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Comment by alimoeeny | Hacker News Reader

I think if you keep different "functions" (engineering, sales, ...) separate, then each can have their own open office without losing productivity. Don't you think so?

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I'm not convinced. I'm in an engineering area but if it's open plan then I'd still be able to see people, hear their (arguably more interesting than sales) conversations, and constantly have to split attention between monitoring the area around me and focusing on whatever problem I'm solving.

An engineer coming into my cube to chat a few minutes ago is what distracted me and now I'm frustrated and browsing HN. It's bad enough in high-walled cubicles; I don't know that I could maintain deep focus for meaningful amounts of time in an open plan.

I put a door on my cubicle recently and being able to mentally expand to fill my space while free from worrying about anybody else has done wonders for my productivity.

I seriously do not know how people still manage to work like that.

One of my requirements is a private office. I will not do cubicles, I sure as hell will not do open plans. Office. Period.

I've turned down a few decent offers because of this, and I'm sure I'll turn down more in the future as well.

I worked at a company that did that. I think there might still have been a productivity loss. All the engineers and programmers got huge studio monitor headphones to shut out the sound of everyone else working. Because of that we all used instant messaging for most our communication even though we were sitting in the same room. We salvaged our productivity by essentially turning ourselves into telecommuters with a commute.

The sales and customer service roles were trying to schedule their calls to minimize the time when two people would be on the phone at the same time, in order to limit background noise.

I don't think the company could have afforded private offices, but I have a hard time believing all of that energy being put into working around the work environment was less expensive than the cost of some high partitions.

I had a similar situation, but it made sense. Instant messaging grants the asynchronicity of emails without the overhead of long waits between replies.

When you want to talk to somebody without interrupting them, it's ideal. I might also suggest more 'got a sec?' type messages to get more of the swifter voice conversations.

That and sometimes we engineers prefer to build our sentences rather than blurt them.

No Research from IBM proves this - you can almost as easily get distracted by co workers in the same functional group.

Though 2 or 3 engineers in an office can work quite well

Depends. In my opinion, for engineers you can have open office rooms with 2-5 people, all engineers/no bullshitting managers. But not more. I've noticed that a lot of work can be done in groups like that...

How many programming questions do you field a day? I think it's probably 3 or 4 for me. I probably bother people 3 or 4 times a day too.

Every one of those conversations happens in someone's office right now, and distracts at most 2 people.

How long does it take for you to get "back in the groove" afterwards? Probably 5-10 minutes for me, more if I was doing something particularly intensive.

Now, lay out me and my ten coworkers in an open floor plan and watch what happens.

There's no way it works.

I have to disagree. One of my main advantages of working at home is that I'm not constantly flooded with tiny requests for comment/help or general small talk - and that's only talking about the engineering part of that company.

(And that company didn't have an open floor plan, but did have shared offices for 2-6 people)

In my opinion it depends on the culture and the people, not the roles/positions in the company.

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