I've never understood the price issue. Class A in midtown Manhattan is $80 per square foot. That's $8,000 per year for a developer that probably makes well over six figures. Put two in an office that's only $4,000 per year.<p>I <i>really</i> don't buy it considering how much money companies spend on office space. Like why he hell would you have offices in Greenwich Village (<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-new-york-office-tour-2016-11" rel="nofollow">http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-new-york-office-tour...</a>) instead of say FiDi. It's not only be much cheaper, but an easier commute to places peopled live, like Brooklyn.
It's been over a decade since I had so much as a semi-private office (shared with just one quiet teammate) so I have to say the death of the open office is exaggerated. And all of their workarounds assume a laptop could ever substitute for a desktop with an ergonomic keyboard and a large screen.<p>It's amazing that the escalating competition in pay and perks never seem to include space to get into the zone.
<i>No designated desks.</i><p>Please please please no. Having "personal" space at the office is just as important as having "quiet" space. I do not want to feel like a drifter, a student in the library, or a tenant in a co-working space, unless I am actually one of those things.
> No designated desks<p>I hate hot desking. I know it's very subjective but when I come into an office for eight hours a day, five days a week, I like to personalise my workspace. I don't drive, I take public transport and walk, and hate carting my laptop and charger around with me. I want my own space, with meeting rooms and collaboration spaces for when I need those things.<p>I may be alone in saying so, but I'd happily take a modest drop in pay for a private office.
I wish someone who works at Pixar could comment in this thread. They've had private offices ever since the steve jobs building, and often you hear that private, customized offices is one of the things that they love about their workplace.<p>The Steve Jobs building is designed to increase chance of random encounters between people to stimulate collaboration, but these encounters happen in the hallways and the designated collaborative spaces, rather than in people's private offices.<p>Some pictures: <a href="https://officesnapshots.com/2007/07/16/pixar-hq/" rel="nofollow">https://officesnapshots.com/2007/07/16/pixar-hq/</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CX9OV43o4Ac" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CX9OV43o4Ac</a><p>Edit: Private offices were first introduced since the Steve Jobs building
<i>And with office space at a premium, private offices for everyone isn’t a realistic alternative, nor is it ideal.</i><p>I disagree. Privacy pods make me claustrophobic, and since I have some ear issues, noise canceling headphones are painful. Offices are only unaffordable if you don’t properly account for the cost of distracted developers.<p>I do agree proper meeting rooms are needed also.
<p><pre><code> Perhaps the most powerful and popular trend in the
move away from open offices is an increased number
of small private spaces
</code></pre>
My company upgraded our offices last year and "privacy pods + informal open spaces" has been a huge success. I don't have any hardcore productivity metrics but the reaction among our developers, including me, has been unanimously favorable.<p>Although, it must be said, we still prefer to work from home quite a bit. This is mostly due to our large number of remote employees in other countries. If I am working with remote people I don't typically commute to the office.
(Disclaimer: I used to work at Dropbox)<p>I'm not a fan of a binary "open office or not" distinction: both can be done well. Dropbox's old office was the best open office I've worked in. Large desks, low employee per sq. ft. density, sound-absorbing foam on the (high) ceilings, teams spaced relatively far apart. The new Dropbox office was a slight regression. Smaller desks, slightly higher employee density, no sound-absorbing material. But it was still mostly fine.<p>IMVU's open offices back in 2012 or so sucked. Employees were packed together to the point that it was sometimes even hard to walk from point A to point B.<p>I feel like the most important office quality metrics are employee density and how well sound carries.<p>Whether or not there are useful collaboration surfaces matters too: cubicle walls are great for stickies and note cards. But that's solvable with easy access to dry-erase walls or dry-erase boards on wheels.
