The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea
m.signalvnoise.com
m.signalvnoise.com
Even when soccer is over, you have to contend with people playing grab-ass all over the office, or jerks (like me) with annoyingly loud keyboards. The modicum of utility of me "jumping into a conversation" really goes out the window when I'm forced to wear headphones all day.
I really don't have a good way of measuring or fully quantifying how much less productive I am personally, but haven't there been a ton of studies that indicate anywhere between 1-1.5 hours a day is wasted per employee due to the open office? I assume that labor is the most expensive part of any big-ish company, so it feels like the "offices are cheaper" argument shouldn't work.
EDIT: I get the point, that was a joke.
Is there anything less professional than watching a game at work? I really don't get why people do this, and why they think it's okay.
Granted, I don't like sports — but I like TV, and I wouldn't watch TV at work. I like computer games, but I wouldn't play computer games at work. It's just odd that sports fans think it's okay to distract people during work hours.
At least pop off down to the pub or something.
For reference, I work in a hardware engineering group. Some mesmerizing process would show up on screen, one person would stop and stare, and 5 minutes later we have a half dozen engineers who've stopped what they were doing to watch How It's Made.
Eventually we settled on Bob Ross as a happy medium in terms of "Pleasant Ambiance" and "Not Too Distracting."
Also, as stated, even if you love sports, if I were to turn on something like Die Hard and cheer at the screen every few minutes when Bruce Willis does something awesome, or play a video game and yell profanities because I died, people would (rightly) think I'm a jerk and distracting everyone. Even if I only did once every four years.
Should they just give me a break to watch TV at work?
I've worked places where we would watch live streams of rocket launches (back when launches were less routine than they are now).
Many people who are trying to work do not care if the event is live. Even as someone who also enjoys watching rocket launches, I wouldn't cheer loudly when it took off, and I'd probably go to some kind of common area to watch it to begin with.
I was responding to a comment that compared watching a movie to following the World Cup live. The two are not comparable at all. I was also responding to other comments that were somehow dumbfounded by others wanting to watch the World Cup in general.
I don’t begrudge people their entertainment, but surely it’s polite not to foist it on others? I don’t play Minecraft let’s play videos for hours at the office, after all!
Plus of course all the normal games, etc.
Add it all up and there is fucking sports all the time.
Again not a problem as long as you don't drag me down to that level.
This thread of Hacker News kvetching has really lost focus on the case against open offices. This reads like a contest of who can be the most uptight in the office.
I go to work to well, work. I like my co-workers, don't mind talking with them a bit and am even friends with some of them. That doesn't mean I want them to bring all their distractions and things that bring them joy to the office. I want us all to get everything done quickly and correctly so that we can all go home and enjoy the things we like.
This sort of outlook might work for those of us that are workaholics, but for everyone else it's a major mental health hazard. Not everyone has wives or children or partners or scores of friends to spend their nights with. I wouldn't be so blase about taking all enjoyment out of the rest of the time those people are spending on this earth.
*Yeah, I know, live and let live, but that is basically impossible with the current sport fanatics around here.
When will they allow us to take our toddlers to work? Could really save on daycare costs :)
That same office (which, as I'm sure you have figured out, was an open office) allowed dogs. Mostly fine, I'd take our well-trained, quiet female pit bull into the office. She'd bug me to go play around outside more than I would have liked, but was otherwise inconspicuous. But as someone else in the thread has pointed out, dogs in the office doesn't scale. There's gonna be the one (or more) dog (much like the one child noted above) that doesn't belong in an office. One lady brought her other-dog-hating dog every day. "Bark, bark, bark" every time another dog was in sight. Etc., etc.
I guess my point is, yessh people, what happened to the professional work environment?
Maybe related to bullshit jobs since these people are obviously not doing any real work, just bringing their homelife to the office in order to make time pass quicker?
And some dogs are jerks. Worked in a place where the boss brought their loud dog to work. Barked constantly, disrupted work, growled whenever clients came into the office. The boss acted like she didn't hear anything.
I like dogs. I have dogs (they came with my wife). But I don’t want to work in a goddamn kennel.
(Fun fact: Google is officially a dog company. Cats are highly discouraged.)
Sartre was right. Hell is other people.
(That said, they had the most expensive and best coffee machine I've ever seen in an office, and a guy who used to make brilliant cocktails on a Friday afternoon - he also stands out in my memory as one of the few front-end developers I've met who couldn't write JavaScript or CSS. That was a surreal contract, it really was.)
At least it ends. I work in a gigantic "airplane hangar" open office with no noise barriers of any kind stretching out to infinity. Everybody around me is on conference calls all day, every day. They put their phones on speaker and then yell louder and louder to be heard over each other. One of them is even one of the Important People with an office with a door that closes... which he leaves open all the time anyway.
You can listen to even fairly quiet music and you won't hear any conversations around you.
Wouldn't be necessary if we had actual offices, but there you go.
[1] https://www.la-sight.com/services/lasik/lasik-results/ [2] https://www.la-sight.com/services/lasik/lasik-explained/fars...
Thanks though.
As an added bonus the obvious rigamarole I have to go through when a coworker taps me on the shoulder makes them more likely to send an email next time.
With earplugs inside noise-canceling phones I still get two layers of sound isolation but have a layer of sound isolation between me and the phones, providing finer volume control so I can add just enough music to finish the job of drowning out loud people around me without hearing damage.
It seems the best solution is to not have loud people around.
I've found any earplug or headphone option will make my tinnitus worse - sometimes days afterwards.
I explain my tinnitus to non-sufferers as being on the threshold of noise intolerance 24/7.
I'm surprised there hasn't been a lawsuit against any of these companies that expect employees to damage their health just so they can save on floorspace?
Now I have a very faint one that "toggles" once or twice a week and ALWAYS when I wear earplugs.
After ignoring the warning signs and also having an ear infection which I never bothered getting medical help for it got much worse.
It's settled down to a manageable level for me now but heed the warnings, you may save yourself a lot of misery in the long run.
I had a random infection a few years ago and just waited for it to pass. Which it did, eventually, but my tinnitus became much worse afterwards. I'm guessing, because the infection did further damage which could maybe have been avoided?
I can't say whether you should stop wearing earplugs because you may sometimes be in a situation where they protect your hearing. But, for blocking out background noise in an office, they're probably not a good idea? [based purely on my own experience]
I think it's because when you double-stuff like I did, the only thing you can hear at that point is the ringing in your ears (and high heels on concrete floors). My brain seemed to lock in on the ringing at that point.
When I wear earplugs, the tinnitus is more prominent, so after I take them out, my brain is kind of "latched" on to it for a while.
I thought everyone has it.
Glad I got out of that hellhole.
This is the big problem with headphones as a solution. You just trade sound disergonomy or physical discomfort, and it solves nothing. Like breaking your finger to distract from the pain of a gun shot wound.
Combine it with the fact that managers have repeatedly told me that wearing earplugs is “rude” and it’s just more of the no-win optics that drive open plan offices in the first place.
This probably depends where you are. An open office plan might well let you use less than half of the square footage per employee, which in somewhere like Manhattan would potentially be saving you on the order of $5-10k per employee. Depending on how significant the productivity hit is, that might well be worth it.
And, from personal experience, companies do it even when the cost per square foot is 1/10th of that of NY.
Faster to deploy, wire, etc.
Relative to what? Here are some portable room dividers: https://www.screenflex.com/
You would be starting with a very tiny space if that doubles the square footage per employee. They completely eliminate visual distractions, give employees a feeling of privacy, and stop a lot of noise. Being portable, they can be changed around as needed, and you can easily create small groups.
We have a couple of mobprogramming stations with big televisions, each team has 1 or 2 of these so there are about 5 in a 20m radius from where I sit. When the first game that Sweden played all of a sudden 3 of the televisions are turned on and of course they are _not(!)_ in sync.
