Comment by SketchySeaBeast
6 years ago
I come to work to work - it's not for the fun perks - the perk is being paid. That's the one perk that keeps me working. Do I think having "fun" takes away from that work? No. But I don't particularly care - I'm a professional, doing professional work, and if I could get 4 walls and silence, I'd happily light the ice cream machine on fire myself. If you want to collaborate, sure, do that - go to a meeting room, or meet in your own pod, and if you really want that open office charm, go work in the lunch room.
FAANG style employees get the best salaries in the world AND the best perks in the world. What exactly is the tradeoff here, if salaries is all you care about? Also, if all companies in the bay area moved to giving each employee an office, where do you think that money is coming from? It will cause depression in salaries.
Open offices work in favor of your salary. And despite the weekly posts on HN about open offices, hardly any employee uses it as a bargaining chip. Microsoft has open offices, and yet not once I have heard anyone on HN saying they would chose MS because of that.
> I am glad that open offices let companies give nice perks to employees even in extremely expensive real-estate markets like the valley. I would rather have a well-equipped onsite gym and a roomy cafeteria and a free ice-cream shop than that space being filled with 100 'offices'.
You're saying companies trade out having open offices for perks. I'm saying I don't care about those perks, and would rather have less perks and 4 walls.
It feels like we're being astroturfed by SV recruiters. It blows my mind when I see people playing ping pong, pool, and arcade games at work. Why would anyone spend an hour or more playing games in the office rather than just getting their work done and leaving to spend time with family, friends, pets, or hobbies?
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>...Open offices work in favor of your salary.
That is not how it works with highly profitable companies like FB, The extra cost to give people some privacy and allow them to less distracted is a tiny percent of the costs to pay the employee salaries + benefits over time. This is not a tradeoff. (Indeed, since people have been shown to be less productive in a distracted environment, employee salaries might be less than what they would be than if they were more productive.)
> What exactly is the tradeoff here, if salaries is all you care about?
All the non-FAANG companies copy the trend of open offices (it's a cargo cult), so if you want to look at it from an utilitarian perspective, more people are actually worse off.