Is the open office layout dead?

If you want me to work remote full time, I need a raise to cover the cost of getting an apartment or house equivalent to my own but with an additional room to turn into a dedicated private office.

Otherwise, I'll take an appropriately designed office.

>> No designated desks

I don't know about anyone else, but for me that would tank the productivity even worse than the open plan.

I have to be at a particular place in order to get anywhere close to "the flow". There are currently two such places: my desk at work, and my desk in my man cave at home.

Whenever we move offices, it takes me weeks to get back to 100% again. I suspect I'm not the only one. Simply put, with no designated desk I would never reach peak productivity at work.

I'm lazy today, so I just grabbed this article which describes office space in the bay area for startups [0]. Their talking all the way up to about $70 per square foot. Peopleware says 100 sq ft per person, so that's up to about $700 per month per employee (or $8400).

I honestly don't think that's crazy money, but you also have to plan for growth. This makes things a lot harder. If you think you are going to grow from 4 developers to 20 in the next couple of years, then you need to make sure you have access to space. Moving offices is usually traumatic, so it's a cost you need to balance.

TBH, I've only ever experienced that much space once in my career. Normally I've had about 60 sq ft and I've had much less in some jobs. My experience is that the extra space is definitely worth it. There shouldn't even be a question about it.

I think the problem is more that it is hard for the people-with-purchasing-power to understand that productivity in knowledge workers can very dramatically. Spending $10K per year on working conditions can easily save you $100K in salary (given current SV salaries) -- you can go with a lower head count and achieve the same amount of work.

But it's not just that. I'm a big proponent of small head count. The communication overhead for large teams can be crippling. When you look at trying to increase production by improving code quality -- it's practically impossible with large teams. If you never speak to half your team mates, there is no way to reach consensus on design approaches. There are ways to mitigate these kinds of problems, but I have to stress that I have never seen successful mitigation strategies in non-open source projects. In fact I've never even seen them attempted because the overwhelming bias is that more programmers == more productivity (amongst people-with-purchasing-power).

But even as I type this, I can see how it is scary to spend money on working conditions. Let's say you are bleeding cash (like most startups), or you are eeking out low single digit percent profit (like most establish companies). You've got some cash to invest and so you think, "We need to raise revenue. To do that, we need the product to have more capability". It's a pretty gigantic leap of faith to conclude "Instead of growing the dev staff by 10%, I'm going to spend that money on improving working conditions". And even if you do, you have to repress the very next thought, "Hmmm... dev staff comprises 10% of my workforce. WTF am I going to do when the sales people demand the same working conditions? If I refuse, all the best ones are likely to quit in a huff".

[0] - https://medium.com/initialized-capital/the-outlook-for-bay-a...

> I may be alone in saying so, but I'd happily take a modest drop in pay for a private office.

My friend felt this so strongly that he actually rents a private office (that he pays for himself) right next to his employer's office.

We are having major issues with an open office. It appears to be sort of like remote work: some can handle it fine, while others can't. It just gets deafeningly loud and distracting even with only 10 people nearby.