As much as it pains for me to say it, I do think small, quiet 1-2 person offices are great for thinking and getting real work done. I believe the IDEO offices in the Bay Area have a combination of a centralised area for discussions and collaboration, but a set of smaller offices for more focused work time. Something which would actually be quite nice to see more of ...
People do the open office floor plan because it's efficient and economical, not because it's the the best for the workers.
We designed a ton of cubbies (like in your university library), 1 person private rooms, 2 person conference rooms, etc. in our office to accommodate for the fact that many people need to more privacy and quiet than just headphones. We also break up the main open plans to help quiet the noise and distraction.
We have about 45,000 sq. ft today, and will be adding another 45,000 sq. ft this year. When we do, there will be much less open floor plan. I do think there's a happy medium, with team rooms of 6 to 15 people, depending on role and requirements.
Supposedly (and I have yet to see this consistently work in action) the efficiency comes from collaboration that naturally happens when there are no physical barriers.
What I generally see is I find out more about my co-workers lives and their interests than the increase in productivity and innovation from the team.
Bear in mind that the giants of our industry are built on open floor plans. So, in "real world" numbers they do hold up fairly well.
I fully accept that there are confounding variables. But, I can't help but also accept that open plans are not the doomsday device that they are often painted as. They are yet another of the many variables that go into how a company is running.
I think it's more accurate to say that it's because open office are cheap (*up front). It's pretty clear that they reduce efficiency in many, if not most, cases, which can be very expensive.
> People do the open office floor plan because it's efficient and economical, not because it's the the best for the workers.
I don't buy it.
They pay these people minimum $60K/year (likely closer to $85K+), there's no way they would intentionally reduce an $85K * 20 worker's productivity to save 10K on furniture like you're suggesting. Even with only a 1% productivity loss that's still 17K/year down the toilet for the team.
No, the real reason people do the open plan thing is that they believe that it improves worker productivity. People are better able to "collaborate" and cannot browse non-work related things (like HK) as easily. Essentially it is another "lines of code"-style management technique that is trendy at the moment.
The funny thing about MBAs are that they aren't scientists and the "facts" they study aren't science. The entire thing is a "circlejerk" of things that sound like they would be constructive but rarely stopping to actually test their assumptions (instead depending on anecdotes like singular "success stories").
Nobody has tested open plan Vs. closed plan. But then how would you do that anyway? How do you measure productivity, lines of code? So that's the rub. People believe, with little basis, that open plan helps but you cannot disprove it for the same reason they cannot prove it.
> with team rooms of 6 to 15 people, depending on role and requirements
I absolutely agree. Team rooms seem to be the optimal. The room gets to set the rules. It's amazing how different team cultures grow, develop and optimize for the team composition and the work they're doing.
Provide a few quiet ultra-concentration nodes that people can reserve and use and conference rooms for inter-team coordinating and you're set.
You get the benefits of quick communication and collaboration, without the downsides of other people's/group's conversations disrupting what you're working on AND the ability to comfortably complain that your teammate is being disruptive...which is socially harder to do with strangers/people in other parts of the company.
If your rule is "put headphones on if you want privacy" you're doing it wrong. If you need to have "flow time" in the afternoon because the warehouse you've stuffed your people into is too noisy to get any real work done (so you have to schedule time to actually concentrate) you're doing it wrong.
Some places even go so far as having re-configurable team rooms, they can change size and shape to accommodate growing and shrinking teams without too much fuss.
I'm curious if you have any "team rooms" with private rooms directly off of them -- such that the team can have a collaborative space and heads-down coding space.
Again, any source for that? I get the feeling it's actually the folks speculating that it's about money who are hoping that to be true, cynically.
Cornell did a study that showed that people interact less when they have offices. Their definition of "frequent interaction" dropped from several times a day ad hoc (with open plan) to several times a week in a meeting. That's some data supporting that it does in fact improve collaboration.
Archive.org is down right now but I can supply a link to the study later if you want.
I love the idea of actually having a quiet room with the sign "library rules" on the door. In the quiet room, if you make noise -- even to have a work-related conversation, you get shushed. GTFO into the open-office area. No apology needed, no excuse accepted.
I've been on both sides, cube vs open plan. I used to liken cubes to prisons, but now I look at them the same way a cat will look at a box that it tries to squeeze itself tightly into, because the cat wants to be there.
I work in an open office, and everyone wears headphones for hours when they need to concentrate.
The thing is, these people are doing irreversible damage to their hearing. Listening to headphones at a volume that will drown out conversation is not a good thing.
Furthermore, I've never experienced as many migraines as I have before switching to an open office. I have to keep pills at my desk. Never had to do that before.
I've had my own office, been in cubicles, and currently work in an open office. I would detest getting trapped in a stuffy, carpet-walled cubicle again, and kind of disliked how isolated the office makes you.
I'm also a little clueless about all the disruptions that everyone is talking about - I think the team I work with now probably has some kind of has an unspoken rule to keep disruptions to a minimum. It's mostly heads down working all day, and when disruptions happen, I usually enjoy them because it's usually the break I need to get out of a mental tunnel.
Having worked in offices like these (in a call center, of all things), I really don't understand how the hell you could get any work done. We had people going home with migraines after two days in conditions like that Facebook photo, and that was just reading scripts into a phone headset for 8 hours. Actually producing anything like an intelligent thought in that kind of corporate tuna can is unthinkable to me.
"We have our own indoor artisanal cheese maker! ... but our actual workspace looks like it was cobbled together after a day of frantic Costco purchases." How about sparing the free Sun Chips and putting some walls in, eh?
Having spent a day at Atlassian's office in SOMA when contracting for them recently, if this sort of setup is done right (with the additional caveat of having an energetic staff) the effect is positively electrifying. The "Costco purchases" jab is overly broad, because this office had very nice motorized standing desks for everybody. Also, the complex was large enough that you could escape into some personal space without feeling like you were hiding.
On the other hand, Gannett attempted a setup like this, except it was out of cheapness (they wanted to lease office space in their Tysons HQ) and was carried out mindlessly. They mixed developers with technical support, managers, etc. thoughtlessly. And they installed "white noise" machines which made matters worse. Working in that place was almost impossible and I quit after a month.
I imagine a call center is a lot more noisy than the average open plan office, though. The open space I work in sounds a lot like a coffee shop (a few muted voices, but not much else)
They are kept in Bull Pens because they treat their employees as sterile commodities to be herded around.
You don't become WalMart/Facebook/Twitter by treating your employees well. You become big and profitable by cutting as many corners as you can and keeping revenue up. Publicly traded companies generally get into this-quarter frenzy that never leaves and kills any sort of long term viability as being a company of and for people.
>You become big and profitable by cutting as many corners as you can and keeping revenue up.
Then why would they be spending millions of dollars on the office perks and architecture? You're contradicting yourself, they're obviously spending a huge amount of money on the office.
Your assertion -- "they're obviously spending a huge amount of money on the office" -- is compatible with the previous assertion. They're spending it on the office, while employees are still treated as fungible cogs to be plugged into said expensive office.
The point of this post is that they spend money making the office look pretty (to get people to accept offers), but they spend almost nothing making it functional. The office has become a marketing ploy; the workers aren't actually treated very well, it just looks like they are because every surface is shiny.
But also, if there's a manager in the middle of the bullpen, people tend to clam up. I experienced this. Managers can have a very hard time handling the typical heated and frank discussions that can arise among engineers. At one time, we had the project manager in our cube maze along with the engineers. If he sensed that two engineers disagreed with one another, or that they were discussing a problem, he would step in to manage it. The obvious outcome was that the engineers found another place to hold our discussions.
You keep using that word. I don't think you know what it means.
(Coming from a contract 'devop')
There is no such thing. Either you code, and your code helps a company's devops requirements. Or you're in ops because you can't code. I need to collaborate less than devs do. My clients know for a fact that most of my work is done more productively at home in the quiet. Yes we need to talk, plan, work with others (sometimes) but who doesn't?
