I think the open office trend might be accelerating remote working opportunities, which has to be a good thing.
I don't mind going to an open office occasionally if 90% of my week is working from my own office with walls, a chair setup for me and some IT equipment that's actually had some investment.
+1 to that. I work remotely, with a visit to the office once every two weeks, mostly spent in meetings and catching up with what the rest of the company are doing. For that sort of thing an open office is fine, just don't expect me to get any quality code written while I'm there.
This rings so true, i had to check i hadn't written this last night. Whilst onsite on that once a fortnight visit, i can't do anything that involves real concentration. I detest open offices, but working from home has just made it worse.
Have been doing DevOps from home for almost three years now; its spoiled me. I'd never work in a traditional office setting again, open office or otherwise.
I was doing a very similar schedule for about six months a year ago. Come in on Monday, do all the status meetings and email and planning work for the week, all the low-concentration, collaborative stuff, then work from home the other four days. It was probably the most productive I've ever been; unfortunately management likes having butts in seats for some reason, so it couldn't last.
It looks like the core problem here is all-or-nothing thinking. On projects requiring a lot of creative thinking and multiple disciplines I like a small team all in one room working side-by-side. On projects not requiring much creative thinking but a lot of deep programming I like to be left alone. When I'm working on my business, I enjoy being in a coworking environment.
Instead what gets implemented is these cafeteria-sized cattle rooms where you can't hear yourself think. Or everybody working in silos by themselves -- which over time destroys productivity, oddly enouh.
It's the one-size-fits-all thinking that's the problem here, not the office furniture layout.
> How could we show management how is it to use IRC, mailing lists or something like Github to collaborate?
I wish I knew the answer. My gut says to take someone experienced working with remote teams to run a trial, to show them the little tricks that can help make it a success. Quantifying success is often difficult even if we feel we know instinctively if it's working for us, or could be part time or with some changes.
However, I've only worked for companies who had a negative attitude towards working remotely even if they half-heartedly tried it occasionally, or companies who were setup as remote-first. Traversing the gap seems to be hard.
Wait twenty years for people who don't know to retire or die, and people who do to move up the ranks. Or find an organization that isn't so set in outdated ways.
Sorry. I'd love to have a better answer, but I've been around a while and I'm not seeing one yet.
It seems difficult to evaluate these articles. Employees want private offices, so they'll tend to view and upvote articles praising private offices. Besides biasing the likelihood of the article to occupy your attention, it could be an incentive for lower-quality news to publish them.
I remember reading in Trump's Art of the Deal book that showing up on-site to regularly inspect the ongoing construction helped get the building done faster and under-budget. That doesn't mean the contractors liked having the client show up on-site every day, even if it worked.
Ask yourself: If the science pointed towards sitting next to the loud sales guy, would you be as likely to upvote an article saying so? This is on the front page because people want it, not because they care about productivity.
Same thing applies to remote working: Most people can't work remotely, even if they say they want to.
> That depends on the equipment you need to use. If it's a phone, a laptop, and an internet connection, you can, and of story.
Have you tried to hire anyone to do remote work, even freelance work? Most people fail miserably if you don't give them structure(and being on-site is a type of structure).
You can work around it by selecting for the small percentage of people who can work independently, but most people aren't in that small percentage. So success by being vigilant in selection would reinforce that it doesn't work on average.
If this site was "Manager News" and everybody here was a manager, I'd be more likely to believe discussion praising allowing remote workers. As it is, I'm skeptical that people aren't believing what they want to hear.
Personally, I find it quite plausible that the loud sales guy is hurting everyone's productivity. But lots of things are plausible, and it seems undisciplined to believe all the resulting discussion.
> Have you tried to hire anyone to do remote work, even freelance work? Most people fail miserably if you don't give them structure(and being on-site is a type of structure).
Have you tried to hire anyone at all? Recruitment is hard. Period.
Failure to track production/results is completely unrelated to where your employee works, as well as failure to produce is only related to the employee. If he/she does not know where he/she best produces, the recruitment is bad to begin with.
This is irrelevant. The truth of whether open spaces or private offices or walled cubicles are better is irrelevant to my argument. Attention and selection bias apply and have a negative effect, even when the target is factually correct.
If well being is a factor of productivity, then it is _by definition_ relevant. I don't see your point.
Also, I see plenty of comments on these threads from people who do like working in open offices.
The "selection bias" you experience is likely just related to the fact that open offices are what is very much in vogue right now, and mostly people who doesn't like it chime in. Likewise if single offices where in vogue we would hear from the people who do like to work in open offices currently.
No, I get your point; but it is a counter-point to a point not made.
> If the science pointed towards NFL players performing better in 6 inch heels, would NFL players promote such a study?
I expect not, probably due to their stake in the situation, i.e. their bias towards factors other than performance. thatwas the point of the hypothetical, and the sole point that was being communicated - to illuminate the concept of that bias existing, qualitatively. The quantitative matter of if it is actually a relevant factor is a different matter, and not raised by that hypothetical.
> It's an entirely pointless hypothetical if you entertain the notion that their preference _IS_ the primary factor for their productivity.
Not if you got the point of the hypothetical. whether you 'entertain' the notion or not is irrelevant, since the truth of the statement is unimportant.
If up was down, up would be down... But why is that point made? Sure, the statement based on the false premise is true, but there's nothing to be gleaned from it whatsoever, because it is never the case.
I accept the 2 step logic. I don't accept that it conveys any relevant information, because it is based on a premise that will never be true.
The statement is not a logical falsehood like 1 + 1 == 3, it's epistemological possible i.e. it's possible given you are not omniscient.
It's also not the case that 'nothing to be gleaned from it whatsoever' because:
A) there are other categorically similar statements (the category being "things developers would dislike") that are 'true'. The structure is still valid, ie: If "X, and X->Y then Y" is useful despite the fact that the second clause is irrelevant for "-X", because the same logical form is valid for other 'X's. It is presumed that the original, given example isn't supposed to represent a general falsehood.
put another way, the category of the statement is "changes developers would dislike, whether productive an non-productive" not "changes developers would dislike, that are also non-productive"
B) The given example ('X') is offered as one (of potentially many) influencing factors. I some cases, developer bias will be more, or less relevant, according to many factors. Its not possible to generalise by stating it is a falsehood; in some cases it will be true that developer bias is relevant. Again, the argument is qualitative, not quantitative (which would be difficult anyway).
The point is this: developer preference can influence their judgments. that is all.
saying "NFL players would be likely agree that sports cars helped their performance", is a similar way of saying the same thing, this time using NFL players and sports cars as a proxy for the same point.
"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."
If you can't give a single example supporting your claim, without instead resorting to confused mental gymnastics, there will be no merit to your case, however much you want it.
Share an example of where developer preference is orthogonal to developer productivity.
> saying "NFL players would be likely agree that sports cars helped their performance", is a similar way of saying the same thing, this time using NFL players and sports cars as a proxy for the same point.
Sure, and this is what a bonus is. People are given bonuses, in all fields. They wouldn't be if it didn't work.
In adversarial work relationships which I would assume any is with working for Trump, I would assume showing up and hounding employees increases productivity (from an already low level), but that's because it's already a shitty place to work.
Anyone that works in a reasonably friendly place, with decent motivators and a good boss, both your goals are aligned, because you want to get shit done as much as your boss does. At that point giving the employee what he/she wants is what you as a boss wants.
I'm lucky in that I'm my own boss, even if clients can sometimes have specific demands. Thankfully they generally only hire me because they trust that our goals are aligned, meaning:
I get paid for results, they get results from me choosing my optimal environment. Win-win.
> Employees want private offices, so they'll tend to view and upvote articles praising private offices.
That's a very sweeping statement. I don't want a private office, and I'm an employee. I can (and do) work remotely on occasion, but I'd still rather be in my office 90% of the time.
It seems to me to be a bit more complicated matter than just slackers suddenly jumping into attention.
"Most people can't work remotely, even if they say they want to."
Actual data would be nice to back that up. Cognitive bias is a constant hindrance when trying to figure out things like these based just on anecdotes and personal experience.
I personally enjoy working in an open office. I think I would have a hard time working from home or in a singular office... I need people around me, I like being able to get up and communicate with colleagues. Yes, it can get annoying, but the pros outweigh the cons for me.
This isn't the trend in tech, I have a lot of developer colleagues that would prefer to stay at home, or at the very least isolate the tech department from the rest of the company.
