All: if commenting, please make it specific and unpredictable—such as about this study—rather than posting generically about open offices and hating them. There have been tons of those threads and they're all the same. It's the diffs that are interesting.
I don't think the article sets out to answer this specific question, but is face to face time inherently better than online interaction in terms of workplace productivity?
Maybe the counter intuitive nature of open office layouts is actually better because it has people communicating faster over email.
There's tradeoffs involved for moving things to text. On the bad side, it's inherently a low-bandwidth channel, and you cannot interrupt to prune irrelevant digressions from the conversational tree.
On the plus side, however, it creates a written artifact that people can refer back to later. This can be incredibly useful, particularly for people with working memory or other executive function issues. Or for things that are complicated enough that a normal amount of WM/EF cannot cope with what's being communicated.
The interesting thing is just four years ago, Writer Nikil Saval penned his book on cubicles and postulated about why cubicles made us all miserable and opined for more open office spaces:
Four years later and we still see plenty of backlash from the open office concept. Is there a sweet spot somewhere in the middle, or will there be a sort of hybrid cubicle/open office concept in the near future?
I'm curious to see what the future holds for office spaces if neither of these are decent solutions.
My recollection is Peopleware lists as an anecdote a Coding War Games study (not alot of data is in the book) where they pit team against team in different work environments, the study is about 30 years old at this point and as far as I know, no one has bothered to either recreate or disprove it. It showed a clear winner in terms of work environments (which was written by one of the book authors so it agreed with the general sentiments of the book.)
I worked for a while in a what you might consider a hybrid system: small rooms of around a dozen people. Usually you don’t have problems of noise or distractions, since there isn’t that much going on, but you can quickly ask people about your issues without even getting up.
I don't believe it's about saving money, because the savings over cubicles are too small to be worth the risk of reduced productivity. The more plausible explanation is that private workspaces signal high social status, and managers prefer their subordinates to look obviously inferior.
I've never heard anybody else call them that. The article considers cubicles to be non-open workspaces: "At the time of the study, OpenCo2 was in the process of a multi-year headquarters redesign, which—as in Study 1—involved a transformation from assigned seats in cubicles to similarly assigned seats in an open office design, with large rooms of desks and monitors and no dividers between people's desks."
I sit in a cube farm and it's like open office. It's noisy and distracting. And I have to stare at a gray wall the whole day. that alone makes me thing about quitting. It's bad for my soul.
Take away that nice gray wall. Take the space you have now in your cube with your desk, and cut that by a factor of four -- or maybe a factor of ten.
You're now sitting at a table, with someone sitting right next to you and their arms are literally inches away from yours), and you have someone sitting right next to you on the other side, just as close. You have someone sitting across from you, and you are constantly fighting for foot space underneath the table.
The table is just wide enough for your computer and your monitor, and you have no place to hang any paper or reference material. You do not have space for a second monitor. You don't have space for a pad of paper next to your keyboard. You don't even have space for your coffee cup where there isn't a high risk that it will get knocked over and spill all over the electronic devices you're using.
You have literally three feet width of table space, and maybe two feet depth. You've got a chair, and you can roll it back far enough to get into it and slide your legs under the table, but if you try to roll it back any further than that then you will hit your neighbor behind you.
We shouldn't limit ourselves to open office or cubes. Both suck and are demeaning and disrespectful in their own way. We should demand real offices (with windows). It doesn't have to be a single person office. I like sharing a room with two or three people. You are not alone but it's not as stressful.
"because the savings over cubicles are too small to be worth the risk of reduced productivity"
No, it's definitely about the money.
The cost savings 'per person' are quite a lot, and that's hard dollars on the spreadsheet.
'Productivity' is a very difficult thing to quantify.
In that business case, the 'hard measure' almost always wins.
Business runs on decisions like that, not on intuition, it takes somebody with a lot of power to override or make a bet on something that's going to 'cost the company money' according to the accountants.
Square footage is expensive, so are cubes, and especially offices ... when your VP Ops is running around, he's trying to get a sweet and cool location ... 'hey we can get this sweet studio for $x/sq foot' in SOMA two books from Caltrain station ... or we can work in the burbs of Oakland ...
