Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace
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I've worked in open offices, offices with high partitions and from home. When I work from home what's stopping me from opening up news or playing video games? When I work in a partition and I need to talk to another engineer face-to-face I can't just glance over to see if they are available. Open offices lets me be around my colleagues and inspires me to focus on my work and get access to help promptly when I need it. I don't give a damn if they see me in a snuggie or sleeping under my desk.
I believe the real problem is the lack of choices. You should be able to choose the kind of environment you want to work in and not feel like you're forced in a situation you don't like. I think it's wrong to say "open offices are destroying the workplace".
Actually any co-location scheme allows this, walls or no walls. It's a matter of culture, not of vertical dividers.
But I concur, it's a bit over the top to say that "everyone" hates open offices since clearly some people don't. Personally, to me it feels like a quarter suffers, of which there is a vocal minority, half don't give a damn and quarter thinks it's ok.
Personally I think open office is the worst to happen to the modern workplace. I like being around my team but I don't enjoy being consciously aware of the doings of the four other teams who share the space I'm in.
Team rooms. Those are golden. Better yet, rooms of 2-3 persons.
One of the offices I like to show as an example is Ubiquiti Networks, particularly images 3 and 4 (pardon the link to my own website): http://officesnapshots.com/2014/03/12/ubiquiti-networks-san-...
One important thing ton consider is not wasting $$$ on coating the walls above about 7' or below 3' as it is basically unusable without those funny library ladders.
The choice of materials and colors (metal, stone, glass and black) feels more suited to a parking garage than an office.
Also glass walls do not help with visual distractions. They can in fact make them worse due to reflections.
Another thing I wonder: are office plants totally out of the picture nowadays?
That explains why I don't recognize the horrors of open offices I read about.
I work for a small company with only 10 people spread over 2 rooms.
Other people have no choice whatsoever about where they work, but still enjoy their coworker interaction to the point they get bored and demotivated when the office is quiet. They might not be the most popular people in the office with programmers who also have no choice where they work, but from their point of view the open plan office is much better than sitting in a dreary box wondering if the question that's on their mind is actually worth getting out of their seat to go to ask a colleague about, whether marketing are in today and whether anyone else has made a sale yet.
I think that sounds more like a team room and not an open office. Team rooms are awesome.
I value spontaneous human interaction very much. I just don't value being aware of the spontaneous human interaction between 40 different people around me.
The key to understanding why open offices suck is that the amount of disturbance - statistically - is relative to the number of conversations that can spontaneously happen.
If we take n people then the number of spontaneous interactions is (back of the envelope) k * n * (n - 1) where k is some scaling factor.
It looks like this: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...
The point is, the more people there are, the more disturbances there are - exponentially. It's totally different to work in a space with 10 people than with 20 people - in the latter there is a 4 times more likelihood there is a disturbance than with 10 people. If we compare a room with 4 people with 40 people then the room with 40 people have relatively 130 times more disturbing events despite there are only 10 times as people around.
This is of course a ridiculously simple model but I think it essentially captures the fact that very large rooms have different dynamics than just large rooms.
And I want that people communicate and ask things spontaneously! But I don't appreciate the fact that without walls people like me need to suffer from noises coming from four different teams. And I don't mean suffer in an aesthetic sense, but in a very gut wrenching, unhealthy, "I cannot concentrate on this algorithm and it pisses me off like no other thing in this earth" way.
"...they get bored and demotivated when the office is quiet."
Do you mean you get bored and demotivated or are you describing how someone else feels specifically about their job?
Could it be rather that their job is just not that meaningful to them? If that is the case then I would hold that as a point against open offices - give people tiny meaningless jobs and remove all the walls so they are peer pressured to perform. I'm obviously exaggerating here to make a point.
Being an adult. Really, do you require a baby sitter to keep you busy?
Busy-work isn't unproductive work- at least, not to the organization. Busy-work is work that the organization needs to have done, but the individual does not find interesting or satisfying to do. Any company is going to require busy-work.
That's exactly what it is.
