Ask HN: Why are you against open plan offices?

You're exposed to everything.

People will tap you on the shoulder.

While I'm the same as you, I don't particularly enjoy the feeling of having noise cancellation headphones on for the entire workday - it starts to feel a bit vertigo-ey.

Some people don't like making small talk.

The best set-up I've ever had was when I had an office with just my team (and only the other engineers) so just the people who I was actually working with.

This meant discussions could actually be useful as we were working on very similar stuff, if not the same - and as they were other engineers we were all capable of offering solutions and not just being a distraction.

In my current open office the vast majority of the people have no idea what I even do and have such entirely different skillsets it's not like we can have productive work discussions. Therefore, it's just noise and distraction.

The negatives are pretty well known. I've seen information like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_plan#Evaluation

> A systematic survey of research upon the effects of open-plan offices found frequent negative effects in some traditional workplaces: high levels of noise, stress, conflict, high blood pressure and a high staff turnover.[16][17]

> The noise level in open-plan offices greatly reduces productivity, which drops to one third relative to what it would be in quiet rooms.

since reading the chapter about it in Steve McConnell's "Rapid Development" in the 1990s.

Ahh, see chapter 30, "Productivity Environments", https://archive.org/details/rapiddevelopment00mcco/page/504/... . You'll need an archive.org account. It doesn't really cover open plan offices - that era was more about cubicles.

I have 300 people on my floor, the group closest to us is from business and spends 2/4 hours a day on the phone. It saddens me because the largest openly claimed benefit of Open Plan offices is "increase collaboration". What I literally see is people locking themselves with headphones and trying to hide in rooms to get some silence. I mean, people literally have to walk around teams to go to the toilet or get a coffee.

I'd like team size cubicles. That would sound to me like a good compromise between collaboration, and deep work. I'm sure people would open up more. In fact, it is how it was setup at Bell Labs back in the time [1], not the pale copy we see everywhere today.

A bit like Agile has become Scrum I'm guessing :).

[1] https://aquicore.com/blog/bell-labs-office-design/

Here's how open offices came about.

The CFO made a spreadsheet, and the "open office" column was a nickel less than the alternatives.

Get rid of the open office! And all it took was a little virus that can decimate the human civilization.

If companies want to cram their employees together, and make them sit shoulder to shoulder on a little table, then just let us work from home. We don’t need to be smashed together like sardines in a can.

By keeping us so close to one another, without physical distancing, and walls that block airflow and people’s germs, then I believe we have gotten sicker over time. Every season, I would always get sick, and I attribute it to the open office. The past 2 months of working from home, has been great, because I avoided getting the flu.

Their principle complaint, was that open offices save money. Well, here’s finally a way for them to save even more money! Remote telecommuting!

Because being people have meetings in the space right behind my desk.

Because I feel like cattle, which could explain why I have this beef XD

This happens for sure

In my experience the ratio of beneficial to detrimental serendipitous and/or spontaneous conversations that result in any benefit is extremely low, so low in fact as to not being worth it. The problem is that people tend to remember the useful one conversation and forget the other 100.

At my current job, never have I ever been involved in anything that has resulted in a solved problem from a casual conversation, yet I was regularly interrupted by other people before I started working from home.

The most productive environments I have known are a modest sized room used as an open plan office where every person there was working on the same project. The managers had their own private offices on another floor. Under those sort of conditions collaboration and intelligent conversations can arise. So long as you manage to exclude the blabbermouths who are constantly asking stupid questions or making unnecessary commentary.

I think I have achieved the best compromise, work from home, turn off emails and all forms of social apps. Then once or twice a week go to the office specifically to have meetings, etc. That way I get the peace and quite to immerse into deep work (Cal Newport) and get the benefits of collaboration and brainstorming. I only check my emails after I have finished the day's deep work. My promise is that I answer all emails addressed to me within 36 hours. Nothing faster. If it's that important people have to text message which I will typically check 2-3 times a day max.

BTW I charge for specified units of work completed according to schedules and budgets that I agree to. Charging on the basis of hours worked just doesn't cut it for me.

Some people can't handle being productive in a extremely loud, and extremely bright environment. It doesn't matter how much I destroyed my hearing by putting loud music over noise-cancelling headphones, I always felt tired after ~2 hours of work.

