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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I have an older noise-cancelling model, the QC 15s, and they do a decent job at noise cancelling even without music. I listen to https://www.brain.fm/ (paid, but lifetime license is cheap) at a low volume to drown out any remaining noise. It's consistent background "white" noise that drowns out even the loudest co-workers. Wear them for 6-10 hours / day, best productivity investment I've ever made.
Can't you just use a pair of noise-canceling cans without piping audio through them? Is there a drawback to turning on the noise-canceling feature without coming through the speakers? It won't be completely quiet (on basic models), but it is probably comfortably quiet for most.
Only the new ones. I have the previous model (Quiet Comfort 25), and they're really nice and dumb. Only a 3.5 jack and a battery compartment, no other interfaces.
> And how much does it cost to have your entire engineering team audibly and visually distracted and annoyed 100% of the time?
No one has any idea, because that isnt a cost which is tracked by the accounting department...
therefore it has zero cost, right?
Right?
> 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.
If only the managers could... I don't know... manage ? And pay attention to what's going on in their company?
Nah... a good percentage of managers I've worked for spend 75% of their time doing management politics / make-work. Getting things done is a low, low, priority.
That 1/3rd stuff is my life exactly. I've basically stopped trying to get serious work done at the office - it's for meetings and that's it. The rest I have to wait until nighttime when I'm nowhere near peak performance and my productivity overall is easily 1/3 less than it would be if I could work in the office
I don't understand how it can be so expensive, I can rent a serviced office for two people locally for £400/month. This is without the economies of scale of an organisation.
This is the part that makes the least sense to me, too. They talk about cost in terms that don't even take into account the reason for wanting offices.
You don't want offices because of feng shui, you want them because of the positive impact they're going to have on productivity / retention / talent acquisition. And yet their rationalizations rarely include anything but real estate costs.
I just don't get it. If a private office would improve an engineer's productivity by 5%, that's over $1k/month in payroll savings they could put toward their 8x8 square with a door.
Now consider that the actual improvement to productivity vs open offices is probably more like 20%, and that an 8x8 square with a door in commercial zoning isn't even close to 1k/month, and that you're also improving your ability to attract and retain top talent.
But don't worry, we have plenty of room for nap pods and massage chairs.
It'd be about £400/month where I am as well, and I'm guessing you're not in London/Cambridge/Oxford.
Also since you're in the UK don't forget about rates (local property taxes that businesses pay in the UK). Once you're beyond a certain size this tax will jump from £50 a month to over £1000.
In London it's more like 600-700 for good quality places in a co-working space (Wework or similar), up to 1k+ for particularly central locations. But then if you can afford the salaries here, the 300-400/month increase per team member compared to a desk in a co-working space doesn't need to cause a particularly big performance bump to be worth it.
You're painting open offices in a completely negative light without seeing that they also have upsides.
I'm in the same position as the CTO above and giving everyone a private office in my company is not even remotely close to being financially feasible. What's more, a lot of engineers actually voiced a preference for open space plans over individual offices.
Cubicles are on the table as an acceptable compromise but given the growth at which we're hiring and growing, it's just not physically feasible.
I don't understand how nobody here can compromise. Build quiet spaces into your office floorplan and eat the cost up front. If you can't afford to provide a place to work quietly for those that want it you can't afford space in that office building. Or you can't afford that number of employees. It's getting ridiculous, If you're going to keep saying it's expensive take the cost from somewhere else, like payroll. Provide a great workspace for your employees and in return you'll get great work. Poor planning upfront is going to cost you so much more on the back end.
The issue is that people who prefer open offices can make use of open areas, while people who need closed spaces actually need them in order to work.
One is a preference, the other is an outright necessity.
You have not mentioned any upsides of open offices for the percentage of the workforce which require isolation. Please, give their needs equal weight and consideration.
> I'm in the same position as the CTO above and giving everyone a private office in my company is not even remotely close to being financially feasible.
Yet somehow most organizations can swing this for management.
> 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.
