As an anecdatum, I am disinterested in Facebook because of that large open office. I currently have my own office, and like that very much. It will be interesting to see where this all goes.
To give my own anecdatum, from the pictures I've been able to find of Facebook's open office, it looks overwhelming to me. I would definitely be stressed there, to say the least.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this blog post doesn't actually seem to answer the question. I'm curious if Facebook really is having difficulty recruiting developers due to this specific issue and if the 40-50% pay offering really has anything to do with that.
It's not true in this case, though. People who have the power to choose, are voting with their feet.
Still, many people have short term thinking or knowledge (better to get higher pay now than realize it will hold back by career trajectory), or they aren't too worried about success of their company or their productivity level.
I always thought open offices became popular because it was literally the cheapest set up for facilities. For startups it worked because all you had to buy was desks. Somehow that got spun in to 'open offices are so sexy!'
Open offices are horrible for productivity imo. Moved to a job with an office and it is so. much. better.
Yes, Stack Overflow Jobs does have the opportunity for employers to include their Joel Test score (including line items, not just the overall number) at the bottom of their postings.
The Joel Test is sort of incorporated into Stack Overflow Jobs (previously Careers) in that a company has the option to include the results of their Joel Test when posting an ad on the site. However, there's no obvious way (at least that I could see) for a candidate to search for jobs that meet specific criteria in the test.
Also, the exact wording for the office part of the test is "Do programmers have quiet working conditions?" This usually means that working conditions might possibly be quiet if nobody else happened to be in the office at the same time as you. While many claim quiet working conditions, I've never seen one that actually provided private offices.
This is anecdotal of course, and just based on looking at photographs they've included on their website or Stack Overflow page, but every job I've viewed recently appears to have an open plan office. In some of the photos you even see people standing around having impromptu meetings in the middle of a group of desks where others are trying to work.
Remember this is just the companies that are actually claiming to provide programmers with quiet working conditions. I can't imagine what the noisy ones are like.
Epic Systems has a private office for each of their 9,000+ employees. Their campus is outside Madison, WI, so it's cheaper to do that there then it would be elsewhere. Private offices don't have to be large. I'm sure the money for private offices would appear if companies were sufficiently motivated to provide them.
I don't know if Epic is a private office nirvana for each of their employees, but to be fair, it does sound like the majority do have a private office. I only live in the area and hear stuff second- and third-hand, but I gather an increasing number of Epic employees are assigned to shared offices. The Boston Globe's glowing commentary on the campus concurs:
"Most employees have a private office; some share one with a colleague."
I've heard the same thing. From what I understand, the issue is that Epic is growing faster than buildings can be built. Regardless, while a shared office is worse than a private office, it's way better than almost any other option. I've worked in a shared office with a partition, a cubicle farm, and an open office, and the shared office was the best work environment by a huge margin.
> That's why we have them... we literally can't afford to give everyone (or anyone for that matter) a private office.
You know, if a prospective employer was straight up with me about that, I'd give it serious consideration. I can understand that not every company can afford an endless supply of private offices in urban areas (although obviously this is not the case with companies like FB).
What bugs me the most about the open office fetish is how it causes productivity to plummet for most developers, at the same time the leadership is spouting off on how great it is for productivity. I mean, as that goofy reality judge said, don't piss on my shoes and tell me it's raining.
It's tempting to ask "leadership" "If it's so great for productivity, why doesn't leadership/management forego their private offices and sit in the middle of the open office floor plan?"
Real estate is also really expensive. I can easily believe that if a company really went for it and tried to give private offices to several hundred engineers, the cost would start rivaling that of salaries.
I worked for a "start-up" (if you can call a 15-year old company that was bought by a VC company a start-up) where the CEO was CONVINCED that open offices were the best thing ever. He made our content people write articles about how great they were and how much better they made our company than other companies in our field. One of our content people was like "this is the worst assignment ever, because it is literally impossible to find research that says open offices make you more productive."
To top that off, he used to talk to people across the office using a megaphone. I was over 100 feet away from him, and people I was on the phone with would ask me what was going on, "Is everything all right over there? Is somebody swearing?"
"Yeah, uh, that's just our CEO."
I don't work there anymore.
My productivity fell off a cliff at my new job when I got promoted and moved to a "nicer" desk. The desk probably has three times as much area as my old desk, but my old desk was in the back corner of an office that was split in half with a partition. I could work for hours without being interrupted. Now I'm in a cubicle right by a door, and I'm interrupted several times per hour. I think open offices just feel more productive -- more than one coworker has mentioned how great it is that they can drop by now without feeling like they are interrupting me.
The efficiency gain with open offices is that, for high-growth companies -- or ones that are uncertain about their long-term size, it's pretty easy to shuffle furniture around to squeeze in more people. When walls and doors get involved, you're committing to "each person gets X sq. ft", for a company that may grow from x to 2x employees.
And that possibility is worth more than letting people get work done? I mean, if people don't get enough work done, you're never going to get to the point where you need to shuffle things around.
They'll get the work done, at the expense of their sanity.
Also, market inefficiency works here too, I think - it can take years before a company tanks. So productivity drop can go unnoticed forever (even when a company fails, there will be enough other factors to blame). Not to mention that marketing can successfully paper over all kinds of crap; mediocre is the standard in our industry.
Often teams that go from X to 2X end up getting less stuff done. There is an argument that startups should grow as fast as possible to pre-pay that debt, but getting less stuff done while burning 2+x the money is only seen as a good idea in SV.
They remind me of new York offices, like law offices with rows of paralegal looking through documents spread on endless tables.
It's something that was a financial necessity in expensive real estate, like Manhattan, FinDi in SF, etc. and someone got the idea to transplant that into suburban offices.
To add, I think it makes sense for a lean startup or a company going through a rough reorg, but once you're mature or overcome financial difficulties, it's not necessarily a good permanent layout.
Individual productivity or team productivity? If you are optimizing for individual productivity - you could be hitting a local maxima...
I do say the above in half-jest: I would love to see any research done in this area. When I was a new joiner, it was convenient to swivel around/walk across the room and talk to someone. Sure, it sucks now that I'm an old hand and noobs keep taking me out of the zone. In addition, it is sometimes beneficial to listen in on ambient conversations (while waiting for compilation or taking a break), sometimes I even chip in when I have a contribution (roughly once a month). I'd like to think this saves my colleagues time. However, I work in a medium sized room (which houses 18 desks), so YMMV.
> Individual productivity or team productivity? If you are optimizing for individual productivity - you could be hitting a local maxima...
Forum discussions like this one seem to be all about individual productivity. In my experience, open offices are really great for ad hoc collaboration and conversation. To combat interruptions, individual developers can easily take steps to not be interrupted when they are doing something that can't be interrupted. But tbh I don't spend 8 hours a day in such a way that I should never be interrupted as a rule. If anything, I like that my teammates feel comfortable to walk over to my desk (or, more commonly, IM me "are you free?" and then walk over) and talk as a default. A lot is gained when people are quick to ask others when they are stuck since that's often the quickest solution to getting unblocked.
> If anything, I like that my teammates feel comfortable to walk over to my desk (or, more commonly, IM me "are you free?" and then walk over) and talk as a default.
All that "collaboration and conversation" lets your team combined productivity asymptoticaly approach the productivity of single developer in a quiet, private office :)
I agree with you here. I also believe that a lot of the current design trends in new spaces these days has this same origin. Light bulbs hanging by a cord, reclaimed wood walls and ceilings, keeping raw pipes, wires exposed etc. It does look kind of cool, but the genesis was small businesses and spaces just trying to save money.
I've worked in an office like that; they had the audacity to make us work in an office with a broken concrete floor (with electrical guide pipes showing), open ceiling with the aircon dripping on my desk, and plywood walls, and call it "industrial design". At least be honest and say it's a temporary design because the whole floor will be repurposed within two years.
As a counterpoint though, another office also went for industrial design, but they did it stylishly - just one visible aircon pipe, and instead of raw concrete, they sprayed it with a kind of foam or fiber that absorbs a lot of sound, in a somewhat dark color. That office has a beer tap, too.
I tend to agree. I think the whole part about "the absence of cubicles will foster creativity and productivity" was just spin used after the fact to justify this choice.
The other reason I think they are used is that they are cheap to reconfigure, you can usually shove more desks in to accommodate more head count and move groups around in order to try to reclaim the ever-shrinking space.
I have worked at startup where my group was moved every few months for some reason. Often times the layout seems to lack any alignment with job requirements.
For instances developers being place right next to marketing folks who spend a lot of time talking on the phone because that's what their job entails.
This makes sense in context of the article. The article states Facebook pays 40-50% more. They've converted (some of) the savings from open office planning to higher salaries for their hires, making the company more attractive for job seekers.
Cafes offer an odd sort of privacy since none of the conversations mean anything to you - effectively white noise - so they're easy to filter out. In an open office, every conversation may apply to you at any point during the conversation, requiring conscious effort to monitor and filter the conversation.
This. It's the otheredness of the conversations which happen at a cafe that makes it work. If you found yourself at a cafe sitting next to, say, the co-worker you can't stand, the director you've heard is trying to kill your project, an ex-partner and their new partner, I suspect the scene could get quite distracting rather quickly.
That's why you never date your co-worker. And if you couldn't help it and fell in love then you should quit your job first and ask him/her on date later.
My point was that an ex-partner, regardless of co-worker status, is a distraction. Having to encounter one at work all the more so, yes, but that wasn't what I was limiting my example to.
So much this. I want to wear my headphones to focus, but at the same time I never know when they're talking about a project behind me that might pertain to what I'm doing....which happens a lot because of our fairly open setup.
Other people at the cafe, I don't care what they're talking about. And it's away from home where I might have other distractions.
Libraries and study areas are more representative of what people need to concentrate.
I expect the cafe is more akin to white noise, not the sort of conversations you'd hear in a dev open office. Sometimes when you overhear some devs talking you can't help get sucked into the conversation. Especially when they are wrong.
Because nobody is tapping you on the shoulder every 10 minutes asking "did you get the email I just sent out?". You also don't see long multi-person meetings in coffee shops (well, actually it does happen, and that's just as annoying).
If you could train coworkers to respect the explicit and implicit signals that people give off when working and concentrating on something and use some fucking etiquette like keeping the shouting to a minimum or taking long conversations elsewhere, this wouldn't be a problem.
I too loathe the disruptiveness of my employer's open office plan, but have found I can easily focus in a cafe. In part, I suspect this stems from mentally being able to classify cafe conversations as "ignorable noise of strangers", whereas in the office, any conversation I hear both comes from a familiar voice and is likely related to the work at hand. Some portion of my mind inevitably tunes-in to these cues.
I read this sentiment often in these discussions. It isn't true for me, however. I can't not pay attention to conversations or noises around me. Sometimes I can't even focus on someone talking directly to me in those kind of environments.
I actually find most open office environments to be better than cafes. Cafes tend to be very loud, have lots of movement, and I get distracted by people slurping their coffee, munching on food, etc. I've also noticed people at cafes who talk on the phone talk much louder than I've experienced people talking on the phone in open offices.
I much prefer the library setting where you're expected to be quiet and there is little movement around you.
The philosopher Michel Foucault actually cites the Panopticon alongside school, military, papal, and other work power structures as being efficient in human discipline.
It arguably worked well for prison power structure too with regards to rehabilitation, until gang infiltration in the late 1960's changed the power status quo.
>Is the idea to figure out who's not working and then Eliminate Them?
