1) $100-200k/yr salary
2) $200-300k/yr fully loaded cost
3) $500k-$5mm/yr value created per employee (rev or market cap or whatever) -- this is actually more like -$huge to +$huge)
Offices cost $7/ft2/mo in Palo Alto, or $2-4/ft2/mo in SF.
A private office is probably 50-100 ft2 more than open plan.
So, we're talking about $100 to $700/mo difference.
I'd personally be willing to pay $500/mo pre-tax to have a private office, vs. a desk in an shared office. Productivity benefits to company are on the order of $10-50k/mo.
Next time I do a startup, I'm doing 3-4 person sized offices for each person (i.e. you have a guest desk, workspace, etc., normally empty), and project areas shared per team, after there are more than just founders.
Developer salaries are probably not affordable for a majority of companies either. But they pay them, otherwise they couldn't get people to come to work for them.
So at some level of developer pay, N companies are profitable. At N+P, fewer companies are profitable, and at N-P, more. All else being equal.
If we cared as much about our desks as we do about our pay, we'd have more offices, and companies would either make less profit, or there would be fewer companies.
But we don't have offices, because we don't insist on it.
Next time you interview, make that as important as salary.
Have your developers work from home then. I work for a fully funded startup where the entire team is remote. I would never go back to an office (I have insane levels of productivity compared to my last gig that had an open office plan, not to mention 0 commute time).
Bravo! My productivity (and motivation) is orders of magnitude higher when I can work in my house in the South of France or at my mother in law's house on the Mexican Riviera.) I will give you 10 hours a day of full productivity if you can save me from my old Jersey City-NYC commute. I don't need to play ping pong with you to build great software for you.
Thank you! Part of my motivation for taking the job was my wife wanted the ability for us to live in Nice, France for a bit. I've noticed you mention in your HN posts that you live in the South of France; congrats on the ability to do that!
At least some open plans, are ultra low walled cubicles. Simply install taller cubicle walls.
The cost is approximately zero compared to the costs of sick days and ruined productivity.
Fire extinguishers are expensive. However, they're pretty cheap compared to getting cited by the fire dept/OSHA for not having a fire extinguisher. And they're really cheap compared to the result of a fire that can't be put out.
It is almost certainly affordable for the vast majority of them. And as the article points out, evidence suggests that they are losing money by not investing in proper office space. Walls are a hell of a lot cheaper than lost employee productivity.
If Rands in Repose didn't have such cryptic titles, I could link you to a blog post from http://randsinrepose.com/ which argued that yes, individual offices would be ideal, while also having common areas for brainstorming.
Can put max 3 people per office. People can move together to an office if they share a common task. Then switch around as tasks change.
But it is important to keep distractions out especially for creative positions.
Also everyone is different so maybe some people prefer the open floor and they should be allowed to work there too. But forcing everyone to do it, I think is misguided.
I was transitioned from a full-height cubicle (in a corner, no less) to a half-height cubicle. I can see from the neck up of the person in the next cube while seated. This was done to "increase collaboration", however myself and my team are placed by a group of people from HR, so it's constantly our recruiters on the phone pre-screening candidates. We never need to interact with them. And I know they are annoyed with us as well when we're talking technical jargon. We both get on each other's nerves and constantly distract each other.
Even if you subscribe to the "open = more collaborative" idea, it only works when you're near people that you interact with daily.
I miss my full-height cubicle, in an area with only people from my department.
> I was transitioned from a full-height cubicle (in a corner, no less) to a half-height cubicle. I can see from the neck up of the person in the next cube while seated.
Wow, that's absurd.
Our company transitioned from 6 foot cube walls to 4.5ish foot cube walls, such that you can see over the cube walls if you're standing up, but not when sitting down. It works very nicely for being able to see across most of the floor, to easily find someone you're meeting with (and who is thus also standing looking around), or to collaborate with your team over cube walls. But if you're sitting down, you have walls all around you, both to muffle noise and to provide a comfortable feeling of privacy.
There are also a large number of drop-in conference rooms ("collaboration rooms"), and some one-person phone-booth rooms for fully private phonecalls.
Cubicles for 4 persons are fine. Or any other way of zoning with small walls - in rows or bigger "cubicles" for more people 6-8, maybe 10.
PS: and while my team is a distraction for others in my office (relatively, not absolutely) I dislike open-spaces. They aren't mentally comfortable, not because of noise (for me) but because of no "feeling" of privacy. It is all subjective of course.
I truly don't understand some peoples hatred of cubicles. Sure I'd rather my own office with a door (I guess), but high-wall cubicles provide just enough privacy for me to keep outside distractions from being a problem (unless a cube-mate starts whistling or something).
Yes. Real offices for everyone, and some open space (e.g. meeting and lunch tables) for people who want it. People should be in contact some of the time, but not exposed to every inane conversation.
Also, open-back visibility (that is, being visible from behind) does more damage than the noise itself, and there are no noise-canceling headphones for that.
Office space isn't that expensive, compared to the productivity loss of having everyone work in a crappy space. (Compared to a traditional office, open-plan saves about $300-450/month per employee in San Francisco, Class A commercial real estate. It's less if you're in Oakland, Brooklyn, or the Midwest) Open-plan is just another case of crappy HR (the norm in tech, sadly) "cutting" costs in a way that actually externalizes them; there are marginal savings on office space, but productivity plummets.
Just to clarify on "open-back visibility", it means that people can see you from behind (ie your back is facing the door/ open space rather than a wall, and by extension it means that they can see your screen), right?
If that's the case, I agree with you, but I'd like to see more details on how/why it is the case. Do you by any chance have any more evidences?
I don't have papers on it. Just years of painful experience, but something I've noticed is that (a) people with walls at their back are generally more productive, and (b) successful or powerful people usually choose seating arrangements that give them a barrier. Visibility from behind suggests low social status and makes people feel "watched".
I can confirm that with a couple dozen n=1 anecdotes. I used to have a mirror on my monitor so I could see people coming up behind me. That calmed the lizard brain down a bit, but I was still distracted every time somebody walked behind me. I've known dozens of programmers who also hate having their back exposed because it's a distraction.
Perhaps a way to mitigate the bad effects of open offices is to allow people to work from home when they need to focus. I spent a year and a half working in an open floor plan, and about 90% of my coding got done at home. I'd remain well-connected to everyone over Skype, and I'd only show up to socialize and/or attend necessary meetings.
Perhaps this isn't optimal for every employee/company, but it's how I made the best of the situation for myself at this company...
I have children that are not yet school aged at home. Working from home only happens after bedtime (and that's if I decide not to spend any time with my wife after the kid's bedtime).
I also work in an "open" plan (recently transitioned to it). The most productive I ever am is when I'm travelling for work. It's the only time I get privacy.
As a side anecdote: I was listening to NPR about a prisoner that was talking about how he turned his life around in prison and read an incredible amount of books. I was feeling jealous of him for a few minutes until I realized how screwed up it was. I was jealous of the free time and relative privacy that a prisoner had. I never get privacy unless I'm travelling for work. Never.
Some activities like teaching are open by nature. Interruptions are ok and even desirable. Design, politics, sales, could have a great amount of work done in the open.
Now, in activities like programming, writing, science, you are suiciding yourself in the open, constant interruptions and the theater.
I have done programming in the open but choosing my partners, one, two or three people that I admired, but it was almost an intimate relationship, far from what people consider OO.
In Soviet Union it was more important what other perceived you were doing that really what you accomplished, so everybody created the farce of working a lot, but the productivity levels were terrible compared with the West. Their work was simulating they were working, and like good actors, some even believed their role.
In big buroucracies managers find very hard to identify what other people really contribute to the work so they start using external cues, like how much(time) this person works, how busy he looks, the sense of security and so on.
"what's the alternative? Everyone get a 4-walled office?"
I work from home. So do the people that work for my company.
I created my company programming, so I could identify the value of the people that work with me. I could trust them, they could manage them selves, and also they are more productive when they don't have anyone breathing over their shoulders.
Of course, it is no lala land. It takes experience, knowledge and work to be able to implement something like this.
4 walled offices for everyone is a nice ideal but its just not affordable in a lot of places. I work in New York City. There just isn't enough space for that. Its totally cost prohibitive to provides offices like that for everyone.
The first job I worked had each office shared by two developers; this seemed to provide a good balance between 'quiet time' and having someone close by you could bug (assuming they didn't look busy) to discuss something.
In my 20-year career, I've only worked in an open office once for 6 months, and it was a significant factor in me quitting. I sat immediately adjacent to a managerial-type guy, and he had people dropping in all the time to discuss something; I'm talking 10 people per hour, on average. I would defy anyone getting any complex programming work done under those circumstances.
Most people in our large open plan office now wear large noise cancelling headphones in an attempt to drown out the gossip by the coffee machine, the colleague behind making a phone call with details far too personal to be sharing/scaring with us, the drone of many printers and photocopiers, inane ringtones, someone laughing far too loudly, and the person who eats with their mouth open and smacks their lips. But otherwise, yeah, go open offices.
I had one experience in an "open office" for approximately six months. It was terrible, constant shuffling of people to acquire the plethora of free food available. Nerf Gun wars and the constant click clack of ping pong approximately 30 ft. away. This article has offered me some vindication in my distaste for the "open office".
No, I don't. But I don't through a nerf ball around the office either. Sure, some people may need a break of think better when doing an activity but you have to be a moron to think throwing something around an office is ok. Go for a walk. Find another bored employee to talk to. Browse the web. Grow up.
The problem is probably closer to these potential noise sources not being properly isolated from the work area, of which open offices are particularly susceptible.
I've only had one work environment that didn't have some type of on-site recreation.
I work for a company whose entire office is on an open plan. Yes, even the CEO sits in a cubicle, as do all the senior management and stuff. And this is not a startup, mind you, its a mid size company.
Although it was kinda scary at first, I've adapted to it, and can see the practical benefits. Not having special offices, there is a sense of egalitarianism amongst the workers and none of the usual rat-race for better offices. As pointed out in another comment, most employees tend to use headphones when they need privacy. Since all the cubicles are the same, maintenance is a breeze.
I guess it depends on your temperament. If you really just like to be left alone when working, it won't help. For me, having so many people around kinda prevents me from going drowsy, which used to happen a lot at my previous job.
Not so new ... but it seems that some news has to be repeated on and on, that people learn.
In 1987 the book "Peopleware" already described the open office trap. But since, the idea keeps coming back in CEOs minds. I experienced it in a big corporation I was in. Decades after Peopleware, Open-Office was declared as "big new invention from the US" -- but it still was the same old fallacy.
The idea kept coming up always in new flavors and new "inventions" -- it seems that the idea is just to attractive for managers to be buried.
The problem is, that you have to invest in people to get best results -- and conventional economical thinking often times goes the opposite direction, how to cut costs.
The open/closed office thing seems like chocolate vs. vanilla. Some people love one and hate the other. Some are okay with both. I've worked in both, at several companies.
I generally prefer open office plans. Clearly other people don't. Everyone is different. There is no RIGHT answer, just RIGHT for you, or for your team...
It's often not the team who decides. I've also been told (but it's just hearsay) that you can't get the highest LEED certification for your groovy new office complex if you have individual offices, so the PR value of that is factored in as well.
The article makes a very clear case against this notion that it's a personal opinion. The problem is while you might like it, you also don't have a continuing objective measure of your own costs of working in an open office plan. For example, are you measuring your epinephrine levels?
As one of the developers who has a interruption surplus (get interrupted more than I interrupt others), I really dislike open offices, they actively prevent me from getting work done.
The whole point of the article is that the differences are empirically and objectively measurable on a wide variety of axes, and almost universally against the open office. It is not a question of personal preference.
That is, there actually is a "right" answer that is the same for everyone. Measuring it is "science."
No, there really isn't a right answer. It may be that it decreases productivity and increases stress, but if it increases employee happiness (regardless of stress), that's a tradeoff that can be made. And the article definitely is less solid on happiness--it appears to vary. I'd certainly never, ever want to go back to an office, regardless of the toll an open plan may take on my productivity.
It's not about goal choice at all. "Productivity versus happiness" is not the issue.
The specific goal can vary and doesn't matter to the question of whether there is a "right answer." For any arbitrary goal, yes, there is actually a "right" objective answer on the question of what factors, if any, influence in general the ability to achieve that goal.
