Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace
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* Separate clusters by function / noise level -- We didn't put sales people and developers next to one another. People who spent all day on the phone were near other people who spent all day on the phone.
* Keep clusters small -- We had 4 person "pods" of desks for most of our early lifecycle. You weren't constantly interrupted by a dozen people from every direction, but you had a few people you could bounce ideas off of when you needed to.
* Lots of breakout spaces -- If you need to have a conversation that lasts more than a minute or so, find a private space. It was nice to hear a snippet of a conversation and decide "I care about this topic, let's break out and discuss further" or "This is not relevant right now, I'm going to disregard."
* Be respectful of flow -- If someone is deep in focus, just leave a post-it on their desk or send a message via chat. (This was a good form of one-bit communication for us.)
I don't think it's impossible to create a great open office layout. People just copied the ceremony without the essence. It's no different than "Agile is broken! We have 20 minute standups 3 times a day and nothing gets done!" Maybe the reason is because you're doing it wrong.
The privacy issue also needs to be addressed on a cultural level as well. My first job was open layout but I had one of those nosey managers that wants to know what you're doing every 15 minutes. I got talked to for being on Facebook during my lunch break. In order to really have a successful open office layout you need to have everyone on board and prepared to "let go" a little. Yeah people goof off during the day. We aren't robots that can sit down at 8:30 and constantly type for the next 8 to 9 hours. At my current job no one really cares if they walk up to you to ask a question and you happen to be taking a couple minutes to clear your head and look at cat gifs. I think that's the way it should be.
I would prefer to choose when to have my interruptions.
"A factory pattern, you say? Well.. Oh, look, a squirrel!"
As someone who's had to run programming groups and do the programming work, I will say open floor plans are the worst idea ever.
If you need/want to get into the zone on a project and actually make progress, the open floor plan will keep you from doing that as much as possible. For breaks, the last thing I would be doing is going on facebook or checking email or doing other useless crap like that.
Your job sounds horrible if people can just walk up any time for any reason. And if you're spending time looking at cat gif's then I think you or your manager needs to revisit how you're spending your time. Doesn't sound like work to me. Sorry...
I think this speaks more to what you think about your coworkers than actually weighing in on open floor plans.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
> pg 2455 days ago | link | parent | flag
> I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.
> It only becomes abuse when people resort to karma bombing: downvoting a lot of comments by one user without reading them in order to subtract maximum karma. Fortunately we now have several levels of software to protect against that.
The fact that upvotes and downvotes are not treated symmetrically seems to imply that they really aren't suitable for merely conveying agreement or disagreement. Somebody's comment shouldn't literally be greyed out, sometimes to the point of being illegible, because a few people disagreed with it. This combination -- using downvotes freely to express disagreement, and hiding or fading out downvoted comments -- is a recipe for groupthink. It's very nearly a form of censoring comments that are maybe contentious but in no way inflammatory or off-topic or poorly written.
For collaboration nothing beats an open office layout. But collaborative periods make up a very small amount of our [developers] time.
If we spent most of our time collaborating then maybe open office layouts would make some sense (though maybe not, since there's still downsides to consider). It is illogical to choose an office layout based on what you spend a small fraction of your time doing.
I can look round and see exactly whether it's OK to approach people....
[NB I wouldn't mind one on a hat I could wear at home!].
And here's the problem - some people just cannot be respectful of other people's time or flow and also you can find a lot of variation between communication styles (e.g. synchronous vs asynchronous) or noise tolerance of people.
For example, some people only want to work from home, whereas I cannot work from home, but on the other hand I need a very distractions free environment. I have really good and respectful colleagues and yet I find myself saying no to requests and interruptions several times per day even, actively declining attempts at synchronous communications between us, just so I could get anything done. This happens to the point of becoming nauseating, not only because "Alex, can you talk?" is distracting enough, but also because I have to say NO a lot. And I'm probably labeled as being a jerk, yet I cannot help being one, because contrary to other people, I really, really need to be left alone when focusing on something.
On your experience, I'm not arguing that the open office in question wasn't productive for you or for your close peers, but have you asked the others about it?
Open floor plans would probably work great for people like that. I prefer to not be pre-empted from my current task, and to have a written record of the things you wanted to tell me, so I can refer to it later. Face-to-face conversations are fine if I'm not already doing something else, but don't force me into one just because you're doing your "manager walk" or can't be arsed to have a specific agenda for the conversation.
