> And for what? Because a minority of people kinda like that configuration? Because it’ll look good in a few photos? Because it’ll impress strangers who visit the office?
Somehow the author missed the primary reason for the open office configuration: "Because it cuts the costs of office space by a HUGE amount (certainly more than half)."
I suppose "Because it makes it easier for managers to keep an eye on their employees and see when they are slacking off." figures in also. Although it's probably a sign of poor management.
I think HN is just focusing on disparaging the messaging from company leads, and pointing out that it’s cheaper but actively harmful as well to performance.
Employee time is usually a lot more expensive than the space they occupy. At least in tech.
You could save quite a lot of money on furniture if everyone sat with their laptops on the floor. But in reality that would be more expensive since the difference in productivity will outweigh the furniture cost.
Ah, but accountants don't measure productivity, only cost. It doesn't matter if it takes 3 times as long to ship your product, the only way they'd justify the higher cost of the office is if it meant cutting jobs.
I agree, and often times is several engineering teams that have their own budgets for labor, verses an entirely different department (facilities) using a different pool of money. Each department has incentives to cut costs independently and often at the expense of other departments.
I would happily buy my own sodas (I don't drink them anyway), chips/snacks (I don't eat them at work), coffee (I do drink coffee!) if it meant I never had to sit in an open office environment again.
You're missing the point that the people configuring the office (most of the time) do not take productivity as a major factor, unless is something extreme and unrealistic like your example. Now it's more like: "everyone is already used to this configuration, and it's 50% (or some big %) cheaper to setup now"
I work in a place with younger developers, who basically run things themselves with management's blessing. They love the open-plan office layout. I think a lot of this is generational: younger programmers are much more social and like noisy environments where they can chat and banter endlessly.
Personal preferences vary but, yeah, a lot of overall preferences are probably age-related. I remember in a long-ago job I had for quite a few years (with an old-style high cubicle arrangement), we had a lot of walking the hallways F2F informal catchups, ate lunch together, had sports teams, etc.
These days I mostly work remote by choice and am good with that. Some of it is better tech to work remote; I didn't even have broadband for most of my time in that former job. But it's also that I have no particular interest in spending a lot of time with coworkers generally beyond what I need to get my job done.
I'm not claiming that it's age-related, but that it's generational. The people who are going into programming these days are not the same type of people who went into it a generation ago. In the 80s, these people would have gone into a different career field.
And I'm not sure I agree with that in general. If I look back at the engineers of the computer company I worked for in the late 80s, I would say there were more women and it was whiter. Certainly, more were from traditional EE disciplines given how relatively new CS was.
But I'm not sure that new engineers at that company were fundamentally different from new engineers joining, say, Facebook today.
It's a penny wise, pound foolish decision though, considering engineering salaries. It's hard to quantify, and often an externalized cost to the facilities management and decision makers, but my own experience suggests open offices are incredibly expensive as a negative multiplier on the engineering output. The "actual work" starts getting done in the evenings, on planes, and on weekends, while the business hours are a circus of meetings and "grab-ass" as the top comment in this thread so eloquently put it.
I'm building my own company now, fully remote, and from an engineering output point of view I've never seen such productivity. No ass-in-seat supervision, no assigned hours, just straight throughput of engineering tasks being closed and features being shipped every day.
> The "actual work" starts getting done in the evenings, on planes, and on weekends, while the business hours are a circus of meetings and "grab-ass" as the top comment in this thread so eloquently put it.
And thus, there is no incentive to change it. Cause total productivity is the same.
How do you counter the common argument that face-to-face communication is the most high-bandwidth and one shouldn't throw away that competitive advantage unnecessarily? I'm not a proponent of that position; on the contrary, I don't want to accept it. But a lot of people think that way.
I find video chat to be as productive or even moreso than face-to-face meetings for small groups of people.
In face to face meetings, many companies (like ones I have worked for) have limited meeting spaces and it's quite hard to book a conference room for more than an hour. Often times, we'd shuffle from one conference room to another.
So even in-person isn't quite as effecient and productive as it could be.
What specific drawbacks, or groups of people for whom face-to-face is a problem, do you have in mind?
FWIW, I personally don't benefit from the "high bandwidth". I'm legally blind; I can't read facial expressions or body language, or even recognize specific faces. SO for me, face-to-face amounts to little more than audio communication with full frequency range and zero latency or drop-outs. All that to say that I can only understand face-to-face communication (edit: as it works for most people) second-hand, so I'm curious, not being argumentative.
Some people are hyper-reactive to certain types of information. Whether you want to call it a preference or a handicap, I don't know. I personally have PTSD. I will nearly instinctively read things into faces that I can never be sure is there. This is perpetually confusing and often overloading for me, not to mention a useless waste of thinking cycles. It's taken me years to learn how to be less reactive, but it's always a process of reducing information down to a minimal set of what is most consistent, structured, and true with respect to the social environment. Which often does reduce down to pure language, the direct translation of a statement and the direction it aligns with.
It gets labeled many things, like social anxiety, aspergers, many other stigmatized disorders - but this is often my root problem - being overloaded with the amount of information present in social environments.
I have greater clarity when I can think separated from people physically, most often through text. I've gotten better with audio, but in person communication is still something of a struggle.
I'm not being argumentative either. Just people have differences, and they aren't always easy to notice, identity, or correct.
Audio in a business environment, at least from my experience, is more predictable and algorithmic, so my sensitivity to that has reduced significantly. Every face to face interaction in my organization routinely feels like a disaster I can't understand in entirety, during or locally near the experience. Reasoning out of it (grounding) is often challenging, I prefer focusing on inanimate objects to ground myself as this ties me to a structured reality, as well as focusing on math and logic because I need those reasoning systems to maintain self direction. It has gotten better in some ways and more difficult in others.
I have some folks I'm very close with where this is not the case. But that's taken a very long time for me, and it is something that has required a lot of patience, understanding, communication, tolerance, forgiveness, hope, and perseverence. It's still something that is just about, the opposite of easy, for every new person I'm introduced to. I am generally told that I'm a reasonably easy to get along with person casually, aquaintance wise, although I consistently apologize for random social behaviors, masking them over with the words awkward, impulsed, compulsed etc. I have a tendency to ramble about technical things and this is bad when I have a tendency to be hypercritical over software (as I'm never sure how my preferences about code may approve or reject the preferences of those I talk to, but that's getting off track). There'stuff that just goes down to the core of us that is intrinsic to our orderings, organizations, and structurings of information - which I'm sure you understand from being blind. In my experience, attempting to change these things is more costly than the benefit 'correction' would provide.
But that's me, PTSD and an understanding of psychology has made me a better software developer by refining my understanding of automation, as well as helping me remove myself from the headspace of what originally was so painful to experience. It doesn't go away, but it gets easier to live with, some days are harder than others, but I still consider myself fairly lucky given everything I've been able to do with what I have.
Text is just crystal clear. I have a tendency to ramble on the internet and I've gone into that wormhole of introspection of 'what will this do to me if I say this', some variant of the halting problem, recurrent infinite descending chains of when minds decide to stop inferencing using limited, selective sets of information, but, shrug. People have said I'm good at writing, and I hope my tendency to overthink has only led to improvement.
Do you think you would be happy in an environment where all business and technical communication was text? Do you think that could even be productive? Or is some amount of spoken communication practically necessary?
This whole exchange has been interesting. Thanks again.
I'm not sure honestly. I think generally I do better not confined to total isolation, but life is a process. There's always going to be challenges regardless of how able someone appears to be.
I do think having diversity in all things is important, they push one's boundaries and allow oneself to redefine oneself. Taking care to reflect on the moment and the big picture, that's important.
Too much of anything is not a good thing, so there is always a need to balance. This allows one to translate skills from one interface to another. The big picture / in the moment reflection / introspection is important because it allows for self direction, instead of just getting caught up in all this mapping of skill set to skill set towards some ideal of being 'well rounded'.
I generally just prefer my base to be text because I code a lot and that's the headspace I need to stay in. Some communication, sparsely distributed in other forms is fine, but too much can direct away from the focus, which in my preference is produce good code, and solve problems in ways that get the closest to perfect I can get, without tipping the balance of losing sight of all the other code information, retaining structure and direction, uniformity, solutions for problems.
I don't enjoy living in a text vacuum as that can get severely isolating when done to excess, but sometimes having that space is necessary for me to continue laying out my own foundation of structure, preference, and direction, as I continue to learn new stuff.
For me it's hard to describe but I get a feeling of knowing how the other person feels from a face to face meeting. Keep in mind, this only works for people I know well and in person (close coworkers, girlfriend, etc.). I still get this over a video chat but it's at a 10% level so I feel like I'm operating without one of my senses.
I often express myself poorly and this extra feeling helps me realize it and take some corrective measures. Really helpful when trying to communicate a difficult technical concept.
Face-to-face is more effective than video conferencing, but not in the way that you'd trivially expect.
Most designated meetings, you can have just fine over a video conferencing system. Where f2f excels is in the conversations after you leave the meeting room - just a casual question to some other person from the meeting, which evolves into an impromptu 5-minute chat. (That is usually more valuable than the entire meeting :)
Spontaneous conversation is incredibly valuable. (Which, ironically, is also cited for open offices). I believe that if you start with a fully remote setup, you are growing a culture that will move these conversations to IM or other channels, by necessity. You'll likely be fine.
But you cannot move a company that has grown up with a culture of f2f meetings to a culture of IM conversations - it's too deeply ingrained.
IOW, you're not "throwing away" something if you build a remote culture from the start. Both models can work, but switching models is hard.
It does seem plausible that requiring an in-person team to switch to IM and other electronic communication would be more difficult than starting out remote.
I work on accessibility for people with disabilities, and I'm blind myself (well, legally blind), so I think a lot about including people with disabilities. It seems to me that working with people with some kinds of disabilities, e.g. deafness or a severe speech impediment, would be akin to forcing an in-person team to switch to IM. (I have no direct experience working with people with those disabilities, so I'm happy to be educated.) So I speculate that starting out remote would also make the team more inclusive in this area.
"It's a penny wise, pound foolish decision" Yes, and repeated infinitely throughout the global corporate world. Basically saying over and over again: corporations care more about dollars than their people, and the people must change or leave - if you want this job at all. What? you're the top in your field? So what, you're not special. Get to work.
Every time the topic comes up on HN half a dozen people insist that the only possible reason anyone could ever consider an open plan office is cost.
Meanwhile, there's a thriving and growing industry selling desks in trendy open plan offices to self-employed people who for the most part could do their work in the privacy of their own home if they didn't think the atmosphere of an open plan office was worth paying for.
Working at home has other issues (distractions, lack of separation between home/work, loneliness) so I can see someone wanting to rent a desk especially if they find working at home that particular day challenging to their productivity.
I mostly work from home these days but I can't imagine starting out that way after school.
A lot of people I know work remotely in whole or in large part. But I've also worked with people who either felt the need for work-home separation or just found home to be too distracting a work environment in one or more ways.
YMMV, but in my neck of the woods the whole office-share thing is having a very hard time. Prices are either very steep and include private offices (hah!), or very cheap for open plan offices. Many of the latter places have devolved into regular cafes because there's no demand.
And specifically, about an easy to measure cost verses an hard (if not impossible) to measure cost. Facilities can easily be measured. Productivity lost due to employees overwhelmed with sights and sounds (and even smells)? Much harder to measure, and so much easier to just not measure it or low ball it. So even if money is being lost, it looks like money is being saved.
> The Basecamp office has a row of desks out in the open which we govern by Library Rules. We also have four private work rooms.
Well it is still a bad decision. Libraries are an open work space and still manage to provide a reasonable working environment. This is less about money but more about a wrong perception of work.
Except that when you actually do have individual offices, it's a sunk cost, and the productivity gains easily offset and pay off the initial outlay.
It is only really start ups that cannot afford to do this. Ironically because they have a small number of employees, open plan offices do work for them because they have fewer employees.
Relocate the office somewhere cheaper than the real estate hell that is the Bay Area, pay equal, but geographically adjusted salaries, and keep the non-open-office floor plan levels of productivity while reaping the benefits of the aforementioned points?
We did it before Facebook was even a twinkle in Zuckerberg's eye, and it's still a stupid idea. All that happens is the level of conversation goes up, and they suppress it with white noise generators. Dumb.
> We were already working from in open office, but at least I had a desk facing the wall behind me, so there was a modicum of privacy and psychological safety. Then management decided that it would “look better” if we went to circular desks where several of us would be sitting with our backs to the hallway, so everyone walking past would be looking at our screen as they passed.
This seems dishonest to me. Can some body explain if I'm missing something?
I understand the argument that open-plan offices increase distractions in general, and the damage that loud people do in particular. But if you really intend on being super focused and productive, I don't understand why it would bother you that someone would look at your screen.
I have worked in an open-plan office and the only times when I was embarrassed that someone saw my screen was because I was wasting my time on reddit/HN, which I shouldn't because that's not what they're paying me for... Once I managed to force upon myself the discipline of just don't open reddit/HN, I was happy to accept one of the desks with the back to the center of the room, because I no longer cared that someone was looking at my screen.
It's human instinct to be on high alert if you're under scrutiny or observation. There are all sorts of studies indicating people do worse on tasks when they know they're being watched. Part of your brain ends up focused on what other people are thinking of you instead of on the task at hand - even if it's only subconscious.
This smacks to me of an "If you have nothing to hide why do you care about your privacy?" argument. Which we should all know is a major fallacy.
There's plenty of reasons to not want others looking over your shoulder that have nothing to do with goofing off. Private emails, even totally business related ones are just that, private. If you're struggling with a problem, having an audience can make it that much worse. Et cetera, et cetera.
The nature of software development makes it hard for a lot of people to do with lots of distractions around them.
- There's also way too much stigma against "time wasting." Your brain needs breaks and distractions to work through problems. Spending some time on a goof off site each day is not a bad thing in and of itself. If your productivity suffers, that's a problem that needs to be addressed. But it can happen via burn out just as easily as via spending too much time reading fan theories on Infinity War Pt. 2.
> This smacks to me of an "If you have nothing to hide why do you care about your privacy?" argument. Which we should all know is a major fallacy.
The fallacy here is conflating the two. To me the most important argument in the usual privacy conversation (i.e. people vs government) is that people defending themselves from government surveillance is a very important part of keeping the balance of power from swinging too much in one direction.
This is nothing of the sort. If you work for a business and you don't like their open-plan offices, find one where they don't have open-plan offices. But saying that you don't like their open-plan offices because you're so productive without distractions, but then you're afraid that people see your screen seems dishonest. Also, if you're super productive but you need to take breaks to look at cat pictures during office hours, why are you afraid that someone will catch you looking at cat pictures? If you actually are as productive as you claim I'm sure people will respect your need for breaks: after all according to you we all need breaks, so "other people" will be doing the same thing. And if they don't respect _your_ need for breaks, then the problem isn't really the office style, but a lack of trust in colleagues. Again, the entire thing seems dishonest.
I can only speak for myself but it makes me unconformable because it makes me feel like I must be super productive for 8 hours straight lest the big boss happen to walk by for the 3 minutes I'm taking a mental break to read something interesting and completely unrelated to work.