Incidentally, the article deals extensively with employee happiness in the form of "job dissatisfaction," which suffers (like almost all other metrics) in open plan offices.
Open office plans seem really polarizing on HN, but it surprises me how often people defend them here (or even evangelize them). For software development, it seems like something that has no upside at all (aside from saving money on office space), and tons of downsides.
For the people who do prefer them (and also spend most of their time writing code), I would be curious to know the following:
(1) How many years have you spent, total, working as a developer in an office environment every day?
(2) What percentage of those years were in open office layouts vs. sharing an office vs. having a private office?
(3) How many times a day, on average, do you interrupt other people with questions, vs. other people interrupting you?
I bring this up because I just really truly don't get the occasional open office boosterism here. My current theory is that most of it comes from people who are still in the honeymoon phase of their career (like, the first few years after college when everything about the workplace still has some novelty to it).
I say this because it seems like many/most of the people I talk to in person who like the open office idea have either literally never had a private office, or are relatively fresh out of college and get a job at Google (or a startup, or wherever), and they're still so excited about everything that even the things that are hassles (like open office plans?) seem like they're brimming with novelty.
Alternately, a lot of the people I talk to who like open offices tend to be those that are constantly pinging the people around them for help, but people rarely or never ping them for help. The only people I've known at my current company who want open offices (or even officemates) are these kinds of people. They don't even realize that they have an 'interruption deficit' (for lack of a better term) within their team, they just like the idea of everyone being more readily available to them and they don't pay the price for it since they rarely get interrupted themselves.
That's an interesting point. It reminds me of something Joel Spolsky wrote:
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)."
Conversely, I've been able to save days of employee time by hearing a conversation between two colleagues that had a faulty assumption on our infrastructure setup.
There are also other solutions to this problem, such as encouraging discussions like this to take place on something like HipChat. Now all the discussions are archived and searchable and even the people that are home sick that day have the chance to overhear something important, not just the guy that happened to be walking by.
And while yes, some discussions will still take place outside of the chat rooms, if this is your default way of working then there should be enough discussion of anything critical that everything makes it's way to chat eventually.
Once everyone's comfortable working this way you can encourage a lot more working from home (or working from wherever in the world you want to be, if your employees aren't all married with kids yet), etc. And that will save you even more on office space.
This type of "chance encounter" is a common rebuttal but instead of planning your office layout on the hope of occasionally catching a mis-communication maybe it would be better to improve how things are communicated so these "faulty assumptions" don't happen (and/or are caught sooner...independent of luck/chance).
Perhaps you can explain something to me that I have found mysterious for years - how does one develop the mindset where they cannot conceive that their opinions on things are not universal? Three separate times in your screed you insinuate that people who like what you do not are not thinking. It's incredibly arrogant.
I'm not the OP, but I'm aligned with the OP in being against open offices. I'm also very cognizant of the fact that I don't have a single opinion that is universal.
But opinions aside if we look at actual studies (at least among the research I've seen, some of which is referenced in this article) far more often than not they point to open offices being an overall negative for knowledge workers.
Also as a related but possibly incorrect observation - it seems that there is usually more table space per employee in cubicle layouts than in open-space. Whenever I see open-space office pictures there are long rows of tables and each worker has a laptop, maybe one monitor and small place for notes and stuff. And right next starts another similar workplace. In 4-person cubicle I (and all the the others in the office) have place for 2-3 or 4 monitors, laptop in dock, heaps of wires, analyzers, stacks of device parts, normal keyboards and mice, plants and other stuff and have free space left.
I have had both and been working in software about 10 years. I don't know if I would say open offices are an unalloyed good, but I would say that people tend to focus on the negatives without honestly considering the drawbacks of the alternatives they'd prefer.
Further, the time when I did have my own office was when I got interrupted the most. My boss would come in all the time and talk to me about whatever, a lot of times not even work-related stuff. Now I work in a place where people will only ever try to interrupt you via Slack, and if you tell them you're busy they will go away. So I think there is a cultural aspect as well, if your company accepts people bothering you whenever, I don't honestly believe an office will put a stop to that.
For software development, it seems like something that has no upside at all (aside from saving money on office space), and tons of downsides.
Commercial real estate is about $3/SF (per month) in San Francisco (Class A) and $4/SF in Manhattan. Open plan offices save about 75-100 SF per employee (more, if you're looking to be sadistic and impractical, but at this point, the productivity loss is obvious.) So the employer is saving, at absolute most, $5000 per employee per year. It's not worth it.
I bring this up because I just really truly don't get the occasional open office boosterism here. My current theory is that most of it comes from people who are still in the honeymoon phase of their career (like, the first few years after college when everything about the workplace still has some novelty to it).
That's basically what it is. The open-plan layout is reminiscent of college and the all-nighters in the computer lab. But work is not college. A bad grade on an assignment is much more fixable than getting fired. The stakes are higher, and that's why a certain brand of professionalism (or, more bluntly, divorcing oneself from behaviors that are acceptable for 18- to 21-year-olds) is necessary.
I say this because it seems like many/most of the people I talk to in person who like the open office idea have either literally never had a private office, or are relatively fresh out of college and get a job at Google (or a startup, or wherever), and they're still so excited about everything that even the things that are hassles (like open office plans?) seem like they're brimming with novelty.
Well, private offices make nerf-gun battles harder. And you hear less juicy gossip. And you don't have an audience for self-important rants about Lena Dunham. It might get so "boring" (in the sense of a lack of distractions) that you might be tempted to actually work to pass the time.
At a former job I worked from home where I had peace and quiet pretty much all day. I only really worked 4-5 hours in a day, but I was significantly (in the order-of-magnitude realm) more productive than my in-office teammates. On the occasion I'd go into the office for a few days my productivity level would similarly plummet, even though I was working for more hours each day. I can only attribute this to the incessant interruptions of the open-office plan.
I know it is just anecdote, but I'm the same way. I just don't have the flexibility to work from home regularly. With one company I previously worked for I took a sick day to stay home so I could actually finish an important project.
>Well, private offices make nerf-gun battles harder. And you hear less juicy gossip. And you don't have an audience for self-important rants about Lena Dunham. It might get so "boring" (in the sense of a lack of distractions) that you might be tempted to actually work to pass the time.
Amazingly this is also an argument from working from home. I've been at two companies during a WFH transition and they act surprised at the increase in productivity. Often times it's this very reason, less babbling and nerf-gun fights and more actual work.
Of course this doesn't cover those who "work from home" by watching Netflix and jiggling the mouse on their laptop every ten minutes or so. I'm talking about the more responsible people.
"Of course this doesn't cover those who "work from home" by watching Netflix and jiggling the mouse on their laptop every ten minutes or so. I'm talking about the more responsible people."
It's probably still more productive because now they are not distracting anyone.
>So the employer is saving, at absolute most, $5000 per employee per year. It's not worth it.
And yet not only are employers embracing it but extending the model with hoteling and virtual desktops. A good friend of mine at Shell checks into his locker every morning and then goes and finds a random desk to work from for the day. I'll give you 10:1 the guy whose idea that was isn't sitting at a cube.
This seems like an unfairly-condescending post to me. The last line primarily. I don't think that having an open office implies the stereotypical "nerf gun wars, billiards, and foosball" environment (or at least it doesn't at the company I'm working for). Nor does it mean that those who work in it are irresponsible, immature, or self-important. Certainly those conditions exist, but it's not fair to generalize it that far.
Having individual offices is is a lot more complex then just more space.
Actually building these things is non trivial. It's not just walls, it's air con vents, electrics, etc. I also think you may be underestimating the extra space required to make an office not feel like a closet.
Then there is natural light. In a big open plan space light travels to the entire space. With offices you either need to build on the edge of the building and have a window, or make at least one wall out of glass (expensive). Even doing that you still can't just take a big room and turn it into partitioned offices.
The capital outlay for a company to fit out a space with individual offices is actually really high and it all comes in one big hit. I'm sure if it was a matter of just paying 5k per employee extra per year the story would be different, but that isn't really a reality.
Saving money on office space is the main reason management goes for Open Plan. Note that in most companies more senior staff typically get their own office still.
Rent is only the beginning of the costs. You need to build out the offices, which in a place like NYC means dealing with union BS and potentially carrying two rental costs if the market is tight. You're easily spending $100/sqft
You also run into tax and other accounting issues by making permanent improvements to the office vs. buying modular cubes and such. Portable equipment gets deducted over a few years... permanent improvements get depreciated over long periods of time (30+ years!)... So you get to pay taxes on profits that you didn't make.
Most companies don't have the cash flow to pay a 30% premium in a high tax state on expensive construction, so cubes are a no brainer.
One of the companies I worked at did the Nerf gun thing. They meant well, but man, there's nothing more annoying than being on a deadline but you can't focus because you're never quite certain when a dart is going to fly at your head or into your coffee. I know companies don't want to be seen as stodgy or unfun, but its probably not a great idea to supply people with things to actively annoy each other...
I've been happy with open plan offices when the seats are far enough apart. If you open someone's door you are certainly going to interrupt them, but looking at someone's face often lets you know if this is a good time to ask them a question or not. My favorite work environment (where I stayed for 1.5 years) was open plan. My least favorite work environment (2 years) was also open plan where people were packed in.
And that's the insidious rot in every open floor plan I've experienced. Once you've put everyone in an open space, step two is to keep packing them in tighter and tighter until they start quitting because that's the only way to continue improving shareholder value(tm).
Anecdotally, the managers always seem to manage to keep their private offices. Funny that...
My experience mirrors yours, I've yet to meet (IRL) someone who has actually experienced private (or at least semi-private two-to-an-office) offices who prefers open offices.
All of the boosters I've run into have only known open offices. Having said that, I'm sure someone will chime in here who has experienced both and prefers open offices, but I have to believe such people are in the vast minority based on my completely anecdotal data
Having done both (as I'm old enough to have started working when open offices were pretty rare), it is kind of ridiculous how much less productive (and less happy) I am in an open office and how difficult it is to find a workplace that isn't open office these days.
Do you have a team chatroom? Are you ever distracted by messages you receive in it?
For me the two are very similar. I work in an open plan office and enjoy being able to talk to my co-workers - often someone will pull their chair up to someone else's to pair program for a while, or just discuss the issue they're having.
If you don't want interruptions, you put headphones on. It works well.
Maybe it's because I've been working "alone" in the quiet for so long, but I can not force myself to not stop and listen when other people are talking. I can, however not switch windows/tabs over to the chat client until I'm ready.
> If you don't want interruptions, you put headphones on. It works well.
It works well for some people. While you may be able to code perfectly well with music blasting in your ears (loud enough to drown out nearby conversations) that is not the case for everyone.
I wear headphones at work but the volume (at which I can actually concentrate on my work) is only sufficient to drown out/filter random background noises (typing/mouse-clicks, HVAC, people walking by, etc) - if there are people having a conversation a few feet away my productivity plummets.
I cannot use headphones to counter noise and distraction. If I use music, I pay attention to the music. White noise I feel like I'm in a science fiction movie. And regardless of how comfortable a particular headphone may be, something on my head is itself a distraction.
Headphones may be at best a distraction mitigation, but what they really are is evidence that your environment is crap.
> My current theory is that most of it comes from people who are still in the honeymoon phase of their career (like, the first few years after college when everything about the workplace still has some novelty to it).
Or are younger people able to handle more distractions? I don't mean that in the sense of "those kids these days", but as a more general developmental thing.
In college I remember doing homework while watching TV with the sound off so I could listen to music and chat with friends on the computer. Over the last few years at work it seems much more difficult to refocus after distractions from coworkers or text messages from friends and family. Has anyone else noticed this? The reason I ask is it's difficult to tell if this is an aging brain issue, or a side-effect of the projects being so much bigger and more complex than anything in highschool, college, and even early-career.
I don't know because I'm old enough that when I was fresh out of college there were no smart phones, and the only people on chat were tech nerds and college students, so the background distraction was just much much lower.
But what I will say is that distraction is bad for everyone, and being objective about ones performance is very difficult. A lot of people claim to be good at multi-tasking because that is what a lot of work environments demand, and so people learn to cope, but on the other side of the coin, many of these supposed multi-taskers have never sat down and thought deeply with enough focus to really solve a difficult problem the right away.
