I've never seen anyone say they did open plan because it was cheap, they just say "improved collaboration, more open space environment" etc. Of course the main motivation is likely to reduce cost, but I haven't seen people say that explicitly.

So I think that the propaganda in favor for open space offices really sped up their adoption. If Google now produces a lot of propaganda in favor of this hybrid wfh model then it will likely also help speed up adoption, although the main reason to do it would be to save office space costs and not the propaganda blurbs we will see.

Corporate environment is rarely honest even if everybody knows what given thing means. You can literally compose dictionary to normal speech at some point.

I have a theory this environment slowly corrupts a character in subtle ways, till folks wake up one day being full of shit while being polite and smiling and when asked everything is fine.

Since there are at least a few comment pointing cheaper being the reason. I have to ask, what sort of cost reduction are we looking at ?

I cant imagine Open Office being a significant cost reduction in overall office renovation. Let alone the human cost and capital far outweighs renovation cost alone.

How could cost saving ever be a reason for Open Office. Am I missing something obvious?

You can pack people more densely, and therefore the office space you need to pay for is smaller for the same number of employees.

At my office (which I haven't seen since March), I have one desk large enough to fit two monitors, and a chair. That's all the space that's for me. My desk is part of a row of 4 desks side-by-side, and there's 4 more desks facing them. If you set up cubicles, with the density I had last time I had a cubicle, you could probably fit half as many people. If you set up offices you could fit even less.

My employer rents half the floors in one building and just about all the floors in the building across the street, so having to find twice as much space would be not only expensive but logistically complex - either we'd all have to move, or you'd have to commute to get to certain teams.

Thank You. In other words, it was not Open Office, per se that was cost saving, it was using Open Office as a tool to give less space to employees that was cost saving.

I mean you could have small cubicles too, I once worked in a office cubicles that physically could not fit anyone taller than 6"2. There are simply not enough leg room.

It's difficult to pack small cubicles and have them still really count as cubicles. Looking for some random pictures from Google Images, my office looks kind of like this: https://s3.amazonaws.com/mentoring.redesign/s3fs-public/open...

And here is a random picture of a small cubicle design: https://cubiclebydesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Works...

Note the dividers in the center area extend back to the sides of the chairs, even though the chairs are not pushed in. If you tried to do that in the first image, you would block the walkway. (You certainly couldn't do the design of the farther-away cubicles; they take up much more room per employee.)

You could do something like this: https://www.quill.com/content/index/resource-center/office-f... But I'd probably call that an open office layout, honestly.

Thanks for putting the time and getting the image for illustration.

I guess I need some time to think deeply about it before it sinks in.

How could it ever be a reason? Saving $1000's worth of rent by making your $25,000/month employee half as productive sounds insane at first glance

but the trick is that the management chain "saving money" and the management chain that gets screwed by the reduced productivity are different

It's hard to measure productivity, too, so it might not be clear how much the open office is really costing a company

Then perhaps the claimed productivity loss is not really as big as many claim on sites like HN? While it is not easy for an individual to measure any productivity loss, a large company or an entire industry would probably be able to put some serious numbers behind a cost/benefit analysis. Since many of the companies that have open plan offices have a rather large per-employee revenue I think it would be relatively easy for them to determine the impact. Since these companies have not only persisted in building open plan offices but have built entire campuses around such plans I think the evidence is quite clear that they are not actually the productivity sink claimed by many.

You're making a good point, but it basically boils down to "Companies' leaders are smart and generally make good, well-researched decisions"

So many great companies fall apart because that is just not true at all.

Since it is so hard to estimate time needed for a task how would you even notice a 50% decrease in productivity?

Give two people the exact same task. Enough times to get useful statistics. It would be very hard from observation only, you kind have to set up experiments like this to know.

Because it doesn't happen during a renovation. An office is moved or opened and they don't buy cubicles in the first place or spend time and money to move them.

Before open offices people had cubicles. So no need to renovate, just throw out the cubicles and buy new furniture.

in other words ... renovate ? :)

that's the same reason google did it. not because it dramatically improves collaboration.

With Google spending hundreds of thousands on each engineer, is that really the place to pinch pennies?

If it actually had the cost that people in this thread are claiming do you really think they would continue to build these sort of offices, year after year for almost two decades? Do you seriously think that they have not looked at the impact and determined that the claimed productivity benefits of private offices are so slight as to not even be worth the effort?

Google has been reducing the average spend per engineer (in terms of benefits and workplace conditions) for quite some time. That is indeed where they have decided to pinch pennies. Real estate costs are non-significant.