The whole point of devops is that it combines development and operations; i.e. everyone works together to make sure that both development and operations are mutually supportive and co-ordinated. Most devops teams I have seen almost all the team are capable developers and sysadmins / operations.
It turns out that devs are great at a lot of ops type tasks.
Basically what you get is developers' innate tendencies towards laziness and over-automation yield really good ops solutions.
Where your typical sysadmin will be perfectly comfortable running a hodgepodge of shell scripts and byzantine commands through the terminal every time he wants a server push, your typical developer just wants the fucking code up on the server so he can get back to work he finds less objectionable.
This is absolutely how you want to approach ops. Just get the shit running with as little human interaction as possible.
> Gobs of well-lit perimeter offices. Every developer, tester, and program manager is in a private office; all except two have direct windows to the outside (the two that don't get plenty of daylight through two glass walls).
The longer I spend in this environment (coming up to five years) the less I like it. I like the idea of having large, interesting open spaces for more social activities including work, but most of the work I do lends itself well to being not surrounded by people having conversations or - in some cases - literally just messing around all day.
I don't understand if you like Fog Creek's environment or you don't.
At any rate, I'm so over the open floor plan/cubicle mazes. I get really distracted by the doppler effect that conversations (sometimes LOUD conversations) that pass by my cubicle, have. Perhaps I'm just a curmudgeon, but I much prefer the solitude that an office with a door provides.
I've heard that cubicles are worse than open offices in terms of audio distraction. In an open office, you've got a constant visual reminder that people can hear you. People tend to be more mindful of their volume levels and where/how they make noise.
I work in an open floor plan. We have fairly standard carpet and ceiling acoustic tiles, the walls are drywall, so we haven't gone to extremes to soundproof but it's not tile and open warehouse ceilings either. We have a culture of being reasonably respectful, but will still have conversations at times. In practice... I find myself hardly remembering the people that exist even 20 feet from me. In theory I can see about 50 people, but I almost never actually remember that. I'm somewhat sensitive to conversation and extremely sensitive to music (can not stand music I'm not in control of), and I'm fine.
I do have modestly nice passively acoustically isolated headphones and frequently use them, but I do that anyhow, not because I'm trying to dodge noise, and I can go hours without them just fine, usually putting them on because I want music, not isolation.
I find myself wondering what percentage of open office complaints come from A: people who are simply psychologically unsuited to them under any circumstances B: people whose open office experiences involved tile floors, warehouse ceilings, and glass walls, which would be a completely different acoustic experience and C: people who haven't actually spent any time in a decent one and are just assuming they'd hate it. No sarcasm. For that matter the studies that keep asserting how bad they I find myself wondering about A and B... certainly you can construct an open space that does suck, but that doesn't mean they all do, and I've never dug into one enough to see what they specify as the "open space".
And to be clear, I'm not asserting that they're obviously better and everybody should love them (and let me reiterate I completely believe in the existence of a set of people who will never like them), but my experience just doesn't seem to bear out the "they suck and can never work and why on Earth would any company ever put them in" attitude... at most it seems like they might be slightly worse on average but it may be below the noise threshold, and it would be the incredibly-perfectly well-run company for whom this would be their biggest problem.
Open offices are more vulnerable to bad cultural practices that you have no control over. A private office fixes these issues with pure physics. If open offices had librarians shushing everyone for talking too loud constantly and stopping people from shoulder surfing they would be a lot better for many people.
Managers hate these solutions because they are explicit social conflicts that creates a lot of ill will and negative morale. If a pre-commit script enforces something vs. an angry email from another engineer it's far less personal.
Worse yet, you have to be a pretty high level manager to make the middle managers do this, because some of them like the noise, or being able to get status any time, etc.
I wish that was true here. One big floor, I can clearly hear several conversations right now. I should be doing math; I'm here posting on HN. We have one guy that likes to put somebody on the speakerphone, and then yell into it. For hours. I'm so distressed.
Maybe invest in some noise-cancelling headphones, and use a white noise generator. I like SimplyNoise for that. It does a great job at drowning out background noises.
And then if you can STILL hear them clearly, put in earplugs under the headphones and crank up the volume.
No, sorry, not damaging my ears for bad decisions of management.
I don't mean to be argumentative, you are just trying to solve the problem that I am in. I've done the headphone thing, they are noise cancelling, I listen to SimplyRain on them, and that helps, but I just can't take all that input. I want quiet. I need quiet. I don't want distraction that is slightly less annoying than the current distraction, at the risk of my health besides.
But yes, your suggestions are really good for the people it can work for.
I can beat that. At one job, I had a person a couple cubicles to the left of me regularly call the person a couple cubicles to the right of me, and both would turn their speakers on. I could hear each half of the conversation coming at me from two different directions.
The guy the other side of the corridor likes to play the radio allllllll day long over some large studio monitor speakers. I shut the door to this office but another guy who sits at the opposite end of this large office (therefore as far away from the door as you can be) likes to open it and jam it open.
I truly despise the flow of bland music that I have no control over, and the ongoing chatting/arguing that passes for radio entertainment. It's like listening to other people's pointless conversations.
I sometimes put headphones on but incessantly bombarding my ears with noise just to cancel out other noise is like spraying deodorant on excrement - pointless. It also means I'll suffer gradual hearing loss
I sometimes wonder if people don't understand that we need time to solve problems and problem solving is best done in quiet! The other guys in this office do not write software so I sometimes wonder if people don't "get" it.
The transparency of the window is a weakness. Some folks have started putting up posters and curtains.
But the real issue is that they transmit basically all the sound. Fortunately there usually aren't conversations going on just outside people's offices, but if two people are talking while walking down the hall or the person in the next office is yelling at folks on hangout, it's not much quieter than a cubicle.
Polished concrete is beautiful and striking, of course, and at some point software development became a creative profession rather than an engineering one, and we stopped mocking people who put form over function.
Oh crap! "Private" offices with glass doors, yeah. So that you never immediately see who enters your office because the door is behind you and you have to turn around. Also with monitors visible to everyone who passes by. This is way worse than any open plan office.
I've worked on open plan floors and also had a private office before. Currently, I share an office with one other dev and I feel it's the best setting I've ever had.
I can confirm this. One of the most productive spaces in my career has been a long U desk with myself and another programmer at each end. We could roll over and talk to each other, or just sit with our backs to each other and ignore the other person. Great!
Until 2009 or so, we used to have private offices at Cray. There were plenty of impromptu conversations. I would argue that they were more pleasant and productive, since we didn't have to worry we were upsetting everyone around us while brainstorming or discussing tech trends. We would meet in an engineer's office so not everyone had to hear the whole thing.
Offices are a really great example of the push to keep programmers from thinking of themselves as professionals, either by treating them like IT or tech support, or like college kids. Google or Facebook's revenue per engineer is probably 3x that of a law firm or consulting firm, but the overwhelming practice in the latter sorts of places is for each professional to have an office with a door.
When you're a growing startup, having private offices costs you flexibility as well as cash because open plan is easier to reconfigure as you grow. If you're at the point where you're commissioning a Ghery, you're well past that excuse.
> the push to keep programmers from thinking of themselves as professionals
Hah. If only we had someone else to blame for that. We do that to ourselves. Programmers act like spoiled little kids when choosing which jobs to apply to or how to conduct their career, (look at all those juice bars! Never seen an accountant use that as a selection criteria.) are often completely unreasonable, (I want $100K salary right out of school, it better be $140K in a year or I'm jumping ship.) and consistently refuse to move to management. (you must pay me more and more money to drift further and further away from company priorities)
Programmers refusing to move to management is not unreasonable. I like being a developer. It's what I studied in school and it's the job I applied for.
It is if you expect career advancement. If you want to stay in the same role making the same salary, plus a minor bump every year for 30 years, by all means don't push yourself to try to figure out how to manage more parts of the organization you work for.
But programmers want their companies to indulge their lofty career ambitions while still being exactly as useful to the company. They want to be like doctors without taking their work half as seriously.
It is interesting the thought about moving to management - I often see that developers have to become project managers or managers of some sort as they get older.