Software development is one field where the rigor forces you to learn this or eventually be exposed as incompetent, but I believe it is useful in any professional work that involves solving problems. Great solutions do not come from raw intelligence, they come from intelligence applied over time. If you can't focus and construct a persistent mental model then you might have a 200 IQ but still not be able to design a good system.
I'm apparently one of the few unashamed Open Office boosters here, so let me see if I can help.
I've worked as a developer for about 12+ years, then as a product/project manager for about 4 years. As a developer, I worked about half that time in soft-walled cubicles of various heights and another half in open office environments. I spent a year or so in a shared walled office. As a project guy, I spent about 3 years in an open office and 1 in a shared walled office (2people).
With my dev lead and project management hats on, open offices wins hands down. Whenever I want I can stand up and do a quick and dirty eyeball scan of the office and gauge who's deep in thought and shouldn't be disturbed, who maybe needs help with something, who's picking their nose on Facebook. Project goals, milestones, etc. can be on prominent display on the walls, so everyone can easily reference them--no more "oh, I didn't know we were releasing next Monday" excuses. Whiteboards all over the place so people can get up and do a quick informal collaboration, then visually reference it later from their desks. Everyone sees everyone all day, bringing an extra bit of team unity, nobody gets to hidey-hole in their office, pretending to not be part of a team. Daily stand-up meeting is quick to set up and painless, it takes a minute for everyone to just get up and walk over to the scrum corner, as opposed to having to lose 10 minutes every time waiting for everyone to decide to come out of their hiding holes. If I do have a quick question, I can tell if they're in the middle of something concentrating by just glancing over their way rather than having to knock on their office door (guaranteeing that I disturb them).
With my developer hat on, it's a bit of a toss up. I can appreciate the benefit of having a quiet, closed-in space to go deep on a problem. And open offices, while they can be quiet if you set basic etiquette rules, will never match the volume level in closed offices. But, in an open office, there's zero friction if someone needs to come chat about the code, collaborate, bounce ideas off me, and vice versa. I've never been offended when someone stopped by to discuss a problem they're having, or ask to review their approach or code. Sure, it gets you out of "the zone" a bit, but you just get back into it. The whole business about having to waste an hour to get back into the zone after an interruption is, frankly, total BS. One thing I'll say though, is the cubicles are the worst of both worlds: You have the noise level of an open office combined with the high-friction human interaction, collaboration that's limited to online tools, and hidey-hole mentality. I'd take either option over a cubicle any day.
I think my ideal office environment is open offices for everyone, but with small private workrooms here and there that people can reserve in 2hr blocks or so, where they can go away into if they really need that occasional alone time to get the job done.
I have to say, what you describe as a manager seems to be more about the benefit to yourself and the way you 'control' your developers and less about trying to provide an environment that is efficient for your devs to deliver code. A lot of the benefits you think you get from an open plan office seem to be achievable through tools like slack.com . Open plan really really sucks as a developer.
The problem is that people hate adopting tools like Slack. They see it as just another tool they have to look at, and they totally discount that the communication is happening otherwise(either in person or another tool). It's not necessarily net new data that they now need to keep abreast of if you are, for example, replacing most email with it.
After 22 years in software development, I have to say I am tired of all the new tools that supposedly solve all the world problems only to be abandoned in the next quarter.
There is nothing wrong to talk to somebody when you want to tell them something. A lot of times it's more efficient then email, IMs or other more fancier tools.
"There is nothing wrong to talk to somebody when you want to tell them something. A lot of times it's more efficient then email, IMs or other more fancier tools."
For you maybe, for them no. That's not to say you should not talk to them, but your interruption of their workflow has a cost you may not perceive.
Thank you for your comment, it provides perspective other than my own which is refreshing and valuable.
I think one of the OPs points touches on this directly though. What is the ratio of questions asked to answers provided, or to put it another way, how many questions are you asking vs how many people come to you for help with their own question? I humbly submit that perhaps you are asking more questions than you are answering - and there's nothing wrong with that, but IMO it does explain a bit why we don't see eye to eye about this. Have you thought about asking one of your subordinates about their perspective on this?
With respect, I disagree about the cost of context switching being BS. I think it heavily depends on the complexity/sensitivity of the task being interrupted, but for any non-trivial task there is almost always a non-trivial cost as well.
> I've never been offended when someone stopped by to discuss a problem they're having...
I just wanted to clarify, I think it would be rather unreasonable to actually feel offended because someone asked your help or advice.
I never feel offended in those situations. I do sometimes feel a bit frustrated or aggravated, but it's always about the fact that I was interrupted and never towards the colleague asking for help, and I take extra care to make sure that this frustration or aggravation never shines through to the person I'm helping because that would discourage them from asking for help and I would rather they asked for help than make an incorrect assumption (for example).
Regarding "interruption deficit", or open-plans being important only to those who ask a lot of questions, I think their experiences _do_ matter. I would guess that these people are mostly junior developers, project managers, or simply people (extraverts?) who prefer social interaction as a part of their work.
Their opinions matter too. Junior developers will probably suffer without easy access to those around them (yes, it's annoying for the senior devs, but that's part of the job). PM's, similarly, need to be effective; in a well-run company, they're there to help and if open-offices are important to that, well, there you go.
I'm a fan of slack etc, but I'm also an extravert. If I'm not talking to others as a part of my job, I'm going to be miserable and leave. I don't think I'm the only one.
I don't disagree with anything you've said, it is important that the job is fulfiling for both introverts and extroverts and that's a very difficult balance to strike.
It's important to point out though that if you make asking questions too easy for new employees, they can end up leaning on that as a crutch instead of developing the troubleshooting skills necessary to solve problems independently.
I've been on both sides of this fence. I've been that new colleague hunting for info that isn't clearly documented, and I've also been the senior colleague who was the go-to person whenever a problem came up that didn't have an immediately-clear answer. I was lucky in that shortly after I started my only senior resigned leaving me with nobody to ask, which forced me to get good at that kind of troubleshooting.
It makes me wonder if new colleagues should be given a time period for when they are allowed to ask any question no matter how stupid. After that time, they can of course still ask questions but it's expected that they try to find an answer before asking. Along the same lines of pair-programming for colleagues who have been here less than 1 year.
Ratio changed as I grew up. As a fresh junior dev, you ask all the questions, as you get more and more senior, it inverts. I consider mentoring the junior folks and passing along whatever tribal knowledge that's not documented yet part of growing into a senior role and have no problem doing it. In fact, I'd rather someone ask me and break my concentration than not ask and go off re-implementing a linked list or something.
I think open office is OK with very self restrained employees.
I was in a pretty big company with super huge open floors, but globally everyone was quite, you would easily prefer to IM a person 10m away than to try to talk directly. Projects would have group IM sessions and it was the polite way to ask or share information.
If some difficult point arises, there was a meeting space at 10 or 20 meters away, or there's the coffee corner otherwise.
When discussion that atmosphere with people working in other fields, retail for instance, they would find it unhuman and creepy, but I think it really strikes the right balance. I moved to another company more 'startup' like in the athmosphere, with people cracking jokes Here and there, and it's just pure hell from a work POV.
Yes, it is essential to work out etiquette and you don't want to mash people together unless they're actively working on the same project. Don't put Chatty Cathy from Purchasing adjacent to the guys trying to design and build the product.
> Whenever I want I can stand up and do a quick and dirty eyeball scan of the office and gauge who's deep in thought and shouldn't be disturbed, who maybe needs help with something, who's picking their nose on Facebook. Project goals, milestones, etc. can be on prominent display on the walls, so everyone can easily reference them--no more "oh, I didn't know we were releasing next Monday" excuses.
I worked in an office like this onc- oh, no, what you're describing sounds more like 5th period English than an office. but seriously, it sounds like you're missing a lot of trust in the ability and autonomy of your reports. I feel bad for your reports, it sounds like you either need to let the axe swing and hire adults or learn to trust and delegate.
There are a couple of things in what you said that raise some pretty big flags for me:
nobody gets to hidey-hole in their office, pretending to not be part of a team.
Seriously? That's what you think people are doing in their office: hiding from the team? I love being part of a good team. I love white-boarding broad design. I love sitting down and hammering out the nitty-gritty details. I even like pair programming and working one-on-one. But I am a classic introvert in that being around people is physically draining. I enjoy company and I'm good company, but it wears me out. Putting me in the same room with 5 other guys for 8 hours a day is a good way to get me burned out and exhausted with your project.
The whole business about having to waste an hour to get back into the zone after an interruption is, frankly, total BS.
This makes me seriously question the kind of work you've been doing. An hour may be on the long side, but there are lots of things I've worked on where an interruption will easily cost 15-30 minutes and have a much bigger impact on my willpower and focus. This is compounded by the fact that I'm mentally exhausted from constantly being in a room full of people.
Tracking a bug down through three layers of application, framework, and security code, for example. Writing that crypto implementation that has to be right the first time or customers get owned is another. Studying that new framework that you want the team to learn because it's the new shiny is another.
where they can go away into if they really need that occasional alone time
Look, I get that you're the boss and you get to tell me what to do. I want the team to succeed, so I'm not going to cause problems; I'll adapt to whatever you've decided we're going to do. But if you really want me at peak productivity you need to understand that alone time is my default mode, not something I need occasionally. I know I'm not the only one like this.
No, I haven't. It's a big part of why I have changed jobs frequently over the last couple of years. It continues to be a source of frustration.
Looking back on my comment I was more harsh than I intended and a lot of that is because I am so frustrated with the current standard working environment. If I didn't have a family to take care of I would be extremely tempted to leave software as a profession entirely because of it.
When I was hired at my current job we had full-height cubes which are still not ideal, but workable. But now I've been shuffled into a new team working back in an open plan office. Many days after work I just want to go live in a cave and be left alone. It's not normal for me to be so socially drained and it's not a healthy dynamic for my family. I'm trying on the side to get my own company off the ground so that I can work the way I want to. We'll see.
I didn't take any offense. As someone else upthread put it, the open-vs-cubicle-vs-office debate is full of opinion and personal preference. I was simply explaining mine, as was requested.
I'm glad you didn't take it personally, it wasn't meant to be personal. But in hindsight I feel like I used you as a stand-in for the objects of my frustration. That's not really fair to you. I'm sorry for that.
I'm a developer, and to be brutally honest, I tend to procrastinate when left to my own devices. It's much harder to do that in an open office, and I feel much more productive in one.
I've worked in software development post-college for 7 years. The first 3 I had my own office and for the last 4 I've been in an open space.
I really think this is a matter of personal taste to a large degree, but for my part I prefer the ability to ask questions readily and listen in on what my colleagues are working on. I think the point you're trying to make about an 'interruption deficit' is off the mark. Someone new to a team is going to ask many more questions than a veteran and it's certainly damaging to their ability to learn if asking questions is a chore or unwelcome socially. Email and messaging apps are alternatives of course, and are often the right choice when the question doesn't merit interruption. But sometimes a quick answer is needed to progress at all and being able to turn around and say something makes things faster.
In open office spaces people are still able to work from a laptop somewhere else, put on headphones, or work from home. And having your own office doesn't mean you aren't interrupted. People would tend to come by for long periods of time when I had an office, seemingly because they were starved of social interaction.
A caveat to all this is that for a brief period I was in an overly crowded open office arrangement and that was very much detrimental to my work.
if you actually read the papers they mention (and others) you will notice that people that defend it are often:
1) mislead by the initial sense of acomplishment and better communication.
it is like working in a war room. you get tons of stuff done, but it is crazy, stressful and you have lots of people working on a little thing that demands attention. your return for all those people is actually less, but you need a war room in some situations.
open office work the same way. you get a initial difficult thing done. but at the usual high cost of having lots of people working on it and ignoring/half-assing others.
2) people like micro-management.
there is no denying. open office plans and war rooms are perfect for the micro manager boss.
I've worked as a developer for 15 years. The first ten or so were in cubes, the last five or so have been in open office plans.
I'd say that I ask other people questions about five times per day and get asked questions about seven times per day, though that's fluctuated a lot. When I'm coming up to speed on a project, language, or company, I obviously ask more questions. When I was the lead engineer at my previous company, I got asked more questions.
Personally, I find the open plan office energizing. I have a social development style anyway (I'm most productive when pairing, and I find that talking through a problem often gives me insight into it), and I don't very often find that I want or need to dive deep into something for 4+ hours at a time -- I'm more likely to make progress at a large project by chipping away at it in half hour to two hours in increments, with breaks that involve a focus change.
