It's a penny wise, pound foolish decision though, considering engineering salaries. It's hard to quantify, and often an externalized cost to the facilities management and decision makers, but my own experience suggests open offices are incredibly expensive as a negative multiplier on the engineering output. The "actual work" starts getting done in the evenings, on planes, and on weekends, while the business hours are a circus of meetings and "grab-ass" as the top comment in this thread so eloquently put it.

I'm building my own company now, fully remote, and from an engineering output point of view I've never seen such productivity. No ass-in-seat supervision, no assigned hours, just straight throughput of engineering tasks being closed and features being shipped every day.

> I'm building my own company now, fully remote

How do you counter the common argument that face-to-face communication is the most high-bandwidth and one shouldn't throw away that competitive advantage unnecessarily? I'm not a proponent of that position; on the contrary, I don't want to accept it. But a lot of people think that way.

Face-to-face is more effective than video conferencing, but not in the way that you'd trivially expect.

Most designated meetings, you can have just fine over a video conferencing system. Where f2f excels is in the conversations after you leave the meeting room - just a casual question to some other person from the meeting, which evolves into an impromptu 5-minute chat. (That is usually more valuable than the entire meeting :)

Spontaneous conversation is incredibly valuable. (Which, ironically, is also cited for open offices). I believe that if you start with a fully remote setup, you are growing a culture that will move these conversations to IM or other channels, by necessity. You'll likely be fine.

But you cannot move a company that has grown up with a culture of f2f meetings to a culture of IM conversations - it's too deeply ingrained.

IOW, you're not "throwing away" something if you build a remote culture from the start. Both models can work, but switching models is hard.

It does seem plausible that requiring an in-person team to switch to IM and other electronic communication would be more difficult than starting out remote.

I work on accessibility for people with disabilities, and I'm blind myself (well, legally blind), so I think a lot about including people with disabilities. It seems to me that working with people with some kinds of disabilities, e.g. deafness or a severe speech impediment, would be akin to forcing an in-person team to switch to IM. (I have no direct experience working with people with those disabilities, so I'm happy to be educated.) So I speculate that starting out remote would also make the team more inclusive in this area.

It's not the most high bandwidth for all of us. More information doesn't always equal better.

What specific drawbacks, or groups of people for whom face-to-face is a problem, do you have in mind?

FWIW, I personally don't benefit from the "high bandwidth". I'm legally blind; I can't read facial expressions or body language, or even recognize specific faces. SO for me, face-to-face amounts to little more than audio communication with full frequency range and zero latency or drop-outs. All that to say that I can only understand face-to-face communication (edit: as it works for most people) second-hand, so I'm curious, not being argumentative.

Some people are hyper-reactive to certain types of information. Whether you want to call it a preference or a handicap, I don't know. I personally have PTSD. I will nearly instinctively read things into faces that I can never be sure is there. This is perpetually confusing and often overloading for me, not to mention a useless waste of thinking cycles. It's taken me years to learn how to be less reactive, but it's always a process of reducing information down to a minimal set of what is most consistent, structured, and true with respect to the social environment. Which often does reduce down to pure language, the direct translation of a statement and the direction it aligns with.

It gets labeled many things, like social anxiety, aspergers, many other stigmatized disorders - but this is often my root problem - being overloaded with the amount of information present in social environments.

I have greater clarity when I can think separated from people physically, most often through text. I've gotten better with audio, but in person communication is still something of a struggle.

I'm not being argumentative either. Just people have differences, and they aren't always easy to notice, identity, or correct.

Thanks for that. So I gather that audio is also more difficult for you than text, but less difficult than face-to-face.

Audio in a business environment, at least from my experience, is more predictable and algorithmic, so my sensitivity to that has reduced significantly. Every face to face interaction in my organization routinely feels like a disaster I can't understand in entirety, during or locally near the experience. Reasoning out of it (grounding) is often challenging, I prefer focusing on inanimate objects to ground myself as this ties me to a structured reality, as well as focusing on math and logic because I need those reasoning systems to maintain self direction. It has gotten better in some ways and more difficult in others.

