“Today we moved into our new Facebook building”
facebook.com
facebook.com
I realize that I'm adding nothing constructive to this thread; I don't care. Maybe some manager somewhere will see this and a hundred other anecdotal opinions and think twice about open offices.
I am the opposite of a prima donna. I just want to work. I want to make awesome stuff, keep my skills sharp and make the company some money. Preferably lots of it.
I'd be fine with an office that's literally 5x5', a desk, a door, a wifi connection, and some shared working areas for when it's time to collaborate. Because yes, collaboration is crucial (and fun) but if I have to hunt all over the damn building for a bit of quiet space (that might not even be avaiable) when it's time to bear down and do some solo coding then this is not going to work.
Hell, I'll even bring my own damn desk, chair, and laptop. Supplied my own laptop to my last two jobs. No big deal. I'm an engineer; I get paid decently. But I need a freaking place to focus for at least half of any given working week - and sometimes, for close to the entire week.
I don't need: famous guest speakers, catered food, fancy architecture, anything. I wouldn't even care if the office was a poorly-insulated garage that gets cold in the winter. I'll bring my own $20 space heater that will heat a 5x5' office just fine.
What I can't have, if you want me to get any work done, is multiple simultaneous conversations taking place five feet away from my head all day long.
To put a dollar value on it? Maybe 25%-50% more than I'd need to work at a similar company with working environment that encourages calm and focus. And I'd be perpetually ready to jump ship to another company with such an environment. I also wouldn't be nearly as productive as I could be otherwise.
Those three things all have dollar values attached - in the tens of thousands of dollars, each.
Best of both worlds.
Keep your mind open, give yourself the opportunity to try it one day, you might be surprised. Besides, it's pretty much a requirement if you ever look for a job in the Silicon Valley.
Nevertheless, I found the open format significantly impaired the depth with which I could think through things. That's where the quiet spots helped out a lot. Unfortunately my company had ridiculous overcrowding issues (the fire marshal literally came after us) so quiet spots could be very hard to find (and you might even hurt yourself politically for taking them). It sounds like this office doesn't have a shortage of space, though.
Most of my more introverted colleagues were able to adapt (max within about a month).
> I've worked in an exclusively open format office and it
> can be hard at times. Ideally you can find 2-3 spots to
> work: your desk near your team, a reliably (tho perhaps
> non-reservable) quiet spot for focusing, and an (perhaps
> unreliable) quiet spot for super privacy (e.g. a
> conference room )
The average mid-level engineer in the U.S. makes something like $80K/year; it's obviously proportionally higher in tech hubs like the valley.
It's just heartbreakingly, frustratingly comical to think of a highly-paid engineer losing hours and hours of work every week as they wander around looking for an actual spot in the office to, you know, work.
That's really the issue here: what should your default zone be?
I like your suggestion that the default location for your desk should be in the collaborative spot. Cornell studied this a few years back and made an interesting observation: We engineers tend to prioritize our personal productivity over team productivity. Left to our own devices, we prioritize offices for exactly the reasons JohnBooty states. Personal productivity is how we're most directly measured and rewarded. But if we do that, team collaboration plummets. It's a lot harder to pull ourselves out of our focus zones into collaboration mode than it is the other way.
So, I don't know if FB's new office has quiet spots (they should), but defaulting to collaborative seating acts as a good counterbalance to our innate biases.
There are so many workplaces that don't even have the option of reliably obtaining distraction-free workspace, though, and that's insanely harmful.
> So, I don't know if FB's new office has
> quiet spots (they should)
> It's a lot harder to pull ourselves out of our
> focus zones into collaboration mode than it is
> the other way.
However, I also think those things are also fairly trivially solved by adopting a software development method that fosters collaboration. Scrum is popular for a reason and feels like it's almost always a good start. On top of that team leaders can also block out time for code reviews, show-and-tells, pair programming, etc.
My default zone should be a team office with a transparent door that shuts (preferably a big, heavy door, so people are subconsciously incentived to only bother opening it if they really need something).
The three-zone scheme sounds nice, but if you give me team offices and conference rooms of various sizes, I'm pretty sure we'll be unstoppable.
NB. I had this exact team-office+heavy clear door setup in my old office and it was awesome. When we moved to the new expensive space, it was just one loud big room, ugh.
I actually would not necessarily recommend "defaulting" to the collaborative desk space. When I moved to a quiet space for a quarter, I was measurably more productive-- among other things I wrote almost twice as many ksloc.
If you want your engineers to excel, I think it's critical to have both strong collaborative and quiet places. During the first quarter or ramp-up, the collaborative space usually makes a good default. New grads will probably do well in shared space for the first 6-12 months. Beyond that, there needs to be quasi-offices (especially for ICs who have naturally introverted temperments). Personally I think it's helpful to put everybody through both arrangements because it encourages people to adapt and diversify in their communication modes and contributor roles.
My guess is that open seating at Facebook fits their core culture, and that open seating isn't necessarily a great fit for every team. If everybody puts on their noise-cancelling headphones and listens to a loop of crickets chirping (seriously this is what my colleagues did) then you need more space and/or need to rethink your layout.
Over the years I've found that the vast majority of work-from-homers share this opinion. Almost unanimously.
I got so much extra work done this winter when it snowed and I worked from home.
...razor straight elbows aren't good either though, which eventually puts a crimp in that pose. Good for short runs of coding though!
There is a reason why companies like http://www.hudl.com/ are killing it here. You can fight for years, or have a ranch with basement when you're a 26-year-old developer.
Socializing about coding is actually my favorite part of my current job. At my previous position I was the only full-time engineer. One reason I took my current job was the chance to work with a team of talented people, most of whom are more experienced (with this technology stack) than me.
I was translating on the first tour of your office to some japanese exchange students, and if I recall correctly, you guys had different rooms that implied different levels of 'don't interrupt' vs 'really don't interrupt me', right?
But i've never had a problem in an open space. You don't wear headphones or a way to indicate to others to not disturb you? And surely you can see where some of the other things you talk about are good for you right? 'catered lunches, well ventilation/heat' etc. If you don't have to worry about those things that's less for you to worry about and you can focus on working! :)
The collaborative time is crucial: I've worked in places where there was no culture of collaboration; sometimes programmers working solo would "go dark," spend days going in the wrong direction, or spend inordinate amounts of time spinning their wheels because they were stuck on technical issues that other engineers could have helped them with very easily.
So: yay collaboration! I'm only opposed to work environments that don't even allow engineers to have uninterrupted solo time when they need it.
> But i've never had a problem in an open space.
> You don't wear headphones or a way to indicate
> to others to not disturb you?
But there are two issues. One is that people often don't respect this - either by intentionally interrupting you, or accidentally interrupting you by having conversations next to your desk that manage to be distracting despite the best efforts of the engineers that made the headphones. We could say that these people are simply being inconsiderate and we'd be right - but I've been doing this for nearly twenty years and sadly this is kind of a universal thing.
The second issue is that open offices often involve a whole lot of visual distraction even if the noise is completely abated. A steady stream of coworkers having animated conversations mere feet away is pretty distracting even with no sound.
> catered lunches, well ventilation/heat' etc.
> If you don't have to worry about those things
> that's less for you to worry about and you can
> focus on working!
I wish more places that had open offices also had places you could lock yourself in where you know you would not be disturbed. Doesn't seem to be the focus for some reason, but I picture a bunch of smallish rooms you could go in and work or maybe nap around the perimeter.
If this sort of things aren't getting caught in your daily stand up meetings then your tech leads/managers to whom your paying big money salaries are working as nothing more than glorified email routers.
In which case merely flattening all walls in your office and creating a fish market is hardly going to solve any issues.
But my team is far more productive across non-coding tasks by being adjacent to each other. And anybody who felt very strongly about not sitting with the team would, in my opinion, not fit in as well here.
My point is: the feeling would perhaps be mutual. And it's OK: every person is not made to work at every company.
One key factor in switching jobs last year was the chance to work with a team of talented coders, instead of simply being the sole software engineer at my old company.
What I (and others, I think) react strongly to is the concept of workplaces where there are no private workspaces (or not enough private workspaces) for those times when solo work is what's required.
