The Open-Office Trap

Here's the simple algebra. Let's say (as the evidence seems to suggest) that if we interrupt a programmer, even for a minute, we're really blowing away 15 minutes of productivity. For this example, lets put two programmers, Jeff and Mutt, in open cubicles next to each other in a standard Dilbert veal-fattening farm. Mutt can't remember the name of the Unicode version of the strcpy function. He could look it up, which takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which takes 15 seconds. Since he's sitting right next to Jeff, he asks Jeff. Jeff gets distracted and loses 15 minutes of productivity (to save Mutt 15 seconds)."

(From http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000068.html)

Further, the time when I did have my own office was when I got interrupted the most. My boss would come in all the time and talk to me about whatever, a lot of times not even work-related stuff. Now I work in a place where people will only ever try to interrupt you via Slack, and if you tell them you're busy they will go away. So I think there is a cultural aspect as well, if your company accepts people bothering you whenever, I don't honestly believe an office will put a stop to that.

Commercial real estate is about $3/SF (per month) in San Francisco (Class A) and $4/SF in Manhattan. Open plan offices save about 75-100 SF per employee (more, if you're looking to be sadistic and impractical, but at this point, the productivity loss is obvious.) So the employer is saving, at absolute most, $5000 per employee per year. It's not worth it.

I bring this up because I just really truly don't get the occasional open office boosterism here. My current theory is that most of it comes from people who are still in the honeymoon phase of their career (like, the first few years after college when everything about the workplace still has some novelty to it).

That's basically what it is. The open-plan layout is reminiscent of college and the all-nighters in the computer lab. But work is not college. A bad grade on an assignment is much more fixable than getting fired. The stakes are higher, and that's why a certain brand of professionalism (or, more bluntly, divorcing oneself from behaviors that are acceptable for 18- to 21-year-olds) is necessary.

I say this because it seems like many/most of the people I talk to in person who like the open office idea have either literally never had a private office, or are relatively fresh out of college and get a job at Google (or a startup, or wherever), and they're still so excited about everything that even the things that are hassles (like open office plans?) seem like they're brimming with novelty.

Well, private offices make nerf-gun battles harder. And you hear less juicy gossip. And you don't have an audience for self-important rants about Lena Dunham. It might get so "boring" (in the sense of a lack of distractions) that you might be tempted to actually work to pass the time.

All of the boosters I've run into have only known open offices. Having said that, I'm sure someone will chime in here who has experienced both and prefers open offices, but I have to believe such people are in the vast minority based on my completely anecdotal data

Having done both (as I'm old enough to have started working when open offices were pretty rare), it is kind of ridiculous how much less productive (and less happy) I am in an open office and how difficult it is to find a workplace that isn't open office these days.

For me the two are very similar. I work in an open plan office and enjoy being able to talk to my co-workers - often someone will pull their chair up to someone else's to pair program for a while, or just discuss the issue they're having.

If you don't want interruptions, you put headphones on. It works well.

Or are younger people able to handle more distractions? I don't mean that in the sense of "those kids these days", but as a more general developmental thing.

In college I remember doing homework while watching TV with the sound off so I could listen to music and chat with friends on the computer. Over the last few years at work it seems much more difficult to refocus after distractions from coworkers or text messages from friends and family. Has anyone else noticed this? The reason I ask is it's difficult to tell if this is an aging brain issue, or a side-effect of the projects being so much bigger and more complex than anything in highschool, college, and even early-career.

I've worked as a developer for about 12+ years, then as a product/project manager for about 4 years. As a developer, I worked about half that time in soft-walled cubicles of various heights and another half in open office environments. I spent a year or so in a shared walled office. As a project guy, I spent about 3 years in an open office and 1 in a shared walled office (2people).

With my dev lead and project management hats on, open offices wins hands down. Whenever I want I can stand up and do a quick and dirty eyeball scan of the office and gauge who's deep in thought and shouldn't be disturbed, who maybe needs help with something, who's picking their nose on Facebook. Project goals, milestones, etc. can be on prominent display on the walls, so everyone can easily reference them--no more "oh, I didn't know we were releasing next Monday" excuses. Whiteboards all over the place so people can get up and do a quick informal collaboration, then visually reference it later from their desks. Everyone sees everyone all day, bringing an extra bit of team unity, nobody gets to hidey-hole in their office, pretending to not be part of a team. Daily stand-up meeting is quick to set up and painless, it takes a minute for everyone to just get up and walk over to the scrum corner, as opposed to having to lose 10 minutes every time waiting for everyone to decide to come out of their hiding holes. If I do have a quick question, I can tell if they're in the middle of something concentrating by just glancing over their way rather than having to knock on their office door (guaranteeing that I disturb them).

