Open offices have driven Panasonic to make horse blinders for humans (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Open offices have driven Panasonic to make horse blinders for humans (2018)

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90 pointsairstrike71 comments

I hate open offices for many reasons. I am one of the fortunate people who can tune out the world around me an concentrate amongst the bustle.

One thing is everyone to your left, right, and behind you being able to see your screen, which makes checking any sensitive personal information annoying.

Additionally: Between the person to your left and right, you only have a tiny little window of workable space for your desk. Basically just a keyboard and mouse, and a water bottle if you are lucky.

What an obnoxious, stupid way to make us work. Little did we know that cubicles were the NICE version of office work.

Open offices was so annoying, having to look for a couch where you could sit with your back to the wall, or a meeting room to answer sensitive work emails.

Did anybody try "inverted open offices" where people sit facing the center and have their back against a wall as you described? Not necessary like that, any configuration where people can't sneak behind you would work.

I suggested this to $bossman, and he shot me down. I rather liked that setup when I was in school, basically a U shape, with every desk facing towards the middle of the U.

What was the rationale? You could hide what you were doing?

It's not even that, he has a nice office (with a door, and a big desk, and an Aeron, of course) and can't physically watch us work anyway. He just has this idea in his head about how an office should look, and U-shapes are not it. I guess it's the management equivalent of bikeshedding.

Bosses like to see you are working.

If yor screen is private, then you can surf the net, watch sports, use Facebook, play games, or any number of unproductive activities.

Over my career I've had private offices, cubicles and open offices. Of the three, I actually liked cubicles the best. They are far from perfect, but they offer the best balance between privacy and communication.

Agreed, same for me. I do have high cubicle walls.

Give me high cubicle walls, a moat and a vat of boiling oil ...

Recently I was give then opportunity to relocate from the cube farm into an adjacent office, but I declined because I like being in the middle of my team and able to just talk over the walls and communicate with everyone easily. This is despite us already all being in a skype room together, sometimes verbal communication is easier or faster.

Also the HVAC setup here is just wrong, my cube is decently comfortable while the office I was offered is either an ice box or blisteringly hot.

> What an obnoxious, stupid way to make us work. Little did we know that cubicles were the NICE version of office work.

When I started working, in cubicles, 20 years ago, people would complain and say we should have offices, not these awful cubicles. Now I'm wishing for cubicles. I pity the next generation that missing open offices because somehow something worse was foisted upon us.

How about "everyone has a laptop, so just take the first free desk when you get in in the morning?"

"hot-desking"/"hotelling". All the productivity downsides of open office, plus opaque social hierarchies

Hint: if you hot-desk but never saw a full fare business class ticket paid by your employer, it's time to switch job; you are at a cost center.

Clearly so many nightmarish things about this setup, but the one that makes my skin crawl is: my chair. Can you imagine having to sit in a different, random office chair every single day? It's like getting in your car every morning and someone has adjusted your seat and mirrors. I'd probably resort to hiding my favorite chair in a broom closet. Not to mention having to sit in the dried sweat and crumbs of who-knows-how-many other people all the time. shivers.

Also monitor: brightness and contrast, positioning.

We're a pair programming company, and we believe in it so much that we make each pair spoon each other while programming.

Atlassian by any chance? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wUOUmeulNs

Oh, damn. I can't unsee that.

In individual "offices' taking designs inspiration from the Japanese so called "coffin hotel" these of offices are stacked three high.

At our company we realize the problem of open office floor plans was the distraction created by coworkers so all of our offices have sound proof doors that will unlock to let you out for your legal mandated 2 10 minute breaks and half hour lunch as require by state law. Thouhg your are allowed and even encouraged to eat in your "office" as there is no cafeteria and you are not allowed off premise during your shift, though we do provide water vending machines and affordably priced vanilla soylent.

Capsule hotels, but transparent so you can look at your co workers

How about 'classroom office'. You have desks you can move around in any formation and make cliques. Plus everyone is used to it from K12 + uni.

You're joking, but I've read that Valve Software does/did something similar, every desk in their office is on wheels so you can move your desk to join up with whatever project you want.

Maybe unsurprisingly, I've also read stories of "clique"-ish behavior there over the years (though I can't confirm how true they are.)

No, I am not joking, thank you. Classrooms make sense, hence their layouts.

Sorry, I assumed (incorrectly) given we're downthread of a bunch of purposefully awful ideas.

Back in 2008 I was working in Germany as a Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter (research fellow). We had 1 office shared by 2 people. Later I got my own office (when my boss left and I had to replace her). Working in a 1 or 2 person office was amazing.

Later I moved to Industry, to a "Silicon Valley Startup" in an open-floor layout. It is horrible and demeaning (in that, it is evident that it is done because your boss doesn't trust you). I stayed like that for 7 years and just now moved to a 100% remote position. Currently I've got my own office at home with everything I want. There's no way I would go back to an open-office plan.

> because somehow something worse was foisted upon us.

Hot-desking without any personalisation opportunity is the next big thing.

