Point taken, I suppose, but this is sort of like saying "you try to have breakfast every morning, do you? Well you know who else tried to have breakfast every morning? Hitler!"
A few years back I worked for a prominent design company. Our small group (of 4) had a nice little corner of 1/4 of an entire floor. "Oooh, nice, brick walls and people that look busy" I thought when I first joined. Not even a week later, reality started to set it. It was so ridiculously noisy.
And there were, of course, a few people that contributed to everything. I would sometimes get in around 8, it would be quiet and the usual offenders were actually working. From 10-6, it was like, forget it, noise non-stop. After 6, back to quiet.
This became really frustrating and after asking the offenders to chill, I made a trip to HR to ask wtf? HR was basically like, meh, nothing we can do. I ended up wishing those offenders would quit or worse. It was so bad and they were so loud.
After that I was like, never again an open floor plan. It was the worst thing ever and a total sham for those that want to focus and just get things done. Requiring the people whole want quiet to put headphones on only adds insult to injury.
Sounds a lot like a place I was at for a bit. My observation was that the noisy people killed productivity for the whole place. Not only because no one else could focus enough to get work done, but also because the noisy ones never really did anything (yes, I checked commit logs). Passing cat video links around, playing music through laptop speakers("your headphones broken, bro?"), bro-style fist bumps because they put a sheen on a button, but no real actual coding.
I see a lot of people entering and exiting and their usual reason is taking a break. Emails about jokes and social activities get sent around the office fairly frequently as well. I'm just wondering how do you draw the line between allowing the employee freedom vs just clamping down on shenanigans.
For coders, check commit logs and the like. They can email cat video links to each other all day long for all I care, but if their last commit was last week then we've got a problem. IOW, you don't cut down on the shenanigans, you make sure the work is getting done. As it often turns out, if there's a lot of cat video links there probably isn't a lot of work and vice versa.
Were I appointed to be king, if you're noisy then STFU, full stop, whether you're getting your work done or not. Indoor voices, people, or take it somewhere else.
We've had issues in our office where a new employee (actually a co-op was completely incapable of controlling the volume of their voice. People on the entire other side of the office, with earbuds on under their over-the-ear headphones, were having a hard time working. That person ended up leaving, and I ended up sending some frustrated IMs to other people on his team. Eventually, I just moved my desk and the co-op learned to keep his voice down, but for that length of time it was impossible to concentrate for more than ten minutes at a stretch.
In every open office I've worked in, desks were huge, and personal items were welcome. (Well, maybe not at my current gig; I haven't seen any personal items yet. But it's a pretty new team of mostly externals.)
It's a hard one to solve. In the company I work in I've sat in 3 different places as teams expanded. Given the density of employees you can achieve in an open plan office vs individual offices, it is hard to justify to an employer.
However one thing we do is, that it is perfectly within your right to work from home if you feel you have enough to get on with and people do this often.
As to headphones, we have golden rule, if they are on, the building better be on fire if you disturb somebody. Not quite a sackable offence but damn close. :)
I've also found that sites like www.coffitivity.com offer a 'break' from the music. They can kill any background conversation distraction. ANY. Investigate white noise.
As to socialising, jokey things still get passed around. We're encouraged to use IM, and we also go in groups to the coffee machine which is kept in a cafeteria area, away from workers where you can chat freely and loudly.
I personally hate open plan offices, but in my 20+ years of working, I've only worked in an office once and that still had 4 people in there because they could squeeze that number into it.
"As to headphones, we have golden rule, if they are on..."
Man I hope that's not the rule here, because when I have headphones on it's to wake me up, not keep the world out; I really don't care if someone disturbs me. Maybe I need an additional indicator...
(open plan office, I like it fine, clearly some here would like more seclusion though)
It may not be for everyone, but for people like me it really boosts productivity. The last office I worked in was a massive open-office in a warehouse which sounds just miserable, but it was great. If I ever had a question, I could just lean over and ask the person I had a question for. No waiting for emails to bounce back and forth or for people to get back to their IMs. If I needed to make a private phone call, I'd just walk out of the office to do it. Plus, having people around me made it easier to focus on work instead of fucking off on Hacker News or Facebook.
Now, as a self-employed individual I rent a seat in a shared open office to maintain that focus. It's far too easy to turn on the TV or play a video game or linger on the phone with a friend when I'm working from home. In a different setting -- with people around: all focused on work -- it's much easier to maintain a focus on work and getting done what's important.
Just to play devil's advocate, your productivity might have gone up but what about the people that you've been directing your questions to? They might have been disturbed and thus, their productivity might have gone down. I get asked a lot of questions which always breaks my train of thought.
I'm not advocating for an open office or a closed office but I do appreciate something balanced. People around me are always collaborating and discussing a great number of things which really makes me lose my focus. I usually come in early when it's really quiet and no one's in yet to get things done. After that, headphones on but even then, I miss the sound of silence rather than drowning out noise with more noise.
>but what about the people that you've been directing your questions to?
That was actually going to be my response. Speaking as the person typically on the other end of the "hey, quick question" it's crazy-distracting and it typically takes me 5-10 minutes to get back to whatever I was coding. It's demotivating that my time in the office is split between meetings and interruptions (direct or just general office roar), as well as why I'm currently receptive to interesting job offers.
Absolutely valid point. But I think most of us just put on headphones if we wanted to be left alone. And in those cases, I'd absolutely email someone instead of interrupting them -- unless it was both important and urgent.
I read this argument a lot, but closed offices work easily with a chat room. We have an IRC channel (and we create separate channels when we need specific group chats). No one feels alone, communication is instant.
I sit in an office with desks with half-height dividers. I enjoy it. A while ago our company expanded into another floor, and my product's team was moved there (dev, QA, product, services, support). Previously the layout was arranged more by department than product.
Pretty much everyone on the team loves it, and has felt a major boost in productivity and team cohesion, as virtually anyone you might need is "right there" in the room with you, and you can tune in to some of the chatter for an organic understanding of what everyone's up to. I imagine if everyone were in offices it would feel dead and empty, and totally kill the team spirit.
I think the only thing we're missing is more ad-hoc space - more conference rooms for breakout groups and individuals seeking temporary escape from the floor.
Given that environment, what do you do when you're trying to concentrate on a particularly challenging issue and you need to tune out the chatter and what others are doing?
For me personally it's not much of an issue, it's just not that distracting. I just don't listen, and if someone addresses me directly I tell them I'm busy. I don't use headphones either because I tend to focus too much on the music.
I realize that this isn't viable for everyone, which is why I think we need more rooms for people to have that isolation when they need it.
edit: There certainly are times where I experience a lot of interruptions, and I'm glad for the after-hours when most people have left. But those interruptions are generally pretty necessary, because important things are happening. On the whole I think it is a net positive for teams that work together to be "on the floor" together.
I think if you have a good culture around open offices, then it's a lot better. If you have a bunch of people who have loud conversations without moving it to a meeting room, interrupt you constantly, don't respect the headphone rule, micromange and shoulder surf vs. treat it as the quiet library environment it should be then it can pretty bad.
It's all about balance. Open offices work for certain occupations but not for others. When it comes to software development I think you need a combination of open office and cube farm. The best balance I've found is open office with all communication happening in a place it can be persisted (Campfire, HipChat, etc.) for others to see and benefit from. Occasionally the entire team can break into talking in the open office area but this should only be done if the entire team is participating. If the entire team isn't participating then communication should be handled in a chat (preferably) or in a conference room.
If you're trying to build software in an open office where people are constantly talking then I'm sorry, good work will not get done. Decisions to change your office layout should be in the interest of boosting communication, team cohesion and productivity. Cubicles are too restrictive, completely open is too distracting.
As far as I'm concerned, a cube farm is an open office. Both provide the same amount of quiet: none.
I think open offices are a terrible idea with huge productivity hits that are not made up in any way by the small advantages they provide, but they aren't going away any time soon.
This was a good article, but again, it won't have any effect. The bottom line means we all have to suffer in noisy, distracting environments whether it's helpful or harmful.
When it comes to software development I think you need a combination of open office and cube farm.
And I think that developers should be in private offices, with doors. However, I will add that I think that a good environment also features plenty of open spaces, conference rooms, breakout areas, etc., where group can coalesce on an ad-hoc / temporary basis, on those occasions when people benefit from the high-bandwidth, face-to-face communication.
Personally I want to be in an open office with the team I'm currently working with, an no one else. While IM works, it's a lot less band with in IM and you miss out on a number more spontaneous design discussions. A good team will not interrupt you with questions they could just as easily goggled.
On the other hand, I hate talk from other teams or projects. The mostly unrelated and in worst case interesting (thus 10 times as effective in distracting me.). So the current open office plan with 6-7 teams in an open area is occasionally really annoying.
I work in an open office with no dividers. Unfortunately for me I don't have selective hearing, so 95% of the time I'm trying to drown out the buzz by wearing over-ear headphones (usually with no music playing). I also spend a lot of time fending off product managers and testers who just refuse to acknowledge the headphone rule and constantly bug me about trivial things that can be put in an email or an IRC message.
The other 5% of the time is great - as other people have already mentioned, it's really easy to listen in to conversations and get an idea of what everybody is up to.
> it's really easy to listen in to conversations and get an idea of what everybody is up to.