At my old job I worked in an open office coworking space and had to hotdesk, so I have no idea where I was going to sit for the day.
We didn't have permanent desks because they were more expensive, and my boss explicitly said so. He also refused to pay for peripherals or for stationary. I'm ideologically opposed to spending my hard earned money on things for work, so I just used loose copier paper and a Macbook with no external monitor, keyboard, or mouse. Not my problem that my productivity was negatively affected.
Some employers really fail to see the bigger picture on these things. Refusing to spend a few dollars on notebooks for me to write in resulted in my notes being scattered all over the place and lost (I'm a big fan of pen and paper). Refusing to pay for a monitor just resulted in me being stuck using a tiny 13" screen. Apparently when I was hired the CEO asked my manager if I would be able to work with an iPad instead of him having to pay for a Macbook Pro. It's really not an attitude conducive to employee moral, I never felt valued in the company, because I was made to feel like a cost, rather than an asset.
> "In short, rather than prompting increasingly vibrant face-to-face collaboration, open architecture appeared to trigger a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates and interact instead over email and IM."
Moi? I see flags raising when tools are blamed (?) for cultural issues. In addition, it's not the quantity of face to face interactions that matter but the quality.
All that said, the open office approach itself is a cheap cheat / proxy for an open minded collaborative organization. It's popular because it worked at successful companies. The problem is, for those conpanies it was more a correlation than a cause.
Yes, face to face matters. But, as mentioned, so does quality and context (i.e., culture).
I'm trapped in a dystopian open-office nightmare as well. When somebody comes up and starts talking to the guy who sits next to me, right in my ear, it's distracting as hell. So when I'm considering talking to somebody else in the office, I take into account the fact that I'm going to be distracting all of the people within earshot of this conversation that they almost definitely don't care about. As a matter of politeness, I try to use chat tools so that I don't disrupt any more people than I need to. Of course, cubicle walls solves that problem and permits face-to-face conversation, but that's not worth a few extra bucks apparently.
And thus, you are the rare gem that actually considers the outcome of your actions on others.
In contrast, most people are totally happy to blather about mindlessly, without any thought or care at all about who they are bothering with their chatter.
1) This isn't only at work, it's everywhere. Just yesterday I was wondering: When / how did walking around talking out loud to yourself (i.e., your phone) become normalized. How / why does having an unseen device in your hand or pocket make rude acceptable?
2) I also wonder how cultural this is? That is, is it only a USA thing? Are there cultures where this is less common? Where open plans might be doable, or at least less offensive?
I'm not sure its 'rude'. If they were with someone and talking to them, it'd be fine. What's the difference? It seems odd; but every odd behavior we see is not rude.
Fair enough. I'll rephrase. Why does it make the usually unacceptable acceptable?
Perhaps too often I'm on the wrong place at the wrong time but I hear plenty of half conversations in public (e.g., on the train) that would not happen if both parties were in the same row.
Too much volume. Questionable subject matter. Far from urgent. The rest of us don't need to hear that. Do they?
That part I'm on board with. Work conversations, kid conversations, spouse conversations that would never be aired in public otherwise, and now I'm privy to toilet-stopped-up issues on the bus.
> “It's popular because it worked at successful companies.”
Is there evidence of this? I’ve only ever heard of cases where companies succeeded in spite of the open plan office, meanwhile you’ve got a place like Stack Overflow that is succeeding even when footing the bill for private offices in Manhattan. Nobody’s copying them...
I think you have to enter the reality of executive status-seeking, cargo-cult copying, narcissistic corporate vanity and opulence, and other sociological problems to begin to understand open-plan offices.
> Is there evidence of this? I’ve only ever heard of cases where companies succeeded in spite of the open plan office, meanwhile you’ve got a place like Stack Overflow that is succeeding even when footing the bill for private offices in Manhattan. Nobody’s copying them...
I searched around for info on this and couldn’t find anything really supporting your claim. At best I think you can say SO is going through all the same stuff that most other growing startups go through: needing to layoff some workers, pivot product strategies. That they are still raising money seems an indicator there is belief in the products, but sure, they might not make it.
For purposes of evaluating whether open-plan offices are effective, your comment seems at best disingenuous and at worst just some axe to grind against SO.