Deming knew how to do it, and even outlined that the entire economy would rise because of improved management practices. I very much believe he is correct.
Child: Daddy, will you play wit me?
Dad: Sorry, I can't I have things to finish off from work.
Child: Why don't you do it when you're at work?
I am a weirdly fluctuating person and some days I work best in total seclusion. Others I need to sit in the middle of a cafe and have the noise and people around me.
So my goal is to be as adaptive as possible without harming the day-to-day work life.
Yes, at (former, thankfully) employer its the border between actionable offense (being written up) and merely being viciously trashed at review time. Management made the explicit decision to enforce collaboration (a 'la the whippings will continue until morale improves) and your actions are direct and intentional insubordination of that explicit formal requirement.
One person will get yelled at in front of everyone else (because its open office, duh) and nobody will dare to wear headphones again.
Its hard to find a more open and shut case description of intentional willful trivially documentable insubordination.
I did the same thing at SAIC when I had a private office. Then my motivation was to have an hour or two for uninterrupted coding.
Except for 2013 I have worked remotely from home, which can be very good, but I do miss out on face time.
> I now make it a point to walk around the halls and
> drop in on people who are open to it (green status
> light on the door).
In offices with "normal" doors sans lights I usually just use the time-honored system: completely shut door means "please don't interrupt unless you're telling me the building is on fire," a completely open door means it's party time, and if my door is open just a crack that means I'm working but you can come in and talk if you need me.
The downside is, as you mentioned, that it can be really difficult to get focused work done. This is especially true if there are other teams sharing the same open space (project managers, designers, etc, etc). The thing that really made it better for me was to get a pair of noise canceling headphones and listen to the right music while I coded. That pretty effectively blocked out almost all of the external noise, or at least brought it down to a level where it wouldn't break into my head space and kill my concentration.
There is still the problem of people feeling more free to interrupt you for every little thing if you are in an open office layout. The only way I've found to mitigate that has been to just try to inform people (in a nice way) how I work and what it does to my productivity when someone breaks in on me during the middle of something. I also try to have a couple of blocks of regular non-coding time during which I keep my headphones off, usually right after team meetings. That way everyone knows that when there is a good time to come talk to me.
At the end of the day I do like the way collaboration works in an open office, but it does require some extra effort to stay productive when your job requires a lot of very directed concentration.
But I also have to admit that I've typically worked at companies where I was part of a smaller technology team in a larger company. As opposed to working at tech-oriented companies where the majority of my coworkers were fellow engineers who would (theoretically) be a little more understanding.
Another thing is that teams with private offices suffer greatly in communication and more importantly in energy and passion. Teams in open office often go to lunch together, have more personal exchanges and have far more socialization. When people see their teams working hard around them, they have little excuse not to follow the suit. In private offices, I often see people catching up on news websites and FB and in fact I even knew a guy who freely admitted that he spent entire days on YouTube. These were smart people and it's not that they were slacking off but most people are actually fairly weak against distractions generated from their own computer. Those distractions in private offices far out number distractions by people in open office.
A 3 person team packed in to a private office is likely the best of both worlds. In private offices, you mostly rely on bumping in to someone in the lobby for serendipitous discussions. Unless your work is isolated and you don't need to talk to anyone, open office is usually better option generally speaking. However I agree that people working in open office have to establish proper norms such as don't talk loud, put phones on vibrate, for long talks go outside, don't disturb a person wearing headphone etc. In most places, I see these norms are generally established.
> When people see their teams working hard around them, they
> have little excuse not to follow the suit.
> In private offices... ...most people are actually fairly
> weak against distractions generated from their own computer
But that is also fairly easily mitigated with methodologies like Scrum where you are frequently touching base with other team members. During the daily standup meetings you publicly commit to what you're going to do in the next day, and inform the team of what you did during the previous day (along with any roadblocks you hit, if any).
I don't find myself tempted to YouTube the day away when I know I've told the team I'm going to to X, Y, and Z today and that I'm going to have to stand up in front of them again tomorrow and let them know my progress (or lack thereof!)
> In private offices, you mostly rely on bumping in to someone
> in the lobby for serendipitous discussions.
> A 3 person team packed in to a private office is likely the best
> of both worlds.
The open floor plan is also a huge cultural boon for that reason. The types of systems that enable communication, collaboration, and mutual motivation in a closed office are the ones that feel "old" and unnatural and corporate. Despite productivity decreases in day to day heads down work, open office collaboration feels very natural and genuine, and that has greater effects.
Plus, it turns out, most of the work in a company larger than a few dozen people is in that communication and collaboration space; not sitting at a desk typing.
It would be excellent parody of the the hula hoop circle "you know, for kids" gag from that old movie.
Your joke is funny, but I promise you that's not the reason for open floor plans.
The key is that even an open plan is a system—it's just a less constrained system, with fewer rules. You still have to view it as a system and study the effects and interactions involved.
[open offices] are a systemic solution to communication, collaboration,
and motivation problems. All three need different systemic solutions
in a private office context, but those solutions would be more forced
and less natural.
The question is if the tradeoff in the reduction/change of collaboration is worth the increased productivity from the better layout. That's not an obvious question to answer, in fact—that's what I'm saying. You need to prove which system is actually superior, with data.
Seriously, FUCK THAT SCRUM SHIT. A daily status meeting isn't that bad, but "you can only work on it if it's in the backlog" and "sprints" and backlog grooming meetings and this brand of aggressive micromanagement that has revived itself in the name of "Agile"... all of that nonsense needs to die in a taint fire.
Not that all of this would have magically gone away if we weren't an "Agile" team but it did contribute to the problem. "Proper" Agile just doesn't fit well with the way most companies want to run their teams. So managers take Agile and make their own personal tweaks to it. Since their brand of Agile has 80% the same rules to what they read in the book, they expect to get 80-100% of the benefits of Agile. Any questioning of the actual results of this system is heresy, since Agile is a well-established management method used by many successful companies.
If that manager had picked up a management system that worked within the company's framework without making so many changes, or if there wasn't so much Agile-worship in the industry that an "Agile" setup was politically unquestionable, the situation would have been a lot easier to fix. As it is, it wasn't until our team completely collapsed that the company reassigned half of that manager's responsibilities to a new department, and the manager decided to retweak their personal brand of "Agile". Even that is probably too little too late; more and more projects are being moved from that dep't into others, to the point where I'm wondering what the devs there will actually have left to do.
So yeah. I'm very skeptical of anything calling itself "Agile", because it's such a nightmare when done wrong, and I'd bet dollars to donuts there are more places doing it wrong than right.
A culture of trust where engineers are treated as professionals and adults, not as children who have to justify weeks and days of their own working time. Open allocation as far as is possible within the confines of the needs of the business.
Status reporting, if the overhead is around 3% (e.g. 15 minutes per day, or a one-hour weekly meeting) isn't so bad. I think it's actually good if it defuses the suspicions ("what does he do?") that, unchecked, can devolve into political behavior.
Scrum involves a lot more, like user stories and an explicit disallowance of working on things not in the backlog. By the book, you have to leave written records of what you did in insulting detail. It's horrible stuff. But I agree: 15 minutes per day for an all-team status meeting isn't that bad, and can be better than the alternative if that alternative is a culture of suspicion and resentment.
If I need to do something that doesn't have a task in the backlog, I just add one and then click "start" in Sprintly. No big deal. It's basically a shared to-do list, and I'm a to-do list kind of guy.
I like the daily stand up meetings. Specifically the emphasis on the fact that it shouldn't be more than 15 minutes in length.
You have my sympathies though. I can certainly see how some companies would implement Scrum in a way that is really anal-retentive and gets in the way.
In a private office, I wouldn't have to worry about this.
Being visible from behind puts stress on you. You may not be aware of it, but it will catch up with you before you're 35. Headphones don't help for that. It's not just the noise that makes open-plan offices so terrible. Booth-style open-plan offices would be a step up, but nearly as expensive as private offices and since this open-plan thing is really about cheapness (and back-door age discrimination, in some cases) that does not sell it.
