Why open floorplans are bad for programming
adevelopersvoice.com
adevelopersvoice.com
On the side that decides on and pays for the offices, open floor plans are cheaper and more convenient. They take less space per person. You can moved stuff around and rearrange them. You don't have to decide on team sizes in advance. You don't have to allocate office quality based on seniority. Managers can get a feel for happenings just by being present. etc. Moving in does not mean a big upfront cost and it is easier to make the decision. These are price and convenience concerns. Those drive the decision most of the time. There are a whole bunch of arguments that can be used to justify the decision. knowledge flow, agility, egality, whatever. You can agree for disagree with them but they're not honestly making up a significant part of the decision so the argument is pointless.
On the other side are the people who work in the companies who mostly don't like open floorplans. It seems to me we don't like them for the same reason we don't want to live in a big dormitory. We want our own space. We want to control our environment. Same thing every 14 year old wants. We spend half our lives at work and we want a pleasant office for the same reason we want a pleasant home. More space is more pleasant. These are "quality of life reasons. This side has abstract arguments too. Quite. concentration. etc.
The whole argument is dishonest. One side wants to make life cheaper and easier for themselves. The other wants to make life more pleasant. Both are pretending to be discussing productivity, creativity and whatnot.
The only problem with cubicles is when you get the half-height wall ones. Then literally you have almost all the same problem as open-floor while literally costing more money and reducing flexibility.
Cubicle walls aren't that expensive. You can put them around small teams. What is expensive are unproductive engineers that cost you $10,000 a month each. In comparison I bet those walls and a little bit more space are worth it.
Walk into any open plan office with developers in it, they will all have headphones in. You think they want to listen to music all day? 10s of thousands of dollars in lost productivity disappearing down the drain right in front of your nose but you're too blind to see.
But then, I also like to work in cafés. In fact, when I work from home I will sometimes open www.rainycafe.com to "simulate" that feeling. As long as nobody is speaking really loud or addressing me directly, it doesn't disturb me.
If everyone is being quiet creative it's fine.
Introduce a person constantly on the phone and it's not.
The other ones, and god I hate them, are the pacing round the office while on a mobile. Only topped by pacing round the office on a mobile who's route goes behind your chair. The most distracting thing in the world to me.
A manager that uses her speakerphone to call someone else.
Two cubes over.
Needless to say, I don't work there anymore.
My three month review ended when I walked out after being criticised for wearing headphones all day.
However, the worst distraction I have is actually another developer whose voice carries like buckshot out at 12 gauge. He's been asked to keep it down but it seems like he is physically incapable of understanding how loud he talks.
- You don't wanna be next to this employee (too lazy, friction)
- Being too close to a [bad] manager
- Being moved was a very cheap lever toward fear of inflicted unspoken sanctionsI took the office, finished the software, and quit.
There are ~30 people on the floor around me right now. There's a quiet conversation happening somewhere, which I didn't notice until I checked just now. Otherwise it's quiet and everyone is working. I can see two pairs of headphones in the bunch.
The frustrating thing about this particular issue is the vehemence of the "pro private office" side - people like mattmanser or mgkimsal routinely talk past people like myself, and pretend we don't exist. When we express our satisfaction with open arrangements we're talked down to, accused of shilling, and otherwise treated like idiots who are too stupid to have valid opinions on something that is a core part of our daily lives. Every single argument boils down to "there's simply no way you've had a positive experience, your experience was actually negative but you're too dumb to know it". There is no concept that some people might actually legitimately like the arrangement.
What works for us might not work for you. This isn't a value judgment upon you or anyone. People are different, shocking, I know. No one here is trying to shove an open-plan office down your throat.
I think people feel like because it's work related it is and must be objective. Measurable and provably better for all involved. It gets very transparent when you hear the reasoning behind very senior people's large expensive offices. There's always some pseudo rational justification.
I'm not saying that environment doesn't affect productivity. I'm saying I don't think that's what is enflaming passions. I see office environments as a form of consumption. Our standards for homes and cars and phones have gone up. Why not office chairs and square footage? Thinking of it that way naturally lends to subjectivity. What you like is supposed to be subjective.
