As Office Space Shrinks, So Does Privacy for Workers | Hacker News Reader

As Office Space Shrinks, So Does Privacy for Workers

nytimes.com

171 pointsgeebee171 comments

"Yodle’s chief executive, Court Cunningham, so values being close to other employees that he does not want a private office."

I've had a few bosses/CEOs who said they loved open space and forced it on everyone. What always ended up happening is that said CEO/boss would then informally requisition the shared conference/meeting room as their own personal office (when they spend 90% of the day in there, it's hard to see it as "the conference room" rather than "X's unofficial office"), and people would be stuck taking Skype calls/meetings in the open space, contributing to ridiculous noise levels (oh and my favorite part was the CEO who'd then step out of his meeting room to tell us we were making too much noise).

She became a convert. “It’s fun,” she said. “That’s the reason I wouldn’t want an office. It’s fun — if you like the people you work with.”

Terrible way to end the article, dismissing all of the concerns that were raised. But it's probably a submarine article planted by the architecture firm anyway.

I have a private office now, and I'd put it in the top 3 of the best things about my job. I have a hard time imagining going back to open space without losing most of my sanity and productivity.

Well, there's another possible alternative: they love microing their team and an open space makes it really easy to poke their nose into the day-to-day lives of their engineers.

Fun!

I have a private office now, and I'd put it in the top 3 of the best things about my job. I have a hard time imagining going back to open space without losing most of my sanity and productivity.

The company I work for has three major offices, and the one I work in is the only one with dedicated two person offices for the engineering staff (not due to policy so much as practical matters of space availability and cost). When I have to travel and work on-site at the other offices I rapidly find myself searching for any way to block out the noise and nuisance as my concentration is continually broken.

Bingo. If a manager wants to sit out with their employees and the manager is not doing the same work as the employees, they're there to micromanage. But they'll phrase it as "it helps communication" (translation: I can bother them any time I want) or "it helps with morale" (translation: the employees make it look like they're working harder because the boss is watching over their shoulder).

As an employee, I don't need a private office. But I sure as hell need my boss to have one.

>If a manager wants to sit out with their employees and the manager is not doing the same work as the employees, they're there to micromanage.

Exactly. My boss (the owner/CEO) has a bad habit of coming by my desk or work bench and saying "Son, whatcha workin' on?", knowing full well I'm juggling three or four tasks he's given me that day on top of my daily workload. I don't like to be rude, but I don't have time for idle chit-chat when I'm that busy, and I certainly don't have time for him to come by and try to mentor me on something he doesn't understand himself.

I've gone so far as to tell him "Look, you hired me to handle the computers and network here, right?" "Right." "And you did that because you have no idea how to do it yourself, right?" "Right, but..." "So please, trust me when I say that I've got this handled. You don't have to check up on me, and I promise you'll get a status report when I'm done." That usually sinks in for about half a day, then he's back to pestering me or another employee, making sure we're doing what we're supposed to.

I honestly don't see how he finds the time to do his duties if he's always looking over our shoulders. A manager who feels he has to micromanage is redundant and unnecessary, as far as I'm concerned.

On the other hand, I've known employees who needed the manager to drop by once a day and ask what they're working on - because they'd go off topic otherwise.

Some employees need micromanaging, others do not. There is no one rule to rule them all.

Dropping by once a day to check in isn't micromanaging, it's being a good manager. A bad manager is either never there when you need him, or always under your nose when you don't. A good manager knows how to stay between those extremes, and knows which employees need more "boss presence" and motivation, and which ones work better with minimal supervision.

A manager who feels he has to micromanage is redundant and unnecessary, as far as I'm concerned.

Everything you said is bang on, but this is one of the salient comments said so far in this thread.

I know this is just anecdata, but this has not been the case for my last three managers, including the current one.

The big test is, if you had no work that needed to be done today, could you sit on reddit all day and not have to explain to your manager what you were doing or why you were doing it? Or not have your manager think less of you? Or give you more work to do?

I'm not saying this is the most ethical thing to do (because in the real world, there's likely always more work that can be done), but it's an interesting test to think about. As long as your work was getting done, if your manager wasn't watching over your shoulder, they would never know you weren't actively working. If your manager is really not interested in micromanaging, they could sit and watch you play Angry Birds on your phone all day, secure in the trust that you were getting done the work that needs to be done. If they're sitting in their office, they would never see you and thus there would be no problem. They wouldn't think to ask you what you were doing, or why, or give you more work. But if they're sitting in the cube behind you, what would they say?

I don't know how your manager would respond. But I think that's the test of seeing the intentions behind a manager choosing to sit with their team. If you were doing something that they would have no problem with if they were in an office (maybe even because they didn't know you were doing it), how would they react to the same thing if they were sitting beside you?

That is pretty much what happened at my current job. We had tall semi-private cubicles that provided a decent amount of sound dampening.

Suddenly we were moving to new cubicles there were half the size and half the height in an open format. The only people who were allowed to vote on the office changes were all the managers who had their own private offices.

Enough hell was raised over the decision that all the managers ended up moving out of the offices to sit with their teams. They get to be miserable with us in all the noise. However, the overall team relations have improved to some degree.

Our new plan is to move to a new location and build team rooms for up to eight people instead of large floors with lots of people.

Clarification Edit: We now also have a single shared private office that be requisitioned by any employee for up to a day regardless of their position as long as they have a good reason.

> build team rooms for up to eight people instead of large floors with lots of people.

This is the right way to do open office planning. Consider Conway's Law. Teams are organized horizontally by how the system is designed by logical or physical system boundary. And you let people move from team to team to get good cross-functional ability and understanding.

Yep! Definitely why it is "up to eight people". A team may only have four people, but if a designer needs to move in from another team then there is space to allow it happen. After eight people on the team there really needs to be a decision if the tasks being handled can be split into separate teams. Such as separating a desktop and mobile client team into two teams.

> The only people who were allowed to vote on the office changes were all the managers who had their own private offices.

After leaving my previous job they moved to a similar half-wall open workspace (that the employees nearly universally hate) and they 2 people that had the most say in the decision both have offices. Also before the move the 3 partners got close parking spaces (<1 block) while all the employees had to walk 3+ blocks from a dimly-lit, rundown parking "structure" (if it could be called that).

Wow, your story about the conference room is almost identical to what Joel (Joel on Software) wrote about CEOs who work in open offices "like everyone else".

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FieldGuidetoDeveloper...

"A fairly common Silicon Valley phenomenon is the CEO who makes a big show of working from a cubicle just like the hoi polloi, although somehow there’s this one conference room that he tends to make his own (“Only when there’s something private to be discussed,” he’ll claim, but half the time when you walk by that conference room there’s your CEO, all by himself, talking on the phone to his golf buddy, with his Cole Haans up on the conference table)."

Thing is, even if a CEO isn't converting a conference room into a private office, even if the CEO is sincerely working in the same office space as everyone else, it still doesn't work. PG wrote about this on a related note in the makers vs managers's schedule. Mild interruptions don't seem like a big deal to managers, and the nature of their jobs means that they'll place constant communication far above quiet, focused, uninterrupted work.

Mild interruptions don't seem like a big deal to managers, and the nature of their jobs means that they'll place constant communication far above quiet, focused, uninterrupted work.

The above is the case for flipping the "current" model on it's head: put the folks whose job it is to constantly communicate in the open space, and give the folks who need quiet, focused, uninterrupted work time in offices with doors.

It's an extremely hard sell for a culture that rewards status with corner offices, but it definitely _seems_ like the right thing to do.

Edit: formatting!

I used to work on a trading floor where the boss sat in the middle of his group (about 40 people in 5 rows) he had an office that i don't think he ever used (except one-on-one bonus talks with employees). so its not all managers that do that.

he also moved everyone around every 4-6 months (especially in terms of who was sitting on either side of him) i liked the system - and i thought it was great/smart to have people sit next to the "boss" for a few months at a time as you definitely were able to build a better relationship/communicate).

The funny thing was is that if you polled the people who didn't need to be on the floor (i.e. the BD people), the introverts hated it, and the extroverts loved it...so i feel personality type is just as important in this analysis

I have a workshop with an office-y looking corner that barely ever gets used. If you aren't using a machine tool, and are coding or doing paperwork, please stay home and do it from home.

