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Comment by ritchiea | Hacker News Reader

I will never understand why this is such a point of contention on HN and why it isn't accepted that some people legitimately prefer open office plans while others prefer quiet. And even more practical and intelligent would be to offer different kinds of spaces so that people can choose where to work based on a particular mood. But instead we just get weekly complaints about open offices.

I'm probably more productive in a quiet private office space but is the point of my work solely to be most productive in the role I have right now? I organically absorb more information about the company working in an open office. That information can have a valuable impact on my work. I end up organically sharing ideas with my co-workers more often in an open office. And in terms of long term happiness I don't want to spend every moment of every day alone coding. There's a balance to be struck.

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Probably because people do not get to choose. The end result can have awful consequences for many people in various aspects of their life that should not be affected by their work environment, the most benign of which is demoralization.

There are plenty of people here who are the ones who make the choice for others. If you're a late hire into an established startup or company, there are many things that you don't get to choose.

Yep. Its also asymmetric- people who like open plans can be 100% productive in an office, but that doesn't apply the other way around. Also, IME the biggest proponents of open plans among engineers tend to be people who WANT to pester their coworkers all the time (either because they get bored and want to chat all the time, or because they have a hair trigger for asking other people for help rather than just looking stuff up in documentation).

In my case, "organic information about the company" is off-topic and of negative value to actual performance of my duties. In my experience, most companies are that way - all the gnosis is just just-so stories about how people think things work. It's exactly Moneyball.

I spend more time debunking that with them in real time than I really have to spare. In very nearly every case, what this is is a set of myths that people use to "move up the organization." The problem is - it only works very rarely.

I would be just fine with a dedicated 2-hour socializing interval per week. Don't get me wrong, I can stand and BS all day with the best of 'em. The problem is that it's fundamentally venal and I lose respect for my cow-orkers that way.

"But you sound like an a.....e." Perhaps, but I'm still doing this 32 years later and all the people who played politics who are my age are either burned out or sold out. Which, selling out is really the point of the corporate exercise, but I like the work.

It's just boring. It's boring watching people trying to outshine each other. The people who are REALLY GOOD don't really even have to try - they have to have discipline and make their version of the thing work, but competition really isn't about exciting horse races that are a hair apart - really good people are just really good. The smart money is about letting the really good rise. But absolutely nobody likes that.

And frankly, if you're out of work, I'm out of there.

It's very difficult to find a place that isn't open office. Every single place I've interviewed and worked at has been open office or low wall cubicles which might as well be open office. The only places that I know of that have private offices for some engineers are joel spolsky companies, microsoft and apple.

So the people who prefer open offices already have a ton of choice. Those who don't have almost no choice.

You know what we need? Some kind of website that lists companies and tells what kind of office environment they have, so that we can proactively look for companies that have the office layout we prefer.

Glassdoor could easily add that.

> I will never understand why this is such a point of contention on HN

Because people keep trying to disguise penny-pinching stinginess as "collaboration" when it's proven time and time again that it doesn't work.

Its about having a choice. Open floors don't leave any choice for people who like to work quietly away from all noise. Not to mention some of us are little or a lot socially anxious which affects performance when there is lot of foot traffic.

In a place where primary place to work is office, still provides common areas where you can talk to your co-workers and have serendipitous conversations. People who seek social interaction find it anywhere, meetings, lunch etc.

Its about choice.

Has anyone tried "free choice"? My suspicion is that it won't irk brillantly because even the loudest open-plan advocates generally perceive private offices as higher-status.

Also, once people are in separate offfices you do need to think about information exchange slightly more actively (a good thing IMO -- but potentially a bit of a shift for the folks who find open plan, listen-in-on-everything to work well)

That's exactly right - the decision is made on status lines instead on practical consideration. And it's not the sort of "status" HN'ers prefer :)

Deliberate communication is, I have experienced, usually a whole lot higher quality than ad-hoc, informal "collaboration". Let people go away and think about it, do their homework, and come back with backed-up, researched, opinions.

Or, you know, you can just interrupt everybody for a useless bike-shedding session at the drop of a hat.

> Deliberate communication is, I have experienced, usually a whole lot higher quality than ad-hoc, informal "collaboration".

Definitely.

I would speculate that people who prefer open-plan are more likely to be adequately happy and productive in more traditional arrangements. So on balance having some degree of privacy and quiet should improve quality of life for the most employees (sadly open-plan layouts are cheaper and easier to shoehorn into various spaces, so they are increasingly common).

All the office or mixed office/high cube environments I've worked in were pretty open office environments. You wanted to talk to someone, you wandered over. Standard was open door to office unless there was some reason to close it. So, yeah, cost aside I'm not sure I buy more collaboration etc. with open plans.

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