> Busy-work is work that the organization needs to have done, but the individual does not find interesting or satisfying to do.
That is not what the term means. Busy work: work that keeps a person busy but has little value in itself. What you're describing is simply boring work. If the work is useful, it is by definition not busy work.
Not-busy != not-productive
And I absolutely use a choice of work space to help mediate this. When I used to freelance I had to get out of my apartment and work at a coffee shop to really start my day. Now I often have days where it's fine to work from home, but when I find myself completely distracted from work while at home I go into the office because it's just slightly less acceptable to be goofing off all the time there, and that's just the nudge I need to get into my work for the day.
* In a survey of more than 3,200 people conducted by Salary.com, 64% say they visit websites unrelated to work daily.
Source: http://business.time.com/2012/03/13/youre-wasting-time-at-wo...
The great thing about a computer is I am the master of it. That means if I have trouble focusing I can easily use these tools you mentioned in order to focus.
I can't do anything about my coworker eating a big bag of chips really loudly; or the sales staff laughing and joking around on the phone with clients all day long.
Presumably nothing so long as your performance levels are maintained within the expected parameters. To my mind that's better, goal focussed rather than time focussed.
On the flip side there's probably nothing stopping you from waking up at 2am and doing some productive work for your employer then either.
No, most of us can't fully control ourselves on everything, which is why we set up systems that help us. A shared office is one such a system.
Please don't be personally rude on HN.
The widespread application of headphones to "solve" this problem is silly. It does nothing to screen out the visual distraction of working with 40 other people in your sightline, and it cuts you off from meaningful discussions with your direct peers.
I've been happiest in spaces where workgroups of 6-8 people were in large-ish shared offices that broke up sightlines and isolated noise. Doors that close, folks (partially frosted glass or not).
Sometimes though, the impossible happens. Maybe a race condition or something. In those cases i find myself questioning my mental model, which is good. It leads me compare what i think is happening to what is actually happening. If i don't find that mismatch, my mind sort of tenses up.
Those terrible problems lead me to question my understanding of reality and my self worth. Some things are just hard. I really do just check out and play video games for a while. Something in my mind relaxes, my subconscious chews on the problem for a while. Sometimes i have to sleep before I feel like i can continue.
When i'm working near my limits, i get weird. I know other poeple who just grit their teeth and go on. I've tried that, but it feels like the road to burnout for me. I know others deal with that well.
Talking sometimes helps, but because my understanding is flawed, my explanation has the same flaws. Some people are good at helping identify the false belief, but usually I still have to let that realization tumble around in my mind for a while before i feel comfortable enough to continue.
It sounds like the low grade anxiety and stress of an open office actually helps keep you on track. Frequent deadlines is a similar kind of pressure that some people excel with.
I'm the same when I get plenty of downtime at work. If I can take a long lunch break and follow it up by going to the gym and nobody at work minds because I am overall very productive then the low grade stress etc actually helps me focus.
Id estimate maybe 25% of open office workers are seriously negatively impacted by an open office.
To put that in perspective if 25% of workers at a company were subject to bullying or sexual harassment we would certainly label the work environment extremely toxic... Even if another 25% were happy and productive in it.
If everyone had offices, I would walk into their office and we would not need to move after starting our discussion because we wouldn't be bothering anyone.
I don't see any advantages to an open plan office with more than 1 team in it (i.e. max 10 people) other than cost and startup-chic aesthetics.
On the other hand, the jerks are not going to think twice about it, and they'll just walk over to someone's desk and start talking at them, and not always with an indoor voice, much less actually trying to keep it down. Jerks 1, non-jerks 0.
Another very, very, VERY common thing I see on places like HN is people talking about how much they love being able to walk over and ask their coworkers questions all the time with open offices. Meaningfully, I don't see them complaining about other people asking them questions all the time due their increased visibility. This always makes it sounds like it just enables people who always ask someone else before trying to figure things out on their own. Jerks 2, non-jerks 0.
On the other hand, open offices are really good at making engineers deeply unhappy and unproductive, while allowing some director or VP to look like a hero for saving a bunch of money while "increasing collaboration". Jerks 3, non-jerks 0.