A while ago my company moved developers into their own office. It didn't last for a long time (for a number of reasons), I saw no benefits in it and was very happy when the decision to move us back in was made.
Maybe - and I know, this is going to sound crazy - maybe companies could provide a little variety and let their developers choose the working environment works best for them?
Small companies can't really offer that many options. Not everyone works for a large company with multiple offices, different room types, etc.
The open office is a concept that saves space too. We have a large open plan office and a few extra meeting rooms people can book. If we were to start walling up the place - half our workers would have to go.
It should be obvious that a company should cater to individual needs, but they rarely do. E.g. open offices are extremely tiring for most introverts, there should be quiet zones/rooms where these people could go to focus/recharge. Ideally they should be offered private space.
There should be strict rules on what is accepted behavior and volumes (of talking) in an open office. Distracting behavior should be reported immediately and corrected.
For me it makes so easy to just pass by and say hello to start a conversation. But my company office is really well designed for that. We also have a lot of meeting rooms where teams can go when they want to do something together that is more noisy or needs more concentration. We have individual rooms for people that wants to concentrate or for managers that want to work on something sensitive.
But even that way you will see some teams that are more open than others. You still can have silos, but if you had teams in individual rooms the isolation will be complete. So open offices help, but are not the complete answer. The company values also play a big role on helping in an open and friendly communication.
> This isn't the trend in tech, I have a lot of developer colleagues that would prefer to stay at home, or at the very least isolate the tech department from the rest of the company.
For me this is the company values part. If you feel that you don't fit or that you have nothing in common with the rest of the people of the company that's an issue to solve.
I think this varies from company to company. At the place I work this is a normal and accepted thing to stop by someone's cube, say hi, and catch up for a bit.
>I need people around me, I like being able to get up and communicate with colleagues. Yes, it can get annoying, but the pros outweigh the cons for me.
Yeah, just not for them.
[Edit] Now, some might be OK with it, but I don't see how one-sided convenience ("to get up and communicate") can be used as an argument, when the issue clearly involves two sides (and, even more so, the rights of the distracted side seem to me more important than the one wishing to communicate something that can't be bothered to use IM, email, slack and another 200 options).
Just tell him it is annoying, half-jokes work wonders for this kind of stuff: hey, you should watch out for this guy, he will drive you insane with his headphone assault, as if he was testing a mic or something.
I worked with this great guy once but he had this tendency to fart from time to time, until during lunch with the team, I just said, jesus, I'm going to install a fart detector under every chair to see who is the sucker farting all the time and then just call him out loudly. Not going to say that it worked 100% but, it was like a 90% improvement, plus we all had a big laugh every time we hit the topic.
One of my colleagues starts huffing about once a second when he's working on something "intensive (from what I can tell)"
(to simulate what I mean, inhale, hold your breath, then suddenly force it out of your mouth against your throat, incredibly loud, and even disrupts my own breathing sometimes)
It could be some sort of tic that he struggles with. He's single handedly the reason that I started bringing headphones to work and my morale since he joined us has never been where it was before, except days when he's not in. In fact, on more than one occasion I felt in a really good mood, tried to reflect on why, and realized "oh! he's not here today!"
But how can one approach someone about something like that? It drives me insane and if I left the company tomorrow it'd be in the top 3 things that made me leave, but it could very easily be a medical condition!
I don't even want to bring it up with a third party because of how immature it sounds "That guy's breathing patterns make me upset", and because I have my own breathing problems (chronic nasal congestion), and sometimes my nose makes whistling sounds! I wonder how many coworkers have been annoyed to the high heavens since I started wearing headphones to cover up that guy's breathing, and was unable to hear my own nose whistling (if I hear it I can usually go to the bathroom and clear my nose a little and it goes away)
Sometimes I eat a late lunch or I eat certain foods and my stomach gets really noisy. And I don't mean passing gas, just the sound of my stomach growling loudly. I'm sure it's incredibly annoying to deal with, but how would someone approach me about that? "Hey, could you quiet down your stomach when I'm focusing?"
Stuff like that is why open offices are horrible. For every positive interaction I have because the guy I talk to is "right next to me", there's some glaring horribly stressful part that wipes out any gains. I think people use open offices as a crutch for poor communication culture anyways, the fact someone isn't "right next to you" shouldn't mean they have a hard time interacting with you when they need to.
To me it feels like a zoo, there's no privacy, almost never a quiet moment, and I'll definitely be reluctant to work at a company with open offices again. There are things between "every office is a sound isolated box with no windows" and "every desk is so close you can hear your coworkers food digest".
Yeah, when you work in an open office you learn every tic that all your co-workers have. Leg jiggling alone can be super annoying.
I also get annoyed by the floor bouncing around at work as people walk around (which might be related to open office plans since there's fewer internal walls so that the flooring acts like more of a drum? or it may just be old construction at the past 2 offices I've been in).
Working in an open office this is actually the biggest distractor: colleagues coming over to talk. Often about things of no relevance to what we are working on. Other times, they could have sent me an IM or email. Instead they get up, and walk over to me. Damn dinosaurs.
Then there are the people who are extremely talkative and as a bonus happen to have very shrill voices, a couple of these are seated about 30 meters from my desk, and they still distract and annoy me; wearing headphones and listening to something--anything else--is a must in an open office.
I'm sure there actually are surveys/research findings that point to a positive, but most don't, as far as employee happiness and productivity goes.
As a remote worker that despises open offices, I don't believe that nodding in agreement with opinion pieces such as those by Lindsey Kaufman is helpful to the discussion about it.
The 2 common cited reasons of "saves real estate costs" and "employee distrust" have become thought-stopping memes that prevents the analysis of executives who prefer working in open offices and became successful with it. I previously posted an example of Mark Zuckerberg's thinking:
Look at those old photos and then listen to him speak about his new 2015 open desk in the video. Contemplate whether he built the new open office to spy on everyone or... was it to recreate and extend the "open office" kitchen table at Harvard that let the team quickly iterate on software and get to $100 billion IPO?
Would Lindsey's complaints sway him? She says:
>A 2013 study found that many workers in open offices are frustrated by distractions that lead to poorer work performance. Nearly half of the surveyed workers in open offices said the lack of sound privacy was a significant problem for them and more than 30 percent complained about the lack of visual privacy.
Why would Mark Z care about these surveys? Of those respondents that were dissatisfied, what did those workers who require private offices build that was great? He built a multi-billion dollar company with a cramped elbow-to-elbow open office.
Opinion pieces about this topic are not convincing. Concrete business performance superior to everyone else based on private offices would be convincing.
> Why would Mark Z care about these surveys? Of those respondents that were dissatisfied, what did those workers who require private offices build that was great? He built a multi-billion dollar company with a cramped elbow-to-elbow open office.
Because companies shouldn't be planned for just a few years, while the initial excitement lasts.
You'll be OK with discomfort if the benefits outweigh it, and in case of Facebook, I'm fairly certain this is what happened. When the work becomes less interesting and more traditional company like, you're toleration levels will start dropping as well. Early bird employees go and seek new challenges and the ones replacing them never experience the initial thrill only the vast, yet crowded, noisy, anti-privacy zone that is supposed to be the place to host extensive thinking.
What works best for Mark Z does not necessarily work best for his staff. Forcing a thousand devs to work exactly as their leader is perhaps not the best path to optimal productivity.
Microsoft conquered the world with closed offices. You can find anecdotes either way. Maybe facebook are big despite open offices. How could you tell the difference?
>Microsoft conquered the world with closed offices. You can find anecdotes either way.
And to your point about anecdotes supporting either narrative: Microsoft was defeated by open-office search company (Google vs Bing), defeated by open-office smartphone company (Apple iPhone vs Windows Phone), defeated by open-office cloud services company (Amazon AWS vs MS Azure). Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that Microsoft has transitioned away from private offices towards open plans in their newer buildings.[1]
I've been looking for compelling evidence that proves the superiority of private offices but haven't found any. The business case studies showing superior performance that's directly caused by private offices don't exist. Yeah, surveys of employees exist but not superior business results.
Apple has only very recently begun to adopt open offices -- meaning in 2016. At the time the iPhone was created and soared to market dominance Apple workers were in actual offices with locks due in part to Apple's obsession with secrecy ( 1 or 2 to an office ).
At least so far as Apple has adopted the open office craze, innovation and sales have dropped with Tim Cook taking a recent pay cut for poor performance.
