There was a study done on the interruption effect of e-mail https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/1328726018000...

seriously, lets just give up on the notion of assigned spaces, idk what value there is when we cant even collaborate because the 4 tiny meeting rooms for 100 people are sitting at the margins of the giant open office. and there aren't any other whiteboards or projectors to use to have conversations. everyone is already wearing headphones so they can try to have a thought to themselves.

there are lots of alternatives. assign rooms to projects and have the principals mostly hang out there. couch areas and pub areas and cubby areas...rooms where you really aren't supposed to talk or hum or do anything out loud.

we've given up any actual utility of the office and are just hanging on to the barest trapping.

Having worked at a company, where they had couch areas: Management will place the couch areas in the middle or adjacent to the desks and it will all be done in an open floor. A couch area with no walls is an invitation to have loud conversations/phone calls in the middle of the office.

If you’re not going to give people phones just take the phones away, not pack people in like sardines.

So when bosses realised they were throwing money away, they came up with the open office with flex-desks: no-one has a fixed place, you can sit whereever you want. And there are less desks than people.

That can work out quite well (I work in such an office) but it depends greatly on ehtics or rules: no TVs with soccer games, no speaker-phone (but only headset) and rooms available for discussions or phone calls. And there is a general area (quite large) where you can drink your coffee and discuss the soccer matches or Tour de France results...

For me it works, but I can imagine that without the requirements listed above it can be a cumbersome workenvironment.

If a company believes it will gain more from “saving money” on open plan offices or hot desking than it will from just paying more to facilitate more and better work from employees through buying the best tools (a private office is a tool like a keyboard or ergonomic chair), it’s self-evidently a company to get far, far away from.

Consider “flex keyboards.” Management realizes that not all keyboards are in use all day, because people are in meetings, at lunch, etc.

So nobody gets their own keyboard. You have to locate an unused keyboard at the times when you need to type.

This is no different than “flex desks.” In both cases (keyboards, desks), the unit cost of providing the dedicated resource to the employee is trivial compared to far more pressing concerns, like producing working software to increase revenue, or bullshit executive compensation.

Even real estate costs for private offices in dense urban areas are trivial by comparison.

I work mostly from home but I do have a cube in the local office. If we got tight for space, it would absolutely make sense to give away my space to someone who would use it more and have me just grab an open chair for those times I have meetings or other reasons to be in the office.

If I had a private office, I would still work from home most of the time. A private office doesn't eliminate a commute.

Why would this make more sense than moving to a bigger office or building more space for the new employee to have a desk without taking yours? Cost is absolutely not an answer.

If they can afford to hire more but not to expand and give each worker adequate space, it suggests the company is just wrong. They actually can’t afford to hire more and would be creating problems if they do. Rather, reinvest what would have been spent on crammed headcount into the ability to expand spatially and later increase headcount with adequate space.

If a company, even a sink-or-swim growth mode start-up, believes it needs to hire people faster than it can provide minimally adequate space for them, then the company is just wrong. That is just not a thing.

Costs do not affect revenue. Perhaps you mean profit?

I'm not arguing for hot-desking as a standard approach, which indeed likely negates any benefits to teams being co-located. But for people who are allocated space that they rarely use? Why not?

People who think cost drives open plan office choices seem to think corporate management are too stupid to ask, what is 10% of our total salary base for these workers. It makes no sense. People have been measuring productivity and morale in knowledge work for a hundred years. Of course they can directly compare cost savings on floor space with metrics correlated with productivity lost to worse workspace, and tie it to the bottom line.

The observable spending habits of companies suggest cost utterly cannot be a driving factor here.

Can you think of reasons why maybe each student doesn't have their own helicopter but does have their own headset (assuming they were cleaned properly after each use and hygiene wasn't a concern)? Those same reasons apply to the office/keyboard situation.

Providing one office per knowledge worker would be cost-effective for companies.

Flight schools have a hard time surviving if they make grossly wasteful or negligent expenditures for the sake of politics and optics, because they are low-capitalized businesses with often much lower revenue per employee and less growth opportunity than highly capitalized tech companies.

