This article is from 2018 and gets posted pretty regularly. I happen to agree with its core thesis but I'm not sure we get anything out of having it on the front page again.
Mostly I think every posting offers those stuck in open plan offices a chance to vent and to realise that the layout is objectivly awful.
Knowing that so many others feel the same way and that the terrible experience isn't due to your own (weak! distracted! worthless!) personality is certainly worth something.
Good point - I stumbled on the article again and decided to post it. It already has ~20 comments, and it's on the front page. My take is that even if the article is not the best on the topic, the conversation about it is happening.
I don't think there's an article out there that I would consider far superior to this. If there is, please post it, I'd upvote it in a heartbeat.
Context: I mostly work remote (a combination of luck, laziness, and my ability to ask for things I really want), but every time I have to be in the office (like today, leaving home in ~30 minutes), I have a weird, unpleasant feeling.
I know I don't like open floor plans.
I particularly don't like that people walking behind me can see my monitor.
I don't like that I can't take calls without disturbing others. Or that getting a private room to talk or make a video call is difficult.
Yesterday, for example, I had to leave a room where I was having a call because someone else had booked it, but I needed to extend the call by another ~15 minutes, so I ended up finishing it in the corridors next to the restrooms.
And mind you, I work with (not for) a great firm, people are super nice - but nobody seems to fully understand how toxic an open office space can be for people.
Finally, I also don't like that startups trying to partially solving these problems are getting funded like crazy, based on a relatively crappy product [0] and an expensive price tag.
I’d be really curious how much of a hit to people’s salary they would be willing to take, or the reduced capabilities of their business, to get an open office environment.
I worked with an internal team that created a brand new office for a decently-sized tech company. We had this exact debate: open or closed. We explored closed, or versions of it (see Spotify’s team rooms as a great example of a compromise), but the end result was the same: if we expected to grow substantially and expand our business a lot, real estate would be the biggest bottleneck. We’d literally have to pay people less and deliver slower if we wanted to make that trade off, and all the companies we talk to who had gone with some form of closed office had shifted to open over time because the costs were huge.
We did the next best thing, because we definitely heard the concerns of people that getting work done at work really was harder than it should be: we created as much private space for 1-2 people as possible that lots of people could use, so you got to decide whether you were in at your desk mode or heads down mode. Several years later, this seems to work all right. There’s still a desire to work from home occasionally, and my teams are pretty understanding about that. Even with the open office plan, though, we still have to rent virtually every open space around us.
I've worked in both open and closed office environments -- currently have my own office, and it is _much_ easier for me to be productive without distractions in this arrangement. Huge improvement in quality of work and quality of life. It's possible that I could be persuaded to go back to an open-office environment, but it would require a _lot_ of additional compensation -- like maybe 50+%.
My example is skewed because I also really enjoy my work, but I fully intend to stay in my current position for the rest of my career because I have a real office with a door. I work in Silicon Valley and just cracked 6 figures in total compensation this year. By far the biggest reason that I have no interest in considering moving is the seeming impossibility of getting a cubicle, much less an office, anywhere else. So empirically, I will give up anywhere from ~50k-200k to do work I enjoy in an office with a door.
It wouldn't have to be much of a salary cut. If you amortize the up-front cost for around a 110 square foot office, the total is only about $5,000 a year (more than an open office).
45 additional square feet at (a vastly overestimated) $100 per year per square foot for rent. $5,000 construction costs amortized over 10 years.
The way we thought about it was primarily butts in seats. For simplicity, if open office = about 1000, a reasonable closed office environment for us would have housed about half of that. If we needed 1000 to deliver product X, we’d either deliver product X over double the time or for double the (real estate) cost plus the non-local collaboration cost (not insurmountable, but it’s part of the tradeoff).
We’d need to see a closed office productivity increase of double or more to justify it, and we just couldn’t, even talking to other companies that had the kind of collaborative environment we thought of as ideal if we had infinite space. They didn’t see increases at that level.
To be clear, I’m seriously simplifying here. There are so many other considerations like workplace happiness, some amount of creative “collision” differences, churn and burnout, different individual needs for privacy, whether certain collaboration styles enabled by space fit the company culture, the type of work that’s happening, how likely that team structures will be the same in 1 year, 5 years, 10 years. Ultimately, we bet on space flexibility and giving teams more control over their space than giving everyone an office or team room. It’s hard to say what the alternate history would have been, but we do pretty regular surveys about workplace happiness and have seen significant positive increases compared to our old office (also open but much more rigid, far fewer private spaces) and general happiness with people’s access to private space and ability to get work done.
Edit: I also don’t want to overgeneralize. This made sense for us, but I think there are lots of situations where it does not make sense to have an open office, especially if you have a smaller company stocked primarily with very, very high performers doing individually-driven but very deep creative work (in the sense of integrating a lot of information). I would hope all companies would be more thoughtful about it, but I wanted to provide a little look at how a company that values privacy and enabling deep work might still arrive at an open office.
I was talking with a friend who works at a company HQ'd in NYC and he said that the average cost per person/desk was over 60k/yr. It was a lot higher than I was expecting.
But the portion that is ascribed to the raw footage would be under $10k/y...the other costs are not really correlated with shared bench vs cubicle vs private office.
No way...a nice sized cubicle is 100 sqft, and Class A rents in Manhattan are under $100/sqft/y. So the actual office space is something like $10,000 or less per year.
Of course there is other overhead, but space itself is in that range. So the max savings, in the most expensive market in the US, is under $10k per year.
But you don't rent by cubicle, you rent by floor or building. So adding a new employee when you have hit your max means you have to figure something out or sink a whole lot of money into a new building for one person.
Office in NYC was remodeled to open office, and the limits were determined by fire code, bathrooms, etc. In the end, a whole bunch of valuable floor space is sitting empty as relaxation rooms, a puzzle table, and funky couch areas that nobody wants to sit at because it’s next to a big boss’s office.
Practically speaking, most people are treating the shift as an implicit agreement that employees can work from home 90+% of the time.
That size seems high. 100 sqft would be a nice sized office. Cubicles are more like 30 square feet. Douglas Coupland gave cubicles the name "veal fattening pens" in Generation X but they're actually smaller now - calf enclosures are 30-35 sqft. The latest fad with standing desks is even smaller.
Yes, that's my point--the cost of raw office space for a single large cubicle/small office in Manhattan is under $10k/year. Other overhead is basically the same for a shared bench vs. large cubicle.
In Austin, I can get a modest 1-2 person private office for around $2k/month. At an annual salary of $120K, that's only 10-20% of developer costs. So the upper bound on the potential real estate savings of an open plan is on the order of 10-20%. Maybe a bit more if most devs are relatively inexperienced and therefore cheaper.
So while the savings is not nothing, when it's that small any potential productivity hit becomes even more of a big deal.
not just density, but "easier" for the decision makers. Its easier to rent a big open room than to figure out an office plan and seating plan and construction schedule. Its easier to move desks around like musical chairs than to have to mutate rooms and halls.
People will almost always take the near-term cheaper and easier option, even when its worse and more expensive in the long run.
Incidentally, this was the one thing I liked about we-work. Room sizes were genuinely appropriate for 2 - 5 people (ofc sold as 3 - 10).
CEO at my company did that and seemed to actually enjoy it, but other executives basically forced him to get an office because he was too often discussing confidential information out in the open.
Constant surveillance is another part of the real reason with collaboration used as the public rationale. I mean, it doesn't make sense, but it makes them feel more like slave-owners, and that makes them happy.
>Constant surveillance is another part of the real reason with collaboration used as the public rationale
when i worked on an open plan office, that was huge. it seems like my boss' favorite hobby was checking everyone's screen to see what they were doing.
once, i was watching a yt video on a monitor while i worked on the other. normal right? nope. my boss came to my "desk" and said i had to shut it down because it was bothering people (it wasn't anything offensive. it was literally a science podcast).
No, that's just another public rationale. Programmer salaries are much more expensive than even private offices.
In a past life, when I wrote software for a living, I would ask my managers how much it cost, so I could pay out of pocket for my own private office. In every case, when pressed, they admitted it wasn't about the money at all. They just needed me to be a Team Player.
It wasn't even about built-out cost. The private offices already existed, and were sitting empty, in anticipation of future sales team growth -- even though I don't think we were hiring for that yet. Everyone on the business side always got a private office. Come to think of it, I don't remember ever hearing management try to explain why the sales team apparently didn't need to be team players.
I am in no way advocating for open offices in any circumstance, but one common complaint I've heard from open-office dwellers is how they sit right next to the sales team who are always on their phones.
As a person who is frequently called by that sales team: I can tell immediately when I'm talking to someone who is in an open-office, and I associate them with phone spammers.
So, sales people: you're losing money because of that open-office environment.
I am not sure why employees would message and email more if they can just turn their chair around to chat about something they are working on.
Does anyone have experience of this? I have worked in open plan offices since 1999 and I've never experienced productivity problems. If anything I'd expect working in a cube would lead to more time wasted cruising websites since your screen is more obscured. I dunno, I've only worked in cubes a handful of times.
I've never really worked in a cubicle (once had a mid tower PC and dual monitors acting as partitions to the front and left) but wouldn't an advantage of an open plan office over a cubicle be that you can see your manager walking towards you from a mile off and be able to quickly look like you're working.
Not to mention that as knowledge workers, a lot of the value+ideas you provide come from reading and research that is not explicitly work related. I encourage my team to spend time doing non-related research and work/tinker on finding new things they are interested in, and to not feel guilty if I walk by and they have reddit or hn open/visible. That being said, working in an open office is like being stuck in a plane of purgatory.
Managers should trust their employees to get stuff done, and not micromanage their time. Employees should get stuff done whether their managers are watching their every move or not, and, trust their managers to not be micromanaging their time. We both need to create a trustworthy relationship.
I have no sympathy for employees who do not do work without being forced to any more than I do for bosses who want to micromanage every minute of employee time or every website they visit. You're both hurting all of us.
Here's another perspective: mercenary-leaning personality types may be able to compartmentalize micromanagement, but highly intrinsically-motivated minds are totally disrupted by it. The anxiety of observation lingers even when the boss isn't looking and all work begins to carry the sting of coercion. Effort for these people grows out of aligning personal agency with meaningful production, so forced conformity to arbitrary management practices (or worst of all, counterproductive ones) actively kills all but the minimal output to remain employed and put food on the table.
But personalities who don't experience the world this way interpret it under the simplistic moral judgment of "laziness", thus perpetuating the very incentive structure that causes it in the first place.
I find it highly dubious that there's a significant fraction of humans who are basically not industrious. That just doesn't seem possible or adaptive in the context of a tribe of hunter-gatherers eeking out survival on the savannah. Rather it seems that we're clinging to unsophisticated organizational structures from the Industrial Revolution, which enabled a highly technical society to emerge in the first place but were never iterated to handle things like psychological diversity or the explosion of highly specialized knowledge work. That’s why we have insanities like software designers working factory shifts, in noisy distracting settings, taking marching orders from people who have no idea what they do.
Like all relationships it is reciprocal notably. Demotivated or stressed employees are more likely to "full slack" (not doing any work as opposed to say switching to a lower intensity duty). Bosses who distrust their employees are more likely to micromanage and stress and demotivate.
Proper results oriented approaches can help for both parties. At the end of the day throughput is what matters for productivity not how hard they work. But that is logistically nontrivial to set up and calibrate properly, let alone other temptations and pressure to try to "optimize" beyond the ability to be sustained. Knowledge work in even the lowliest sense isn't optimal like an assembly line.
Making matters worse as usual for any would be reformers are inertia and politics of course. It is the ultimate "dancing monkey" but instead of being between security and the monkey choosing the latter, the choice is practical and wise decisions or politically pleasing ones.
I just recently went from a personal office to an open plan and find the new situation devoid of merit. Noise-canceling over-the-ear headphones are a must, and phone calls are impossible. Since meeting rooms are minimal, that's an issue too. I've done a handful of meetings in my car.
Even if he was, it’s a waste of time - even if the company started out with sane working conditions, they’ll eventually switch over to an open office because it saves 2% of the operating budget (on paper).
And woe to those who need to take a conference call with multiple of their desk neighbors but no conference rooms are available. Nothing like a bunch of people all sitting next to each other talking on the same phone call.
Why companies would implement an open office without a plethora of private meeting spaces is beyond me.
I suspect that, as people have been discussing upthread, open offices and a lack of meeting rooms are both symptoms of the underlying problem that a company just doesn't have enough space. I worked in an open office once where the company wasn't under space pressure, and it wasn't nearly as bad.
3/3 of my last companies have moved to new offices while I was there, proudly touting the open floor plan and increased number of meeting rooms.
3/3 found that the meeting rooms were inadequate before they even filled the open floor plan seating.
Open floor plans mean meeting rooms become mandatory for just about every interaction. The promised ease of interaction doesnt happen when everyone is in headphones and the polite people dont want to talk while in close quarters with others NOT in the conversation.
I can't tell you how many times I walked past the 12 person conference room with just two people sitting in there, because, where else are they going to have a private discussion when every other room is booked?
As you said, when everyone has an office, only meetings of more than a handful of people need a separate conference room.
Don't know, don't care. If they have a problem with it, they should talk to management. I'd personally be fine with a private office, but I have my doubts about getting one.
In an open-plan office, "turning their chair around to chat" involves everyone in the vicinity who overhears the conversation, and "turning around" is only possible for the single-digit number of next-seat neighbours.
Consider the opposite extreme of private offices. An impromptu meeting involves some walking, but otherwise the meeting stays between just those directly-involved. There's no cost to anyone else.
Keeping this distracting effect in mind, silent communication (messaging) looks more attractive.
I'm working in an open office now. With few exceptions, every single person wears headphones (presumably noise-canceling) most of the day. Some people (especially me) have video conferences from our desks.
For a "hey there" conversation, most teammates have to get up and walk over to someone else... tap them to shake them out of their focus and get them to take their headphones off.
Don't think any of us resort to email, but then again I'm only on one of many teams. We do use Slack but again I don't know how many private Slack conversations occur. (Most of my team is not located here, so everything is Slack, and most of it is in a team channel.)
I'm not sure I have a solid takeaway, but I can say that I'm much, much more engaged with my remote teammates than my local ones.
>For a "hey there" conversation, most teammates have to get up and walk over to someone else... tap them to shake them out of their focus and get them to take their headphones off.
I think it's pretty tough to read if it's okay to interrupt when your teammate is wearing headphones (especially if, as you said, everyone wears them most of the day). Sometimes I'm just wearing headphones to listen to some music while doing something easy and tedious, which would be okay to interrupt. But if I'm diving deep into some system to find a mystery bug, then I'd be annoyed if interrupted.
I'm currently working on a project exploring physical interruptions and would appreciate hearing about your (and other HN users') experiences: https://forms.gle/syL1XrLAauxd57hr7
I worked in an open-office for a year and my experience there was pretty bad. I was in a deep-work, heavy focus department sandwiched between two walking paths (we called our desks "Review Island") and literally anyone in the company including CEO could walk within 2 feet of you when they headed for coffee or water. So, you're on edge, your peripheral vision is a ton of people walking by. Then, the two departments next to us were very collaborative, they involved a lot of conversations...and yet, they also hated the open-office.
