But Where Do People Work in This Office?

I was the engineering manager at my previous employer and we were reconfiguring our office layout. I talked to the engineers and with one exception each person wanted private offices. We set up one floor of the office with high cubicle walls, and a lot of sound isolation. So not exactly private offices, but really a pretty nice setup (with the best equipment and furniture available).

On a separate floor we had a bullpen with ops folks, people who were on the phone a lot, etc. One by one, each engineer gravitated towards the bullpen until no one spent more than perhaps 1 day per week in the dedicated office space. The part of the office that each engineer had claimed to want to work in became abandoned.

I think, in spite of the theoretical want for quiet space and isolation, there's a very human need at work to be in the middle of the action -- to hear what's going on, and to be connected to your colleagues. There were certain tasks and problems for which engineers would walk downstairs and make use of the dedicated space, but it was ultimately not where folks wanted to be on a daily basis.

Generally software developers at any level are treated as the lowest level of person at companies, even when the company specializes in software. As a result, they are packed in wherever they fit.

The theory seems that developers benefit from feeling like a frathouse of some sort, where they play in most of their area, but otherwise cram together to study for a bit, so that they can go back to goofing off afterwards.

Developers are not treated as professionals. They are treated as animals; herded together to make them work, but otherwise just giving them big grassy fields.

Check out Fog Creek's office: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/12/29.html

> Gobs of well-lit perimeter offices. Every developer, tester, and program manager is in a private office; all except two have direct windows to the outside (the two that don't get plenty of daylight through two glass walls).

The longer I spend in this environment (coming up to five years) the less I like it. I like the idea of having large, interesting open spaces for more social activities including work, but most of the work I do lends itself well to being not surrounded by people having conversations or - in some cases - literally just messing around all day.

There's gotta be a balance.

People do the open office floor plan because it's efficient and economical, not because it's the the best for the workers.

We designed a ton of cubbies (like in your university library), 1 person private rooms, 2 person conference rooms, etc. in our office to accommodate for the fact that many people need to more privacy and quiet than just headphones. We also break up the main open plans to help quiet the noise and distraction.

We have about 45,000 sq. ft today, and will be adding another 45,000 sq. ft this year. When we do, there will be much less open floor plan. I do think there's a happy medium, with team rooms of 6 to 15 people, depending on role and requirements.

Having worked in offices like these (in a call center, of all things), I really don't understand how the hell you could get any work done. We had people going home with migraines after two days in conditions like that Facebook photo, and that was just reading scripts into a phone headset for 8 hours. Actually producing anything like an intelligent thought in that kind of corporate tuna can is unthinkable to me.

"We have our own indoor artisanal cheese maker! ... but our actual workspace looks like it was cobbled together after a day of frantic Costco purchases." How about sparing the free Sun Chips and putting some walls in, eh?

Open floor plan offices are generally pretty unpleasant, but some of the negative effects can be mitigated.

I worked at Sun Micro a while ago (the place that is now Facebook), and we all had offices at the time. However, Sun had also started to create numerous drop-in work centers. One of them was in downtown SF, just south of market.

This was an "open" office with three largish rooms with cubicles and desks, and a smaller number of offices with doors that close (reservable or walk in).

Here's what made it work - one of the rooms was designated a "zone of silence", and it really was enforced. The two outer rooms had phones at each desk, the quiet room did not. Sales people and other workers who needed to make noise worked in the outer rooms, programmers and other heads down people worked in the quiet room.

Not surprisingly, there were plenty of people who wanted to break the rules. This generally happened when all the desks in the loud room were taken. Then you'd get people trying to take phone calls in the quiet room on their cell phones. Some felt that as long as they spoke in a relatively hushed tone of voice, it would be ok (though everyone could still hear their conversation). Others figured that the phone could ring, and they could start their conversation in the room, as long as they were actively walking outside the room as they talked.

What saved it was an office manager who simply wouldn't tolerate it. She would absolutely tell people that they couldn't do this, and that their right to work from the drop in center would be revoked if they continued to do it. She didn't care about their rank, or if they liked her.