Just rows and rows of homogenous work terminals.

Plug in, crunch, go out.

Yeah. It seems like a lot of hybrid setups are going to have shared desk spaces going forward.

just wait give a 10 years and it will look like crowded call centers, where your packed in knee to knee with your coworkers at shared desks in the most "space efficient" way possible.

That's what modern airline cabins look like, with a screen in front of each seat, and a headset on each pair of ears. Even some business class cabins (I don't fly THAT often but I watch travel vlogs).

Worth remembering that cubicles were invented as being good for workers as it replaced what amounted to the standard open office floor plan with the bossman looking over the workers.

Cubicles provided privacy and focusing ability.

Of course, like all technology, cubicles, work-from-home, and open floor plans all have pluses and minuses.

Personally, I have started to consider the possibility that the problem is we keep thinking about The One Perfect Solution To Rule Them All rather than realizing that no system is good for 40 to 60 hours of work a week with the varied tasks and times needed at each.

For most office work you need places for private and individual focus time, places for quick informal chats that don't disturb others, places for small meetings, places for small work groups to collaborate, places for larger meetings, and others.

That's without getting into individual worker preference - some love cafe settings for focus, some want bright sunny windows, some dark basements, most will have different preferences for different work.

I suppose with enough redundant space you could offer all those things, but that's expensive.

Work from home, with proper infrastructure for meeting and collaboration spaces is likely the best fit for many office jobs, but I know from experience that such things also have "work" invade private life and time in ways that can be very off-putting (and vice-versa).

> realizing that no system is good for 40 to 60 hours of work a week with the varied tasks and times needed at each.

40-60 hours? Shouldn't we be going the other way here?

I am with you.

I started out at 55-90 hrs over 5-6 days and occasionally 7 days a week after being promised 4-10hr days a week. I was pretty sure I was paying excessive dues. This was entry level engineering after all.

Later got a 32 hr a week job. Should have stopped right damn there. Ah the fool I was. Bumped it to 40. Then left for “growth” - a “startup within” a megaCorp.

Now doing “every waking minute I can stand without breaking”.

Sweatshop corporate slavery on both ends of the experience/skill ladder. Credentials and experience mean nothing to work life balance.

My biggest gripe with open plan offices is that they often seem to lead to tiny desks. Maybe because the mindset that leads to open plan offices eventually also leads to maximizing the butts-in-seats:floorspace ratio.

If desks are wide enough, people next to you can't readily stare at your screen, and it's more feasible to add dividers between desks. When they're narrow, ugh, horrible.

Open Offices are horrible for all the reasons we all know...

There is one thing I do not get. Why did and do so many people who had and have to work in such environment so enthusiastically embrace it?

It was so incongruous to see. People I knew and know of all types so eager to get on board with this new movement. Unfortunately I think they got taken in by the fact that it was the so called cool companies that wanted to expand fast and save on space that espoused it. So everyone* became a believer despite the obvious issues. It was fascinating to see this happen (as well as the frowns for not being on-board with this)

I'm happy to see pushback on this miserable layout.

In the early 90's in college I worked in an open plan in a small software company - 10 developers? Management kept proposing cubes and we argued against it. I can't imagine why we argued against it now?

Maybe we had fewer personal items on our screens due to the internet not being used all that much? We argued that it was nice to be able to turn around and ask someone a question. Maybe it's just because we were such a small close knit team?

On the other hand, we also had fairly large desks as well.

There are full height cubes, half height and cubes with "visibility shields" or whatever they call them.

I think the half height ones are a decent compromise. You stand up and you can see the people around you. If you sit, you have your privacy. With stand up desks this can be different, but you can orient desks so that people aren't looking at you from behind.

I can see where if a team grew organically that an open office can work --but you never know when that will change (team changes, management changes, etc.)

They can seem like a good idea at first. If you've never worked in such an environment before, you might not notice how shitty it truly is. At least not until the day you're desperately trying to concentrate, but Steve who is sat next you keeps talking about his pet porcupine, and Fiona breathes so loud the elves could have shot her in the dark, all the while people at the edge of your field of vision are constantly walking to and fro the coffee maker.

> Why did and do so many people who had and have to work in such environment so enthusiastically embrace it?

Because startups wanted to work in the "cool" places and the primary cheap real estate in those "cool" areas was warehouses. And your startup wasn't going to spend 3/4 of its cash remodeling the warehouse into offices when there was a 90% chance it was going to go bankrupt anyway.

So, you threw down planks for desks, ran ethernet over the beams and got to coding.

Of course, the money people realized it was cheap everywhere, and so were happy to promulgate it as "the way SV does it".

I can totally imagine the "roll up your sleeves" mentality when you're bootstrapping the first few years. However, you had established companies, who had been start-ups but were now mature companies as well as old school companies who embraced this ridiculous trend and many employees themselves embraced it as the cool new work environment while a handful tried bucking the trend unsuccessfully. Unsuccessfully because they were seen as anti-innovation, old school, inflexible, un-hip, etc.

