As I understand it though, open office is a trend. Your mechanism doesn't explain why there was ever a time without open offices. So what's changed to make office managers more penny-wise, or have there always been "open collaborative offices" just under a different name?

I take it you've never seen a newspaper "bullpen", or a clark's office. :) It comes down to class. Many professions that were once afforded private accommodation are now being downclassed. It's also easier to scale up and down by moving what are essentially picnic tables.

Indeed. Now only the very top management have the privilege of private offices. I've worked on a +400,000 sqft campus where only a handful of top managers had private offices. Generally, you have a private office only if you are important enough that you also have a personal secretary.

On the plus side, most modern office buildings are shoving the private offices toward the interior, with open offices around the perimeter having actual daylight. We can thank the USGBC and LEED certification for a lot of that.

You'd have trouble designing a more depressing environment than an open office in a building interior with fluorescent troffers if you tried. Good riddance.

You worked on MPK20?

As i understand it, open offices were the norm. I knew paralegals who worked in open offices before it hit tech offices. It also used to be that way in most offices before cubicles became commonplace (watch movies from the 40s or 50s which have offices as backdrops)

I think what happened is that as the work done in offices gained more value people who worked in offices were convinced that having your own space was more prestigious (by furniture companies, office space companies, etc.) so it became normal to move away from shared cattle pens.

Now shared space is being sold as collaborative so as to insinuate anyone not on board with the concept must be an uncollaborative sort of fellow.

I recall working in a high priced tower a place which made money, some people got proper offices, but most people got three foot beautiful mahogany desks side by side. Expensive desks but floor space was even more expensive.

The trend in businesses across the country isn't from private office to open offices. It's from cubicals to open office. Cublicals don't really predate the big white collar office, but they've been around since the 1960s. Before then offices tended to be smaller. But they had bullpens then too.

People hated cublicals because they imagined the alternative was a private office. Instead the alternative is no real private space at all. People started believing cublicals are the worst of both worlds. Not as private as an office, but still limits community and collaboration.

In the media, cublical farms were considered at best a joke and at worst the tyranny of the modern workplace.

What is pushing the trend further is insane real estate prices. Now even executives and high value employees (lawyers, management, etc) are getting pressured to give up offices.

My guess is that the big issue at play here is land price and zoning issues in the big cities where companies need to be headquartered to attract top talent. It's hard to build new buildings, and it's hard to build them tall. Building out in the suburbs is no longer seen as attractive. So, the solution is to maximize the space available while providing other perks like catered lunches and snacks etc.

But what's the purpose of attracting top talent if you proceed to waste said talent's time and productivity in a distraction-rich environment?

Feels like cargo-cult management.

I'm pretty certain a reasonable fraction of "top talent" will at least consider a remote opportunity if you don't want to set up an office somewhere expensive.

Open offices went away with the clerical staff. In the 90s, a professional job like IT would be in cubes or shared offices. Real offices don't make sense financially, mostly for tax reasons.

What changed is that IT operations became a bigger thing, and we started needing more programmers. The traditional cubicle created the illusion of a private space, but made IT ops hard because you couldn't see anybody.

Now open offices are back. Wifi is displacing many of the managed cabling requirements, and people are into the feeling of "energy" that comes with a newsroom like environment.

If you look around you and see a big open room of people futzing around with headphones -- take the hint. You're the clerk of the 2010's.

> If you look around you and see a big open room of people futzing around with headphones -- take the hint. You're the clerk of the 2010's.

Good point.

Whenever this topic comes up I wonder why would a business risk de-valuing one of its biggest investments (payroll) by creating a potentially productivity killing environment. But if programming is now considered a cost centre (like clerks were in their day), I wonder what would be considered the profit centre of a software company?

Many large businesses don't seem to optimise globally. Perhaps the real estate or facilities part of the business sets itself a target to reduce costs by 20%, they execute the plan and at end of year point out their savings and managers get a bonus.

Why should they care if it means that the software devs in a completely different part of the business are now less productive? Most large organisations are so dysfunctional that the negatively impacted parts of the business can't fight back against bean counters from elsewhere.

This is playing out at my work right now with virtual desktops being imposed on all developers, even though it means that projects that used to take 1 min to compile now often take 15 mins to compile. Crazy.

My two cents is that as time moves on we have a need to show growth and it simply isn't easy to do so once you have picked tie low hanging fruits. Thus, we try to look for ways to increase revenue and cut costs that were previously ignored as the cost of doing business. This isn't necessarily a bad thing.

For example, a company I used to work at sold its building and rented (leased?) only three floors and the basement from the new owners. This injected cash into the company. I don't know what the slightly smaller cubicles cost the company in terms of employee productivity. How do we quantify such things?

