The inexplicable rise of open floor plans in tech companies

The inexplicable rise of open floor plans in tech companies
nathanmarz.com

For what it's worth: assuming white-collar employees, the multiplier is typically 50% to 100% depending on your location and how generous you are with perks, rather than 20%. If you only have $120k available in the budget to hire someone, don't offer a salary higher than $80k, or you're going to have a very unfun meeting with your accountant saying "OK, would you prefer I took the money from somewhere else in the business, or do you want to go to prison for not paying our portion of the payroll taxes?"

There exist many folks who have more experience with San Francisco hiring than I have, but the word on the street for e.g. funded startups trying to pay market salaries is that you should be budgeting $15k~$20k a month to increase your team size by one.

I like to get out for several hours almost every day, though. I head to either Krankies Coffee or Camino Bakery in Winston Salem, and both venues have: a lot of people talking about family, studies, work, business, gossip; the espresso machine; music; and at Krankies the coffee-roasting machine. * Undifferentiated noise actually helps a lot! * I find the background din soothing and conducive to designing and coding. The one thing that's annoying is the occasional person who insists on carrying on their half of a conference call very loudly, but I don't see that much.

I've had pretty good experiences with open floor plans in companies too. They've never been the row-upon-row of adjacent tables depicted in the post, but close enough see/hear everything that's going on. In the open environment, a lot of the noise will probably be discussions about coding/design matters on other projects, or general office hijinx. There are downsides to that, but there's a lot of benefit too. You don't need to wait till the water cooler to see some matter needs discussion.

I can see how both the open floor plan and coffee shop environment will be distracting for some. I always hated libraries as a student, and always did my best work in non-quiet environments.

(I miss having coworkers just five steps over -- they're now 2700 and 8000 miles away.)

Email clients, chat clients, Social media, rapid fire short form articles, distraction wherever you look; these all contribute to a reduced attention span.

I do think it's possible to change the habit, but that requires mindfulness to engage in less context switching activities. That's really, really hard.