Teams in open office often go to lunch together, have more personal exchanges and have far more socialization
This has more to do with the people than the office layout. There are open-plan offices with eat-at-desk culture and there are private-office layouts where people eat lunch together and play board games after work. Private offices don't mean that there aren't open spaces when people want them.
In private offices, I often see people catching up on news websites and FB and in fact I even knew a guy who freely admitted that he spent entire days on YouTube.
I spend more time goofing off in open-plan offices, because I have to hide the goofing off. Here's how it works for me. I have a certain amount of goofing off that I need to do per day, just because I'm a curious person (it's not actual "goofing off", it's just not immediately work-related). In a private-office layout, it might be 10 minutes every 2 hours spent checking the news, on HN or Reddit, reading a poetry book on the internets, whatever. In an open-plan layout, it takes 20 minutes to get that 10 minutes of goofing off in, because even though I don't actually need to hide it (I'm senior enough that I could pull the "so fucking what" card, and no one cares anyway because everyone goofs off a little bit) I still feel that social pressure.
I do agree about extra stress in open plan workspaces. I'm the kind of person that can't block out people around me like I notice some other people do, so everyone that walks past my desk I feel the need to glance up at them. In coffee shops I prefer the seating with my back to the wall. Music can be used to block out some of that distraction, but not all of it.
I really wish people would stop repeating this. It's complete hogwash. It doesn't even stand up to the most basic of scrutiny. If it were true, how the hell did we ever get work done before the open office plan?
Suddenly transporting a failing team of globally located people into the same room together isn't going to magically make them into an effective team. People don't fail to communicate because they aren't sitting next to each other. People fail at communicating because they are terrible communicators. PROTIP: if they actually write "excellent communicator" on their resume, then they are not.
Similarly, suddenly scattering a succeeding team across the planet isn't going to make them fail. People who are good at communicating figure out how to communicate even under the worst conditions. Most of the developers on all of the big FOSS projects have never even heard each other's voices!
But no, let's treat people like cattle and make them hotbunk on workstations. If you have room to put up your own photos of your family at your desk, clearly you're wasting company resources and your desk could be smaller. You exist only at the pleasure of the company.
Office-chair jockeys of the world, UNITE!
Too many tech companies are up their own asses with how hip and cool their offices are. I just want to work when I want, how I want, and in an environment of my own choosing. I 100% understand that collaboration needs to take place at certain times and I really do enjoy the collaboration of remote work with other employees. However the "collaboration" that takes place in these types of offices is just wheel spinning and time wasting. It truly is the art of not working. It's all about how you look in front of managers (who are really only interested in asses in chairs and looking good to their managers...the cycle of doing nothing continues).
I really prefer having all hands with other remote employees 6-10 times per year where everyone is together in the same room. The meetings and collaboration that comes out of these is much more meaningful. Time is of the essence so we make it count.
It stems from a lack of understanding of systems and the way people fit into them and work together toward a genuine goal. This lack of understanding comes from beliefs in individual aptitude and attribution bias, among other things.
It doesn't have to be that way. Deming's system of profound knowledge provides a good start to undermine politics and ineffective work cultures.
What you're seeing is not a problem of office layout or design, is what I'm saying.
I enjoyed how you phrased that. I work at a giant multinational and yes yes I know all about the stereotype that innovation only comes from the tiny little startups on HN, but innovation flows both ways, like it or not, and over the last decade one megacorp major cultural shift I've seen is collaboration only happens in email because its documented and highly accountable. If you really want to share opinions or idea or requirements or demands in a verifiable documented backed up permanent fashion then you put it in email. You don't have a "real" opinion until its written down and sent in email.
If you just want to talk about sports or the weather or gossip about colleagues or lie to someones face about a due date or product change or a spec, you exclusively do that verbally on the phone or in a meeting or text. Non email based collaboration is seen as a fake waste of time, because, lets face it, it is. If you're too much of a coward or crook to put your name to a statement, then its not worth reading. If someone refuses to document what they're saying in email or a bug ticket they are pretty much treated as liars or ignored. Its an interesting cultural shift. I have one older boss (yeah office space style I have a couple bosses, informally) who is all about the "personal" nature of a phone call or meeting, but its always super ineffective. He's still a nice guy and overall a good manager, but "old people thinking" is holding him back compared to the other mgmt who have moved on with the times.
It seems to work extremely well, especially with multi-office, multi-timezone, multi-national, multi-company teams. (edited to add, and this factors into the "scalability" mantra heard so often on HN... don't set yourself up to fail, operate like a big company from the start) And violating the "new way" by only communicating verbally or in meetings seems to dismally fail fairly often.
This large company innovation will probably spread to the smaller companies sooner or later.
I guess it must work for them, and I have gathered over the years that I must be something of an outlier in my comfort with and preference for communication via writing, but god I wish we could just cancel all meetings forever and just solve things simply and quickly via email.
This is one of the reasons working for Microsoft was an exercise in misery. People who haven't worked there have trouble believing me when I describe the amount of time people there routinely waste in bullshit status meetings. It was maddening.
They'll ask me questions about how things work and I just don't think well on-the-spot like that about code I wrote 2 years ago. I remember it well enough that I could look it up and get them an answer in an email in 15 minutes, but they had to call to ask, so they want the answer NOW. They'll call at 7:30 at night and complain they couldn't get a hold of me. They won't leave a message. They could have sent an email and I would have an answer for them first thing in the morning. But they would rather call during off-hours, then wait until nearly the end of the next day to call back.
Then, they will say a bunch of stuff, nobody will write it down (except me, IFF I actually hear it). If they are bad ideas, I'll argue a little, but not having the time to research the pros and cons, I can't provide a good recommendation with alternatives (and I hate complaining without alternatives). So everyone will "agree" that it's the direction we (meaning I) should go. I'll bust my ass to get it done, present the changes, and they'll question why I would do things in such "confusing" ways, when what makes it confusing is what I complained about in the first place.
"Just brute force it!" They'll say, like it's somehow a magical incantation to turn a programmer from architecture astronaut to a pragmatic realist "like them". "No, we can't brute force it, because the problem is exponential and runtime explodes when we apply it to real data." "Don't quote that math mumbo jumbo to me, we just need to get it done, I don't care how good it is." Then later, "wow, this is really slow, maybe we should find someone else to be working on this."
Sorry, getting a little off topic there. But basically, I hate not working with people who know how to communicate properly, but I've learned to work within the system (or lack thereof, rather). I've just taken to agreeing to everything they say, then doing whatever the hell I want. I know what their goals are better than they do. I can make a better project then they know how to, and they never remember what they actually told me to do. I just tell them it was all their idea, and they don't have the documentation to contradict me, so it works great.
I'm much more open to receiving phone calls now, because even if it's much harder to search an audio file, at least I have something to search. If I'm not sure if I forgot something, I can just open up the file and listen to it again. I would still rather get an email, but some people just NEED to take a phone for whatever reason.
Given that you have some trouble hearing, you can take the time you want to re-listen to a conversation with the volume as you like it.
As a bonus, it's also helpful to get a hold of a certain kind of people that thinks they can say anything and are not accountable because it's not in writing.
But I guess it doesn't matter much when money is aplenty.
The other subtle thing is that you are being stripped of any privacy --we all get lumped together. Stripped naked of your individual humanity and sent into a human pen to do your work in a commune. It's great for some people, but one has to realize what is being taken away in the name of the unassailable communication and collaboration (and who in their right minds would want to go against that grain).
She enjoys the team vibe but also needs to block out people around her fairly often. The 'phones allow a lot more freedom to sit anywhere and still be able to work.
That said, a common reason for it is back-door age discrimination. Plenty of companies use open-plan offices without such an intent (they "look" busy, which pays off in marketing, and they're cheap) but the open-plan fetishism is all about "culture fit", meaning exclusion of the old, the female, the lower-than-upper-middle-class, and all disabilities except early stage alcoholism.
Tech companies are, in general, very badly managed. It doesn't prevent them from being successful because technology is so powerful that it compensates for inept management. I see this as a good thing in the long term (imagine what this industry could do if it wasn't run by idiots) but, culturally, it's bad because the worst attributes of "startup culture" are infecting the whole economy.
