The Open-office Trap

That is 100 sq ft per 4 employees whereas giving each employee a tiny 6x6 cube (although I live in a 8x8) would be 144 sq ft per 4 employees, so if you go with offices you actually use less space than cubicles and if you are flex timing it the employees feel it is much more spacious.

I currently work in a team of 4 flex timers each with 8x8 cubes, in a sea of cubes, and I'd much rather have a nice 10x10 with a door for the 4 of us. We'd save a huge amount of real estate this way and get more work done.

You can of course fit far more than 4 employees in a 10x10 office if you ultra-flex time it. More than two decades ago I was baby sitting a large IBM financial mainframe network (SDLC, source route bridging, that kind of thing) and we had like ten people assigned to a 10x10 but due to 24x5 coverage, not to mention remote work, we never had more than two people in the office at a time.

I've never in my life so far, worked a job where everyone works precisely 9-5 M-F so I can see where non-flex time lifestyles might be more difficult. I would have a serious problem tolerating rush hour driving twice a day, five times a week, but thats another matter.

That said in addition to a mandatory visitors chair, white boards everywhere. Just fucking everywhere. Nothing seemed to help collaboration like being able to start water cooler level talk about a problem and with out even noticing transition to hashing it out on a whiteboard.

Truly modern offices have hot desks AND are wired for teleconferencing - right in the open areas! That's right, if "open" is good for communication then a 60" screen on the wall with video cameras pointing at you is even better! You can share in the dull roar of collaboration with people on other continents ALL DAY! In the average open space you can fit at least two, maybe three such screens. When you have them installed, get the tradesmen to come during office hours. It costs way more if they come after hours and your employees should get the chance to see drills, saws and nailguns operated by professionals, they may learn something.

We all know there's nothing that stimulates productivity like the sound of productivity, right? So when you plan your next office, leave the kitchen open too - the scrape of chairs on the tiles, the sound of the dishwasher being unloaded, the happy PING of the microwave - not to mention the aromas of hot food - all these things will make employees feel right at home. Using only the most modern materials in the office - lots of glass and steel - will ensure the entire workforce shares the joy. You don't want to be damping the precious sound waves with carpet or plasterboard.

I wish I was joking.

I rarely get sick, but then again we're seven people in one office and only one have kids ( kids makes a difference ). Mentally it's different story. I can't begin to count the number of days where I get home stressed out due to the noise of my co-workers and people going in an out of the room to talk to one of my colleagues.

Maybe I'm just special, but for me to completely focus and do my best work, I need an almost eerie silence. That's doesn't mix well with co-workers talking on the phone or a radio playing.

Open offices have been known to be a bad idea since Peopleware, but they are just so cheap to build.

However, on-the-desk quants and IT are genuinely respected for their sacrifice. Sure, they have to be highly available from 9:20 to 4:10, but the rest of the time is completely their own (usually for research; they tend to work 11-hour days not because anyone is making them, but because they love the work). They're paid very well for that intense 7 hours, and no one would subject them to the humiliation of "Agile" micromanagement. Quants have traders come by to ask about trading strategies at high levels, but they don't deal with PMs and "story points" and arguments about whether what they worked on over the past week was "in the backlog" or not. Quants have something much closer to an open allocation environment than most software engineers, and if they can't hack the stress (and not everyone can, especially for years on end) of being on the desk, they're usually moved to off-the-desk roles and the change isn't stigmatized.

(Some will come in and say that quants are second-class citizens in hedge funds and, if one looks at 95th-percentile compensation, that appears to be true. Quants hit a ceiling around $500k-1.5M, which is 1% of what the best traders make, but they're respected. On the other hand, non-managing programmers are third-class citizens in most Valley startups, and they aren't making any money either.)

Open-plan offices make sense on trading desks, just as "Agile" makes sense for a small consulting firm on the make-or-break project that'll take it into the big leagues (under which it's reasonable to ask the tech staff to truly "sprint", because delivering the project will result in a quantum leap in client relations, quality of work, and compensation). The problem is that management tends to take these processes that conditionally result in high performance (for a short while) and attempt to implement the costly, negative and painful aspects (e.g. open-plan offices and Scrum) while failing to deliver the upside (e.g. quant-level bonuses, genuine equity rather than 0.05% bullshit) that makes talented people willing to tolerate the pain.