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One of my offices, after vocal complaints about the open office plan, did a quick survey.

Roughly 50% were fine with the open office plan. (this office was mainly devs, HR, recruiting, and data scientists) As someone that is drained by social interactions (I _like_ them, but afterwards I'm drained, not energized), that is easily distracted by movement, and who can't hear conversations in the background without instinctively trying to focus on what is being said, open offices are hell for me.

I was utterly mystified by the "other" 50%. How do you just "choose" what to focus on? That's like controlling a reflex. I knew there were extraverts, but SO MANY?!

Trying to tune out the background conversations is especially hard when most of them are in a language you speak usefully, but not fluently.

Works the same in the reverse case: I'm a native speaker in the office language, but many of my coworkers are not. One of them is impossible for me to tune out, only because of a difficult accent (his grammar etc are actually better than the ones that I can tune out). It feels as if a mental background process for flagging keywords or something like that keeps bailing out with an exception, "sorry consciousness, you take over". I discovered that I can limit the effect with positive framing as a naturally occurring experiment that grants an interesting window into the inner workings of the mind. At least this way, the distraction does not get compounded by annoyance (which also would be quite unfair). I can only imagine how bad it must be when everyone around you causes that kind of escalation to consciousness.

Can't find it anymore, but I could swear there was a study that recently hit the HN front page that found that everyone's productivity objectively takes a hit in a distracting environment. But, subjectively, extraverts perceive themselves as being more productive, while introverts don't.

Yup it’s been proven that libraries are good places to get work done not cafeterias.

They really should have collaborative AND personal spaces. Not a forced airport-like office setup.

What were they smoking when they designed those?

For me, a little noise is the worst. A busy cafe with a constant level of noise is easy for me to tune out. If everyone is silent but like every 30s something happens: Someone coughs, a bag of snacks is rustled, a cardboard strap is opened. That's the worst.

Agreed.

I'm fine when the general level of noise is way up, because there's less for the brain to latch onto and get distracted by. I've churned out serious lines of code in a noisy cafe, but always churn out more when I'm at home: my noises, no distractions.

It's the human interaction though that drags me away from the work-from-home/work-in-a-cubicle lifestyle.

I find even quiet conversations in an open environment to be the worst of all distractions. The clacking of pens and the slurping of drinks in a library set my teeth on edge, forcing me to wear headphones, which means I may as well be outside with the rabble.

This makes me wonder if the core of the problem is the lack of control over your own environment somehow

Sure but a cube farm isn't going to save you from this.

This is driven with money-saving in mind -- at least short term. Consider it is easier to lease space as a landlord if it is open space floorplan, and it is easier to deal with a 1-2 year temporary space as a startup, than actually pay to modify it.

This. Extroverts are likelier to choose the survey response that reinforces their identity. If you’re a social person, then “I love open office plans, they totally make me more productive” is the pro-social answer.

I would rephrase 'reinforces their identity' to 'helps maintain their sanity and happiness'.

I am not even saying they don't take a hit to their productivity. Just that that's not the important metric to those folks, they just would dread a job where they're isolated.

A lot of this depends on people on the maker's schedule vs. the manager's schedule.

Or put another way, some people like the office environment because it matches how they communicate and get things done. The office environment is built around the idea of real-time conversations, which can be helpful for collaboration if it's not overused.

With that being said, the office (especially open-offices) take this idea way too far. I just finished a post about it a couple minutes ago: https://www.friday.app/office-vs-remote-distance-communicati...

Surveys like that don't work very well. The same people would probably also have been "fine" with their own office. Many people just want to get along, and enduring this and that is something that we learn all the way from childhood.

"cove of 2-3 people" isn't really open plan. Working next to a couple people who you'll probably end up getting friendly with if they aren't jerks is very different from working in an ocean of 50 people.

This conversation is a great example of the differences in personalities, and why there is no single solution for everybody. As a rather misanthropic person, my preference is to see other human beings (that aren't loved ones) very rarely, ideally never. I don't want to see, hear, smell, etc people.

Until I'm fully remote, cubicles are the best scenario I've found. They let me feel "invisible and isolated" and I love it. If I could build out my cubicle to be a complete box with opaque walls and soundproofing, I'd do so in a heartbeat.