I have a strong work ethic. The productivity loss actually makes me sad. It's a waste of my employer's money, the customer's money, and everyone's time. Just let me be productive. Please.
The lack of privacy is just uncomfortable. It always feels like you're being watched, even if you're not.
There are many reasons for it. The first is that I have a fixed amount of "goofing off" (which is just giving my mind some rest) that I'll do per day. In a private office, it might take 20 minutes and I'm done and back to work. In an open-plan office where I have to intersperse it with the appearance of working and it takes longer (and the goofing off is less mentally restful, so I do more). The second is that, contrary to what a lot of people say, I find that 15- to 30-minute slivers of time (between other engagements) can be very productive, but not in an open-plan office. So the meeting multiplier is more severe. If lunch is 12:00 then a meeting from 10 to 11 kills the rest of the morning, whereas with private offices you'd still have 45-55 minutes of useful time. The third is that I've always felt like if getting work done efficiently were important, I'd have a legitimate working environment to get it done in. Being visible from behind suggests low status, which suggests that the work isn't that important. So if I'm intellectually engaged or the work is helping my career, I'll do it very well... but if neither is true, the surrounding physical environment supports me in not caring. Fourth, of course, is the anxiety caused by the aggravating and unreliable work environment. It would be bad to deal with a constantly noisy environment, but that would at least be predictable. Open-offices add to the evil by failing you at unpredictable times. Someone might tap you on the shoulder. Broken. Someone might pair with the person sitting next to you. Broken. The person behind you might get a phone call. Broken.
I remember getting interrupted by jokes or background chatter or just physical movement from people walking around but the worst is how easy it becomes for people to ask minor questions that were far better suited for email/chat. Lots of communication can be async but this setup actively encourages interruptions so we can all "collaborate".
From everything I've read they are mostly built because of the lower costs, better flexibility, and associated collaboration benefits.
Open-plan offices aren't collaborative. Open-Plan Syndrome actually makes people more selfish and misanthropic. When people don't feel in control of their space (and what makes open-plan so bad isn't just the awfulness of the environment, but how fucking unreliable it is) they tend to be more jealous and territorial, not less.
They also aren't egalitarian. Let's say that you're two seats away from the CEO, and between you and him is a junior who needs to pair a lot. Whose space is going to be invaded when that happens? Not the CEO's. That's just human nature. It's not even conscious, most of the time. Open-plan offices actually reinforce status differences.
The main reason for the open-plan trend is that these offices photograph well. The act of getting work done is abstract and hard to prove for the camera. Open-plan offices look busy and energetic and (gahh) youthful. Unfortunately, they're also awful places to work for 8-10 straight hours, in the same way as one would not want to live in Times Square (as opposed to the Upper West Side or Brooklyn Heights) even though it is visually impressive.
I'm generally in favor of a somewhat hybrid approach, where small teams have their own cubicle or office and everything is open inside because I've seen what happens when that sort of organic communication doesn't happen either because people work in individual offices or because too many people work remotely.
Which only works when staff are half listening to most conversations. Which means they are distracted for pretty much the entire day.
I think a related issue is that putting pressure on subordinates is a thing that managers can point to in order to justify their position. It's a lot harder to mostly stay out of the way.
And man, how I hate those. I can't get focus, which forces me to bring the deep-thinking work home, proceeding on a two-shift day, similar to what Paul Graham describes on the "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule" essay (http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html). Even simple things like sending a page-length email took more time than needed, and were high frustrating.
Yet, recently I've been working on a company which only have team rooms. I'm on a 3 persons' room, but the rooms vary from 1 to 6 persons. Furthermore they have lots of perforated plates on ceilings and rooms are (mostly) sound isolated from adjacent ones by a foam-like thing they stuff between the division separations.
When I started here I just had that -wow- moment. I couldn't believe I was actually doing software design, reading documentation and others immerse thinking tasks during normal work time. No need to carry stuff home no more.
