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Comment by libertine | Hacker News Reader

Always take these opinions with a grain of salt.

Remember Google was the promoter of the open-space office configuration, and that trend ended up being a terrible mistake for a lot of companies that followed just because it was the latest fashion in office design.

I had bad experience with it, in the context of a Media Agency, to the point where I found that more than 10 people in an open space starts to become too much. 15 to 20 you need to have headphones cranked up in order to be able to do any work.

So bare in mind that just because it's Google doesn't mean they should be the trend setter. Google does what Google thinks will work for them.

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Open plan offices worked great; it’s just that the promotors of it were lying about why they were doing it.

The main point of an open plan office is to reduce the cost of said office. That’s it. Everything else is about trying to find a nice, polite fiction about productivity and communication.

It’s been repeatedly debunked that in terms of real estate and operating costs, open plan offices don’t save money compared to one-office-per-worker designs, not even in super dense urban centers. To boot, many tech companies actively spend money to tear down privacy features and install open plan features, even when there is no growth plan or need for higher worker density per square foot, often even splurging ridiculous money to make the office have excessively opulent features like gourmet dining, coffee bars, alcohol bars, roof decks, etc. - despite hugely financial losses from the destructive effect on productivity and lack of privacy.

Offices are not chosen for short term cost savings, except possibly very early stage startups. Beyond that, offices are juvenile shrines to the company executives and founders.

>It’s been repeatedly debunked that in terms of real estate and operating costs, open plan offices don’t save money compared to one-office-per-worker designs

Source? I can't imagine there would be enough space for individual offices larger than a phonebooth per employee in the same space as open offices.

Anyway, to play the devil's advocate for the move fast and beak things type of companies, open offices are not only about cost, but about the ease to move people and teams around instantly as projects/resources change and more people are onboarded without having to constantly tear down and erect walls to accommodate the various sized teams.

Google never cared about costs. It bought Boston Dynamics as a personal playground for Andy Rubin, and then when Rubin was exposed as a serial harasser, they gave him a $90m severance package.

Google cares very much about cost. That's why they always terminate their own projects and services even if people enjoy them. They just happen to care more about their friends.

For most programmers, open plan offices are too noisy.

Joel Spolsky said it in 2000 in his "Joel test". https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s... (see #8)

> For most programmers, open plan offices are too noisy.

> Joel Spolsky said it in 2000 in his "Joel test".

What makes Joel Spolsky so certain? And what makes you so certain he's right? It's all just personal opinions.

There is research (IBM) that found at 10-15% improvement with offices vs open plan.

We have to move people to space (filled with old weird lab and office rooms) and are considering open space simply because it’ll be many months sooner we can move, since only demolition is required.

Similarly, rearranging teams is much easier and faster in an open plan office.

One of the big issues here is that developer happiness and productivity doesn’t show up clearly on a balance sheet, which is why open plan offices continue to dominate.

Is it really easier? In an open office you more or less have to sit by your team to not be disturbed by standups and other BS cermonies that really should be in an meeting room or someones office.

With single office there is no rush to move at all.

Easier for the team rearranging things, not you.

I think they show up just lower than “can we fit everyone in the office space available”.

That's not true.

I'm an engineering director involved in planning space for 5,000+ software engineers. I went into this strongly preferring individual offices, or a shared office of 2-4 people. We spent a lot of time talking to people over the past year (before COVID).

What I learned was pretty surprising:

(1) Most of our people prefered an open floor plan. They like the sense of community that comes with it.

(2) People hate "noise", but what they consider noise is interesting. They like noise from their own team. It helps them stayed plugged in & informed. What they hate is noise from other teams. Stepping back it makes sense. If Alice is talk to Bob about Foo, and Charlie works on Foo, he's glad he overhear it. On the other hand if Danielle is on another team & has never heard of Foo, it's just a distraction.

So in the end, despite starting out as basically hating open floor plan, that's what we're doing & I'm strongly supportive. We're still being thoughtful about noise, and will have ways so teams don't hear the noise of other teams, but we're basically doing an open floor plan.