With my developer hat on, it's a bit of a toss up. I can appreciate the benefit of having a quiet, closed-in space to go deep on a problem. And open offices, while they can be quiet if you set basic etiquette rules, will never match the volume level in closed offices. But, in an open office, there's zero friction if someone needs to come chat about the code, collaborate, bounce ideas off me, and vice versa. I've never been offended when someone stopped by to discuss a problem they're having, or ask to review their approach or code. Sure, it gets you out of "the zone" a bit, but you just get back into it. The whole business about having to waste an hour to get back into the zone after an interruption is, frankly, total BS. One thing I'll say though, is the cubicles are the worst of both worlds: You have the noise level of an open office combined with the high-friction human interaction, collaboration that's limited to online tools, and hidey-hole mentality. I'd take either option over a cubicle any day.

I think my ideal office environment is open offices for everyone, but with small private workrooms here and there that people can reserve in 2hr blocks or so, where they can go away into if they really need that occasional alone time to get the job done.

I really think this is a matter of personal taste to a large degree, but for my part I prefer the ability to ask questions readily and listen in on what my colleagues are working on. I think the point you're trying to make about an 'interruption deficit' is off the mark. Someone new to a team is going to ask many more questions than a veteran and it's certainly damaging to their ability to learn if asking questions is a chore or unwelcome socially. Email and messaging apps are alternatives of course, and are often the right choice when the question doesn't merit interruption. But sometimes a quick answer is needed to progress at all and being able to turn around and say something makes things faster.

In open office spaces people are still able to work from a laptop somewhere else, put on headphones, or work from home. And having your own office doesn't mean you aren't interrupted. People would tend to come by for long periods of time when I had an office, seemingly because they were starved of social interaction.

A caveat to all this is that for a brief period I was in an overly crowded open office arrangement and that was very much detrimental to my work.

1) mislead by the initial sense of acomplishment and better communication.

it is like working in a war room. you get tons of stuff done, but it is crazy, stressful and you have lots of people working on a little thing that demands attention. your return for all those people is actually less, but you need a war room in some situations.

open office work the same way. you get a initial difficult thing done. but at the usual high cost of having lots of people working on it and ignoring/half-assing others.

2) people like micro-management.

there is no denying. open office plans and war rooms are perfect for the micro manager boss.

1) 9 years

2) 1 year in shared office with only boss, 4 years in shared office with 4 other people, 4 years in a fully open office

3) In person I never interrupt others, but I will IM others about 3 times a day. As far as folks interrupting me, I spend 25% of my time managing folks, so I expect (and get) lots of interruptions, but people know to IM me first. Headphones help as a signaling mechanism for this, as well as blocking out noise.

I loved my office that was just me and my boss as it was quiet and also had a great view. I also love my current open office because it's a great space and facilitates easy conversation, plus my standing desk is next to a window. It's no honeymoon period, been a developer for 9 years and in the workforce for 15 years.

Also, I absolutely hated the shared office with 4 people. Just absolutely terrible to be in cubicles in a small space with none of the benefits of a private office or open office. And people constantly opening the door to go in and out until we finally everyone was just propping their doors open, so it was semi-open anyways.

Edit to note: I work for a great non-profit and it helps to be surrounded by people I love and who I know are working hard to make a positive change for the world. If I were working for a corporation I'm not sure if I would feel the same about an open office plan or not.

1.) I've been a developer (in some context, this also includes "startup founder", "tech lead", and about a year total of internships) for about 10.5 years.

2.) Private office for 1 year total (across 2 companies). Shared office for 1 year (2 companies). Worked from home for a total of 2.2 years (2 companies). Private cube for 1.25 years (3 companies). Shared cube for 1.5 years. Open-floorplan for 20 months (Google), and war-room (same team in a large, 5-10 person office) for 2.5 years.

3.) It's varied throughout my career. As a startup founder, I neither interrupt people nor get interrupted, since I'm working from home and am the only developer on the project. When I was a tech lead, I did literally nothing but get interrupted; incoming requests outnumbered outgoing by roughly 10:1. As an individual dev, typically I'd be interrupted about 2-3 times for every time I asked someone else a question (my preference is usually much more toward figuring out something for myself than asking questions...probably moreso than it should be).