I have some folks I'm very close with where this is not the case. But that's taken a very long time for me, and it is something that has required a lot of patience, understanding, communication, tolerance, forgiveness, hope, and perseverence. It's still something that is just about, the opposite of easy, for every new person I'm introduced to. I am generally told that I'm a reasonably easy to get along with person casually, aquaintance wise, although I consistently apologize for random social behaviors, masking them over with the words awkward, impulsed, compulsed etc. I have a tendency to ramble about technical things and this is bad when I have a tendency to be hypercritical over software (as I'm never sure how my preferences about code may approve or reject the preferences of those I talk to, but that's getting off track). There'stuff that just goes down to the core of us that is intrinsic to our orderings, organizations, and structurings of information - which I'm sure you understand from being blind. In my experience, attempting to change these things is more costly than the benefit 'correction' would provide.

But that's me, PTSD and an understanding of psychology has made me a better software developer by refining my understanding of automation, as well as helping me remove myself from the headspace of what originally was so painful to experience. It doesn't go away, but it gets easier to live with, some days are harder than others, but I still consider myself fairly lucky given everything I've been able to do with what I have.

Text is just crystal clear. I have a tendency to ramble on the internet and I've gone into that wormhole of introspection of 'what will this do to me if I say this', some variant of the halting problem, recurrent infinite descending chains of when minds decide to stop inferencing using limited, selective sets of information, but, shrug. People have said I'm good at writing, and I hope my tendency to overthink has only led to improvement.

Do you think you would be happy in an environment where all business and technical communication was text? Do you think that could even be productive? Or is some amount of spoken communication practically necessary?

This whole exchange has been interesting. Thanks again.

I'm not sure honestly. I think generally I do better not confined to total isolation, but life is a process. There's always going to be challenges regardless of how able someone appears to be.

I do think having diversity in all things is important, they push one's boundaries and allow oneself to redefine oneself. Taking care to reflect on the moment and the big picture, that's important.

Too much of anything is not a good thing, so there is always a need to balance. This allows one to translate skills from one interface to another. The big picture / in the moment reflection / introspection is important because it allows for self direction, instead of just getting caught up in all this mapping of skill set to skill set towards some ideal of being 'well rounded'.

I generally just prefer my base to be text because I code a lot and that's the headspace I need to stay in. Some communication, sparsely distributed in other forms is fine, but too much can direct away from the focus, which in my preference is produce good code, and solve problems in ways that get the closest to perfect I can get, without tipping the balance of losing sight of all the other code information, retaining structure and direction, uniformity, solutions for problems.

I don't enjoy living in a text vacuum as that can get severely isolating when done to excess, but sometimes having that space is necessary for me to continue laying out my own foundation of structure, preference, and direction, as I continue to learn new stuff.

Thank you for your interest and questions.

For me it's hard to describe but I get a feeling of knowing how the other person feels from a face to face meeting. Keep in mind, this only works for people I know well and in person (close coworkers, girlfriend, etc.). I still get this over a video chat but it's at a 10% level so I feel like I'm operating without one of my senses.

I often express myself poorly and this extra feeling helps me realize it and take some corrective measures. Really helpful when trying to communicate a difficult technical concept.

I find video chat to be as productive or even moreso than face-to-face meetings for small groups of people.

In face to face meetings, many companies (like ones I have worked for) have limited meeting spaces and it's quite hard to book a conference room for more than an hour. Often times, we'd shuffle from one conference room to another.

So even in-person isn't quite as effecient and productive as it could be.

> The "actual work" starts getting done in the evenings, on planes, and on weekends, while the business hours are a circus of meetings and "grab-ass" as the top comment in this thread so eloquently put it.

And thus, there is no incentive to change it. Cause total productivity is the same.

"It's a penny wise, pound foolish decision" Yes, and repeated infinitely throughout the global corporate world. Basically saying over and over again: corporations care more about dollars than their people, and the people must change or leave - if you want this job at all. What? you're the top in your field? So what, you're not special. Get to work.

> It's a penny wise, pound foolish decision though, considering engineering salaries.

Yeah, but people are replaceable. Whereas you, as an entrepreneur, only have one life to live. Choose wisely.

/s

That argument doesn't hold water.

Employee time is usually a lot more expensive than the space they occupy. At least in tech.

You could save quite a lot of money on furniture if everyone sat with their laptops on the floor. But in reality that would be more expensive since the difference in productivity will outweigh the furniture cost.

