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Comment by jesseryoung | Hacker News Reader

It seems like when "Open Office" articles come out there seem to be quite a few people talking ill of them. I recently switched jobs and with it switched from an open concept (large room with whiteboards separating teams) to an office (shared with one other coworker.) Maybe I was conditioned to like it (I certainly didn't like it at first) but I really did prefer the open concept when working on a team of 8 or 9 people. I never missed a conversation my team was having and if I ever needed anything all I needed to do was turn around. I guess I get the noise issues, but even in an office with my door open I can still hear conversations in the hallways so I still wear my noise canceling headphones.

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What was your role on the team?

Did your team-members enjoy you turning around and interrupting them?

Is it really that hard to get up and walk to another office so you don't disturb 8 other people with a question they don't care about? Walking around occasionally in the day is actually good for us.

And two person offices are a mild improvement over cubicles, which are a significant improvement over open offices. But neither is remotely as good as a one person office.

I was a team lead/solutions architect.

> Did your team-members enjoy you turning around and interrupting them?

I don't think it's fair to call all conversations "interruptions" and my co-workers were all very conscious of causing any unwanted interruptions.

> Is it really that hard to get up and walk to another office so you don't disturb 8 other people with a question they don't care about?

It wasn't, and I often did walk around as I regularly needed to interact with other teams. 99% of people had headphones on through all parts of the day.

As a side note, this workplace was comprised of mostly men and women under the age of 35 with quite a few right out of college. We regularly got comments from the interns that we hired that they chose to work their because of the open environment. Age may play a factor here I suppose.

You don't consider that your position of authority affected a different dynamic than if you were a lower ranked individual contributor?

> As a side note, this workplace was comprised of mostly men and women under the age of 35 with quite a few right out of college.

I'm not sure how this is relevant. One might as easily conclude that these folks don't know any better due to youth and inexperience as that "it's just a different age and culture."

I had this exact thing happen. I was consulting for a team that just acquired a small company. They had this huge building, but got most people into a large open area. The lead was certain it was so useful, he was tuned in, everyone loved it. Plus "they can go into offices if they need it". In personal interviews with employees, nearly everyone hated it and wished they could just permanently have an office and only come out at times, but didn't want to say anything.

You know, it's one thing when you're crammed in because getting an office means moving the whole company to a new building.

Must be quite frustrating to sit in a nearly empty building and have everyone sardined into one large room.

Sounds like you haven't been on the other side often enough. Most of a programmer's added value to a company happens in the 4 hours (give or take) that they are "zoned in" to what they're doing. As tech lead, when you knock them out of the zone early, you cost your company a lot of money because it's usually going to be a while before things ramp up again.

Lots (most?) of developers don't like having their focus interrupted. You assume because they are cordial that they were fine with the interruption. As their team lead and SA, they don't really have a choice.

As a side note, we're all idiots fresh out of college. We hear about things that seem good, but don't have the experience to make a proper value judgement. Lots of college kids have group study sessions and think they are great. The reality is that they are great for socializing, but generally terrible for studying. Open offices appeal for the same social reasons (with the same kind if issues). With no real life/work experience, its little wonder that this is preferred.

You made me think of something interesting. My 4 hours NEVER happens and I'm in a cube-farm/closed space. Interruptions happen all the damn time. Sure we don't like our focus interrupted, but that's what work is. It's dealing with the managers and leads that need to ask you something urgent while managing your deadlines and dealing with noise which is still very much present in a closed-office area unless you are the board members that get to work remote.

I have one cool little experience which was an open office that switched to a closed office space during my stay. Productivity went down regardless of the boundaries put in place because now the leads and managers have their offices closed for meetings and therefore engineering staff is next in line to handle emergencies/data requests. Granted this is due to our workflow as well, however the point I'm making isn't that one setup is always better than the other but that it probably depends on multiple things and if you think you're gonna get 4 hours of golden time in a real, moving business then that's very naive or you have been very lucky yourself.

I think the reason I liked open offices is because when I needed to rethink an algorithm and analyze it I had at least 3 people that could offer their commentary. And while study groups may not work for reading a book, they damn sure work on designing algorithms when you need to openly discuss the tradeoffs and goals. Just my 0.02 on the whole thing but TL;DR sounds like open offices don't work for some places, but work great for others.