I wish I had noted the article when I'd originally read it, but a couple of years ago I read one which surveyed many of the creators of 'big products' in those successful companies, asking them about their working environment. Most of those companies did, it is true, feature open offices. None of the companies benefitted from them. Those who built the important products that catapulted those companies to success did so without exception away from their desk. As I recall, one would find an empty office or conference room and simply claim it for a few hours to get some work done. Another would go outside and work on a bench, away from everyone else. Another would work primarily late at night when others weren't around. The companies succeeded in spite of their open offices, not because of them. But many MBAs are little more than cargo cultists, following along what others who are successful have done without any understanding or curiosity as to the 'why' the thing worked for them and whether it would apply to their own organization.
"But many MBAs are little more than cargo cultists, following along what others who are successful have done without any understanding or curiosity as to the 'why' the thing worked for them and whether it would apply to their own organization."
That's pretty much how MBA classes work with their case studies.
"All that said, the open office approach itself is a cheap cheat / proxy for an open minded collaborative organization. It's popular because it worked at successful companies. The problem is, for those conpanies it was more a correlation than a cause."
Exactly. Collaboration is a mindset, not an office layout. Same happened with Agile. Let's just pick some random artifacts from Scrum and think we are Agile instead of actually being agile.
> Moi? I see flags raising when tools are blamed (?) for cultural issues. In addition, it's not the quantity of face to face interactions that matter but the quality.
I don't think it's blaming the tools, rather just commenting that when you're jammed into an open office, sending an email is far less disrupting to your colleagues than having a conversation in person.
My experience has been fine once I got some good noise canceling headphones, before that I had serious issues concentrating. My main issue is not having long uninterrupted blocks of time to complete projects that require a lot of focus.
For me headphones don’t help. The constant peripheral movement and people walking aroundbehind me are the biggest issues, just triggers a fight vs flight reflex to constantly check where people are around me.
Lighting and other environmental factors are second biggest issue.
The simple fact that Panasonic sees a (profitable) need for something like their Human Blinkers, it feels more like a cure for the symptom and not the cause.
There were a lot more cubes in the olden days and people hated those as well. Please, don't forget that historical knowledge. But open plan is not better.
I think what happened is, very basically, we saw that water cooler / hallway conversations were so much easier than going and bothering someone in their cube or office. You knew in that context that you were not bothering someone so much, just mentioning something at lunch. At lot more cross pollination. So people took that and ran with it, thinking that tearing down the walls would increase collaboration.
But what the missed was the context. Hallway context = you're not bothering too much. Open plan context = now you're bothering not only that person but everyone around them as well. It wasn't the walls, it was expectations for focus in a given space.
The Big Thing to remember here is that we still need regular workday contexts where we do lower the threshold to team collaboration. Many of us engineers here on HN love to get on these thread and say stuff like, total isolation and concentration all day long? Sounds great! Maximize my productivity! That brings us back to cubes. But it's actually important to strike a balance with team productivity and cross pollination as well. Open plan is not it though. Maybe we need to bring back the water cooler with the tiny cups.[1]
[1] Just kidding, that would be terribly wasteful.
There's a whole lot more noise isolation than no cubicles at all. This greatly varies depending on the cubicles.
The cubicles at the feynman computing center in fermilab were practically reconfigurable offices with dividers nearly reaching to the ceiling.
There are certainly bad cubicles which serve almost no purpose at all. I think what you'll find is it's mostly just a regression over time from private offices to open floor plans. Throughout the middle ground it starts out with office-like cubicles, and towards the open plan end of the time window they have low, thin walls before completely vanishing.
In my opinion it's mostly cost-driven. Companies are trying to increase the worker density, especially in areas like silicon valley where ft^2 is at a premium.
They're just using "improved collaboration" as a consolation prize without admitting "we simply can't afford to give you all reasonable isolation anymore, and there's so many of you engineers on the market you no longer all have leverage to demand it"
Frankly, the talented folks easily get sufficient leverage to work from home or wherever they want anyways. So it's not really all that big of a deal, unless you're stuck in the office because you lack the leverage to escape.
> There's a whole lot more noise isolation than no cubicles at all. This greatly varies depending on the cubicles.
