Comment by bruce511 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bruce511 | Hacker News Reader

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So back in the day we solved the open office problem by putting walks and doors around each worker. We moved premises and took the opportunity to give everyone a (small) office with a door. About 70% of our actual floor plan was for common open space - big kitchen, diner, lounge etc. But for work you had a private space with a door.

Over 10 years later we bought another company and had their local staff over for a visit. Almost immediately a fairly loud person exclaimed "it's so quiet here!" (and not in a good way). Their office was separated into rooms of 4-5 people, so they were used to plenty of banter. Interestingly the quiet ones complained about the loud ones (but not the other way around).

We ended up with a somewhat hybrid model - we took on more space and made more open-plan areas, and small-team offices.

I'm a coder, do I like the solitude to focus. Others need more interaction. I think there's a danger in trying to propogate a one-approach-for-everyone. Different people have different needs. Creating a mix of spaces allows for mentorship at the beginning and an eventual migration to either a solitary space, or co-work space, depending on personality. This approach though never seems to get any press, it's always about the tyranny of open plan, or the soulessness of everyone being locked away in cells. (on HN its always the tyranny of Open plan :)

Very few people get to actually try out the cell. Cubicles aren't offices. They're wire cages for moneys at the zoo.

We should try having more actual offices before we declare it equal but different to the elementrary school recess that are open office plans.

In my context cubicals are considered to be "open plan". We had some cubical dividers in our first office, way back in the day, but it's an interim stage at best.

Of course we had that because we didn't have space for walls. When we moved we got a lot more space, made offices, but monthly rent went up about 6 fold. It's a very real cost.

In fact, after salaries, it's our biggest cost by a long way. Given that most people are happy working from home we'll likely downscale our space a lot at our next lease renewal.

> Very few people get to actually try out the cell. Cubicles aren't offices. They're wire cages for moneys at the zoo.

Never having worked in a cubicle, I wonder: don't those dividers actually help a bit with noise? Sure, I don't expect them to be individual-office level quiet, but still better than fully open.

I used to work in a building where one "open-office" had dividers mounted on the desks, reaching about the screen height, with carpeted floors and some kind of sound absorbing panels on the ceilings. It was extremely quiet compared to the other "regular" offices that only had the carpets.

I think quiet is a proxy measure for “safe and secluded”. In every actual office I’ve been fortunate enough to have, I arranged my desk to face the door and, with the door closed, not only did I get quiet but I also got “cannot be snuck up upon”.

I think there’s a primal aspect to how deeply you are willing to block out your local environment and let your mind go deep on a problem that relates to how safe/secure that environment feels.

Noise is just the most obvious annoyance to talk about, but I don’t think it’s primarily about the noise.

Tall-walled cubicles did give you some separation. While managers (generally) had offices they were mostly for 1.) status, 2.) a bit more space, and 3.) to give them somewhere they could easily have a private conversation. The cultural expectation was doors open unless there was some specific reason not to. In practice the focus difference between offices and cubes wasn't all that great.

They don't give any respite from the noise. At most they give you a bit of privacy from people staring at your screen. And most mini-cubicles these days don't even help with keeping someone from staring at your screen from behind. It's downright creepy. I very much agree with the wire-cages for monkeys at a zoo comment.

These days everyone spends their in-office time on zoom calls with their coworkers, and no amount of blankets dividing the workspace is able to absorb the constant "You're on mute Bob" that fills the office air.

What's the rational behind coming in at that point?

When I was in an office, my team was co-located, so we rarely needed a call. Currently my team is mutually remote without an office, so we zoom our preferred environment.

A lot of people do a combination of working with people locally and having with calls with people, possibly in different groups, who are elsewhere. When I was a product manager I met with many people who were in the office and we'd typically do that in person. (At that time, anyone local came in.) But I probably also spent hours every day on the phone with field people and others who weren't in the same location.

Sometimes a bunch of us meet at the office to work together on something that needs a lot of back and forth, like a brainstorm session. And to socialize during lunch. If independent work is needed then we’re all at home.

> Interestingly the quiet ones complained about the loud ones (but not the other way around).

What else would you expect? The ones impinging on others were fine with it, the ones being impinged upon not so much.

> Different people have different needs.

This is the bit that people need to keep sight of. People and groups are all different and there’s no one size fits all answer.

While I agree with "People and groups are all different and there’s no one size fits all answer." in a sense, we cannot stop there. There is more searching to be done.

Let me take a slight sidebar, after which I'll reconnect to open offices. I've recently studied the philosophy and ethics of pluralism. It was eye opening. If you start an ethical exploration where pluralism (respecting differences in values) is take for granted, and think it through, you do not necessarily end up with relativism (the claim that all values are equally good).

The ethics of pluralism apply to many other areas where people have differences, such as preferences for working environments. The connection is simple: if a group of people need to share a working environment, there will need to be some mechanism by which decisions are made. There is some budget of money and space that will need to be allocated.

Such a decision mechanism is (ultimately, whether it is obvious or not) connected to some underlying values. If the office manager decides based on "taking the pulse" of the office, you run the risk have an appointed person acting in a somewhat authoritarian way. How can you really guarantee the needs of the workers are actually being synthesized in a fair way? This is an incredibly challenging and complex area of philosophy and ethics.

If it is "one person, one vote", there may not be an underlying value system, since it appears to be purely a matter of politics. However, when such a system picks "one person, one vote", they may be missing out on better solutions, such as systems that work hard to find a consensus before simply taking a vote.

I could write hundreds of pages on this, because I've studied many others who have written probably 3 to 5 orders of magnitude more. It seems for the last twenty years, I've found myself disappointed that these topics seem mostly unexamined in most practical work situations. I've had to come to terms with the fact that many people are simply unaware, too busy with other things, or unaware of the importance of these mechanisms. Frankly, it is an uncomfortable place to be... when a big driver of my thinking is "let's make X situation better" but a relatively small number of organizations seem interested or able to make progress.

Instead, I see a parade of fads, usually connected with fairly pathetic PR campaigns (justifications to convince the workers) that such fad is desirable.

I've heard of this appealing design called "Eudaimonia Machine" that combines spaces for deep work and spaces for collaboration [1]. I would love to know if any companies have tried this out.

[1] - https://medium.com/@jsmathison/i-cant-stop-dreaming-of-eudai...

Would be nice if the article about office space design had any photos or floor plans or images besides 3 stock photos

My last company, I had offices with doors, conference rooms with glass doors, and collaboration spaces in between. It worked very well.

I remember going into an interview (written coding test too ha) and the cubicles had ceiling-high walls which were this dark plastic blue in color. The lighting was not right and it was dim. That was a weird place.

I worked in an open non-cubicle design too, closed back headphones ftw.

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