U.S. workers hate ‘open’ office spaces
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People should not HAVE to do buy/use something just to be productive. It's downright disrespectful to expect your workers to just "deal with the noise in a professional manner".
It's possible that escalating a "buy me PPE" request to the company lawyer could raise a few eyebrows into exactly what conditions you're being asked to work under.
In addition to being completely unable to filter out any distracting noise, I also have misophonia, so an open office is anything between distracting as all get-out and torture, but the headphones and some good loud music mitigate that greatly.
(I once worked between someone who tapped their feet and someone who drummed on the desk constantly. Those weeks were not productive, even with headphones.)
Buying high wall cubicles or paying for a construction company to build out offices is still buying something to be productive.
I’m sure they could be repurposed the way you suggest. But don’t most people in open spaces use slack or equivalent for that?
Surrounding yourself by whiteboards might also allow you to approximate walls.
I've got two colleagues that are horrible about this. Fortunate enough to have an office with a door, and play music quietly at my desk so I'll hear it if someone knocks--since I face slightly away from the door.
Except they'll skip knocking and just walk in and around my desk to do the shoulder tap if the door's open.
I've been training them out of this behavior by saying "oh hey did you knock? I must have missed it, what's up?"
Time will tell how this goes, heh.
Although I do wear headphones pretty much constantly, I have always made a point to be responsive to people and not ignore them. If someone needs my attention, they will get it, and I made a point of doing everything I can to help people. Yes, I'd rather not be disturbed, but if they really need my help, then I will gladly stop and help. This is no different than if I were in a cubicle or my own office. I have no problems with that kind of distraction. It's the unintentional distractions that we need to eliminate.
In a typical corporate office, I would not tolerate it. I would push back, and I encourage anyone with sufficient job security to push back too.
Very early in my career, when I as still operating in the break/fix world of help desk support I toured an office during an interview. It was a boilerroom sales team, complete with a gong that someone bashed as I walked along the back wall to the conference rooms, everyone cheered madly, papers flew, loud music started playing off of a set of overhead speakers. I winced the moment the music blared and almost visually grimaced from the volume. Along the way the hiring manager interviewing me pointed to an area in the back of the office with laptops stacked up to the desk from the floor, monitors, cables everywhere-directly underneath one of the speakers. He didn't have to tell me, I figured it out, but he told me anyway
"And over there is where IT sits".
I stopped the recruiter before we made it to the conference room and politely pardoned myself from the interview process. No way in hell.
IMO, that push back needs to start early, as early as possible where possible. Not everyone may have the circumstances to punt on an interview like that, completely understandable, but the interview is just as much for your benefit as theirs. Candidates should evaluate as much as they can by sheer power of observation as they can verbally asking about working from home.
That means taking in what you can that you might not be explicitly shown-or worse, steered away from if you're brought in for an on-site interview.
I'll quickly summarize the majority of HN conversation for the uninitiated: if a potential employer asks you to write something on a white board or solve a take home coding problem, politely gather your things, leave, and start contributing to an open source Rust project until a more ethical employer makes you an offer. Follow the same procedure if a potential employer has an open office, uses recruiters, or employs anyone with the job title "Scrum Master."
But to answer your question, apparently like everyone that posts to HN. ^_^
I made my feelings known most emphatically, but I stuck it out for 2 years, and now we are moving back to cubicles. The thing is, so many people now work from home that the open office layout isn't so bad.
After 8 hours, my ears actually hurt from wearing air-traffic-controller style headphones all day.
The guys in the tower are ATC, they do ground control (still ATC) and local control, surface to 2500' with a 5-mile radius. The dark room guys (TRACON) do surface to the top of their airspace (depends, 18k, 23k) with a 60-mile radius (roughly). Then there is center/en route, which does air traffic above the TRACON when you are level flying at 30k+.
Simplified version.
Source: Was an air traffic controller.
I don't believe that productivity is hurt because of open office sounds, I think people just love complaining.
I've worked both with my own office and in an open office. The difference is night and day. I'm vastly more productive and much happier in a closed door office. Most people report the same.
To clarify, just because you're in a library doesn't mean it is absolutely pin drop quiet. There is basic atmosphere noise. I of course am in favor of a closed office, and cubicle farms and open environments are easily more favorable for the employer than employee, but it seems expected to have some basic noise in an open office that people love complaining about—instead of championing closed offices which is never going to happen in a lot of companies.
Your lack of belief does not invalidate other people's experiences. You may feel that your productivity isn't hurt in open offices, and you might even be right about yourself. But "this doesn't bother me so it doesn't bother anyone" (or even "so it shouldn't bother anyone") causes serious problems.
"It doesn't bother me, so obviously, it doesn't bother other people"
I'd have a hard time caring about that if I had to wear headphones and play them loud enough to drown out the noise around me in the first place.
(Luckily, I have a door and a pair of headphones with a noise cancelling function that is usually good enough without even any music playing.)
But even in a very noisy environment, think the tube in London, where the noise level when going through a tunnel can be similar to a factory floor, surprisingly, people will hear your noisy iphone and will be annoyed by it. Now if it is in London they will be too polite to let you know. But I think not making annoying noise is also a form of politeness I like to adhere to in any case.
Why would you want to ADD to the problem instead of being part of the solution?
You need Steel-Toed boots and Earplugs for some locations - I'm not sure how much of that is compensated. For waste processing, you either "deal with it" or have a purchase some form of smell-cancelling equivalent (peppermint oil on a cotton swab is an example I've heard used in a hospital). What about slip-resistant shoes for cooking in a kitchen?