There's a catch-up meeting once a week, usually on Wednesday afternoon because that's when it works for everybody, and everything else is via video call.

The people operating the machine tools talk to me directly, but they're mostly there to build what I design.

Seems to work OK for everyone except for one lady who I've let go because she kept showing up to work stoned (I don't care if you do drugs off the job, but if you want to operate a lathe or a drill press, you must be sober. If you can't, I can't get any work of you for the day, so go home).

At my last job we had open floor plans.

The top boss has his own corner office. It was all glass so he can keep an eye on everyone.

> What always ended up happening is that said CEO/boss would then informally requisition the shared conference/meeting room as their own personal office ..

... and it's followed down the chain, by VPs requisitioning "war rooms". If your bloody "war" is lasting more than a week, it's not a "war" anymore!

"But it's probably a submarine article planted by the architecture firm anyway."

Agree, and to those who don't know that means see this[1]:

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

[1] It's PG's phrase not a common reference.

The more common expression in media is "advertorial".

But it's probably a submarine article planted by the architecture firm anyway.

Yup, see a very similar one from 2012 [1] (I knew this sounded familiar), same firm, NBBJ.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/business/new-office-design...

Wouldn't an architecture firm be advocating for more space?

Cornell did a study awhile back that found that employees with their own private offices collaborate less often with their colleagues. A lot less. In fact their very perception of what constituted "frequent" interaction plummeted from several times a day to a few times a week. And it happened in scheduled meetings whereas it was more ad hoc in an open plan office.

They also noted something very interesting: we tend to prioritize our own personal productivity over team productivity, probably because most of us are compensated and promoted based on personal accomplishments.

You can see why management struggles with balancing these two objectives in space design. I think most of the comments here are very cynical but not very well reasoned. They tend to have not very well thought through conspiracy theories, like architecture firms wanting smaller spaces (what?) or pinning it all on cost cutting. Cost cutting? Businesses pay engineers HUGE salaries; if there was clear evidence that a given office plan was significantly less productive it would logically be a huge waste of money to put their highly paid employees in it.

The reality is there is a balance of individual and team productivity that organizations need to achieve. We have learned a lot about the drawbacks to purely private office layouts (like lower team collaboration and depressingly poor social interaction). We are learning about the drawbacks to purely one big open plan layouts (like noise as it scales beyond a handful). There is no one easy solution.

Source: Organizational Dilemmas and Workplace Solutions ‐ Work Effectiveness, Communication, and Office - Cornell University International Workplace Studies Program https://web.archive.org/web/20140615182702/http://iwsp.human...

There are actually a large number of these studies of which the one you linked is...one.

Your logic as to why management makes these choices suggests you think organizations operate on logic vs institutional habits, trends and intra organization conflict. Citation needed ;).

Your survey of sentiment of the comments here (or the thousands made in similar posts) doesn't seem particular rich or nuanced, perhaps you are working deliberately with a supposition that your current situation is "just fine"?

Open plan is a relatively recent trend[1], ergo it cannot reflect an "institutional habit". Again with the poor reasoning.

One thing the Cornell study highlights is how engineers have a class bias in favor of maximum individual productivity. That is how they are rewarded. It would follow that there would be many "thousands" of comments in favor of private offices. Where these seem to fall flat is in explaining why management nonetheless build open plan offices that optimize for team collaboration, e.g. ascribing it to "greed" or "habit" or "architecture firm conspiracy" -- that is where the logic errors arise.

[1] It is also a very old trend historically, but in the tech sector it is a recent trend following cubes and offices.

Recent? Cubicle farms have been around for 30 years, now. We're simply at the truly extreme end of a very long term trend.

As for why, the answers there are fairly simple: cost and snake oil. 30 years ago open plans and cubicles were pitched as a way to increase "collaboration", with no corroborating evidence that showed a commensurate increase in overall productivity. It was, to put it plainly, salesmanship and BS.

I'd strongly recommend a pass through Peopleware for a more thorough treatment on the topic.

Open plan is a distinctly different approach than cubicles.

True. It seems cubicles were an attempt to undo some of the damage of open plan architecture, which goes back even further than I thought:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-origin-of-cubi...

Damn you, Frank Lloyd Wright!

I know I prioritize my productivity over that of the team because that's what I'm judged on. If I spend a lot of time helping the team, but at the cost of not getting my work done on time, then I don't get praised for helping the team; I get chastised for not getting my work done.

There's an inherent distrust of management's motives in this case because moving to an open layout from a more private one happens to align with some of the worst "management" tropes: micromanagement and cost-cutting.

> if there was clear evidence that a given office plan was significantly less productive it would logically be a huge waste of money to put their highly paid employees in it.

Yes, but as no one can effectively quantify employee performance in "knowledge work", no one will be rewarded for "improvements in productivity". Cutting facility costs has a measurable impact however.

> no one can effectively quantify employee performance in "knowledge work"

That's certainly not universally true. You can look at engineer commits, bug counts, speed of execution, all sort of metrics that would be directly impacted by distractions. If these were plummeting under open plan it would be pretty clear to management that it was costing them more money, not less.

I searched that study and found no references to chat rooms. It's my theory that private offices and enthusiastic chat room use has the advantages of both.

I suspect there may be a generation gap in familiarness of asynchronous instant communication. The avg 18-24 year old sends ~100+ txts a day, 45+ goes to 10-15. [1] People who've grown up up using txts, face book chat, IRC, AIM, etc. seem to see chat as a "default medium" for communication, where as those without that experience (not necessarily just an age thing, plenty of 30+ who spent decades on freenode etc) some times have a view of "being forced to use chat" instead of just knocking on someones door.

[1] http://www.pewinternet.org/2011/09/19/how-americans-use-text...

I'm late to the party, but...

> Cost cutting? Businesses pay engineers HUGE salaries; if there was clear evidence that a given office plan was significantly less productive it would logically be a huge waste of money to put their highly paid employees in it.

That depends on the business. I have only worked with companies that do primarily government contracting. Engineer salaries get billed to specific government contracts. Facilities costs come out of general overhead. The first bucket generates revenue for the company, since they bill us out for more than they pay us (including benefits); the second bucket is limited, severely in some cases, and pooled across the entire company. In such a system, cost cutting on perks and facilities makes rational sense because the people controlling the budget for those things don't give a shit about salaries. Any company wherein money for facilities is separated from money for salaries is going to be vulnerable to such pressures.

I have generally found that being "one issue fundamentalist" is always counter productive but people often write pieces that "hey this works great always".

I too work at a place which has open desk not by design but that is how we rented the office. But I am personally more productive when no on is around so I either prefer to go to a conf. room and work or simple work at odd hours when no one is around. I am far more comfortable when I can talk to myself, sing to myself and do some weird things which I wont dare do in public. I am pretty sure there are many more people like me out there.

A number of years ago when I had my first large corporate job (systems admin type work), they had most of my team (4 people) in a bullpen area with desks pointing to the corners (and some dividers in place). But everyone could lean out to the aisle and have a quick pow-wow session. Meanwhile, I was stuck in an old directors-sized office that had been converted to cubicles, which is where some periodic contractors would normally sit. But it was empty most of the time, except for me. In that case, I felt really out of place and left out of the loop most of the time.

Now I'm in an open office with 4-ft high dividers (tall enough that you can almost see over them when sitting down), and I hate that too.

I'm in a similar boat. This is my first job where I work from home 98% of the time. I don't think I could ever go back to an office. It's so freaking quiet and perfect here during the day, my productivity is amazing right now. And I can wear comfortable clothing... and no commute... and eat whenever I want... and I have a private bathroom...

Honestly, you'd probably have to pay me 2x what I make now for me to even consider a non-remote position. I can go into the office every once in a while for a meeting or something, but for everything else, remote is where it's at.

If you are an engineer, developer, or programmer the only way to fight the power on this is to refuse to accept offers from companies who treat their employees like cattle. It's amazing that I still hear founders getting very upset about the fact that they can't hire, while enacting "open office" or "bullpen" policies like the one at Yodle.

