Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace
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Many people here advocate private offices, which are great, but as soon as you start putting up walls, you've totally restricted access to natural light in the interior of the building. Access to natural light and breaking down the hierarchy that came with private offices (exterior for high-level employees, corner for the highest) are partly responsible for creating an environment where open office are desirable alternatives.
With all of condemnation for open plan office happening, I'm excited to see what the next swing of the pendulum back toward privacy will bring us. Hint: It won't be private offices.
Some of the things I'm excited about in this regard are:
-Activity-based working office designs
-Increased working from home/telecommuting arrangements
The most important part of office design is to consider your company's culture, and then develop an office that will best support it rather than jumping onto what types of designs have worked for the unique cultures of other companies.
Of course, that means that you need to build office buildings more like hotels; you can't so easily retrofit existing office buildings.
This is not true of other businesses. A software company makes no money at all from its architecture, so it can gain a competitive advantage by making more dense use of its available office space.
Also: who wants a meeting room or common area with no natural light?
After all, you'll spend more conscious time in the office than in a hotel room.
"Increased working from home/telecommuting arrangements"
I'm hopeful that this will start happening as the labor market for information workers stays tight. A good start might be if workers started negotiating it as a fringe benefit - say, one telecommute day per month.
Which means you need different, i.e. better, buildings, those for which it is possible to construct window offices of 4-to-6 people.
> Hint: It won't be private offices.
Yeah, I don't think private offices will "come back", so to speak, but almost anything is better than the current "let's all share a long table"-thing. From my experience offices hosting 4-to-6 people are the best in terms of privacy, communication and ROI for the organization.
The hierarchy is real and shouldn't be pretended away. Having the CEO hotdesk does not actually make the company more egalitarian.
The results were not what he would have wanted: management now commandeers the conference and meeting rooms almost all the time.
And the buildings are incredibly awful for individual workers (absolutely no privacy at all, either a totalitarian no-sound approach or complete chaos, no private phone calls, etc.)
it's kind of like the Agile debate. Either you adhere to it 100% or it's a FAIL. What about taking all the parts that work for you and adopting them according to local culture. I get that it's no longer pure Agile but it can still partially work (i.e. having scrums and sprints and frequent releases but without having to work 12 hr days to meet the sprint if things come up etc). sorry about off point but the 2 debates have always been similar to me.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_gOgdHlT33Jo/TQ7zXFqaxjI/AAAAAAAAAJ...
http://www.mz-web.de/image/view/2012/4/23/17117282,16301136,...
http://www.donfeidner.de/assets/images/P1000400_SAP_Star_Bui...
The wings have offices which can sit 6 to 8 people and at the center there are the meeting rooms, restrooms and lunch area.
At the core of the problem lies a misunderstanding of the problem that open plans are/were meant to address and can also be tied back to our problem with management models and incentives in our corporations and society.
It's a complicated matter that I can't do justice here, but if you have incompetent management trying to satisfy abusive demands from "investors" aka Wall Street, incompetent management leads to believe the problem of gaining ever more "productivity" out of a corporation and workers is solved by squeezing ever harder to get that last drop out. Which incompetent management and incentives lead them to believe can be done by putting everyone in a big open space so they feel surveilled and monitored and will do what they can to appear like a good worker by doing busy work and staying longer doing. This is largely all due to a system without employee protections where anyone in the 99% can be fired at a moment's notice because some executive screwed up or needs to be paid more.
It's more obviously presented as exercise metaphor, but the following post about "Why Productive People Always have Time to Exercise"http://riskology.co/sharpen-the-saw/ also applies to these types of circumstances.
On a side note: Why the hell doesn't HN support markdown? The site's already kind of embarrassingly styled, it's shameful that you can't even link somehow.
That's kinda subjective; it looks fine to me, although I do miss contextual linking and collapsible comments (a la reddit) - although, this is something they're working on.
At the first startup, thankfully, customer service was in an open office in another part of the small building. Couldn't imagine having to work next to those conversations.