Yes, Apple is moving to open offices in the new Cupertino headquarters, the "spaceship," but that is not how they achieved their big success with the iPhone.
>Apple workers were in actual offices with locks due in part to Apple's obsession with secrecy ( 1 or 2 to an office )
I don't have the cites handy but my recollection is that the specific iPhone teams (hardware and software) were working long hours in the open around conference tables. That subgroup was isolated from the rest of Apple employees because of the secrecy so yes in that sense, they weren't "open" on the gigantic scale of Facebook.
Working in an open space with people you are actually working with is different from being crammed into one space with people you have nothing to do with.
I worked at Apple from 2014 to 2016 and the iPhone, iPad, etc. teams I was working with were in offices, one or two to an office, up until a big move to an open office in early 2016. They appeared to have been in offices for years.
Apple is sufficiently secretive that indeed some other teams might have been in open offices. Not the ones that I saw or interacted with. I was working on a key part of the iPhone and iPad technology.
Microsoftie in dev div, have to speak up here: (usual disclaimer, no secret info, only my own thoughts)
Many of the teams are not (or only recently) switched to open offices. I think it's quite unrealistic to try and attribute bing/mobile performance to something that wasn't even largely rolled out at the onset of those competitions, as opposed to the occams razor of well discussed strategy issues in those markets. As much as I'm a proponent of private offices, to attribute business success to one or the other (and not just as an added cost function that may move the needle slightly) seems to be focusing on the more minor of all the things that could lead to a product success/failure. In that vein I think employee satisfaction _is_ key, as a longterm trend of unhappiness (from ANY source) CAN lead to the sort of things that do disrupt key product delivery. (see sister posts on the cost of turnover discussion, etc)
I doubt that open vs private offices is a dominant factor in business results. The list of more important things is long. But, that doesn't mean that it isn't a good thing to give employees a pleasant working environment. Yes, you could save on office furniture by making people sit on the floor, but why would you do that to your staff?
>Look at those old photos and then listen to him speak about his new 2015 open desk in the video. Contemplate whether he built the new open office to spy on everyone or... was it to recreate and extend the "open office" kitchen table at Harvard that let the team quickly iterate on software and get to $100 billion IPO?
People have gotten to multi billion IPOs without open spaces.
It's just a random historical accident on Facebook's story, and it that sense it would be like considering PHP essential to Facebook's IPO, as if if they used Python or Ruby or anything similar, they wouldln't have made it.
>Why would Mark Z care about these surveys? Of those respondents that were dissatisfied, what did those workers who require private offices build that was great? He built a multi-billion dollar company with a cramped elbow-to-elbow open office.
People have built "multi-billion dollar companies" with all other kind of traits, including private offices (Microsoft, Apple) but also sexism, treating employees badly, death marches, poisonous work culture, etc.
It doesn't mean that companies should imitate all these to get to the "multi-billion dollar" part, any more than they should imitate open offices.
>the comment I was replying to missed TFA, because it gives pointers to research on the issue.
The research[1] that various journalists in Washington Post, Harvard Business Review, WSJ, etc are pointing to is a survey of employees' satisfaction levels and not an analysis comparing business results.
If that oft-cited survey is the best ammunition we have, it won't move the needle towards private offices. What we need is business evidence of private offices enabling productivity levels superior to everyone else with open offices.
"In 80 clinical trials, Dr. Glenn Wilson, a psychiatrist at King's College London University, monitored the IQ of workers throughout the day. He found the IQ of those who tried to juggle messages and work fell by 10 points -- the equivalent to missing a whole night's sleep and more than double the 4-point fall seen after smoking marijuana. "This is a very real and widespread phenomenon," Wilson said. "We have found that this obsession with looking at messages, if unchecked, will damage a worker's performance by reducing their mental sharpness."
>It doesn't mean that companies should imitate all these to get to the "multi-billion dollar" part, any more than they should imitate open offices.
I'm not claiming open offices are superior nor am I recommending that people copy Facebook's practices.
Instead, I'm asking people to suspend the common Dilbert-PointyHairedBoss disadvantages about open offices and instead, really try to get inside the head of people like Mark Zuckerberg.
To exercise the notion of entertaining thoughts we don't agree with, let's write out a very uncomfortable sentence that might be uttered by Mark Z: "I don't want to build private offices because that would be a competitive disadvantage and handicap Facebook's ability to innovate."
Did that sentence make your eyeballs hurt? Good. If the programming community can't honestly engage with people executives who feel the truth of the above statement in their heart, the discussion on the topic will go nowhere. Showing news articles such as the one by Lindsey won't convince them.
>There are countless researches on the importance of focus and the impact of distractions.
Yes, of course uninterrupted focus and shielding from distractions is important. However, that factor will take a back seat if collaboration outweighs it. Unless that research shows that a _group_ of programmers in private offices outperform programmers in open offices, it means nothing to people like Zuckerberg.
If you watch the Mark Zuckerberg video, it is clear he prioritizes collaboration over disruptions. He's not stupid and knows that there will be inevitable distractions. He's optimized for collaboration because it matches his experience for success.
The way to counteract that thinking is to create a company with private offices that crushes Facebook (or one of Facebook's business units.) You need some type of business evidence that frightens him into building private offices.
>To exercise the notion of entertaining thoughts we don't agree with, let's write out a very uncomfortable sentence that might be uttered by Mark Z: "I don't want to build private offices because that would be a competitive
disadvantage and handicap Facebook's ability to innovate."
Did that sentence make your eyeballs hurt? Good. If the programming community can't honestly engage with people executives who feel the truth of the above statement in their heart, the discussion on the topic will go nowhere. Showing news articles such as the one by Lindsey won't convince them.
An executive, including Mark, can be an arsehole and hold any kind of BS opinion (e.g. "I can't hire women and/or pay them the same, because they are not as good as men").
If they can't see why something is bad for their employees, fuck them. It's not like they run the only game in town.
And "it's good for the bottom line" is not an excuse. All kinds of shit can be good for the bottom line, including illegal practices (e.g. blackmailing foreign employees that you'll have them deported).
He used the tools in the right way, and it was no small feat that should be dismissed that easily. Just a quick summary:
1) Give consumers what they want instead of what you think they want.
2) He used tools as intended. Instead of wasting time implementing Erlang trying to achieve the best messaging platform ever, he went with something that was popular and was easy to understand for everybody at the time, which was PHP. Then went on to improve the system as they needed with HHVM, React, React Native, etc.
3) As much as somebody can hate Facebook for being a social network/privacy leech, which is something a lot of programmers dismiss precisely because of the social part, just the fact they popularized React as one of the defacto front-end frameworks speaks volumes about how they can push real innovation for everybody else.
4) And even simple stuff like sharing pictures. I still remember vividly how awkward was to share pictures before Facebook. Sure, I think Flickr or similar stuff was there already, but nobody is going to keep clicking on your gallery so they can see how an amazing photographer you are. Sometimes the greatest innovation is in the simplest things, and if you ask me, this was THE feature they brought to the table.
Yawn. mixi.jp was doing Facebook before Facebook was widely available. It even had the much-vaunted news wall. Mixi screwed themselves in a few ways, mainly by being a Japanese-only site and (later) requiring a Japanese phone number to register, but still, Facebook was hardly an innovation. Mixi was written in Perl. (In fact Mixi has/had features which even now I've never seen in social media sites, such as the "ashiato" feature where you can see who has been looking at your profile)
LinkedIn, any number of dating sites, and I believe MySpace all have (had) it.
When a site is focused on "social", like MySpace or Facebook, it comes across as invasive. When a site is focused on personal "marketing", like LinkedIn or dating networks, it can more be useful feedback on your reach.
So you are saying that the Wright brothers did not innovate because Alberto Santos Dumont among others did the first experiments regarding aviation (or heavy aviation as they say)?
This is the first time in my life that I have heard about mixi.jp. Facebook was able to capture not only the US but almost the whole world for that matter. Again, dismissing those achievements as if they were nothing really does not give them proper credit.
The data that should sway people like Zuckerberg is the data that shows that open offices have beneficial effects that often outweigh the drawbacks for companies smaller than 8-12 people, or for teams of 4-8. Above that threshold, the data shows that the drawbacks exceed the benefits.
Yes! This exactly! You can have at most a dozen people round a kitchen table. You can't put the whole company around the same table. The social dynamics simply don't scale that way.