That's why I prefer something in the middle of open office and having a private office: One office per team of 6-8 people. Then one is always in the loop of what's happening, not stuck alone and don't have to listen to that much noise.
A good thing with such an arrangement is to have designated "person of contact" per day that handles all disrupts from outside that team's office, leaving the rest to work uninterrupted.
> A good thing with such an arrangement is to have designated "person of contact" per day
Usually this is the job of the 'manager' (assuming that the role of 'manager' is filled by a specific person, and not just another one of the engineers).
work in an open office with no dividers.
Unfortunately for me I don't have selective
hearing, so 95% of the time I'm trying to
drown out the buzz by wearing over-ear
headphones (usually with no music playing)
My wife has the same problem (no selective hearing). And while I understood it intellectually, it never really made sense. Of course you can focus your hearing, you just have to try... never said that, but that was my thought.
Then recently, an odd combination if sinus infection, cold, and related ear troubles inflicted this on me. I was attending a company/community even with several hundred attendees. Quite suddenly, it was like every conversation in the common area was happening right next to me. It didn't matter how close or far, or how loud - it was all happening at once, and I while I could still hear the person I was talking to, I could no longer distinguish what they were saying as there were too many other conversations that my brain was trying to interpret. This went on for about two hours, then my ears popped, and things were roughly back to normal.
Ho-ly crap. Even with that experience, I find it difficult to fathom living with that nonstop - I don't know how you do it without going insane, particularly if you have to work in an open office.
TL;DR: I finally understand the experience of lacking selective hearing, and sympathize. While hoping it never, ever happens to me again.
I wonder, is it possible to learn how to have selective hearing?
I think I learned it by working in a loud dorm, then a loud house, and then a loud work environment. It's no issue for me to ignore other people now. It's actually a joke in my office where people struggle to get my attention while I'm focused.
In my open office, I currently code next to some project managers, who spend all day on the phone negotiating.
This is a bit bad, but I just wear PPE Ear Defenders all day, on top of in ear headphones. With both of these, I can't hear a thing.
The eerie quiet is great for short bursts of concentration, but it also means I can turn my music up to a normal level without worrying about escaping noise annoying my colleagues.
It looks very nerdy, and people need to email me or wave if they want something (which cuts down interruptions a lot). I take them off about half the time so as to be social, which I guess is like leaving an office door open.
Sort of sad it's necessary though. Hope this helps people with a similar situation.
Unfortunately for me it's not that simple since I'm also very distracted by visual noise. Someone who passes by in my peripheral view can bring me out of flow as will the feeling of having someone behind my back do.
I recently was fortunate enough to have my own office for a while and I haven't been as productive since...well, since last time I had my own office some five years back. It's an awesome feeling to enter flow almost as you enter your room...
It's interesting to think back at my 15+ years long career and realize that the times when I've been most productive coincides with the times I've had my own office.
Sounds like you need to find a way of working remote (at that company or somewhere else). I figure if much of your life is spent at work, life is too short to work somewhere you can't achieve your best.
I'm the same. Can you put some pot plants to the left and right behind your screen? (more socially acceptable than other barriers) Request a second or larger monitor for your work? You can argue that it'll improve your productivity; you don't have to tell them that's because it'll block out your FOV, not because you actually want to display stuff on it…
Another thing that would help is moving to a different desk, but I'm guessing that might be a bit more difficult to negotiate.
(These days I'm self employed and work from home but that's what I did when I worked in an open-plan office. Also, if you can, come in to work before everyone else, while it's still very quiet. Usually more acceptable than coming in later than everyone else and staying later.)
Hah, yes, sorry - I'm not encouraging cannabis growing in the office. Pretty sure that's a standard name for a houseplant in UK English, didn't make the connection with the US term at all when I was typing it.
The sad thing is that even if you look at it economically it doesn't make sense. Say that in order for each employee to have their own office you need 10m2 extra space per employee. Where I live, that would amount to ~2.5% of the employees salary, i.e. if a private office makes your emplyees more than 2.5% more productive you're profiting from private offices. In my experience my productivity boost when working in a private office amounts to maybe as much as 25% or more.
Oh, definitely. But then there are plenty of other ways of increasing programmer productivity which don't look like busywork so non-programmer managers won't have them. I guess try to get out of employment situations like that...
Even though I don't own a gun, I own two sets of ear protection for this very reason! Just as effective as Bose but for $30, could be worn throughout flights (before recent FAA changes), and needed no batteries.
I recently bought Audio-Technica ATH-M50 studio headphones. Highly recommend! Even with the music turned way down, I barely hear other people talking. If I don't need to be in hyper concentration mode, I use regular head phones. Amazon link to the Audio-Technica studio headphones-->
http://www.amazon.com/Audio-Technica-ATH-M50-Professional-Mo...
Oh yeah, if you look for 'recording headphones' you can find regular headphones rated not to leak sound. Apparently it's pretty important during recording sessions. I liked the look of these: http://www.extremeheadphones.com/
It also really does not work for people with ear problems (I am one, I can't wear headphones or earplugs for more than 10mn at a time anymore, it starts hurting like the blazes and I have to remove them for a few hours)
>It also really does not work for people with ear problems
Have you ever worn over-the-ear headphones for 10 hours? It's uncomfortable.
And that's not even the worst part. Drowning out coworker nonsense with loud music is permanently damaging to your hearing. Focusing on writing some crappy Ruby isn't worth sacrificing a sense.
> Have you ever worn over-the-ear headphones for 10 hours? It's uncomfortable.
I can barely wear 'phones for 10 minutes. Because it physically hurts.
I have worn 'phones for hours on end a decade or so ago (my weapons of choice were K271s before my ear issues flared up and made that a non-option). They could get pretty hot around the ears, but they were very comfortable.
> Drowning out coworker nonsense with loud music is permanently damaging to your hearing.
There are cans and buds with good isolation (or noise-cancelling).
I would bet that the highly-blocking in-canal earbuds are actually less damaging than cheap ones that sit on top of your ear. Reason being that without any external noise, you can turn the level down on the music and get the same perceptual loudness.
I know for a fact that when I got some nice etymotic earbuds (-20dB of outside sound), I was able to turn the level down from my average of about 70%, to more like 40-50% on my ipod.
That's my thinking as well, but I'm not a hearing specialist.
It's my understanding that sound pressure is the damaging element we're concerned with, however, does blocking the ear canal with a headphone increase the pressure (, and damage,) as there's nowhere for the frequency to dissipate?
I use Shure earphones (SE-315) with custom molded ear inserts (see your audiologist). Not nearly as quiet as shooting range earplugs + muffs would be, but more socially acceptable and very good audio quality.
Aren't those bit uneffective in the speech frequency range? While wearing such thing angle grinder sounds bearable but I can still hear people talking.
Err... electronic active noise canceling headphones don't work on speech, only against simple droning noises. I'm talking about headphones that use thick pads of material and a strong seal around your ears to straight block sound.
You can just about hear people through them, whisper quiet. But if you are also wearing some in ears, then music, or white noise at a comfortable volume will eliminate it completely.
You want headphones that do like -30db noise attenuation.
I'm talking about simple passive air defenders that look like large headphones, have seal around the ear and padding. I think those are optimised for noises outside of speech range. After all you want to still be able to hear people while operating heavy machinery.
Heh. Open layouts were a response to the cubicle system which isolated people and gave the impression that you are nothing but cattle on an assembly line. It also reinforced status (size of cubicle/office/location). Just watch any 80s or 90s movie. Now the pendulum is swinging the other way. Have the original problems with cubicles been solved?
The problem is that people look for ideological purity and look to absolutes because an unambiguous answer seems simple, whereas the reality is quite grey. The reality is that some people work better in cubicles, and some prefer open layouts. To complicate things even further, some situations call for one, others call for the other.
I see a similar debate going on between proponents of traditional schools (rows of desks, and teacher in front) and structure-less/self-pacing schools. Which is better? Well, some kids thrive in one, others thrive in the other. Worse, some kids get absolutely destroyed within the wrong king of system.
I have a laptop that easily connects with my external monitors at my desk in the open layout, but when I really need uninterrupted work time, I just go to one of our private rooms and hook up to the projector in there. Gives me a nice blend.
Really? In the UK it seems to be pretty normal in the newer buildings. My first experience of them was at a city bank shortly before 2000. Very nice interview, all going swimmingly, "Let me show you around our offices"...
The programmers sat near the printer so that people could hassle them every time it ran out of paper. You could identify where the sales team sat before you entered the room. Everybody above the rank of team leader had an office elsewhere.
The next interview I went to was also open plan - in the sense that 5 programmers shared a decent size office. Stayed there for almost 10 years.
I dig working in an open office. I see my work as very collaborative, so I wouldn't want to be in an environment where I was siloed off. That being said, headphones are critical.
But headphones can't replace quiet. They can just replace one source of noise with another. And they aren't necessarily comfortable to wear for extended periods of time anyway.
Headphones help mitigate the grotesque and evil nature of "open plan" offices, but they are no panacea.
My company gives all engineers their own office with a door. Recently four of us petitioned to be able to have an open office together. We collaborate better, feel generally happier, and knowledge sharing happens so much more fluidly.