Short of trolling the recruitment process, this is hard to do in reality.

How exactly is it hard to do? Trolling the process isn't necessary. During the interview, you simply ask about the work environment. And you don't have to wait for the interview to ask, you can do it in an email.

I think he's talking about doing this on such a scale that it has a measurable impact on the trend.

I interview 3-4 times/month in the bay area, as a way of keeping myself in tune with the interview process for when I do want a new gig, seeing what new tech trends are popping up in interviews (and what specific gotcha questions are popular), and so on. Generally I don't intend to take the job. It could certainly be interpreted as trolling the process, but I've taken the opportunity to note things I didn't love about the company when I decline offers (I see it as the mirror of wanting a company to be specific about weaknesses if they choose not to hire me), including open or noisy office space, the appearance of high pressure to work unnecessarily lengthy hours, poor clarity in equity granting, and lack of diversity.

>I interview 3-4 times/month in the bay area, as a way of keeping myself in tune with the interview process for when I do want a new gig

Sounds like you're wasting a lot of people's time and resources.

Companies could obviate the need for this sort of reconnaissance by being more open about pay expectations and honest about experience requirements. They aren't because they perceive a benefit to holding an information advantage over applicants. If this information advantage wasn't widely sought by firms, then there would be no advantage to interviewing several times a month. So really, any given firm could avoid their time being wasted by the gp. But presumably they would rather have their time wasted than to give up their information advantage, so it doesn't really make sense to lay all the responsibility for wasting people's time at the feet of the gp. Most candidates just accept the information disadvantage. The gp doesn't, but that's merely a rational response to the incentives put forth by the job market.

This is an aside, but I think there's a strong case to be made for publishing salaries, with names. I know it's an intimidating step, but this information is easily found on line for public service workers. The sky hasn't fallen, and there are a number of real benefits.

One possible angle - perhaps openly publishing payroll info (name, title, pay) should be a requirement for all companies that receive an H1B or other work visa.

Keep in mind, there is precedent. Information about how much a house sold for is public. Imagine if, when you were selling your house, you only had a bit of information gleaned from conversations with neighbors here and there, whereas the buyer had a massive database at his or her disposal with exact prices for every house sold in your neighborhood in the last 50 years. You'd be at a massive disadvantage. That's the situation employees are in.

As of 2001 is was a requirement to post the salary of H1-B employees. That how while at Lucent I found out the one who was if anything better at the particular job we were doing was earning $48K to my $80K :-(.

That alone is pretty important information, though I'd go one step farther and require all employee payroll data to be published.

Yeah, that doesn't work. I used to be really open with what I earned, because I didn't care if people knew. Turns out that sometimes people can get a bit resentful if you do similar jobs and you earn a little more than them. And sometimes people that do similar jobs and earn a little or a lot more than you seem to take this as a social signal and you get a new little social wall between you as you're not on their level.

I had a friend who worked in a job doing social research, and one of the jobs was talking to people about childhood sexual abuse that they had, a job that was only done by the more experienced staff. This is random cold-calling to strangers, and it was handled very delicately, reminding the person at regular intervals that they can stop the survey any time and that all questions were optional. He said the odd thing was that if someone started the survey, they generally completed the 20-minute interview, and it was only in the demographics section at the end that people bridled a little - at the 'salary range' question.

Some people don't care about who makes what salary. A lot of people use it to varying degrees as a social status signaller. I've tried being open about mine, and these days, I'd prefer not to share, though I still do with close friends who I know aren't wanky about salary.

> Yeah, that doesn't work. I used to be really open with what I earned, because I didn't care if people knew. Turns out that sometimes people can get a bit resentful if you do similar jobs and you earn a little more than them. And sometimes people that do similar jobs and earn a little or a lot more than you seem to take this as a social signal and you get a new little social wall between you as you're not on their level.

This is really a consequence of a culture that confuses material compensation with personal worth and success. I wonder if this is different outside of the western/North American job market.

Certainly her/his own. I can understand doing this once or twice a year, maybe once a quarter, but 3-4 times per month! If she/he is going through traditional loops how are they getting all that time off of work?

They're hardly wasted -- I derive a great deal of value by exploiting the current extreme inefficiency in the method by which most companies hire.

I think the poster you replied to was saying that you are wating other people's time by doing interviews in bad faith.

If you think they deserve to have their time wasted because their interview processes are inefficient... well, I guess I'll just say that I disagree with you strongly.

As long as he is open to changing jobs then he is not wasting their time. If anything there wasting his time by not being up front about salary info etc.

So is the whole send in your CV, do a bunch of phone interviews, never hear back spiel.

It's a market, if you find people are consistently wasting your time, you probably just don't have anything good to offer.

How do you feel about companies interviewing say 20 people for a single position?

Loosely related, how do you pull this off? Given that interviews effectively take up whole days, I feel like it'd be really tough for me to routinely work four day weeks and everyone at the office be OK with it.

>> "Given that interviews effectively take up whole days"

Really? I find they are either an hour in the office or a few 30 minute phone calls. At least in tech. I know in other fields they have all day group interviews with lots of team building stuff but I haven't encountered that in tech (well at least with startups).

Onsite interviews are consistently 4-6hr chunks at many places in the bay area.

Wow. What actually takes place in that time?

In my experience, I have had 3-6 hour long blocks with 1-3 members of the company, technical and non-technical. It typically starts with 5-10 minutes of chit-chat about my background and the company, then we do a technical exercise or a series of personality questions (for instance, explaining something technical to an employee in marketing to see if we could work together and if I could communicate across departments). After that, we wrap up with ~10 minutes of Q&A. Since it takes up so much time, it's important to get the phone screen right to not waste time on both sides. I have heard of companies that will have you pair program for a whole day instead of doing whiteboard questions.

I don't think I would do well in those sorts of interviews. I guess my experience is different because I've only interviewed remotely (remote interview, on site job). So they were typically 2-3 30 min Skype calls with different members of the company (CEO, CTO, Investor occasionally) and then I would send through code for them to look at or they would give me a small feature of their product to develop (1-2 days paid remote work) and review me based on that.

That kind of coding interview would be ideal too, but that takes more total time than 4-6 hours. It's 8-16 hours total vs 3-6 hours. When an engineer has a FT position already, they can't easily commit that much time as you can as a freelancer.

As the sister comment notes, many interviews are either by phone/videochat, or an hour or two in the office. I do the occasional all-day meeting, but not more often than every month or two.

One perk of my current gig is a very high level of flexibility (I'm in the actual office maybe 15-20 hours per week, and work from home or coffeeshops the rest of the time), which makes this much more viable.

How is rejecting a bad offer trolling? Please explain.

I make it vary clear that an open office plan bump by salary requirements by 20k/year. It's not really trolling IMO.

Agreed, though I actually think that this happens earlier in the decision tree. A lot of people with the talent to be top software developers never enter the field in the first place, as part of a rational market response to pay, career prospects, and working conditions (keep in mind, we're talking about an academically talented and hard working group of people here).

I don't think it's open offices per se (though they aren't exactly improving the appeal of software dev jobs), so much as the employment conditions that lead to imposing open offices on a class of worker that so clearly benefits from a quiet, focused environment.

Out of curiosity, what exactly are the other fields that top people would enter? Are you thinking of finance, law, or medicine, or something else?

All of the above and more. I do want to be sure I don't come off as claiming that there's no good reason to be a developer, I just don't think that the claims that there is a puzzling shortage of developers hold up when you consider the other options available. If it's hard to hire software developers, that's because the people talented enough to do the job are engaged in a rational, market based decision to do something else instead.

One good place to start is here:

http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/rankings/the-100-b...

And compare salaries in high cost regions, rather than comparing national salaries. For instance, a dental hygienist in San Francisco earns, at the median, $112,970, a registered nurse in SF earns $127,670, and a Software Developer in San Francisco earns $114,400.

So a software developer in SF, ground zero for the worker shortage, earns a bit more than a dental hygienist, and considerably less than a registered nurse. The median Lawyer in SF (not necessarily a good job, I'll admit) is quite a bit higher, and of course Physicians earn far more.