I too have had great experiences doing productive new work in small open offices up to 6 people. I'm currently not enjoying my open office of >100 people. I'd be quite happy with a team-sized office with a door and decent internal sound damping.
>> Of those respondents that were dissatisfied, what did those workers who require private offices build that was great?
Clearly since we can't match these workers with a highly successful, innovative, billion dollar idea their opinions are worthless. After all, such things never happened until Mark invented the open office.
I doubt Zuckerberg is that naive. There's a big difference between a kitchen table and a quarter-mile long open room with a thousand people having conversations in it. How many people started[1] a multi-billion dollar company from the latter?
[1] I want to emphasize started not worked at.
To answer your question, Microsoft famously gave developers private offices through much of the 90s and I think early 00s while they were becoming successful enough to be sued under the antitrust laws. So, there's one example for you.
Even a little attention to acoustics could make the open or quasi-open office much better for workers. At the moment, you're expected to deal with this yourself by putting on headphones and overwriting the noise with music.
The "modern" open-plan office in which I work is particularly bad at acoustics. The dining area has a dome, which looks nice but sounds like an echoing railway station. I avoid it because I can't make out conversations in that kind of environment. Said dining area is isolated from the rest of the office by a partial wall that does not go all the way up.
All walls and ceiling surfaces are smooth and flat to maximise acoustic reflection. When we first moved in, the glass-fronted meeting rooms were echoing little boxes that were also impossible to hold conversations in, so we had to fit fabric acoustic suppressing wall hangings.
Offices could do well to learn from the "modern bar vs. traditional pub" layout approach. The bar is open and loud; conversation requires either out-louding people or leaning into someone's ear. The traditional pub "snug" has wooden half-partitions into booths, lots of fabric on the seating, maybe a few wing chairs, and a twisty internal layout. The ambient volume is much quieter.
An office laid out like a snug would still technically be "open" but would stop noise travelling across the office. Even just an acoustic suppressant ceiling would make a big difference.
Yes, but most adults tune themselves somewhat to the ambient level. So having a loud incoherent "murmur" from the rest of the office also makes your neighbours louder.
There are similarly competitive people in engineering disciplines, even. I think many of us know that person that when trying to argue why their problem solution is the best problem solution tend to try to be the loudest person in the room. (Some of us work to reform in college; others might be that way their entire lives.)
Back at university I went to dinner with one of those people who liked to talk loudly over other people, and another person who was normally soft-spoken but had been an officer in the Navy and therefore professionally trained in loudness.
The ensuing loudness war almost got us thrown out of the restaurant.
> Offices could do well to learn from the "modern bar vs. traditional pub" layout approach. [...] The traditional pub "snug" has wooden half-partitions into booths...
My coworking space has acoustic dampening all over the place, which helps heaps.
We have booths for phone calls/skype/whatever as well as multi-person booths for meetings which are all super well dampened, you can barely hear people outside of them.
I guess they're very similar to a snug like you're mentioning. We also do have some acoustic suppressing things hanging from the roof (it's a very high-roofed office). There are also seperators at the desks b
It is not just about the acoustics, but visual distraction. You can make vacuum silence with 3M earplugs + Peltor X5A as I do, but that doesn't help sensing people walking around me.
I am working for almost 6 years and all of my workplaces were (are) open office. But I believe there is a big difference as privacy at open office and private office.
There are open offices with privacy (covers around your table) and just 10s of people sitting next to each other on a row with tiny tables.
Problem with no privacy is, people tends to talk next to each other compared to open office with privacy (people use messengers more often then). This creates a lot of noise in the office which causes needing of headphones. And of course there is always some person that shouts from first to last row about some joke.
If you are not giving constant smoking breaks your only breaks at work time is visiting some non-work website (facebook or news site etc.) and when you visit one of these sites, your colleagues just start eyeing up your monitor, or you get eye contact with your boss (Murphy's law). Thanks to big screens nowadays, someone can see your screen 3 rows behind you whenever you switch to not work related website.
Having private office for everyone won't be possible on space wise and I believe author and other people just needs open office with covers around. Sitting at row of tables like at internet cafe is bad impact on your performance for sure (and also privacy wise).
Last but not least, I should say that, because of productivity reasons (usage of personal phones, social sites etc.) is a big bs. for having open offices. As long as you do your duty on time with good quality, you should be allowed to use your personal phone or facebook or whatever. Blocking usage of these items or websites doesn't assure of better productivity.
I never experienced cubicle environment (at least not like the ones at US offices), private space means like 4 tables placed like a square (one desk on each corner) and seperated with covers on desk. It's not ideal to work in cubicles which is slightly bigger than coffins.
Ping pong room, Nerf shooting ranges are all "fancy" rooms they use to give the modern, fun working environment message (or lie). If they need extra space, I am sure most companies would demolish even bathrooms but don't touch those "fun rooms". And I agree that it's bs.
"Having private office for everyone won't be possible on space wise"
Private offices are not the only sane alternative to open offices.
Rooms for two to three persons, such that they each have their own private working space (ie. they have desks and no one has to sit back to the door) is a pretty good arrangement IMO.
That's a good point. Actually I was in this situation. This is what happened: Team X requested a room for their department (4 person in total) because they need silence and quiet atmosphere to do their job, and open office was too noisy for them. Then other teams said that we need quiet atmosphere also, why they can get a room but our team can't.
Result: No team got any room (except heads and managers)
Bottomline: Equal opportunities should get offered to every team or drama happens. People don't mind if managers and heads have their own rooms (not even shared rooms) for some reason but if any other team have shared room but they don't have, then it causes drama.
Managers deal with confidential employee related data and need to have discrete discussions now and again to operate smoothly. I can totally see the point of managers having offices beyond pure status. That said, if 'regular' employees are doomed to open office this is not a such a good thing for morale.
The biggest mistake of any open office is putting tech people in the same room as sales, or in my case: tech people in the same room as support (phones). Way to go management.
I thought the same, but it could be worse. My team sits alongside one of the organization's helpdesks, and they're a hell of a lot less noisy than the open-plan web dev agency guys in the next suite over.
It's like languages in computer science, there's no "one fits all" in terms of office space organization. Some prefer open-office setups, some prefer being quiet in a private space. I actually like a mix of both. Or event of four types of workplaces: from home (no commute, no money spent on food, my vinyl record player), from an open-space (open connection with people you know), from a coffeeshop (connection with people you don't know) or from a private meeting room (private connection with people you know). We need a mix of all of those, and managers need to trust people: they know best where to work to be the most productive.
It's hardly possible to say that one is better than the other. Companies may opt to have both of these office types and transact the employees within according to their preferences on this matter.
The biggest mistake I see in implementations of open office plans is work areas that are too small. The open office works best when it feels spacious and customizable, not cramped and fixed. Desks and whiteboards on wheels, choice of standing/sitting, and room for teams to self organize is fun and productive. The shoulder-to-shoulder seating at rows of fixed workstations common in off-the-shelf open plans is what's oppressive. In short, if a company is moving to an open floor plan to save on real estate, then they're doing it wrong.
I was thinking about this the other day, and I sat down and designed an office space for a company built around paired programming.
The design is focused around four-office bullpens like so: Two programmers share a 225 sqft office. Offices open into common spaces for collaboration and reception. Some sort of gatekeeper sit at a desk in the reception area, playing interference for anyone trying to interrupt programmers at work, either in their office or in a collaborative session.
The offices themselves could have windows, and each bullpen would take up 1100 sqft or so. Here's a rough design of a bullpen:
+---------------+----------+---------------+
office collab office
+---------------+----------+---------------+
office reception office
+---------------+----------+---------------+
entrance
So, in a 2500 sqft space, you could provide a controlled work environment for 16 programmers.
That's 40'x40', but it also gives you space for the local printer, the fridge, sink, and microwave oven, and some local servers. The central area is about 16'x24', which is reasonable for 8 people, and cramped for 10. The accessible path is compliant with ADA guidelines, I think.
I don't like shared offices.
Outside of the basic 40'x40' pod, it would make sense for the kitchenettes to share a wet wall with bathrooms, and try to get at least one exterior window to the offices closest to the entry, like this: (each char is 10 ft high by 5 ft wide)
Most of the open office complains and articles are anecdotal. From what I know Google is fanatical about data gathering for efficiency they probably have the data to support open work spaces otherwise they wouldn't be doing it.
