Open Office Layout is Bad for Brain | Hacker News Reader

Open Office Layout is Bad for Brain

infoq.com

70 pointstszming64 comments

I work on problems (code) that can take an hour to grok, another hour to get the code state into my head, and then more minutes to surgically implant the right change. Invite me into a meeting or chatter outside my cubicle, and I'm derailed. So that's why I get most of my work done early, early in the morning or after everybody else has left.

This article presents the most blindingly obvious case. Why is it even worthy of discussion? Because folks who call themselves authorities have made rediculous assertions (Open office plans are productive), written a book and gotten the foolish notions somehow embedded. It takes an authority and a study and a published report to undo the damage.

Or we could just rebel - No, I won't work in your echo chamber.

  -- guy currently suffering under Agile-zealot manager

My most productive hours are after 4pm, when everyone else is gone or busy scrambling to finish things and get home.

The assertion I disagree with is that this is worse with an open office than a cubicle farm. In my experience cubicle farms are terrible because people don't see those around them that are being annoyed by an overly loud conversation.

And there i was going to comment "But MS Office had the same layout for years!".. until i clicked that link.

I also thought is was about OpenOffice.org until I read your comment.

Headphones are an integral part of the open office layout, especially for developers. I recommend decent-quality sound-isolating earbuds which can give you a personal audio environment at any time without irritating your coworkers.

Using headphones is a sign you don't want to be disturbed, as well. This isn't a sacrosanct rule, but it should be taken into consideration when you choose to interact with someone, possibly interrupting them. If you think they are focused on something, send them an IM instead.

Working from home a day or two a week, or working in the office before or after everyone else arrives or leaves is another good way to avoid interruption.

I would rather have private office where I can listen to the music while I work, then having to wear headphones in open office.

Headphones are a great idea for some people. I for myself work best in silence. Even if there is music playing it disturbs my concetration. Maybe I am especially weak at focussing, but I think to some degree this is true to everybody who listens to music while working.

I disagree. For certain tasks, certain types of music, ideally albums I have heard many times before, help me to relax and stay focussed. For others, I cannot concentrate with music.

I find it quite a disadvantage in my current office that when I need to do something detailed in a rigorous way I do not get to wear headphones.

>ideally albums I have heard many times before

I find this to be true also.

Additionally, I've noticed that during the planning stage music is less helpful/possibly distracting. However, once I've more or less decided what to do and am focused more on implementation music can help me focus.

Music is distracting when you need to be creative, because your creative brain is effectively distracted by the music. I read about a study[1] recently that presented a programming problem to two groups; one group listened to music while they solved it and the other group had silence. While each group performed acceptably with regards to creating a solution that conformed to the spec, the music-listening group neglected to notice that a series of transformations in the problem spec turned out to result in no changes whatsoever. The group working in silence was able to make the connection and came up with a more efficient program.

[1] Sorry, can't find the source. Will update if I find it.

Pretty sure that study was mentioned in Peopleware, but didn't include a citation reference.

I believe you are correct.

I don't disagree with your point, but the 'study' is essentially an anecdote about two incidents, in which the difference could just as easily be about the group members involved; I think one cannot draw significant conclusions from it, as described.

I understand your point and I think for most people that works. Not all people are the same, though.

I agree. I've had better results listening to white noise.

White noise hurt my ears, but I found pink noise working great and not disturbing. I could listen to it for an hour; at one point my imagination starts treating it as a sound of sea waves on a beach.

Yes, I like nature sounding noises like beach or wind.

http://simplynoise.com/ has decent brown noise.

I've used earplugs but haven't so much since I got a pair of Bose QC 15 noise-cancelling headphones. They work wonders for blocking out background conversation.

For moderate levels and when I am in a relaxed state to begin with, I can leave the destructive interference feature off. The insulation all by itself is very effective. If the noise is really annoying (or if I'm anxious or tired or something) I can turn on the noise-cancellation. It can feel a little awkward at first and I have a vague sense that it might not be good for my ears, but essentially all external distractions just fade into the background. To interrupt me you basically have to walk up and tap on my desk.

Try getting some Sennheisers, and playing http://www.simplynoise.com/ - after awhile, you're no longer aware of the noise, but you can't hear anything else, either.

Yes, it's a sign that I don't want to be disturbed. It's also a sign that people routinely fail to pick up on or just plain ignore in order to ask me mundane questions.

I think headphones are unfortunate though because they are often used to drown out all the noise around - or at least this has been my experience. In my current company and especially my last one (a very well know design studio), headphones were used because it was insanely noisy. I look forward to a day where the only reason I have headphones on is because I want to actually listen to some music.

