Engineering offices
I’m the co-founder of a tech startup. Like all other tech companies, we’re in constant need of more software. Always have been, always will be. Hardware is cheap and accessible, but we can’t order more software, because software is done by people. To get more software done, you need to increase the productivity of people.
We’re 15 people at my company — Opbeat — and often most of us are in the office at the same time. Our office looks like the typical tech startup cliche: We’re at the 2nd floor of an old industrial warehouse building. We’re sitting next to each other at 4-person islands in one big open room. It looks great and was easy to set up. And, I’m pretty sure we’re much less productive in this environment than we could be.
Not long ago, I was visiting a friend at the Trello offices in New York. I got up the elevator, was met by the receptionist and then guided to the the big open space, where I met my friend. Aside from the beautiful view of the Hudson through the panorama windows, it seemed like your typical tech office. It’s not.
Down the hallway from the open space, It has lots of small, private offices. ~3m2 offices with windows and glass doors. Everyone had a place to go and close the door and get deep work done — for hours in a row. It didn’t look “vibrant cool”, but it felt vibrant!
In 2008, Joel Spolsky, the co-founder of Fog Creek and Trello, wrote a post about why he chose to spend big ($200k office deposit) on the new Fog Creek office. Summarized in one quote, his answer was: “That’s our business model. Nice offices, smart programmers, great products, profit.”
Back in 2004, Paul Graham of YC gave an epic “Great hackers” talk at Oscon. He said:
“Hackers use their office as a place to think in. If you’re a technology company, their thoughts are your product. So making hackers work in a noisy, distracting environment is like having a paint factory where the air is full of dust and grit. […] An office environment is supposed to be something you work in, not something you work despite.”
And he continued on why hackers like to work from home:
“Hackers work in rooms with a door, that is closed. […] They have a sofa then can take a nap on instead of sitting in a coma at their desk, pretending to work. There’s no crew of people with vacuum cleaners that roars through the office everyday during the prime hacking hours. There are no meetings!”
Working from home isn’t distraction free, but it has a lot of qualities we should emulate at company offices. At home you have distractions like your electrical bill on the counter, no food in the fridge and kids running around. At the office you can forget about domestic chores and there’s plenty of food, drinks and coffee. For most tech companies, the office comes with a price of constant disturbance from people and stuff around you.
Looking around our office, I cringe from all of the disturbances around myself and our entire team. “Deep work is the killer app of the knowledge economy”, and deep work is hard to achieve regularly in a disturbing office environment. So, why are so many tech companies still working out of open offices? What would it take to get private spaces at our office? Time? Money?
Let’s break it down. As mentioned, we’re 15 people at the office. For simplification, let’s say all of our employees earn $6,000 per month and let’s say we could improve productivity of each employee with 1 hour per day by introducing private spaces. Quick math suggests that would give us a productivity increase worth $141,000 per year. All of a sudden Joel’s office investment (for a much bigger team) seems like an investment with great return.
So, why are we — and so many tech companies — working out of an open office?