People want to have conversations when they want to; at other times, they want silence. I think there was an effect where no one wanted to interrupt others' silence, so they just emailed or chatted when a simple walk-over-and-chat would suffice...if we had had more space and more individuals with offices, I think a lot more productive collaboration would've occurred.
So, in summary, the noise/distraction was already so bad, we didn't want to make it worse.
Simple, when you go visit someone in a private office you can close the door and have a long conversation about your topic and really hash out the details. If you turn around and start blabbering to one of your teammates in an open office plan, everyone within hearing distance will want to murder you. If you're not aware of this, I guarantee everyone within 30 feet of you is already wearing headphones and hates you.
So now you have to coordinate on Slack to go to one of the shared team meeting rooms instead. At that point you might as well have your conversation in Slack, even if the person is sitting right next to you. And that's the state of open offices today, co-located but void of any actual collaboration.
I've worked in single person offices, 2-3 person offices and open offices. 2-3 person offices where everyone works on the same thing is the best, by far. Remote work is the new private office, not quite as good as a 2-3 person office, but infinitely better than an open office.
Honestly, I don't see this as a thing once you get to a certain size. It used to be a thing at my workplace when we were smaller. However, now, the place is just so loud with conversation/whatever on a daily basis that people are less bothered by individual conversations near them. It's like complaining about conversation next to you when you're in a cafeteria full of it already.
Everyone wears headphones at my place if they're trying to focus. Last job literally handed out construction ear muffs.
Also, all the rooms are taken up by meetings. Mostly by business/product. There's no rooms left for engineers to hash things out, frequently.
> However, now, the place is just so loud with conversation/whatever on a daily basis that people are less bothered by individual conversations near them.
I cannot adequately describe the horror this sentence induces in me.
Feel like it's pretty normal in SV - but, I don't like it either.
I haven't really been in a startup office that wasn't this way in quite a while. First startup I was at played music all the time - that wasn't great. Second place (not a startup) had engineers stationed next to sales people who had to be on the phone all the time at their desks. Third one - the sales folks were further away but everyone not in engineering was so loud that they gave those muffs out (lots of customer service reps sat near engineering too - lots of phone calls). And now I am at one where everyone is next to everyone even at a billion dollar company. Each person gets a 60"x30" desk (it might be smaller actually) and they shove 6-8 of them together in groups of 2x3 or 2x4. Then put them in really close proximity where you have about 12-18" between your chair at your desk and the person behind you. Not uncommon to run into the person behind you. This is for a company with over $100mil in funding. There's about 100 people in the office. It's not a very large office at all.
Most people just don't join the company if it's an issue - but I don't think anyone has cited that as an issue yet. Most people complain more about the terrible codebase or poor management or bad numbers or poor compensation. (Inclusive or)
> Everyone wears headphones at my place if they're trying to focus. Last job literally handed out construction ear muffs.
This doesn't work for a lot of people, including myself. Being sonically cut off from the environment causes many people a great deal of anxiety and stress.
Private offices aren't cubes. You can still hear conversations with cubicles. And if you have an office with more than one person, the long conversation still disrupts the other people in the office.
Long conversations do deserve private space, but this can be resolved by having ample meeting spaces.
You can hear loud conversations. Those fabric walls do a surprisingly good job at limiting the spread of a normal-volume conversation to about 1 cubicle around you, and you can speak in soft tones and not be heard at all.
I think I need to know what kind of businesses actually have people working in discrete offices of 2-3 people. The only place I've really seen this is at Kodak/Creo. It was horrible and stagnant.
White noise generators and proper office design mitigate nearly all of your concerns. There is obviously etiquette to having quick conversations around colleagues and meeting rooms are always available for deeper collaboration. For the most part our work is planned out carefully, most problems can be resolved via a couple of quick Slack messages.
I feel socialized and look forward to coming to work. If I worked in a small 2-3 person silo I'd feel like an instrument of industry rather than a family member. I know that sounds trite but it's true, feeling part of a larger team / the business as a whole is incredibly motivating.
I admit my concept of small private offices is marred by my own experiences of those work environments which have all been just soulless bad places to work. I know that is not the rule for cube/small office workplace design.
You would message and email more because you can't just turn your chair around to chat about something you are working on. If you do that, you kill the productivity of a dozen other people while you have that chat, and get them mad at you as a bonus.
I remember one office design where they had these tables placed between desks faced back to back, on the theory that people would use those tables for collaborative work. Instead, the tables just became oversized bookshelves. People couldn't have a conversation over them because conversations make noise.
>I am not sure why employees would message and email more if they can just turn their chair around to chat about something they are working on.
Well first of, if I just turn my chair around, I'm talking to the wall.
Secondly, I could yell at another develop from one table and they might not even realise because they're wearing noise-cancelling headphones. I mean, of course they are, they are in a room with 30+ other people.
If I want to collaborate in an open office, I need to get up from my desk, walk to someone else's desk, tap them on the shoulder to get them to remove their headphones and then stand there and talk to the other person + 10 people around them.
By definition, there can only be max four people (usually less) you can just “turn your chair around and talk to” without shouting over somebody else’s head - or just getting up and walking over to where they are just as you would if people had cubes. Your insinuation that this is possible or meaningful is so obviously disingenuous that I’m having a hard time you’re making it in good faith: if you’d tried it for even a few hours you’d be able to see the flaw in it.
Not every solution will solve every problem for every person.
Some people thrive in open environments, some don’t. Some people need accidental encounters to propel innovative change, some don’t.
To say these types of cultures are “dumb” (or even the opposite) is akin saying “peanut butter is the worst possible thing you could ever eat!” just because you’re allergic to it.
A randomized controlled trial with some clear prospectively defined measure of detriment would be how to prove that. Actually running a trial like that is going to be logistically near impossible though.
The OP's point is that open plan offices don't even encourage things they claim to encourage, like those "accidental encounters" that may be helpful for some people. In an open-plan office, everyone ends up avoiding in-person interaction because of how distracting it can be to those around them.
A research paper with n = 2 (companies) isn't exactly representative.
Anecdotally, I've seen the complete opposite (where in-person interactions happen far more because of the open floor plan) at three large companies. So the point stands: open floor plans will not produce positive results for every organization, that's to be expected.
Snark aside, I have a personal office and I love it. I don't like to listen to constant noise/music to cancel out the other noise/music. I like being able to have private calls without all of the noise in the background. If I'm working on something particularly difficult I like closing my door and having peace and quiet. I also enjoy the sense of ownership and prestige. It's nice feeling like I matter and my space and attention are worth something.
Working in an open office is too chaotic for me. Being around people is exhausting and distracting. I like to have a space I can retreat to for a few hours and get some deep work done. Silence is usually what I appreciate the most.
Just to get the alternate view out there too: I had an office once with a door that closed. As an extrovert it was awful. I felt lonely all day. The only way to get any human contact besides email and text was to leave and go walk the halls or find some common area. I ended up pretty much never using it and instead worked from the break room. From time to time they’d give me an officemate to share the office, but they were all extroverts too, so of course were never around.
Different strokes for different folks. I love open offices and wouldn’t go back to closed ones if given the choice. I also have difficulty WFH for the same reasons.
More employers should offer more choices, as everyone is different and what suits one worker might be awful for another.
At one point I had an office that I shared with a couple other people. I had shelves, blackboards, and a couple people to talk to. Outside the office was common space. It was great!
Downside: the arrangement was likely quite expensive.
As a thought experiment, imagine that a company offered each employee a choice - a private work area or a cacophonous open bullpen. You and I both know that 90% of the employees would choose the private work areas, and all five of you “extroverts” would move into the open area. What we have is an extremely tiny minority forcing their preferences on everybody else, not caring much about the negative impact. Of course, we also all know that open offices are about surveillance and saving a few dollars (on paper) and not about collaboration anyway.
This always comes up in these discussions. Extroverts say they prefer the open office format because they can talk to others. That's nice and all, but shouldn't you be working rather than satisfying your desire to talk to others? (The same goes for workers not in an open office not playing on HN all day.)
It's not necessarily just to idly chat with other people, but has more to do with where you get your energy. I find I'm most productive and energized when surrounded by other people. Conversation is a part of it, and the ability to collaborate on the fly is great. If I'm heads down on something it's fine to be isolated every so often, but if it's for more than a few days my energy level is sunk and my productivity actually decreases dramatically.
I get it and I totally appreciate my extrovert colleagues. I think the ability to have both is good. Sometimes I do like to work with others.
It's just that often open-plan offices are an all-or-nothing affair. It's a weird way to construct a space for people to work and collaborate given how different we all are.
These conversations always seem to be extremely one-sided, and it's frustrating. I wouldn't even classify myself as an extrovert; it's a continuum and people fall all over the place. Ultimately, though, an ideal office needs to cater to everyone.
Some of my favorite offices have been ones that have the typical open office structure, but also lots and lots of "hiding places" and different areas. I'm super ADHD and changes in scenery were helpful, and being able to adapt my environment to the task at hand, or even give people having impromptu conversations a refuge so the desk areas weren't noisy.
The startup I work at currently encourages everyone to work from home tuesdays and thursdays. It makes for a great mix; when I'm in the office I can engage with my coworkers, catch up, or have those deeper discussions that inevitably come up face-to-face. Work that requires intense concentration can be batched for those days, or I can opt to take additional time at home if necessary.
Workplaces themselves are so egregiously one-sides in the other direction that these discussions have to be one-sided, because by definition it’s the huge, huge majority of people who find the existing actually workplaces to be one-sidesly disergonomic.
You’re worried that the discussion is one-sides. I’m worried that physical workplaces are one-sided, today, for real, to such an extent that it’s deeply cognitively harmful to many people.
Is there? About the only thing I've seen suggested that might work is to offer everyone a choice but as another poster commented, the vast majority would choose an office over an open floorplan.
Group rooms, shared offices, etc., would be an acceptable compromise for some but far from all. These middle solutions still have the negatives of the open floorplan just on a smaller scale. If you prefer cola and I prefer water, watered down cola isn't going to make either of us very happy.
What I'm saying is that it goes beyond socializing; if I'm cut off from other people and heads-down all the time I get depressed and it's counter-productive. I socialize plenty outside of work, but I am happiest and most productive at when I can feed off other people's energy.
It's a balance, though, and overstimulation is still an issue, and I need periods of quiet and concentration like anyone else.
Extroverts think out loud, so they need someone to talk with just to think. So long as the other person is an extrovert that is okay because they both work the same way.
Extroverts - because they talk and ask questions are often the first to know. If the company has decided some project isn't doing the introverts can waste a lot of time continuing on a canceled project. Also extroverts can sometimes discover a quick/easy need to fill - a 10 minute script at the right time can sometimes be more valuable than a years of effort an introvert puts into the main project.
Human interaction is more than just blabbering at the water cooler. It could be as little as just seeing people walking in and out, hearing them rinse out their coffee cup, overhearing nuggets about which part of the project is behind or overhearing technical discussions that might give me ideas to try. All these things are challenging to come by when you’re shut in a quiet office. To some people this stuff doesn’t matter and/or is even detrimental to concentration. I get that. To others it’s as vital as oxygen. I don’t think one preference is any more or less valid than the other.
The people walking in and out, rinsing out their coffee cups, overhearing discussions that are occasionally useful but usually not is the problem for those of us distracted and stressed out by open-plan offices.
As far as preferences go, though, if you get even a small part of the external stimulus you want, it's already started wearing on us. Perhaps larger companies could try offering quiet floors with lots of barriers vs "social" open-plan floors.
No. That might be the perspective of the employer. Work from an employee perspective is about satisfying your own needs: financial, social, goal-oriented, etc. You obviously need to get some amount of work done to keep your job and meet your own goals, but not necessarily 8 hours of sustained effort per day.
If you have an office environment you should NEVER have an open office policy. The extroverts who like interaction/interruptions won't be in their office in the first place, while those who hate it need their door closed.
I'm an extreme extrovert, and I despise open plan offices, because my productivity doesn't involve the social interaction I enjoy so much. When I'm in the Zone, I have no such desires.
On the other hand, I favor pair programming. But even then, it should be done in two-person offices with a door, not in cacophanous cafeterias.
I thought that was true, but I had a vendor just last week state out loud, “We use a waterfall methodology.” It is alive and well, even if the smartest thinkers in the field never subscribed to it literally.
thank you. I try not to post just to vehemently agree, but this is a pretty egregious case of revisionism.
we were just so blind back then that we thought we could predict the future. When faced with direct evidence that things weren't going according to plan, or that the commercial landscape had changed, we stubbornly went back to our Gantt charts and insisted that it just couldn't be so.
so we just never got anything done..until some genius decided we had to meet every morning and schedule everything in 2 week intervals.
It was advocated, it was not meant to be advocated, but it was.
And Agile has it's fault and it has become filled with consultants, buzzwords and all kinds of things but early days when I built an internal system used in factories for a large company. The old ways of building and documenting software there was pretty much waterfall and there was a lot of middle-management, reporting, architects, documenting etc.
I was a part of a pretty young team + one offshore team in India (that was not great but not bad either) and we had a great boss who fought for us when we wanted to develop using pretty standard Scrum instead and we had a great product owner who immediately got what we were after and had great domain knowledge.
That project went sooo much better than previous ones and even if there were a lot of fighting and escalations in the beginning the whole concept of "Just call into our demo's we have every three weeks and see what we are developing and then give feedback" was like a revelation for some would be users of the system or owners of processes we implemented.
waterfall wasn't advocated because there hadn't been a movement for alternatives yet, it was just the default, like the iphone 2G, nobody called it iphone 2g when it came out, but in the context of newer models that's how we differentiate it
> Except that Waterfall was never really advocated
I've heard countless people advocate for waterfall. I was formally taught waterfall years ago. It was how many people approached development for a long time, and how some people still approach it today.
Still being taught in school; my CS program in Rome had it as one of the "software engineering methods" chapters, it was part of the finals curriculum and everything.
> It was conceived as a straw man which was being dissed so vigorously that people started believing it was real.
So much this.
I've been in the industry for about 30 years, and I've never once seen a place that used a methodology that could be called "waterfall" as described by many agile proponents.
I've been at it just as long. I've been certified in a multi-week course to work as a developer (around 2000-2002) in a waterfall system that included a VCS and some issue tracking I believe.
It was always a "no true scotsman" issue. If it didn't work, it was because we didn't adhere to it and didn't gather the requirements completely enough. So, sure, waterfall never existed in the sense that it never worked out, but it certainly existed in the sense that it was pursued to the tune of countless man hours and countless dollars.
I started out in defense and it was standard practice there, especially in regards to contract management. I had to take a formal training class in the process.
It was also the only process I learned in college ('94) and was strongly advocated in my classes.
Most attacks from the agile community probably are coming from a place of never having actually seen or practiced the real thing however. For example it does flow backwards at times, it's not the nonsense straight line process that gets straw-manned sometimes.
> Most attacks from the agile community probably are coming from a place of never having actually seen or practiced the real thing
This is rather my point. In "waterfall" shops I've worked at, the way it has never worked is that the application is completely designed up front, then implemented. The reality is that there has always been iteration involved, and there has always been refining and modification of design, and etc.
The only thing (aside from "ceremonies") I see agile bringing that didn't exist in my experiences with "waterfall" is the notion of bringing the customer in as a constant part of the development process -- which is a welcome addition.