In the first company it wasn't so bad, we had all our computers circled and pointed toward the center (mostly) which afforded us a little bit of privacy at least, but it was awkward looking up to have a thought and making eye contact with a fellow coder across from me. Though sometimes it was funny. I think the hardest part was the distraction of being the end-point for anyone's conversation at any time they felt like talking to me - no matter how good a coding groove I was in. Or maybe it was having to listen to 2 other coders figure out a problem together in the same office where I was trying to work. Hmm. Either way, I prefer private offices.
At the next startup I went to, the computers faced the wall in the office. It was designed this way so the management could look over our shoulder all day long. Needless to say, I quit within months. Constantly being questioned why I was working in a certain file, or viewing part of the project's website that the boss didn't understand made me cringe. I'd go home grumpy everyday. I'd eat in my car at a creepy park across the street just to get away from the place. It was awful.
Worked for myself ever since. In an office.
With the managers though... Yeah that's annoying. I'd invite them to sit down next to you for a nice four-hour pair programming session - and if they refused, they probably didn't really care and they can leave you to it. Glad you left, micro-management like that just says that the management thinks you're inept and / or doesn't trust you.
I like my work colleagues, but sometimes I need to concentrate (or I'm just grumpy for some reason).
Or, you know, tell people to be quiet.
I completely agree with you, without music, noise cancelling headphones are pretty much useless to help you focus by canceling 'asymmetric' noise.
My personal setup is to have a pair of earplugs in resina as a first layer, my headphones as a second layer, the noise cancelling option on and finally low volume music. With that setup I can't hear anything to the point where I get scared shitless if someone disturbs me. That's how deep in the zone I become!
Solution for this was proposed in Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. Engineers were working in big room, but they were so focused, guests had to use special protocol: stand beside desk and wait quietly until you are noticed.
I hate the modern corporate office environment. HR should just be upfront about what open plan offices are about: saving money. It lets you cram in as many people in as small an area as possible. That's it. Nevermind if they're productive or not. We're SAVING MONEY!
Which wouldn't be so bad except for the fact that company laptop is unusable for approximately 30 minutes after boot (or hibernate/suspend), when it tries to scan the whole drive for viruses or whatever.
I don't even want to count how many hours of productivity are wasted because of stupidities like these.
I work in an open office of ~20 people and did exactly what you described - I brought my own keyboard to replace the standard issue flat Apple keyboard my company purchased in bulk. It has made a big difference in my typing speed. In fact there's four of us in here with mechanical keyboards and nobody seems to mind. But maybe that's because one of them is the CEO :)
We've honestly never had it come up as a problem.
When headphones are effective at masking background noise, people sometimes tap me on the shoulder or knock on my desk. It can be really jarring if you're lost in thought and not aware of your surroundings. Interruptions are normally costly, but being surprised like that makes it so much harder to regain focus afterward.
It's horrible - I have to endure the customer support calls the whole day long and can't find even 5 min. in silence, in order to concentrate on the programming tasks I'm supposed to do. I tried putting on headphones and listening to white noise etc., but that doesn't cut it either. I need silence to work efficiently and it's been that way ever since I cam remember. My productivity has absolutely tanked in the open office and coming this Friday, I will quit the job and spend the coming weeks getting back into self-employment and working from home.
> I fully agree. I currently work for a startup and after we moved into
> a new office last month our management had the glorious idea of
> putting the programmers next to the customer support team in an open office :/
It's damn difficult to get non-IT people to change their POV.
Basically we meet 2-3 times a week to organize and share ideas, and spend there rest of the week heads down at home, coding in whatever pace and setting we like.
Closed private offices enable people to slack at work and pretend to work 80h week while actually dozing off most of the day. I'm not saying everybody does that, but it's certainly a possibility and something I have observed few times. Once I was tasked with "doing something about" a manager who played competitively StarCraft at work.
In reality that's a symptom of a larger issue, where we are (consciously or not) evaluated on how long we stay at the office over how productive we are. IMO it's nobodys business if I play StarCraft at work, as long as it helps me, or doesn't prevent me from achieving my objectives.
That said, I agree, evaluating on time at the office is the wrong metric, but for the vast majority of managers, they have no idea how to evaluate it otherwise because they do not understand the tasks at hand.
