Companies are still designing open plan offices | Hacker News Reader

Companies are still designing open plan offices

fastcompany.com

36 pointsohjeez20 comments

> Employees don’t like them. Research proves they’re ineffective. Why is it taking so long for us to get rid of them?

Um, because they're the cheapest option and these decisions are done by some bean counter not by the employees?

As a european dev I used to envy the people working in SV based on their salaries until I saw picture with how the FB office looks like: cramped seating, artificial lighting, no windows for fresh air, only AC vents.

Even though I barely make a 1/5 of a FAANG employee, I feel blessed to work in a 4 man office, where I have a seat by the windows overseeing trees, external blinds so I can control the amount of natural light I get and can open the window to control the amount of fresh air I get. To me, you can't put a price on these things.

Sadly, open plan offices are coming here as well, slowly but surely, marketed as a hip SV import to attract juniors while seniors knows it's just cost cutting BS.

They're cheaper and they look good. The hidden costs of lower employee productivity and happiness are just that, hidden. I've worked at places with completely open offices and with smaller offices for teams of 4-6 people and its much nicer to have some private space, especially when you need to sit down and think through some problems.

One company handed out noise-canceling headphones but that's just a bandaid over the problem.

One extra benefit to fail-fast startups and landlords is also that space can be simply reconfigured by adding and removing desks. No pesky walls to knock down or glass doors to add when your brand new pizza delivery app fails and has to make room for a beauty box startup.

I've found, anecdotally, that offices with 3-6 employees working on the same area offers the best communication. If you're in a room with that amount of coworkers, you do have a certain level of noise. People talk, someone usually has a customer on the phone.

However, the background conversations tend to be on-topic and this seems to be much less distracting opposed to lots of noise about everything. On top of that, you pick up what the rest of the team is working or struggling on to some degree. And this is really, really valuable we've found.

I agree. The problem is when you have an eight person team and a five person team, etc. You start to lose a lot of space when there is a mismatch.

20 years ago I used to be in a 20 person group, multiple teams but not everyone. I think I would have preferred 12 (there were a couple of those). But managers had glass wall private offices.

Yep. I interviewed at a place with 3 tech leads were all in the same room. One had given notice and I figured I'd be his replacement. When I showed up on day one I found that they had hired an additional person who started the week before. So the three of them were in one office and I was next door. After awhile when I mentioned being left out of important decisions they offered to have all of us move into the hallway...which would have sucked for everybody.

> After awhile when I mentioned being left out of important decisions they offered to have all of us move into the hallway...which would have sucked for everybody.

Yikes. I started my career 20 years ago as a junior sysadmin in the networking closet (seriously, my boss helped me pull a desk in there). I would take that over an open office plan any day.

My office has 1 person cellphone booths for use when someone needs to meet 1:1 with a remote office. In my ideal world I'd just have one of those as a dedicated space to work in when I needed it. With such a setup there needn't be any expensive office rework between tenants.

The fundamental idea that employees need different kinds of space throughout the day is sound. But in practice we are amply provisioned with 8 different kinds of collaborative space (desks, conference rooms, auditoria, nooks, lounges, cafes, phone booths, libraries) and no space for quiet work. We even have Quiet Rooms, but they are for meditation and napping, no laptops allowed.

Partly this is a question of social norms rather than physical plant. Make any of those spaces Library Rules and they would be great.

Open offices aren't so bad if you have a large personal space (eg, large desk and some room to move around). If you have a small/standard desk, it gets a lot worse.

Unfortunately many open offices are just desk rows, no dividers, and everyone is on top of each other (in my experience). Extra bonus points if you've outgrown the space and meeting rooms need to be booked 3 weeks in advance.

CEO sits behind double doors.

Really? I've never worked in an open plan in which the CEO didn't also have a desk. Never there and always in meetings, but no special office

I worked in one startup where the CEO worked in the open office "just like us" but he usually worked in a conference room (the nicest one!), not only for meetings. If he wanted the space, he got it.

Always. The C suite is too good for open space but it's fine for the rest of us plebs.

I consistently see criticism towards the space thats provided by an employer. I think there needs to be params on the culture of working in an open space environment. The truth is its just cheaper than everyone having their own office. Headphones, Slack/Email and not having conversations in the open has worked in my experience.

>The truth is its just cheaper than everyone having their own office.

Crappy plastic chairs, $5 non-brand keyboards and recycled CRT monitors are also cheaper.

If you want results from people working in a highly focus intensive and cognitive loaded job, and care about their mental health, adding divider walls is an irrelevant cost.

You already pay them 70K+ per year, it's not some 20K/year developing world call center.

You also don't need to give everyone their own office -- you could have people in smaller units of 2 to 4 persons.

But this is only true if you plan on holding on to those people over the long term, which you don't. You work them until they leave voluntarily or burn out, at which point you replace them with a new crop of fresh-faced university grads.

This has the added benefit of ensuring that the $70K/year or whatever you're paying these people stays static. Experienced people have a bad habit of expecting to earn more money as their skills deepen. By keeping your workforce in a constant state of churn, you drive those people away before they can start making demands.

> Headphones, Slack/Email and not having conversations in the open has worked in my experience.

This is fine when it's 5, 10, 20 people but open offices of 200+ people that is a combination of engineering, product, sales, marketing, etc does not. Even when small groups have conversations it's suddenly magnified through the whole office.

Great that you found a way to work like that; I for one cannot. And in my experience, even with headphones, it is far less productive especially for coders.

Employers are generally adamant that having conversations out in the open is the point of an open office.

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