While I have met some developers who are very productive in the "go into a room, close the door, emerge a half day or a day later with code" style, the majority of developers I've met who rail against interruptions and distractions seem to be incapable of producing good work even when they are given their wish and not interrupted.
2) 1 year in shared office with only boss, 4 years in shared office with 4 other people, 4 years in a fully open office
3) In person I never interrupt others, but I will IM others about 3 times a day. As far as folks interrupting me, I spend 25% of my time managing folks, so I expect (and get) lots of interruptions, but people know to IM me first. Headphones help as a signaling mechanism for this, as well as blocking out noise.
I loved my office that was just me and my boss as it was quiet and also had a great view. I also love my current open office because it's a great space and facilitates easy conversation, plus my standing desk is next to a window. It's no honeymoon period, been a developer for 9 years and in the workforce for 15 years.
Also, I absolutely hated the shared office with 4 people. Just absolutely terrible to be in cubicles in a small space with none of the benefits of a private office or open office. And people constantly opening the door to go in and out until we finally everyone was just propping their doors open, so it was semi-open anyways.
Edit to note: I work for a great non-profit and it helps to be surrounded by people I love and who I know are working hard to make a positive change for the world. If I were working for a corporation I'm not sure if I would feel the same about an open office plan or not.
I'll share my answers as well. Durations are rounded to the nearest month and may not add up to 100% because of rounding; also, most of my jobs have some combination of situations, since I tend to move around a lot internally.
1.) I've been a developer (in some context, this also includes "startup founder", "tech lead", and about a year total of internships) for about 10.5 years.
2.) Private office for 1 year total (across 2 companies). Shared office for 1 year (2 companies). Worked from home for a total of 2.2 years (2 companies). Private cube for 1.25 years (3 companies). Shared cube for 1.5 years. Open-floorplan for 20 months (Google), and war-room (same team in a large, 5-10 person office) for 2.5 years.
3.) It's varied throughout my career. As a startup founder, I neither interrupt people nor get interrupted, since I'm working from home and am the only developer on the project. When I was a tech lead, I did literally nothing but get interrupted; incoming requests outnumbered outgoing by roughly 10:1. As an individual dev, typically I'd be interrupted about 2-3 times for every time I asked someone else a question (my preference is usually much more toward figuring out something for myself than asking questions...probably moreso than it should be).
I am mildly in favor of open-plan offices, and here's why: most of the interesting stuff is happening outside of your head. I'll grant that open-plan offices are a huge distraction, they pull you out of flow, and as a result, you will write a lot less code than you would in a private office. However, here's where I say something controversial: code is a liability, not an asset. The goal of a developer is to solve problems, and you will solve more problems if you know what the pressing problems are than if you just put your head down and code up what your boss tells you to. It really sucks to slave away at a masterpiece of technology for a year or two, and then find that nobody uses it because you weren't solving the right problem to begin with.
Here's another statistic: in those 10.5 years of experience, I've implemented 30 projects (as in, working code delivered to boss/cofounder/teammates/market). Of those, 10 were successes, where I define "success" as either "used by > 1 million people", "at least 6 internal teams use it", or "made money for employer". The successes included 2 shared offices, 3 warrooms, 2 shared cubes, 2 open floorplans, and 1 private cube. The failures included 5 private cubes, 2 private office, 2 shared office, 7 open floorplans, and 4 works from home. (Interestingly, this seems to reproduce what I've heard in the literature of "same team in an office" > "private office" > "unrelated teams in an open floorplan".)
I'm curious, do folks in favor of private offices consider a project to be successful when it is delivered according to spec to your boss? Or is it successful when it makes it to market and makes a profit for the company? If it's the former, that would explain the differing views right there: it's quite possible for private offices to help you efficiently produce the wrong product.
It's funny but I think both sides of this argument are equally valid.
Personally I think you need to interrupt coding frequently, for health and for cognitive freshness. When I've been tech lead, often the most heads-down devs produced the most problematic code if you didn't check in on them. My belief was along the lines of "if you don't throw away everything and start over at least once you're doing it wrong," with the idea being that coding too fast results in complex, un-elegant solutions. Finally, in a fast-paced environment, you simply have to check in with each other, and having to schedule meetings or calls just sucks. The team I'm in right now is not co-located and we're losing tons of productivity.
And yet. When I work at a remote location (not home but near-home, not at the main site), I get TONS more coding, research, writing, and shit work done. No comparison. The work I'm doing now is perhaps more amenable to sole-contributor stuff, but I recall in the faster-paced jobs this was also true.
It seems like flexibility is needed. Open-plan is great, but maybe rotating offices would be good, where people can spend a day in them cranking some stuff out, and then come up for air for the rest of the week.
Polarizing is a good way to put it. For such a generally free thinking crowd, there's a lot of flat out hate for the open office here.
Personally, I've seen it work well (where I'm at now), and I've seen it work badly (two jobs ago). I've also seen the same in separate offices. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I don't really find that age or experience tends to matter that much as to where it works or doesn't. It's more about the work you're doing, and the company you're doing it for.
Some dev projects - those heavy on the back end especially, or requiring lots of sheer coding manpower over critical thinking, I think they definitely don't gain anything from the open office. The same could be said as well for the truly complex coding work out there - which, honestly, is less and less a reality.
If you're wiring up pages that do some middle tier logic or dealing with heavily interactive sites, which I think is what many of us do day to day, rather than the super intense, super difficult coding work that we all wish we did, I think the collaborative benefits can outweigh the risk of interruption.
If you're actually doing that big brain work, or really working on something that needs complete concentration, then yes, being able to zone in on it interruption free is definitely a good thing.
Like every other process, or tool, it depends on the context and the problem you're solving. And like most problems, you need the right person to use that tool or process. So does it work for every scenario, and every person? No, definitely not. The same can be said for a closed office as well.
Bottom line - right people, right place, for the right task at hand.
I work as a software engineer for the last 22 years. ~4 of them as engineer manager, the rest as an individual contributor.
I hate offices. I worked in Microsoft in an office and it was hell. I was alone. It was not a team. It was me. It was sometimes better to email somebody then walk around to talk to them.
I love open office plans. Yes, it's disruptive. But if I want to tell somebody something, I lift my head and talk. Everybody can hear what is going on and they can tune in if they are interested. For people that have distraction problems, usually headphones work quite well.
Of course, I assume that people talk quietly and not scream their head off.
BTW, I am usually the one that give advice and information instead the other way around.
The regular classroom, not the 'open classroom', is the analogue of the open office - a group of people with a common task, unseparated by walls. A private tutor would be the educational equivalent of a private office.
Additionally, 'open-office' to me means OpenOffice, and while I can accept that it doesn't to everyone, be consistent. It's one of the rules of good journalism. The hyphen in the heading is not used in the article. Likewise, we have 'nineteen-fifties' versus '1997'. The ironic bit about spelling out 'nineteen-fifties' in a non-conventional, inconsistent manner... is the phrase in the article immediately following it... </oldmanrant>
With all due respect, the open office educational analogy is the cafeteria study hall, with everyone walking around and gossiping and goofing off and basically getting nothing productive done other than putting on a show.
If the open office full of distractions is the ideal working environment, then when I get an emergency call from work, I assume I'll fix the emergency faster if I take my laptop to the neighborhood daycare center and sit down right in the highest chaos room. Oddly enough at home when no pretensions are necessary because there is nobody to show off to, people who have to actual work, pick a nice quiet closed door "office".
A lot of open office love comes from utterly incompetent management and its very politically incorrect to discuss this other than semi-anonymous forums like this. "I have no idea how to manage these people or how to convince them to do what I want, but at least I can see them all squashed together like sardines". If your standard of performance is low enough, mere visibility is at least better than nothing.
Your open office experiences and mine are massively different. I guess that's why two reasonable people can have different opinions on the subject.
I would go nuts if people were gossiping and being as chaotic as a daycare... Luckily I've never run into that. Actually the worst gossip-y company I ever worked at was a closed office/tall cubicle company.
When it comes to studying, most people I know seek a calm place without interruptions where you can concentrate on reading or solving hard exercise. Like your own room or a library. Office is equivalent of that.
Open office is equivalent of trying to study in a busy corridor where groups of people chat, come and go and every 15 minutes someone stops by to tell you hello.
Now, five or other small team in one room is a great thing. Kind of the best solution I would say. You can discuss when you need and it can be calm most of the time. However, open office is usually six such teams together overhearing each other while having next to zero chance to actually concentrate on anything.
I agree that the open office layout definitely hinders your ability to focus. My current company has an open office but about 9 empty offices that people can go into and focus if they need them. That has worked out well... people utilize those often... I certainly do.
The upside to the open office is that collaboration is effortless.
The downside is that collaboration can become a crutch. It will only hinder you when you need to do the kind of "nose to the grindstone" work that's often needed.
To me, the ideal working scenario includes a private working space for each person and a public space for when collaboration is needed.
>...To me, the ideal working scenario includes a private working space for each person and a public space for when collaboration is needed.
I agree. The best working environment I ever had was private offices with soft seating areas at the rend of each hall. It was easy to collaborate with others and easy to get a quiet environment. You never felt like you were interrupting several other people if you went to ask a person a question. If you had to take a phone call to talk to deal with a private family issue or call a Dr or lawyer, you could just close your door. If you had to send a private email you didn't need to worry that others will see something they shouldn't see. Offices also had much more usable desk space than I have had in open office settings.
I can see why people like offices (except for Zuckerberg are there any CEOs who sit in an open floor plan?), where I work now, the only people who like the open office arrangement are the managers who naturally have private offices.
Are there any studies that support productivity in an open office environment? The studies referenced in this article and others seem pretty negative overall. Certainly seems to be the trend at most companies these days that I've interacted with. Is it mainly just the cheaper option per square foot?
Well, Facebook is building the world's largest open bullpen office, with 2800 workers in 1 room(!) I wonder what they think of this research that shows open office plans being detrimental.
Maybe I'm being cynical but I don't believe it when people say open plans result in more "collaboration" or "openness". It just sounds like a rationalization
By far the most collaborative environments for me have been individual offices or two to an office.
In an open floorplan I find myself constantly being distracted and trying to wall people off, which makes my emotional state less open to discussion... because I'm trying to focus on work.
With an office with one or two people in it, you don't have to worry as much, can be more open because you know you will get time to focus.
The company I work for is moving from individual offices to an open floor plan. They didn't even bother to talk to programmers about it, and admitted they looked at individual office locations but didn't think it mattered when we protested.
They've also gone from a 6 person dev team to now 3. While there are many problems that caused me and the other two people to leave, them choosing an open office without consulting use and then blowing off our objections is characteristic of the disrespect they show generally.
I think that companies with open office plans don't really respect engineers. And I include google and Facebook in this assessment.
I can see how open offices are deeply unproductive for mid to large sized companies. But for a team of < 10, I've generally found it to be pretty nice. Everyone has to learn to respect each other, but when you're constantly working closely it's convenient not to have any walls.
Does anyone else have experience with small teams working in open spaces?
Yet another argument work working remote. I have to admit, the Basecamp book Remote has completely sold me on remote. I've been remote for two years and never again would I want to work in any office other than my own.
I think one of the reasons you are seeing open offices as cost savings measures is because a lot of the companies considering it have absolutely no clue how to quantify the productivity of the people inhabiting the space. This is inherently a far worse problem.
just based on the strongly divergent opinions, maybe this falls into the category of "divisive yet inconsequential", like emacs vs vim or brace placement?
That a question is controversial does not in itself imply that there is no right answer and it's all just a matter of personal preference. The controversy tells us mainly something about the people holding the divergent opinions, such as the extent to which they embrace or reject the scientific method, and the extent to which they are aware of what scientific research exists.
Science evolved precisely as a way to avoid this social noise and find the true status of the subject, through the use of empirical observation and repeatable experiments that test specific hypotheses.
Could there be errors in these studies? Sure, and science has a process for dealing with that possibility, too: create another experiment that empirically falsifies one of their conclusions.
The whole point of the article is that the differences are not inconsequential at all. Numerous academic studies have objectively measured many differences in many different specific environments, and show that the open office is worse in almost all ways related to running a successful business.
