in particular. Does this "variety of areas" and
"no designated desks" approach force us to use laptops and external monitors?
Do we not get to use those beautiful 5K iMacs or a souped-up tower? Do you get
one and _also_ have a laptop??

Believe it or not this is my main concern. I am ok with designating zones that
are "library rules" for focus even if they are not full offices, alongside
chattier collaborative areas, a more social cross-team cafe space, etc. It's
moving equipment among them I'm worried about -- you can't stick to library
rules if you need to cluster around someone's computer to do a code review.

~~~
the_bear
We just give everyone top-tier laptops (MBPs or Surface Books) and set up a
docking station plugged into two big monitors, a keyboard, and a mouse at each
desk. This seems to be the best of both worlds. You have the mobility of a
laptop, but a full workstation wherever you decide to sit down.

In our case, everyone has an assigned desk in the open office which they can
customize however they want, but we also have standing desks and private
offices that people can use whenever they want, and those have the same
docking station setup.

I guess if you need a really powerful desktop for some reason this wouldn't
work, but I think a $2k laptop should be powerful enough for almost everyone.
Certainly no one at my company (13 people) seems limited by their equipment.

------
Zigurd
I doubt it. Although I think a quiet private office is the best environment
for those times when you need hours of uninterrupted concentration, other
changes make open offices tolerable. My 4k screen occupies almost all of my
field of view. I like ambient music for the coding trance.

Instead I predict the death of the office. Remote work in dispersed co-working
spaces is even more cost-efficient than an open office.

~~~
prawn
I co-own a co-working space where most of us are in one open-plan room of
around 10 people.

While home offices are more cost- and time-efficient (no commute, no office
cost to employers), I still come into the office despite having a decent set
up at home. I'm more productive here even with the open plan, the time lost
commuting, etc. And we have had steady enquiries from prospective tenants, all
in a similar situation.

Going by HN, not everyone loves open plan, but for me, the advantages of a
shared, open office are: people being able to see my screen from afar mean I'm
more likely to stay on task rather than get distracted and research holidays
non-stop, I enjoy the social interactions with colleagues, and face-to-face is
best for collaborating.

I think we'll see dispersed co-working spaces for a while, at least until VR
is strong enough to emulate the benefits of working with peers.

~~~
mahyarm
Yeah home offices do have the cabin fever effect. Stay home all day and night
because thats where everything is.

------
rcarmo
Last time I switched jobs, I moved from a 3-person office (engineering
managers) to a hot-desking "culture" (consulting & sales) where we all sit
around large tables (power sockets only, all wireless).

Everyone spends time with customers, so hot-desking makes complete sense (and
we have a mix of differently sized glass cubes for solo work and meetings,
with extra monitors and conferencing gear).

As a direct result, I now do most of my actual work at home, keep in touch via
Skype, and go to the office only for internal meetings. It's completely
impossible to do any sort of focus work in an open plan office.

The upside of being able to work anywhere, anyhow is, however, completely
offset by office politics. You have to literally waste a couple of days a week
for the sake of face time and trying to herd things through a miasma of
constant interruptions and overly excited interactions (everyone is low on
time and concentration, so conversations are hurried and often unfocused).

(Edit: typos)

------
zitterbewegung
So, why isn't one of the solutions at the bottom something like : "Have
traditional offices?" or is this implied?

------
m-p-3
I wish it was. Since our management decided to test the open office/hot desk
layout, we mostly deal with docking station issues non-stop.

Most of our equipment is Dell, and those docking station connectors seems to
be even more fragile now. I guess (and hope) this will get better when all our
laptops will support USB-C docking station..

------
athenot
I think it depends a lot on the culture of the organization. Currently my team
is highly distributed and my local colleages only meet in person in the office
about twice a week, with the support from the very top of our BU. In our case,
I feel that having my own space that sits empty 5 days out of 7 is highly
wasteful. Currently my own desk is spartan: 2 monitors and the necessary
cables; that's it.

When working from home becomes the norm, I think change in the office setup is
inevitable and I welcome that tradeoff. I would love a modern shared desk
setup, as long as all of desks have good monitors to go with them. Heck, group
them in pods of 4/8/12 desks and make them bookable just like conference rooms
(but for a day).

------
mianos
It seems to me, inn Sydney, open offices are being used even more. If they are
such shite, who is making the decisions? As far as I can see, from this
thread, many others and talking to people, anecdotally, the most minor set of
people actually like them. Who is making the decisions? What will change this?
Refusal, mutiny? I have been told, if I don't like open offices I would not be
a suitable employee because everyone else does. In my current firm I went as
far as organising the place for us to move. A mix of rooms, some large, some
small. It rocks compared to the open office in the last place.

------
hobarrera
Being someone who's always worked in open offices (for almost ten years now),
I can't even think of what an alternative would be. Single offices per
developer, kinda like lawyers? It seems that would take up a chunk of space,
and would be pretty much the same as working from home.

Honestly, I think open offices are mostly here to stay. Those who dislike it
and want isolation, privacy, and less distractions, can always pick to work at
home (I know I do multiple days a week).

------
pbreit
If open offices are so bad wouldn't it be easy to create a competitive
advantage by going with some other layout?

------
horusthecat
I'll throw in my 2 cents and say I've worked in "open" floorplans I didn't
mind--but these were always at on ghost-town-empty offices for companies that
were living on investor life support in spaces that could have housed 3x more
people without being crowded

------
gargarplex
I rented a private office in _Manhattan_ for $900/month. i.e., <10% of my
salary. This is a no-brainer... Why not just rent each individual engineer a
private office? Why the need to own the office space? Company
identity/"cult"ure?