Not at all - Foucault looked at discipline in the sense of humans being molded to become skilled and efficient at work - observing everything from monks to boarding schools in an effort to analyze power structures for discipline.
With panopticon, the power model is the all seeing eye, which is necessary to scale to so many prison inmates. With the open office structure, the power structure is more with your work peers, which is more similar to the group/tribal type of power structure.
What are the alternatives to open offices for companies with hundreds or thousands of developers? Do you have offices with dozens of people split up by team?
I've been to the AWS headquarters in Seattle and I think that's what their setup is like but I didn't get too much of a chance to look around.
I've worked on systems administrations teams that had their own office and being able to close the door was awesome.
I worked for a company which had one office for every two employees, with a total number of employees around 1,500. It wasn't that hard; it was still a campus, it just took an extra building to house everyone.
So many open office plans leave enough floor space for walls and hallways; they just don't put them in place.
> What are the alternatives to open offices for companies with hundreds or thousands of developers? Do you have offices with dozens of people split up by team?
Offices. Team Rooms. Decent cubicles.
Microsoft has offices for developers. Even they are somewhat jumping on the Open Office bandwagon (or team rooms).
Amazon generally has team aisles with 7 (iirc) foot walls between teams which blocked out most conversations from neighbouring teams and desks placed against 4-5 foot walls breaking up the aisle into sections. Each aisle had a window at the far end from the hallway and meeting rooms, bathrooms, office supplies, etc. were in the middle of the floor.
A much nicer setup IMO than Google which had a fairly haphazard cube farm resulting in distance from a window being basically luck of the draw.
* Look good in photo ops and publicity: "Look how much everyone is working together _all the time_. So much activity happening! We are not like those places with loners and antisocial people hiding in cubicles"
* Cubicles were used to be associated with boring, slow bureaucratic offices.
Those 4 things conspire to make them more popular. I think it is simpler a function of them being cheaper in general and everything else is just justification. But in case Facebook, can't imagine they don't have the money...
Well I am glad this is changing though. There seems to be a backlash against open offices lately.
> Cubicles were used to be associated with boring, slow bureaucratic offices.
Honestly, I'd rather work in a "boring, slow bureaucratic office" than at some hip modern startup. The "boring, slow bureaucratic office" probably takes better care of their employees and offers a less-stressful work environment.
It also keeps people working longer than maybe they want to. I've heard from several folks in one of our more open areas (15-20 people) that it's awkward to leave at the usual end of shift time because they have to walk across a room filled with people still grinding away.
> One does not have to be an especially perceptive critic to realize that AO II is definitely not a system which produces an environment gratifying for people in general. But it is admirable for planners looking for ways of cramming in a maximum number of bodies, for "employees" (as against individuals), for "personnel," corporate zombies, the walking dead, the silent majority. A large market.
I've worked most of my career in cube farm configurations and had little reason to complain. At my last job of 15 years, the 26 yr old newly appointed manager announced that we were moving to 'an open, war room atmosphere'. Exit imminent, fortunately I ended up working from home. Privacy, natural light, open ended schedule to be productive. Best thing to ever happen to me
Is there anyone here who likes open offices more than a floorplan divised into smaller rooms? I ask because I've worked in an open office setting as a developer for years (the place is otherwise nice) and thoroughly despise it as a workspace. Yet some people don't seem to mind it. I don't mind serendipity. The problem is I serendiptously overhear everyones discussion which is incredibly disruptive for deep work.
Factories have huge machines, whih create added value. They have a good reason for loud noises and need for ear protection.
Offices, on the other hand, are places where people come to create added value by mostly by thinking (if they are programmers).
Are there people who enjoy the bustle of open office while trying to untangle a decade old piece of C++ spaghetti? Whose work output it actually improves?
I'm trying to figure out if the open offices are bad mostly for everyone or just for someone like me.
I prefer open offices. You get a pretty significant echo chamber effect on articles like this because people who don't like it turn out to comment.
Personally, I have no difficulty with noise (I prefer working in coffee shops to at home), and being able to easily start a design discussion with 4 or 5 engineers when necessary is extremely valuable. I totally get why some people don't like it though.
"Being able to easily start a design discussion with 4 or 5 engineers" means "easily break 4 or 5 engineers out of their flow" along with "easily create a distraction for the other 15 engineers within earshot of the easily-started discussion".
I'm fine with coffee shops over home (and did the same in college), but coffeeshop noise is "white noise" -- whirring espresso grinders, a blur of conversations between people I don't know about things that aren't going to activate my distraction monkey.
Maybe it depends on the domain. "Flow state" makes sense for something like a startup where single coders are writing huge diffs on their own. I work on a huge codebase where "figuring out what code to write" occupies dramatically more of our time than "writing code".
I think that is a difference. I have never worked in that kind of environment.
When I was at a large defense contractor the work was broken down into such small chunks that each engineer was essentially off on their own working on their piece of the system. In fact, that was the way all engineering, not just software engineering, was done there. There might be a point where two or three people would need to discuss an approach, but that wasn't the majority of the time.
The company I just finished at works multiple small contracts simultaneously. Because of the small scope it was very common to be the only person working on the code for a particular project, though there was more collaboration than at my previous company.
The place I am going seems to be more like what you describe, so it will be interesting to see if my opinions of open office layouts change after that.
What is your definition of "huge diffs"? For me, the process of reading some library documentation, reading existing code, and producing, say, 50-100 lines of quality code to require enough concentration that it's hard to focus in an open environment without losing my train of thought.
"and being able to easily start a design discussion with 4 or 5 engineers when necessary is extremely valuable"
I honestly do not understand this statement. Are you trying to say that if you were in cubes, you couldn't do that? You couldn't ask people to come over and talk something out? And are you stating that your design discussion is more important than whatever they're working on?
That depends on the person. I like when other people come to my desk and ask me for help on a whim, even when I'm in the middle of something. It doesn't destroy my productivity, and often it even gives me ideas how to make my work more useful. I do respect when other people don't want to be interrupted, though.
You do realize that people like you are why we don't like open floor plans right?
That "easy conversation" is not scheduled, and now I need to stop what I am doing, listen to you for an hour, and still finish the rest of my tasking on time.
I genuinely enjoy working in open office after working in both settings to the point that I would never never work in a company that is not open office aganin. All the noise points are valid here though.
For me personally, I like it because:
- Better/Faster communications. I can ask and answer questions on the spots vs. scheduling a meeting. This is gaming changing. For the same type of question, I can get answered within 10 mins vs more than 1 day. This is a HUGE productivity boost.
- Better team culture. Sitting next to each other make the team much closer. More likely to go to lunch/dinner, hang out, and become friends outside of work. This will give people empathy to each other and more willingly to help/unblock you.
For the noise issues, I get around it by blocking heads down time in my schedule and find a quiet corner in a office.
I'm a developer who recently moved from a large open space to a small quiet room with just a handful of people. To me it feels like a big downgrade. I loved the constant chatter in the open space, and I was much more aware of what the whole team is concerned with. I felt that it was very important for setting my work priorities right. Meetings and emails are much more restrictive than just sitting next to everyone whose work interacts with mine. And it didn't impede my coding at all, I could always put on some noise (SimplyRain) and tune out.
I'm a developer who recently moved from a large open space to a small quiet room with just a handful of people. To me it feels like a big downgrade. I loved the constant chatter in the open space
I'm going to guess that there's some individual variation in preference for quiet / noise. I'm the kind of person who can't really get deep work done, like writing proposals or novels, in noisy, busy environments. I look at all the people, listen to the sounds, and generally can't get into a state of flow.
That being said, I've met lots of writers who say they can't work in quiet rooms because they need some stimulation or they go nuts. Lev Grossman, for example, has talked about writing most of the Magicians trilogy (the first one is good! https://jakeseliger.com/2009/08/28/the-magicians-lev-grossma...) in coffee shops.
I suspect that on average most people would be better served by quiet focus, but that a fair number would not be.
If this is true—anyone doing industrial organization research may have a research topic here—I don't know how it would be implement organizationally, especially because offices and layouts are almost instantly going to be linked up with status and hierarchy issues, and most people will want the higher status option, regardless of whether it fits them well or not.
Coffee shops are very different; the noise is not that of colleagues but of random strangers. The effect can be almost like white noise. Colleagues talk about things that you can't help but get involved with.
Yes, I prefer open offices. It makes the office feel more alive and interesting, and I'm less likely to get distracted since I know other people can see my screen. I have no difficulty concentrating because of noise, in part because my office is super quiet usually--people know to grab a meeting room if they're going to have a long conversation. In the past when I worked at places without easy access to meeting rooms, I just used headphones more.
I've worked in a 2-person office, in a cubicle, and in open office plans of various sizes. I personally prefer the open office format. It makes the team feel more cohesive, it makes me able to jump in to problems that are happening, and it's never stopped me from doing work that requires deep concentration. And if I really wanted to, I could book a small conference room or go to a corner booth somewhere away from my team and work there, but I don't ever feel the need to.
You don't need an open office for the team to work in the same space. A team room is not a gigantic open office. It's a big room with walls. I loved working in a teamroom. I get instant awareness what everyone else is doing in my team - the actual claimed benefit of an open office - with no downsides. An open office has several teams and one is forced to be aware of their doings as well.
My biggest problem with moving to a corner or meeting room is that I lose my desk and with it, my nice keyboard, mouse and two huge monitors with everything laid out nicely on them. Instead I have to switch to a 13" laptop screen, a chiclet keyboard and a touchpad. That shift is hugely jarring.
I despise it as a workspace as well. Some people don't mind as much, but I haven't met anyone that's openly enthusiastic about it.
I got a pair of Etymotic In-Ear Headphones[0] which have kept me sane for several years now. They have interchangeable tips with a NRR on-par with foam plugs. Worth every penny in an open office.
I prefer open. I've never seen cube farms or offices that have a decent amount of natural light.
Also, I seem to be the minority in comments, but I don't mind people talking around me. I don't use my ears/hearing to code, so it doesn't distract me nearly as much as chat windows or anything visual on my laptop. I suppose the real issue is people having interesting conversations around me... But I have headphones and music if I need to concentrate (I probably only wear them for 1-2 hours a week to block out conversations).
Every week one a new article like this is posted, and every week the comments are overwhelmingly "open offices are bad". Every week I meet more people like me who don't comment because they don't feel strongly about protecting open offices, and would like the people who are upset by open offices to find their comfortable place.
There really are quite a few of us who don't mind open offices... I'd guess it's probably a majority of people... We don't really want to impose on others...
My only real concern is that the people who want their own offices tend to also have seniority and want natural light... I've seen these people carve out their own personal paradise, while blocking other's ability to have a good working environment.
Context: Mid-thirties, Sr Engineer in Seattle who has worked for small startups (< 10) up to Amazon.
My solution: Ability to concentrate is a teachable skill. Every skill-based sport has to teach players how to focus on the goal and ignore the distraction (hence my assertion that Golf isn't skill-based). We use enough sportsball analogies in coding, so I'll add another.... Coding in an office is like batting against a pitching machine.
I think there are very different experiences and expectations on what the craft of software engineering is like. Different tasks and organizations require different time budgets for e.g. collaboration and deep work.
My coding has very little to with sport-like activity and is more like the task of a lone clocksmith (although we have a team, individuals have quite large chunks of codebase carved for themselves).
For some problems I am straining on the edge of my working memory capacity.
