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Comment by jlengrand | Hacker News Reader

I'm not actually against open plan offices....at team level. I'm against open plan offices at large corp level.

I have 300 people on my floor, the group closest to us is from business and spends 2/4 hours a day on the phone. It saddens me because the largest openly claimed benefit of Open Plan offices is "increase collaboration". What I literally see is people locking themselves with headphones and trying to hide in rooms to get some silence. I mean, people literally have to walk around teams to go to the toilet or get a coffee.

I'd like team size cubicles. That would sound to me like a good compromise between collaboration, and deep work. I'm sure people would open up more. In fact, it is how it was setup at Bell Labs back in the time [1], not the pale copy we see everywhere today.

A bit like Agile has become Scrum I'm guessing :).

[1] https://aquicore.com/blog/bell-labs-office-design/

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> I'd like team size cubicles.

Upvoting and quoting to emphasise this point. The alternative to open plan is not individual offices, it's team offices.

So... regular offices?

Because that's how most office building have been organized outside of tech for decades.

In one job we had large rooms where each team was housed. There were no closable doors so it felt open but gave us quiet so we could concentrate.

That doorway was a psychological deterrent to people coming to socialize or ask stupid questions. It made them stop no briefly.

The people who needed privacy due to sensitive nature of their work, like HR and legal, got offices with doors. I hear from people at other companies that this is not always the case.

I wasn't there to experience it first hand, but it seems like that's how it started as well. Extra collaboration in between teams, but small enough panel size in your direct surrounding. Were not meant to evolve constantly around 100s of people all day

How about something like the 1972 Centraal Beheer offices:

http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/central_beheer.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_xHQjBKbjo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rT1VQHcZOj0

https://www.ahh.nl/index.php/en/projects2/12-utiliteitsbouw/...

haha, het ziet zeker goed uit! I like the whole 'factory' look of it.

>I'm not actually against open plan offices....at team level.

Having now worked in one of these at a large company, we found those sorts of "team offices" hurt collaboration and innovation even more than open floor plans. Unless the company is relativley small, the random conversations between people from different teams is often the key to innovation and getting problems solved early without having having to have formal meetings and delays. A team room means that to ask a co-worker on another team a simple question (or to just see what they are working on) becomes a big deal because you are now entering that other team's space and interrupting a dozen people. Unless you really know the other person well, we found people just are very hesitant to do it.

In big companies, there usually isn't a problem with communicating within a team - the problems occur when teams aren't communicating with people in other teams. These team rooms ruin informal inter-team collaboration and communication.

With the pandemic it isn't hard to see that a small enclosed team room with people packed in it is also a pretty good way to guarantee a virus will be spread to others.

Yeah, I mean I'll leave pandemic out of the discussion simply because airco will make sure the virus is spread everywhere in the building, not just the team anyways.

I do agree with you in a way, that's one of the dangers. But I also see today that a lot of teams are not even sure what's being done just next to then, simply because everyone has headphones on all day. Creating a climate of inter exchange and communication in between teams is indeed key.

>Yeah, I mean I'll leave pandemic out of the discussion simply because airco will make sure the virus is spread everywhere in the building, not just the team anyways.

If the air con is recirculating the air like in the case of that restaurant in China, that is true. Otherwise the risk isn't as clear:

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/can-air-conditioning-...

>...But I also see today that a lot of teams are not even sure what's being done just next to then, simply because everyone has headphones on all day. Creating a climate of inter exchange and communication in between teams is indeed key.

I agree. The best environment I've seen for that is individual offices with shared collaboration spaces near the offices.

> A team room means that to ask a co-worker on another team a simple question (or to just see what they are working on) becomes a big deal because you are now entering that other team's space and interrupting a dozen people.

Which is better than interrupting the hundred plus people in the giant open-office space?

Unless they feel the need to yell, they are probably interrupting a small number of people and not hundred plus people. The difference in the open floor plan is that at least they aren't entering the private space of another team. What we saw is that when each team is in their own little silo, people are reluctant to go invade another team's private space unless they knew the person very well. Inter-team knowledge sharing and collaboration really dropped.

While team silos create additional problems, obviously the hundred plus style open floor plans are still pretty horrible. The best approach I have seen is individual offices with shared collaboration areas nearby. People can do deep work by closing their office door. People can pair-program, have someone look over their code, have a private conversation etc. by going to another's office without disturbing everyone else. A shared collaboration area allows for quick easy group discussion when helpful.

in a 100 people room there will always be people walking around. what an open office does is to train people to ignore the noise around them (pity those that can't adjust). you'll see people walking by and you'll ignore them. in a team room, if someone enters, you know that it's for the team, and everyone will perk up to see what the 'intruder' wants.

Isn't that kind of the point of having team offices?

>...Isn't that kind of the point of having team offices?

Having each team in their own silo isn't necessarily a good thing. They may feel they are getting more done in their daily standup meetings, but long term innovation often comes from inter-team collaboration and sharing of expertise.