You realize that these two statements contradict each other, right?
My experience has been that cubicles offer little or no noise isolation as compared to no cubicles; both alternatives are basically the same (i.e., much worse) in comparison with offices.
YMMV was your second statement. Your first statement was a flat assertion that is false for many people, including me.
> You're applying a worst case experience with a cubicle to all cubicles
No, I'm saying that the worst case experience exists and is basically the same as no cubicles. Your statement that I objected to was "There's a whole lot more noise isolation than no cubicles at all", which is simply false for the worst case (which I think is fairly common actually).
No way. In cubes you still get plenty of noise. You can't have a quiet private conversation in cubes. You still have people walking behind your back. And you have a gray wall to stare at.
Noise exists in both, but a cubicle does have enough wall to remove peripheral movement while you're trying to focus.
But I get your point - you can arrange to have your back to a cubicle wall, but then you get more peripheral movement, or you end up with people walking behind you (which I find much worse)
> Hallway context = you're not bothering too much. Open plan context = now you're bothering not only that person but everyone around them as well. It wasn't the walls, it was expectations for focus in a given space.
So more watercoolers and coffee machines, then!
(Seriously, I think this would help. And location is important, too - you don't want the "dev team water cooler" at the back of the dev team office and the "project managers' water cooler" at the back of the project managers' office. You put one in between dev and project management and you put one in between project management and engineering, etc. so there's organic inter-silo mingling.)
I’ve mentally given up trying to fight open workspaces and hotdesks. Arguing about why it’s become the standard doesn’t help me. So I either work from home when I feel like doing intense work, or I’ve accepted that my productivity isn’t going to be as high at office.
And it’s not just the noise. I don’t like it when I feel like people are looking over my shoulder. I just concentrate better in a smaller, self contained room.
>yet there is scant direct empirical research on how human interaction patterns change as a result of these architectural changes
wat.
There are literally more than 1,000 studies that have been done on the impact of open floor plan offices to productivity (almost universally finding very significant negative effects). My mind boggles at how anyone interested in the topic could possibly conclude that there is scant evidence on the subject. It's extremely well-trod terrain.
Office spaces were designed for repetitive office tasks which assisted repetitive manufacturing operations. Mental work is profoundly and fundamentally different in character, and offices have never been designed with the goal of enhancing it. The place of work in society, the idea of the 40 hour work week, and all such things are still following practices optimized for manufacturing. That human beings have different capacities for mental exertion compared to physical exertion, that the benefits of uninterrupted concentration are super-linear in terms of time spent in that state, and that mental work of poor quality can have very negative value, causing the expenditure of far more effort overall than necessary, these sorts of things get ignored. Doing anything in a business which appears to make things 'easier' on workers is reflexively viewed at least with suspicion, if not outright derision. That's a social problem, mostly, and not one that is likely to change over short time spans or without great effort and risks being taken. It's understandable that most companies are risk-averse, so change happens slowly.
The quest for diversity in the workplace should include the physical layout. To gather a diverse set of solutions to a business problem, collaboration is essential, but so is a limit to collaboration. Assign three people to generate a proposed solution. You'll get a more diverse solution set to cherry pick from the _less_ they collaborate. After that is the right time to collaborate. A physical layout that supports this includes both isolated workspaces and conference rooms.
Or, coming soon, save money on floor space by cramming folks together like sardines but wearing VR rigs to simulate isolation. Or use the same tech to simulate collaborative spaces among remote workers.
What I don't get is why they hand wave as to why the f2f interaction reduces.
They even say "people isolate themselves with headphones", and don't look at the converse: if you need to wear headphones because of people talking, you probably realize the frustration you cause other people if you have a conversation around them.
This is not a hard concept, and it remains weird that they don't address it.
They talk about all sorts of complex topics ("Similarly, recent collective intelligence work suggests that, like our open offices, too much information from social data can be problematic", "assumes that spatial boundaries built into workspace architecture support collaboration and collective intelligence by mitigating the effects of the cognitive constraints of the human beings working within them.", etc), rather than going:
1. Open plan means more distraction. By design: that is the increased f2f interaction.
2. Basic decency means people attempt to reduce unnecessary distractions for others.
Not my experience - people do talk in open offices because fundamentally there is a point where email, etc just doesn't work.