If the big boss happens to walk by for the 3 minutes you're taking a mental break and that is a problem, I would say the problem is the boss/culture, not the space.
Think about it. You just said that someone "catching you" taking a break is an issue and that in your mind that is a justification for keeping your screen hidden.
"with backs to the hallway" - depending on how far away the hallway is this can be distracting. In the past I've sat with my back maybe a 1.5m from a wall, and the space between was used as a standard route by countless people - distracting.
Again, I totally understand the "it's distracting" argument, I have made the same argument myself. I was pointing a finger at the "I don't like it when people can see my screen" argument.
If somebody is looking over my shoulder as I'm trying to work, my productivity goes right to zero. It doesn't matter if I'm writing code or pounding nails - I need people to leave me the hell alone and let me work, without constant feedback and micromanagement.
The argument of "increased collaboration" that I keep hearing is kind of negated when people have the soccer game on and you're bombarded with constant cheering, which is my current situation.
Even when soccer is over, you have to contend with people playing grab-ass all over the office, or jerks (like me) with annoyingly loud keyboards. The modicum of utility of me "jumping into a conversation" really goes out the window when I'm forced to wear headphones all day.
I really don't have a good way of measuring or fully quantifying how much less productive I am personally, but haven't there been a ton of studies that indicate anywhere between 1-1.5 hours a day is wasted per employee due to the open office? I assume that labor is the most expensive part of any big-ish company, so it feels like the "offices are cheaper" argument shouldn't work.
Ha, yeah, fair point, I was just informed that it's almost over. Don't worry, there always seems to be more sports to watch. They'll probably move onto curling or something today.
> The argument of "increased collaboration" that I keep hearing is kind of negated when people have the soccer game on and you're bombarded with constant cheering
Is there anything less professional than watching a game at work? I really don't get why people do this, and why they think it's okay.
Granted, I don't like sports — but I like TV, and I wouldn't watch TV at work. I like computer games, but I wouldn't play computer games at work. It's just odd that sports fans think it's okay to distract people during work hours.
I agree. When I suggested putting on a low-budget 50's monster movie on as background noise (e.g. Gamera, Godzilla, The Giant Claw, something that's amusing to look at for thirty seconds, laugh a bit, but not overly distracting), people act almost offended that I would waste company time like that. But if the TV has some form of ball on it, drop everything.
the important people in the office both get to dictate what's allowed, and are in my experience more likely to be extroverted/sports-watchy types. Thus they exploit their position to watch sports with the other important people and who cares what the nerds think/want.
I think people are generally more tolerant of live events. I've been in offices where everyone's watching a political inauguration, or dramatic rescue, etc.
Last time (perhaps the previous football World Cup?) my manager simply said I could go home once the game started, as no-one else was going to do any work so that was fair.
I worked in a highrise office that had TVs ringing the floor that you could remote into to display dashboards and whatnot. One day I decided to play, on mute, endless episodes of How It's Made.
For reference, I work in a hardware engineering group. Some mesmerizing process would show up on screen, one person would stop and stare, and 5 minutes later we have a half dozen engineers who've stopped what they were doing to watch How It's Made.
Eventually we settled on Bob Ross as a happy medium in terms of "Pleasant Ambiance" and "Not Too Distracting."
That's making the assumption that they stop watching when your national team is not playing, which hasn't been the case here.
Also, as stated, even if you love sports, if I were to turn on something like Die Hard and cheer at the screen every few minutes when Bruce Willis does something awesome, or play a video game and yell profanities because I died, people would (rightly) think I'm a jerk and distracting everyone. Even if I only did once every four years.
Just watch it in the breakroom or somewhere where it doesn't disturb others. At one previous employer, they reserved a big conference room / auditorium and got food, like a mini team building event. At another a bunch of people just went to a bar en masse. If you can't take 90 minutes out of your team's schedule, or if it's considered OK to just blast the game in an open-office, there's something wrong with the work culture IMO.
It is not unreasonable to ask people to move to an area where people aren't trying to work, even if the event is live. Many people do not care about <x>ball and would like to work, and typically an office is the place where you are supposed to do that. Having the game on in the common work area is incredibly distracting with people cheering.
Many people who are trying to work do not care if the event is live. Even as someone who also enjoys watching rocket launches, I wouldn't cheer loudly when it took off, and I'd probably go to some kind of common area to watch it to begin with.
I don't think that's a fair assessment. Quite a few people in this thread do not share the same values that you do, even the more fundamental ones like patriotism.
It doesn't matter how big a deal it is. It's not work. Even if it's a natural disaster or a war, if it's not work you go watch it in a break room or you take PTO and stay home or you do whatever you need to ensure that it's not disruptive to others. The level of entitlement necessary to believe that your company and everyone in it should accommodate your personal non-work video watching boggles my mind.
But when the non World Cup watchers are in the minority then you have it exactly backwards. You're asking all the football fans (which at World Cup time is nearly everyone) to accommodate your idiosyncratic personal desire to carry on working.
The desire to carry on working isn't an idiosyncratic personal desire. It's why you're paid to be there, why the space exists. How is that not supernova-level obvious? Can someone's sense of entitlement be so huge that it blots out even that? I wouldn't have thought so until now.
It's completely obvious, you're right, but you are missing my point to some extent. It's nothing to do with personal entitlement. I'm guessing you've never been in a European office when the national team is playing an important World Cup match. Probably around 90% of people are not working at that point. Its like a public holiday. Consider the reaction if someone asked all the support staff to come into the office on a Sunday because they felt like getting some work done.
Did I say it is OK to disrupt others in the workplace? Of course it isn't, regardless of the event.
I was responding to a comment that compared watching a movie to following the World Cup live. The two are not comparable at all. I was also responding to other comments that were somehow dumbfounded by others wanting to watch the World Cup in general.
In America, people tend to watch any of the games, or at least that’s been my experience.
I don’t begrudge people their entertainment, but surely it’s polite not to foist it on others? I don’t play Minecraft let’s play videos for hours at the office, after all!
Or, as Androider said, put it in the break room. Where I work, that's exactly what they did: there's a TV in the break room that's on all the time, so for world cup it was tuned to that. No problem: if you want to watch it for a few minutes, go do it in the break room. If you want to not be bothered while you work, don't hang out in the break room.
I did a recent stint in a central government office (London, UK) and having your dog with you in the office seemed quite normal... to them. To me, as a seasoned IT contractor... not so much.
we have dogs in the office. they're quiet and most people love them. in any case they are the least of the distractions...and usually only if you made the miserable decision to eat lunch at desk (which in an open office can be even more of a nuisance)
Dogs are fun to have around. I love to give them scratches and bellyrubs when I need a distraction from frustration. I'm allergic and my arms will get itchy but it's worth it.
This thread of Hacker News kvetching has really lost focus on the case against open offices. This reads like a contest of who can be the most uptight in the office.
I like cats, dog and my son. Do I think added any of them to my office would be a good idea? No.
I go to work to well, work. I like my co-workers, don't mind talking with them a bit and am even friends with some of them. That doesn't mean I want them to bring all their distractions and things that bring them joy to the office. I want us all to get everything done quickly and correctly so that we can all go home and enjoy the things we like.
If you spend well over 50% of your day in a certain place you should damn well enjoy being there.
This sort of outlook might work for those of us that are workaholics, but for everyone else it's a major mental health hazard. Not everyone has wives or children or partners or scores of friends to spend their nights with. I wouldn't be so blase about taking all enjoyment out of the rest of the time those people are spending on this earth.
For one thing, they shed and make your clothes and personal spaces look disgusting. They also try to interact with you and touch you without your consent. Dogs are animals. They belong outside, not in shared people spaces.
Though much has been discussed on the topic, I consider down votes to be for those comments that don't contribute to the discussion, even if I might agree. In your case, however, I not only disagree, I don't feel your comment has contributed positively to the discussion. Whereas the parent comment did bring a different viewpoint to the discussion, though I might disagree with them.
In conclusion, have a down vote. Parent: have an upvote.
I'm happy with that. I was just kvetching really (and I didn't actually downvote). I strongly feel that votes should be used as you statrd., and not in lieu of a reply expressing disagreement through the courtesy of a reply. my complaint really is that downvoting is so capricious. people who hate dogs in the office downvoted me for saying that dogs have not been a problem at my office. the statement was factual, respectful and related. meanwhile I can say some snarky thing and get upvoted like crazy. it's just silly
Not a toddler, but I did take my 4 year old to work for a half day once when childcare fell through. I have my own office though and she was quiet, playing with blocks in a corner.
One of my colleagues brings his 5-y/o to work once a week (open office of course), and let me tell you: a chattering, running, squealing kid is even more distracting than the dogs and televisions put together.
Yeah, had a dev manager that used to bring his daughter, who I'd guess to be around 10. She was so noisy and obnoxious, I seriously thought she had a mental disability, so I cut her some slack (not that it suddenly made it okay to take her to work). And then I figured out that she was just undisciplined...
That same office (which, as I'm sure you have figured out, was an open office) allowed dogs. Mostly fine, I'd take our well-trained, quiet female pit bull into the office. She'd bug me to go play around outside more than I would have liked, but was otherwise inconspicuous. But as someone else in the thread has pointed out, dogs in the office doesn't scale. There's gonna be the one (or more) dog (much like the one child noted above) that doesn't belong in an office. One lady brought her other-dog-hating dog every day. "Bark, bark, bark" every time another dog was in sight. Etc., etc.
I guess my point is, yessh people, what happened to the professional work environment?
So much this. Workplaces used to be for working. Then you could go home after 8 hours and let go. Now you spend 12 hours getting half the work done because the office is no longer a workplace but a hangout.
'I guess my point is, yessh people, what happened to the professional work environment?'
Maybe related to bullshit jobs since these people are obviously not doing any real work, just bringing their homelife to the office in order to make time pass quicker?
Agreed! Some people are allergic to dogs. Some are afraid of dogs.
And some dogs are jerks. Worked in a place where the boss brought their loud dog to work. Barked constantly, disrupted work, growled whenever clients came into the office. The boss acted like she didn't hear anything.
I’m semi-allergic to dogs and deathly allergic to cats. One of my previous jobs started out as people bringing in their dogs (which was always fun when I was on a call and two of them got into a fight), and shortly before I left they started allowing cats, as well. I raised the fact that I’m allergic to both and mostly got ignored with an “apology”. And most people in the office looked at you like you were an animal-hating monster if you even suggested they take away that policy.
I like dogs. I have dogs (they came with my wife). But I don’t want to work in a goddamn kennel.
To pile on, I used to work in an office where a coworker's spouse sometimes showed up with their dog and newborn baby, in the middle of the day. Then I got to enjoy 20-40 minutes of high-pitched screeching in the office as the Slack channel was littered with things like, "WHERE IS THE LITTLE HUMAN. I MUST SEE THE LITTLE HUMAN" and "LOOK AT THE FLUFFER!"
I once worked in an agency where the MD had a dog. Sometimes he used to wash it in the sink in the kitchen.
(That said, they had the most expensive and best coffee machine I've ever seen in an office, and a guy who used to make brilliant cocktails on a Friday afternoon - he also stands out in my memory as one of the few front-end developers I've met who couldn't write JavaScript or CSS. That was a surreal contract, it really was.)
At least it ends. I work in a gigantic "airplane hangar" open office with no noise barriers of any kind stretching out to infinity. Everybody around me is on conference calls all day, every day. They put their phones on speaker and then yell louder and louder to be heard over each other. One of them is even one of the Important People with an office with a door that closes... which he leaves open all the time anyway.
Tbh, a good pair of 'closed back' full size headphones with noise cancellation would do just a good job (if not better musically) as wearing ear defenders over earphones.
Laser eye surgery is a fantastic choice for many people, especially people who are nearsighted, under 40, and don't have any contraindications. It's less effective[1] and riskier[2] for farsightedness, and there's only so much it can do for presbyopia. It's also riskier for people who have autoimmune disorders, immune deficiencies, diabetes, or dry eyes.
It's also great for correcting astigmatism. The nearsightedness that I got corrected was reasonably well managed by glasses, but my astigmatism was compensated for by my brain. I got noticeably more well-coordinated after laser eye surgery freed up visual processing ability this way, and I've heard other anecdotal evidence of this phenomena as well.
At the risk of sounding like a shill, I recently picked up a set of Noisefigher Sightlines (https://noisefighters.com). They're replacement ear pads with a notch cut out for glasses. My glasses don't fit in perfectly, but the frames put noticeably less pressure on my head now.
You could go the opposite route: good earplugs with good noise canceling over-ear headphones. The advantage of this over the other setup is that the minimum effective volume from music is lower, protecting against tinnitus. I had the same issues and found this setup works well for me.
As an added bonus the obvious rigamarole I have to go through when a coworker taps me on the shoulder makes them more likely to send an email next time.
I prefer the music to come from the headphones because my in-ear phones can be overly loud, even on the lowest volume setting on my phone. Having music coming from them hours every day had me feeling like I was damaging my hearing.
With earplugs inside noise-canceling phones I still get two layers of sound isolation but have a layer of sound isolation between me and the phones, providing finer volume control so I can add just enough music to finish the job of drowning out loud people around me without hearing damage.
I've found any earplug or headphone option will make my tinnitus worse - sometimes days afterwards.
I explain my tinnitus to non-sufferers as being on the threshold of noise intolerance 24/7.
I'm surprised there hasn't been a lawsuit against any of these companies that expect employees to damage their health just so they can save on floorspace?
I've also wondered about that. I didn't feel like I had tinnitus (I have a very mild one) until after I moved my apartment to a noisier street and wore earplugs for about 2 weeks.
Now I have a very faint one that "toggles" once or twice a week and ALWAYS when I wear earplugs.
Are you suggesting that I get checked for an ear infection or saying that I should stop using ear plugs? I have pretty much done the latter, only wearing them for the occasional nap once every other week.
I'm suggesting if you ever do get an ear infection to seek medical attention asap.
I had a random infection a few years ago and just waited for it to pass. Which it did, eventually, but my tinnitus became much worse afterwards. I'm guessing, because the infection did further damage which could maybe have been avoided?
I can't say whether you should stop wearing earplugs because you may sometimes be in a situation where they protect your hearing. But, for blocking out background noise in an office, they're probably not a good idea?
[based purely on my own experience]
Same here! I had very faint tinnitus (from headphones in the office all day), but after we moved offices (open office space) and I started wearing earplugs UNDER my hearing protection earmuffs, my tinnitus started going wild.
I think it's because when you double-stuff like I did, the only thing you can hear at that point is the ringing in your ears (and high heels on concrete floors). My brain seemed to lock in on the ringing at that point.
This unfortunately doesn’t work because these types of over-ear sound blockers are extremely physically uncomfortable. I can’t get work done while wearing anything like that because it feels like my head is being squeezed.
This is the big problem with headphones as a solution. You just trade sound disergonomy or physical discomfort, and it solves nothing. Like breaking your finger to distract from the pain of a gun shot wound.
Combine it with the fact that managers have repeatedly told me that wearing earplugs is “rude” and it’s just more of the no-win optics that drive open plan offices in the first place.
> I assume that labor is the most expensive part of any big-ish company, so it feels like the "offices are cheaper" argument shouldn't work.