In my own experience - I've known a few people who were genuinely better at their development work in open environments. Better as in measured output vs what they thought of themselves. They felt better - they liked the atmosphere - but they also thought they did good work, when they weren't doing terribly good work. Was it causal? Probably not, but it more proves the point that it's harder to self-assess beyond emotional state (which, really, IS a component of work life - I get that).
But what also happens with these religious wars is that the few anecdotes of "hey - I ENJOY working in open plan areas" is used to justify it for everyone.
You want open with other people - that should be allowed. You want an office with a door to shut to work? That should be allowed too. You want to switch between the two - that should be allowed and it EXTREMELY RARE.
Essentially, without loud 'anti' open office plan voices, the 'hey, this is cheaper' crowd gets its way. And when they can find a small percentage of people who do work well in that environment, it's justification-icing on the decision cake.
You're paying a team of people... say, $500k per year - spend the extra few percent and get an office that can accommodate multiple working styles to have the best possible places for all types of people to work. The larger world tends to default to the benefit of extroverts, and 'open plan offices' is one more 'default' that needs to be challenged, especially for many knowledge workers.
In every place I've been with open plans or open cube farms - management NEVER sat there - always had private offices. There's an acknowledgement that it's useful for some type of work, and you're not it. Incredibly divisive attitude for a 'team' to have to put up with. And... for every one example of "but... famous person X sits in an open plan with the team" there are hundreds who don't - it's not the norm.
"No one here is trying to shove an open-plan office down your throat."
MOST companies are because it saves a few bucks. The costs may be non trivial, but the cost compared the salaries, benefits and lost productivity generally are trivial.
See the part of my original post: "Every single argument boils down to "there's simply no way you've had a positive experience, your experience was actually negative but you're too dumb to know it""
You're doing it right now. I'm not prescribing open-plan offices on you, so don't prescribe yours onto me. Furthermore, this blind assertion "people who like open plan are actually more productive in private offices" has a gigantic "citation needed" on it. It is a universal assertion every time it comes up, yet is NEVER substantiated.
> ""hey - I ENJOY working in open plan areas" is used to justify it for everyone."
Except no one here is doing this. You're setting up a straw man and declaring gleeful victory knocking down a stance no one in this thread has advocated.
Look at what others are saying:
"I understand why open floorplans don't work for some people but I personally enjoy working in one..."
"Open floorplans are fine so long as there's an alternative option available."
"We had private rooms too, and many engineers preferred working in quiet, but I'm glad it wasn't all private offices."
No one here is prescribing open floor plans on you, but you have spent many replies in this thread behaving as if they are, and prescribing private offices onto them by insisting that you know their productivity better than they do.
You have spent this entire thread accusing people of forcing their preferences onto you, but it would appear in actuality it's the reverse.
They do it at companies I've worked at.
Some of those comments weren't in place when I originally commented.
Yes, not everyone here is advocating that. It's one of the few hot-button issues for me, and it still feels like 'moderate' tones get used to justify herding people in to open plans to save a few bucks.
I'm not accusing people in this thread of doing that - I'm saying it happens a lot on the outside, and the voices of moderation - the types expressed in this thread - get used by non-programmers to justify open plans. Perhaps I didn't clarify that, or perhaps it's a distinction without a difference.
"I derive energy from other people working around me."
That's great and all, but what effect does it have on the others around you. It's a rather self-centered view (almost by definition!) but.. "I derive... around me". It may be extremely draining on the people around you, but if it's OK because you get something from it, that makes it fine?
I'm projecting here, certainly, but the whole statement about what works for you bothers me. I've seen more teams be under-productive in open floor plans compared to similar teams that have the options of shared and private workspaces. Is the floor plan the only factor? Probably not, but it's certainly one that was very noticeable. Perhaps it's just symptomatic of something larger?
In this thread you have accused myself, and others, of prescribing our preferences to you. We have not, in fact you have done the reverse to us.