The rest of Agile that I see can be thought of as refinements to waterfall, not as something entirely different.
I worked in a place that called it "spiral". Because they did the phases of waterfall over and over again, until finally drilling down through the roof of Hell.
Yes, it was horrible.
Yes, it got worse when they added the mandatory omnibus all-hands standup scheduled for 8:45-9:00 every morning, that always somehow lasted until at least 9:30, because everyone was continually justifying their existence.
And it was redundant with the spreadsheets that recorded the time spent on any particular task, down to the second.
Waterfall represents the default approach to managing chaos. One or two programmers with a single customer have an easy time getting a job done. When the budget gets into the millions, the project fails from having too many chefs in the kitchen, etc. So the gut reaction is to overload the front end with process. Finish requirements first, create a high level design, split it up into components that can be implemented, create a detailed design for each component, implement the design, integrate, test. I heard a ton of times as a consultant from average people, "we needed to specify more of this up front and create better designs ahead of implementation."
It doesn't work this way because software development is the process of figuring out the actual requirements and a good design. You don't have to follow an agile methodology to acheive a successful project, but you do have to have feedback loops that reduce the risk of wasted effort.
In the engineering analogy, I like to tell people that the compiler is the builder. All coding is an exercise in architecture and engineering that produces a detailed design (the code).
> It doesn't work this way because software development is the process of figuring out the actual requirements and a good design.
In my experience very few people truly understands why engineering is something expensive at its core, and it's usually this particular lack of understanding that ironically ends up making making things even more expensive and produces worse value-for-money, and so the vicious cycle continues.
I've seen too many projects where the specification guys were basically writing the whole program suite in English and then expecting it to just translate smoothly to computer code.
Then their beautiful 5 year late 2000 page specification slams head first into the realities of computers and the project immediately becomes quagmired. It's basically the Soviet model of computer programming, where you try to make all of the design decisions from the top but the people at the top don't have the whole picture and can't make good decisions and the scope is way too large for mere mortals to learn enough to make said decisions.
Oh yes it was advocated. Maybe the actual term "waterfall" was invented in order to criticize the methodology, but it was describing and criticizing a real, commonly used methodology.
Waterfall is really how you manage other large construction projects like building a house or a bridge. So it is not completely crazy to think you can also develop software that way. It took many failures to realize software demanded a different approach.
Yes! I remember when I was in University (1990s) how they taught us about how waterfall was bad and iterative development processes were just starting (XP was still not invented).
Iterative development processes where beautiful, and had great ideas. The problem with today's "Agile" methods as implemented in the industry is that they usually only do the first iteration and stop there, making it practically mainly waterfall.
The problem is applying a methodology because it is the current fad.
Management should be adapted to the conditions: the scale of the project, the nature and availability of the customer, the personalities and roles of the team members,... Sometimes, the best results looks like waterfall, sometimes it looks like agile, sometimes it looks like there is no methodology at all. When things "just work" you don't realize there is a process, that's the sign of a manager doing a good job.
The worst case is usually when a manager follows a methodology "by the book", except for the parts that don't fit or are "too expensive". Not realizing that pieces go together and changing one will affect the others.
The same could be said of design patterns in programming. They are good to know, but they are just guidelines. Using a design pattern for the sake of it usually leads to terrible, often bloated code.
The best situation I had was two in an office (it was an academic institution just being started and there was plently of space at the time).
One other person means company if you both want to chat, and generally silence when you need to get stuff done.
As the institute grew I think they squeezed 5 people into tHe same office. Which meant random informal meetings appearing frequently. My productivity plumeted.
The only way to make an open office tolerable is to give its inhabitants a lot of space. You can resist the temptation to cram people in by giving them really big desks.
My comfort level is, if I can smell my coworkers, then we're sitting too close.
The vast majority of my office time was in cubicles, which are pretty good. Usually enough privacy to get things done. I did have a glassed-in private office for about a year at one company. That was productivity heaven. In retrospect I was dumb to leave that company when I did, but they started demolishing offices for cubicles about 2 years later. It is all about efficient use of real estate.
I've been at a millennial run company for the last 6 years, first 4 in open space. What a productivity fuck, for all the often repeated reasons. And I really consider them de-humanizing. I gave up on trying to explain this to management years ago.
Working from home the last 2 years. Whenever I do visit the home office nothing gets done. Looking at what my colleagues do, I think they only ever get much done on work form home days.
In many cases the Federal tax code can also be the driver of these decisions because the amortization on building upgrades is way longer than cubicles. However, tables over cubicles is likely something else. To me, it's just cheap, like how call centers used to be (even they have cubicles now).
> The vast majority of my office time was in cubicles, which are pretty good.
I remember watching "Office Space" circa 2000 and it looked pretty soul crushing, and working in pre-FAANG big tech around 2006, it felt very mechanical and depressing. I get your gripes, but I think some is also rosy retrospection.
I understand what you're saying, but it's really more that we didn't know just how bad it could get. Cubicle farms were "soul crushing", because they came about from the same management practices that eventually led to open-floor plans: treating people as cost centers rather than people, micromanaging measurable real-estate costs at the expense of unmeasurable productivity.
And while one can theoretically make good software in open-floor-plan-environment/current-whipping-boy-programming-language-of-the-month/etc., the existence of such things is a big sign on the door "we probably don't care about craft".
You seem to be in a very small minority, then... I have to agree with most of the opinions I've read through the thread, open floor plans are a total productivity killer, way too many distraction sources and most of what communication there is, is irrelevant because no team stayed separate or respected anyone else's audio boundaries.
Cubes are still rather poor, but at least I odn't have to see what my neighbor's doing, or listen to any but the loudest noises. I'm three steps away from everyone else in the team, and if we need an impromptu discussion the aisle is at least a cube width, so plenty of quick standup space.
An office / separate workroom away from the team opposite me would be great but I can earbud them away.
I hear a conversation relevant to me and jump in, a conversation stops being relevant I jump out
That simple interaction has added tons of value for me over the last few years of open offices.
We have a very simple way to indicate you don't want to be interrupted, headphones or a flag
There's also tons of huddle rooms you can go into if you want to hunker down in quiet
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Everyone is different, some people feel switching from keyboard to mouse is a huge productivity drain and invest a lot in avoiding that transition
Maybe I'm just fortunate but it's never been an issue for me, people are pretty respectful of their coworkers where I've worked
> a huge part of craft is communication, and open offices are great for that.
But they aren't great for that. For most people, they're the opposite. That's the point the article is making, and the article agrees with what I've personally observed.
I've never worked in one, unless I count schoolrooms.
But I can imagine that I'd be so jumpy and angry that I'd refuse to talk with anyone. And that I'd wear humongous headphones, and blast death metal or whatever.
The dynamic in the spaces that I worked was that all of the devs want to be respectful of the other devs. Part of what that means is that you want to avoid making noise. The result is that speaking is kept to the bare minimum.
>a huge part of craft is communication, and open offices are great for that.
Can you explain this to me? How does an open office lead to better communication than cubes or partitioned group work spaces?
I'm in an open office. A lot of communication is done via email and IM. When someone comes to my desk to ask a question, collaborate, or just say hey, I typically don't get up. If a group stops by, we'll usually move to a collaborative area or set up a meeting. This would be true no matter if I were in a cube or partitioned group area. If I have a private office, I may not even have to leave my desk.
The typical response I see to this is that open offices tend to have this implied notion of everyone is willing to communicate at any time. I'd argue that on an individual level for developers, that's more often false. Someone head-down probably doesn't want to be interrupted.
And I have a way of indicating I do want to be interrupted: I leave my door open, I walk around the floor and look for other open doors, I move to the break room and have lunch with everyone else. It would bug the shit out of me if someone interjected themselves into a conversation I was having with someone else in my office.
That's the problem with open-floor-plan. It presumes "my need to know what you're saying/doing is more important than you even getting the opportunity to consent to me knowing."
>...Everyone is different, some people feel switching from keyboard to mouse is a huge productivity drain and invest a lot in avoiding that transition
And they are likely wrong. People believe a lot of things about themselves that don't hold up to scrutiny. For example, people think they can multitask, etc and studies show that the aren't nearly as productive doing that as they think they are. People think that open offices help collaboration, but that is not what the research shows. As the article says:
>...As my colleague Jessica Stillman pointed out last week, a new study from Harvard showed that when employees move from a traditional office to an open plan office, it doesn't cause them to interact more socially or more frequently.
>Instead, the opposite happens. They start using email and messaging with much greater frequency than before. In other words, even if collaboration were a great idea (it's a questionable notion), open plan offices are the worst possible way to make it happen.
>Previous studies of open plan offices have shown that they make people less productive, but most of those studies gave lip service to the notion that open plan offices would increase collaboration, thereby offsetting the damage.
> How does an open office lead to better communication than cubes or partitioned group work spaces?
It doesn't make sense because that's not the reason open-floor-plan exists. The reason is 100% cost-savings. "Communication" is just a post-hoc rationalization, created by management, parroted by employees too boorish to learn how to communicate politely and effectively.
He seems to have edited his comment because the part you’re replying to isn’t there any more, but you’re correct, open offices don’t improve communication and they can’t meaningfully improve communication. If you happen to need to “communicate” with any of the maximum four people you’re physically adjacent to, then yes, you can start a conversation without having to get up from your chair. Otherwise, you have to get up and walk across the room to where the other person is (or just IM them): exactly the same as with cubicles.
(replying to the pre-edit comment, as I think that can be insightful)
I do agree that open office looks a lot less depressing than a cubicle farm; being able to see a large area tends to be more pleasing than lots of obstructions. However, actually having the same amount of people (or, usually, more people because that's why they have open offices in the first place) can cause issues due to the more intense noise and distractions. But that wouldn't be visible in a quick visit; it would need to come out over a prolonged period of working in that environment. And somehow all the decision makers never actually work in the middle of the open plan office…
Sitting in an open-plan office lets you know that you're not "worth it". That you're not respected. And you're way too distracted to actually get much done. So you zone out with music, watch YouTube, hang out on HN, etc.
And then, because you're not productive, you're condemned to an open-plan future :(
Every person I work with daily could work at a place with a private office if they wanted.
Hell, I'm pretty sure if they asked seriously for a private office, the company would jump over itself to make it happen.
If you need to do passive aggressive stuff like refuse to work because you're in an open office that's rather unfortunate, a lot of very successful, productive, people work in open offices.
Well I'm not good enough to demand an office, but I like to think I'm on the upper half of the talent scale and when I'm job hunting I can be somewhat selective. The office style is one of my selection criteria, so companies with open plan offices are putting themselves at a disadvantage. It wont show up on a balance sheet but it will hurt them in the long run.
Typically companies with open plan offices have more "quirks" sending people away.
I used to work for a global 500 company that had cube farms at some locations, and others on an open plan.
I'm not gonna lie, the cube farms were an awful eyesore. But I still really enjoyed the occasional weeks I'd spend visiting those offices, and would have jumped at the chance to move to one. The people were quite a bit more outgoing and social, and yet the space still managed to be quieter. Noise level and character were generally comparable to those of my college's library.
I did appreciate how easy it was to liven it up inside your own cubicle though. There are entire lines of office products designed to work with cubicle walls. I had posters, calendars, and random knicknacks, and I was able to create a space where I felt happy. I've never been able to personalize a space the same way since.
Hell, at my current job personalization of your space is actively discouraged, since there's a culture of hot-desking if you're coming in from another office.
Ah yeah, hot-desking, the next progression in cost-savings-cum-"oh no, actually, this is about collaboration!" So much collaboration that I can't expect to always have my seat with my team?
I've got a similar experience to the OP (35+ years in tech). Cubicles as "soul crushing" as they look are much better than the open floor plan offices. Best of all was when I had an office with a door for a few years.
The beauty of the cubicle was in its practical functionality. If you’re working effectice and productively you don’t really notice the plainness of your surroundings.
A private space, but you could still see out the window.
Yeah, all of the talk about "increased collaborations!" seems to be hand-waivey, pseudo-admittance of "we don't know how to communicate effectively!"
I work in a private office now. I almost never work from home, and it's never to "be productive", almost always because of some personal scheduling issue. I used to work in open-office environments and would try to work from home as much as possible. One of them was even at a company around the corner from where I am now, so it wasn't even a commuting issue.
We have weekly meetings scheduled to force the issue of getting everyone caught up. But mostly, I just take a daily walk around the floor, see folk and get caught up on everything. The meetings mostly become "catching up the one person who was out the rest of the week".
We don't do daily standups. Ugh, what a boondoggle Scrum became after The Suits found out about it. Who needs it, anyway? Just talk to people.
If you have to make up organizational excuses to get people to talk, you're making excuses for people who don't talk. It's not acceptable to be a team contributor and not know how to communicate effectively.
Damn .... this is exactly my story as well ... moved to working from home for the last 3 years and when I do go into the office nothing gets done. Open-Plan 250 people straight line of sight to them all, nightmare for being productive.
To me cubicles and open office are pretty much the same. Both are noisy and offer no privacy. Single offices or team rooms with maybe 4 people are the best.
I suspect it’s merely a function of personality. Introverts will find it tiring and invasive. Extroverts will probably find it energizing, and will probably have the most vocal opinions shared.
Mind you, tech leans towards introverts and it’s much easier to find temporary loud spaces than temporary quiet spaces so... probably not ideal
Also WFH. I occasionally work from a coworking space when I need a change of scenery, but I plan those days knowing that my productivity will be much different (certain tasks lend themselves to open spaces better than others). Visits to the home office (a two-hour drive) are for connecting with colleagues rather than heads-down work time.
I've been a part of these discussions at very high levels and this is the consistent theme. Short-term, easily quantifiable savings against nebulous, hard to quantify harms. Facilities folks always win and get a pat on the back. Any push back about the open office should, in my opinion, start with addressing this basic incentive. Everything about collaboration, open communication, etc. is just window dressing used to justify the moves.
To be completely accurate, it's all about maximizing profit and minimizing costs, which in this case means having as many people in a given amount of floor space as is legally possible.
The benefit of the low cost per person of office space is weighed against the negatives:
* Employee attitude/positive workplace (hard to measure)
* Difficulties introduced to the workplace by the increased density - noise, psychological effects, smells, etc (hard to measure/easily dismissed)
* A less pleasant workplace makes employee retention work less well (difficult to measure)
The other up side of the open plan space is that it's a project that an otherwise ineffective manager can do to appear valuable.
The real elephant in the room of open plan offices is "hoteling", IE employees are supposed to sit down at the first open space and start working. The real reason this is implemented is that assigning spaces in an open plan is difficult, and hoteling avoids arguments over who gets the better spot (near the restrooms, vending machines, windows, or whatever) and avoids the work of tracking employee seating and doing assignments.
However, in every single open plan space I've worked in, everyone sits in the same location every day. Despite this being obvious, no one ever seems to remember this when they decide on yet another open plan office conversion.
Indeed, I also feel its a closed loop, you only get managers who want to be in total control, which tightens the loop, and we end up with daily stand ups in a battery cage under continuous surveillance.
It gets worse at the lower end of the food chain (e.g. call centres) - even toilet breaks are monitored. Strangely though in the same places there is often a lot of down time because calls are bursty, so watching youtube is permitted (friends of my daughters talk). We are indeed in the strangest timeline.