The problem with the distraction avoidance is that it demands mental resources. If there is some benefit in training working in a stresfull environment there could be a sound proof room for such a purpose where employees could go for a limited time to train. The inverse of large open office/small quiet room pattern.
At first level there could be just white noise in the room. Once that is mastered as an added stimulus the feet could be placed in a bucket of icewater. At the next level the room is filled with monkeys. Etc.
As someone who has done lone-wolf development, let me tell you that so many issues go away once you develop a well-functioning team to work on problems collaboratively.
My initial reaction is that there seems to be much bigger issues with the way your company is structured. The words you're using ("lone", "carved", "straining on the edge") suggest a stressful situation where each individual carries their own weight... If that's the case, I can certainly see why you'd be upset by someone else impeding your ability to work. I wouldn't last long in an environment like that, either pushing it to be more collaborative, or just leaving.
I can't imagine any coding that isn't improved by adding collaboration (a great starting point is code reviews... make PRs early and get opinions on rough-cuts). If you don't have this in your current environment, I highly encourage trying to kickstart it... you're really missing out on a great way to remove stress, improve quality, and have more fun.
Sorry, I was perhaps not quite precise enough. I agree that collaboration on complex technical topics is wonderfull. There is quite a lot of collaboration and we do have a great team. The system is divided to many components and each of those components has usually only one or two active developers.
The inherent technical complexity of the components is such that sometimes a feature needs days of coding - thus the 'more locksmith, less of a ballgame' analogue. I should have perhaps pulled some other analogue.
I recently started working in an open plan office, and I was fairly apprehensive going in after seeing the many many rants about them here. And indeed, my environment has all the worst of people's complaints and more, but it's... fine?
I dunno, I just don't feel particularly unproductive. I thought maybe I just didn't have any point of comparison, but then I had a few days working from home and it didn't seem massively different.
A lot of people here are talking about flow, but I don't really feel the need for concentration for the majority "tactical" level coding, and when I run into sufficiently complicated "strategic" level problems, I find it much more effective to discuss them than to try and solve them on my own.
As the moderator of a Reddit sub focused on comp sci careers, I don't think the open office is an issue for junior level developers. The worship of what we in that sub call the big 4 (some combo of Google, Facebook, Apple (or Microsoft), Amazon) is pretty much what you hear from every college senior, and I've never heard anyone even mention this as a negative.
Of course these are mostly people who haven't had much experience working in office environments except possibly an internship or part-time work. Facebook might face some challenges recruiting experienced devs who know what kind of environment suits them, but anecdotally I don't see it at the junior level.
I think some of it may also come with the amount of guidance and mentoring those people require.
Early in your career, the best thing for you to do is to acquire knowledge -- not raw output. The open office allows for knowledge sharing and eavesdropping in ways closed offices do not. However, as you progress you require less 1:1 time with people and can work independently given a set of goals and general architecture. This requires less face time and more coding time.
Frankly, when it comes to those big 4 companies, I think the perceived value of having that name on the resume will probably overshadow any perceived shortcomings in any of the environments.
Like you say, a bunch of people who have never worked in an open plan office obviously won't complain about it, nor will they realize it's something they should filter by.
They haven't experienced the problem yet.
Take renting a flat. I now know to avoid everywhere with storage heaters, just like I avoid places with single glazing and I also now know I should check the shower water pressure.
My point was that if the open office plan is scaring anyone away, it hasn't yet (in my experience) impacted junior developers who are still quite enthusiastic about Facebook. Facebook doesn't only hire experienced developers, and even their experienced hires may not have a formed opinion on open office environments.
There are plenty of people who are biased about things (like an open office environment) they haven't personally experienced, yet hold their bias based on hearing about the experiences of others.
I've never been in an airplane crash, and I'm pretty sure I never want to be in an airplane crash. I don't need to personally have that experience to have a bias against it.
If you didn't know about storage heaters or single glazing before renting a flat, there are probably a number of ways you could have discovered those things without having to experience them directly. It certainly wouldn't require "magic" as you say.
If a bias against open offices is happening, it doesn't seem to be impacting our newest industry entrants yet.
Traditionally that was the case with Microsoft but they've rebuilt at least the Azure buildings into no-private-space hellholes (IHMO). It was a major reason why I didn't pursue a position there - yuck.
When I applied there and was given a tour of several areas it seems to be small team rooms that could fit, at most, 10 people. But this was also in just two parts of two buildings in their headquarters so who knows if that's the norm across the entire company.
That seems more team-space than open office (lots of people see that as a sort of a "happy medium" between real open office and everyone-has-a-private-office that allows team to collaborate more effectively than the latter but provides less extraneous distraction than the latter; not sure I share this assessment, but I definitely see it as a distinct thing from either alternative.)
For those like me who're susceptible to software fences around unproductive behavior, HN has a useful "antiprocrastination" option available under your profile settings.
Where I work (at Google), it's generally pretty quiet; you'll occasionally have conversations going on, but most of the time all you hear is typing. It's not quite "library-like", but making phone calls at your desk is very strongly frowned upon.
At my last company, we generally had 1-2 person offices; it was very easy to stay in your office all day long and never interact with other developers. With the open plan here, we're much more likely to have impromptu team conversations.
I think it would be better if we were in separate rooms in groups of 8-10, but open offices definitely are not all negative. When I work from home I miss the human interaction.
I mean, Google is a big company, and it varies widely. I sit in an open office space with the staffing team. They are much louder than our team, most of the time.
I like the idea of team rooms, we should try more of that.
Did you not have a team chat application in your 1-2 person offices? In my experience that has always provided an excellent balance between distraction and isolation.
Sure, it helps to some degree, but can also be very distracting in its own right. Being able to turn to the person next to you or behind you and ask a question is very different from pinging somebody over IM / IRC / etc.
Even a little respect would go a long way. I don't mind people having conversations, but loud laughter from the team across the way can really get on my nerves. And don't even get me started on phones ringing...
I strongly mind people having conversations about anything that is not work-related. If you want to talk about Game of Thrones or the latest sportsball game, take it outside.
I thought listening to music all day was bad. Then I got moved in to a cube area when I got promoted. The old-timers listen to the radio all day. The radio is so much worse than just listening to other people's music -- not only am I forced to listen to music I don't care for, but the ads are twice as loud as the actual music. So I can completely tune out the music and still be interrupted by some grifter yelling about what a crazy deal you can get on a new car.
Ads & music. You got off easy! Combine with a bunch of inept presenters that fill in time by raving about tabloid news like it's their religion. It's madness.
I used to work in a place like that, sometimes I would get up and dance (badly) and shout banging chooons! ... they soon turned it off.
Another place they had the radio on so I would laugh loudly at the DJs jokes, then say oh man, so funny, but so distracting, what was I doing again? Oh hell. I can't remember. They turned that off too.
Good point, the real problem is not open offie vs closed office. It's distractions - noise, interruptions, visual distractions etc outside of the computer screen. Actually if you really think about it, the biggest distractions for quality work are multi-tasking on the computer.
Its the definition of dreary/depression, but perfect for concentration.
There's so much room in the middle - theres no reason you can't have nice offices, or even nice cubicles, or mixed spaces depending on the job type or even personal preferences.
It seems though that the only "acceptable" option outside of lifeless cube farms is open offices for some reason - I have no idea why.
I worked for a year at IBM's RTP campus. Everyone had their own dimly lit cube with 5-foot walls, no natural daylight, and white noise playing over speakers to drown out conversation. The depressing undertone of the office was part of what pushed me to quit.
My team at my present job works in an open setting with 8 people in the room and windows with natural daylight. It's quiet enough to focus but gives us the opportunity for interaction also. I think that team-sized rooms are a good compromise between a completely open and completely secluded workspace.
Team sized rooms are definitely the way to go. You can avoid conversation from other teams that you don't care about. When there is a conversation in the room, it's probably related to what you're doing so it's not necessarily distracting you.
I worked in a room with just my team and it worked out great. We were able to have discussions and draw stuff on white boards on the wall without distracting anyone else. It also helped with team bonding.
This probably works great if you have evenly-sized, relatively stable teams. The place I just left has teams that ranged from just me to the entire eight-persob company, and the teams could change on a month-to-month basis. In fact, it wasn't unusual to be working on two or three projects simultaneously.
Well, you could have a primary team you work for, and then get called on to work on other things for other teams periodically (while staying at your same desk). That's pretty much what we do here. My team lead is always the same person, but sometimes I do work for the other two team leads, especially when work is light in the current iteration for my normal project.
I've had this and private offices... what happens is that difficult conversations can't take place except outside of the office (unless there is another space to go). Need to have a 1-1? Everyone else hears it. No meta conversations can take place unless someone is willing to go out for some coffee. The team banter ends up being trivial, and can be incredibly distracting if you need to buckle down to get something done.
Your office doesn't have a single shared meeting room? Most places I've seen with open offices have some sort of meeting rooms to use for private conversations. How do you have a client call or anything of that matter?
If everyone has their own office, then someone coming into your office is an everyday affair. They could be talking about a programming problem, lunch, or something personal. You don't know, but you would go crazy wondering about it, because it happens all day.
In an open room where half a dozen or so people sit, if two people stand up, walk into a conference room, and shut the door, that's weird and curious.
> In an open room where half a dozen or so people sit, if two people stand up, walk into a conference room, and shut the door, that's weird and curious.
This also happens all the time, thus not weird. (or people don't talk ...)
I work in an open office and grabbing a room with somebody is totally normal—it happens every day, for all sorts of boring reasons. We even have small rooms perfect for this purpose: three or four chairs and no tables or video conferencing equipment. People use them for anything from random conversations (technical or not), personal phone calls or even just a bit of extra privacy and quiet for solo work.
Personally, I've been very happy with the environment. It helps that the open part of the office is bright, quiet and pretty sparsely populate.
> If everyone has their own office, then someone coming into your office is an everyday affair.
Why don't you introduce the rule that entering another office is only allowed for scheduled appointments and emergency cases (life is in danger or the production server crashed).
The company I just left does not. The company I was at previously had so little meeting room space that it was almost impossible to get a room without booking days in advance.
There were things I liked at that company (mostly the people), but everything about the way the offices were set up had me on edge all the time. No private meeting space, not a single person had their back to a wall, people were thrown into offices at random with no regard to who was on what team...
After I got laid off, I landed at a place where I work in a cube farm, and it's so much less stressful.
I hope your leaving was voluntary, though... if it was, then congrats on the new job!
(and, yeah, I figured out who you are from the about section on your profile... I used to sit right behind you)
It does, with shared walls with another meeting room (where one can hear a lot of what goes on in the next room). Its considered neutral ground, and honestly it doesn't work well for private conversations (everyone in the office knows you're both tense and holed up in a room). I find that conversations take a different tone in a shared rather than private environment.
Yes, people do use it for those conversations, but you have to walk past all the business/marketing/sales people and your boss(s). Outside the office is a place to confide - where an "official" meeting or neutral meeting room is a place that puts everyone on the defensive, more so than anywhere else.
The idea put forth by Mark Cuban that "there should be no secrets at a startup" is extremely unfounded in my opinion - unpopular opinions or contrary positions frequently only flow in privacy as to not cause embarrassment or hostility.
Mine does, but you need to go through two doors to get to it.
That's a barrier compared to just chatting at someone's desk. Or the developer doesn't want to move their laptop, so they'd rather stay at their desk that go to the meeting room.
That leads to too many conversations in the open plan office.