If I have a door, I can hang a "do not disturb" sign on it, and lo, I am not disturbed. Otherwise, it may just be closed because the compressor from the fridge in the break area bothers me. I don't mind interruptions, provided they are more important than what I am currently doing, but it seems like open plans lower the threshold for interruption. Some people see that as also lowering the threshold for collaboration. But there are ways to design a space to encourage one without also encouraging the other.
The thing I like most about async is that there must necessarily be a record of everything that was said. When appropriate, the record may be retransmitted.
Things like internal wiki entries, message boards, e-mail chains, instant message groups, and issue-tracker tickets are all asynchronous. If you conduct most of your business with ephemeral synchronous conversations, you're going to end up repeating yourself a lot, and there's going to be a larger "hit by a bus" risk. I consider it to be irresponsible business practice.
There's good reason why human development was very slow during oral tradition, and experienced exponential growth after writing.
Some use of synchronous is always appropriate. But using it instead of asynchronous rather than in addition to it is, in my opinion, pure folly. At best, the synchronous communication is what you use to make your asynchronous communication more efficient.
Amen. My voicemail greeting for my work phone is "Hi, you've reached the voicemail box of Jack Maney. Instead of leaving me a voicemail, please leave me an email. Thank you."
It's faster and easier to get an email, click it, and read/skim it, and let it sit in your inbox until you're ready to decide what to do with it.
We also communicated our preferences directly. If someone was interrupting us, we would let them know that it was better to send an email or grab us before or after a known distraction (arriving at work, lunch, coffee break, end of day). We tried to schedule meetings on Mondays and Fridays to give us largely uninterrupted time during the week. People respected our preferences and tried to accommodate the "Maker's Schedule."
I'm not sure every company could or should work this way, but I worry that backlash around poor implementations of the open layout will cause us to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It's up to each company to evaluate the compromises necessary to create a productive workspace, open or otherwise. I worked with great people and the open office concept worked for us.
OK, so I believe that this is a good strategy - the ones that prefer more privacy, should get it, the ones that prefer the open space should get an open space.
My unsolicited advice on this is to just let yourself be distracted. As much as we may not like it, it's much more important to be liked among your peers than to have high raw productivity. Employment is a popularity contest (at least for popularity among the powerful segment of the corporate structure) and there's really no way around that. If we accept that, our future as employees becomes brighter.
Could it be that a solution or mitigation here is to directly address this problem? I think the idea that people are only capable of communicating in a certain way is probably too strict. Maybe it's just my experience but it seems to me that most people (with exceptions of course) don't give or get direct feedback about what type of communication works best for them, more typically they use some passive-aggressive move like brightly colored headphones or just acting annoyed and expect people to get the hint. This probably works to some degree but in a large open space it seems like you need everyone on the same page.
edit: a clarification. It is ridiculous to put backend/Linux developers on Macs with 8Gb of memory on which it is nearly impossible to run a virtual machine. And glossy monitors are very good for designers in light-controlled rooms, not so for developers, who can see every ceilings light in theirs.
If you work with a bunch of thoughtful people, of course they are going to respect flow. And they're going to realize when their personal habits affect the people around them. Even gregarious extroverts will be quiet in a library like atmosphere, and move their conversations to a kitchen or break out room
The open office allows people to split into sub teams and to work together on projects more fluidly than an arrangement where people have strong physical barriers to moving.
But it's a sort of environment that comes together as the sum of its parts. Forcing an open environment into a shitty company with shitty employees will likely make it worse.
>>> Maybe the reason is because you're doing it wrong.
That can be said of any failed ideology.
Viewing your office layout as an ideology is part of the problem. It's not about us-versus-them. It's about identifying your team's work styles and building a space to support them as best as you can.
Open offices can work well, but it requires a little bit of effort and adherence to the rules. We have plenty of breakout areas for impromptu meetings, ample numbers of meeting rooms for more extended ones. There's plenty of space to cloister oneself for a while if needed. Our development team is together, and a few desks away from more customer-facing staff, which keeps noise down.
Yeah, there are occasional distractions. But so long as everybody is respectful, there are benefits too. It's great for quick pairing sessions, which we do a lot; overhearing conversations and being able to chip in with relevant information is really often useful; even just being able to see who's physically in the office helps.
I suspect a lot of this is going to be dependent on size and culture. So maybe there's an argument that on the whole, open-plan is not worth it. But I'm unconvinced.