You really think that your productivity has risen more than 10% every year? Do you have any numbers to back that up? I know you use a ticket tracking system. You can add up all your completed story points, by year, pretty easily. If you're really getting 10% better every year, consistently, it should be easy to ask for a bigger raise.
My experience is that developers don't increase their value as fast as they increase their pay.
Yup. The guys with their names on the door still write briefs for a living. So to with doctors. Head of Surgery at a hospital still cuts people open for a living.
Do any of the employees get excited about juice bars, or is it just the management trying to use juice bars as a decoy.
> (I want $100K salary right out of school, it better be $140K in a year or I'm jumping ship.)
Professionals get high pay. Software engineers get pay in this range, and it's bizarre to scoff at pay concerns when you are arguing that employees are unprofessional.
Professional software engineers with years of experience get pay in that range. Guys just starting out want that kind of money. I see it all the time.
The employees might not give a damn about the juice bars once they get hired, but you better believe they're all sharing picture of Google's workplace and just glossing over their environment and culture and recruiting practices.
> Professional software engineers with years of experience get pay in that range. Guys just starting out want that kind of money. I see it all the time.
At Google, new grads get 120+k with their bonus, not including the ~62*$500 in stocks every year for 4 years or the ~$25k in signing/reloc bonuses. If a new grad gets offered that amount, why would they not want the same elsewhere?
I just went through the process of getting my post graduation job (Computer Engineer btw). Before I went to any interviews I asked my peers what sort of offers they got and it was all between $75-90K. I went to job interviews and when they asked what I expected for salary I told them what I had heard and was scoffed at from several companies. I received 3 offers, $65k, $70k and $95k. I got the $70k offer to go up to $83k with a two month signing bonus which I took mostly because of the better location.
Companies will constantly tell you that you are worth less because it isn't in their interests. Don't buy it.
From my time at consulting firms and experience with law firms, this isn't true any more.
I was at the offices of a large law firm in the City of London yesterday and only very senior partners had offices. They had a lot of very nice meeting rooms on separate client facing floors and 'working floors' with open plan offices where lawyers and paralegals did their work.
US law firms anywhere but Manhattan give attorneys their own office, even typically legal interns and those who haven't passed the bar yet. And it is almost always external offices with a window.
Even in Manhattan they typically just share with one other associate for 2-4 years.
This definitely isn't the norm in my experience. I have friends in many of the magic and silver circle law firms in London. All of them have shared private offices for their junior staff and individual offices for the senior staff.
>> Every developer, tester, and program manager is in a private office
> The longer I spend in this environment (coming up to five years) the less I like it
> I like the idea of having large, interesting open spaces for more social activities including work, but most of the work I do lends itself well to being not surrounded by people having conversations
This is confusing.. Are you saying you do like Fog Creek's setup, or you don't?
I've seen a couple of comments expressing confusion at @asicallydan's comment, but it seems pretty clear to me.
For the last five years he has been in an environment with private offices. Initially he liked the private offices, over the years he's liked them less and less. Now he likes the idea of large, interesting open spaces more than private offices.
Haha, actually it's the other way around. Originally I had "The longer I spend in this environment" at the top but moved it when I thought it'd be good to start my comment with an example of a type of office environment I like the idea of.
How are those offices private when there's a full glass wall on the corridor, and what looks like an opening below the ceiling to the next office? That appears to add up to neither visual nor audio screening.
(Audio distraction causes trouble in conversation for me, and visual distraction disrupts any kind of concentration. I might actually prefer a tall cubicle to this setup, not to endorse the cubicle.)
Motion within one's visual field, especially intermittent motion, deters concentration on things other than that motion. (Why do you think TVs cut scenes every few seconds?) The desks there do not obviously make it possible to face away from the corridor; plus people walking by cast shadows. Facing away does help, but it's inferior. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8895162 has someone else reporting the same complaints about motion; I guess it's not a coincidence this is someone else developing nontrivial algorithms.)
The feeling of being watched over your shoulder isn't something I'd dismiss either, though it's not a work-ruiner by itself for me. If you're actively anti-privacy, stop calling them private offices.
“But I just couldn't stop thinking about one thing: the AT&T offices were dingy and dark, in some kind of a stone age office that smelled of 1930s bureaucracy. People were starting to look like mushrooms. There were torn Dilbert cartoons all over the cubicles. (Warning sign number one.) The furniture was falling apart. It was just nasty. But Viacom was in a nice, shiny, modern, bright office building that felt like lawyers' offices. It was clean and new and pleasant. I know I should have been thinking about something more substantial as I made my decision, but I just could not get over how unpleasant it would be to spend my days working in the AT&T dungeon.”
— Joel Spolsky, Whaddaya Mean, You Can't Find Programmers?, June 2000
Has this guy even worked in any of these environments? I've worked at Facebook and it is surprisingly quiet. If people want to have meetings or talk, there are plenty of conference rooms to take advantage of. Worst case, the free Sennheisers in the tech vending machines takes care of any other noises that you might not like.
I personally work better in an open office environment. I work off the energy of others and it allows me to focus more than being alone in an office.
While I understand if people legitimately don't like an open office environment, this type of article seems like it is just trying to put down these companies with little knowledge about how loud it really is in these offices.
And if you don't like the environment at Facebook/Google/Twitter/etc, just move to another company. Let's not pretend that it is hard to get another job with one of those companies on your resume.
The noise isn't the only consideration (though it is a big one). Visual distractions, lack of privacy, the feeling of being watched, people approaching from behind you, etc. The human animal is stressed by these things.
That's the problem with large open plan offices. The only way for it to be workable for everyone is if everyone shuts up. I find it incredibly stifling.
My ideal environment is the team I'm working on in one big room, the music going, everyone jamming on the project together. Getting shit done. That's probably what Zuckerberg et al remember from when they started the company, and that's why they want to recreate it for 3,000 people.
Unfortunately, once you have more than 1 team in the room, it breaks down. You just shipped something awesome and want to shout about it? The other team gives you dirty looks and want you to just STFU because they're 3 days from shipping and in total crunch mode. Some people just like quiet all the time, they'll give you a dirty look when you get noisy.
Thus the big rooms of people end up being completely silent, it's the only way to make it work. They are terrible for collaboration. The only conversations happen in conference rooms, otherwise you disturb 100+ people.
In my mind small rooms, holding 4-10 people, are ideal. Each team gets a room. If the team likes it quiet, it will be quiet. If you want to bounce ideas around, you can do it without feeling like you are disturbing other teams. If you want to play music, you can play music. I think it's the feeling that the open plan offices are going for, but people haven't connected the productivity of open plan office with the actual size of the open room yet.
Facebook has 'War Rooms' for teams who are shipping a large release soon. They are smaller rooms that can fit 12-18 people. Most of the time they have separate desks but sometimes teams just commandeer a conference room.
This sounds a bit like your idea, though a few more people.
I think I would quit in about ten minutes if I had to put up with someone else's music choices. I don't even like putting up with my own when I'm working but I'm forced to to drown out everyone else.
Don't you feel self-conscious that everybody can see your every movement, for the entire day?
To me it reminds me of one of those victorian prisons where every inch can be viewed from the central platform. Now that I think about it, even prisoners get a lot more privacy than this.
I would only feel self-conscious if people judged what I was doing all day. I didn't feel like I was being judged.
I always passed this one guy who had a separate monitor to watch some kind of anime. Another seemed to always have Netflix on. During the World Cup this summer, so many people had a window/monitor watching the games.
The culture was very much this: get your work done? cool. do whatever you need to continue getting your work done.
I personally work better in an open office environment. I work off the energy of others and it allows me to focus more than being alone in an office.
I have stints like this, particularly when working on a hard problem. One person typing with others brain storming is a great way to push through hard problems.
For a lot of us coding is a very solitary endeavor, but it doesn't have to be.
I know you're getting downvoted, but I agree with you. There is no way whatsoever I could go back to working in a private / cubicle partitioned office. I'm open-plan for life. The energy and intelligent conversations I overhear completely eclipse any negative aspects imho. I guess it's important that you like hearing what your coworkers have to say. If I _truly_ need to concentrate, the headphones and some www.polskastacja.pl and I'm all set.