I think that if you look through the data, it's pretty clear that software developers are paid decent but not remarkable salaries. And I'm not complaining about good salaries for nurses and dental hygienists, that's absolutely great by me. I just think we need to stop acting like there's some great mystery behind why people with choice (i.e., whose career options aren't limited by where and how they can get a work visa to the US) aren't going into software development.

I remember being invited to Facebook (their PA office, before they moved), and was horrified to see the row-upon-row of folding tables being used as desks, with barely enough elbow room. I lost my desire to work there right away.

On the other hand, if I had joined then, ye olde bank balance would have been much fatter. ;-)

Sometimes I wonder at the limits of productivity here. Your average Office worker can do things that took multiple people to do in the pre-business IT age. We're so productive that we have no more low-hanging fruit to grab. Now we've entered the age of cargo-cult HR thinking like these office plans which are trying to squeeze out some tiny bit of productivity at the cost of extra misery for workers.

It saddens me a bit to think that instead of being rewarded for being productive and competitive, we're just squeezed more and more. Remember when futurists in the past were predicting the 3 or 4 day workweek because of productivity gains and automation? People are working just as long and whatever dividends are being paid out from the efficiencies of modern work, just seem to be going nowhere or into the pockets of ownership.

Personally, I'm hoping this stuff gets so bad that the white collar types start a revolt of sorts. We're seeing the blue collar types being 1099'd to death or worked hard at below living wages. Maybe its time we got squeezed so hard that we start taking a more political stance. Basing our modern work environment on what is essentially 1890's factory work policies (9-5, weekends, lunch breaks) seems crazy. I'm not even sure why I'm even in the office most days. Its all so inefficient and backwards, that all this open office shuffling just seems to be a way to guarantee that we won't ask for the 4 day workweek or the 35 hour week, via losing productivity by having coworkers yell in our ears all day.

I'm not saying this is intentional, its just management incompetence. They also have no idea what to do with this glut of cheap labor. Shoving us into smaller cubes or open spaces just seems like the next logical move when they hold all the cards.

I work remote. I don't understand why you all tolerate this kind of nonsense.

Excluding some short-term engagements and occasional visits to client offices, I haven't worked in an office on a daily basis since 2008. Every time I go into a client's physical office, it's like walking into somebody's den and finding an 8-track tape recorder, a black-and-white TV set, a rotary phone, and a Betamax.

When I go into an office, I don't think "why do people even do this?" I think, "why did people even do this?" It's so archaic that even when I see it happening right in front of my eyes, I have to remind myself that it still isn't over.

Finding a remote job is a lot harder than finding a job at a Bay Area startup, because companies which hire remote hire from all over. But it's absolutely worth it. And finding remote clients is relatively easy.

Don't subject yourself to this kind of foolishness. There's nothing professional or reasonable about it. It's just a vestigial custom, a primitive ritual which hasn't fully died out yet.

There are not nearly enough remote jobs currently, though it seems that more companies are wising up. I agree 100% with you on this however. Office work is archaic now and an expense that can be eliminated. Not only do businesses with remote developers save money, but they get more productive developers who can spend 90% of their time coding or on code reviews (that's how much I currently spend). Sadly, many companies just want to micromanage and when asked, will reply with some bullshit about company culture. Let's not kid ourselves. This has nothing to do with company culture or collaborating or fostering any kind of environment. The only reason to not allow remote working is because the company feels it needs to micromanage.

I'm certain that there isn't currently any company offering competitive salaries and remote work that isn't inundated with qualified applicants. Not that there is a shortage of qualified engineers in the first place (at least in the US), but the companies that are too stupid to find them would be well served to offer remote work and see those qualified applicants lining up.

A lot of people aren't like us, they are extroverts and they love going in and seeing everyone, and they hate being at home. Even I as an introvert got depressed being at home everyday and not having somewhere to go. The best is a mix with flexibility.

Remote will never apply to everyone and every line of work.

Most cities have coworking spaces. Even if you only work there once a week they're a great for replacing the social aspect of work.

Well, as much as I'd like to work remotely, there aren't that many openings. Plus, I think that it's more difficult to find companies that are willing to allow more junior employees to work remotely.

I mostly agree with you, but I'm not giving you an upvote because I just went through the following:

I worked in an office with an open floor plan. It was freezing all the time, strategists come over every 10 minutes and tap you on the shoulder, someone closed a deal so people break out the whistles and air horns and shit, and when you did work from home for a day, people made you feel guilty. I got tired of it and said "fuck it, I'm looking for a new job".

I got a number of interviews from companies of all walks of life, but they all had one thing in common: Programming jobs with the application on Github and the ability to use your own computer for development. So why the fuck not work from home? Well, turns out only one company I interviewed with let people work remotely. In fact, that company is completely remote with no real office. And that's the job I took.

You see, these jobs are rare and I sympathize with anyone who is stuck working in an office and wants to work from <insert location here>.

When interviewing, I will absolutely rule a company out if the office space isn't appropriate. I like open offices, but I need my own desk, and my back to a wall. Any companies with bullpen-style shared long tables is immediately out.

but I need my own desk, and my back to a wall

I'm curious why you want your back to the wall. All the people I know that do this are chronic goof offs. They always scramble to cover whatever they're looking at when I come in to talk with them.

I am genuinely curious and not trolling you.

EDIT: downvotes? Really? This is a very legit question and is producing legit conversation.

I can't speak for the original commenter, but it seems reasonable to me, because if your monitor is facing away from a wall, there is a constant burden of wondering who might be behind you and what they might think of what is on your screen. And this is when you're doing actual work.

When you're not doing work, it makes goofing off on the Internet less of a mental relief, and things are overall more stressful.

Same here. It's important to not feel like someone may hit you in the back of the head with no warning. Admittedly, it's not something that happens in most workplaces... most not all.

It's a primal fear kind of thing, and doesn't have to be rational.

Yep, pretty much.

Exactly. Take something like looking at documentation to see if C# uses printf(), print(), or print "". It's 100% work related, but it's kind of embarrassing that I forgot. I don't need my coworkers or boss seeing that.

Having people constantly walking behind you is incredibly distracting. If I have a wall and no chance of anyone behind me, I won't be nearly as distracted.

"Typed while goofing off in my cubicle".

Having people constantly walking behind you is incredibly distracting.

Interesting. I'm exactly the opposite. When I see people walking in front of me it's a total distraction. It makes it almost impossible to concentrate.

Indeed; per my other comment in this subthread, if they're known I want them walking behind and to the side of me, but please please not in front, that defeats my "don't pay attention" mental filters.

One of the most elementary self-defense concepts is that you don't leave your back to a door, the classic US example being Wild Bill Hickok: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Bill_Hickok#Death_at_Dead...

I personally want everyone behind me to be known, with entries where strangers can come from somewhere in my direct or peripheral vision range. Or a loud enough door that I can hear someone opening it.

I hate the feeling of people behind me and not knowing if someone has come up behind me to stare. Most of it stems from grade school bullying where people would take cheap shots from behind.

Yes, this sort of setup is perfect for those that want to goof off. However, that should be easily reflected in productivity reports through a work tracking system such as Pivotal or Jira. If the employee is doing all their assigned tasks within the expected allotted time then all should be fine.

"CONSTANT VIGILANCE!!!"

Yep, grade school is exactly where I developed a lot of this, plus having a born malicious 6 years younger brother. But I can slot people into "safe" categories and then not worry about them (see my other comments in this subthread).

As for "come up behind me to stare", you just have to get in the mindset that they'll be awed by the skills you're displaying ^_^.

When people can't walk by and see your monitor you definitely rule out people walking by looking at your monitor and striking up conversation about whatever you are currently working on. It's not so much about privacy as it is about getting your work done in peace. A workplace that offered people the option to move into a more communal space when working on projects, but also offered cubicles or offices would be a solution.

I'll take a crack at this:

In college I would always prefer sit in the very back of the lecture hall, back to the wall, even though I knew that real go-getters were supposed to sit in the front. I get really startled if people walk up behind me and try to get my attention, especially if they touch me, my clothing, or my chair. I don't like to be in a space where I can't see who is coming in and out of it, for my own safety as well as to minimize jump-scares. If people coming up behind you while you're all vulnerable and absorbed in thought is something that bothers you, having to work in a space where this is a constant possibility is annoying in the same way that working around high-pitched mechanical background noises or rapidly flickering lights is annoying. It's constant low-level apprehension and stress.