By all means, I don't enjoy the open office layout - I literally spent 20 minutes this morning talking to my immediate neighbor about NOTHING.
HOWEVER, I suppose what I'd like to ask is - "what makes a white-collar job's comfort more important than other occupations, to the point they should be either compensated for purchasing items to maintain it or isolated with [cubicle] walls put up?"
[Slippery slope fallacy incoming] Maybe that music or podcast is distracting you from work, I mean we wouldn't want you to see a 20, but think 10 because your podcast was simultaneously playing their 10% Squarespace ad. You are right, noise is distracting and corporate is now providing all employees with noise-cancelling earplugs.
EDIT: Since I've been downvoted, can I have an explanation, or is this a simple I'm saying something the HN community disagrees with?
Steel-Toed boots and earplugs are necessary because of safety requirements. You can crush your toes and lose your hearing as a result of that job.
Waste processing smells because of the fact that, well, waste smells. There is utterly nothing the company or the individual can do other than mask the smell for them self.
Programming has no such utterly-unavoidable noise aspect (unless you count meetings and around-the-desk discussions, things which I personally can deal with to a reasonable extent). There is absolutely, positively no reason that a company of a decent size can't format their office in a way that is less distracting than an open-office format.
Drawing a line between white and blue collar jobs in this manner is a false equivalence and a strawman.
Is there a tech company which has an open floor plan for programmers only because they're cheap?
That said, I would still say that there are plenty of ways to improve (what I would consider) "comfort" in your work environment; however, they do not need to be reimbursed by the company (moving this back to your original post).
Likewise, as the other reply to this post mentions - cost.
Simply put, what is the cost involved and relative productivity gained/lost from each layout design. What about experimental designs? Without this type of information, it is difficult to convince a decision maker to improve these conditions. Those metrics need to be quantifiable, not anecdotal (I get more work when there aren't conversations around me vs. I resolved 10 bugs in the open office environment and 25 equivalent bugs in a cubicle).
This gets into more the MBA and Information Systems world of quantifying intangibles in tech (like productivity), but to obtain this in an environment that would be deemed acceptable for experimentation, you'd need a corporate culture interested in experimentation - because not every layout will work for every group or every person in said group. Even then, being a group that opts into experimentation is not indicative to a real work environment, and so better results would require a new cohort for each experimental layout.
Regardless, without decision maker buy-in and quantifiable metrics that can beat the cost/productivity metrics of open-office, articles like this only serve to form an echo chamber.
This has been well documented since the early 2000s. Programmers are statistically and significantly more productive if they have enclosed offices with closing doors. And decision makers that care have been acting on it for just as long (see Joel on Software, I'm not a huge fan, but this has been a harping point of his, as an owner of a software company, for years).
Any company that forces programmers to work in open-plan environments is either ignorant, or just doesn't care.
I'll agree with everything you stated but this as the terminology you use makes it sound malicious. Instead, I can imagine consulting firms with plenty of talking points convincing a decision-maker they were right. Furthermore, we cannot assume any particular environment will be optimal for all employees for all companies. "Productivity" was studied, but has branched into more concrete terms, rather than been solved. Even with a company that is open to helping improve conditions, what should they do, how long will the ROI take, etc.
While I accept the assumption of being more productive in an enclosed space, could you point me to a specific paper? Mostly because "productive" is not as well defined and is more a generalized term (respectfully, many terms can fall under the "productive" umbrella). I ask about the paper because a) I'd be curious to see how they define and measure productivity, and b) it may be beneficial for student learning (another knowledge-specific domain)
For boots, compensation is not required as "this type of equipment is very personal, is often used outside the workplace, and that it is taken by workers from jobsite to jobsite and employer to employer" [1] -- though I know some employers who offer a "Footwear Reimbursement", and/or loan out steel toe guards when requested.
Earplugs, yes, by law in the US.
[1]: https://www.osha.gov/dte/outreach/intro_osha/7_employee_ppe....
> "what makes a white-collar job's comfort more important than other occupations, to the point they should be either compensated for purchasing items to maintain it or isolated with [cubicle] walls put up?"
First, it has nothing to do with money. I've offered at several jobs to pay to escape the open office space, and I've always been refused permission. Other jobs are often isolated, when there's a possibility for distraction, even at these same companies.
Second, it's not about "comfort", either. Distractions make it impossible to concentrate, which is literally my only job. If they hired me to do a job, they can't simply put me in a situation where I can't apply my skills, and then judge me based on my performance there.
You're being downvoted because you're trying to steer the conversation into "compensation" and "comfort", neither of which are the issue here.
It's not necessary to assume that it's more important to express a personal dislike or suggest that it's counterproductive. So the fallacy here is strawman.
It's intellectual work that requires a high degree of concentration. Not all white collar work is like that and not all blue collar work isn't, but programming requires keeping a lot more in your head at once than someone on an assembly line and noise inhibits this. There's also the type of noise, people talking is a lot harder to filter out than other background noise, I can sleep with a train track a few meters away and can concentrate with music playing but I can't work in an open office.
Now we actually have a flexible remote policy, but that's an entirely different can of worms, as I liked having a place to do deep work in that wasn't a coffee shop. My home is a bit too distracting sometimes.
Private office, closing door. This should be the minimum price to hire someone.
Cube walls, over the years kept getting shorter and shorter until finally doing away with them entirely.
The point is - the business requires that you have zero privacy or any kind of time to yourself in any capacity outside of assigned breaks.
The whole purpose is to create a panopticon of a work place, where even when you aren't being watched you modify your behavior on the possibility that you're being watched
Open offices are inherently authoritarian in a corporate/cyberpunk sort of way. That's their primary function. All this crap about collaboration and fostering open communication is just the face of it.
