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Poll: What's your preferred work environment? (private/shared office, openspace)

54 points by egor83 ↗ HN
There's a discussion going on in a thread about work at Microsoft [1] regarding the preferred work environment; people seem to have different opinions on this matter, so I wonder what the bottom line is.

What do you like most?

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2269988

60 comments

[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] thread
tastybites
A private office is very different than working from home, I'm not sure why that's the same option.
egor83
I've never worked in a private office, so it was hard for me to judge; I thought those two options were quite close.

Could you please list some differences between a home and a private office?

thematt
Private offices still have the potential for in-person interruptions. Working from home usually requires electronic communication to get ahold of somebody, which is much easier to defer if you're in the middle of working.
egor83
Phone call?

It's not a real substitute to face-to-face discussion, but still is an option to reach someone in urgent cases.

tallanvor
It's a matter of isolation. Working from home takes away the ability for you to walk over to someone's desk/office and have a quick chat or go over a problem that may be difficult to cover via email or IM. And no matter how accessible you try to make yourself, when you're working from home, the distance barrier means that your coworkers won't consider you as someone to contact easily. It also means people are more likely to forget to pass on information because when they don't see you, they don't think about you as much.
starpilot
I'm wondering whether you mean a work area where each employee has his own office, or an office for an independent programmer without coworkers. The latter might be similar to home working, though without the casualness (coding while undressed) or ability to attend to home/family tasks at the same time.
egor83
a work area where each employee has his own office

Your own room in a company building.

mkramlich
You've just marked yourself as somebody who is very likely still in college and/or under the age of 25 and/or does not have spouse and kids and dog and cat, etc. :)
egor83
The latter.

Now I remember I once discussed this with a friend of mine who is married and has a kid; he told that it's much easier to concentrate in the office.

So, yes, my bad, the first line should've been split in two.

benji-york
I submit that properly trained, "spouse and kids and dog and cat" aren't disruptive. I have all of those but a dog and work at home for hours at a time without interruption.
danssig
At home my wife or kids can bother me every 5 minutes. Literally. Every. Five. Minutes.
SoftwareMaven
I was surprised by that one, too, even though it actually does apply to me: I work at home about 75% of the time and am in a private office the other 25%. I completely agree that they are apples and oranges.
stewiecat
Indeed it is. At home I don't have my office neighbor yelling questions through the wall at me.
ondrasej
I've voted for work from home, as it is what I do most of the time. But I also do have a place at a shared office and I prefer to spend at least a day each week there, as it's sometimes easier to concentrate there and I do really hate sitting at one place all the time.
shiftb
I like a mix. I'm energized working in a really open shared environment (like Hacker Dojo or Pier 38), but I also love working from home. Too much working from home gets really lonely.

Now that I've left my last job and starting on my own I work from home most of the time.

T-R
I feel like I might enjoy a shared or open office, but my only experience with it involved trying to concentrate on coding while listening to the CEO reduce the new hire to tears on a more-than-weekly basis.
mcuk
An office of about five employees seems optimal to me, normal office desks - no cubicles for people to hide in. Ringing phones need to be kept to a minimum for development though, as they are too distracting.
Devilboy
Yea 'Peopleware' also found that small offices with 3-4 people to be optimal.
SoftwareMaven
I have a very difficult time working in a shared place, and it isn't because I can't code with distractions. I'm actually very sensitive to certain noises, whether it is somebody chewing an apple or potato chip (drives me CRAZY) or tapping their fingers, any obnoxious, repetitive noise sets me off.

On the other hand, I can happily work with a dozen people engaged in conversations around me, even if they are pulling me in on occasion.

jsvaughan
You might find this interesting:

"People who have misophonia are most commonly annoyed, or even enraged, by the sound of other people eating, breathing, coughing, or other ordinary sounds."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misophonia

fierarul
I couldn't really vote for any of the existing options.

When I have something really hard I prefer to work from home since I have (almost) no distraction and it's quiet.

