Open offices are as bad as they seem–they reduce face-to-face time by 70% | Hacker News Reader

Open offices are as bad as they seem–they reduce face-to-face time by 70%

arstechnica.com

48 pointsnevir26 comments

Is anyone arguing in favour of open offices? I thought they existed because they were cheaper and then management tries to justify them after the fact by saying they foster collaboration.

Aren't these blog posts just preaching to the choir?

Open offices are a success because they achieve their goal of reducing costs. The "collaboration" was wishful thinking that didn't pan out.

Annecdotally from experience of advocating for less-open offices and more cubes / mini-offices, there's not a lot of concrete data out there from reputable sources to counter research from strong sources like HBS and the like justifying open-office collaboration to convincingly make the case to Management Execs.

I personally like seeing articles like this because it helps add to my backlog of research to point to for when I make the case yet again in the future.

cheaper yes but I think they are also perpetuated because they satisfy the egos of leadership. There's the visual satisfaction of seeing rows and rows of their diligent workers, and managers can easily inspect anyone's availability, walk up and demand instant attention.

Having worked on a floor with individual (or dual) offices, and now being in an open-space for over a year, I personally feel a lot more collaborative in an open-space environment.

Mostly startups and then to management types in Silicon Valley, which has been picked up spread beyond corporations and educational institutions used to justify more cramming people together in the interests of "collaboration". I saw it over at PayPal, where they were pushing it as a means for "fostering creativity and collaboration". Tore down cubicles and put in long rows with 1 ft high partitions. Just awful for concentration, focus work, staying in a flow and getting work done.

There have to be jobs where it works better than the typical coder focused world we see in hacker news. I would think....

At the same time I think every world requires everyone to have SOME space.

>the use of email increase between 22 percent and 56 percent

Less about email, more about Slack these days.

I think someone on Twitter pointed this out (maybe DHH?) : it's quite hilarious to walk into an office in SF that rents for 10's of thousands of dollars a month and see everyone glued to their laptop screens sending messages over Slack.

I think this is the most frustrating paradox of Silicon Valley : we're living in a time where humanity is connected via virtually instant communication services more so than any other time in our existence, building tools to enable this in real-time and even through video (!), but no: you need to be centrally located physically in the most expensive place to live & work on the planet for...reasons? And yet, you'll be doing exactly the same stuff, using the exact same tools, that you would be if everyone were remote.

/rant

It's the classic "butts in seats" theory of management.

Personally, I think you are right and have similar feelings about the subject.

That said, the big success story companies have been mostly (all?) been built on the butts in seats model. Maybe there is something to it that we are missing?

> That said, the big success story companies have been mostly (all?) been built on the butts in seats model.

Not sure about that claim... but certainly they weren't built on the open-office model.

Yeah, that is a good point.

sure we spend a lot of time on our computers. but we have meetings too. we talk to people around us. we eat together and get coffee together. no one goes to work and stares into their laptop all day.

and doing this remote is great from time to time. but you will spend 5-10 or 15 mins getting the VC set up. you will hear 7 words out of 10 and infer the rest or rarely ask to repeat. you will be alone and have less personal connection to your coworkers.

i’ve done both extensively and prefer going to work a lot. i WFH often, but it’s not optimal to work remote every single day. we have people who live out far for cheap and come in every few months. no matter how much of a “rockstar” they are, their organizational value is less than one in the building. whether it’s on merit or just humans liking humans they see, face to face contact is important and has real value

I find most meetings to be superfluous opportunities for the biggest egos to exercise their vocal cords as everyone else writes emails or sends messages...

I have suggested that one gets a weekly word budget and if one exceeds it, one loses a dollar of compensation per word.

It makes total sense: open offices discourage talking and collaboration. Most people are "library quiet" as to not disturb others.

Chat wasn't as much of an issue when the UI was boring. IRC was boring and people used it mostly when they needed to.

Slack is made by a former gaming company that understands how to make chat more psychologically addictive and appealing. Our devs said, "You can take slack from our cold dead hands." We've had emoji wars, integration wars and so on. Slack is not for chat.

Interesting that Discord has managed to beat them as the Slack for gaming.

Used to work for this startup who was spending 25% of their revenues on a fancy open office....needless to say it was very hard to focus when people are yapping and socializing next to you.

I still firmly hold that VR will become mainstream and mundane once someone can create seamless virtual offices, so you can get the verisimilitude of interacting with your coworkers face to face both in meetings and down digital hallways, while living anywhere in the whole dang world.

Who is the leader in that realm? Microsoft's HoloLens?

VSpatial, big screen, and any of the compatible vr hardware.

I can't find the article anymore, but the "open office vs. cubicle" debate suffers from the same thing that so many of these hot-buttons topics suffer from: nuance.

The original "action offices" by Herman Miller were a lot more similar to the "open offices" you see today. There's space to collaborate, but still enough to have your own privacy. People can engage and disengage how they see fit.

However, corp overlords took the "action office" to its logical extreme and created the oft-loathed cubicles to cram as many workers in one space, like cattle.

Then, the backlash. Open Offices! So cool! Everyone talks to each other! This, too, was taken to its logical extreme, with long tables and 0 privacy. Similarly, this was born out of short-term objectives around the bottom line instead of thinking about the employees and getting work done.

The real solution, I think, is to get out of the frame of open vs. closed vs. cubicles vs. whatever, and start thinking about not only your corporate culture, but how your company plans to get work done on a day-to-day. Great offices are really expensive, at the end of the day. If your employer makes a lot of money but still treats you like an expense, rather than an owner, then perhaps consider looking elsewhere.

Here's a video I found that's related to the afore-mentioned article that I couldn't find:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgDHifV62WI

Personally I find that I do best if I work from home some percentage of time, and work from the office for the remainder. That way I can get my face to face stuff done, and my concentration-based work done.

I would love to have 2 days to WFH per week.

Working with people is hard, getting them to cooperate and work better as teams is hard.

At the same time gimmicks like an open office is no solution, quite the opposite.

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