I did have a couple of ugly moments about it. I very politely asked people on a couple of occasions not to use their phones in the designated quiet room (with signs everywhere about it), and more than once, they started in on how much more important their work was than mine.

But it was relatively rare, because the signage and vibe of the room really was pretty clear about it, and the office manager was very strict and just didn't have the kind of personality that was easily pushed around.

I'm currently working at a place where I have 4 locations I can work from:

1 - my office (shared with one other person)

2 - a team room, about 10 people right now

3 - an office across from my client, it's a "guest cube" in a cube farm

4 - from home

Plus the normal mix of conference rooms.

I find that in any given week, I'll rotate through about 3 of those pretty comfortably. My officemate also has a similar work schedule, so I'm alone in my office most of the time, so I use it for deep concentration. It's too isolated though to spend all my time there.

The team room is great if I need to collaborate, or get my energy up. It's also not too bad if I need to concentrate as everybody there is working.

The guest cube is where I go if I need to do document editing, presentations, client meetings...stuff that's so distracting I can't get any technical work done anyway.

And home, because well, who doesn't want to work from home every once in a while?

So far, it's the best workplace I've ever been, and this includes about 5 years of working from home, various client sites, cubes, personal offices, open floor plans. The best part is that it doesn't cost the company a fortune, but I get flexibility, privacy when I need it, collaboration when I need it, different work contexts etc.

I've been more productive in the few months I've been here than I've been anywhere else in my career.

Why do people like working in coffee shops?

It's cramped. It's noisy. There's barely enough power outlets (if at all). Uncomfortable chairs. Annoying conversations. Hipster baristas.

Yet people all over the world cram into coffee shops like Starbucks, sucking up the free wifi with a grande half-calf mocha latte, churning out a report or answering e-mails, sometimes even on a conference call. Conditions that could border on sweatshop if it weren't for the food and drink. It seems completely unintuitive.

Are there benefits to this environment? Perhaps.

For one thing, you don't know anyone there; nobody is going to interrupt you, or tell loud inappropriate jokes while tossing a football, and you are so close to people you are forced to focus on what is right in front of you. You get the comfort of being near other humans without any requirement to ever interact with them. Then there's the convenience of easy access to food, a bathroom, and that miracle drug we're all dependent on. Add the internet and a table and chair and it's like some utopian Japanese vision of the future of all offices. The music is a nice bonus.

But there's one thing I think really makes the coffee shop an ideal place to work: no expectations.

You can come and go as you please. No assigned seats. No meetings. No interruptions. Nothing but your coffee and chair and table space and internet. Who cares if it's loud? Who cares if it's impractical to stay there? If you just need to get something done and break away from the commitment to a typical monotonous working life, this is your hideaway.

I think all offices should just be giant coffee shops.

It depends on your responsibilities. If you are in devops, ops or support, open office is great for you.

If you are a coder, an engineer, or an architect, then open office is painful.

If you are a manager, then open office is embarrassing.

Managers like bullpens because they are very cheap. They cram a lot of people into a small space. They don't require the maintence of door locks or even cube walls. People can be moved around very easily.

I think they also like that everyone can look over everyone else's shoulder very easily, which creates peer pressure to work. In my experience, the maangers that advocate this are often the ones that are really spending all their time in special break-out rooms or conference rooms.

It's funny how most of these places hire the top cs grads and dont realize they're implemented an n^2 noise generation (audio and visual) algorithm for their developers, deoptimizing the very thing you hired them for: concentrated brain power.

Maybe the best thing to do is layout things like a microprocessor, where everyone gets their own isolated location (ram/register address), a place where people who need to be associated come together periodically (a local cache), and a meeting place for larger groups (an ALU) for bigger operations.

