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Comment by thatcherclay | Hacker News Reader

We had a caved in office in our last space, and the expected downsides from now having enough casual conversations bit us. Engineering did not know what client services was doing, client services did not talk to sales, and leadership was hard/nonexistent. Our new space is night and day - we have a big open floor plan and enough conference rooms so that you can always find a quiet place to brainstorm. We still have some of the old cultural problems that the old space created, but we are trending upward.

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My favorite past employer had a sea of 8x8 cubes. The solution to communications issues like this was all you can eat Friday night pizza parties. People stayed to 11 PM hashing over issues of the week. One day, the beancounters decided to put a 3-slice quota on the pizza. That was the end of that.

A few years later they tried to shove engineering into 6x6 cubes. That lasted 2 months. Productivity had plummeted.

Naively imposing open offices to improve collaboration is like naively imposing scrum to improve communication - both are externally imposed edicts attempting to establish by fiat something that needs to grow organically.

>People stayed to 11 PM hashing over issues of the week. One day, the beancounters decided to put a 3-slice quota on the pizza

For the price of a meal the company got up to six hours of overtime from staff members at the beginning of the weekend and they decided to cut it to a third of a meal?!

It was the bean counters that put the kibosh on the all-you-can work pizza parties?

Fire the bean counters. Compared to the hourly wage of an engineer, even a whole large pizza per hour is a great deal.

Granted, the institution would have fallen apart in the long run. Eventually people would get lives outside of work (families, friends, hobbies...) and realize that 'free pizza' in exchange for 4-5 hours of off-the-clock labor is a shitty deal for anyone making more than minimum wage. People would get hired on that just saw the company as a paycheck & wanted to get out after their 9-5.

We're the same way. Big open floor plan with conference rooms (although not enough). We have ~35 people in our big room and it's relatively quiet all day. People take phone calls in the conf rooms and everyone in the big room is usually working on heads down work (mix of programmers, project managers and data analysts).

Conversations pop up throughout the day and there are little pockets of noise but everyone is pretty happy. In fact I just hired a developer who said one of the things he liked was the large open floor plan.

>> Big open floor plan with conference rooms (although not enough)

My last boss drew the office up with ONE conference room. Big mistake. You need at least 3 for the size of our office. One for actual conferences and a phone call room and a 'war room'.

The lunchroom was sized too big, and was only used for lunch from 11:30 to 1:00, so it became the second conference room or place to take a phone call.

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