
Open offices can lead to closed minds - ad
https://www.economist.com/news/business/21746925-some-workplace-designs-are-more-about-cost-cutting-collaboration-open-offices-can-lead
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acd
If it was a hotel room would you like to share it with 10-100 of others or
rather have your own private space? Same with offices.

You are more productive in private offices with shared collaboration spaces
rather than open office floor spaces.

High rents convinced the world this some how was a good idea.

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lsc
>High rents convinced the world this some how was a good idea.

Maybe, but I think the causal chain is complex. I mean, even at $5/sqft/month
(which is really pretty nice office space) that's a tiny percentage of what
one of the top-tier bay-area companies is paying an engineer.

I think open plan offices are in style; they _look_ like what a scrappy
startup might have looked like after the 2008 crash when warehouse space was
super cheap (I myself rented some $1/sqft warehouse space in the early teens
for my office. It was pretty great, but then it was as much workshop as
office, and we had an under-mezzanine that was closed off and quiet for non-
workshop work. Most of the space didn't have a mezzanine, and I certainly
would have expanded the one that was there if I was staying a while.)

Of course, once you get people with money in you see these converted
warehouses in SF with ridiculously high ceilings and no mezzanine; just a
giant sun room or something.

I think what needs to happen is that the next scrappy startup that gets big
needs to... start with individual offices. Or if they can't afford that, at
least cubicles. I know people don't like how cube farms look? but as far as
comfort and noise reduction, they are a thousand times better than an open
plan office.

When I started in the late '90s, it seems that it was mostly a status thing;
managers and the most important individual contributors got offices, while all
but the most abject of workers got cubes.

This seemed to descend into a system where the higher status employees started
doubling or quadrupling up in the offices, and the cubes on the floor slowly
atrophied to the little bits of fabric you clip to your sit/stand desk these
days.

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dahdum
Anecdote, but having spent years in an open office the amount of emailing and
chat happening instead of talking skyrocketed as density increased.

Any time anyone spoke everyone else could hear the conversation, so
discussions tended to be formal and short. No "how are the kids" or other
pleasantries.

Meetings would drag on, if only for the added bit of privacy you had in
conference rooms.

There were some benefits, but overall I'm not a fan of them.

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valuearb
The only benefits are that open offices “appear” to save the company money.
Since the cost of private offices is only a couple percent of an engineers
salary, and the increase in productivity is far more, private offices are
significantly cheaper. And better for collaboration.

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sbinthree
The science here is pretty clear that remote workers outperform open office
workers. With the exception of winner-take-all monopolies and associated
"weird" aspects of how they operate, it seems like a services business is
much, much better off allowing remote workers from anywhere in a similar
timezone / language than they are having an office.

~~~
valuearb
It’s been shown workers with private offices outperform open office workers as
well.