Open offices shift the cost of f2f communication vs. email/chat. Different people have different thresholds, but I suspect that there are few people for which open office doesn't move the talk vs. text bar.
I wonder if any of these studies of workspaces take sound into consideration. These studies seem visual in nature, where sound tends to be as significant for many of us.
I've worked remotely, from cubes, open offices, and have spent plenty a working hour in cafes. And amazingly, I've noticed I focus best either isolated (at home), or at a cafe, where I'm effectively surrounded by white noise.
Edit: I'm not just interested in "is person talking" or not, but what is the nature of the sound environment.
For me, people talking is not "white noise". People banging on things is not "white noise". Machines dinging and donging and bleeping and blarping is not "white noise".
For me, only actual white noise would qualify as "white noise".
And even true white noise can be pretty distracting if it is too loud.
As dang mentioned, threads about open office hate are pretty common on HN, so I'll talk about the time I liked an open office plan, and try to figure out why I liked it.
The one time I really, really enjoyed an open office was when my desk was in a corner. I sat with my back to the corner, facing out toward the open room. So I felt like I got to enjoy a bit of privacy, while still enjoying the benefits of the openness. Things never really got so noisy that I couldn't concentrate, which was nice. I wore headphones sometimes, but it was because I wanted to, do because I felt like doing so was necessary for concentration.
In contrast, I don't think I'd do as well in an office with nothing but long rows of developers packed in like sardines. It feels a bit too much like this:
I also once (and only once) had a positive experience with an open office.
At the first startup I worked at, the entire team of about 10 people sat in a ~700sqft "war room." Computers and desks lined two of the walls, whiteboards lined the other two walls. Open space in the middle. Everyone was in a technical role.
I was very junior at the time, but I learned a lot. I had the opportunity to listen to how the senior engineers discussed problems and the considerations they thought important. The writing and diagrams on the whiteboard were the reference for component interactions and process flow. The room was mostly quiet, except for technical discussion. It was easy to run end-to-end tests by simply talking to the person who owned the component at the other end of the stack. I learned a lot in that role.
We were a small team focused on the same product. Every issue any one person ran into was within the scope of concern of every other person in that room. I think it was an effective setup.
I think similarly important research would be to measure the health impact of these offices. We should make the business world visible/transparent and legally responsible of their impact on human societies.
It’s critical to not let up on this topic, and to pedantically keep energy focused on hammering home the points that cost-effectiveness does not support choosing open plan layouts, headphones don’t solve the problem, and to understand this choice by corporations you have to look at status signalling and sociological problems.
Even treating the topic like it’s some kind of even or fair debate about productivity is a problem now. It’s well beyond dispute that productivity suffers to such a degree that it erases any cost savings. It’s important to stop acting like there is some need for further proof or debate about this, and move on to social outrage and unwillingness to engage with companies that choose for _everyone_ to be embedded in open plan layouts (rather than letting some workers choose open spaces if they like it, other workers choose private offices if they need it, and simply just paying what this costs).
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[ 0.84 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] threadMaybe the counter intuitive nature of open office layouts is actually better because it has people communicating faster over email.
On the plus side, however, it creates a written artifact that people can refer back to later. This can be incredibly useful, particularly for people with working memory or other executive function issues. Or for things that are complicated enough that a normal amount of WM/EF cannot cope with what's being communicated.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/04/our-cub...
Four years later and we still see plenty of backlash from the open office concept. Is there a sweet spot somewhere in the middle, or will there be a sort of hybrid cubicle/open office concept in the near future?
I'm curious to see what the future holds for office spaces if neither of these are decent solutions.
Its actually about saving money.
This is as they say in yes minister "not readily believable"
You're now sitting at a table, with someone sitting right next to you and their arms are literally inches away from yours), and you have someone sitting right next to you on the other side, just as close. You have someone sitting across from you, and you are constantly fighting for foot space underneath the table.
The table is just wide enough for your computer and your monitor, and you have no place to hang any paper or reference material. You do not have space for a second monitor. You don't have space for a pad of paper next to your keyboard. You don't even have space for your coffee cup where there isn't a high risk that it will get knocked over and spill all over the electronic devices you're using.