I work in open spaces as a software engineer for all my career (14 years) and have long gotten used to them. Currently have 2 other teams sitting in the same space, often chatting, headphones usually help. Not a fan of working from home.
> They start using email and messaging with much greater frequency than before.
Couldn't the same focus that drove the open-office transition also be responsible for driving more effective communication tools? Or just more collaboration in general, which naturally results in an increased use in communications tools?
Or maybe the tools have just been improving over time, which results in an entirely unrelated increase in use?
There are so many potential explanations here. This seems like a non-point.
The author of the article (and, presumably, most businesses) are living in the past.
I work in an open-plan office in a place that makes heavy use of the latest collaboration software, and it works great. There is virtually no use of email or IM internally. Just persistent chat and collaboration with Teams.
> The Harvard study, by contrast, undercuts the entire premise that justifies the fad. And that leaves companies with only one justification for moving to an open plan office: less floor space, and therefore a lower rent.
From beginning this was the reason - because when planning for the office the cost difference between open/close office would show up in the Excel files - loss of productivity no Excel or Project Mgmt software can capture (it is hand-wavy stuff for CFO office).
Apart from rent, the cost of HVAC (heating, cooling) is drastically reduced - installation, operation and maintenance - open office has more efficient distribution due to no obstructing walls, lesser duct outlets - in closed office plan, each office needs to have at least one outlet, most of the time more than one.
Then ofcourse saving on drywalls, doors, locks, etc.
Yep, and I've used those arguments to justify working from home permanently before.
Last time I just found out when the bean counters were coming around and worked from home the days they were in the office. When the plan came out and they hadn't figure out a slot for me I just told them I work from home and started doing it full time. Problem solved.
Caveat: It helped we were an acquisition. Roles and norms were very in flux. I'd done work in other areas to pass off all my onsite responsibilities to the purchaser.
I was reading "Bloomberg by Bloomberg" over the weekend and I thought his opinion on the topic was relevant since I believe Bloomberg was one of the first major workplaces that placed everyone in tight open-office type environments. My understanding of his opinion on the topic was: yes there are distractions but you also learn new things. Fundamentally I think there is considerable misunderstanding between people who subscribe to the above view and people (like me) who see considerable personal performance improvements when allowed to work distraction-free. It is not clear to me that "concentration spaces" and etc. are a solution/concession since IME most of the time they are filled with people on phone meetings; even if you find an empty one, you will still hear the people next to you due to the thin walls and the necessary loudness. Edit: the relevant part in the book was at page 163 for my edition in the chapter "Management 101".
> yes there are distractions but you also learn new things
I've found that, in open plan offices, attempting to mentor or be mentored on something is a great way to earn dirty looks from anyone who's unfortunate enough to be sitting nearby. If you do it often, people will start griping about you behind your back.
Mini meeting rooms can work, when you can find them, for about a year. After that, the company will respond to complaints that people will hang out in them for hours on end (which I could swear was the point, but I digress) by requiring them to be reserved ahead of time in Outlook. Which puts the brakes on using them for genuine collaboration, because reserving meeting rooms in Outlook is a minor hassle, especially if you're a Linux or Mac user, and it's ultimately easier and less demoralizing to just not talk to each other than it is to play a game of, "Mother may I," whenever you want to have an impromptu discussion.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if it turns out that the square footage you need for an open plan office plus a sufficient amount of meeting space ends up being greater than the square footage you need for a more traditional style of office. The last open plan office I worked at was probably 1/3 meeting spaces, and it still didn't feel like enough.
I don't buy it. Most people are trying to get shit done so are wearing headphones and for the people that aren't, you only overhear people who happen to be within earshot radius from where you're sitting and only if you're somewhat paying attention or not otherwise distracted, and of that stuff you do overhear, how much is actually relevant or useful? In my personal experience, the amount of times I overheard something in the work space (as opposed in a social space area like the break room) that was useful or relevant to me has been far, far less than the amount of useful stuff I've encountered in places that had a "be vocal on slack" culture.
Loving the video at the bottom where they exhibit one of those people whose careers are tied to the success of their new open office layout. Very chef's kiss.
and here I am, at my newly renovate office with gasp open plan. We have some cliché things like table tennis desk, rock climbing space(that no one have a time to climb, of course) and garden plot with fresh vegetable(just for show off at new office opening day), that HR staff told us that employee can plant their own after that(good luck with that) Everything about it screams pretentious and dumb.
What's better, we have a meeting room that decorate like a kitchen, with no door and the wall that is not rise to the ceiling, if you know what I mean. The noise level comes from that 'meeting room' is just unbearable. The worst meeting room design I've seen in my life.
The only thing I can do is put on my trusty noise-cancelling headphones, thanks god for this miraculous technology in this noisy world.
> The only thing I can do is put on my trusty noise-cancelling headphones, thanks god for this miraculous technology in this noisy world.
Noise-canceling headphones help a lot, but I've tried all the most expensive, top-of-the-line ones, and unless you play some sound (which, no matter what you play, is tiring in the long run) you can still hear people talk, they just remove the lower frequencies.
What happened to Joel Spolsky’s blog-famous push for private offices in Fog Creek Software, when he moved to StackExchange did they carry that idea on?
If open plan offices are so bad for “productivity”, why don’t they get selected out by market forces?
Is it Price’s Law, the square root of the number of employees do half the work, and the rest doesn’t matter if they have offices or cattle desks, high or low productivity - what most of us do doesn’t matter enough to matter?
I think bad productivity office plans don't get selected out by market forces because almost everyone is doing it. And the small number of companies not doing it are still competing with a much larger number of companies in a situation where luck is a big part of the outcome. So the effect gets drowned out, I'm thinking.
I've worked in a variety of settings, and my favorite is a small team in a conference room/tiny open office. 3-8 people.
People tend to be respectful of each other's concentration at that number of people. And since you're in the same team, most interruptions are likely to be useful to other members of the team. But if we wanted to just bother 1 specific person, we would just use instant message.
Our manager worked in the same conference room too. But he would step outside for any calls he had to make.
It also gave an exiting "small startup" feel for me, even when working for a large company.
This is by far the most effective workplace environment and arrangement I have experienced as well, for teams and large companies - almost like physical 'pod' structures
Same, best setup for me was quads of corner desks with high exterior walls, making a sort of open room of four that were faced away from each other but within earshot. The cubes had sliding frosted glass windows between quads that you could open to talk to the adjacent team.
Also high natural light with moderate ceiling lights and good task lighting on ample desk surface.
This was at a premium EDI firm in the 90’s. It was awesome.
Same! I worked in a setting like that and it was by far the most productive environment I've been in as far as pure work volume and concentration. Basically people were in tiny open offices sorted by teams (i.e. frontend, backend, copywriters). Our group kept the room pretty dark and no one talked, we just messaged each other. I realize that description can sound a little creepy, but it was blissful.
Open office-wise the best was getting a desk that was in a corner around a pony wall. So I had a wall (conference room) at my back, a pony wall at my left and a desk facing towards me, which is almost like a wall in front. Also the people I was sitting near could control the lights on our side of the wall. We kept only half on and it was super helpful. I think bright fluorescent lighting is a little distracting. Maybe not distracting, but not awesome.
I agree. I found cubicles a bit soul-sucking and private offices too isolated. An open plan in a small area is fine for me, but 200 people on a floor is too many. If you're pair programming, you can get away with a lot more noise around you than if you're trying to concentrate by yourself. Also, people are less likely to interrupt a pair that is obviously hard at work than they are to bug an individual.
I guess I'll be the exception here. I'm in a psudeo-open workspace right now which is pretty much what you're talking about except that we're not in a room, it's what the company calls a "pod" with high walls and a single doorway. I would say 90% of all distractions etc. come from inside the pod. Moving us into our own room would make no difference. It does get pretty loud sometimes in the building, but it's mostly white noise and easy (at least for me) to ignore. The only way to work mostly without distractions here is to wear headphones, which generally signals to others that they should leave you alone, but even then people will still just wander over and bother you because you're right there. For some people the idea of chatting someone who's sitting 5 feet away from them is super weird.
The most productive times I have, hands-down, are when I work from home.
> For some people the idea of chatting someone who's sitting 5 feet away from them is super weird.
This is exactly what happens in my employer's "pod rooms." There are 10 of us and inevitably someone will be all, "Jack; Jack!; HEY, JACK!!" and someone else says "he has his headphones on just send him an IM" and the first person replies "ugh!" and then gets up to walk over and stand at Jack's shoulder until Jack takes off his headphones and looks up at the person.
It's not just one person that does this or we might could get the behavior to change. Apparently humans in group spaces just really, really, really want to verbally speak to other humans in those spaces and there's no amount of "hey guys I'm really trying to work here could you keep it down" that doesn't come across as rude or condescending.
I guess part of it for me is there seems to be no escaping from the noise of life any more. At least at work I used to have an office with a door that I could close for a couple of hours of solitude and heads-down real work. Now, after the building redesign, there are 950 people in the building and a pittance of conference rooms and phone rooms and "team rooms" (little conference rooms supposedly shared between just two or three teams sitting in larger "pod rooms" but, in practice, squatted in by one or two people all day). I've spent twenty minutes walking around my building and the adjacent one just trying to find somewhere to do a phone screen for an interview candidate.
Combine that with the rest of the world getting louder[0] and it's becoming a little frustrating.
0 - Right now I can hear my neighbor upstairs walking around on the hardwood floors all of our apartments have with his hard-soled shoes like he's been doing for the past hour, the traffic outside because apparently density should only exist next to busy arterials in the city where I live, planes loudly going overhead because the cloud ceiling is lower and they're taking a more direct route to the airport, and now the backup generator for the newly-constructed senior home is running its weekly test.
> Right now I can hear my neighbor upstairs walking around on the hardwood floors all of our apartments have with his hard-soled shoes like he's been doing for the past hour, the traffic outside because apparently density should only exist next to busy arterials in the city where I live, planes loudly going overhead because the cloud ceiling is lower and they're taking a more direct route to the airport, and now the backup generator for the newly-constructed senior home is running its weekly test.
Cities grew too quickly and are now kind of like the startup that never planned for its explosive growth and is struggling to cope trying to keep the wheels from falling off. A paradigm shift is needed, and will come about at some point- I'm just not sure when, and in what form.
Or I'll just move to Montana and do a self-sustainable ranch(hah). I don't necessarily want to be that far out, but looking at the way things are going, wife and I rarely go out anymore anyways due to the overcrowding, so the benefits of having a city is rapidly diminishing.
> so the benefits of having a city is rapidly diminishing.
To be 100% clear, I still love living in the dense city where I do and I have no plans on moving away from it. But I don't think employers have yet figured out that taking away the quiet(er?) spots at work does a lot of harm because it means loss of hours of quiet.
I also readily admit that a good chunk of this is on me. I am increasingly a curmudgeon, probably because of changes at work, and so I take it out on the other parts of my environment by quietly being frustrated.
I've lived in the middle of nowhere before and hated it. I've lived in the "quiet" suburbs and hated it. At least living in the city, with the attendant noise, I get more out of it than I lose; I'm just still frustrated at my employer (and my industry) for taking away my office door.
It'll be interesting to see if SpaceX's Starlink LEO internet service will spur remote workers to spread out even further into places like Montana. We've already had to deal with some remote workers relocating to developing countries and in one case, even an active warzone, without telling the company first.
Remote work is still challenging though. The nature of not being able to get person-to-person time (regardless of how good video calls get) will always remain a challenge in its own right.
The space issue is fundamental: there just aren't that much space around cities as they stand today. The only pragmatic solutions are:
1) Build up. Everyone wants to live in these areas, so build as tall of buildings as possible and just spread out upwards. Doesn't solve the personal office problem though since Tokyo is super dense but I don't think anybody has a private office?
2) Build new cities. America is big, and there is still plenty of space left to build. But it looks to me like a combination of power-law economics, plus locale desirability, and political willingness to invest into infrastructure is pushing most ordinary people right back into the clutches of 1).
> Remote work is still challenging though. The nature of not being able to get person-to-person time (regardless of how good video calls get) will always remain a challenge in its own right.
Even as a remote worker, I used to think this was true.
I no longer believe this is the case.
In remote video calls each human is like an augmented cyborg integrated with their computer and the internet.
The nature of IRL meetings tend to disrupt the augmentation aspect. Above a certain number of people perhaps augmentation becomes more obstacle then advantage though.
The above is anecdotal and your experience may differ.
Work life in Japanese cities is difficult to compare with it in the United States because Japanese culture is so much different. Diversity is not prized, conformity and harmony are. A large open space with 300 workers in Japan operates very differently than an open space with 300 workers in an American city.
Build new cities, you're on the right track though I doubt it will happen from scratch like in China. Rather mid-tier cities such as Huntsville and Boise will grow into larger cities.
Remote work has its up and down sides. I've been doing it for two years. Most of the time it is better but there are occasions when collaborating on some idea or document would work better in person at a whiteboard. But those get fewer all the time and the remote collaboration tools get better over time. I'd love for all of us to have Surface Hub whiteboards but they're still too expensive to have a reasonable ROI. Over time though, the price will go down, as will that of other high fidelity collaboration tools.
>It's not just one person that does this or we might could get the behavior to change.
Presuming you're not the only one who's experiencing this it seems like this could be surfaced to the entire team and some norms could be established around when it's appropriate to approach someone. E.g. "If they're wearing headphones then they don't want to be interrupted, so send an email/IM/whatever instead."
I am a millennial (born in '88) and I would LOVE to have a cubicle. My first job was at Cisco in San Jose, California which had cubicles. I was fortunate enough to be introduced to the corporate environment with cubicles.
I loved my cubicle. Like you said: just enough privacy to get things done. People would come by only if absolutely necessary otherwise they would mind their own business.
Having cubicles also prevented useless chatter.
Then I left that company and my productivity and mental peace has never been the same. Not even near.
I think people's experiences and what they consider cubicles vary widely. When I started, I had a true cubicle with a standing 'U' shaped desk around the cube perimeter, which could've housed two employees. The cubicles had tall walls (7ft) so there was some actual privacy. those were Cubicle Nirvana, but for density reasons have seen two iterations of smaller, and smaller cubes. 'drive-by' type meetings were easy to accommodate without disrupting others.
Currently, our cubicles are a honey-comb type arrangement. (think pods of three cubicles on one side, two on the other) There is no privacy, and rows behind you leave 18" of space to the employee behind you. Gone are the tall walls for working while standing. Edges of the cubicles do not stand proud of the desks, so it's not much to work with.
We've seemingly taken the worst of both worlds when it comes to cubicle AND open office concepts. I wouldn't even know what to call it, other than awful.
Ironically, we have collectively forgotten why cubicles were invented, and why office workers originally hailed them as wonderful things: they ended the open office workspaces that were dominant at the time.
There's also the floor size to consider, cubicles or team sized cubicles where everyone has windows or at least some natural light are very different from cubicles in a massive (wide/long) dilbertesque building with only artificial light in the center. In my neck of the woods these large buildings in industrial/technology parks are becoming a thing of the past and a lot of newer offices buildings are very thin which makes cubicles much more appealing.
Your post reminded me of how my own perception has changed.