Wait, what? How do open office plans put women, older folks, and lower-income folks at a disadvantage?
It doesn't come naturally to people whose life experiences involve violations of trust, embarrassing illnesses, or physical danger. (With age, the percentage of people who have such experiences increases, and approaches 100%.) You have to still have that sense of immortality to be OK in an open-plan office.
Also, having children makes people less trusting of strangers, for obvious biological reasons. Having a helpless being that you must protect at all costs makes people less OK with the blind trust in strangers you're supposed to have if you want to fit in to the "I'm at one with everyone, man!" California culture.
Older people are also not able to take as much abuse of their fight-or-flight systems, and pregnancy has a similar effect on women.
I've worked in 4 small offices for companies ranging from 6-60 people, I need a quiet focused atmosphere to work in, and two of the offices provided that, despite being shared spaces.
In one of them, (6-8 people) we always had quietly playing ambient music. Not to everyone's tastes and some people used headphones, but it meant no one tried to talk over desks, and if people needed to speak it set the tone as one a bit like a library.
The office I'm in now (20 people) is much the same. We don't have any music, but through a strong example set by the founders and a culture of being able to ask people to be quiet politely and without repercussions, regardless of who it is, we have a very quiet working space and conduct most conversations over IM or in separate meeting rooms.
Based on my experience in the other offices, I can see why many people would be against open offices, but I believe they can be done well. Whether Facebook's are or not I do not know.
Having to share an office with others is fine too imo - every team can determine their own levels of distraction and noise and whatnot. More than one team in one room is asking for trouble though.
6 people sharing 800 square feet is pretty nice, and you can actually have semi-private phone conversations in a space like that just due to the distance between you and your coworkers (especially if the space is broken up by half-walls, plants, etc).
100 people sharing 5,000 square feet, on the other hand, might work great for a trading floor but absolutely sucks if you're trying to write code or a thoughtful email to a customer.
In any case, the thing that bothered me most about open offices wasn't the noise so much as the lingering feeling that other people were looking over my shoulder. I was often reluctant to voice this concern because (at least in my mind) the implication was that I had something to hide, but I know that others I worked with felt the same way.
Who the fuck thinks that a stock exchange like environment is good for productivity? May be some people like it, most of us(engineers) don't. Why?, do you ask. I will tell you.
Lot of engineering(programming) work is built on trying to get a focus on the problem. How do I do that? Not by asking around, pulling shirts and generally being a nuisance. Now there are people like this, who would like nothing more than a open office plan, because the answer is only a shirt-pull away. We achieve focus on the problem by concentrating hard, building delicate structures in the mind, controlling certain variables, testing theories all in mind. When somebody pokes at me or laughs hard, this structure comes tumbling down. We can reconstruct it only with some effort and patience, but it is irritating. This irritation builds up over time, becomes chronic stress and makes you an unsavory person.
For managers - Is it not enough for you that you box us in little time slots under the pretense of agile? You have to go all the way and give us a chicken coop to do our work?
I agree completely. I don't have an open office space but I still have to keep my door open which leads to me overhearing people on the phone and the general work chatter anyway, so I end up with headphones. :P
I completely agree with you but without an open layout how do I control my employees?
And:
With an open layout I can put more people in less space.
This is what business people think. All the rest is poetry.
Also, what does it mean to "design" an open office? There is no architecture.
For me, I hate the feeling of BEING WATCHED. It's just unnerving. There's people all around me with low cube walls...
* I want to stare ahead as I focus - someone's looking at me.
* I have my big headphones on and am rocking to the music - someone's looking at me.
* I wanna put my head down on desk and think - someone's looking at me.
* I check gmail - someone's looking at me
* redit break - someone's looking at me
* I scrape off dry snot caused by the super-dry office air - someone's looking at me.
* I'm working - someone's looking at me
I just can't be in my own head when I'm so surrounded by people... always there... always right. behind. me.
Funny thing is - I'm not an antisocial person. I love people. Just not when I'm trying to focus on something. Then the very presence of others makes me nervous.
And yes, when I'm focused, I like to talk to myself out loud, lie down on a couch to think, rock to music and draw a lot (when designing something). All those things look silly and I'm uncomfortable doing any of it when not alone.
The problem is that some of the areas of the brain that do that processing are also used when handling other complex tasks such as programming. This overloading of processing areas will vary from person to person, of course.
This problem is the main reason I could never work in an open office, and have serious productivity problems even ion an office shared with only one other person. It's not that they are interrupting constantly or otherwise distracting in the commonly-used sense. If there are people around, I have to be aware of them, which wastes mental CPU time and introduces cache-flushing context switches at annoying times.
It just get wrapped in a bunch of politically correct fluff about "something something collaboration" ... "something something support and community" to make it difficult for people to oppose it.
God forbid you raise an objection and suddenly you are worse than Hitler and hate people and need therapy.
Agree. It's practically abusive. Even if you're a great worker, pillar of the community, whatever, the fact remains that a surveillance state is an anxiety state.
The problem is that this industry is now fueled by the eagerness of clueless 22-year-olds who've never had a serious health problem or personal matter that interferes with work, who still think they're immortal, and buy into that "if you have nothing to hide" fallacy. Fuck that shit.
What a nightmare.
These "glass palace" offices may work for bankers or marketing teams. For programmers you could just as well plant their desks into the middle of a mall.
j/k!
http://afflictor.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/openoffice.j...
http://www.basexblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/office-w...
Given how high programmer salaries are, the productivity loss due to open offices is almost definitely more than the office space savings.
It seems like an introvert/extrovert thing. The introverts would prefer a quiet working space (and they're usually the best workers), but extroverts want the easy communication (and they're usually the bosses).
Even small team rooms of 4-10 people get annoying when the other person has a smelly meal, has a cold, prefers a different temperature, or listens to music on his headphones so loudly I can hear it.
One of my favorite jokes is when a job ad says "We provide headphones so you can concentrate!" as a serious job perk. How about a quiet space?
To be fair, I don't think everyone that uses the term "open office" is thinking "auditorium with 1000+ people." Attempting to extrapolate anything conclusions taken from open office environments of 4-10 people out to 1000+ people seems insane.
1000 sounds like a nightmare.
When was the last time you interviewed someplace that gave all programmers their own office?
I need focus and fast compile times, not a damn booth.
That's an incredibly simplistic way to view an effective workforce.
Uh what? I'm an extreme introvert but don't see any reason to believe introverts are usually the best workers. I am not even that convinced that introverts would prefer a quiet working space any more than extroverts do. After all, just because someone is extroverted doesn't mean they have an easier time concentrating in a noisy environment.
I love a quiet workspace, and I also enjoy an open office plan. There's a need for the advantages of both environments—the ease of collaboration and the focused heads-down time—which is why this is such a difficult discussion to have.
Off topic, but how did you "convert"? Was it a conscious effort or did it just seem to happen? I ask mostly because I had a period of a few years where I felt like I leaned closer to extroversion, but now I'm pretty firmly an introvert, and I'd like to be able to push it back to the other side, but can't quite figure out how exactly to do that.
As far as office plans go, as an introvert I really don't mind working in loud, distracting environments. I've gotten blocking out the outside world down to a science, and I'm pretty hard to distract unless someone is specifically talking to me, but I've found that an office with a door doesn't really stop that anyways. My ideal office is probably some variation of what I have at my current job, half-cubicles (4 pushed together) with 1-5 other people nearby. It's isolated enough, but still lets us collaborate and see other people enough to keep the madness at bay.
Seriously, they're antiquated descriptors. I was only pointing out how ridiculous it is to assume someone's lack of knowledge of terms.
They only persist because they provide a considerable amount of validation to behaviors of self-described introverts who desire permission for their personality. Most humans don't fall into either category absolutely.
- College in an extremely social club environment (marching band) - Moved across the country to a new place, forced me to meet new people, change social skill set - Moved from small companies to fast growing larger company, with mostly introverted people around me, I tended to fill out the gaps - Role more focused on personal interactions - New romantic relationship that allows for individualism, fulfillment, so I seek social interaction outside it (previous relationships were less balanced) - Exercise, diet make me feel more positive and social in general
In short, my life has significantly changed since I considered myself an introvert. Most of it I attribute to just growing up and developing as a person. I could also see myself shifting back, depending on my situation. No biggie, both are good, and certainly I still have many introverted qualities.
