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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'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

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).

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...

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).

> 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".

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.

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.

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 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.

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.