Why does it have to be either or? Why not provide a variety of different work environments, encourage employees to find the one that best suits them, and work there? I think back to my days at the University. Sometimes a louder, open space was great so I'd head to the student union or the group floor of the library. Or maybe I needed some isolated quiet time, find a private room in the library so I could think. I've worked in places that had only open spaces, and it was very difficult to find any quiet, more private rooms. There are times that I like a more open environment, and I get work done there, but when there are no quiet places I can retreat to when I need it, then it can become very frustrating to get any work done. And no, don't tell me you provide me headphones to 'block out' the noise. Sometimes its quiet I want, not louder noises to block out the existing noises (not to mention the fact that it doesn't block out visual stimulation which can be equally distracting).

We should have someone like Ben Horowitz who has been a line manager of engineers, CEO of a large company that cranks out code - both the pure "New technology" type code, as well as the "Lots of framework code" type engineering, comment on this. But, from memory, I think he said something like this:

"Engineering productivity, counterintuitively, appears to increase as you move them out of private offices into contact with one another, both through cross-pollination of different ideas, as well as the energy inherent in working in a team environment. This graph of productivity, though, does have a maxima as density increases, until it begins to once again decrease as the distractions become a dominating effect. With that said, not all engineers are alike, and there are some individuals that are far more effective in a quiet room, than those who benefit from the open office layout. The efficient engineering organization should make opportunities for both types of engineers to excel."

I never thought I'd feel thankful for having high cubicle walls, but here we are.

I am currently working at Google as an intern and I'm probably going to be the contradicting opinion in this thread but I really appreciate the openspace office we have here. Maybe because it's my first "real" office job, but I do not find much of a problem working here. When I want to be on my own to think on stuff, I just put my headphones on (sometimes with music, sometimes without, since they are good at canceling noise anyway) and it's like being in my own isolated office. And if that is not enough, we have small cubicle-like mini-rooms where you can go and isolate yourself, most people use them to have phone conversations or do interviews, but nothing stops you from working in there with your laptop.

All in all, though, maybe it's my floor that is very quiet but there's not much distraction or annoying background noise as most people are busy working. When they are not working, they go somewhere else (the pub, the relax rooms, etc etc). If they want to have a work-related conversation that lasts more than 5-10 minutes, we have open areas with whiteboards separated from the desk area, or we have separate conference rooms you can use. Most of the time, I enjoy taking my headphones off and listening to a couple of coworkers making remarks on stuff (either work or non-work related), it helps me relieve stress and boredom much more than just staring at a wall or reading some articles online.

Ironically, the major source of annoyance in our floor recently has been the old AC system that sometimes starts making very loud noises and bothers everybody, but this is not the fault of the openspace office so it doesn't count :)

Unfortunately corporate culture has shifted to the point that it's seen as incredibly wasteful to give people private offices. Literally the only technology company I know of which provides private offices for everyone is Fog Creek.

Moreover, even if a startups wants to give their engineers private offices, external forces make it challenging. VCs think it's unnecessary overhead, and even some developers are turned off by the prospect when recruiting (particularly new grads).

So far the solution we've found is to have a separate "sanctuary" room. It's located right next to our main office, but it's kept completely silent. All conversations have to be kept out in the open office or conference rooms. So far it's working pretty well—when you want to hunker down and work, there's space for that but we can also collaborate easily.

It's also interesting to see where people have set up their "desk" (ie. default location, with their monitor). The majority of the company gravitates towards the open office by default, but a few writers and one engineer default to the sanctuary. Perhaps the open office is more attractive, even if it's less productive.

Personally, I put my desk in the sanctuary but end up spending most of my time in the open office.

I like this trend toward giant open plan offices - it gives us folks who work in our own quite offices a competitive advantage. :-)

As much as it pains for me to say it, I do think small, quiet 1-2 person offices are great for thinking and getting real work done. I believe the IDEO offices in the Bay Area have a combination of a centralised area for discussions and collaboration, but a set of smaller offices for more focused work time. Something which would actually be quite nice to see more of ...

Is it a generation gap? Old programmer vs new? The open office trend may be the death of my 2 decade career in writing software.

I do not need a spacious office: a room with a door, a distinct lack of distracting windows, and a 4x6 desk and an overflow side table would be perfect. Closing a door means I can focus and block out traffic, noise and the general hubbub of an office.