For fun, let's slippery slope this trend into the setting for a story.<p><i>At some point the workplace will just end up an unlivable hellscape where people have to walk to work 20 miles from their triple bunked dorms, and then stand inches from each other for 16 hour double shifts wearing nothing but VR goggles and chord boards. The 12th floor walkup, non-temperature controlled "office" warehouse will smell like fear and sweaty humanity, the only "perk" will be the government mandated yearly flea and louse spray that will rain down from the ceiling and the monthly cleaning of the shared feeding tubes.<p>During enforced sleeping periods, employees will spend precious sleep time sending tap-code (error corrected of course) to each other the workings of a conspiracy wherein they'll demand 60cmx30cm standing desks, a 12" CRT monitor, 12 hour shifts and 1 day off of work a quarter and a decent burial instead of being shoved off into a nameless mass grave.</i><p>I call this book, Apathy Shrugged
As long as an office is considered a status symbol by management, then the open plan environment will stay. In a general sense, offices for any reason related to productivity is a non-starter today (has been so for a number of decades).<p>Offices are considered a reward for climbing the hierarchy not for actual work by the plebs (you know, those who would actually need it or benefit from it for work purposes).<p>And certainly, if the senior bods don't have offices then the junior workers will never get them.
> No designated desks<p>If the day comes that my $DAYJOB employer goes this route, that's the exact day I quit. Hot desking is some of the most idiotic, brain-dead stupid shit I can imagine. I have desk drawers for a reason... so I don't have to lug around every single item I use at my desk, everywhere I go. Not to mention the books on my desk, which I am <i>definitely</i> not hauling back and forth every day.
I hope so.<p>I didn't work in in one, but worked in a cubicle as an intern, then in an office with 3 other people focusing on the same project, then in my own office with a door, now at home. But I can only imagine the sensory distraction and just can't see why anyone thought it was a good idea for software development.<p>Sure I can see the photo-op image appeal for PR purposes "Oh look at our dynamic startup, working in an exposed brick re-purposed warehouse. So much collaboration, all the time, with everyone...". But then after the picture is taken everyone should have the option to grab an office or an isolated area to do actual work, or separate white-boarding conference room if they are talking or designing something".<p>I also find it interesting that these large tech companies at the bleeding edge of technology like Amazon, Google, Facebook are selling digital connectivity (ads, social connections, office suites, email, video chat, messengers, cloud infrastructure) -- and still require their employees to be physically present in the same building to do work.<p>Wonder if remote work in the next revolution in how our economy works. The more things are digitized, hopefully the less we'll be tied to a physical tech hub area. That could have pretty large effects on real estate, traffic, taxes, how developed various areas get (smaller towns might see some development) etc.
What a stupid clickbait headline. Obviously it's not dead. Research that shows it's terrible has been around longer than open offices have been popular. If management cared about the evidence they wouldn't have done it in the first place.<p>Let me fix their conclusion with the cheapest, most employee friendly way to solve the problem.<p>> Luckily, the solution is fairly simple— <i>allow everyone to work remote.</i>
You know what are great? Cubes. Cubes are great.<p>Arrange them in pods of 6-8 with one common entrance to the space and put a dev team in one (and windows at the end, ideally).<p>Easy as that.
No hot desking. please.<p>the people pushing hotdesking seem to be manager types that spend their days talking to various groups of people.<p>but it fails completely for some dev types. oh sure you can churn out some css while balancing your laptop on the edge of a table at the local cafe but just try that with a desktop workstation plugged into various bits of hardware while doing hour+ compiles.
Funny, the quoted Architecture Firm in the article is Gensler, who designed my last company's office space. Which included 6 rows of desks[1], each row seating 8 people with no separation left and right, and only a low divider between the person in front of you. And they designed it in 2015, 3 years after the PDF the quote was taken from was published. Sounds like even they aren't buying into the "open offices are dead" narrative.<p>[1]<a href="https://www.google.com/maps/uv?hl=en&pb=!1s0x89c803629c02a719:0x855ed517a092a7c8!2m22!2m2!1i80!2i80!3m1!2i20!16m16!1b1!2m2!1m1!1e1!2m2!1m1!1e3!2m2!1m1!1e5!2m2!1m1!1e4!2m2!1m1!1e6!3m1!7e115!4s/maps/place/planit%2Bagency/@39.2735008,-76.6026092,3a,75y,197.87h,90t/data%3D*213m4*211e1*213m2*211sXmvPHaq4b4kAAAQ2tADHwQ*212e0*214m2*213m1*211s0x89c803629c02a719:0x855ed517a092a7c8!5splanit+agency+-+Google+Search&imagekey=!1e2!2sXmvPHaq4b4kAAAQ2tADHwQ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjQxo3XxOjVAhWDyoMKHafbAnYQoB8IfzAM" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/maps/uv?hl=en&pb=!1s0x89c803629c02a71...</a>
Unrealistic suggestions for a dev with 2+ monitors or a desktop. Managers might be able to leverage focus rooms because they are more mobile, but average devs are not.<p>Often it's the average manager who has time to talk and likes to talk loud, so a more reasonable middle ground is to avoid cross-functional rooms/clusters.