So here I am trying to do some work with three TVs games all slightly delayed from each other, meaning one cheer turns into three.
Now I work at a large newspaper and we sit 40m from the editorial staff so that adds to the background noise. To top it all of someone in the sports department thought it would be a good idea to @channel (usually reserved for "OMG the website is down what do we do!?") when some of the TVs stopped working (not really a job for the developers..).
That just killed whatever positive things I used to think about open offices.
Until I read that, the worst I’d ever heard was a friend who worked next to a slamming fire door. He had to wear hearing protection/ear muffs. Get this: he was the PhD physisist that did all the hard math coding for the company.
He has a private office where he works now thank goodness.
Then, given all that, you get the coworker two seats down Slacking you. If you're Slacking folks within 10 seconds walking distance then what's the point of being in the office at all.
I think the ideal would be commuting to the office one day a week to take care of meetings which are more productive in person such as sprint planning, grooming etc.
So when bosses realised they were throwing money away, they came up with the open office with flex-desks: no-one has a fixed place, you can sit whereever you want. And there are less desks than people.
That can work out quite well (I work in such an office) but it depends greatly on ehtics or rules: no TVs with soccer games, no speaker-phone (but only headset) and rooms available for discussions or phone calls. And there is a general area (quite large) where you can drink your coffee and discuss the soccer matches or Tour de France results...
For me it works, but I can imagine that without the requirements listed above it can be a cumbersome workenvironment.
If a company believes it will gain more from “saving money” on open plan offices or hot desking than it will from just paying more to facilitate more and better work from employees through buying the best tools (a private office is a tool like a keyboard or ergonomic chair), it’s self-evidently a company to get far, far away from.
Consider “flex keyboards.” Management realizes that not all keyboards are in use all day, because people are in meetings, at lunch, etc.
So nobody gets their own keyboard. You have to locate an unused keyboard at the times when you need to type.
This is no different than “flex desks.” In both cases (keyboards, desks), the unit cost of providing the dedicated resource to the employee is trivial compared to far more pressing concerns, like producing working software to increase revenue, or bullshit executive compensation.
Even real estate costs for private offices in dense urban areas are trivial by comparison.
The open office I am in ATM is one such places where a handfull of people (loud, discussing totally not related to work, factually completly idiotic conversations) spoil it for all others. There is nothing to be done about these people since they've been with the company forever and a day and are thus basically exempt from all rules (be it noice or dresscode).
5 Years ago I have actively stoped working from home to segrate work from family. Now I have found myself to do at least 1, often 2 days from home again and planning to change employer. No I will not tell them the reason since I can not affort to burn that bridge.
TL;DR Manager A makes a good impression by saving some office space, Manager B looses employees but will never find out why.
Not criticizing this person, I despise my open office environment too. I also wouldn't (and didn't) tell tell my employer about this when I left for a few years in the past for the same reason.
I work mostly from home but I do have a cube in the local office. If we got tight for space, it would absolutely make sense to give away my space to someone who would use it more and have me just grab an open chair for those times I have meetings or other reasons to be in the office.
If I had a private office, I would still work from home most of the time. A private office doesn't eliminate a commute.
Why would this make more sense than moving to a bigger office or building more space for the new employee to have a desk without taking yours? Cost is absolutely not an answer.
People who think cost drives open plan office choices seem to think corporate management are too stupid to ask, what is 10% of our total salary base for these workers. It makes no sense. People have been measuring productivity and morale in knowledge work for a hundred years. Of course they can directly compare cost savings on floor space with metrics correlated with productivity lost to worse workspace, and tie it to the bottom line.
The observable spending habits of companies suggest cost utterly cannot be a driving factor here.
I'm not arguing for hot-desking as a standard approach, which indeed likely negates any benefits to teams being co-located. But for people who are allocated space that they rarely use? Why not?
If they can afford to hire more but not to expand and give each worker adequate space, it suggests the company is just wrong. They actually can’t afford to hire more and would be creating problems if they do. Rather, reinvest what would have been spent on crammed headcount into the ability to expand spatially and later increase headcount with adequate space.
If a company, even a sink-or-swim growth mode start-up, believes it needs to hire people faster than it can provide minimally adequate space for them, then the company is just wrong. That is just not a thing.
Costs do not affect revenue. Perhaps you mean profit?
Especially when some people eat at their desks.
Generic rubber dome keyboards are torture — chiclet style keyboards surely violate a bunch of Geneva conventions.
Never mind the filth and grime.
I will keep a mouse and keyboard in the office under lock and key somewhere if I end up in that situation.
Can you think of reasons why maybe each student doesn't have their own helicopter but does have their own headset (assuming they were cleaned properly after each use and hygiene wasn't a concern)? Those same reasons apply to the office/keyboard situation.
The logic is that, compared to the salaries of software engineers and revenues of many tech companies, desks and keyboards are extremely cheap.
The cost of a ~$100k engineer spending 10m per day looking for a desk, with 8h day and 200k total employee cost to employer, is ~4k/yr. Paired with the cost the company pays in developer annoyance potentially causing higher turnover or lower productivity , buying more desks and office space is likely the cheaper option. One helicopter per student is obviously not so...
Providing one office per knowledge worker would be cost-effective for companies.
Flight schools have a hard time surviving if they make grossly wasteful or negligent expenditures for the sake of politics and optics, because they are low-capitalized businesses with often much lower revenue per employee and less growth opportunity than highly capitalized tech companies.
A high capitalized tech company, on the other hand, can piss away money on dipshit open floor plan offices, roof decks, $500,000 Christmas parties, etc., and the executive committee doesn’t care. They have very little incentive to optimize that spending and often make spending choices based on the capricious and whimsical desires of an adult-baby CEO who is more like Veruca Salt than a competent business person.
Really though the cost of office space vs people making 100k/year means you don't actually need top optimize it that hard. The core problem is they tend to come out of separate budgets, so some middle manager can write down they saved x million on a review / resume while costing the company 3x that indirectly.
PS: Used Model S's are also something to keep an eye on.
It's just unfortunate that the commute here in the Bay Area has gotten so bad that a lot of people end up working from home.
All of it is completely unrelated with work. And sort of sad, although its a good thing, that no matter what happens, humans will needs humans.
This is the world they wanted, when they dissolved unions and other pillars of stability, one mans grape-vine over "Unreliable mercenaries" is another mans freedom of choice.
Here's to Sienna and Florence, their high towers may stand a thousand year or crumble under the siege tomorrow, no-one cares only the chests in the deep cellars are whats important.
All those walls build to create synthetic loyalty- be it out of fear of being law suited for knowledge transfer, or cartels to avoid the rising prices of mercenary's - if history tells us one thing - in the end the war always wins.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Wars
"Wes Brot ich ess, des Lied ich sing, wes Gold ich trag, des Tod ich bring."
There is no need in this.
There was a study done on the interruption effect of e-mail https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/1328726018000...
Amen. We can work remotely. Let me work in my home office.
I'm sitting here now because there's scheduled railway maintenance going on. If not I prefer traveling to the office (it's more than 45 minutes each way.)
But as long as everyone can choose for themselves I think more people probably should work from home.
If you’re not going to give people phones just take the phones away, not pack people in like sardines.
seriously, lets just give up on the notion of assigned spaces, idk what value there is when we cant even collaborate because the 4 tiny meeting rooms for 100 people are sitting at the margins of the giant open office. and there aren't any other whiteboards or projectors to use to have conversations. everyone is already wearing headphones so they can try to have a thought to themselves.
there are lots of alternatives. assign rooms to projects and have the principals mostly hang out there. couch areas and pub areas and cubby areas...rooms where you really aren't supposed to talk or hum or do anything out loud.
we've given up any actual utility of the office and are just hanging on to the barest trapping.