I agree completely. I prefer the open office layout a hundred times over, compared to a private room or a cubicle. Maybe it depends on your coworkers, you have to trust them not to be too loud or bothersome, and you have to be fine with being in the same room as these people for 8+ hours a day for a long time.
At my office, the "Dev Room" has 10 engineers in the same room, as well as open desks for anyone else to join us. The rest of the office has rooms with 1-3 people working in them, but we requested to take this large room. Whenever anyone from the rest of the office walks into the dev room, they always have to remark "Wow, it's so silent in here." And it's true, it's a different world once you walk in here. We even have our own conference room only accessible through this room.
But because everyone here are friends, it's easy for us to ask questions, have fun, play around. Right now as I type this, two developers are drawing Chinese characters and playing with the new Google Translate app. The rest of us have headphones on. It's on you to ignore distractions and get your work done, but everyone does, and everyone helps each other and laughs while doing it.
I am currently working at Google as an intern and I'm probably going to be the contradicting opinion in this thread but I really appreciate the openspace office we have here. Maybe because it's my first "real" office job, but I do not find much of a problem working here. When I want to be on my own to think on stuff, I just put my headphones on (sometimes with music, sometimes without, since they are good at canceling noise anyway) and it's like being in my own isolated office. And if that is not enough, we have small cubicle-like mini-rooms where you can go and isolate yourself, most people use them to have phone conversations or do interviews, but nothing stops you from working in there with your laptop.
All in all, though, maybe it's my floor that is very quiet but there's not much distraction or annoying background noise as most people are busy working. When they are not working, they go somewhere else (the pub, the relax rooms, etc etc). If they want to have a work-related conversation that lasts more than 5-10 minutes, we have open areas with whiteboards separated from the desk area, or we have separate conference rooms you can use. Most of the time, I enjoy taking my headphones off and listening to a couple of coworkers making remarks on stuff (either work or non-work related), it helps me relieve stress and boredom much more than just staring at a wall or reading some articles online.
Ironically, the major source of annoyance in our floor recently has been the old AC system that sometimes starts making very loud noises and bothers everybody, but this is not the fault of the openspace office so it doesn't count :)
I liked them too, when I was an intern and the first few years of my real job.
But after I acquired more knowledge it became more stressing, because everyone was asking me stuff all the time. Also I had to listen to all the communication that was going on around me.
Headphones are but a crutch and a bad one too, since all I want is silence when working and no music or anything...
Agreed - there is something nice about having a quiet space to retreat to at work so you can focus on getting stuff done without any noise/distractions. I miss having a private office sorely since everyone just goes to me and asks me questions, making it harder for me to be productive. Oftentimes these questions are ones that if the developer did more research, he/she could have figured it out.
>Oftentimes these questions are ones that if the developer did more research, he/she could have figured it out.
Have you tried pointing that out to your coworkers? I've had plenty of cases where asking a question gave me a "Sure, here's how you do it. But the next time, be aware you can do X and Y instead." and that taught me to look up stuff first before asking silly questions. I just don't feel like this is a problem related to openspace offices.
The easier it is to ask a question, the lower the quality of those questions.
I can't remember how often I "fixed" something by telling the people they have to empty their browser cache or that they aren't in the right directory...
Mind I recommend earplugs if you want absolute quietness? Sometimes I do wear headphones on without anything playing, because they provide really good sound isolation. You could get specifically noise-canceling headphones for that.
Regarding getting asked all the time by other people, I would think that is more of an organization problem. Nothing stops me from pinging coworkers on irc or any other IM program for help or actually going to their office in person. As an advantage to openspace office, I can just raise my head, look at my coworker and ask "hey, do you have a second?". More often than not I get a "sure, give me a few minutes" if they are busy or they can just lean over or walk to my desk without wasting too much time. And if it's a more serious issue it's "Shall we move to a more private place?".
I honestly don't see a problem, nobody stops you from telling your coworkers to check the documentation regarding their question (if there is one, is it a common question? Maybe you should write something up since you are more knowledgeable on the matter and don't like being interrupted about it). But yeah, this is probably because I'm just an intern and I don't have experience on the matter, but I enjoy working like this.
The fact that you have to wear noise-canceling headphones (bought on your own dime, no less) to get work done is an indication that the space has failed in its primary purpose, which is to enable you to get your work done. A good office layout (or any good architecture, really) does not force the people who live in it to fight against the environment it creates.
You don't have to, you can do it. And who said anything about buying it on your own dime? It depends on the company but I'm fairly sure any of the big companies with such open offices will provide them to you for free upon request.
I would say the benefits of getting your work done vs having complete and entire silence are not so easy to summarize. A lot of people in this thread seem to assume that an open space office is super noisy full of people talking where in my (very limited, I admit) experience there's hardly any noise other than the sound of people hammering on keyboards (and the AC). There are occasional conversations but those last a few seconds because, as I already said, if they were longer, people would move out of the way.
Maybe it depends on the company, people and office.
I am a SWE for Google and my area is super noisy. Construction, dogs barking (on our floor), phone calls, etc. My job requires me to work with a lot of PCBs, so I have to stay at my desk; I can't exactly curl up somewhere quiet.
I hate the noise level here. I haven't yet worked up the courage to expense a good pair of noise canceling headphones, but it may come to that.
Google HQ is officially a "dog friendly" campus, and dogs are welcome in the engineering offices, where some bark. Some owners respond by taking their dogs outside immediately, but others just shush their pet, which of course resumes barking half a minute later.
Polite requests to take it away are met with "Oh, she's usually not like this, I don't know what's wrong, I'm sure she'll be quiet now..." And nobody wants to be "that guy" by telling the owners to take their dog and GTFO. So the dogs end up staying.
It does. We have people doing speaker phone calls with bad connections where they are yelling, endless joking and cackling, people walking by and saying 'hi' to you when you are deep in code. It's utterly impossible.
It's not just the decibel level that damages hearing. Constant, low-volume white noise can damage hearing as well. I know quite a few ex-signals intelligence folk who are nearly deaf in their left ears from sitting in trailers, holding the cans up to their left ear while transcribing radio transmissions.
I'm pretty sure I have my own mild hearing loss problem in my right ear from the near-constant headphone use I had to do in the last open-floor plan office I worked in. It's not just "things sound quiet". Everything sounds normal volume. It just sounds muddy and garbled if people are talking in lower registers.
It's your first job, just wait, they do get old, specially when things like, I don't know, your girlfriend breaks up with you and you just wanna get down to work and not talk about the last episode of game or thrones, and what you did this weekend (fight with your girlfriend).
Maybe I'm different, I'd like to be alone for a longer time at the office, I get the best work done when I'm working from home too.
I think that's the crux of the argument right here. I think most people who experienced both, myself included, will strongly disagree.
> it helps me relieve stress and boredom much more than just staring at a wall or reading some articles online.
Just staring at a wall? Come on, having a personal office door means you can open it and interact with other people when you so desire. Not when they so desire.
Yes, when you are new and not doing much work, and often asking your neighbors for help (as a junior person should!), the open offices are fine. (But team rooms are better) When you are trying to get work done, not so much.
> we have small cubicle-like mini-rooms ... but nothing stops you from working in there with your laptop.
That seems like a waste of the monstrously powerful workstations with 30" monitors
I have a semi-private office (two of us) in a ~15X15 office with a door, I would not give it up for anything in the world. openspaces are terrible for productivity. too many distractions.
Is this some extension / perversion of the original XP principles? I feel like XP Explained talks a lot about office layout and how it can foster communication and teamwork.
I used to think that programmers complaining about open office spaces were just nitpicking... then I learned how to program. Open offices are a reason for headphones at best and a nightmare at worst.
That having been said, I've worked in spaces where everyone had their own private office. It was great for productivity, but I felt like I never got to know anyone. All communication was forced, which caused a lot of annoying and unnecessary meetings.
I'm not sure what the answer is, but it's probably somewhere in the middle.