A high capitalized tech company, on the other hand, can piss away money on dipshit open floor plan offices, roof decks, $500,000 Christmas parties, etc., and the executive committee doesn’t care. They have very little incentive to optimize that spending and often make spending choices based on the capricious and whimsical desires of an adult-baby CEO who is more like Veruca Salt than a competent business person.

The logic is that, compared to the salaries of software engineers and revenues of many tech companies, desks and keyboards are extremely cheap.

The cost of a ~$100k engineer spending 10m per day looking for a desk, with 8h day and 200k total employee cost to employer, is ~4k/yr. Paired with the cost the company pays in developer annoyance potentially causing higher turnover or lower productivity , buying more desks and office space is likely the cheaper option. One helicopter per student is obviously not so...

The open office I am in ATM is one such places where a handfull of people (loud, discussing totally not related to work, factually completly idiotic conversations) spoil it for all others. There is nothing to be done about these people since they've been with the company forever and a day and are thus basically exempt from all rules (be it noice or dresscode).

5 Years ago I have actively stoped working from home to segrate work from family. Now I have found myself to do at least 1, often 2 days from home again and planning to change employer. No I will not tell them the reason since I can not affort to burn that bridge.

TL;DR Manager A makes a good impression by saving some office space, Manager B looses employees but will never find out why.

Not criticizing this person, I despise my open office environment too. I also wouldn't (and didn't) tell tell my employer about this when I left for a few years in the past for the same reason.

Especially when some people eat at their desks.

Generic rubber dome keyboards are torture — chiclet style keyboards surely violate a bunch of Geneva conventions.

Never mind the filth and grime.

I will keep a mouse and keyboard in the office under lock and key somewhere if I end up in that situation.

Really though the cost of office space vs people making 100k/year means you don't actually need top optimize it that hard. The core problem is they tend to come out of separate budgets, so some middle manager can write down they saved x million on a review / resume while costing the company 3x that indirectly.

PS: Used Model S's are also something to keep an eye on.

It's just unfortunate that the commute here in the Bay Area has gotten so bad that a lot of people end up working from home.

All of it is completely unrelated with work. And sort of sad, although its a good thing, that no matter what happens, humans will needs humans.

There is no need in this.

This is the world they wanted, when they dissolved unions and other pillars of stability, one mans grape-vine over "Unreliable mercenaries" is another mans freedom of choice.

Here's to Sienna and Florence, their high towers may stand a thousand year or crumble under the siege tomorrow, no-one cares only the chests in the deep cellars are whats important.

All those walls build to create synthetic loyalty- be it out of fear of being law suited for knowledge transfer, or cartels to avoid the rising prices of mercenary's - if history tells us one thing - in the end the war always wins.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Wars

"Wes Brot ich ess, des Lied ich sing, wes Gold ich trag, des Tod ich bring."

Unless there's an urgency, or some complication that should be discussed in person; slack is the preferred method so as to allow the party you are interrupting a chance to change their focus in the least impactful manner.

If I go to someone directly, I am losing 10-15 minutes of my own productivity + the length of the conversation and that's multiplied by the number of people I interrupted.

Some people who I've worked with, love to have to have a face to face for questions or information that is not urgent and could easily be taken care of via slack. They seem to do so because they prefer to small talk, lament, debate or some other personal reason; they don't do it for technical reasons.

If your team can effectively communicate passively, on slack, your on a team that has a foundation from which a remote-work policy can easily be enacted.

Amen. We can work remotely. Let me work in my home office.

I'm sitting here now because there's scheduled railway maintenance going on. If not I prefer traveling to the office (it's more than 45 minutes each way.)

But as long as everyone can choose for themselves I think more people probably should work from home.

I have a coworker within ONE second of me, I can lean back a few inches and tap them on the shoulder. And I do, frequently, when they send me a 1:1 slack message.

"What's up?"

"Oh I had a question for you in Slack"

"I'm three feet away from you, I'm not doing this over slack, what's up?"

Obviously this is different if they send a code snippet or an app screenshot that I need to look at, but even then when we need to discuss the next steps relevant to that snippet or screenshot, I'll still tap them over the shoulder

"Hey, did you try x?"

"Oh no I didn't, lemme see what happens..." pause "Yup that worked, thanks!"

"No problem"