Many other professions factor in distractions in their office space set up. I don't think I've been to a decent attorney or CPA office setup where they were in a shared space or hotdesk situation. Offices layouts can definitely be built for this approach - perhaps you're just noting that nothing's available? Or nothing's available at a price management wants to pay?
> If you want to redraw the floorplan, you have to sign rental contracts upwards of 5 years, something no sensible startup would do ...
If it was a nicely done space, I've little doubt the space owner would have trouble leasing it out again, either to one large org, or to smaller orgs who all want private space. I run a coworking space, and most people who contact me are still really just looking for individual office space.
Landlords won't generally let you make structural/material changes to a floorplan without a longterm lease to justify it. However, you can make some pretty snazzy temporary office space that doesn't require permanent modifications to the space using privacy walls and glass partitions[1].
From a structural standpoint, they're basically fancy cubicles, and made by the same companies as standard cubicles. The most damaging thing they do to the structure is mount the tracks for the glass into the floor and ceiling. But that's usually considered normal wear and tear since it's easily fixable on move-out.
From an aesthetics perspective, they're effectively mini offices and can be done very well, making a space look nice and chic and making employees a lot happier. All with what amounts to some fancy cubicles.
What do they actually do for noise mitigation though? If people can't take calls in them without disrupting others, and if someone could theoretically still shout at their neighbor when they need to have a discussion it sounds less than ideal.
Depends entirely on the type you get and how you install them. If you get floor to ceiling types with appropriate glass, it provides just as much sound isolating properties as a traditional office.
And with appropriate sound dampeners (either on the ceiling, as artwork or whatever on the walls, or a non-glass side), you keep the sound within one from echoing or sounding hollow. A few setups I've seen involved using opaque glass as a side/separator between alcoves, and hanging sound dampeners disguised as artwork on those walls. Another used faux-walls made out of the same material as traditional cubicles to separate each micro-office, and that material is designed expressly for sound dampening. And works really well if it's floor to ceiling.
The entire article offers as much evidence for their claims as I do: none.
Have you visited the offices at Google? Yahoo? Facebook? Tesla? Square? Twitter?
They are all bursting at the seams and are fighting on a daily basis with each other to find new space to expand, which is very hard to find here. Same for pretty much all the companies in the Bay Area, actually.
The mere idea of switching these companies from an open floor plan to individual offices will get you laughed at for proposing something completely nonsensical.
Really? Who did the quantification? Citation needed.
Probably you missed the "increasing body of research" mentioned in TFA then...
"According to a study on the cost of interrupted work, a typical office worker is interrupted every 11 minutes. Even worse, people often take up to 25 minutes to refocus on the original task."
"Researchers have found that the loss of productivity due to noise distraction doubles in open office layouts compared to private offices, and open office noise reduces the ability to recall information, and even to do basic arithmetic."
"In a 2013 study about the privacy-communication trade-off in open offices, 60% of cubicle workers and half of all employees in partitionless offices said the lack of sound privacy was a significant problem."
" A study on the association between sick days and open office plans found that people working in open offices took 62% more sick days than those in private offices. And remember all those interruptions that workers experience in open offices? In a survey in the International Journal of Stress Management, employees who were frequently interrupted reported 9% higher rates of exhaustion."
"Clearly, open office layouts aren’t the hotbeds of creativity designers originally hoped they would be. And with office space at a premium, private offices for everyone isn’t a realistic alternative, nor is it ideal. The ebb and flow of effective collaboration requires several types of spaces. As workplace experts outlined in the Harvard Business Review, employees tend to generate ideas and process information alone or in pairs, then come together in a larger group to build on those ideas, and then disperse again to take the next steps."
> "According to a study on the cost of interrupted work, a typical office worker is interrupted every 11 minutes. Even worse, people often take up to 25 minutes to refocus on the original task."
So they're interrupted more frequently that the time it takes to refocus and therefore never complete any task?
This might seem like a naive question but could you buy a child's play house with door and windows that is big enough for a desk and use those instead?
I feel like the aversion toward cubicles is more psychological and association-based than really makes sense. A cubicle is (as a sibling poster pointed out) just an office without a door. Sure, the walls don't always go all the way to the ceiling, and they're thinner than real walls, but they serve a similar purpose.
