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Comment by jackfoxy | Hacker News Reader

35+ years in the IT workforce here.

Yep, dumbest idea ever.

The vast majority of my office time was in cubicles, which are pretty good. Usually enough privacy to get things done. I did have a glassed-in private office for about a year at one company. That was productivity heaven. In retrospect I was dumb to leave that company when I did, but they started demolishing offices for cubicles about 2 years later. It is all about efficient use of real estate.

I've been at a millennial run company for the last 6 years, first 4 in open space. What a productivity fuck, for all the often repeated reasons. And I really consider them de-humanizing. I gave up on trying to explain this to management years ago.

Working from home the last 2 years. Whenever I do visit the home office nothing gets done. Looking at what my colleagues do, I think they only ever get much done on work form home days.

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"It is all about efficient use of real estate."

I've been a part of these discussions at very high levels and this is the consistent theme. Short-term, easily quantifiable savings against nebulous, hard to quantify harms. Facilities folks always win and get a pat on the back. Any push back about the open office should, in my opinion, start with addressing this basic incentive. Everything about collaboration, open communication, etc. is just window dressing used to justify the moves.

> It is all about efficient use of real estate.

To be completely accurate, it's all about maximizing profit and minimizing costs, which in this case means having as many people in a given amount of floor space as is legally possible.

The benefit of the low cost per person of office space is weighed against the negatives:

* Employee attitude/positive workplace (hard to measure)

* Difficulties introduced to the workplace by the increased density - noise, psychological effects, smells, etc (hard to measure/easily dismissed)

* A less pleasant workplace makes employee retention work less well (difficult to measure)

The other up side of the open plan space is that it's a project that an otherwise ineffective manager can do to appear valuable.

The real elephant in the room of open plan offices is "hoteling", IE employees are supposed to sit down at the first open space and start working. The real reason this is implemented is that assigning spaces in an open plan is difficult, and hoteling avoids arguments over who gets the better spot (near the restrooms, vending machines, windows, or whatever) and avoids the work of tracking employee seating and doing assignments.

However, in every single open plan space I've worked in, everyone sits in the same location every day. Despite this being obvious, no one ever seems to remember this when they decide on yet another open plan office conversion.

I lead these budget planning meetings and this is accurate

> The vast majority of my office time was in cubicles, which are pretty good.

I remember watching "Office Space" circa 2000 and it looked pretty soul crushing, and working in pre-FAANG big tech around 2006, it felt very mechanical and depressing. I get your gripes, but I think some is also rosy retrospection.

It was dull, gray, and lacking in character but it sure beats sitting elbow to elbow cafeteria style trying to get work done.

I did appreciate how easy it was to liven it up inside your own cubicle though. There are entire lines of office products designed to work with cubicle walls. I had posters, calendars, and random knicknacks, and I was able to create a space where I felt happy. I've never been able to personalize a space the same way since.

Hell, at my current job personalization of your space is actively discouraged, since there's a culture of hot-desking if you're coming in from another office.

Ah yeah, hot-desking, the next progression in cost-savings-cum-"oh no, actually, this is about collaboration!" So much collaboration that I can't expect to always have my seat with my team?

I used to work for a global 500 company that had cube farms at some locations, and others on an open plan.

I'm not gonna lie, the cube farms were an awful eyesore. But I still really enjoyed the occasional weeks I'd spend visiting those offices, and would have jumped at the chance to move to one. The people were quite a bit more outgoing and social, and yet the space still managed to be quieter. Noise level and character were generally comparable to those of my college's library.

I do sit next to others but do have full sized desk, two large monitors and with a pair of good headphones I think it works pretty well.

Right - I'd expect this in Japan where space really is a premium and the collective work attitude is much different but... why here in the States?!?

I understand what you're saying, but it's really more that we didn't know just how bad it could get. Cubicle farms were "soul crushing", because they came about from the same management practices that eventually led to open-floor plans: treating people as cost centers rather than people, micromanaging measurable real-estate costs at the expense of unmeasurable productivity.

And while one can theoretically make good software in open-floor-plan-environment/current-whipping-boy-programming-language-of-the-month/etc., the existence of such things is a big sign on the door "we probably don't care about craft".

You know what, if I'm going to be downvoted for an opinion, it should at least earn it:

Too bad open offices are here to stay, if you were worth it you could get an office, maybe invest in some good headphones :)

You seem to be in a very small minority, then... I have to agree with most of the opinions I've read through the thread, open floor plans are a total productivity killer, way too many distraction sources and most of what communication there is, is irrelevant because no team stayed separate or respected anyone else's audio boundaries.

Cubes are still rather poor, but at least I odn't have to see what my neighbor's doing, or listen to any but the loudest noises. I'm three steps away from everyone else in the team, and if we need an impromptu discussion the aisle is at least a cube width, so plenty of quick standup space.