I wonder if people hated cubicles because they looked and felt cheaper than actual private offices, thus giving the Office Space/Dilbert/Matrix/Fight Club effect of feeling like an office drone, even if the actual work experience is preferable to open offices.

It's precisely this. Later on when the pivot to open offices took hold the management joined in deriding cubicles as oppressive and stifling. Well, mission accomplished. They are now mostly a rarity and a perk at those places that still have them.

> everyone to your left, right, and behind you being able to see your screen

This always bugged me, did some research while writing this answer, so TIL it's called the audience effect [1]: when a person’s behavior changes because they believe someone else is watching them.

At some level it reminds me of the double-slit experiment and how the interference pattern disappears once you start measuring through which slit the particle goes. Do some results fundamentally require their process to stay hidden to the observer if they're ever to see the light of day? Still wondering...

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5095155/

Edit: above link about the audience effect emphasizes the belief of being watched: horse blinders, by constraining your wide field of view to your screen may certainly limit the distractions of whatever motion your hardwired brain would have noticed in your peripheral vision, however, is the illusion of privacy sufficient to limit the audience effect? Certainly, you'll stay aware that the coworker on your left will keep looking at your screen even if you can't see them? (unless you don't believe in object permanence but let's keep it simple).

So, maybe it works for horses but even there, quoting wikipedia: "Not all horses can stand blinders, some get very nervous if they can't see their surroundings."

And we thought the 1996 Dilbert 'Head Cubicle' was satire. https://dilbert.com/strip/1996-09-15

Ubiquitous open offices are one of those trends that highlight that despite high compensation, mobility, and demand, Silicon Valley software engineers don't always possess the leverage they think they have. Some decisions are just completely in management's hands, and if the prevailing management trend is to embrace open offices, well- there's no current solution against it other than WFH.

I've had mostly positive experiences in open offices, but the one I liked the most was in the mid 90s (if about 10 people in a room qualifies as open office): a room in which we had our desktops arranged as a square around and facing a giant aquarium. The positive environment, the soft music we had 100% control on, fishes, and the gentle bubbling of the air in the aquarium all contributed to a very relaxing and creative environment. As of today however, I very much prefer a libre office than an open one (pun intended); that is, my home.

A good open office can be very good, when each person gets plenty of space around them, things are generally quiet, and management isn't always wandering around (everybody wants to check HN or reddit occasionally, but feels weird doing it when management can see). Defaulting to a setup where most people can't see each other's screens is a nice touch, and the aquarium is cool.

These sound awfuly bad for wearing, i would be so nervous less my periphery vision. I have office with a door and will kill to keep it. Ability to have a call in peace and quiet, talk without being heard and without hearing others, do work without other persons looking over my shoulder, constant bothers, have not the visual distractions, are all reasons why I can have any productivity. Open office classic case of a surface cost savings but lost productivity make very expensive in actuality.

what is the next after horse blinders? Naturally - VR. No need for the desk space for monitor, so the office density can be increased again, like 2x, while you'll be having prime corner office in VR (though probably bean counters would soon find a way/reason to "save" in VR too, and you'll get a nice collaborative VR open office :). Facebook Horizon and "metaverse" somehow come to mind in this context.

followed by a neurolink in the brain to just type and see & maybe a reclining chair with probes plugging directly into spine for high b/w connection. eventually if you can work you way out of student loans then you start losing your physical body parts for virtual until you are finally left as a brain in a jar.

Then the real fun begins..

Focus Cap, a similar product: https://focuscap.io/

This one looks even more demeaning with its fast food server fashion style.

Yes, but in lowers your error rate by over 600%.

The Isolator Helmet is from 1925:

https://www.thevintagenews.com/2015/12/22/the-isolator-an-in...

Love it. So dystopian—-giving one the illusion of space while giving none at all. Create your own panopticon…

These seem nice, actually. Even in an empty office peripheral motion distracts me easily so I'd get some use out of them.

But 'horse blinders' is not the comparison I'd use, especially given the field... this is a professional (ie. expensive) take on the stereotypical hacker hoodie.

Add this to the list of reasons I prefer to work remotely. I get a private office with full control over the air conditioning, my own chair, desk, monitors, etc, and no coworkers staring at my computer.

Sounds like a plot from Silicon Valley (the TV show).

All it needs is some Hooli branding on it.

Maybe they were developed using The Conjoined Triangles of Success?

> (the TV show)

...or the real thing.

Yep, I made something similar out of cardboard for myself and used it in office in the past. I'm super sensitive to motion in my peripheral vision.

Just say neigh.

'news' from 2018? anything new to add to this?

Like there hasn't been a million further articles about open plan offices and strategies

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19884448

Just get an office with a door.

“let them eat cake“

Unless you are at a top 10 company, open floor plans are a cost-cutting measure. That's a red flag!

I don't think you'd be so obtuse to respond with a 'just get a better job' comment if you understood that expression, so for future reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake

"if youre homeless, just buy a house"

“If you’re poor just make more money”

Reply on news.ycombinator.com