And while there are a lot of cost considerations, it wasn't a factor at all in making this decision.

(And, fwiw, I still retain my own personal preference for individual offices, but I'll have a desk in the open just like everyone else.)

Por que no los dos? Give offices to those who need to focus and open plan to those who like getting distracted all day. Seems like a win-win to me. What's with this dogmatic "everyone must sit in a bull pen" trend?

I assume you are getting downvoted for tone, but the idea itself seems reasonable.

I do wonder if some of the preference is dependent on stage-of-life too. When I was younger and had fewer friends I enjoyed open offices more. As an older employee with a family and more non-work friendships the disadvantages of open plans are more obvious

Rather than asking a hypothetical, it probably would have been better to test it. Create an open floor plan with say 100 engineers. Survey job satisfaction before and N months after. At that point decide how people can be the most productive.

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.

>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...

>..A study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology of more than 40,000 workers in 300 US office buildings: "...Enclosed private offices clearly outperformed open-plan layouts in most aspects of IEQ (Indoor Environmental Quality), particularly in acoustics, privacy and the proxemics issues. Benefits of enhanced 'ease of interaction' were smaller than the penalties of increased noise level and decreased privacy resulting from open-plan office configuration."

https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/science-just-proved-that-...

An article in the New Yorker summarizes some research on open offices. Besides the effects on productivity, there are also health effects. For example:

>...In a recent study of more than twenty-four hundred employees in Denmark, Jan Pejtersen and his colleagues found that as the number of people working in a single room went up, the number of employees who took sick leave increased apace.

>...In laboratory settings, noise has been repeatedly tied to reduced cognitive performance. The psychologist Nick Perham, who studies the effect of sound on how we think, has found that office commotion impairs workers’ ability to recall information, and even to do basic arithmetic. Listening to music to block out the office intrusion doesn’t help: even that, Perham found, impairs our mental acuity. Exposure to noise in an office may also take a toll on the health of employees. In a study by the Cornell University psychologists Gary Evans and Dana Johnson, clerical workers who were exposed to open-office noise for three hours had increased levels of epinephrine—a hormone that we often call adrenaline, associated with the so-called fight-or-flight response.

https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-open-office-...

> Rather than asking a hypothetical, it probably would have been better to test it.

IBM did test this. Back in the 1970's.

Single offices with a closable door were best for productivity.

Everybody just chose to ignore all the research because re-architecting the available space in San Francisco in 1998-1999 (a lot of warehouses) would be so expensive. So, they set up "open office" plans and ran ethernet and power on the exposed beams (CHEAP!).

At no point did anybody decide open floorplan was better (witness all the programmers with noise cancelling headsets).

My story of open office.

Because on COVID our office is closed and at home i have two kids, and sometimes i really need to concentrate to get things done. So one day i tried to go to my nearest library and work from there. It's "open office" but it's quite there even if there are people around doing their work.

I was so productive as there are no distractions. No temptations to go to fridge, no passing by colleagues to say hello, no noise. I've done things in couple hours that would have taken whole day at my normal office.

So i think open office is not a problem, problem is whats happening around you in that open office.

>...So i think open office is not a problem, problem is whats happening around you in that open office.

Yea libraries have created the only type of 'open office' where people can actually be productive. The way they do it is to prevent all noise and distractions.

The main rationalization people use to promote open floor plans is that it increases collaboration but the only way an open floor plan can work is to dramatically decrease collaboration. This article covers some of that research:

>...A new study from Harvard reveals that open-plan offices decrease rather than increase face-to-face collaboration

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

The problem is that companies of all sizes are most innovative when people are able (and encouraged) to collaborate without destroying the productivity of those around them.

How do you know your engineers like the open floor plan when most engineers are currently working from home?

Are you serious? Maybe this person is using evidence gathered from before WHF? Would you also argue that you can't talk about open floor plans at night because technically all the engineers would presumably be at home sleeping?