But for a normal day's work, I prefer a nonsmoking coffee shop with decent WiFi that's not too overcrowded and has lounge/easy going music.

acgourley
It seems like the choice is not only personal, but can change day to day or even hour to hour. Sometimes you need to lock down your privacy, other times you want to be approachable and make sure you're passively consuming information flow.

In that light almost no offices are getting it close to right - they all force a certain paradigm on workers. Working from home from time to time offers a little flexibility but that's it.

I'm not sure what my perfect office would look like, but it would definitely be one where I could pick different work contexts.

More practically speaking, a private office with a big glass door is probably close. When shut, people can see I'm there, but can also see I'm busy. When open, the large frame of the door makes me feel connect to the rest of the office.

lawnchair_larry
Guessing most of the non-private-office voters are manager types.

Private office for me, but not working from home. I like the social environment, but there are times when I like to close the door. This could be because I don't want to hear you, because I don't want you to hear me, or because I don't want things that I have left out getting touched/stolen.

Also, if you end up being perceived as some kind of subject matter expert, people will bug you non-stop. I like to help, but I only have so much time for that. I found that having an office raises the bar just enough that some of the more casual questions seem to go away.

Ask any experienced coder who does not have a private office if they have done the "headphones with no music on" trick.

My old manager once walked into another site's office and discovered their "open concept." He was raving about how great it was that he could ask anybody anything at any time, and everyone could have all kinds of collaboration. shudder

mkramlich
> He was raving about how great it was that he could ask anybody anything at any time, and everyone could have all kinds of collaboration.

Yep. Great for the asker. Horrible for the askee.

Been there, done that, have t-shirt, hope to never wear it again.

mkramlich
> and everyone could have all kinds of collaboration.

it's funny that he used that word. because I've developed a theory that "too much collaboration" is one of the main reasons why larger companies turn into Big Dumb Companies who then get their lunch eaten by smaller, more nimble upstarts. They collaborate too darn much. Instead of just Making Things Happen and moving forward.

kahawe
It shows the fundamental differences in the work a manager and a software engineer does.

The open communication will make it easier for the manager to load-off work, to stay in the loop, to check on their employees "subtly" and writing all those project plans and reports does not take the same amount of "being in the zone" as software engineering does.

So if the manager works better with more people around them and everybody knows how important communication is since they keep drilling that into managers these days - well of course your manager is going to assume that putting 5 times as many coders into one room is going to give them 5 times the results plus even more since we all know in a team 1 + 1 = 3, right???

The sad thing is, it is obvious that to this day most managers have no clue how software engineering and any other kind of "knowledge work" (I hate that term) is fundamentally different from Ford's ideas of mass production.

lenary
Thinking over this comment, would it be weird to set up an office where the managers all are in an open-plan setup, and the developers all have their own private offices? I think it would be interesting to see what the outcome was

(Disclaimer: i'm a developer who works in an open-plan office and hates it)

rdl
I prefer having a private offices for "home base", with a variety of open plan workspace, small conference rooms, etc. for temporary use, with a laptop or rolling desk. A private office where the entire front wall could roll up or slide away, turning it into an alcove rather than a room, would be ideal.
wladimir
Working from home, or outside in the garden, or in a park... Everywhere except in an office.
gamble
One thing I've noticed in open-plan offices is that mid/upper management almost always has private offices, with desks that face the door. Funny how that works, isn't it?

It's always struck me as a little strange and off-putting that some people can be enthusiastic about open plan. Companies only do it because it's cheap. Most of them don't make the slightest effort to minimize disruption. Open plan is only a step above Dickensian rows of writing desks. It's something to put up with, perhaps, but to applaud?

smhinsey
I think this varies dramatically depending on your role. At my company, when we were evaluating office space, the consulting people came up with this "hotel" scheme where everything was an open floor plan and you didn't even have a regular desk, and they all loved the idea.

