No, that's just another public rationale. Programmer salaries are much more expensive than even private offices.
In a past life, when I wrote software for a living, I would ask my managers how much it cost, so I could pay out of pocket for my own private office. In every case, when pressed, they admitted it wasn't about the money at all. They just needed me to be a Team Player.
It wasn't even about built-out cost. The private offices already existed, and were sitting empty, in anticipation of future sales team growth -- even though I don't think we were hiring for that yet. Everyone on the business side always got a private office. Come to think of it, I don't remember ever hearing management try to explain why the sales team apparently didn't need to be team players.
I am in no way advocating for open offices in any circumstance, but one common complaint I've heard from open-office dwellers is how they sit right next to the sales team who are always on their phones.
As a person who is frequently called by that sales team: I can tell immediately when I'm talking to someone who is in an open-office, and I associate them with phone spammers.
So, sales people: you're losing money because of that open-office environment.
Constant surveillance is another part of the real reason with collaboration used as the public rationale. I mean, it doesn't make sense, but it makes them feel more like slave-owners, and that makes them happy.
>Constant surveillance is another part of the real reason with collaboration used as the public rationale
when i worked on an open plan office, that was huge. it seems like my boss' favorite hobby was checking everyone's screen to see what they were doing.
once, i was watching a yt video on a monitor while i worked on the other. normal right? nope. my boss came to my "desk" and said i had to shut it down because it was bothering people (it wasn't anything offensive. it was literally a science podcast).
not just density, but "easier" for the decision makers. Its easier to rent a big open room than to figure out an office plan and seating plan and construction schedule. Its easier to move desks around like musical chairs than to have to mutate rooms and halls.
People will almost always take the near-term cheaper and easier option, even when its worse and more expensive in the long run.
Incidentally, this was the one thing I liked about we-work. Room sizes were genuinely appropriate for 2 - 5 people (ofc sold as 3 - 10).
CEO at my company did that and seemed to actually enjoy it, but other executives basically forced him to get an office because he was too often discussing confidential information out in the open.
I’d be really curious how much of a hit to people’s salary they would be willing to take, or the reduced capabilities of their business, to get an open office environment.
I worked with an internal team that created a brand new office for a decently-sized tech company. We had this exact debate: open or closed. We explored closed, or versions of it (see Spotify’s team rooms as a great example of a compromise), but the end result was the same: if we expected to grow substantially and expand our business a lot, real estate would be the biggest bottleneck. We’d literally have to pay people less and deliver slower if we wanted to make that trade off, and all the companies we talk to who had gone with some form of closed office had shifted to open over time because the costs were huge.
We did the next best thing, because we definitely heard the concerns of people that getting work done at work really was harder than it should be: we created as much private space for 1-2 people as possible that lots of people could use, so you got to decide whether you were in at your desk mode or heads down mode. Several years later, this seems to work all right. There’s still a desire to work from home occasionally, and my teams are pretty understanding about that. Even with the open office plan, though, we still have to rent virtually every open space around us.
My example is skewed because I also really enjoy my work, but I fully intend to stay in my current position for the rest of my career because I have a real office with a door. I work in Silicon Valley and just cracked 6 figures in total compensation this year. By far the biggest reason that I have no interest in considering moving is the seeming impossibility of getting a cubicle, much less an office, anywhere else. So empirically, I will give up anywhere from ~50k-200k to do work I enjoy in an office with a door.
I've worked in both open and closed office environments -- currently have my own office, and it is _much_ easier for me to be productive without distractions in this arrangement. Huge improvement in quality of work and quality of life. It's possible that I could be persuaded to go back to an open-office environment, but it would require a _lot_ of additional compensation -- like maybe 50+%.
It wouldn't have to be much of a salary cut. If you amortize the up-front cost for around a 110 square foot office, the total is only about $5,000 a year (more than an open office).
45 additional square feet at (a vastly overestimated) $100 per year per square foot for rent. $5,000 construction costs amortized over 10 years.
The way we thought about it was primarily butts in seats. For simplicity, if open office = about 1000, a reasonable closed office environment for us would have housed about half of that. If we needed 1000 to deliver product X, we’d either deliver product X over double the time or for double the (real estate) cost plus the non-local collaboration cost (not insurmountable, but it’s part of the tradeoff).
We’d need to see a closed office productivity increase of double or more to justify it, and we just couldn’t, even talking to other companies that had the kind of collaborative environment we thought of as ideal if we had infinite space. They didn’t see increases at that level.
To be clear, I’m seriously simplifying here. There are so many other considerations like workplace happiness, some amount of creative “collision” differences, churn and burnout, different individual needs for privacy, whether certain collaboration styles enabled by space fit the company culture, the type of work that’s happening, how likely that team structures will be the same in 1 year, 5 years, 10 years. Ultimately, we bet on space flexibility and giving teams more control over their space than giving everyone an office or team room. It’s hard to say what the alternate history would have been, but we do pretty regular surveys about workplace happiness and have seen significant positive increases compared to our old office (also open but much more rigid, far fewer private spaces) and general happiness with people’s access to private space and ability to get work done.
Edit: I also don’t want to overgeneralize. This made sense for us, but I think there are lots of situations where it does not make sense to have an open office, especially if you have a smaller company stocked primarily with very, very high performers doing individually-driven but very deep creative work (in the sense of integrating a lot of information). I would hope all companies would be more thoughtful about it, but I wanted to provide a little look at how a company that values privacy and enabling deep work might still arrive at an open office.
In Austin, I can get a modest 1-2 person private office for around $2k/month. At an annual salary of $120K, that's only 10-20% of developer costs. So the upper bound on the potential real estate savings of an open plan is on the order of 10-20%. Maybe a bit more if most devs are relatively inexperienced and therefore cheaper.
So while the savings is not nothing, when it's that small any potential productivity hit becomes even more of a big deal.
I was talking with a friend who works at a company HQ'd in NYC and he said that the average cost per person/desk was over 60k/yr. It was a lot higher than I was expecting.
No way...a nice sized cubicle is 100 sqft, and Class A rents in Manhattan are under $100/sqft/y. So the actual office space is something like $10,000 or less per year.
Of course there is other overhead, but space itself is in that range. So the max savings, in the most expensive market in the US, is under $10k per year.
But you don't rent by cubicle, you rent by floor or building. So adding a new employee when you have hit your max means you have to figure something out or sink a whole lot of money into a new building for one person.
Office in NYC was remodeled to open office, and the limits were determined by fire code, bathrooms, etc. In the end, a whole bunch of valuable floor space is sitting empty as relaxation rooms, a puzzle table, and funky couch areas that nobody wants to sit at because it’s next to a big boss’s office.
Practically speaking, most people are treating the shift as an implicit agreement that employees can work from home 90+% of the time.
That size seems high. 100 sqft would be a nice sized office. Cubicles are more like 30 square feet. Douglas Coupland gave cubicles the name "veal fattening pens" in Generation X but they're actually smaller now - calf enclosures are 30-35 sqft. The latest fad with standing desks is even smaller.
Yes, that's my point--the cost of raw office space for a single large cubicle/small office in Manhattan is under $10k/year. Other overhead is basically the same for a shared bench vs. large cubicle.
But the portion that is ascribed to the raw footage would be under $10k/y...the other costs are not really correlated with shared bench vs cubicle vs private office.
