The problem is, good office space is expensive. Just as it's cheaper to eat mass-market junk than to shop for organic food, it's cheaper to pack your employees into veal-fattening pens, turn on the bad fluorescent lighting, and imagine that having everyone together in one place will result in magical "teamwork" synergy that makes up for the pain.
I have a theory that good office space is an adaptive luxury afforded only to small companies: just as large and small animals have to develop special anatomical features to overcome the surface-area/volume ratio problem, large companies have to make sacrifices that accommodate for their size.
Even Microsoft and Google have adopted cube-farm mentalities as they've grown, and presumably, they know something about programmer happiness...
There are a lot of cheap office spaces that are great to work in. The trouble is, they tend to be small.
For example, I suspect Yahoo was paying more per square foot for the grim cube farm we moved to after getting bought than Viaweb was for our cheery offices on the top floor of a triple-decker in Harvard Sq.
I think the problem with big company offices is that the office space available in large quantities tends to be grim. It seems like you have to pay a fortune to make office space both pleasant and large.
The problem may not be impossible to solve, though. I doubt many big companies have tried to make offices that were large, pleasant, and cheap. There might be solutions if someone looked for them.
I agree on that, but also sometimes I find myself much more productive when I work from home. There is a lot less distraction, no interruptions, quiter, can play my favorite music in the background, -- very important things to productivity when you are coding.
But I also find that when I am in office, I can do things faster, if it is something when there are other people involved. I can go to their desk and discuss about how to resolve a particular issue, maybe even draw things on a whiteboard. It helps a lot.
So, Ideally I would like to come to work only 2-3 days a week, and work from home the rest. But unfortunately my manager would probably feel uneasy about it, as he is not a former engineer, so he just wont understand. So giving him these arguments wont be enough. There have to be some direct and measurable economic benefits for a company to allow telecomuting en masse.
Yeah I've been doing some freelance work remotely for the last 7 months while being a student full time, and I find myself wasting a lot of time just talking of messenger with other people who're like me. Communicating over the internet takes up half of my work time(or close to that), what a waste!
Of course. That's where the "good enough manager" comes in. There's a time to be together and a time to be alone. Good management and scheduling can make this work beautifully.
I'm currently going through some real problems with workspace quality at the office. We're growing too quickly, and I think given the real estate market and general state of the economy, corporate level management is a little hesitant to start going after new office space.
I see things like this and really believe them, but wow, I wish I could just buy a good workspace in a box, bring it in, and set it up like a tent in the middle of the loud open office.
I have a theory that good office space is an adaptive luxury afforded only to small companies: just as large and small animals have to develop special anatomical features to overcome the surface-area/volume ratio problem, large companies have to make sacrifices that accommodate for their size.
Even Microsoft and Google have adopted cube-farm mentalities as they've grown, and presumably, they know something about programmer happiness...