We need a job site that lists companies that provide your own office. I would only apply there.

That's why we have them... we literally can't afford to give everyone (or anyone for that matter) a private office.

When my company moved to open offices we were straight out told that we were doing this so that more people could be squeezed in.

I worked for a "start-up" (if you can call a 15-year old company that was bought by a VC company a start-up) where the CEO was CONVINCED that open offices were the best thing ever. He made our content people write articles about how great they were and how much better they made our company than other companies in our field. One of our content people was like "this is the worst assignment ever, because it is literally impossible to find research that says open offices make you more productive."

To top that off, he used to talk to people across the office using a megaphone. I was over 100 feet away from him, and people I was on the phone with would ask me what was going on, "Is everything all right over there? Is somebody swearing?"

"Yeah, uh, that's just our CEO."

I don't work there anymore.

My productivity fell off a cliff at my new job when I got promoted and moved to a "nicer" desk. The desk probably has three times as much area as my old desk, but my old desk was in the back corner of an office that was split in half with a partition. I could work for hours without being interrupted. Now I'm in a cubicle right by a door, and I'm interrupted several times per hour. I think open offices just feel more productive -- more than one coworker has mentioned how great it is that they can drop by now without feeling like they are interrupting me.

The efficiency gain with open offices is that, for high-growth companies -- or ones that are uncertain about their long-term size, it's pretty easy to shuffle furniture around to squeeze in more people. When walls and doors get involved, you're committing to "each person gets X sq. ft", for a company that may grow from x to 2x employees.

That said, they're a disaster for productivity.

They remind me of new York offices, like law offices with rows of paralegal looking through documents spread on endless tables.

It's something that was a financial necessity in expensive real estate, like Manhattan, FinDi in SF, etc. and someone got the idea to transplant that into suburban offices.

To add, I think it makes sense for a lean startup or a company going through a rough reorg, but once you're mature or overcome financial difficulties, it's not necessarily a good permanent layout.

> Open offices are horrible for productivity imo.

Individual productivity or team productivity? If you are optimizing for individual productivity - you could be hitting a local maxima...

I do say the above in half-jest: I would love to see any research done in this area. When I was a new joiner, it was convenient to swivel around/walk across the room and talk to someone. Sure, it sucks now that I'm an old hand and noobs keep taking me out of the zone. In addition, it is sometimes beneficial to listen in on ambient conversations (while waiting for compilation or taking a break), sometimes I even chip in when I have a contribution (roughly once a month). I'd like to think this saves my colleagues time. However, I work in a medium sized room (which houses 18 desks), so YMMV.

I agree with you here. I also believe that a lot of the current design trends in new spaces these days has this same origin. Light bulbs hanging by a cord, reclaimed wood walls and ceilings, keeping raw pipes, wires exposed etc. It does look kind of cool, but the genesis was small businesses and spaces just trying to save money.

I tend to agree. I think the whole part about "the absence of cubicles will foster creativity and productivity" was just spin used after the fact to justify this choice.

The other reason I think they are used is that they are cheap to reconfigure, you can usually shove more desks in to accommodate more head count and move groups around in order to try to reclaim the ever-shrinking space.

I have worked at startup where my group was moved every few months for some reason. Often times the layout seems to lack any alignment with job requirements.

For instances developers being place right next to marketing folks who spend a lot of time talking on the phone because that's what their job entails.

This makes sense in context of the article. The article states Facebook pays 40-50% more. They've converted (some of) the savings from open office planning to higher salaries for their hires, making the company more attractive for job seekers.

You'd be surprised at how many pragmatic decisions get spun as "sexy" for the world of business halfwits

> Cubicles were used to be associated with boring, slow bureaucratic offices.

Honestly, I'd rather work in a "boring, slow bureaucratic office" than at some hip modern startup. The "boring, slow bureaucratic office" probably takes better care of their employees and offers a less-stressful work environment.

It also keeps people working longer than maybe they want to. I've heard from several folks in one of our more open areas (15-20 people) that it's awkward to leave at the usual end of shift time because they have to walk across a room filled with people still grinding away.

The philosopher Michel Foucault actually cites the Panopticon alongside school, military, papal, and other work power structures as being efficient in human discipline.

It arguably worked well for prison power structure too with regards to rehabilitation, until gang infiltration in the late 1960's changed the power status quo.

Cafes offer an odd sort of privacy since none of the conversations mean anything to you - effectively white noise - so they're easy to filter out. In an open office, every conversation may apply to you at any point during the conversation, requiring conscious effort to monitor and filter the conversation.

Libraries and study areas are more representative of what people need to concentrate.

I expect the cafe is more akin to white noise, not the sort of conversations you'd hear in a dev open office. Sometimes when you overhear some devs talking you can't help get sucked into the conversation. Especially when they are wrong.

Because nobody is tapping you on the shoulder every 10 minutes asking "did you get the email I just sent out?". You also don't see long multi-person meetings in coffee shops (well, actually it does happen, and that's just as annoying).

If you could train coworkers to respect the explicit and implicit signals that people give off when working and concentrating on something and use some fucking etiquette like keeping the shouting to a minimum or taking long conversations elsewhere, this wouldn't be a problem.

I too loathe the disruptiveness of my employer's open office plan, but have found I can easily focus in a cafe. In part, I suspect this stems from mentally being able to classify cafe conversations as "ignorable noise of strangers", whereas in the office, any conversation I hear both comes from a familiar voice and is likely related to the work at hand. Some portion of my mind inevitably tunes-in to these cues.

I read this sentiment often in these discussions. It isn't true for me, however. I can't not pay attention to conversations or noises around me. Sometimes I can't even focus on someone talking directly to me in those kind of environments.

Someone told me Cafes are for Output Works, Not Input Works.

I actually find most open office environments to be better than cafes. Cafes tend to be very loud, have lots of movement, and I get distracted by people slurping their coffee, munching on food, etc. I've also noticed people at cafes who talk on the phone talk much louder than I've experienced people talking on the phone in open offices.

I much prefer the library setting where you're expected to be quiet and there is little movement around you.

(nit: "full gamut" is the phrase)

I worked for a company which had one office for every two employees, with a total number of employees around 1,500. It wasn't that hard; it was still a campus, it just took an extra building to house everyone.

So many open office plans leave enough floor space for walls and hallways; they just don't put them in place.

> What are the alternatives to open offices for companies with hundreds or thousands of developers? Do you have offices with dozens of people split up by team?

Offices. Team Rooms. Decent cubicles.

Microsoft has offices for developers. Even they are somewhat jumping on the Open Office bandwagon (or team rooms).

Amazon generally has team aisles with 7 (iirc) foot walls between teams which blocked out most conversations from neighbouring teams and desks placed against 4-5 foot walls breaking up the aisle into sections. Each aisle had a window at the far end from the hallway and meeting rooms, bathrooms, office supplies, etc. were in the middle of the floor.

A much nicer setup IMO than Google which had a fairly haphazard cube farm resulting in distance from a window being basically luck of the draw.