I am mildly in favor of open-plan offices, and here's why: most of the interesting stuff is happening outside of your head. I'll grant that open-plan offices are a huge distraction, they pull you out of flow, and as a result, you will write a lot less code than you would in a private office. However, here's where I say something controversial: code is a liability, not an asset. The goal of a developer is to solve problems, and you will solve more problems if you know what the pressing problems are than if you just put your head down and code up what your boss tells you to. It really sucks to slave away at a masterpiece of technology for a year or two, and then find that nobody uses it because you weren't solving the right problem to begin with.

Here's another statistic: in those 10.5 years of experience, I've implemented 30 projects (as in, working code delivered to boss/cofounder/teammates/market). Of those, 10 were successes, where I define "success" as either "used by > 1 million people", "at least 6 internal teams use it", or "made money for employer". The successes included 2 shared offices, 3 warrooms, 2 shared cubes, 2 open floorplans, and 1 private cube. The failures included 5 private cubes, 2 private office, 2 shared office, 7 open floorplans, and 4 works from home. (Interestingly, this seems to reproduce what I've heard in the literature of "same team in an office" > "private office" > "unrelated teams in an open floorplan".)

I'm curious, do folks in favor of private offices consider a project to be successful when it is delivered according to spec to your boss? Or is it successful when it makes it to market and makes a profit for the company? If it's the former, that would explain the differing views right there: it's quite possible for private offices to help you efficiently produce the wrong product.

Personally, I've seen it work well (where I'm at now), and I've seen it work badly (two jobs ago). I've also seen the same in separate offices. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I don't really find that age or experience tends to matter that much as to where it works or doesn't. It's more about the work you're doing, and the company you're doing it for.

Some dev projects - those heavy on the back end especially, or requiring lots of sheer coding manpower over critical thinking, I think they definitely don't gain anything from the open office. The same could be said as well for the truly complex coding work out there - which, honestly, is less and less a reality.

If you're wiring up pages that do some middle tier logic or dealing with heavily interactive sites, which I think is what many of us do day to day, rather than the super intense, super difficult coding work that we all wish we did, I think the collaborative benefits can outweigh the risk of interruption.

If you're actually doing that big brain work, or really working on something that needs complete concentration, then yes, being able to zone in on it interruption free is definitely a good thing.

Like every other process, or tool, it depends on the context and the problem you're solving. And like most problems, you need the right person to use that tool or process. So does it work for every scenario, and every person? No, definitely not. The same can be said for a closed office as well.

Bottom line - right people, right place, for the right task at hand.

  I work as a software engineer for the last 22 years. ~4 of them as engineer manager, the rest as an individual contributor. 
  I hate offices. I worked in Microsoft in an office and it was hell. I was alone. It was not a team. It was me. It was sometimes better to email somebody then walk around to talk to them.
  I love open office plans. Yes, it's disruptive. But if I want to tell somebody something, I lift my head and talk. Everybody can hear what is going on and they can tune in if they are interested. For people that have distraction problems, usually headphones work quite well.
  Of course, I assume that people talk quietly and not scream their head off.
  BTW, I am usually the one that give advice and information instead the other way around.

e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5768771

I work in cubicle, and once I put the standing shelf desk in at home I'll be working from home more because of this same thing.

But it is important to keep distractions out especially for creative positions.

Also everyone is different so maybe some people prefer the open floor and they should be allowed to work there too. But forcing everyone to do it, I think is misguided.

PS: and while my team is a distraction for others in my office (relatively, not absolutely) I dislike open-spaces. They aren't mentally comfortable, not because of noise (for me) but because of no "feeling" of privacy. It is all subjective of course.

Also, open-back visibility (that is, being visible from behind) does more damage than the noise itself, and there are no noise-canceling headphones for that.

Office space isn't that expensive, compared to the productivity loss of having everyone work in a crappy space. (Compared to a traditional office, open-plan saves about $300-450/month per employee in San Francisco, Class A commercial real estate. It's less if you're in Oakland, Brooklyn, or the Midwest) Open-plan is just another case of crappy HR (the norm in tech, sadly) "cutting" costs in a way that actually externalizes them; there are marginal savings on office space, but productivity plummets.

Perhaps this isn't optimal for every employee/company, but it's how I made the best of the situation for myself at this company...

Some activities like teaching are open by nature. Interruptions are ok and even desirable. Design, politics, sales, could have a great amount of work done in the open.

Now, in activities like programming, writing, science, you are suiciding yourself in the open, constant interruptions and the theater.

I have done programming in the open but choosing my partners, one, two or three people that I admired, but it was almost an intimate relationship, far from what people consider OO.

In Soviet Union it was more important what other perceived you were doing that really what you accomplished, so everybody created the farce of working a lot, but the productivity levels were terrible compared with the West. Their work was simulating they were working, and like good actors, some even believed their role.