I was going crazy the first 6 months here because I was holed up in a office by myself with little in-person communication. There was no benefit to being in the office versus working remotely. My first attempt was to get the company a HipChat account for engineers to stay more connected. I even pushed for a couple of monthly engineer events so I would have an opportunity to interact with other engineers.
Open office setups can go horribly wrong. Never allow anyone who spends time on the phone into the open office setup. That stifles all interaction due to the need for silence. Additionally, engineers are forced to listen to a single side of a conversation that likely has nothing directly to do with the engineers. Project and account managers have a valuable job, and engineers should not need to be distracted by work that is not related to what they need to accomplish.
Additionally, I believe an open office for engineers should be reasonably small (4-10 people), and there should be some common responsibilities or projects between the engineers.
Other steps can be taken to give people the appropriate space for the task at hand. I've used a stand-up desk for the past three years. I hardly ever spend a whole day standing. I alternate between sitting and standing as my body gives me signals. Similarly, having quiet space (alternatively headphones, if desired) to crank on certain work can be useful useful. That said, three of the four of us have not used solitary space in the past 2 months.
Basically all of this is to say the issue is not black and white. If you prefer to work in a private office, like more than half of the engineers at my company do, that's fine. If you prefer to work in the company of others, that is fine too. Not everyone wants to work at a startup, and not everyone hates working for big financial companies.
Team-sized open plans look interesting. Even better if there is plenty of private space (like meeting rooms) available for people never using all of them... But that arranjement is unstable - the meeting rooms won't survive office politics - much better to have private offices for everybody, with an open "patio" shared by the entire team where you could work if you want (yes, I did keep the arranjement, just changed the names).
As an afterthought, now that phones are all VoIP, are there WiFi endpoints available for sale?
Sure, just be sure your WiFi network has been deployed for voice (much higher density of APs). Cisco Jabber, Avaya One-X, Microsoft Lync are all available on PC, Mac, Android and iOS. For Asterisk and SIP based deployments, Bria makes an excellent softphone for the same platforms.
I seriously cannot understand the lasting attachment people have for $400 plastic devices, but using a tablet or smartphone avoids problems caused by an unstable/busy PC. In 2005, at an accounting firm (conservative user base, broad mix of ages) voluntary / satisfied softphone users was 35%, today I would expect it would be nearly double. Never hurts to ask the IT department.
> I seriously cannot understand the lasting attachment people have for $400 plastic devices
It helps to have a phone that is not the computer you are working on. At least for me that excludes any tablet I have on hand (if I have it nearby, there's probably something there that I should read). I didn't think about using smartphones - bring your own SIP endpoints for work, could be nice.
> It helps to have a phone that is not the computer you are working on.
Agreed. A coworker of mine rolled back to a restore point, which caused his computer to get kicked off the domain. He couldn't log in at all, so he had to call IT. The problem was his phone was a softphone on his computer.
The problem is that your company is a cheapskate outfit just buy a separate ip based phone and plug that into the other port at your desk - oh you did follow standard practice and pull two cat5's to every desk.
We have hotel cubes now. We can't assign names to a hardware phone because a different person could be sitting in the desk every day, and giving someone a floating hardware phone would mean you have to carry it home daily.
Not sure if we have 2 drops per cube. There's 2 ports, but I don't know if they're active, cabled but not hooked up to a switch, or not even run to the cube. Haven't bothered to test because our old Cisco phones had a pass-through port, and now I only have 1 device that could use an ethernet port.
Totally agree with you. While there are times I'm very busy and wished I had a closed in office, 90% of the time I find it highly beneficial to be in an open office.
Heartily agree. At larger companies in the past, I was part of a cube farm. Absolutely hated it, so much noise and interruption. At my current gig, it's a LOT quieter, smaller, friendlier and virtually no phones ringing off the hook. I've left my office with a door to sit in the open area for more social opportunity as I started feeling lonely. I could get in the office and leave after a full day of work without talking to anyone. :(
One of my biggest reservations with a programming career is the general lack of human contact. Open offices alleviate this somewhat, and make work much more tolerable to me. I do realize that I am significantly more talky than most of my coworkers though (Sorry guys!)
At my previous two companies I've found that HipChat is generally much more accessible to non-engineers. Ideally there aren't multiple communication tools for the same purpose, so I'd rather have HipChat than AIM + IRC.
Additionally, it has some nice features like cross-device chat history, various embed support, etc.
I can see the accessibility to non engineers being slightly better. At the same time HipChat does horrible things with XMPP support, so unless you are using their client, you are in trouble. Also, if I remember correctly their client does not support other chat protocols, which means I'd have to run two separate chat clients, which is increasing the number of applications I normally run by 33% (chat, terminal, browser). I can see its value, but I cannot recommend it over IRC or just your own jabber server.
Exactly! When i first started this job, there was no sitting room with the team. So i was assigned an office of my own near the Execs. (Its my first job after graduation). So obviously that was a privilege, but it truly is hellishly boring. I was so disconnected with my team.
Eventually i got shifted to sit with my team in an open space and its really great. It's a small enough room with around 20 people, people sitting in teams. i suppose The presence of other teams can be a bit distracting at times, but it also gives you more people to interact with. You get a grasp on more than just your current assignment. You connect with more people than just your current team. So it ain't all bad. there are pros and cons. I guess when you're a senior, you want more space to yourself.
The telephone is my main gripe at the moment. My line manager likes to conduct all his business over the phone. One of my colleagues likes to project her voice across the entire office despite the phone being less than an inch from her mouth. In addition to this many in the office have developed an idiotic system whereby the phones of absent colleagues are answered. When the phone is answered the caller is informed that the intended recipient is not there and a message is taken. For some reason my colleagues do not understand that they are doing exactly what the voice-mail service does.
At my office, if you don't answer your phone for an internal call (for example, due to being busy talking to another developer about a tough problem, or deep in concentration on a problem) the person who called you will get up and come in to your office to see why you didn't answer. Really makes it impossible to have any solid development time.
"The office cubicle was created by designer Robert Propst for Herman Miller, and released in 1967 under the name "Action Office II". Although cubicles are often seen as being symbolic of work in a modern office setting due to their uniformity and blandness, they afford the employee a greater degree of privacy and personalization than in previous work environments, which often consisted of desks lined up in rows within an open room.[1][2
I've never liked the open office layouts anyways. The two companies I worked for used it and it was tremendously noisy and so I usually did anything I could to avoid having to work in the office. Either by going to the cafeteria to work, or staying home. It made both of the teams I worked on very inefficient. The exact opposite goal it was meant to address.
I worked in an office similar to that "1937 office" for a few months in the early 90's -- in Japan.
The desk layout on the "engineering floor" of the building seated senior engineers behind the junior engineers. All the way back to the VP of engineering in the back.
As a foreign visiting engineer from a California startup, I was seated in the back near the VP. I think they were trying to be respectful to me. Engineers then came back to my desk to ask me questions, although I was actually very junior to them. Hilarity ensued, when they actually took my advice.
There's another huge reason the cubicle office is dominant: Cubicles are immediately tax deductible, while building out offices is considered a capital improvement, and therefore has to be depreciated over a longer period of time.
Tax law all too frequently shapes behavior, and this is one of those cases.
Honestly this is horrifying. The idea that companies are making damaging decisions because they have favorable tax benefits and congress probably didn't even realize it. Well that makes me sad.
Reminds me of the office in the well-known Soviet film, Sluzhebniy Roman (Office Romance) filmed in the Soviet Union in the early 70's. But the senior manager did have her own office which doubled as a conference room.
During my career, I went from office to cubes, to office and now open layout. I thought I would hate the open layout, but actually I like it a lot. I'm not easily distracted, so it's convenient being able to ask questions directly without having to walk around or knock on a door.
The other thing I enjoy that I didn't expect was the social aspect, where I can chat with everyone in the room before work starts in earnest in the morning, or after 6-ish when we're all ready to leave for home anyway.
Perhaps the worst aspect of all this, is the purposeful, or even casual, ideologue. An arrangement works for them, or they think it does -- or, BEST PRACTICES dictate that it should... and viola, a dictate.
I am one who needs some control over his environment. In the majority of cases, these means peace and quiet particularly/mostly from human noise, as well as a lack of visual distraction. (Although there are times when I work well -- best even -- in a frenetic environment; however, these are limited in both type and frequency.)
I'm a bit older, and I fell into a generation that was subscribing to and prescribing whole-heartedly the "open", "collaborative" environment.
It did not work for me. Yet I received unrelenting pressure, including from medical professionals, that I was the one who... "simply" needed to learn to adapt.
Well... now we know a bit better. (Although I don't trust society to have truly "learned" this in any permanent fashion.) But the chronic stress of this situation has caused for me major adjustments in career and, eventually, rather run me down.
To put the bottom line at the bottom, here: If a situation is not working for you, IT IS NOT WORKING FOR YOU. TRUST THIS. TRUST YOURSELF!
"Professionals" of varying occupations and levels of training will all -- ALL -- tell you all kinds of crap. Even several years of medical school does not divorce most from their prejudices nor from cultural suasion.
Don't waste your time -- your life -- running yourself down trying to live up to someone else's idea of the "right way".
Definitely. I'd add, if "medical professionals" were telling you you were wrong from something you felt clearly, run away. You aren't incorrect or just "need to adapt". We are all not built the same and as an introvert I do fit the "only critics" mold but damn do open plans suck for me.