Ah, but accountants don't measure productivity, only cost. It doesn't matter if it takes 3 times as long to ship your product, the only way they'd justify the higher cost of the office is if it meant cutting jobs.

I agree, and often times is several engineering teams that have their own budgets for labor, verses an entirely different department (facilities) using a different pool of money. Each department has incentives to cut costs independently and often at the expense of other departments.

I would happily buy my own sodas (I don't drink them anyway), chips/snacks (I don't eat them at work), coffee (I do drink coffee!) if it meant I never had to sit in an open office environment again.

> Ah, but accountants don't measure productivity, only cost.

Accountants don't get to decide the office layout in my experience.

You'd be surprised how often accountants run a company unofficially, and all the ways that it happens.

You're missing the point that the people configuring the office (most of the time) do not take productivity as a major factor, unless is something extreme and unrealistic like your example. Now it's more like: "everyone is already used to this configuration, and it's 50% (or some big %) cheaper to setup now"

Maybe companies should just be honest about why they run open offices instead of trying to sell it as something they do for the employees.

I work in a place with younger developers, who basically run things themselves with management's blessing. They love the open-plan office layout. I think a lot of this is generational: younger programmers are much more social and like noisy environments where they can chat and banter endlessly.

Personal preferences vary but, yeah, a lot of overall preferences are probably age-related. I remember in a long-ago job I had for quite a few years (with an old-style high cubicle arrangement), we had a lot of walking the hallways F2F informal catchups, ate lunch together, had sports teams, etc.

These days I mostly work remote by choice and am good with that. Some of it is better tech to work remote; I didn't even have broadband for most of my time in that former job. But it's also that I have no particular interest in spending a lot of time with coworkers generally beyond what I need to get my job done.

I'm not claiming that it's age-related, but that it's generational. The people who are going into programming these days are not the same type of people who went into it a generation ago. In the 80s, these people would have gone into a different career field.

And I'm not sure I agree with that in general. If I look back at the engineers of the computer company I worked for in the late 80s, I would say there were more women and it was whiter. Certainly, more were from traditional EE disciplines given how relatively new CS was.

But I'm not sure that new engineers at that company were fundamentally different from new engineers joining, say, Facebook today.

Every time the topic comes up on HN half a dozen people insist that the only possible reason anyone could ever consider an open plan office is cost.

Meanwhile, there's a thriving and growing industry selling desks in trendy open plan offices to self-employed people who for the most part could do their work in the privacy of their own home if they didn't think the atmosphere of an open plan office was worth paying for.

Working at home has other issues (distractions, lack of separation between home/work, loneliness) so I can see someone wanting to rent a desk especially if they find working at home that particular day challenging to their productivity.

I mostly work from home these days but I can't imagine starting out that way after school.

A lot of people I know work remotely in whole or in large part. But I've also worked with people who either felt the need for work-home separation or just found home to be too distracting a work environment in one or more ways.

YMMV, but in my neck of the woods the whole office-share thing is having a very hard time. Prices are either very steep and include private offices (hah!), or very cheap for open plan offices. Many of the latter places have devolved into regular cafes because there's no demand.

I think HN is just focusing on disparaging the messaging from company leads, and pointing out that it’s cheaper but actively harmful as well to performance.

Not sure about that. Remote would save so much more on office space! Yet most companies hate remote and don't allow it.

I think the real reason is managers want to be able to see everyone at a glance; it's all about control.

Not likely, unless these managers have really keen eyes and are able to look at everyone's monitor at the same time....

And specifically, about an easy to measure cost verses an hard (if not impossible) to measure cost. Facilities can easily be measured. Productivity lost due to employees overwhelmed with sights and sounds (and even smells)? Much harder to measure, and so much easier to just not measure it or low ball it. So even if money is being lost, it looks like money is being saved.

> The Basecamp office has a row of desks out in the open which we govern by Library Rules. We also have four private work rooms.

Well it is still a bad decision. Libraries are an open work space and still manage to provide a reasonable working environment. This is less about money but more about a wrong perception of work.

Apple, Google, etc. could definitely afford team offices. Apple built almost all their campuses from scratch...

Productivity is also about money.