IMO, most managers are paid very nicely to babysit employees and use unspoken threats and coercion to make them feel scared and threatened enough for their livelihoods where they will sit rather quietly and produce work at a measurable-yet-uninspired rate.
Much like elementary school.
I know I'm older then most of the IT workers here are and due to that, my personal experiences and insights may not reflect the current realities of many here, but they have been real to me over my 30 year career.
I have been working remotely now, for myself, for the past 3 years.
It was difficult in the beginning to have the discipline to actually keep my head "at work" for the required 8 hours, but now...I couldn't really imagine ever wanting to go back to an onsite gig.
My boss could not be happier with the arrangement as he is realizing significant cost saving as well...it's a real win-win but both sides have to be willing to do their parts for it to work.
What did you do yesterday / What you did today / What are your issues <=== this is similar to what some elementary schools ask their kids to do
What? The schmucks are not happy with coding in the human equivalent of a bucket of crabs? Did you try giving them coffee? Did you try saying the phrase "unlimited vacation"? Did you jingle your keys?
It should be called undefined vacation, because there's clearly a limit, unless taking half of the year off is fine.
That definitely hasn't been the case for me. I've had unlimited vacation and take off 4 weeks a year + assorted random days off (2/month).
I would never work somewhere with constrained vacation. Having to file paperwork for a random day showing family around town is ridiculous.
That being said, I think "untracked" is the best definition. It's obviously not unlimited, but there's also no hard limit. And the limit depends on behavior (leaving for 6 weeks is frowned upon, but 3 random days off every month is fine).
I've taken as many as 44 days off, which is a lot more.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/holiday-entitlement-rights/entitlement
While I agree with the status analysis, I don't think that's why programmers are forced into open offices.
Traders are high status, but work in a terrible environment (wide open trading floors).
Traders work in an environment where very quick turnaround matters.
Most software development roles are nothing like this.
The engineering team pushed for "quiet private space". We avoided asking for "offices" so that the focus was on what sort of environment we needed, and didn't jump straight into the status and/or cost issues.
It never happened.
The main reason wasn't cost savings (though that was definitely a factor) or management paranoia (which wasn't too bad) or status/ego. It was simply a total failure to understand the process of software engineering, despite being told by the people who were employed to do that job.
The people planning the offices were from a sales background. They were extroverts. They hated quiet spaces. They'd walk into the office and immediately start up some useless conversation that broke everyone's concentration. No matter how many times we tried to explain to them that we got far more work done if they'd just shut the f* up (we'd usually put it more politely than that), they'd keep on thinking that he most important thing was to have a "cool", "vibrant" space and, to them, that meant open-plan and loud.
They both illustrate you suffer from the same condition they are: that neither one of you respects the way the other is. What silence is to you (an me perhaps) social interaction and "pointless chat" is to them. If your productivity went up by them not talking, theirs will go down for the same reason.
- Person A works requires social interaction to be productive.
- Person B works requires silence to be productive.
Problem:
- Person A is actively disrupting Person B's work to be productive.
- Person B is not actively disrupting Person A but Person A is left unproductive as a result of non-action
The only practical solution is to have Person A work with other Person As and have a separate work area for Person B's. The solution is not to sacrifice Person B's productivity for Person A's benefit. This is a managerial and office layout problem, characterizing it as a problem of Person B's ability to be understanding is not fair nor a rational course of action.
Yes, often they'd carry on a conversation between themselves, which was an interruption, but was a symptom of the poorly designed office space. It's hardly their fault that their job and/or personality thrives on conversation. That was why the engineering team wanted a separate quiet work space for our team, so they could do their thing without breaking the productivity of the dev team.
But what I meant with They'd walk into the office and immediately start up some useless conversation was that they'd start it with us. Partly because they wanted conversation but also because they thought it was good for us. That the office was too quiet and we needed to liven it up a bit. That the reason we weren't talking is because we needed someone to break the ice for us.
That failure to understand what makes an engineering team productive led them to try and do things that were totally counter-productive, but they just didn't see it. It's in that context that they really needed to just stop.
That's the problem. You have to insist that an engineer is on the office planning committee.
I pushed hard to be included in the choice of office space at my last startup and managed to get us a "silent" room. (Almost as good as private offices.)