When you introduce screens into the equation, as in open office, there's a new annoyance which I guess you might call "violation of intellectual personal space". Have you ever gotten really annoyed that someone was reading your book over your shoulder? Or felt antsy when someone grabbed your laptop to do an internet search? Or had a coworker glance over at your screen when you were deep in thought and say "Hey, what's that?" Computers, books, and notes can feel like extensions one's mind and it's annoying when anybody can come peruse what we're thinking. My monitor is my mind-workspace. I'm happy to have visitors, but not at any old time they feel like strolling through the door!

I'm not saying that YOU think this, but your comment brought it to mind: Some people think that by making it so that anyone can see your screen, you're less likely to goof off. (With the logical follow-up: Anyone who wants their back to the wall at work just wants to goof off.) Neither is true, in my anecdotal experience. People in open offices will still goof off, they'll just be more sneaky about it. (Or, there will be a complete breakdown in focus and professionalism, and everyone will goof off in a completely brazen manner.)

> I don't like to be in a space where I can't see who is coming in and out of it, for my own safety as well as to minimize jump-scares.

This! I am extremely jumpy and I hate being snuck up when I'm deep in thought/in the zone which I am as often as possible. If I notice you approaching me you can probably assume I am between tasks or took a break because when I am programming I have my music turned up and I can't hear people walking up and even my peripheral vision is limited in these situations. I can't tell you how many times someone has walked up next to me and I haven't noticed except for when I turn my head to see my laptop screen (where I keep all my chats) and catch them in the corner of my eye and almost fall out of my chair.

I try to not let this affect my level of focus because I really do think that's more important than a few scares a day but if I had my back to a wall then I wouldn't have to worry about it at all.

> I can't tell you how many times someone has walked up next to me

> almost fall out of my chair

> a few scares a day

Preach, my easily startled brother, preach. But yet your co-workers don't catch on that you jump-scare so easily?

We should make little signs or banners for people's desks. "Deeply Absorbed Programmer: Do Not Sneak Up On." Issue little handbooks on how to safely interrupt a programmer, as we do currently with sleepwalkers.

If I have to interrupt someone in an open-plan office and can't just message them to get their attention (seriously, what's wrong with just messaging people for non-urgent issues?), I am careful to approach them from the front or peripherally-viewable side and try visual cues first (hand-waving, etc.). I would NEVER use a physical alert method (touching them, knocking on their desk, dropping papers in on their keyboard, etc.). This is one of my several guarantees to the nation.

> But yet your co-workers don't catch on that you jump-scare so easily?

They do and they ask me "How can I come over without startling you" to which I reply "Message me on chat that you are coming over or get me a desk where I have my back to a wall".

I really dislike when someone walks over and stands behind me waiting for a good break point. While they may have good intentions I don't like being observed without my knowledge and it's probably just going to freak me out more when I "feel" your presence and turn around.

because it's a natural instinct, your "nothing to hide" type argument can't trump thousands of years of evolution

When I worked as a dev I hated having people walking around behind me. I worked at a place where my desk was near a relatively high traffic area so there was a constant stream of people walking past.

I find it hard to really concentrate on something with random people walking around or hanging out behind me. It has nothing to do with them looking at my screen even - just knowing someone is standing around behind me can be a little unnerving. I'd much prefer having them in front of me than behind me.

It almost feels like a primal survival instinct. When you're concentrating on work you're more vulnerable because you're less aware of your surroundings. It's not like I'm really expecting to be attacked from behind or anything but something deep in my brain is sending up an alarm.

> why you want your back to the wall. All the people I know that do this are chronic goof offs.

"Goof offs" sounds like something a McDonalds manager has to micromanage for amongst his summer hire of local teenagers. I didn't spend four years getting a BSCS, studying compiler internals, graph theory, finite state automata, 1st, 2nd and 3rd normal forms, the fetch/execute cycle etc., plus all my subsequent study, so that my manager can monitor me at any moment to see if I'm "goofing off".

Your comment is exactly the reason why I need a desk with my back to the wall. If I walk in on an interview and see I would not have that, I have a suspicion that managers are people with your mentality.

I don't want to work at a company with potential goof offs coding elementary PHP and people who police them to make sure they're spending every second pounding out code. I want to do professional work and have the autonomy to do so.

Millions of years of my mammalian ancestors being hunted has had an impact on how my brain is wired. I do not like things sneaking up behind me, no matter what I am doing.

I know I am not going to be eaten while working in an office building, but that does not stop my brain from sending a surge of adrenaline into my bloodstream when somebody unexpectedly appears behind me. Those adrenaline surges are not conducive to concentration or productivity..

For me, because I work with health information. You need to not be able to casually glance at my screen.

1. If I'm going to be spending 2000+ plus hours a year in a single physical location it needs to have some privacy and comfort, at an absolute minimum.

2. I'm not willing to be scrutinized by others for exactly how I spend my time. Or how I appear to be spending my time. Goofing off, at least I'm only distracting myself, instead of wandering around distracting others. "Following orders" leads to intellectual heat-death. In the software profession this kills earning power.

3. Many people fail to realize that whatever minor thing they are currently locked on to psychologically is totally inconsequential. I can't have them hovering over me and yammering about it and trying to get me to click/type/open/smell whichever program/website/document/foodstuff has gotten them whipped up in a frenzy. People aren't conscious of boundaries when they're excited and this needs to be defended against physically with doors, desks, and body position.

4. Maybe it helps individual productivity to the detriment of group productivity. When I get a big raise based on group productivity, I'll start to care about it.

I hate glare / screen reflections. I find them very distracting and annoying. The best way to avoid this is having a wall behind you.

I rule out companies that have devs working in cube farms or behind closed doors. I can almost always see this is how the company does development by just looking at their code.

What are some tell-tale signs?

Why is having an office for everybody a bad thing? You think the it's a reflection on the culture somehow?

You can almost see people running in opposite directions and closing their doors behind them sitting at their keyboards coding away in silence. Lots of duplication of code. Writing lame tests after the code is "done", over-compartmentalizing everything, features that aren't specified in any requirements, factories creating factories creating factories. Lots of "Design Patterns", etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

> I like open offices, but I need my own desk, and my back to a wall.

This is huge, I HATE having my back to a opening and one that people are constantly walking by. No I'm not redditing/screwing around at work but I think I deserve some level of privacy. Closing/hiding banking tabs, insurance statements, pay stubs, etc is really taxing and it means that I normally have to switch off my music before doing any of these tasks so that I can hear people approaching and then I forget to turn my music back on and get distracted by conversations/people around me resulting in less work getting done until I can get back in the "zone". I'm also extremely jumpy and strongly dislike being snuck up on (even when it wasn't that person's intention) which is why I want my back to a wall. It definitely drives up my stress levels to be so "exposed".

PS: For those of you thinking this helps cut down on goofing off and/or If you need to see my screen to know I'm working then just fire me, I can't/won't work under such conditions.

You can get a screen shield that reduces viewing angles for that kind of stuff. That's what we do for HR/accounting staff who are in open areas.

That's a good idea but it would make showing my screen to co-workers more difficult. It would also, no doubt, make me the butt of a number of jokes about "What is Josh doing that's so secretive" to which I would like to reply "None of your fucking business" but we all know I can't/won't. I think what sucks the most is the people ALWAYS making the decisions on how offices are laid out are the same people who have offices so they really don't care about the people in cubes.

Note: While I'm not a huge fan of cubicles I don't have a huge issue with them, just how ours are laid out (Large cube with a desk in each corner facing the wall). I can see some advantages but IMHO the privacy issue trumps them all.

Again, I want to thank you for your suggestion but I just don't think it will work for me.

I'd argue that what people are doing at work is by definition their coworkers' business.