I'm in a large shared office of 4 desks. I have a single coworker that sits right next to me though him or I moving to the vacant lot doesn't really cross our minds. I am however consistently distracted as he's particularly fidgety, talks to himself (I do when I'm alone), and either chews really loudly or I've just grown to hate it. I have had no problems with him as a person but the effects of the constant disruption bring about a certain disdain towards others that distract him or myself. I can't divorce myself from it and my ears can't take a full day of headphones even if I severely enjoy the music I listen to.
I see open plans as facilitators in nothing but pain all around and where I am currently. We've always been in a open office cube farm of some nature but something about the move to a new place specifically designed to be this way was a bigger kick in the balls than I had anticipated. I can't think of any place that would prize distractions as a badge of honor either, at least not where developers are concerned. Yet that's exactly what we have now and that I've allowed some shitty process to make me this much of a shitty person is the real problem. Its like I can't ever correct it either so I just need to move on or it's going to continue to push me into atrophy.
Basically your last paragraph is key. Notice this early. If you can change policy for your sake, good. If you can't, run away. You don't deserve the inevitable downturn it'll have on your livelihood.
My last company visited a company with open office and took pictures to prove to us how great it is. In the pictures the people are hunched down behind their screens, to avoid the distraction of the person facing them, and 90% have head phones on because of the noise distraction.
Basically, they were in mental cubes when they were lacking physical cubes.
P.S. The company I worked for went with the open office, productivity plummeted and the office is now closed. When I pointed out the above issues in the pictures I was told: "You don't like it? Maybe you need to work somewhere else". Well, now, they all work somewhere else.
The best environment I've ever worked in was a combination open office, private space hybrid. You had your desk, whether you wanted a sitting desk or standing desk, you could choose from either, and you were by default in the open office area. However, surrounding this large room were a dozen or so closed offices where you could pop in and have a meeting or do some coding in private.
However, one of the organize-all-the-things guys on the internal operations team once caught me in a coding marathon in one of those offices and sent an email to the entire company "reminding" everyone that those offices were for God-knows-what-he-thought-they-were-for, not for work. So I returned to my ergonomic island and toiled away, surrounded by the noise of a hundred private conversations.
I've always thought since then that if that had panned out, that you could choose at any moment if you wanted to be in the open room or in a private room in the perimeter, that would have been the ideal layout.
Thanks for sharing, I've always thought that seemed like the right compromise. If I was looking to build a similar space, would you have any advice or observations?
Unfortunately, I've only ever been a spectator in the design of offices, I've never played much of an active role in their organization. The best advice I can offer is to have the utmost respect for your developers, since they are your prized assets. Give them good equipment, choices, and solicit them for feedback on what they want.
I wish I could upvote this more than once. It's too common for developers to assume they're more valuable rather than benefiting from a currently tighter job market.
In economics terms, that's the same thing. Tighter job market, more competition for dev talent, devs have more choices, the good ones choose the environment that values them the most.
Only in the most simplistic understanding – anyone serious will factor in limited information and human irrationality rather than assuming that observed market behaviour represents Econ 101 game-theoretical optimal decisions.
If you work at a large company, you might be well paid because you're working on the CEO's pet iOS project and there's a developer shortage. The market is working to give you higher pay but there's no relation to any sort of actual value. Most places don't even make a serious effort to quantify value or cost in a remotely scientific manner.
There's some of that, to be sure, but different employees are different. Everyone spends some amount of time doing collaborative work, and some amount of time doing individual work that requires concentration and focus. Different jobs require a different mix of these two kinds of work. Developers tend to spend most of their time on the individual concentration end of the spectrum, which is why you see comments like the parent's. But it applies just as much to anyone who requires an equivalent amount of individual focused work time each day.
The logical outcome of this is that your office layout should be different for employee groups doing different types of work, but since having an office is seen as a perk of upper management, giving offices to some groups and open plan areas to other groups is seen as favoritism and elitism rather than simply providing the best environment for everyone's job, and I think that's a big reason why it doesn't often happen.
I've been in such an office, and I loved it. Some people, like me, spent most of their time in the main open space. Others camped out all day in a private office. Most moved between the two.
From a design perspective:
- Glass walls are nice. This office was a group space surrounded by smaller rooms (which had the windows). The offices were glass on the interior wall (facing the group space), which allowed light in, but opaque on the walls between offices, allowing for privacy.
- Variety was important. Iirc, we had like 4-6 offices that would fit 2 people at desks, 3 that would fit 4 or 5 people around a table, and 1 that fit about 12 around a small conference table. This was for a 25-person company, and seemed to provide about the right amount of space.
- We ended up soundproofing a few rooms because people would use them for calls or loud music playing and it'd disturb the neighboring offices.
The large pharma I used to work for is still in the process of spending millions of dollars redoing all of their floors to open work space areas. Around the outside of the floors are "focus booths" which just have a small desk/phone/monitor setup for someone to work in for a few hours.
These booths are always full and occupied by folks for the entire day, since most people don't like the loud open area workspace and sit in these small offices so they can have phone calls and concentrate.
Every time I've been involved in an open floor plan office I look at the conference rooms. They end up occupied by the most senior person that doesn't have an office.
At one company where I worked management got offices, so it was senior developers staking out the conference rooms... at another, no one had an office, so the owner got the nicest conference room and some of the leads fought over the lesser ones.
We used to have one of those. It was called the "Tree House" because one guy filled it with plants. It was great. Then we moved offices - open floor plan - and we no longer have the equivalent. :(
most people don't like the loud open area workspace and sit in these small offices so they can have phone calls and concentrate.
FWIW, good acoustical engineering can make a significant difference in how loud an open-space "feels." Putting sound-absorbing materials on all architectural features and hanging sound-diffusing baffles from the ceiling can change a loud room into a significantly quieter and less distracting room.
It isn't a panacea, but it isn't hard to do. You will need someone experienced in room acoustics to design it for you. I'd still prefer small offices over an open space, but if management is stuck on having an open-space then getting good sound control in there will make the best of a bad situation.
You can hear the reverse in a lot of trendy restaurants nowadays where, for some reason that I can't comprehend, it is fashionable to deliberately make the dining area as loud as possible.
I could not agree more. Acoustic treatment can dramatically change a rooms ambiance in an almost imperceptible way. It's amazing how voice volume goes down, because the listener can clearly hear you, so you don't have to raise your voice over the other conversations to be heard. Once you experience a well treated room, you long to return to it.
I also have wondered why more restaurants don't use sound treatment. I have noticed that the high class restaurants always have sound treatment. Don't these other restaurants know that if you install adequate sound treatment that you can charge more? Obviously not...
I can't google for references now, but restaurants like loud dining areas because there is a linear relationship between the dB of background noise and the money customers spend on drinks.
I haven't seen the references you mentioned, but is it possible that the cause and effect here are swapped? It seems more likely that increased drinking leads to increased noise.
I believe the logic is that talking and drinking compete for the oral mutex, so limiting the ability to talk (by making it so loud that talking becomes pointless because nobody can ear you) increases drinking throughput. Or something like that.
I worked in a new office like that. The management were oh-so proud of how smart they were in selecting that design. Of course every one of them had his own office.
The problem with focus booths is that it's not "your" space. You don't come back to the same one every day, you can't have pictures of your family on the desk, etc.
Focus booths are a small courtesy to allow people to make phone calls and hold 1:1 or very small meetings, but that's about it.
It was an awful work environment, even though it looked very modern and stylish. It was one of the main reasons I quit that job.
I'm pretty sure I work in the same place. It's impossible to get a focus booth or enclave (is that what they call the small group rooms?) unless you get there early. Fortunately, they told me I would be mobile, then assigned me a desk in a lab space. Not being able to have food at my desk is a small price to pay for having a desk.
This was pretty similar to (at least the buildings I worked in 2012-2013) Facebook Menlo Park: open space, but many of small side offices for coding/ad-hoc meetings/views.
Personally, however, I'd prefer the reverse: offices as the default (two people per office okay, as long as there's space) with open space (with portable white boards, bean bag chairs, desks) in the middle for ad-hoc design/discussions.
Cubicles do seem the worst of both world, however: an ad-hoc meeting is no longer so ad-hoc (as it requires hunting for an available conference room), but the noise/interruption issues are no better than open areas.
The best office space I've ever work at was like that. It was a relatively small part of one of MSFT buildings which Ray Ozzie carved out for the Mesh incubation. Everyone had a small private office with glass door/walls and in the middle there was big open area with couches, chairs, pillows, whiteboard walls and conference rooms.
Interesting! I worked in that same office when FUSE Labs was there in the post-Ozzie time (2012), and like some of the other commenters pointed out, I never saw a single one of my coworkers doing actual work outside of their offices. It was awesome for team meetings, though.
> I'd prefer the reverse: offices as the default (two people per office okay, as long as there's space) with open space (with portable white boards, bean bag chairs, desks) in the middle for ad-hoc design/discussions.
I've worked in environments like that. Unfortunately, the open space looks like "not working" to people and is highly visible. Since no one wants to be publicly seen as not working, they just ended up being a very nicely decorated and inviting ghost town.
