I don’t buy the argument that bean counters are unable to account for vaguer aspects of productivity loss. For one, bigger corporations invest huge amounts of money into productivity research and take the topic very seriously. They aren’t unsophisticated or naive and corporations will really study the internal incentives they create for cost cutting, to make sure they aren’t mistakenly cutting costs that actually lead to other, unanticipated costs. Sure, bureaucracy makes this imperfect, and some companies are worse than others, but it wouldn’t explain 80% or more of all companies shifting to known productivity-destroying office spaces.
Plus, it’s widely and popularly disputed that open plans are actually cheaper, e.g. even in pop articles like this:
I’ve also seen sources claiming that an open plan developer is less than 9% cheaper in real estate terms than a private office developer, without any consideration about interruptions, distractions, communicable disease, lower morale, changed vacation or sick time habits, etc.
9% might sound like a lot of savings on a naive glance, but when these employees are costing you $150K of wages and a bunch more in overhead & benefits, you would be hugely sensitive to big, publicly discussed sources of productivity reduction, because it’s immediately obvious, especially to corporate finance, that saving 9% on floor space means nothing if you’re losing 15% of labor ouput from distractions, 5% from increased sickness or vacation habits, 2% from widely reported morale issues, etc.
I think really the issues are much more status driven, seeking to force flow-requiring knowledge work into a commodity, to push down the age and wages of employees.
And part is cosmetic. If you think of a start-up itself as a product, and the investors as the user, and the VCs as the company, then VCs optimize cosmetic attractiveness to create start-ups they can sell for as little substance as possible.
So if grand visions of hoodie-clad developers sipping craft coffee in an exposed brick, glass, ductwork open plan hell will convince the dimwitted actor or retired athlete to invest on visions of the next unicorn, then why would they care about worker productivity?
The whole point is credential and cosmetics to lever up the known-to-be-unrealistic valuation to foster an inflated IPO or acquisition, and it’s not a function of actual economic product of employees.
Then after some unicorns hammer this strategy, everyone else (including big corps trying yo look hip) just start cargo-cult copying it.
My only remaining surprise is at how long this open plan bubble can persist before people realize these companies are not about any type of productivity.
> Plus, it’s widely and popularly disputed that open plans are actually cheaper, e.g. even in pop articles like this:
It is now, but when did that start?
I vaguely recall when it was still actually controversial (perhaps due to lack of data), but that may have been as long as 10 years ago. I also recall when open plan wasn't even a thing and the discussion was merely cubicles vs. hard walls.
> My only remaining surprise is at how long this open plan bubble can persist before people realize these companies are not about any type of productivity.
If I may be flippant for a moment, I'm shocked.. shocked!.. That there is wastefulness going on this VC-fueled establishment.
I'm certainly less surprised, as I believe productivity (and its less sexy cousins efficiency and profit) have long been disregarded as being far less important than growth, ever since the dot-com boom, in the world of (many, if not most) VC-driven startups.
What startles me is just how much VC money is flowing directly up to Amazon via AWS (sometimes actually encouraged by the VCs themselves), as that smells more like inflation of a bubble than merely paying programmers to be distracted.
For me personally, I derive a lot of self-identity from my own productivity, and end up caring about my work and treating it like a craft.
I wish I could turn this off and just accept better paying jobs that embed me in a distraction-filled room where nobody really cares about my productivity so long as I superficially appear to try hard and evangelize the company line.
But I just can't. I am too intrinsically quixotic. For me, and the I guess dying breed of people like me, the side effect of the VC behavior you mention is like death by a thousand cuts.
I'm not sure we're so much a dying breed as that we were always a small minority to begin with.
We just have to hold out hope for the even rarer manager that recognizes such objective value and can transform it into subjective value to sell up the chain.
Not all open spaces are created equal. If a bunch of the square footage is allocated to non-work purposes (entertainment, artwork, airy high ceilings, food, staff services, etc) then reducing cost is NOT the primary goal. But in most IT shops, where cost cutting by management through reducing IT's physical footprint is seen as a major win to trimming the budget (wasted) on IT, the savings isn't a mere 9% but more like 75%.
For example, I work at Merck & Co, where management has decided not only to move all of IT into much smaller open spaces, but at my site, they've decided that only 200 chairs are now needed to house the 600 staff. Thus the intended savings due to downspacing is FAR greater than 9%.
Since I can't believe Merck's management is unique in its enthusiasm for human bin packing, a small number like 9% likely applies only to startups in high rent districts where 'open space' truly is a design concept that implies more is sought than just physical space minimization.
But the producivity loss would be correspondingly gigantic in that case. For a big conglomerate like that, it seems more likely it is an IBM-style ageism strategy, to make the conditions so undignified and fundamentally unworkable for experienced adults that over time they quit and are replaced by young workers. The company is placing a wager on the idea that it does not need actual productivity, and benefits from warm bodies doing menial tasks with limited productivity.
It probably should be viewed as a direct statement that the company doesn’t value engineering talent, and experienced people should plan to leave unless they’re OK with this.
This seems more likely than the idea the company believes it’s somehow saving 75% on space with some open plan hot-desking approach without losing engineering productivity.
Maybe all that research you write about does not translate down to workers. Because the corporation around here don't seem to implement any of it and decisions don't seem to be much influenced by productivity considerations.
They are not result of complete stupidity either, but they seem to be result of price, how "representative" space is and similar down to earth considerations.
The research is only focused on the end result for workers. It does translate. Corporate managers just have different (often irrational) incentive schemes related to cosmetics, cargo-cult copying, value signalling, etc. And in some cases outright don't care about worker productivity (e.g. if they get paid just because a credentialed worker is associated with their firm, and not based on that worker's output.)
Plus, it’s widely and popularly disputed that open plans are actually cheaper, e.g. even in pop articles like this:
< https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/blog/hr/2016/... >
I’ve also seen sources claiming that an open plan developer is less than 9% cheaper in real estate terms than a private office developer, without any consideration about interruptions, distractions, communicable disease, lower morale, changed vacation or sick time habits, etc.
9% might sound like a lot of savings on a naive glance, but when these employees are costing you $150K of wages and a bunch more in overhead & benefits, you would be hugely sensitive to big, publicly discussed sources of productivity reduction, because it’s immediately obvious, especially to corporate finance, that saving 9% on floor space means nothing if you’re losing 15% of labor ouput from distractions, 5% from increased sickness or vacation habits, 2% from widely reported morale issues, etc.
I think really the issues are much more status driven, seeking to force flow-requiring knowledge work into a commodity, to push down the age and wages of employees.
And part is cosmetic. If you think of a start-up itself as a product, and the investors as the user, and the VCs as the company, then VCs optimize cosmetic attractiveness to create start-ups they can sell for as little substance as possible.
So if grand visions of hoodie-clad developers sipping craft coffee in an exposed brick, glass, ductwork open plan hell will convince the dimwitted actor or retired athlete to invest on visions of the next unicorn, then why would they care about worker productivity?
The whole point is credential and cosmetics to lever up the known-to-be-unrealistic valuation to foster an inflated IPO or acquisition, and it’s not a function of actual economic product of employees.
Then after some unicorns hammer this strategy, everyone else (including big corps trying yo look hip) just start cargo-cult copying it.
My only remaining surprise is at how long this open plan bubble can persist before people realize these companies are not about any type of productivity.