In this thread you have accused myself, and others, of being selfish when in fact we advocate for people to work in any environment that best suits them.
In this thread you have insisted that you know our (none of whom you've ever met) productivity better than we do ourselves.
In this thread you have presumed that we work in environments where we are disrespectful of our peers. Speaking only for myself, that cannot be further from the truth. Around here we have discussed candidly what works for people and what does not, offer alternatives to people who do not want open environments, and we continue to encourage people to speak up on any issues relating to the work environment, whether it's productivity-related or simply related to their enjoyment (believe it or not, not all open-plan-preferring people work best in just any open-plan setup). We are fully cognizant that different people work better in different environments, and we offer that freedom to everyone.
You have falsely accused many of us the same disrespect you have shown us. You have falsely accused us of projecting and prescribing, when the only one doing the projecting and prescribing is you.
You are looking for a Big Bad Guy so hard it borders on the absurd. You have approached anyone here even slightly pro-open-plan with hostility and condescension when no attitude has been shown to you.
We get it, you've had bad experiences at previous companies re: open-plan. Don't take it out on us. Neither myself nor anyone who has commented here is responsible for your past experiences, and none of us take anything close to the stance you have previously experienced. So don't treat us like it.
Agreed on dropping this - not intending to cause offense - I also suspect that if this was a face to face conversation we'd have agreed more than disagreed (as has happened when this has come up at user group meetings in the area now and then).
Clearly not everybody is working - someone posting comments to HN...
BTW, There is nothing wrong with wanting a nicer work environment.
You're putting words into people's mouth that aren't true (and you did compare us to 14 year olds!). Yes privacy is good, but mostly we'd just like to be able to get on with work without constant interruptions.
If you'd have claimed all CEOs are inherently paranoid and don't trust their workers to work in private offices you'd have been as wrong.
For what it's worth, I read their comment as meaning that some things we desire are the same throughout our lifetimes. In the same way that teenagers want to decorate their rooms to reflect themselves, as adults we have the same drives (though maybe with fewer posters of slightly-shameful bands).
>> We want our own space. We want to control our environment. Same thing every 14 year old wants. We spend half our lives at work and we want a pleasant office for the same reason we want a pleasant home. More space is more pleasant.
In fact, most tech professionals are ethical people who enjoy their work and prefer to be more productive. Posters here have been hoping, I think, to point out to employers that a cost savings on workspace, walls etc. may actually cost more in productivity, turnover, inefficiency.
There may be some dishonesty in management claims that open plans are beneficial for anything other than the short-term budget. Managers may have to make such decisions to produce numbers their bosses are demanding, because of the way corporations work. However, there is no apparent basis for the implication of some conflict between employee comfort and work-product benefit to the employer.
1. Have some peace and quiet and do my job
2. After getting done with however much work I have I can leave early
It would be about the same amount of work done, but I would save myself so much time. But of course companies want me to be a factory worker with people looking over my shoulder to make sure I'm actually working and forcing me to work 8 hours no matter what. This is why I am no longer a software engineer.
The problem wasn't that you were a software engineer. The problem was the companies you were working for.
I usually find this distinguished by whether a company is a software company or a non-software company that requires software by extension (i.e. IT/Big Co).
Stop working for IT companies and go work for a software company. You'll get exactly what you are asking for -- peace and quiet, flexibility, and giving up part of your salary.
It also happens at any company that bills government contracts, because they have to submit time cards with actual hours worked in order to get paid. You also need to keep a daily timecard.
I've always worked this way, focusing on something while a part of me was processing what was said around and being able to "pause" what I was doing to help around and get back to my work pretty easily. Of course it does not work all the time and some times you just need to focus for a few hours and in this case I just increase the volume of my music in my headphones and stop caring about the rest.
For me the main issue with open floorplans is when other people assume they can just come to your desk and ask you anything without thinking you could be busy and/or in the zone as you describe it when having a closed office would make them think twice before just dropping by unanounced. For me this was easily solved by explaining that it is a lot easier to drop me a line by email or chat and I'd get back to them as soon as I was available.