It's not necessarily about how it looks; it's about default choices. If there aren't many people working there already, people are unlikely to join them.
I think my ideal would be small offices for people, with areas that are more open, but not a single huge open area. I could definitely see how what you're saying could happen.
I always like to think of the library my university had. It had rooms of all sizes going around most of the outside, and then little pockets of chairs and even some cubical type areas. The bookshelves broke everything up mentally, so I never felt in the open, but also never confined. Some of the rooms had white boards and some were just tiny rooms with a desk you could use.
For me personally, the key is variety and flexibility, and not assuming that one thing works perfectly for everyone.
> I've worked in environments like that. Unfortunately, the open space looks like "not working" to people and is highly visible. Since no one wants to be publicly seen as not working, they just ended up being a very nicely decorated and inviting ghost town.
FYI, this is exactly what happens to luxurious and inviting game rooms at videogame companies.
> Personally, however, I'd prefer the reverse: offices as the default
This is essentially what I have now. We have four people in two very large rooms connected by an open internal corridor. There's chairs in each room, and a large table in one of the rooms. It's a very productive setup.
Sounds like study rooms in college libraries. I like it. It solves the space problem and provides more flexibility than the office solution. Sometimes you do want to be around the rest of the team, and sometimes you're working closely with one co-worker and you need some one on one work time with them.
I agree that they are the same in concept. In my limited experience, the college study rooms were used pretty much exclusively in the week or so leading up to finals. Where I work now, the same types of spaces are constantly filled. It could just be a matter of balancing the need with the availability of those kinds of rooms.
I'd lov this arrangement if it were the reverse of how I've seen it implemented.
The meeting/private rooms should be in the center, away from the scarce windows, and the more frequently used common space should have the privilege of natural lighting. Too many conference rooms are allowed to hog the view.
This is how we've had our offices in previous companies, and the new office we're building will have this layout as well. It works great. You get privacy or you get sunlight :)
exactly my submission, many years ago, which matches what was ultimately used for our AWARD WINNING offices on the other side of the country. the local office is moving again and using low walled cubes in large rooms. It would be great for honest appraisal of office design and approval by the cubicle-bound-occupants and not the office-blessed-few.
This is how my company works - we have our open office, with our "cubes" out amongst everyone else, but we have tiny little work rooms with TVs and adapters, and the ability to close a door (well it's a glass door but still), and work.
And no one's ever told me I can't work in one of them all day if I wanted to (I don't). I bet there'd be a discussion if I moved into one permanently, or even for more than a straight few days, but for now at least, we have the best of both worlds.
The worst is when, not only are you surrounded by private conversation, but forced to listen to godawful music blasting at full volume from the office stereo.
I worked in a hybrid environment at Apple (we had this office / common area setup in Infinite Loop). It was a great working environment, and I got a lot done. You could leave your door open and join in the conversation, or close your door and shut out the world for a while.
I work in an open space plan at Valve now, and it's pretty decent. The thing that makes it decent is that desks are mobile; there is no assigned space (want an office? find an empty one and move in) so you can very easily choose who to work next to. This cuts down a great deal on interruptions caused by people interrupting the people /next/ to you, which I found was the actual source of randomization in most cubical environments.
Also, stuffing more than a few dozen people into a shared area is probably bad. Don't do that.
Mobile desks. Let people move where they want to. If nothing else I get tired of looking at the same walls from the same angle day in and day out. I like variety.
Overall though I prefer an open space environment with the ability to periodically go of to a quiet area for deep thinking. Sometimes you just need that solitude to do your best work.
Depends on the space; if it's big enough you can get away with more people (remember, they can shuffle). Sound-deadening floor and ceiling material helps a lot. The most important thing is still attitude toward your cow-orkers, though.
This is the problem of the commons in its classic incarnation. If the private offices are shared, pretty soon you will have people either squatting in them or accusing others of squatting.
Open layouts are a way to save lots of money per employee. They provide no tangible benefit over private offices that are big enough to have coding sessions in, but they cost a hell of a lot less. Next time someone tells you that they are more productive in an open layout office ask them if they had ever worked with an engaged and energetic team where everyone did have large private offices. Chances are, they did not and therefore have no basis for comparison.
On my first day on one job, my managers invited me to lunch. I thanked one for assigning me a desk next to a corner in their open office. The other supervisor could not resist chiming in that they could move people around at will. The other manager averted his eyes. I never expressed gratitude for my working conditions again.
Headphones would be too distracting for me--however I am developing tinnitus, which has become a blessing in disguise.
Although I find it difficult to listen to music now, I would rather listen to the ringing in my ears than office chatter.
Face-to-face communication is the primary and most efficient way for humans to interact. Coming to a consensus in email with more than two people is a nightmare.
On the other hand, putting it into an email gives a chance for people to digest and think about it offline, for the person who was travelling that day to be able to see it, for you to be able to forward it to the team who's working on the UI across the Atlantic from you.
Face to face communication definitely has it's place, but it can also lead to cliquish and insular behavior, and can lose out on some benefits of having a paper (well, electronic) trail.
This is over-generalized. Most generalizations about the human race are based off of extroverted personalities, and not the introverted people that comprise the vast bulk of programmers.
This is now pure anecdotal, but the programmers I know prefer to communicate over email, if they're forced to communicate at all. Typically, because this allows them to take the time to get their point across perfectly before sending it.
Programmers have done amazing things while collaborating on massive projects across the planet using nothing but mailing lists and the occasional IRC chat. While this doesn't disprove they might not have communicated better if they were all in one big room together, I'd say it does shine some doubt.
Also, for what it's worth, I'm currently typing this from an open floor plan and I quite dislike it. I miss my quiet office.
I am an introvert but when trying to communicate something complicated that requires lots of roundtrips, I'll take a 15 minute face-to-face meeting over a day long email chain full of misunderstanding any day of the week. Any company where this is understood will move fast and kick ass.
I don't disagree with you. However, the problem arises when said company decides to stick everyone in a big room and says "go forth and collaborate." Before having my office moved into an open floor plan, we still had plenty of face-to-face conversations. Meetings, hallway talks, getting up and walking to another's office, and phone calls were still an option when email wasn't.
Taken as a whole, I think programmers realize that email is a tool like any other- it has its uses, and its times when it should not be used. I feel the same could be said for group settings- there are times it makes sense, and there are times when it doesn't. I'll never understand the tendency of corporations to say "This methodology is good in this particular set of variables, therefor we will use it 100% of the time for every situation."
the programmers I know prefer to communicate over email, if they're forced to communicate at all. Typically, because this allows them to take the time to get their point across perfectly before sending it.
What they often don't realize is that the recipients of their carefully crafted emails don't read them, or at best, skim them.
For one guy I work with, every email is a PhD thesis. They are WAAAAAYY too long-winded and nobody else even pretends to read them anymore.
I sort of dislike email discussion in many cases because I feel like I need to cover all points and consider all possible replies. Even for areas you know well, simply expressing your points understandably and concisely can take a lot of time and effort, and as you often don't really know exactly which points are important to the recipient, much of that effort might be wasted.
In a face-to-face discussion you can drill down and explore exactly those areas which need exploring... If it's a subject you know well enough to talk about without a lot of offline research, this is often way easier.
I've worked at a 100% remote company for the last 9 years - we generally prefer chat rooms.
Email, IM, chat have 1 big thing going for them: documentation. I can pull up the chat logs of every decision we've ever made in the company. Want to remember why we did something 8 years ago - is that a bug or a feature? We can find out if it is, and why.
Why then saying important things is much harder than writing a letter? And why it's easier to read hard things than keep up with the person that talks about them?
And yet the world's highest quality, and most widely used pieces of software are developed between thousands of people on email lists everyday (Linux, FreeBSD, etc, etc).
He is missing the point of Open office plans. Frankly, the blog post comes off as a little entitled when he says "we all deserve office of our own" (paraphrasing). Really ? How about a bed to nap while we are at it (well ok google has the nap pods). The point of open office plan is to try and encourage a culture of equality (in my opinion). I love open office plan because I could be sitting next to a college graduate and an executive director at the same time. Imagine the level of access you have if you have the balls to actually utilize it. With closed doors, even if the person inside is welcoming, it just creates a senseless fear of rejection.
All this point about not being able to focus and getting disturbed all the time is hardly an issue. Most co-workers are respectful of your time whether they are in open office or closed office. The ones that are not respectful will bother you regardless of where you sit. Behind closed door ? No problem, I will give this guy an annoying phone call.
Now is there a binary answer to this ? Of course not. But claiming that Open office plans are completely useless is stretching it a little too far.
"Here's the simple algebra. Let's say (as the evidence seems to suggest) that if we interrupt a programmer, even for a minute, we're really blowing away 15 minutes of productivity. For this example, lets put two programmers, Jeff and Mutt, in open cubicles next to each other in a standard Dilbert veal-fattening farm. Mutt can't remember the name of the Unicode version of the strcpy function. He could look it up, which takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which takes 15 seconds. Since he's sitting right next to Jeff, he asks Jeff. Jeff gets distracted and loses 15 minutes of productivity (to save Mutt 15 seconds).
