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Comment by LoSboccacc | Hacker News Reader

Many large company will do but the large brunt of codetariat working for cash strapped business living and dying according to investors and customers will be keept in the open spaces: they looks cool in photos, convey a reassuring sense of "working bees" and sells well to visiting customers, so I fear the open plan it's here to stay.

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HR is driven by data. To kill open floor plans, start citing the floor plan as the primary reason for leaving. If that becomes a theme, IMO open floor plans will become cancer. It just takes time.

That violates rule number one of dealing with HR: Don't talk to HR.

It doesn't matter how innocuous the comment is. It can come back to bite you. Example:

You: "I don't like open floor plans."

HR: "Add a note to his file that he's anti-social. If he ever comes back here it'll be recorded already."

Yeah, I've got one of those "non-regretted depature" notes on my record at Google. So what? Google lost out, not me.

Jobs aren't scarce, but talent is. I've never gone for want of employment and Google blind-allocated me into a boring gig I hated. And yes, I'm very anti-social when I'm coding. I wouldn't want to work for a company that considered that a negative trait.

non-regretted departure?

Is that something like "Quit my job at Google, middle fingers in the air," or what?

Disagreed (reasonably politely but persistently with lots of data) with upper management about what became a key technology to Google a year after I left. Got told to shut up about that technology or leave. Chose the latter and made a successful career out of being an expert in that technology. Found out later through my contacts that HR slammed the door behind me.

Yeah, but by then you, and all the others, have already left. Plus, the costs of a re-remodel can be quite persuasive. Time is on the side of the folks who made the original decision to commit to the open floorplan concept in the first place.

Growing companies are adding new space all the time. That's when to schedule a transition like this.

If talent has to quit to get HR to grok anything, the cancer in the company is HR. And good luck citing that as the reason for quitting, and good luck expecting HR to grant permission for your manager to give you a good recommendation.

>HR is driven by data.

This is not my experience.

Maybe you've worked with better companies than I have.

I would agree.

HR is driven by perceptions

I would argue that HR is largely driven by legal obligation.

I find it's best to work as though HR is driven by one thing: their mission is to protect the company from adverse employee action. They are agents of the company, not of employees, and it's best to assume they view employees almost as adversaries. Not necessarily enemies, per see, but definitely not 100% aligned with the best interests of the company.

That is the crux of the issue, isn't it? Actual productivity does not matter that much on a grand scale, the perceived productivity and therefore sales is what matters.

I think we can have our cake and eat it too. The all-glass office style at We Work could be adopted. I wish the glass was a bit thicker but the small shared office or bullpen model is ideal IMO.

I am currently working from a WeWork location and can provide a data point, that all-glass offices are terrible with soundproofing. The other downside of having glass partitions is that you could see what your neighbours were doing (and vice versa), which in my opinion is no different from visual pollution.

Yea, I tried weWork to see if my employees would like it. In one of the meeting rooms a neighbor came over and warned us not to talk about any confidential information since everyone in their office could hear us. We sell B2, in a regulated industry. Leaky sound is a deal breaker.

So, we're in a suburb now, $/sqft is less, 2 devs in a quiet room, 2 sales in a different room.

I will not get open plan for my team. 2 persons per 144sqft office seems a good fit to me

I am also at a WeWork location, but I find that the noise outside of our room is hardly noticed. That being said, I agree about the clear glass, I wish more of the glass was frosted.

A lot of engineers discount the impact of visibility and focus too much on the sound distractions. I think visibility is just important. It's all part of a violent transparency theme I think is captured pretty well here: https://web.archive.org/web/20150321053931/https://michaeloc... Even if you don't suffer from more-than-normal anxiety over it to the point of panic attacks, all the studies on normal people show open plans aren't great.

Personally, I hated my experience in the glass-door offices of WeWork. The cheaper communal areas they had were vastly more productive and everyone was was respectful of it being a public space for everyone to work (for the most part).

The actual offices on the other hand, had almost no sound deadening between them, the hallways way too narrow and it was all-party, all-the-time. People from other companies getting absolutely smashed on keg beer starting at noon was a daily problem. At the one building I went to that had entire floors of conference rooms, you could hear everything from 3 conference rooms over, making phone calls impossible.

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