That said, I am a huge fan of cubes/offices/personal spaces. The most productive I've ever been is in those types of environments.

Speaking of "Bad for Brain", InfoQ's website is the worst thing to happen to exposition in computing since leet-speak.

I have seen better aesthetics in an government risk-mitigation newsletter. They get rockstar speakers, but drab them in corduroy & loafers. Awful, just awful.

I personally can't concentrate in any kind of open-space office. When I need to focus, the very feeling of other people being present is a huge distraction to me. It was true since early childhood - I couldn't do homework or learn anything at home if I wasn't alone in a room with doors closed.

I don't really know how to explain it.

Same here. Nobody believes me when I tell them I can feel others' presence in a visceral way.

I have lesser but still significant problems in cube environments. Would love to get out of the cube farm...and I believe I'd produce a lot more value if I weren't stuck in an uncomfortable place.

Yeah, I also think that I'd produce a lot more value if allowed to work in different conditions...

Also, I often find myself in a free conference room with a whiteboard, or in a park outside with paper and pencil, and do my thinking there. I'm having a hard time thinking near computers, and it's three orders of magnitude more difficult if there are co-workers nearby.

Nobody believes me

This is a very frustrating aspect of the experience.

After being coaxed/coerced for years to "be like everyone else", I finally learned to take this as a sign -- as a mandate -- to GTFO.

Such an environment will wear you down and eventually destroy you. The sooner you leave it, the better.

(And, if we are indeed that good, leaving may be the best way of counter-acting such attitudes, as the institutions we leave struggle to make do with what is left. If this is not the case, you've nonetheless extracted yourself from what, in my experience, is a personally self-destructive position.)

I concur.

What's telling too is that people who want to get work done in such an environment stay home to do it.

Including the zealots.

I call it "psychic elbow room" - read it somewhere, not sure where, or I'd attribute.

I have the same problem. I grew up on a ranch in rural Texas. It was remote enough that I might as well have been on Asimov's Solaria for all the human company I had. Over the years, I became accustomed to reading, thinking, and tinkering in relative isolation.

Whether the cause is simply my background or is perhaps strengthened by some neurological factor, I am completely unable to filter out superfluous external stimuli.If someone is talking on the phone in the same room with me, I can't not listen to their conversation no matter how much I wish otherwise.

The people with whom I work tend to have difficulty understanding this aspect of my nature. I'm afraid I come off as rude and aloof when I put on my headphones and request to be IMed rather than tapped on the shoulder. Generally, these requests are ignored. One of our sales people actually came over and pulled my headphones off my head. My startled reaction did not go over well with her.

I'm not asocial. I like people. I just need silence to think.

None of the research has been about open programming environments. The article quotes two studies that did not study open programming environments, and the rest is opinion and speculation, albeit from some respected people.

So when they say "If you are just getting into some work and a phone goes off in the back ground it ruins what you are concentrating on" they are talking about a room full of people who answer phones as part of their business.

My most successful project was done in an "open" office, with the five programmers' desks arranged in a circle, facing out. We could all concentrate when required, but we could communicate immediately when there was a problem. Sometimes an interruption was annoying. Most of the time the communication paid of hugely. I think programmers are good at judging when to bug another programmer. That said, we had an awesome team.

In my experience, a bunch of programmers in offices is a great way to get lots of the wrong thing done. It may be because when I've been in this situation, the team was not as experiences as the team above. Or it may be that offices kill communication, discourage bouncing ideas around, and encourage "going dark".

When I hear of open offices that didn't work, there's usually more shit policy coming down from management and being imposed than just the open office.

That's the most important thing: What does the team want?

The problem is that the people who decide how to layout offices, don't do the kind of "stateful" work that requires long periods of concentration, and don't understand those that do. Their work is broken up into much more discrete chunks. PG talks about this in his essay http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

I remember some research quoted by Christopher Alexander (of design patterns fame.) although I cannot find the reference at the moment. I believe it was in the justification section for the "half-open wall" pattern.

The gist of it was that people tend to prefer spaces that are about half closed (I'm quoting from memory, I'm aware this quantification is imprecise) - i.e. somewhere between a lone desk in the middle of a huge room (0% closed) and a cubicle (almost 100% closed). Something striking the balance between the feeling of being shielded (nobody likes open space behind their backs) and being cramped (nobody likes a view-blocking wall in front of their nose.)

