Why open office design makes people less productive

Don't look so far. It's just cheaper. Also it gives managers the feeling they can avoid people slacking off because everbody see what you are doing.

Folks who practice pairing and mobbing would probably disagree about constant collaboration.

The primary motivator I think is just cost.

It costs probably less than 1/2 in terms of square footage and overhead.

Expenses are easy and tangible, the social stuff, not so much, so the 'hard data' of cost efficiency wins.

I've worked in open spaces and it drives me absolutely batty, I can't get anything done. I refuse to consider that mid-level business professionals should be resigned to wearing 'headphones' to have to keep the noise out, it's undignified.

I've actually worked in a small team environment several times and I really love it. At one point we were in an old vault with no windows and concrete walls, and it was great. We all had the same taste in music so we just cranked it up and let the sales guys outside do their thing and they left us alone.

In another case I was in a room with 8 people arranged into 2 "pods". We all worked on similar projects and would often turn to each other to get help, show something off, etc. I got sick more often that year (I think the ventilation in that room was bad) but we were very productive and I really enjoyed working there.

Pure speculation: HNs perhaps more likely to have a personality type that values personal time and extreme concentration, which open plan might be less useful for. Also HNs perhaps have tendency towards being contrary or iconoclastic, so as open plan popular, articles decrying it popular here

Because open offices are fucking terrible if you are a programmer, with people moving around in your line of sight and yammering coming nonstop from everywhere. Concentration becomes far harder than it needs to be, and productivity plummets.

My boss occasionally brings up the idea of swapping out of having private offices and dumping everyone in a big bullpen. I have to keep reminding him that I'm either quitting or working 95% from home if that ever happens.

I spent two summers of my PhD at research labs with private offices. It was awesome. At grad school, I work in an open plan lab. When reading or writing papers I find it very difficult to concentrate when people are having overlapping Skype calls on speaker phone or loud conversation near my desk. In a private office, I could take a paper and a whiteboard and really focus.

Also, interruptions become less jarring. If I'm focusing deeply in an open office, I have headphones on. That means if someone wants my attention, they have to come up close behind me and tap me on the shoulder, which is pretty intrusive of the personal space. In my private office, I wouldn't have to wear headphones in the first place, and if someone wanted to interrupt, they would knock on the door. Much less intrusive.

Interruptions also become less frequent. In an open office people seem to think that they can just come over to your desk and grab you to ask you, well, anything. The closed door has a good deterrent effect, people will interrupt you only for serious things, like lunch, "the building is on fire," and so on.

I've worked in a high walled cube, a low walled cube, and an open office. The open office looked nicer and more modern, but the high walled cube was the most comfortable of the 3.

You could work in the high walled cube without feeling like someone was watching over your shoulder, and people were a little more respectful about interrupting you when they came by. Low walled cubes encouraged more conversation over the cube walls, but open office somehow encouraged it less than the cubes because everyone had headphones and earplugs in.

Have you worked in an office building where individual developers have their own private offices to compare? From past experience, having a private office limits distractions and allows one to focus completely on the task at hand.

As for cubicles, they're significantly worse than private offices; you get the drawbacks of both open plan offices and private offices, without getting either the privacy or the noise isolation.

I feel the opposite. The open plan has parallels in communist/collectivist systems with all the negative aspects (surveillance, lack of privacy, etc.) but with none of the “positives” (not being able to get fired, ability to slack off, make up production goals, etc). It’s the worst of both worlds.

I always thought of it like university, sure there's a few people who study in the cafeteria but most of us preferred the much more quiet areas of the library or own rooms to get hours of intensive work finished.

Perhaps you were the cafeteria guy or gal, but most of us do worse trying to abstract extremely complex data flows in visually and audially noisy environments.

Alternatively, maybe you worked in a quieter open office. A lot of mine have been inundated by chatter about Games of Thrones, uproarious laughter, and the smells and sounds of people masticating.

None of which I find particularly conducive to work.

Depends on the workplace. My last one was open office, but people were mostly on their headphones, so I never had a problem concentrating there. My current one has me seated near people who, apparently, have quite a bit of free time on their hands, so they spend most of the day talking to each other about nothing in particular. It's extremely difficult to think if you're not piping white noise into your ears.

Before I started work I was waiting for stories of cubicle farms.

When I started, reality was you didn't even get your own cubible, just a desk. Now you don't even get a desk, it's all hotdesking.

I'm so glad I work from home now (most of the time), I get my own office, my own desk, and don't have to wear headphones. If I do go into the office for some face time, or to do something physical in the equipment room, I usually end up in the pub as there's nowhere to actually sit.

> Having visited cubicle offices

Ah, so you didn't actually work in them. Yes, they don't look good, but those walls provide privacy.

> Why are "open offices are bad" stories so popular on HN?

I often say that programming is 8 hours high-performance mind sport a day. Every serious high-performance sportsperson would be furious if he/she were forced to perform training with, say, cheap sneakers from the next discount supermarket. So it is quite logical that programmers get furious about open offices.

To me cubicles are just a variation of open office with the same set of problems. It's about dedicated offices vs. sitting in the open.

The cost-savings argument doesn't really work. For one thing, those savings aren't real. What does "ample amount of meeting rooms" mean? It means a higher seat-per-employee ratio, just to make up for the inconvenience of their main seats not being usable for those huddles. And speaking of inconvenience, time spent walking to/from rooms and waiting outside rooms for the last group to get out and adjusting chairs and wiping boards and picking up your crap is all time not spent producing. I've seen many people lose 5-10 minutes of productivity every hour of every day like that. That's not cost savings. Neither is the effect on productivity when people are in their primary seats. Look at any company's expense breakdown. Personnel will be at or near the top; real estate will be much further down. Keeping people more productive is a much bigger cost savings than cheaping out on real estate.

I contend that there is no way to implement an open-office system that truly reduces costs. The only reason they're so common is a combination of cost insensitivity and cargo culting.

my enterprise has gone full tilt. open offices, w/ hot desking and instead of laptops its a thin client. so yeah when you need or want to work from home you have to use the slow citrix client. fun..

I had a private office a couple of times in academia. Not uncommon (although the open plan trend has been showing up there, too).

The private sector does seem to have embraced the bullpen pretty thoroughly...

They exist. My first job had offices with 1 to 4 people per room. We even had doors!

They're uncommon nowadays, but Sun Microsystems [1] and Microsoft [2] had them. Apparently Microsoft is replacing them with open office designs these days though. FogCreek [3] is adamant about private offices.

[1] https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Work-is-where-you-ha... [2] https://officesnapshots.com/photos/22763/ [3] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/12/29/the-new-fog-creek-...