And you would be correct for the most part but for development at least (and undoubtedly for other jobs but I'm a programmer so I'm going to focus on that) I don't just work between the hours of 9-5. I can't stop myself for thinking about work problems from bleeding over into my personal time. Likewise I cannot function as a human being in the United States without using some time that most people would consider "work hours" for personal matters. A number of gov entities are only open while I'm at work (Some even only make their website available from 9-5, a cardinal sin if there ever was one), things like banking need to happen within certain hours or they get pushed to the next day, etc.

Furthermore I use my personal computer as my work computer so there are apps/notifications that are not of a work-nature and are not for my coworkers eyes. Also I don't know if you have company chat or use some chat program at work but I'm guessing you would not like all of your chat's to be public or even just public with your co-workers. What I'm trying to say is I get where you are coming from but I don't think you are considering all the things you might do on your computer that you might not want to hide but at the same time you don't want to advertise.

More and more what happens on my screen is an extension of my brain and so you could say watching me use my computer is watching me think (from the searches I do, the docs I look up, etc). No one would consider giving a running monologue of their thoughts throughout the day but watching my screen get's pretty close to that, for me at least.... I may be an edge case but I think that I deserve some level of privacy. If you want to know what I'm doing ask the PM (or look on my whiteboard) or look at my commits or just ask me, you don't need to watch over my shoulder to know what I'm up to.

> Some even only make their website available from 9-5, a cardinal sin if there ever was one

Not for the US so could you give me some examples?

Here is one example: http://freakonomics.com/2012/08/20/this-website-only-open-du... but I'm pretty sure I ran into an issue with the IRS website (how we pay/manage our taxes) but now I can't find mention of it.

Some people have said it may be due to reports that run at night and can't have new data coming in while they run or something similar but I don't buy it. If that's the case then just modify your query such that the data it gets has a "WHERE submitted_date <= <EOD DateTime>".

Certain US federal government websites will be inactive during certain late hours. In extreme cases they are only available during regular business (9a-5p).

This is almost always because there is some ambiguously worded regulatory or statutory requirement that says that department or entity has to provide live personal support, and rather than pay the increased staff they just take the site down.

I'm the same way, and it's not even a privacy concern really. Just an animal instinct to be weary of what is going on behind me that I can't see.

I once worked under similar conditions. It was at a very small software company, they made a chiropractic practice management app and I was on the support team. There were four of us on the team, including our manager, and our cubicles were in a cross shape with two open sides each. My cubicle had my back wide open to the CEO's and lead programmer/VP's offices, so if either of them walked out of the office they could see my screen. I never had anything not work-related on my screen, but I was big into anime at the time and so my wallpaper was SE: Lain or Cowboy Bebop or Robotech or whatever, depending on my mood that day.

Anyway, I was the butt of a lot of jokes when I'd close out of a full screen app and one of them would walk by and see it. It's a bit dehumanizing to have the two most important people in the company make fun of you at the lunch table every day. "Hey Morgan, which cartoons are you watching now?" "My 5 year old can recommend some for you" and so on. Yeah, I was a college kid and all my peers were into anime too, but it stings when your bosses make fun of you every day. If we had had a more sensible cubicle layout with our screens facing away from the entrance, it would have been a less stressful job.

"That's a playground tease right there. My kid can show you better ways to do it."

> Yeah, I was a college kid and all my peers were into anime too, but it stings when your bosses make fun of you every day. If we had had a more sensible cubicle layout with our screens facing away from the entrance, it would have been a less stressful job.

Or if you had bosses with a modicum of respect for their employees, independent of cubicle arrangement.

Yeah, the cubicle configuration was only part of the problem. Early on I had expressed an interest in learning to code (I was taking SQL and Java programming classes alongside my regular courses in college at the time), and I approached the lead programmer/VP with this desire. He said he'd get back to me on it, that they had no problem with training me up to work on the codebase since they needed fresh eyes on it. The next day he drops about a ream of printed paper on my desk and said I should "study this code" and let him know what I thought of it. It wasn't code of course; it was old garbage data they used to test the program. Not a single line of actual code, just pages and pages of test data. I felt it was equivalent to an adult handing their toddler a toy cellphone to keep them occupied.

Needless to say, I quit working there once I was out of school, and went back to government work.

It really boggles my mind how the default approach to corporate real estate in the startup world seems to be getting a lease in a trendy (ie, expensive) neighborhood, spending significant money to make the space nicer, paying a lot in terms of perks (food, laundry, etc)....but at the end of the day, everyone's in this big open-air, hangar-like environment where you can't have a private conversation, and there's such a demand for conference room time that it becomes a source of conflict.

I used to work in an office in a trendy part of NYC at a company that had 3 catered meals per day, a VERY well-stocked liquor cabinet, and a varied, seemingly endless supply of high-end drinks and snacks (as in the fresh-squeezed juices that retail for $9.99, candy imported from Japan, etc). They also had an open office that was not horribly crowded but very open nonetheless.

I have also worked in a shabby nondescript office in a standard, non-sexy building and neighborhood where I had my own office with a door that closed. It wasn't big, but it was private.

The latter was definitely cheaper on a $/employee basis, and not only did I prefer it in an abstract way, but I was definitely more productive.

Open offices are cheap. That's why they are so beloved.

They're also very distracting. I'm in an office right now where I have to use headphones and loud music to not listen to sales and account management all day... and that's just the audio distractions.

That's a classic open office plan fail. Sales and account management do not need to be in the same space as dev.

No, but you see, it fosters synergy between teams

Completely agree, this is the way my office is currently setup while they're building additional space for developers and it drives me insane. This PHP CEO tweet describes my situation pretty dead on: https://twitter.com/PHP_CEO/status/549719518420152321

Open offices are cheaper (more people per sq ft) but all office space prices have skyrocketed in the "tech hubs" in the last decade or so.

Chronic hearing loss from loud music is going to be the black lung of cubicle workers.

Yeah, fun all right. "Why aren't you finished with your project?"

"I can't concentrate at the office. But I'm having fun. Isn't that enough?"

"Sure, sure. Carry on!"

What kills me about this is that for me (and a lot of people) it's not about square footage.

It's about distractions. I would literally be fine working inside a phone booth-sized office that provided some visual and auditory privacy.

Good point. I completely agree. While my Bose QC-15 headphones can often go a long way toward the auditory privacy, the visual part is still there (and highly distracting).

At my last gig we built out a new office space- of course all the execs got offices and none of the support people who talk on the phones all day got an office.

So everyone was in a giant open room with a concrete floor and hard desks- a couple rugs, but it didn't cut it.

On top of that the CTO said he didn't like not being able to see the devs so he put a dropcam on the shelf over our area... so open area for devs plus a camera recording everything we say and do and only one person with access...

How did he still have people working for him? I imagine that kind of bullshit would make most of the team walk out.

Yea, it did me. Most people are just willing to put up with whatever- I really want to enjoy the work I do and where I work so it was a pretty big deal for me. Everyone thought I was overreacting. They did take the camera down- not sure if it went back up...

Long tables would have given each person even less space, he said — about 2 feet wide by 1 ½ feet deep.

Seriously? 2 feet is elbow-bumping width. Is this moron planning office space, or seating for fucking RyanAir?

One of the times this came up[1] someone made a good point (wish I could save comments :) ) about the important distinction between sharing an open office with engineers, versus random people walking by/loud sales cales/managers/etc. In the first case, people don't mind interruptions - from other engineers. In the second case, interruptions are terrible. So according to that comment, a group of expert engineers working in a shared space can really experience some synergy. sometimes if you can say, "hey do you have a sec" and ask a super-quick engineering question, it can really help. If a few people start discussing architecture, everyone can join. etc. Apparently it works. If it's other engineers.

This makes me wonder.

Reading our present article - what we're really missing is some data. Really, any data. All of those people who have beaten it into us that "correlation is not causation" have won a Pyrrhic victory. We're left without even an indication of what the correlation is.

I have no idea whatsoever whether the data points plotting productivity (y) and space per worker (x) is a random scatter plot, clearly correlated positively, negatively, has a peak, has any shape at all, or whatever.

I don't care what data you're showing. For the y axis you can use startup market cap/valuation per employee for all I care. You can use lines of code - a terrible metric. Or whatever other proxy for productivity you want.