This probably depends where you are. An open office plan might well let you use less than half of the square footage per employee, which in somewhere like Manhattan would potentially be saving you on the order of $5-10k per employee. Depending on how significant the productivity hit is, that might well be worth it.
Yeah, I'm on my phone so I can't do a full break even on this easily, but here's my rough estimate. If you're losing 1.5 hours of productive work per day, five days per week, and employees are otherwise productive 30 hours per week for 50 weeks out of the year, that's 375 hours per year out of a 1500 hour work year. That means for a $10k per employee rent savings, you lose more in wasted wages for anyone making over $40k per year. Even if we double the estimated productive hours per year, it still doesn't make sense for anyone making $100k or more.
You would be starting with a very tiny space if that doubles the square footage per employee. They completely eliminate visual distractions, give employees a feeling of privacy, and stop a lot of noise. Being portable, they can be changed around as needed, and you can easily create small groups.
We have a couple of mobprogramming stations with big televisions, each team has 1 or 2 of these so there are about 5 in a 20m radius from where I sit. When the first game that Sweden played all of a sudden 3 of the televisions are turned on and of course they are _not(!)_ in sync.
So here I am trying to do some work with three TVs games all slightly delayed from each other, meaning one cheer turns into three.
Now I work at a large newspaper and we sit 40m from the editorial staff so that adds to the background noise. To top it all of someone in the sports department thought it would be a good idea to @channel (usually reserved for "OMG the website is down what do we do!?") when some of the TVs stopped working (not really a job for the developers..).
That just killed whatever positive things I used to think about open offices.
Until I read that, the worst I’d ever heard was a friend who worked next to a slamming fire door. He had to wear hearing protection/ear muffs. Get this: he was the PhD physisist that did all the hard math coding for the company.
He has a private office where he works now thank goodness.
Yeah and what kills me is how ubiquitous tellocomms are for multi-site corps. I can't tell you how many meetings I've been in where everyone was at their desk, headphones on and each was playing the mute/unmute game in order to not blast everyone else on the meeting with the surrounding noise.
Then, given all that, you get the coworker two seats down Slacking you. If you're Slacking folks within 10 seconds walking distance then what's the point of being in the office at all.
I think the ideal would be commuting to the office one day a week to take care of meetings which are more productive in person such as sprint planning, grooming etc.
The thing is that this working-from-home people significantly impact the efficiency of your office. It's a trend (could be the open-office space started it) but resulted in people easily working 2 or more days from home. That implies that any desk you have is empty about 40% of the time. Or: your entire office is not being used for 40%...
So when bosses realised they were throwing money away, they came up with the open office with flex-desks: no-one has a fixed place, you can sit whereever you want. And there are less desks than people.
That can work out quite well (I work in such an office) but it depends greatly on ehtics or rules: no TVs with soccer games, no speaker-phone (but only headset) and rooms available for discussions or phone calls. And there is a general area (quite large) where you can drink your coffee and discuss the soccer matches or Tour de France results...
For me it works, but I can imagine that without the requirements listed above it can be a cumbersome workenvironment.
“flexdesks” or “hot desking” is just about the most juvenile reaction to working from home I can imagine.
If a company believes it will gain more from “saving money” on open plan offices or hot desking than it will from just paying more to facilitate more and better work from employees through buying the best tools (a private office is a tool like a keyboard or ergonomic chair), it’s self-evidently a company to get far, far away from.
Consider “flex keyboards.” Management realizes that not all keyboards are in use all day, because people are in meetings, at lunch, etc.
So nobody gets their own keyboard. You have to locate an unused keyboard at the times when you need to type.
This is no different than “flex desks.” In both cases (keyboards, desks), the unit cost of providing the dedicated resource to the employee is trivial compared to far more pressing concerns, like producing working software to increase revenue, or bullshit executive compensation.
Even real estate costs for private offices in dense urban areas are trivial by comparison.
As much as I share your sentiment, fact is that these trivial savings show up nicely on someone's target and the deteriorating effect shows up somewhere else, if at all.
The open office I am in ATM is one such places where a handfull of people (loud, discussing totally not related to work, factually completly idiotic conversations) spoil it for all others. There is nothing to be done about these people since they've been with the company forever and a day and are thus basically exempt from all rules (be it noice or dresscode).
5 Years ago I have actively stoped working from home to segrate work from family. Now I have found myself to do at least 1, often 2 days from home again and planning to change employer. No I will not tell them the reason since I can not affort to burn that bridge.
TL;DR Manager A makes a good impression by saving some office space, Manager B looses employees but will never find out why.
I don't understand why you can't tell them the reason you're leaving without burning a bridge - "I don't work well in an open-office environment, I found I was constantly distracted and inefficient. It's just not the right environment for me to thrive" isn't untrue or pointing fingers, and it's valuable feedback for your employer.
I think perhaps bigger than the open office problem is grand parent point seems obvious to me in our current society. Either you are 110% on board with what the company wants, or you aren't a team player (and implied a bad person/worker/resource). It is daring to question them, daring to say they did something imperfect.
Or more simply, if he wants to return to this employer in the future and they have the same or similar office space, they will surely ask him why he thinks that he will now, somehow, be able to work well in in that environment that was so problematic for him in the past.
Not criticizing this person, I despise my open office environment too. I also wouldn't (and didn't) tell tell my employer about this when I left for a few years in the past for the same reason.
There's a risk the word gets out that you don't work well in team, can't adapt to a new environment or can't focus under the simple stress of office life.
I work mostly from home but I do have a cube in the local office. If we got tight for space, it would absolutely make sense to give away my space to someone who would use it more and have me just grab an open chair for those times I have meetings or other reasons to be in the office.
If I had a private office, I would still work from home most of the time. A private office doesn't eliminate a commute.
> “If we got tight for space, it would absolutely make sense to give away my space to someone who would use it more and have me just grab an open chair for those times I have meetings or other reasons to be in the office.”
Why would this make more sense than moving to a bigger office or building more space for the new employee to have a desk without taking yours? Cost is absolutely not an answer.
Because the costs involved are tiny compared to lost productivity based on developer salaries and, more obviously, because these same companies spend millions on coffee stations, roof decks, alcohol-focused parties, etc.
People who think cost drives open plan office choices seem to think corporate management are too stupid to ask, what is 10% of our total salary base for these workers. It makes no sense. People have been measuring productivity and morale in knowledge work for a hundred years. Of course they can directly compare cost savings on floor space with metrics correlated with productivity lost to worse workspace, and tie it to the bottom line.
The observable spending habits of companies suggest cost utterly cannot be a driving factor here.
Cost is absolutely an answer. If I'm not really using space and am completely indifferent to whether I have a permanent desk or not, why on earth would it be rational for the company to spend the money, time, and disruption associated with adding additional real estate?
I'm not arguing for hot-desking as a standard approach, which indeed likely negates any benefits to teams being co-located. But for people who are allocated space that they rarely use? Why not?
But the original hypothetical situation has the baked-in presumption that the company wants to and is able to hire more people. If they can afford to do this via space expansion, they should (for purposes of the bottom line).
If they can afford to hire more but not to expand and give each worker adequate space, it suggests the company is just wrong. They actually can’t afford to hire more and would be creating problems if they do. Rather, reinvest what would have been spent on crammed headcount into the ability to expand spatially and later increase headcount with adequate space.
If a company, even a sink-or-swim growth mode start-up, believes it needs to hire people faster than it can provide minimally adequate space for them, then the company is just wrong. That is just not a thing.
Mice too. I'm left-handed with long slim hands; the mouse I love most is no longer being made (damn it Logitech! get me that G3 mouse back!). Any generic mouse is torture. Right-handed mice are torture.
Generic rubber dome keyboards are torture — chiclet style keyboards surely violate a bunch of Geneva conventions.
Never mind the filth and grime.
I will keep a mouse and keyboard in the office under lock and key somewhere if I end up in that situation.
By your logic, the flight school I'm currently attending should have one helicopter per student/instructor pair since we could get more flying done without having to schedule helicopters. From the point of view of the instructor and student this is a fantastic idea. From a business standpoint it really doesn't make much sense. They do, however, give each student their own headset and view-limiting devices. We could share those, too, they're only used when the helicopter is used.
Can you think of reasons why maybe each student doesn't have their own helicopter but does have their own headset (assuming they were cleaned properly after each use and hygiene wasn't a concern)? Those same reasons apply to the office/keyboard situation.
The logic is that, compared to the salaries of software engineers and revenues of many tech companies, desks and keyboards are extremely cheap.
The cost of a ~$100k engineer spending 10m per day looking for a desk, with 8h day and 200k total employee cost to employer, is ~4k/yr. Paired with the cost the company pays in developer annoyance potentially causing higher turnover or lower productivity , buying more desks and office space is likely the cheaper option. One helicopter per student is obviously not so...
Providing one helicopter per student would be cost-ineffective for flight schools.
Providing one office per knowledge worker would be cost-effective for companies.
Flight schools have a hard time surviving if they make grossly wasteful or negligent expenditures for the sake of politics and optics, because they are low-capitalized businesses with often much lower revenue per employee and less growth opportunity than highly capitalized tech companies.
A high capitalized tech company, on the other hand, can piss away money on dipshit open floor plan offices, roof decks, $500,000 Christmas parties, etc., and the executive committee doesn’t care. They have very little incentive to optimize that spending and often make spending choices based on the capricious and whimsical desires of an adult-baby CEO who is more like Veruca Salt than a competent business person.
We used flexible desks for years as a consultant shop, but where given actual offices and could easily reserve meeting rooms. That's a much better cost / productivity trade-off.
Really though the cost of office space vs people making 100k/year means you don't actually need top optimize it that hard. The core problem is they tend to come out of separate budgets, so some middle manager can write down they saved x million on a review / resume while costing the company 3x that indirectly.
PS: Used Model S's are also something to keep an eye on.
Too many people work from home who don't need to. Some people have reasonable commutes and don't bother showing up in the office most of the week. While working from home may help your productivity since you don't have to worry about commute time, it has a negative impact on the rest of your team who walks into a half-empty office.
It's just unfortunate that the commute here in the Bay Area has gotten so bad that a lot of people end up working from home.
I'm sorry, what criterion other than the commute time do you use to determine who "needs to" work from home? Increased productivity while working from home does not simply stem from lack of commute. It's all in the article.
Why bother with offices at all then? Why are companies paying tons of money for office space on prime real estate in SF, or dishing out free lunches and dinners, if people are more productive working from home? Google and Facebook should just mandate that people work from home.
I didn't say that commute was the only factor, but it is a major factor. Give each person a private room and eliminate the commute, people will still work from home. It's comfortable, you don't need to deal with your manager or colleague in person, and everything's async so you can focus without getting interrupted by a knock on your private office door.
I have heard that argument before, mostly its by people for whom the office is some sort of social life replacement/ bro club experience. Also there are sun-king-middle-managers who only get that power feeling when a huge crowd of admirers tours the hallways with them.
All of it is completely unrelated with work. And sort of sad, although its a good thing, that no matter what happens, humans will needs humans.
I've worked with teams big and small, mostly as an individual contributor, and the issue with not having a good team culture is you get churn. You can't have good team culture when half of your teammates are just at home most of the time, or if you're at home and the rest of your team is in the office. People jump around companies too often because they get jaded, bored, enticed by better offers elsewhere, and without team camaraderie and connections that bind the team together personally, you're going to get a high churn rate.
Well, churn is just capitalism at work.
The only stock you gain for loyalty is the laughing-stock, of everyone else who gets rewarded for double-jumping every ship.
This is the world they wanted, when they dissolved unions and other pillars of stability, one mans grape-vine over "Unreliable mercenaries" is another mans freedom of choice.
Here's to Sienna and Florence, their high towers may stand a thousand year or crumble under the siege tomorrow, no-one cares only the chests in the deep cellars are whats important.
All those walls build to create synthetic loyalty- be it out of fear of being law suited for knowledge transfer, or cartels to avoid the rising prices of mercenary's - if history tells us one thing - in the end the war always wins.
I slack and email co-workers who are within spitting distance of me. More often than not they are busy and I don't want to interrupt their flow with something that does not require immediate attention. So I'll shoot a Slack or email their way and let them get to it when they get to it.
That's a nice sentiment, however a lot of people have notifications turned on in both their email client and in Slack, so you end up interrupting them anyway.
While true, there's a significant difference: It's very easy to ignore a notification - the same can't be said about a verbal/face to face interruption.
You are a saint. I have a near retirement age coworker in the same office who mutters a lot while working and from time to time will just start talking loudly to people across the room. It's one of the main reasons why I got a noise-canceling headset.
I agree. But I like slack more than talking because I get time to think and a transcript after. Probably yet another reason I love working from my home office.
plus with CYA, Tim can't deny being told about the remogolio project direction change if you can screenshot the slack message you sent to him at 14:28.
I'm sitting here now because there's scheduled railway maintenance going on. If not I prefer traveling to the office (it's more than 45 minutes each way.)
But as long as everyone can choose for themselves I think more people probably should work from home.
The reason I slack people who are ten seconds walk from my desk is mostly because, if I walk up to them and talk to them, I'm generating noise which will disrupt the other hundred people in my open plan office
Which when you think about it is absurd really. Here we are in this open plan office that is meant to encourage communication and collaboration and yet we're communicating over Slack because we don't want to disturb our other colleagues.
As a manger who has had to support moves to these environments, I can share that it is also about money. Higher density offices, cheaper to furnish and easier reconfigure.
Less fixed wiring. No desk phone, no pabx.....and collaboration.
i miss having an office. and lately i've started to miss having a desk, as it seems they are always shuffling people around, or someone is trying to have a bullpen meeting over your head. or as someone mentioned those awful group video conferences which make me resent having even bothered to commute.
seriously, lets just give up on the notion of assigned spaces, idk what value there is when we cant even collaborate because the 4 tiny meeting rooms for 100 people are sitting at the margins of the giant open office. and there aren't any other whiteboards or projectors to use to have conversations. everyone is already wearing headphones so they can try to have a thought to themselves.
there are lots of alternatives. assign rooms to projects and have the principals mostly hang out there. couch areas and pub areas and cubby areas...rooms where you really aren't supposed to talk or hum or do anything out loud.
we've given up any actual utility of the office and are just hanging on to the barest trapping.
>there are lots of alternatives. assign rooms to projects and have the principals mostly hang out there. couch areas and pub areas and cubby areas...rooms where you really aren't supposed to talk or hum or do anything out loud.
Having worked at a company, where they had couch areas: Management will place the couch areas in the middle or adjacent to the desks and it will all be done in an open floor. A couch area with no walls is an invitation to have loud conversations/phone calls in the middle of the office.
Then, given all that, you get the coworker two seats down Slacking you. If you're Slacking folks within 10 seconds walking distance then what's the point of being in the office at all.
I have a coworker within ONE second of me, I can lean back a few inches and tap them on the shoulder. And I do, frequently, when they send me a 1:1 slack message.
"What's up?"
"Oh I had a question for you in Slack"
"I'm three feet away from you, I'm not doing this over slack, what's up?"
Obviously this is different if they send a code snippet or an app screenshot that I need to look at, but even then when we need to discuss the next steps relevant to that snippet or screenshot, I'll still tap them over the shoulder
"Hey, did you try x?"
