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This was pretty similar to (at least the buildings I worked in 2012-2013) Facebook Menlo Park: open space, but many of small side offices for coding/ad-hoc meetings/views.

Personally, however, I'd prefer the reverse: offices as the default (two people per office okay, as long as there's space) with open space (with portable white boards, bean bag chairs, desks) in the middle for ad-hoc design/discussions.

Cubicles do seem the worst of both world, however: an ad-hoc meeting is no longer so ad-hoc (as it requires hunting for an available conference room), but the noise/interruption issues are no better than open areas.

> I'd prefer the reverse: offices as the default (two people per office okay, as long as there's space) with open space (with portable white boards, bean bag chairs, desks) in the middle for ad-hoc design/discussions.

I've worked in environments like that. Unfortunately, the open space looks like "not working" to people and is highly visible. Since no one wants to be publicly seen as not working, they just ended up being a very nicely decorated and inviting ghost town.

> I've worked in environments like that. Unfortunately, the open space looks like "not working" to people and is highly visible. Since no one wants to be publicly seen as not working, they just ended up being a very nicely decorated and inviting ghost town.

FYI, this is exactly what happens to luxurious and inviting game rooms at videogame companies.

Exactly right: this was when I worked at EA. :)

I think my ideal would be small offices for people, with areas that are more open, but not a single huge open area. I could definitely see how what you're saying could happen.

I always like to think of the library my university had. It had rooms of all sizes going around most of the outside, and then little pockets of chairs and even some cubical type areas. The bookshelves broke everything up mentally, so I never felt in the open, but also never confined. Some of the rooms had white boards and some were just tiny rooms with a desk you could use.

For me personally, the key is variety and flexibility, and not assuming that one thing works perfectly for everyone.

So don't make it look like a break room.

It's not necessarily about how it looks; it's about default choices. If there aren't many people working there already, people are unlikely to join them.

> Personally, however, I'd prefer the reverse: offices as the default

This is essentially what I have now. We have four people in two very large rooms connected by an open internal corridor. There's chairs in each room, and a large table in one of the rooms. It's a very productive setup.

The best office space I've ever work at was like that. It was a relatively small part of one of MSFT buildings which Ray Ozzie carved out for the Mesh incubation. Everyone had a small private office with glass door/walls and in the middle there was big open area with couches, chairs, pillows, whiteboard walls and conference rooms.

Interesting! I worked in that same office when FUSE Labs was there in the post-Ozzie time (2012), and like some of the other commenters pointed out, I never saw a single one of my coworkers doing actual work outside of their offices. It was awesome for team meetings, though.

The large pharma I used to work for is still in the process of spending millions of dollars redoing all of their floors to open work space areas. Around the outside of the floors are "focus booths" which just have a small desk/phone/monitor setup for someone to work in for a few hours.

These booths are always full and occupied by folks for the entire day, since most people don't like the loud open area workspace and sit in these small offices so they can have phone calls and concentrate.

Every time I've been involved in an open floor plan office I look at the conference rooms. They end up occupied by the most senior person that doesn't have an office.

At one company where I worked management got offices, so it was senior developers staking out the conference rooms... at another, no one had an office, so the owner got the nicest conference room and some of the leads fought over the lesser ones.

Open office plan here.

We have a little room tucked down a hallway that maybe 5-7 people know about, and no one uses. I've been in here for 3 weeks, and it's wonderful.

We used to have one of those. It was called the "Tree House" because one guy filled it with plants. It was great. Then we moved offices - open floor plan - and we no longer have the equivalent. :(

most people don't like the loud open area workspace and sit in these small offices so they can have phone calls and concentrate.

FWIW, good acoustical engineering can make a significant difference in how loud an open-space "feels." Putting sound-absorbing materials on all architectural features and hanging sound-diffusing baffles from the ceiling can change a loud room into a significantly quieter and less distracting room.

It isn't a panacea, but it isn't hard to do. You will need someone experienced in room acoustics to design it for you. I'd still prefer small offices over an open space, but if management is stuck on having an open-space then getting good sound control in there will make the best of a bad situation.