So not only can you hate all the noise and distraction around you, but tomorrow it can be entirely new set of people that piss you off. Also nothing says "you don't matter" like not even giving someone 4x6 feet of space for a desk and chair they can call their own..
This is the point:
> https://www.wired.com/1999/02/chiat-3/
> As the unofficial story goes, Jay Chiat was skiing down a mountain in Telluride when it dawned on him that the conventional American office structure was antiquated and counterproductive; that revolution was not only inevitable but overdue; and that destiny had selected him, Jay Chiat, as its agent of change.
So the boss can see himself as a trend-setting visionary.
That link it pretty interesting, since it was clear that "hoteling" was awful 20 years ago in 1999. It's bizarre that I was reading about the how terrible 2019's trends in office space are when I was a kid.
At least until management cracks down and makes attendance mandatory.
It was the last in a series of increasingly-escalating "fuck yous" from the company's ownership to employees.
TBH they would have been better off just cutting 20% of their staff if they were looking to cut costs for whatever reason. It's better to have a smaller workforce of happier, productive employees than a larger number of alienated, angry employees all half-assing things while looking for other jobs.
I left soon after and never looked back. In retrospect it was a symptom of a bigger problem at the company.
At no time did they consider the effect on personal space and depersonification of this new “paradigm”.
People were hoodwinked into believing this was more social, more cooperative and more egalitarian. No it wasn’t. It was cheaper to seat people and it took freedom away from workers. You now had a multiplicity of eyes upon you. So now even if you don’t have anything productive to do till tomorrow, you have to at least pretend you have something to do now. So instead of thinking about what and how you’ll do things to morrow you waste your time pretending along with everyone else in the corral.
I saw this happen at places which say they “care about workers” and offer a good “work-life balance”. It was such horseshit. If you have to propagandize your beliefs you don’t actually believe them.
In my experience, it was rare that anyone was a proponent of it except as a cost-savings measure. In almost every case, everyone knew what it meant that the staff had open-plan but the people responsible for it had offices with doors.
Perhaps the better matching myth is the Emperor's New Clothes:
Lower per-head facilities costs.
If it enhances productivity so much why is it not good for everyone. It was absolutely a cost cutting method allowing them to shove more peons in the same space and keep an eye on them all from the safety of their high towers.
That's how the tech community operates. You get a few early, loud supporters to shut down any conversation that may draw attention to the negatives. Eventually, years later those people grow hoarse from yelling and sensible people return to the conversation.
(The Agile consultant fad seems an interesting telephone game from the ideal of "pair programming". Devolving from "pair programming in offices setup up for two and only two developers to closely share code without other distractions" to "pair programming is easier in open offices than cubicles" to "open offices enable ad hoc pair programming without dedicating people to actually learning/using pair programming, right?" bokum.)
Having been on a high profile (presented at the IEEE) early RDA/DSDM/Agile project at British Telecom in the mid 90's.
1 You produce code faster - not necessarily better 1 month vs 2 years :-) 2 We had a dedicated section of the office just for the team - not the classic open plan office.
I've never seen that.
Rather, the "innovators" fail upwards, never sticking around long enough to get pinned with the damage and chaos they caused.
Next up is AI/ML.
Like you have 10 seats and 20 sales people or consultants, who spend 3/4 of their time on the road or on location. This way you don't need to spend money on seating that's not being used most of the time.
For everything else hot seating/hotel seating is utter crap.
If you're tight on space, it's perfectly reasonable to shift people who aren't in the office most of the time to hoteling but if someone is going to be butt in seat most days, why not give them a permanent space?
Less space to lease, less desks and chairs to buy, less cabling to run.
Office space is expensive.
That sounds like the opposite of a hotel (no rooms, have to vacate overnight.)
That's what I can't wrap my head around with the debacle that professional software development has become... isn't there supposed to be a _shortage_ of developers? Wouldn't that suggest that they'd be trying to find ways to retain and attract us instead of finding new and creative ways of kicking us in the teeth?
I was one of the few who got to keep their office during the demolition, I think mostly because it was written in my contract when I accepted this job. So although I, personally, don't think they look very efficient, I can relate that the staff in my company dispise the lack of privacy and general noise that results from working in an open office space.
Who am I kidding, anyone need a Java/Kotlin back-end developer?
Now, if you frequently hear a flush without hearing the running water from the sink, that's a problem.
However, this workplace is not in sales. We are much more on the regulatory side, which means we're dealing with private information. Previously we did a pretty good job of maintaining information security by compartmentalizing issues to those individuals who needed to know.
Now, although still handcuffed by the same privacy legislation, we're expected to have these private conversations beside each other in a single room. How comfortable is the person on the phone going to feel about releasing private information if they can overhear everyone else's conversation in the background?
Again, I reiterate that these people aren't leaving because of the open office space concept. Removing all of the walls in the office just happened to also remove any reason to stick it out and try to work through the other problems.
In any case, I wish you the best of luck. Your situation sounds horrible.
That's not normal - sounds like there must be a lot more going on than just the switch to an open office.
> Again, I reiterate that these people aren't leaving because of the open office space concept. Removing all of the walls in the office just happened to also remove any reason to stick it out and try to work through the other problems.
There are definitely other issues involved. If there were not, I imagine an open office with this group would have actually been kind of fun, in a way, as we all get along really well and enjoy each other's company.
But if everyone is stressed due to significant structural reorganizations and process changes already? An open office concept just rubs salt into the wounds, IMHO.
