Why Open Offices?
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The major takeaways I have from reading about this when I started in tech entrepreneurship are:
1) Knowledge workers need 30 square feet of desk to get optimal efficiency
2) They need 100 square feet of space
3) cubicles are as good as an office if the walls are over 8 feet high (!)
4) small teams tend to want to talk at the same time, and be quiet at the same time.
These together round up into recommended 400 or so square foot offices with doors that close and house teams of four people, all working on the same thing at the same time.
If teams are 2 or 3, they should have a smaller space. That's enough space for desks, a couch, a whiteboard area, etc.
I have found over the years that this tracks fairly closely with my own preferences. I really want to be able to talk and interrupt a team-mate when we're working if we're working on the same thing. We also often are hacking away and need silence, but instant access to whoever is in the know about a certain bit of code is undeniably great, and provided we aren't breaking each-other out of flow, is fine.
This system works really well when it's a small team and the team is working on the same stuff. It breaks down when there are multiple things happening or more than four or so people: interruptions abound, killing productivity.
I think you'll often see workers getting this situation when they really need to be productive by commandeering a conference room and shutting the door. But, it makes sense to provide it for teams in general, in my opinion.
Open-plan was workable. Some sound pollution from other teams, but easy access to my team was good.
Individual cubes make no sense to me at all. All the sound pollution of open-plan, with none of the easy access to teammates. I hate it.
Numbers don't lie.
That's how Rob Petrie worked, with Buddy and Sally. That looked like fun.
For a while my company was mixing tech support/customer relations and engineers in the same 4-person office -- that doesn't work too well.
When switching project it is important to switch offices as well. (Doesn't Valve do that with their desks-on-wheels?)
As for sturdiness, it's weight and rigidity make it a very stable desk.
I've already had two people ask me to make them one (with a nice margin on top), I think a lot of people are tired of crappy fall apart desks.
Scaffolding was old stock from a local scaffolders (I wanted the distressed industrial look, just given 'em a ring).
Fittings are from ebay (there are standard sizes and joints), the legs are spinners (if you turn the handles the desk moves up and down).
The top panel is 28mm structural birch ply (structural ply may have surface blemishes and patches rather than finishing ply so if that matters get finishing ply but since I wanted the industrial look and it's way cheaper to boot), routed with a 5mm edge and covered in 4 coats of heat resistant wax (makes it water proof without ruining the color).
Original panel was 8ft x 4ft so I took a strip of the long side for the shelf (if you work out your dimensions most timber places will make the cuts for you).
Through holes are 60mm and there are 3 on the back (UK plugs are massive).
http://i.imgur.com/YzfWv5E.jpg in construction, two cross beams are for the shelf which sits on them, the middle upright is because even 28mm play will sag.
Total height range is ~85cm (I'm quite tall and normal desks are a tad too low) to ~140cm.
Would work nice on a smaller desk though :).
I expect this to be different now, and possibly more dependent on screen space than on physical desk space.
I think you'll often see workers getting this situation when they really need to be productive by commandeering a conference room and shutting the door. But, it makes sense to provide it for teams in general, in my opinion.
There have been a couple big projects where we flew in the remote people just to get the whole team in a room together. So it's not only the workers that know this; management does as well or they wouldn't approve the travel budget.
Still, I'm personally happier with more desk space. We still use paper all the time. Tufte points out in one of his books that humans are better at spatial comparisons than time-based comparisons, hence his fetish for data density, and mine for lots of screen and desk real estate.
It's like people who buy solar panels in north england; they think it gives them 'free' energy and they are being 'green', while ignoring completely the carbon footprint of making that panel in the first place; while that panel will /never/ repay itself with the energy it harvests.
Going back to open offices (and I'm typing this from one!) I think it's a disaster. There are days when all I can really do is read HN, as there's about 3 loud conversations within 5 meters of me, including one Italian guy who's yelling into his skype microphone.