You can hear the reverse in a lot of trendy restaurants nowadays where, for some reason that I can't comprehend, it is fashionable to deliberately make the dining area as loud as possible.

http://www.grubstreet.com/2013/07/adam-platt-on-loud-restaur...

I could not agree more. Acoustic treatment can dramatically change a rooms ambiance in an almost imperceptible way. It's amazing how voice volume goes down, because the listener can clearly hear you, so you don't have to raise your voice over the other conversations to be heard. Once you experience a well treated room, you long to return to it.

I also have wondered why more restaurants don't use sound treatment. I have noticed that the high class restaurants always have sound treatment. Don't these other restaurants know that if you install adequate sound treatment that you can charge more? Obviously not...

I can't google for references now, but restaurants like loud dining areas because there is a linear relationship between the dB of background noise and the money customers spend on drinks.

I haven't seen the references you mentioned, but is it possible that the cause and effect here are swapped? It seems more likely that increased drinking leads to increased noise.

I believe the logic is that talking and drinking compete for the oral mutex, so limiting the ability to talk (by making it so loud that talking becomes pointless because nobody can ear you) increases drinking throughput. Or something like that.

I worked in a new office like that. The management were oh-so proud of how smart they were in selecting that design. Of course every one of them had his own office.

The problem with focus booths is that it's not "your" space. You don't come back to the same one every day, you can't have pictures of your family on the desk, etc.

Focus booths are a small courtesy to allow people to make phone calls and hold 1:1 or very small meetings, but that's about it.

It was an awful work environment, even though it looked very modern and stylish. It was one of the main reasons I quit that job.

I'm pretty sure I work in the same place. It's impossible to get a focus booth or enclave (is that what they call the small group rooms?) unless you get there early. Fortunately, they told me I would be mobile, then assigned me a desk in a lab space. Not being able to have food at my desk is a small price to pay for having a desk.

I worked in a hybrid environment at Apple (we had this office / common area setup in Infinite Loop). It was a great working environment, and I got a lot done. You could leave your door open and join in the conversation, or close your door and shut out the world for a while.

I work in an open space plan at Valve now, and it's pretty decent. The thing that makes it decent is that desks are mobile; there is no assigned space (want an office? find an empty one and move in) so you can very easily choose who to work next to. This cuts down a great deal on interruptions caused by people interrupting the people /next/ to you, which I found was the actual source of randomization in most cubical environments.

Also, stuffing more than a few dozen people into a shared area is probably bad. Don't do that.

A few dozen? More than 6 and you've got everyone's occasional quick chats adding up to constant distraction.

Depends on the space; if it's big enough you can get away with more people (remember, they can shuffle). Sound-deadening floor and ceiling material helps a lot. The most important thing is still attitude toward your cow-orkers, though.

I've had very good experiences with anything from 5 up to 20.

Mobile desks. Let people move where they want to. If nothing else I get tired of looking at the same walls from the same angle day in and day out. I like variety.

Overall though I prefer an open space environment with the ability to periodically go of to a quiet area for deep thinking. Sometimes you just need that solitude to do your best work.

I'd lov this arrangement if it were the reverse of how I've seen it implemented.

The meeting/private rooms should be in the center, away from the scarce windows, and the more frequently used common space should have the privilege of natural lighting. Too many conference rooms are allowed to hog the view.

This is how we've had our offices in previous companies, and the new office we're building will have this layout as well. It works great. You get privacy or you get sunlight :)

Yay, nice subtle way to make people hate spending time in their private offices: Make it feel like a punishment, akin to solitairy confinement.

No, a good private office should have natural light coming in through windows!

The worst is when, not only are you surrounded by private conversation, but forced to listen to godawful music blasting at full volume from the office stereo.

Thanks for sharing, I've always thought that seemed like the right compromise. If I was looking to build a similar space, would you have any advice or observations?

I've been in such an office, and I loved it. Some people, like me, spent most of their time in the main open space. Others camped out all day in a private office. Most moved between the two.

From a design perspective:

- Glass walls are nice. This office was a group space surrounded by smaller rooms (which had the windows). The offices were glass on the interior wall (facing the group space), which allowed light in, but opaque on the walls between offices, allowing for privacy.