I'll just give a +1 for small pods and breakout spaces, since those were a big part of what worked for us.
Here's what I would add to what you're saying:
1. Being respectful of flow has never worked for a team I was on. Instead, what we did is that at all times we had a pair (or the odd person out) whose job it was to field questions. If you needed to know something from a team, you went to the assigned person or pair. A corollary of this is that everyone on a given team was expected to be able to answer questions as a representative of the team. 2. Pair programming: I definitely am prone to distraction, but it's much easier to stay focused when you're working with someone on something. This also contributes to information sharing, which contributes to everyone on the team being able to answer questions.
Many people mention that introverts have a hard time working in an open office layout. But what I haven't seen mentioned on this thread is that extroverts might have an equally hard time working in isolation. I'm an extrovert and I've definitely been in situations where isolation hurt my productivity. And I think that points to the core of the problem: your office space needs to meet the needs of your team, not some romanticized ideal of an Agile™ team. It's unlikely that any processes or procedures are going to make an open office work for an office full of introverts. If an open office doesn't work for your team, that doesn't mean open offices don't work, it just means that your team needs something different.
This points back to the agile manifesto[1]: "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools." An office is just a tool. If you're still looking for a one-size-fits-all office layout, you're prioritizing that tool over the individuals who are using it. That's not agile.
Your entire post is about how you can minimise the negatives, but anyone who has been to a library before already knows you can make an open plan almost noise free.
The whole point with the office (for me) is to provide an environment to maximize developer output of value.
I do not need to serendeptiously eavesdrop on every discussion on the floor with 40 people to provide maximum ouput. What I do need, is quiet.
Vice versa it is fair to ask why cant the people who yearn extra stimulus to install disco lights in their offices and play some bazar tape from their headphones :)
You can't disregard your peripheral vision. People walking behind me all day stresses me out in a predictable fashion, as it does with most introverts I've worked with. Unfortunately for me, most startup programmers these days seem to be extroverts. Which makes sense, I suppose, given the large percentage of apps focused on all things social.
It has nothing to do with introvert / extrovert from what I can see. But I don't understand why people keep thinking that headphones are some magic cure all. Sometimes you need quiet so you can focus, and just replacing one source of noise with another does absolutely nothing. Not to mention that "open plan" allows a constant stream of visual and tactile distractions as well as auditory.
Really, open plan offices have no redeeming qualities at all that I can see. They're optimized to disrupt productivity to the greatest possible degree, while providing a superior illusion of collaboration. In my experience, they're a complete joke.
"I want to see my fucking employees and grab them at any time," is the thinking here. Our productivity and comfort? They don't really matter because the competitors are doing the same thing. There's nowhere to flee to. There's no winning other than clawing your way up to management and hoping to god you can still do tech work once you get there.
This is always why I'm never shocked to hear about video games or operating systems or huge pieces of software written by one guy, alone, in a quiet space. Of course you can do those things when you have the proper space and drive. This is also how novels get written for that matter. Can you imagine writing novels the way we're making software? They'd never get done and the ones that do would just be terrible.
Here's why bosses like them:
1. They're cheap. 2. Other businesses are doing it.
At our workplace we have some "meeting rooms" that are effectively small offices. Some of our team who don't like the hustle and bustle of a more open workspace effectively commandeer such rooms almost every day (on days they're not working from home).
Given how email/IM based we are, it seems to all work out fine (for me). For others or folks who don't have the proper layout (i.e., private 1-2 person room available ) then it could indeed suck.
The low walls were a blessing and a bane. My team worked well like that. None of us are particularly loud people. We all had headphones and quiet music. The flow of the pen allowed easy communication and rolling between each others cubes.
The bane came from other teams around us. There was a woman that was going through an extremely messy divorce (attempted murder of herself and children by arson). She was understandably upset. Rather than taking family medical leave she would talk to her mother for hours in her cube. Her voice was particularly grating to me. I ended up leaving one day to buy a pair of firing range headphones and firing range earplugs.
Sadly the headphone/earplugs only sort of worked. They're designed to reduce low noises like a gunshot. Her voice was higher. They did help. I was able to concentrate.
> she would talk to her mother for hours in her cube
Hello HR, they would be all over that.
On the plus side I have firing range headphones now. So I can go to the actual firing range a few blocks from my house. I am also prepared if I ever have a child. Crying gets to me. So I'll put those on and be one of the most loving fathers ever. I'll probably have music earbuds in too.