I came into an open plan workplace with low expectations due to so many complaints seen on community sites like this. But I was pleasantly surprised and found I like it a lot better than being isolated in an office. Keeping a team sitting together like you said is key. I also feel it's a little easier visiting other teams, since you can see them from afar and just walk over. Coworkers are generally good about being mindful about noise and grab a nearby meeting room when needed.

One thing that surprised me I didn't expect is, our building has an open ceiling design with the pipes, cables, lighting, structural beams, etc. all exposed. Furthermore they are sprayed with some kind of chunky foam material, and together this has pretty unbelievable noise suppression ability. In a previous building sound traveled a lot further due to flat ceilings, but here I can barely even detect that someone two rows away is talking, let alone make out what they are saying.

Would you really want to be in meeting rooms post Covid?

Compared to a zoom meeting, definitely!!

How many years have you had an office with a door and how do you compare that?

I've never worked in a completely open plan. The closest was this sort of "pod" setup where it's semi open and it can be terrible. It's not terrible if you have some premium corner or window spot where you are semi-isolated, if you're anywhere close to where people are walking or are surrounded from all directions then you (well I) can basically do not real work the entire day. In that latter scenario I pretty much did all the "real" work by staying late after everyone went home. I've seen setups where people are packed into huge rooms and I'd need to be in pretty dire straights before I ever consider working there.

Where exactly are you situated in this open plan? Are people walking right in front of you for example? Or immediately behind your back? Let's say you want to get a coffee, are you walking immediately behind someone's back or immediately in front of their faces? How many people have headphones on all day or try to insulate themselves from the environment in other ways? When people get sick, is the entire office sneezing and coughing? Curious minds want to know ;)

This is really well said and I hadn't thought about it quite like this. It's true, I really don't mind when my colleagues on my team are talking within earshot or even adjacent teams I may tangentially support. What I hate though is engineers on teams I have nothing to do with or, worse, non engineering teams talking nearby.

After my last job with a noisy open office, I was so happy that we had to start working remotely. I loved my company, coworkers, the technology I was working on, pay was decent, etc.

But, pre-Covid, I was desperately looking for a fully remote job to guarantee that I never had to work in an open office again.

Then Covid happen and I stopped looking. Management was trying to get us back in an open office in July. It was even going to be worse. No one was using conference rooms for calls and quick chats before. They definitely weren’t going to do it post Covid.

I was desperate to find another job before July. I was lucky enough to find a fully remote role.

Are you an extrovert? Do your people have actual deadlines or shipping products? Because for an introvert it can turn into a sort of pressure cooker sometimes. Noise yes, but visual distractions too.

I started preferring off hours, when what I would REALLY prefer is to be with my team, just not in this terrible way. Worst is when the guy you are facing has raised is desk to standing height when I am sitting.

I would treat this as an example of people not knowing what they want. How many of those people who preferred an open floor plan have worked somewhere where they had an office with a door? I'll hazard a guess, <5%? How can they tell? It's like asking someone from the Sahara desert how they think they'd do in the north pole.

A private office doesn't mean don't talk with your team. You get people crowding an in office for discussion, you have meeting rooms, if you feel like hanging our with your team member(s) and they feel like hanging out with you then by all means hang out. If you need to disconnect from them to get something done, shut the door and focus. In any sort of normal place with offices people hang together all the time, but since nobody has offices any more, nobody knows that...

I agree.

I've seen places where people leave their office door open when they are fine with being visited, or just want to see other people go by. Where a closed door means don't visit or at least knock, but it's not usually closed.

I basically have a private office right now (WFH, lol) and I'm the only person on the project right now, so for me it works. But previously I've always worked in teams, 3 - 8 people. The noises from one's own team is almost never noise, because it's pertinent to the project you all are working on (if everyone is working on something else you're not an actual team). The noises from other teams though, ugh.

Last job I had, we had "team rooms"; thankfully I was able to provide input and managed to steer them away from doing an open office. That is ideal, I think, if you've got teams working on different things.

I've worked in a fully open office with about 8 teams, that was too much.