"Oh no I didn't, lemme see what happens..." pause "Yup that worked, thanks!"
Slack affords a method of passive communication where waving hands or tapping someone on the shoulder is an invasive method of communication.
Unless there's an urgency, or some complication that should be discussed in person; slack is the preferred method so as to allow the party you are interrupting a chance to change their focus in the least impactful manner.
If I go to someone directly, I am losing 10-15 minutes of my own productivity + the length of the conversation and that's multiplied by the number of people I interrupted.
Some people who I've worked with, love to have to have a face to face for questions or information that is not urgent and could easily be taken care of via slack. They seem to do so because they prefer to small talk, lament, debate or some other personal reason; they don't do it for technical reasons.
If your team can effectively communicate passively, on slack, your on a team that has a foundation from which a remote-work policy can easily be enacted.
>> The argument of "increased collaboration" that I keep hearing is kind of negated...
Yeah, they say it promotes more collaboration because you may overhear something where your input is relevant and join in. Or something like that. While that may be true, the increase in UNwanted distraction completely overwhelms any benefit. So then they tell us to be respectful of people around us and keep things quiet - we don't want people to overhear you. Wait wasn't that the point?
Ah, sorry, it's a bit of local expression from where I grew up. People would say "grab-ass" when people are running/playing around and yelling like children at the office. It's not too uncommon for startups to have Nerf guns or something.
> people are running/playing around and yelling like children at the office. It's not too uncommon for startups to have Nerf guns or something.
I hate this sort of environment combined with expectation to stay late. It always seems to me that if people would work instead of playing, we might not have to stay late. And that we are not working as much as we brag about, because people play a lot.
I agree. I typically come in at about 9:15am, leave anywhere from 7pm-8pm, and it's not because I'm some great worker. It's because I need to finish up the sprint and too much crap is happening around the office.
I don't know that I wouldn't work late even if I had a private office, but I do think that I'd be able to accomplish more.
I found that when I am really working and focus on producing quickly, I get tired much sooner. As if, there us some max I can achieve during day, faster or slower.
Of course then, I am tired also in the evening and that limits what I can do in the evening. (If I am too tired to code, I am also too tired to play logical game or learn something.)
I come in at 10-11am and leave at 4-5pm (including an hour of lunch). The rest of my work I complete from home. There's no need to be in the office for all of your "workday".
The only two rational factors why anyone would choose open office:
1. the floor space really is so expensive you can waste xx% of capital output of labour.
2. You inherit a dysfunctional organization or just a one you cannot trust, and want to "keep an eye" on everyone so they behave. Michael Bloomberg gave this rationale in New York.
3. Bonus round for hotdesking : You expect/have a fairly high churn rate. Why bother assigning people personal spaces since it's so much work to keep track of the facilities. Let the people find their own space. Besides, you might outsource xx% of your operations in near future so it's not like you plan on investing in long term team building.
So, any linear combination 1,2 or 3 should suffice as an explanation. Any serious publication which praises open offices is likely a piece by a consultant who makes a living out of peddling said solutions and are offering political propaganda to make the employees less resistant.
The most common irrational reason: You don't really have an opinion what consitutes a good working space but open offices seem to be trendy ("It's what the big boys are doing") and a consultant made you an offer to redesign your office space, so, why not.
> You don't really have an opinion what consitutes a good working space but open offices seem to be trendy ("It's what the big boys are doing") and a consultant made you an offer to redesign your office space, so, why not.
I'm pretty sure the lemming see, lemming do explanation is one of the top actual reasons.
Considering the high regard for fiduciary duty towards stock holders among corporate officers I would imagine it's stratified - company officers accept the financial rationale since it's explicitly affecting profits positively, while lower rung troopers might accept the political explanation of increased something something interaction as at least a plausible one.
Sure. Just don't forget that corporate officers are also people, and no amount of fiduciary magic will enable them to exceed the typical limitations of human nature. And that includes falling victim to trends, gossip, and me-too.
In general, let's not elevate anybody to superhuman status, no matter what Ayn Rand wants you to believe. It's never true, and it never ends well.
I don't think any manager who chooses and open office plan because it's cheaper (and I'm betting that that is almost all of them) has considered, or cares about, the cost of reduced productivity. Otherwise it wouldn't be so common.
But that's just my experience. I've found it's difficult to underestimate management.
My previous employer and I had a conversation about the open office he wanted to set up in our new office space. I kept telling him it was a bad idea. He really wanted to encourage a "vibrant and collaborative environment!" I kept trying to tell him that what he perceived as vibrant and collaborative was his employees not getting any work done. Those generally weren't work conversations. They were jokes, catching up with life events, etc... Of course, he won. I wish I had this study to point to at the time.
Since then I've heard they have installed what can only be described as rows of tables. They're not really desks. Just long rows of white tables where one row of employees faces another with an 8" glass divider between the two employees. You know; for privacy.
I think it's less about increased collaboration but more about fostering culture and relationships between team members. Imagine a soccer team where everyone trains independently and only heads in to the office for video sessions. Teams with good culture, good bond between team members, often succeed (there's a particular sports team in the Oakland that is a good example).
What exact property of private office space prevents fostering a team culture ? At some point, people need to stop discussing and get something done, and that requires quiet, un-interrupted, work time.
I think you might have missed my point; it's not about the world cup (or any ball-based sport you want to talk about) in particular. I'm complaining about the fact that <event x> can make people loud and therefore very distracting.
I wouldn't suggest changing the office layout if I were only distracted by events every four years. I get distracted by events related to the open office every single day; the latest one just happened to be the World Cup when I wrote that.
The it is cheaper argument works because the savings are short term, easy to quantify and the person making the open office decision can easily claim credit for them while the costs are long term, hard to quantify and difficult to assign directly to the decision for an open office.
You really can just put in the headphones and ignore distractions for a few hours. And then, leave. You don’t have to sit there for 8+ hours. Go in in the morning, talk to a few people face to face, sit there with headphones for ~2 hours, and then maybe after lunch, go elsewhere and work from another location you like.
Sure but that’s all just conditioning. Just do it. And if you get in trouble show the code you wrote. Repeat. Eventually you’ll be at peace with just walking out the door.
It is not just conditioning. Some people physically cannot, or have significant barriers to doing so. I would have to give up my two 29" monitors and work over a shitty RDP connection. At my previous two companies I had to be physically at my desk to actually do my job.
And I’m saying, yes, I know, I understand, I used to say the exact same lines before I switch to a laptop and just started doing it. Your words read like a man dying to get out of the office but blaming someone else for why you can’t. I’m not saying this to be mean, I’m like trying to talk to my former self and convince him, hey, i can do this!
Open plan offices have been known to be bad since at least 1987, when the first edition of Peopleware was published. A good portion of the book discusses issues with employee distraction and its inverse relationship to productivity. They use evidence from the field to discuss office layout, and also other issues like office wide paging systems (that used to be a thing!), phone calls, and email.
Have the authors of Peopleware actually run the numbers? If they are such a bad idea, why do open offices proliferate?
It seems to me like the backlash against open offices is a small minority of programmers with autism spectrum disorders and chapped-ass syndrome. Your job is not to have your whims catered to so you can be maximally productive. Your job is to bring value to the company. And that means working well in an open-office environment since that seems to work best for the company.
>...It seems to me like the backlash against open offices is a small minority of programmers with autism spectrum disorders and chapped-ass syndrome.
What makes you say that? The vast majority of the comments on this thread are from people who have had bad experiences with open floor plans. While there may be some who have been diagnosed on the autism spectrum, none have mentioned, that.
>...Your job is to bring value to the company. And that means working well in an open-office environment since that seems to work best for the company.
If you find something that makes yourself and your team less productive, the way you bring value to the company is to let people know. For example, if your work machine is 10 years old and takes N times longer to do a build than a new machine would, don't pretend you are being a good employee by not mentioning it to the company. Same goes for other parts of the work environment.
Could you please not post shallow, inflammatory dismissals like this? The context for this discussion is a recent study (see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17448187) that ought to count as “running the numbers”.
These articles keep being written, I guess as individuals each eventually discover this for themselves -- is it having any positive effect as far as any HNers can tell?
Every time I see it on the front page I forward the link to my direct supervisor and my contact at the mother ship one hop away from the CEO and it feels like I'm doing something, therefore it's having a positive effect on me. Unfortunately corporate policy remains unchanged.
If anything, it's convincing upper management that they must be doing something right because anything that makes us this miserable has to be good for the bottom line.
Knowledge workers, aka the creative class, are required to be on both schedules. They are both makers and managers. So if they are doing it 'right' they basically have two jobs.
My biggest issue with my open floor office is that it seems like everyone just takes calls at their seats. We have private spaces and enclaves for that, but I am just bombarded with 4 people within 10 feet of my workspace on their phone. To counteract I throw on some Ambient music on my headphones, which sort of works but I still find I prefer to work in silence.
Does it not seem like open-office etiquette to take a phone call in a private space when other people are trying to work?
Why can't the team agree on some norms of behavior for this very situation? We're supposed to be collaborating, so how about we all collaborate on where to take a phone call, what is and is not acceptable for noice in our work space? If we can or can not microwave fish leftovers and eat our desk? The important stuff.
A critical piece of making the open space work is people being open with another. For watching big events on tv, you can take that into a conference room too. Cheer all you want. Gotta call your partner or someone else? Go in a room.
Why can't the team agree on some norms of behavior for this very situation
Who is going to assume the authority when a company is promoted as having a flat hierarchy, or holocracy, etc.? If the CEO is speakerphoning or fomenting adhoc floor meetings in an open-plan, nobody is going to say it's bad.
It's not about saying "it's bad". It's about talking about what might be better. Flat hierarchy or not, anyone should be able to bring up the topic.
And if you can't, that's a bad place to be working. There should be some kind of trust between people.
You don't need any kind of hierarchy to have real leaders. Every where I've been, you just step up and try to make it happen. Most of the time a bunch of other people are going to "thank you!". It won't always work and you can be diplomatic in how you approach it. But just make it happen and stop waiting for someone else to do it.
And if they, whomever they is, don't like it, move on.
It's not like people never actually comment on how they'd like to change their job environment. I wouldn't be surprised if it's the most common complaint among humans in general!
Do you have any examples of non-management fomenting a change in the entire physical architecture of their office, or other large change in a company?
For a lot of people, "taking calls" is a major part of their job. I usually work remotely but, when I am in the office, hunting for a free enclave every time I need to have a phone conversation isn't practical and certainly doesn't scale if everyone were to do it.
I do think that it's on management to try to segregate groups that don't talk much and prefer quiet from groups whose jobs involve a lot of phone conversations but it's not practical for many roles to avoid talking on their desk phone. That's why they have one.
This is certainly a good point and part of the reason why I just deal with the noise. Desk segregation based on noise levels rather than teams is actually a pretty good idea. Not sure of the implementation of something like that.
It does vary within teams but overall team roles are a reasonable first cut. You probably don't want to sit software developers right next to your recruiters or inside sales groups.
For anyone who doesn't want to drop their email into their webpage to see pricing (yes, I received an outreach email within 15 minutes of doing so) their pricing starts at $4.5k and $14k "on sale". Bit steep for my blood, but, there's obviously some bigger spenders out there!
I've never worked in an office where people regularly talked on their phones in the open. The people at the company who talked on the phone for their job (sales, customer service etc.) had their desks in a different area and had a different setup with high cubicle walls or offices.
If I take or make a phone call, it must be in a place where my computer, my notes and my phone are located. This means the open office, regardless of how much I disturb my audience.
I like the name of the post, full of passion. From the first look, you can see how the writer "enjoys" open spaces and couldn't hide his feelings. What deals with open offices itself, I found it appealing, but that's just what people prefer, we all have different preferences.
The OP point of an office being used to impress visitors is on point. Since we're all remote we resorted to building a TV wall of 6 screens of 65 inch each that features a team map of 300 people all around the world. Visitors love it and I don't distract my fellow team members by showing it.
I wish everyone would give up on the "increases collaboration" thing and just admit that open-plan offices are about shoving as many people as possible into a given space
I suffer in an open office, but everybody on my team that I might collaborate with is actually in a different time zone, so there's absolutely no chance that the "open-ness" of the office will help me in any way.
The increased collaboration is a plain and albviius benefit for me as a developer.
A site crushing issue was solved in 30 seconds due to me overhearing a conversation in ouropen plan office. Without that it would have been at least 3 hours of pass the parcel to work out what incredibly obscure thing with timezones had happened.
How many such situations don't happen despite an open office, because the person who could have solved it was wearing noise blocking headphones? Most discussions near me don't require my attention, so none of them get my attention.
Either I listen to none of the discussions and remove any apparent benefit of collaboration in an open office, or I listen to all of the discussions, and I accomplish nothing personally.
You can pay me to focus, or you can pay me to listen to conversations and look for opportunities to help. You can't have me do both.
I agree. It feels like a 'if you repeat a lie often enough' kind of statements. I'll never buy into it, there is no evidence that anyone can show me. Open offices are terrible.
I'm sure this is just anecdotal, but we all kind of like our open office layout. We're not just at desks sitting shoulder to shoulder. They're more of these horseshoe-esque things, and you have plenty of room between you and the next person. We have an open ceiling, so the A/C provides some good, loud background noise to drown out conversations. And lastly, we're pretty strict about having people IM you before they come to your desk, so interruptions aren't as intrusive.
I really think open office layouts can be implemented correctly, it's just that managers don't take the time to really tailor them for their development teams. We all wanted the lights off to work in? Lights are off. We wanted standing desks? We got standing desks. We wanted 2 monitors? We got 2 monitors that have adjustable heights. I think the problem with open offices is that managers are just using them as a way to save money on office space. If you really want a good office area for your developers, I think you can accomplish that with an open office layout if you really try.
So, you have to sit there more or less quietly to not disturb others? In an nice cube farm, you can walk over to someone else cube and have a quiet discussion and not disturb the entire office.
If you're a relatively small office, I suppose no cubicles could work. Wait until you have offices in other parts of the country/world that you need to collaborate with remotely. Everyone is on a call for 25% of the day, and it's terrible. It's terrible to listen to 2/5 people next to you on a conference call, and it's terrible to listen to people that are in those environments on your conference call because they are trying to talk like they're in a library.
One cool thing I saw once was a company that had a "quiet room" for its developers set aside in the middle of an open office. Si they could kinda get the best of both worlds.
Vaulted ceilings with lots of natural light can make me prefer an open office. Better if it’s more like a design studio with a lot of artifacts/plush to break up the desk monotony.
Some problems defy budget. I'm in a mid-sized office (8 people) or in a customer's larger office (about 30 people) and in both cases noise is moderate (and mostly consisting of interesting conversation) but there are plenty of idiots who turn off air conditioning, open the windows or pull up curtains regardless of everyone else's comfort.
>None of this is new. There’s been an endless stream of studies showing that the open-plan office is a source of stress, conflict, and turnover. And yet it’s still the default in tech. An almost unquestioned default. That’s a fucking travesty.
No, it's the other way round: you create conflict and turnover by introducing an open-plan office. That way, your codebase remains maintainable since handovers happen regularly.