> Most of the open office complains and articles are anecdotal.
Anecdotal? There's a great New Yorker article[1] that references a number of studies. This blog post[2] links to a couple others and addresses costs/alternatives. A "study of over 40,000 survey responses collected over a decade has found that the benefits for workers are quickly outweighed by the disadvantages"[3]. Here's a Washington Post piece[4] on office furniture designers realizing (citing multiple studies) "open-plan spaces are actually lousy for workers." A TIME article[5] highlighted decades of research that associated open layouts with "greater employee stress, poorer co-worker relations and reduced satisfaction with the physical environment."
> As an excessive water drinker, I feared my co-workers were tallying my frequent bathroom trips. At day’s end, I bid adieu to the 12 pairs of eyes I felt judging my 5:04 p.m. departure time.
That's your problem then! If people is judging you for going to the bathroom or browsing Hacker News instead of your results, then what the company/employees value is the problem.
People can browse internet at work, and if at the end of the year they are high performers I will give them an above average salary increase. If they are extra hours at the office, never look at Facebook but they don't perform well I will have a talk with them to see what's happening as that's not good.
12 eyes judging doesn't mean judging and penalizing, it means judging in a social sense.
I think many people experience that where I work. When I walk past someone in our open office they tend to look at monitor with work on it even if they were just looking at something else on another one.
Our management is the kind that could care less if we watched Youtube all day if we were keeping up performance, and I'm not even management (or close!) and yet people still feel a little bit of stress knowing someone is looking over their shoulder inadvertently.
For me, one thing is the feeling of being constantly watched (even when you're not) that's detrimental to both health (stress) and productivity. So even if I'm less likely to browse HN when in an open office (compiling!) my productivity is much lower compared to a private office. Of course this is also due to audio and visual disturbances.
Interestingly one of the pros often mentioned for open office space is that it enables collaboration, I've never seen that work out in practice very well, though. At least I'm much less prone to start a discussion with someone in an open office because it will disturb everyone else who are not interested in the topic. More often than not other people will hush you and so on.
So in the end an open office is detrimental to my health, happiness, productivity and (surprise) collaboration but hey I'm saving the company some thousand $$ each year, or am I?
To say that one size fits all is, at best, silly. A given (company) culture is the aggregation of: people hired, the environment they work in, how they are treated, etc. One person's "I'd never work there" is another's "I'd kill to work that."
p.s. That said, perhaps the Washington Post is correct. The workplace should be either robots, or pseudo-enslaved humans. But Jeff isn't going to appreciate an article with that slant.
Part of the reason why this is controversial, I think, comes down to the majority of the type of work that people are doing on a day-to-day basis.
If you get to work, have a ten-minute standup, then go and try to hammer out code the vast majority of the rest of the day, then you need a default-private environment. Visual and auditory privacy, in a closed office, with multiple large monitors, correlates with success here.
But if you spend most of your time bouncing ideas off each other, then the fluidity of verbal communication is much more efficient, for most people and use cases, than putting everything in writing first. With such constant change, keeping everyone in the loop is going to be at a higher priority than pure development speed.
The balance is probably what kind of organization you have. Do you have a small start-up where the entire company can fit into one room? An open space (well, relative to its size) probably makes sense. Do you have a large organization where somebody writes spec and passes it to a programmer for implementation? Private offices for programmers are probably best. Do you have small feature teams where management gives feature requests to the team as a whole? Give the team its own private room, segregating them from other teams.
FWIW, one of the main reasons I started Fogbeam Labs is because I want to build the company I always wanted to work at. So... if and when the day comes that we are successful enough to start hiring employees, and have a traditional office, one thing I absolutely intend to commit to is a "everyone gets a private office, with a door" policy.
Now, that said... I'm starting to question the need for traditional offices in general, as technology improves our ability to work remotely. I don't know if I'd want to go for a 100% "work from home or wherever you want" policy or not, but it's not something I would unilaterally rule-out right now either.
Sadly we're probably still a ways off from reaching the point where any of this will come into play. But we'll keep grinding, exactly because the world needs more companies that treat employees as people not fucking "resources". (Don't even get me started on how pissed off I get when I hear somebody refer to a person as a "resource").
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 194 ms ] threadI don't mind going to an open office occasionally if 90% of my week is working from my own office with walls, a chair setup for me and some IT equipment that's actually had some investment.
It looks like the core problem here is all-or-nothing thinking. On projects requiring a lot of creative thinking and multiple disciplines I like a small team all in one room working side-by-side. On projects not requiring much creative thinking but a lot of deep programming I like to be left alone. When I'm working on my business, I enjoy being in a coworking environment.
Instead what gets implemented is these cafeteria-sized cattle rooms where you can't hear yourself think. Or everybody working in silos by themselves -- which over time destroys productivity, oddly enouh.
It's the one-size-fits-all thinking that's the problem here, not the office furniture layout.
How could we show management how is it to use IRC, mailing lists or something like Github to collaborate?
I wish I knew the answer. My gut says to take someone experienced working with remote teams to run a trial, to show them the little tricks that can help make it a success. Quantifying success is often difficult even if we feel we know instinctively if it's working for us, or could be part time or with some changes.
However, I've only worked for companies who had a negative attitude towards working remotely even if they half-heartedly tried it occasionally, or companies who were setup as remote-first. Traversing the gap seems to be hard.
Sorry. I'd love to have a better answer, but I've been around a while and I'm not seeing one yet.
I remember reading in Trump's Art of the Deal book that showing up on-site to regularly inspect the ongoing construction helped get the building done faster and under-budget. That doesn't mean the contractors liked having the client show up on-site every day, even if it worked.
Ask yourself: If the science pointed towards sitting next to the loud sales guy, would you be as likely to upvote an article saying so? This is on the front page because people want it, not because they care about productivity.
Same thing applies to remote working: Most people can't work remotely, even if they say they want to.
Employees want a little privacy and most of the want a quiet are. It's not the same as a want of private offices.
> If the science pointed towards sitting next to the loud sales guy
"If". Show me the data ;)
> Most people can't work remotely, even if they say they want to.
That depends on the equipment you need to use. If it's a phone, a laptop, and an internet connection, you can, end of story.
If you need specialized equipment it gets problematic indeed.
EDIT: typo.
Have you tried to hire anyone to do remote work, even freelance work? Most people fail miserably if you don't give them structure(and being on-site is a type of structure).
You can work around it by selecting for the small percentage of people who can work independently, but most people aren't in that small percentage. So success by being vigilant in selection would reinforce that it doesn't work on average.
If this site was "Manager News" and everybody here was a manager, I'd be more likely to believe discussion praising allowing remote workers. As it is, I'm skeptical that people aren't believing what they want to hear.
Personally, I find it quite plausible that the loud sales guy is hurting everyone's productivity. But lots of things are plausible, and it seems undisciplined to believe all the resulting discussion.
When I worked remote I had meetings to attend every week and consistent schedules to deliver to.
Plausible is such a weak word given the amount of evidence we have.
In study after study we can see loud consistent distractions significantly reduce our ability to perform complex tasks.
It could be that loud sales people are the special kind of distraction that improves productivity but it's doubtful.
Have you tried to hire anyone at all? Recruitment is hard. Period.
Failure to track production/results is completely unrelated to where your employee works, as well as failure to produce is only related to the employee. If he/she does not know where he/she best produces, the recruitment is bad to begin with.
You are ignoring the point; That popularity is biased by personal preference.
Also, I see plenty of comments on these threads from people who do like working in open offices.
The "selection bias" you experience is likely just related to the fact that open offices are what is very much in vogue right now, and mostly people who doesn't like it chime in. Likewise if single offices where in vogue we would hear from the people who do like to work in open offices currently.
You are arguing about whether X, when X was an irrelevant example to make another point.
More explicitly, the argument is of the form:
"If the science pointed towards X; where 'X' is an idea that is not popular among developers."
In this scenario, it is irrelevant if X is true because it is a hypothetical.
An example: If the science pointed towards NFL players performing better in 6 inch heels, would NFL players promote such a study?
It's an entirely pointless hypothetical if you entertain the notion that their preference _IS_ the primary factor for their productivity.
Or more likely, their productivity is the major factor for their preference.
No, I get your point; but it is a counter-point to a point not made.
> If the science pointed towards NFL players performing better in 6 inch heels, would NFL players promote such a study?