It took a lot of getting used to: constant chatter, loud talkers, ice chewers, mouth noises, farting, personal phone calls that were too personal... But I acclimated.
I continued to work in a 9'x9'x (x5' high) cube for 25+ years and the last company I worked for switched to an open floorplan for my last 3 years there.
IT WAS HELL. At least in my small cube I had some sense of privacy, but now everyone could see my screen, or see me having to deal with various biological discomforts, it just sucked. I'm glad I became a contractor 5 years ago because it is great to be out of that mess. Hopefully I'll never have to return.
Were they literally chewing ice or is this some idiom?
I cannot stand it. On top of just being an annoying sound, it makes me think about / feel pain, because it sounds like it really hurts.
Yes, it could be bad for my teeth, but that's likely not why they're telling me about it. It bothers them more than it concerns them, or they'd stop telling me about it after a few times.
I encountered two people like this in my life. It would make me physically ill, like an allergy, but no one else around us complained so I tried to get over it and ended up just working in a lab.
I'm old enough now were it to happen again I'd flood every channel with complaints until we arrived at a compromise, but I was younger then.
This is a classic instance of misophonia. Certain sounds, especially sounds related to eating, generate disproportionate and irrational reactions, often (internally) physical. Anything from fear to disgust to anger, with the accompanying bodily state.
My kryptonite is nail clipping.
High wall cubes are fine too... Obviously a real office with a door would be ideal, but I think that door has closed at this point in time.
Individual quiet spaces are still needed for private meetings and client calls.
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/25/e5/8c/25e58cb8380ba9d5a9afdb1c1...
The key being team -- you are next to people you are actively collaborating with on a day to day basis.
What I've noticed is that a handful of people together in a space will typically work out issues like music vs. no music, lights on vs. off, blinds open vs. closed, etc. without a lot of trouble.
But there's a tipping point where it gets much harder. Put 20 people in an open office and suddenly everyone is wearing headphones and nobody is talking (except the people who are ALWAYS talking/yelling to each other) and it sucks.
I think as far back as the late 70s, "Peopleware" cited a bunch of studies that found that small shared offices with flexible policies on letting people move around (so people can self-organize either around their teams or with people they share space well with) was optimal. Sadly few offices seem to have adopted this.
Which is unfortunate because it's one of the many things I liked about working at Microsoft: they really seemed to take your productivity seriously when I worked there.
Worked in an office like that and agree, it worked pretty well. It's not always feasible to assign individual offices to people but 1-5 people works. I'd say 5 is even high, ideally it would be 2-3.
> but I think that door has closed at this point in time.
Well, I'd say working from home is like that? :-) Hopefully that's an option for more people. I am doing that now and it's pretty good, but the idea is that the whole team has to be remote, otherwise you don't want to be the odd one out.
If you organize bullpens around clumps of people who work together constantly, it makes more sense than doing it to an entire department or company. Though you should also have a quiet space per bullpen and meeting rooms for anything requiring cross-team collaboration or secretive stuff.
Even if all 12 folks are on the same team, I'm sure it's possible to split them up into subspecialties or working groups. An unstructured blob of 12 people on a team doesn't sound that ideal either way, regardless of seating arrangements.
Still, looking back over the past eight months at all of the distractions from kids, I'm still dealing with less distractions (external, at least...) than my previous gig in an large open office environment.
We each have privacy (and our own seating), but the collaboration is always available and not overwhelming.
I dig it a lot more than the cube I had at my old job.
Now I work in industry with a fully open office and yeah, it's a nightmare.
For long discussions that's when you book a meeting room.
There's not a ton of research on this. But what's out there[1] suggests that open office spaces actually decrease collaboration.
[1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.201...
That's never stopped anyone in my office. The place is full of constant interruptions that an open office layout facilitates.
do you really collaborate any better in an open office? I can't have any real conversation in such an environment because it's just too loud.
I think you hit the nail on the head - you're at a level where you have to communicate a lot. Devs that are more focused on production rather than coordination work away from their desks - that says to me that most people can't (or prefer not to) do their work at their work.
Are you contrasting open offices with individual offices? Cubicles are barely larger than the desk/chair itself, I could believe maybe a 10%~ loss from cubicles due to inefficiency but not much more.
Assuming they all need to be in the office every day to collaborate..
I would say in Europe open offices are pretty normal, and people do not hate them that much.
I have worked in a classic "cubicle" environment in the US for a few months, and I cannot say it affected my productivity significantly.
Employers do need to control costs like real estate, but they also have an interest in keeping employees productive. So they do surveys and listen to employees and I suspect the reality is people aren't complaining as much as we think they are.
Also, a lot of people who can't stand the noise already do work remotely. They would still be in the broader surveys complaining, but employers wouldn't hear them on internal surveys.
> I wonder if it's a cultural Europe/US thing?
It might be all the extra vacay in Europe. Noise is a stressor, and getting away from it lets that stress diminish.
> I have worked in a classic "cubicle" environment in the US for a few months, and I cannot say it affected my productivity significantly.
Most people filter that stuff out effectively, but some people don't, and if you're like me and your brain amps it up, it can be pretty hellish.
I also don't really see them being "the norm" - the software development company I work for since 8 years puts 2-4 people into an office, and that's it. We had some experiments with up to 8 or 10 in a room, but everyone really hated it, and management listened. We just moved into a larger building, but we still have only 4 desks maximum per office.
But then, maybe I'm just lucky. Our company staying away from open offices because of abysmal feedback by employees is definitely one of the reasons why I've been there for almost a decade now.
You will need a lot of rooms and furniture specifically placed and designed for ad-hoc collaboration.