To hell with running a successful business. I'm interested in my happiness as an employee, and an open plan office is a thousand times better for that.
Edit since I'm getting downvotes: All the articles I've seen about the pros and cons of open plan offices mostly focus on productivity. But, as an employee, I'm much more interested in my happiness than my productivity, above a reasonable minimum. These sorts of articles tend to ignore that tradeoff.
This article does discuss happiness somewhat, but the results are less clear than those for productivity. I think it's pretty clearly something people disagree on, but this fact tends to get swept under the rug by authors who focus on the productivity losses.
I explained how science works because the original post says that "strongly divergent opinions" is, in and of itself, probable evidence that the matter is "divisive but inconsequential." This proposition can only follow from an unscientific epistemology and worldview where anecdotal polls of opinion alone can be taken as the decisive factor in deciding whether a factual proposition is likely to be consequential or not.
Objective metrics are, by definition, those without subjectivity involved. Naturally there can be disputes over the details, or mistakes made, and through an iterative process errors are identified and corrected, moving arbitrarily close to the objective truth of the situation. Over time, this remedies the problem of individual mistakes and subjectivity being involved in the process.
At this stage, hundreds of studies have been done, so we are well along that path and any remaining errors in the thesis are likely to be minor and non-material.
If this is not true, everyone is welcome to come up with an experiment to falsify them all.
I have primarily worked in open plan offices and even though a few studies have indicated that they are worse than closed office spaces, honestly sometimes some environments thrive with open planned spaces, others do not.
I am currently in my mid twenties and most people in my age bracket have not really experienced a non open plan office space, it is all they have ever known. I have worked at a couple of corporate companies that were not open plan and I noticed a few things.
People in non open plan offices tend to be more antisocial, this is more of an observation than a proven fact. I worked for a media company and instead of getting up and talking to a colleague in the office, people would just use Skype even if the person was a 10 second walk away. Teams tend to stick to themselves, people only associate with their own teams because non open plan offices do not encourage collaboration or a social aspect.
Having said that, I do find at times open plan offices can be distracting. One place I worked at had plush toys you could grab and put on your desk. If someone had a plush toy sitting on their desk, you knew not to disturb them. They didn't always work though, people who felt as though they had an emergency that required your attention would still annoy you.
Not only that, but the same place also had a quiet space you could go work in, considering everyone had laptops, this was possible. We had beanbags, a dim lit part of the room with gentle lighting so the screens weren't harsh on your eyes and all completely separate and somewhat soundproof from the hustle and bustle of the open office area.
Don't get me started on what happens when someone new starts and people try and find space, I call it the "open office shuffle" you are made to move along to make space for a new colleague, I am not saying that non open offices don't have the same problem, but it is more distracting in an open office environment.
I think regardless of what kind of office setup you have, there are always going to be issues. Most people have only ever known one or the other. If you are used to your space, I can see how an open office could be a problem for you at first, but if you have only ever really experienced open offices, then you are probably aware and desensitised to all of the intricacies and issues with them.
My favourite aspect of an open space as a developer is I feel like I am more social with my work colleagues. I get to speak with people I probably wouldn't speak with usually in a closed office environment. I can openly ask questions and have discussions in person without using Skype or Google Hangouts and when it comes to lunch, usually everyone eats together and pulls people away from their computers forcing them to go and eat, instead of at their desk.
One solution to quell the issue of open office dilemmas could be to have proper solutions in place; breakout rooms for people on a deadline who need to concentrate, company supplied noise cancelling headphones, rule of no eating at your desk (so people are not distracted by your lip smacking, chewing and smell of food), no phone calls at your desk (if you want to make a call, go to a quiet part of the building or outside) and finally if you are sick, stay home and work if you can, otherwise rest.
"instead of getting up and talking to a colleague in the office, people would just use Skype even if the person was a 10 second walk away"
We all have different personalities and everyone is different, so I'm not suggesting I'm right and you're wrong, but for me I don't see that as a negative.
Receiving a skype (or other IM-type of service) query is far less intrusive to my work than talking to someone in person at my desk. Better yet, ask me in an email if you don't need the answer right away since email signals that you don't expect an immediate response and maybe I'm deep in thought and answering your question to a useful degree will pull me out of the 5 levels of abstraction my brain is currently working under, losing me half an hour of real work to get back to that point later.
On the flip side of your points I've found that open offices encourage people to ask me questions that they could easily google and find the answer in about as much time as it takes me to answer them, which means they are burning my time (and more importantly, my focus/flow) wastefully. Not to mention they are distracting everyone else around us as well. Multiply this by half a dozen times or more per day and it really starts to be a productivity sink.
In San Francisco the pendulum has definitely swung back closer to center (the scale being all open to combination of open and private to private office intensive) with most startups occupying a hybrid solution with a myriad of breakout rooms and smaller meeting spaces / soft seating.
The trend over the last decade began with die-hard open office plan fanpeople (breaking free of dads private office intensive historical), who quickly found that there was a lot of counterproductive distractions. From there as more traditional business starting adopting a start-up mentality to their office space, a balance had to be struck to ensure productivity.
Now the offices of Airbnb, Optimizely, Weebly, all have very strong distribution of open communal work area with solid guidelines from a cultural perspective on how to treat people in that environment, while also matching the open area with ample meeting space distributed evenly throughout their building.
With a more thoughtful approach than just open vs not open I think a balance can be readily created while also speaking to the culture of the company and genre of business it functions in (gaming, Saas, mobile, etc.).
For the record
1- 10 years
2- open (3.5 yrs) vs closed (6.5 yrs)
3- dozens but you learn the headphone rule which basically means (don't bother me or text / message me)
I don't see meeting rooms as a balance. It doesn't solve the increased distraction of an open floorpan. Also, meeting rooms that are communal are not as useful- consider a whiteboard on a communal meeting room vs. one in a small office that houses 2-3 developers. That office whiteboard can have project info on it for weeks, while the communal one can't be left there.
For me, in an open office, having headphones on is not enough. There's visual distraction as well. People interacting in your field of vision are also a distraction.
I work in a place that has open offices, but broken into pods of 20 or so desks. In addition to that there are meeting rooms and a more general-use area. It's rather similar to the start up offices you describe (I have seen Airbnb's in person).
I like this setup, I find it freeing because you can move to where you are more comfortable working at any given time. But the catch is, you can't just say seating is "variable" as a way of punting on giving people desks. Everyone should have a place that undisputedly belongs to them.
As much ingenuity as there is in Silicon Valley I am amazed at how uninspiring office layouts are, particularly the near dominance of the "open office".
Surely there are some companies trying out now "contrarian" layouts such as cubes, offices, bull-pens, etc?
I like the open office layout most of the time because I find that learning and team bonding occurs very quickly in these setups.
An ideal environment for me would be an open office most of the time but with four walled offices available for me to occupy on a weekly reservation basis where I can get some coding work done when I need to focus. Something soundproofed maybe, to allow me to play music without needing headphones.
We had such a setup in one of the engineering buildings in university and I found that I really thrived when I was able to "plug-out" when I needed to focus and "plug-in" when I needed to work with other people - all while not having to wear headphones!
open office is very easy to get wrong, and thus it is usually the case. Myriad of wrong details immediately surface. For example, shades - any issue with it and people get the direct or once-reflected or significant part (they installed these modern fashionable semi-shades in our office which block too little) of sunlight right into your eyes as there are no cubicle walls to protect you.
Near the passageway the lights are not soft/spread fluorescent, instead it is individual light bulbs, so forget sitting face toward that direction (which would be happily back to the sunlight mentioned above) as those bright dots of lights on your peripheral vision field are just like small suns.
Compare to those lightning problems the issues like highly collaborative excited guys running like herd of elephants from one workplace to another across the space is just nothing.
I'm curious about private offices and regions. While it was possible to find companies in the Bay Area that offered private offices, I have yet to find any here in Tokyo. I've assumed it's because real estate in Tokyo is more expensive, but what about other cities around the world?
I work in Beijing and we have 4 desk cubicles in an open space (so you get cubicle walls and around each quad. What is nice is that they put the open office area around the exterior, so I got a window! In contrast, we have offices for the level 65+ crowd, and they are quite unappealing to me because of they are interior, no natural light windows. Now I just have to avoid getting promoted.
Here's my argument against open office: I work in the dark.
I am sensitive to the flickering of fluorescent lights that most people cannot see. Most offices have standard fluorescent lights, often with cheap bulbs or ballasts that have not been changed since the building was built.
People also have different temperatures that they are comfortable at.
So, you really need at minimum four offices:
Dark & Cold
Dark & Warm
Light & Cold
Light & Warm
This ignores all the other problems with open offices and cubicle farms. Programmers really need to spread out. You need a whiteboard, preferably a large one for every two programmers. They need a desk big enough to support two or three monitors (if you're only giving them one, you're being penny wise and pound foolish, most likely.) Many programmers like to have books open for reference on the table. Or documents, etc.
Collaboaration is higher in my experience when people have their own offices or a few people per office. Focus is much higher.
Why kill productivity by %30 (a low estimate for the negative impact on my personal productivity) in order to save a fraction of an engineers salary?
I think it's just bad management.
But the nice thing is, these people advertise that they have open floorpans, like they don't even realize it's a mistake, and that makes it easy to just say "next" when looking at jobs.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 221 ms ] thread1) $100-200k/yr salary 2) $200-300k/yr fully loaded cost 3) $500k-$5mm/yr value created per employee (rev or market cap or whatever) -- this is actually more like -$huge to +$huge)
Offices cost $7/ft2/mo in Palo Alto, or $2-4/ft2/mo in SF.
A private office is probably 50-100 ft2 more than open plan.
So, we're talking about $100 to $700/mo difference.
I'd personally be willing to pay $500/mo pre-tax to have a private office, vs. a desk in an shared office. Productivity benefits to company are on the order of $10-50k/mo.
Next time I do a startup, I'm doing 3-4 person sized offices for each person (i.e. you have a guest desk, workspace, etc., normally empty), and project areas shared per team, after there are more than just founders.
So at some level of developer pay, N companies are profitable. At N+P, fewer companies are profitable, and at N-P, more. All else being equal.
If we cared as much about our desks as we do about our pay, we'd have more offices, and companies would either make less profit, or there would be fewer companies.
But we don't have offices, because we don't insist on it.
Next time you interview, make that as important as salary.
The cost is approximately zero compared to the costs of sick days and ruined productivity.
Fire extinguishers are expensive. However, they're pretty cheap compared to getting cited by the fire dept/OSHA for not having a fire extinguisher. And they're really cheap compared to the result of a fire that can't be put out.
But it is important to keep distractions out especially for creative positions.
Also everyone is different so maybe some people prefer the open floor and they should be allowed to work there too. But forcing everyone to do it, I think is misguided.
Even if you subscribe to the "open = more collaborative" idea, it only works when you're near people that you interact with daily.
I miss my full-height cubicle, in an area with only people from my department.
Wow, that's absurd.
Our company transitioned from 6 foot cube walls to 4.5ish foot cube walls, such that you can see over the cube walls if you're standing up, but not when sitting down. It works very nicely for being able to see across most of the floor, to easily find someone you're meeting with (and who is thus also standing looking around), or to collaborate with your team over cube walls. But if you're sitting down, you have walls all around you, both to muffle noise and to provide a comfortable feeling of privacy.
There are also a large number of drop-in conference rooms ("collaboration rooms"), and some one-person phone-booth rooms for fully private phonecalls.
PS: and while my team is a distraction for others in my office (relatively, not absolutely) I dislike open-spaces. They aren't mentally comfortable, not because of noise (for me) but because of no "feeling" of privacy. It is all subjective of course.
Also, open-back visibility (that is, being visible from behind) does more damage than the noise itself, and there are no noise-canceling headphones for that.
Office space isn't that expensive, compared to the productivity loss of having everyone work in a crappy space. (Compared to a traditional office, open-plan saves about $300-450/month per employee in San Francisco, Class A commercial real estate. It's less if you're in Oakland, Brooklyn, or the Midwest) Open-plan is just another case of crappy HR (the norm in tech, sadly) "cutting" costs in a way that actually externalizes them; there are marginal savings on office space, but productivity plummets.
If that's the case, I agree with you, but I'd like to see more details on how/why it is the case. Do you by any chance have any more evidences?