"and oh....it turns out open offices will save us $5m a year in facilities costs." is usually delivered at the end, when nobody is paying attention anymore, because it was preceded by "free snacks at every 25th cube!" and "will allow you to configure seating to keep your team near you"
For work that requires lots of talking (or not lots of deep thinking), they work "ok", but for knowledge work, they're basically the worst idea ever conceived outside of sending all your coders to rock concerts all work day and wondering why nothing is getting done.
Where I work, most people get or split offices, but we can work in a few other places, including an open work area. Most people hate working there because it will inevitably have somebody on speaker phone having an argument with their health insurance over an unpaid bill, and that conversation will go on for 2 or 3 weeks solid. Appeals to management have basically been ignored, and now we're getting ready to move to a new facility that's all open space.
Surely you have an empty conference room somewhere
In the offices where I'm at now though, conference rooms have become the quiet spaces though. Life imitating HN comments I guess ;)
It's not just that tho, even people who move they ass to talk to someone else usualy /stand/ by that someone else, so instead of having a quiet head-to-head, it always become a 'broadcast'.
I know that they could at least have signs saying 'quiet space' and all that, but that would fly in the face of the idea they have that it 'improves communication'. It's blatantly false, I have no friggin' clue what 80% of the people are doing in this office anyway...
I'm in an open space too, so I definitely feel your pain.
My firm moved me to a shared office for 6 months (finally I got my solo office back last month). They had that policy. "Oh for conference calls just use this admin office we set up." But nobody ever used it.
That's a huge "FUCK YOU" to your employee. The company is cheaping out and then making your job harder by forcing you to relocate.
And it plain just doesn't work. If a guy I'm working with calls with a quick question, what am I supposed to do? Call back?
It's a little OT, but do you have some real data to back this up? This argument came up a lot in discussions about light bulbs and fluorescent lamps, but in reality cost of fluorescent lamp is around 1% of its lifetime energy consumption. I highly doubt that solar panels cost more energy to produce than 10% of their lifetime output, even in such poor conditions as England.
Subsidies etc. are a different matter, because then you're talking about competing with other sources and the strawman argument "it costs more energy to produce than it saves" doesn't work.
That's a problem. If he's in an open area, let alone an office where people are trying to work, he shouldn't do that.
Solve them problem of 'him' and maybe open offices will be less distracting?
Go on, show your working.
Companies do stupid things all. the. time. They fly in the face of all available evidence. People are put in charge that shouldn't be in charge. They are driven by ego, or other measures that lead to sub-optimal decisions. Sometimes they are really good, but just make mistakes. I'm a programmer, and my compiler tells me I make 100 mistakes a day; I don't fault upper management for the same. They just don't have that immediate feedback loop that we do. Of course they will make expensive mistakes.
Heck we see it in this thread. Evidence shows that productivity is lowered in open office environment, yet we read claims that it is improved.
Because one have a soul and may not want to rip off others?
I would think most rich people got there because they created something valuable enough for people to pay money for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_of_poverty
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/05/12/american-meritocra...
My personal theory is that the open office trend at Google (and probably Facebook, and others) was initially driven by the fact that the founders jumped directly from school, and never had a "real job" with a normal, old-school office when they were first starting.
Thus they have never personally seen the immense value of a real office, but they HAVE seen the value to the "computer lab" sort of bullpen environment that was common in the 90s (when almost everybody had to show up to the lab to get their work done, as very few people had *nix machines elsewhere where they could do their assignments).
And Zuckerberg and Brin and Page probably switched from mostly programming to mostly management by the time their companies reached substantially more than 10 people. They probably have really fond memories from their time when their companies were <10 people.
When problems are well defined (you have workable requirements) then you availability becomes less important, so your capacity to work becomes relatively more important.
When problems are not well defined or written down, then availability becomes more important, and capacity for work less important.
Given that most startups are working on simple CRUD apps, where their most difficult problems usually stem from their own poor organizational skills (poor build procedures, badly configured servers, technical debt in the code) rather than a difficult problem domain it seems clear to me that availability would become more important to employers than capacity for work.
Also managers prefer to be able to _see_ people working. (Never mind that the work being done in a bullpen is not productive.)
