Recruiting costs of an open office plan: an anecdote

Since Facebook emerged to take over the world, many startups have emulated its open office plan, looking something like this:

However this trend got started, a little reflection can show some costs associated with it. How does a knowledge worker concentrate in a wide-open room like this, especially when conversations are going on? Doesn't productivity have to suffer?

I am normally an extrovert, but I do strongly prefer at least a modicum of privacy in my workspace. I don't know how prevalent my view is, but an experience I had last night makes me think some introverts may agree with me.

I attended a networking event at the fascinating startup climate.com, whose Seattle office is lovely but wide open with apparently no private space except a conference room. I mentioned my concern to the hosts. They responded respectfully, but obviously aren't in a position to rearrange the office after just getting it set up in February. Especially if I'm the only one whining about the issue.

I had a conversation with a fellow potential recruit who shares my view of this office layout saying, "it's lovely but our [less attractive] office is a quieter and nicer place to work." I suggested that he join me in emphasizing this to our hosts but he declined, not wanting to "come in and tell them how to arrange their office." Instead he left quietly and will probably stay at his current job rather than considering climate.com.

Maybe there are a lot of introverts who feel the same way; how would we know? Is there any measurement being done of the effectiveness of these recruiting events? I thought the company looked very attractive and interesting place to work, but ...

What would I do if I were in charge at climate.com? For starts, I'd allow/encourage any sort of shogi screen or other barrier between workspaces. I'd also allow anybody sensitive to the issue to work remotely up to about 1/2 the time, and in the meantime be looking for a longer term strategy of moving to or transforming the current space into one giving workers more privacy.

I don't think the definitive study on office space has yet been done, but I tend to think that in 20 years the open plan for knowledge workers may be considered as we now consider smoking in restaurants. What were we thinking letting this go on for so long?

The Economic Advantage of Being Bald

I was starting to go bald pretty seriously by the early 1990's, and by the time I bought this bottle of shampoo in 2002 I had very little hair left. 

The cost: $1.78. That's 17.8 cents per year for all the shampoo I needed for the small amount of hair I have.

This one is now empty; maybe I'll go to Whole Foods and get a $12 bottle of shampoo this time!

Income trade thanks to Dan Sheridan

I watched a webinar on options trading last week from which I learned a valuable trade:

Use out-of-the money calls or puts, depending on the chart direction of the underlying ... choose calls for a falling stock, puts for a rising one (use 20-day moving average, maybe adding 50 as a tiebreak) ... with about 30 days to go, find the strike with a delta of 12 to 15%, making that the middle of the 3-leg butterfly ratio trade. Thinkorswim calls it an unbalanced butterfly.

(Unfortunately, OptionsXpress calls it "sorry, you can't do this in a single trade". *grumble* Makes me wish I hadn't just consolidated my wife's IRA with OX ...)

For example, if the RUT June strike showing the right delta is 800, make that the middle leg. The lower leg is $10 below, the upper leg is $10 above. The trade was as of Monday the 21st:

Buy to open 3 June 2012 810 calls

Sell to open 4 June 2012 800 calls

Buy to open 1 June 2012 790 call

... with RUT around 753.

This trade produces about a 10% return! Better yet, the risk graph shows that 10% return all the way down to 0 (for calls). Terror attack, Euro dissolves, whatever -- you still make 10%.

There is a simple and not too expensive adjustment you can make if your trade goes haywire (in this case, if RUT rallies toward 800). The adjustment is:

Sell to close 1 of the 810 calls

Buy to open 1 of the 790 calls

... thus making the trade into a 2-4-2 butterfly with the typical limited risk and high reward spike in the middle of the graph.

So one can (for example) in a $50K account, risk $45000 of margin (saving $5K for adjustments) and make $4500 most months (only occasionally losing 7% or so, about $3000). Not bad!

Thanks again to Dan Sheridan for putting on his webinar on this.

I could fall in love with Julia!

The new programming language, that is. Take a look! Fewer lines of code than even Python, but almost as fast as C++! Built-in support for multicore (looks like -- I haven't verified this yet.)

Looks pretty exciting to me!

Pandora's Star

I came across this book via a recommendation from Audible and enjoyed it greatly. My Lovely Wife even liked it, and our tastes in media are generally orthogonal so I think most readers/listeners will find it worthwhile.

The sequel, Judas Unchained, isn't quite as good IMHO, but you'll probably have to stick with it to see how the story comes out!

• Author's website

Paul Graham at Pycon 2012

I had planned to see this talk in person, but Pycon filled up before I had the chance to register!

Anyway, this guy is part of the inspiration for my attending grad school. Here's his talk. Here are the essay that hooked me on his book and the one that I responded to most forcefully as it matched my (less well developed) conclusions on the differences in programming languages.

Enjoy!

Backup Power Request for Quote!

I give up! I wanted a fuel cell (supposedly $5K in 2001 but $56K recently) but the recent ice storm is one multi-day power outage too many for us.

What I really want: backup power as a service! The agreement:

       * You keep our power on
       * no more noise than 65 dB at 7 meters
       * no more pollution than allowed by California CARB
       * you own the equipment & do all maintenance (oil changes, etc.)
       * Fuel is (probably) propane as we have a 500 gal tank, but if you
          have some exotic technology?
       * I pay you $X per month forever

If you don't want to do that, I want a generator and transfer switch meeting the above noise/emissions parameters installed ASAP. Please send a quote!