I'm sure I'd love to have a private office but just how feasible is that? My current company has 18 full-time "knowledge workers", where in the world is a startup going to find them all private offices?
I'd really love to know what the alternative is that we're all missing out on? I've worked in cubical farms, bullpens and open-plan offices and none of them are ideal but headphones, IM and established boundaries mean I can work in peace when I want to.
I believe Joel Spoelsky (I think) had something different too, where it wasn't a real private office with a huge space and thick walls but something with thinner walls that let light in but were opaque
I'm sure you can probably also work with a local university that has an industrial design program. Maybe some of their students can design cheap portable structures that are easy to assemble, cheap to build, aesthetically pleasing, and yet offers a decent amount of both auditory and visual privacy?
The cynic in me thinks that, in most places, it would be like the Better Off Ted episode where the bosses decided it was too risky to let people "just do whatever the hell they wanted", but they could express their individuality through one of four preselected and inoffensive themes: Green Bay Packers, cats, space, and race cars.
I think people who have the problem of open work spaces wouldn't mind something as uniform and boring as a cubicle or a near equivalent since it's seen as a lesser evil.
Going from an open office plan to individual offices increases the square footage per employee by about 40. This is only about $4,000 a year per employee (in a really expensive office space market), and makes a huge difference in that employee's productivity.
Consider it part of their compensation. After all, you'd not hesitate buying them a $4,000 computer setup to do their work, why is there so much hesitation on offices?
Split them into 3 separate offices with 6 people a piece.
I don't think the argument is that every worker needs their own personal office but clumping an entire company's worth of staff into one big room isn't an effective place to do work.
This, definitely. The team I'm on needs a shared lab space where we have a guaranteed area to set equipment up and collaborate during integration. Instead we're spread across the whole office, and there's never enough space in the shared lab so some of us have to do noisy things in cubicles.
My first software developer job was working in a converted house where each large room had about 10 people in it. Each room was usually split up so that you had about 2 or 3 people grouped together, depending on the project.
Overall it was a very good layout. Out of all the places I've worked at, it comes in second to working at home (which I now do exclusively). It seems to be a good compromise between open-plan and giving each person their own office.
I'd really love to know what the alternative is that we're all missing out on? I've worked in cubical farms, bullpens and open-plan offices and none of them are ideal but headphones, IM and established boundaries mean I can work in peace when I want to.