I wish I could say the same :) I get pulled into a million conversations simply because I'm there and accessible. Open floorplans decimate focus, in my experience.
Easier? For them? Or you? A perennial argument for open floor plans is that it 'fosters open dialogue' and other such twaddle. For someone to be standing 6 feet from you and be told it'd "easier" to go back to their desk and send you an email instead of just talking to you is ... counter-intuitive at the very least. Unbelievable to some.
I was in an 'open floor plan' a few years back, and would email over to the sysadmin who sat 8 feet from me. The owner yelled at us (and by extension, the other 8 people in the open area, distracting all of them) because we weren't talking directly. "That's why you're all out here - to communicate better!" And then he stormed back to his private office.
"I've always worked this way, focusing on something while a part of me was processing what was said around and being able to "pause" what I was doing to help around and get back to my work pretty easily. Of course it does not work all the time and some times you just need to focus for a few hours and in this case I just increase the volume of my music in my headphones and stop caring about the rest."
If this is actually the case, you're in the minority. After doing this for... 19(?) years, few developers I've met or worked with are actually more productive in open environments. A fair number are more comfortable, but they've not been any more productive (and in some cases, less so) than anyone else on the team, nor have they ever been markedly more productive than people with more private surroundings. My metric for this is purely subjective reading of the quality of their work - number/severity of bugs, features worked on, complexity of code/project/features/bugs/etc. Yeah, so and so was great to work with, pleasant, fun, etc, but always was the last to get things done, always had a few lingering bugs to clean up, never took on the harder features/bugs, etc. Again, totally subjective reading on my part, and it might be biased some because I'm generally not in favor of open floor plans.
I'm in favor of private work spaces and open common areas where people can meet to collaborate when they want. I understand it's an extra expense, and there are times when it's simply not possible. The best teams I've seen operate were ones where it was s small team with private offices and available open areas for collaborative meetings. Tables/desks there allowed for bringing laptops to work on code when needed for longer periods as a small group. Usually a group of 2-4 would brainstorm an issue in the open area, possibly hack out a few things on laptops, people would generally go back to private offices for a while to hammer things out, then come back to discuss and demo. I saw this most recently as an outside contractor coming in to a local company, and they were one of the best teams I'd ever worked with. Things got done rather quickly, everyone had a good sense of responsibility, etc (this was ... 4 people, then 5, IIRC). But then things changed, a couple more people came on, physical environment changed, and things went downhill. I can't say it was entirely the change in physical space, but personally I think it contributed a lot - more people were in open spaces, more 'collaboration' was someone standing near someone's desk trying to do that there (the open area and large meeting rooms were rarely available due to company expansion). Things took longer to get done, and there were more lingering bugs that took longer to sort out.
Yes, 100% anecdotal, but I watched this myself as a partial outsider. I had no long term vested interest, and was only onsite part time - the open vs closed stuff didn't actually affect me - I always did my work at home.
It depends. When someone is stuck on a compiling issue, pinging me on our chat/IRC is clearly easier than speaking loudly and hoping I'll hear and help. But at the same time, being able to hear other people discussions and chose when I think I'd be able to help is awesome. It also helps me learn a lot just by hearing other people technical issues.
Also open floorplan does not mean "just 8 members of your team" in the same place. Where I was before it meant 120 developers working on different project for the company but in the same place. An issue with this is that people outside of the developer teams would just pop over to my desk because I was the one that seemed available to ask for things. This can be annoying if it happens 10 times a day especially when none of the questions have anything to do with you. Explaining them that sending an email with questions would help worked most of the time and forced them to try and contact the right person instead of asking the developer closest to the door especially at lunch time.
If this is actually the case, you're in the minority. After doing this for... 19(?) years, few developers I've met or worked with are actually more productive in open environments
That may well be true. I've worked this way for 8 years now and clearly enjoy a lot more open floorplans especially when it is "developers-friendly" so no sales team next to you using the phone all day.
