Comment by jasode
3 days ago
>What amazes me about this phenomenon and so many others is just how long the executive class are willing to stick with a counterproductive trend. RTO, open offices,
The issue is that executives and managers don't see it as counterproductive because there's no compelling business evidence out there to change their mind.
Instead, here's what people actually see...
Microsoft of 1990s brags about their programmers having real offices with a door. But the later Google startup with "counterproductive" open offices beats them on a search engine and mobile phone. Microsoft's newer campuses are now open office.
Fog Creek Trello had blogs with photographs of their offices for the developers explaining all the great benefits... but they also stumble and eventually get acquired by the open-office Atlassian.
Where are all the business cases of the closed-office-with-doors beating out the unproductive-distraction-chaos-open-offices?!? Can't think of one? There lies your problem.
The person who wrote this thread's article, Maria Konnikova -- is a journalist and book author -- and not a tech CEO who bet her company's productivity on a running a dev shop with private offices. That is why executives don't listen to her and are not swayed by articles like this.
If we want to get rid of open offices, it has to be done with real businesses and not magazine articles.
Microsoft was tearing apart competitors (many of whom used cubicles for the lack of open landscape trend then) for good first couple decades. Reason they were sidelined by GOOG is being oblivious to the Web. Which is honestly more a leadership problem than office space problem.
Google fooled everyone. We all thought the bean bag chairs and foosball tables and 5-gallon pails of M&Ms caused massive surges in creativity and productivity. In reality, it was a firehose of advertising money that paid for it all.
This just reinforces that most business leaders follow what the lucky top end does and don't actually have anything else to contribute. It sounds like ample evidence to get rid of most of them, or at least move their pay/bonuses lower.
> But the later Google startup with "counterproductive" open offices
Following your own logic Google execs would have surely read "compelling business evidence" available at that time, and implemented real offices
GP isn't saying that there is evidence that open offices work. GP is saying that execs want such evidence. Way back when Google was young its execs thought outside the box, so it's no surprise that they didn't copy what MSFT was doing.
Wait, so now there are thinking-outside-the-box-execs who don’t need any evidence, and regular-gimme-evidence-execs who do?
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