Imagine the opposite: a productive coder from a silent office leaves after 30 years. There is a very high probability that it takes months until new recruits can make meaningful changes since nothing has been documented. If you enforce regular handovers you can be sure that some documentation has accumulated somewhere.
Man, reading the comments makes me think I'm the only one who loves open offices. After switching from a cube I never want to go back. I found being locked in a cube all day was depressing and created a culture of working zombies. With an open office in my experience people seem much happier.
It’s funny because I’ve always noticed that coworkers seem way more depressed and zombie-like in open plan offices, because they cannot get any relief from the constant stream of distractions and focus distuptors.
Cubes seem to be very much a US led thing. I've worked in and around London (UK) for over 25 years now, and have worked in small offices (~10 people) up to massive 2000+ people trading floors. Not once have I seen an office split into the 'Office Space' or 'Dilbert' style of cube working.
Given the choice, and as a 100% remote worker now, I'm so glad I don't actually have to choose, I think I'd take the cube over an open trading floor environment any day.
I used to stay later and use the hours from 17h onwards where there was more peace to get productive work done, as it was impossible during the day with all the interruptions and standups (plus headphones all day non-stop).
Only 1.5h hours lost hours a day? Try 3h or so at least LOL
Working from home, it feels like time is elastic at least the first few times, then you get used to it. You start working, get what it feels like half a day of work done and look at the clock: it's still 11 AM.
I am a full time remote worker, but I have survived the tyranny of an open office in the past. I dislike the open office format.
A lot of the time companies don't "choose" an open office, it chooses them.
If you are working at a small or mid-sized company, building out rented office space you will probably outgrow in a year or two is a crappy investment.
The alternative? Buy the desks, throw them into a room, expect people to be quiet and respectful.
I think what's a terrible idea is pegging people to specific locations. That used to be necessary to find someone in the office but nowadays we have other tools to discover each other's locations.
Instead of binding people to locations, I'd much rather bind activities/moods to locations, e.g.
- the studious space: hushed atmosphere like a library, NO TALKING, for people actively working on brain problems
- the collaboration space: when you need to huddle with a few other people and solve a problem out loud
- the audio privacy space: small rooms for remote conferences where you're the only participant
- etc.
What's important is to have extra monitors in all these spaces, so a decent work setup can be had anywhere.
As a compromise, what's been working in our own office is that the open plan is—with rare exceptions—the "Library": very quiet talking, if any. For the super quiet, that's the Home Office. And for all the rest, we have conference rooms which are all equiped with very large screen telepresence equipment and which supports wireless screen sharing. So anytime we need to make noise, we have what we need. And for those who need some momentary privacy on their own, we have Audio Privacy Rooms with are set up with 1 armchair, small table and video phone. (Disclaimer: I work for the Collaboration group at Cisco so we're eating our own dog food and have easy access to it; I do realize these things do have a cost.)
What if a worker needs personalized space, like certain lighting, ergonomic chair & keyboard, works on a special desktop station not with a portable laptop, etc.?
Also, in every job I’ve had, the tasks I am asked to complete always require absolute quiet, private concentration time, for most hours on almost all days. The same has been true for most colleagues in each of these businesses, across all different software teams.
Given this, why not make the default be dedicated private offices per person, and then have separate areas for collaboration, interview rooms, etc.?
A “Library” open plan area would simply not be good enough as a default, since it lacks dedicated privacy and lacks customizability per each individual for sound, lighting, equipment, etc.
I think the main thing is that any solution proposing to put a lot of programmers into the same shared, open room is just wrong-headed and unworkable. That’s the defining property that makes these workspaces bad.
> What if a worker needs personalized space, like certain lighting, ergonomic chair & keyboard, works on a special desktop station not with a portable laptop, etc.?
They would set their stuff up in the space that best fit their needs or even work from home.
What do you mean? The nature of needing to customize your space is fundamentally incompatible with sitting in a large open plan space. How could you “set [your] stuff up” in an open plan area?
For example, suppose there is harsh overhead fluorescent lighting above your desk. But you require soft lighting from a desk lamp for eye comfort. In a private office, you can bring in a lamp. If you bring in a lamp to your open-plan desk, it’s futile, because the harsh communal lighting is enforced on you, not customizable.
Lighting is certainly trickier, but if it's that big of a deal, work with the people around you and/or your manager to move to a darker part of the office where you can set up your own lighting.
I have worked in multiple open offices where people didn't want harsh fluorescent light and they worked with the team/facilities/whoever to get the lights dimmed/removed/changed to be more compatible with what people wanted.
> “I have worked in multiple open offices where people didn't want harsh fluorescent light and they worked with the team/facilities/whoever to get the lights dimmed/removed/changed to be more compatible with what people wanted.”
I’ve never seen an open-plan office where this would be possible, do you have any links?
In the open plan offices I’ve worked in, the overhead lighting could not be dimmed, and it would not be possible to only dim lights for part of the floor and not others, because there was no barrier, wall, corner, etc., separating one group of people from another. If you dim the lights directly overhead, it’s still way too harshly bright from the lights 3 or 4 rows over from you anyway.
I don't have any links, but most office buildings I've encountered let you turn off sections of lights. For more granular control we've simply removed the lightbulbs. (Sometimes to the chagrin of the facilities people)
If lights from far away are a problem I don't have a very good solution beyond hanging a flag or something from the ceiling to try and block the light.
> What if a worker needs personalized space, like certain lighting, ergonomic chair & keyboard, works on a special desktop station not with a portable laptop, etc.?
Evidence would suggest that companies are willing to harm their employees, reduce productivity, and pay more recruiter fees rather than pay for cubicles.
The author completely misses the point using straw man argumentation. The managers sign the leases not because the of nice-looking photos, "increased collaboration" and other ridiculous arguments, but because of the bottom line. Open-plan offices are cheaper and that's the sole reason. Whatever other reasons are communicated to employees they're just typical corporate internal PR. I haven't actually met anyone who really believed all this - everyone knows these office are much worse than separate rooms, and it's also common knowledge that they're unavoidable because of (much) lower cost.
Do you have evidence that open plan spaces are actually cheaper, even just in plain real estate terms? I’ve always read that they end up being less than a few percent cheaper per person after all is said and done. To boot, a lot of companies spend millions on stupid, opulent office features like fountains, coffee stations, roof decks, beer, etc. How do you explain that they are willing to spend so much more on that stuff instead of spending that budget on giving healthy workplace privacy?
I worked for a company once that already had a huge office in Columbus, Ohio, with private offices for everyone. They had no engineering presence in that office and no plans to increase headcount in that office. It was an HR office primarily, and the workers there needed privacy everyday to be on the phone about sensitive topics like legal issues or salary.
The CEO announced in a company meeting once that they would be totally remodeling that office to change it into open plan seating (we found out later it came at a cost of $14 million, purely to destroy good privacy and turn it into open plan seats, in a building the company already owned, with no need to accomodate more head count).
The CEO just said, “We are an innovation company and that makes each and every one of you an innovator — and innovators love open spaces.”
So I think you’re wrong. Companies don’t care about open plan offices for saving money (and they often lose money on it).
I guess we come from different backgrounds. Personally, I've never met a person who liked the idea of open-plan offices - and this includes all managers. Of course they choose the best places for themselves to keep the maximum level of privacy possible.
As for the CEO - I can't imagine he could say "we're going to squeeze you all against your will to improve the bottom line." He had to say the usual bs, whether he believed it or not.
As for concrete data, check any online calculator. This one [1] shows individual offices as taking 3 times as much space as open-plan offices. As personnel costs are usually one of the highest fixed costs, going open plan might be a good alternative to lowering the salary when a manager wants to improve the bottom line - or, sometimes, to save the employees in troublesome times.
Did you read my comment? How would the CEO be squeezing people for the bottom line? The company already owned the building, and even after the open plan remodel, they put the same number of workers into the same square feet of floor space.
I don’t understand your comment at all. What bottom line were they improving by paying $14MM to take down pre-existing privacy features, while not increasing worker density per square foot at all?
Also “look at any online calculator” is a silly response that tells me you’ve never actually looked into the data on this at all. Open plans don’t save 3x space in a vacuum, because they introduce other costs. And it still doesn’t address why a company would create gourmet coffee stations, roof decks, alcohol-focused meeting spaces, opulent fountains, huge budgets for “sleek” interior decorating, etc.
If they save 3x on space, but then use that extra space anyway for a dipshit coffee station, then your point holds no credibility: they are still paying for the huge space that could have housed all the employees with private offices. They just fill it with dipshit perks and then cram people into the remaining space.
Additionally, cubicles with high walls offer a lot if the privacy and noise blocking that private offices could give, but without taking any additional floor space when compared with open-plan offices.
So again, the answer to this behavior simply cannot be cost savings. That is not consistent with the choices that upper management make regarding offices.
Yes, I fully understand your point. Also, I worked in top- and middle-level management and one thing you can be sure is that the way you present things happening in the company is of utmost importance. And I don't know any reasonable manager who doesn't care about money. It's possible that the CEO in question was an exception but in most companies remodeling the already owned office to open plan was an excuse to squeeze in more people, introduce desk sharing and other disruptive inventions.
I'm curious about the future of the company you mention. I bet that when hard times come, the fountains and the rest will go away, while the open plan is going to stay.
> “but in most companies remodeling the already owned office to open plan was an excuse to squeeze in more people, introduce desk sharing and other disruptive inventions.”
It still seems like you didn’t fully read my comment. This has not been my experience at all. Most companies choose open floor plans because they superficially look trendy and because it is a cargo cult copy of what Facebook & trendy start-ups do. They are even happy to spend more money on this type of floor plan.
You keep asserting that companies are very budget conscious when it comes to real estate expenditures, but this doesn’t match reality, and you’re still not addressing the bigger point of stupid corporate spending on fountains, roof decks, parties, etc., which totally contradicts your point of view.
> “the fountains and the rest will go away, while the open plan is going to stay.”
This makes no sense. I’m not even sure you understand how real estate works. You don’t make money by removing a fountain or a roof deck you previously paid to install. You just lose more money if you want it removed or remodeled. If you fall on hard times, you’re absolutely not spending money to pay construction workers to remove physical features of the office. I can’t begin to describe what a naive understanding of office real estate you project.
Also, any theories we might come up with about open plan office choices have to be good theories when the company has lots of money, not just when it’s having hard times, because tons of perfectly profitable companies that can easily and trivially afford to pay for whatever office space they want are still irrationally choosing open plan spaces (which destroy productivity and make workers unhappy) even when any cost savings from doing so would be entirely trivial compared with billions and billions of net income.
The idea that managers in those cases are simultaneously so unconcerned about money that they will throw lavish parties, spend millions on unnecessary office decor, roof decks, etc., and yet also act deeply concerned over a few million of extra rent to get a large enough space for private offices ... it obviously refutes what you’re saying.
The faux concern offer real estate cost obviously is just for show, as a pretext for the overtly political reasons to choose open plan layouts.
You seem to think companies try to save money at all costs, and see open floor plans as a necessary evil to cut costs.
Company spending behavior contradicts that claim. Companies clearly and obviously do not see open floor plans as a necessary evil. Not at all.
Is it time to get depressed yet? This has been a topic for such a long time. It was in peopleware in 1987. I thought I discovered the topic when Joel (On Sofware) wrote about it in 2000. While a few people seem to enjoy open offices, the overwhelming majority of developers I know, or who chime in on HN, value a quiet place to work and dislike open offices.
And yet, not only has nothing changed, it seems to be getting worse. It couldn't be more clear to me that developers, at least on this issue, simply have no clout as a profession. There may be a few individuals who can make demands, but on the balance, these are decisions imposed on us, as a group, and we are apparently unable to do anything about it.
The really sad thing is, this isn't a situation where we're asking to fly first class, or for more vacation. We're talking about asking for something that will make us more productive and increase the value we largely hand over to our employers, simply because it's depressing to not be able to do a good job due to distractions.
So yeah, I'm depressed about it.
There was a time when I read these essays and felt a bit more charged up, like people were starting to understand something important and that things would change. Well, now we have open offices.
I'll finish with another variant on my broken record: the industry talks constant about the critical shortage of software engineers, but it won't give them a quiet place to work. Actually, that last sentence is too optimistic - it won't allow them a quiet place to work. Those places exist, but companies often demand that their programmers spend 8 hours a day in places that are too noisy for focus.
> This book seemed convincing when I read it in college. It even had all sorts of studies backing up what they said. No deadlines is better than having deadlines. Offices are better than cubicles. Basically all devs I talk to agree with this stuff.
> But virtually every successful company is run the opposite way. Even Microsoft is remodeling buildings from individual offices to open plan layouts. Could it be that all of this stuff just doesn't matter that much? If it really is that important, how come companies that are true believers, like Fog Creek, aren't running roughshod over their competitors?
That's a great point. The top companies are succeeding in spite of a practice developers say they despise. So isn't that evidence they're right, and the devs are wrong?
Here's the thing - how many industries rely so deeply on controlling their workforce's right to live and work in the United States? How many industries lobby congress so ferociously and constantly about a shortage of highly skilled workers?
Well, yeah, if an industry has the right to decide who is and isn't allowed to live in the United States, in a system where non-family based immigration is difficult and spots are hard to come by, then sure, they can be very successful imposing work conditions that people with personal and economic freedom of mobility would reject in favor of another profession. But if you really want to live in the US and Facebook controls whether you get and keep a work visa, then sure, you'll put up with an open office. And because of the way we allocate green cards (requiring a corporate sponsor, and greatly restricting how many are issued every year, with a long queue), you may have to put up with it for quite a while.
So another way to look at it is this: companies say they are in a desperate competition for key workers in critical shortage, and they can't recruit domestically no matter how good an offer they make. They also require working conditions that most developers say they despise. Uh, how about working conditions that most developers don't despise, have you tried that?
Personally, I'm fairly certain that this stuff does matter, but that a successful company will inevitably backslide to the corporate mean. The things that initially made it successful will be lost. Anything not an immediate disaster from management's perspective (open offices) will creep in. It might be decades before people realize the company was running off inertia, though.
I suspect the answer is that it doesn't matter all that much at the end of the day. People have different preferences at different stages of their career and larger companies are always going to be distributed to at least some degree.
And, to the degree it does matter, 1.) the individual company's/team's context is probably relevant and 2.) companies/teams tend to take actions which at least somewhat mitigate the disadvantages of whatever approach they've chose. So an all-remote company may well have different decision-making processes than a co-located one, probably systematically holds F2F meetings of various times, and so forth. In open floor plans where people mostly work in the office, there's often some flexibility to spend some time off by yourself.
I am an employee at Microsoft, who has had both offices and open space teams, and who has chatted with Dan about many of these points.
I'd make two statements, both are entirely my own.
1. The impact of these changes often lags the change itself, and status quo takes time to shift. Open spaces were definitely a fad for a while, and a lot of people (broader than MS) certainly started drinking the koolaid, yet it took ~decade for the rollout to really move in force. Conversely, I see far more anti-open-space articles nowadays than a decade ago. On top of this as well, bigCo corporate momentum cannot be underemphesized. IBM is still a behemoth, recent follies and very well-discussed employee-QOL-"hiccups" aside.