I remember when I graduated college I interviewed and got a job and went to work at this company that in hindsight, had these awesome large high end cubicles, with wooden U shaped desks and tall partitions. Yet, I remember walking to my cubicle and feeling a pang of sadness. I could see this huge cubicle farm and I was being guided to my own "little" cubicle to go and sit in. Felt like a hamster in a cage - a small cog in a huge machine. Which I guess I was. All the managers had offices along the outsides of the farm, facing the windows.
But now that my expectations have been lowered further... I'd take that cubicle setup over an open plan office any day.
If space is at such a premium, the solution is to encourage more remote work. At this point, the industry, with its years of experience in outsourcing, offshoring and working with distributed teams has proven that remote work is an excellent and efficient model. At the very least, it should be far more mainstream than it is.
>But now that my expectations have been lowered further... I'd take that cubicle setup over an open plan office any day.
Scott Adams nailed it in his book from 15 years ago:
>After your boss has taken away your door, your walls, and your storage areas, there aren't many options left for the next revolution in office design. One of the following things is likely to go next: the floor; the ceiling; your happiness. I think the floor will stay, but only because your company would have to dig a huge hole all the way to the other side of the earth to get rid of it. As you can imagine, a huge hole through the earth would represent a serious threat to office productivity.
Insufficient parking makes me feel like it's a scam done knowingly. If there's not enough stalls in the lot, it encourages you to go earlier so you'll find a stall available, which leads to a feedback loop of the entire workforce needing to show up earlier and earlier (and of course, with the expectation that they'll work when they get to their desk, and still stay til 5).
One company I was at switched to "hot desking" after carefully monitoring the usage rate of desks throughout the building.
Come time to do the switch, and unless you are at the office by 7.30-8.00 it's musical chairs and people end up working in the kitchenettes.
Turns out they did their desk usage survey during the holiday season. So of course there was tons of spare desks at the time.
Also ignoring the fact that developers are going to be in the office every day - they budgeted on everybody being like sales people and out of the office half their time.
This sounds like a job for remote work, but I'm guessing this was the sort of shop that expected you to be in the office 4 out of 5 or more days per week.
Millennial here, Working in IT (Support and Development). I work for a company that had existed for over 50 years, they gave me a dedicated office, The productivity increase is incredible, I'm reluctant to ever change jobs because I'd lose my office and become thrown into the pile of people in the center of an office (Hell).
My experience has been the opposite, and I've been in cubes, remote, my own office, and open-offices.
Cubicles are the soul-sucking solitude that give a false sense of privacy. You're still just as interruptable except isolated from everyone else. If you see your coworkers as a problem then maybe this is nice but I never felt that way, preferring open office space to cubicles.
I work in an open office environment. I never thought I’d say this, but it works excellently; there’s always energy in the air, collaboration is easy, and it’s a great space to hold company all-hands meetings. I’d say there are 4 keys to making this work:
1) The founders have a great sense of aesthetic and our office is a beautiful space as a result (also stays very clean), meaning it stays less stressful and promotes a positive mood. This may not be strictly necessary but it sure helps it not feel like the hellscape that “open office” evokes.
2) There are plenty of closed-room office spaces available if you need focus time
3) Both of our open-office sections are in rooms much bigger than the rows of desks, so despite having a large number of people in one room, it never feels crowded
4) There is Sonos in both open-office areas and people are pretty good about not hogging it or playing obnoxious/too-loud music
I’ve also worked in open offices that were nightmarish, but saw these same factors (minus the aesthetic portion) make for an effective office environment elsewhere as well. Music, breakout offices, and non-desk space seem to be the musts (but do decorate nicely because it matters more than I ever would have thought before).
EDIT: I should add that it’s usually pretty quiet, and the music very low. I don’t consider it a distraction, but I also like my coworkers’ music so this may not work for everyone. Also, headphones are universally respected as a “do not disturb” signal.
My job is 'focus time' 95% of the day. So I need to monopolize on of those office spaces. Hey! Just put a sign on the door - Joe's Office. And we're back to closed offices.
Definitely! There are some dedicated offices for those who need them as well. It’s just the support and dev teams that have open offices. Both of those teams do a lot of informal communicating internally and externally so it’s nice for them (I’m on the dev team and do a mix of focus work and communication).
> it’s a great space to hold company all-hands meetings.
I've never been in an all-hands meeting that was actually useful. Usually its a bunch of guys bragging about how great they are in roundabout ways.
> There is Sonos in both open-office areas
Oh god. That alone would want me to not work there. I don't want to listen to someone else's music (most of the time, I don't want to listen to music at all -- I work from home now, thankfully, and spend most of the day without any noise or music at all. Silence is amazing. I don't want to be overstimulated all day every day)
2) is flawed: I don't want to go to a private office for focus time. I got my external monitors, headphones, dock, etc. in my main seat. It's my working area, and should be the main focus area.
Same exact story here - worked in an open office that was awful that we slowly transformed into one that functioned extremely well.
Where I've always thought open offices break down is when you have the space filled with people who wouldn't normally talk to each other if they were in their own offices. Organizations that have roughly the same number of projects as they have developers.
Where it started to work extremely well, is when the only people within a 10 foot radius of me exclusively worked on the same project, codebase and backlog as me. If you're building a component for a developer that's sitting to the right of you, tested by a QA sitting to the left of you with business rules written by the BA sitting behind you it's incredible how fast you can move.
> 2) There are plenty of closed-room office spaces available if you need focus time
As a coder, the ratio is like 99% focus time and 1% socialising. If I were just to take an office everyday id be viewed as entitled even if its the most rational thing
> 4) There is Sonos in both open-office areas and people are pretty good about not hogging it or playing obnoxious/too-loud music
Just, why is there a Sonos in the first place!? I can't imagine being at work and wanting to hear someone's playlist.
> 2) There are plenty of closed-room office spaces available if you need focus time
This is key.
If I had the flexibility to work in one of these spaces regularly (30+ hours a week), I would be fine. Oh, and each of these rooms has a dual monitor setup with a docking station for my laptop, right?
IT and other staff needs peace and quiet to concentrate to be productive.
People interact less in open plan offices and tend to put on head phones to silence the noise. Since you produce less in open plan offices yes they are not smart.
Plus you are more likely to get sick in an open office, for example if you neighbor sneezes.
"Compared to cellular offices, occupants in 2-person offices had 50%
more days of sickness absence [rate ratio (RR) 1.50, 95% confidence interval (95% CI) 1.13–1.98], occupants
in 3–6-person offices had 36% more days of sickness absence (RR 1.36, 95% CI 1.08–1.73), and occupants in
open-plan offices (>6 persons) had 62% more days of sickness absence (RR 1.62, 95% CI 1.30–2.02)."
IT and other staff needs peace and quiet to concentrate to be productive.
I'm not disputing that open plan offices are unproductive, but if you run a company it's just much cheaper to have an open plan office. In many places in the worls rent is high enough for more complex layouts that it would be cheaper to have a few extra junior staff than to have a different office structure.
While it could definitely be less productive, it might actually be more profitable to have an open layout.
This doesn't really explain why companies that build their own offices stick to open plan, but it's definitely the reason for small companies.
For me the problem is not really distractions (I don't care if people interrupt me from time to time, in fact I like it). My problem is the mental strain that stems from lack of privacy, the knowledge that people can see me and my monitor all the time, it's like there's a background process in my mind that checks whether what I want to do (move a lot in my chair, comment on HN, eat something) is ok with people around me. And this constant monitoring and self-control is tiring.
This is very common even when people have no sense of needing to “hide” what’s on their screen... it’s just a natural fight vs flight human impulse to he worried about who is walking around in your space.
Even worse for the large fraction of the population who are introverts.
One thing that helped me get past this feeling was looking around at other desks and realizing that either a. no one cares what you are doing because they are too busy working on their own stuff or b. half the office is watching youtube anyway.
While this is hardly an unknown fact amongst HN readers, a lot of people get very surprised when told about this.I've seen some of my colleagues going to private mode to browse something not work related, and when I explain that tbis won't help at all, they are almost shocked.
As someone who actually works on the IT-side of this, your statement is technically correct but my experience suggests a vanishingly-small number of employers actually monitor this data in any rigorous way. The only time I've ever seen an org reviewing web logs was in response to a specific formal HR complaint.
The association of open-plan offices to the Panopticon:
> ..The fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched means that they are motivated to act as though they are being watched at all times. Thus, the inmates are effectively compelled to regulate their own behaviour.
> ..Foucault used the panopticon as metaphor for the modern disciplinary society in Discipline and Punish.
> He argued that discipline had replaced the pre-modern society of kings, and that the panopticon should not be understood as a building, but as a mechanism of power and a diagram of political technology.
> ..In the landmark surveillance narrative Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), George Orwell said: "there was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment ... you had to live ... in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinised."
Foucault would also argue that open-office is the best office plan. His ideas of the power structure behind discipline reach far beyond what the penal system implemented them as.
I get easily startled when I am very focused and people walk around in my peripheral vision or behind me. It really stresses me out. I work remote now so life is good but when I was at the office I was completely exhausted every evening because of this stress
Exactly! I would be fine in an open office where monitors can't be seen from behind (sideways is okay, I should be able to show colleagues sitting beside me, my screen). Perhaps, between two rows a thin paper-ish wall can be put up.
This resonates so much with me. One of the advantages of being an early engineer at my company has meant that I was able to choose my spot in office: right at the back, next to a window, in the corner.
Sure, it feels like I'm being a bit anti-social at times, but I'm very comfortable in my corner :)
Don't think they're any worse than any other layout, most implementations are just lazy. There needs to be sane guidelines (no music overhead playing, relatively quiet, move discussions into a closed room) or obviously it won't work. I prefer it over cubicles.
So I worked in a legacy industry and they co-located a couple of teams near our biggest client. They decided to put in place an open office concept for the engineers and support staff, and gave the VPs and sales guys private offices.
Especially when we first moved into the office the VPs loved to take the customers on a tour and stand at the top of the space and tell them how great this open office was. I was in a bad mood one time when this happened and the VP asked me if I agreed (with the customer) and I said, "it is perfect for what it was built for, it was built to show our customers how many resources we have and to imply that we have no walls separating our BUs from working together." He was not happy, but also had no lines of responsibility to me or my business segment.
And like all open offices it was loud so everyone put on headphones and we had zero cross-BU interaction and very low inter-BU interaction. At one point corporate tried to push a no headphones rule because it looked bad when they brought in customers and it did not land well in the cube dwellers. A compromise was reached to not allow headphones when customers leadership visits where planned, about once a month.
My biggest problem with the design was that they guy in the desk that faced me spent around 80% of his time on conference calls. Now he wasn't loud at all, almost never said anything on these calls, but he would sit silently with his headset on staring directly at me the whole time. Now he wasn't looking at me, just looking forward but it was really disconcerting.
What I always find funny about the whole concept is that the open cube was really first imagined by Taylor as he tried to apply physical labor efficiencies into the office world. You would have everyone in an open office with the manager slighly raised up behind everyone so he could monitor them to ensure everyone was working at peak efficiency. Plus the modern leader of open offices, a company I forgot the name of in Colorado implemented and pushed open offices into the modern world, and then killed the practice internally in less than 2 years.
I hate the open office plans with no view blockers or ones that are too low that peoples eyes peek over. It's so distracting to see movement or peoples eyes that I now deliberately lower my chair as far as it goes so that the tiny short wall blocks everything.
There are definitely problems with the open office but one thing I can say is that there is truly a different energy to the office when it's open and people can chat spontaneously. Some of my best projects have started this way, as have all my office friendships.
I'd definitely get more heads-down work done in a private office setting. However in that setting I'd mostly be annoyed I couldn't just work from my home office, since I'd be commuting to spend 80%+ of my time alone anyway.
I never understand this line of reasoning. I have my own office. It's right next to most of my team's offices. My door is open 90% of the time. If someone wants to chat spontaneously, I don't think walking 15 feet is going to stop them.
You'd be surprised, it doesn't seem like a lot but there is a big difference between having to stand up and walk over and leaning over, or kicking your chair over.
My experience has been the opposite. People in open offices tend to avoid in-depth conversations because they don't want to disturb their neighbors; instead, they take conversations into conference rooms. The only people holding conversations in the open space are those talking about non-work topics (usually TV shows, movies, or sports), and seemingly lacking all awareness that they're disturbing the people trying to be productive.
>Wouldn’t you agree it’s much more practical and inviting if you could just turn around a talk?
No. Even when I visit my less fortunate comrades in the cube farms, I constantly feel guilty for opening my mouth because I know that there are 10 other people in earshot who probably don't have any interest at all in the discussion we're having.
>And a text conversation and face to face one are very different and could lead it to different places.
I agree, which is why I think it's important to make it easy to have face to face conversations by making sure that there's space to do so without disturbing my coworkers.
> when it's open and people can chat spontaneously
That so different from my experience at two companies using the open office scheme -- at both of those, spontaneous chatting was very, very rare because it so easily disturbs everyone not involved in the chatting.
When I've worked in both cube farms and companies that had real offices, spontaneous chatting was common.
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 340 ms ] threadKnowing that so many others feel the same way and that the terrible experience isn't due to your own (weak! distracted! worthless!) personality is certainly worth something.
I don't think there's an article out there that I would consider far superior to this. If there is, please post it, I'd upvote it in a heartbeat.
Context: I mostly work remote (a combination of luck, laziness, and my ability to ask for things I really want), but every time I have to be in the office (like today, leaving home in ~30 minutes), I have a weird, unpleasant feeling.
I know I don't like open floor plans.
I particularly don't like that people walking behind me can see my monitor.
I don't like that I can't take calls without disturbing others. Or that getting a private room to talk or make a video call is difficult.
Yesterday, for example, I had to leave a room where I was having a call because someone else had booked it, but I needed to extend the call by another ~15 minutes, so I ended up finishing it in the corridors next to the restrooms.
And mind you, I work with (not for) a great firm, people are super nice - but nobody seems to fully understand how toxic an open office space can be for people.
Finally, I also don't like that startups trying to partially solving these problems are getting funded like crazy, based on a relatively crappy product [0] and an expensive price tag.
[0]: https://room.com/
I worked with an internal team that created a brand new office for a decently-sized tech company. We had this exact debate: open or closed. We explored closed, or versions of it (see Spotify’s team rooms as a great example of a compromise), but the end result was the same: if we expected to grow substantially and expand our business a lot, real estate would be the biggest bottleneck. We’d literally have to pay people less and deliver slower if we wanted to make that trade off, and all the companies we talk to who had gone with some form of closed office had shifted to open over time because the costs were huge.
We did the next best thing, because we definitely heard the concerns of people that getting work done at work really was harder than it should be: we created as much private space for 1-2 people as possible that lots of people could use, so you got to decide whether you were in at your desk mode or heads down mode. Several years later, this seems to work all right. There’s still a desire to work from home occasionally, and my teams are pretty understanding about that. Even with the open office plan, though, we still have to rent virtually every open space around us.
45 additional square feet at (a vastly overestimated) $100 per year per square foot for rent. $5,000 construction costs amortized over 10 years.
We’d need to see a closed office productivity increase of double or more to justify it, and we just couldn’t, even talking to other companies that had the kind of collaborative environment we thought of as ideal if we had infinite space. They didn’t see increases at that level.