Having worked in a variety of office environments over the last 15 years, my favorite has been shared, closed office space. My employee moved into a relatively small building which had 2-3 person offices in it. The devs were one, QC in another, sales in another. It worked quite well. We could close our door, but still collaborate when we needed to. We also had several meeting rooms if we needed to talk between teams.
I'm also not against the "pod"-style cubes (4 or so people in a large cube), assuming the pods aren't cramped on top of one another.
My company recently built out a schmancy new open plan office and moved a bunch of people from my team there. Based on what I've seen so far the answer is that people don't work in that office. They work from home, because that's the only place you can get any actual work done. They do come into the office one or two days a week, but only so that management doesn't feel like they wasted money on all those ping-pong and pool tables.
Is it a generation gap? Old programmer vs new? The open office trend may be the death of my 2 decade career in writing software.
I do not need a spacious office: a room with a door, a distinct lack of distracting windows, and a 4x6 desk and an overflow side table would be perfect. Closing a door means I can focus and block out traffic, noise and the general hubbub of an office.
Managers like bullpens because they are very cheap. They cram a lot of people into a small space. They don't require the maintence of door locks or even cube walls. People can be moved around very easily.
I think they also like that everyone can look over everyone else's shoulder very easily, which creates peer pressure to work. In my experience, the maangers that advocate this are often the ones that are really spending all their time in special break-out rooms or conference rooms.
I've always believed that the direct manager of a team should have to work in the same conditions as the team itself. I find it distasteful when the team members are crammed into cubicles or just open desks in some sort of bullpen while the manager has a spacious private office and becomes disconnected from the conditions that the rest of the workers experience.
If you feel the need to delineate different power levels in the company with different working spaces, that's fine, but it needs to be done intelligently. Let executives who only work with other executives have their own offices. If you must put the workers in an open bullpen, though, then their immediate manager should be a part of it as well.
We should have someone like Ben Horowitz who has been a line manager of engineers, CEO of a large company that cranks out code - both the pure "New technology" type code, as well as the "Lots of framework code" type engineering, comment on this. But, from memory, I think he said something like this:
"Engineering productivity, counterintuitively, appears to increase as you move them out of private offices into contact with one another, both through cross-pollination of different ideas, as well as the energy inherent in working in a team environment. This graph of productivity, though, does have a maxima as density increases, until it begins to once again decrease as the distractions become a dominating effect. With that said, not all engineers are alike, and there are some individuals that are far more effective in a quiet room, than those who benefit from the open office layout. The efficient engineering organization should make opportunities for both types of engineers to excel."
I am in agreement here with that - there are benefits to both types of spaces. I am surprised there are not more companies willing to just let people pick their workspace smartly, whether it is a private office or open office.
Generally software developers at any level are treated as the lowest level of person at companies, even when the company specializes in software. As a result, they are packed in wherever they fit.
The theory seems that developers benefit from feeling like a frathouse of some sort, where they play in most of their area, but otherwise cram together to study for a bit, so that they can go back to goofing off afterwards.
Developers are not treated as professionals. They are treated as animals; herded together to make them work, but otherwise just giving them big grassy fields.
My first reaction was that this was a bit over the top, but... on reflection, not really. Fog Creek's setup looks nice, but outside of that, I've rarely seen any company treat their developers like they treat their marketing folks, legal, financial and other areas. Financial/accountants aren't generally expected to sit in an open room with 15 other people with foosball games going on in their line of site.
Should we encourage "pair accounting" and have accountants share a laptop screen to get their work done?
There's an element of mentoring and support that can go on in those open environments - adhoc help, etc - but that seems to be partially a cover for the fact that many people aren't all that good at what they do, and the better people need to help train (sorry, "lead") the less experienced folk.
My own experience in open plans, beyond the general noise, is that it's harder for people to admit they have a question, because it's visible to an entire group. Likewise, it's harder to call someone out for not pulling their weight in an open plan setting, without calling more attention to the interaction.
"private by default" seems to work well for OO developers, just not when it comes to their office space.
Well usually the ratio is something like 1 finance|accounting|hr|legal:50 general employees at a company after a certain size. The 8 people in accounting/finance/hr for a 250 person company has a closed office mostly because of the frequently sensitive conversations and the need to file papers that need to be locked but accessed frequently?
Other departments like marketing that don't have a team office nearly as much.
> Fog Creek's setup looks nice, but outside of that, I've rarely seen any company treat their developers like they treat their marketing folks, legal, financial and other areas.
I think a big distinguishing factor here is whether software is the company's primary product or not. At Adobe back in the days it was being run by (founder) John Warnock, there was very much an attitude that the developers were the company's bread and butter, and they were treated well. Junior developers often had private offices to themselves. Same went for Microsoft back then.
Most other types of companies see software developers as overhead and treat them accordingly.
Sure, but rilita's original claim was "at companies", not at job sites. Your sense of indignation is a bit unwarranted given how loosely you're reading the post.
What makes you think from an organizational perspective that there is a difference between them? It is far more likely that the engineers are viewed as having similar fungibility as the janitors than management is viewed as having similar fungibility (for example).
What I'm saying is that developers typically don't have their own hierarchy. Sometimes there is a "lead developer", but usually there is a non technical person over top a group of developers, and that person is given an office and more respect.
It has been shown time and again that open floor plans actually harm developer productivity more than they help it. Imo the most reasonable mid ground is giving developers larger cubes big enough to allow pair programming when desired. High cube walls are necessary also so that conversations within a cube don't make it impossible for nearby desks to concentrate.
I agree that it enhances creativity, so it may be a match for a gaming company, especially when the game itself is targeted at a college demographic, but I don't think it is good for developing corporate systems.
In this sense, it may be the best fit for places such as twitter and facebook... their target demographic is not business people.
For myself, I think all software should be made in the most professional way possible, and I don't think goofing around is conducive to that.
That said, there is a large push to draw in lots of new junior level developers to get stuff done, and a belief that you don't need more than 1 or 2 engineers with 5 years of experience. My objection is that skilled engineers with 5+ years of experience continue to get treated the same way even as they mature and become able to be leaders.
I don't know if I agree. At the companies I've been in developers are treated like gods. Sure, we've been sitting in open office plans but so has the management.
I've worked at 3 companies and it's never been like this. If anything I've noticed developers are afforded more freedom, flexibility, and respect. I really have no idea what you're talking about.
it's a bit of a feeding cycle. When you're not treated as one, and it's not expected, you don't act like one. When there's a group, if they all want to act non-professionally, the one person who wants to is overruled or ostracized because they don't "fit in".
I used to work at Epic (the Health IT company), which is known for its interesting office design and giving its staff individual offices [1]. Now that I've been working for startups, I've worked in more bullpen-type offices.
A few things:
1) Having my own office did not mean that there weren't distractions. It's impractical to build sound-proof walls between offices and the guy across from me loved to try to sing opera for hours a day. I eventually moved offices to another part of campus for that reason.
2) Likewise, I've worked in open offices that were pretty monastic. Engineers are quiet, everyone is wired in and most people talk on Slack/HipChat. The only interruption was when the mailman would drop off the daily mail.
3) I think the worst thing about open offices are the logistics of staff that need to take phone calls. As a customer-facing programmer that does sales support and configuration assistance it's sub-optimal not having a dedicated space for phone calls. When the perfect storm arises of too many people needing to take calls, everything flies into anarchy where I'm forced to take a call in a common space and try to be quiet. A bullpen that has some separation and accommodation for those needs is ok. A bullpen that doesn't have that is not.
Those office all look nice - until you get to the place where work actually takes place. I don't care if the foosball table is in a nice room or if the kitchen is fancy. I spend 95% of my time at my desk. Focus some energy on making that area bearable.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 268 ms ] threadWe designed a ton of cubbies (like in your university library), 1 person private rooms, 2 person conference rooms, etc. in our office to accommodate for the fact that many people need to more privacy and quiet than just headphones. We also break up the main open plans to help quiet the noise and distraction.