I think we just grew up through the Dilbert-esque "cubicle farm" revolt, and we have negative associations that aren't entirely deserved.
If cubicles are a way to cram more people into a space because offices take up too much room, and open office plan is a way to cram more people into a space because cubicles take up too much room. And yet there's still the sentiment among open-office-plan workers that they wouldn't want to go back to cubicles, when most of the reasons they don't like the open office plan would be solved by cubicles.
I pretty much agree. They also feel like shantytowns in a way since they are flimsy pieces of material. I'd imagine that a nicer looking quality framework of wood without the ghastly florescent lighting would go a long way to improve perception.
It's funny, since I see restaurants that generate only $70 per meal (around 2 hours or so?) build super elegant wooden partitions that accomplish the exact same thing that cubicles do in an office environment.
It seems like it shouldn't be too expensive to do that...
Compared to no walls at all? Fuck yeah. When I was at IBM, they had us (~60 people) in one big room, with no walls, no noise-dampening, right next-door to a server room (with the accompanying server hum coming through the walls). I used to go downstairs to the "cubicle hell" area and just walk around and dream about how nice it would be to work down there. There was a point I'd have paid money to move to the cube-farms, compared to the hell-hole we were in.
Cubicles were maligned as passé ("cubicle farms") and staid so that managers and facilities could present open office spaces as au courant, forward and entrepreneurial so that in turn they could save in area per employee expenses.
If they can call cubicles "farms" (echoing sharecropping, drudgery), then we could just as easily and aptly call open office layouts "sardine cans" with all the earned baggage that comes with.
I find even half walls to be as bad as open layouts.
I hated the cube for years until 2012 when I had my first open workspace job. It was a small shop and space was limited. The next two shops I worked at were also in open floor plan layouts. At least with the most recent one I could work from home 3 to 4 days out of the week.
I have to admit, I started to miss the cube. I don't want to see other people pick their noses. I don't want other people to see me pick my nose if I'm not thinking about it. I hate having another person in my peripheral.
In both cubes and open work spaces, I wear headphones for most of the day. Sometimes the music is paused but I keep them on anyway. Music is really the only thing that keeps me sane in IT jobs.
Agreed on all points. One thing that cubes protect against is visual distractions. In an open plan, even when I'm able to focus on my work, I'll always be catching something out of the corner of my eye.
I need a wall in front of me. It's really distracting to have things move in my peripheral vision while trying to focus on a screen. I just built a wall out of monitors and cabinets to block out the front of my desk and wear noise cancelling headphones.
I like cubicles because, frankly, my only experience actually working in them was when I was delegated to work for Genentech for a bit (I don't usually work in the US). The cubicles they had were large enough to have a second seat and a whiteboard — you could hold a face-to-face meeting with them, no problem. Oh, and they were designed in such a way that you had to get into one to look at someone's screen. As a bonus, mine actually had a window (I guess guest privilege?), but even the inner ones were fairly roomy.
On the other hand, I've seen places where I (I'm 6"2') just wouldn't fit so I'd have permanent leg pain. Oh, and the screens are easily visible to passers by. Just the pain itself would be enough to hate those.
Cubicles are better for all the reasons other people mentioned.
They seem to have been replaced by cheaper long tables in offices that are genuinely paperless, since all any employee needs is a computer, monitor and chair. In my experience, cubicles usually have a file cabinet and other paper storage, utensil drawer, desk phone, wall calendar and other stuff I seldom see in modern tech offices.
And when it doesn't matter which computer is used by which employee, or everyone carries a laptop and phone with them, enter hotdesking.
It's simply horrible how expensive it would be to give private offices even to >3 people in our company.
Great, your company made a poor decision from a planning / facilities / real-estate standpoint. Quit and go find a job with a company that didn't choose as poorly.
>It's simply horrible how expensive it would be to give private offices even to >3 people in our company.
100 square feet per year is $7K/year in SF. It is pennies compare to how open office kills productivity. People who haven't worked in offices or even good cubes may probably don't even know what good programmer productivity looks like or feels like :)
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.