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Comment by magduf | Hacker News Reader

>My theory is that open space is extremely helpful to certain types of people, and those traits coincidentally overlap with the people calling the shots at a lot of companies. Sociable upper managerial-types probably value being able to collaborate more easily in open space more than being able to concentrate in private offices.

Yes, and in addition, sociable developers value being able to collaborate more easily in open space. I don't know what your coworkers are like or what age range they are, but over my career, I've absolutely seen that engineers in their 20s absolutely prefer open spaces, and are extremely sociable. I haven't seen this so much with older generations. The type of people entering this profession has really changed over the decades.

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If your developers skew towards those in their 20s, many of them have never experienced working in solitude. University culture is dominated by study groups and camping out in the library, so it's no great stretch to go from that to an open-office layout, or even one where you are forced to hot-desk.

And laptops have been the norm. It's a little different when you were accustomed to go back to your dorm room where you had your desktop setup to get anything done.

>And laptops have been the norm. It's a little different when you were accustomed to go back to your dorm room where you had your desktop setup to get anything done.

This isn't quite right: before having your desktop computer in your dorm room was normal, you had to go to a computer lab to get anything done, and those had no privacy whatsoever. Computer labs with PCs were quite common until colleges started requiring students to buy their own PCs, and before this, the computer labs had terminals (like VT100) which connected to VAX servers or mainframes.

Anyone who went to college up until the mid-1990s should be familiar with computer labs.

> computer lab to get anything done, and those had no privacy whatsoever.

My computer lab in college had a lab monitor who enforced the "library quiet" culture. It was nice.

This theory doesn't pass the smell test.

Virtually every university library has quiet areas and collaborative areas now. Most of my peers go to the library to concentrate (work in solitude) and visit the loud area of the library when they want to be more social or meet in groups. Also it's not like people are constantly talking in the loud area either, most people are by themselves focusing on work but will be interrupted by friends occasionally whereas in the quiet area interruptions don't happen at all. You sometimes end up texting your friend next to you because you don't wanna disturb others.

There was a post a few months ago on HN saying that librarians are rethinking how libraries should be structured because people are using them to go and focus rather than for books.

Your hot-desk point is true though, my peers at the office and at school are more accustomed to carrying around a laptop and setting up wherever rather than setting up a personal workspace with pictures of family and the sort.

It sounds to me like universities should just stop wasting space in the library on study areas, and downsize the library a lot so it only has rooms for books and nothing else.

Then, they should separately have buildings (or separate spaces within that building maybe, for existing structures) that are dedicated entirely to studying, with both quiet areas with cubicles (there were things like this at the library when I went to college), and more open areas where talking is acceptable. Then, the university can put a cafe there to sell overpriced coffee drinks and snacks, and the building should be very profitable.

Why does it matter if it is a single building or multiple buildings? My university has a library that has book space, quiet study areas, group study areas and multiple overpriced food/drink vendors.

It doesn't really matter that much, and it really doesn't matter at all if it's different wings of the same building. But separating these things for future construction might make some sense: for instance, you could put the study building in a really convenient part of campus, and stick the library off the side in a less-convenient location, since people don't use that as much.

I'm also thinking that you might not want lots of food and drink around the stacks of books. But in an open study area, why not?

Finally, if I go to the library to look at stacks of books, the last thing I want is for the bookcases to be surrounded by a somewhat noisy study area with groups of people talking. It should be as quiet as a tomb.

In 1990 there were probably 1 million developers. Now it's probably closer to 100 million.

Developers are close to a representative sample of the whole population, and the general populace is not introverted :-)

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