As I said before, what I've seen is that random conversations between people from different teams is often the key to innovation and getting problems solved early without having having to have formal meetings and delays. I've also seen teams in their silo end up making poor choices in areas of technical design where they didn't have as much background.

If two companies are competing with each other, the one where there is great informal inter-team collaboration is going to have an advantage over the one where each team is in its own silo and at best ignores the other teams.

the question is, what is better for collaboration. if getting a question to another team is a such a big deal, then it will happen less and hurt interteam collaboration

once you have people working from home, or teams spread over multiple locations then any offline communication becomes a problem because the remote people are excluded. interteam communication is not an officelayout problem but a company communication culture problem.

changing the office layout may be one approach to address the problem, but it may not always make the problem go away.

> I'd like team size cubicles.

For a while we had 1st and 2nd line support on the other side of the aisle from us on a floor that had ~ 75 people working there, it was so hard to concentrate.

My boss was trying to get a room built for our team: 4 developers, 2 Analysts and 2 testers alas it never happened. Something about collaboration, despite the fact that our team was working an entirely new product line using a new technology (for the company).

> What I literally see is people locking themselves with headphones and trying to hide in rooms to get some silence. I mean, people literally have to walk around teams to go to the toilet or get a coffee.

This sentence describes me. I have my headphones plugged in almost all times because I cant focus with all the noise.

You are not alone in this. Many developers find noise to be a especially distracting factor. I am in this category.

Also, I feel the need to comment on the widespread notion that the primary motivation for open-plan office is that "it facilitates collaboration" which in my opinion and experience is barely truthful in any way.

The reality is that open-office is motivated by the costs of rent -- it really is that simple.

The whole thing about "collaboration" is after-the-fact rationalizing because organizations lack the courage to admit that it really is about money.

> I'd like team size cubicles. That would sound to me like a good compromise between collaboration, and deep work.

I agree, but isn't that just a room? When I was doing research at my university, all of the offices were laid out this way -- each group had one room where they all worked so they could discuss things (and the building is one of the older buildings in our 200-year-old university). Also (though I work from home) when we have face-to-face meetings at my employer's offices, the offices are similarly laid out (2-6 people from the same team in a room).

I knew that the open offices thing was the new fad in "efficiency improvements to the workplace which are actually just a way to save money", but is it really so common now that people feel the need to reinvent the room and call it a "team sized cubicle"?

I'm not an expert on the matter, but I read that originally Bell Labs opened up those 'rooms' to create inter disciplinary collaboration.

In other words, exactly a room yes, but making sure that you as as chemist run into a geologist once in a while, or a computer scientist gets to meet a biologist. It was about alleyways and corridors, rather than rooms itself.

Of course, things have evolved with time and get used for other reasons (saving costs is indeed a big one) and we also tend to idealize the past so I won't make facts out of what I read but it makes sense to me.

Hotdesking often means team members can't sit near each other. I find it hilarious that you have people who spend their entire day on zoom calls with collegues in different parts of the buildings, who also claim they can't possibly work from home.

that's not hilarious. some people just need the occasional face to face interaction, and can't tolerate being alone. i used to work in a kind of hackerspace where i'd sometimes pick the large kitchen as my workspace with others there doing completely unrelated things just because it felt better than being locked up in my room.

> I'd like team size cubicles. That would sound to me like a good compromise between collaboration, and deep work.

Small clusters of real offices (i.e., floor to ceiling walls, doors, all lights under control of occupant) opening on a shared space might be better for that. I worked at a place like that once. There are some diagrams of the arrangement in this comment [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3730655

Does that not just create silos though. So many things require cross-team working. If each team has its own private space then information bottlenecks will occur

You have to compare the cost of potential information bottlenecks with the cost of no deeper work being done at all. To combat the bottlenecks, just include shared spaces - a kitchen with a water cooler, a foosball table, a customary time where people go to lunch as a group. Serendipity will happen there, and workstations can be reclaimed as places for concentration.

The best approach I have seen is individual offices with shared collaboration areas nearby. People can do deep work by closing their office door. People can pair-program, have someone look over their code, have a private conversation etc by going to another's office without disturbing everyone else. The shared collaboration area allows for quick easy group discussion when helpful. In terms of preventing information bottlenecks, it is easy for someone in another team to walk by and ask a question of someone or run an idea by them without it being a big deal.

Maybe, i'm not convinced. In my experience social interactions in shared spaces like kitchens etc tend to be dominated by general niceties and non-work chat. Which is fine, obviously, but I don't think you get the benefits as when people working on similar stuff are physically proximate to one another in their workspace, and can get feedback on an idea they are working on now instantly from knowledgeable coworkers

> people working on similar stuff are physically proximate to one another in their workspace, and can get feedback on an idea they are working on now instantly from knowledgeable coworkers

Yeah, but the issue people arguing against open-space have, myself included, is that we explicitly don't want to have these interactions, at least not in unstructured form - because your request for feedback from me "now instantly" is actively preventing me from getting my work done.

It's just that, a request. You are not obliged to help people straight away if you are deeply engaged in something. In fact most people are polite enough to not ask if it's clear you are busy. But if you're not, having access to that immediacy is a real boon IMO.