In the office not working constitutes mostly of playing dumb games or reading hacker news, the latter being kind of ok, but certainly it doesn't leave me refreshed and willing to go back to my not-so-hip-after-the-latest-js-framework code.
I don't think it's realistically possible to put a metric on one's performance, that would allow us to break from time-based evaluations completely. That being said, I see how my colleagues are progressing with their work and it has nothing to do with which are working from home, which from office and there is also no clear time-value correlation either. It has more to do with how motivated they are, what internally drives them and how skilled they are.
I have a friend at work who believes deeply in software craftsmanship principles and it's a privilege to see how he works. He stays at home more than most of us, but provides a steady and consistent stream of small, high-quality pull requests, all day, every day. I watch how not slacking at work can have a great impact on the project and on the team morale. It has very little to do with an open space, WFH, what kind of laptop you work on and what blend of coffee you are given. I grew to believe those are just excuses I (and others) are giving themselves to not fully focus on work. Once I admitted that to myself, I decided to spend my slacking time in a way that improves my performance later. I hope one day it will go away completely, or I will get organized enough to be consistent in my output regardless of interruptions.
I observe this often. My workplace has closed offices for the middle managers, with windows so you can see in, and you can tell from their body language that they're either slacking off or socializing.
But like you say, it's not my business, what it takes for them to get their jobs done, and I wouldn't begrudge them a few breaks during the day. It makes me more sympathetic to lower level workers who also seem to waste time.
I also realize that management is a highly collaborative activity, so it is done better in closed offices because you can have substantive conversations without having to think about being in front of an audience. Given that most management decisions are based on social consensus, I want the managers above me to have good relationships with their peers.
When discussing it with managers, I compare the open office plan to multi-tasking: Being within earshot of 5 colleagues is like working on 6 tasks at once. So the open environment is good for workers who multi-task well.
I would have liked to see some studies on actual productivity level fluctuations based on these moves.
Otherwise, it's simply another variation of "I'm not used to it, so it's bad."
Personally I have seen private and public ways of working succeed for different styles of projects which seems to be the newest trend i.e. having mix use spaces.
The best model I've heard about is "work rooms" for everyone, with facilities to move to when you're collaborating.
I'm mostly asking to see those studies & have a nuanced breakdown of them (rather than simply saying they exist or (as the author did in their piece) saying they had a bad experience)).
[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272494413...
[2] http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/255498?uid=3739696&uid...
[3] http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-open-office-t...
It's the same as the "I can work 60 hours productivly" brigade. All the studies, for over a century (yes, century, not decades) have shown otherwise. They are studies that show that people delude themselves into thinking they are more productive than they are. And yet, no matter how many articles and papers you post, nope.
HN insists.
They are ingrained memes on HN that won't, despite all the evidence you ever post, go away.
So why bother? You can google it yourself, and then promptly ignore all the professional studies and still believe in open plan offices. It's simply not worth the effort.
Interesting.
For some reason working conditions and working hours are incredibly emotive subjects, similar to women in tech, that tend to bring out the irrational side of otherwise lucid HN posters.
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But seriously, how can NOT putting large number of people together for long times not cause diseases? That's one of major reason flu starts during the winter...
Not the author of the comment you're replying to but elsewhere in this thread (in response to someone else looking for studies) I provided links to numerous articles that each cite/link multiple studies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9611091
But to be helpful, http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Open+office+plans+productivity
I would like to see the studies that show ANY positive benefit from open office plans, other than: "They are cheaper to built and run".
"data suggest that creating collisions—chance encounters and unplanned interactions between knowledge workers, both inside and outside the organization—improves performance"
Just one of many notable quotes from the article.
It isn't a formal study but it is pragmatic i.e. "Managers might be tempted to simply build big social spaces and expect great results, but it’s not that simple. Companies must have an understanding of what they’re trying to achieve (higher productivity? more creativity?) before changing a space"
If you're a company with hundreds of worldwide branches, then the potential benefits make asking questions like this a worthwhile endeavour. Very large companies actually try to design their buildings around what will lead to the greatest productivity.