Perhaps this isn't optimal for every employee/company, but it's how I made the best of the situation for myself at this company...
I also work in an "open" plan (recently transitioned to it). The most productive I ever am is when I'm travelling for work. It's the only time I get privacy.
As a side anecdote: I was listening to NPR about a prisoner that was talking about how he turned his life around in prison and read an incredible amount of books. I was feeling jealous of him for a few minutes until I realized how screwed up it was. I was jealous of the free time and relative privacy that a prisoner had. I never get privacy unless I'm travelling for work. Never.
Some activities like teaching are open by nature. Interruptions are ok and even desirable. Design, politics, sales, could have a great amount of work done in the open.
Now, in activities like programming, writing, science, you are suiciding yourself in the open, constant interruptions and the theater.
I have done programming in the open but choosing my partners, one, two or three people that I admired, but it was almost an intimate relationship, far from what people consider OO.
In Soviet Union it was more important what other perceived you were doing that really what you accomplished, so everybody created the farce of working a lot, but the productivity levels were terrible compared with the West. Their work was simulating they were working, and like good actors, some even believed their role.
In big buroucracies managers find very hard to identify what other people really contribute to the work so they start using external cues, like how much(time) this person works, how busy he looks, the sense of security and so on.
"what's the alternative? Everyone get a 4-walled office?"
I work from home. So do the people that work for my company.
I created my company programming, so I could identify the value of the people that work with me. I could trust them, they could manage them selves, and also they are more productive when they don't have anyone breathing over their shoulders.
Of course, it is no lala land. It takes experience, knowledge and work to be able to implement something like this.
In my 20-year career, I've only worked in an open office once for 6 months, and it was a significant factor in me quitting. I sat immediately adjacent to a managerial-type guy, and he had people dropping in all the time to discuss something; I'm talking 10 people per hour, on average. I would defy anyone getting any complex programming work done under those circumstances.
I work in cubicle, and once I put the standing shelf desk in at home I'll be working from home more because of this same thing.
I've only had one work environment that didn't have some type of on-site recreation.
Although it was kinda scary at first, I've adapted to it, and can see the practical benefits. Not having special offices, there is a sense of egalitarianism amongst the workers and none of the usual rat-race for better offices. As pointed out in another comment, most employees tend to use headphones when they need privacy. Since all the cubicles are the same, maintenance is a breeze.
I guess it depends on your temperament. If you really just like to be left alone when working, it won't help. For me, having so many people around kinda prevents me from going drowsy, which used to happen a lot at my previous job.
If its just a bunch of people sitting on tables without any sort of division ... I can see why that would be annoying.
In 1987 the book "Peopleware" already described the open office trap. But since, the idea keeps coming back in CEOs minds. I experienced it in a big corporation I was in. Decades after Peopleware, Open-Office was declared as "big new invention from the US" -- but it still was the same old fallacy.
The idea kept coming up always in new flavors and new "inventions" -- it seems that the idea is just to attractive for managers to be buried.
The problem is, that you have to invest in people to get best results -- and conventional economical thinking often times goes the opposite direction, how to cut costs.
I generally prefer open office plans. Clearly other people don't. Everyone is different. There is no RIGHT answer, just RIGHT for you, or for your team...
As one of the developers who has a interruption surplus (get interrupted more than I interrupt others), I really dislike open offices, they actively prevent me from getting work done.
The horror stories here seem to be giant rooms full of inconsiderate loud frat boys.
My current office is 8-10 people, open plan, great inter-team communication, and a pleasant atmosphere....
That is, there actually is a "right" answer that is the same for everyone. Measuring it is "science."
The specific goal can vary and doesn't matter to the question of whether there is a "right answer." For any arbitrary goal, yes, there is actually a "right" objective answer on the question of what factors, if any, influence in general the ability to achieve that goal.
Incidentally, the article deals extensively with employee happiness in the form of "job dissatisfaction," which suffers (like almost all other metrics) in open plan offices.
For the people who do prefer them (and also spend most of their time writing code), I would be curious to know the following:
(1) How many years have you spent, total, working as a developer in an office environment every day?
(2) What percentage of those years were in open office layouts vs. sharing an office vs. having a private office?
(3) How many times a day, on average, do you interrupt other people with questions, vs. other people interrupting you?
I bring this up because I just really truly don't get the occasional open office boosterism here. My current theory is that most of it comes from people who are still in the honeymoon phase of their career (like, the first few years after college when everything about the workplace still has some novelty to it).
I say this because it seems like many/most of the people I talk to in person who like the open office idea have either literally never had a private office, or are relatively fresh out of college and get a job at Google (or a startup, or wherever), and they're still so excited about everything that even the things that are hassles (like open office plans?) seem like they're brimming with novelty.
Alternately, a lot of the people I talk to who like open offices tend to be those that are constantly pinging the people around them for help, but people rarely or never ping them for help. The only people I've known at my current company who want open offices (or even officemates) are these kinds of people. They don't even realize that they have an 'interruption deficit' (for lack of a better term) within their team, they just like the idea of everyone being more readily available to them and they don't pay the price for it since they rarely get interrupted themselves.
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)."
(From http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000068.html)
And while yes, some discussions will still take place outside of the chat rooms, if this is your default way of working then there should be enough discussion of anything critical that everything makes it's way to chat eventually.
Once everyone's comfortable working this way you can encourage a lot more working from home (or working from wherever in the world you want to be, if your employees aren't all married with kids yet), etc. And that will save you even more on office space.
I thought the "light on two sides" was particularly clever.
One thing holding back enclosed offices in SF is the very high ceilings in many of the older buildings. would high walled cubes work?
> The monthly rent for our offices, when fully occupied, will run about $700 per employee.
That's $8,400 per year in Manhattan.
And these are shots from their new Denver office: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stackexchange/7776308984/in/set... http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/09/join-us-for-our-openin...
tl;dr there is at least some open-plan stuff. Which, really, just makes the most sense; a healthy mix of options is hard to argue with.
But opinions aside if we look at actual studies (at least among the research I've seen, some of which is referenced in this article) far more often than not they point to open offices being an overall negative for knowledge workers.
Further, the time when I did have my own office was when I got interrupted the most. My boss would come in all the time and talk to me about whatever, a lot of times not even work-related stuff. Now I work in a place where people will only ever try to interrupt you via Slack, and if you tell them you're busy they will go away. So I think there is a cultural aspect as well, if your company accepts people bothering you whenever, I don't honestly believe an office will put a stop to that.
Commercial real estate is about $3/SF (per month) in San Francisco (Class A) and $4/SF in Manhattan. Open plan offices save about 75-100 SF per employee (more, if you're looking to be sadistic and impractical, but at this point, the productivity loss is obvious.) So the employer is saving, at absolute most, $5000 per employee per year. It's not worth it.
I bring this up because I just really truly don't get the occasional open office boosterism here. My current theory is that most of it comes from people who are still in the honeymoon phase of their career (like, the first few years after college when everything about the workplace still has some novelty to it).
That's basically what it is. The open-plan layout is reminiscent of college and the all-nighters in the computer lab. But work is not college. A bad grade on an assignment is much more fixable than getting fired. The stakes are higher, and that's why a certain brand of professionalism (or, more bluntly, divorcing oneself from behaviors that are acceptable for 18- to 21-year-olds) is necessary.
I say this because it seems like many/most of the people I talk to in person who like the open office idea have either literally never had a private office, or are relatively fresh out of college and get a job at Google (or a startup, or wherever), and they're still so excited about everything that even the things that are hassles (like open office plans?) seem like they're brimming with novelty.
Well, private offices make nerf-gun battles harder. And you hear less juicy gossip. And you don't have an audience for self-important rants about Lena Dunham. It might get so "boring" (in the sense of a lack of distractions) that you might be tempted to actually work to pass the time.
Amazingly this is also an argument from working from home. I've been at two companies during a WFH transition and they act surprised at the increase in productivity. Often times it's this very reason, less babbling and nerf-gun fights and more actual work.
Of course this doesn't cover those who "work from home" by watching Netflix and jiggling the mouse on their laptop every ten minutes or so. I'm talking about the more responsible people.
It's probably still more productive because now they are not distracting anyone.
I think you're off by quite a bit with your price-per-square-foot estimates: http://therealdeal.com/blog/2013/10/01/manhattan-leasing-str...
That is from last year and the average price in Manhattan was about $60/sf.
$60/sf/yr works out to $5/sf/month, not far from your parent poster's assertion.
And yet not only are employers embracing it but extending the model with hoteling and virtual desktops. A good friend of mine at Shell checks into his locker every morning and then goes and finds a random desk to work from for the day. I'll give you 10:1 the guy whose idea that was isn't sitting at a cube.
Of course it doesn't. Most of them have no choice.
Actually building these things is non trivial. It's not just walls, it's air con vents, electrics, etc. I also think you may be underestimating the extra space required to make an office not feel like a closet.
Then there is natural light. In a big open plan space light travels to the entire space. With offices you either need to build on the edge of the building and have a window, or make at least one wall out of glass (expensive). Even doing that you still can't just take a big room and turn it into partitioned offices.
The capital outlay for a company to fit out a space with individual offices is actually really high and it all comes in one big hit. I'm sure if it was a matter of just paying 5k per employee extra per year the story would be different, but that isn't really a reality.
You also run into tax and other accounting issues by making permanent improvements to the office vs. buying modular cubes and such. Portable equipment gets deducted over a few years... permanent improvements get depreciated over long periods of time (30+ years!)... So you get to pay taxes on profits that you didn't make.
Most companies don't have the cash flow to pay a 30% premium in a high tax state on expensive construction, so cubes are a no brainer.
Anecdotally, the managers always seem to manage to keep their private offices. Funny that...
All of the boosters I've run into have only known open offices. Having said that, I'm sure someone will chime in here who has experienced both and prefers open offices, but I have to believe such people are in the vast minority based on my completely anecdotal data
Having done both (as I'm old enough to have started working when open offices were pretty rare), it is kind of ridiculous how much less productive (and less happy) I am in an open office and how difficult it is to find a workplace that isn't open office these days.
For me the two are very similar. I work in an open plan office and enjoy being able to talk to my co-workers - often someone will pull their chair up to someone else's to pair program for a while, or just discuss the issue they're having.
If you don't want interruptions, you put headphones on. It works well.
It works well for some people. While you may be able to code perfectly well with music blasting in your ears (loud enough to drown out nearby conversations) that is not the case for everyone.
I wear headphones at work but the volume (at which I can actually concentrate on my work) is only sufficient to drown out/filter random background noises (typing/mouse-clicks, HVAC, people walking by, etc) - if there are people having a conversation a few feet away my productivity plummets.
Headphones may be at best a distraction mitigation, but what they really are is evidence that your environment is crap.
Or are younger people able to handle more distractions? I don't mean that in the sense of "those kids these days", but as a more general developmental thing.
In college I remember doing homework while watching TV with the sound off so I could listen to music and chat with friends on the computer. Over the last few years at work it seems much more difficult to refocus after distractions from coworkers or text messages from friends and family. Has anyone else noticed this? The reason I ask is it's difficult to tell if this is an aging brain issue, or a side-effect of the projects being so much bigger and more complex than anything in highschool, college, and even early-career.
But what I will say is that distraction is bad for everyone, and being objective about ones performance is very difficult. A lot of people claim to be good at multi-tasking because that is what a lot of work environments demand, and so people learn to cope, but on the other side of the coin, many of these supposed multi-taskers have never sat down and thought deeply with enough focus to really solve a difficult problem the right away.
Software development is one field where the rigor forces you to learn this or eventually be exposed as incompetent, but I believe it is useful in any professional work that involves solving problems. Great solutions do not come from raw intelligence, they come from intelligence applied over time. If you can't focus and construct a persistent mental model then you might have a 200 IQ but still not be able to design a good system.
I've worked as a developer for about 12+ years, then as a product/project manager for about 4 years. As a developer, I worked about half that time in soft-walled cubicles of various heights and another half in open office environments. I spent a year or so in a shared walled office. As a project guy, I spent about 3 years in an open office and 1 in a shared walled office (2people).