To be clear, I’m seriously simplifying here. There are so many other considerations like workplace happiness, some amount of creative “collision” differences, churn and burnout, different individual needs for privacy, whether certain collaboration styles enabled by space fit the company culture, the type of work that’s happening, how likely that team structures will be the same in 1 year, 5 years, 10 years. Ultimately, we bet on space flexibility and giving teams more control over their space than giving everyone an office or team room. It’s hard to say what the alternate history would have been, but we do pretty regular surveys about workplace happiness and have seen significant positive increases compared to our old office (also open but much more rigid, far fewer private spaces) and general happiness with people’s access to private space and ability to get work done.
Edit: I also don’t want to overgeneralize. This made sense for us, but I think there are lots of situations where it does not make sense to have an open office, especially if you have a smaller company stocked primarily with very, very high performers doing individually-driven but very deep creative work (in the sense of integrating a lot of information). I would hope all companies would be more thoughtful about it, but I wanted to provide a little look at how a company that values privacy and enabling deep work might still arrive at an open office.
Unfortunately, in an open environment, the most important factors are uncontrollable.
Of course there is other overhead, but space itself is in that range. So the max savings, in the most expensive market in the US, is under $10k per year.
Practically speaking, most people are treating the shift as an implicit agreement that employees can work from home 90+% of the time.
https://www.wired.com/2000/05/is-your-cubicle-shrinking-too/
So while the savings is not nothing, when it's that small any potential productivity hit becomes even more of a big deal.
People will almost always take the near-term cheaper and easier option, even when its worse and more expensive in the long run.
Incidentally, this was the one thing I liked about we-work. Room sizes were genuinely appropriate for 2 - 5 people (ofc sold as 3 - 10).
...except they are actually in meetings 90% of the time, and may even have a dedicated meeting room (which is just an office by another name).
Actually hours at their open floor plan desk are easily in the single digits per week, of not per month.
Or working from their home office. Which isn't an option for the common people.
When the company I work for was looking for an extra office close by, they were all open plan. Changing that was never a topic of discussion.
when i worked on an open plan office, that was huge. it seems like my boss' favorite hobby was checking everyone's screen to see what they were doing.
once, i was watching a yt video on a monitor while i worked on the other. normal right? nope. my boss came to my "desk" and said i had to shut it down because it was bothering people (it wasn't anything offensive. it was literally a science podcast).
In a past life, when I wrote software for a living, I would ask my managers how much it cost, so I could pay out of pocket for my own private office. In every case, when pressed, they admitted it wasn't about the money at all. They just needed me to be a Team Player.
It wasn't even about built-out cost. The private offices already existed, and were sitting empty, in anticipation of future sales team growth -- even though I don't think we were hiring for that yet. Everyone on the business side always got a private office. Come to think of it, I don't remember ever hearing management try to explain why the sales team apparently didn't need to be team players.
So, sales people: you're losing money because of that open-office environment.
Because it's a free-for-all for those signup bonuses/commissions.
Does anyone have experience of this? I have worked in open plan offices since 1999 and I've never experienced productivity problems. If anything I'd expect working in a cube would lead to more time wasted cruising websites since your screen is more obscured. I dunno, I've only worked in cubes a handful of times.
Managers should trust their employees to get stuff done, and not micromanage their time. Employees should get stuff done whether their managers are watching their every move or not, and, trust their managers to not be micromanaging their time. We both need to create a trustworthy relationship.
I have no sympathy for employees who do not do work without being forced to any more than I do for bosses who want to micromanage every minute of employee time or every website they visit. You're both hurting all of us.
But personalities who don't experience the world this way interpret it under the simplistic moral judgment of "laziness", thus perpetuating the very incentive structure that causes it in the first place.
I find it highly dubious that there's a significant fraction of humans who are basically not industrious. That just doesn't seem possible or adaptive in the context of a tribe of hunter-gatherers eeking out survival on the savannah. Rather it seems that we're clinging to unsophisticated organizational structures from the Industrial Revolution, which enabled a highly technical society to emerge in the first place but were never iterated to handle things like psychological diversity or the explosion of highly specialized knowledge work. That’s why we have insanities like software designers working factory shifts, in noisy distracting settings, taking marching orders from people who have no idea what they do.
Proper results oriented approaches can help for both parties. At the end of the day throughput is what matters for productivity not how hard they work. But that is logistically nontrivial to set up and calibrate properly, let alone other temptations and pressure to try to "optimize" beyond the ability to be sustained. Knowledge work in even the lowliest sense isn't optimal like an assembly line.
Making matters worse as usual for any would be reformers are inertia and politics of course. It is the ultimate "dancing monkey" but instead of being between security and the monkey choosing the latter, the choice is practical and wise decisions or politically pleasing ones.
And woe to those who need to take a conference call with multiple of their desk neighbors but no conference rooms are available. Nothing like a bunch of people all sitting next to each other talking on the same phone call.
Why companies would implement an open office without a plethora of private meeting spaces is beyond me.
3/3 found that the meeting rooms were inadequate before they even filled the open floor plan seating.
Open floor plans mean meeting rooms become mandatory for just about every interaction. The promised ease of interaction doesnt happen when everyone is in headphones and the polite people dont want to talk while in close quarters with others NOT in the conversation.
As you said, when everyone has an office, only meetings of more than a handful of people need a separate conference room.
I've never had any problem making a phone call in an open office.
Consider the opposite extreme of private offices. An impromptu meeting involves some walking, but otherwise the meeting stays between just those directly-involved. There's no cost to anyone else.
Keeping this distracting effect in mind, silent communication (messaging) looks more attractive.
For a "hey there" conversation, most teammates have to get up and walk over to someone else... tap them to shake them out of their focus and get them to take their headphones off.
Don't think any of us resort to email, but then again I'm only on one of many teams. We do use Slack but again I don't know how many private Slack conversations occur. (Most of my team is not located here, so everything is Slack, and most of it is in a team channel.)
I'm not sure I have a solid takeaway, but I can say that I'm much, much more engaged with my remote teammates than my local ones.
I think it's pretty tough to read if it's okay to interrupt when your teammate is wearing headphones (especially if, as you said, everyone wears them most of the day). Sometimes I'm just wearing headphones to listen to some music while doing something easy and tedious, which would be okay to interrupt. But if I'm diving deep into some system to find a mystery bug, then I'd be annoyed if interrupted.
I'm currently working on a project exploring physical interruptions and would appreciate hearing about your (and other HN users') experiences: https://forms.gle/syL1XrLAauxd57hr7
90+% of the messages were private, and we had pretty good activity on public channels.
People want to have conversations when they want to; at other times, they want silence. I think there was an effect where no one wanted to interrupt others' silence, so they just emailed or chatted when a simple walk-over-and-chat would suffice...if we had had more space and more individuals with offices, I think a lot more productive collaboration would've occurred.
So, in summary, the noise/distraction was already so bad, we didn't want to make it worse.
So now you have to coordinate on Slack to go to one of the shared team meeting rooms instead. At that point you might as well have your conversation in Slack, even if the person is sitting right next to you. And that's the state of open offices today, co-located but void of any actual collaboration.
I've worked in single person offices, 2-3 person offices and open offices. 2-3 person offices where everyone works on the same thing is the best, by far. Remote work is the new private office, not quite as good as a 2-3 person office, but infinitely better than an open office.
Everyone wears headphones at my place if they're trying to focus. Last job literally handed out construction ear muffs.
Also, all the rooms are taken up by meetings. Mostly by business/product. There's no rooms left for engineers to hash things out, frequently.
I cannot adequately describe the horror this sentence induces in me.
I haven't really been in a startup office that wasn't this way in quite a while. First startup I was at played music all the time - that wasn't great. Second place (not a startup) had engineers stationed next to sales people who had to be on the phone all the time at their desks. Third one - the sales folks were further away but everyone not in engineering was so loud that they gave those muffs out (lots of customer service reps sat near engineering too - lots of phone calls). And now I am at one where everyone is next to everyone even at a billion dollar company. Each person gets a 60"x30" desk (it might be smaller actually) and they shove 6-8 of them together in groups of 2x3 or 2x4. Then put them in really close proximity where you have about 12-18" between your chair at your desk and the person behind you. Not uncommon to run into the person behind you. This is for a company with over $100mil in funding. There's about 100 people in the office. It's not a very large office at all.
Most people just don't join the company if it's an issue - but I don't think anyone has cited that as an issue yet. Most people complain more about the terrible codebase or poor management or bad numbers or poor compensation. (Inclusive or)
This doesn't work for a lot of people, including myself. Being sonically cut off from the environment causes many people a great deal of anxiety and stress.
Long conversations do deserve private space, but this can be resolved by having ample meeting spaces.
White noise generators and proper office design mitigate nearly all of your concerns. There is obviously etiquette to having quick conversations around colleagues and meeting rooms are always available for deeper collaboration. For the most part our work is planned out carefully, most problems can be resolved via a couple of quick Slack messages.
I feel socialized and look forward to coming to work. If I worked in a small 2-3 person silo I'd feel like an instrument of industry rather than a family member. I know that sounds trite but it's true, feeling part of a larger team / the business as a whole is incredibly motivating.
I admit my concept of small private offices is marred by my own experiences of those work environments which have all been just soulless bad places to work. I know that is not the rule for cube/small office workplace design.
I remember one office design where they had these tables placed between desks faced back to back, on the theory that people would use those tables for collaborative work. Instead, the tables just became oversized bookshelves. People couldn't have a conversation over them because conversations make noise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1uCYK6wnjk
Well first of, if I just turn my chair around, I'm talking to the wall.
Secondly, I could yell at another develop from one table and they might not even realise because they're wearing noise-cancelling headphones. I mean, of course they are, they are in a room with 30+ other people.
If I want to collaborate in an open office, I need to get up from my desk, walk to someone else's desk, tap them on the shoulder to get them to remove their headphones and then stand there and talk to the other person + 10 people around them.
I have observed two main reasons for this.
1. More people now have headphones on to keep them focused. So people send IM's so as not to distract them.
2. It is easy to disturb others when having face to face conversations in the open area.
By definition, there can only be max four people (usually less) you can just “turn your chair around and talk to” without shouting over somebody else’s head - or just getting up and walking over to where they are just as you would if people had cubes. Your insinuation that this is possible or meaningful is so obviously disingenuous that I’m having a hard time you’re making it in good faith: if you’d tried it for even a few hours you’d be able to see the flaw in it.
Some people thrive in open environments, some don’t. Some people need accidental encounters to propel innovative change, some don’t.
To say these types of cultures are “dumb” (or even the opposite) is akin saying “peanut butter is the worst possible thing you could ever eat!” just because you’re allergic to it.
Anecdotally, I've seen the complete opposite (where in-person interactions happen far more because of the open floor plan) at three large companies. So the point stands: open floor plans will not produce positive results for every organization, that's to be expected.
Snark aside, I have a personal office and I love it. I don't like to listen to constant noise/music to cancel out the other noise/music. I like being able to have private calls without all of the noise in the background. If I'm working on something particularly difficult I like closing my door and having peace and quiet. I also enjoy the sense of ownership and prestige. It's nice feeling like I matter and my space and attention are worth something.
Working in an open office is too chaotic for me. Being around people is exhausting and distracting. I like to have a space I can retreat to for a few hours and get some deep work done. Silence is usually what I appreciate the most.
Different strokes for different folks. I love open offices and wouldn’t go back to closed ones if given the choice. I also have difficulty WFH for the same reasons.
More employers should offer more choices, as everyone is different and what suits one worker might be awful for another.
Downside: the arrangement was likely quite expensive.
This always comes up in these discussions. Extroverts say they prefer the open office format because they can talk to others. That's nice and all, but shouldn't you be working rather than satisfying your desire to talk to others? (The same goes for workers not in an open office not playing on HN all day.)
It's just that often open-plan offices are an all-or-nothing affair. It's a weird way to construct a space for people to work and collaborate given how different we all are.
Some of my favorite offices have been ones that have the typical open office structure, but also lots and lots of "hiding places" and different areas. I'm super ADHD and changes in scenery were helpful, and being able to adapt my environment to the task at hand, or even give people having impromptu conversations a refuge so the desk areas weren't noisy.
The startup I work at currently encourages everyone to work from home tuesdays and thursdays. It makes for a great mix; when I'm in the office I can engage with my coworkers, catch up, or have those deeper discussions that inevitably come up face-to-face. Work that requires intense concentration can be batched for those days, or I can opt to take additional time at home if necessary.
You’re worried that the discussion is one-sides. I’m worried that physical workplaces are one-sided, today, for real, to such an extent that it’s deeply cognitively harmful to many people.
What I'm saying is there's a way to meet in the middle.
Group rooms, shared offices, etc., would be an acceptable compromise for some but far from all. These middle solutions still have the negatives of the open floorplan just on a smaller scale. If you prefer cola and I prefer water, watered down cola isn't going to make either of us very happy.
It's a balance, though, and overstimulation is still an issue, and I need periods of quiet and concentration like anyone else.
Extroverts think out loud, so they need someone to talk with just to think. So long as the other person is an extrovert that is okay because they both work the same way.
Extroverts - because they talk and ask questions are often the first to know. If the company has decided some project isn't doing the introverts can waste a lot of time continuing on a canceled project. Also extroverts can sometimes discover a quick/easy need to fill - a 10 minute script at the right time can sometimes be more valuable than a years of effort an introvert puts into the main project.
As far as preferences go, though, if you get even a small part of the external stimulus you want, it's already started wearing on us. Perhaps larger companies could try offering quiet floors with lots of barriers vs "social" open-plan floors.
On the other hand, I favor pair programming. But even then, it should be done in two-person offices with a door, not in cacophanous cafeterias.
It was conceived as a straw man which was being dissed so vigorously that people started believing it was real.
we were just so blind back then that we thought we could predict the future. When faced with direct evidence that things weren't going according to plan, or that the commercial landscape had changed, we stubbornly went back to our Gantt charts and insisted that it just couldn't be so.
so we just never got anything done..until some genius decided we had to meet every morning and schedule everything in 2 week intervals.
And Agile has it's fault and it has become filled with consultants, buzzwords and all kinds of things but early days when I built an internal system used in factories for a large company. The old ways of building and documenting software there was pretty much waterfall and there was a lot of middle-management, reporting, architects, documenting etc.
I was a part of a pretty young team + one offshore team in India (that was not great but not bad either) and we had a great boss who fought for us when we wanted to develop using pretty standard Scrum instead and we had a great product owner who immediately got what we were after and had great domain knowledge.
That project went sooo much better than previous ones and even if there were a lot of fighting and escalations in the beginning the whole concept of "Just call into our demo's we have every three weeks and see what we are developing and then give feedback" was like a revelation for some would be users of the system or owners of processes we implemented.
I've heard countless people advocate for waterfall. I was formally taught waterfall years ago. It was how many people approached development for a long time, and how some people still approach it today.
Here's just one concrete example I could find in seconds - an article from 2006 advocating for its benefits https://www.techrepublic.com/article/understanding-the-pros-....
So much this.
I've been in the industry for about 30 years, and I've never once seen a place that used a methodology that could be called "waterfall" as described by many agile proponents.
It was always a "no true scotsman" issue. If it didn't work, it was because we didn't adhere to it and didn't gather the requirements completely enough. So, sure, waterfall never existed in the sense that it never worked out, but it certainly existed in the sense that it was pursued to the tune of countless man hours and countless dollars.
