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Comment by ryguytilidie | Hacker News Reader

Let's be honest. If we wanted engineers to be most productive, we would give them quiet, private spaces to work. But that is expensive so we put them in open plan arrangements that cost less and pretend that the main reason it's done is higher productivity.

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As someone who is regularly exposed to these types of decisions, I don't think cost is the reason. Everyone recognizes that engineers are more expensive than office space. Private offices result in engineers getting more done but working on the wrong things, or solving problems in slightly the wrong way. The goal is to expose developers to the organization more so they have a stronger sense of what users/customers value, and can make better decisions.

As a rough guess, optimal business value in an enterprise software company probably results from engineers spending 20-40% of their time with users/product managers/other stakeholders and 60-80% of their time actually programming/designing/working with other developers. These numbers are highly imprecise and depend on circumstances, but they're probably in the right order of magnitude.

The issue with private offices is that in my experience many engineers will prefer to spend 95% of their time engineering and just 5% of their time understanding the problem. As a result they build more features but the features are significantly less valuable. 2-3 person offices seems to mitigate that pretty well, while open plan offices seem to go way too far in the other direction.

I've been places that claim exactly that. But if that were really true, then a much more effective way to do that would be to include engineers in the design meetings, the customer feedback sessions, and strategy discussions. In most open plans I've seen, the engineers sit together. That doesn't sound like exposing them to the rest of the business.

But I think we're probably in violent agreement here. I like team rooms. Small team including product people, engineers, qa, even support and sales sometimes, in one enclosed space. Much less random noise, and a more focused vibe. Either that or 100% remote with a single shared team chat room.

We're definitely on the same page. I see a lot of companies frame the choice as binary: open-plan vs. private offices. The most effective methods are usually somewhere in the middle, and depend on the problem & team. Agree that bringing engineers into design/strategy/customer feedback is extremely important and much more effective than just open-plan offices.

When engineering, I personally enjoy spending 11 AM - 4 PM interacting with others and 4 PM - 8 PM locked up in a room working on code. I wish that switching around like that were an option in more offices.

I think it's better to have a culture where engineers naturally feel comfortable leaving their offices.

I worked at a company that had 3:00 tea time, like in academic departments. People drank coffee and played board games, but after half an hour, they were talking about work again and the cross-department communication that was needed would happen organically.

That's a lot better than subjecting engineers to a 24/7 open-plan arrangement that will, after 8 hours at a stretch, wear on a typical person's nerves and health.

I agree with you that 2- or 3-person offices will probably provide enough privacy for most people. Individual offices have their perks, but they do require attention to common spaces and communication to prevent the siloization you talked about.

off-topic, but aren't you on a voluntary hacker news diet?

Agreed, open offices as a solution to lack of collaboration is like nuking a mosquito from orbit.

The most individually effective tactic I've found is to eat lunch/play games/get coffee with people in order departments as much as possible. A lot of the best communication occurs in a relaxed setting-I'm convinced that a major key to success is to encourage/enable people who don't normally spend time together to hang out informally.

It's culture. People do it because everyone else is doing it. And hey, it's less expensive and more flexible, not good reasons to buck the status quo.

The problem you're describing has nothing to do with the type of office space, and everything to do with a significant lack of management ability and technical leadership. Do you really need to be looking over someone's shoulder on a minute-by-minute basis?

A manager who does this is incompetent or has hired incompetent people.

A technical leader who does this is controlling or -- again -- is dealing with incompetent people.

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