You have literally three feet width of table space, and maybe two feet depth. You've got a chair, and you can roll it back far enough to get into it and slide your legs under the table, but if you try to roll it back any further than that then you will hit your neighbor behind you.
That is an open office. Welcome to my world.
Here's the answer: you can measure the savings over cubicles, and you can't measure the reduced productivity.
No, it's definitely about the money.
The cost savings 'per person' are quite a lot, and that's hard dollars on the spreadsheet.
'Productivity' is a very difficult thing to quantify.
In that business case, the 'hard measure' almost always wins.
Business runs on decisions like that, not on intuition, it takes somebody with a lot of power to override or make a bet on something that's going to 'cost the company money' according to the accountants.
Square footage is expensive, so are cubes, and especially offices ... when your VP Ops is running around, he's trying to get a sweet and cool location ... 'hey we can get this sweet studio for $x/sq foot' in SOMA two books from Caltrain station ... or we can work in the burbs of Oakland ...
Sadly, it's mostly a cost decision.
We didn't have permanent desks because they were more expensive, and my boss explicitly said so. He also refused to pay for peripherals or for stationary. I'm ideologically opposed to spending my hard earned money on things for work, so I just used loose copier paper and a Macbook with no external monitor, keyboard, or mouse. Not my problem that my productivity was negatively affected.
Some employers really fail to see the bigger picture on these things. Refusing to spend a few dollars on notebooks for me to write in resulted in my notes being scattered all over the place and lost (I'm a big fan of pen and paper). Refusing to pay for a monitor just resulted in me being stuck using a tiny 13" screen. Apparently when I was hired the CEO asked my manager if I would be able to work with an iPad instead of him having to pay for a Macbook Pro. It's really not an attitude conducive to employee moral, I never felt valued in the company, because I was made to feel like a cost, rather than an asset.
Moi? I see flags raising when tools are blamed (?) for cultural issues. In addition, it's not the quantity of face to face interactions that matter but the quality.
All that said, the open office approach itself is a cheap cheat / proxy for an open minded collaborative organization. It's popular because it worked at successful companies. The problem is, for those conpanies it was more a correlation than a cause.
Yes, face to face matters. But, as mentioned, so does quality and context (i.e., culture).
I'm trapped in a dystopian open-office nightmare as well. When somebody comes up and starts talking to the guy who sits next to me, right in my ear, it's distracting as hell. So when I'm considering talking to somebody else in the office, I take into account the fact that I'm going to be distracting all of the people within earshot of this conversation that they almost definitely don't care about. As a matter of politeness, I try to use chat tools so that I don't disrupt any more people than I need to. Of course, cubicle walls solves that problem and permits face-to-face conversation, but that's not worth a few extra bucks apparently.
In contrast, most people are totally happy to blather about mindlessly, without any thought or care at all about who they are bothering with their chatter.
1) This isn't only at work, it's everywhere. Just yesterday I was wondering: When / how did walking around talking out loud to yourself (i.e., your phone) become normalized. How / why does having an unseen device in your hand or pocket make rude acceptable?
2) I also wonder how cultural this is? That is, is it only a USA thing? Are there cultures where this is less common? Where open plans might be doable, or at least less offensive?
Perhaps too often I'm on the wrong place at the wrong time but I hear plenty of half conversations in public (e.g., on the train) that would not happen if both parties were in the same row.
Too much volume. Questionable subject matter. Far from urgent. The rest of us don't need to hear that. Do they?
Is there evidence of this? I’ve only ever heard of cases where companies succeeded in spite of the open plan office, meanwhile you’ve got a place like Stack Overflow that is succeeding even when footing the bill for private offices in Manhattan. Nobody’s copying them...
I think you have to enter the reality of executive status-seeking, cargo-cult copying, narcissistic corporate vanity and opulence, and other sociological problems to begin to understand open-plan offices.
Stack Overflow is going out of business...
For purposes of evaluating whether open-plan offices are effective, your comment seems at best disingenuous and at worst just some axe to grind against SO.
You mean, you want human beings to be treated like ... actual human beings?!?
What kind of crazy person are you?!?
;)
That's pretty much how MBA classes work with their case studies.
