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Comment by jordigh | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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