The next place I worked (steel industry) at had my cubicle which was at least four times as big as that place before but I'm confident my productivity didn't go up four times because of it.

I'll agree with gp though. It is reprehensible to defend open floor plans as anything other than a cost cutting measure.

> The next place I worked (steel industry) at had my cubicle which was at least four times as big as that place before but I'm confident my productivity didn't go up four times because of it.

The thing is it doesn't have to quadruple in order to justify the extra real-estate cost because your monthly salary is (probably) much higher than the monthly rent on your desk space.

If you're paid $120k (10k/month) and rent is $5/sq-ft per month [1]; going from 36 sq-ft of space for your desk (small) to 144 sq-ft of space (4x as much) will cost $540/month. Meanwhile even a 10% productivity decrease would cost ~$1k per month.

Edit: Thinking more about it, the productivity loss is even worse than above. You might be paid $120k/year, but the company expects to extract some multiple of this number in value from the work you do (I've heard target numbers like $500k/year) - so a 10% decrease in productivity is more like $4k/month in lost value.

[1] https://www.quora.com/How-much-is-typical-office-space-per-s...

That's the thing though, the 10% number is fuzzy. I agree there's definitely a productivity boost from having a private office, but it's hard to quantify. The smaller square footage and lower lease payments are easy to quantify. If productivity expectations are set based an open office, then the increase with the more expensive private offices is unknown.

Additionally, high overhead increases risk. Maximum productivity is only important as long as you have more work than there are employees to do it. What if there's a downturn (as in 2008)? Now you're locked into an expensive lease and no longer have the revenue to support it. The company with lower overhead can hold out longer until things turn around. Employees can be laid off. Getting out of a lease or selling a building are harder.

"Cube Farm"

I don't think people are saying everyone should have private offices, which I agree is not feasible from an economic standpoint. Nor have I seen any studies saying that private offices justify the costs of themselves in increased productivity gained.

But there are ways that offices can be designed to be less likely to disrupt your work. Maybe grouping a few people in a private office instead? Or set "quiet hours"? Have designated "quiet rooms" where talking is prohibited? I feel like there are a lot of things that can be experimented with or try that are not a huge expenditure.

And I know putting a dollar amount saved on productivity with innovations in workplace design are harder to show, but I think it's a widely known fact that interruptions affect knowledge work and peoples ability to focus. So if someone who should be working on focus work is frequently being interrupted every 30 minutes by noises and people asking questions and it takes that person 15 minutes to get back into the groove each time, it's easy to see just how many wasted hours there will be.

>Maybe grouping a few people in a private office instead? Or set "quiet hours"? Have designated "quiet rooms" where talking is prohibited? I feel like there are a lot of things that can be experimented with or try that are not a huge expenditure.

Having two dedicated "work from home" days every week at my company seems to serve this exact purpose. Those are often some of our most productive days and it cuts back on commute times which have a lot of benefits.

I work from home full-time so you won't see much argument from me :) In an ideal scenario, I would prefer something like 4 days at home, 1 day at the office for face-to-face meetings.

I'm curious, given that you say you're more productive, are there any discussions in your company about expanding remote work to not only be a part-time thing?

If companies were trying to minimize office square footage, remote work would be a lot more popular.

It's funny how tech is a great use-case of remote work, yet if one reads today's "Ask HN: Who is hiring?" post, the vast majority of listings require onsite involvement.

They are, or they were. IBM and Yahoo had that policy for example.

Companies with 30-60 employees have other priorities though.

But then who would the A-type managers talk at? ;-)

Not quite Hanlon or Occam, but here's a razor:

"Never attribute to innovation that which is adequately-explained by penny-pinching."

I used to think that cost was the main incentive too.

But it doesn't explain why so many A-List silicon valley companies use open plan. Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., all have intense competition for engineers, and they spend a lot on perks for their employees. And devote lots of footage to amenities such as gyms, game rooms, etc. It doesn't seem that cost would be the driving factor for these companies.

just because a company is A-list it doesn't mean it's immune from fads and cargo culting, especially given the poetic image of start-ups all in the same room working towards a common goal 24/7, forgetting though that those start-ups are working on POC-quality code most of the time to get funding, which is the kind of coding that gets done when you keep getting interrupted 10 times an hour

hah.

why do people fall in this trap over and over again? if you can do basic math you understand that the cost of people is >>>> cost of the space. For small startups, one person can cost you more, per month, than all your rent.

open space can work great sometimes depending on the type of work done, but I've yet to see a place where people are not simply tired of the noise and the constant interruptions.

I don't think it's just square footage. Managers also believe (as they have expressed to me) that workers need to be watched.

And how much are you paying per year for those people?