I'm in favor of private work spaces and open common areas where people can meet to collaborate when they want.
The issue with this is that I then lose the ability to follow what other people are working/stuck on and whether I can help, etc. Because people will most of the time stay in quiet area and use the open spaces only for informal gathering, having fun, or even meetings when no rooms are available.
Interestingly, I don't find this precludes open plan offices. It just means I want to grab a corner desk.
I've noticed, when you invite a guest to sit in a room, the guest will almost always takes the chair with the back facing the wall.
(Actually, the explanation I give to people is that I'm terrified of assassination attempts, which is related from a scientific point of view but has the bonus of making my life sound much more exciting than it is.)
It's harder to be distracted by 5 ringing phones in a private office.
"to not listen to anything that is "out of scope""
Doors work wonders too, and don't end up necessarily causing physical pain after a while, some headphones can.
It's very rare that one solution works all of the time.
98% of feng shui is about avoiding that feeling.
(*) As long as no one else is in the office.
Meeting rooms and rooms for management are usually not part of this arrangement, because, you know, management has to work.
I simply work better and more efficient if there's complete silence. I can work with a low level of background noice, but if certain songs / types of songs are playing on the radio I just stop until it's gone. My ears simply won't tune out some sounds, such as a high pitch female singers. Also some radio shows are just designed to have annoying sounds because it's "fun".
My first rule of music at work is: no human voice, unless you have autism. (And even then, you may not be able to tune out anything.)
A decrease in productivity may not be an insurmountable business problem. Private offices take up more square footage which has a direct annual cost. Open floor plans have higher density, which might offset the decrease in productivity. Open floorplans may/may not work well depending on the number of folks involved (eg. a team of 100 vs a team of 10) and types of job functions and size of the open floor plan area (maybe "pods" work better than one wide open area).
I'm sure there's lots of interest questions that could be answered if some rigor where applied to this issue.
We had private rooms too, and many engineers preferred working in quiet, but I'm glad it wasn't all private offices. I can usually get more out of one minute of conversation than five minutes of instant messaging.
It seems to me that most complaints stem from the fact that many people here have worked with inconsiderate people.
Don't get me wrong I think its really important to be able to 'plug in and get on' without distraction as a programmer, but I'm just making the point not everyone works well this way if they do it all the time.
The stuff I'm working on influences my ability to focus much more than the environment.
If I'm doing something boring or uninteresting I could be in a monastic cell and still manage to get distracted.
this is not something you can blanket statement like: eating asbestos is bad for your health
With all the project-management garbage (often in the name of "Agile") designed to mash software down into chunks that can be done mindlessly by CommodityJavaDrones, making software development superficially reliable (but the product soulless) the job is easy, which the business wants. It's more expensive to dumb down the job and hire idiots (legitimate 10x programmers only cost 1.5-2x) but more reliable-- the risks are long-term and thus pushed off to the next guy-- as they see it. So the attrition for promotion has to be conducted by subjecting people to petty stresses, but in bulk, and seeing who cracks first. When someone has the first panic attack, goes to the ER (a real panic attack, if you don't know what it is, is terrifying) and one way or another isn't working there in 3 months, that's part of the design.
Also, as one who suffers panic attacks, it's not the noise that makes people sick (and, with enough time in an open-plan office, almost everyone will get sick) because people will tune that out over time, but open-back visibility, which is much harder to get used to. The creepy feeling of being watched is what fucks peoples' health up. That could be fixed with booth-style seating if regular offices can't be afforded, but you never see that either.
There's a false egalitarianism to it as well. Managers typically have desks in the bullpen as well so they can say that it's a blanket policy, but that's making an unfair comparison. Managers can come and go as they please, typically only spend a couple hours per day in the bullpen, and don't have much to fear from visibility anyway; but workers who take the side offices "too often" draw suspicion and, even if they're getting a lot of work done, have to worry about getting "culture fitted" (that is, no-hired or fired for being old, sick, or female.)
I love programming itself but this is a fucking shitty industry and it's goddamn time we rise up and take it the fuck back.