Exactly. Collaboration is a mindset, not an office layout. Same happened with Agile. Let's just pick some random artifacts from Scrum and think we are Agile instead of actually being agile.
I don't think it's blaming the tools, rather just commenting that when you're jammed into an open office, sending an email is far less disrupting to your colleagues than having a conversation in person.
Lighting and other environmental factors are second biggest issue.
The simple fact that Panasonic sees a (profitable) need for something like their Human Blinkers, it feels more like a cure for the symptom and not the cause.
I'm not sure I get the fight or flight response, but I certainly am constantly aware of the people walking by constantly.
I think what happened is, very basically, we saw that water cooler / hallway conversations were so much easier than going and bothering someone in their cube or office. You knew in that context that you were not bothering someone so much, just mentioning something at lunch. At lot more cross pollination. So people took that and ran with it, thinking that tearing down the walls would increase collaboration.
But what the missed was the context. Hallway context = you're not bothering too much. Open plan context = now you're bothering not only that person but everyone around them as well. It wasn't the walls, it was expectations for focus in a given space.
The Big Thing to remember here is that we still need regular workday contexts where we do lower the threshold to team collaboration. Many of us engineers here on HN love to get on these thread and say stuff like, total isolation and concentration all day long? Sounds great! Maximize my productivity! That brings us back to cubes. But it's actually important to strike a balance with team productivity and cross pollination as well. Open plan is not it though. Maybe we need to bring back the water cooler with the tiny cups.[1]
[1] Just kidding, that would be terribly wasteful.
People hated cubes in contrast to having an office, not in contrast to sharing one huge office without any privacy at all.
Not if the major disadvantage to open plan is that you're constantly being disturbed by your coworkers because there is no noise isolation.
The cubicles at the feynman computing center in fermilab were practically reconfigurable offices with dividers nearly reaching to the ceiling.
There are certainly bad cubicles which serve almost no purpose at all. I think what you'll find is it's mostly just a regression over time from private offices to open floor plans. Throughout the middle ground it starts out with office-like cubicles, and towards the open plan end of the time window they have low, thin walls before completely vanishing.
In my opinion it's mostly cost-driven. Companies are trying to increase the worker density, especially in areas like silicon valley where ft^2 is at a premium.
They're just using "improved collaboration" as a consolation prize without admitting "we simply can't afford to give you all reasonable isolation anymore, and there's so many of you engineers on the market you no longer all have leverage to demand it"
Frankly, the talented folks easily get sufficient leverage to work from home or wherever they want anyways. So it's not really all that big of a deal, unless you're stuck in the office because you lack the leverage to escape.
You realize that these two statements contradict each other, right?
My experience has been that cubicles offer little or no noise isolation as compared to no cubicles; both alternatives are basically the same (i.e., much worse) in comparison with offices.
You're applying a worst case experience with a cubicle to all cubicles. I've had offices that sucked too, it doesn't mean offices are universally bad.
YMMV was your second statement. Your first statement was a flat assertion that is false for many people, including me.
> You're applying a worst case experience with a cubicle to all cubicles
No, I'm saying that the worst case experience exists and is basically the same as no cubicles. Your statement that I objected to was "There's a whole lot more noise isolation than no cubicles at all", which is simply false for the worst case (which I think is fairly common actually).
But I get your point - you can arrange to have your back to a cubicle wall, but then you get more peripheral movement, or you end up with people walking behind you (which I find much worse)
Cubicles are somewhere in the middle between the two extremes.
So more watercoolers and coffee machines, then!
(Seriously, I think this would help. And location is important, too - you don't want the "dev team water cooler" at the back of the dev team office and the "project managers' water cooler" at the back of the project managers' office. You put one in between dev and project management and you put one in between project management and engineering, etc. so there's organic inter-silo mingling.)
And it’s not just the noise. I don’t like it when I feel like people are looking over my shoulder. I just concentrate better in a smaller, self contained room.
wat.
There are literally more than 1,000 studies that have been done on the impact of open floor plan offices to productivity (almost universally finding very significant negative effects). My mind boggles at how anyone interested in the topic could possibly conclude that there is scant evidence on the subject. It's extremely well-trod terrain.