Has this guy even worked in any of these environments? I've worked at Facebook and it is surprisingly quiet. If people want to have meetings or talk, there are plenty of conference rooms to take advantage of. Worst case, the free Sennheisers in the tech vending machines takes care of any other noises that you might not like.

I personally work better in an open office environment. I work off the energy of others and it allows me to focus more than being alone in an office.

While I understand if people legitimately don't like an open office environment, this type of article seems like it is just trying to put down these companies with little knowledge about how loud it really is in these offices.

And if you don't like the environment at Facebook/Google/Twitter/etc, just move to another company. Let's not pretend that it is hard to get another job with one of those companies on your resume.

Those office all look nice - until you get to the place where work actually takes place. I don't care if the foosball table is in a nice room or if the kitchen is fancy. I spend 95% of my time at my desk. Focus some energy on making that area bearable.

I look at those wide-open office spaces and get anxious. I need my lonely, quiet space to work.

I have a semi-private office (two of us) in a ~15X15 office with a door, I would not give it up for anything in the world. openspaces are terrible for productivity. too many distractions.

I used to work at Epic (the Health IT company), which is known for its interesting office design and giving its staff individual offices [1]. Now that I've been working for startups, I've worked in more bullpen-type offices.

A few things:

1) Having my own office did not mean that there weren't distractions. It's impractical to build sound-proof walls between offices and the guy across from me loved to try to sing opera for hours a day. I eventually moved offices to another part of campus for that reason.

2) Likewise, I've worked in open offices that were pretty monastic. Engineers are quiet, everyone is wired in and most people talk on Slack/HipChat. The only interruption was when the mailman would drop off the daily mail.

3) I think the worst thing about open offices are the logistics of staff that need to take phone calls. As a customer-facing programmer that does sales support and configuration assistance it's sub-optimal not having a dedicated space for phone calls. When the perfect storm arises of too many people needing to take calls, everything flies into anarchy where I'm forced to take a call in a common space and try to be quiet. A bullpen that has some separation and accommodation for those needs is ok. A bullpen that doesn't have that is not.

[1] http://www.xconomy.com/wisconsin/2014/09/19/epic-hopes-wi-ca...

My company recently built out a schmancy new open plan office and moved a bunch of people from my team there. Based on what I've seen so far the answer is that people don't work in that office. They work from home, because that's the only place you can get any actual work done. They do come into the office one or two days a week, but only so that management doesn't feel like they wasted money on all those ping-pong and pool tables.

Wherever my next job is, I'll make sure to take a tour of the working environment. If it looks anything like these photos, I'll decline an offer.

The author is incredulous that any of these companies get any work done. Yet. All of these companies are tremendously successful and produce great software. Obviously there is quite a bit of disconnect between what the author thinks and what happens in reality.

Personally I think it's because none of these places are about productivity. In fact I think it's the exact opposite. Take Google for instance. If you think about working on improving Google search what kinds of things do you think are important? Productivity? Or Creativity? My bet is on creativity which I think is where these kinds of workspaces excel.

You are in a room full of smart people who are all collaborating on the same set of problems. Innovative solutions are more likely to occur in that environment than closed off in a personal office. Personally, I like the trend of offering both kinds of workspaces. Private offices for when you just need some time to think. Public workspaces for collaboration and creativity. Conference rooms for meetings. Leave it up to the individual to determine when they need to work in each space.

I've worked in a bunch of these kinds of spaces - all utterly distracting. Turns out I'm more productive in my own quiet space at home. If you are doing this to your workers, give 'em the option to work from home and save the rent.

If those office layouts don't appeal to you, it's because those companies don't want to recruit you.

Deep-pocketed companies like Facebook (who surely have enough money to build any kind of office space) choose to build open layouts as a signal. They want to attract a certain kind of developer, and they probably have a platoon of operations researchers telling them they need to arrange their offices like this to get them.

If you like quiet private offices then you will not work at Facebook. But that's okay because Facebook doesn't want you anyway.