Now let's move them into separate offices with walls and doors. Now when Mutt can't remember the name of that function, he could look it up, which still takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which now takes 45 seconds and involves standing up (not an easy task given the average physical fitness of programmers!). So he looks it up. So now Mutt loses 30 seconds of productivity, but we save 15 minutes for Jeff. Ahhh!"
certainly. I am sure there are many points against open office plans. All I am saying that there is no binary or "my way or the highway" kind of solution to this. It has to be balanced. You just should not dismiss open office completely. My 2 cents.
> Imagine the level of access you have if you have the balls to actually utilize it.
Ugg. The thing I want the least is to chit chat with you about random bullshit, beer or overhear you talk about your christmas, your hanukkah or your puppy or child. If you and I need to have a conversation, we can set aside a time and talk. This applies equally to whether the "you" is the mentor or the "I" is a mentor.
Just because two people work side by side doesn't necessarily mean access magically changes.
My friends who did medicine get these. Apparently the hospitals have a number of quarters that the medical staff share where they can catch up on sleep if they need it.
Well, I write this from a quiet corner I escaped to from my open office area so I could have a sustained focus time.
I've worked in open office, half-cube, full cube, shared office, and sole office. Of all of those, sole office was best for concentration and shared office was best for collaboration.
248 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 249 ms ] threadA few years back I worked for a prominent design company. Our small group (of 4) had a nice little corner of 1/4 of an entire floor. "Oooh, nice, brick walls and people that look busy" I thought when I first joined. Not even a week later, reality started to set it. It was so ridiculously noisy.
And there were, of course, a few people that contributed to everything. I would sometimes get in around 8, it would be quiet and the usual offenders were actually working. From 10-6, it was like, forget it, noise non-stop. After 6, back to quiet.
This became really frustrating and after asking the offenders to chill, I made a trip to HR to ask wtf? HR was basically like, meh, nothing we can do. I ended up wishing those offenders would quit or worse. It was so bad and they were so loud.
After that I was like, never again an open floor plan. It was the worst thing ever and a total sham for those that want to focus and just get things done. Requiring the people whole want quiet to put headphones on only adds insult to injury.
Too bad quiet just isn't valued anymore..
Were I appointed to be king, if you're noisy then STFU, full stop, whether you're getting your work done or not. Indoor voices, people, or take it somewhere else.
Are those people productive? If yes, you keep them, if not you warn/fire them.
However one thing we do is, that it is perfectly within your right to work from home if you feel you have enough to get on with and people do this often.
As to headphones, we have golden rule, if they are on, the building better be on fire if you disturb somebody. Not quite a sackable offence but damn close. :)
I've also found that sites like www.coffitivity.com offer a 'break' from the music. They can kill any background conversation distraction. ANY. Investigate white noise.
As to socialising, jokey things still get passed around. We're encouraged to use IM, and we also go in groups to the coffee machine which is kept in a cafeteria area, away from workers where you can chat freely and loudly.
I personally hate open plan offices, but in my 20+ years of working, I've only worked in an office once and that still had 4 people in there because they could squeeze that number into it.
Man I hope that's not the rule here, because when I have headphones on it's to wake me up, not keep the world out; I really don't care if someone disturbs me. Maybe I need an additional indicator...
(open plan office, I like it fine, clearly some here would like more seclusion though)
Now, as a self-employed individual I rent a seat in a shared open office to maintain that focus. It's far too easy to turn on the TV or play a video game or linger on the phone with a friend when I'm working from home. In a different setting -- with people around: all focused on work -- it's much easier to maintain a focus on work and getting done what's important.
I'm not advocating for an open office or a closed office but I do appreciate something balanced. People around me are always collaborating and discussing a great number of things which really makes me lose my focus. I usually come in early when it's really quiet and no one's in yet to get things done. After that, headphones on but even then, I miss the sound of silence rather than drowning out noise with more noise.
That was actually going to be my response. Speaking as the person typically on the other end of the "hey, quick question" it's crazy-distracting and it typically takes me 5-10 minutes to get back to whatever I was coding. It's demotivating that my time in the office is split between meetings and interruptions (direct or just general office roar), as well as why I'm currently receptive to interesting job offers.
Pretty much everyone on the team loves it, and has felt a major boost in productivity and team cohesion, as virtually anyone you might need is "right there" in the room with you, and you can tune in to some of the chatter for an organic understanding of what everyone's up to. I imagine if everyone were in offices it would feel dead and empty, and totally kill the team spirit.
I think the only thing we're missing is more ad-hoc space - more conference rooms for breakout groups and individuals seeking temporary escape from the floor.
I realize that this isn't viable for everyone, which is why I think we need more rooms for people to have that isolation when they need it.
edit: There certainly are times where I experience a lot of interruptions, and I'm glad for the after-hours when most people have left. But those interruptions are generally pretty necessary, because important things are happening. On the whole I think it is a net positive for teams that work together to be "on the floor" together.
If you're trying to build software in an open office where people are constantly talking then I'm sorry, good work will not get done. Decisions to change your office layout should be in the interest of boosting communication, team cohesion and productivity. Cubicles are too restrictive, completely open is too distracting.
I think open offices are a terrible idea with huge productivity hits that are not made up in any way by the small advantages they provide, but they aren't going away any time soon.
This was a good article, but again, it won't have any effect. The bottom line means we all have to suffer in noisy, distracting environments whether it's helpful or harmful.
And I think that developers should be in private offices, with doors. However, I will add that I think that a good environment also features plenty of open spaces, conference rooms, breakout areas, etc., where group can coalesce on an ad-hoc / temporary basis, on those occasions when people benefit from the high-bandwidth, face-to-face communication.
On the other hand, I hate talk from other teams or projects. The mostly unrelated and in worst case interesting (thus 10 times as effective in distracting me.). So the current open office plan with 6-7 teams in an open area is occasionally really annoying.
The other 5% of the time is great - as other people have already mentioned, it's really easy to listen in to conversations and get an idea of what everybody is up to.
That's why I prefer something in the middle of open office and having a private office: One office per team of 6-8 people. Then one is always in the loop of what's happening, not stuck alone and don't have to listen to that much noise.
A good thing with such an arrangement is to have designated "person of contact" per day that handles all disrupts from outside that team's office, leaving the rest to work uninterrupted.
Usually this is the job of the 'manager' (assuming that the role of 'manager' is filled by a specific person, and not just another one of the engineers).
Then recently, an odd combination if sinus infection, cold, and related ear troubles inflicted this on me. I was attending a company/community even with several hundred attendees. Quite suddenly, it was like every conversation in the common area was happening right next to me. It didn't matter how close or far, or how loud - it was all happening at once, and I while I could still hear the person I was talking to, I could no longer distinguish what they were saying as there were too many other conversations that my brain was trying to interpret. This went on for about two hours, then my ears popped, and things were roughly back to normal.
Ho-ly crap. Even with that experience, I find it difficult to fathom living with that nonstop - I don't know how you do it without going insane, particularly if you have to work in an open office.
TL;DR: I finally understand the experience of lacking selective hearing, and sympathize. While hoping it never, ever happens to me again.
You end up tuning out everything, and can't have a conversation in a noisy area.
I think I learned it by working in a loud dorm, then a loud house, and then a loud work environment. It's no issue for me to ignore other people now. It's actually a joke in my office where people struggle to get my attention while I'm focused.
This is a bit bad, but I just wear PPE Ear Defenders all day, on top of in ear headphones. With both of these, I can't hear a thing.
The eerie quiet is great for short bursts of concentration, but it also means I can turn my music up to a normal level without worrying about escaping noise annoying my colleagues.
It looks very nerdy, and people need to email me or wave if they want something (which cuts down interruptions a lot). I take them off about half the time so as to be social, which I guess is like leaving an office door open.
Sort of sad it's necessary though. Hope this helps people with a similar situation.
Ear defenders, buy good ones -> http://goo.gl/NlgnPv
I recently was fortunate enough to have my own office for a while and I haven't been as productive since...well, since last time I had my own office some five years back. It's an awesome feeling to enter flow almost as you enter your room...
It's interesting to think back at my 15+ years long career and realize that the times when I've been most productive coincides with the times I've had my own office.
Another thing that would help is moving to a different desk, but I'm guessing that might be a bit more difficult to negotiate.
(These days I'm self employed and work from home but that's what I did when I worked in an open-plan office. Also, if you can, come in to work before everyone else, while it's still very quiet. Usually more acceptable than coming in later than everyone else and staying later.)
The sad thing is that even if you look at it economically it doesn't make sense. Say that in order for each employee to have their own office you need 10m2 extra space per employee. Where I live, that would amount to ~2.5% of the employees salary, i.e. if a private office makes your emplyees more than 2.5% more productive you're profiting from private offices. In my experience my productivity boost when working in a private office amounts to maybe as much as 25% or more.
Highly recommend this option as well.
Edit - best-seller on amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00009LI4K
Good lord, this is not an elegant solution.
Have you ever worn over-the-ear headphones for 10 hours? It's uncomfortable.
And that's not even the worst part. Drowning out coworker nonsense with loud music is permanently damaging to your hearing. Focusing on writing some crappy Ruby isn't worth sacrificing a sense.
I can barely wear 'phones for 10 minutes. Because it physically hurts.
I have worn 'phones for hours on end a decade or so ago (my weapons of choice were K271s before my ear issues flared up and made that a non-option). They could get pretty hot around the ears, but they were very comfortable.