Hopefully decision-making people can become aware that there's a huge spectrum of preferences, and work to accommodate them rather than impose preferences on others.

Extroverts: I feel invisible and isolated and I hate it.

Introverts: I feel invisible and isolated and I love it.

More like:

Introvert: Anyone could (and has in the past) interrupted my thoughts in similar situations, I need to be ready.

Introvert: What are they saying? Does that involve me or an area I should be concerned about?

Introvert: There's someone within speaking voice 'ear-shot' and/or eye-contact range, lets work on that task together.

im not sure what any of this has to do with introversion

No one is 100% polarized introvert or extrovert though. I’m willing to be t silent environments are more conducive to productivity.

Whomever designs those open spaces watches way too much Fixer Upper. That or not enough — the open spaces are communal but there are ALSO spaces for people to retreat into their space.

>I’m willing to be t silent environments are more conducive to productivity.

It's always worked for libraries, I think. Why not offices?

Aren’t libraries usually open spaces? But they enforce strict silence.

So you can go tap on anyone’s shoulder but if you want to have a conversation you need to head to a non working area.

That sounds like the best idea to me. Open office plan, but no loud conversations are allowed. You need to maintain strict library like silences. However, you also provide enough breakout rooms or non quiet areas where people can head over to to have a discussion.

Which of course can never work in an office environment. Leave your desk for every Zoom/WebEx conference call? Whisper with the colleague who needs to talk to you for a minute about something? You're not going to decamp to a meeting area for all the daily grind stuff- so the open area is always going to be interruptingly loud.

We have unofficial office rules that work just like that. We do not have a sea of 50 people in the same space however, instead we have sort of isolated spaces that contain about 15-20 people each. All phone calls, chats longer than a minute or two ('I need to whiteboard this with you') and such are always done in small dedicated phone / meeting rooms on the sides of the open space. There is an adjacent coffee and food eating space shared by 3 such shared spaces, so about 40 people. It works well enough, almost everyone is mindful of sticking to the rules, since it benefits everybody to keep it that way.

Another anecdata: I'm in an open office right now, and the area that I'm in could ostensibly be considered to be a "cove", with about 6 people. I hate it. I'm not on the same calls, so people being in calls messes with my flow. They're not on my same calls, so I either have to move to a hot and sticky phone booth, or leave the building entirely (I've taken a few calls in my car) since I work on projects that aren't ready for the office rumor mill.

I really miss my cubicle. I could stand up and have a conversation, or sit down and be in relative peace. The sound and visual isolation offered by those fabric walls can't be overstated.

I feel invisible and isolated in my open plan office anyway, but also exposed in all the ways that spike my anxiety and keep me from getting work done. It's the worst of both worlds.

I think the former aspect probably has more to do with the job itself than the physical working environment ... it's hard to walk away from what I get paid, but one of these days I'll probably have to.

The second sounds like hub-and-spoke, where you have pods of 2-4 people clustered around common area. (I enjoy that as well.)

Open concept is usually more like 20-40 in a giant pen without any sort of separation or soundproofing between.

Studies suggest hub-and-spoke is good; open concept is high density feedlots applied to white collar work.

I am curious as what type of work did you do at that job. "I could catch errors others were making as they were going" sounds as something I would not be able to do as a developer.

As has been alluded to in previous incarnations of this article topic and subsequent HN commentary, for a typical IT/software job the ideal I think is to either have functional teams in their own closed open area or to have such an area along with a quiet cube or office (even if it's "hoteled") for work that requires long periods of uninterrupted focus.

An great alternative is just an open office where remote workers meet a few times a week to collaborate then go back home to get stuff done.

Somehow there has to be a mix because an open office space with all the yackety yak that comes with it is practically impossible to get any real individual work done. I end up making progress during quiet times at home after hours or when I take a day off/sick leave. Not ideal. Where is our 21st century Jetsons future, dammit. It's not supposed to be worse.

The small group - if they work at least on related things - can be valuable. Those huge areas of desk next to desk as in modern "startup" (in quotes since it includes Facebook etc.) open offices are a way different story, though.