I suspect that during the first dot-com boom, open offices were all the rage because they were cheaper. When I entered the industry in 1998, my employer (a start-up) had an open office, as it was less expensive to find used desks and skip cubes altogether. In fact, I didn't work in my first cube farm 'til I took my current job seven years ago--instead, my employers generally had four person cubes/pods.
Heck, in the late 1970s, my dad's engineering firm had "pods" for certain functional groups.
The only kind of work which cannot be done efficiently in a constant noise and distractions are these "engineering tasks" which require intense mental concentration (or what they usually call "meditating on a problem").
But such kind of high-skilled jobs are about 5% (and the best guys have their rooms, because they are worth it) so there is no wonder that 90% is an open space.
An example of such a task, which requires a quiet place would be "analyzing and decomposing an unfamiliar problem domain into a reasonable, valid metrics/heuristics to be used within machine-learning algorithms, given that you have no PhD in ML or problem domain's field". Very common scenario, isn't it?
I really believe that the open office floor plan led me to leaving my former job -- I simply could not be as productive as I needed to be in an open floor plan environment.
I wouldn't be surprised if Open-Office floor plans cost more in productivity than they save in rent. I don't mean to 'hate' on it so much; but it's hard to explain just how distracting, noisy, and damaging to productivity it can be.
I'm not going to take apart the article: there's simply too many errors to get into. I will say in the author's defense that many companies will jump onto a bandwagon without having any idea of why other people are riding or where it's going. [insert long list of good ideas that corporate america adopted and killed]
On a personal note, I do not like co-location. I also do not like open plan offices. I like it quiet, with my space, my music, my 3-screen development setup, and my door. Which I can shut.
And that's what makes this discussion so painful for me to both watch and participate in. You see, as somebody who helps teams perform better, for certain kinds of work -- creative work where there is a lot of change and risk -- open plan beats the hell out of other setups. It's not even close. [for the proper definition of open plan.]
In the past couple of years I have seen several teams that were unable to accomplish much of anything start working much more effectively by simply sitting beside each other and being there during the day. In some cases, they did nothing else: just sat beside each other. Still, work improved. The effect is so noticeable you could almost write a book and start a movement just on open floorplan.
The last misconception I'll address, since it seems to run rampant, is that open floor plan is not about productivity or cost savings. It's about having people work with each other. This may actually mean less work gets done; but it's the right work. Open floor plan is where the guy at the end of the table late on a Friday afternoon observes aloud to himself "You know, maybe we should be doing X instead of Y" and everybody has the social and emotional context to realize that you just changed the scope of the work from 10x to x. [insert many more examples here]
For me personally, this trend isn't all bad:
When I work someplace with this setup it's kind of nice to "hang out with my friends" even if it isn't nearly as productive.
When I'm working for myself, being able to think deeply gives me a competitive advantage over places with open-offices. :-)
I keep a diary of learning notes and have throughout my career. It's interesting to go through it and see that in my university days I was picking up concepts, tools, and techniques far faster than I do now despite the fact that I am considerably better and more experienced. I chalk it up to the fact that I can't just "go dark" for a week to properly learn something distraction free even if it would be in my companies best interests.
Which helps illustrate that point that its never been about increased productivity and collaboration-its always been about cutting the cost of office space and increasing the supervisor's ability to monitor what you're doing every second of the day.
I don't get why we stuck in cookie-cutter office spaces which leads to everything expect producitivty.
Private offices are definitely nice, but I also enjoy the positives of an open office
I suppose it depends on the personality. Generally, though, with private offices, well-designed communal areas, and huddle rooms (plus larger conference rooms), it's hard to see how an open floor plan has any advantages other than supposed cost cutting. The crux of the issue, I think, is that it requires a rather special type of personality to be really productive in a more chaotic open floor plan, whereas it requires a much less special type of personality to be really productive when one has the option of retiring to an office.
Really, what's most important to me is that one has the option of retiring to a private space when the extra concentration is needed. If one were to sit in an open space by default, but always was guaranteed a small private space when needed, I wouldn't see many issues. But I've seen very few open office plans that can legitimately offer that sort of dynamic. Headphones do not constitute a private space -- they're more of a bandaid.
In my office, they have small "conference rooms" which really only have space for 2-3 people that you can reserve if you want to hide away in somewhere quite. I usually fall back to these if I need to go heads down on something.