What you described was your path to developing social skills, which is great.
I am an extremely social person. Many different groups of friends, very social at work, love going out and am always up for just about anything. I know I am an introvert because I need alone time in order to recharge.
I define introversion by the MBTI definition: "I like getting my energy from dealing with the ideas, pictures, memories, and reactions that are inside my head, in my inner world. I often prefer doing things alone or with one or two people I feel comfortable with. I take time to reflect so that I have a clear idea of what I'll be doing when I decide to act. Ideas are almost solid things for me. Sometimes I like the idea of something better than the real thing."
Similarly, I define extroversion by the MBTI definition: "I like getting my energy from active involvement in events and having a lot of different activities. I'm excited when I'm around people and I like to energize other people. I like moving into action and making things happen. I generally feel at home in the world. I often understand a problem better when I can talk out loud about it and hear what others have to say."
I define my personality shift from introversion to extroversion as a shift from primarily the first definition to the second. The shift is not in full: Meyers and Briggs not only recognized the spectrum between the two and the conditionality of both personalities, they accounted for it in their assessment.
I still have periods of overstimulation by crowds that require alone time to "recharge." I also have periods of overstimulation of introverted self-care, in which I require crowds and groups to "recharge."
Overall, I find the black-and-white dichotomy to be insufficient to describe the experience. The gray area is better, but I still think the presence of the opposing words does a disservice to the people attempting to define themselves and others in terms of them.
This myth persists huh.
http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/rankings/the-100-b...
Doctors and Lawyers, of course, earn far more.
Signed, a former mostly-introvert, now mostly-extrovert, who remains an able and efficient member of my team, thank-you-very-much.
Now, down to business, my office actually does have a 'quiet space' of substantial square footage, filled with bean bags, comfy chairs, and lots of nooks and crannies. It's highly effective to go work there when needed.
The rest of the office remains an open floor plan. I find it useful to split my time between both places, one bearing all the advantages of human interaction (it's not so bad), the other providing concentration when required.
This situation is remarkably balanced.
* 3-4 month old figures: http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/
No one person is fully introverted/extroverted. Everyone appreciates alone/quiet time to an extent and appreciates other people's company to an extent. It's way more of a spectrum than it is a black and white status.
I love meeting new people and going to social events, but I also have no problem spending time alone working on projects. What am I? A worker or a boss?
This is probably less of a factor for Facebook, who built a bespoke office building and have a ton of cash, but it's definitely driving things elsewhere in the real-estate market. If you read what's being written in the architecture / office-consulting business, there is much touting of the cost/flexibility advantages of open-plan offices compared to "legacy" floorplans. Even boring old companies like ExxonMobil are moving towards open-plan offices in new construction mostly for this reason. And office buildings built speculatively by investors in the past 20 years almost never have actual structural offices like older buildings do, because that's seen as producing a rental inventory that's less flexible. Companies leasing space just get a big open floor space, and then have a choice between setting it up in open-plan or cube-farm style.
Individual productivity isn't the aim. I've seen research that suggests the most predictive factor in the success of a team is how much they communicate. Yes, you might lose out on lines of code productivity, but you might also find that you're writing much more of the right lines of code and your colleagues are too.
I think the differences many of these arguments partially boil down to the differences in the nature of various lines of business. I have had four positions at two companies and have never had a situation where changing desks every day was feasible. Work from home has never been an option for me. Since I like the type of work I do, I want to do it in a real office (something I have yet to do).
http://www.radialsblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/UBS-tr...
Their actual office work, meetings, decision making and nearly everything else will be happening from a 'meeting room'. So in essence they will have a private office in which they will spend most of their time in.
> There’s a strong culture in Silicon Valley that requires you to jam a lot of programmers into a big open space, despite a preponderance of evidence that private offices are far more productive, something which I’ve covered repeatedly on this site. I’m not really getting through to people, I don’t think, because programmers kind of like being social, even if it means they are unproductive, so it’s an uphill battle.
I’ve even heard programmers say things like, “Yeah, we all work in cubicles, but everyone works in a cubicle—up to and including the CEO!”
“The CEO? Does the CEO really work in a cubicle?”
“Well, he has a cubicle, but actually now that you mention it there’s this one conference room that he goes to for all his important meetings…”
Mmmm hmmm. 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).
(From http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FieldGuidetoDeveloper...)
I'm really impressed by how non-gimmicky this Gehry building looks on the outside, and it seems like they really did a good job designing whatever space isn't consumed by the open plan.
(kidding)
"Someone clear a path for the wheelchair!"
I feel similarly about a lot of Gehry's more well known work.
I'm interested to see how the building performs. If only I worked in Facebook management...
Or, in an extreme example, the ones you see in anechoic chambers: https://www.google.com/search?q=anechoic+chamber&source=lnms...
The foam devices serve to both absorb sound energy, and to scatter the remaining sound energy at a variety of angles, where much of it will collide with other reflected sound waves and cancel out.
I needed some acoustic foam for a small project at home and found this place. They seemed pretty affordable (and had lots of colors) compared to other places, though I'm far from an expert and I was only buying ~$40 of foam so I didn't exactly spent too much time comparison shopping: http://www.foambymail.com/acoustical-foam-products.html
(But I could never live in France. Two weeks was 13 days too long.)
Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work ✥ done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't ✥ know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in ✱ importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect ✞ sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can ✝ say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ✝ ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow ✲ they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame.
Instead I get forced into open collaboration-enhancing offices with the idea of increasing team productivity. But on scrums and all other things I am judged on the merits of personal productivity (tickets closed, issues resolved, whatever). This leaves me disgruntled because I have no way of showing to project managers that I've helped N people with their issues. They only care how many issues I closed.
This then shapes my personal values and how I judge myself as well. Which in turn makes me shun the open plan office. Which in turn ultimately makes me a worse engineer a few years down the line.
This is a problem.
I'm not saying that you are saying the opposite, I'm just saying that the cause/effect is very much up in the air. I never thought it was as straight forward as asking "what is better?" (as he rightly asks too)
Personally, I never looked for fame (and I'm old enough to say that I likely never will look for it). In the end, what I want is: to be right. Even if it takes 100 wrongs to get there. With that in mind, I would be better off if I was an extrovert as I'd probably get through the wrongs quicker than if I preferred my solitude.
But as it stands, I like to be able to stare absentmindedly in a random direction without the risk of accidentally glancing at someone's new hat or haircut.
I don't know if I am slower or slightly wrong. I would not rule it out, though. :)
There's nothing about being extroverted that makes you like concentrating less. ;)
The whole "easier to collaborate with others" with an open floor plan is just excuse. I communicate better over text chat anyway.
I don't know you of course but I really doubt that text chat would ever surpass the effectiveness of face to face communication.
Development is always tricky because often you need clear air to solve problems but then occasionally collaboration is required.
1. Open plan for day-to-day with some private rooms. 2. Private rooms for day-to-day with lots of breakout rooms (or similar).
I think the first is cheaper (lower square footage), but I'd much rather work in the second.
Technology might get us there someday.
I have no doubt that developers will write more code whilst in offices free of distraction. But the question is do they miss out on key business knowledge by not being around other people. Especially if they are in Agile feature teams.
Considering the amount of money and effort engineers put into blocking distractions in open-plan offices, it is probably about the same.
In which case you can not argue that there is significant money/effort involved. It's either the cost of headphones and the effort of walking tens of metres. Developers are going to need better arguments than that to convince HR/Management that this is not a trend worth doing.
What do you mean, "again"? This statement is the first mention of such in this sub-discussion. Also, I'm not going on a tangent about the joke that the "private areas" in such offices turn into or how infeasible this design is for many lines of business.
> In which case you can not argue that there is significant money/effort involved.
"Significant money and effort" as in the sum total devoted to finding solutions to the problem of distracting, sub-optimal environments being foisted upon engineers, not the cost to a single hypothetical engineer.