Did I mentioned already how I hate open-offices? :)
We've gone from half-walls to no walls.
That said, comparing open-plan offices to cubicles is like comparing horse shit to pig shit. They're both low-status office arrangements and it's amazing to me that programmers tolerate them.
I actually don't think that open-plan offices are used because they're cheap or because they're effective (which they're clearly not). They market well. So much of the current "tech industry" is about marketing and the open-plan frat-house environment looks busy and vibrant. It just also happens to make for a terrible place to work.
If your business structure is so terrible that you can't manage a remote team, you're probably not that great at managing folks onsite either.
Also, co-location does create serendipitous instances of sharing information.
It's not a matter of management. It's about does the organization need the maximum communication bandwidth between individuals possibly from separate teams or not.
If we take for granted that silos are bad, then that leads to the notion that cross-segment communications are good, and the easiest way to have those is co-locate everyone.
There is something lost in organizational potential by not co-locating if the culture is open and encourages individual initiative.
Working remote does have it's values as well, I grant that. I feel I'm much able better to concentrate at home. But I recognize the value face to face communication has as well.
Once I spent a full day at the office; I was totally beat afterwards.
The only problem is that it _looks_ like I only work half-days to everybody else.
In my experience with cubicles, the middle-level of noise was most common. Since there was often only one conversation happening in the office, it could be heard by many people and it was hard for me to tune out. (Sometimes people would be in their own offices but on the same conference call, so the only noise would be that one conversation in stereo!)
However in the open-office, we often end up with enough noise to be at a coffee-shop level of noise which is easier to tune out. (My preference being Library > Coffee Shop > 1 conversation)
Also, a cubicle provides many more places to store stuff: reference books, office supplies, all the papers your supposedly paperless office still finds a way to generate, and whatever you've personally done to make your workspace your workspace.
My cynical suspicion is that the biggest benefit open floorplans provide to employers is that they're much cheaper. Even if you buy everyone motorized sit/stand desks, floor mats and Herman Miller chairs, you're not only spending less per employee than you would on a cubicle (a standard setup with a generic chair, shelving and even a single file cabinet easily hits $2K), you're fitting more employees into the same space.
This happens to me daily and even having conversations with people they still make the same mistakes.
Its not a cynical suspicion, its just about stacking employees like Lincoln Logs to get the cheapest work space with the most people.
Considering the profit that most of these employers are seeing per employee, and given their entire product rests on the brains of these people, it just seems penny smart and pound foolish.
I don't doubt that at all, and to me it would explain why university offices are trending toward open-plan. Managers tend to like open-plan.
So 10/10 times now companies pick the option that costs 2x-3x less, be dammed with trying to figure out its impact on productivity.
On the other hand, I have found that open plan offices can be a boon when working in small teams. One arrangement I remember quite fondly had groups of 4 desks in an X configuration with L shaped desks. We were working 4 to a team and it was a friendly and cooperative environment. The L shaped desks were also significantly roomier than I've encountered elsewhere.
I should note that my experience is in London, where I suspect there's a greater premium on floorspace than in many other places.
A real story: a given company moved to new, but existing, installations. The original facilities were organized in small rooms. The boss ordered a full redesign of the interior into a single large open space, with one exception: a closed office for himself.
This ancient philosophy of "what's good for others doesn't suit me" never convinced me. :)
edit: In summary, the more pairwise interactions between people your team has, the more likely they are to be a productive, successful team. Open office plans lend themselves to more serendipitous interactions between people.
My 2c, is that open office vs closed office is simply a matter of tradeoffs. It seems easier to 'opt-out' of distractions (by putting on headphones) than 'opt-in' to interaction (by say wandering the halls talking to random people in their cubes.) People who complain about open offices probably are complaining about a culture where an open office results in distraction, not the office itself. If you have a culture where people can be sitting next to you but can signal they shouldn't be interrupted, or there is ample quiet space for private work to be done, you can have the best of both worlds.