I expect not, probably due to their stake in the situation, i.e. their bias towards factors other than performance. that was the point of the hypothetical, and the sole point that was being communicated - to illuminate the concept of that bias existing, qualitatively. The quantitative matter of if it is actually a relevant factor is a different matter, and not raised by that hypothetical.
> It's an entirely pointless hypothetical if you entertain the notion that their preference _IS_ the primary factor for their productivity.
Not if you got the point of the hypothetical. whether you 'entertain' the notion or not is irrelevant, since the truth of the statement is unimportant.
If up was down, up would be down... But why is that point made? Sure, the statement based on the false premise is true, but there's nothing to be gleaned from it whatsoever, because it is never the case.
I accept the 2 step logic. I don't accept that it conveys any relevant information, because it is based on a premise that will never be true.
So why is "the point" made?
The statement is not a logical falsehood like 1 + 1 == 3, it's epistemological possible i.e. it's possible given you are not omniscient.
It's also not the case that 'nothing to be gleaned from it whatsoever' because:
A) there are other categorically similar statements (the category being "things developers would dislike") that are 'true'. The structure is still valid, ie: If "X, and X->Y then Y" is useful despite the fact that the second clause is irrelevant for "-X", because the same logical form is valid for other 'X's. It is presumed that the original, given example isn't supposed to represent a general falsehood.
put another way, the category of the statement is "changes developers would dislike, whether productive an non-productive" not "changes developers would dislike, that are also non-productive"
B) The given example ('X') is offered as one (of potentially many) influencing factors. I some cases, developer bias will be more, or less relevant, according to many factors. Its not possible to generalise by stating it is a falsehood; in some cases it will be true that developer bias is relevant. Again, the argument is qualitative, not quantitative (which would be difficult anyway).
The point is this: developer preference can influence their judgments. that is all.
saying "NFL players would be likely agree that sports cars helped their performance", is a similar way of saying the same thing, this time using NFL players and sports cars as a proxy for the same point.
If you can't give a single example supporting your claim, without instead resorting to confused mental gymnastics, there will be no merit to your case, however much you want it.
Share an example of where developer preference is orthogonal to developer productivity.
> saying "NFL players would be likely agree that sports cars helped their performance", is a similar way of saying the same thing, this time using NFL players and sports cars as a proxy for the same point.
Sure, and this is what a bonus is. People are given bonuses, in all fields. They wouldn't be if it didn't work.
Creationists claim the same thing.
I've explained well enough, it should be explicitly clear by now. If not, I find it unlikely you'll get it from further discussion.
Anyone that works in a reasonably friendly place, with decent motivators and a good boss, both your goals are aligned, because you want to get shit done as much as your boss does. At that point giving the employee what he/she wants is what you as a boss wants.
I'm lucky in that I'm my own boss, even if clients can sometimes have specific demands. Thankfully they generally only hire me because they trust that our goals are aligned, meaning:
I get paid for results, they get results from me choosing my optimal environment. Win-win.
That's a very sweeping statement. I don't want a private office, and I'm an employee. I can (and do) work remotely on occasion, but I'd still rather be in my office 90% of the time.
There has been quite a lot of material written about the behaviour instigated by the knowledge of being observed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
It seems to me to be a bit more complicated matter than just slackers suddenly jumping into attention.
"Most people can't work remotely, even if they say they want to."
Actual data would be nice to back that up. Cognitive bias is a constant hindrance when trying to figure out things like these based just on anecdotes and personal experience.
If you work as a team leader, manager, or senior programmer, it's absolutely a must-read. I can't recommend it more highly than that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Project...
https://blog.codinghorror.com/peopleware-revisited/
http://new.joelonsoftware.com/navLinks/fog0000000262.html
I personally enjoy working in an open office. I think I would have a hard time working from home or in a singular office... I need people around me, I like being able to get up and communicate with colleagues. Yes, it can get annoying, but the pros outweigh the cons for me.
This isn't the trend in tech, I have a lot of developer colleagues that would prefer to stay at home, or at the very least isolate the tech department from the rest of the company.
A while ago my company moved developers into their own office. It didn't last for a long time (for a number of reasons), I saw no benefits in it and was very happy when the decision to move us back in was made.
The open office is a concept that saves space too. We have a large open plan office and a few extra meeting rooms people can book. If we were to start walling up the place - half our workers would have to go.
They would have to go to another office space? Companies move all the time.
Floorspace adapts to company operations. Not the other way around - unless something is terribly broken.
There should be strict rules on what is accepted behavior and volumes (of talking) in an open office. Distracting behavior should be reported immediately and corrected.
For me it makes so easy to just pass by and say hello to start a conversation. But my company office is really well designed for that. We also have a lot of meeting rooms where teams can go when they want to do something together that is more noisy or needs more concentration. We have individual rooms for people that wants to concentrate or for managers that want to work on something sensitive.
But even that way you will see some teams that are more open than others. You still can have silos, but if you had teams in individual rooms the isolation will be complete. So open offices help, but are not the complete answer. The company values also play a big role on helping in an open and friendly communication.
> This isn't the trend in tech, I have a lot of developer colleagues that would prefer to stay at home, or at the very least isolate the tech department from the rest of the company.
For me this is the company values part. If you feel that you don't fit or that you have nothing in common with the rest of the people of the company that's an issue to solve.
And kill the other's focus and "zone" concentration for up to 30 minutes...
Yeah, just not for them.
[Edit] Now, some might be OK with it, but I don't see how one-sided convenience ("to get up and communicate") can be used as an argument, when the issue clearly involves two sides (and, even more so, the rights of the distracted side seem to me more important than the one wishing to communicate something that can't be bothered to use IM, email, slack and another 200 options).
Maybe it's half that we don't have societal etiquette around open offices.
Nothing that some clever electricity trap on the headphone exterior can't fix.
I worked with this great guy once but he had this tendency to fart from time to time, until during lunch with the team, I just said, jesus, I'm going to install a fart detector under every chair to see who is the sucker farting all the time and then just call him out loudly. Not going to say that it worked 100% but, it was like a 90% improvement, plus we all had a big laugh every time we hit the topic.
(to simulate what I mean, inhale, hold your breath, then suddenly force it out of your mouth against your throat, incredibly loud, and even disrupts my own breathing sometimes)
It could be some sort of tic that he struggles with. He's single handedly the reason that I started bringing headphones to work and my morale since he joined us has never been where it was before, except days when he's not in. In fact, on more than one occasion I felt in a really good mood, tried to reflect on why, and realized "oh! he's not here today!"
But how can one approach someone about something like that? It drives me insane and if I left the company tomorrow it'd be in the top 3 things that made me leave, but it could very easily be a medical condition!
I don't even want to bring it up with a third party because of how immature it sounds "That guy's breathing patterns make me upset", and because I have my own breathing problems (chronic nasal congestion), and sometimes my nose makes whistling sounds! I wonder how many coworkers have been annoyed to the high heavens since I started wearing headphones to cover up that guy's breathing, and was unable to hear my own nose whistling (if I hear it I can usually go to the bathroom and clear my nose a little and it goes away)
Sometimes I eat a late lunch or I eat certain foods and my stomach gets really noisy. And I don't mean passing gas, just the sound of my stomach growling loudly. I'm sure it's incredibly annoying to deal with, but how would someone approach me about that? "Hey, could you quiet down your stomach when I'm focusing?"
Stuff like that is why open offices are horrible. For every positive interaction I have because the guy I talk to is "right next to me", there's some glaring horribly stressful part that wipes out any gains. I think people use open offices as a crutch for poor communication culture anyways, the fact someone isn't "right next to you" shouldn't mean they have a hard time interacting with you when they need to.
To me it feels like a zoo, there's no privacy, almost never a quiet moment, and I'll definitely be reluctant to work at a company with open offices again. There are things between "every office is a sound isolated box with no windows" and "every desk is so close you can hear your coworkers food digest".
I also get annoyed by the floor bouncing around at work as people walk around (which might be related to open office plans since there's fewer internal walls so that the flooring acts like more of a drum? or it may just be old construction at the past 2 offices I've been in).
Then there are the people who are extremely talkative and as a bonus happen to have very shrill voices, a couple of these are seated about 30 meters from my desk, and they still distract and annoy me; wearing headphones and listening to something--anything else--is a must in an open office.
I'm sure there actually are surveys/research findings that point to a positive, but most don't, as far as employee happiness and productivity goes.
