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Comment by bobthepanda | Hacker News Reader

I don’t get why it’s always presented as cubicle farm vs fully open floor. My company uses semi-open offfices; you have an open office with 8-10 people in a team, but don’t share space with other teams. So it’s access to the people you work with directly and no more.

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This setup is my favorite, although I have worked in offices of 3-6.

That's still an open office.

Technically yes, but it feels very different to an open office with 50 people in it. <=10 is small enough that everyone is able to respect each others' privacy, noise, etc while still enjoying some of the benefits of an open office such as turn-your-chair-around collaboration. I think we need a new term for when <=10 people are in an open office. It just isn't the same as what is usually referred to when someone says "open office".

It is exactly what people are referring to when they say 'open office'. What we need is a word for offices with 50 people in them.

> It is exactly what people are referring to when they say 'open office'. What we need is a word for offices with 50 people in them.

Those have historically been called "bullpen offices".

It really isn't. Most people are thinking of this: https://blog.nuclino.com/files/9f08086a-9bde-4d95-929a-f7f2c...

No, open offices resemble sweatshops, 50+ people per floor with no doors, privacy, or noise barriers.

That's the "team room" concept - each team has an "open office", but it's not open to all the noise from everyone else. There's a door for when the team is heads down on stuff.

I work in a 10 person open office with lots of separation - 1200sqft, 7 would be better but there is no comparison to a 50 person bullpen with everyone within arms reach of another.

What is the room layout of this setup? A dedicated room with 8-10 people in them where you close the door for quietness?

Every team on the floor is in a semi-enclosed room with an opening into the hallway (no door).

In practice noise doesn't really leak from rooms into the hallway, so it's not a problem most of the time unless something extremely loud is happening, like a dog acting up or someone building flatpack furniture.

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