I remember Fogcreek came up with an interesting design that used angles and transparency to get some good light, etc: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html
In open office I rarely talk to people because it's so loud.
Yeah, old school, and it worked well, better than later work places with various cubicle themes and shared conference rooms that you had to compete for if you needed quiet or privacy.
I was hoping that mid-range/business laptops would go in a similar direction with power-and-thunderbolt connectors, so you could have you monitors, network etc all through one connector, and just pick up your laptop and move to another desk.
It looks like we might be getting there with USB-C, but it seems much delayed to me.
And now you can actually talk to each other which you can't really do in an open space...
The problem is that rent is easy to measure, and the productivity your staff would have, once things were settled in, with an appropriate work environment is less easy to measure specifically (there may be studies which provide an approximate basis for estimating it, but that's different than a direct and company-specific measure.)
Btw, any manager out there that has not read Peopleware, please make yourself and your team a favour and get yourself a copy (and read it, of course).
Also, are the people that make the budget decisions the type of people that thrive on collaboration and open plans, or the type of people that prefer quiet and isolation? if they are the type of people that thrive on open plans they might feel negatively about private offices period, which leads to making your case about their positives even harder.
On one hand you have hard data, open offices cost x, open plan costs x/2, on the other hand you have "engineers say they could be more productive with offices" against "do you remember when we were small and working in a single room, that was awesome, we were so agile and communicative" (whether or not that is applicable at your particular company size or stage, burning the midnight oil on your stack to cobble together a demo for a pitch is not the same as writing production level tricky security code)
Not to mention that part of why you do that then is so you don't have to do that anymore.
But clearly for the people with more introverted working styles it won't work.
So let people pick. Want to sit in the communal workspace? OK, do so. Want your own office? OK done.
From time to time you'll need to intermix. Sometimes a social butterfly needs to tune out the distractions. Provide a place for it. Sometimes a hermit crab needs to sit with the team for 1/2 day and pair program. As Picard says, make it so.
This is not rocket science. The important part is that company management has to recognize that getting this right is one of the most important financial investments they will make. Instead of seeing space as a cost sink ... something to be standardized, minimized, and papered over with free lunch and dumbass "team building" shit, they need to recognize that of all the places to spend money, spending it on compensation for rewarding hard working employees is number one, and spending it on creating a humanity-affirming physical work environment is number 2. In visibly healthy companies, everything else hinges massively on those two things. Companies that have been so distorted away from humanity that they grind out success (generally for senior level people only) despite humanity-disaffirming workplaces ought to be seen as the frightening panopticons they are.
Sometimes it's the opposite, and you definitely do want meat flap acoustics often, and silent digital communication less so.
For any given company, you need to understand this. You can't just assert that an open floor plan "is collaborative." It is one kind of collaborative. It may not be the right kind for you. And worst of all will be to assert that it definitely is the necessary kind merely as an excuse when your real motivation is to minimize financial investment into physical space.
The headphone solution is also insensitive to people with extreme aversions to distracting sounds, such as sufferers of misophonia. In a lot of cases, if you are embedded in an open plan, there is no such thing as "opting out." It's a fixed decision mandated upon you.
http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2008/02/sporting-the-oak.h...
This was a great system in medieval buildings where most doors opened directly to the outdoors, which in itself is a great privacy feature.
It's really easy to find an extrovert-friendly workspace, much harder to find an introvert-friendly one, because pretty much all managers are extroverts (they have to be, to succeed at management) and they are the ones that decide the office layout.
Makes me wonder sometimes how deaf people can manage in today's vocal-collaboration oriented workplace, which is sad as the type of work we do lends itself extremely well to text-based communication.
< http://homepages.se.edu/cvonbergen/files/2013/01/Reversing-t... >
Also consider that despite Peopleware, literally nobody builds offices for programmers as if they were attorneys. And yet we muddle through.
Having been involved in office planning to support moves 4-5 times... Costs were 5x-7x more for build out for a fixed office design vs. modular and would take much much longer.
Just in terms of labor, you're talking about dramatically higher costs for drywall, electricians, and carpenters. If you're retrofitting, construction triggers full code compliance ($$$), and in major cities you often run into labor/prevailing wage problem.
Office productivity, morale, collaboration, and communication are higher than open-plan. The degree to which those things are higher is enough to more than make up for the higher rent, even over relatively short periods of time.