As a remote worker, I sometimes work at my desk, I sometimes work at coffee shops, and I get a nice blend that way. Sometimes I log into IRC, sometimes I don't, and again, I'm able to find the balance which works for me personally.

Background noise is up to me. Interacting with co-workers is up to me (to a point, of course).

Some of my rent will be tax-deductible for me personally, none of it will be an expense for my employer.

Meanwhile, none of the existing research supports open-plan offices. Yet it's the norm in the industry.

Scalability is a reason that many growing companies use open floors. When you are growing rapidly, you're often put in a situation where you need the most flexible possible floor plan, otherwise you have to move offices. Having way more offices than employees sitting empty waiting for the hiring to happen in the next few years feels too much like a waste of space. This makes the open office plan very seductive when making decisions about how to lay out the floors.

Personally, I think that most office designers take the concept of open offices too far. From what I've seen of several offices, as a Software Engineer, is that Open Office is meant to be entirely open. This means that the only dividers/partitions are for things like meeting rooms. The rest of the office is open, such as halls, cafeterias/break rooms, etc. This is what causes my hatred of open offices.

I am on the fence about cubicles/private offices, because I do like the fact that my team is close by and I can have a conversation by turning around and talking to them. The annoying noise for me is all the idle chatter from people in meeting rooms near by coming out of their meeting and deciding to carry on a conversation right outside the meeting room, or while walking back to their desk.

Ideally, I'd like an open office to mean that it's open for my team, where we are partition/sectioned together, but that there is a door or some way of keeping out all the ambient office noise/sights. I believe if I had this, I would be able to get a lot more work done as I'm not having to wear headphones to cut out the general clutter of distractions from my environment.

My favorite space was the one we laid out for our startup back in the dotcom boom.

We had large cubicles that housed 4 developers each. We each had a corner, and there was a small conference table in the middle so we could just turn around and collaborate. It was a great mix of a shared environment and private, where it was easy to talk to the folks on your team, but also easy for everyone to just work quietly for much of the time.

It's not about individual productivity - it's about team and company productivity.

I doubt anyone questions whether individual effectiveness suffers from an open layout. However open layouts have several benefits that more than compensate: - Impromptu conversations are easy. The barrier to ask someone a question is lower - it's faster to get unblocked. - Shared context. With conversations happening in the open, others will often overhear, sometimes learn, and often will choose to participate. - Impromptu socialization leads to better morale. Someone drops by to chat socially, others join in, people build personal relationships. - Function-specific spaces. The space saved by having a denser desk layout is allocated to having everything from kitchens to massage chair rooms to ping-pong tables. At the same cost per employee, an open space layout has more 'perks'.

I've worked in both offices and open spaces and I far prefer open spaces with a good etiquette about when to interrupt someone.

And bathrooms. Why are there never enough bathrooms in tech companies?

1. These are clearly marketing pictures taken by professional photographers. Well done ones I might add. They are meant to demonstrate (perception/reality) what daily life of an any employee is. Not every big tech company is a composed of 99% engineers. Cassandra and HHVM were built there (or somewhere similar), yet people whose only evidence is a bunch of marketing pictures decide to question the design decisions of people with intimate knowledge about their company's organization.

2. There is yet to be conclusive evidence that open offices work or don't work, and I don't expect this to change anytime soon. What is clear to me is that the correlation between good code and office does not exist. Think of how much code has been written in kitchens, garages, vans, etc that may have changed the world...

I think there's a balance to be struck.

I used to think that programmers complaining about open office spaces were just nitpicking... then I learned how to program. Open offices are a reason for headphones at best and a nightmare at worst.

That having been said, I've worked in spaces where everyone had their own private office. It was great for productivity, but I felt like I never got to know anyone. All communication was forced, which caused a lot of annoying and unnecessary meetings.

I'm not sure what the answer is, but it's probably somewhere in the middle.

I can't stand open plan offices, I can just about cope with a shared office as long as phone calls are very rare/none existent.

My current office http://imgur.com/a/KmHEO is about perfect, Apart from the computer I spent essentially nothing on it, the desk was off freecycle, the chair inherited from previous tenant etc.

