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Comment by DonsDiscountGas | Hacker News Reader

IMHO the ideal situation would be for people to work in their own offices, with doors that closed, and short commutes. Easy to work distraction-free alone, easy to have group meetings and random chats.

But real estate costs have made this approach untenable, so something has to give.

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I don't know how much commercial real estate costs, but in the region around Twitter's HQ it's about $5-$6k for a 1000 square foot apartment

Assuming it's the same price per square foot for commercial space, that's less than $1000 a month for a 100 square foot office for each employee. Considering these employees are making more than 20x that, if offices could improve their productivity, it seems like it'd be well worthwhile

But since the cost of building those offices will be reflected in this quarter's earnings and destroy some executive bonuses, while the benefits won't be reflected in earnings for at least a full quarter and possibly longer, building individual workspaces is impossible.

Another way of looking at it: the market price for office space is based on each employee having a 4’ x 2’ desk with the same space again for a chair.

You are talking about increasing the per capita headcount sixfold from 16 sq ft to 100. That’s going to have a significant effect on real estate cost.

Yeah, but Silicon Valley tech companies are already pulling in $2M per employee per year.. if spending 0.5% of that on better offices increases that revenue by 10%, you can probably bet that they'll want to do it

Presumably the higher ups legitimately believe that the open office plans are better for the company, which fits with how insistent most of them are to get butts back in seats now despite almost everyone hating the commute and the office life

> easy to have group meetings and random chats.

I don't understand this argument. How is online chat not easy? With slack, I can fire off a question to any coworker instantly. I don't have to physically relocate myself to wherever they are in the office to ask it. And they can answer when it is appropriate for them, rather then be disturbed by my incursion into their space. If it's something that requires a conversation, then we schedule time to have a video chat or instantly transition to realtime video if convenient for both of us.

And how are group meetings not easy online? Online we can see / hear each other in near real time, we can type on the same document an see each other's edits in near real time, we can draw...I mean...What are people doing during group meetings that are difficult without physical presence?

> But real estate costs have made this approach untenable, so something has to give.

I need a citation here. Big tech was so large and profitable the last decade that thinking it’s real estate costs that led them to open office spaces and not a flawed ideology re: work and collaboration.

I assume the larger portion of what's "untenable" is "short commutes"; spending multiple hours of unpaid personal time in a car per day just driving to and from work so that you can have the place you sleep be affordable is a huge downside of a lot of in-person jobs that used to be taken as more of a default pre-pandemic, before so many places showed "yeah we could let you work from home but we just don't want to".

The downsides of an open floor plan can be at least partially countered by headphones, but there's much less that you can do on an individual level to make up for having that much of your personal time locked up in pure transit.

Remote work has changed a lot, but construction in the places where the big tech companies are headquarters is highly constrained. It’s not like they all could immediately triple the size of their campuses again. Tech companies did build large new campuses at enormous cost, but mostly development crowded out other development. Everyone is bidding for the same land and labor.

Reasonably, one company could give everyone an office but there’s no way everyone could do it at once.

Urban planning in large parts of the USA isn't very conducive of this approach, since housing space tends to be quite segregated from office space.

I also can only assume that it plays a role in office real-estate costs too, just like it does on housing costs.

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