Having worked at a company, where they had couch areas: Management will place the couch areas in the middle or adjacent to the desks and it will all be done in an open floor. A couch area with no walls is an invitation to have loud conversations/phone calls in the middle of the office.
I have a coworker within ONE second of me, I can lean back a few inches and tap them on the shoulder. And I do, frequently, when they send me a 1:1 slack message.
"What's up?"
"Oh I had a question for you in Slack"
"I'm three feet away from you, I'm not doing this over slack, what's up?"
Obviously this is different if they send a code snippet or an app screenshot that I need to look at, but even then when we need to discuss the next steps relevant to that snippet or screenshot, I'll still tap them over the shoulder
"Hey, did you try x?"
"Oh no I didn't, lemme see what happens..." pause "Yup that worked, thanks!"
"No problem"
Unless there's an urgency, or some complication that should be discussed in person; slack is the preferred method so as to allow the party you are interrupting a chance to change their focus in the least impactful manner.
If I go to someone directly, I am losing 10-15 minutes of my own productivity + the length of the conversation and that's multiplied by the number of people I interrupted.
Some people who I've worked with, love to have to have a face to face for questions or information that is not urgent and could easily be taken care of via slack. They seem to do so because they prefer to small talk, lament, debate or some other personal reason; they don't do it for technical reasons.
If your team can effectively communicate passively, on slack, your on a team that has a foundation from which a remote-work policy can easily be enacted.
Didn't you know that you shouldn't use headphones in an open-plan office, because it prevents you from collaborating with others? /s
Yeah, they say it promotes more collaboration because you may overhear something where your input is relevant and join in. Or something like that. While that may be true, the increase in UNwanted distraction completely overwhelms any benefit. So then they tell us to be respectful of people around us and keep things quiet - we don't want people to overhear you. Wait wasn't that the point?
> people are running/playing around and yelling like children at the office. It's not too uncommon for startups to have Nerf guns or something.
I hate this sort of environment combined with expectation to stay late. It always seems to me that if people would work instead of playing, we might not have to stay late. And that we are not working as much as we brag about, because people play a lot.
I don't know that I wouldn't work late even if I had a private office, but I do think that I'd be able to accomplish more.
Of course then, I am tired also in the evening and that limits what I can do in the evening. (If I am too tired to code, I am also too tired to play logical game or learn something.)
One day I'll write that book I keep thinking about. It'll be glorious.
Uncommon but not rare term where I grew up.
Sure hope you're not googling it in an open-plan office...
I closed tab very very fast.
According to this study open offices do reduce face to face communications: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/373/1753/2017...
The only two rational factors why anyone would choose open office:
1. the floor space really is so expensive you can waste xx% of capital output of labour.
2. You inherit a dysfunctional organization or just a one you cannot trust, and want to "keep an eye" on everyone so they behave. Michael Bloomberg gave this rationale in New York.
3. Bonus round for hotdesking : You expect/have a fairly high churn rate. Why bother assigning people personal spaces since it's so much work to keep track of the facilities. Let the people find their own space. Besides, you might outsource xx% of your operations in near future so it's not like you plan on investing in long term team building.
So, any linear combination 1,2 or 3 should suffice as an explanation. Any serious publication which praises open offices is likely a piece by a consultant who makes a living out of peddling said solutions and are offering political propaganda to make the employees less resistant.
The most common irrational reason: You don't really have an opinion what consitutes a good working space but open offices seem to be trendy ("It's what the big boys are doing") and a consultant made you an offer to redesign your office space, so, why not.
I'm pretty sure the lemming see, lemming do explanation is one of the top actual reasons.
In general, let's not elevate anybody to superhuman status, no matter what Ayn Rand wants you to believe. It's never true, and it never ends well.
But that's just my experience. I've found it's difficult to underestimate management.
Since then I've heard they have installed what can only be described as rows of tables. They're not really desks. Just long rows of white tables where one row of employees faces another with an 8" glass divider between the two employees. You know; for privacy.
???
Do you work at Sterling Cooper Draper?
If you want to watch soccer, take a vacation day.
Riiight, because soccer and office work are so similar!
/s
I wouldn't suggest changing the office layout if I were only distracted by events every four years. I get distracted by events related to the open office every single day; the latest one just happened to be the World Cup when I wrote that.
Somehow the author missed the primary reason for the open office configuration: "Because it cuts the costs of office space by a HUGE amount (certainly more than half)."
I suppose "Because it makes it easier for managers to keep an eye on their employees and see when they are slacking off." figures in also. Although it's probably a sign of poor management.
It's not about collaboration, it's not about socializing, it's about money. Just like all other business related decisions.
Employee time is usually a lot more expensive than the space they occupy. At least in tech.
You could save quite a lot of money on furniture if everyone sat with their laptops on the floor. But in reality that would be more expensive since the difference in productivity will outweigh the furniture cost.
I would happily buy my own sodas (I don't drink them anyway), chips/snacks (I don't eat them at work), coffee (I do drink coffee!) if it meant I never had to sit in an open office environment again.
Accountants don't get to decide the office layout in my experience.
These days I mostly work remote by choice and am good with that. Some of it is better tech to work remote; I didn't even have broadband for most of my time in that former job. But it's also that I have no particular interest in spending a lot of time with coworkers generally beyond what I need to get my job done.
But I'm not sure that new engineers at that company were fundamentally different from new engineers joining, say, Facebook today.
I'm building my own company now, fully remote, and from an engineering output point of view I've never seen such productivity. No ass-in-seat supervision, no assigned hours, just straight throughput of engineering tasks being closed and features being shipped every day.
And thus, there is no incentive to change it. Cause total productivity is the same.
How do you counter the common argument that face-to-face communication is the most high-bandwidth and one shouldn't throw away that competitive advantage unnecessarily? I'm not a proponent of that position; on the contrary, I don't want to accept it. But a lot of people think that way.
In face to face meetings, many companies (like ones I have worked for) have limited meeting spaces and it's quite hard to book a conference room for more than an hour. Often times, we'd shuffle from one conference room to another.
So even in-person isn't quite as effecient and productive as it could be.
FWIW, I personally don't benefit from the "high bandwidth". I'm legally blind; I can't read facial expressions or body language, or even recognize specific faces. SO for me, face-to-face amounts to little more than audio communication with full frequency range and zero latency or drop-outs. All that to say that I can only understand face-to-face communication (edit: as it works for most people) second-hand, so I'm curious, not being argumentative.
It gets labeled many things, like social anxiety, aspergers, many other stigmatized disorders - but this is often my root problem - being overloaded with the amount of information present in social environments.
I have greater clarity when I can think separated from people physically, most often through text. I've gotten better with audio, but in person communication is still something of a struggle.
I'm not being argumentative either. Just people have differences, and they aren't always easy to notice, identity, or correct.
I have some folks I'm very close with where this is not the case. But that's taken a very long time for me, and it is something that has required a lot of patience, understanding, communication, tolerance, forgiveness, hope, and perseverence. It's still something that is just about, the opposite of easy, for every new person I'm introduced to. I am generally told that I'm a reasonably easy to get along with person casually, aquaintance wise, although I consistently apologize for random social behaviors, masking them over with the words awkward, impulsed, compulsed etc. I have a tendency to ramble about technical things and this is bad when I have a tendency to be hypercritical over software (as I'm never sure how my preferences about code may approve or reject the preferences of those I talk to, but that's getting off track). There'stuff that just goes down to the core of us that is intrinsic to our orderings, organizations, and structurings of information - which I'm sure you understand from being blind. In my experience, attempting to change these things is more costly than the benefit 'correction' would provide.
But that's me, PTSD and an understanding of psychology has made me a better software developer by refining my understanding of automation, as well as helping me remove myself from the headspace of what originally was so painful to experience. It doesn't go away, but it gets easier to live with, some days are harder than others, but I still consider myself fairly lucky given everything I've been able to do with what I have.
