Why We Still Believe in Private Offices

Am I the only one that considers lunch to be a sacred, personal time that I don't want to spend on small talk with coworkers? I need my lunch break to recover from the day's stress and pace, so I can come back refreshed and ready to code for 4-5 more hours. As an introvert, I find the team lunches to be waay more stressful than actual work, and that eliminates any benefits of a nicely cooked meal. If I end up in a team lunch situation, I find it hard to be productive for the rest of the day (unless I take a separate mini-lunch break by myself later).

The situation was especially bad at one recent job where the lunch conversations always revolved around local sports, which I had no interest in, or this guy remodeling his house, which was only interesting the first 3 times he gave us an update. So I started bringing sandwiches to work, parking in the garage beneath the building, and eating lunch all alone in my car in the dark, listening to NPR or just enjoying the silence. It was the most refreshing hour of my workday and I felt 200% more productive after that break than I would after 30 minutes of small talk about sports.

I just want to point this out to people who think team lunches should be mandatory. Not everyone enjoys them equally, and it's not always just about the food.

The thing to consider here is Stack Exchange is a company that serves geeks, and is built by geeks. Naturally the culture and values of the company are going revolve around developers. But for a huge chunk of the companies out there everything revolves around sales and marketing. The actual role and importance of developers varies from company to company but very few of them are going to revolve around them in the same way. At many they're an afterthought.

While there is no "typical manager" it's safe to say that if you sample any given company and take all their managers and executives you won't find a lot of coders. Executives don't sit around talking about Rust vs Go, because it really isn't that important to their business most of the time. So they really have no idea what it's like to be a coder, and probably don't take up a lot of cycles thinking about it.

Most jobs do benefit from collaboration. Development is no exception, however too much socialization and interruptions kill us. This is what they fail to understand on most levels. They see sales, marketing, and other groups that benefit from being able to swivel a chair and ask a question and automatically assume that it will help developers, since they "never meet their deadlines" anyway.

So in my opinion the push for open offices for coders is mostly out of touch thinking, a little need for micromanagement, and of course being able to show off work being done for people taking a walk through. How that affects developers is of little concern.

There is another possibility, that all offices are fundamentally flawed creations designed not to foster work so much as to create a dynamic of control.

When you pay someone and you control both their place and time for over 1/3 of their daily life, there are inherent problems. I'm not sure that any office plan is ever going to be super ideal because of the fundamental problems of power and control that come with an employer/employee relationship.

Open plans are designed to look cool and help recruiting. They also create a sense of "busyness" that owners and managers love. Busyness is proof they are still in charge.

Arguing about wether or not it is better for productivity is a red herring. It was never about productivity in the first place. Most of what happens in an office is only tangentially related to the idea of work efficiency.

It bums me out some to see the standard-bearer for private offices in our profession showing us floor-to-ceiling glass walls in a panopticon arc, "not as creepy as you think"[1]. The Overton window's shifted so far to the cage-free side that privacy isn't even in our frame? OK, a few companies still believe in offices with walls.

I don't doubt that it's a fine place to work, likely nicer than the cubicles I've worked in, though maybe not better than my home office. But they're clearly not private.

[1] From a caption on the original version of the page.

I like what Stackoverflow does with their offices. Certainly better than what is trendy right now (open plan) and better than a cube' farm also.

I will say I think Microsoft's little offices are better overall. The ones I've seen have four real walls, a wooden door, and a window to outside with a blind on it. So if you want to work in the dark, you can.

Stackoverflow's glass offices mean that you cannot shut out the light, have to deal with any glare, may get distracted with what is going on in the offices either side of yours, and it means people can look over your shoulder whenever they choose.

They would be perfectly good offices with full length blinds on them. But then the people next to you may complain that you're blocking their natural light. But overall they still aren't even near the worst around...

I can't emphasize how important it is not to just barge in on somebody's office or workstation without pinging them online or on their phone first. Unexpected questions lead to incomplete, unsure, or downright incorrect answers, which can unintentionally alienate your employees/coworkers.

But it's also important that actual discussions do take place in person with undivided attention, not being distracted by things going on around you. Miscommunications lead to fallouts between coworkers or employers and bosses.

As I developer I need my focus space. But I also want a separate place to be able to discuss things with coworkers -- as long as my workstation remains my castle, I'm happy to come out and go to meetings, do trainings, ask/answer questions, and hang out during lunchtime or breaks.

In my last place of work, we had two main teams, and their rooms were separated by a shared commons room, but this led to a divided culture. Everyone had laptops and each desk had a couple monitors, so every week, a couple people swapped out from each room and mixed up the teams. That alone helped our productivity and intra-office culture.

I liked the comment: "I’m a big advocate of remote work culture even if nobody works remote."

That really works: respect people's time even if you are in the shared, no-cube, open office world.

I've recently left one organization for another. I was a Dev in a Cube for for several years. I now have my own office with a large window. It couldn't be a more pleasant experience.