The best part of the office is the ability to close/lock the door to prevent the annoying "walk ups" that really disrupt work.
the drop in real estate costs shows up in the ledger...
the drop in productivity... not so much. Even if it did, it would take data that is typically not tracked to prove that the real estate change was the cause of it.
Mind you, it wasn't the only thing. Everything about the hiring process and people I spoke with screamed replaceable cog--they actually hired me solely based on my resume and only gave me a plant visit when I asked for one--but the bullpen office arrangement sure didn't help.
A fun-fact(tm) proudly shared on a tour still haunts me to this day:
"Behold the largest office space (er...cubical farm) in the US... 5,000 or so seats."
Not a single study she linked to is conclusive and applicable to all situations. The studies merely suggest that there may be drawbacks to open offices.
Additionally, she mentions the camaraderie among teammates masking lost productivity. Who's to say that this doesn't contribute to the overall well being of the office? Even if it does mean some near-term productivity is lost.
Each company is different, and each department within the company is different. We just moved into an office space, and our sales floor is much different than our dev area. Sweeping generalizations like the one made in this article aren't helpful for anybody.
Were I working from home or out of that persons earshot, I would have dug around for potentially hours or days before finding my solution.
Were I heads down writing code a lot (I don't do that very often these days), I'd head over to the private (no-noise-policy) work rooms nearby.
Let's assume that open office floorplans result in a decrease in productivity. The author mentioned that the open office plan did create a sense of camaraderie. Suppose that people attrited or you lost out on recruiting talent because your office felt too old-school, or they left because other startups felt more fun. This is one instance where long-term productivity could suffer for the sake of near-term productivity.
I'm not saying that this happens, but it's something to consider. In fact, we're in the process of selecting office space right now, and it's a lot easier to find law firm style offices with only rooms - no open space. We've decided against it - and are going with open space (plus a few quiet rooms) for a couple reasons. First, we don't want to lose out on the fun factor. Being able to shoot the shit with your friends may be distracting, but it makes the workday a lot more bearable. Our particular dev team actually agrees with this, but I could definitely see the counter argument. The other reason is that it makes much more sense for our sales team, call support, and operations guys to be able to shout questions to each other in real time. Try giving an inside sales rep his or her own office - their numbers plummet because they are no longer immersed in the competitive environment of a sales floor.
Any way, I'm just trying to make the point that there are downsides to having a traditional cubicalized office that could erode the immediate benefits.
"Now, I don't want to comment on the effectiveness of open floor plans for fields other than my own. But for software development, this is the single best way to sabotage the productivity of your entire engineering team."
http://nathanmarz.com/blog/the-inexplicable-rise-of-open-flo...
There's really only so much you can do with a hundred people in a large open space-there's a constant background hum of people moving, shifting, eating, listening to music that you just can't get rid of
There's simply no denying it. Maybe these open space workplaces don't have situations like this. But in my line of work it's part of the job.
Also programming requires a minimum of focus, I might not consider programming a hard, highly intellectual task, but personally I'm very easily distracted. I also have a very hard time concentrating at something properly if I can sense I'm watched or analyzed.
Maybe it has something to do with how people want team interaction. You could ask teams to meet at least twice a day, and they might prefer having their own office.
The best way, I think, would be to always workers if they either prefer to have their own small office or to work in a open space.
To me, the best is to use my laptop in a empty park, with or without internet access, preferably without. I just download any documentation, some article or tutorial, eventually some wikipedia offline browser, and I'm able to concentrate.
From my limited experience working in these areas, I do believe this is the crucial insight and the real reason behind the movement...Occam's razor and all that.
Where I last worked in an open-office environment, we had a fairly strict "no talking" policy, and were expected to use IM to communicate to the people next to us.
I always thought, "well, isn't this defeating the purpose of the open floorplan?", and of course it does, unless you factor in the above insight.
And I contest some of the points raised: For companies where people are mostly left to themselves save for meetings and sync ups, is it really about a supervisor's ability to monitor what you're doing? Collaboration is probably the driving force, which again raises the question as to how does one measure and evaluate such things?
Plus, are private offices really the alternative for most people working in open offices? I think the cubicle is a much more likely replacement than the private office.
