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Comment by pradn | Hacker News Reader

This is one of those old school things I missed when I moved from Microsoft to Google, another being having a private office. (Though Microsoft is switching to open plan offices as well as a cost saving measure.)

The Microsoft library had tons of books, subscriptions to scholarly journals, and made it easy to order new books.

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It's easy for bean counters to measure the cost savings of open plan layouts (e.g. higher utilization of office space). I wonder if anyone has tried to measure the productivity loss of open plan vs private offices, which might tilt it back towards private offices.

There is no substitute for having a door to close to isolate noise, and being able to do some intensive work.

What a throw back... what is this 2015? Are we arguing about open offices? Guess I will spout my thoughts.

I love my cubicle. It's my personal private space. I hate open desks.

I really did like an in between I had once - which was a cubicle in a room with no windows, and the other 4 people on my team. I would only overhear relevant things, nobody walked into our room for no reason, and it made it easy to say ' hey can someone look at this' and usually you'd get help.

( no windows - great for programming, I also had a desk job that was sun facing at 4pm with crappy blinds... swear I lost some vision permanently from that).

If you didn't have windows were you mainly on Linux or OS X?

Good as a joke, but even better - we were all on Linux

I would even push back on the "higher utilization" claims; you could easily build very tiny private offices with not much efficiency loss, and a one time additional expense of the buildout, but that's marginal in the scheme of things.

The open plan office layout suffers productivity loss when a coworker with recreational drug problems and relationship problems brings that to work.

I've heard the story of tennis enthusiasts being the prime movers of the open plan layout.

It’s funny how the “open” plans are never what I would consider open, something along the lines of an airplane hangar where the ceilings are out of the way.

My last job was in an open plan office with a constant noise level of 70db, peaking into 80db several times an hour. After about a year of it I noticed that it was affecting me mentally in a really bad way.

I would get super irritated at people for small insignificant things, be as adversarial/hostile as possible and try to turn every discussion into an argument, I saw slights everywhere, and everyone was stupid.

Once I noticed and figured out it was the noise that made me go crazy I bought noise canceling headphones (Sony WH1000XM3), wore them every day all day either listening to nothing or calming rain (using the Rainy Mood app on iPhone).

After a few weeks I was completely back to my normal happy self. All the perceived slights disappeared, other people were smart and reasonable again, small things were small things easily forgiven and meetings went much smother.

It's absolutely wild how the noise of an open plan office can affect you mentally. I was not the only one going crazy from it, earlier, shortly after we moved to the open plan office one of my colleagues was let go for having gone crazy in much the same way (he was more exposed to upper management).

I thought this comment was going towards you finding a high CO2 concentration in your office, but this makes sense too.

I was going to get treatment for burnout. Turned out the best treatment was a private office.

My noise canceling headphones were originally a nice to have while working in my own huge private office. I switched to a company with an open floorplan, and now they're a must-have every day.

I've been going into the office 3+ times per week since early 2022. We went from about 6 people to 30 or so in the room every day. The noise levels can get overwhelming after a few hours, and someone has an annoying tacky ringtone. I thought people stopped with annoying ringtones 10+ years ago?

I scrolled down looking for someone mentioning the Microsoft library. I used it to teach myself Typescript, on the job, there. One of the regrets I had after leaving Microsoft is that I didn't make greater use of the library.

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