An open space with just desks crammed in is awful, but if the above is catered for it’s awesome and I don’t want to work any other way.
It takes a lot of room and smart planning though.
Previous place we had a bunch of teams in mobs in an open space with just enough ad-hoc rooms and furniture made up of sound-dampeners.
Great experience.
This always comes up in these discussions. It's not a binary "everyone working at one long table" versus "everyone in their own hotel room". It's a continuum. There are options that allow each worker to have their own space at rather low cost. I don't buy the cost argument or the space argument.
I've been inside designs where workers have their own doors for a cost of a few thousand dollars and taking up very little extra space. Spread that out over ten years and you're talking a cost of $400 a year - if they don't have the money for that, you shouldn't be working there, because they don't have the money to pay you. Absolutely trivial relative to a six-figure salary.
I don't understand. If it provides space for 90% of your team to work away from their desks then surely that's enough space just to have provided them with private offices in the first place? (Plus open spaces for collaboration the 10% of the time that they want it)
Side note: I'd be curious to see responses for office preference (open, or not open) distributed by age.
I think it's important to work on noise reduction through office design and offering quiet isolated spaces to work for people that need that environment. But overall I'm a big fan.
However, I'm currently in an office where they went to great lengths to absorb sound and space everyone out to create an area that at most times is actually quiet except for the few times we chat with each other.
So in this instance I don't mind it, I mostly chill on the nearby couch anyway. So I can see how some would love it, and others would hate it. It really does matter how the office is architected and the density of people.
I'm 37.
I never worked in my own office (I'm 39), so I'm really curious what you prefer: phone, email, knocking on someones door?
Also, how do you stay in the loop about what's going on?
On the flip side, most of the day my door is open, and I don't mind occasionally being interrupted to help someone else with whatever they need. If I have a conference call or I just want to really focus on something, I close my door and it's unlikely anyone will knock or otherwise disturb me unless the building is on fire.
Since most team communication happens over IM, it's easy for anyone to read back on what they missed. Most teams also do daily stand-ups or other meetings, to catch the larger group up on anything important.
FWIW, all the places I've worked that had offices in whole or in part had a culture in which everyone left their door open unless they didn't want to be disturbed for some reason. Collaborating was never an issue. If everyone always kept their doors shut, I think I would have found that hindered communication, esp. pre-IM.
It's a wonderful, comfortable way to work. Your ability to concentrate is respected. It's overall a much quieter environment conducive to solving problems. You'll loop in yourself during lunch, at meetings, getting coffee, passing by other offices/being passed by, etc.
My team is distributed around the world so my team collaboration is all virtual, although my management and some of my [internal] customers are located in the same building as me so they can stop by my office or vice versa if we have things to work on together.
When I read other people's complaints, it seems that most of them are not properly placed next to the people they need to work with.
Personal calls should be taken in a private room. Chatting should be done at the coffee corner. (Team)work is done at the open office, the rest should be taken outside.
If you really need to concentrate on a hard topic, there are headphones that either provide you quietness, or music. Or what I knew some people did was to work a day at home, to tackle something difficult. But the drawback is that they have a hard time staying in the loop, and not as easily accessible to others to ask questions (Hey, can you come take a look at this).
But like everything, it has its drawbacks. And it seems it's a very personal preference, and might also depend on your team/project structure.
I'm 39.
That's not always practical. This is less true of developers but, for some people, talking on the phone or at least being on conference jobs describes a pretty good chunk of their days.
For example, I've worked at places that seem to be an HN ideal (everyone gets their own room) that range from perfection to the energy level of a mausoleum. And office cultures that range from collaborative to eerie isolation. And in the latter cases, I've pined for some walls to be broken down and some spaces to be shared.
I'm also someone pretty picky on where I get work done. In uni, when it came time to study, I'd shop between three places to see which had an energy I liked the most. I was more likely to pick a bustling Starbucks with couches, so open offices themselves aren't a deal breaker. I need more info than that to eliminate a specific case.
I'm 30.
I also hate with a passion having people walking around behind me where I can't see them. It's not a question of having things on my screen that I don't want people to see; it's a question of feeling safe and not being constantly startled/on edge.
I'm 34.
Well it's comforting to see someone else has this issue. I find this to be the only part about 'open' offices that I personally take issue with at the moment. I really can't continually wear headphones and it does not seem unreasonable for software developers to be able to code in a relatively quiet environment
I worked at a small company with 5 total devs and we all sat back to back in a large office and it was pretty good. So I guess the answer is it depends.
I work from home now and this is the best office plan. Slack and other communication tools seem to render the point of having a brick and mortar office moot for a lot of programming work. My team is spread all over the world. Mileage is of course going to vary based on the job.
I eventually moved on and now have a cubical. I find myself able to be much more productive than ever before. Part of it is because I don't feel like someone is staring at my back and checking my monitor all the time. Another part is that it is vastly quieter than the previous work place despite having literally 100x what the last place had (from startup to Fortune 100 company). If I want to communicate or collaborate with others, I can hit them up at their cubes, and there can be little group discussions in the hallways between cubes without being major distractions to others. I don't get the insane ear fatigue I'd get with headphones in 6+ hours a day like before, too. Needless to say, based on my experiences, I personally prefer cubes to an OO layout.
In practice, I've adjusted my schedule to something like the "double schedule" that PG describes in [0]. When I'm at the office, I spend my time on meetings, planning, managerial stuff, spreadsheet/dashboard work, and simple coding. Then I go home and do all of my complex coding remotely til 1am or so. Obviously this isn't great for work-life balance, and it's terrible for my sleep schedule when I need to be at 8am meetings. But I think a compressed version of this setup (e.g., if I could reasonably only be physically present in the office 4 hours a day) would be pretty much optimal for me, including the open office space.