It's a request, but just issuing a request to a developer in a state of deep focus stands a good chance of kicking them out of that focused state, ruining anywhere between half an hour and the rest of the day for them. So you need to be really mindful of the cost of just asking someone if they have time.

The usual solutions I've employed or been subjected to in the past are: 1) headphones on == no interruptions of any kind, 2) direct questions and requests to IM (with notifications off), and 3) if you need someone's repeated help during the day, then note your questions on a list, and agree on a period (e.g. every hour on the clock) when you and that someone will go over the list together. In my experience, 3) is magical, because once you start noting questions down instead of asking for help immediately, you'll discover that before the hour is up, you'll have answered most of your questions yourself.

I feel like you're being a bit precious. If someone asks you 'hey, can you help out with this', and you respond 'no not right now i'm busy', that knocks you out for half an hour to the rest of the day???

FWIW I'm a pretty independent worker and I agree people should try and work things out on their own before asking for help

It's not necessarily about having that happen once though. That can happen the many times throughout the day, and 2-3 interruptions in one day can be a lot. I think a lot of the point of not doing open-plan is to engineer an environment where it happens less often.

That being said, it's entirely possible that some tasks will require absolute focus and having a 2 minute conversation will legitimately lose you a large amount of productive time. There may also be a subset of people who are more likely to get these particular tasks, and those people will feel the negative effects of an open plan office much more than others working on more easily interruptible tasks.

Yes, it is that bad for some people. But most importantly, even if it meant "just" 5 minutes to get back into flow, you still have an organization that doesn't know how to share information and you have a manager that is crippling team productivity without even knowing.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/02/12/human-task-switche...

> I agree people should try and work things out on their own before asking for help

That is far from ideal in two ways:

- knowledge sharing suffers. You do your research and solve your problem or you don't and you have to ask to someone else more experienced. Knowledge sharing is kept to an oral tradition. Teams quickly start depending on one or two key members and juniors are often with a feeling with being left alone.

- you still have this anxiety of "when is it okay to interrupt?" On both ends. Everyone's threshold is different, so there is always someone who will be annoyed by the interruption and suffer.

The way to fix this is by promoting collaboration (pair-programming sessions are great and both partners already expect the communication, so "flow" is easier to maintain, also it is terrible to do on open-floor plans) and having a clear written practice to share knowledge and documentation.

There is no single situation where an open plan office leads to more team and individual productivity.

In my experience, "Being able to be productive while not in The Zone" is a job skill like any other that can/should be learned and improved with practice. I used to be like that, where if you said peep to me while I was focused, I snapped out of it and couldn't work my way back up to productivity easily. This is kind of a "junior developer" problem that IMHO developers just need to overcome with practice. Having a kid helped me a lot. Suddenly there were distractions all day, and I was forced to learn how to be productive in 30 minute spurts.

As one gets more senior in their development career, their days will get more and more punctuated with meetings. You start gradually moving from the "maker" to "manager" schedule. So your reality will be a day with a handful of 1 hour time slots available for deep work. In my view you just need to deal with this reality and learn how to be productive in it.

> In my view you just need to deal with this reality and learn how to be productive in it.

IMO, senior developers who are “productive in it” are getting by on pattern matching.

Just like I can drive to my local mall without even thinking about it.

They haven’t actually learned how to be productive working this way.

>> Just like I can drive to my local mall without even thinking about it.

I have seen plenty of software that appears to have been written by someone who was 'not even thinking about it' and it is invariably problematic and expensive-to-maintain.

Do you really believe there are senior devs that are productive without even thinking about it?

That just strikes me as odd -- maybe they are working on stuff should be given to Juniors?

> Do you really believe there are senior devs that are productive without even thinking about it

All the time. I’ve done it myself plenty of times over my career.

> That just strikes me as odd -- maybe they are working on stuff should be given to Juniors?

Would you give a delivery job to a brand new driver or a driver who has done the required route dozens of times and could do it without thinking?

Yeah, after two kids I did manage to learn to deal better with interruptions, but I still feel a difference between "able to work" and "being in the zone". I am able to be interrupted in the middle of a list of actionable items and resume to it somewhat painlessly, but ask me to, e.g, plan a sprint or write a longer-term strategy doc and I will just wait until all the lights in the house (or office) are out.

I do disagree, however, about it being a problem related to lack of experience. It is good when someone can learn to handle interruptions, but it's even better when they don't have to. Handling interruptions and impediments are the main responsibility of a good manager, not of the developers.

This is what everyone assumes, but when you actually test that idea, it turns out not to be true:

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.201...

Thank you for the academic link providing a solid contradiction to the idea that open-plan facilitates or improves 'collaboration'.

this, the best office I worked at was in a Large room where me and 4 other engineers sat in an open office layout in 4 corners of the room. People from other teams would peek in and talk to us when they need us. When we need to have an engineering meeting people just gathered in our room and we closed the door.

Yup, a room for the team is perfect. And then a gatekeeper (team lead) at the door everything has to go through.

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