- lunch/dinner is done in a dining area
- I invite people out for a coffee break
- I can go hangout in a common area
- I can just walk in to someone's office just like I would walk to someone's desk in an open floor plan
- I bump into people while walking down the hall, grabbing a snack from the kitchen, etc.
There's just so many ways I interact with people at the office, that making sure I'm surrounded by people I can't look away from or mute all the time is completely unnecessary.
And I don't want to have to blast music into my ears all day and wear horse blinkers just to get some continuous hours of distraction-free creative thinking done.
Open offices with the inevitable Loud Howard from Dilbert lead themselves to serendipitous interactions? Do they? Throw in Angry Dude, who goes through a Model M keyboard per month as well. You get interactions all right, but it's not the productive kind. The serendipitous interations happen in coffee kitchens, a fact that the best architects already know.
Very few people can actually 'opt-out' of distractions by any means except removing themselves from the vicinity of other people.
> If you have a culture where people can be sitting next to you but can signal they shouldn't be interrupted, or there is ample quiet space for private work to be done, you can have the best of both worlds.
I find that culture exceedingly rare and highly dependent on the nature of the work you are doing. A webdev on a Macbook Air on the company Wifi can easily pick up and go somewhere else. A dev tied to a hard line or physical resources (books, special hardware, etc.) can't. The latter also forces impromptu meetings at people's desks, since the discussion generally revolves around something that can't be picked up and taken to a breakout space. Assuming breakout spaces exist; my previous employer was creating open plans with only a handful of overbooked conference rooms.
I do understand that some people need solitude to do there work, which means that if a company goes open-office, they need to also have some spaces allocated for private rooms.
My wife is in finance, and I stopped by her work place the other day, and you could hear a pin drop. It was like a library filled with people, I couldn't believe I used to work in an environment like this.
The only drawback that I agree with the author is the vulnerability to disease. We have suffered throught his as well, and I'm not sure what to do about it besides wearing masks all the time. If a more dangerous disease did flare up in our area, I would probably work from home, and I think the employer should offer this as an alternative, especially if there is something particularly dangerous going around.
Wait 20 years and there will have been a big transformation in the workplace with more people working privately - likely with the addition of more work-from-home/remote arrangements. But there will be a push again at that point with new articles written about how people are typing away without any personal contact and how 'insert early adopter' is the devil and how they are crushing the souls of their workers.
Smart workplace design appropriately accommodates the needs of workers for the types of work they do as well as the needs of the worker as a human.
Total cop-out answer, but it really comes down to balance between communication and privacy.
I think workplace design needs to keep in mind a variety of factors, and they cannot always be optimized totally for the company itself or totally for the individual employees... which would be an impossible notion anyway.
We rave about how fast companies can scale up from small startups to have hundreds or thousands of employees, but I'd love to see that work in the Bay Area with all staff getting private offices. Quickly build more highrises? Not likely.
Not all employees want - or need - private offices in the first place. And even if there would be a benefit to providing them, maybe the company doesn't feel like optimizing individual productivity is the most important thing in the business.
All that said, there is likely a decent overlap in the Hacker News Venn Diagram of people who loathe open plans and people who start companies. I've wondered why we don't hear about more new companies who have adopted a privacy-first office strategy. Surely it would give them an edge in hiring those staff who desire such workplaces.
It seems to me that a better compromise would be to have small private rooms in addition to open collaborative spaces. Cubicles are the worst of both.
Now that I have gone back to my coding roots, but still work on a "trading floor" (open plan tech office), I have found myself having to enforce my will to my partners to inform them that I will be working only half day in the office, because my productivity skyrockets as soon as I get home in front of my computer, with nothing to distract me. Luckily, I have the luxury of being able to do this. I believe my productivity in the open plan office is easily less than 50% of what it is at home.
I do not believe that coding is a collaborative activity beyond periodic (twice a week max?) discussions to ensure teamwork. It's an intensely private activity, as is all work which demands high concentration, including writing.
EVERY single engineer (or was it every employee) got an enclosed small office. One office per employee. Full height glass wall between the hallway and the office. Big enough for a desk, chair, 2 chairs for visitors.