It's warm and quiet and beyond that I'm not fussed about architectural masterpieces.

They are kept in Bull Pens because they treat their employees as sterile commodities to be herded around.

You don't become WalMart/Facebook/Twitter by treating your employees well. You become big and profitable by cutting as many corners as you can and keeping revenue up. Publicly traded companies generally get into this-quarter frenzy that never leaves and kills any sort of long term viability as being a company of and for people.

There's few if any private offices in trading. Even those who have them don't use them except for meetings.

As an introvert I can understand the need for quiet time, but part of what makes work 'fun' (and frankly tolerable) is the interaction with your teammates who are working on similarly challenging problems. I definitely miss the back and forth now that it's just me and my co-founder in a private office.

I code in an open office. My solution: headphones, and three 27 inch monitors angled inward. It's not quite as good as walls, but it cuts out enough visual distraction that it works well enough. I've also got an adjustable-height desk that I leave at standing height, so there's not much going on above monitor height.

A big chunk of the benefit of having an office is keeping your visual field entirely work-related.

Ha, this is where I work:

http://news.images.itv.com/image/file/257809/image_update_b4...

That photo is quite old. There are about 80% more desks in that room now (around 1000 in total). It's pretty loud. I put up with it though because the job is otherwise pretty awesome.

That Dropbox office was a big damper on my enthusiasm interviewing there. "Wow, this is the most beautiful office I've seen... but how do you all concentrate?" They had some answers, fwiw, and maybe I'd have adapted, though my experience of similar setups over a few months says no.

This is a real problem for recruiting if the recruitee is me.

As I commented on the article: I used to work at DeveloperTown (http://developertown.com) in Indianapolis. Their "house" setup is both unique and awesome. Any article discussing office space for programmers and designers needs to reference them.

Here is what I think about when someone says open office: http://www.belarus.by/relimages/000914_392548.jpg

Am I the only one here that does not like too much silent offices? I like to feel my environment alive, I don't want silence, I want the low noise of smart people discussing, sharing and interacting.

Is this some extension / perversion of the original XP principles? I feel like XP Explained talks a lot about office layout and how it can foster communication and teamwork.

I put on headphones if I want quiet. What I really need to get away from is flowdock/hipchat/etc... invading my screen. That kills my flow worse than anything else.

I am not sure if the author visited any of the offices in question, but they do have plenty of rooms/floors/isolated areas where people do work.

We are set up in offices with 2-5 developers per room. Works out nicely. If work styles don't meld, you can request to move (given there is space).

Would collaboration be hurt by spreading things out?

I work in an open office and I love it, when this space was designed, we all hated it, we cried, we moaned and grunted about it. We left our nice comfy cozy private spaces and have to rub elbows with others. More than a year later, I will pick it any day over any other space, collaboration at it's best. For the first time I find myself enjoying to work more with others than to work alone. So whilst some may not like it, please do realize that there are those of us that love it.

clearly the author does not understand how important both vanity and greed are to most people - especially decision makers. XD

I don't see the problem. When I put on my headphones it's like I'm sitting in a private office.

I wonder what do people who disagree with open floor plans think the desks should be like?

Introverts prefer a quiet place to be able to focus and work, a lot.

I've done some impressive work... From my bed.

This resonates with me so much. I currently work in a 'creative' and 'collaborative' open office and I just don't enjoy it. It's loud, distracting, frustrating and worst of all, it makes me a hypocrite. I hate the noise, but I am just as much a part of the problem as everyone else. I talk to teammates and make jokes when other people are working, just as they do when I'm working. I can't keep count of how many times per day I'm deep in thought and then get startlingly pulled out of it when I notice my line-of-sight goes right through someone and they're looking at me.

I find myself coming up with reasons to work from home, where I am much more productive, much more comfortable and (I think) much more creative. I can take the time I need, I can think out loud, I can pace, I can drop to the floor and do some pushups (which I find helps reset my brain state and get a new line of thoughts flowing) without distracting other people.

A private or semi private office wouldn't fix all these issues, but it would go a long way in making me want to come into the office.