Text is just crystal clear. I have a tendency to ramble on the internet and I've gone into that wormhole of introspection of 'what will this do to me if I say this', some variant of the halting problem, recurrent infinite descending chains of when minds decide to stop inferencing using limited, selective sets of information, but, shrug. People have said I'm good at writing, and I hope my tendency to overthink has only led to improvement.
This whole exchange has been interesting. Thanks again.
I do think having diversity in all things is important, they push one's boundaries and allow oneself to redefine oneself. Taking care to reflect on the moment and the big picture, that's important.
Too much of anything is not a good thing, so there is always a need to balance. This allows one to translate skills from one interface to another. The big picture / in the moment reflection / introspection is important because it allows for self direction, instead of just getting caught up in all this mapping of skill set to skill set towards some ideal of being 'well rounded'.
I generally just prefer my base to be text because I code a lot and that's the headspace I need to stay in. Some communication, sparsely distributed in other forms is fine, but too much can direct away from the focus, which in my preference is produce good code, and solve problems in ways that get the closest to perfect I can get, without tipping the balance of losing sight of all the other code information, retaining structure and direction, uniformity, solutions for problems.
I don't enjoy living in a text vacuum as that can get severely isolating when done to excess, but sometimes having that space is necessary for me to continue laying out my own foundation of structure, preference, and direction, as I continue to learn new stuff.
Thank you for your interest and questions.
I often express myself poorly and this extra feeling helps me realize it and take some corrective measures. Really helpful when trying to communicate a difficult technical concept.
Most designated meetings, you can have just fine over a video conferencing system. Where f2f excels is in the conversations after you leave the meeting room - just a casual question to some other person from the meeting, which evolves into an impromptu 5-minute chat. (That is usually more valuable than the entire meeting :)
Spontaneous conversation is incredibly valuable. (Which, ironically, is also cited for open offices). I believe that if you start with a fully remote setup, you are growing a culture that will move these conversations to IM or other channels, by necessity. You'll likely be fine.
But you cannot move a company that has grown up with a culture of f2f meetings to a culture of IM conversations - it's too deeply ingrained.
IOW, you're not "throwing away" something if you build a remote culture from the start. Both models can work, but switching models is hard.
I work on accessibility for people with disabilities, and I'm blind myself (well, legally blind), so I think a lot about including people with disabilities. It seems to me that working with people with some kinds of disabilities, e.g. deafness or a severe speech impediment, would be akin to forcing an in-person team to switch to IM. (I have no direct experience working with people with those disabilities, so I'm happy to be educated.) So I speculate that starting out remote would also make the team more inclusive in this area.
Yeah, but people are replaceable. Whereas you, as an entrepreneur, only have one life to live. Choose wisely.
/s
Meanwhile, there's a thriving and growing industry selling desks in trendy open plan offices to self-employed people who for the most part could do their work in the privacy of their own home if they didn't think the atmosphere of an open plan office was worth paying for.
A lot of people I know work remotely in whole or in large part. But I've also worked with people who either felt the need for work-home separation or just found home to be too distracting a work environment in one or more ways.
I think the real reason is managers want to be able to see everyone at a glance; it's all about control.
Well it is still a bad decision. Libraries are an open work space and still manage to provide a reasonable working environment. This is less about money but more about a wrong perception of work.
The real reason for open office layout is this:
- we do not trust ourselves and our employees to do what we say
It is only really start ups that cannot afford to do this. Ironically because they have a small number of employees, open plan offices do work for them because they have fewer employees.
I've had my own office and found it lonely and boring. I never got less work done than at that job. Everything took longer because I had to stand up and walk to talk to my team. Instant messaging sort of worked, but if they didn't respond immediately, you didn't know if it was because they missed the message or they weren't actually in their office.
Because I hardly ever talked to my team members I never felt any real friendship or camaraderie with them. That made it harder to get help when I needed it and made my day a lot less enjoyable.
I find that I thrive in open offices. I don't even need headphones to concentrate. Everyone is different I guess.
I am a IC and I love open offices.
Also agree that privat offices feel lonely and are a hassle.
I think like with many things there is just a vocal minority that bitching about open offices...we need more people speak up about all the benefits of open offices (besides the economic ones for the company that get cynically cited every time).
But the downside is I’m a workaholic. I spend too many hours working.
When I’m in the “work room” I work, otherwise I don’t. I think the brain associates different spaces with different modes of thinking.
I can’t get jack shit done at the office other than lots of meetings. To do real coding work, I have to remove people from my surrounding.
But the general point is: don't force people into an environment they hate and can't work in. I probably am several times more effective when I work from home in quiet. For others an open office is good.
I'm skeptical of people who say that being in an open office doesn't affect their productivity at all. Really? How can you be sure?
Just my personal observation how open office or a cube farm with loud neighbors affects me.
For me, the part of coding that is art simply does not happen in an open office.
now I imagine dilbert's boss being sad in an office, looking at all the workers in cublicles and thinking of ways to make friends :D
I kind of think being in a group of 4-6 cubicles is pretty ideal
I think my best working experience was when I worked at a startup where there was a big "bullpen," but it was mostly for customer service; all other teams had massive conference rooms where you would have 3-5 people _max_ in that room, with the potential to shut the door if that team wanted privacy or more silence than other teams.
I do have noise cancelling headphones, but I always have music when working - even when I'm working from home.
What we also have, which helps a ton, is an abundance of meeting rooms - some with a tiny table and four chairs. We'll still have a two minute discussion at our desks, but instinctively head to a room for longer discussions. I'm not sure if this was an intentional solution to the cons of open offices - but it seems extremely effective.
Everyone in the building I was in had a private office with floor-to-ceiling exterior windows and a door that closed.
Groups of offices shared a larger open common room with sofas and comfy chairs and coffee tables conveniently arranged for sitting around talking. There were white boards in the offices and on several walls of the common areas.
You need to concentrate? Go in your office and close the door. Feeling amenable to visits from colleagues? Open the door. Feel the need for free-form conversation with one or more colleagues? Plop onto the couch and talk things over.
NeXT was laid out somewhat similarly, but with less convenient common areas.
At various times I've experienced wall-to-wall private offices, giant open rooms with everyone side-by-side on long tables, and everything in between. For my money, the Newton office was the best. Privacy and camaraderie were available to us at all times in whatever measure suited each of us.
Or at least fail in the direct sense of the word, and not “inspired something actually successful”.
Fascinating. I've always found Conway's Law [0] to hold up incredibly well, and there's a perfect example.
The offices all had whiteboards on two walls and were large enough to comfortably fit 3-4 chairs total. This was great because it meant any useful meeting could happen in anyone's office. There were larger conference rooms on the corner of each hallway which had screens for video conferencing and larger tables to accommodate larger groups of folks.
If you needed privacy to focus, you closed your door. If you were open to watercooler-chit-chat, you left your door open. It was easy to overhear technical conversations if you wanted to, but also easy to ignore since you had 3.5 walls of noise privacy.
At the time I did not realize how good of a work environment that was. It was almost a decade ago. I still consider that my ideal work environment if I have to work in an office.
Whereas, lawyers in law firms are considered revenue generators and they are treated that way.
When I switched from programming to lawyering, one of the biggest differences I noticed was how the law firm staff and office manager were always trying to make it easier for me to generate billable hours. Years later it still feels weird having "staff" that take of care you and work hard to remove obstacles that may interfere with your work. I can't even make my own copies w/o a staff person offering to do that for me. Staff that catch me refilling the coffee pot will offer to do it for me.
And, the million dollar view from my high-rise office still takes my breath away.
Now instead of feeling like a tool/plebe I feel like a milk cow. The law firm's entire setup is to keep me working efficiently (not that its perfect but they try).