2. "success" is not binary. It's especially harder to judge when "product success" is often impacted by so many externalities it becomes very difficult to ask "what really is the impact of X specific factor." It becomes _even harder_ when the entire industry did this shift almost in lockstep, so finding "outliers" that are also viable employers for an individual became less and less an option. In that context, all I can bring is anecdata, and the # of peers I've worked with who dislike open spaces and will make active career choices to avoid them (myself included) seems to be growing.
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[ 27.1 ms ] story [ 3154 ms ] threadSomehow the author missed the primary reason for the open office configuration: "Because it cuts the costs of office space by a HUGE amount (certainly more than half)."
I suppose "Because it makes it easier for managers to keep an eye on their employees and see when they are slacking off." figures in also. Although it's probably a sign of poor management.
It's not about collaboration, it's not about socializing, it's about money. Just like all other business related decisions.
Employee time is usually a lot more expensive than the space they occupy. At least in tech.
You could save quite a lot of money on furniture if everyone sat with their laptops on the floor. But in reality that would be more expensive since the difference in productivity will outweigh the furniture cost.
I would happily buy my own sodas (I don't drink them anyway), chips/snacks (I don't eat them at work), coffee (I do drink coffee!) if it meant I never had to sit in an open office environment again.
Accountants don't get to decide the office layout in my experience.
These days I mostly work remote by choice and am good with that. Some of it is better tech to work remote; I didn't even have broadband for most of my time in that former job. But it's also that I have no particular interest in spending a lot of time with coworkers generally beyond what I need to get my job done.
But I'm not sure that new engineers at that company were fundamentally different from new engineers joining, say, Facebook today.
I'm building my own company now, fully remote, and from an engineering output point of view I've never seen such productivity. No ass-in-seat supervision, no assigned hours, just straight throughput of engineering tasks being closed and features being shipped every day.
And thus, there is no incentive to change it. Cause total productivity is the same.
How do you counter the common argument that face-to-face communication is the most high-bandwidth and one shouldn't throw away that competitive advantage unnecessarily? I'm not a proponent of that position; on the contrary, I don't want to accept it. But a lot of people think that way.
In face to face meetings, many companies (like ones I have worked for) have limited meeting spaces and it's quite hard to book a conference room for more than an hour. Often times, we'd shuffle from one conference room to another.
So even in-person isn't quite as effecient and productive as it could be.
FWIW, I personally don't benefit from the "high bandwidth". I'm legally blind; I can't read facial expressions or body language, or even recognize specific faces. SO for me, face-to-face amounts to little more than audio communication with full frequency range and zero latency or drop-outs. All that to say that I can only understand face-to-face communication (edit: as it works for most people) second-hand, so I'm curious, not being argumentative.
It gets labeled many things, like social anxiety, aspergers, many other stigmatized disorders - but this is often my root problem - being overloaded with the amount of information present in social environments.
I have greater clarity when I can think separated from people physically, most often through text. I've gotten better with audio, but in person communication is still something of a struggle.
I'm not being argumentative either. Just people have differences, and they aren't always easy to notice, identity, or correct.
I have some folks I'm very close with where this is not the case. But that's taken a very long time for me, and it is something that has required a lot of patience, understanding, communication, tolerance, forgiveness, hope, and perseverence. It's still something that is just about, the opposite of easy, for every new person I'm introduced to. I am generally told that I'm a reasonably easy to get along with person casually, aquaintance wise, although I consistently apologize for random social behaviors, masking them over with the words awkward, impulsed, compulsed etc. I have a tendency to ramble about technical things and this is bad when I have a tendency to be hypercritical over software (as I'm never sure how my preferences about code may approve or reject the preferences of those I talk to, but that's getting off track). There'stuff that just goes down to the core of us that is intrinsic to our orderings, organizations, and structurings of information - which I'm sure you understand from being blind. In my experience, attempting to change these things is more costly than the benefit 'correction' would provide.
But that's me, PTSD and an understanding of psychology has made me a better software developer by refining my understanding of automation, as well as helping me remove myself from the headspace of what originally was so painful to experience. It doesn't go away, but it gets easier to live with, some days are harder than others, but I still consider myself fairly lucky given everything I've been able to do with what I have.
Text is just crystal clear. I have a tendency to ramble on the internet and I've gone into that wormhole of introspection of 'what will this do to me if I say this', some variant of the halting problem, recurrent infinite descending chains of when minds decide to stop inferencing using limited, selective sets of information, but, shrug. People have said I'm good at writing, and I hope my tendency to overthink has only led to improvement.
This whole exchange has been interesting. Thanks again.
I do think having diversity in all things is important, they push one's boundaries and allow oneself to redefine oneself. Taking care to reflect on the moment and the big picture, that's important.
Too much of anything is not a good thing, so there is always a need to balance. This allows one to translate skills from one interface to another. The big picture / in the moment reflection / introspection is important because it allows for self direction, instead of just getting caught up in all this mapping of skill set to skill set towards some ideal of being 'well rounded'.
I generally just prefer my base to be text because I code a lot and that's the headspace I need to stay in. Some communication, sparsely distributed in other forms is fine, but too much can direct away from the focus, which in my preference is produce good code, and solve problems in ways that get the closest to perfect I can get, without tipping the balance of losing sight of all the other code information, retaining structure and direction, uniformity, solutions for problems.
I don't enjoy living in a text vacuum as that can get severely isolating when done to excess, but sometimes having that space is necessary for me to continue laying out my own foundation of structure, preference, and direction, as I continue to learn new stuff.
Thank you for your interest and questions.
I often express myself poorly and this extra feeling helps me realize it and take some corrective measures. Really helpful when trying to communicate a difficult technical concept.
Most designated meetings, you can have just fine over a video conferencing system. Where f2f excels is in the conversations after you leave the meeting room - just a casual question to some other person from the meeting, which evolves into an impromptu 5-minute chat. (That is usually more valuable than the entire meeting :)
Spontaneous conversation is incredibly valuable. (Which, ironically, is also cited for open offices). I believe that if you start with a fully remote setup, you are growing a culture that will move these conversations to IM or other channels, by necessity. You'll likely be fine.
But you cannot move a company that has grown up with a culture of f2f meetings to a culture of IM conversations - it's too deeply ingrained.
IOW, you're not "throwing away" something if you build a remote culture from the start. Both models can work, but switching models is hard.
I work on accessibility for people with disabilities, and I'm blind myself (well, legally blind), so I think a lot about including people with disabilities. It seems to me that working with people with some kinds of disabilities, e.g. deafness or a severe speech impediment, would be akin to forcing an in-person team to switch to IM. (I have no direct experience working with people with those disabilities, so I'm happy to be educated.) So I speculate that starting out remote would also make the team more inclusive in this area.
Yeah, but people are replaceable. Whereas you, as an entrepreneur, only have one life to live. Choose wisely.
/s
Meanwhile, there's a thriving and growing industry selling desks in trendy open plan offices to self-employed people who for the most part could do their work in the privacy of their own home if they didn't think the atmosphere of an open plan office was worth paying for.
A lot of people I know work remotely in whole or in large part. But I've also worked with people who either felt the need for work-home separation or just found home to be too distracting a work environment in one or more ways.
I think the real reason is managers want to be able to see everyone at a glance; it's all about control.
Well it is still a bad decision. Libraries are an open work space and still manage to provide a reasonable working environment. This is less about money but more about a wrong perception of work.
The real reason for open office layout is this:
- we do not trust ourselves and our employees to do what we say
It is only really start ups that cannot afford to do this. Ironically because they have a small number of employees, open plan offices do work for them because they have fewer employees.
This seems dishonest to me. Can some body explain if I'm missing something?
I understand the argument that open-plan offices increase distractions in general, and the damage that loud people do in particular. But if you really intend on being super focused and productive, I don't understand why it would bother you that someone would look at your screen.
I have worked in an open-plan office and the only times when I was embarrassed that someone saw my screen was because I was wasting my time on reddit/HN, which I shouldn't because that's not what they're paying me for... Once I managed to force upon myself the discipline of just don't open reddit/HN, I was happy to accept one of the desks with the back to the center of the room, because I no longer cared that someone was looking at my screen.
Am I missing something?
There's plenty of reasons to not want others looking over your shoulder that have nothing to do with goofing off. Private emails, even totally business related ones are just that, private. If you're struggling with a problem, having an audience can make it that much worse. Et cetera, et cetera.
The nature of software development makes it hard for a lot of people to do with lots of distractions around them.
- There's also way too much stigma against "time wasting." Your brain needs breaks and distractions to work through problems. Spending some time on a goof off site each day is not a bad thing in and of itself. If your productivity suffers, that's a problem that needs to be addressed. But it can happen via burn out just as easily as via spending too much time reading fan theories on Infinity War Pt. 2.
The fallacy here is conflating the two. To me the most important argument in the usual privacy conversation (i.e. people vs government) is that people defending themselves from government surveillance is a very important part of keeping the balance of power from swinging too much in one direction.
This is nothing of the sort. If you work for a business and you don't like their open-plan offices, find one where they don't have open-plan offices. But saying that you don't like their open-plan offices because you're so productive without distractions, but then you're afraid that people see your screen seems dishonest. Also, if you're super productive but you need to take breaks to look at cat pictures during office hours, why are you afraid that someone will catch you looking at cat pictures? If you actually are as productive as you claim I'm sure people will respect your need for breaks: after all according to you we all need breaks, so "other people" will be doing the same thing. And if they don't respect _your_ need for breaks, then the problem isn't really the office style, but a lack of trust in colleagues. Again, the entire thing seems dishonest.
Think about it. You just said that someone "catching you" taking a break is an issue and that in your mind that is a justification for keeping your screen hidden.
Even when soccer is over, you have to contend with people playing grab-ass all over the office, or jerks (like me) with annoyingly loud keyboards. The modicum of utility of me "jumping into a conversation" really goes out the window when I'm forced to wear headphones all day.
I really don't have a good way of measuring or fully quantifying how much less productive I am personally, but haven't there been a ton of studies that indicate anywhere between 1-1.5 hours a day is wasted per employee due to the open office? I assume that labor is the most expensive part of any big-ish company, so it feels like the "offices are cheaper" argument shouldn't work.
EDIT: I get the point, that was a joke.
Is there anything less professional than watching a game at work? I really don't get why people do this, and why they think it's okay.
Granted, I don't like sports — but I like TV, and I wouldn't watch TV at work. I like computer games, but I wouldn't play computer games at work. It's just odd that sports fans think it's okay to distract people during work hours.
At least pop off down to the pub or something.
For reference, I work in a hardware engineering group. Some mesmerizing process would show up on screen, one person would stop and stare, and 5 minutes later we have a half dozen engineers who've stopped what they were doing to watch How It's Made.
Eventually we settled on Bob Ross as a happy medium in terms of "Pleasant Ambiance" and "Not Too Distracting."
Also, as stated, even if you love sports, if I were to turn on something like Die Hard and cheer at the screen every few minutes when Bruce Willis does something awesome, or play a video game and yell profanities because I died, people would (rightly) think I'm a jerk and distracting everyone. Even if I only did once every four years.
Should they just give me a break to watch TV at work?
I've worked places where we would watch live streams of rocket launches (back when launches were less routine than they are now).
Many people who are trying to work do not care if the event is live. Even as someone who also enjoys watching rocket launches, I wouldn't cheer loudly when it took off, and I'd probably go to some kind of common area to watch it to begin with.
I was responding to a comment that compared watching a movie to following the World Cup live. The two are not comparable at all. I was also responding to other comments that were somehow dumbfounded by others wanting to watch the World Cup in general.
I don’t begrudge people their entertainment, but surely it’s polite not to foist it on others? I don’t play Minecraft let’s play videos for hours at the office, after all!
Plus of course all the normal games, etc.
Add it all up and there is fucking sports all the time.
Again not a problem as long as you don't drag me down to that level.
This thread of Hacker News kvetching has really lost focus on the case against open offices. This reads like a contest of who can be the most uptight in the office.
I go to work to well, work. I like my co-workers, don't mind talking with them a bit and am even friends with some of them. That doesn't mean I want them to bring all their distractions and things that bring them joy to the office. I want us all to get everything done quickly and correctly so that we can all go home and enjoy the things we like.
This sort of outlook might work for those of us that are workaholics, but for everyone else it's a major mental health hazard. Not everyone has wives or children or partners or scores of friends to spend their nights with. I wouldn't be so blase about taking all enjoyment out of the rest of the time those people are spending on this earth.
*Yeah, I know, live and let live, but that is basically impossible with the current sport fanatics around here.
also people are animals too.
In conclusion, have a down vote. Parent: have an upvote.
When will they allow us to take our toddlers to work? Could really save on daycare costs :)
That same office (which, as I'm sure you have figured out, was an open office) allowed dogs. Mostly fine, I'd take our well-trained, quiet female pit bull into the office. She'd bug me to go play around outside more than I would have liked, but was otherwise inconspicuous. But as someone else in the thread has pointed out, dogs in the office doesn't scale. There's gonna be the one (or more) dog (much like the one child noted above) that doesn't belong in an office. One lady brought her other-dog-hating dog every day. "Bark, bark, bark" every time another dog was in sight. Etc., etc.
I guess my point is, yessh people, what happened to the professional work environment?
Maybe related to bullshit jobs since these people are obviously not doing any real work, just bringing their homelife to the office in order to make time pass quicker?
And some dogs are jerks. Worked in a place where the boss brought their loud dog to work. Barked constantly, disrupted work, growled whenever clients came into the office. The boss acted like she didn't hear anything.
I like dogs. I have dogs (they came with my wife). But I don’t want to work in a goddamn kennel.
(Fun fact: Google is officially a dog company. Cats are highly discouraged.)
Sartre was right. Hell is other people.
(That said, they had the most expensive and best coffee machine I've ever seen in an office, and a guy who used to make brilliant cocktails on a Friday afternoon - he also stands out in my memory as one of the few front-end developers I've met who couldn't write JavaScript or CSS. That was a surreal contract, it really was.)
At least it ends. I work in a gigantic "airplane hangar" open office with no noise barriers of any kind stretching out to infinity. Everybody around me is on conference calls all day, every day. They put their phones on speaker and then yell louder and louder to be heard over each other. One of them is even one of the Important People with an office with a door that closes... which he leaves open all the time anyway.
You can listen to even fairly quiet music and you won't hear any conversations around you.
Wouldn't be necessary if we had actual offices, but there you go.
[1] https://www.la-sight.com/services/lasik/lasik-results/ [2] https://www.la-sight.com/services/lasik/lasik-explained/fars...
Thanks though.
As an added bonus the obvious rigamarole I have to go through when a coworker taps me on the shoulder makes them more likely to send an email next time.
With earplugs inside noise-canceling phones I still get two layers of sound isolation but have a layer of sound isolation between me and the phones, providing finer volume control so I can add just enough music to finish the job of drowning out loud people around me without hearing damage.
It seems the best solution is to not have loud people around.
I've found any earplug or headphone option will make my tinnitus worse - sometimes days afterwards.
I explain my tinnitus to non-sufferers as being on the threshold of noise intolerance 24/7.