In big buroucracies managers find very hard to identify what other people really contribute to the work so they start using external cues, like how much(time) this person works, how busy he looks, the sense of security and so on.

"what's the alternative? Everyone get a 4-walled office?"

I work from home. So do the people that work for my company.

I created my company programming, so I could identify the value of the people that work with me. I could trust them, they could manage them selves, and also they are more productive when they don't have anyone breathing over their shoulders.

Of course, it is no lala land. It takes experience, knowledge and work to be able to implement something like this.

In my 20-year career, I've only worked in an open office once for 6 months, and it was a significant factor in me quitting. I sat immediately adjacent to a managerial-type guy, and he had people dropping in all the time to discuss something; I'm talking 10 people per hour, on average. I would defy anyone getting any complex programming work done under those circumstances.

For me, in an open office, having headphones on is not enough. There's visual distraction as well. People interacting in your field of vision are also a distraction.

I like this setup, I find it freeing because you can move to where you are more comfortable working at any given time. But the catch is, you can't just say seating is "variable" as a way of punting on giving people desks. Everyone should have a place that undisputedly belongs to them.

I agree. The best working environment I ever had was private offices with soft seating areas at the rend of each hall. It was easy to collaborate with others and easy to get a quiet environment. You never felt like you were interrupting several other people if you went to ask a person a question. If you had to take a phone call to talk to deal with a private family issue or call a Dr or lawyer, you could just close your door. If you had to send a private email you didn't need to worry that others will see something they shouldn't see. Offices also had much more usable desk space than I have had in open office settings.

I can see why people like offices (except for Zuckerberg are there any CEOs who sit in an open floor plan?), where I work now, the only people who like the open office arrangement are the managers who naturally have private offices.

I can disagree reasonably, but what good does that actually do me? Do I talk to my manager about it? He agrees but has no control over the layout. The upper-level management? They don't agree and don't care. Find a new job that's not open-plan? I already did, and then my team got all moved into one big conference room.

This isn't good for my mental health or productivity. But its what most companies do so I'm stuck.

As one of the developers who has a interruption surplus (get interrupted more than I interrupt others), I really dislike open offices, they actively prevent me from getting work done.

That is, there actually is a "right" answer that is the same for everyone. Measuring it is "science."

We all have different personalities and everyone is different, so I'm not suggesting I'm right and you're wrong, but for me I don't see that as a negative.

Receiving a skype (or other IM-type of service) query is far less intrusive to my work than talking to someone in person at my desk. Better yet, ask me in an email if you don't need the answer right away since email signals that you don't expect an immediate response and maybe I'm deep in thought and answering your question to a useful degree will pull me out of the 5 levels of abstraction my brain is currently working under, losing me half an hour of real work to get back to that point later.

On the flip side of your points I've found that open offices encourage people to ask me questions that they could easily google and find the answer in about as much time as it takes me to answer them, which means they are burning my time (and more importantly, my focus/flow) wastefully. Not to mention they are distracting everyone else around us as well. Multiply this by half a dozen times or more per day and it really starts to be a productivity sink.

If the open office full of distractions is the ideal working environment, then when I get an emergency call from work, I assume I'll fix the emergency faster if I take my laptop to the neighborhood daycare center and sit down right in the highest chaos room. Oddly enough at home when no pretensions are necessary because there is nobody to show off to, people who have to actual work, pick a nice quiet closed door "office".

A lot of open office love comes from utterly incompetent management and its very politically incorrect to discuss this other than semi-anonymous forums like this. "I have no idea how to manage these people or how to convince them to do what I want, but at least I can see them all squashed together like sardines". If your standard of performance is low enough, mere visibility is at least better than nothing.

Open office is equivalent of trying to study in a busy corridor where groups of people chat, come and go and every 15 minutes someone stops by to tell you hello.

Now, five or other small team in one room is a great thing. Kind of the best solution I would say. You can discuss when you need and it can be calm most of the time. However, open office is usually six such teams together overhearing each other while having next to zero chance to actually concentrate on anything.

Science evolved precisely as a way to avoid this social noise and find the true status of the subject, through the use of empirical observation and repeatable experiments that test specific hypotheses.

Could there be errors in these studies? Sure, and science has a process for dealing with that possibility, too: create another experiment that empirically falsifies one of their conclusions.

The whole point of the article is that the differences are not inconsequential at all. Numerous academic studies have objectively measured many differences in many different specific environments, and show that the open office is worse in almost all ways related to running a successful business.