How open is Dropbox to remote work? A lot of places of work "allow" or "tolerate it," but it feels hard to use this working mode for a consistent period. Working from home often has the same stigma as unlimited vacation days--you can do it, but it's often frowned upon...
The open office layout won't be dead in the U.S. until tax laws offer accelerated depreciation for building office walls. Right now the depreciation schedule for commercial building construction is something like 39 years, meaning that expenses incurred this year to renovate an office won't be recouped for almost four decades. Meanwhile, cubicles are considered furniture, which has a depreciation schedule of 7 years. (Note: I didn't look up the actual numbers, so I might be off a little.)<p>If companies got the same tax benefits for building walls that they do for buying cubicles, we'd see more walls, since everyone knows they're better for productivity and office harmony.
As far as I am concerned the Office is dead, open or not in the tech field. I mean an office which you travel to, and work all day. No way am I going back to that for less than another 70k a year on top. It isn't 1930.
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.
I dont think we'll ever get private office spaces back. I personally like the openness of the open-plan office, but struggle with the noise.<p>What would help enormously though would just be full-high glass partitions between banks of desks - e.g. put each group of 4+4 desks inside a glass "fish tank" so that noise does not propagate as easily outside of that group, no need for doors although that would be a bonus.<p>You'd not need to radically alter the layout of the offices too much - just a thin sheet of toughened/safety/whatever glass between the banks. Bonus points for making it modular so that the tanks can be enlarged to put 4 banks in one batch rather than just 2 etc. Surely this sort of thing would not consume too much space/money?<p>I would be concerned about echos within these glass-walled partitions, but then on the other hand I've never struggled with echos in the glass-walled meeting rooms so I guess it might be ok.
> The open office layout is meant to foster an egalitarian work environment that inspires creativity and spontaneous collaboration among colleagues.<p>Wait what? I thought that collaboration was the minor benefit to what is otherwise just a way of making more people fit in less space.<p>The biggest actual benefit of the open office is that it can be situated in a much better location than an office where developers have private rooms. Ask 10 developers whether they want private offices (or at least not large shared spaces) and they'll probably say yes.<p>But ask the same 10 developers in an office in a nice location in SF, London, Berlin, Stockholm... whether they'd want private offices at the expense of ending up in an office park where the rent would be the same for the larger office - and they probably don't.
I wish.<p>I'm currently working on a 1 year old subsidiary that tries very hard to be modern (Spotify organisation, brand new offices…), and as part of that modernity went full Open Plan™.<p>It's not a full blown boiler room, but we do have zero privacy and a good deal of noise.
I wonder why so few are talking about the in-between. There seems to be only open offices or everyone has their private room. The first is my personal nightmare, the second is very expensive and hinders quick collaboration with colleagues.<p>At my workplace we have a mix of both. We have project rooms (my current one has 6 people) where people are working on the same or similar things. This keeps the noise and visual distractions to a minimum (we have small cubicle-like walls attached to our desks that rise with the desk if you raise it up) while still allowing us to ask the quick question or look at things together if required (of course you need to limit that so that you don't bug them all the time). In my experience this is the best compromise if you are working in a project with a few other people.<p>The removal of personal desks would be terrible IMO. Many people have said they just like having a desk, but I also have notepads, things attached to the desk "walls", stuff for fidgeting when I'm thinking, 2 monitors attached to my laptop, keyboard, mouse, headphones... I can take my laptop to go sit wherever else, but why would I? I would have to carry around so much stuff or forgo these productivity tools I have. Sometimes I do write with just my laptop in the common areas somewhere, but it's only for a short while. Sure, you could put standardised desks everywhere with the same setup, but then it would probably not match _my_ preferences anymore and thus would be worse for my working.