The 2 common cited reasons of "saves real estate costs" and "employee distrust" have become thought-stopping memes that prevents the analysis of executives who prefer working in open offices and became successful with it. I previously posted an example of Mark Zuckerberg's thinking:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13374848
Look at those old photos and then listen to him speak about his new 2015 open desk in the video. Contemplate whether he built the new open office to spy on everyone or... was it to recreate and extend the "open office" kitchen table at Harvard that let the team quickly iterate on software and get to $100 billion IPO?
Would Lindsey's complaints sway him? She says:
>A 2013 study found that many workers in open offices are frustrated by distractions that lead to poorer work performance. Nearly half of the surveyed workers in open offices said the lack of sound privacy was a significant problem for them and more than 30 percent complained about the lack of visual privacy.
Why would Mark Z care about these surveys? Of those respondents that were dissatisfied, what did those workers who require private offices build that was great? He built a multi-billion dollar company with a cramped elbow-to-elbow open office.
Opinion pieces about this topic are not convincing. Concrete business performance superior to everyone else based on private offices would be convincing.
Because companies shouldn't be planned for just a few years, while the initial excitement lasts. You'll be OK with discomfort if the benefits outweigh it, and in case of Facebook, I'm fairly certain this is what happened. When the work becomes less interesting and more traditional company like, you're toleration levels will start dropping as well. Early bird employees go and seek new challenges and the ones replacing them never experience the initial thrill only the vast, yet crowded, noisy, anti-privacy zone that is supposed to be the place to host extensive thinking.
Microsoft conquered the world with closed offices. You can find anecdotes either way. Maybe facebook are big despite open offices. How could you tell the difference?
And to your point about anecdotes supporting either narrative: Microsoft was defeated by open-office search company (Google vs Bing), defeated by open-office smartphone company (Apple iPhone vs Windows Phone), defeated by open-office cloud services company (Amazon AWS vs MS Azure). Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that Microsoft has transitioned away from private offices towards open plans in their newer buildings.[1]
I've been looking for compelling evidence that proves the superiority of private offices but haven't found any. The business case studies showing superior performance that's directly caused by private offices don't exist. Yeah, surveys of employees exist but not superior business results.
[1]http://www.geekwire.com/2014/microsoft-developer-division/
What is needed is an interventional study or a few.
At least so far as Apple has adopted the open office craze, innovation and sales have dropped with Tim Cook taking a recent pay cut for poor performance.
Yes, Apple is moving to open offices in the new Cupertino headquarters, the "spaceship," but that is not how they achieved their big success with the iPhone.
I don't have the cites handy but my recollection is that the specific iPhone teams (hardware and software) were working long hours in the open around conference tables. That subgroup was isolated from the rest of Apple employees because of the secrecy so yes in that sense, they weren't "open" on the gigantic scale of Facebook.
Apple is sufficiently secretive that indeed some other teams might have been in open offices. Not the ones that I saw or interacted with. I was working on a key part of the iPhone and iPad technology.
Many of the teams are not (or only recently) switched to open offices. I think it's quite unrealistic to try and attribute bing/mobile performance to something that wasn't even largely rolled out at the onset of those competitions, as opposed to the occams razor of well discussed strategy issues in those markets. As much as I'm a proponent of private offices, to attribute business success to one or the other (and not just as an added cost function that may move the needle slightly) seems to be focusing on the more minor of all the things that could lead to a product success/failure. In that vein I think employee satisfaction _is_ key, as a longterm trend of unhappiness (from ANY source) CAN lead to the sort of things that do disrupt key product delivery. (see sister posts on the cost of turnover discussion, etc)
People have gotten to multi billion IPOs without open spaces.
It's just a random historical accident on Facebook's story, and it that sense it would be like considering PHP essential to Facebook's IPO, as if if they used Python or Ruby or anything similar, they wouldln't have made it.
>Why would Mark Z care about these surveys? Of those respondents that were dissatisfied, what did those workers who require private offices build that was great? He built a multi-billion dollar company with a cramped elbow-to-elbow open office.
People have built "multi-billion dollar companies" with all other kind of traits, including private offices (Microsoft, Apple) but also sexism, treating employees badly, death marches, poisonous work culture, etc.
It doesn't mean that companies should imitate all these to get to the "multi-billion dollar" part, any more than they should imitate open offices.
You don't need data to know that sexism, employee abuse and other social ills are are bad so that's not a good comparison.
Then the comment I was replying to missed TFA, because it gives pointers to research on the issue.
The research[1] that various journalists in Washington Post, Harvard Business Review, WSJ, etc are pointing to is a survey of employees' satisfaction levels and not an analysis comparing business results.
If that oft-cited survey is the best ammunition we have, it won't move the needle towards private offices. What we need is business evidence of private offices enabling productivity levels superior to everyone else with open offices.
[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272494413...
E.g.: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~gmark/CHI2005.pdf
Or:
"In 80 clinical trials, Dr. Glenn Wilson, a psychiatrist at King's College London University, monitored the IQ of workers throughout the day. He found the IQ of those who tried to juggle messages and work fell by 10 points -- the equivalent to missing a whole night's sleep and more than double the 4-point fall seen after smoking marijuana. "This is a very real and widespread phenomenon," Wilson said. "We have found that this obsession with looking at messages, if unchecked, will damage a worker's performance by reducing their mental sharpness."
You are disagreeing with people who may not actually disagree with you (I know I think open concept offices are terrible for most purposes).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13419444
I'm not claiming open offices are superior nor am I recommending that people copy Facebook's practices.
Instead, I'm asking people to suspend the common Dilbert-PointyHairedBoss disadvantages about open offices and instead, really try to get inside the head of people like Mark Zuckerberg.
To exercise the notion of entertaining thoughts we don't agree with, let's write out a very uncomfortable sentence that might be uttered by Mark Z: "I don't want to build private offices because that would be a competitive disadvantage and handicap Facebook's ability to innovate."
Did that sentence make your eyeballs hurt? Good. If the programming community can't honestly engage with people executives who feel the truth of the above statement in their heart, the discussion on the topic will go nowhere. Showing news articles such as the one by Lindsey won't convince them.
>There are countless researches on the importance of focus and the impact of distractions.
Yes, of course uninterrupted focus and shielding from distractions is important. However, that factor will take a back seat if collaboration outweighs it. Unless that research shows that a _group_ of programmers in private offices outperform programmers in open offices, it means nothing to people like Zuckerberg.
If you watch the Mark Zuckerberg video, it is clear he prioritizes collaboration over disruptions. He's not stupid and knows that there will be inevitable distractions. He's optimized for collaboration because it matches his experience for success.
The way to counteract that thinking is to create a company with private offices that crushes Facebook (or one of Facebook's business units.) You need some type of business evidence that frightens him into building private offices.
Did that sentence make your eyeballs hurt? Good. If the programming community can't honestly engage with people executives who feel the truth of the above statement in their heart, the discussion on the topic will go nowhere. Showing news articles such as the one by Lindsey won't convince them.
An executive, including Mark, can be an arsehole and hold any kind of BS opinion (e.g. "I can't hire women and/or pay them the same, because they are not as good as men").
If they can't see why something is bad for their employees, fuck them. It's not like they run the only game in town.
And "it's good for the bottom line" is not an excuse. All kinds of shit can be good for the bottom line, including illegal practices (e.g. blackmailing foreign employees that you'll have them deported).
Yes, but what he built was yet another banal social media site in php. Nothing that required deep thinking or innovation.
1) Give consumers what they want instead of what you think they want.
2) He used tools as intended. Instead of wasting time implementing Erlang trying to achieve the best messaging platform ever, he went with something that was popular and was easy to understand for everybody at the time, which was PHP. Then went on to improve the system as they needed with HHVM, React, React Native, etc.
3) As much as somebody can hate Facebook for being a social network/privacy leech, which is something a lot of programmers dismiss precisely because of the social part, just the fact they popularized React as one of the defacto front-end frameworks speaks volumes about how they can push real innovation for everybody else.
4) And even simple stuff like sharing pictures. I still remember vividly how awkward was to share pictures before Facebook. Sure, I think Flickr or similar stuff was there already, but nobody is going to keep clicking on your gallery so they can see how an amazing photographer you are. Sometimes the greatest innovation is in the simplest things, and if you ask me, this was THE feature they brought to the table.
It's obviously a conscious business decision.
