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Comment by akhayam | Hacker News Reader

I have never been productive in open office spaces and then saw an HBS study showing empirical data on the things I felt all along: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2017.023...

I totally see the value of cultivating ideas in a private space without constant background noise, and then sharing these ideas with the right arguments for feedback when you see them as ripe.

Unfortunately, the narrative by big tech has popularized the notion that these open spaces with everyone speaking over each other has great productivity and collaboration benefits. It saves them a lot of cost to not build and maintain humane cubes, but other arguments of how great it is for "me" are just bogus.

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Trust HN to turn every single thread into an opportunity to rail against open office spaces.

They're a very-objectionable topic! Complaining will continue until office spaces stop being so open.

Interesting. That link deserves its own submission.

Here you go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36889478

I've never worked in an open office space myself. I imagine there'd be a lot of distractions due to the factors you've listed. It's not that difficult to go up to someone else's cubicle for a chat.

I've worked in various size open offices, they can best be described like financial trading floors, some are busy and chaotic, some are not.

The main point with an open office, is people can shout across the room quickly and easily when they want something from someone else which may need an immediate response or response in the timescales said office works to when resolving problems. ie some offices need to resolve things by the end of day, others need to resolve problems within a few days. Its also a lazy way of communicating without a document trail like a messaging system can provide.

Very difficult to manage, accountability is virtually at zero, so if you have a team which doesn't work or has personality clashes, that's a team which will perform poorly, but still look super busy.

Seating arrangements are interesting as well, you can spot hierarchies.

It probably explains the saying, if you want something done properly, do it yourself!

Shouting across the room saves one person 15 seconds while simultaneously distracting every single other person in the office. Regardless of how pro-open office one is, that seems like a terrible trade off.

> day, others need to resolve problems within a few days. Its also a lazy way of communicating without a document trail like a messaging system can provide.

This is the biggest benefit of a slack-first (or whatever your messaging software of choice is) approach. It’s very common that I search chat history from weeks or months ago because someone already answered something that I need to refer back to.

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