We have about 45,000 sq. ft today, and will be adding another 45,000 sq. ft this year. When we do, there will be much less open floor plan. I do think there's a happy medium, with team rooms of 6 to 15 people, depending on role and requirements.
Efficient for what or who, I wonder?
What I generally see is I find out more about my co-workers lives and their interests than the increase in productivity and innovation from the team.
I fully accept that there are confounding variables. But, I can't help but also accept that open plans are not the doomsday device that they are often painted as. They are yet another of the many variables that go into how a company is running.
I don't buy it.
They pay these people minimum $60K/year (likely closer to $85K+), there's no way they would intentionally reduce an $85K * 20 worker's productivity to save 10K on furniture like you're suggesting. Even with only a 1% productivity loss that's still 17K/year down the toilet for the team.
No, the real reason people do the open plan thing is that they believe that it improves worker productivity. People are better able to "collaborate" and cannot browse non-work related things (like HK) as easily. Essentially it is another "lines of code"-style management technique that is trendy at the moment.
The funny thing about MBAs are that they aren't scientists and the "facts" they study aren't science. The entire thing is a "circlejerk" of things that sound like they would be constructive but rarely stopping to actually test their assumptions (instead depending on anecdotes like singular "success stories").
Nobody has tested open plan Vs. closed plan. But then how would you do that anyway? How do you measure productivity, lines of code? So that's the rub. People believe, with little basis, that open plan helps but you cannot disprove it for the same reason they cannot prove it.
I absolutely agree. Team rooms seem to be the optimal. The room gets to set the rules. It's amazing how different team cultures grow, develop and optimize for the team composition and the work they're doing.
Provide a few quiet ultra-concentration nodes that people can reserve and use and conference rooms for inter-team coordinating and you're set.
You get the benefits of quick communication and collaboration, without the downsides of other people's/group's conversations disrupting what you're working on AND the ability to comfortably complain that your teammate is being disruptive...which is socially harder to do with strangers/people in other parts of the company.
If your rule is "put headphones on if you want privacy" you're doing it wrong. If you need to have "flow time" in the afternoon because the warehouse you've stuffed your people into is too noisy to get any real work done (so you have to schedule time to actually concentrate) you're doing it wrong.
Some places even go so far as having re-configurable team rooms, they can change size and shape to accommodate growing and shrinking teams without too much fuss.
Someone pointed out you do get to know your coworkers better, but I'd argue you just get to know them better, faster.
Cornell did a study that showed that people interact less when they have offices. Their definition of "frequent interaction" dropped from several times a day ad hoc (with open plan) to several times a week in a meeting. That's some data supporting that it does in fact improve collaboration.
Archive.org is down right now but I can supply a link to the study later if you want.
Utterly impossible to concentrate on things w/out headphones.
The thing is, these people are doing irreversible damage to their hearing. Listening to headphones at a volume that will drown out conversation is not a good thing.
Furthermore, I've never experienced as many migraines as I have before switching to an open office. I have to keep pills at my desk. Never had to do that before.
I've had my own office, been in cubicles, and currently work in an open office. I would detest getting trapped in a stuffy, carpet-walled cubicle again, and kind of disliked how isolated the office makes you.
I'm also a little clueless about all the disruptions that everyone is talking about - I think the team I work with now probably has some kind of has an unspoken rule to keep disruptions to a minimum. It's mostly heads down working all day, and when disruptions happen, I usually enjoy them because it's usually the break I need to get out of a mental tunnel.
"We have our own indoor artisanal cheese maker! ... but our actual workspace looks like it was cobbled together after a day of frantic Costco purchases." How about sparing the free Sun Chips and putting some walls in, eh?
On the other hand, Gannett attempted a setup like this, except it was out of cheapness (they wanted to lease office space in their Tysons HQ) and was carried out mindlessly. They mixed developers with technical support, managers, etc. thoughtlessly. And they installed "white noise" machines which made matters worse. Working in that place was almost impossible and I quit after a month.
You don't become WalMart/Facebook/Twitter by treating your employees well. You become big and profitable by cutting as many corners as you can and keeping revenue up. Publicly traded companies generally get into this-quarter frenzy that never leaves and kills any sort of long term viability as being a company of and for people.
Then why would they be spending millions of dollars on the office perks and architecture? You're contradicting yourself, they're obviously spending a huge amount of money on the office.
Today's tech company employees are some of the most pampered in history. The list of perks Facebook and Twitter offer is huge (http://www.glassdoor.com/Benefits/Facebook-US-Benefits-EI_IE...). Comparing them to WalMart is ridiculous.
If you are a coder, an engineer, or an architect, then open office is painful.
If you are a manager, then open office is embarrassing.
- Spend half of your day in conference rooms;
- Stop giving a single fuck about the privacy, and 'excel in transparency' (or whatever corporate bullshit is applicable).
But also, if there's a manager in the middle of the bullpen, people tend to clam up. I experienced this. Managers can have a very hard time handling the typical heated and frank discussions that can arise among engineers. At one time, we had the project manager in our cube maze along with the engineers. If he sensed that two engineers disagreed with one another, or that they were discussing a problem, he would step in to manage it. The obvious outcome was that the engineers found another place to hold our discussions.
You keep using that word. I don't think you know what it means.
(Coming from a contract 'devop')
There is no such thing. Either you code, and your code helps a company's devops requirements. Or you're in ops because you can't code. I need to collaborate less than devs do. My clients know for a fact that most of my work is done more productively at home in the quiet. Yes we need to talk, plan, work with others (sometimes) but who doesn't?
Yes, this is the only reason why people become system administrators.
Basically what you get is developers' innate tendencies towards laziness and over-automation yield really good ops solutions.
Where your typical sysadmin will be perfectly comfortable running a hodgepodge of shell scripts and byzantine commands through the terminal every time he wants a server push, your typical developer just wants the fucking code up on the server so he can get back to work he finds less objectionable.
This is absolutely how you want to approach ops. Just get the shit running with as little human interaction as possible.
> Gobs of well-lit perimeter offices. Every developer, tester, and program manager is in a private office; all except two have direct windows to the outside (the two that don't get plenty of daylight through two glass walls).
The longer I spend in this environment (coming up to five years) the less I like it. I like the idea of having large, interesting open spaces for more social activities including work, but most of the work I do lends itself well to being not surrounded by people having conversations or - in some cases - literally just messing around all day.
There's gotta be a balance.
At any rate, I'm so over the open floor plan/cubicle mazes. I get really distracted by the doppler effect that conversations (sometimes LOUD conversations) that pass by my cubicle, have. Perhaps I'm just a curmudgeon, but I much prefer the solitude that an office with a door provides.
I do have modestly nice passively acoustically isolated headphones and frequently use them, but I do that anyhow, not because I'm trying to dodge noise, and I can go hours without them just fine, usually putting them on because I want music, not isolation.
I find myself wondering what percentage of open office complaints come from A: people who are simply psychologically unsuited to them under any circumstances B: people whose open office experiences involved tile floors, warehouse ceilings, and glass walls, which would be a completely different acoustic experience and C: people who haven't actually spent any time in a decent one and are just assuming they'd hate it. No sarcasm. For that matter the studies that keep asserting how bad they I find myself wondering about A and B... certainly you can construct an open space that does suck, but that doesn't mean they all do, and I've never dug into one enough to see what they specify as the "open space".
And to be clear, I'm not asserting that they're obviously better and everybody should love them (and let me reiterate I completely believe in the existence of a set of people who will never like them), but my experience just doesn't seem to bear out the "they suck and can never work and why on Earth would any company ever put them in" attitude... at most it seems like they might be slightly worse on average but it may be below the noise threshold, and it would be the incredibly-perfectly well-run company for whom this would be their biggest problem.
Worse yet, you have to be a pretty high level manager to make the middle managers do this, because some of them like the noise, or being able to get status any time, etc.
And then if you can STILL hear them clearly, put in earplugs under the headphones and crank up the volume.
I don't mean to be argumentative, you are just trying to solve the problem that I am in. I've done the headphone thing, they are noise cancelling, I listen to SimplyRain on them, and that helps, but I just can't take all that input. I want quiet. I need quiet. I don't want distraction that is slightly less annoying than the current distraction, at the risk of my health besides.