I've worked in a half-open office which I was really sceptical about at first (we moved into it while I was working there), it wasn't just an open office but it was three floors with an open atrium in the center. But it worked, somehow; there wasn't too much noise coming from the atrium, and every team had their own area cordoned off with half-walls (whiteboard walls) so you could walk around them, but there was no visual distraction and noise was muted / indirect. I think that's the best way to do open offices. Wouldn't have minded if they put some noise insulation in between the whiteboard walls though.

It's more than that. Open floor plans make it impossible to talk with your team. Because if you do talk you're bothering everyone else. Working from home, it's much easier to do phone conferences, because people don't have to lower their voices to not disturb other office drones.

Apparently you're supposed to go to a meeting room, but in many places they're often 100% used most of the time, and what's the benefit of moving to a different room for an impromptu, 5 min chat?

I doubt that. All the evidence would suggest Google is maximizing employee comfort anf productivity to the exclusion of all else. They are already spending literal billions on real estate in pretty much all the most expensive metro areas in the world. If they thought smaller offices were more successful they’d do it. Pretty sure that the success of open floor plan is based on solid scientific evidence.

Personally I enjoy working in open floor plan. It’s only when I’m having a bad day I don’t feel like it. But I wouldn’t feel like being in any kind of office environment at that point.

Google is actually notoriously bad at office and capacity planning. Over the years, significant chunks of time, my teams were literally sitting in hallways. Usually it’s impossible to book a meeting room, and so on.

Basically problems like this are not easily quantifiable and nobody gets bad review because of this, so they don’t get solved.

The places I've worked with open offices did it because it was cheap, not because it was cool.

that's the same reason google did it. not because it dramatically improves collaboration.

With Google spending hundreds of thousands on each engineer, is that really the place to pinch pennies?

If it actually had the cost that people in this thread are claiming do you really think they would continue to build these sort of offices, year after year for almost two decades? Do you seriously think that they have not looked at the impact and determined that the claimed productivity benefits of private offices are so slight as to not even be worth the effort?

Google has been reducing the average spend per engineer (in terms of benefits and workplace conditions) for quite some time. That is indeed where they have decided to pinch pennies. Real estate costs are non-significant.

I've never seen anyone say they did open plan because it was cheap, they just say "improved collaboration, more open space environment" etc. Of course the main motivation is likely to reduce cost, but I haven't seen people say that explicitly.

So I think that the propaganda in favor for open space offices really sped up their adoption. If Google now produces a lot of propaganda in favor of this hybrid wfh model then it will likely also help speed up adoption, although the main reason to do it would be to save office space costs and not the propaganda blurbs we will see.

Corporate environment is rarely honest even if everybody knows what given thing means. You can literally compose dictionary to normal speech at some point.

I have a theory this environment slowly corrupts a character in subtle ways, till folks wake up one day being full of shit while being polite and smiling and when asked everything is fine.

Since there are at least a few comment pointing cheaper being the reason. I have to ask, what sort of cost reduction are we looking at ?

I cant imagine Open Office being a significant cost reduction in overall office renovation. Let alone the human cost and capital far outweighs renovation cost alone.

How could cost saving ever be a reason for Open Office. Am I missing something obvious?

You can pack people more densely, and therefore the office space you need to pay for is smaller for the same number of employees.

At my office (which I haven't seen since March), I have one desk large enough to fit two monitors, and a chair. That's all the space that's for me. My desk is part of a row of 4 desks side-by-side, and there's 4 more desks facing them. If you set up cubicles, with the density I had last time I had a cubicle, you could probably fit half as many people. If you set up offices you could fit even less.

My employer rents half the floors in one building and just about all the floors in the building across the street, so having to find twice as much space would be not only expensive but logistically complex - either we'd all have to move, or you'd have to commute to get to certain teams.

Thank You. In other words, it was not Open Office, per se that was cost saving, it was using Open Office as a tool to give less space to employees that was cost saving.

I mean you could have small cubicles too, I once worked in a office cubicles that physically could not fit anyone taller than 6"2. There are simply not enough leg room.