I think with open plans you're sharing a lot more germs too. How many times have your co-workers came into work sneezing? Even in a cube farm, those germs just spread. At least with an office you can keep you and your germs better confined.

One thing I don't understand -- in this time of laptops, tablets and ubiquitous internet access (whether in-office wi-fi or the mobile broadband), why do we still have this discussion?

Are there any companies out there who have a heterogeneous office layout, with open-space areas, single-person rooms and anything in between which could then be used by anyone to their own preference? I would like to see a setup where I'm able to work together with my team in a small-group environment in the morning, and then retreat to a single-person office in the afternoon. In most companies, there is very little reason to be bound to a single desk throughout the day.

I can imagine such a workplace, with team leads/managers being responsible to coordinating their teams when it comes to workplaces, and ideally the company would monitor the usage and constantly adapt and improve the workplace accordingly.

I work at Esri where almost everyone gets their own office with a sliding door. Private offices are still alive here (Thanks Jack :)

I've been seriously annoyed about that since I started working in one of those open offices. I've read a few articles about it and cannot understand why would someone like to be in such an environment. Stack Exchange's organization/culture seems to be a quite balanced approach, providing both the common areas where people can be together working/relaxing AND a proper space for them to stay focused while working alone on something. Really good to know there are companies trying to get it right instead of cool.

It'd be nice if in an ideal setting there was a balance of both open and closed perspectives. I guess I consider myself an introverted extrovert. While I enjoy being around others and having physical interaction when the situation precludes the necessity open is great. But I think as others have said what the powers at be fail to realize is that in order to be productive SE's we need longer, uninterrupted fragments of time throughout the day for deep, intense, unadulterated focus...when this doesn't happen. Things go to Hell in a hand basket rather quickly. More problematic for me than physical space restriction was the timetable restriction that too many meetings and other time sucks can have. Non-code pushers fail to understand that that question they asked about in the 8 a.m. stand up hasn't been solved or even thought about b/c we can't get a waking 2+ hours of fluid thought. Having worked in pretty much every type of space I still can't say which I really prefer/which makes me most productive!

The new offices my company is moving to will have an open floor plan and a foosball table.

Time to fight for remoting rights.

So what other software companies have private offices?

In addition to Stack Exchange, Microsoft was mentioned.

When I worked as a developer at Carnegie Mellon, I had an office shared with one or two other people (which was a nice perk, given the pay was much lower than industry).

Any others?

(note: none of the following has anything to do with office layout)

"Joel’s management philosophy is deceptively simple: hire smart people who get things done, and get the hell out of their way. The role of management is to give the people who actually do the work — the developers, designers, sysadmins, etc. — all the tools they need to get their jobs done, and then trust them to do the job!"

Let's say you work directly with about 15 people. The majority of those people are remote, with some local. The manager hangs back in meetings and listens for problems, and hurriedly works to resolve roadblocks for their direct reports. They also chime in occasionally if people need a reminder of a pressing high priority item or objective.

Now let's say those 15 people all come from different places and all have different ways of 'getting things done'. One person builds a unicycle in order to achieve the goal of 'transporting A to B'. Another person builds a bicycle. Yet another attempts to build a space shuttle.

If you're really really lucky, all of these different inventions and methods will simply mesh, and there will be no friction within the team, and things just churn on forever.

If you're dealing with smart, experienced people, there may be a lot of back-and-forth discussion while people try to figure out which kind of solution is the best.

If you're dealing with egocentric 'rock stars', absolutely nothing gets done unless someone basically bullies someone else into caving on their method.

Even if nobody actually ever voices a problem with the way someone else works, it is in a manager's interest to be invested in the past, present and future of the work produced. Legacy systems need to keep working, current designs need to be in-line with best practice, and planned work needs to be future-proof and maintainable. How do they do that by staying hands-off?

Where do I think Joel's management philosophy leaves you? If you're lucky, with product that mirrors the quality of your employees combined with their ability to form a single cohesive unit where everyone's work complements each other. If you're not lucky, you get arguments, delays, and code that doesn't support the goals of the project or the group.

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On a completely unrelated note: Jesus would I love to have a full kitchen in my office. I would be inspired to try to cook creative dishes and share with my coworkers. And i'd spend more time in the office.

I've worked in shared offices, open offices and for the last couple of years I've worked here http://imgur.com/a/13uvk (office on the cheap, it's my own company so I spend money only where it's important)

For me there is zero comparison, I enjoyed a shared office, loathed an open office beyond measure and absolutely love the peace and quiet that comes from working in a private office.

If my company isn't a success and I go back to regular employment I'm dreading that bit more than any other part of been employed.

This look like open plan to me: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.709036,-74.006763,3a,75y,268...

I assume those aren't developers?

An important point is that focusing on online tools (instead of in-person encounters) improves communication. Everyone is on equal footing in terms of being exposed to conversations.

In-person conversations, while arguably higher-bandwidth, are only shared by the participants. You had to have been there.