Open offices are like hives: filled with busy looking, low cost replaceable drones.
tl;dr: Maybe open offices are popular because most startups aren't working on hard problems.
Yet these startups hire people as if they had very difficult problem domains to tackle, thus filtering for people who work better in the other environment you mentioned.
But no setup works for everyone. And we need to stop pretending that open office plans are some poorly thought out pranks invented by clueless managers that offer nothing to developers.
I am a developer. I am not an extrovert. I love working in an open office, and the one job I had almost 10 years ago that was rows and rows of offices made me MISERABLE. I almost quit but luckily was able to move to a team that had a team area with an open plan.
Fact: In today's age of agility, rapid development, minimum viable products, continuous deployment, and short iterations it is much more important that you can discuss things with your coworkers and stakeholders quickly and figure out if you are working on the right thing, rather than going away for 6 months into some basement, close the door, and come back with a finished product.
Fact: Distractions are cultural not physical. Provide the team with good quality headphones, shame people who have non-silent notifications on their devices, create a policy where people can indicate when they're deep in thought on something complex and would prefer not to be distracted (eg. Do Not Disturb status on internal chat that you check before messaging someone or tapping them on the shoulder), and provide flex space people can go to on a case by case basis for privacy. Do this and all the problems with "focus" that open-office haters complain about GO AWAY.
I've worked on a team that had its own large cubicle, with four people in it. We all mostly worked on the same thing, and we could roll ourselves over to screens and have whiteboard discussions. That was great.
I've had my own office, with a window. That was even better. Then I shared it with another person. That was still great. Then there were three of us. Conversation stopped. None of us worked on the same thing.
And of course I've worked in cubes. What evs.
I've never worked in an open office of long tables and no partitions. I know I'd hate not being able to raise my eyes and stare off into space without inadvertently staring at someone nearby. And the distractions would kill me. But I guess that's just me, and all I have to do is see that at the interview so I can say no; problem solved?
Fact: that has absolutely no relation to offices. And "offices" doesn't have to mean singles either (they usually don't in my experience).
> Provide the team with good quality headphones
I can't wear headphones. I literally, physically, can't wear headphones for more than 10~15 minutes, it starts hurting like somebody's driving nails through my eardrums. Now what?
> shame people who have non-silent notifications on their devices
And people who have bodily functions, and people who put the volume too high on their headphones, and people who type too hard, and people with tics. Just shame people on a general basis really, that makes for great esprit de corps.
> Do this and all the problems with "focus" that open-office haters complain about GO AWAY.
Yes, everybody must love what you love and you can't be wrong, because "no setup works for everyone" except for the one you want.
Thankfully you're in the minority and everyone else is quiet wearing headphones, so you don't have to.
See a doctor? That's definitely not normal.
You think? Sadly having fucked up middle ears isn't exactly fixable, it's something I can only make do with, so that didn't answer the question: how do you[0] handle employees who can't wear headphones when your[0] solution to noise issues is "just wear headphones"?
[0] this is a generic "you", I know the specific you is not the one who originally made this assertion.
Are you saying those don't work for you?
Unless you're talking about the volume of music making your ears hurt in which case guess what - I didn't say anything about listening to anything on those headphones. Just having them on provides enough insulation that you don't need to pipe in any additional sound
You don't say.
> Are you saying those don't work for you?
Yes, it's not a question of pressure on the external ear or I'd have said "my ears are too large" and wouldn't have mentioned the middle ear.
> Unless you're talking about the volume of music making your ears hurt
No, it's not a question of volume.
> I didn't say anything about listening to anything on those headphones.
Neither did I, though
> Just having them on provides enough insulation that you don't need to pipe in any additional sound
Hardly, even with high-quality closed 'phones.
In case you're not a native speaker, the pronoun one uses in English is "one".
Aside: I still don't quite get what exactly about the headphones is causing you pain? If you have them on, without playing anything, is that painful? (in which case maybe lighter ones that exert no pressure on the skull could help?) Is it the volume? Is there some weird property of sound produced by the headphones that is not present in general noise, that causes the pain?