If you're a smaller company, then you might want open plan offices for very different reasons (a perception of cohesion etc). Data can and is applied to this, but it typically isn't because the companies aren't large enough for it to matter too much in terms of productivity; the benefits start to be dwarfed by more pressing matters.
http://javatroopers.com/Peopleware.html#Chapter_13
Tom de Marco quotes Cristopher Alexander, his first rule is that there is no "one-size-fits-all" solution :) but there are patterns :)
Alexander identifies the need for all three of
- a communal space
- a semiprivate/team space ("war rooms", etc)
- a private space
Also: "Each team needs identifiable public and semiprivate space and each individual needs protected private space."
They also say that:
"enclosed offices need not be one-person offices. The two- or three- or four-person office makes a lot more sense, particularly if office groupings can be made to align with work groups. Even in open-plan offices, co-workers should be encouraged to modify the grid to put their areas together into small suites. When this is allowed, people become positively ingenious in laying out the area to serve all their needs: work space, meeting space, and social space. Since they tend to be in interaction mode together or simultaneously in flow mode, they have less noise clash with each other than they would with randomly selected neighbors."
But some things aren't easily measurable. Is it a coincidence that companies who pioneered the open office plan are also some of the most successful in the world? Show me how you'd even begin to disprove that and I'll show you a dozen confounding variables making it silly to even try. What is the true impact of an open office on a culture of collaborative interaction? And what's the impact of that type of interaction on success? Hard to measure.
Sometimes we look at the things we can easily make into numbers and assume they describe the whole truth. Not always so.
"The most important things are unmeasurable." —W. Edwards Deming
What does it matter if it's successful when it's abusive. And putting introvert geeks in an open office even if it does give you an extra ounce of efficiency until they burn out from the emotional stress is abusive.
I always like the quote at the end of the post, that proves absolutely nothing but is just there for the sake of a cheap punchline.
> s it a coincidence that companies who pioneered the open office plan are also some of the most successful in the world?
I would rather consider the coincidence of younger companies being easily influenced by the last thing that's fashionable because of young CEOs at their head, instead of relying on any particular dataset to make rational decisions on how tom best work between people.
> We get it, HN is majority introvert,
Arent Hackers more likely to be introvert anyway ?
Cubicles can be quite expensive. The appeal appears to be flexibility.
Actual open offices - no cubicles, just tables - approximate a continuous meeting.
It's a bit more than that. For example, individual closed offices require their own ducts/convectors/filters for heating and air conditioning, their own fire sprinklers and smoke detectors, their own overhead lighting fixtures, etc. Also, the walls of offices generally need to be painted (nobody wants bare sheetrock), unlike the walls of cubicles.
Cubicles can indeed be expensive, but the labor to build offices is even more expensive.
(As someone who works in a private office, I think the increased productivity it gives me is well worth the expense.)
The HVAC has to be there anyway. It's just a few more ducts.
The labor to build offices isn't that expensive, and it's not like the boss is gonna have you some in on Saturday to do it :) People who sell cubicles also sell (or contract) the labor to do installations.
Yes. If a successful company had their employees sitting in bean bag chairs all day, that wouldn't mean that somehow bean bag chairs we're responsible for their success.
And to be fair, I've met people, online and off, who legitimately like open offices or would prefer a hybrid. But I've met roughly an order of magnitude more people who don't like them at all and just want a quiet, personal space.
And you're right, there are a lot of confounding factors when you look at companies like Google. For instance, I'm sure the prospect of getting filthy rich was pretty enticing for early employees, who probably found the work conditions nearly irrelevant in comparison. Same thing goes for Facebook. There's a well-known notion that some companies are just so successful so fast that they can basically do anything in terms of office dynamics and it will work for them. This is commonly applied to Valve's management strategy (or lack thereof).
Also, you could fairly easily argue that both Google and FB met with the majority of their success before they engineered massive open office farms. You could also fairly easily argue that both have been doing a pretty mediocre job lately, with some successes but lots of failures, mostly just maintaining their status (especially Facebook, in my humble opinion).
I'd imagine that the more upside there is for employees, and the more empowered the employees are in general, the more they'll tolerate and perform well in an open office on average.
