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Comment by alaskamiller | Hacker News Reader

Silicon valley culture used to be that way, and is still that way. The cube farms was the prevailing best practice.

Then the pendulum swung to the other side with the new kids entering the workforce and wanted open office, work families, and all that. Which then created the cargo culting from others entering the process.

Now we're on the bubble of the pendulum swinging back.

So it goes.

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As a counterpoint I've met and managed people who preferred open office arrangements. Which only really only proves that generalizations are bad.

I agree also that we're likely at the full extension of the pendulum on the open office trend. The formal/informal observation for me is key, some people want work to be more like their college dorm. They are in fact "living" at work and eliminating any notion at all of a work/life balance. I expect, but can't predict, that this will change as they get older.

Counter-example to your expectation: as I've gotten older the separation of my work from the rest of life has been nearly eliminated. I run my own business, so I'm always on the clock. Or never on the clock, depending on how you look at it. At parties, I tell people I'm unemployed. My business is my hobby. It just happens to earn money.

So your savings or other passive income provide for your needs when you hobby happens to 'not' earn money? There are a lot of people in my circle of friends who have reached that point of not "needing" to work in the sense of putting food on the table or paying for things, but working on things they enjoy because they have things to do which are fun.

'unemployed' tends to get people who don't know you wondering if they should feel sorry for you or not, 'retired' seems to bring up images of rocking on the deck chair and playing golf during the day. I feel like what you are doing is somewhere between those two.

Sorry, I wasn't clear enough. I work 40-60 hours most weeks on my business. Yesterday was a 14-hour day. Sometimes I take a week or month off. It's my only source of income, though I have been stashing away over the years.

It's just that, in the moment, it doesn't often feel like work.

The only people who want the open office are the people who either don't want to pay for cubicles, or want to cram more people into a space (worker density) than a cube farm will allow.

Or they don't want to feel like I'm [0] locked in a room alone for absolutely no reason.

[0] Oops, we were using "they."

But if you want to kill the alone-ness, all you have to do is step out. Heck, people used to pair program in cubes long before this open space disease (sorry, my opinion). For those of us that are unable to function in the cage-free farm, our only option is to destroy our hearing with headphones to try to get some work done.

Step out to where exactly? Generally it's not just you in your own office, everyone else is too.

I think I misunderstood your original comment 'Or they don't want to feel like I'm [0] locked in a room alone for absolutely no reason.'. I took it to mean that cubicles/offices cause loneliness. I now see that what you were saying is that the reason people are stuffed in the bullpen is the 'concern' that you outlined.

Step out and walk around? Where I work, we have private offices, but people have self segregated into a chatty end of the hallway, and "Siberia."

Maybe a hub-and-spoke type of setup like Bell Labs had?

Cal Newport wrote a bit about it in Deep Work [1] and I think it sounds like a potential way to get the best of both worlds.

[1] https://medium.com/@GrandCentralPub/excerpted-from-deep-work...

IMO remote is the new vector that will disrupt the pendulum's back and forth.

Working remote requires a high level of professionalism and independence, and it puts face-time at a premium. So you use it for your top priorities (which may be socializing / culture-building stuff, or it may be collaborating stuff).

Idiots! Stop picking one extreme or the other!

Someone stick a wall in front of this pendulum at the half-way point. Please!

Cube-farm vs. open are not the extremes. My father had an office the size of a studio apartment with a door and a couch and a detergent bottle he peed in to avoid running into co-workers in the bathroom. I've seen an SF startup where people sit shoulder-to-shoulder on picnic benches, their only privacy, headphones and a single glass-walled conference room. That's extreme.

Cubicles aren't even the halfway point. Proper offices might be. Everyone working from home is the extreme.

Where does one work in SW in SF if one wants an office with a door? Does it even exist?

Bullshit. nobody wanted open floor plans, or if they did, they had immediate buyers remorse. Open floor plans became a fad that turned into a way for cheap ass companies to slash costs and brag about it on linkedin about how trendy they were being.

I can prove you wrong. I want and like open floor plans, and have never had buyer's remorse. I'll rule out any cube farm for any future job; I hate the isolation.

It is unfortunate that companies can't be flexible and give employees the environment that the employees find will make them more productive. So one group of people could be seated elbow to elbow with headphones to avoid some of the distractions and another group of people would have personal offices with a door where they can concentrate - that way everyone is happy.

Open office is more than elbow-to-elbow with headphones on. out of the 8 people who sit in my immediate vicinity, rarely are more than one or two wearing headphones.

While it's definitely distracting, there is a type of conversation that occurs which I have never experienced in all my years as a cube farmer. If I want isolation, I can go sit somewhere else or work from home or a cafe. It feels like the default being not isolation makes all the difference.

My highest function team had a mostly open office. Big, wide, open, lotsa windows, plants, couch etc. 12 people, self selected. We had a handful of offices for anyone who preferred or needed that.

Then my boss stuffed some clowns onto my budget and ruined the magic.

Since then, most places I've worked have been either call centers or highschool cafeterias. No amount of bon ami can overcome inhumane working conditions.