~~~
chrisper
You can't seriously expect me to also rent my own office space as an employee.
What is next? Have to buy my own gear out of my own money? The very reason I
am an employee of a company and not self-employed is to not have to worry
about these things.

Unless you can somehow provide each employee an additional budget. But what I
have seen so far is that that "extra" budget comes out of the pay roll.

------
m3kw9
Open office is alive and well, there are always gonna be certain office
cultures that likes it

------
nurettin
>> Propst himself accused companies of manipulating his original idea into
“hellholes.”

Ironic.

This so-called visionary had no idea his futuristic ideals would be twisted by
the drive to increase profit by cutting corners in an economy where people are
seen as milking cattle.

------
nkkollaw
Not at Apple, apparently.

~~~
briandear
That’s correct. Everyone has a private office.

~~~
Clubber
I believe I read their new campus, the spaceship, is open floor plan.

~~~
nkkollaw
I've seen this picture from Wired:
[http://creativebits.org/sites/default/files/applrend7.jpg](http://creativebits.org/sites/default/files/applrend7.jpg)
(source:
[http://creativebits.org/inside_apples_spaceship_headquarters](http://creativebits.org/inside_apples_spaceship_headquarters))

~~~
jack_kc
The first photo looks more like a dining room than an office. I can't imagine
using a computer while sitting at one of those tables.

~~~
userbinator
That looks like a cafeteria or food court in a mall. Definitely not an office.

------
bogomipz
I am curious why this is on the dropbox blog, did they solve this in their own
offices with the recommendations outlined? Maybe someone from that works there
can chime in?

------
bigdubs
I would be ok with our current trends in office planning if there was a better
work from home policy.

Let me work one or two days a week from home where I have a decent desktop
setup.

------
ge96
Not related, I think it would be cool if tech company offices had VR headset
for seeing forests/deserts/other scenery. Holodeck haha

------
unixhero
It is not dead. It has invested every living corner of this earth.

Does it suck and ruin my productivity and drain my work happiness? Yes.

------
Shikadi
Before reading the article I was prepared to talk poop about the libre office
interface :(

------
LeicaLatte
Great work was never done in offices. Mines, workshops and studios >> offices.

------
adamnemecek
Couldn't have come sooner.

------
tlogan
All this talk reminds me of my father's drunken talk: real estate is the king
- if you want to get rich be in real estate.

Sadly... it is true.

\----

P.S. For readers who are a little slow, the point is that if office space is
not a cost center then everybody would have an office.

------
mikhailfranco
home > office > cubicle > hell (9th circle) > open plan

------
mattlondon
> No designated desks

We had an office where they tried this as an experiment. Each desk was sit-
stand, had one or two 24inch monitors, a chromebox + mouse + keyboard, plenty
of wall sockets easily accessible at the top of the desk and powered-USB port
for charging etc. People either plugged their laptop in, or just logged in on
the chromebox and were away.

And it was awful.

* People started to have "their" desk where they "always" sit, and left things like coats on the chair, running shoes under the desk, folding bikes (you name it) at the desk. This had the effect of taking the desk "out of circulation" meaning when the "usual" occupier wasn't there for a day people still didn't use the desk, or someone did use it but the usual occupier came in late and someone else was there it was a super-awkward moment of either the first person packing up and moving elsewhere, or the usual occupant getting in a huff with someone in "their desk" and/or continually interrupting the other person when they come over to collect their notebook or headphones or something.

* There were less desks than people. 90% of the time this was fine as usually enough people were on vacation/at clients/on training etc. Occasionally though it meant there was no space and people roamed the office for 15 minutes before having to go and work from Starbucks (if they had brought their laptop with them)