Meanwhile, I thought that sounded like the worst possible scenario imaginable.

larsberg
Managers often have to sit in a configuration that keeps their monitor away from prying eyes. Just scanning my inbox headers when I was managing would have shown things that were sensitive (HR, like disciplinary action or re-orgs, and legal, mainly related to acquisitions), and just forget about during review season when I had to fill in feedback, raise, and bonus numbers.
gamble
Just group all the related managers in a single shared office. This is what my husband's company does - he shares a large private office with the two other leads on his project. Confidential info has not been an problem. If shared space is really advantageous, this should be the best of both worlds.
ChuckMcM
One of the things we did here was insure that managers stayed "in the middle" since at a small company its important to be accessible. That being said, sometimes as a manager one has to look at data which is private (say one of your direct report's current compensation plan) and for that we have private offices where folks can take their laptop and work privately for a while. Its a reasonable mix.

Its interesting to see some of the changes that have impacted offices, and phones and IRC are a good example. It used to be that a company phone meant a unit on a desk somewhere, these days it can easily be a cell phone. With that restriction lifted.

I find the tools (workstations, laptops) vs file cabinets, notebooks, and reference books, makes it easer to be 'present' where you have your laptop and your phone. And while 'open plan' is less expensive (certainly from a build out perspective) the communications you miss can be a bigger cost over all.

nitrogen
I most prefer working in a private office with lots of glass and blinds and desk space for two or more people, so I can choose whether to see or be seen and have other programmers come in and brainstorm or code as necessary. An added bonus is being able to play my music on speakers instead of headphones. Unfortunately I've only had one job like that. Working now from a home office on a startup comes close, but there's not the wealth of colleagues with whom I can whiteboard or review code.
tuhin
Voted for Open Space. Though the optimum setup for me is Open space with lots of exchange of ideas and partial cubicles for teams. However the infrastructure should have spaces/couches/rooms people/groups can use depending on the need/mood/requirement.
martinemde
There's a major flaw with this poll. It was started around midnight PST on a Sunday night so most US office workers already went to bed.
Zev
Hacker News will still be here in the morning.
camtarn
You say major flaw, I say interesting experiment - watch the vote totals as the European office workers wake up, and see how the proportions change once the US comes online :) I wonder if there is a significant difference in working environment preferences between the two?
mkramlich
private office or work from home or work at Starbucks or wherever I want, whenever I want

private office with insect robots & board games and plenty of blank wall space and table space to cover with ideas or prototypes

in other words, exactly what I have now

maxer
working from home sucks, i find myself depressed "finishing work" then going to another room, your stuck at home constantly,

got myself out of the house and got a shared office space and productivity went through the roof

TimeForThis
I would prefer a private office for me and my team, rather than totally isolated. I could do without hearing my other colleagues have phone calls and meetings at their desks.

However, working from home means I don't have to worry about my company's internet policy and I can just get my work done and have my fun. Pisses me right off that they block sites rather than get rid of unproductive workers.

yannickmahe
I actually never worked in a private office, so the comparison is mainly on what I imagine, but I think it's the best solution.

However, working in a shared office/open space does have its advantages, especially if you get to work with people you like to interact with. Also, having worked next to my bosses' cubicle has allowed me to learn a lot about how it is at his level - before eventually reaching it.

bojanbabic
combination of working from home and shared office works best for me
ivenkys
There is a specific / very specific case missing here - Working on the Trading Floor.

I have found that the general noise + energy level of a Floor gives you a natural high and it also drowns out individual Phone calls + conversations (which tend to be the most distracting). Additionally, in my case i only get interrupted via email and very rarely via IM, so it works for me.

Failing that - a quiet co-working space is best.

cmontgomeryb
There are a few people talking down about open plan offices, but I'm moving from a company where we all have our own offices to one where the developers are in open plan.

I don't believe what gamble said, that companies do it because it's cheap. That certainly helps, especially for newer companies, but there are many people like myself who prefer this environment and consider it to be a bonus.

I think it's more about company culture than the layout. My old company had a toxic culture. Most office doors were closed, people thought it was OK to just walk up and talk at you while you're working etc. A company with a good culture of people who understand each other's needs and the work they're doing will be much more able to get along in an open plan office.

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