As I understand it though, open office is a trend. Your mechanism doesn't explain why there was ever a time without open offices. So what's changed to make office managers more penny-wise, or have there always been "open collaborative offices" just under a different name?
I take it you've never seen a newspaper "bullpen", or a clark's office. :) It comes down to class. Many professions that were once afforded private accommodation are now being downclassed. It's also easier to scale up and down by moving what are essentially picnic tables.
Indeed. Now only the very top management have the privilege of private offices. I've worked on a +400,000 sqft campus where only a handful of top managers had private offices. Generally, you have a private office only if you are important enough that you also have a personal secretary.
On the plus side, most modern office buildings are shoving the private offices toward the interior, with open offices around the perimeter having actual daylight. We can thank the USGBC and LEED certification for a lot of that.
You'd have trouble designing a more depressing environment than an open office in a building interior with fluorescent troffers if you tried. Good riddance.
As i understand it, open offices were the norm. I knew paralegals who worked in open offices before it hit tech offices. It also used to be that way in most offices before cubicles became commonplace (watch movies from the 40s or 50s which have offices as backdrops)
I think what happened is that as the work done in offices gained more value people who worked in offices were convinced that having your own space was more prestigious (by furniture companies, office space companies, etc.) so it became normal to move away from shared cattle pens.
Now shared space is being sold as collaborative so as to insinuate anyone not on board with the concept must be an uncollaborative sort of fellow.
I recall working in a high priced tower a place which made money, some people got proper offices, but most people got three foot beautiful mahogany desks side by side. Expensive desks but floor space was even more expensive.
The trend in businesses across the country isn't from private office to open offices. It's from cubicals to open office. Cublicals don't really predate the big white collar office, but they've been around since the 1960s. Before then offices tended to be smaller. But they had bullpens then too.
People hated cublicals because they imagined the alternative was a private office. Instead the alternative is no real private space at all. People started believing cublicals are the worst of both worlds. Not as private as an office, but still limits community and collaboration.
In the media, cublical farms were considered at best a joke and at worst the tyranny of the modern workplace.
What is pushing the trend further is insane real estate prices. Now even executives and high value employees (lawyers, management, etc) are getting pressured to give up offices.
My guess is that the big issue at play here is land price and zoning issues in the big cities where companies need to be headquartered to attract top talent. It's hard to build new buildings, and it's hard to build them tall. Building out in the suburbs is no longer seen as attractive. So, the solution is to maximize the space available while providing other perks like catered lunches and snacks etc.
I'm pretty certain a reasonable fraction of "top talent" will at least consider a remote opportunity if you don't want to set up an office somewhere expensive.
Open offices went away with the clerical staff. In the 90s, a professional job like IT would be in cubes or shared offices. Real offices don't make sense financially, mostly for tax reasons.
What changed is that IT operations became a bigger thing, and we started needing more programmers. The traditional cubicle created the illusion of a private space, but made IT ops hard because you couldn't see anybody.
Now open offices are back. Wifi is displacing many of the managed cabling requirements, and people are into the feeling of "energy" that comes with a newsroom like environment.
If you look around you and see a big open room of people futzing around with headphones -- take the hint. You're the clerk of the 2010's.
> If you look around you and see a big open room of people futzing around with headphones -- take the hint. You're the clerk of the 2010's.
Good point.
Whenever this topic comes up I wonder why would a business risk de-valuing one of its biggest investments (payroll) by creating a potentially productivity killing environment. But if programming is now considered a cost centre (like clerks were in their day), I wonder what would be considered the profit centre of a software company?
Many large businesses don't seem to optimise globally. Perhaps the real estate or facilities part of the business sets itself a target to reduce costs by 20%, they execute the plan and at end of year point out their savings and managers get a bonus.
Why should they care if it means that the software devs in a completely different part of the business are now less productive? Most large organisations are so dysfunctional that the negatively impacted parts of the business can't fight back against bean counters from elsewhere.
This is playing out at my work right now with virtual desktops being imposed on all developers, even though it means that projects that used to take 1 min to compile now often take 15 mins to compile. Crazy.
My two cents is that as time moves on we have a need to show growth and it simply isn't easy to do so once you have picked tie low hanging fruits. Thus, we try to look for ways to increase revenue and cut costs that were previously ignored as the cost of doing business. This isn't necessarily a bad thing.
For example, a company I used to work at sold its building and rented (leased?) only three floors and the basement from the new owners. This injected cash into the company. I don't know what the slightly smaller cubicles cost the company in terms of employee productivity. How do we quantify such things?
The next place I worked (steel industry) at had my cubicle which was at least four times as big as that place before but I'm confident my productivity didn't go up four times because of it.
I'll agree with gp though. It is reprehensible to defend open floor plans as anything other than a cost cutting measure.
> The next place I worked (steel industry) at had my cubicle which was at least four times as big as that place before but I'm confident my productivity didn't go up four times because of it.
The thing is it doesn't have to quadruple in order to justify the extra real-estate cost because your monthly salary is (probably) much higher than the monthly rent on your desk space.
If you're paid $120k (10k/month) and rent is $5/sq-ft per month [1]; going from 36 sq-ft of space for your desk (small) to 144 sq-ft of space (4x as much) will cost $540/month. Meanwhile even a 10% productivity decrease would cost ~$1k per month.
Edit: Thinking more about it, the productivity loss is even worse than above. You might be paid $120k/year, but the company expects to extract some multiple of this number in value from the work you do (I've heard target numbers like $500k/year) - so a 10% decrease in productivity is more like $4k/month in lost value.
That's the thing though, the 10% number is fuzzy. I agree there's definitely a productivity boost from having a private office, but it's hard to quantify. The smaller square footage and lower lease payments are easy to quantify. If productivity expectations are set based an open office, then the increase with the more expensive private offices is unknown.
Additionally, high overhead increases risk. Maximum productivity is only important as long as you have more work than there are employees to do it. What if there's a downturn (as in 2008)? Now you're locked into an expensive lease and no longer have the revenue to support it. The company with lower overhead can hold out longer until things turn around. Employees can be laid off. Getting out of a lease or selling a building are harder.