For reference, I am 8 years into a software engineering career and heavily considering going to law school.
Source: Lawyer that hated writing patents and went back to tech.
¹ https://www.nalp.org/salarydistrib
² 20+% of lawyers have alcohol problems: https://www.americanbar.org/publications/youraba/2016/march-...
³ 4x rate of depression and highest suicide rate among occupations: https://www.americanbar.org/publications/gp_solo/2015/march-...
I obtained a CS degree, worked in tech for several years, and decided to attend law school to study IP like you’re intending. I attended one of best schools for IP, and worked writing patents. Despite a great law firm and clients, the work was not stimulating and a net drain on society. I left to start my own company in tech again.
My work as a core Django developer during school was more fulfilling intellectually and professionally.
Studying law will not bring the prestige you’re seeking. I didn’t listen to the lawyers who told me that either.
I have a Computer Engineering degree and programmed for 10+ years, mainly at startups that didn't pan out with some contracting thrown in there too. During that time some of my friends went into IP law and were doing well.
I eventually reached my last straw with startups and bit the bullet and went to LS at night while doing programming.
IMO industry experience is more important than LS rank/performance for patent attorneys. (I went to a local third tier LS school and had no problem.) It is your understanding of the technical subject matter that will set you apart from other patent attorneys especially from those w/o much industry experience. That said, I only work on computer/software patents, never gadgets or circuits.
Downsides include: drafting good patents is more exhausting for me than programming; the job can get grindy at times; and it also kind of sucks being in the service industry, dealing with those pesky clients can sometimes be a hassle. Being a diva programmer was more fun in that aspect.
Also, LS is expensive, my school charges about 2X what it did when I went. I went at night and worked at programming jobs during the day. This reduced my opportunity cost by at least $400K.
Upsides include: meeting a lot of smart people; learning about what they are building; flexible hours; nice office; decent pay; not having to build the inventions -- we just talk about cool parts and don't have to spend n-months or years getting them work; and not having to program for work.
Playing travel agent for an hour suddenly makes a lot less sense when it keeps you from billing out at $500/hr. for some client.
ADDED: The one time I did some legal work (for an expert witness report) the ticking clock made me very aware of what was a good use of my time and what wasn't.
What world are you living in?
They used to break the law to do it (anti-poaching agreements).
edit-to-add: Why do you think they ignore the research that says open offices are not healthy or productive? Because they can get devs to stay using less expensive means, such as, increased compensation and treats.
Developer salaries are high but revenues per developer are huge for these companies.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9760414
Is it time to get depressed yet? This has been a topic for such a long time. It was in peopleware in 1987. I thought I discovered the topic when Joel (On Sofware) wrote about it in 2000. While a few people seem to enjoy open offices, the overwhelming majority of developers I know, or who chime in on HN, value a quiet place to work and dislike open offices.
And yet, not only has nothing changed, it seems to be getting worse. It couldn't be more clear to me that developers, at least on this issue, simply have no clout as a profession. There may be a few individuals who can make demands, but on the balance, these are decisions imposed on us, as a group, and we are apparently unable to do anything about it.
The really sad thing is, this isn't a situation where we're asking to fly first class, or for more vacation. We're talking about asking for something that will make us more productive and increase the value we largely hand over to our employers, simply because it's depressing to not be able to do a good job due to distractions. So yeah, I'm depressed about it.
There was a time when I read these essays and felt a bit more charged up, like people were starting to understand something important and that things would change. Well, now we have open offices.
I'll finish with another variant on my broken record: the industry talks constant about the critical shortage of software engineers, but it won't give them a quiet place to work. Actually, that last sentence is too optimistic - it won't allow them a quiet place to work. Those places exist, but companies often demand that their programmers spend 8 hours a day in places that are too noisy for focus.
> This book seemed convincing when I read it in college. It even had all sorts of studies backing up what they said. No deadlines is better than having deadlines. Offices are better than cubicles. Basically all devs I talk to agree with this stuff.
> But virtually every successful company is run the opposite way. Even Microsoft is remodeling buildings from individual offices to open plan layouts. Could it be that all of this stuff just doesn't matter that much? If it really is that important, how come companies that are true believers, like Fog Creek, aren't running roughshod over their competitors?
Here's the thing - how many industries rely so deeply on controlling their workforce's right to live and work in the United States? How many industries lobby congress so ferociously and constantly about a shortage of highly skilled workers?
Well, yeah, if an industry has the right to decide who is and isn't allowed to live in the United States, in a system where non-family based immigration is difficult and spots are hard to come by, then sure, they can be very successful imposing work conditions that people with personal and economic freedom of mobility would reject in favor of another profession. But if you really want to live in the US and Facebook controls whether you get and keep a work visa, then sure, you'll put up with an open office. And because of the way we allocate green cards (requiring a corporate sponsor, and greatly restricting how many are issued every year, with a long queue), you may have to put up with it for quite a while.
So another way to look at it is this: companies say they are in a desperate competition for key workers in critical shortage, and they can't recruit domestically no matter how good an offer they make. They also require working conditions that most developers say they despise. Uh, how about working conditions that most developers don't despise, have you tried that?
At least developers generally quit before we get to the point of wanting to jump off the building.
And, to the degree it does matter, 1.) the individual company's/team's context is probably relevant and 2.) companies/teams tend to take actions which at least somewhat mitigate the disadvantages of whatever approach they've chose. So an all-remote company may well have different decision-making processes than a co-located one, probably systematically holds F2F meetings of various times, and so forth. In open floor plans where people mostly work in the office, there's often some flexibility to spend some time off by yourself.
I'd make two statements, both are entirely my own.
1. The impact of these changes often lags the change itself, and status quo takes time to shift. Open spaces were definitely a fad for a while, and a lot of people (broader than MS) certainly started drinking the koolaid, yet it took ~decade for the rollout to really move in force. Conversely, I see far more anti-open-space articles nowadays than a decade ago. On top of this as well, bigCo corporate momentum cannot be underemphesized. IBM is still a behemoth, recent follies and very well-discussed employee-QOL-"hiccups" aside.
2. "success" is not binary. It's especially harder to judge when "product success" is often impacted by so many externalities it becomes very difficult to ask "what really is the impact of X specific factor." It becomes _even harder_ when the entire industry did this shift almost in lockstep, so finding "outliers" that are also viable employers for an individual became less and less an option. In that context, all I can bring is anecdata, and the # of peers I've worked with who dislike open spaces and will make active career choices to avoid them (myself included) seems to be growing.
I really think open office layouts can be implemented correctly, it's just that managers don't take the time to really tailor them for their development teams. We all wanted the lights off to work in? Lights are off. We wanted standing desks? We got standing desks. We wanted 2 monitors? We got 2 monitors that have adjustable heights. I think the problem with open offices is that managers are just using them as a way to save money on office space. If you really want a good office area for your developers, I think you can accomplish that with an open office layout if you really try.
If you're a relatively small office, I suppose no cubicles could work. Wait until you have offices in other parts of the country/world that you need to collaborate with remotely. Everyone is on a call for 25% of the day, and it's terrible. It's terrible to listen to 2/5 people next to you on a conference call, and it's terrible to listen to people that are in those environments on your conference call because they are trying to talk like they're in a library.
Does it not seem like open-office etiquette to take a phone call in a private space when other people are trying to work?
A critical piece of making the open space work is people being open with another. For watching big events on tv, you can take that into a conference room too. Cheer all you want. Gotta call your partner or someone else? Go in a room.
Who is going to assume the authority when a company is promoted as having a flat hierarchy, or holocracy, etc.? If the CEO is speakerphoning or fomenting adhoc floor meetings in an open-plan, nobody is going to say it's bad.
It's not about saying "it's bad". It's about talking about what might be better. Flat hierarchy or not, anyone should be able to bring up the topic.