Ok, in this case, probably. But standing desks are apparently a good thing, and the vast majority of us eschew them. And so on. Anything that seems like an inconvenience gets demonized as a rule. So just asking is a minefield.
At my workplace, for instance, not once in the history of the company has anyone with an office ever given it up, under any circumstances, to move into a cubicle again. Likewise, someone with a cubicle next to a window has never, in my tenure at the company, moved to a cubicle not next to a window.
As for standing desks, I didn't realize that people actively eschewed them. My impression is just that they're impractical for a lot of people to actually obtain. If your workplace doesn't provide them and won't on request, your options get sort of limited. I have a coworker who made a makeshift standing desk but it's not very ideal. I imagine a ton of people are in this situation.
Ok, but let's suppose that, by some ingenious study, you're able to determine that nobody prefers the open office, everybody prefers private offices (quite strongly), and yet productivity for the company is better with an open office. That's pretty counter-intuitive, but the world is filled with counter-intuitive things. Does that mean that companies should all switch to open offices?
Should a company do something just because it can be shown to increase productivity? I don't think that's necessarily the case. For instance, it might be that the productivity gain is somewhat minimal and that over the years a number of great employees are lost (or not able to be hired) due to the office layout. So in that case the illusion of temporary increased productivity will lead to a long-term net decrease in productivity.
In this case, an open office creates a certain type of culture and work environment. That might be desirable for the company as a whole, even if it's suboptimal for some individuals, and even if certain measurements at a low level are against it.
Those companies who pioneered the open office plans also do a lot of other things that set themselves apart from other companies. It doesn't necessarily mean anything important.
For all you know, the open plan office could be a failed attempt to optimise their workforce.
It's boring for two reasons; firstly because it doesn't allow you to make any decision at all based off it - it's the intellectual equivalent of sticking your head in the sand. Secondly, it's not a fact you need to know in order to judge success; there are many proxies for 'better/worse' which can be tested and quantified. These are widely used by big companies in order to optimise their workforces.
The reason that it's not really done in tech is simply because they're so much smaller, and so the benefit of someone spending the time on devising and performing such tests is lower.
Yet the popular story here is that they're highly detrimental and have a causal relationship with low productivity. That might be true for individuals, but we have no evidence (as far as I know) that it's true at an organizational level. The benefits to the company from a systems perspective could far outweigh the difference in individual productivity. We don't know, yet people act as though that systems view is not relevant.
I'm not making an argument, anyway, I'm pointing out a hole in the analysis: there are factors that are possibly involved that are more difficult to quantify that everyone seems to be alright with just ignoring. My hunch is that the lack of quantifiability of the cultural, social, and human factors resulting from office plans makes them a blind spot for people with more logical/analytical perspectives, like yourself. I fail to see how that's boring or irrelevant.
Many companies that have been among "the most successful in the world" got there without open offices.
Just because a company does something doesn't mean it was a major factor in its success. We have no way of knowing if Google (or whoever) would have been less successful had they not been such fans of open offices (conversely they may have been even more successful - we have no way of knowing).
> Show me how you'd even begin to disprove that
Aside from the studies mentioned in this article there have been many other articles[1][2][3][4][5] written citing numerous studies (some spanning decades!) that consistently show open offices are terrible. Just because some companies have been successful despite that doesn't mean the science is wrong (that would be like saying smoking isn't bad for you because you know healthy 90 year-olds that smoke a pack a day).
> What is the true impact of an open office on a culture of collaborative interaction?
As developers we spend the vast majority of our time not collaborating. For jobs where you're interacting with others for most of the time you can make a stronger argument for an open office - but when you only spend a small amount of time doing so it doesn't make sense to optimize for that (given the numerous downsides).
[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/blogs/on-leadership/wp/2015/04...
[5] http://ideas.time.com/2012/08/15/why-the-open-office-is-a-ho...
Just having someone around, who are working on a different piece of the same puzzle is a major motivator.
At home, I can find ANYTHING to entertain me.
At work, when I have a group of motivated peers around me who are focused on the same goal, so am I.