Office spaces were designed for repetitive office tasks which assisted repetitive manufacturing operations. Mental work is profoundly and fundamentally different in character, and offices have never been designed with the goal of enhancing it. The place of work in society, the idea of the 40 hour work week, and all such things are still following practices optimized for manufacturing. That human beings have different capacities for mental exertion compared to physical exertion, that the benefits of uninterrupted concentration are super-linear in terms of time spent in that state, and that mental work of poor quality can have very negative value, causing the expenditure of far more effort overall than necessary, these sorts of things get ignored. Doing anything in a business which appears to make things 'easier' on workers is reflexively viewed at least with suspicion, if not outright derision. That's a social problem, mostly, and not one that is likely to change over short time spans or without great effort and risks being taken. It's understandable that most companies are risk-averse, so change happens slowly.
Or, coming soon, save money on floor space by cramming folks together like sardines but wearing VR rigs to simulate isolation. Or use the same tech to simulate collaborative spaces among remote workers.
They even say "people isolate themselves with headphones", and don't look at the converse: if you need to wear headphones because of people talking, you probably realize the frustration you cause other people if you have a conversation around them.
This is not a hard concept, and it remains weird that they don't address it.
They talk about all sorts of complex topics ("Similarly, recent collective intelligence work suggests that, like our open offices, too much information from social data can be problematic", "assumes that spatial boundaries built into workspace architecture support collaboration and collective intelligence by mitigating the effects of the cognitive constraints of the human beings working within them.", etc), rather than going:
1. Open plan means more distraction. By design: that is the increased f2f interaction.
2. Basic decency means people attempt to reduce unnecessary distractions for others.
Open offices shift the cost of f2f communication vs. email/chat. Different people have different thresholds, but I suspect that there are few people for which open office doesn't move the talk vs. text bar.
I've worked remotely, from cubes, open offices, and have spent plenty a working hour in cafes. And amazingly, I've noticed I focus best either isolated (at home), or at a cafe, where I'm effectively surrounded by white noise.
Edit: I'm not just interested in "is person talking" or not, but what is the nature of the sound environment.
For me, only actual white noise would qualify as "white noise".
And even true white noise can be pretty distracting if it is too loud.
YMMV.
The one time I really, really enjoyed an open office was when my desk was in a corner. I sat with my back to the corner, facing out toward the open room. So I felt like I got to enjoy a bit of privacy, while still enjoying the benefits of the openness. Things never really got so noisy that I couldn't concentrate, which was nice. I wore headphones sometimes, but it was because I wanted to, do because I felt like doing so was necessary for concentration.
In contrast, I don't think I'd do as well in an office with nothing but long rows of developers packed in like sardines. It feels a bit too much like this:
https://maas.museum/app/uploads/sites/7/2018/08/xCaption-9_e...
Does anyone else feel this way? As though there are both good ways and bad ways to do open plan offices?
At the first startup I worked at, the entire team of about 10 people sat in a ~700sqft "war room." Computers and desks lined two of the walls, whiteboards lined the other two walls. Open space in the middle. Everyone was in a technical role.
I was very junior at the time, but I learned a lot. I had the opportunity to listen to how the senior engineers discussed problems and the considerations they thought important. The writing and diagrams on the whiteboard were the reference for component interactions and process flow. The room was mostly quiet, except for technical discussion. It was easy to run end-to-end tests by simply talking to the person who owned the component at the other end of the stack. I learned a lot in that role.
We were a small team focused on the same product. Every issue any one person ran into was within the scope of concern of every other person in that room. I think it was an effective setup.
Direct employees of the company get more space than that, but not us dirty, rotten, stinking contractors.
For them, humans are a cost center. And cost centers exist for only one purpose -- to be squeezed out of existence.
So why do you think they would care about how the humans in the company are treated?
Even treating the topic like it’s some kind of even or fair debate about productivity is a problem now. It’s well beyond dispute that productivity suffers to such a degree that it erases any cost savings. It’s important to stop acting like there is some need for further proof or debate about this, and move on to social outrage and unwillingness to engage with companies that choose for _everyone_ to be embedded in open plan layouts (rather than letting some workers choose open spaces if they like it, other workers choose private offices if they need it, and simply just paying what this costs).