But yes, your suggestions are really good for the people it can work for.
I truly despise the flow of bland music that I have no control over, and the ongoing chatting/arguing that passes for radio entertainment. It's like listening to other people's pointless conversations.
I sometimes put headphones on but incessantly bombarding my ears with noise just to cancel out other noise is like spraying deodorant on excrement - pointless. It also means I'll suffer gradual hearing loss
I sometimes wonder if people don't understand that we need time to solve problems and problem solving is best done in quiet! The other guys in this office do not write software so I sometimes wonder if people don't "get" it.
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.708933,-74.006578,3a,75y,203...
Added: Max_Horstmann's put them at your left or right approach also works for me.
But the real issue is that they transmit basically all the sound. Fortunately there usually aren't conversations going on just outside people's offices, but if two people are talking while walking down the hall or the person in the next office is yelling at folks on hangout, it's not much quieter than a cubicle.
Polished concrete is beautiful and striking, of course, and at some point software development became a creative profession rather than an engineering one, and we stopped mocking people who put form over function.
Pretty interesting people working there, I see.
See also http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-06/lets-all-ju... (though it looks like the chap there forgot the unicorn head)
I must be in the wrong job haha
When you're a growing startup, having private offices costs you flexibility as well as cash because open plan is easier to reconfigure as you grow. If you're at the point where you're commissioning a Ghery, you're well past that excuse.
Hah. If only we had someone else to blame for that. We do that to ourselves. Programmers act like spoiled little kids when choosing which jobs to apply to or how to conduct their career, (look at all those juice bars! Never seen an accountant use that as a selection criteria.) are often completely unreasonable, (I want $100K salary right out of school, it better be $140K in a year or I'm jumping ship.) and consistently refuse to move to management. (you must pay me more and more money to drift further and further away from company priorities)
But programmers want their companies to indulge their lofty career ambitions while still being exactly as useful to the company. They want to be like doctors without taking their work half as seriously.
What lofty career ambitions? My productivity at work goes up at least 40-50% every year. I'm not expecting to capture even half of that.
Instead I'm just under $200k. Not bad by any means but I wouldn't call sub-10% annual raises as lofty career ambitions.
It is interesting the thought about moving to management - I often see that developers have to become project managers or managers of some sort as they get older.
My experience is that developers don't increase their value as fast as they increase their pay.
> (I want $100K salary right out of school, it better be $140K in a year or I'm jumping ship.)
Professionals get high pay. Software engineers get pay in this range, and it's bizarre to scoff at pay concerns when you are arguing that employees are unprofessional.
The employees might not give a damn about the juice bars once they get hired, but you better believe they're all sharing picture of Google's workplace and just glossing over their environment and culture and recruiting practices.
At Google, new grads get 120+k with their bonus, not including the ~62*$500 in stocks every year for 4 years or the ~$25k in signing/reloc bonuses. If a new grad gets offered that amount, why would they not want the same elsewhere?
Companies will constantly tell you that you are worth less because it isn't in their interests. Don't buy it.
I was at the offices of a large law firm in the City of London yesterday and only very senior partners had offices. They had a lot of very nice meeting rooms on separate client facing floors and 'working floors' with open plan offices where lawyers and paralegals did their work.
Even in Manhattan they typically just share with one other associate for 2-4 years.
> The longer I spend in this environment (coming up to five years) the less I like it
> I like the idea of having large, interesting open spaces for more social activities including work, but most of the work I do lends itself well to being not surrounded by people having conversations
This is confusing.. Are you saying you do like Fog Creek's setup, or you don't?
For the last five years he has been in an environment with private offices. Initially he liked the private offices, over the years he's liked them less and less. Now he likes the idea of large, interesting open spaces more than private offices.
(Audio distraction causes trouble in conversation for me, and visual distraction disrupts any kind of concentration. I might actually prefer a tall cubicle to this setup, not to endorse the cubicle.)
Just turn your back to the glass, or use an Oculus Rift.
The feeling of being watched over your shoulder isn't something I'd dismiss either, though it's not a work-ruiner by itself for me. If you're actively anti-privacy, stop calling them private offices.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/atlassian/sets/721576316725737...
Guess who's winning the bug tracking market share
That said, I'm amazed by the size of the offices etc. from just bug tracking software. Does everyone not just use Trac or Bugzilla or something?
“But I just couldn't stop thinking about one thing: the AT&T offices were dingy and dark, in some kind of a stone age office that smelled of 1930s bureaucracy. People were starting to look like mushrooms. There were torn Dilbert cartoons all over the cubicles. (Warning sign number one.) The furniture was falling apart. It was just nasty. But Viacom was in a nice, shiny, modern, bright office building that felt like lawyers' offices. It was clean and new and pleasant. I know I should have been thinking about something more substantial as I made my decision, but I just could not get over how unpleasant it would be to spend my days working in the AT&T dungeon.”
— Joel Spolsky, Whaddaya Mean, You Can't Find Programmers?, June 2000
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000050.html
I personally work better in an open office environment. I work off the energy of others and it allows me to focus more than being alone in an office.
While I understand if people legitimately don't like an open office environment, this type of article seems like it is just trying to put down these companies with little knowledge about how loud it really is in these offices.
And if you don't like the environment at Facebook/Google/Twitter/etc, just move to another company. Let's not pretend that it is hard to get another job with one of those companies on your resume.
My ideal environment is the team I'm working on in one big room, the music going, everyone jamming on the project together. Getting shit done. That's probably what Zuckerberg et al remember from when they started the company, and that's why they want to recreate it for 3,000 people.
Unfortunately, once you have more than 1 team in the room, it breaks down. You just shipped something awesome and want to shout about it? The other team gives you dirty looks and want you to just STFU because they're 3 days from shipping and in total crunch mode. Some people just like quiet all the time, they'll give you a dirty look when you get noisy.
Thus the big rooms of people end up being completely silent, it's the only way to make it work. They are terrible for collaboration. The only conversations happen in conference rooms, otherwise you disturb 100+ people.
In my mind small rooms, holding 4-10 people, are ideal. Each team gets a room. If the team likes it quiet, it will be quiet. If you want to bounce ideas around, you can do it without feeling like you are disturbing other teams. If you want to play music, you can play music. I think it's the feeling that the open plan offices are going for, but people haven't connected the productivity of open plan office with the actual size of the open room yet.
This sounds a bit like your idea, though a few more people.
To me it reminds me of one of those victorian prisons where every inch can be viewed from the central platform. Now that I think about it, even prisoners get a lot more privacy than this.
I always passed this one guy who had a separate monitor to watch some kind of anime. Another seemed to always have Netflix on. During the World Cup this summer, so many people had a window/monitor watching the games.
The culture was very much this: get your work done? cool. do whatever you need to continue getting your work done.
I have stints like this, particularly when working on a hard problem. One person typing with others brain storming is a great way to push through hard problems.
For a lot of us coding is a very solitary endeavor, but it doesn't have to be.
At my office, the "Dev Room" has 10 engineers in the same room, as well as open desks for anyone else to join us. The rest of the office has rooms with 1-3 people working in them, but we requested to take this large room. Whenever anyone from the rest of the office walks into the dev room, they always have to remark "Wow, it's so silent in here." And it's true, it's a different world once you walk in here. We even have our own conference room only accessible through this room.
But because everyone here are friends, it's easy for us to ask questions, have fun, play around. Right now as I type this, two developers are drawing Chinese characters and playing with the new Google Translate app. The rest of us have headphones on. It's on you to ignore distractions and get your work done, but everyone does, and everyone helps each other and laughs while doing it.
All in all, though, maybe it's my floor that is very quiet but there's not much distraction or annoying background noise as most people are busy working. When they are not working, they go somewhere else (the pub, the relax rooms, etc etc). If they want to have a work-related conversation that lasts more than 5-10 minutes, we have open areas with whiteboards separated from the desk area, or we have separate conference rooms you can use. Most of the time, I enjoy taking my headphones off and listening to a couple of coworkers making remarks on stuff (either work or non-work related), it helps me relieve stress and boredom much more than just staring at a wall or reading some articles online.