> It's either the cost of headphones and the effort of walking tens of metres.
That statement presumes: a) headphones are allowed; b) headphones work for everyone; c) people have work they can pick up and move; d) that private areas actually exist in sufficient quantity for those who want them; e) that private areas are not appropriated permanently by people up the political food chain.
> Developers are going to need better arguments than that to convince HR/Management that this is not a trend worth doing.
That statement assumes HR and Management care about any argument besides cost.
Also, you completely ignored the point I was actually making, which is that throwing engineers together into a giant room does not give you the cross-pollination that so many management consultants claim you get.
The debate is about whether or not we want to force employees to exclusively in a collaborative way, with no reliable option for quiet solo work -- as many of these "open office" workplaces do -- is a good idea.
Mainly, I'm curious about how they define productivity. An office full of people performing completely independent tasks is almost certainly less productive than having separate offices; the advantage of open offices comes when everyone's work is interrelated. In an open environment, whenever I need to make a decision on implementation, I can easily ask someone intimately familiar with the area my code effects, and vice versa. The result is that people are more likely to make the better choices for the long-term future of the code base.
I'm also curious if there are any longitudinal studies that address moral. I wouldn't be surprised if people in open offices feel less like a cog in the system. I could also imagine it's a lot harder to develop a hatred of your coworkers and your boss if they're working right in front of you.
There's a good New Yorker article[1] from last year that references a number of studies. This blog post[2] links to a couple others and addresses costs/alternatives. Also, "a study of over 40,000 survey responses collected over a decade has found that the benefits for workers are quickly outweighed by the disadvantages"[3]. Here's a Washington Post article[4] referencing Facebook's new building and linking to a few other studies.
Of course you can certainly decide to dismiss the research and base your opinion on anecdotes or assumptions, but don't judge research as being poorly done just because you disagree with the findings.
[1] http://www.newyorker.com/currency-tag/the-open-office-trap
[2] http://nathanmarz.com/blog/the-inexplicable-rise-of-open-flo...
[3] http://theconversation.com/open-plan-offices-attract-highest...
[4] http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/30/g...
Also, what happens during flu season? How many people are gone and how often vs private office setting? I'd love to see a study on this.
I am working in a company that is redesigning the building to be more open plan. It is clear that HR is driving the decision not architects or interior designers.
As far as noise goes, even with audio engineers on staff, the level of disruptive noise was horrible. People having calls at their desks, testing mobile notifications, etc. Thankfully, I worked at home 50+% of the time as getting productive work done in the office was incredibly difficult. Large open space + open office = bad idea.
Our office in Stockholm, while an open office, had many smaller sections offset by walls, break rooms, etc. It was a much better experience overall, but still not optimal.
1. I have glasses and a hearing aid (cochlear implant) and have yet to find headphones that don't make my left ear/head throb with pain after more than six hours.
2. Visual distractions: people walking through, people seemingly approaching me (but actually approaching someone nearby), people waving, etc. are all just as bad as auditory distractions, if not worse for me personally since I tend to rely heavily on vision to replace what I can't hear.
The problem with a noisy open space environment is that my environment is going to decide when I can do work. When I have the inspiration to fix a problem and I need to be able to focus, this has to be on "my terms", not that of my environment.
It's an old-school, assembly line style of thinking. An open floorplan gives the impression of vulnerability, you won't goof off on HN or reddit when you know somebody could be looking. A loss in crunchtime productivity may be worth it if the employees would otherwise spend 2 hours a day wasting time privately. The culture determines the amount of time spent socializing in plain view but the open office completely kills any attempt to spend company time on non-work activities in private.
I work outside the tech bubble but even with my limited experience, I know that the more company provided distractions (a 9 acre park, free snacks in the breakroom, etc), the less you'll be allowed to actually do anything but work.
The conditions have never been better to work remotely, yet I guess another way to eliminate commutes is to make your workplace so livable you never leave (much). :)
I think of it like a sausage factory, the boss loves the product but doesn't want to know how it's made. Leave me to work in my own way.
It's not just you, that stuff is in our biology.
Even worse than motion in your peripheral vision is activity behind your back (e.g. people walking by).
Unknown action (sound/vibrations) behind our back triggers our flight reflex, which is very hard to suppress.
Almost reads like an Onion article. I'm sure that they thought this through though before spending so much money.
I keep thinking the latest announcement of "gigantic open floor plan" is going to be that stroke too far. But I have also learned to be disappointed.
The open floor plan, with +-3 hour start/end time to your 8 hour work day (from say, 8:30-5), with optional hour lunch (paid or unpaid depending on policy/culture).
Think about it.. there are definitely collaboration benefits to be had with the open floorplan. The contrast to that is always the "engineer needs alone time" bit. I get it, I work well both ways, but as others have said, you can't do all of either all of the time. That's where true flexibility in working schedule comes in.
Like your quiet time? Come in at 6 and leave at 3. Or come in at 11, and leave at 7. The bulk of the office will tend to come in near the societal norm of 9-5, especially those who like the collaborative bit the most, and that leaves you the ends to pick from. Entire office likes to get together for group hour long lunches? Skip it and work. The idea is, if you honestly can't fit the work you need to do into blocks of time at the ends or middle of the day when the office naturally quiets down, you've got a bigger problem than the distractions of the office. The idea that you must have 8 hours of quiet or near quiet to do your job means you're not that good at doing your job, or your job role is too demanding for a reasonable person to do. If it's truly the case, you're likely SO good at what you do someone's noticed and you're getting what you want already.
I think the bigger issue is how we've all been duped into how the open-plan offices "work" from MBA dicks.
The problem is, they do work - for a lot of people. Things are getting done, at the biggest companies (case in point, the original article). People can complain and I'm right there with you - I love my quiet, but you have to adapt, and an engineer that can't adapt isn't much of an engineer, in my opinion. There's an army of people who can adapt working at these "god forsaken hideous open offices" which must then be "gender discriminating experienced engineers" when they can't work like it's 1990 anymore.
This is the new reality. We don't have to write COBOL or VB or Pascal anymore, we don't have to wear suits, and most of us are paid really well, taken very seriously as a profession and in high demand.
That comes with a little bit of give for all that take.
Dodging rush hour is a plus for me.
"Where does the actual work get done?" Why are those photos never included.
Over a period of I've noticed the best way to handle has been to just tune out. I mean just be completely irresponsive to anything happening around you. Unfortunately I've been told many times by my manager that certain cultures can consider as being rude.
Its almost like the office is now a community center for people to just gather around and chat.
Where does the actual work get done? Why are those pictures never included?
> The funniest thing about all of these "office design" photos that I see of big companies.
Are you A/B testing your comments?
That's a good idea though..If only I had the time
I don't even want to think about how the whole "open office" philosophy will influence future restroom design.
I spend a lot of time working out of cafes, both for my job and when I'm working on some personal project. ~4-8 hours a day in a cafe plus a coffee every 90 minutes or so and plenty of water means I have a lot of experience with coffee shop public restrooms. And almost all of them are terribly designed.
The worst problem, common to almost all cafes, is that a place with a capacity of ~40 people or so will have two single-user gendered restrooms. By this I mean there is a label or picture on each door indicating "Male" or "Female". This is a problem for a number of reasons, including that it creates issues for trans and genderqueer people, but also that it inevitably creates situations where there is a queue for one restroom (because of a user who is taking their time, for whatever reason) while the other is empty. Of course, someone could jump out of the queue and use the empty restroom, but there's a social norm that we generally must abide that forbids this.
Another inefficiency is that faucets for washing up tend to be locked in the same single-user room as toilets. This causes backups when a person needs to use the faucet but someone else is using the toilet or vice versa. Plenty of people just pop into a single-user restroom to adjust their hair or wash their hands or whatever.
In something like 9 years of working consistently out of cafes, I've seen just two that have what I consider to be well-designed restroom facilities: the Starbucks at Main & Olympic in Santa Monica, CA, USA and Sightglass Coffee in SoMa, San Franciso, CA, USA. Each have an open, shared sink area with a glut of faucets and two to four single-user toilets behind locked doors opening out into it. I've never seen a line for the restrooms at these cafes, although I don't know if that's because of good design or because no one wants to use such weird restrooms ;-)
http://sf-hrc.org/compliance-guidelines-prohibit-gender-iden...