EDIT: to add to this, the open office we had was not noisey. There weren't massive conversations happening all the time and it was normally just inside voice levels of noise. I haven't experienced what I am imagining as the restaurant equivalent of an office.

Sure we don't like our focus interrupted, but that's what work is. It's dealing with the managers and leads that need to ask you something urgent while managing your deadlines and dealing with noise which is still very much present in a closed-office area unless you are the board members that get to work remote.

It really isn't normal to be constantly interrupted. I'm a developer managing 2 other devs and dealing with stakeholders and still manage to go many hours without interruptions. It's all about respect and being organized. Most urgent things only become urgent because somebody dropped the ball. Improve the way people work and organize that work, and the urgencies go away. You do need to retrain some people a bit to be respectful of your time, but mostly it works out because mostly people mean to do right by each other.

Could just be the California style. Or finance. Don't really know any other office locales so this could be true.

> 99% of people had headphones on through all parts of the day.

Yes I've found that to be true as well. I myself typically wear expensive noise cancelling headphones all day and blast music, damaging my hearing, in order to drown out distractions. Fuck open offices.

Buy passive insulating headphones, they usually work better.

Unfortunately no headphones eliminate visual distractions.

We regularly got comments from the interns that we hired that they chose to work their because of the open environment.

It's unlikely that many of them had competing offers from a company that offered private offices, given how few companies actually offer private offices. Most likely they were just indoctrinated / brainwashed into drinking the Open Plan Koolaid and are just parroting a stock line.

This is why I actually like cubicles. you are physically close to your team, if your space is organized well you are on a common isle with people you work with, but you still have at least a little bit of isolation in your personal workspace.

I DO NOT understand why cubes get so much hate.

As someone with ADD (who immediately drops focus when someone walks by or when music has lyrics) cubicles are much better than most open office plans.

They just don't look as "cool" or "hip" as a long, open table.

I should add that we did not have long open tables. Each person had their own mobile sit/stand desk and mobile filing cabinet for personal belongings. There was quite a few people who positioned themselves facing a corner for that reason.

Possibly because having cubicles for each employee creates the expectation that each employee will stay at their cubicle. Walking up to a colleague's cubicle to chat about a work-related project can be misconstrued by an uninformed observer as "not working". This incentivizes employees to stay in their own cubicles.

That is the simplest way I can think of by which we might come to the usual "cubicle hell" scenario where workers are stuck from 9 to 5 in their cubicles while being occasionally nagged by management (as in Office Space).

Cubicles really are the best IMO too. They block off visual distractions, which is equally as important as minimizing noise.

I prefer cubes as long as they have 6ft walls or more. I once worked in a open plan where I had 12 sq ft of space. At least with carpet and walls you get some sound damping but can still ask hear what's going on if you need to.

Slight differences in cubes make a big difference to me. I was just moved to a cube where the only feasible setup is having my back to foot traffic and it drives me nuts.

Okay, I'll break it down for you:

Open office plans are soul crushing and noisy. They are not explicitly given to disorganization and distraction, but prone to it.

Cubicles are soul crushing and organized. They are not explicitly private, but prone to it.

Not all spaces are created equally. Most are bad, but some are appalling. If you find one that is "good" you probably don't work there. Give it time, and it will suck eventually. They all do. None of them are actually Home.

I find that if there are enough conversations in an open-plan office the conversations blend together and I can tune them out (similarly to a coffee shop). At the cube-farm I worked at there would often be exactly one conversation happening at a time making it difficult for me to focus on anything else.

So I find cubicles to be the worst of both worlds: not private enough to have quiet but not loud enough to tune everything out.

That is a culture issue. We are a remote heavy team. Like GitLab, we have made it a part of our company DNA to write everything down. It is just about the norms of the organization. Writing everything down takes disicpline, but pays off in the long run.

I'd be curious to see what people think of when they say "open office". The description from you and others of < 12 people in a common space doesn't fit my definition. The open offices I've experienced are ~100 people separated by rolling whiteboards at best.

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