Open Offices Make You Less Open

"In the 15 days before the office redesign, participants accumulated an average of around 5.8 hours of face-to-face interaction per person per day. After the switch to the open layout, the same participants dropped to around 1.7 hours of face-to-face interaction per day."

Maybe it's because what used to take 3 hour meetings to settle, now took 3 minutes of talking with the guy next to you?

"productivity, as defined by the metrics used by their internal performance management system, had declined after the redesign to eliminate spatial boundaries.”"

Maybe their metrics are wrong? Maybe they measured lines of code written, and maybe they used to do busywork writing lines of code that weren't really needed, and now they're actually able to get things done? They don't say anything about their metrics and expect us to trust that they were just less productive.

All my life, I've done my programming work either alone at home, in the silence of a library or with a small team in a quiet room. I consider that open offices are a bane to my productivity. I honestly cannot focus without headphones on. However, you have to keep an ear open at all time in order for the benefits of such an office.

I often do unpaid overtime simply to have time alone and I consider that during those times my productivity triples.

All open office plans should offer quiet private areas for employees where they could go and focus on complicated issues. Sadly, I have yet to see anyone offer it (except maybe the big names like Google and Amazon).

Open offices are cheaper, and they look a lot cooler than a bunch of hallways and closed doors (and certainly cooler than cubicles). They're gonna be hard to get rid of.