I thought I was finished with writing about the horror known as Open Offices for a while but I just came across an article that so fully mirrors my feelings on the subject that I had to wade into the morass once more. The article, Open-Plan Office: Great for Photo Shoots, Terrible for Collaboration, is over at the Nuclino Blog and does a good job of summarizing the problems with open offices. I’ll let you read the post for those reasons and while you’re there, take a look at the pictures and see if they don’t make your blood run cold. The first one, with its high ceiling and lack of walls reminds me of a local mall whose architecture amplifies every sound and makes it painfully noisy. But there’s one aspect of the article that bears more comment.
I’ve been pretty vocal in my belief that the real driver of open offices is cost savings on real estate and buildout. Sometimes I felt that maybe I was being a bit too cynical or overwrought. The real problem is that I was being naive. I had no idea how large those saving were. I thought it was probably a few hundred thousand dollars for a Google-sized company. Silly me. It turns out that Google—Alphabet, actually—saves about $350 million a year on real estate charges by moving to open offices. That’s chump change, though. JPMorgan & Chase saves over a billion dollars a year with open offices. The article has a chart showing the savings for several large companies.
Those savings, as the article points out, make it unlikely that we’ll ever get rid of open offices. It offers a few suggestions for living with them but, really, your best option is to find a job with a sane office arrangement or that will let you work from home.