I've had this and private offices... what happens is that difficult conversations can't take place except outside of the office (unless there is another space to go). Need to have a 1-1? Everyone else hears it. No meta conversations can take place unless someone is willing to go out for some coffee. The team banter ends up being trivial, and can be incredibly distracting if you need to buckle down to get something done.
>When there is a conversation in the room, it's probably related to what you're doing so it's not necessarily distracting you.
My rebuttal to this point is the amount of time my previous co-workers would spend discussing lawn care strategies.
Overall though, I agree with you. Team sized rooms are a livable compromise, and have some nice upsides while tamping down the downsides of a fully open office.
You're conception of it being a rebuttal is exactly wrong. My point was, my team would spend a lot of time talking about things that weren't related to work or my interests, so it was indistinguishable from any of the myriad other distractions present in an open office. Basically: If you're co-located with 1 person or more, you will be subjected to distractions you have no interest in and serve no purpose for yourself or your team.
That seems like a way to exacerbate Conway's law problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law . Most of the technical debt I try to fight off is based on my team doing something that makes sense for us based on what we're good at / what we think other teams want, but doesn't line up with what other teams want / what they think we can deliver; we end up essentially building abstraction layers around other teams, and they build abstraction layers around us.
If you put everyone in a private office and default conversations to email lists / group chat (which is the model that basically the entire open source community uses), that's fine. If you have an open floor plan where it's easy to wander over to another team's area, that's also fine. But making it super easy for your own team to talk without other people hearing seems the worst of both worlds; you have all the distraction problems of open floor plans (every conversation concerns you), and you don't get the organic conversations that open floor plans are supposed to promote.
It sounds like you are trying to compensate for a lack of systems engineering by changing the office layout. You shouldn't be relying on serendipitously overheard conversations for coordinating things like this.
Yeah, I am inclined to agree. However, part of systems engineering is figuring out where technical conversations happen. Apache has "if it didn't happen on the mailing list, it didn't happen" as a rule precisely because they want to avoid the unreliability of serendipitously overhearing conversations, precisely because that's important to how they engineer systems. I would be a fan of a system design / an office layout where everyone has a private room and all conversations default to happening in email or group chat, and in-person conversations (which are, on occasion, definitely needed!) require some activation energy.
However, lots of in-person offices like these serendipitous conversations, and that's often pitched as an advantage of open plan layouts. That's also pitched as an advantage of getting lunch together, team outings, etc. etc. If you're going to decide to use this advantage (which I think is okay, but suboptimal), you had better put some systems engineering thought into how you want to use this advantage.
I see Conway's Law as a statement about the world, not a class of problems. Team size is capped by human nature, and systems will develop to mirror team sizes. The only solution is to find lower-communication "seams" for both your team boundaries and your system boundaries.
Abstraction layers around teams sounds like a good thing, as long as they abstraction layers make sense.
Abstraction layers around systems are a good thing. Teams have all sorts of weird properties, like a manager's willingness to focus on problems or recruit certain types of people. In an ideal world, teams and systems line up; in practice they don't, and Conway's Law is that the system design starts to conform to the team structure instead of vice versa.
Short of a private office, this would be my top choice.
But the big thing, I think -- Put a wall between the hallway and the work area. Too many irrelevant people have irrelevant conversations when they're walking by and it's distracting.
On a related note, people who have a job requiring them to be constantly on the phone should not be placed within earshot of people who need to focus. Sales and support need to have walls between them and developers. Trying to code while someone is on the phone 4-8 hours a day is debilitating.
I work in a team sized room and much rather would have my own quiet space. I happen to sit next to a "key person" who is constantly having (important) discussions with coworkers that I don't need to or want to hear.
I'm really distraction and noise sensitive so I really prefer working from home when there's code to be written.
I say there is a problem within your team (like that "key person" not knowing what is or isn't productive in what he does) that you are hoping to solve through seclusion. Excluding such bad quirks, assuming everyone is acting reasonably (in a tolerant frame of reference), I would say team sized spaces strike a good balance between the peer interaction accessibility and the bad effects of crowd noise.
The problem with our team is that it's not really a team in the traditional sense. We're an engineering office for a multinational and we're a team only in the sense that we have a common manager but all of us pretty much work on different projects, with most of the collaborators being overseas (with a 10 hour timezone difference).
The "key person" is really a key figure and his opinion is valued for a lot of different things, so he's talking a lot to different people. But almost none of it concerns me.
Even if I worked together with the guys I sit next to, I'd prefer that there was a door between me and them. I prefer to work in silence and uninterrupted and if my opinion is required I'd rather work it out before/after lunch or schedule a time slot for it.
I work in a team sized room and much rather would have my own quiet space. I happen to sit next to a "key person" who is constantly having (important) discussions with coworkers that I don't need to or want to hear.
I'm really distraction and noise sensitive so I really prefer working from home when there's code to be written.
I would love to have a private office. Currently I spend most of my day blasting my ears because I simply can not concentrate with the constant Skype calling, people singing to themselves or random drive by meetings. And we are only 4-5 in the office.
I worked in a room like that at my last employer. There were four of us in one office (with room for a fifth). It was easily the worst arrangement I've ever worked in.
I'd rather have either a cube farm or a two-person office with both our backs to the wall. I like my privacy.
Agreed! Our space has 3ft high cube walls and you hear every single conversation everyone has. It's incredibly distracting and I can no longer just throw headphones on to mask it. Now I find too much music distracting too.
I couldn't do anything in an open office without blocking the noise. Visual distractions are almost as bad but are harder to block.
I use sox to generate audio. It is available for win/Mac/Linux. I set it for 90 minutes of brown noise which gives me a reminder to get up and walk around when it ends. I believe it can generate white or pink noise if you prefer.
I run out of monitors already. My current office looks like this:
|
O|O
---+--- |
O|O O|O
| ---+---
X|O
|
+----|
| | | |
--+DDD+--+ |----------
| |
X - me
O - other people,
DDD - doors.
The +-like lines are desk areas, we have no dividers there; everyone is facing each other. I've managed to block off the two people in front of me with monitors, and the one to the right of me is hidden behind his own monitors. But I still struggle with the space to the left and behind me, and I'm seriously considering building a cubicle out of pizza boxes...
There's an ideal middle ground, which is private offices with outdoor-facing windows and open workspaces available elsewhere. Sometimes you need to be alone and concentrate, sometimes you need to be surrounded by some activity and social interaction.
That's a problem for planning of both headcount and space. A company should know its growth profile and plan accordingly. Having slack space (meeting cubes, shared space) which can be converted helps. Short answer: plan ahead.
Rotating employees through different workgroups helps build stronger overall team cohesion. Gives people a chance to mix and match.
Running into this at work now. 7-8 person spaces. We're crunching down and rearranging things now to fit in more people where necessary. Currently in the process of attaining a new building. Reason I'm reading this article: new building plan is to put all 100+ folks in open office with concrete floors.
I don't know why this is not discussed more. People either talk about either open floor plans or complete private solo offices. Or cubicles, although no one seems to like that.
A private office with your team of 4-5 people seems ideal. You don't get the interruptions and noise of open floor plans, or even cubicles. You're also not alone and isolated all day. Your team is right around you to discuss any issues. It also helps build team cohesion. It is the best setup in most cases I've seen.
I've worked in open offices where I have to concentrate, but it is like Grand Central Station. Putting on earphones doesn't help much. So the work I was supposed to do gets pushed off to tomorrow, and then the day after tomorrow.
Cubicles are a compromise - no one likes them because they're either still to open or not open enough depending on who you talk to. I'd still take a cubicle any day over an open plan though.
It's clear that there's no one-size-fits-all solution to office spaces. I would personally love working in a dark basement with lots of walls and minimal conversation. Introvert/extrovert strikes again!
I consider myself an introvert too, even though a lot of people in my Hackerspace are utterly convinced I'm one of the more extroverted people they know. All because I can hold a conversation and like doing public talks every now and then.
The best description of introvert / extrovert thing I found is that comic strip - http://imgur.com/76HUN. Being an introvert, social interactions cost me energy instead of giving it, and that's why it's easy to deliver public talks when you feel like it, while at the same time avoiding people for most of the day.
Yeah, but Jon wanders over to my desk to chat on a regular basis. Often for an hour plus. I like Jon and am always happy to chat, just doesn't seem like introvert behavior. Not complaining. :)
Natural light is one of the most important aspects of an office to me. A few years ago I actually turned down an offer because I realized I'd be sitting in an interior team-sized room with no windows and just a door to a hallway, again with no windows. I would have been giving up a seat next to huge windows with light flooding into the room. I just knew that I'd end up depressed in those working conditions and decided to turn it down.
Maybe this seems melodramatic, but sitting for 8+ hours in a small room with no natural lighting reminds me too much of high school. I was really unhappy during high school, and I honestly believe a lot of it was just the physical environment. If I can avoid it, I will. I still have that same seat described above next to huge windows and every day I'm so happy to come in and just bask in the sun's glory. Even if it's a cloudy or rainy day it's just great.
I literally had a 4th floor corner office with a window in grad school. Unfortunately, the window measured about 10"x24", with a lousy view, and the office literally wasn't big enough to accommodate the three of us who shared it all at the same time. :P
I shared an office with a floor to ceiling set of windows.
Some director of another division found out about it and literally had facilities remove the desks and put high cubes in so that we wouldn't have more window than him.
Working in a SCIF is the WORST. Never again. Though I was able to work in one, very briefly, that had windows. It was bizarre to me being in a SCIF but with windows that had blinds open...
Working in a SCIF isn't so bad when you've got an outside office. I typically spend half my day in each location. I have had days, however, where I go into the SCIF in the morning and don't emerge until its time to go home. Fortunately, that's pretty rare.
I worked at a place that put a cube farm in a 'cleaned' out oil bunker for the former power plant. They built false walls and had airflow between the concrete wall and the false wall[1] which was a rather scary wind noise since we were 50' underground. Obviously no natural light and cell phones and radios didn't work. Had to wear a tie / jacket because dress codes even though it would have been illegal for a client to get into our area. I call that job my "3 Seasons in Heck".
1) something to do with concrete still bleeding oil even if sealed so smell wouldn't get to us.
And for those wondering what is a SCIF: "A Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF; pronounced "skiff") in United States military, security and intelligence parlance, is an enclosed area within a building that is used to process Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) types of classified information."
Don't expect that in the US anytime soon as we haven't even mandated annual leave yet.
I really think natural light should be required for all. I went to a high school in Texas literally modeled after a prison. No windows, no natural light anywhere in the entire building. Built in 1979. What is wrong with these people?
I took my SATs at a high school classroom with a huge windows looking out to a forest setting... It was incredible
I struggled with fatigue for most of my sophomore year of high school. I started falling asleep in class out of nowhere. Then, as suddenly as I started falling asleep in class, I stopped.Looking back, I realized that I had been going days and weeks without seeing the sun. None of my classes had windows, nor did the lunchroom or the gyms. I had been getting to school early for clubs and leaving late because of sports. I was arriving at school before sunrise and leaving after sunset once the days got short enough.
Speaking of forests -- I think schools are overly concerned with controlling the environment kids learn in. I personally think that letting the mind wander for short periods helps your mental stamina recover.
I developed more-than-moderate SAD in high school that took years to get over. They really need to stop making high school kids get up so damn early, and adjust the school year so kids are off more in the worst of the Winter (like, most of it, ideally)
It could also work for much of Europe, but we probably wouldn't use the word "sophomore", and I've never seen or heard of a school with no windows. I doubt it is allowed.