Open offices seem to start in companies with 10 people, and eventually turn out in floors with hundred of other workers screaming loudly so they can be heard over the existing noise. Ideally, an open office should have noise detectors over the office to remind people to keep their noise down.

As a positive, if I were 20 years older I'd probably have started working in cubicles, which have all the negatives of an open office but without any natural sunlight.

In an open office all they have to do is vaguely wave their hand in the corner of my vision with "hey just a quick question" that inevitably turns into a 15 minute product revision meeting.

Most of the time, i have someone next to me or close to me, who is on phone with someone else.

I had a 4 people office once and it was great. Close the door, noise is outside.

Secondly, however, is the inability to control my own environment. Some days I'd like it to be dark, some light. Sometimes I'm cold, sometimes I'm hot. Or I want loud music or silence. Etc. You might think these are all minor things and generally they are but if all of them slightly negatively impact you, you might end up being cranky and unproductive the entire day.

Cubicles are slightly worse because they suffer from the exact same issues but are much uglier.

Having a private office was great, but a team space I shared a few years ago - rented just for that team, for around three months - was astonishingly productive for all of us, with almost none of the downsides of open plan.

As far as open plan goes: it is worse for mental health, productivity, and creativity. There is ample evidence to support those assertions ( https://theconversation.com/a-new-study-should-be-the-final-...).

The only advantage open plan has is that it is cheaper, per person, than any alternative - if you only factor in the cost of office space.

It's easier to get more connected than less connected.

For example facilitate social discussions by adding shared spaces, as it relies on the estates department. Comparatively, noise and interruptions are a lot harder to hchange as it relies on behaviour.

Solving hard problems requires focus time. You constantly fight against focus time in an open office.

I appreciate your open mind on the subject!

> However I'm inclined to say I don't think I would enjoy cubicles or private offices. I feel like you'd miss out on so much collaborative effort and serendipitous & spontaneous conversations with colleagues that solve problems out of the blue.

This is very unsettling to hear: That's the exact kind of hand-wavy argument that managers make.

Truthfully, I can't help but think of Stockholm syndrome when I read that sentence.

Here's the clencher: If you can't collaborate effectively in a private office or from home, there's a systemic mechanism failure. If your team or company isn't setup for effective communication, you will find yourself trapped in an open office plan and believing they're the only way to work.

However, the real problem is buried: Your team/company either cannot effectively collaborate outside of an artificial environment, or at least believes that to be the case. Assuming this is true: Why?

For background, I've worked remote for most of my career, but at the start, I had an open office job (and a two hour commute each way, consisting of an hour walk to the nearest bus stop and an hour bus ride to downtown Orlando, because the job didn't pay well enough to consider purchasing a car). In hindsight, it was a miserable experience, but at the time I just coped with it.

> I also think it's just plain isolating being on your own in a room all day.

Easy lifehack: Don't do that. Working remote doesn't require you do that. Working in a private office doesn't require you do that.

If you have a private office, you can also schedule 1:1 meetings in your office.

If you're working from home, take regular breaks to talk to your family/neighbors/etc. Pet your dogs. Dogs need love too!

> What's wrong with just putting some headphones on if you want to put your head down and do some deep, quiet work?

What's wrong with putting your jams on the speakers, rather than headphones, in your home office and standing up to dance when a good song comes on your playlist to get your blood flowing?

Different strokes.

Think of a library.

I have not even brought up the visual or olfactory distractions, either.

I can't work with music/headphones. I tried, but it doesn't seem to work for me as I tend to focus on the music.

I think most people who complain about them here haven’t experienced the alternatives. The most likely alternative is cubicle farms, which are soul crushingly terrible, or a number of different solutions which all require use of much more floor space. The economics of a more-floor-space approach would reasonably make everybody about $20,000-$50,000/year more expensive to employ, and well you can guess where that money would come from...

Fortunately, I work from home most of the time. I've build the antithesis to an open plan office: I've built an even smaller office in my office where I've essentially put up black curtains all round my desk. Working with a VR headset might be an option as well, but from what I hear they're not quite production ready yet for long term office/programming work.