Ironically, the major source of annoyance in our floor recently has been the old AC system that sometimes starts making very loud noises and bothers everybody, but this is not the fault of the openspace office so it doesn't count :)
But after I acquired more knowledge it became more stressing, because everyone was asking me stuff all the time. Also I had to listen to all the communication that was going on around me.
Headphones are but a crutch and a bad one too, since all I want is silence when working and no music or anything...
Have you tried pointing that out to your coworkers? I've had plenty of cases where asking a question gave me a "Sure, here's how you do it. But the next time, be aware you can do X and Y instead." and that taught me to look up stuff first before asking silly questions. I just don't feel like this is a problem related to openspace offices.
I can't remember how often I "fixed" something by telling the people they have to empty their browser cache or that they aren't in the right directory...
Regarding getting asked all the time by other people, I would think that is more of an organization problem. Nothing stops me from pinging coworkers on irc or any other IM program for help or actually going to their office in person. As an advantage to openspace office, I can just raise my head, look at my coworker and ask "hey, do you have a second?". More often than not I get a "sure, give me a few minutes" if they are busy or they can just lean over or walk to my desk without wasting too much time. And if it's a more serious issue it's "Shall we move to a more private place?".
I honestly don't see a problem, nobody stops you from telling your coworkers to check the documentation regarding their question (if there is one, is it a common question? Maybe you should write something up since you are more knowledgeable on the matter and don't like being interrupted about it). But yeah, this is probably because I'm just an intern and I don't have experience on the matter, but I enjoy working like this.
I would say the benefits of getting your work done vs having complete and entire silence are not so easy to summarize. A lot of people in this thread seem to assume that an open space office is super noisy full of people talking where in my (very limited, I admit) experience there's hardly any noise other than the sound of people hammering on keyboards (and the AC). There are occasional conversations but those last a few seconds because, as I already said, if they were longer, people would move out of the way.
Maybe it depends on the company, people and office.
I hate the noise level here. I haven't yet worked up the courage to expense a good pair of noise canceling headphones, but it may come to that.
Polite requests to take it away are met with "Oh, she's usually not like this, I don't know what's wrong, I'm sure she'll be quiet now..." And nobody wants to be "that guy" by telling the owners to take their dog and GTFO. So the dogs end up staying.
I'm pretty sure I have my own mild hearing loss problem in my right ear from the near-constant headphone use I had to do in the last open-floor plan office I worked in. It's not just "things sound quiet". Everything sounds normal volume. It just sounds muddy and garbled if people are talking in lower registers.
Maybe I'm different, I'd like to be alone for a longer time at the office, I get the best work done when I'm working from home too.
I think that's the crux of the argument right here. I think most people who experienced both, myself included, will strongly disagree.
> it helps me relieve stress and boredom much more than just staring at a wall or reading some articles online.
Just staring at a wall? Come on, having a personal office door means you can open it and interact with other people when you so desire. Not when they so desire.
> we have small cubicle-like mini-rooms ... but nothing stops you from working in there with your laptop.
That seems like a waste of the monstrously powerful workstations with 30" monitors
http://robert.love.usesthis.com/
> Ironically, the major source of annoyance in our floor recently has been the old AC system
If you weren't working in the HVAC room, you wouldn't hear that noise in your office (or it would be muffled)
I used to think that programmers complaining about open office spaces were just nitpicking... then I learned how to program. Open offices are a reason for headphones at best and a nightmare at worst.
That having been said, I've worked in spaces where everyone had their own private office. It was great for productivity, but I felt like I never got to know anyone. All communication was forced, which caused a lot of annoying and unnecessary meetings.
I'm not sure what the answer is, but it's probably somewhere in the middle.
I'm also not against the "pod"-style cubes (4 or so people in a large cube), assuming the pods aren't cramped on top of one another.
I do not need a spacious office: a room with a door, a distinct lack of distracting windows, and a 4x6 desk and an overflow side table would be perfect. Closing a door means I can focus and block out traffic, noise and the general hubbub of an office.
I think they also like that everyone can look over everyone else's shoulder very easily, which creates peer pressure to work. In my experience, the maangers that advocate this are often the ones that are really spending all their time in special break-out rooms or conference rooms.
If you feel the need to delineate different power levels in the company with different working spaces, that's fine, but it needs to be done intelligently. Let executives who only work with other executives have their own offices. If you must put the workers in an open bullpen, though, then their immediate manager should be a part of it as well.
"Engineering productivity, counterintuitively, appears to increase as you move them out of private offices into contact with one another, both through cross-pollination of different ideas, as well as the energy inherent in working in a team environment. This graph of productivity, though, does have a maxima as density increases, until it begins to once again decrease as the distractions become a dominating effect. With that said, not all engineers are alike, and there are some individuals that are far more effective in a quiet room, than those who benefit from the open office layout. The efficient engineering organization should make opportunities for both types of engineers to excel."
The theory seems that developers benefit from feeling like a frathouse of some sort, where they play in most of their area, but otherwise cram together to study for a bit, so that they can go back to goofing off afterwards.
Developers are not treated as professionals. They are treated as animals; herded together to make them work, but otherwise just giving them big grassy fields.
Should we encourage "pair accounting" and have accountants share a laptop screen to get their work done?
There's an element of mentoring and support that can go on in those open environments - adhoc help, etc - but that seems to be partially a cover for the fact that many people aren't all that good at what they do, and the better people need to help train (sorry, "lead") the less experienced folk.
My own experience in open plans, beyond the general noise, is that it's harder for people to admit they have a question, because it's visible to an entire group. Likewise, it's harder to call someone out for not pulling their weight in an open plan setting, without calling more attention to the interaction.
"private by default" seems to work well for OO developers, just not when it comes to their office space.
Have you ever seen finance people work? That happens all of the time.
Are the certified professional accountants treated the same way?
Other departments like marketing that don't have a team office nearly as much.
http://www.examiner.com/article/pwc-deloitte-e-y-and-kpmg-bi...
I think a big distinguishing factor here is whether software is the company's primary product or not. At Adobe back in the days it was being run by (founder) John Warnock, there was very much an attitude that the developers were the company's bread and butter, and they were treated well. Junior developers often had private offices to themselves. Same went for Microsoft back then.
Most other types of companies see software developers as overhead and treat them accordingly.
It has been shown time and again that open floor plans actually harm developer productivity more than they help it. Imo the most reasonable mid ground is giving developers larger cubes big enough to allow pair programming when desired. High cube walls are necessary also so that conversations within a cube don't make it impossible for nearby desks to concentrate.
In this sense, it may be the best fit for places such as twitter and facebook... their target demographic is not business people.
For myself, I think all software should be made in the most professional way possible, and I don't think goofing around is conducive to that.
That said, there is a large push to draw in lots of new junior level developers to get stuff done, and a belief that you don't need more than 1 or 2 engineers with 5 years of experience. My objection is that skilled engineers with 5+ years of experience continue to get treated the same way even as they mature and become able to be leaders.
A few things:
1) Having my own office did not mean that there weren't distractions. It's impractical to build sound-proof walls between offices and the guy across from me loved to try to sing opera for hours a day. I eventually moved offices to another part of campus for that reason.
2) Likewise, I've worked in open offices that were pretty monastic. Engineers are quiet, everyone is wired in and most people talk on Slack/HipChat. The only interruption was when the mailman would drop off the daily mail.
3) I think the worst thing about open offices are the logistics of staff that need to take phone calls. As a customer-facing programmer that does sales support and configuration assistance it's sub-optimal not having a dedicated space for phone calls. When the perfect storm arises of too many people needing to take calls, everything flies into anarchy where I'm forced to take a call in a common space and try to be quiet. A bullpen that has some separation and accommodation for those needs is ok. A bullpen that doesn't have that is not.
[1] http://www.xconomy.com/wisconsin/2014/09/19/epic-hopes-wi-ca...