Oh and one more thing. Maybe because I work in IT but what is it with installing AC related machinery ABOVE/NEAR the server room (like ceiling)? The machinery makes SO much noise in the office.
Microsoft is/was well-known for giving employees their own office.
It also sounds like the writer works in a place that doesn't really need much inter-person communication on an hour by hour basis. As a software develop I find being able to quickly ask those 5 second questions invaluable, questions I wouldn't necessarily have bothered to ask if I had get up or send an email.
> Each day, my associates and I are seated at a table staring at each other, having an ongoing 12-person conversation from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
It takes a certain amount of self control to avoid this; just as it takes self control not to spend your entire day browsing HN...
The noise sucks though, especially for tasks that require full concentration. Headphones and/or earplugs can help a bit, but it's no substitute for a truly tranquil environment. Working from home can help there, but then that's the other extreme of connectedness.
I've pondered a bit if you could have a "no loud conversations" policy (think: like a library), with a bunch of rooms off to the side that could be used for conversations.
Seems like it might give a bit of best of both worlds.
Edit: Also, the open office is made worse by the current stylistic trend of no carpet and shiny hard surfaces everywhere. It looks cool, but it amplifies noise like crazy.
That's at least a little telling, isn't it?
Suggestion: Request to be interviewed in the actual seat/location that you're going to be working in and see what they say.
That said, for productivity, nothing beats being able to close my door and put on headphones in my current office.
Office layout is certainly an area where one size does not fit all.
It's lucky that I can work from home and not be too distracted, but for some people with kids/stay-at-home partner, it may be difficult. It would be great if employers at least gave people the option to have an office.
If you want to run a sales team, open office is almost mandatory. The energy you hear from others closing deals causes you to become energized, creating a compounding effect. An ops/customer success team needs to be open office so that agents can quickly exchange off the cuff conversations with each other in real time.
The point is, there are different office layouts that work for different types of people & workers.
Ask your employees what kind of setup they like and accommodate! Some people like private offices and some people don't - I don't understand why companies look at this in absolute terms.
Some people are just naturally louder, and yeah, it can be a little distracting. It's not without trade offs. But for every time I have to ask someone to quiet down, there's four or five situations where everyone being easily accessible has been a good thing for getting my job done.
I'd lean more on private space for every team working on a single deliverable, but that's just my preference.
This started with the observation that what's presently called "Human Resources" used to be called "Personnel" and before that simply the "Staff Department". A progression of euphemistic bullshit words.
Letters and parcels are "deliverable". How about "task", or "feature", or "report", or just "thing".
I actually don't think the purpose of open-plan offices is intimidation, nor that they are cheap. It's marketing. "Startup" is now a brand. At high levels, it's an excuse for bad behavior. ("We can't afford the severance cost or publicity of a layoff, so we'll fire 10 percent for phony 'performance' reasons. They knew this was a risk when they joined a startup.") For the rest, it's a useful ruse that allows companies that are even more cutthroat (just as young gangsters are typically more violent than older criminals who recognize that bloodshed is bad for business) to somehow present themselves as Not Corporate. And let's be honest: open-plan offices look sleek, busy, and vibrant. They're photogenic. They're also awful places to work, just as Times Square is (to New Yorkers, anyway) an undesirable place to live.
Open-plan offices also raise interesting questions about legality and discrimination. There's a solid argument that they discriminate unfairly against older workers, people with disabilities, and women. I certainly wouldn't go into anywhere typical tech office if I were pregnant; I can handle the open-plan stress with enough meds, but can the baby? The nagging but chronic stress of being visible from behind can't be good for the fetus. So what should the legal status of open-plan offices be? Obviously, they shouldn't be banned outright. Trading floors need them, and companies under 20 people should be allowed to use whatever office space makes sense for them. Ultimately, though, while I think open-plan work environments should be legal, I think the burden of proof out to lie with the employer, and "we're a tech company" is not sufficient. I also think that companies using open-plan offices should be taxed to pay for a public disability fund in order to compensate for the health costs that companies can currently get away with externalizing.