(For example, the UK requirements for a school building state "giving priority to daylight in all teaching spaces, circulation, staff offices and social
areas" and "providing adequate views to the outside or into the distance to ensure visual comfort and help avoid eye strain" [1])
The shortest day in San Francisco is 9.5 hours. The shortest day in Chicago is slightly north of 9 hours. The shortest day in London is less than 8 hours.
That's not an insane schedule. It's a bit longer than regular day, unless you're in London or north.
I have my office windows all blacked out with blinds and a heavy curtain. Natural light makes it difficult to look at the screen. I will enjoy my natural light when I don't need to use my brain for coding and work. The best environment is like an evening or night: darkness except some dim, indirect lights, just like evenings and nights with slight ambient lighting. Best offices accommodate different needs.
C and Python. Lots of bash scripting. Spare time projects still tend to favour lispy languages. I use Clojure, Chicken Scheme, and others. I'd love to use Hy but having tried it a few times seriously, it's not mature enough yet.
I sit right next to a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. The new designer who just started sits across from me and can't stand the sunlight, so he pulls the blinds down every day, all day. Drives me nuts, especially in the winter when I'm at work for all of the daylight hours I'm awake for.
Not the OP, but it can be a difficult conversation.
I had a similar one when I was at CS school, one of our dorm room-mates was always covering the room's window with paper and stuff like that in order to not let the morning sun in. It drove me crazy. Being younger and more impulsive of course that I told him that what he was doing was bothering me. Not sure what the end-result was (this happened ~15 years ago), only that it created a tense atmosphere between me and said room-mate for the remaining of the school year. I'd imagine bringing that additional stress into an work-like environment it's not for the best.
It's not melodramatic. I have a Film background and it's the same there - any person who's minimally studied artificial lighting will tell you that artificial lighting is still nothing like natural lighting. This is just considering the color spectrum reproduction you get and not even going into natural health benefits.
If we can't even film with artificial lighting and get away with it, what makes people think we can live under artificial lighting conditions for the majority of our working life ? It's madness.
Exactly. The whole point of a "open" office is so that people who constantly work with each other can easily communicate. Not to be cheap bastards and cram as many workers into a small a space as possible to save money on office space and furniture.
I work from home full time now in a dedicated office space, however over the years I've worked in variety of setups ranging from:
1) four to six desk offices - quite enjoyable, peaceful, reasonably sociable at appropriate times and lots of natural light. The occupants were always developers or sysadmins who know the value of a bit of peace and quiet.
2) ten to sixteen desk open plan offices - not terrible because the occupants were almost entirely developers plus or minus a few sysadmins. Meetings were always held in an adjoining dedicated meeting rooms. Again quite peaceful, reasonably sociable and again both these places had plenty of natural lighting. Letting developers have a peaceful environment was respected and project management and sales folks were located in the next set of offices along the way so they could yell and shout over the phone in their own bubble.
3) Massive open plan 30-40+ desks (a bank) - bloody awful depending on where you were allocated a seat. Space was also used hyper efficiently so no four desk pods or the like. Just rows and rows of tables. Several different teams were packed into an entire floor, the noise was quite distracting and was like working in a barn. Would never do this again.
Ideally I like working in my own dedicated office space, but if I had to go back to working in an office again then options 1 & 2 above wouldn't be terrible provided phone calls and arsing about were kept to a minimum. However anything larger than that would be a turn off for me now.
That said I've never worked in a cubicle farm, that might not be too terrible for me provided I could see daylight.
These Facebook type "fun" open plan offices are a total turn off for me, but that's probably an age thing. Perhaps if I was in my 20's again it might be ok for a while. But then I've never had a desire to work for Facebook, Google et al.
If I have to share, I'd rather it was with randoms from other parts of the organisation than with close colleagues. Less of a feeling that every conversation going on in the room is potentially important.
Yeah, I wasn't really talking about the lux level, but rather about "cheating natural daylight". Unless your office window is getting direct mid-day sun (so it's.. a skylight?) you aren't getting close to 100k lux.
To make it seem like sunlight you have to simulate Rayleigh scattering. I remember seeing a company that was making artificial skylights that did this, but can't seem to find it anymore.
Hah, that old server room on the second floor of 500? That place was incredibly depressing. I worked from home nearly every day (breaking the "two days per week maximum" policy) because I couldn't stand it in there and my team wasn't located in RTP anyway.
Yup, 2nd floor of the 500 building. I worked in a couple different cubes, the old server room, and a "war room" - all with no visible windows, all with extremely loud white noise. Not sure why they haven't done a big renovation, it's quite obvious that the Feng Shui in that place is as bad as it gets.
Thank you. I'm scared of the virulent backlash against open offices from devs right now. Is "productivity" really the only measure of job satisfaction?
I'm more than happy to sacrifice some of my productivity for the sake of feeling more connected to my team, more light, and a general sense of freedom.
If my employer agrees, and is willing to tolerate this productivity decrease (as apparently most employers are), then this is a mutually beneficial arrangement!
These devs complaining about open floor offices think that the alternative is every company springing for private offices with optional team areas. It's NOT. Most companies can't and won't afford this. The alternative that most of us would be facing is rows and rows of dimly lit cubicles, as was the convention in the 90's.
> Is "productivity" really the only measure of job satisfaction?
Productivity is a side effect of good employees working in a good environment. Programmers aren't satisfied because they're productive; they're productive because they're satisfied.
When my company moved to an open office plan we, the developers, tried to argue that we needed the ability to concentrate and that this would hinder that. We were told that every job required concentration and that we shouldn't be such prima donnas who think we are special snowflakes. Someday I'm going to get a special snowglobe and shove it down the throat of the sales lady who sits next to me who holds conference calls all day long from her desk.
Unfortunately I love everything else about my job so I'm disinclined to move on.
> the sales lady who sits next to me who holds conference calls all day long from her desk
I've had this situation in the past a few times and to some degree today. If we have to have open office plans then at least take some effort into grouping "talkers" together away from "heads down" people.
Is that so hard? There's no real economic argument, as it's just putting some thought into where people sit. There's no collaboration argument, because people on the same team would site together. Etc. From the reactions when I've brought it up, that's a completely unreasonable request. The whole idea than anyone's productivity might benefit from a quiet work environment seems to make management/HR upset.
Well, I'd never be able to find the people who implemented the open floor plan. That's one of the problems with huge companies - the guilty are to often anonymous ;-)
The problem with the sales person is that there are room set aside for making phone calls (whether personal or business) and there are always some available, but apparently that is entirely too unreasonable to expect someone with a laptop to go find a room instead of letting everyone in a 30 foot radius listen in on the call.
Good question. In the past we've had some issues with this, and it's possible to mildly influence volume and "out in public" call frequency downward by asking. But it requires a combination of a thick hide and some institutional status to make it happen. If the person you are asking is a peer or a senior, forget it.
It's not that simple. She has been around a long time and even though she isn't a manager, seniority goes a long way at my company. My manager has mentioned it to her, but realistically that's as far as he can take it.
Ask for a place farther from her, perhaps switching with some other talkative colleague in a better spot. If manager rises eyebrows, argue that she is too loud and inconsiderate(unscrupulous) to other people. Even better if more colleagues share this view, make a move together.
I've had the opposite experience. As a software consultant I'm often on client calls. Our developers decided that a gong was the way to signal stand up time. They eventually moved to bongo drums. I don't know what they do now. I work from home.
Yes, I actually used to have a copy of it posted on my wall until too many "managers" mocked me for it. In my experience, those who are not "makers" truly truly truly do not comprehend in the smallest way what concentration, interruptions, meetings, etc. mean from a developers standpoint.
Few years ago my company switched to an open office layout. There was a temporary arrangement issue, so I had to sit in the sales section of the floor for a few weeks. I don't think I accomplished a single thing the entire time I was there. Constant phone calls, loud talking across multiple rows of desks. It was like that scene in the movie Wall Street. The guy behind me was incapable of properly using a keyboard. He would mash the keys down as if he was angry at them. Never heard such noise from squishy dome keys before. Jesus.
Really? Because every time new iPhone hits the stores I keep seeing news about how they were sold out in one day, or how Apple online store has a shortages of this or that version.
He used the term "no shortage" not to literally say that it is possible to obtain an iPhone no matter what, but rather to mean "I see lots of them around". Indeed, a lot of people have iPhones.
One cannot simply pay more on average. The demand for good engineers is high and Facebook must compete for them.
I believe supply and demand with market rates is a much bigger factor on the average Facebook engineer salary than the quality of the engineer. For one, we are only dealing with a discrepancy on the order of 40-50%. Is a good engineer only 40-50% better than an average engineer?
Better devs should have better options than less skilled developers, so if you have a high hiring bar you will be dealing with competitors trying to get those same employees. I don't think 10% over a standard offer would cover a competitors offer.
It's also very easy to "accidentally" put more people into a very large room than it would be allowed by working regulations. There's at least one large Silicon Valley company who likes to do that. The working conditions can be quite miserable.
You can call it an open office that amplifies communication in the team, so noone will notice that they're almost piling up vertically. And the problem is not just noise. Too many people breathing the same air leads to rising carbon dioxide levels which makes concentrating quite hard. Unless the office was literally built for large crowds, the ventilation will usually be insufficient to cool the office in summer and to provide adequate levels of air flow.
I stopped calling those things "open offices" and use the term "laying battery" instead.
I wouldn't use the term laying battery for a room where employees get salarys of (often) more than 5x the country's median to work there. I'd say no developer at Facebook was forced to work there, they all could easily get another job (maybe paid worse). It's purely their choice to work in this environment. I think the comparison with a laying battery isn't a really good fit here.
What's described here is still a "first world problem", some people seem to forget that.
I don't like open offices. Sometimes they can be downright harmful though I can deal with them if I'm sitting with my back to the wall.
Many years ago, when I was fresh out of uni, I lost my job because of an open office; I was sitting relatively close to a bathroom and people kept walking past behind me - After 1 week this made me feel stressed and paranoid and I couldn't concentrate.
One month in, the boss asked me into his office and basically told me that I was unproductive and that "I'm going to have to cut you loose" - Being young, I thought there was something wrong with me but after working in several other companies, I learned the importance of the workplace environment.
If I ever get into a situation where I had to work with my back facing a large empty room again, I would start looking for a new job straight away. I feel shivers just thinking about it...
Oh but your psychological wellbeing means nothing to the dimwit who loves open offices and thinks he can still do "deep work" (most likely trivial crap like stitching together some libraries to make the front end of a CRUD application) while spending half the day disturbing others with endless non productive talk ("team work").
Or even worse, someone whose job is to talk on the phone and use the stupid CRUD app, and who has never done anything cognitively demanding in their entire life, literally.
Most of the problems about overhearing conversations, etc, can be dealt with by a nice pair of headphones. Here, it's universally accepted as the 'do not disturb' signal.
If the employer provides super comfortable noise-cancelling headphones I would agree.
Personally, listening to music all day gives me a headache and podcasts are too distracting. And I don't need these headphones for anything else (otherwise, I'd already have a pair!)
I wonder what would come of it if I requested some.
I am wondering if this is the divide. I personally do not mind open spaces because I have headphones. I find that I can work anywhere so long as I have wifi, my laptop and a pair of headphones. But I have also been wearing headphones most of my life to drown out the noises of my environment (and sadly the sounds of domestic abuse growing up).
