Hacker News Reader

Comment by hb3b | Hacker News Reader

Peopleware debunked the myth that open office plans raise employee productivity. It should be required reading for all startup office managers. If there is a common struggle amongst employees with noise, demand a quiet room/area and a headphones subsidy.

View on HN

I thought the point of open offices was to increase team productivity, not employee productivity.

Increase the productivity of a team by reducing that of its members? How do you see that working?

Chemotherapeutic agents are poisonous, and yet they’re administered to cancer patients.

What is deletarious at a granular level is not necessarily deletarious for the system as a whole.

A worker might be occasionally distracted in an open office (-1 to efficiency, say), but at the same time might benefit e.g. from more direct communication channels (+2 to efficiency). That’s a net win of +1 efficiency.

Whether that’s how it actually works out, well... I have no horse I’m that race.

I can’t disagree with you, open offices are just like cancer to productivity.

Have you ever heard the expression the sum is greater than its parts?

Let's say one of my coworkers is working on some code I'm familiar. I may be able to sacrifice about 10% of my productivity (just from overhearing that they're working on something I know about) to double their productivity.

How often does that have to happen? Literally you have to hear productivity doublers almost daily for it to work. What about the ones you miss?

And how bad is your fellow developer that they not only need your help to double their productivity, but that they wouldn’t even think of asking for your input if they were in a private office. Like they can’t even operate Slack.

Because when working in teams, 1 + 1 doesn't necessarily equal 2. Good, collaborating teams produce in excess of the sum of their parts. Companies will take a hit in individual productivity if they think overall productivity will be more than the sum of individual productivity.

That’s great and likely true, but what does it have to do with open offices? The signal to noise ratio of open office areas is minuscule compared to the ratio of devs in private offices using Slack. I know cause I’ve done both.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com