I sincerely appreciate the reminder though - thank you.
My team has an open area, but it is semi-closed off from other teams. There were two desks which would have had their monitors in full view of others walking by, so we rearranged our area and put up semi-high walls to combat this. Much to the disdain of other management who feared "others will follow suit." Spoiler: They did.
37, US, Sr. Manager level in Quality Engineering. The majority of my meetings I'd rather not have in front of my team (ICs, Leads, Managers, etc). Partly because I have to talk a lot, partly because people ended up asking questions about things they overheard which weren't concrete yet. If something is changing, if I am working through collaboration, or there is a disagreement, I don't want to distract my team with that fluid information. I mention this as it puts me squarely in the position of a manager who spends a lot of time in a room but wants his team in a semi-open area. All of my bosses have offices and most of my peers have offices. I chose to bypass my office to be close to my team. That said, I am in an unreservable room for 3-5 hours a day.
As a side note for this transition, I used the department budget to buy everyone a pair of QC35s. I budget a pair for every new hire as well. It is a bandage over root cause _and_ created conflict across other groups, but I gladly took the heat. Soon that budget will come out of the New Hire Resources pool!
Which is to say if you're paying a developer $70K+/year (+taxes/benefits), and you're skimping on a $2K one time cost cubicle, even if that loss results in increased turnover ($$$), reduced morale ($$$), or reduced productively ($$$) then that's an irrational decision.
Employers should consider a "1-2%" per-employee per year "morale fund." If you're paying someone $70K/year the least you could manage is $700-1400 to keep them sweet, it is just good business. Better equipment, software to make them more productive, a nicer chair, whatever.
But I've come to realize that managers rarely make decisions for purely rational reasons. The prestige and internal politics often play a larger role than pure costing.
That said, I still think it's generally a foolish thing to do for many companies and I personally despise open offices. I've recently transitioned to being fully remote, and a hatred of the open office plan was a good part of what pushed me in that direction.
Would you people not prefer to see the difference in their wage packet? A company that chooses open offices can offer higher wages it doesn't mean they don't care about their employees productivity.
Au contraire, as the open office plan is usually paired with the "all-in-one-bucket-PTO" plan. So if you take a sick day, it comes out of your vacation/holiday time. Ergo, employees are even more motivated to come in while feeling a little puny. Otherwise the kids are going to be pissed when you have to trim a day off that trip to Disney World.
My last workplace (Asana) has untracked PTO. All the places I got offers from (established companies) had either untracked PTO or seperate vacation and sick leave.
Fast forward a few years, and now I'm working remotely and loving it. In fact, when I do work in coffee shops or something, I hate it, because I struggle to focus and get things done (unlike most, I straight-up can't listen to music and code at the same time, so headphones are out).
So maybe it just depends on where you are in your career?
1- teams sit together
2- people who need to be on their phones (aka sales) are in a different office
3- buffer spaces between communal areas (kitchen, lounge) and desks
4- people respect each other
I've been in an open office that followed those rules, and it was actually pretty great, because people helped each other a lot more; a bit like open-ended pair programming if you wanted it.
I've also been in an open office that violated all of those rules, and absolutely detested it. Especially that one person who played their radio out loud for the team to "enjoy" and sprayed air freshener everywhere, and the sales people ringing a bell whenever a sale landed, and the kitchen microwaves constantly going off, and and and... it was a minor hell.
I'd like that
You can design an open office to work well.
You can design an open office to be a sweatshop fitting in the maximum number of employees at the lowest cost.
You cannot do both.
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I have worked in an open office I liked. It was the former. Plenty of huddle rooms and other private spaces, different groups physically had a good amount of open floor space between them and another group, and great design to minimize visual distractions for people.
I do not believe it saved any significant amount of floorspace over a more traditional cube setup. But it worked well and I didn't have major complaints.
However, I have seen far more "open offices" that are just purely out to fit the most employees in the smallest space, and everyone is always miserable in those.
So far, the change has been positive. People are able to, on the fly, pick the type of physical work environment they want to experience at a given point in time.
Also, our management invested in VERY nice noise canceling headsets for anyone who requested one. That technology has done wonders for productivity and has increase the quality of our video conferences.
In my office we've tested every single noise canceling headset, from Bose QC, to Sennheiser PXC 550, to B&W PX, and everything in between.
The noise canceling is a weird hiss, increases feelings of ear pressure, and the discomfort manifests as a headache or car sickness after a few hours- and that isn't even taking into account the other pains people feel from prolonged use of over ear headphones.
When you're talking about wearing something for 8 hours a day, there are some real ergo needs that drive the shape and technology of the device. Think about how light typical call center headsets are- that is a professional device.
Not to say it doesn't work for you individually, but noise canceling headsets are NOT a solution that works for an office worth of people. Out of about 500 people in my office, only 20 or so stuck with noise canceling cans as their daily headsets.
The trick is to mask it with something similar. A babble generator is very effective at blocking the words people are saying: https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/cafeRestaurantNoiseGenerat...
And for annoying clicky or other odd sounds, this railroad masks them pretty well: https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/railroadNoiseGenerator.php...
(If you find those useful, definitely toss the site owner a few bucks.)
My ideal office is essentially private regular office space, and then big conference rooms which can be taken over by teams for days/weeks/months. I've gotten more work done in a shared conference room with people in it than anywhere else, but it has to be during a specific task-focused time.