If you're building from scratch, up-front costs are higher, and long-term gains from productivity, etc., are also much higher, once again more than offsetting the higher up-front costs and making private offices a winner from a net-present-value perspective.
Higher rent + long, time and attention consuming build outs + accounting nightmares are more expensive than you think.
Look at Joel Spolsky's story. 4x rent plus $500k in extra buildout. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/12/29.html
Do you think Joel would not attribute a significant amount of the financial returns his companies have seen to his cultural choices about providing the best workplaces, even when it cost him a lot to do so?
Of course, since you can treat programmers as adults, you can just explain that to them. And, with whatever funds and free variables that you can work with, you can focus on providing the healthiest workplace available at your budget.
I don't see a lot of companies running into this issue though. If you're at the point of receiving VC funding, then you can afford to give everyone an office. 4x rent + $500k up front is round off error for a lot of firms, and even for some firms where that would be feasible-but-expensive, it's probably worth it.
What I don't see, though, is a bunch of firms actually running the numbers here. No one is pragmatically checking whether they can give their employees this thing that would be super great for the employees and for the company. Instead, I see a lot of people looking for excuses, a priori, to not invest in it, and to instead put the money towards over-the-top, opulent expenses, and designing a workplace that functions more like peacock feathers than as a workplace.
I would totally agree with you if I looked around and saw a bunch of VC firms or founders going "shit, I'd really like to make a healthy and productive workplace for my employees, but the budget is just too tight." But I don't see that. I see people who a priori place more value on the status aspects of workplaces than the functional or humanity-affirming aspects, and as a result want to confirmation-bias their way into rationalizing decisions to make every wall a transparent soap marker surface cuz it looked cool in A Beautiful Mind.
That is not being impacted here. And in most cases, an extra month or so does not make a difference.
And how does that compare to what you're paying for personnel? It's like arguing that you can't afford the best computers for your developers.
Edit: to be clear by "important" I don't mean that it's a good thing, I mean that it has an unfortunately big impact on PR, hiring, and it's something that the people in charge take seriously. Personally I prefer individual offices, regardless of the coolness factor.
This is an important lesson for undergrad CS majors. Instead of working really hard to master dynamic programming or taking that extra course on programming language concepts, you should instead just watch Michael Bay's Transformers movie so that you know when to say "Furrier Transform" at the right moment.
Seriously. Go right now and buy a pair of purely decorative eye glasses. At work tomorrow, got stand by the coffee machine and let your glasses slide slightly down your nose. Wait for an important-seeming person to walk by and then push your glasses up and say "Furrier Transform" -- this is a much faster way to a promotion than coding at your desk.
Be wearing a slim-fitting hoodie if at all possible. If your MacBook doesn't already have stickers reflecting which causes you SJW on reddit, get some now!!!!11
Lol.
I can't quite tell if you're mocking InclinedPlane's comment or the mentality it points out.
Sad though it is, there is a lot of cargo culting around startup office management in SF these days - and presumably elsewhere too. I doubt people really think deep down that having the cliche startup office - tightly packed open plan desks, plenty of microbrews in the fridge, a few bottles of expensive whisky, a wall of snacks, a hoverboard or two - will make or break the success of their compamy. But no one wants to be the first to try not doing it and find out.
Much of that cargo culting is driven by idiotic investors who want to be able to pop into the office and gawk at a veritable army of hoodie-clad brogrammers who look like they came from someone shaking a VHS copy of Hackers a little too hard. As sad as it is, founders and start-up executives often choose these knowingly-dysfunctional offices because it's the most rational choice they can make under the constraints that dummy investors are placing on them. If they go to the investor and say, "boy, for 4x the rent and a buildout cost of $500k, we could really get the product teams humming at a fast pace" they'll just be told to hold onto some ass pennies [0]. But if they say they're going to turn the entire office into one large lazy river waterpark ride, where developers get their own inner tube and a waterproof laptop and everyone wears GoPros all day which will live stream their entire workday to their new spinoff business Constagram ... well now the investor is listening.
But I agree that in a huge number of cases, it's just cargo culting for status. It's probably even damaging their ability to recruit workers, but the cargo cult status matters more.
Where I am we have stunning giant metal photo prints covering most walls (and floors and ceilings), mostly-private offices (metal mesh walls with doors that close, and often with giant photos covering the mesh to make it more private).