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PeoplewareOnSharedSpaces
"enclosed offices need not be one-person offices. The two- or three- or four-person office makes a lot more sense, particularly if office groupings can be made to align with work groups. Even in open-plan offices, co-workers should be encouraged to modify the grid to put their areas together into small suites. When this is allowed, people become positively ingenious in laying out the area to serve all their needs: work space, meeting space, and social space. Since they tend to be in interaction mode together or simultaneously in flow mode, they have less noise clash with each other than they would with randomly selected neighbors."
I always found it very easy to concentrate in big spaces as long as I feel nobody cares about what I am doing, and that seems easy in a big room. I also don't care much about small distractions or noises, I always hear people complaining about getting out of the zone when they have to chat a bit with a coworker. It takes me a big effort to get into the zone when I am starting to work, some kind of a starting period while I load all the relevant information in my head, but once I'm there I can get in and out and attend subtasks or have a conversation with somebody with no problem.
Though being able to go and watch the spitfire they rebuilt being demoed was really cool.
But as said elsewhere, that doesn't mean open offices are the answer.
In a mostly-tech company I couldn't imagine not having some compartments so that you don't suddenly find yourself 1 among 30 people in the same room - I'd go completely insane.
Or is this open office = packing everybody into one huge area like sardines no matter what their job role or what their team is doing with little or no account for ownership?
I find we lump a huge amount of stuff into the category "open office", much of it crappy, then stand outside and throw rocks at the entire concept.
Let's not do that.
Did someone, anywhere on the floor, open something that produces hazardous vapors? Why contain it to one room when you can expose 1/3 of the building?
The University of Michigan's Biology program currently has a building under construction with the same "feature", and I am sure there are others.
Here it is the other way around, the open office parts of the building are very quite, nobody dears make too much sound. It is much more social to walk into an office for a quick chat, only disturbing 1, 2 or 3 others.
Work-from-home is the way forward - LINQ combined with trust mean I can work in my pyjamas. Win!
> If employers want to make the open-office model work, they have to take measures to improve work efficiency. For one, they should create more private area
Many companies already split up like this, breaking teams down and giving all the members ample space and privacy. The truly open model that I've seen work the best is sales teams, where it has a "sales floor" feel and employees can be energetic making sales.
I've always worked in shared offices, ranging from 3 people to, currently, and entire department of 40 or thereabouts. Never seems to be a problem. But with large rooms, you do need to consider acoustics of course. And letting managers keep a close eye on people is a terrible reason for anything.
This worked especially well when our startup was based out of a coworking space that had lots of temporary private spaces for individuals aside from the per-company office rental, when we were just four people.
What I'd like to see are new STUDIES about open offices, not the rehashing of personal experiences and anecdotes.
The article we're discussing mentions multiple studies...beyond that there's a great 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.
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]. A Washington Post article[4] on office furniture designers realizing (citing multiple studies) "open-plan spaces are actually lousy for workers." And a TIME article[5] highlighted decades of research that associated open layouts with "greater employee stress, poorer co-worker relations and reduced satisfaction with the physical environment."
[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/blogs/on-leadership/wp/2015/04...
[5] http://ideas.time.com/2012/08/15/why-the-open-office-is-a-ho...
That's not a realistic solution for the vast majority of people. Many people (such as myself) have absolutely no desire to start a company - and many who would want to aren't in a financial position to go an undetermined amount of time without a paycheck.
> find a new job
With most companies choosing to ignore the countless studies done on this subject and instead just do what the cool kids are doing there aren't many jobs to pursue that are not in an open-office.
Or maybe there is more to consider than just one issue, but it's still worthy of criticism? Maybe an job can offer great benefits, exciting challenges, a valuable product and great coworkers but still have room for improvement in the office layout. Your solution to that situation would be "shut up and quit" over "raise awareness of the issue to improve things for everyone"?
I get lonely though! I miss the technical and social conversations we used to have in the kitchen or round the coffee machine.
What would be ideal is if I were to rent an office inside the company I'm working for. I would actually be quite happy to pay my client to rent a bit of their space if it's ever a possibility. After all rental costs are chickenfeed compared to developer compensation.