With my dev lead and project management hats on, open offices wins hands down. Whenever I want I can stand up and do a quick and dirty eyeball scan of the office and gauge who's deep in thought and shouldn't be disturbed, who maybe needs help with something, who's picking their nose on Facebook. Project goals, milestones, etc. can be on prominent display on the walls, so everyone can easily reference them--no more "oh, I didn't know we were releasing next Monday" excuses. Whiteboards all over the place so people can get up and do a quick informal collaboration, then visually reference it later from their desks. Everyone sees everyone all day, bringing an extra bit of team unity, nobody gets to hidey-hole in their office, pretending to not be part of a team. Daily stand-up meeting is quick to set up and painless, it takes a minute for everyone to just get up and walk over to the scrum corner, as opposed to having to lose 10 minutes every time waiting for everyone to decide to come out of their hiding holes. If I do have a quick question, I can tell if they're in the middle of something concentrating by just glancing over their way rather than having to knock on their office door (guaranteeing that I disturb them).
With my developer hat on, it's a bit of a toss up. I can appreciate the benefit of having a quiet, closed-in space to go deep on a problem. And open offices, while they can be quiet if you set basic etiquette rules, will never match the volume level in closed offices. But, in an open office, there's zero friction if someone needs to come chat about the code, collaborate, bounce ideas off me, and vice versa. I've never been offended when someone stopped by to discuss a problem they're having, or ask to review their approach or code. Sure, it gets you out of "the zone" a bit, but you just get back into it. The whole business about having to waste an hour to get back into the zone after an interruption is, frankly, total BS. One thing I'll say though, is the cubicles are the worst of both worlds: You have the noise level of an open office combined with the high-friction human interaction, collaboration that's limited to online tools, and hidey-hole mentality. I'd take either option over a cubicle any day.
I think my ideal office environment is open offices for everyone, but with small private workrooms here and there that people can reserve in 2hr blocks or so, where they can go away into if they really need that occasional alone time to get the job done.
For you maybe, for them no. That's not to say you should not talk to them, but your interruption of their workflow has a cost you may not perceive.
I think one of the OPs points touches on this directly though. What is the ratio of questions asked to answers provided, or to put it another way, how many questions are you asking vs how many people come to you for help with their own question? I humbly submit that perhaps you are asking more questions than you are answering - and there's nothing wrong with that, but IMO it does explain a bit why we don't see eye to eye about this. Have you thought about asking one of your subordinates about their perspective on this?
With respect, I disagree about the cost of context switching being BS. I think it heavily depends on the complexity/sensitivity of the task being interrupted, but for any non-trivial task there is almost always a non-trivial cost as well.
> I've never been offended when someone stopped by to discuss a problem they're having...
I just wanted to clarify, I think it would be rather unreasonable to actually feel offended because someone asked your help or advice. I never feel offended in those situations. I do sometimes feel a bit frustrated or aggravated, but it's always about the fact that I was interrupted and never towards the colleague asking for help, and I take extra care to make sure that this frustration or aggravation never shines through to the person I'm helping because that would discourage them from asking for help and I would rather they asked for help than make an incorrect assumption (for example).
Their opinions matter too. Junior developers will probably suffer without easy access to those around them (yes, it's annoying for the senior devs, but that's part of the job). PM's, similarly, need to be effective; in a well-run company, they're there to help and if open-offices are important to that, well, there you go.
I'm a fan of slack etc, but I'm also an extravert. If I'm not talking to others as a part of my job, I'm going to be miserable and leave. I don't think I'm the only one.
It's important to point out though that if you make asking questions too easy for new employees, they can end up leaning on that as a crutch instead of developing the troubleshooting skills necessary to solve problems independently.
I've been on both sides of this fence. I've been that new colleague hunting for info that isn't clearly documented, and I've also been the senior colleague who was the go-to person whenever a problem came up that didn't have an immediately-clear answer. I was lucky in that shortly after I started my only senior resigned leaving me with nobody to ask, which forced me to get good at that kind of troubleshooting.
It makes me wonder if new colleagues should be given a time period for when they are allowed to ask any question no matter how stupid. After that time, they can of course still ask questions but it's expected that they try to find an answer before asking. Along the same lines of pair-programming for colleagues who have been here less than 1 year.
I was in a pretty big company with super huge open floors, but globally everyone was quite, you would easily prefer to IM a person 10m away than to try to talk directly. Projects would have group IM sessions and it was the polite way to ask or share information.
If some difficult point arises, there was a meeting space at 10 or 20 meters away, or there's the coffee corner otherwise.
When discussion that atmosphere with people working in other fields, retail for instance, they would find it unhuman and creepy, but I think it really strikes the right balance. I moved to another company more 'startup' like in the athmosphere, with people cracking jokes Here and there, and it's just pure hell from a work POV.
I worked in an office like this onc- oh, no, what you're describing sounds more like 5th period English than an office. but seriously, it sounds like you're missing a lot of trust in the ability and autonomy of your reports. I feel bad for your reports, it sounds like you either need to let the axe swing and hire adults or learn to trust and delegate.
nobody gets to hidey-hole in their office, pretending to not be part of a team.
Seriously? That's what you think people are doing in their office: hiding from the team? I love being part of a good team. I love white-boarding broad design. I love sitting down and hammering out the nitty-gritty details. I even like pair programming and working one-on-one. But I am a classic introvert in that being around people is physically draining. I enjoy company and I'm good company, but it wears me out. Putting me in the same room with 5 other guys for 8 hours a day is a good way to get me burned out and exhausted with your project.
The whole business about having to waste an hour to get back into the zone after an interruption is, frankly, total BS.
This makes me seriously question the kind of work you've been doing. An hour may be on the long side, but there are lots of things I've worked on where an interruption will easily cost 15-30 minutes and have a much bigger impact on my willpower and focus. This is compounded by the fact that I'm mentally exhausted from constantly being in a room full of people.
Tracking a bug down through three layers of application, framework, and security code, for example. Writing that crypto implementation that has to be right the first time or customers get owned is another. Studying that new framework that you want the team to learn because it's the new shiny is another.
where they can go away into if they really need that occasional alone time
Look, I get that you're the boss and you get to tell me what to do. I want the team to succeed, so I'm not going to cause problems; I'll adapt to whatever you've decided we're going to do. But if you really want me at peak productivity you need to understand that alone time is my default mode, not something I need occasionally. I know I'm not the only one like this.
I'm curious if you've succeeded in finding an office environment that would let you work that way ?
Unless you're working from home most of the time, it seems like "the management" would generally not be too keen to this.
Looking back on my comment I was more harsh than I intended and a lot of that is because I am so frustrated with the current standard working environment. If I didn't have a family to take care of I would be extremely tempted to leave software as a profession entirely because of it.
When I was hired at my current job we had full-height cubes which are still not ideal, but workable. But now I've been shuffled into a new team working back in an open plan office. Many days after work I just want to go live in a cave and be left alone. It's not normal for me to be so socially drained and it's not a healthy dynamic for my family. I'm trying on the side to get my own company off the ground so that I can work the way I want to. We'll see.
there's your opinion and then there's science which actually goes out and sees how the real world works (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interruption_science)
I really think this is a matter of personal taste to a large degree, but for my part I prefer the ability to ask questions readily and listen in on what my colleagues are working on. I think the point you're trying to make about an 'interruption deficit' is off the mark. Someone new to a team is going to ask many more questions than a veteran and it's certainly damaging to their ability to learn if asking questions is a chore or unwelcome socially. Email and messaging apps are alternatives of course, and are often the right choice when the question doesn't merit interruption. But sometimes a quick answer is needed to progress at all and being able to turn around and say something makes things faster.
In open office spaces people are still able to work from a laptop somewhere else, put on headphones, or work from home. And having your own office doesn't mean you aren't interrupted. People would tend to come by for long periods of time when I had an office, seemingly because they were starved of social interaction.
A caveat to all this is that for a brief period I was in an overly crowded open office arrangement and that was very much detrimental to my work.
1) mislead by the initial sense of acomplishment and better communication.
it is like working in a war room. you get tons of stuff done, but it is crazy, stressful and you have lots of people working on a little thing that demands attention. your return for all those people is actually less, but you need a war room in some situations.
open office work the same way. you get a initial difficult thing done. but at the usual high cost of having lots of people working on it and ignoring/half-assing others.
2) people like micro-management.
there is no denying. open office plans and war rooms are perfect for the micro manager boss.
I'd say that I ask other people questions about five times per day and get asked questions about seven times per day, though that's fluctuated a lot. When I'm coming up to speed on a project, language, or company, I obviously ask more questions. When I was the lead engineer at my previous company, I got asked more questions.
Personally, I find the open plan office energizing. I have a social development style anyway (I'm most productive when pairing, and I find that talking through a problem often gives me insight into it), and I don't very often find that I want or need to dive deep into something for 4+ hours at a time -- I'm more likely to make progress at a large project by chipping away at it in half hour to two hours in increments, with breaks that involve a focus change.
While I have met some developers who are very productive in the "go into a room, close the door, emerge a half day or a day later with code" style, the majority of developers I've met who rail against interruptions and distractions seem to be incapable of producing good work even when they are given their wish and not interrupted.
1) 9 years
2) 1 year in shared office with only boss, 4 years in shared office with 4 other people, 4 years in a fully open office
3) In person I never interrupt others, but I will IM others about 3 times a day. As far as folks interrupting me, I spend 25% of my time managing folks, so I expect (and get) lots of interruptions, but people know to IM me first. Headphones help as a signaling mechanism for this, as well as blocking out noise.
I loved my office that was just me and my boss as it was quiet and also had a great view. I also love my current open office because it's a great space and facilitates easy conversation, plus my standing desk is next to a window. It's no honeymoon period, been a developer for 9 years and in the workforce for 15 years.
Also, I absolutely hated the shared office with 4 people. Just absolutely terrible to be in cubicles in a small space with none of the benefits of a private office or open office. And people constantly opening the door to go in and out until we finally everyone was just propping their doors open, so it was semi-open anyways.
Edit to note: I work for a great non-profit and it helps to be surrounded by people I love and who I know are working hard to make a positive change for the world. If I were working for a corporation I'm not sure if I would feel the same about an open office plan or not.
1.) I've been a developer (in some context, this also includes "startup founder", "tech lead", and about a year total of internships) for about 10.5 years.
2.) Private office for 1 year total (across 2 companies). Shared office for 1 year (2 companies). Worked from home for a total of 2.2 years (2 companies). Private cube for 1.25 years (3 companies). Shared cube for 1.5 years. Open-floorplan for 20 months (Google), and war-room (same team in a large, 5-10 person office) for 2.5 years.
3.) It's varied throughout my career. As a startup founder, I neither interrupt people nor get interrupted, since I'm working from home and am the only developer on the project. When I was a tech lead, I did literally nothing but get interrupted; incoming requests outnumbered outgoing by roughly 10:1. As an individual dev, typically I'd be interrupted about 2-3 times for every time I asked someone else a question (my preference is usually much more toward figuring out something for myself than asking questions...probably moreso than it should be).
I am mildly in favor of open-plan offices, and here's why: most of the interesting stuff is happening outside of your head. I'll grant that open-plan offices are a huge distraction, they pull you out of flow, and as a result, you will write a lot less code than you would in a private office. However, here's where I say something controversial: code is a liability, not an asset. The goal of a developer is to solve problems, and you will solve more problems if you know what the pressing problems are than if you just put your head down and code up what your boss tells you to. It really sucks to slave away at a masterpiece of technology for a year or two, and then find that nobody uses it because you weren't solving the right problem to begin with.
Here's another statistic: in those 10.5 years of experience, I've implemented 30 projects (as in, working code delivered to boss/cofounder/teammates/market). Of those, 10 were successes, where I define "success" as either "used by > 1 million people", "at least 6 internal teams use it", or "made money for employer". The successes included 2 shared offices, 3 warrooms, 2 shared cubes, 2 open floorplans, and 1 private cube. The failures included 5 private cubes, 2 private office, 2 shared office, 7 open floorplans, and 4 works from home. (Interestingly, this seems to reproduce what I've heard in the literature of "same team in an office" > "private office" > "unrelated teams in an open floorplan".)
I'm curious, do folks in favor of private offices consider a project to be successful when it is delivered according to spec to your boss? Or is it successful when it makes it to market and makes a profit for the company? If it's the former, that would explain the differing views right there: it's quite possible for private offices to help you efficiently produce the wrong product.