Everyone who sees it seems to think it looks a helluva lot cooler than a generic open floor plan.
Every employee also gets a modest decorating budget for their offices, so the insides of them look pretty cool too. More importantly, it sends a signal that we respect people's need for quiet and private personal space to get work done. We have shared spaces as well for those who want to be more social, but we don't force it.
Seems to be working well for us.
[1] http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/regional/2010-05/01/content_980...
This isn't always true and I would never want to enforce it dogmatically. For some people / teams / companies, significant remote working is very successful. I just don't believe it's always or even frequently better than a physical office with adequately private and quiet working conditions.
I do believe fully remote working is probably better than the shambolic open-plan disasters that are common these days, so if someone makes you believe in a false dilemma pitting fully open-plan versus fully-remote, then fully-remote is probably the lesser of two evils.
I did read the parent article. I responded as I did because I am dumbfounded that the idea of paying for the cost-effective extra benefits of private offices is not really even considered -- we've come so far on the path to destructive workspaces that we don't even think about it any more.
I still don't agree. In my experience, the added productivity gains from working in a Peopleware-ideal office, where I could occasionally stop by a colleague's office to ask a question, were not much greater than what could be accomplished through video and chat. The personal "comradery" gains were slim to nil as well.
The negatives are tremendous. Wasting time traveling to the office. Wasting time appearing to work, which is probably 50% of the average office workers day if we're being honest. Having to arrange your life around work instead of the other way around.
If nothing else, I think a fully broken-down cost analysis of your office layout plus the higher cost-of-living expenses built into employee wages when hiring in a big city would convince you that remote is the way. Probably looking at 30-50k per employee savings for hiring remote vs SF, and getting happier, more productive employees.
Still, your points are well taken. On the other hand, if a company is really looking at fully-remote work as a way to avoid paying higher wages, that would be a red flag for me. I'm very good at what I do, and even if I'm not co-located in Fancyopolis, I expect to be earning a competitive wage based on the value I can add to the business, not how much a gallon of milk costs for me. It comes off as extremely petty and divisive for a company to intentionally play cost of living to their advantage like that. And further, what stops a person from choosing to live in a more expensive place? Your company is in Milwaukee but I want to live in London and work remotely.
The kinds of risks that employees face are very asymmetric when compared with what employers face. For a lone employee, the single number that is your annual compensation is a big deal. Other companies might force you to tell them that number if you seek a new job. And whatever that number is, that's going to determine your pay. Those other companies won't give a shit about cost of living.
Let's say you used to live in SF and made X-thousand per year. Then you took a new job in Austin, TX, and someone convinced you that you should accept something like 0.7X per year, because Austin is cheaper and 0.7 still leaves you quote unquote above market there.
A few years later, you're looking to move to New York, well guess what, you're salary is going to be pegged to 0.7X, not X, and you might have to negotiate hard even just to get it back up to X in New York, let alone arguing for whatever premium the 0.7X might have been above market in Austin.
That's just how these things work. Have you negotiated pay when considering a move from a major city to a city with lower cost of living? I have before, and one of the major points of discussion was that salary actually should not decrease in response to cost of living changes. That's just an unpleasant side of it that the hiring company has to eat. The risks facing the lone employee are too high that they'll never recover the "downward adjustment" amount if they ever find that they need to move on to another area again.
When I speak with HR reps about this, I've never had a problem. Sometimes they will say they are not looking to pay in the range I am seeking, but they universally understand and fully expect it when candidates say that their salary should not decrease purely due to cost of living decreases.
Provide a real office environment for every knowledge worker.
You know ... a door that shuts ... a window ... space to allow your gaze to adjust.
Things that are ... human.
It's really simple.
And before you say it costs too much, it doesn't. The problem is that you're in denial about how much your current offices with open floor plans are costing you. You merely think the cost is equal to the rent. It's much greater than the rent, though, because of lowered productivity, lowered morale, increased superficiality of important inter-worker communication, incessant interruptions disrupting developer flow, more sick time, etc. etc.
If you didn't pretend like those aren't affecting you, and you actually counted their cost, you'd see that the extra cost in real estate for offices is well worth it even in short-term scenarios like 1-year where you're using your start-up runway to pay for it.
Even in San Francisco. Even in Manhattan.