I kind of wonder if the ideal office would be essentially an apartment building or hotels, with studio or 1br "apartments" per person, and then some meeting rooms/work rooms for actual work. Having a private bathroom, quiet office, "living room" office where you could have meetings, etc. would be pretty awesome.
Shared team spaces as "open offices", where everyone there is contributing to the same thing and understands the context of everything that needs to be communicated out loud. Basically the people who attend a daily scrum should be in the same room (with exceptions).
This paired with quiet working areas where all disturbances are forbidden (no talking, no "can you just quickly look at this") is a good combo for productivity.
Having my headphones on constantly is annoying and I cannot seem to tune out all of the ancillary motion around me. It also doesn't help that the monitors are now so much closer to my face that I now find myself turning my head back and forth more to see my monitors and by the end of the day my eyes are tired.
Especially once you get out of your own house.
For me, the difference was similar to weighted vs unweighted piano keys. With a mechanical keyboard I could get into a rhythm that I miss when working on a bubble-type keyboard. I've since trained myself (mostly out of necessity due to travel) to type almost as quickly and error-free on my laptop keyboard, but I do still miss the feedback from mechanical springs.
If I did 'spring' for a new mech keyboard now, however, I'd find the quietest one I could get, that still provided some sense of feedback. I don't need my noisy clicks to provide a juvenile signal to my coworkers that, yes, I am indeed working really hard on something really important right now.
Like leaky headphones, loud keyboards reliably do annoy neighbors, whether they're willing to speak up or not.
Matias Quiet Click / Brown switches (with o-rings) are not all that loud. Or the 'topre' switches which are not really 'mechanical' but already feel a lot better than standard membrane can be an option.
I've worked somewhere that had things like these:
https://i.imgur.com/F2TDKSe.jpg
And while on paper we were one "open office," in practice the dividers created mini-cubes/"offices." Which made it a reasonable workplace.
People argue that creating distinct offices is expensive, but cubicles/dividers aren't. I feel like the reason for open plan isn't about cost, it is about trust i.e. that management wants to oversee/micromanage employees.
I have mentioned to facilities that they should be putting these in to get some insulation between different groups but they refused.
> I feel like the reason for open plan isn't about cost, it is about trust i.e. that management wants to oversee/micromanage employees.
That's one of those things I really don't understand. What kind of manager would want to micromanage my work? How would they even do that? And do they really have nothing better to do with their time? It's one of those caricatures I only know from Dilbert.
The kind that's looking out for people watching Netflix movies all day instead of working. That's right - they're willing to kill the productivity, engagement and loyalty to the company rather than actually doing a little bit of management and paying attention to who's actually doing work. And we're letting them get away with it.
I've never met that type since I started working for more professional organisations, though.
Open office is just so much more exhausting. Especially if they do not have a lunch area with a door. Either the entire floor becomes filled with loud chatter, or the lunch area becomes a quiet, depressing wasteland.
I wish companies were more transparent that it is a way to save cost. I would have happily put up with a smaller cube, or better benefits in exchange for floor space.
When good candidates start turning down positions because of the office layout, that might create some pressure to change, though.
But I think one of the problems is that bad office layouts tend to exacerbate problems. They may be the ultimate underlying cause of retention problems, but they're typically not the proximate cause, and thus don't get the blame they're due. Someone might leave because of interpersonal conflicts or just "not fitting in" to their team, which might not seem like an office-layout issue. But who knows if they might have gelled better with their team if they weren't all sitting around with noise-cancelling headphones on, or glaring at each other for turning the lights on/off, or taking too many phone calls, or all the other annoyances of an open office.
So, I started leasing an office in town about a year and a half ago. Totally worth it. It's a quiet space to work where nobody interrupts me or touches anything. And, the internet's about 5x faster than what I have at home. When the weather is nice, I bike in.
It'd be great if my employer paid for it, but my base pay is sufficient.
I was stunned, but asking around there were enough people that didn't seem to have a problem with the distractions to explain it, so I think it was actually representative.
What was most distracting was when the CEO or anyone in the company can walk 2 feet behind or 5 feet in front of you while you're working. That was one of the biggest factors, other than low salary, that pushed out SO many of my team (50% turnover in the single year I was there) and lead to numerous poachings. Management did not care, however, because they simply hired new people from the pool of underemployed biological scientists.
Compare that to my current post, I'm in a cubicle room with 3-5 other people, depending on their remote schedule, and its super quiet and very focused. I get a lot more hard things done now, and learn a LOT more, though my social life at work definitely took a hit.
Open space requires 60-110 ft^2 (5.5-10 m^2) per person [1]
Let's assume that with offices you'd need 150 ft^2 (14^m) - that's including extra corridor space etc - a whooping 90 ft^2 (8.4 m^2) extra.
Let's assume that open space costs you just 10% of productivity (studies show that it's more than that [2], [3]).
I bet that just 10% of the salary alone is more than rent on 90 ft^2 for majority of employees..
[1] https://www.officefinder.com/how.html
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02724...
[3] https://www.steelcase.com/research/articles/privacy-crisis/
Because that costs money, and open offices are a cost-savings measure. It's a way to be cheap while looking hip/stylish/whatever.
In some cases I think there's also a barely-concealed dick measuring thing going on, where companies put in open office space so that they can elevate some employees by giving them cubicles (and executives, obviously, will always get outer-ring offices with windows!). So you take away with one hand, give it back with the other, and suddenly what was formerly standard for everyone becomes an incentive you can hand out discretionarily.
No decent restaurant uses stadium seating as their decor. There's good reason. Patrons don't want to dine in a gymnasium.