But whatever you use, anything is better than nothing at all.

What I'm wondering is: in a software or startup context - or any context at all - what is the shape of the correlation at all between productivity and space per worker?

This seems to be a central question, but the article only hints at an answer without presenting any data at all.

Since it's clearly a choice all organizations and startups face - let's see it!

[1] Other discussions on open offices:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=open%20office&sort=byPopularit... (top stories)

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=open%20office&sort=byPopularit... (top comments)

All the complaints about open office plans for software development are valid. However, having worked at many places that have both open and closed office spaces, I've found that the closed office spaces promote knowledge siloing, creating a lot of power for people who have had more time (to make a mess) in the code.

There's a right way and a wrong way to do open office planning. One of the basics is, why do you need 40 people to ship your product? Are you sending rockets to mars? Creating a LHC? Open plans start and end with a half a dozen people. Beyond that size, they need their own room.

There's also a right way and a wrong way to disseminate information within a team that doesn't require a work environment that's detrimental to productivity (code reviews and pair programming immediately come to mind).

Open plans as a way to avoid "siloing" is the wrong solution to a much bigger problem.

The most important thing in software is that humans build software systems. And that they need to communicate with as high-fidelity and efficiency possible. Often that works with small teams that are co-located without doors. If I have to get up to ask you a question, I might not ask it. I might spend then next 1/2 hour trying to read code. Maybe I'll figure it out but you could have just told me in 15 seconds. That's the idea here. But it can work with closed doors, too; especially as the product matures (or, heh, ossifies).

Often that works with small teams that are co-located without doors. If I have to get up to ask you a question, I might not ask it. I might spend then next 1/2 hour trying to read code. Maybe I'll figure it out but you could have just told me in 15 seconds.

The flipside is that, if you spend a half hour figuring something out instead of interrupting me, you don't interrupt my flow, which could translate into a much greater reduction in productivity than if you'd just dealt with it yourself.

Put another way: open offices make it too easy to interrupt someone else.

In our space we find a balance with electronic communication. Two person offices reduce distraction. IRC and email serve as a middle ground to interruption (as folks on the receiving end can control when the interruption occurs). Interruptions in meatspace only occur when they're actually necessary.

Edit:

And I forgot the other big benefit: two person offices mean you can co-locate people who work in the same product area, and when broader discussions need to happen, the offices can double as meeting spaces without everyone else being interrupted by the conversation.

So offices actually assist in facilitating communication as the threat of distracting others is substantially reduced.

"Could" translate. Not "Does" translate. Turn this around again. What's more valuable: your productivity or the overall team productivity? Open offices don't have to be a place where it's "too easy to interrupt", but I agree they often are.

I'll put my money on "does".

If you don't interrupt me, you lose 30 minutes of your time solving your problem (and, by the way, learn to learn along the way).

If you do interrupt me, you save yourself, say, 25 minutes, while I probably lose 60 minutes of effective flow time ("gee, I'm distracted now, might as well go to the bathroom and get another coffee while I'm at it... oh hey, look some emails, let's take a look at those...").

And that's ignoring the distraction you create for all the folks around me as you come and ask your question.

So in terms of overall team productivity (which is a function of the individual productivity levels of the team members), I will happily take the bet that open offices are far worse than closed ones in the the scenario you've proposed.

You're basically saying that your productivity is more important than someone else's productivity.

"If I have to get up to ask you a question, I might not ask it."

That seems very inefficient for most questions. Why not ask online instead?

Every time this comes up, I just don't get it. Pop the question into your team chat, work on something else for a bit, and come back to that issue after you've got your answer.

That is a nice analogy. Let's add some human to it. How about disturbed close communication? Because of stress through noise or by a misheard conversation. Annoyances lead to new communication problems. The open offices I saw in my career were filled with people wearing headphones wherever it was allowed. Which brings us back to just getting more people in less space...

I wonder what happened to the health aspect of this. How about walking over? Where is the problem? Pro Tip: take the stairs. You can even sit down then if there is enough space for a second chair.

> If I have to get up to ask you a question, I might not ask it. I might spend then next 1/2 hour trying to read code. Maybe I'll figure it out but you could have just told me in 15 seconds. That's the idea here.

The opposing idea is that in the long-term picture, choosing to spend more time now in order to figure it out yourself leads to developing the very skills that will let you avoid needing help in the future. Much like coding every day makes you a better coder, debugging things yourself makes you a better debugger.

God forbid you let people work from home.

Can't do that, we looked at the VPN logs and no one ever logged in.

That doesn't mean no one would ever log in.

Then you hired the wrong people.

It's really a huge bummer how many companies won't invest the effort in supporting distributed teams. I think it's holding back the industry as a whole.

First, I won't work for a company whose office isn't up to my standards. And I don't have high standards, but an open office bullpen is a flat-out no from me. I'd only ever work in those conditions if it was the only way for me to get an income and I really needed it. I'm sure there are lots of other programmers like me, which means these companies are just losing out on talent. I won't even apply to Facebook because of their floorplans.

Second, if your office is up to snuff but you're on the other side of the country, now I've got to leave my girlfriend behind to go work for you. We'll either have to do a long-distance relationship or she'll have to move with me. Well, if I don't really want to work for you, I'm just going to say no yet again. I really don't think I'm the only programmer who's not single. I've heard that some even have "kids" and a "family" of their own, which makes moving cross-country an even bigger deal.

Third, if you're located in a hyper-expensive urban area and my cost of living is going to double, you're going to have to double my salary before I accept. I'm not going to cut my modest lifestyle in half just to work for you, on top of the above issues.

The end result is that I'm extremely picky about where I work. If more companies just allowed remote developers, all those hurdles are resolved immediately.

You're not the only one. Just about everything you said applies for me, and I'm willing to bet there is a silent majority in the same situation. I would put in my two weeks notice in a heartbeat if a company that let me work from home made an offer, but so far I have to keep telling the Google recruiters that no, I'm still not interested in relocating.

Hint to recruiters: first thing to do if you have a talent "shortage" - consider that maybe you aren't doing enough to attract talent, and communicate it up the chain to let management know why your recruitment and retention rates suck.

My friend's employer, a large corporation in Dallas, where it is snowing/sleeting today (this is unusual and this city is not prepared so they prefer people stay in):

"You must come into the office today. If you wish to work from home you must use a vacation day."

We've got a long way to go.

What company? They need to be called out.

Companies that use open plan offices do it for the appearance of productivity over actual productivity.

Actual productivity in modern software enterprises is visible in task management tools like JIRA and in the repos, and communication, especially in an environment where spoken English might not be everyone's strength, is best seen in a Hangout or other chat/collaboration tool.

Failing to accommodate workers' preferences for working conditions is just plain bad practice, no matter what such preferences might be or how they might vary depending on the nature of a project. You can always see the health of a team and of a project no matter how project resources are located and connected.

If the boss is actually minding the store, he'll be doing it by taking a look at how his projects are proceeding, using objective metrics, not "by walking around" or at meetings.

The boss may need a lieutenant to grok JIRA for him. But failing to be able to manage a project because you can't look over everyone's shoulder is a management failure, not a failure of the work environment.

I work crammed into a long table at a Starbucks, and I much prefer it to the company office. Call me crazy, but I don't think office space and privacy is the most important thing to office workers.

The problem is they're stuck in an office.

you have a sense of privacy in public, a lot more than in a space with a set group of people that you have to constantly interact with. in a cafe nobody cares how "busy" you look, you're just getting stuff done, in an office it quickly becomes about appearances, or leaving only after your boss left even if you're no longer productive, etc. basically in a public space people can "judge" what you're doing but it doesn't matter while in a private space people "judge" you and it matters.

This is why companies move to the suburbs. Prestige of a Manhattan address over the comforts of the burbs.

I wouldn't really mind an 'open' space if I was sitting with people who wanted a similar environment. I want... low lighting and min noise. I don't think everyone wants that but the office should be hacked up to accommodate environments that allow people to focus. I know people who thrive in the noise, but I do not.

Last job I was in a short cube right next to the breakroom so ALL DAY people walked by, talked and stared at my screen. It drove me nuts.