So I'm curious if people who hate open spaces had greater control of their environment growing up. I didn't and adapted. Maybe I'm reaching here, but curious of other's opinion on this take.
It's a total first world problem, but none of the headphones that FB provides in the vending machines are actually noise cancelling. There are Sennheiser HD 280s (huge over-ear headphones, quite comfortable, good sound quality and do deaden surrounding noise a little), Apple Earbuds (meh) and a seemingly easily-breakable Klipsch in-ear set that I can't remember the model number of.
The headphones are very reasonable for what they do (and of course, they're free to you, so even better) but in terms of actual noise cancelling you'd have to buy your own. Of course, FB pays developers well so spending $300 on a set of Bose QCs is no problem at all, but a lot of people don't bother or see the point when there are free sets in the vending machines.
This is absolutely not a solution if you have tinnitus or a hearing damage or both.
Also this is an insane workaround. Think about what you’re suggesting: the environment that you’re working in, the place where you go to, intentionally, to focus and concentrate, is so filled with undesired and irrelevant noise, that in order to get your work done, you need to tune it out with headphones. How does that make sense?
These companies are constantly in search of the smartest people and yet they think they can get away with such obviously illogical lines. They have people who are best at identifying and fixing corner cases in very complex systems and yet they want these employees to ignore this completely illogical line of thinking? This is insulting and annoying.
Some studio headphones have excellent passive noise cancelling. They're designed to avoid sound leaking through so they basically shut out most noises even if they're plugged off. Look at DT 770 as an example.
Which also means you can use them on a very low level so that they don't cause hearing problems if used for long time.
You would think. For me it seems every time I put them on some asshole wanders up and starts talking to me as if I can hear a single word they are saying.
Are you always listening to music when you wear headphones? Or do you use noise-cancelling headphones only for their noise-cancelling, to create silence?
While this may affect a developer's decision to work at Facebook, my first thought is that Joel is ignoring the gorilla in the room. The number one reason that people don't want to work at Facebook is their product and mission. As someone in the comments mentioned, SpaceX has very tight and open cubicles, but people there are paid _below_ market rates, and they are doing _very_ deep work, so Joel's argument doesn't hold water in all cases.
EPA is shitty, but the FB campus is right on the bay and not in EPA. The only shitty thing about it is that you have to deal with the Dumbarton bridge traffic, which is good or bad depending on which side of the bay you live on.
Yet they have a lot of bright people working there and every year a ton of new-grads fight for the chance for an internship there. Plus the company is doing really well and treating their employees really well. A top 5 best places to work at according to Glassdoor. It really must be so miserable there...
As people get older, they tend to wonder if what their doing is valuable, or even morally right. So I think as Facebooks employees are getting older, they naturally want to leave. At this point Facebook is one big click bait site and that's not something people want to work on long term.
If Facebook was more about bringing people closer together, and less about showing ads down the throats of it's users, more people would want to work there.
For most of my career I worked at companies with full size cubicles and was okay with it. My current employer started with an open office structure. We are a fairly small group of developers so things were not so noisy and it was easier to communicate. But then I am getting old now and taking daily medicines for chronic issues. It was hard getting the privacy to take my medicines. We've now switched to full cubicles with the front at half height so this is a better blend of openness and privacy.
My personal anecdote: The main reason I never consider interviewing at Facebook is because of their office layout. I politely decline their requests to chat. And that's totally their choice to make. Maybe it works for them, but I know it doesn't work for me.
"He’s also one of the first Silicon Valley insiders to publicly and directly endorse the importance of deep work over the fuzzier values of connection and serendipity."
Isn't Joel and all of his enterprises based in New York City? am I wrong in thinking Silicon Valley insiders live and/or work in Silicon Valley?
482 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 330 ms ] threadMe too.
Still, many people have short term thinking or knowledge (better to get higher pay now than realize it will hold back by career trajectory), or they aren't too worried about success of their company or their productivity level.
Open offices are horrible for productivity imo. Moved to a job with an office and it is so. much. better.
joel used to (still does?) host a job board that used Joel Test as a factor. Maybe it died when StackOverflow launched.
Also, the exact wording for the office part of the test is "Do programmers have quiet working conditions?" This usually means that working conditions might possibly be quiet if nobody else happened to be in the office at the same time as you. While many claim quiet working conditions, I've never seen one that actually provided private offices.
This is anecdotal of course, and just based on looking at photographs they've included on their website or Stack Overflow page, but every job I've viewed recently appears to have an open plan office. In some of the photos you even see people standing around having impromptu meetings in the middle of a group of desks where others are trying to work.
Remember this is just the companies that are actually claiming to provide programmers with quiet working conditions. I can't imagine what the noisy ones are like.
A measly additional 60 square feet of floor space, 10-20 grand in construction costs, and the same desk/chairs, amortized over 5 or so years.
Even building separate rooms for groups of programmers would provide for great gains at low costs.
"Most employees have a private office; some share one with a colleague."
https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2015/07/28/epic-systems...
You know, if a prospective employer was straight up with me about that, I'd give it serious consideration. I can understand that not every company can afford an endless supply of private offices in urban areas (although obviously this is not the case with companies like FB).
What bugs me the most about the open office fetish is how it causes productivity to plummet for most developers, at the same time the leadership is spouting off on how great it is for productivity. I mean, as that goofy reality judge said, don't piss on my shoes and tell me it's raining.
To top that off, he used to talk to people across the office using a megaphone. I was over 100 feet away from him, and people I was on the phone with would ask me what was going on, "Is everything all right over there? Is somebody swearing?"
"Yeah, uh, that's just our CEO."
I don't work there anymore.
My productivity fell off a cliff at my new job when I got promoted and moved to a "nicer" desk. The desk probably has three times as much area as my old desk, but my old desk was in the back corner of an office that was split in half with a partition. I could work for hours without being interrupted. Now I'm in a cubicle right by a door, and I'm interrupted several times per hour. I think open offices just feel more productive -- more than one coworker has mentioned how great it is that they can drop by now without feeling like they are interrupting me.
That said, they're a disaster for productivity.
Also, market inefficiency works here too, I think - it can take years before a company tanks. So productivity drop can go unnoticed forever (even when a company fails, there will be enough other factors to blame). Not to mention that marketing can successfully paper over all kinds of crap; mediocre is the standard in our industry.
Which is how it should be, even with open offices.
It's something that was a financial necessity in expensive real estate, like Manhattan, FinDi in SF, etc. and someone got the idea to transplant that into suburban offices.
To add, I think it makes sense for a lean startup or a company going through a rough reorg, but once you're mature or overcome financial difficulties, it's not necessarily a good permanent layout.
Individual productivity or team productivity? If you are optimizing for individual productivity - you could be hitting a local maxima...
I do say the above in half-jest: I would love to see any research done in this area. When I was a new joiner, it was convenient to swivel around/walk across the room and talk to someone. Sure, it sucks now that I'm an old hand and noobs keep taking me out of the zone. In addition, it is sometimes beneficial to listen in on ambient conversations (while waiting for compilation or taking a break), sometimes I even chip in when I have a contribution (roughly once a month). I'd like to think this saves my colleagues time. However, I work in a medium sized room (which houses 18 desks), so YMMV.
Forum discussions like this one seem to be all about individual productivity. In my experience, open offices are really great for ad hoc collaboration and conversation. To combat interruptions, individual developers can easily take steps to not be interrupted when they are doing something that can't be interrupted. But tbh I don't spend 8 hours a day in such a way that I should never be interrupted as a rule. If anything, I like that my teammates feel comfortable to walk over to my desk (or, more commonly, IM me "are you free?" and then walk over) and talk as a default. A lot is gained when people are quick to ask others when they are stuck since that's often the quickest solution to getting unblocked.
This is orthogonal to the office layout, though.
As a counterpoint though, another office also went for industrial design, but they did it stylishly - just one visible aircon pipe, and instead of raw concrete, they sprayed it with a kind of foam or fiber that absorbs a lot of sound, in a somewhat dark color. That office has a beer tap, too.
The other reason I think they are used is that they are cheap to reconfigure, you can usually shove more desks in to accommodate more head count and move groups around in order to try to reclaim the ever-shrinking space.
I have worked at startup where my group was moved every few months for some reason. Often times the layout seems to lack any alignment with job requirements.
For instances developers being place right next to marketing folks who spend a lot of time talking on the phone because that's what their job entails.
That's why you never date your co-worker. And if you couldn't help it and fell in love then you should quit your job first and ask him/her on date later.
Other people at the cafe, I don't care what they're talking about. And it's away from home where I might have other distractions.
I expect the cafe is more akin to white noise, not the sort of conversations you'd hear in a dev open office. Sometimes when you overhear some devs talking you can't help get sucked into the conversation. Especially when they are wrong.
If you could train coworkers to respect the explicit and implicit signals that people give off when working and concentrating on something and use some fucking etiquette like keeping the shouting to a minimum or taking long conversations elsewhere, this wouldn't be a problem.
I much prefer the library setting where you're expected to be quiet and there is little movement around you.
It arguably worked well for prison power structure too with regards to rehabilitation, until gang infiltration in the late 1960's changed the power status quo.
Not at all - Foucault looked at discipline in the sense of humans being molded to become skilled and efficient at work - observing everything from monks to boarding schools in an effort to analyze power structures for discipline.
With panopticon, the power model is the all seeing eye, which is necessary to scale to so many prison inmates. With the open office structure, the power structure is more with your work peers, which is more similar to the group/tribal type of power structure.
I've been to the AWS headquarters in Seattle and I think that's what their setup is like but I didn't get too much of a chance to look around.
I've worked on systems administrations teams that had their own office and being able to close the door was awesome.
So many open office plans leave enough floor space for walls and hallways; they just don't put them in place.
Offices. Team Rooms. Decent cubicles.
Microsoft has offices for developers. Even they are somewhat jumping on the Open Office bandwagon (or team rooms).
A much nicer setup IMO than Google which had a fairly haphazard cube farm resulting in distance from a window being basically luck of the draw.
* Are usually cheaper
* Look good in photo ops and publicity: "Look how much everyone is working together _all the time_. So much activity happening! We are not like those places with loners and antisocial people hiding in cubicles"
* Cubicles were used to be associated with boring, slow bureaucratic offices.
Those 4 things conspire to make them more popular. I think it is simpler a function of them being cheaper in general and everything else is just justification. But in case Facebook, can't imagine they don't have the money...
Well I am glad this is changing though. There seems to be a backlash against open offices lately.
Honestly, I'd rather work in a "boring, slow bureaucratic office" than at some hip modern startup. The "boring, slow bureaucratic office" probably takes better care of their employees and offers a less-stressful work environment.
> One does not have to be an especially perceptive critic to realize that AO II is definitely not a system which produces an environment gratifying for people in general. But it is admirable for planners looking for ways of cramming in a maximum number of bodies, for "employees" (as against individuals), for "personnel," corporate zombies, the walking dead, the silent majority. A large market.
– George Nelson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubicle#Impact_on_society
I've been through the full gambit: single office; shared office; cube; back to shared office; open office.
My favorite is definitely open office, because it's simply more social.
"It's a magnificent idea. FOR EVERYONE ELSE, NOT ME."
Factories have huge machines, whih create added value. They have a good reason for loud noises and need for ear protection.
Offices, on the other hand, are places where people come to create added value by mostly by thinking (if they are programmers).
Are there people who enjoy the bustle of open office while trying to untangle a decade old piece of C++ spaghetti? Whose work output it actually improves?