When a site is focused on "social", like MySpace or Facebook, it comes across as invasive. When a site is focused on personal "marketing", like LinkedIn or dating networks, it can more be useful feedback on your reach.
EDIT: I hate the word "creepy"
This is the first time in my life that I have heard about mixi.jp. Facebook was able to capture not only the US but almost the whole world for that matter. Again, dismissing those achievements as if they were nothing really does not give them proper credit.
I too have had great experiences doing productive new work in small open offices up to 6 people. I'm currently not enjoying my open office of >100 people. I'd be quite happy with a team-sized office with a door and decent internal sound damping.
Clearly since we can't match these workers with a highly successful, innovative, billion dollar idea their opinions are worthless. After all, such things never happened until Mark invented the open office.
[1] I want to emphasize started not worked at.
To answer your question, Microsoft famously gave developers private offices through much of the 90s and I think early 00s while they were becoming successful enough to be sued under the antitrust laws. So, there's one example for you.
The "modern" open-plan office in which I work is particularly bad at acoustics. The dining area has a dome, which looks nice but sounds like an echoing railway station. I avoid it because I can't make out conversations in that kind of environment. Said dining area is isolated from the rest of the office by a partial wall that does not go all the way up.
All walls and ceiling surfaces are smooth and flat to maximise acoustic reflection. When we first moved in, the glass-fronted meeting rooms were echoing little boxes that were also impossible to hold conversations in, so we had to fit fabric acoustic suppressing wall hangings.
Offices could do well to learn from the "modern bar vs. traditional pub" layout approach. The bar is open and loud; conversation requires either out-louding people or leaning into someone's ear. The traditional pub "snug" has wooden half-partitions into booths, lots of fabric on the seating, maybe a few wing chairs, and a twisty internal layout. The ambient volume is much quieter.
An office laid out like a snug would still technically be "open" but would stop noise travelling across the office. Even just an acoustic suppressant ceiling would make a big difference.
The ensuing loudness war almost got us thrown out of the restaurant.
Booths, partitions... just like qubickles?
https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22qubickles%22
We have booths for phone calls/skype/whatever as well as multi-person booths for meetings which are all super well dampened, you can barely hear people outside of them.
I guess they're very similar to a snug like you're mentioning. We also do have some acoustic suppressing things hanging from the roof (it's a very high-roofed office). There are also seperators at the desks b
There are open offices with privacy (covers around your table) and just 10s of people sitting next to each other on a row with tiny tables.
Problem with no privacy is, people tends to talk next to each other compared to open office with privacy (people use messengers more often then). This creates a lot of noise in the office which causes needing of headphones. And of course there is always some person that shouts from first to last row about some joke.
If you are not giving constant smoking breaks your only breaks at work time is visiting some non-work website (facebook or news site etc.) and when you visit one of these sites, your colleagues just start eyeing up your monitor, or you get eye contact with your boss (Murphy's law). Thanks to big screens nowadays, someone can see your screen 3 rows behind you whenever you switch to not work related website.
Having private office for everyone won't be possible on space wise and I believe author and other people just needs open office with covers around. Sitting at row of tables like at internet cafe is bad impact on your performance for sure (and also privacy wise).
Last but not least, I should say that, because of productivity reasons (usage of personal phones, social sites etc.) is a big bs. for having open offices. As long as you do your duty on time with good quality, you should be allowed to use your personal phone or facebook or whatever. Blocking usage of these items or websites doesn't assure of better productivity.
We've regressed to worse than cubicles because it is not "possible space wise"?
Considering the average salary of a programmer, it sounds totally possible space wise.
Besides, how about they drop the ping pong room, the Nerf shooting range and the like first?
Ping pong room, Nerf shooting ranges are all "fancy" rooms they use to give the modern, fun working environment message (or lie). If they need extra space, I am sure most companies would demolish even bathrooms but don't touch those "fun rooms". And I agree that it's bs.
Private offices are not the only sane alternative to open offices.
Rooms for two to three persons, such that they each have their own private working space (ie. they have desks and no one has to sit back to the door) is a pretty good arrangement IMO.
Result: No team got any room (except heads and managers)
Bottomline: Equal opportunities should get offered to every team or drama happens. People don't mind if managers and heads have their own rooms (not even shared rooms) for some reason but if any other team have shared room but they don't have, then it causes drama.
The design is focused around four-office bullpens like so: Two programmers share a 225 sqft office. Offices open into common spaces for collaboration and reception. Some sort of gatekeeper sit at a desk in the reception area, playing interference for anyone trying to interrupt programmers at work, either in their office or in a collaborative session.
The offices themselves could have windows, and each bullpen would take up 1100 sqft or so. Here's a rough design of a bullpen:
+---------------+----------+---------------+
+---------------+----------+---------------+ +---------------+----------+---------------+ So, in a 2500 sqft space, you could provide a controlled work environment for 16 programmers.I don't like shared offices.
Outside of the basic 40'x40' pod, it would make sense for the kitchenettes to share a wet wall with bathrooms, and try to get at least one exterior window to the offices closest to the entry, like this: (each char is 10 ft high by 5 ft wide)
Anecdotal? There's a great New Yorker article[1] that references a number of studies. This blog post[2] links to a couple others and addresses costs/alternatives. A "study of over 40,000 survey responses collected over a decade has found that the benefits for workers are quickly outweighed by the disadvantages"[3]. Here's a Washington Post piece[4] on office furniture designers realizing (citing multiple studies) "open-plan spaces are actually lousy for workers." A TIME article[5] highlighted decades of research that associated open layouts with "greater employee stress, poorer co-worker relations and reduced satisfaction with the physical environment."
[1] http://www.newyorker.com/currency-tag/the-open-office-trap
[2] http://nathanmarz.com/blog/the-inexplicable-rise-of-open-flo...
[3] http://theconversation.com/open-plan-offices-attract-highest...
[4] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-leadership/wp/2015/04...
[5] http://ideas.time.com/2012/08/15/why-the-open-office-is-a-ho...
That's your problem then! If people is judging you for going to the bathroom or browsing Hacker News instead of your results, then what the company/employees value is the problem.
People can browse internet at work, and if at the end of the year they are high performers I will give them an above average salary increase. If they are extra hours at the office, never look at Facebook but they don't perform well I will have a talk with them to see what's happening as that's not good.
I think many people experience that where I work. When I walk past someone in our open office they tend to look at monitor with work on it even if they were just looking at something else on another one.
Our management is the kind that could care less if we watched Youtube all day if we were keeping up performance, and I'm not even management (or close!) and yet people still feel a little bit of stress knowing someone is looking over their shoulder inadvertently.
Interestingly one of the pros often mentioned for open office space is that it enables collaboration, I've never seen that work out in practice very well, though. At least I'm much less prone to start a discussion with someone in an open office because it will disturb everyone else who are not interested in the topic. More often than not other people will hush you and so on.
So in the end an open office is detrimental to my health, happiness, productivity and (surprise) collaboration but hey I'm saving the company some thousand $$ each year, or am I?
p.s. That said, perhaps the Washington Post is correct. The workplace should be either robots, or pseudo-enslaved humans. But Jeff isn't going to appreciate an article with that slant.
If you get to work, have a ten-minute standup, then go and try to hammer out code the vast majority of the rest of the day, then you need a default-private environment. Visual and auditory privacy, in a closed office, with multiple large monitors, correlates with success here.
But if you spend most of your time bouncing ideas off each other, then the fluidity of verbal communication is much more efficient, for most people and use cases, than putting everything in writing first. With such constant change, keeping everyone in the loop is going to be at a higher priority than pure development speed.
The balance is probably what kind of organization you have. Do you have a small start-up where the entire company can fit into one room? An open space (well, relative to its size) probably makes sense. Do you have a large organization where somebody writes spec and passes it to a programmer for implementation? Private offices for programmers are probably best. Do you have small feature teams where management gives feature requests to the team as a whole? Give the team its own private room, segregating them from other teams.
Now, that said... I'm starting to question the need for traditional offices in general, as technology improves our ability to work remotely. I don't know if I'd want to go for a 100% "work from home or wherever you want" policy or not, but it's not something I would unilaterally rule-out right now either.
Sadly we're probably still a ways off from reaching the point where any of this will come into play. But we'll keep grinding, exactly because the world needs more companies that treat employees as people not fucking "resources". (Don't even get me started on how pissed off I get when I hear somebody refer to a person as a "resource").