- Variety was important. Iirc, we had like 4-6 offices that would fit 2 people at desks, 3 that would fit 4 or 5 people around a table, and 1 that fit about 12 around a small conference table. This was for a 25-person company, and seemed to provide about the right amount of space. - We ended up soundproofing a few rooms because people would use them for calls or loud music playing and it'd disturb the neighboring offices.

Unfortunately, I've only ever been a spectator in the design of offices, I've never played much of an active role in their organization. The best advice I can offer is to have the utmost respect for your developers, since they are your prized assets. Give them good equipment, choices, and solicit them for feedback on what they want.

> "The best advice I can offer is to have the utmost respect for your developers, since they are your prized assets."

Not just devs. Employers should have utmost respect for all their employees.

I wish I could upvote this more than once. It's too common for developers to assume they're more valuable rather than benefiting from a currently tighter job market.

There's some of that, to be sure, but different employees are different. Everyone spends some amount of time doing collaborative work, and some amount of time doing individual work that requires concentration and focus. Different jobs require a different mix of these two kinds of work. Developers tend to spend most of their time on the individual concentration end of the spectrum, which is why you see comments like the parent's. But it applies just as much to anyone who requires an equivalent amount of individual focused work time each day.

The logical outcome of this is that your office layout should be different for employee groups doing different types of work, but since having an office is seen as a perk of upper management, giving offices to some groups and open plan areas to other groups is seen as favoritism and elitism rather than simply providing the best environment for everyone's job, and I think that's a big reason why it doesn't often happen.

In economics terms, that's the same thing. Tighter job market, more competition for dev talent, devs have more choices, the good ones choose the environment that values them the most.

> In economics terms, that's the same thing.

Only in the most simplistic understanding – anyone serious will factor in limited information and human irrationality rather than assuming that observed market behaviour represents Econ 101 game-theoretical optimal decisions.

If you work at a large company, you might be well paid because you're working on the CEO's pet iOS project and there's a developer shortage. The market is working to give you higher pay but there's no relation to any sort of actual value. Most places don't even make a serious effort to quantify value or cost in a remotely scientific manner.

Employees are your most prized asset I wouldn't limit it to just devs.

I'm curious, why didn't you just tell the operations guy to piss off?

This is the problem of the commons in its classic incarnation. If the private offices are shared, pretty soon you will have people either squatting in them or accusing others of squatting.

Open layouts are a way to save lots of money per employee. They provide no tangible benefit over private offices that are big enough to have coding sessions in, but they cost a hell of a lot less. Next time someone tells you that they are more productive in an open layout office ask them if they had ever worked with an engaged and energetic team where everyone did have large private offices. Chances are, they did not and therefore have no basis for comparison.

Same here. If you needed privacy you have it. If you wish to have a collaborative work space you have it.

My mood changes, some days I can deal with others other days I just want to put my head down and program alone. This was a great option to have.

This is how my company works - we have our open office, with our "cubes" out amongst everyone else, but we have tiny little work rooms with TVs and adapters, and the ability to close a door (well it's a glass door but still), and work.

And no one's ever told me I can't work in one of them all day if I wanted to (I don't). I bet there'd be a discussion if I moved into one permanently, or even for more than a straight few days, but for now at least, we have the best of both worlds.

exactly my submission, many years ago, which matches what was ultimately used for our AWARD WINNING offices on the other side of the country. the local office is moving again and using low walled cubes in large rooms. It would be great for honest appraisal of office design and approval by the cubicle-bound-occupants and not the office-blessed-few.

Sounds like study rooms in college libraries. I like it. It solves the space problem and provides more flexibility than the office solution. Sometimes you do want to be around the rest of the team, and sometimes you're working closely with one co-worker and you need some one on one work time with them.

I agree that they are the same in concept. In my limited experience, the college study rooms were used pretty much exclusively in the week or so leading up to finals. Where I work now, the same types of spaces are constantly filled. It could just be a matter of balancing the need with the availability of those kinds of rooms.