Here in Southern California, West Hollywood recently passed a similar ordinance that prohibits gendered single-user restrooms in public spaces and businesses.
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-weho-gender-neut...
Worth a look. I've seen it in action up close.
IMO there are four types of mutually exclusive workspaces in a tech office setting: Open collaboration, library time, telephone booths, and small to large general assembly.
These four, while briefly explained, highlight their purpose for optimal productivity in the day to day workflow.
Specifically, library time would be an open space for work but with an implied quiet noise level. In contrast open collaboration is similar but without the noise level restriction. Both spaces would live in separate areas not near each other for understood respect in work style.
Just my 2 cents. :-)
>>On the roof is a 9-acre park with walking trails and many outdoor spaces to sit and work.
That's awesome.
H|A
-+-
C|K
I used to work at a consulting company, and I'd be in an open plan office with 5 other teams, working on 5 other projects. Everyone was working through engineering decisions that were unrelated to my own.
If everyone's on the same team, at least, there is some saving grace to the open plan office - you overhear stuff that you might be able to contribute to.
I'm surprised that open works there, but Zuckerberg is a developer and has hired most of the senior team. They must have data that it works for them.
I won't feel good if my manager/co-worker comes to my desk at the time when I was just switching to some music on youtube. It can give a wrong impression of you even when you know you were not doing the wrong thing.
I know some may object to these. That's ok, this is my list. I'll answer questions though and I'm open to suggestions.
Here's my list, developed over 25 years working for companies, mostly startups:
Never work...
0. where you're not getting equity along with a paycheck, or where you can't ask the CFO how many shares are outstanding on a fully diluted basis, and get an answer, during your interview.
1. for a manager who is not an engineer, unless you're the CTO.
2. Think twice working for any "tech" company where the CEO is not an engineer, or technically proficient. (Tim Cook is technically proficient, Jeff Bezos is not.)
3. in an open office plan.
4. for a company that shows disrespect for employees in other ways. Companies try to hide so you have to look close.
5. for a company that uses cult behavior, eg: "magic phrases" like Amazon's "Today is Day One!!", or that has a management book that all employees are supposed to read (if said book is of the pop-management variety)
6. for a company that doesn't provide you a convenient parking space at their expense (you should be working remote anyway!)
7. for a company that doesn't provide flex hours. Flex needs to really mean flex. Midnight to 8AM is an acceptable work schedule.
8. for any company with standup meetings, or other pointless meetings. (yeah yeah, all of the previous "SCRUM" teams have been "doing it wrong", so that just means nobodies doing it "right")
9. on a team where mandatory meetings happen more than twice a year
10. for a company that employs stack ranking, in any form.
11. for less than 3 weeks of vacation a year
12. for a "starter" salary that will be "made up later", unless this is a startup and you're getting a significant chunk of equity- eg: shares valued at most recent round of investment, or a $1M valuation if no investment, EXCEEDS the lost income.
12. for equity with a vesting schedule with an initial cliff longer than 90 days, (30 days is appropriate)
13. for equity with a vesting schedule over 4 years (and only 4 for > %5 equity)
14. for a company that has taken money from dishonest or unethical VCs (I know a lot of the bad ones but check "the funded" for reviews)
15. for a company that doesn't hire ops engineers, but expects developers to be "on call"
16. for a company that has a lot of restrictions about vacation and doesn't treat it as real (eg: you don't get all your days when you leave, bad PTO policies, etc)
17. in any office without adequate bathrooms, this includes any buildings where people are packed like sardines. combine the gender ratio of tech companies with more than %100 occupancy and the bathrooms are insufficient
18. in any setup with less than a dual thunderbolt display, or single 35"4k monitory.
19. on windows on a regular basis
20. where my development machine can't be a Mac
I think you underestimate Bezos's technical clue, though.
And a 1y cliff is pretty standard. There's no real downside to that.
Convenient to transit plus a transit pass can work for some employees and having that as an option would work for me some of the time. The situation that caused this to go on the list was one where there was no convenient access to transit and I lived in a place without access to transit. A better phrasing would be "have transportation and parking if necessary be convenient and not a significant distraction from work."
I worked with Bezos dealt with him on tickets etc.
1 year cliff is terrible when you get "laid off" in month 11. There's absolutely no reason for it, really. It's not like it takes a year to figure out if an employee is any good or not. It's just greed. It may be "standard" but so are open office plans and I'm no longer interested in "standard".
My last place rented near a subway station, 2hr on-street parking, no nearby garages, would only cover $250/year for parking. Running out of the office every 2 hours to spend 10 minutes driving around looking for another open spot is a stupid way to spend your workday. Spending $4k-$5k for personal parking is a stupid thing to ask employees to do.
The offered free mass transit at another office, but wouldn't provide any subsidy at mine until there was a virtual walk out and then they offered what was basically 3 days worth of transit subsidies.
And then they wondered why they could never get any customers to visit their office for meetings.
Seriously, get office space your employees can actually get to. I'll never make that mistake again.
I am paying $260/mo for my parking spot. It's not awesome, but it's not the end of the world.
My point is that parking (or some reasonable transit alternative) should be figured into the operating costs for the company. Acting like employees don't need to actually get to work is not a good way to run a business.
It should be $0/mo for your parking, your company should be getting you the space as part of your overall compensation/operating costs.
I should add, the office I worked at now sits empty, every single employee who worked there left (including myself).
Real companies understand that as part of their facility costs, they need to provide this stuff. So they pay for a parking lot when land is cheap, or pay for monthly parking in cities. Or they pay to subsidize mass transit. If a company doesn't want to pay for the cost of running a business in a place with expensive parking, then they should office where parking is cheap. If they don't want to pay for the cost of actually running their business, they shouldn't be in it.
It's the employee's cost to figure out how to get to work, it's the company's cost to figure out what to do with them once they get there.
Provides CalTrain pass? Add $45 dollars to salary (I expect to use it 3 times/year).
It's about the wasted time dealing with a parking space.
The companies that don't provide parking often locate in places where you spend an hour a day, in aggregate, dealing with parking one way or another-- looking for a space, walking to the building from the space, etc.
I'm CTO of a very small startup, and we're experimenting with an organizational structure based on the causes of this list and a bunch of other stuff-- found a CEO whose really all about the love- there is no other word for it.
We're not hiring yet, unfortunately.
Yeah, the rules are different for founders, etc. More meetings, more availability, etc.
The CEO is also the domain expert in this situation, and we have a great personality fit.
Ideally I think engineers should be CEOs. Engineers can learn business a lot easier than biz guys can learn engineering. But it's not always going to be the right choice.
Really, I just want to work remote and be responsible for my own environment.
That's the ultimate lesson of much of this list--- offices are the bane of my productivity.
Of course if you're building windows software you're going to be working on a windows machine, same thing with iOS. But if you're building stuff to run on linux servers, seems wrong to make your employees do it on windows (since it's not unix.) Sure if some employee prefers to do it on windows (since it has ssh, etc.) more power to them!
You asked why people were downvoting. I suspect 19/20 have a lot to do with it.
I did that once. Once. Then it went on the list. Over 20 years ago.
22. for a company with an employee handbook that is all about protecting and absolving the company while imposing an undue burden of petty rules on the employees, including interfering with things that are none of the companies business such as alcohol consumption outside of work.
How do you go through life being so rigid on such relatively trivial issues?
Worse, it seems to unfairly distort things as well. On what basis have you concluded that this person thinks he's better than people from India?
And I think except for a few bullet points he's not asking for much that isn't pretty normal in the US. My first job out of college satisfied bullet points
1,2,3,4,5,6,8,10,11,12A,14,15,16,17,18,19,20.
I left out most of the equity-based ones simply because the company didn't do equity. I left off 7 even though we had very flexible hours. They just weren't so flexible that you could work at night.
Anyway, what bugs me so much is the entitlement. Sure, maybe you can find a job like that. But what makes you think that you deserve it?