> Drowning out coworker nonsense with loud music is permanently damaging to your hearing.
There are cans and buds with good isolation (or noise-cancelling).
I know for a fact that when I got some nice etymotic earbuds (-20dB of outside sound), I was able to turn the level down from my average of about 70%, to more like 40-50% on my ipod.
It's my understanding that sound pressure is the damaging element we're concerned with, however, does blocking the ear canal with a headphone increase the pressure (, and damage,) as there's nowhere for the frequency to dissipate?
You can just about hear people through them, whisper quiet. But if you are also wearing some in ears, then music, or white noise at a comfortable volume will eliminate it completely.
You want headphones that do like -30db noise attenuation.
This blog talks about the 'filtering' you describe, completely new to me... http://eardefenders.org/2011/07/filtered-v-s-non-filtered/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Projects...
The problem is that people look for ideological purity and look to absolutes because an unambiguous answer seems simple, whereas the reality is quite grey. The reality is that some people work better in cubicles, and some prefer open layouts. To complicate things even further, some situations call for one, others call for the other.
I see a similar debate going on between proponents of traditional schools (rows of desks, and teacher in front) and structure-less/self-pacing schools. Which is better? Well, some kids thrive in one, others thrive in the other. Worse, some kids get absolutely destroyed within the wrong king of system.
There are no simple answers.
And cubes were a response to open layouts which were noisy and provided no privacy. Shit's cyclical.
Cubes were much cheaper than offices.
Open layouts were much cheaper than cubes.
The programmers sat near the printer so that people could hassle them every time it ran out of paper. You could identify where the sales team sat before you entered the room. Everybody above the rank of team leader had an office elsewhere.
The next interview I went to was also open plan - in the sense that 5 programmers shared a decent size office. Stayed there for almost 10 years.
But headphones can't replace quiet. They can just replace one source of noise with another. And they aren't necessarily comfortable to wear for extended periods of time anyway.
Headphones help mitigate the grotesque and evil nature of "open plan" offices, but they are no panacea.
I was going crazy the first 6 months here because I was holed up in a office by myself with little in-person communication. There was no benefit to being in the office versus working remotely. My first attempt was to get the company a HipChat account for engineers to stay more connected. I even pushed for a couple of monthly engineer events so I would have an opportunity to interact with other engineers.
Open office setups can go horribly wrong. Never allow anyone who spends time on the phone into the open office setup. That stifles all interaction due to the need for silence. Additionally, engineers are forced to listen to a single side of a conversation that likely has nothing directly to do with the engineers. Project and account managers have a valuable job, and engineers should not need to be distracted by work that is not related to what they need to accomplish.
Additionally, I believe an open office for engineers should be reasonably small (4-10 people), and there should be some common responsibilities or projects between the engineers.
Other steps can be taken to give people the appropriate space for the task at hand. I've used a stand-up desk for the past three years. I hardly ever spend a whole day standing. I alternate between sitting and standing as my body gives me signals. Similarly, having quiet space (alternatively headphones, if desired) to crank on certain work can be useful useful. That said, three of the four of us have not used solitary space in the past 2 months.
Basically all of this is to say the issue is not black and white. If you prefer to work in a private office, like more than half of the engineers at my company do, that's fine. If you prefer to work in the company of others, that is fine too. Not everyone wants to work at a startup, and not everyone hates working for big financial companies.
As an afterthought, now that phones are all VoIP, are there WiFi endpoints available for sale?
It helps to have a phone that is not the computer you are working on. At least for me that excludes any tablet I have on hand (if I have it nearby, there's probably something there that I should read). I didn't think about using smartphones - bring your own SIP endpoints for work, could be nice.
Agreed. A coworker of mine rolled back to a restore point, which caused his computer to get kicked off the domain. He couldn't log in at all, so he had to call IT. The problem was his phone was a softphone on his computer.
Not sure if we have 2 drops per cube. There's 2 ports, but I don't know if they're active, cabled but not hooked up to a switch, or not even run to the cube. Haven't bothered to test because our old Cisco phones had a pass-through port, and now I only have 1 device that could use an ethernet port.
I think the simple trick to this is 2 person offices.
Additionally, it has some nice features like cross-device chat history, various embed support, etc.
Eventually i got shifted to sit with my team in an open space and its really great. It's a small enough room with around 20 people, people sitting in teams. i suppose The presence of other teams can be a bit distracting at times, but it also gives you more people to interact with. You get a grasp on more than just your current assignment. You connect with more people than just your current team. So it ain't all bad. there are pros and cons. I guess when you're a senior, you want more space to yourself.
All of this disturbs me while I'm trying to code.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubicle
"The office cubicle was created by designer Robert Propst for Herman Miller, and released in 1967 under the name "Action Office II". Although cubicles are often seen as being symbolic of work in a modern office setting due to their uniformity and blandness, they afford the employee a greater degree of privacy and personalization than in previous work environments, which often consisted of desks lined up in rows within an open room.[1][2
Image of an office circa 1937: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Photograph_of_the_Division...
I've never liked the open office layouts anyways. The two companies I worked for used it and it was tremendously noisy and so I usually did anything I could to avoid having to work in the office. Either by going to the cafeteria to work, or staying home. It made both of the teams I worked on very inefficient. The exact opposite goal it was meant to address.
The desk layout on the "engineering floor" of the building seated senior engineers behind the junior engineers. All the way back to the VP of engineering in the back.
As a foreign visiting engineer from a California startup, I was seated in the back near the VP. I think they were trying to be respectful to me. Engineers then came back to my desk to ask me questions, although I was actually very junior to them. Hilarity ensued, when they actually took my advice.
EDIT: Clarified
Does anyone know of any companies in Japan that offer their engineers private office spaces?
Tax law all too frequently shapes behavior, and this is one of those cases.
Do you have any other (terrifying) examples?
Hence the lack of much brick or stone, built-for-the-ages construction beyond veneers.
The other thing I enjoy that I didn't expect was the social aspect, where I can chat with everyone in the room before work starts in earnest in the morning, or after 6-ish when we're all ready to leave for home anyway.
I am one who needs some control over his environment. In the majority of cases, these means peace and quiet particularly/mostly from human noise, as well as a lack of visual distraction. (Although there are times when I work well -- best even -- in a frenetic environment; however, these are limited in both type and frequency.)
I'm a bit older, and I fell into a generation that was subscribing to and prescribing whole-heartedly the "open", "collaborative" environment.
It did not work for me. Yet I received unrelenting pressure, including from medical professionals, that I was the one who... "simply" needed to learn to adapt.
Well... now we know a bit better. (Although I don't trust society to have truly "learned" this in any permanent fashion.) But the chronic stress of this situation has caused for me major adjustments in career and, eventually, rather run me down.
To put the bottom line at the bottom, here: If a situation is not working for you, IT IS NOT WORKING FOR YOU. TRUST THIS. TRUST YOURSELF!
"Professionals" of varying occupations and levels of training will all -- ALL -- tell you all kinds of crap. Even several years of medical school does not divorce most from their prejudices nor from cultural suasion.
Don't waste your time -- your life -- running yourself down trying to live up to someone else's idea of the "right way".
I'm in a large shared office of 4 desks. I have a single coworker that sits right next to me though him or I moving to the vacant lot doesn't really cross our minds. I am however consistently distracted as he's particularly fidgety, talks to himself (I do when I'm alone), and either chews really loudly or I've just grown to hate it. I have had no problems with him as a person but the effects of the constant disruption bring about a certain disdain towards others that distract him or myself. I can't divorce myself from it and my ears can't take a full day of headphones even if I severely enjoy the music I listen to.
I see open plans as facilitators in nothing but pain all around and where I am currently. We've always been in a open office cube farm of some nature but something about the move to a new place specifically designed to be this way was a bigger kick in the balls than I had anticipated. I can't think of any place that would prize distractions as a badge of honor either, at least not where developers are concerned. Yet that's exactly what we have now and that I've allowed some shitty process to make me this much of a shitty person is the real problem. Its like I can't ever correct it either so I just need to move on or it's going to continue to push me into atrophy.
Basically your last paragraph is key. Notice this early. If you can change policy for your sake, good. If you can't, run away. You don't deserve the inevitable downturn it'll have on your livelihood.
Basically, they were in mental cubes when they were lacking physical cubes.
P.S. The company I worked for went with the open office, productivity plummeted and the office is now closed. When I pointed out the above issues in the pictures I was told: "You don't like it? Maybe you need to work somewhere else". Well, now, they all work somewhere else.
However, one of the organize-all-the-things guys on the internal operations team once caught me in a coding marathon in one of those offices and sent an email to the entire company "reminding" everyone that those offices were for God-knows-what-he-thought-they-were-for, not for work. So I returned to my ergonomic island and toiled away, surrounded by the noise of a hundred private conversations.
I've always thought since then that if that had panned out, that you could choose at any moment if you wanted to be in the open room or in a private room in the perimeter, that would have been the ideal layout.
Not just devs. Employers should have utmost respect for all their employees.
Only in the most simplistic understanding – anyone serious will factor in limited information and human irrationality rather than assuming that observed market behaviour represents Econ 101 game-theoretical optimal decisions.