* If you were at meetings or otherwise away from your desk, you would often come back to your desk to find that someone else was now sat at the desk you were sitting at before.

* Even if you found a desk, you were often not near your team. Cue constant "Where are you sitting?" instant messages and people wandering around trying to find each other.

* Desks often had missing cables and stuff - so even if you did get a desk sometimes it was on that one desk where the monitors dont work, or someone had taken the power cable, or the keyboard had a "sticky H key" or something. Because no one "owned" the desks, no one bothered to report the faults to the people managing the facilities and just moved to another desk or stole the cable/keyboard/mouse/whatever from another nearby desk.

* Engineers could not use desktops (since they would have to move them every day, and company policy is no source code stored on laptops) so the _computers_ got given a fixed location, and the nomad engineers had to find a desk to remote desktop into the desktop each day. This is fine for short periods, but day-in, day-out 8+ hours a day looking at remote desktops leads to sea-sickness due to the small lag. So even if the receptionist or admins or spreadsheet jockeys could go and sit in the cool-zones for their work, the engineers were stuck at a dekstop because they need the monitors and stuff to do their job.

After about 9 months or so we moved to a different building due to growing out
of the experimental building and went back to assigned-desks in an open plan
office which was hugely improved.

Please, for anyone reading this, please please please do not instigate non-
designated desks for your workers.

tl;dr - non-designed desks had all of the same problems as an open office, but
with extra additional micro-stresses every day that really add up over time to
make your working day a misery.

~~~
gedy
I'm curious what in holy hell did they say or think they were improving by
using open seating?

~~~
mattlondon
I think the line of thinking was to try and reduce the number of desks/space
needed.

The idea I think - and it is perfectly valid idea - is that most of the time
only ever about 70-90% of people based in an office are actually physically
there. The rest of the time they are on vacation/training/client-
meetings/working from another office/working from home etc.

So there are a LOT of empty desks any day of the week, so why pay for office
space to accommodate all of your staff when it is very, very rare for 100% of
people to be there?

I understand the rationale, but in practice it really sucked.

Some suggestions for improving non-designated seating would be:

* Run things at a more generous margin (e.g. space for 90% of employees rather than 75% - made up numbers but you get the idea)

* Sort out issues with equipment - either through daily checks of everything or a more stream-lined approach to getting faults fixed (i.e. dont go through "raising a ticket" ball-ache, but something like put a rubber-duck on the desk or something then someone comes and checks out everything, or have floor-walkers who can be grabbed ad hoc)

* Have a _STRICT_ no-camping policy, and clear the desks Every. Single. Day. so that anything left behind is put into lost property bins at the end of the day, then given to charity at the end of the month if not claimed.

* Clean & Tidy the desks up every day so it doesn't look like an explosion in a hacker's bedroom every morning.

* Anchor specific teams in specific area - i.e. allow people to go anywhere if they want, but give some teams designated spaces where they get priority - e.g. "This is the QA team area", or "This is the test team area".

* Allow people who need specialist equipment (e.g. developers) to have fixed desks with their equipment.

------
jgh
wow they took the open office concept and somehow made it worse. Kudos,
Dropbox.

------
quickthrower2
Another data point for Betteridge's law of headlines