<i>> Luckily, the solution is fairly simple—design offices with a variety of areas to suit different kinds of work</i><p>Putting aside the expense of the space for this -- let's just say it's all worth it if you're building a unicorn company and want maximum productivity on both the individual and team level.<p>My question is, what's the best way to implement the equipment side of things? It's also really important, I imagine, to offer the best computing equipment, for engineers and designers in particular. Does this "variety of areas" and "no designated desks" approach force us to use laptops and external monitors? Do we not get to use those beautiful 5K iMacs or a souped-up tower? Do you get one and <i>also</i> have a laptop??<p>Believe it or not this is my main concern. I am ok with designating zones that are "library rules" for focus even if they are not full offices, alongside chattier collaborative areas, a more social cross-team cafe space, etc. It's moving equipment among them I'm worried about -- you can't stick to library rules if you need to cluster around someone's computer to do a code review.
I doubt it. Although I think a quiet private office is the best environment for those times when you need hours of uninterrupted concentration, other changes make open offices tolerable. My 4k screen occupies almost all of my field of view. I like ambient music for the coding trance.<p>Instead I predict the death of the office. Remote work in dispersed co-working spaces is even more cost-efficient than an open office.
Last time I switched jobs, I moved from a 3-person office (engineering managers) to a hot-desking "culture" (consulting & sales) where we all sit around large tables (power sockets only, all wireless).<p>Everyone spends time with customers, so hot-desking makes complete sense (and we have a mix of differently sized glass cubes for solo work and meetings, with extra monitors and conferencing gear).<p>As a direct result, I now do most of my actual work at home, keep in touch via Skype, and go to the office only for internal meetings. It's completely impossible to do any sort of focus work in an open plan office.<p>The upside of being able to work anywhere, anyhow is, however, completely offset by office politics. You have to literally waste a couple of days a week for the sake of face time and trying to herd things through a miasma of constant interruptions and overly excited interactions (everyone is low on time and concentration, so conversations are hurried and often unfocused).<p>(Edit: typos)
I wish it was. Since our management decided to test the open office/hot desk layout, we mostly deal with docking station issues non-stop.<p>Most of our equipment is Dell, and those docking station connectors seems to be even more fragile now. I guess (and hope) this will get better when all our laptops will support USB-C docking station..
I think it depends a lot on the culture of the organization. Currently my team is highly distributed and my local colleages only meet in person in the office about twice a week, with the support from the very top of our BU. In our case, I feel that having my own space that sits empty 5 days out of 7 is highly wasteful. Currently my own desk is spartan: 2 monitors and the necessary cables; that's it.<p>When working from home becomes the norm, I think change in the office setup is inevitable and I welcome that tradeoff. I would love a modern shared desk setup, as long as all of desks have good monitors to go with them. Heck, group them in pods of 4/8/12 desks and make them bookable just like conference rooms (but for a day).
It seems to me, inn Sydney, open offices are being used even more. If they are such shite, who is making the decisions? As far as I can see, from this thread, many others and talking to people, anecdotally, the most minor set of people actually like them.
Who is making the decisions? What will change this? Refusal, mutiny? I have been told, if I don't like open offices I would not be a suitable employee because everyone else does. In my current firm I went as far as organising the place for us to move. A mix of rooms, some large, some small. It rocks compared to the open office in the last place.
Being someone who's always worked in open offices (for almost ten years now), I can't even think of what an alternative would be. Single offices per developer, kinda like lawyers? It seems that would take up a chunk of space, and would be pretty much the same as working from home.<p>Honestly, I think open offices are mostly here to stay. Those who dislike it and want isolation, privacy, and less distractions, can always pick to work at home (I know I do multiple days a week).
