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> Treat your office like a library, not a kitchen. A VP at my fast growing and profitable Fortune 500 publicly ridiculed my proposal to let our smallish engineering team geek in empty, unused offices in the building, on grounds that the office was not a library. He was kicked upstairs and to another division, bless him.
The tension is not realizing that difference.
Because it's cheap. Less walls to build, more employees packed on to a floor. Do you lose more money than you're saving due to decreased productivity? Maybe. But that's hard to prove, and "This office proposal is $X million cheaper because we can lease three fewer floors" is very straightforward.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That office is mostly empty space, and with all the effort to noise damp one has to ask - why bother? Just add offices at that point. At Microsoft you could always chat in the halls and people would just close their doors.
Now everything is moving to open office or has already moved :(, I envy the people that still have their own office.
> Open offices clearly suck. So why are you (most likely) still working in one? Behind all the fluff, there is a simple explanation: they save insane amounts of money.
In the beginning, there was a lot of talk about open offices producing more collaborative environments, and I'm willing to give this charitable credence and believe that some people might really have thought that at the time. It was an emerging idea and the complete ramifications were not really understood.
These days though, I don't think anyone ingenuous would defend that idea anymore — it's all about money, and this is doubly so in dense tech hot spots like San Francisco where real estate commands a huge premium.
My large company is entirely open office, and has even been known to downsize standard desk size in order to get more of them into the same area. It's annoying, and there's no question that it creates a large productivity tax (desks are packed tightly enough that even a small group of people having a conversation at normal voice levels three rows over is pretty disrupting), but it mostly works, and giving everyone their own office in our central location would be pretty much financially infeasible. You learn to start working around it as best you can with sound insulating headphones, working from home where possible, or even reserving the occasional meeting room when you can.
I find some comedy in the fact that my parent's generation used to complain non-stop about being ousted form their offices and into cubicle farms. These days, my generation would kill for cubicles. Even a couple drawers to store a few personal items are a fantasy at this point.
I think the real reason is that the bosses like watching all their subordinates at once. They can see that nobody is slacking (or at least everybody is pretending not to, which signals social submission almost as well), and enjoy the feeling of power. Productivity statistics don't produce the same feeling, partly because they're too abstract, and partly because they're evidence of submission to the organization as a…
Because it's cheap. Less walls to build, more employees packed on to a floor. Do you lose more money than you're saving due to decreased productivity? Maybe. But that's hard to prove, and "This office proposal is $X million cheaper because we can lease three fewer floors" is very straightforward.
The impact on productivity also depends on the type of work. I suspect it's a net loss in the long run for things that require or benefit from deep work.
I have basically given up on finding a job that would give me an office with a door that closes. I think it's much more likely that I could find a remote job. If I ask for an onsite office I would basically be laughed at or thought of as a prima donna.