I'm surprised there hasn't been a lawsuit against any of these companies that expect employees to damage their health just so they can save on floorspace?
Now I have a very faint one that "toggles" once or twice a week and ALWAYS when I wear earplugs.
After ignoring the warning signs and also having an ear infection which I never bothered getting medical help for it got much worse.
It's settled down to a manageable level for me now but heed the warnings, you may save yourself a lot of misery in the long run.
I had a random infection a few years ago and just waited for it to pass. Which it did, eventually, but my tinnitus became much worse afterwards. I'm guessing, because the infection did further damage which could maybe have been avoided?
I can't say whether you should stop wearing earplugs because you may sometimes be in a situation where they protect your hearing. But, for blocking out background noise in an office, they're probably not a good idea? [based purely on my own experience]
I think it's because when you double-stuff like I did, the only thing you can hear at that point is the ringing in your ears (and high heels on concrete floors). My brain seemed to lock in on the ringing at that point.
When I wear earplugs, the tinnitus is more prominent, so after I take them out, my brain is kind of "latched" on to it for a while.
I thought everyone has it.
Glad I got out of that hellhole.
This is the big problem with headphones as a solution. You just trade sound disergonomy or physical discomfort, and it solves nothing. Like breaking your finger to distract from the pain of a gun shot wound.
Combine it with the fact that managers have repeatedly told me that wearing earplugs is “rude” and it’s just more of the no-win optics that drive open plan offices in the first place.
This probably depends where you are. An open office plan might well let you use less than half of the square footage per employee, which in somewhere like Manhattan would potentially be saving you on the order of $5-10k per employee. Depending on how significant the productivity hit is, that might well be worth it.
And, from personal experience, companies do it even when the cost per square foot is 1/10th of that of NY.
Faster to deploy, wire, etc.
Relative to what? Here are some portable room dividers: https://www.screenflex.com/
You would be starting with a very tiny space if that doubles the square footage per employee. They completely eliminate visual distractions, give employees a feeling of privacy, and stop a lot of noise. Being portable, they can be changed around as needed, and you can easily create small groups.
We have a couple of mobprogramming stations with big televisions, each team has 1 or 2 of these so there are about 5 in a 20m radius from where I sit. When the first game that Sweden played all of a sudden 3 of the televisions are turned on and of course they are _not(!)_ in sync.
So here I am trying to do some work with three TVs games all slightly delayed from each other, meaning one cheer turns into three.
Now I work at a large newspaper and we sit 40m from the editorial staff so that adds to the background noise. To top it all of someone in the sports department thought it would be a good idea to @channel (usually reserved for "OMG the website is down what do we do!?") when some of the TVs stopped working (not really a job for the developers..).
That just killed whatever positive things I used to think about open offices.
Until I read that, the worst I’d ever heard was a friend who worked next to a slamming fire door. He had to wear hearing protection/ear muffs. Get this: he was the PhD physisist that did all the hard math coding for the company.
He has a private office where he works now thank goodness.
Then, given all that, you get the coworker two seats down Slacking you. If you're Slacking folks within 10 seconds walking distance then what's the point of being in the office at all.
I think the ideal would be commuting to the office one day a week to take care of meetings which are more productive in person such as sprint planning, grooming etc.
So when bosses realised they were throwing money away, they came up with the open office with flex-desks: no-one has a fixed place, you can sit whereever you want. And there are less desks than people.
That can work out quite well (I work in such an office) but it depends greatly on ehtics or rules: no TVs with soccer games, no speaker-phone (but only headset) and rooms available for discussions or phone calls. And there is a general area (quite large) where you can drink your coffee and discuss the soccer matches or Tour de France results...
For me it works, but I can imagine that without the requirements listed above it can be a cumbersome workenvironment.
If a company believes it will gain more from “saving money” on open plan offices or hot desking than it will from just paying more to facilitate more and better work from employees through buying the best tools (a private office is a tool like a keyboard or ergonomic chair), it’s self-evidently a company to get far, far away from.
Consider “flex keyboards.” Management realizes that not all keyboards are in use all day, because people are in meetings, at lunch, etc.
So nobody gets their own keyboard. You have to locate an unused keyboard at the times when you need to type.
This is no different than “flex desks.” In both cases (keyboards, desks), the unit cost of providing the dedicated resource to the employee is trivial compared to far more pressing concerns, like producing working software to increase revenue, or bullshit executive compensation.
Even real estate costs for private offices in dense urban areas are trivial by comparison.
The open office I am in ATM is one such places where a handfull of people (loud, discussing totally not related to work, factually completly idiotic conversations) spoil it for all others. There is nothing to be done about these people since they've been with the company forever and a day and are thus basically exempt from all rules (be it noice or dresscode).
5 Years ago I have actively stoped working from home to segrate work from family. Now I have found myself to do at least 1, often 2 days from home again and planning to change employer. No I will not tell them the reason since I can not affort to burn that bridge.
TL;DR Manager A makes a good impression by saving some office space, Manager B looses employees but will never find out why.
Not criticizing this person, I despise my open office environment too. I also wouldn't (and didn't) tell tell my employer about this when I left for a few years in the past for the same reason.
I work mostly from home but I do have a cube in the local office. If we got tight for space, it would absolutely make sense to give away my space to someone who would use it more and have me just grab an open chair for those times I have meetings or other reasons to be in the office.
If I had a private office, I would still work from home most of the time. A private office doesn't eliminate a commute.
Why would this make more sense than moving to a bigger office or building more space for the new employee to have a desk without taking yours? Cost is absolutely not an answer.
People who think cost drives open plan office choices seem to think corporate management are too stupid to ask, what is 10% of our total salary base for these workers. It makes no sense. People have been measuring productivity and morale in knowledge work for a hundred years. Of course they can directly compare cost savings on floor space with metrics correlated with productivity lost to worse workspace, and tie it to the bottom line.
The observable spending habits of companies suggest cost utterly cannot be a driving factor here.
I'm not arguing for hot-desking as a standard approach, which indeed likely negates any benefits to teams being co-located. But for people who are allocated space that they rarely use? Why not?
If they can afford to hire more but not to expand and give each worker adequate space, it suggests the company is just wrong. They actually can’t afford to hire more and would be creating problems if they do. Rather, reinvest what would have been spent on crammed headcount into the ability to expand spatially and later increase headcount with adequate space.
If a company, even a sink-or-swim growth mode start-up, believes it needs to hire people faster than it can provide minimally adequate space for them, then the company is just wrong. That is just not a thing.
Costs do not affect revenue. Perhaps you mean profit?
Especially when some people eat at their desks.
Generic rubber dome keyboards are torture — chiclet style keyboards surely violate a bunch of Geneva conventions.
Never mind the filth and grime.
I will keep a mouse and keyboard in the office under lock and key somewhere if I end up in that situation.
Can you think of reasons why maybe each student doesn't have their own helicopter but does have their own headset (assuming they were cleaned properly after each use and hygiene wasn't a concern)? Those same reasons apply to the office/keyboard situation.
The logic is that, compared to the salaries of software engineers and revenues of many tech companies, desks and keyboards are extremely cheap.
The cost of a ~$100k engineer spending 10m per day looking for a desk, with 8h day and 200k total employee cost to employer, is ~4k/yr. Paired with the cost the company pays in developer annoyance potentially causing higher turnover or lower productivity , buying more desks and office space is likely the cheaper option. One helicopter per student is obviously not so...
Providing one office per knowledge worker would be cost-effective for companies.
Flight schools have a hard time surviving if they make grossly wasteful or negligent expenditures for the sake of politics and optics, because they are low-capitalized businesses with often much lower revenue per employee and less growth opportunity than highly capitalized tech companies.
A high capitalized tech company, on the other hand, can piss away money on dipshit open floor plan offices, roof decks, $500,000 Christmas parties, etc., and the executive committee doesn’t care. They have very little incentive to optimize that spending and often make spending choices based on the capricious and whimsical desires of an adult-baby CEO who is more like Veruca Salt than a competent business person.
Really though the cost of office space vs people making 100k/year means you don't actually need top optimize it that hard. The core problem is they tend to come out of separate budgets, so some middle manager can write down they saved x million on a review / resume while costing the company 3x that indirectly.
PS: Used Model S's are also something to keep an eye on.
It's just unfortunate that the commute here in the Bay Area has gotten so bad that a lot of people end up working from home.
All of it is completely unrelated with work. And sort of sad, although its a good thing, that no matter what happens, humans will needs humans.
This is the world they wanted, when they dissolved unions and other pillars of stability, one mans grape-vine over "Unreliable mercenaries" is another mans freedom of choice.
Here's to Sienna and Florence, their high towers may stand a thousand year or crumble under the siege tomorrow, no-one cares only the chests in the deep cellars are whats important.
All those walls build to create synthetic loyalty- be it out of fear of being law suited for knowledge transfer, or cartels to avoid the rising prices of mercenary's - if history tells us one thing - in the end the war always wins.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Wars
"Wes Brot ich ess, des Lied ich sing, wes Gold ich trag, des Tod ich bring."
There is no need in this.
There was a study done on the interruption effect of e-mail https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/1328726018000...
Amen. We can work remotely. Let me work in my home office.
I'm sitting here now because there's scheduled railway maintenance going on. If not I prefer traveling to the office (it's more than 45 minutes each way.)
But as long as everyone can choose for themselves I think more people probably should work from home.
If you’re not going to give people phones just take the phones away, not pack people in like sardines.
seriously, lets just give up on the notion of assigned spaces, idk what value there is when we cant even collaborate because the 4 tiny meeting rooms for 100 people are sitting at the margins of the giant open office. and there aren't any other whiteboards or projectors to use to have conversations. everyone is already wearing headphones so they can try to have a thought to themselves.
there are lots of alternatives. assign rooms to projects and have the principals mostly hang out there. couch areas and pub areas and cubby areas...rooms where you really aren't supposed to talk or hum or do anything out loud.
we've given up any actual utility of the office and are just hanging on to the barest trapping.
Having worked at a company, where they had couch areas: Management will place the couch areas in the middle or adjacent to the desks and it will all be done in an open floor. A couch area with no walls is an invitation to have loud conversations/phone calls in the middle of the office.
I have a coworker within ONE second of me, I can lean back a few inches and tap them on the shoulder. And I do, frequently, when they send me a 1:1 slack message.
"What's up?"
"Oh I had a question for you in Slack"
"I'm three feet away from you, I'm not doing this over slack, what's up?"
Obviously this is different if they send a code snippet or an app screenshot that I need to look at, but even then when we need to discuss the next steps relevant to that snippet or screenshot, I'll still tap them over the shoulder
"Hey, did you try x?"
"Oh no I didn't, lemme see what happens..." pause "Yup that worked, thanks!"
"No problem"
Unless there's an urgency, or some complication that should be discussed in person; slack is the preferred method so as to allow the party you are interrupting a chance to change their focus in the least impactful manner.
If I go to someone directly, I am losing 10-15 minutes of my own productivity + the length of the conversation and that's multiplied by the number of people I interrupted.
Some people who I've worked with, love to have to have a face to face for questions or information that is not urgent and could easily be taken care of via slack. They seem to do so because they prefer to small talk, lament, debate or some other personal reason; they don't do it for technical reasons.
If your team can effectively communicate passively, on slack, your on a team that has a foundation from which a remote-work policy can easily be enacted.
Didn't you know that you shouldn't use headphones in an open-plan office, because it prevents you from collaborating with others? /s
Yeah, they say it promotes more collaboration because you may overhear something where your input is relevant and join in. Or something like that. While that may be true, the increase in UNwanted distraction completely overwhelms any benefit. So then they tell us to be respectful of people around us and keep things quiet - we don't want people to overhear you. Wait wasn't that the point?
> people are running/playing around and yelling like children at the office. It's not too uncommon for startups to have Nerf guns or something.
I hate this sort of environment combined with expectation to stay late. It always seems to me that if people would work instead of playing, we might not have to stay late. And that we are not working as much as we brag about, because people play a lot.
I don't know that I wouldn't work late even if I had a private office, but I do think that I'd be able to accomplish more.
Of course then, I am tired also in the evening and that limits what I can do in the evening. (If I am too tired to code, I am also too tired to play logical game or learn something.)
One day I'll write that book I keep thinking about. It'll be glorious.
Uncommon but not rare term where I grew up.
Sure hope you're not googling it in an open-plan office...
I closed tab very very fast.
According to this study open offices do reduce face to face communications: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/373/1753/2017...
The only two rational factors why anyone would choose open office:
1. the floor space really is so expensive you can waste xx% of capital output of labour.
2. You inherit a dysfunctional organization or just a one you cannot trust, and want to "keep an eye" on everyone so they behave. Michael Bloomberg gave this rationale in New York.
3. Bonus round for hotdesking : You expect/have a fairly high churn rate. Why bother assigning people personal spaces since it's so much work to keep track of the facilities. Let the people find their own space. Besides, you might outsource xx% of your operations in near future so it's not like you plan on investing in long term team building.
So, any linear combination 1,2 or 3 should suffice as an explanation. Any serious publication which praises open offices is likely a piece by a consultant who makes a living out of peddling said solutions and are offering political propaganda to make the employees less resistant.
The most common irrational reason: You don't really have an opinion what consitutes a good working space but open offices seem to be trendy ("It's what the big boys are doing") and a consultant made you an offer to redesign your office space, so, why not.
I'm pretty sure the lemming see, lemming do explanation is one of the top actual reasons.
In general, let's not elevate anybody to superhuman status, no matter what Ayn Rand wants you to believe. It's never true, and it never ends well.
But that's just my experience. I've found it's difficult to underestimate management.
Since then I've heard they have installed what can only be described as rows of tables. They're not really desks. Just long rows of white tables where one row of employees faces another with an 8" glass divider between the two employees. You know; for privacy.
???
Do you work at Sterling Cooper Draper?
If you want to watch soccer, take a vacation day.
Riiight, because soccer and office work are so similar!
/s
I wouldn't suggest changing the office layout if I were only distracted by events every four years. I get distracted by events related to the open office every single day; the latest one just happened to be the World Cup when I wrote that.
Are they in prison, North Korea or something like that?
Or do you mean that they Choose not to.... or that their paat choices makes it hard to change?
It seems to me like the backlash against open offices is a small minority of programmers with autism spectrum disorders and chapped-ass syndrome. Your job is not to have your whims catered to so you can be maximally productive. Your job is to bring value to the company. And that means working well in an open-office environment since that seems to work best for the company.
What makes you say that? The vast majority of the comments on this thread are from people who have had bad experiences with open floor plans. While there may be some who have been diagnosed on the autism spectrum, none have mentioned, that.
>...Your job is to bring value to the company. And that means working well in an open-office environment since that seems to work best for the company.
If you find something that makes yourself and your team less productive, the way you bring value to the company is to let people know. For example, if your work machine is 10 years old and takes N times longer to do a build than a new machine would, don't pretend you are being a good employee by not mentioning it to the company. Same goes for other parts of the work environment.
If anything, it's convincing upper management that they must be doing something right because anything that makes us this miserable has to be good for the bottom line.
More on that in Paul Graham's Essay: http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
Does it not seem like open-office etiquette to take a phone call in a private space when other people are trying to work?