If you work at a large company, you might be well paid because you're working on the CEO's pet iOS project and there's a developer shortage. The market is working to give you higher pay but there's no relation to any sort of actual value. Most places don't even make a serious effort to quantify value or cost in a remotely scientific manner.
The logical outcome of this is that your office layout should be different for employee groups doing different types of work, but since having an office is seen as a perk of upper management, giving offices to some groups and open plan areas to other groups is seen as favoritism and elitism rather than simply providing the best environment for everyone's job, and I think that's a big reason why it doesn't often happen.
From a design perspective:
- Glass walls are nice. This office was a group space surrounded by smaller rooms (which had the windows). The offices were glass on the interior wall (facing the group space), which allowed light in, but opaque on the walls between offices, allowing for privacy.
- Variety was important. Iirc, we had like 4-6 offices that would fit 2 people at desks, 3 that would fit 4 or 5 people around a table, and 1 that fit about 12 around a small conference table. This was for a 25-person company, and seemed to provide about the right amount of space. - We ended up soundproofing a few rooms because people would use them for calls or loud music playing and it'd disturb the neighboring offices.
My mood changes, some days I can deal with others other days I just want to put my head down and program alone. This was a great option to have.
These booths are always full and occupied by folks for the entire day, since most people don't like the loud open area workspace and sit in these small offices so they can have phone calls and concentrate.
At one company where I worked management got offices, so it was senior developers staking out the conference rooms... at another, no one had an office, so the owner got the nicest conference room and some of the leads fought over the lesser ones.
We have a little room tucked down a hallway that maybe 5-7 people know about, and no one uses. I've been in here for 3 weeks, and it's wonderful.
FWIW, good acoustical engineering can make a significant difference in how loud an open-space "feels." Putting sound-absorbing materials on all architectural features and hanging sound-diffusing baffles from the ceiling can change a loud room into a significantly quieter and less distracting room.
It isn't a panacea, but it isn't hard to do. You will need someone experienced in room acoustics to design it for you. I'd still prefer small offices over an open space, but if management is stuck on having an open-space then getting good sound control in there will make the best of a bad situation.
You can hear the reverse in a lot of trendy restaurants nowadays where, for some reason that I can't comprehend, it is fashionable to deliberately make the dining area as loud as possible.
http://www.grubstreet.com/2013/07/adam-platt-on-loud-restaur...
I also have wondered why more restaurants don't use sound treatment. I have noticed that the high class restaurants always have sound treatment. Don't these other restaurants know that if you install adequate sound treatment that you can charge more? Obviously not...
The problem with focus booths is that it's not "your" space. You don't come back to the same one every day, you can't have pictures of your family on the desk, etc.
Focus booths are a small courtesy to allow people to make phone calls and hold 1:1 or very small meetings, but that's about it.
It was an awful work environment, even though it looked very modern and stylish. It was one of the main reasons I quit that job.
Personally, however, I'd prefer the reverse: offices as the default (two people per office okay, as long as there's space) with open space (with portable white boards, bean bag chairs, desks) in the middle for ad-hoc design/discussions.
Cubicles do seem the worst of both world, however: an ad-hoc meeting is no longer so ad-hoc (as it requires hunting for an available conference room), but the noise/interruption issues are no better than open areas.
I've worked in environments like that. Unfortunately, the open space looks like "not working" to people and is highly visible. Since no one wants to be publicly seen as not working, they just ended up being a very nicely decorated and inviting ghost town.
I always like to think of the library my university had. It had rooms of all sizes going around most of the outside, and then little pockets of chairs and even some cubical type areas. The bookshelves broke everything up mentally, so I never felt in the open, but also never confined. Some of the rooms had white boards and some were just tiny rooms with a desk you could use.
For me personally, the key is variety and flexibility, and not assuming that one thing works perfectly for everyone.
FYI, this is exactly what happens to luxurious and inviting game rooms at videogame companies.
This is essentially what I have now. We have four people in two very large rooms connected by an open internal corridor. There's chairs in each room, and a large table in one of the rooms. It's a very productive setup.
The meeting/private rooms should be in the center, away from the scarce windows, and the more frequently used common space should have the privilege of natural lighting. Too many conference rooms are allowed to hog the view.
No, a good private office should have natural light coming in through windows!
And no one's ever told me I can't work in one of them all day if I wanted to (I don't). I bet there'd be a discussion if I moved into one permanently, or even for more than a straight few days, but for now at least, we have the best of both worlds.
I work in an open space plan at Valve now, and it's pretty decent. The thing that makes it decent is that desks are mobile; there is no assigned space (want an office? find an empty one and move in) so you can very easily choose who to work next to. This cuts down a great deal on interruptions caused by people interrupting the people /next/ to you, which I found was the actual source of randomization in most cubical environments.
Also, stuffing more than a few dozen people into a shared area is probably bad. Don't do that.
Overall though I prefer an open space environment with the ability to periodically go of to a quiet area for deep thinking. Sometimes you just need that solitude to do your best work.
Open layouts are a way to save lots of money per employee. They provide no tangible benefit over private offices that are big enough to have coding sessions in, but they cost a hell of a lot less. Next time someone tells you that they are more productive in an open layout office ask them if they had ever worked with an engaged and energetic team where everyone did have large private offices. Chances are, they did not and therefore have no basis for comparison.
Having a private office is bad for some employees and some people's productivity.
I went from an open office that I loved to having my own office, which I hate.
I could write this same article saying the opposite things and it would be no less correct.
I hate my office. In the almost 2 years I've been at my current company I feel like less of a team member than I did in 2 months at my last job.
Headphones would be too distracting for me--however I am developing tinnitus, which has become a blessing in disguise. Although I find it difficult to listen to music now, I would rather listen to the ringing in my ears than office chatter.
If you want my attention, send me an e-mail. Also: get off my lawn.
Face to face communication definitely has it's place, but it can also lead to cliquish and insular behavior, and can lose out on some benefits of having a paper (well, electronic) trail.
This is now pure anecdotal, but the programmers I know prefer to communicate over email, if they're forced to communicate at all. Typically, because this allows them to take the time to get their point across perfectly before sending it.
Programmers have done amazing things while collaborating on massive projects across the planet using nothing but mailing lists and the occasional IRC chat. While this doesn't disprove they might not have communicated better if they were all in one big room together, I'd say it does shine some doubt.
Also, for what it's worth, I'm currently typing this from an open floor plan and I quite dislike it. I miss my quiet office.
Taken as a whole, I think programmers realize that email is a tool like any other- it has its uses, and its times when it should not be used. I feel the same could be said for group settings- there are times it makes sense, and there are times when it doesn't. I'll never understand the tendency of corporations to say "This methodology is good in this particular set of variables, therefor we will use it 100% of the time for every situation."
What they often don't realize is that the recipients of their carefully crafted emails don't read them, or at best, skim them.
For one guy I work with, every email is a PhD thesis. They are WAAAAAYY too long-winded and nobody else even pretends to read them anymore.
In a face-to-face discussion you can drill down and explore exactly those areas which need exploring... If it's a subject you know well enough to talk about without a lot of offline research, this is often way easier.
For some people, id rather shoot myself in the face than be face to face or try to comprehend their "email".
Its all "lean", "agile", and "we need to test your test cases manually just to make sure they work, thats what tests or for".
Email, IM, chat have 1 big thing going for them: documentation. I can pull up the chat logs of every decision we've ever made in the company. Want to remember why we did something 8 years ago - is that a bug or a feature? We can find out if it is, and why.
All this point about not being able to focus and getting disturbed all the time is hardly an issue. Most co-workers are respectful of your time whether they are in open office or closed office. The ones that are not respectful will bother you regardless of where you sit. Behind closed door ? No problem, I will give this guy an annoying phone call.
Now is there a binary answer to this ? Of course not. But claiming that Open office plans are completely useless is stretching it a little too far.
"Here's the simple algebra. Let's say (as the evidence seems to suggest) that if we interrupt a programmer, even for a minute, we're really blowing away 15 minutes of productivity. For this example, lets put two programmers, Jeff and Mutt, in open cubicles next to each other in a standard Dilbert veal-fattening farm. Mutt can't remember the name of the Unicode version of the strcpy function. He could look it up, which takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which takes 15 seconds. Since he's sitting right next to Jeff, he asks Jeff. Jeff gets distracted and loses 15 minutes of productivity (to save Mutt 15 seconds).
Now let's move them into separate offices with walls and doors. Now when Mutt can't remember the name of that function, he could look it up, which still takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which now takes 45 seconds and involves standing up (not an easy task given the average physical fitness of programmers!). So he looks it up. So now Mutt loses 30 seconds of productivity, but we save 15 minutes for Jeff. Ahhh!"
From here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html
Ugg. The thing I want the least is to chit chat with you about random bullshit, beer or overhear you talk about your christmas, your hanukkah or your puppy or child. If you and I need to have a conversation, we can set aside a time and talk. This applies equally to whether the "you" is the mentor or the "I" is a mentor.
Just because two people work side by side doesn't necessarily mean access magically changes.
My friends who did medicine get these. Apparently the hospitals have a number of quarters that the medical staff share where they can catch up on sleep if they need it.
I've worked in open office, half-cube, full cube, shared office, and sole office. Of all of those, sole office was best for concentration and shared office was best for collaboration.