It was also the only process I learned in college ('94) and was strongly advocated in my classes.
Most attacks from the agile community probably are coming from a place of never having actually seen or practiced the real thing however. For example it does flow backwards at times, it's not the nonsense straight line process that gets straw-manned sometimes.
This is rather my point. In "waterfall" shops I've worked at, the way it has never worked is that the application is completely designed up front, then implemented. The reality is that there has always been iteration involved, and there has always been refining and modification of design, and etc.
The only thing (aside from "ceremonies") I see agile bringing that didn't exist in my experiences with "waterfall" is the notion of bringing the customer in as a constant part of the development process -- which is a welcome addition.
The rest of Agile that I see can be thought of as refinements to waterfall, not as something entirely different.
Yes, it was horrible.
Yes, it got worse when they added the mandatory omnibus all-hands standup scheduled for 8:45-9:00 every morning, that always somehow lasted until at least 9:30, because everyone was continually justifying their existence.
And it was redundant with the spreadsheets that recorded the time spent on any particular task, down to the second.
It doesn't work this way because software development is the process of figuring out the actual requirements and a good design. You don't have to follow an agile methodology to acheive a successful project, but you do have to have feedback loops that reduce the risk of wasted effort.
In the engineering analogy, I like to tell people that the compiler is the builder. All coding is an exercise in architecture and engineering that produces a detailed design (the code).
In my experience very few people truly understands why engineering is something expensive at its core, and it's usually this particular lack of understanding that ironically ends up making making things even more expensive and produces worse value-for-money, and so the vicious cycle continues.
Then their beautiful 5 year late 2000 page specification slams head first into the realities of computers and the project immediately becomes quagmired. It's basically the Soviet model of computer programming, where you try to make all of the design decisions from the top but the people at the top don't have the whole picture and can't make good decisions and the scope is way too large for mere mortals to learn enough to make said decisions.
Waterfall is really how you manage other large construction projects like building a house or a bridge. So it is not completely crazy to think you can also develop software that way. It took many failures to realize software demanded a different approach.
Iterative development processes where beautiful, and had great ideas. The problem with today's "Agile" methods as implemented in the industry is that they usually only do the first iteration and stop there, making it practically mainly waterfall.
The problem is applying a methodology because it is the current fad.
Management should be adapted to the conditions: the scale of the project, the nature and availability of the customer, the personalities and roles of the team members,... Sometimes, the best results looks like waterfall, sometimes it looks like agile, sometimes it looks like there is no methodology at all. When things "just work" you don't realize there is a process, that's the sign of a manager doing a good job. The worst case is usually when a manager follows a methodology "by the book", except for the parts that don't fit or are "too expensive". Not realizing that pieces go together and changing one will affect the others.
The same could be said of design patterns in programming. They are good to know, but they are just guidelines. Using a design pattern for the sake of it usually leads to terrible, often bloated code.
One other person means company if you both want to chat, and generally silence when you need to get stuff done.
As the institute grew I think they squeezed 5 people into tHe same office. Which meant random informal meetings appearing frequently. My productivity plumeted.
My comfort level is, if I can smell my coworkers, then we're sitting too close.
Yep, dumbest idea ever.
The vast majority of my office time was in cubicles, which are pretty good. Usually enough privacy to get things done. I did have a glassed-in private office for about a year at one company. That was productivity heaven. In retrospect I was dumb to leave that company when I did, but they started demolishing offices for cubicles about 2 years later. It is all about efficient use of real estate.
I've been at a millennial run company for the last 6 years, first 4 in open space. What a productivity fuck, for all the often repeated reasons. And I really consider them de-humanizing. I gave up on trying to explain this to management years ago.
Working from home the last 2 years. Whenever I do visit the home office nothing gets done. Looking at what my colleagues do, I think they only ever get much done on work form home days.
In many cases the Federal tax code can also be the driver of these decisions because the amortization on building upgrades is way longer than cubicles. However, tables over cubicles is likely something else. To me, it's just cheap, like how call centers used to be (even they have cubicles now).
I remember watching "Office Space" circa 2000 and it looked pretty soul crushing, and working in pre-FAANG big tech around 2006, it felt very mechanical and depressing. I get your gripes, but I think some is also rosy retrospection.
And while one can theoretically make good software in open-floor-plan-environment/current-whipping-boy-programming-language-of-the-month/etc., the existence of such things is a big sign on the door "we probably don't care about craft".
Too bad open offices are here to stay, if you were worth it you could get an office, maybe invest in some good headphones :)
Cubes are still rather poor, but at least I odn't have to see what my neighbor's doing, or listen to any but the loudest noises. I'm three steps away from everyone else in the team, and if we need an impromptu discussion the aisle is at least a cube width, so plenty of quick standup space.
An office / separate workroom away from the team opposite me would be great but I can earbud them away.
I hear a conversation relevant to me and jump in, a conversation stops being relevant I jump out That simple interaction has added tons of value for me over the last few years of open offices. We have a very simple way to indicate you don't want to be interrupted, headphones or a flag There's also tons of huddle rooms you can go into if you want to hunker down in quiet - Everyone is different, some people feel switching from keyboard to mouse is a huge productivity drain and invest a lot in avoiding that transition Maybe I'm just fortunate but it's never been an issue for me, people are pretty respectful of their coworkers where I've worked
But they aren't great for that. For most people, they're the opposite. That's the point the article is making, and the article agrees with what I've personally observed.
But I can imagine that I'd be so jumpy and angry that I'd refuse to talk with anyone. And that I'd wear humongous headphones, and blast death metal or whatever.
But then there are the loudmouths :(
Can you explain this to me? How does an open office lead to better communication than cubes or partitioned group work spaces?
I'm in an open office. A lot of communication is done via email and IM. When someone comes to my desk to ask a question, collaborate, or just say hey, I typically don't get up. If a group stops by, we'll usually move to a collaborative area or set up a meeting. This would be true no matter if I were in a cube or partitioned group area. If I have a private office, I may not even have to leave my desk.
The typical response I see to this is that open offices tend to have this implied notion of everyone is willing to communicate at any time. I'd argue that on an individual level for developers, that's more often false. Someone head-down probably doesn't want to be interrupted.
That simple interaction has added tons of value for me over the last few years of open offices.
We have a very simple way to indicate you don't want to be interrupted, headphones or a flag
There's also tons of huddle rooms you can go into if you want to hunker down in quiet
-
Everyone is different, some people feel switching from keyboard to mouse is a huge productivity drain and invest a lot in avoiding that transition
Maybe I'm just fortunate but it's never been an issue for me, people are pretty respectful of their coworkers where I've worked
That's the problem with open-floor-plan. It presumes "my need to know what you're saying/doing is more important than you even getting the opportunity to consent to me knowing."
And they are likely wrong. People believe a lot of things about themselves that don't hold up to scrutiny. For example, people think they can multitask, etc and studies show that the aren't nearly as productive doing that as they think they are. People think that open offices help collaboration, but that is not what the research shows. As the article says:
>...As my colleague Jessica Stillman pointed out last week, a new study from Harvard showed that when employees move from a traditional office to an open plan office, it doesn't cause them to interact more socially or more frequently.
>Instead, the opposite happens. They start using email and messaging with much greater frequency than before. In other words, even if collaboration were a great idea (it's a questionable notion), open plan offices are the worst possible way to make it happen.
>Previous studies of open plan offices have shown that they make people less productive, but most of those studies gave lip service to the notion that open plan offices would increase collaboration, thereby offsetting the damage.
https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/its-official-open-plan-of...
It doesn't make sense because that's not the reason open-floor-plan exists. The reason is 100% cost-savings. "Communication" is just a post-hoc rationalization, created by management, parroted by employees too boorish to learn how to communicate politely and effectively.
I do agree that open office looks a lot less depressing than a cubicle farm; being able to see a large area tends to be more pleasing than lots of obstructions. However, actually having the same amount of people (or, usually, more people because that's why they have open offices in the first place) can cause issues due to the more intense noise and distractions. But that wouldn't be visible in a quick visit; it would need to come out over a prolonged period of working in that environment. And somehow all the decision makers never actually work in the middle of the open plan office…
Sitting in an open-plan office lets you know that you're not "worth it". That you're not respected. And you're way too distracted to actually get much done. So you zone out with music, watch YouTube, hang out on HN, etc.
And then, because you're not productive, you're condemned to an open-plan future :(
Hell, I'm pretty sure if they asked seriously for a private office, the company would jump over itself to make it happen.
If you need to do passive aggressive stuff like refuse to work because you're in an open office that's rather unfortunate, a lot of very successful, productive, people work in open offices.
That seems counterintuitive. Or at least from what I've read. Such as TFA.
> If you need to do passive aggressive stuff like refuse to work because you're in an open office that's rather unfortunate ...
TFA actually presents evidence that there's a productivity hit.
Well I'm not good enough to demand an office, but I like to think I'm on the upper half of the talent scale and when I'm job hunting I can be somewhat selective. The office style is one of my selection criteria, so companies with open plan offices are putting themselves at a disadvantage. It wont show up on a balance sheet but it will hurt them in the long run.
Typically companies with open plan offices have more "quirks" sending people away.
I'm not gonna lie, the cube farms were an awful eyesore. But I still really enjoyed the occasional weeks I'd spend visiting those offices, and would have jumped at the chance to move to one. The people were quite a bit more outgoing and social, and yet the space still managed to be quieter. Noise level and character were generally comparable to those of my college's library.
Hell, at my current job personalization of your space is actively discouraged, since there's a culture of hot-desking if you're coming in from another office.
open floorplan < cubicles < office with a door
The beauty of the cubicle was in its practical functionality. If you’re working effectice and productively you don’t really notice the plainness of your surroundings.
A private space, but you could still see out the window.
The leap to open floor plans was a whole other level. It's like plotting soul crushing on a log scale.
I work in a private office now. I almost never work from home, and it's never to "be productive", almost always because of some personal scheduling issue. I used to work in open-office environments and would try to work from home as much as possible. One of them was even at a company around the corner from where I am now, so it wasn't even a commuting issue.
We have weekly meetings scheduled to force the issue of getting everyone caught up. But mostly, I just take a daily walk around the floor, see folk and get caught up on everything. The meetings mostly become "catching up the one person who was out the rest of the week".
We don't do daily standups. Ugh, what a boondoggle Scrum became after The Suits found out about it. Who needs it, anyway? Just talk to people.
If you have to make up organizational excuses to get people to talk, you're making excuses for people who don't talk. It's not acceptable to be a team contributor and not know how to communicate effectively.
Mind you, tech leans towards introverts and it’s much easier to find temporary loud spaces than temporary quiet spaces so... probably not ideal
I've been a part of these discussions at very high levels and this is the consistent theme. Short-term, easily quantifiable savings against nebulous, hard to quantify harms. Facilities folks always win and get a pat on the back. Any push back about the open office should, in my opinion, start with addressing this basic incentive. Everything about collaboration, open communication, etc. is just window dressing used to justify the moves.
To be completely accurate, it's all about maximizing profit and minimizing costs, which in this case means having as many people in a given amount of floor space as is legally possible.
The benefit of the low cost per person of office space is weighed against the negatives:
* Employee attitude/positive workplace (hard to measure)
* Difficulties introduced to the workplace by the increased density - noise, psychological effects, smells, etc (hard to measure/easily dismissed)
* A less pleasant workplace makes employee retention work less well (difficult to measure)
The other up side of the open plan space is that it's a project that an otherwise ineffective manager can do to appear valuable.
The real elephant in the room of open plan offices is "hoteling", IE employees are supposed to sit down at the first open space and start working. The real reason this is implemented is that assigning spaces in an open plan is difficult, and hoteling avoids arguments over who gets the better spot (near the restrooms, vending machines, windows, or whatever) and avoids the work of tracking employee seating and doing assignments.
However, in every single open plan space I've worked in, everyone sits in the same location every day. Despite this being obvious, no one ever seems to remember this when they decide on yet another open plan office conversion.
Open offices are a psychological tool to control workers. All privacy is removed. This allows them to impose their will on you.
In exchange they get reduced productivity but they don’t seem to care about that as much as control over their staff.
It gets worse at the lower end of the food chain (e.g. call centres) - even toilet breaks are monitored. Strangely though in the same places there is often a lot of down time because calls are bursty, so watching youtube is permitted (friends of my daughters talk). We are indeed in the strangest timeline.
Let me take a stab: 1998-2000? Ha!
(Same here.)
Couldn't the same focus that drove the open-office transition also be responsible for driving more effective communication tools? Or just more collaboration in general, which naturally results in an increased use in communications tools?
Or maybe the tools have just been improving over time, which results in an entirely unrelated increase in use?
There are so many potential explanations here. This seems like a non-point.
I work in an open-plan office in a place that makes heavy use of the latest collaboration software, and it works great. There is virtually no use of email or IM internally. Just persistent chat and collaboration with Teams.
From beginning this was the reason - because when planning for the office the cost difference between open/close office would show up in the Excel files - loss of productivity no Excel or Project Mgmt software can capture (it is hand-wavy stuff for CFO office).
Apart from rent, the cost of HVAC (heating, cooling) is drastically reduced - installation, operation and maintenance - open office has more efficient distribution due to no obstructing walls, lesser duct outlets - in closed office plan, each office needs to have at least one outlet, most of the time more than one.
Then ofcourse saving on drywalls, doors, locks, etc.
Last time I just found out when the bean counters were coming around and worked from home the days they were in the office. When the plan came out and they hadn't figure out a slot for me I just told them I work from home and started doing it full time. Problem solved.
Caveat: It helped we were an acquisition. Roles and norms were very in flux. I'd done work in other areas to pass off all my onsite responsibilities to the purchaser.
I've found that, in open plan offices, attempting to mentor or be mentored on something is a great way to earn dirty looks from anyone who's unfortunate enough to be sitting nearby. If you do it often, people will start griping about you behind your back.
Mini meeting rooms can work, when you can find them, for about a year. After that, the company will respond to complaints that people will hang out in them for hours on end (which I could swear was the point, but I digress) by requiring them to be reserved ahead of time in Outlook. Which puts the brakes on using them for genuine collaboration, because reserving meeting rooms in Outlook is a minor hassle, especially if you're a Linux or Mac user, and it's ultimately easier and less demoralizing to just not talk to each other than it is to play a game of, "Mother may I," whenever you want to have an impromptu discussion.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if it turns out that the square footage you need for an open plan office plus a sufficient amount of meeting space ends up being greater than the square footage you need for a more traditional style of office. The last open plan office I worked at was probably 1/3 meeting spaces, and it still didn't feel like enough.
I don't buy it. Most people are trying to get shit done so are wearing headphones and for the people that aren't, you only overhear people who happen to be within earshot radius from where you're sitting and only if you're somewhat paying attention or not otherwise distracted, and of that stuff you do overhear, how much is actually relevant or useful? In my personal experience, the amount of times I overheard something in the work space (as opposed in a social space area like the break room) that was useful or relevant to me has been far, far less than the amount of useful stuff I've encountered in places that had a "be vocal on slack" culture.
What's better, we have a meeting room that decorate like a kitchen, with no door and the wall that is not rise to the ceiling, if you know what I mean. The noise level comes from that 'meeting room' is just unbearable. The worst meeting room design I've seen in my life.