A critical piece of making the open space work is people being open with another. For watching big events on tv, you can take that into a conference room too. Cheer all you want. Gotta call your partner or someone else? Go in a room.
Who is going to assume the authority when a company is promoted as having a flat hierarchy, or holocracy, etc.? If the CEO is speakerphoning or fomenting adhoc floor meetings in an open-plan, nobody is going to say it's bad.
It's not about saying "it's bad". It's about talking about what might be better. Flat hierarchy or not, anyone should be able to bring up the topic.
And if you can't, that's a bad place to be working. There should be some kind of trust between people.
You don't need any kind of hierarchy to have real leaders. Every where I've been, you just step up and try to make it happen. Most of the time a bunch of other people are going to "thank you!". It won't always work and you can be diplomatic in how you approach it. But just make it happen and stop waiting for someone else to do it.
And if they, whomever they is, don't like it, move on.
It's not like people never actually comment on how they'd like to change their job environment. I wouldn't be surprised if it's the most common complaint among humans in general!
Do you have any examples of non-management fomenting a change in the entire physical architecture of their office, or other large change in a company?
I do think that it's on management to try to segregate groups that don't talk much and prefer quiet from groups whose jobs involve a lot of phone conversations but it's not practical for many roles to avoid talking on their desk phone. That's why they have one.
Unfortunately, team culture takes precedence over neat tools. It's just a common thing on my team to do take calls at your desk.
For anyone who doesn't want to drop their email into their webpage to see pricing (yes, I received an outreach email within 15 minutes of doing so) their pricing starts at $4.5k and $14k "on sale". Bit steep for my blood, but, there's obviously some bigger spenders out there!
I think your comment is ironic considering your previous comment:
>but there are plenty of idiots who turn off air conditioning, open the windows or pull up curtains regardless of everyone else's comfort.
I literally jumped at the opportunity to move my cube to share a window, and an entrance.
Give me remote; or give me death at this point.
There's not much natural light and a set of nice headphones can't overshadow.
After doing 100% remote developer, I would rather drive for Uber and make $7 bucks an hour than ever work in a physical office again.
I'm easily 2-3x mpre productive remote without even considering the savings in time not having to drive to/from work
The increased collaboration is a plain and albviius benefit for me as a developer.
A site crushing issue was solved in 30 seconds due to me overhearing a conversation in ouropen plan office. Without that it would have been at least 3 hours of pass the parcel to work out what incredibly obscure thing with timezones had happened.
You can pay me to focus, or you can pay me to listen to conversations and look for opportunities to help. You can't have me do both.
I really think open office layouts can be implemented correctly, it's just that managers don't take the time to really tailor them for their development teams. We all wanted the lights off to work in? Lights are off. We wanted standing desks? We got standing desks. We wanted 2 monitors? We got 2 monitors that have adjustable heights. I think the problem with open offices is that managers are just using them as a way to save money on office space. If you really want a good office area for your developers, I think you can accomplish that with an open office layout if you really try.
If you're a relatively small office, I suppose no cubicles could work. Wait until you have offices in other parts of the country/world that you need to collaborate with remotely. Everyone is on a call for 25% of the day, and it's terrible. It's terrible to listen to 2/5 people next to you on a conference call, and it's terrible to listen to people that are in those environments on your conference call because they are trying to talk like they're in a library.
No, it's the other way round: you create conflict and turnover by introducing an open-plan office. That way, your codebase remains maintainable since handovers happen regularly.
Imagine the opposite: a productive coder from a silent office leaves after 30 years. There is a very high probability that it takes months until new recruits can make meaningful changes since nothing has been documented. If you enforce regular handovers you can be sure that some documentation has accumulated somewhere.
And yet the battle still rages.
If you haven't read the book, I'd recommend it. If only to realise how little we've learned.
Given the choice, and as a 100% remote worker now, I'm so glad I don't actually have to choose, I think I'd take the cube over an open trading floor environment any day.
Only 1.5h hours lost hours a day? Try 3h or so at least LOL
Working from home, it feels like time is elastic at least the first few times, then you get used to it. You start working, get what it feels like half a day of work done and look at the clock: it's still 11 AM.
A lot of the time companies don't "choose" an open office, it chooses them.
If you are working at a small or mid-sized company, building out rented office space you will probably outgrow in a year or two is a crappy investment.
The alternative? Buy the desks, throw them into a room, expect people to be quiet and respectful.
Instead of binding people to locations, I'd much rather bind activities/moods to locations, e.g.
- the studious space: hushed atmosphere like a library, NO TALKING, for people actively working on brain problems
- the collaboration space: when you need to huddle with a few other people and solve a problem out loud
- the audio privacy space: small rooms for remote conferences where you're the only participant
- etc.
What's important is to have extra monitors in all these spaces, so a decent work setup can be had anywhere.
As a compromise, what's been working in our own office is that the open plan is—with rare exceptions—the "Library": very quiet talking, if any. For the super quiet, that's the Home Office. And for all the rest, we have conference rooms which are all equiped with very large screen telepresence equipment and which supports wireless screen sharing. So anytime we need to make noise, we have what we need. And for those who need some momentary privacy on their own, we have Audio Privacy Rooms with are set up with 1 armchair, small table and video phone. (Disclaimer: I work for the Collaboration group at Cisco so we're eating our own dog food and have easy access to it; I do realize these things do have a cost.)
Also, in every job I’ve had, the tasks I am asked to complete always require absolute quiet, private concentration time, for most hours on almost all days. The same has been true for most colleagues in each of these businesses, across all different software teams.
Given this, why not make the default be dedicated private offices per person, and then have separate areas for collaboration, interview rooms, etc.?
A “Library” open plan area would simply not be good enough as a default, since it lacks dedicated privacy and lacks customizability per each individual for sound, lighting, equipment, etc.
I think the main thing is that any solution proposing to put a lot of programmers into the same shared, open room is just wrong-headed and unworkable. That’s the defining property that makes these workspaces bad.
They would set their stuff up in the space that best fit their needs or even work from home.
For example, suppose there is harsh overhead fluorescent lighting above your desk. But you require soft lighting from a desk lamp for eye comfort. In a private office, you can bring in a lamp. If you bring in a lamp to your open-plan desk, it’s futile, because the harsh communal lighting is enforced on you, not customizable.
I have worked in multiple open offices where people didn't want harsh fluorescent light and they worked with the team/facilities/whoever to get the lights dimmed/removed/changed to be more compatible with what people wanted.
I’ve never seen an open-plan office where this would be possible, do you have any links?
In the open plan offices I’ve worked in, the overhead lighting could not be dimmed, and it would not be possible to only dim lights for part of the floor and not others, because there was no barrier, wall, corner, etc., separating one group of people from another. If you dim the lights directly overhead, it’s still way too harshly bright from the lights 3 or 4 rows over from you anyway.
If lights from far away are a problem I don't have a very good solution beyond hanging a flag or something from the ceiling to try and block the light.
I believe your comment is overly optimistic in most cases.
They could use rolling desks.
https://gamebridgeu.wordpress.com/2016/12/01/desks/
Cubicles use up the same amount of space and at least you have some privacy.
Evidence would suggest that companies are willing to harm their employees, reduce productivity, and pay more recruiter fees rather than pay for cubicles.
I'm sure some people love it, but there should be options to work in an environment that's best for you.
I worked for a company once that already had a huge office in Columbus, Ohio, with private offices for everyone. They had no engineering presence in that office and no plans to increase headcount in that office. It was an HR office primarily, and the workers there needed privacy everyday to be on the phone about sensitive topics like legal issues or salary.
The CEO announced in a company meeting once that they would be totally remodeling that office to change it into open plan seating (we found out later it came at a cost of $14 million, purely to destroy good privacy and turn it into open plan seats, in a building the company already owned, with no need to accomodate more head count).
The CEO just said, “We are an innovation company and that makes each and every one of you an innovator — and innovators love open spaces.”
So I think you’re wrong. Companies don’t care about open plan offices for saving money (and they often lose money on it).
It’s all about bullshit optics.
As for the CEO - I can't imagine he could say "we're going to squeeze you all against your will to improve the bottom line." He had to say the usual bs, whether he believed it or not.
As for concrete data, check any online calculator. This one [1] shows individual offices as taking 3 times as much space as open-plan offices. As personnel costs are usually one of the highest fixed costs, going open plan might be a good alternative to lowering the salary when a manager wants to improve the bottom line - or, sometimes, to save the employees in troublesome times.
[1] http://officeprinciples.com/planning/space-calculator/result...
I don’t understand your comment at all. What bottom line were they improving by paying $14MM to take down pre-existing privacy features, while not increasing worker density per square foot at all?
Also “look at any online calculator” is a silly response that tells me you’ve never actually looked into the data on this at all. Open plans don’t save 3x space in a vacuum, because they introduce other costs. And it still doesn’t address why a company would create gourmet coffee stations, roof decks, alcohol-focused meeting spaces, opulent fountains, huge budgets for “sleek” interior decorating, etc.
If they save 3x on space, but then use that extra space anyway for a dipshit coffee station, then your point holds no credibility: they are still paying for the huge space that could have housed all the employees with private offices. They just fill it with dipshit perks and then cram people into the remaining space.
Additionally, cubicles with high walls offer a lot if the privacy and noise blocking that private offices could give, but without taking any additional floor space when compared with open-plan offices.
So again, the answer to this behavior simply cannot be cost savings. That is not consistent with the choices that upper management make regarding offices.
I'm curious about the future of the company you mention. I bet that when hard times come, the fountains and the rest will go away, while the open plan is going to stay.
It still seems like you didn’t fully read my comment. This has not been my experience at all. Most companies choose open floor plans because they superficially look trendy and because it is a cargo cult copy of what Facebook & trendy start-ups do. They are even happy to spend more money on this type of floor plan.
You keep asserting that companies are very budget conscious when it comes to real estate expenditures, but this doesn’t match reality, and you’re still not addressing the bigger point of stupid corporate spending on fountains, roof decks, parties, etc., which totally contradicts your point of view.
> “the fountains and the rest will go away, while the open plan is going to stay.”
This makes no sense. I’m not even sure you understand how real estate works. You don’t make money by removing a fountain or a roof deck you previously paid to install. You just lose more money if you want it removed or remodeled. If you fall on hard times, you’re absolutely not spending money to pay construction workers to remove physical features of the office. I can’t begin to describe what a naive understanding of office real estate you project.
Also, any theories we might come up with about open plan office choices have to be good theories when the company has lots of money, not just when it’s having hard times, because tons of perfectly profitable companies that can easily and trivially afford to pay for whatever office space they want are still irrationally choosing open plan spaces (which destroy productivity and make workers unhappy) even when any cost savings from doing so would be entirely trivial compared with billions and billions of net income.
The idea that managers in those cases are simultaneously so unconcerned about money that they will throw lavish parties, spend millions on unnecessary office decor, roof decks, etc., and yet also act deeply concerned over a few million of extra rent to get a large enough space for private offices ... it obviously refutes what you’re saying.
The faux concern offer real estate cost obviously is just for show, as a pretext for the overtly political reasons to choose open plan layouts.
You seem to think companies try to save money at all costs, and see open floor plans as a necessary evil to cut costs.
Company spending behavior contradicts that claim. Companies clearly and obviously do not see open floor plans as a necessary evil. Not at all.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9760414
Is it time to get depressed yet? This has been a topic for such a long time. It was in peopleware in 1987. I thought I discovered the topic when Joel (On Sofware) wrote about it in 2000. While a few people seem to enjoy open offices, the overwhelming majority of developers I know, or who chime in on HN, value a quiet place to work and dislike open offices.
And yet, not only has nothing changed, it seems to be getting worse. It couldn't be more clear to me that developers, at least on this issue, simply have no clout as a profession. There may be a few individuals who can make demands, but on the balance, these are decisions imposed on us, as a group, and we are apparently unable to do anything about it.
The really sad thing is, this isn't a situation where we're asking to fly first class, or for more vacation. We're talking about asking for something that will make us more productive and increase the value we largely hand over to our employers, simply because it's depressing to not be able to do a good job due to distractions. So yeah, I'm depressed about it.
There was a time when I read these essays and felt a bit more charged up, like people were starting to understand something important and that things would change. Well, now we have open offices.
I'll finish with another variant on my broken record: the industry talks constant about the critical shortage of software engineers, but it won't give them a quiet place to work. Actually, that last sentence is too optimistic - it won't allow them a quiet place to work. Those places exist, but companies often demand that their programmers spend 8 hours a day in places that are too noisy for focus.
> This book seemed convincing when I read it in college. It even had all sorts of studies backing up what they said. No deadlines is better than having deadlines. Offices are better than cubicles. Basically all devs I talk to agree with this stuff.
> But virtually every successful company is run the opposite way. Even Microsoft is remodeling buildings from individual offices to open plan layouts. Could it be that all of this stuff just doesn't matter that much? If it really is that important, how come companies that are true believers, like Fog Creek, aren't running roughshod over their competitors?
Here's the thing - how many industries rely so deeply on controlling their workforce's right to live and work in the United States? How many industries lobby congress so ferociously and constantly about a shortage of highly skilled workers?
Well, yeah, if an industry has the right to decide who is and isn't allowed to live in the United States, in a system where non-family based immigration is difficult and spots are hard to come by, then sure, they can be very successful imposing work conditions that people with personal and economic freedom of mobility would reject in favor of another profession. But if you really want to live in the US and Facebook controls whether you get and keep a work visa, then sure, you'll put up with an open office. And because of the way we allocate green cards (requiring a corporate sponsor, and greatly restricting how many are issued every year, with a long queue), you may have to put up with it for quite a while.
So another way to look at it is this: companies say they are in a desperate competition for key workers in critical shortage, and they can't recruit domestically no matter how good an offer they make. They also require working conditions that most developers say they despise. Uh, how about working conditions that most developers don't despise, have you tried that?
At least developers generally quit before we get to the point of wanting to jump off the building.
And, to the degree it does matter, 1.) the individual company's/team's context is probably relevant and 2.) companies/teams tend to take actions which at least somewhat mitigate the disadvantages of whatever approach they've chose. So an all-remote company may well have different decision-making processes than a co-located one, probably systematically holds F2F meetings of various times, and so forth. In open floor plans where people mostly work in the office, there's often some flexibility to spend some time off by yourself.
I'd make two statements, both are entirely my own.
1. The impact of these changes often lags the change itself, and status quo takes time to shift. Open spaces were definitely a fad for a while, and a lot of people (broader than MS) certainly started drinking the koolaid, yet it took ~decade for the rollout to really move in force. Conversely, I see far more anti-open-space articles nowadays than a decade ago. On top of this as well, bigCo corporate momentum cannot be underemphesized. IBM is still a behemoth, recent follies and very well-discussed employee-QOL-"hiccups" aside.
2. "success" is not binary. It's especially harder to judge when "product success" is often impacted by so many externalities it becomes very difficult to ask "what really is the impact of X specific factor." It becomes _even harder_ when the entire industry did this shift almost in lockstep, so finding "outliers" that are also viable employers for an individual became less and less an option. In that context, all I can bring is anecdata, and the # of peers I've worked with who dislike open spaces and will make active career choices to avoid them (myself included) seems to be growing.