And if you can't, that's a bad place to be working. There should be some kind of trust between people.
You don't need any kind of hierarchy to have real leaders. Every where I've been, you just step up and try to make it happen. Most of the time a bunch of other people are going to "thank you!". It won't always work and you can be diplomatic in how you approach it. But just make it happen and stop waiting for someone else to do it.
And if they, whomever they is, don't like it, move on.
It's not like people never actually comment on how they'd like to change their job environment. I wouldn't be surprised if it's the most common complaint among humans in general!
Do you have any examples of non-management fomenting a change in the entire physical architecture of their office, or other large change in a company?
I do think that it's on management to try to segregate groups that don't talk much and prefer quiet from groups whose jobs involve a lot of phone conversations but it's not practical for many roles to avoid talking on their desk phone. That's why they have one.
Unfortunately, team culture takes precedence over neat tools. It's just a common thing on my team to do take calls at your desk.
For anyone who doesn't want to drop their email into their webpage to see pricing (yes, I received an outreach email within 15 minutes of doing so) their pricing starts at $4.5k and $14k "on sale". Bit steep for my blood, but, there's obviously some bigger spenders out there!
I think your comment is ironic considering your previous comment:
>but there are plenty of idiots who turn off air conditioning, open the windows or pull up curtains regardless of everyone else's comfort.
Instead of binding people to locations, I'd much rather bind activities/moods to locations, e.g.
- the studious space: hushed atmosphere like a library, NO TALKING, for people actively working on brain problems
- the collaboration space: when you need to huddle with a few other people and solve a problem out loud
- the audio privacy space: small rooms for remote conferences where you're the only participant
- etc.
What's important is to have extra monitors in all these spaces, so a decent work setup can be had anywhere.
As a compromise, what's been working in our own office is that the open plan is—with rare exceptions—the "Library": very quiet talking, if any. For the super quiet, that's the Home Office. And for all the rest, we have conference rooms which are all equiped with very large screen telepresence equipment and which supports wireless screen sharing. So anytime we need to make noise, we have what we need. And for those who need some momentary privacy on their own, we have Audio Privacy Rooms with are set up with 1 armchair, small table and video phone. (Disclaimer: I work for the Collaboration group at Cisco so we're eating our own dog food and have easy access to it; I do realize these things do have a cost.)
Also, in every job I’ve had, the tasks I am asked to complete always require absolute quiet, private concentration time, for most hours on almost all days. The same has been true for most colleagues in each of these businesses, across all different software teams.
Given this, why not make the default be dedicated private offices per person, and then have separate areas for collaboration, interview rooms, etc.?
A “Library” open plan area would simply not be good enough as a default, since it lacks dedicated privacy and lacks customizability per each individual for sound, lighting, equipment, etc.
I think the main thing is that any solution proposing to put a lot of programmers into the same shared, open room is just wrong-headed and unworkable. That’s the defining property that makes these workspaces bad.
They would set their stuff up in the space that best fit their needs or even work from home.
For example, suppose there is harsh overhead fluorescent lighting above your desk. But you require soft lighting from a desk lamp for eye comfort. In a private office, you can bring in a lamp. If you bring in a lamp to your open-plan desk, it’s futile, because the harsh communal lighting is enforced on you, not customizable.
I have worked in multiple open offices where people didn't want harsh fluorescent light and they worked with the team/facilities/whoever to get the lights dimmed/removed/changed to be more compatible with what people wanted.
I’ve never seen an open-plan office where this would be possible, do you have any links?
In the open plan offices I’ve worked in, the overhead lighting could not be dimmed, and it would not be possible to only dim lights for part of the floor and not others, because there was no barrier, wall, corner, etc., separating one group of people from another. If you dim the lights directly overhead, it’s still way too harshly bright from the lights 3 or 4 rows over from you anyway.
If lights from far away are a problem I don't have a very good solution beyond hanging a flag or something from the ceiling to try and block the light.
I believe your comment is overly optimistic in most cases.
They could use rolling desks.
The single most important motivation for open offices is cost. The facilities department inside almost every company is viewed as a cost, and managers of departments viewed as a cost have only one way to make a bonus: cut costs. Most of the facilities costs are a multiple of the square meters (rent, cleaning, heating, ...), so to cut costs you cut square meters. How do you do this most easily? Get rid of walls first (open office), get rid of fixed desks second (flexdesk / hot desk), then keep reducing the ratio of desks to staff and push people to work from starbucks. Of course, it’s always packaged up as an enabling story, creating better workplaces, but in almost all cases that I saw the core driver was cost.
To get back to private offices the facilities department needs to be seen as an investment, with higher productivity as ROI. The trick is proving that with numbers. Reducing square meters is so much easier.
The answers were extremely polarized, with about half the office loving them and half the office hating them.
The separation was pretty clean: people whose jobs involved focusing for extended periods of time hated it. People whose jobs were mundane/mindless/entry level, people whose jobs involved multitasking across a lot of things, and people whose jobs involved constant interruptions, loved it.
This is broadly consistent with the thesis "open plan offices are very bad for focus and concentration"
This is a great description of being a software engineer at certain companies. The pay is good, though.
As a manager in an open plan office, I will say this is categorically untrue. I have twelve people interupting me constantly, and I need to stay late or start early regularly so that I can get some uninterrupted work time. It also tends to work against self sufficiency. Rather than learn how to do something (or find out how to find out), it's too easy to ask someone (like me).
I do have a lot of meetings, but I also have work. I need to read specs, for example, and understand all the implications. I need to plan projects with complicated circular dependencies. These are "load lots of stuff into memory" jobs. It's impossible to do in 20 minutes stretches.
I'm also a sprint-and-rest type of personality. I get a lot done I. My most productive stretch of the week. Knocking me out of a productive roll can be real costly in time.
It also makes me a worse/lazier manager. Rather than make sure people are working on a nice big chunk of something, and have everything they need to get the job done, I can trickle information in as we go. That's invariably worse, but less work upfront.
There are definitely upsides too. You get a lot of cohesion for free, especially at a company in the 50-250 people range.
Why? Your employers dysfunctional work environment isn't your problem to fix.
If you need me to work overtime because we're unexpectedly busy, then I'll work overtime. I'm not subsidizing your choice to cheap out on the office environment with my personal time.
Not that anything's changed, but since they're unwilling to try and address the issue I also have no guilt and receive no reprimand for the wasted hours.
(But my frustration with my inability to be productive here was definitely a huge driving factor in my decision to leave.)
The increased collaboration is a plain and albviius benefit for me as a developer.
A site crushing issue was solved in 30 seconds due to me overhearing a conversation in ouropen plan office. Without that it would have been at least 3 hours of pass the parcel to work out what incredibly obscure thing with timezones had happened.
You can pay me to focus, or you can pay me to listen to conversations and look for opportunities to help. You can't have me do both.
More on that in Paul Graham's Essay: http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
They may not admit that, but look at their actions. If you don't like their unhealthy office space they are okay with you taking a hike.
Only 1.5h hours lost hours a day? Try 3h or so at least LOL
Working from home, it feels like time is elastic at least the first few times, then you get used to it. You start working, get what it feels like half a day of work done and look at the clock: it's still 11 AM.
I ask, having gone into interview after interview in the last few years and just seeing ikea tables lined up with an equally absurd line of monitors and tiny 4x4 foot spaces, desperately decorated so workers can come in and quickly spot their little section of the subdivision, and ultimately deciding "No. I'm not gonna work like this".
Just wondering.
I'm much older than I was earlier in my developer years (turning 36 in a few months) and have come to form an appreciation for this kind of thinking. With age my patience for some of the crap these high-speed, energetic startups (and even some established companies looking to target the young and energetic worker by adopting startup-y tropes-like the open office) put their workers through has plummeted.
I don't care about your beer. I care about your healthcare plan. Do you offer retirement benefits? Are you matching contributions?