And yes, there is a problem with being entitled. The world is already too full of selfish assholes. I really would not want to work with someone who is looking for so many reasons to be unhappy with a job.
So much entitlement...
I highly suspect your measurement of "too much entitlement" is a matter of your own jealousy.
Jealousy? Of what? Of wanting too much?
Because if you simply didn't want X, it would just be a matter of taste. So instead, you think it is unreasonable to want X, as you don't think anyone should have it before you unless they are to take some kind of social penalty.
You can call that entitled, I call it experienced enough not to be a sucker.
That you think I'm an asshole for listing red flags that indicate systemic problems in companies, in my opinion, reveals more about yourself than me.
If nobody tries to raise the standard, then it will never be raised. Based on his other posts, this guy is the CTO of a small startup. Maybe in a year or two he'll be hiring and providing these benefits to others. How's that a bad thing?
I understand being turned off by entitlement. But, really, calling the guy who's advocating for better environments for workers and employees an asshole seems backwards. If we're going to call anyone an asshole, surely it would be the people fighting in the opposite direction.
I think you're taking for granted the centuries of work that it's taken to get even to where we are now. Read about what working conditions were like a century ago or more. Go read about the horrors of being a chimney sweep. We don't have to endure that sort of treatment anymore because people were entitled and whiny and constantly strove for better conditions. Let's do the same for those who will follow us another 200 years from now.
Also, whoever is going on a downvote spree on everyone here, I invite you to simply enter the discussion instead. I've downvoted nobody.
And despite all of this, no, not enough, now we must campaign for no more than 2 mandatory meetings per year?
I'm not a special snowflake. I like solving problems and doing meaningful work that contributes to the well being of others in some way. Those are my only requirements. Everything else is flexible.
And the list reads like a tour rider (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rider_%28theater%29), not some attempt at advancing worker's rights.
I guess I was trying to give the person the benefit of the doubt and not assume that he's like that on the job. Maybe he is. But he also might just be picky about where he works but great once he's made a decision. I guess I don't see the point of worrying about which way it is because it doesn't matter -- his point is only to list red flags about companies that he's built from experience, and I see value in sharing that with others.
Beyond that, having enough of a salary to live on is all a person really needs. Having such an inflexible laundry list of demands just ends up making a person unhappy. I bet there are more hidden demands beyond this list. This just reeks of bad attitude, selfishness, and entitlement.
The happiest people are those who desire the least.
And I don't think "the least" is in any way an accurate description of what you have or want.
You're far more inflexible than I am.
I will not work at a company that mistreats its customers. A license manager, software whose purpose is to inhibit the use of another piece of software, is an example of such abuse. Having been on the receiving end of such abuse, my condition is to not force that abuse on anyone else.
At a guess: after spending enough of that life to realize that those 'trivial' issues can make all the difference between feeling good in the longer term or feeling miserable.
Making a meeting mandatory is a big red flag that the meeting is a waste of time.
Re: office plans, I'm fine with a cubicle as long as it's tastefully done, developers are segregated from sales people, etc. I want to see that thought has went into it. I understand that sometimes a company truly can't afford private offices for somebody, so what it really comes down to, for me, is whether they care about their working environment in a legitimate, thoughtful way (as opposed to a bandwagony way).
I personally believe that benefits should be a la carte.. pick what you want, get cash for ones you don't want. The "free food" thing is a big one for me. I don't like 90% of the food offered, I'd rather just have the cash.
For instance, most 401k plans only let you invest in terrible expensive investments (like index funds. Fine as an option but these are not actually good investments for people who can manage their own money.)
Instead of equity, you could ask to be paid $20k more, go to a casino, and bet it all on one spin of roulette at 36:1. If you win the first spin, let half of it ride on another 36:1 bet. That would give you a better payout distribution than is likely from equity.
The equity thing is about the mindset of the boss, more than compensation.
Although some of your "requirements" are perfectly reasonable, I would never hire you. Good engineering is all about compromise and working with reality.
"where my development machine can't be a Mac"? Seriously?
I'd actually agree with this. You want to give your employees the best possible machine to work with -- machines are cheap compared to salaries. If he wants a Mac, I'd buy him a Mac.
Your work machine is not your personal computer. The best possible machine is anything that makes you more productive and reduces friction for whatever you happen to do at work. That may very well be a Mac, or may very well be something else. If you company gives you a Mac but everyone else uses Windows and Outlook, that will increase friction and make you less productive, not more.
It's like asking for a red computer, because you like red.
I absolutely hate Linux on the desktop, yet I happily use Linux for work. It works just fine for work and reduces friction in a lot of ways. When I leave work, I switch to my personal Mac. It is actually better this way, I don't feel like I'm working when I'm using my personal machine.
My point is just this: if you impose a hardcoded set of requirements instead of finding our what works best for each particular context, you're probably as fixed-minded when actually working. Nobody wants a fixed-minded employee.
But as someone who has used a Mac in an office full of people using Windows and Outlook, it didn't increase friction. And I was even using OS X.
Your perspective forgets that you can run Windows on a Mac. I said "Let me use a Mac", I didn't say I wouldn't dual boot into windows (though having to use windows all the time is a separate requirement.)
I put that down there because it is the machine that makes me more productive.
You're saying forcing me to use windows, which isn't even unix, makes me more productive simply because my pointy haired boss uses it?
And you call me "fixed-minded"?
Nope.
There are also many companies populated by "prima donnas" with their Macs on their standing desks being very productive at nothing that actually matters.
I fail to follow your reasoning. I also fail to follow your reasoning that this kind of trivialities implies something about the prospective employer (as I said, there are other items in your list that are perfectly reasonable). It does not, but it may imply something about the prospective employee.
I don't know you, so I'm not making a judgment on you personally. I am, however, making a judgment based on your list. Just like any potential employer would do (even those that would otherwise happily comply with all of the items). If you have to argue against this, therein lies the problem.
So yes, please don't hire me if you're just going to then turn around and wasted my time (by making me work on windows or Linux on the desktop, for instance.)
I understand compromise and working with reality-- and the reality is no company may be able to make all the points on this list. That's why it's facetiously called the "Prima Donna" list.
But if you're not interested in facilitating good engineering then I'm not interested in wasting time TRYING to work for you.
There are plenty of employees who should rightly hate their jobs, but they work in shipping, not corporate.
How did you get through the first two decades of your career without a 4k monitor?
(co?)incidentally that could make such a room almost bearable as a work environment, personally...
I guess it fits well with the platform attitude. Employees are just another component of the platform. Make them happy, keep them at work longer hours, derive more value from them.
But these should be zoned, yes.
Opening a window is very important for a lot of people, including myself.
Companies use these horrible office layouts for a number of reasons, and not all are so distasteful: everyone else is doing it, they're cheap, and they take good pictures for marketing because they "look busy". But, when you get to the core of it and the leadership behind this open-plan fetishism, it's all about age discrimination.
Life changes make people less able to handle the chronic visibility (especially from behind) that these offices inflict. For women, pregnancy will do the trick. Men tend to like open-plan offices less after having children as well, because when you have kids you no longer perceive the world as free of danger, due to having a biological imperative to protect another creature, and you stop believing in the "nothing to hide" bullshit that convinces people to accept such invasions into their privacy. But even in childless people, the ability to handle the needless stress inflicted by open-plan offices seems to decline around age 30.
There's also a stress that comes from incoherent noise when it comes from all angles. This is something that scuba divers are aware of, because of the way water plays with sound. It can exacerbate the "blue orb phenomenon" that can cause an open-water freak-out (which sounds, presumably unintentionally, similar to an open-office panic attack).
This is especially bad for technology. The cruelty of software's age discrimination is that it takes 10-20 years just to be good at this stuff. People are pressured to leave the industry long before their prime.
Oh, and there's a 1 to 2 percent per year chance, even in healthy people, that you get a life-altering anxiety or panic disorder if you do knowledge work in an open-plan office. (They aren't as bad for less cognitively intense tasks.) That doesn't show up in the marketing materials, and the casualty rate is low enough that few people talk about it, but it's a factor as well.