Is this what you are referring to? http://zeta.math.utsa.edu/~yxk833/Chris.furniture.html

The original text I referred to is this book by Christopher Alexander: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pattern_Language

I believe the text you linked uses the Alexander's principles and applies them to office arrangement. Interesting.

Hmm, according to that, it sounds like cubes should work better if the employee is facing outward. Computer on the open side of the cube with the screen facing into the cube, rather than computer on the far side of the cube.

Is this common anywhere?

How do you get out? Crawl under the desk?

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I wonder if many of the same drawbacks of an open office layout affect cubicle farms as well. I have worked in both situations, and I have not found that cubicle walls significantly dampen office noise. Cubes probably lessen other kinds of distractions, but visual distractions are easy to ignore anyway.

I think many people regard cube farms as "open space". Especially with the ever shrinking wall sizes and square-footage per person.

Having seen start-up occupying warehouse-sized spaces with plastic foldable tables set up next to one another filling the whole space, there are values of "open space" greater than your typical cube-divided office space.

That office layout, and some technical problems (said shop's first Google result was of a quarter-million passwords compromised by way of a developer's poor password choice, neglecting to use RSAkey auth, and, well, cleartext storage of user passwords), were chief among reasons I declined any further interest in the opportunity. It still ranks high among horror stories I've personally witnessed.

"That office layout, resulting in some technical problems..."

Fixed that for you. ;-)

I suspect ultimate causality was sloppy thinking resulting in both the office layout and the multiple security issues, though it's also quite likely that this was something of a cascade failure.

Does anyone remember the article that showed researchers were more productive when they had more lines-of-sight in their work space? Something about being able to easy interact with people and exchange ideas, since they would often come into visual contact with people.

Perhaps this all depends on what you're working on.

I can't be the only one who at first thought this would be about the UI layout of OpenOffice.org...

I half agree. I have found offices, real offices, to be much more productive than both cubicles and open layouts.

For me personally, cubicles and open layouts are both equally distracting, but I prefer open layouts simply because I hate sitting in a box.

I'd much rater have a real office, but for me cubicles are in now way quieter or less distracting then an open setup.

I wonder what kind of cubicles the people have, to whom the open setup is that much worse? Maybe some kind of sound insulated luxury cubicle?

Depends on what I'm working on. A tough problem that could take me a full day to complete? On those days, I miss my office-with-a-door. A relatively simple debugging task that requires input and verification from my coworkers? It's so much faster to just look up and say, "Hey John, can you glance at this?" without having to walk through a hallway into someone else's office.

Interesting but all anecdotal. The office layout productivity study that sticks in my mind showed that any change in office layout improved productivity for a short time. More light, dimmer light, higher cubicle walls, no cubicle walls, etc. It all improved productivity. And then there was a return to mean.

What if you had a cubicle layout, but each of the walls could be slid up or down. So it converts between open plan and concentration cubicle mode? Having the walls up implies you are deep in concentration so people shouldn't disturb you.

Though perhaps would just leave their walls up constantly

Its all about change and shared state. Humans (unlike, say, chickens or purely functional systems) cache state in their heads about the world. In fact the brain operates so slowly compared to a processor that without caching we could not operate. For example, when we catch a ball the reason we are able to predict its trajectory is not because we measure its current speed and direction and then perform some calculation and repeat for every frame. It is because we compare it with the cached (and to some extent abstracted) memory of a thousand balls we caught before, find the closest match and do a little extrapolation from it. The book 'On Intelligence' covers this. The phrase he uses to describe the human brain is a "memory prediction machine" The problem with state of course is not the state itself, but the fact that there is more than one copy of it. In a purely functional program (or a chicken!) there is only one copy which is passed around, nothing is retained. If you put your hand over a chickens eyes they just go completely still, nothing in, nothing out. In more stateful systems the best we can do is to minimise the sharing of state i.e assign ownership of the state to certain subsystems. As humans are stateful this also works out to be the best model for them. This means that the optimum situation for quality in programming is to have one person develop all of the code. Its not always possible to do this and so the next best thing is to try to split the solution up into subsystems with well defined interfaces. Even at this we often have to assign a small team to each subsystem and we usually try to further decompose that but effectively at this point we are sharing state between people. Everybody needs to update their cache so that they all have a very similar mental model of the solution or there will be problems. They need to update their cache all the time as it is a model of a world that is being changed by the solution itself as the objective of the solution is to change the world in some way. The problem is that when the state of the world changes its not as simple as passing that state value to one of the actors i.e. Its not like passing some simple value like an integer around the place. The truth is that when the state of the problem changes in some signifigant way then the people involved need to have time, in peace and quiet, to update their complex model in a way that is consistent with the change. They have to figure out what the new information means in the context of the problem and more importantly they need to give their brain time to come up with a solution that fits with the new state of the problem. So there are two ways a system based on shared state between people can fail. 1) Somebody fails to get notified of a state change. 2) Somebody does not spend the time to properly integrate this into their understanding. In either case that person will go around with a faulty model of the system and that is when the bugs start to happen. As far as I can see the agile guys seem to be primarly focused on 1) and neglect 2). I think you need to work on both (given that you have no option but to work on a system with many people in which you cannot completely isolate the functionality to be implemented by each person). So what does this have to do with office space? Have an open plan office but tell people to stay at home for the morning, or tell people to stay at home every second day. i.e. Make sure they are communication AND make sure they have time on their own to digest the communication properly. The reason I know this works is that I worked like this as a contractor for a while and it was easily the most productive period I ever had. Much more productive that working in an open plan office all the time and even slightly more productive than working on something completely alone.