The only thing I can do is put on my trusty noise-cancelling headphones, thanks god for this miraculous technology in this noisy world.
That's not literally the only thing you could do. You could quit.
I'll never again make the mistake of hiring on somewhere without first seeing the working environment. Too many times...
Well, that's one big choice to make haha.
Noise-canceling headphones help a lot, but I've tried all the most expensive, top-of-the-line ones, and unless you play some sound (which, no matter what you play, is tiring in the long run) you can still hear people talk, they just remove the lower frequencies.
If open plan offices are so bad for “productivity”, why don’t they get selected out by market forces?
Is it Price’s Law, the square root of the number of employees do half the work, and the rest doesn’t matter if they have offices or cattle desks, high or low productivity - what most of us do doesn’t matter enough to matter?
People tend to be respectful of each other's concentration at that number of people. And since you're in the same team, most interruptions are likely to be useful to other members of the team. But if we wanted to just bother 1 specific person, we would just use instant message.
Our manager worked in the same conference room too. But he would step outside for any calls he had to make.
It also gave an exiting "small startup" feel for me, even when working for a large company.
Also high natural light with moderate ceiling lights and good task lighting on ample desk surface.
This was at a premium EDI firm in the 90’s. It was awesome.
Open office-wise the best was getting a desk that was in a corner around a pony wall. So I had a wall (conference room) at my back, a pony wall at my left and a desk facing towards me, which is almost like a wall in front. Also the people I was sitting near could control the lights on our side of the wall. We kept only half on and it was super helpful. I think bright fluorescent lighting is a little distracting. Maybe not distracting, but not awesome.
The most productive times I have, hands-down, are when I work from home.
This is exactly what happens in my employer's "pod rooms." There are 10 of us and inevitably someone will be all, "Jack; Jack!; HEY, JACK!!" and someone else says "he has his headphones on just send him an IM" and the first person replies "ugh!" and then gets up to walk over and stand at Jack's shoulder until Jack takes off his headphones and looks up at the person.
It's not just one person that does this or we might could get the behavior to change. Apparently humans in group spaces just really, really, really want to verbally speak to other humans in those spaces and there's no amount of "hey guys I'm really trying to work here could you keep it down" that doesn't come across as rude or condescending.
I guess part of it for me is there seems to be no escaping from the noise of life any more. At least at work I used to have an office with a door that I could close for a couple of hours of solitude and heads-down real work. Now, after the building redesign, there are 950 people in the building and a pittance of conference rooms and phone rooms and "team rooms" (little conference rooms supposedly shared between just two or three teams sitting in larger "pod rooms" but, in practice, squatted in by one or two people all day). I've spent twenty minutes walking around my building and the adjacent one just trying to find somewhere to do a phone screen for an interview candidate.
Combine that with the rest of the world getting louder[0] and it's becoming a little frustrating.
0 - Right now I can hear my neighbor upstairs walking around on the hardwood floors all of our apartments have with his hard-soled shoes like he's been doing for the past hour, the traffic outside because apparently density should only exist next to busy arterials in the city where I live, planes loudly going overhead because the cloud ceiling is lower and they're taking a more direct route to the airport, and now the backup generator for the newly-constructed senior home is running its weekly test.
Cities grew too quickly and are now kind of like the startup that never planned for its explosive growth and is struggling to cope trying to keep the wheels from falling off. A paradigm shift is needed, and will come about at some point- I'm just not sure when, and in what form.
Or I'll just move to Montana and do a self-sustainable ranch(hah). I don't necessarily want to be that far out, but looking at the way things are going, wife and I rarely go out anymore anyways due to the overcrowding, so the benefits of having a city is rapidly diminishing.
To be 100% clear, I still love living in the dense city where I do and I have no plans on moving away from it. But I don't think employers have yet figured out that taking away the quiet(er?) spots at work does a lot of harm because it means loss of hours of quiet.
I also readily admit that a good chunk of this is on me. I am increasingly a curmudgeon, probably because of changes at work, and so I take it out on the other parts of my environment by quietly being frustrated.
I've lived in the middle of nowhere before and hated it. I've lived in the "quiet" suburbs and hated it. At least living in the city, with the attendant noise, I get more out of it than I lose; I'm just still frustrated at my employer (and my industry) for taking away my office door.
The space issue is fundamental: there just aren't that much space around cities as they stand today. The only pragmatic solutions are:
1) Build up. Everyone wants to live in these areas, so build as tall of buildings as possible and just spread out upwards. Doesn't solve the personal office problem though since Tokyo is super dense but I don't think anybody has a private office?
2) Build new cities. America is big, and there is still plenty of space left to build. But it looks to me like a combination of power-law economics, plus locale desirability, and political willingness to invest into infrastructure is pushing most ordinary people right back into the clutches of 1).
Even as a remote worker, I used to think this was true.
I no longer believe this is the case.
In remote video calls each human is like an augmented cyborg integrated with their computer and the internet.
The nature of IRL meetings tend to disrupt the augmentation aspect. Above a certain number of people perhaps augmentation becomes more obstacle then advantage though.
The above is anecdotal and your experience may differ.
Build new cities, you're on the right track though I doubt it will happen from scratch like in China. Rather mid-tier cities such as Huntsville and Boise will grow into larger cities.
Remote work has its up and down sides. I've been doing it for two years. Most of the time it is better but there are occasions when collaborating on some idea or document would work better in person at a whiteboard. But those get fewer all the time and the remote collaboration tools get better over time. I'd love for all of us to have Surface Hub whiteboards but they're still too expensive to have a reasonable ROI. Over time though, the price will go down, as will that of other high fidelity collaboration tools.
Presuming you're not the only one who's experiencing this it seems like this could be surfaced to the entire team and some norms could be established around when it's appropriate to approach someone. E.g. "If they're wearing headphones then they don't want to be interrupted, so send an email/IM/whatever instead."
I loved my cubicle. Like you said: just enough privacy to get things done. People would come by only if absolutely necessary otherwise they would mind their own business.
Having cubicles also prevented useless chatter.
Then I left that company and my productivity and mental peace has never been the same. Not even near.
Currently, our cubicles are a honey-comb type arrangement. (think pods of three cubicles on one side, two on the other) There is no privacy, and rows behind you leave 18" of space to the employee behind you. Gone are the tall walls for working while standing. Edges of the cubicles do not stand proud of the desks, so it's not much to work with.
We've seemingly taken the worst of both worlds when it comes to cubicle AND open office concepts. I wouldn't even know what to call it, other than awful.
I remember when I graduated college I interviewed and got a job and went to work at this company that in hindsight, had these awesome large high end cubicles, with wooden U shaped desks and tall partitions. Yet, I remember walking to my cubicle and feeling a pang of sadness. I could see this huge cubicle farm and I was being guided to my own "little" cubicle to go and sit in. Felt like a hamster in a cage - a small cog in a huge machine. Which I guess I was. All the managers had offices along the outsides of the farm, facing the windows.
But now that my expectations have been lowered further... I'd take that cubicle setup over an open plan office any day.
If space is at such a premium, the solution is to encourage more remote work. At this point, the industry, with its years of experience in outsourcing, offshoring and working with distributed teams has proven that remote work is an excellent and efficient model. At the very least, it should be far more mainstream than it is.
Scott Adams nailed it in his book from 15 years ago:
>After your boss has taken away your door, your walls, and your storage areas, there aren't many options left for the next revolution in office design. One of the following things is likely to go next: the floor; the ceiling; your happiness. I think the floor will stay, but only because your company would have to dig a huge hole all the way to the other side of the earth to get rid of it. As you can imagine, a huge hole through the earth would represent a serious threat to office productivity.
One company I was at switched to "hot desking" after carefully monitoring the usage rate of desks throughout the building.
Come time to do the switch, and unless you are at the office by 7.30-8.00 it's musical chairs and people end up working in the kitchenettes.
Turns out they did their desk usage survey during the holiday season. So of course there was tons of spare desks at the time.
Also ignoring the fact that developers are going to be in the office every day - they budgeted on everybody being like sales people and out of the office half their time.
I never thought the hot desk policy at a company I wasn’t even working at would affect my morning...
Cubicles are the soul-sucking solitude that give a false sense of privacy. You're still just as interruptable except isolated from everyone else. If you see your coworkers as a problem then maybe this is nice but I never felt that way, preferring open office space to cubicles.
1) The founders have a great sense of aesthetic and our office is a beautiful space as a result (also stays very clean), meaning it stays less stressful and promotes a positive mood. This may not be strictly necessary but it sure helps it not feel like the hellscape that “open office” evokes.
2) There are plenty of closed-room office spaces available if you need focus time
3) Both of our open-office sections are in rooms much bigger than the rows of desks, so despite having a large number of people in one room, it never feels crowded
4) There is Sonos in both open-office areas and people are pretty good about not hogging it or playing obnoxious/too-loud music
I’ve also worked in open offices that were nightmarish, but saw these same factors (minus the aesthetic portion) make for an effective office environment elsewhere as well. Music, breakout offices, and non-desk space seem to be the musts (but do decorate nicely because it matters more than I ever would have thought before).
EDIT: I should add that it’s usually pretty quiet, and the music very low. I don’t consider it a distraction, but I also like my coworkers’ music so this may not work for everyone. Also, headphones are universally respected as a “do not disturb” signal.
It all depends on the job.
If my only choices were working in this office and homelessness, I would honest to go choose homelessness.
I've never been in an all-hands meeting that was actually useful. Usually its a bunch of guys bragging about how great they are in roundabout ways.
> There is Sonos in both open-office areas
Oh god. That alone would want me to not work there. I don't want to listen to someone else's music (most of the time, I don't want to listen to music at all -- I work from home now, thankfully, and spend most of the day without any noise or music at all. Silence is amazing. I don't want to be overstimulated all day every day)
Where I've always thought open offices break down is when you have the space filled with people who wouldn't normally talk to each other if they were in their own offices. Organizations that have roughly the same number of projects as they have developers.
Where it started to work extremely well, is when the only people within a 10 foot radius of me exclusively worked on the same project, codebase and backlog as me. If you're building a component for a developer that's sitting to the right of you, tested by a QA sitting to the left of you with business rules written by the BA sitting behind you it's incredible how fast you can move.
As a coder, the ratio is like 99% focus time and 1% socialising. If I were just to take an office everyday id be viewed as entitled even if its the most rational thing
> 4) There is Sonos in both open-office areas and people are pretty good about not hogging it or playing obnoxious/too-loud music
Just, why is there a Sonos in the first place!? I can't imagine being at work and wanting to hear someone's playlist.
This is key.
If I had the flexibility to work in one of these spaces regularly (30+ hours a week), I would be fine. Oh, and each of these rooms has a dual monitor setup with a docking station for my laptop, right?
Yikes. that sounds awful for focus-time.
IT and other staff needs peace and quiet to concentrate to be productive. People interact less in open plan offices and tend to put on head phones to silence the noise. Since you produce less in open plan offices yes they are not smart.
Also there is link to noise pulltion and overall health. Open Office spaces will be more noisy than private offices. https://www.pac-intl.com/pdf/NoisePollutionTakesTollonHealth...
Plus you are more likely to get sick in an open office, for example if you neighbor sneezes. "Compared to cellular offices, occupants in 2-person offices had 50% more days of sickness absence [rate ratio (RR) 1.50, 95% confidence interval (95% CI) 1.13–1.98], occupants in 3–6-person offices had 36% more days of sickness absence (RR 1.36, 95% CI 1.08–1.73), and occupants in open-plan offices (>6 persons) had 62% more days of sickness absence (RR 1.62, 95% CI 1.30–2.02)."
Link to study https://www.sjweh.fi/show_abstract.php?abstract_id=3167
https://www.rivier.edu/academics/blog-posts/the-price-of-col...
I'm not disputing that open plan offices are unproductive, but if you run a company it's just much cheaper to have an open plan office. In many places in the worls rent is high enough for more complex layouts that it would be cheaper to have a few extra junior staff than to have a different office structure.
While it could definitely be less productive, it might actually be more profitable to have an open layout.
This doesn't really explain why companies that build their own offices stick to open plan, but it's definitely the reason for small companies.
Even worse for the large fraction of the population who are introverts.
Many companies have systems circumventing https via additional certificates—effectively a man in the middle attack.
> ..The fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched means that they are motivated to act as though they are being watched at all times. Thus, the inmates are effectively compelled to regulate their own behaviour.
> ..Foucault used the panopticon as metaphor for the modern disciplinary society in Discipline and Punish.
> He argued that discipline had replaced the pre-modern society of kings, and that the panopticon should not be understood as a building, but as a mechanism of power and a diagram of political technology.
> ..In the landmark surveillance narrative Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), George Orwell said: "there was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment ... you had to live ... in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinised."
Sure, it feels like I'm being a bit anti-social at times, but I'm very comfortable in my corner :)
I had one of those IBM offices back in the day. Great for IT productivity.
I can't imagine its comfortable holding it in until you use the bathroom.
Especially when we first moved into the office the VPs loved to take the customers on a tour and stand at the top of the space and tell them how great this open office was. I was in a bad mood one time when this happened and the VP asked me if I agreed (with the customer) and I said, "it is perfect for what it was built for, it was built to show our customers how many resources we have and to imply that we have no walls separating our BUs from working together." He was not happy, but also had no lines of responsibility to me or my business segment.
And like all open offices it was loud so everyone put on headphones and we had zero cross-BU interaction and very low inter-BU interaction. At one point corporate tried to push a no headphones rule because it looked bad when they brought in customers and it did not land well in the cube dwellers. A compromise was reached to not allow headphones when customers leadership visits where planned, about once a month.
My biggest problem with the design was that they guy in the desk that faced me spent around 80% of his time on conference calls. Now he wasn't loud at all, almost never said anything on these calls, but he would sit silently with his headset on staring directly at me the whole time. Now he wasn't looking at me, just looking forward but it was really disconcerting.
What I always find funny about the whole concept is that the open cube was really first imagined by Taylor as he tried to apply physical labor efficiencies into the office world. You would have everyone in an open office with the manager slighly raised up behind everyone so he could monitor them to ensure everyone was working at peak efficiency. Plus the modern leader of open offices, a company I forgot the name of in Colorado implemented and pushed open offices into the modern world, and then killed the practice internally in less than 2 years.
Sorry, but this image is hilarious.
I'd definitely get more heads-down work done in a private office setting. However in that setting I'd mostly be annoyed I couldn't just work from my home office, since I'd be commuting to spend 80%+ of my time alone anyway.
I’d imagine that if I needed to get up, walk up there and knock on my coworker’s door, I’d rather just message him.
And a text conversation and face to face one are very different and could lead it to different places.
No. Even when I visit my less fortunate comrades in the cube farms, I constantly feel guilty for opening my mouth because I know that there are 10 other people in earshot who probably don't have any interest at all in the discussion we're having.
>And a text conversation and face to face one are very different and could lead it to different places.
I agree, which is why I think it's important to make it easy to have face to face conversations by making sure that there's space to do so without disturbing my coworkers.
That so different from my experience at two companies using the open office scheme -- at both of those, spontaneous chatting was very, very rare because it so easily disturbs everyone not involved in the chatting.
When I've worked in both cube farms and companies that had real offices, spontaneous chatting was common.