Amusingly, Wikipedia's page on cubicles has a photo captioned "before cubicles: open office with desks arranged in rows, 1937."[0]
I wonder if open offices spread illness faster than other layouts? (I say this has I'm listening to half my office coughing their lungs up with a cold)
My first job was on a newspaper production floor. It was an open office clustered by role, with matching support people clustered nearby. I have never seen an environment that had the astonishing level of productivity per person of this team, and I mean by easily a factor of 10x. Any question I had I could get an answer in 2 seconds. We were using laughably old equipment, but there was no emailing anything, and there was no possibility of miscommunication. It was exhilarating.
OTOH these were well defined tasks, with a deadline at the end of each day. So it was like running a team tough mudder every week.
My next office job, years later, had a semi-open floorplan. It was an absolute nightmare. My coworkers would listen to Howard Stern every morning, and then leave the radio on afterwards. People would have protracted calls on speakerphone. Compared to the newspaper, it seemed like no one was ever actually working, instead they were just talking about nonsense, and torturing me in the process. Typically someone would send you an email, then immediately walk over to your desk and explain it to you with no regard for whether you were busy.
But this work was complex, boring, intricate, different every time, and the deadlines were months away, the biggest challenge was planning and focus. There was much less reason for teamwork and a much greater need to delve in to your task and be left alone.
So I think generalizing about open floorplans is difficult. It obviously has to do with company culture and the type of work.
I completely agree with you but without an open layout how do I control my employees?
And:
With an open layout I can put more people in less space.
This is what business people think. All the rest is poetry.
So it's not like the company isn't aware; it's just that they seem to believe the negative effects aren't bad enough to offset the cost of more office space (or the opportunity cost of slower hiring)
Cornell did a study while back that found that communication gets worse with private offices. The pernicious thing is that employees' very perception of "frequent communication" changes depending on which kind of environment they're in. If they're in open plan it's several times a day often on the fly. If they have a private office, it plummets to "several times a week in a scheduled meeting". [1]
So that's consistent with private office people saying everything's fine -- because their very perception of the standard for team interaction has vastly diminished.
They also noted that office workers may be biased to favor plans that maximize their personal productivity even at the expense of team productivity, because their compensation is tied more to the former. Whereas management sees the bigger picture of both elements.
That may go a long way towards explaining why employees and management are often at odds over how to arrange the office.
(Having said that, by no means do I think that a constant barrage of noise in your face in a maximally open office is optimal. There are many degrees of openness, and I'm just pointing to evidence that private offices may swing too far in the other direction.)
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140615182702/http://iwsp.human...
It takes me lots of energy to ignore something. Like someone walking behind my computer monitor. Like someone having a loud unrelated conversation next to me. Like being conscious of my appearance and behavior (out of respect for others). And it takes energy to solve problems and write great code.
I simply can't do it all every day, day in and day out. Monday is fine. I can work long hours on Monday in the office, getting lots of good work done. But on Tuesday, I am irritable and can't focus as well. By Wednesday, I'm useless. If I go into the office, I come home exhausted, unable to even speak.
Fortunately I can work from home, but it's a heartbreaking trade. It's not as much fun (or productive) to collaborate over the internet as it is in person. I am definitely not going to accidentally end up going out to lunch or coffee with a new friend. Etc.
Comments to the tune of "suck it up", "wear headphones", are nothing new to the ears of introverts. We've been dealing with this _extroverted culture_ all our lives. Extroverts thrive on stimulation. Introverts drown in it.
The effect on productivity therefore cannot be determined without knowing what you're going to be doing.
I do find these articles fascinating from the perspective of an economist. Economists frequently assume workers get paid based on their productivity. Then we see that in the real world employers are willing to adopt an open office model that workers hate, even one that can reduce productivity, because they want to monitor the workers to see what they are doing. If workers were paid according to productivity, it wouldn't matter how many times they checked Facebook between 8 am and 5 pm.
> it's way more productive to have my coauthors right next to me.
Having people you do not work with (and especially their conversations) in the same room is, as far as I can see, always harmful.
And this is why a lot of startups work well in an open plan. When there are only 5 people in the company it can work well.
It is a completely different situation than the typical 80-150 people per floor open plans of larger companies.
The shared space is much more tolerable when everyone is part of the same role (developer in this case), meaning approximately the same sensitivity to interruptions, the same frequency of phone conversations, etc. Contrast that with the open office I worked in, with Customer Service and Sales folks mixed in with sysadmins and developers. That environment isn't good for anyone: the devs are irritated by all the chatter from the CSR and Sales folks, who in turn feel guilty even though it's their job to be jabbering on the phone all day. Ironically, the office space was occupied largely by people who were rarely IN those offices because they were all in meetings constantly.