An office / separate workroom away from the team opposite me would be great but I can earbud them away.

From my reply below:

I hear a conversation relevant to me and jump in, a conversation stops being relevant I jump out That simple interaction has added tons of value for me over the last few years of open offices. We have a very simple way to indicate you don't want to be interrupted, headphones or a flag There's also tons of huddle rooms you can go into if you want to hunker down in quiet - Everyone is different, some people feel switching from keyboard to mouse is a huge productivity drain and invest a lot in avoiding that transition Maybe I'm just fortunate but it's never been an issue for me, people are pretty respectful of their coworkers where I've worked

> a huge part of craft is communication, and open offices are great for that.

But they aren't great for that. For most people, they're the opposite. That's the point the article is making, and the article agrees with what I've personally observed.

I've never worked in one, unless I count schoolrooms.

But I can imagine that I'd be so jumpy and angry that I'd refuse to talk with anyone. And that I'd wear humongous headphones, and blast death metal or whatever.

The dynamic in the spaces that I worked was that all of the devs want to be respectful of the other devs. Part of what that means is that you want to avoid making noise. The result is that speaking is kept to the bare minimum.

Ah. So that's why meatspace collaboration goes down, yes?

But then there are the loudmouths :(

>a huge part of craft is communication, and open offices are great for that.

Can you explain this to me? How does an open office lead to better communication than cubes or partitioned group work spaces?

I'm in an open office. A lot of communication is done via email and IM. When someone comes to my desk to ask a question, collaborate, or just say hey, I typically don't get up. If a group stops by, we'll usually move to a collaborative area or set up a meeting. This would be true no matter if I were in a cube or partitioned group area. If I have a private office, I may not even have to leave my desk.

The typical response I see to this is that open offices tend to have this implied notion of everyone is willing to communicate at any time. I'd argue that on an individual level for developers, that's more often false. Someone head-down probably doesn't want to be interrupted.

> How does an open office lead to better communication than cubes or partitioned group work spaces?

It doesn't make sense because that's not the reason open-floor-plan exists. The reason is 100% cost-savings. "Communication" is just a post-hoc rationalization, created by management, parroted by employees too boorish to learn how to communicate politely and effectively.

He seems to have edited his comment because the part you’re replying to isn’t there any more, but you’re correct, open offices don’t improve communication and they can’t meaningfully improve communication. If you happen to need to “communicate” with any of the maximum four people you’re physically adjacent to, then yes, you can start a conversation without having to get up from your chair. Otherwise, you have to get up and walk across the room to where the other person is (or just IM them): exactly the same as with cubicles.

I hear a conversation relevant to me and jump in, a conversation stops being relevant I jump out

That simple interaction has added tons of value for me over the last few years of open offices.

We have a very simple way to indicate you don't want to be interrupted, headphones or a flag

There's also tons of huddle rooms you can go into if you want to hunker down in quiet

Everyone is different, some people feel switching from keyboard to mouse is a huge productivity drain and invest a lot in avoiding that transition

Maybe I'm just fortunate but it's never been an issue for me, people are pretty respectful of their coworkers where I've worked

>...Everyone is different, some people feel switching from keyboard to mouse is a huge productivity drain and invest a lot in avoiding that transition

And they are likely wrong. People believe a lot of things about themselves that don't hold up to scrutiny. For example, people think they can multitask, etc and studies show that the aren't nearly as productive doing that as they think they are. People think that open offices help collaboration, but that is not what the research shows. As the article says:

>...As my colleague Jessica Stillman pointed out last week, a new study from Harvard showed that when employees move from a traditional office to an open plan office, it doesn't cause them to interact more socially or more frequently.

>Instead, the opposite happens. They start using email and messaging with much greater frequency than before. In other words, even if collaboration were a great idea (it's a questionable notion), open plan offices are the worst possible way to make it happen.

>Previous studies of open plan offices have shown that they make people less productive, but most of those studies gave lip service to the notion that open plan offices would increase collaboration, thereby offsetting the damage.

https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/its-official-open-plan-of...

And I have a way of indicating I do want to be interrupted: I leave my door open, I walk around the floor and look for other open doors, I move to the break room and have lunch with everyone else. It would bug the shit out of me if someone interjected themselves into a conversation I was having with someone else in my office.

That's the problem with open-floor-plan. It presumes "my need to know what you're saying/doing is more important than you even getting the opportunity to consent to me knowing."

Well, that's exactly the point, in a way.

Sitting in an open-plan office lets you know that you're not "worth it". That you're not respected. And you're way too distracted to actually get much done. So you zone out with music, watch YouTube, hang out on HN, etc.

And then, because you're not productive, you're condemned to an open-plan future :(

Every person I work with daily could work at a place with a private office if they wanted.

Hell, I'm pretty sure if they asked seriously for a private office, the company would jump over itself to make it happen.