Yeah, this is what Sun Micro did a long time back. At many of the drop in centers, Sun divided the office space into loud office and quiet office. The office manager clearly was empowered to kick people out of the quiet office if they were making noise, so it worked.

The downside is that it does help to be able to have a private conversion, spontaneously. A UI expert pops by your office, asks a few questions, the conversation shifts over to work, you end up showing a few screens, talking about it. You can do this in an office without worrying about disrupting the people around you (my experience is that devs tend to be far more sensitive about this).

So ironically, I actually think that open offices reduce the amount of communication between certain types of workers, because people who value quiet are shy about making noise (because they know how much it derails their own work). As a result, the casual conversations that lead to valuable work related conversations never happen.

Any manager of a technical group who says open plans result in a better product or service are either (1) lying because "open" is cheaper (more bodies per square foot / meter), or (2) completely ignorant of the concept of concentration and focus, and therefore not competent management.

My expectation is that the former is the most often case.

I just closed our 4000sq ft office after 2.5 years and went fully remote. That office was my "dream" office for my small company. Here's what I learned: 1. 4000 sq ft is way too small for an open office. There's no where for anyone to work quietly, without distraction. 2. Engineers and people that need to work without distraction (like me) just can't get enough done. 3. Working remotely in a quiet space is 10x more productive for me, and as far as I can tell, my co-workers. 4. The office space is for my ego, not for my shareholders. 5. Some people are not setup for remote working and I don't think there are enough viable co-working situations yet. Just an opinion. These people need an office to work at.

There is no doubt in my mind that if I could I would short office space. It's way overpriced and counterproductive.

It is not about privacy, but about concentration and productivity.

Both approaches have merit. Any solutions would do well to achieve the best of both while still remaining feasible.

In the past, I've thought about physically-convertible setups, but this is probably far too exotic to be practical. Likewise, affording each employee two desks, one of each type, doesn't rank very high on the feasibility scale either.

What about emulating helicopter cabin communication?

Give each employee audiophile-grade closed headphones and\or in-ear monitors. Then, issue a high quality microphone along with it. Finally, use this setup with say, Slack (once they add voice support).

Open office. Each desk angled back-to-wall or similar to afford visual privacy, and the only problem you're left with is conversational privacy.

For that, anything from conference rooms to sufficiently loud artificial ambient office noise could work.

I work for an IT consultancy that has about 40 people and an open office. I have never had any issues. Probably because almost everyone is a developer/administrator and people mostly prefer communicating through IRC. The office space is completely silent, and the desks are in groups, far apart from each other. It is wonderful, looks good and doesn't make me feel depressed sitting in a cubicle with partitions shorter than my height giving a fake sense of privacy.

All I am saying is there is a wrong way and a right way of maintaining open offices. Bashing all open offices for being cheap and unproductive is naive.

I'm curious as to why the responses to this topic don't mention electronic communication more often. Tapping someone on the shoulder when they're in flow leads not only to immediate destruction of mental state, but usually someone nearly falling out of their chair.

Headphones being the universal symbol for "otherwise occupied, please DND", why don't people use these electronic communication systems we spent the last two decades developing?

You get an IM along the lines of "Got a sec?" and you can gracefully swap that mental state out to disk and address the question.

Really, it's a no brainer.

Considering how cheap office space is compared to labor, the trend of compacting workers into ever tinier cubes (with or without walls) is insane.

I wrote about good data science/engineer environments in Agile Data Science (O'Reilly, 2012). You can read it here: https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/agile-data-sc...

Pasted inline:

Agile Environments: Engineering Productivity

Generalists require more uninterrupted concentration and quiet than do specialists. That is because the context of their work is broader, therefore their immersion is deeper. Their environment must suit this need.

Invest in 2-3x the space of a typical cube farm, or you are wasting your people. In this setup, some people don’t need desks, which drives costs down.

Rows of cubicles like cells of a hive. Overbooked conference rooms camped and decamped. Microsoft Outlook a modern punchcard. Monolithic insanity. A sea of cubes.

Deadlines interrupted by oscillating cacophonies of rumors shouted, spread like waves uninterrupted by naked desks. Headphone budgets. Not working, close together. Decibel induced telecommuting. The open plan.

Competing monstrosities seeking productivity but not finding it.

—Poem by Author

Before very long, people get very confused that the process is the content. That’s ultimately the downfall of IBM. IBM has the best process people in the world. They just forgot about the content.

—Steve Jobs

We can do better. We should do better. It costs more, but it is inexpensive.

In Agile Data Science, we recognize team members as creative workers, not office workers. We therefore structure our environment more like studio than office. At the same time, we recognize that employing advanced mathematics on data to build products requires quiet contemplation and intense focus. So we incorporate elements of the library as well.

Many enterprises limit their productivity enhancement of employees to the acquisition of skills. However, about 86% of productivity problems reside in the work environment of organizations. The work environment has effect on the performance of employees. The type of work environment in which employees operate determines the way in which such enterprises prosper.

—Akinyele Samuel Taiwo

It is much higher cost to employ people than it is to maintain and operate a building, hence spending money on improving the work environment is the most cost effective way of improving productivity because of small percentage increase in productivity of 0.1% to 2% can have dramatic effects on the profitability of the company. —

—Derek Clements-Croome and Li Baizhan The Sane

Workspace Creative workers need three kinds of spaces to collaborate and build together. From open to closed, they are: collaboration space, personal space and private space.

Collaboration Space

Collaboration space is where ideas are hatched. Situated along main thoroughfares and between departments, collaborative spaces are bright, open, comfortable and inviting. They have no walls. They are flexible and reconfigurable. They are ever changing, always rearranged. Bean bags, pillows and comfortable chairs. Collaboration space is where you feel the energy of your company: laughter, big conversations, excited voices talking over one another. Invest in and showcase these areas. Real, not plastic, plants keep sound from carrying and they make air :)

Private Space

Private space is where deadlines get met. Enclosed and soundproof, private spaces are libraries. There is no talking. Private space minimizes distractions. Dim light, white noise. There are bean bags, couches and chairs, but ergonomics demand proper workstations too. Separated sit/stand desks with docking stations behind (bead) curtains with 30” LCDs.

Personal Space

Personal space is where people call home. In between collaboration and private space in its degree of openness, personal space should be personalized by each individual to suit his or her needs. Shared office or open desks, half or whole cube. Personal space should come with a menu and a budget. Themes and plant-life should be encouraged. For some people, this is where you spend most of your time. For others… given adequate collaborative and private space, a notebook and mobile device, some people don’t need personal space at all.

Above all, the goal of the Agile Environment is to create immersion in data through the physical environment: printouts, posters, books, whiteboard, etc.

Bean bags, pillows and comfortable chairs. Collaboration space is where you feel the energy of your company: laughter, big conversations, excited voices talking over one another. Invest in and showcase these areas. Real, not plastic, plants keep sound from carrying and they make air :)

When it was in 454 Tech Square, the MIT AI Lab had just such a space at one end of the rectangular building on the 8th floor, albeit without the reconfigurability I snipped. And a huge whiteboard, maybe huge enough to cover one of the walls if I remember correctly (can't find a picture, unfortunately). All in nice brighish colors + white.

No real plants, or not many, though, RMS has a fear of them (seriously).

> Considering how cheap office space is compared to labor,

Unfortunately the finance department is great at showing the opposite.

They're in different asset categories. E.g. if times get tough you can lay off people, but office space is generally leased for fairly long terms, and if you can't sublet for one reason or another....

And if the company is old enough they too often come out of different budgets.

The cost difference is so big, even the factor of leases shouldn't make a difference. We're talking an order of magnitude usually (from what I've read on the topic). And once you factor in severance packages, etc, it's a no-brainer. It's possible to argue the merits of open versus closed, small teams versus big teams, etc, but any organization using cost of space against productivity is doing something very wrong.

My favorite environment is having four to eight people (one team) in one very large room with a door. And a couch.

So, private office proponents: what bay area companies actually provide this to their engineers? I haven't seen a single one in my experience.

I've been part of several startups. They often start with private offices, until the space fills up. Then you start sharing, camping in the lab etc.

Private ~~study~~ work carrels anyone?

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