Escaping the Open Plan Office

blog.borud.no

13 points·Melchizedek··5 comments

This seems to be a perennial topic on HN and this is one of the most concise summations of why open plan offices are disliked.

That said, it doesn't seem like anyone is listening - are there any examples of companies moving away from the open plan office? Or are we doomed to be battery developers for evermore?

It seems likely that we're stuck with them unfortunately. They're trendy, less expensive, and the people making the decisions (as well as the people designing the spaces as the article points out) generally don't feel the consequences as severely as developers do.

If it were easier to measure the productivity lost due to open offices they would probably be less popular, but without that I don't have much hope.

I think the biggest driver here is cost more than anything, and on that point I think we're stuck with them, even as the trendiness of them fades. As long as open-plan offices allow you to cram more people per square foot than other designs, companies will stick with them because lowering OpEx is more important than improving unmeasurables. As you said, if there were some way to accurately and unarguably measure productivity loss in dollars, we'd probably see this trend reverse, but until then it's liable to stick around.

The only hopeful note here is that some of the early adopters have started to move away from it, and industrial designers have started to come up with people-dense but less productivity-destroying designs (e.g. https://www.steelcase.com/quiet-spaces/)

"We hire only the best, so we can sabotage them!" An honest job ad.

better: we hire only the "best", so we can sabotage them!

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