I'd rather have an office.

I know this is a bit irrelevant... but did you mean 'bonhomie'? (I only think that because I was really, really confused by that sentence - then I realized I had been mispronouncing 'bonhomie' in my head this whole time, quite badly. I guess I learned it by reading and you learned it by speaking :P)

Spot on! Nicely done.

lmao yeah I think I know exactly how you feel. Right now I sit mostly around people I really enjoy hanging out and working with, so it's fantastic. A year ago I was sitting in a super crowded area while construction was going on and it was really really unpleasant.

You're lucky, I can't. I agree that an open office has its benefits but when you can't treat its downsides with the methods you stipulate then I don't feel it's worth it on balance. I'm forever distracted and even just the cubicle farm (not fully sealed offices) was a much better environment for me.

>...I'm forever distracted and even just the cubicle farm (not fully sealed offices) was a much better environment for me.

Yea for those whose work requires some concentration, the best environment might be where workers have offices with open areas available to them when they want to discuss issues with other team members. It is very sad that companies can't be flexible in this area and instead like to pretend that only upper management needs to concentrate, have a private conversation, etc.

Same for me, with the stipulation that I've never had my own office. But I just can't imagine having my own office unless it's a radically different role than I'm interested in. I don't see the point. I'm not taking phone calls or meeting people privately.

Focused and creative work benefit heavily from isolated environments where it is easier to focus. It is less tiring to work in quiet environments without distractions.

I think there is one difference between the person who prefers cubicles/isolation and one who prefers an open space: when you want to get away from the isolation, all you have to do is walk over to a willing party and have a chat. For people (like me and others in this thread) who are unable to function in open spaces, there is no escape from the torture.

I don't think this is true at all. Human social behavior is incredibly sensitive to perceived norms and paths of least resistance; this can be observed all the time in online games where minor changes to UI or reward structures have drastic ramifications on player social behavior. A lot of interaction simply will never come about if it isn't fostered organically by the environment.

This isn't to dispute that the benefits of an open office plan are fairly minuscule compared to the costs for most people, myself included.

Yes, but online games are a collective. Consider the case of open spaces where you have one team per aisle. Team 1 can be as noisy as they wish - there is no penalty most of the time from the unrelated Team 2. I was in such a predicament at a large e-commerce company - I was seated the aisle over from a very noisy team that ran in debug mode. They and their manager thought this was the way a good team works so my complaints were discarded with extreme prejudice. Two aisles over was a relatively quiet team with a very loud chewer/scraper - the person was very careful with his food and spent 5 minutes every work day scraping his plastic container right there at the desk.

I used to have to listen to white noise just to get away from the drip-drip torture of the endless prattle - my productivity at home used to be 5x compared to working in this open Hades.

I guess you are right - a lot of interaction will never come about if it isn't fostered organically by the environment. I am saying that in my case, what was fostered organically by the environment was people that first speak what they are about to type before typing it and utter every exclamation point associated with a failed `ls` or etc. It was Hades. I have ringing in my ears from listening to loud music and noise to drown out this aural rubbish and I can assure you that this ringing is a quintillion orders of magnitude more pleasant than the cacophony foisted on to me by the fine co-workers at this establishment, courtesy of the cage free office plan. I left as soon as I could and while I miss the money/benefits, I don't miss the noise - not one little bit.

I shudder. Your loud chewer story triggered a flash back to a coworker clipping their nails (talons) next to me.

About the noise pollution...

Like decision fatique, I think we all have a stimulation budget (buffer). Most of the time, I'm fine. Until I'm not. And my budget (buffer) gets smaller as I age.

Nowadays, I'm completely content to be facing a wall, with earbuds in, so I can tune out and get some real work done.

If I want to talk to someone I feel very comfortable going over to their office and having a conversation. At most I'm interrupting 1 person. In an open office or cubicle farm if I walk up to someone and strike up a conversation I'm interrupting 10 people.

This is very true. For starters, you will foster an entirely different level of relationship with a coworker 10 feet away from you than you will with one 30 feet away.

I've worked in several open plan companies, and what I find to be a key differentiator is that the companies that make it work: a) institute a reasonable minimum amount of space per person b) have enough quiet areas for people who find the open plan uncomfortable

Oh man, finally we found the responsible person for open office misery :)

Where's the "Uber for pitchforks" startup when you need it ...

Desk sharing is he worst when you have to think deeply. The talkers never shut up.

Are you an Engineer?

Yeah, I like open offices. It's nice to be able to take off my headphones and ask a question to someone close by. Or just take a break and talk to them about something non work related.

Even if I had a private office I would have my headphones on 80% of the time.

I'm not a fan of sharing a giant auditorium with the entire company. I am a fan of having a large room with a group of 5-7 people sharing it.

That said, noisy open rooms suck.

It's great for my team. We are highly collaborative, so it helps to just be able to turn around and talk.

White noise generators and carpet kill sound from traveling very far (i.e. between teams).

People who need to focus grab a room or put on headphones. People on the team learn and respect other people's work habits.

When we start using voice activation commonly I'm hoping we're going back to offices.

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