My prior open plan (even with remote) offices had an average tenure of 2-3 years maybe?
Times are tight. Companies don't have as much money lying around as they did in the nineties -- that or they're just not willing to admit that they do.
You enjoy open offices, but does a basic cubicle (as an option - you can always have meetings/other open spaces) really hinder your productivity, in the same way open offices hinder the productivity of many?
If not, then the right thing to do (for a professional work environment - a place intended for productivity first, and subjective enjoyment at best second) is to respect the needs of others in this situation. Any commons involves compromise.
The only buildings/floors I've seen that are all offices either were management or super secret algorithms and electronic systems integration projects. Like the kind of stuff where the "old boring legacy tech" exceeds the kind of stuff Hollywood shows you.
Though I have noticed a very unwelcome trend where some newer defense companies are building open-plan offices because they think it's "cool". Fine example of the worst sort of cargo-culting.
Now that I work at a big pharmaceutical (where profit margins are famously big), we recently transitioned to an open space. It's ugly, tight, offers no storage space, has a low ceiling, little daylight, and you can't sit in the same space from day to day. The space is even broken up across three floors so you're guaranteed not to be able to find your friends.
Management seems hell bent on driving out talent. Pretty much all our best and brightest have left. Their replacements have all been 22 year-olds, who've never worked anywhere else and don't know that it doesn't have to be like this.
Right now I'm sitting in a corner near a wall with the open office floor plan. I have some desks partially behind me, with a conference room that's not used much. I've gotten used to it.
I liked the six devs in a room thing, but my company outgrew that office two years ago.
I also invested in some noise cancelling headphones, and it's absolutely essential.
Right now I have two coworkers talking 5 feat from me, and I can't hear them.
Then our team lead decided we needed to have a morning stand-up meeting every day in the middle of this space, seemingly completely oblivious to the fact that we were bothering all the other teams in the same shared space.
Firms are not stupid. I am not doubting that there is a productivity hit due to distracting noise and motion, but it's probably not outweighed by the reduction in real estate cost.
Open offices feel like a real dick move by any company that uses it to corral employees as close together as possible.
Maybe if they have reasonable break rooms it's not so bad, but how many companies give you more than the bare minimum space you need to work?
I'm I just mistaken about their collective silence? Or if not, does their silence imply some kind of ulterior motive?
I've participated in office buildouts and seen architectural sketches of cubes vs. "open plan" tables. You can put a lot more people into the same area when you are just giving everyone a table.
Higher density means less square footage which means lower rent. QED.
For example in my company facilities makes the decisions but they have a nice team room with windows for everyone.
So in short I believe that decisions about workspaces almost never that made by the prople who have to work there. And when you get to the level of people who can shape their workspace like CEO and VP you rarely see open office as the choice but usually private office with window.
Can't we make it a law that anyone who designs office spaces for software companies MUST read Peopleware first? They described these exact same problems THIRTY YEARS AGO.
The solutions are there too, just read the damn book.
There's a variety of devices that can be worn:
- Over-the-ear passive earmuffs, ex Peltor Optime III: Visible to others, reduce all ambient sounds, some people can wear headphones beneath them. Comfortable, but somewhat heavy.
- In-ear earplugs, ex 3M 90585-00000T: Not very visible to others, reduce all ambient sounds, no headphones. Comfort varies, lightweight.
- Over-ear Active Noise Cancelling [ANC] headphones, ex Bose QuietComfort: Visible, reduce ambient noise but not ambient speech. Comfortable, heaviest option, require batteries. Some new expensive in-ear options available.
- In-ear headphones playing music: Not very visible, reduce ambient sounds by virtue of playing louder sounds over top and drowning out dynamic range of ears. Comfortable, lightweight, requires cables or batteries. May cause hearing damage at volume levels sufficient to drown out ambient speech.
- Over-ear passive earmuffs over headphones: A bit clunky to take off, but have the benefits of both.
My problem -- or rather, my employer's problem -- is that I'm an indiscriminate eavesdropper. If someone's talking near me (or people are talking on the radio or TV), I find it extremely difficult to ignore the conversation. Active or passive noise cancelling does a much better job of canceling out the background than speech, increasing the SNR of the open-office chatter I want to drown out. I wish there was an option for ANC that would actively reduce ambient speech.
... which means that they're probably here to stay.
The cubicle walls are so short that I can see other's heads while sitting down (and if the person is tall and/or they prefer to raise their chair high, I can see their face) and conversations are often audible from 2 cubes away.
Upper level management wants to reduce costs but also, to remind everyone that they are cogs in the machinery and that they want to basically turn every job they can, into essentially a regimented call-center sort of job, with quantitative stats being collected on all aspects of work performance.
Only the very decent pay and the prospects for promotion out of this part of the company are keeping me around (it's the pay, really).
Loyalty to the company itself: approximately zero.
1. All open office layouts must include a stipend for high quality, noise cancelling headphones that won't hurt your ears long term and are comfortable enough to wear all day.
2. People should have a little LED that sits on their desk, monitor, etc that they can turn red when they don't want to be disturbed (like this).
https://redlevelgroup.com/busylight-the-next-level-do-not-di...
Noise-cancelling headphones are designed to cancel predictable background noise, such as the white noise of an airplane's engines while flying. They are not designed to cancel the noise of conversations happening around you.
Furthermore, noise-cancelling headphones cause dizziness and nausea after extended use in many people. This is well-documented and also fairly understood, given the relationship between the ears and the vestibular system.
Finally, auditory noise isn't the only problem people have with open office layouts. Visual distractions and the "fishbowl effect" are also significant factors.
Yeah, collaboration here we come!