If you need to do passive aggressive stuff like refuse to work because you're in an open office that's rather unfortunate, a lot of very successful, productive, people work in open offices.

> Every person I work with daily could work at a place with a private office if they wanted.

That seems counterintuitive. Or at least from what I've read. Such as TFA.

> If you need to do passive aggressive stuff like refuse to work because you're in an open office that's rather unfortunate ...

TFA actually presents evidence that there's a productivity hit.

(replying to the pre-edit comment, as I think that can be insightful)

I do agree that open office looks a lot less depressing than a cubicle farm; being able to see a large area tends to be more pleasing than lots of obstructions. However, actually having the same amount of people (or, usually, more people because that's why they have open offices in the first place) can cause issues due to the more intense noise and distractions. But that wouldn't be visible in a quick visit; it would need to come out over a prolonged period of working in that environment. And somehow all the decision makers never actually work in the middle of the open plan office…

> if you were worth it you could get an office

Well I'm not good enough to demand an office, but I like to think I'm on the upper half of the talent scale and when I'm job hunting I can be somewhat selective. The office style is one of my selection criteria, so companies with open plan offices are putting themselves at a disadvantage. It wont show up on a balance sheet but it will hurt them in the long run.

Typically companies with open plan offices have more "quirks" sending people away.

I've got a similar experience to the OP (35+ years in tech). Cubicles as "soul crushing" as they look are much better than the open floor plan offices. Best of all was when I had an office with a door for a few years.

open floorplan < cubicles < office with a door

No it’s not.

The beauty of the cubicle was in its practical functionality. If you’re working effectice and productively you don’t really notice the plainness of your surroundings.

A private space, but you could still see out the window.

Of course we compared cubicles to private offices back when there were still cubicle farms and found them "soul crushing".

The leap to open floor plans was a whole other level. It's like plotting soul crushing on a log scale.

Yeah, all of the talk about "increased collaborations!" seems to be hand-waivey, pseudo-admittance of "we don't know how to communicate effectively!"

I work in a private office now. I almost never work from home, and it's never to "be productive", almost always because of some personal scheduling issue. I used to work in open-office environments and would try to work from home as much as possible. One of them was even at a company around the corner from where I am now, so it wasn't even a commuting issue.

We have weekly meetings scheduled to force the issue of getting everyone caught up. But mostly, I just take a daily walk around the floor, see folk and get caught up on everything. The meetings mostly become "catching up the one person who was out the rest of the week".

We don't do daily standups. Ugh, what a boondoggle Scrum became after The Suits found out about it. Who needs it, anyway? Just talk to people.

If you have to make up organizational excuses to get people to talk, you're making excuses for people who don't talk. It's not acceptable to be a team contributor and not know how to communicate effectively.

Pretty much all you say I agree with.

Open offices are a psychological tool to control workers. All privacy is removed. This allows them to impose their will on you.

In exchange they get reduced productivity but they don’t seem to care about that as much as control over their staff.

Indeed, I also feel its a closed loop, you only get managers who want to be in total control, which tightens the loop, and we end up with daily stand ups in a battery cage under continuous surveillance.

It gets worse at the lower end of the food chain (e.g. call centres) - even toilet breaks are monitored. Strangely though in the same places there is often a lot of down time because calls are bursty, so watching youtube is permitted (friends of my daughters talk). We are indeed in the strangest timeline.

Damn .... this is exactly my story as well ... moved to working from home for the last 3 years and when I do go into the office nothing gets done. Open-Plan 250 people straight line of sight to them all, nightmare for being productive.

> It is all about efficient use of real estate.

In many cases the Federal tax code can also be the driver of these decisions because the amortization on building upgrades is way longer than cubicles. However, tables over cubicles is likely something else. To me, it's just cheap, like how call centers used to be (even they have cubicles now).

To me cubicles and open office are pretty much the same. Both are noisy and offer no privacy. Single offices or team rooms with maybe 4 people are the best.

Also WFH. I occasionally work from a coworking space when I need a change of scenery, but I plan those days knowing that my productivity will be much different (certain tasks lend themselves to open spaces better than others). Visits to the home office (a two-hour drive) are for connecting with colleagues rather than heads-down work time.

I work in open spaces as a software engineer for all my career (14 years) and have long gotten used to them. Currently have 2 other teams sitting in the same space, often chatting, headphones usually help. Not a fan of working from home.

> 35+ years in the IT workforce here. [...] I did have a glassed-in private office for about a year at one company.

Let me take a stab: 1998-2000? Ha!

(Same here.)

I suspect it’s merely a function of personality. Introverts will find it tiring and invasive. Extroverts will probably find it energizing, and will probably have the most vocal opinions shared.

Mind you, tech leans towards introverts and it’s much easier to find temporary loud spaces than temporary quiet spaces so... probably not ideal

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