Hacking the Startup Open Floor Plan Office | Hacker News Reader

Hacking the Startup Open Floor Plan Office

blog.idonethis.com

37 pointsropiku13 comments

"Open Plan" seating is the Devil. Knowledge workers, anyone who needs to spend a significant portion of their day primarily using their brains, should have individual private offices... with doors. That shut. And walls.. that go all the way to the ceiling.

Sure, provide plenty of open areas where people can voluntarily choose to assemble into groups, or even work solo, but in the presence of some comforting babble (for the times when we want noise). And make those areas near sources of natural light, and provide couches, chairs, tables, portable whiteboards, good wifi, etc. But give people a private place they can retreat too for when they need solitude and peace and quiet.

Obviously there are a lot of concerns to balance here, and resources are limited, but I believe this should be the ideal. When the day comes that Fogbeam Labs have offices and employees, it's my intention to adhere to this mantra: "private offices for all, but plenty of communal work areas available."

I'm assuming your individual private office suggestion has little to no windows, and therefore little to no natural light.

Frankly, that would suck, and make me less productive than even a single window.

Well, that depends. You can either have the private offices around the perimeter and with windows and natural light, or put the shared workspace areas near the natural light. But there's only so much perimeter to go around...

Personally I'd be OK with a office with little natural light, as long as A. there's no flourescent light, and B. I have somewhere comfortable I can go sit that is near natural light, when I need light. Frankly, natural light is less important to me, than freedom from distracting noise, motion, smells, etc., and a sense of privacy.

The other thought I have on this, is to put shared work area near the windows, and then try to design the layout of the rest of the building to try to expose the "bowels" of the floor to as much natural light as possible. In a building where skylights are an option, that might be a way to help things out.

Open plan is for business not for workers. Business like it because it's 'flexible', work can 'flow' around the office, it's 'cheap'.

Workers hate it because there is no space for them. There is no quiet away from coworkers. There is no freedom from the smells of co-workers (coffee, curry, cologne/perfume). When one phone rings everyone's brain momentarily switches from their task to their phone.

When I was 20 I could counter all of these but I was more keen than effective. Now I'm nearly 40 highly trained, highly effective and I can't stand offices like this, it's wasting my time, I just walk away from it.

Indeed, open plan is for business, but not in the way you think.

Cubicles and desks are office furniture, and get written off at a rate that is much faster compared to how you write off office space (from the capital expenditures budget).

The "fostering communication" thing is the spin they put on it because they know you'd leave if they told you to your face that you aren't worth enough to them to spend the money on an office.

I'm glad the open plan is being reconsidered. Personally, I don't think open plans scale past 4-8 people for reasons stated in the article - ambient noise and conversations.

I can see why startup CEOs love them: they achieve success with a small number of employees - mostly quiet technical types crammed into a single room- and build a successful foundation. Survivor bias kicks in and now open plans get baked into company culture. Nobody asks "Does this layout make sense now that we're more than just 6 hackers in a room?"

Why is this "hacking"? Using this word in lieu of more suitable words like innovating, variating, changing, or adapting (for starters) devalues the word's meaning and makes light of English's amazingly diverse buffet of vocabulary and rather expansive etymological roots.

Fair enough. I (the author of the post) actually changed the title some time after posting. I wasn't happy with the word choice myself, but I couldn't find the right words.

Oops, I down voted this when I meant to up vote.

Shopify's ideas seam pretty awesome. The last two startups I worked at had open-floor plans, both of which made it incredibly hard to focus. I was constantly getting pulled into conversations that didn't involve me. And I'll be the first to admit, I was part of the problem too: causing distractions for other coworkers when I was having a conversation. It's just a natural temptation when you're sitting across from someone.

I hate open floor plans. My company recently moved from a two person office floor plan to an open floor plan. Before the move, the majority of us were talkative, social, and also got our work done. Now, in the open office, it's like a library. No one wants to talk b/c everyone else can here the conversation. Not to mention our bosses are sitting in this open floor plan as well.

My biggest pain point with open floor plans is this. Sometimes, I just want to put my head down and code for 3 hours straight. Doing this sends off an antisocial vibe to the other marketing, content, and SEO employees sitting near me.

I personally hate open floor plans when I'm coding. Even visual distractions can get me out of the zone just as easily as auditory distractions.

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