Hey that's a real nice pool table you've got there. There's a slim to none chance I'll ever be playing on it (partly because I'll mop the floor with anybody you throw at me over a game of 8-ball), do you support continuing education of your employees? How? Subsidized or can I expect to be reimbursed for taking a certificate course?
Are you discussing met objectives with the workforce? What gets discussed in an all-hands meeting? Did we meet our monthly business goals or did we come up short? Or are the meetings just feel good moments of superlatives for someone who got a positive reaction on twitter?
Don't get me wrong, this line of thinking kind of drifts away from the core discussion we're having about open-office spaces, but I look at the open office space as an indicator of QOL in the work place.
I walk in for an interview and see rows and columns of monitors, surge protectors and switches, entire ecosystems of cables mashed under a desk and the only thing that looks like a wall separating one area from the next being a conference room with not enough chairs, and history has taught me to be very incredulous. Very good chance I'm not going to want to work there or will regret it in a few months.
I'm pretty damn sure that if private offices were somehow cheaper they would do that instead and figure out some other way to handle collaboration.
That being said, I wish everyone could have their own. But, as the person who writes the rent check and the salaries, I can't afford to go from $6k a month to $15k a month, plus $100k outlay to build out an office where everyone gets a private space. It's just incredibly expensive.
I'll do it if everyone would take a paycut though!
Cubicles use up the same amount of space and at least you have some privacy.
Evidence would suggest that companies are willing to harm their employees, reduce productivity, and pay more recruiter fees rather than pay for cubicles.
I literally jumped at the opportunity to move my cube to share a window, and an entrance.
Give me remote; or give me death at this point.
There's not much natural light and a set of nice headphones can't overshadow.
I can look at the engineering area at any given day and see every member of the engineering team with headphones/earbuds on. Slack/IRC/Skype for Business gets ignored...why? It allows us to focus on the task at hand, without the noise of the office around us.
One of the best startups that I've worked at -- culture wise -- had a policy of two days a week, there would be no meetings, chatter around the office, or loud noises in the afternoon, and they'd play something that was rather chill/relaxing that everyone would agree on...and it really helped with productivity: the number of commits went up on Tuesdays and Thursdays because we were able to get things done without the hassle of anyone bothering us but the tasks at hand.
If open plan offices were designed with sound masking/dampening, the correct number of bathrooms per person (because, they were originally designed for cubes, not open seating, there are never enough bathrooms, it seems), the correct network planning (limiting your DevOps guys to one network drop always sucks when we're the ones pushing around gb+ images), and parking (because open plan seating usually implies that they're trying to stuff more people into a smaller space, so, there's never usually enough parking for the area) I would not really have an issue with open plan offices. I have a great pair of noise cancelling headphones and they work well for me.
That's because employers don't care and employees don't unite to fight them back on such matters.
If anything, it's convincing upper management that they must be doing something right because anything that makes us this miserable has to be good for the bottom line.
A lot of the time companies don't "choose" an open office, it chooses them.
If you are working at a small or mid-sized company, building out rented office space you will probably outgrow in a year or two is a crappy investment.
The alternative? Buy the desks, throw them into a room, expect people to be quiet and respectful.
- Give enough desk space: i.e, 2 monitor, laptop, enough space for a few books and papers, and 2 feet of space to move my chair in each direction.
- No people making calls. Have sound-insulated single person, non-bookable, meeting rooms/call booths for calls. Also anyone playing anything on their computer without headphones must be prohibited. Basically no one should be hearing any one-way conversations.
- Strict rules on two-way conversations. Anything that's taking more than 5 mins to discuss and does not involve the whole area should go to a meeting room.
With this arrangement, open office has worked for me. I am able to provide solutions when I hear something about which I know something, other people are able to provide me solutions, I get to hear about stuff that effects me sooner (e.g, hey the commits aren't going through due to test failures). I have found that the number of noises that bother me is actually very few in reality, and I have my trusty insulated headphones for that.
1) If it works for some of the most successful tech companies on the planet (Google / Facebook / Amazon,) why can't it work for us?
2) Prove to me that the loss in productivity is higher than the cost / investment necessary to build everyone an office (or a semi-isolated cube) + value gained from collaboration.
I hear lots of hearsay and opinions, but if folks have good research or articles to point to, I'd love to have them in my back pocket for the next time I have this argument.
The OP links to the recent study that the supposed communication benefits of open plan offices also appear to be a myth which calls into question the premise of 2)
Have these companies always been open-office, or is this something they've recently moved to? These companies have been successful for years and can probably absorb the productivity losses an open office generates for a while.
Because it's not about what merely works, it's about what's better.
Keith Richards and others wrote great music even while on heroin. But you can do even better without heroin.
>2) Prove to me that the loss in productivity is higher than the cost / investment necessary to build everyone an office (or a semi-isolated cube) + value gained from collaboration.
There's no extra collaboration, just extra disruption, so you don't have to prove anything.
The open floor plans hurt their expensive worker's productivity, but they have the money to hire more people. A small company has to be more worried about worker productivity than a large mega corp.
>...2) Prove to me that the loss in productivity is higher than the cost / investment necessary to build everyone an office (or a semi-isolated cube) + value gained from collaboration.
There is pretty much overwhelming research that people are more productive and healthy at work when they have some privacy and don't have distractions. One example - a study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology of more than 40,000 workers in 300 US office buildings: "...Enclosed private offices clearly outperformed open-plan layouts in most aspects of IEQ (Indoor Environmental Quality), particularly in acoustics, privacy and the proxemics issues. Benefits of enhanced 'ease of interaction' were smaller than the penalties of increased noise level and decreased privacy resulting from open-plan office configuration."
https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/science-just-proved-that-...
This article talks about some of the other research on the negative health effects and other effects on productivity:
https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-open-office-...
Even the idea that there is any actual "value gained from collaboration" in an open floor plan is questionable and anyone claiming it should show some evidence for it. In a large company, the issues always seem to be between teams, not inside the individual teams. An open floor plan lets you hear every random conversations in your own team, but it really discourages people from going to another teams area to ask a casual question or have an impromptu discussion of what they are working on since they know they would be disrupting several people.
The best environments I have seen are when there are individual offices with plenty of open areas and conference rooms for people to meet.
And yet the battle still rages.
If you haven't read the book, I'd recommend it. If only to realise how little we've learned.
Given the choice, and as a 100% remote worker now, I'm so glad I don't actually have to choose, I think I'd take the cube over an open trading floor environment any day.
I've heard of one older section of the Apple campus (pre alien spacecraft) where you can have your own space with a door etc but that's about it...
Open-plan offices are a pain point which serve to drive everyone with a bit of entrepreneurial spirit to start their own company. They're supposed to be oppressive. We're due for a Scattering.
We're all truly open plan heroes. Take the rest of the day off.
...orrrrr I could work from home, which I do 2 days per week, and it's very nice. No distractions, "private office", all the natural light I want, good food.
I'm sure some people love it, but there should be options to work in an environment that's best for you.
This is not my experience at all. From what I see, most programmers these days are definitely extroverts, if they're under the age of ~35.
I worked for a company once that already had a huge office in Columbus, Ohio, with private offices for everyone. They had no engineering presence in that office and no plans to increase headcount in that office. It was an HR office primarily, and the workers there needed privacy everyday to be on the phone about sensitive topics like legal issues or salary.
The CEO announced in a company meeting once that they would be totally remodeling that office to change it into open plan seating (we found out later it came at a cost of $14 million, purely to destroy good privacy and turn it into open plan seats, in a building the company already owned, with no need to accomodate more head count).
The CEO just said, “We are an innovation company and that makes each and every one of you an innovator — and innovators love open spaces.”
So I think you’re wrong. Companies don’t care about open plan offices for saving money (and they often lose money on it).