I'll throw in my 2 cents and say I've worked in "open" floorplans I didn't mind--but these were always at on ghost-town-empty offices for companies that were living on investor life support in spaces that could have housed 3x more people without being crowded
I rented a private office in <i>Manhattan</i> for $900/month. i.e., <10% of my salary. This is a no-brainer... Why not just rent each individual engineer a private office? Why the need to own the office space? Company identity/"cult"ure?
>> Propst himself accused companies of manipulating his original idea into “hellholes.”<p>Ironic.<p>This so-called visionary had no idea his futuristic ideals would be twisted by the drive to increase profit by cutting corners in an economy where people are seen as milking cattle.
I am curious why this is on the dropbox blog, did they solve this in their own offices with the recommendations outlined? Maybe someone from that works there can chime in?
I would be ok with our current trends in office planning if there was a better work from home policy.<p>Let me work one or two days a week from home where I have a decent desktop setup.
All this talk reminds me of my father's drunken talk: real estate is the king - if you want to get rich be in real estate.<p>Sadly... it is true.<p>----<p>P.S. For readers who are a little slow, the point is that if office space is not a cost center then everybody would have an office.
> No designated desks<p>We had an office where they tried this as an experiment. Each desk was sit-stand, had one or two 24inch monitors, a chromebox + mouse + keyboard, plenty of wall sockets easily accessible at the top of the desk and powered-USB port for charging etc. People either plugged their laptop in, or just logged in on the chromebox and were away.<p>And it was awful.<p>* People started to have "their" desk where they "always" sit, and left things like coats on the chair, running shoes under the desk, folding bikes (you name it) at the desk. This had the effect of taking the desk "out of circulation" meaning when the "usual" occupier wasn't there for a day people still didn't use the desk, or someone did use it but the usual occupier came in late and someone else was there it was a super-awkward moment of either the first person packing up and moving elsewhere, or the usual occupant getting in a huff with someone in "their desk" and/or continually interrupting the other person when they come over to collect their notebook or headphones or something.<p>* There were less desks than people. 90% of the time this was fine as usually enough people were on vacation/at clients/on training etc. Occasionally though it meant there was no space and people roamed the office for 15 minutes before having to go and work from Starbucks (if they had brought their laptop with them)<p>* If you were at meetings or otherwise away from your desk, you would often come back to your desk to find that someone else was now sat at the desk you were sitting at before.<p>* Even if you found a desk, you were often not near your team. Cue constant "Where are you sitting?" instant messages and people wandering around trying to find each other.<p>* Desks often had missing cables and stuff - so even if you did get a desk sometimes it was on that one desk where the monitors dont work, or someone had taken the power cable, or the keyboard had a "sticky H key" or something. Because no one "owned" the desks, no one bothered to report the faults to the people managing the facilities and just moved to another desk or stole the cable/keyboard/mouse/whatever from another nearby desk.<p>* Engineers could not use desktops (since they would have to move them every day, and company policy is no source code stored on laptops) so the <i>computers</i> got given a fixed location, and the nomad engineers had to find a desk to remote desktop into the desktop each day. This is fine for short periods, but day-in, day-out 8+ hours a day looking at remote desktops leads to sea-sickness due to the small lag. So even if the receptionist or admins or spreadsheet jockeys could go and sit in the cool-zones for their work, the engineers were stuck at a dekstop because they need the monitors and stuff to do their job.<p>After about 9 months or so we moved to a different building due to growing out of the experimental building and went back to assigned-desks in an open plan office which was hugely improved.<p>Please, for anyone reading this, please please please do not instigate non-designated desks for your workers.<p>tl;dr - non-designed desks had all of the same problems as an open office, but with extra additional micro-stresses every day that really add up over time to make your working day a misery.
>> No designated desks<p>I don't know about anyone else, but for me that would tank the productivity even worse than the open plan.<p>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.<p>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 saw long back in a Microsoft job ad in some computer magazine that one of the perks they offered devs was "a door" or "a room with a door" :)<p>Some years later, I visited an MS development center in Hyderabad, and was invited to the offices of a few devs - they actually did have a decently large room each as their office, with enough space for more than one desk, many computers, space for many books, etc., and still some free space in the middle, plus a whiteboard each, etc.