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Comment by __ralston3 | Hacker News Reader

I always found it interesting that "hating open office spaces" is one of those sort of biased-HN things, similar to general dislike/distrust of popular social media platforms. Virtually every parent comment on the thread is along the lines of "I don't like open offices", which is obviously fine, seeing as how to each their own. However, I for one LOVE open offices. The fact that I can see what's going on, feel the vibe of the office, distract myself for a bit should I so choose to do so. Or even if I want to put my headphones in and turn the music all the way up, I have the option and I really enjoy it. To me, the open style makes the office feel like more of a community, as opposed to "an office" (similar to cubicles, offices, and mini-cubicles) and I absolutely enjoy that.

Side note: I'd be curious to see responses for office preference (open, or not open) distributed by age.

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My first introduction to an open office layout was when I was 26 working in the Bay Area. For me, it was awful. I was surrounded by people who weren't working on anything I was working on and had no connection to what I was doing. It felt like everyone was watching everything I did, and I could never get any work done. To top it off, part way through my time there, they brought in a customer support team and placed them right next to me. They then started to put a counter of the number of customers who were subscribed to our service and would start cheering when it hit arbitrary numbers; the CEO would come in from time to time, sometimes completely unannounced to us... The people were nice, and the product was decent, but the distractions were very hard to get any work done.

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.

I'm 27. I'd love open office spaces if my job never required writing complex code. But I find it all but literally impossible to do so in an open office, which means that I can't both (1) do my work exclusively at my desk during work hours and (2) actually get all of my work done.

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.

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

Your schedule sounds like that of an indentured servant. Seriously, you regularly start work at 8am and end at 1am? What kind of life is that? As someone who's fallen into a rabbit hole where that sort of madness gets normalized, let me remind you: it's not normal. Find somewhere else unless you're making millions?

If I'm making millions, I'm doing it very gradually. And I am looking for other opportunities. But I should clarify that I don't work from 8am to 1am every day - I probably have one 8am meeting a week on average, and the late nights ebb and flow with the projects I'm working on. The rest of the time, I work roughly 9:30 to 5. I still work more hours than I'd like, and the occasional time-sensitive, coding-heavy projects are brutal, but it's not as bleak as my last comment suggests.

I sincerely appreciate the reminder though - thank you.

I also prefer open offices. I see software engineering as a very social activity. It's also nice to be able to overhear certain discussions and questions.

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.

>Personal calls should be taken in a private room.

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.

My jobs have ranged from heads-down engineering work to constant meetings, phone calls, and impromptu chats. For all of them, I much prefer a private office or at least a private cube. I can't wear headphones for an extended period of time due to physical pain (yes, I've tried lots of form factors; no, none of them have helped), so open office plans where the "solution" is to just tell people to wear headphones and blast music are nonstarters for me.

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.

> I can't wear headphones for an extended period of time due to physical pain

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

Preference for semi-open team spaces, but not as far as offices-for-all. If the choice was binary, I'd choose open.

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!

I hate open offices and miss the days when I had my own office with a door.

I'm 37.

How do you communicate with your team members? For me it has always been: turn around and ask. Or if they look busy, wait until they get a coffee before interrupting.

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?

Not OP, but I am lucky enough to have my own office with a door. Everyone in my group just leaves their door open if they are available to be interrupted. I communicate entirely by email and in person. If it's a quick thing that I only need a verbal response to, I'll usually walk over and see if the person is in their office (w/ door open) first. If not, or if I need something more substantial, I'll email.

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.

Not OP, but Slack/IRC/IM of some kind is the answer to most of your questions. I've bounced around between shared office, private office, cubicle, private bullpen, and open office my whole career, and by far the least productive I ever was was in the open office. In all other situations, my team communicated mostly over instant messaging, or if it was really important, by wandering down to their office and knocking.

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.

>by wandering down to their office and knocking

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.

> I never worked in my own office

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.

I have an office with a door and I love it (but no windows to the outside, unfortunately). If I'm on a call or just want to be able to work uninterrupted for a while, I'll close it, otherwise I'll leave it ajar so colleagues can stop by if they have a question or want a quick chat. I work in product R&D; the building also has a cube farm area for IT and HR and business folks, so I'm really happy I'm not there.

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.

Slack and email. Occasionally I'll physically go ask someone something, but that's rare outside of meetings.

I've been in some open office situations where it was so loud that you couldn't even talk to each other about, ya know, work stuff. It was like living in a call center. Conference rooms were overbooked and the situation was simply untenable.

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.

40 years old. It probably has a lot to do with not liking change, if I start and its an open office plan, it is what it is. If they transition to open office after I start then I think it depends on how the open office plan is pitched. If its pitched as making everyone more productive then I would expect all of the executives to also be out in the open. If they are all still in offices I know it was just to cut costs. Worked at a very large company where this happened and all the executives (200+ of them) kept their offices.

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.

To me, it all just depends too much on other factors in the office. I can't lambast an office's open design until I know what's replacing it. And I think this is why we fixate so much on hating open offices (easy) instead of agreeing on the optimal office (hard).

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.

25 years old, only worked in non-open office (cubicles) when I was an intern in college. Since then have only worked in open space. I love the ability to just put on headphones and grind away most of the day, but my coworkers that I work with most often are still literally just a chair pivot away. We turn around, collaborate on how to solve a problem together, then turn back to our computers and execute.

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.

42. Been in an open office for about 15 years now. I think there are pros and cons but I prefer private office or a cubical with some privacy. I agree with you that OO enables communication, absolutely the case. I can see if people are here I need to talk to, walk over and talk to them in person (which I prefer). However it's a mixed bag, if you are the person being interrupted all the time to talk about something. There's an expensive context switch.

I don't really care that much though I'd certainly take a private office if offered. (Says someone who mostly works from home.) I will note that I read a very emotional spiel somewhere not that long ago from someone who worked in a traditional cubicle environment and they hated how isolating the space was.

I wonder if there is any correlation in preference vs introversion/extroversion aspects of the person?

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