It's difficult to pack small cubicles and have them still really count as cubicles. Looking for some random pictures from Google Images, my office looks kind of like this: https://s3.amazonaws.com/mentoring.redesign/s3fs-public/open...

And here is a random picture of a small cubicle design: https://cubiclebydesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Works...

Note the dividers in the center area extend back to the sides of the chairs, even though the chairs are not pushed in. If you tried to do that in the first image, you would block the walkway. (You certainly couldn't do the design of the farther-away cubicles; they take up much more room per employee.)

You could do something like this: https://www.quill.com/content/index/resource-center/office-f... But I'd probably call that an open office layout, honestly.

Thanks for putting the time and getting the image for illustration.

I guess I need some time to think deeply about it before it sinks in.

Because it doesn't happen during a renovation. An office is moved or opened and they don't buy cubicles in the first place or spend time and money to move them.

Before open offices people had cubicles. So no need to renovate, just throw out the cubicles and buy new furniture.

in other words ... renovate ? :)

How could it ever be a reason? Saving $1000's worth of rent by making your $25,000/month employee half as productive sounds insane at first glance

but the trick is that the management chain "saving money" and the management chain that gets screwed by the reduced productivity are different

It's hard to measure productivity, too, so it might not be clear how much the open office is really costing a company

Then perhaps the claimed productivity loss is not really as big as many claim on sites like HN? While it is not easy for an individual to measure any productivity loss, a large company or an entire industry would probably be able to put some serious numbers behind a cost/benefit analysis. Since many of the companies that have open plan offices have a rather large per-employee revenue I think it would be relatively easy for them to determine the impact. Since these companies have not only persisted in building open plan offices but have built entire campuses around such plans I think the evidence is quite clear that they are not actually the productivity sink claimed by many.

Since it is so hard to estimate time needed for a task how would you even notice a 50% decrease in productivity?

Give two people the exact same task. Enough times to get useful statistics. It would be very hard from observation only, you kind have to set up experiments like this to know.

You're making a good point, but it basically boils down to "Companies' leaders are smart and generally make good, well-researched decisions"

So many great companies fall apart because that is just not true at all.

> Remember Google was the promoter of the open-space office configuration

I don't think that's true. First, open-space offices predate Google by many years. (Frank Lloyd Wright invented the open-plan office in 1936. They were common in tech companies long before Google.) Second, Google used a mixture of enclosed offices with doors and open-space.

Now get rid of OKRs at small companies that involves anyone else besides managers.

We have a really small web agency (5 people) and I agree that we don't need to be in the office, that we share with other people of the same company of another division, to get good work done. We need to be together to boost ideas more. Technology and remote tools stigma don't allow you to substitute that for now.

> Remember Google was the promoter of the open-space office configuration

Are you thinking of Facebook perhaps? Google used to favor the 4-to-a-cube/office configuration.

They did not follow it just because it was fashionable. They followed it because seating people like that requires like 1/4 of the space and cost of offices, and real estate in big cities is incredibly expensive.

Well yeah I totally get your point but “we wanted to give people a sense of certainty in those uncertain times” that makes 1000% sense to me.

A Google open floor plan without any of the other perks/distractions is a completely different experience.

Interestingly, most mainstream media had open offices way before it was cool.

I think media and finance had it very early. Here is a story with picture of old newsrooms. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-newsroom-rush-of-...

What strikes me is the high level of communication and coordination across individualS required to do that work. This seems to be the quality that newsrooms and trading floors are optimized for.

My experience is that in open space where everybody are following basic noise hygiene rules, most of the sounds you got are keyboard and mouse clicks and sometimes mouse wheel crackle. Setting and enforcement of said rules are in mutual company's and employees interest.

So like a library? Headphones can help but I do tire of them. And if anyone needs voice control to support their work (accessibility).

Good example, yes. Like a library. Just some basic rules like "talk in a whisper or use a meeting room", "set your phone on silent and forward notifications to your workstation", and so on. Passages wide enough to go without disturbing people nearby.

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