It’s all about bullshit optics.
As for the CEO - I can't imagine he could say "we're going to squeeze you all against your will to improve the bottom line." He had to say the usual bs, whether he believed it or not.
As for concrete data, check any online calculator. This one [1] shows individual offices as taking 3 times as much space as open-plan offices. As personnel costs are usually one of the highest fixed costs, going open plan might be a good alternative to lowering the salary when a manager wants to improve the bottom line - or, sometimes, to save the employees in troublesome times.
[1] http://officeprinciples.com/planning/space-calculator/result...
I don’t understand your comment at all. What bottom line were they improving by paying $14MM to take down pre-existing privacy features, while not increasing worker density per square foot at all?
Also “look at any online calculator” is a silly response that tells me you’ve never actually looked into the data on this at all. Open plans don’t save 3x space in a vacuum, because they introduce other costs. And it still doesn’t address why a company would create gourmet coffee stations, roof decks, alcohol-focused meeting spaces, opulent fountains, huge budgets for “sleek” interior decorating, etc.
If they save 3x on space, but then use that extra space anyway for a dipshit coffee station, then your point holds no credibility: they are still paying for the huge space that could have housed all the employees with private offices. They just fill it with dipshit perks and then cram people into the remaining space.
Additionally, cubicles with high walls offer a lot if the privacy and noise blocking that private offices could give, but without taking any additional floor space when compared with open-plan offices.
So again, the answer to this behavior simply cannot be cost savings. That is not consistent with the choices that upper management make regarding offices.
I'm curious about the future of the company you mention. I bet that when hard times come, the fountains and the rest will go away, while the open plan is going to stay.
It still seems like you didn’t fully read my comment. This has not been my experience at all. Most companies choose open floor plans because they superficially look trendy and because it is a cargo cult copy of what Facebook & trendy start-ups do. They are even happy to spend more money on this type of floor plan.
You keep asserting that companies are very budget conscious when it comes to real estate expenditures, but this doesn’t match reality, and you’re still not addressing the bigger point of stupid corporate spending on fountains, roof decks, parties, etc., which totally contradicts your point of view.
> “the fountains and the rest will go away, while the open plan is going to stay.”
This makes no sense. I’m not even sure you understand how real estate works. You don’t make money by removing a fountain or a roof deck you previously paid to install. You just lose more money if you want it removed or remodeled. If you fall on hard times, you’re absolutely not spending money to pay construction workers to remove physical features of the office. I can’t begin to describe what a naive understanding of office real estate you project.
Also, any theories we might come up with about open plan office choices have to be good theories when the company has lots of money, not just when it’s having hard times, because tons of perfectly profitable companies that can easily and trivially afford to pay for whatever office space they want are still irrationally choosing open plan spaces (which destroy productivity and make workers unhappy) even when any cost savings from doing so would be entirely trivial compared with billions and billions of net income.
The idea that managers in those cases are simultaneously so unconcerned about money that they will throw lavish parties, spend millions on unnecessary office decor, roof decks, etc., and yet also act deeply concerned over a few million of extra rent to get a large enough space for private offices ... it obviously refutes what you’re saying.
The faux concern offer real estate cost obviously is just for show, as a pretext for the overtly political reasons to choose open plan layouts.
You seem to think companies try to save money at all costs, and see open floor plans as a necessary evil to cut costs.
Company spending behavior contradicts that claim. Companies clearly and obviously do not see open floor plans as a necessary evil. Not at all.
These types of workplaces are not a newly-hatched resource squeeze by our ruthless capitalist overlords. They are a physical work pattern which has been reinvented and retooled many times, and isn't going away. In most of history, "office"==="big room".
Mark, the eighties called and they want their open-plan office back
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_and_the_Terrible,_Ho...
And then when school-cafeteria-style open offices became de rigeur in the startup culture, people seemed hesitant to push back on the "but collaboration!" nonsense. It looks like the overton window for that is finally starting to shift.
Do not allow eating meals in the general workspace. The main office should not be an "office-ateria". Right now, there's a ~3.5 hour block between 11am-2:30pm where there's a 50 percent chance people are eating and having a conversation about last night's episodes/games 5 feet behind my back.
Similarly, if you need to pull up a group of people for anything more than a quick conversation? Get together in a room. Do not do it amongst the rest of the team. Offices still need several private rooms to make this possible. Same thing with phone calls. Any sort of long term outlaid conversations should be relegated to private rooms, or to that cafeteria area. The more people involved the shorter it must be for it to happen acceptably amongst the general workspace.
Lastly, let people be remote when they need to, encourage it even. Don't make jokes about it, or discourage it for any reason other than important dates/meetings. Give them everything they need to succeed remotely. Open office plans make everyone aware of who is there and who is not, and currently, "not being there" is frowned upon. So even people with a valid reason, like they're on the second week of a bad cold, feel pressured to return earlier than necessary.
With these three things, I could reasonably expect that my work space and general area is a suitable environment to focus, to have quick, productive discussions and general be a part of the group.
Without them, I'm an irritable bastard with headphones on all day who loathes everyone around me.
If I forget to charge them, however, my productivity goes out the roof. I cannot sit in an open plan office for 8 hours and get even close to the same amount of work done, as if I'd had headphones on the whole day.
also listened to their own headphones and not a common radio (as that one same playlist can drive someone crazy)
No, it's the other way round: you create conflict and turnover by introducing an open-plan office. That way, your codebase remains maintainable since handovers happen regularly.
Imagine the opposite: a productive coder from a silent office leaves after 30 years. There is a very high probability that it takes months until new recruits can make meaningful changes since nothing has been documented. If you enforce regular handovers you can be sure that some documentation has accumulated somewhere.
This seems dishonest to me. Can some body explain if I'm missing something?
I understand the argument that open-plan offices increase distractions in general, and the damage that loud people do in particular. But if you really intend on being super focused and productive, I don't understand why it would bother you that someone would look at your screen.
I have worked in an open-plan office and the only times when I was embarrassed that someone saw my screen was because I was wasting my time on reddit/HN, which I shouldn't because that's not what they're paying me for... Once I managed to force upon myself the discipline of just don't open reddit/HN, I was happy to accept one of the desks with the back to the center of the room, because I no longer cared that someone was looking at my screen.
Am I missing something?
There's plenty of reasons to not want others looking over your shoulder that have nothing to do with goofing off. Private emails, even totally business related ones are just that, private. If you're struggling with a problem, having an audience can make it that much worse. Et cetera, et cetera.
The nature of software development makes it hard for a lot of people to do with lots of distractions around them.
- There's also way too much stigma against "time wasting." Your brain needs breaks and distractions to work through problems. Spending some time on a goof off site each day is not a bad thing in and of itself. If your productivity suffers, that's a problem that needs to be addressed. But it can happen via burn out just as easily as via spending too much time reading fan theories on Infinity War Pt. 2.
The fallacy here is conflating the two. To me the most important argument in the usual privacy conversation (i.e. people vs government) is that people defending themselves from government surveillance is a very important part of keeping the balance of power from swinging too much in one direction.
This is nothing of the sort. If you work for a business and you don't like their open-plan offices, find one where they don't have open-plan offices. But saying that you don't like their open-plan offices because you're so productive without distractions, but then you're afraid that people see your screen seems dishonest. Also, if you're super productive but you need to take breaks to look at cat pictures during office hours, why are you afraid that someone will catch you looking at cat pictures? If you actually are as productive as you claim I'm sure people will respect your need for breaks: after all according to you we all need breaks, so "other people" will be doing the same thing. And if they don't respect _your_ need for breaks, then the problem isn't really the office style, but a lack of trust in colleagues. Again, the entire thing seems dishonest.
Think about it. You just said that someone "catching you" taking a break is an issue and that in your mind that is a justification for keeping your screen hidden.