Use paragraphs.

may be he works in the open space office.

I believe this is what's generally called a "wall of text". The lack of paragraphs drastically reduces my willingness to read it.

There is a good chance there were paragraphs when he wrote it and HN ignored it, because HN comments require an extra newline. Bad user or bad usability?

That was exactly what happened. I can hardly read the comment now myself and its too late to edit it. At the risk of just adding noise to the thread here it is with paragraphs:

The problem with state of course is not the state itself, but the fact that there is more than one copy of it. In a purely functional program (or a chicken!) there is only one copy which is passed around, nothing is retained. If you put your hand over a chickens eyes they just go completely still, nothing in, nothing out. In more stateful systems the best we can do is to minimise the sharing of state i.e assign ownership of the state to certain subsystems. As humans are stateful this also works out to be the best model for them. This means that the optimum situation for quality in programming is to have one person develop all of the code. Its not always possible to do this and so the next best thing is to try to split the solution up into subsystems with well defined interfaces. Even at this we often have to assign a small team to each subsystem and we usually try to further decompose that but effectively at this point we are sharing state between people. Everybody needs to update their cache so that they all have a very similar mental model of the solution or there will be problems. They need to update their cache all the time as it is a model of a world that is being changed by the solution itself as the objective of the solution is to change the world in some way.

The problem is that when the state of the world changes its not as simple as passing that state value to one of the actors i.e. Its not like passing some simple value like an integer around the place. The truth is that when the state of the problem changes in some signifigant way then the people involved need to have time, in peace and quiet, to update their complex model in a way that is consistent with the change. They have to figure out what the new information means in the context of the problem and more importantly they need to give their brain time to come up with a solution that fits with the new state of the problem. So there are two ways a system based on shared state between people can fail. 1) Somebody fails to get notified of a state change. 2) Somebody does not spend the time to properly integrate this into their understanding. In either case that person will go around with a faulty model of the system and that is when the bugs start to happen. As far as I can see the agile guys seem to be primarly focused on 1) and neglect 2). I think you need to work on both (given that you have no option but to work on a system with many people in which you cannot completely isolate the functionality to be implemented by each person).

So what does this have to do with office space? Have an open plan office but tell people to stay at home for the morning, or tell people to stay at home every second day. i.e. Make sure they are in communication AND make sure they have time on their own to digest the communication properly. The reason I know this works is that I worked like this as a contractor for a while and it was easily the most productive period I ever had. Much more productive that working in an open plan office all the time and even slightly more productive than working on something completely alone.

Slightly OT, but I've read that humans simplify ball catching by moving in such a way as to keep the ball in the same place in their field of view. There might be more details in the papers below, but paywalled so I don't know:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/01679457939...

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1014...

"the eyes and/or the head move so that the image of the moving object is maintained at the same place on the fovea"

> Bad user or bad usability?

The second, of course. When it comes to usability, HN scores pretty low.

A quick google search reveals that this is very old news.

[12 Jan 2009] http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5isNavMO9o...

Before I read the article I was sure he was talking about OpenOffice.org :(

the title really is confusing! I already thought about what I would want to comment about OpenOffice.org.

Even with its problems, an open plan is preferable to small window-less offices or cubicles.

I'm sure you have extensive research to support this conclusion - can you share it with us? Sometimes the most obvious opinions and beliefs turn out to be wrong, and it's useful to see the actual research.

Thanks.

When categorizing information, it is possible to recognize personal opinions as such and handle it appropriately.

Link?

Personally, I find working in an open office environment terribly distracting. It feels like a constant meeting and people always feel now is a good time for a question or a chat.

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