I'm trying to figure out if the open offices are bad mostly for everyone or just for someone like me.
Sometimes success depends on willingness to use ear coverings and stimulants (caffeine, ritalin, adderall), and willingness varies.
I'd rather pay for a wall than overload my body with drugs and a clamp on my head.
Personally, I have no difficulty with noise (I prefer working in coffee shops to at home), and being able to easily start a design discussion with 4 or 5 engineers when necessary is extremely valuable. I totally get why some people don't like it though.
I'm fine with coffee shops over home (and did the same in college), but coffeeshop noise is "white noise" -- whirring espresso grinders, a blur of conversations between people I don't know about things that aren't going to activate my distraction monkey.
When I was at a large defense contractor the work was broken down into such small chunks that each engineer was essentially off on their own working on their piece of the system. In fact, that was the way all engineering, not just software engineering, was done there. There might be a point where two or three people would need to discuss an approach, but that wasn't the majority of the time.
The company I just finished at works multiple small contracts simultaneously. Because of the small scope it was very common to be the only person working on the code for a particular project, though there was more collaboration than at my previous company.
The place I am going seems to be more like what you describe, so it will be interesting to see if my opinions of open office layouts change after that.
I honestly do not understand this statement. Are you trying to say that if you were in cubes, you couldn't do that? You couldn't ask people to come over and talk something out? And are you stating that your design discussion is more important than whatever they're working on?
or, rephrased, the ability to destroy 3 man-hours of productivity on a whim.
That "easy conversation" is not scheduled, and now I need to stop what I am doing, listen to you for an hour, and still finish the rest of my tasking on time.
[1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ask-the-brains-ba...
- Better/Faster communications. I can ask and answer questions on the spots vs. scheduling a meeting. This is gaming changing. For the same type of question, I can get answered within 10 mins vs more than 1 day. This is a HUGE productivity boost.
- Better team culture. Sitting next to each other make the team much closer. More likely to go to lunch/dinner, hang out, and become friends outside of work. This will give people empathy to each other and more willingly to help/unblock you.
For the noise issues, I get around it by blocking heads down time in my schedule and find a quiet corner in a office.
I'm going to guess that there's some individual variation in preference for quiet / noise. I'm the kind of person who can't really get deep work done, like writing proposals or novels, in noisy, busy environments. I look at all the people, listen to the sounds, and generally can't get into a state of flow.
That being said, I've met lots of writers who say they can't work in quiet rooms because they need some stimulation or they go nuts. Lev Grossman, for example, has talked about writing most of the Magicians trilogy (the first one is good! https://jakeseliger.com/2009/08/28/the-magicians-lev-grossma...) in coffee shops.
I suspect that on average most people would be better served by quiet focus, but that a fair number would not be.
If this is true—anyone doing industrial organization research may have a research topic here—I don't know how it would be implement organizationally, especially because offices and layouts are almost instantly going to be linked up with status and hierarchy issues, and most people will want the higher status option, regardless of whether it fits them well or not.
I got a pair of Etymotic In-Ear Headphones[0] which have kept me sane for several years now. They have interchangeable tips with a NRR on-par with foam plugs. Worth every penny in an open office.
[0]http://www.etymotic.com/consumer/headset-earphones/hf3.html
Also, I seem to be the minority in comments, but I don't mind people talking around me. I don't use my ears/hearing to code, so it doesn't distract me nearly as much as chat windows or anything visual on my laptop. I suppose the real issue is people having interesting conversations around me... But I have headphones and music if I need to concentrate (I probably only wear them for 1-2 hours a week to block out conversations).
Every week one a new article like this is posted, and every week the comments are overwhelmingly "open offices are bad". Every week I meet more people like me who don't comment because they don't feel strongly about protecting open offices, and would like the people who are upset by open offices to find their comfortable place.
There really are quite a few of us who don't mind open offices... I'd guess it's probably a majority of people... We don't really want to impose on others...
My only real concern is that the people who want their own offices tend to also have seniority and want natural light... I've seen these people carve out their own personal paradise, while blocking other's ability to have a good working environment.
Context: Mid-thirties, Sr Engineer in Seattle who has worked for small startups (< 10) up to Amazon.
My solution: Ability to concentrate is a teachable skill. Every skill-based sport has to teach players how to focus on the goal and ignore the distraction (hence my assertion that Golf isn't skill-based). We use enough sportsball analogies in coding, so I'll add another.... Coding in an office is like batting against a pitching machine.
My coding has very little to with sport-like activity and is more like the task of a lone clocksmith (although we have a team, individuals have quite large chunks of codebase carved for themselves).
For some problems I am straining on the edge of my working memory capacity.
The problem with the distraction avoidance is that it demands mental resources. If there is some benefit in training working in a stresfull environment there could be a sound proof room for such a purpose where employees could go for a limited time to train. The inverse of large open office/small quiet room pattern.
At first level there could be just white noise in the room. Once that is mastered as an added stimulus the feet could be placed in a bucket of icewater. At the next level the room is filled with monkeys. Etc.
My initial reaction is that there seems to be much bigger issues with the way your company is structured. The words you're using ("lone", "carved", "straining on the edge") suggest a stressful situation where each individual carries their own weight... If that's the case, I can certainly see why you'd be upset by someone else impeding your ability to work. I wouldn't last long in an environment like that, either pushing it to be more collaborative, or just leaving.
I can't imagine any coding that isn't improved by adding collaboration (a great starting point is code reviews... make PRs early and get opinions on rough-cuts). If you don't have this in your current environment, I highly encourage trying to kickstart it... you're really missing out on a great way to remove stress, improve quality, and have more fun.
The inherent technical complexity of the components is such that sometimes a feature needs days of coding - thus the 'more locksmith, less of a ballgame' analogue. I should have perhaps pulled some other analogue.
I dunno, I just don't feel particularly unproductive. I thought maybe I just didn't have any point of comparison, but then I had a few days working from home and it didn't seem massively different.
A lot of people here are talking about flow, but I don't really feel the need for concentration for the majority "tactical" level coding, and when I run into sufficiently complicated "strategic" level problems, I find it much more effective to discuss them than to try and solve them on my own.
Of course these are mostly people who haven't had much experience working in office environments except possibly an internship or part-time work. Facebook might face some challenges recruiting experienced devs who know what kind of environment suits them, but anecdotally I don't see it at the junior level.
Early in your career, the best thing for you to do is to acquire knowledge -- not raw output. The open office allows for knowledge sharing and eavesdropping in ways closed offices do not. However, as you progress you require less 1:1 time with people and can work independently given a set of goals and general architecture. This requires less face time and more coding time.
Exactly. I didn't think an open floor plan was such a bad idea until I started working full-time in one. I can't stand it.
Like you say, a bunch of people who have never worked in an open plan office obviously won't complain about it, nor will they realize it's something they should filter by.
They haven't experienced the problem yet.
Take renting a flat. I now know to avoid everywhere with storage heaters, just like I avoid places with single glazing and I also now know I should check the shower water pressure.
I didn't magically know these things before.
There are plenty of people who are biased about things (like an open office environment) they haven't personally experienced, yet hold their bias based on hearing about the experiences of others.
I've never been in an airplane crash, and I'm pretty sure I never want to be in an airplane crash. I don't need to personally have that experience to have a bias against it.
If you didn't know about storage heaters or single glazing before renting a flat, there are probably a number of ways you could have discovered those things without having to experience them directly. It certainly wouldn't require "magic" as you say.
If a bias against open offices is happening, it doesn't seem to be impacting our newest industry entrants yet.
Open spaces do have a lot of distractions.
http://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt-...
For those like me who're susceptible to software fences around unproductive behavior, HN has a useful "antiprocrastination" option available under your profile settings.
At my last company, we generally had 1-2 person offices; it was very easy to stay in your office all day long and never interact with other developers. With the open plan here, we're much more likely to have impromptu team conversations.
I think it would be better if we were in separate rooms in groups of 8-10, but open offices definitely are not all negative. When I work from home I miss the human interaction.
I like the idea of team rooms, we should try more of that.
[1] controlled by a clique, really
Another place they had the radio on so I would laugh loudly at the DJs jokes, then say oh man, so funny, but so distracting, what was I doing again? Oh hell. I can't remember. They turned that off too.
There's so much room in the middle - theres no reason you can't have nice offices, or even nice cubicles, or mixed spaces depending on the job type or even personal preferences.
It seems though that the only "acceptable" option outside of lifeless cube farms is open offices for some reason - I have no idea why.
My team at my present job works in an open setting with 8 people in the room and windows with natural daylight. It's quiet enough to focus but gives us the opportunity for interaction also. I think that team-sized rooms are a good compromise between a completely open and completely secluded workspace.
I worked in a room with just my team and it worked out great. We were able to have discussions and draw stuff on white boards on the wall without distracting anyone else. It also helped with team bonding.
In an open room where half a dozen or so people sit, if two people stand up, walk into a conference room, and shut the door, that's weird and curious.
This also happens all the time, thus not weird. (or people don't talk ...)
Personally, I've been very happy with the environment. It helps that the open part of the office is bright, quiet and pretty sparsely populate.
Why don't you introduce the rule that entering another office is only allowed for scheduled appointments and emergency cases (life is in danger or the production server crashed).
There were things I liked at that company (mostly the people), but everything about the way the offices were set up had me on edge all the time. No private meeting space, not a single person had their back to a wall, people were thrown into offices at random with no regard to who was on what team...
After I got laid off, I landed at a place where I work in a cube farm, and it's so much less stressful.
I hope your leaving was voluntary, though... if it was, then congrats on the new job!
(and, yeah, I figured out who you are from the about section on your profile... I used to sit right behind you)
Yes, people do use it for those conversations, but you have to walk past all the business/marketing/sales people and your boss(s). Outside the office is a place to confide - where an "official" meeting or neutral meeting room is a place that puts everyone on the defensive, more so than anywhere else.
The idea put forth by Mark Cuban that "there should be no secrets at a startup" is extremely unfounded in my opinion - unpopular opinions or contrary positions frequently only flow in privacy as to not cause embarrassment or hostility.
That's a barrier compared to just chatting at someone's desk. Or the developer doesn't want to move their laptop, so they'd rather stay at their desk that go to the meeting room.
That leads to too many conversations in the open plan office.
My rebuttal to this point is the amount of time my previous co-workers would spend discussing lawn care strategies.
Overall though, I agree with you. Team sized rooms are a livable compromise, and have some nice upsides while tamping down the downsides of a fully open office.
If you put everyone in a private office and default conversations to email lists / group chat (which is the model that basically the entire open source community uses), that's fine. If you have an open floor plan where it's easy to wander over to another team's area, that's also fine. But making it super easy for your own team to talk without other people hearing seems the worst of both worlds; you have all the distraction problems of open floor plans (every conversation concerns you), and you don't get the organic conversations that open floor plans are supposed to promote.
On one hand I totally agree with you. On the other hand Conways law exist for a reason.
I see no reason why this shouldn't be another case of "[...] these ought you to have done, and not to leave the other undone."
However, lots of in-person offices like these serendipitous conversations, and that's often pitched as an advantage of open plan layouts. That's also pitched as an advantage of getting lunch together, team outings, etc. etc. If you're going to decide to use this advantage (which I think is okay, but suboptimal), you had better put some systems engineering thought into how you want to use this advantage.
Abstraction layers around teams sounds like a good thing, as long as they abstraction layers make sense.
But the big thing, I think -- Put a wall between the hallway and the work area. Too many irrelevant people have irrelevant conversations when they're walking by and it's distracting.
