Open-Plan Offices Are Making Us Less Social | Hacker News Reader

Open-Plan Offices Are Making Us Less Social

bloomberg.com

27 pointsmancerayder12 comments

I’m not sure if it makes us less social but I noticed that open plan creates one of the two environments:

1) Super distracting. Everyone is talking the whole time and it’s hard to focus. Your team member bugs you all the time and you realize that your team is part of the noise.

2) Slack driven communication. No one bothers anyone and all the conversation is done on Slack. You slack a person even if they are sitting next to you. Pretty awkward and can be time consuming.

Can companies just come out and say it? They’re all adopting open offices because they’re cheaper and the cogs are easy to move around.

Though it baffles me why Facebook, Google, etc., companies that can afford it, don’t switch to 2-4-6-8 person offices. Best option: not too isolated, not too bunched up together.

I think the main reason is that it looks good. Nothing better than overlooking a wide open space where the worker bees are moving around. That is, as long as you can then retreat into your quiet corner office.

I feel like optimizing for manageability is a great way to run a tech company into the ground.

And I notice that Microsoft, which gives its programmers offices, seems like the only tech megacompany that can still produce software.

Microsoft Windows is probably the worst software product of all time. All Microsoft has is lawyers and a good marketing department

Many people have been using Windows successfully since at least 95.

There’s definitely worse products out there.

Don't worry Microsoft is doing their best to change to open offices.

> seems like the only tech megacompany that can still produce software.

Pretty sure Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, can produce software too. I could be wrong.

This and preferring ads to subscriptions are the two topics I feel like I disagree with 99% of HN.

I much prefer open offices and I don't mind my neighbors having conversations. Sometimes it turns out to be pretty useful what you overhear by accident. Otherwise headphones work.

Same here -- it's not too noisy, and it is really useful to overhear someone having an issue and then jumping in to help. Only on relatively few occasions is it a problem, specifically when one of my team members who speaks English as a second language is having trouble with HP support, he tends to get a bit louder and more excited. At that point I just take a quick tea break.

I have only ever worked in open-plans.

Sometimes it is useful to take an hour alone in a meeting room, or after core hours when it is empty, but I've been of the opinion that I am paid to facilitate the company's goals. Generally that requires collaborating and helping team members, so open-plan works for me.

Here's the academic paper on which this article is based: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/373/1753/2017...

and here is the HN discussion of that paper from a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17448187

Reply on news.ycombinator.com