Personally I think you need to interrupt coding frequently, for health and for cognitive freshness. When I've been tech lead, often the most heads-down devs produced the most problematic code if you didn't check in on them. My belief was along the lines of "if you don't throw away everything and start over at least once you're doing it wrong," with the idea being that coding too fast results in complex, un-elegant solutions. Finally, in a fast-paced environment, you simply have to check in with each other, and having to schedule meetings or calls just sucks. The team I'm in right now is not co-located and we're losing tons of productivity.
And yet. When I work at a remote location (not home but near-home, not at the main site), I get TONS more coding, research, writing, and shit work done. No comparison. The work I'm doing now is perhaps more amenable to sole-contributor stuff, but I recall in the faster-paced jobs this was also true.
It seems like flexibility is needed. Open-plan is great, but maybe rotating offices would be good, where people can spend a day in them cranking some stuff out, and then come up for air for the rest of the week.
Personally, I've seen it work well (where I'm at now), and I've seen it work badly (two jobs ago). I've also seen the same in separate offices. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I don't really find that age or experience tends to matter that much as to where it works or doesn't. It's more about the work you're doing, and the company you're doing it for.
Some dev projects - those heavy on the back end especially, or requiring lots of sheer coding manpower over critical thinking, I think they definitely don't gain anything from the open office. The same could be said as well for the truly complex coding work out there - which, honestly, is less and less a reality.
If you're wiring up pages that do some middle tier logic or dealing with heavily interactive sites, which I think is what many of us do day to day, rather than the super intense, super difficult coding work that we all wish we did, I think the collaborative benefits can outweigh the risk of interruption.
If you're actually doing that big brain work, or really working on something that needs complete concentration, then yes, being able to zone in on it interruption free is definitely a good thing.
Like every other process, or tool, it depends on the context and the problem you're solving. And like most problems, you need the right person to use that tool or process. So does it work for every scenario, and every person? No, definitely not. The same can be said for a closed office as well.
Bottom line - right people, right place, for the right task at hand.
Additionally, 'open-office' to me means OpenOffice, and while I can accept that it doesn't to everyone, be consistent. It's one of the rules of good journalism. The hyphen in the heading is not used in the article. Likewise, we have 'nineteen-fifties' versus '1997'. The ironic bit about spelling out 'nineteen-fifties' in a non-conventional, inconsistent manner... is the phrase in the article immediately following it... </oldmanrant>
If the open office full of distractions is the ideal working environment, then when I get an emergency call from work, I assume I'll fix the emergency faster if I take my laptop to the neighborhood daycare center and sit down right in the highest chaos room. Oddly enough at home when no pretensions are necessary because there is nobody to show off to, people who have to actual work, pick a nice quiet closed door "office".
A lot of open office love comes from utterly incompetent management and its very politically incorrect to discuss this other than semi-anonymous forums like this. "I have no idea how to manage these people or how to convince them to do what I want, but at least I can see them all squashed together like sardines". If your standard of performance is low enough, mere visibility is at least better than nothing.
I would go nuts if people were gossiping and being as chaotic as a daycare... Luckily I've never run into that. Actually the worst gossip-y company I ever worked at was a closed office/tall cubicle company.
Open office is equivalent of trying to study in a busy corridor where groups of people chat, come and go and every 15 minutes someone stops by to tell you hello.
Now, five or other small team in one room is a great thing. Kind of the best solution I would say. You can discuss when you need and it can be calm most of the time. However, open office is usually six such teams together overhearing each other while having next to zero chance to actually concentrate on anything.
The downside is that collaboration can become a crutch. It will only hinder you when you need to do the kind of "nose to the grindstone" work that's often needed.
To me, the ideal working scenario includes a private working space for each person and a public space for when collaboration is needed.
I agree. The best working environment I ever had was private offices with soft seating areas at the rend of each hall. It was easy to collaborate with others and easy to get a quiet environment. You never felt like you were interrupting several other people if you went to ask a person a question. If you had to take a phone call to talk to deal with a private family issue or call a Dr or lawyer, you could just close your door. If you had to send a private email you didn't need to worry that others will see something they shouldn't see. Offices also had much more usable desk space than I have had in open office settings.
I can see why people like offices (except for Zuckerberg are there any CEOs who sit in an open floor plan?), where I work now, the only people who like the open office arrangement are the managers who naturally have private offices.
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/05/27/article-2331658-1A...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2584738/Now-T...
e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5768771
By far the most collaborative environments for me have been individual offices or two to an office.
In an open floorplan I find myself constantly being distracted and trying to wall people off, which makes my emotional state less open to discussion... because I'm trying to focus on work.
With an office with one or two people in it, you don't have to worry as much, can be more open because you know you will get time to focus.
The company I work for is moving from individual offices to an open floor plan. They didn't even bother to talk to programmers about it, and admitted they looked at individual office locations but didn't think it mattered when we protested.
They've also gone from a 6 person dev team to now 3. While there are many problems that caused me and the other two people to leave, them choosing an open office without consulting use and then blowing off our objections is characteristic of the disrespect they show generally.
I think that companies with open office plans don't really respect engineers. And I include google and Facebook in this assessment.
Does anyone else have experience with small teams working in open spaces?
Science evolved precisely as a way to avoid this social noise and find the true status of the subject, through the use of empirical observation and repeatable experiments that test specific hypotheses.
Could there be errors in these studies? Sure, and science has a process for dealing with that possibility, too: create another experiment that empirically falsifies one of their conclusions.
The whole point of the article is that the differences are not inconsequential at all. Numerous academic studies have objectively measured many differences in many different specific environments, and show that the open office is worse in almost all ways related to running a successful business.
Edit since I'm getting downvotes: All the articles I've seen about the pros and cons of open plan offices mostly focus on productivity. But, as an employee, I'm much more interested in my happiness than my productivity, above a reasonable minimum. These sorts of articles tend to ignore that tradeoff.
This article does discuss happiness somewhat, but the results are less clear than those for productivity. I think it's pretty clearly something people disagree on, but this fact tends to get swept under the rug by authors who focus on the productivity losses.
Having happy employees is a key aspect of running a successful business.
Objective metrics are, by definition, those without subjectivity involved. Naturally there can be disputes over the details, or mistakes made, and through an iterative process errors are identified and corrected, moving arbitrarily close to the objective truth of the situation. Over time, this remedies the problem of individual mistakes and subjectivity being involved in the process.
At this stage, hundreds of studies have been done, so we are well along that path and any remaining errors in the thesis are likely to be minor and non-material.
If this is not true, everyone is welcome to come up with an experiment to falsify them all.
I am currently in my mid twenties and most people in my age bracket have not really experienced a non open plan office space, it is all they have ever known. I have worked at a couple of corporate companies that were not open plan and I noticed a few things.
People in non open plan offices tend to be more antisocial, this is more of an observation than a proven fact. I worked for a media company and instead of getting up and talking to a colleague in the office, people would just use Skype even if the person was a 10 second walk away. Teams tend to stick to themselves, people only associate with their own teams because non open plan offices do not encourage collaboration or a social aspect.
Having said that, I do find at times open plan offices can be distracting. One place I worked at had plush toys you could grab and put on your desk. If someone had a plush toy sitting on their desk, you knew not to disturb them. They didn't always work though, people who felt as though they had an emergency that required your attention would still annoy you.
Not only that, but the same place also had a quiet space you could go work in, considering everyone had laptops, this was possible. We had beanbags, a dim lit part of the room with gentle lighting so the screens weren't harsh on your eyes and all completely separate and somewhat soundproof from the hustle and bustle of the open office area.
Don't get me started on what happens when someone new starts and people try and find space, I call it the "open office shuffle" you are made to move along to make space for a new colleague, I am not saying that non open offices don't have the same problem, but it is more distracting in an open office environment.
I think regardless of what kind of office setup you have, there are always going to be issues. Most people have only ever known one or the other. If you are used to your space, I can see how an open office could be a problem for you at first, but if you have only ever really experienced open offices, then you are probably aware and desensitised to all of the intricacies and issues with them.
My favourite aspect of an open space as a developer is I feel like I am more social with my work colleagues. I get to speak with people I probably wouldn't speak with usually in a closed office environment. I can openly ask questions and have discussions in person without using Skype or Google Hangouts and when it comes to lunch, usually everyone eats together and pulls people away from their computers forcing them to go and eat, instead of at their desk.
One solution to quell the issue of open office dilemmas could be to have proper solutions in place; breakout rooms for people on a deadline who need to concentrate, company supplied noise cancelling headphones, rule of no eating at your desk (so people are not distracted by your lip smacking, chewing and smell of food), no phone calls at your desk (if you want to make a call, go to a quiet part of the building or outside) and finally if you are sick, stay home and work if you can, otherwise rest.
We all have different personalities and everyone is different, so I'm not suggesting I'm right and you're wrong, but for me I don't see that as a negative.
Receiving a skype (or other IM-type of service) query is far less intrusive to my work than talking to someone in person at my desk. Better yet, ask me in an email if you don't need the answer right away since email signals that you don't expect an immediate response and maybe I'm deep in thought and answering your question to a useful degree will pull me out of the 5 levels of abstraction my brain is currently working under, losing me half an hour of real work to get back to that point later.
On the flip side of your points I've found that open offices encourage people to ask me questions that they could easily google and find the answer in about as much time as it takes me to answer them, which means they are burning my time (and more importantly, my focus/flow) wastefully. Not to mention they are distracting everyone else around us as well. Multiply this by half a dozen times or more per day and it really starts to be a productivity sink.
The trend over the last decade began with die-hard open office plan fanpeople (breaking free of dads private office intensive historical), who quickly found that there was a lot of counterproductive distractions. From there as more traditional business starting adopting a start-up mentality to their office space, a balance had to be struck to ensure productivity.
Now the offices of Airbnb, Optimizely, Weebly, all have very strong distribution of open communal work area with solid guidelines from a cultural perspective on how to treat people in that environment, while also matching the open area with ample meeting space distributed evenly throughout their building.
With a more thoughtful approach than just open vs not open I think a balance can be readily created while also speaking to the culture of the company and genre of business it functions in (gaming, Saas, mobile, etc.).
For the record 1- 10 years 2- open (3.5 yrs) vs closed (6.5 yrs) 3- dozens but you learn the headphone rule which basically means (don't bother me or text / message me)
For me, in an open office, having headphones on is not enough. There's visual distraction as well. People interacting in your field of vision are also a distraction.
I like this setup, I find it freeing because you can move to where you are more comfortable working at any given time. But the catch is, you can't just say seating is "variable" as a way of punting on giving people desks. Everyone should have a place that undisputedly belongs to them.
Surely there are some companies trying out now "contrarian" layouts such as cubes, offices, bull-pens, etc?
An ideal environment for me would be an open office most of the time but with four walled offices available for me to occupy on a weekly reservation basis where I can get some coding work done when I need to focus. Something soundproofed maybe, to allow me to play music without needing headphones.
We had such a setup in one of the engineering buildings in university and I found that I really thrived when I was able to "plug-out" when I needed to focus and "plug-in" when I needed to work with other people - all while not having to wear headphones!
Near the passageway the lights are not soft/spread fluorescent, instead it is individual light bulbs, so forget sitting face toward that direction (which would be happily back to the sunlight mentioned above) as those bright dots of lights on your peripheral vision field are just like small suns.
Compare to those lightning problems the issues like highly collaborative excited guys running like herd of elephants from one workplace to another across the space is just nothing.
I am sensitive to the flickering of fluorescent lights that most people cannot see. Most offices have standard fluorescent lights, often with cheap bulbs or ballasts that have not been changed since the building was built.
People also have different temperatures that they are comfortable at.
So, you really need at minimum four offices: Dark & Cold Dark & Warm Light & Cold Light & Warm
This ignores all the other problems with open offices and cubicle farms. Programmers really need to spread out. You need a whiteboard, preferably a large one for every two programmers. They need a desk big enough to support two or three monitors (if you're only giving them one, you're being penny wise and pound foolish, most likely.) Many programmers like to have books open for reference on the table. Or documents, etc.
Collaboaration is higher in my experience when people have their own offices or a few people per office. Focus is much higher.
Why kill productivity by %30 (a low estimate for the negative impact on my personal productivity) in order to save a fraction of an engineers salary?
I think it's just bad management.
But the nice thing is, these people advertise that they have open floorpans, like they don't even realize it's a mistake, and that makes it easy to just say "next" when looking at jobs.