On the other hand, when I want to give my eyes some rest, I can focus on Manhattan high-rises in the window. When I need to talk to my colleagues face to face, or just see if they are at their desks, it is easy to do, too. If we need to talk for more than a minute, we could walk to the coffee point of to a meeting room.
I can imagine an open space implemented badly: people cramped together, with little elbow room, phone-talking sales reps next to code-laden programmers next to number-crunching financial guys, and no meeting rooms. I won't like such a setup either.
But from where I sit, the open space plan looks pretty okay.
There is closed office space available, if you want it. Most people choose not to use it.
Once you have mobility, you get to choose who you work with. You can get together in ad-hoc groups for a while, bring more people in as necessary, and leave for some other place when you need to. It sounds too simple and maybe too stupid to be as powerful as it actually is.
I've also worked in open plans where you don't have a choice of where to sit. It sucked hard. I wouldn't do that again.
While I see the advantages to open offices, not everyone works the same way, companies who want to maximize employee effectiveness should cater to both types of needs.
Effectively companies trade productivity for higher transparency and cheaper office space. What happened to the need to actually maximize productivity?
To give the benefit of doubt it is plausible people might confuse open plan offices with team rooms.
It has gone away since governemnts started supporting specific companies all around.
When I worked in a private office I found it hard to stay motivated. This is in contrast to an open office when I can look at the people around me all working hard on the same problem. It makes me feel motivated to keep working.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8696391
We demote duplicates, but if there are already comments on the thread, we leave the post open so discussion can continue.
I then work from 3pm-5pm and 10pm-12pm at home. Im usually one of the most productive and it keeps me fresh. Fyi I have done this at several companies and my bosses always seem happy with it
90% of people will answer the latter.
Case closed.
I was pretty shocked since I thought the open office had been well debunked over the past 4 years or so.
The article says: there are many ways in which open offices are not great.
The headline says: they are destroying the workplace.
The article doesn’t come close to making that claim, even if “destroy the workplace” were a meaningful idea.
Which is not to say that they aren't there, it's just that private offices are not investable, so they won't happen any more.
I wonder if Eric Schmidt believes that great art will be produced by the most efficient market, or if he thinks that breakthrough science will come out of the most popular lab?
Google makes 250k per employee, and can afford to have a thoughtful and spacious open office that has sound proofing and sufficient break-out rooms and meeting places.
On top of that, they can afford to be picky with their employees and hire thoughtful intelligent people.
Compare that with a standard company workplace.
First, they get excited about saving money by smashing more people into a smaller area. Second, they are following a trend and don't know to care about the 'small' things that make an open office livable (adequate side rooms, soundproofing, etc) Third they have whatever hierarchy they had before, which probably prevents people from collaborating easily because they'll be stealing time from their bosses projects etc. Next, they aren't hiring to Google's standards. After that, they might not be in a tech industry with quick feedback to failure and success and be filled with people who therefore optimizing for weirder goals. Finally, all those employees aren't used to the open office plan, resent it, and are filled with bad habits.
So in the end it's easy for me to see tons of terrible open office plans, while acknowledging they work terrifically for some people.
Perhaps most companies don't have tasks that are hard enough to really require optimum concentration?
Before Toyota and JIT factories were run generally really inefficiently.
"I am upset that no one else seems to like TV shows I find enjoyable and they keep getting canceled."
You are comparing trivial entertainment with the environment most people spend the most of their productive hours as adults?
"Oh, I see you have lost an arm. Well, my finger itches sometimes. It happens."
Communication between teams/etc IS IMPORTANT
And we need people to be able to be productive using other tools if they won't meet face to face (like HipChat, or others)
Second, it's not even the noise that wrecks people but visibility from behind ("open-back visibility"). That's not because people are constantly hiding things. It suggests low status and makes it hard (and stressful) to perform at one's best.
There are environments where open-plan offices are better, but they're rare. One is a trading floor, where seconds matter (a lot) and information must be broadcast quickly and verbally (i.e. yelling). Unless there's a real-time sensitivity to what they're doing, programmers are better off with more privacy.
If you are going to use an open-plan office, the least you can do is to give everyone a 7-foot wall at his or her back.