No, individual areas are the way to go.
Team rooms are still better than cramming people side by side row after row.
I'm really distraction and noise sensitive so I really prefer working from home when there's code to be written.
The "key person" is really a key figure and his opinion is valued for a lot of different things, so he's talking a lot to different people. But almost none of it concerns me.
Even if I worked together with the guys I sit next to, I'd prefer that there was a door between me and them. I prefer to work in silence and uninterrupted and if my opinion is required I'd rather work it out before/after lunch or schedule a time slot for it.
I'm really distraction and noise sensitive so I really prefer working from home when there's code to be written.
I'd rather have either a cube farm or a two-person office with both our backs to the wall. I like my privacy.
I use sox to generate audio. It is available for win/Mac/Linux. I set it for 90 minutes of brown noise which gives me a reminder to get up and walk around when it ends. I believe it can generate white or pink noise if you prefer.
>play -n synth 90:00 brownnoise brownnoise
I find a second row of monitors helps for this.
Rotating employees through different workgroups helps build stronger overall team cohesion. Gives people a chance to mix and match.
A private office with your team of 4-5 people seems ideal. You don't get the interruptions and noise of open floor plans, or even cubicles. You're also not alone and isolated all day. Your team is right around you to discuss any issues. It also helps build team cohesion. It is the best setup in most cases I've seen.
I've worked in open offices where I have to concentrate, but it is like Grand Central Station. Putting on earphones doesn't help much. So the work I was supposed to do gets pushed off to tomorrow, and then the day after tomorrow.
I consider myself an introvert too, even though a lot of people in my Hackerspace are utterly convinced I'm one of the more extroverted people they know. All because I can hold a conversation and like doing public talks every now and then.
The best description of introvert / extrovert thing I found is that comic strip - http://imgur.com/76HUN. Being an introvert, social interactions cost me energy instead of giving it, and that's why it's easy to deliver public talks when you feel like it, while at the same time avoiding people for most of the day.
Maybe this seems melodramatic, but sitting for 8+ hours in a small room with no natural lighting reminds me too much of high school. I was really unhappy during high school, and I honestly believe a lot of it was just the physical environment. If I can avoid it, I will. I still have that same seat described above next to huge windows and every day I'm so happy to come in and just bask in the sun's glory. Even if it's a cloudy or rainy day it's just great.
We liked to joke it was a near equivalent to a Vegas Casino for mathematicians.
Some director of another division found out about it and literally had facilities remove the desks and put high cubes in so that we wouldn't have more window than him.
1) something to do with concrete still bleeding oil even if sealed so smell wouldn't get to us.
This is why office buildings in most of Western Europe aren't as massive and square as in countries like the US.
I really think natural light should be required for all. I went to a high school in Texas literally modeled after a prison. No windows, no natural light anywhere in the entire building. Built in 1979. What is wrong with these people?
I took my SATs at a high school classroom with a huge windows looking out to a forest setting... It was incredible
Speaking of forests -- I think schools are overly concerned with controlling the environment kids learn in. I personally think that letting the mind wander for short periods helps your mental stamina recover.
Is it possible that you were really really tired? That schedule sounds insane to me. Unless you're very high north, I guess.
It could also work for much of Europe, but we probably wouldn't use the word "sophomore", and I've never seen or heard of a school with no windows. I doubt it is allowed.
(For example, the UK requirements for a school building state "giving priority to daylight in all teaching spaces, circulation, staff offices and social areas" and "providing adequate views to the outside or into the distance to ensure visual comfort and help avoid eye strain" [1])
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/standards-for-sch...
That's not an insane schedule. It's a bit longer than regular day, unless you're in London or north.
http://www.weareteachers.com/blogs/post/2015/08/25/best-of-t...
I had a similar one when I was at CS school, one of our dorm room-mates was always covering the room's window with paper and stuff like that in order to not let the morning sun in. It drove me crazy. Being younger and more impulsive of course that I told him that what he was doing was bothering me. Not sure what the end-result was (this happened ~15 years ago), only that it created a tense atmosphere between me and said room-mate for the remaining of the school year. I'd imagine bringing that additional stress into an work-like environment it's not for the best.
https://www.amazon.com/Difficult-Conversations-Discuss-What-...
If we can't even film with artificial lighting and get away with it, what makes people think we can live under artificial lighting conditions for the majority of our working life ? It's madness.
Now I'm having 5 big windows in my room, from 3 sides :) Working from home as contractor.
1) four to six desk offices - quite enjoyable, peaceful, reasonably sociable at appropriate times and lots of natural light. The occupants were always developers or sysadmins who know the value of a bit of peace and quiet.
2) ten to sixteen desk open plan offices - not terrible because the occupants were almost entirely developers plus or minus a few sysadmins. Meetings were always held in an adjoining dedicated meeting rooms. Again quite peaceful, reasonably sociable and again both these places had plenty of natural lighting. Letting developers have a peaceful environment was respected and project management and sales folks were located in the next set of offices along the way so they could yell and shout over the phone in their own bubble.
3) Massive open plan 30-40+ desks (a bank) - bloody awful depending on where you were allocated a seat. Space was also used hyper efficiently so no four desk pods or the like. Just rows and rows of tables. Several different teams were packed into an entire floor, the noise was quite distracting and was like working in a barn. Would never do this again.
Ideally I like working in my own dedicated office space, but if I had to go back to working in an office again then options 1 & 2 above wouldn't be terrible provided phone calls and arsing about were kept to a minimum. However anything larger than that would be a turn off for me now.
That said I've never worked in a cubicle farm, that might not be too terrible for me provided I could see daylight.
These Facebook type "fun" open plan offices are a total turn off for me, but that's probably an age thing. Perhaps if I was in my 20's again it might be ok for a while. But then I've never had a desire to work for Facebook, Google et al.
The aural equivalent (https://rainymood.com/) certainly works for me.
Natural light is around 100K lux. That is crazily expensive to generate.
(I sit next to a window atm. It's a bit annoying when the sun shows up after lunch)
I'm more than happy to sacrifice some of my productivity for the sake of feeling more connected to my team, more light, and a general sense of freedom.
If my employer agrees, and is willing to tolerate this productivity decrease (as apparently most employers are), then this is a mutually beneficial arrangement!
These devs complaining about open floor offices think that the alternative is every company springing for private offices with optional team areas. It's NOT. Most companies can't and won't afford this. The alternative that most of us would be facing is rows and rows of dimly lit cubicles, as was the convention in the 90's.
Productivity is a side effect of good employees working in a good environment. Programmers aren't satisfied because they're productive; they're productive because they're satisfied.
I'm much more satisfied with light and space, at the expense of noise and productivity.
Unfortunately I love everything else about my job so I'm disinclined to move on.
I've had this situation in the past a few times and to some degree today. If we have to have open office plans then at least take some effort into grouping "talkers" together away from "heads down" people.
Is that so hard? There's no real economic argument, as it's just putting some thought into where people sit. There's no collaboration argument, because people on the same team would site together. Etc. From the reactions when I've brought it up, that's a completely unreasonable request. The whole idea than anyone's productivity might benefit from a quiet work environment seems to make management/HR upset.
The problem with the sales person is that there are room set aside for making phone calls (whether personal or business) and there are always some available, but apparently that is entirely too unreasonable to expect someone with a laptop to go find a room instead of letting everyone in a 30 foot radius listen in on the call.
Few years ago my company switched to an open office layout. There was a temporary arrangement issue, so I had to sit in the sales section of the floor for a few weeks. I don't think I accomplished a single thing the entire time I was there. Constant phone calls, loud talking across multiple rows of desks. It was like that scene in the movie Wall Street. The guy behind me was incapable of properly using a keyboard. He would mash the keys down as if he was angry at them. Never heard such noise from squishy dome keys before. Jesus.
Source: lived there for 6 years.
More likely a sign of a high hiring bar and corresponding paycheck.
I believe supply and demand with market rates is a much bigger factor on the average Facebook engineer salary than the quality of the engineer. For one, we are only dealing with a discrepancy on the order of 40-50%. Is a good engineer only 40-50% better than an average engineer?
They insist only on hiring those who pass their interview.
Seems to overlap with the set of good devs, but it's definitely not the entire set.
Which hey, good for them I guess.
You can call it an open office that amplifies communication in the team, so noone will notice that they're almost piling up vertically. And the problem is not just noise. Too many people breathing the same air leads to rising carbon dioxide levels which makes concentrating quite hard. Unless the office was literally built for large crowds, the ventilation will usually be insufficient to cool the office in summer and to provide adequate levels of air flow.
I stopped calling those things "open offices" and use the term "laying battery" instead.
What's described here is still a "first world problem", some people seem to forget that.
Many years ago, when I was fresh out of uni, I lost my job because of an open office; I was sitting relatively close to a bathroom and people kept walking past behind me - After 1 week this made me feel stressed and paranoid and I couldn't concentrate.
One month in, the boss asked me into his office and basically told me that I was unproductive and that "I'm going to have to cut you loose" - Being young, I thought there was something wrong with me but after working in several other companies, I learned the importance of the workplace environment.
If I ever get into a situation where I had to work with my back facing a large empty room again, I would start looking for a new job straight away. I feel shivers just thinking about it...
Or even worse, someone whose job is to talk on the phone and use the stupid CRUD app, and who has never done anything cognitively demanding in their entire life, literally.
People can have opinions differing from yours while still doing 'deep work' of a nature that you'd find respectable.
Jeez.
Most of the problems about overhearing conversations, etc, can be dealt with by a nice pair of headphones. Here, it's universally accepted as the 'do not disturb' signal.
(former FB employee)
Personally, listening to music all day gives me a headache and podcasts are too distracting. And I don't need these headphones for anything else (otherwise, I'd already have a pair!)
I wonder what would come of it if I requested some.
So I'm curious if people who hate open spaces had greater control of their environment growing up. I didn't and adapted. Maybe I'm reaching here, but curious of other's opinion on this take.
http://fortune.com/2011/07/06/facebooks-vending-machines-a-c...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAjChZ3gyps
The headphones are very reasonable for what they do (and of course, they're free to you, so even better) but in terms of actual noise cancelling you'd have to buy your own. Of course, FB pays developers well so spending $300 on a set of Bose QCs is no problem at all, but a lot of people don't bother or see the point when there are free sets in the vending machines.
Also this is an insane workaround. Think about what you’re suggesting: the environment that you’re working in, the place where you go to, intentionally, to focus and concentrate, is so filled with undesired and irrelevant noise, that in order to get your work done, you need to tune it out with headphones. How does that make sense?
These companies are constantly in search of the smartest people and yet they think they can get away with such obviously illogical lines. They have people who are best at identifying and fixing corner cases in very complex systems and yet they want these employees to ignore this completely illogical line of thinking? This is insulting and annoying.
Arguendo, one could wear headphones without them being plugged in, strictly for signalling purposes, if it were necessary.
Which also means you can use them on a very low level so that they don't cause hearing problems if used for long time.
How about just an appropriate workplace for the job, like 99% of all other jobs, even some of the lowest paid ones?
Have a bit of self respect and respect for your craft.
We should be asking for more money when the company offer an open space. This could stop the trend.
If Facebook was more about bringing people closer together, and less about showing ads down the throats of it's users, more people would want to work there.
Isn't Joel and all of his enterprises based in New York City? am I wrong in thinking Silicon Valley insiders live and/or work in Silicon Valley?