(please don't take this as me disbelieving you, I'm just curious)
Headphones are a cognitive and physical distraction to me. When I think, I only want to think about what I'm thinking about. I only like listening to music when I'm not trying to accomplish something.
Headphones are merely an inferior office, with its walls shrunk down to fit your head.
That's a false dichotomy.
> Fact: Distractions are cultural not physical.
Citation needed. Every study suggests you are wrong.
Managers who deliberately create environments where headphones are mandatory should be brought up on charges.
Basic rule of thumb: If your headphones are loud enough to block out ambient conversation, they're damaging your ears. In 20 years, deafness is going to be associated with programmers in the same way we associate black lung with coal miners.
Also, I'm happy for you that your brain is only derailed by particularly loud ringtones or people tapping you on the shoulder, you lucked out on that one! But my brain is different: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misophonia
[1] By cancel out, I mean make it impossible to understand the conversation, while the headphones are silent or playing in low volume.
(NB. This reply entirely useless if you can't tolerate in-ear buds.)
http://productivity.stackexchange.com/questions/7213/do-nois...
We need to stop treating developers like precious children. You do not need ABSOLUTE SILENCE to be able to do your work. 99% of us are not writing the next PageRank or inventing the next Djkstra's Algorithm. And even when we are 99% of the time is spent on build environments and configuration and plumbing.
This does not require absolute uninterrupted focus surrounded by silence. Making a mistake does not cause a bomb to go off or a plane to fall out of the sky.
Put on a pair of comfortable headphones and do not plug them into anything and 75% of the noise around you is gone. Turn on some white noise or some gentle ambient music of dozens of lyrics-free genres and it goes up to 95%. If the only way you can work is if you can't hear any other noise outside of your own head, you have failed as a human being because no other profession requires that.
No, most people don't need to work in an anechoic chamber.
But any distracting noise adds to cognitive load, and since you're being paid to use your cognitive abilities, productivity suffers.
If you're paying people to do something and then making it harder for them to do it, the problem is not with the people.
I'm sorry I don't have empathy for bullshit rare disorders like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misophonia
There's a lot of evidence that open offices destroy productivity, and almost no evidence that they increase it.
So whatever your reasoning hiring people, paying them a lot of money, and then making it harder for them to do their jobs is an irrational position.
You know, that line is a loud bullshit alarm all by itself.
But I'll bite anyway. Open offices make communication harder. Much harder. You can barely talk to someone with you equipment around without disturbing someone. So you must choose, either you talk or you produce something.
Yes, you disturb someone. You let them consider whether they want to pause what they are doing and join your conversation, and make it more productive, or put their headphones on and tune you out. The choice exists.
Too late. Train of thought already lost. Learn to do your own work instead of harassing those around you to help.
No, none of those are bullshit. The idea that they are new is complete bullshit, and the idea that throwing those terms around justifies something is also so.
- open room of around 15 people, bit of chit-chat but mostly quiet
- small area of 3-4, disparate types so very quiet
- large divided room of 10, pretty raucous, very fun, lots of trash talking
- small area, quiet, mostly alone
- room of 4-5, very social
- room of 3-4, we barely shut up all day while working; put headphones on if you want to concentrate
"Fact" 0: In today's agility etc: this is mostly true for startups where you have a product owner who does not really know what he wants. If you use for example SCRUM you plan beforehand and you have an immutable sprint when you know what to work on thus you can work uninterrupted for 1-2 weeks then you can have a meeting to discuss the direction and have a retrospective + planning. The "work for 6 months in a basement" is an exaggeration and no one works like that today (except for the developer of Dwarf Fortress but it is another story). So the point is: you can be agile/rapid/do MVPs/etc and uninterrupted at the same time. I have done it at many companies so I know it works.
"Fact" 1: Distractions have nothing to do with culture. People in an open office distract you simply because your preferences does not match:
* switches off air conditioning
* bumps your chair because of small spaces
* turns on the lights (which you don't like)
just to name a few. Another thing is that policies work in theory but in reality most people will think that their problem is more important than some policy and will go to your desk and ask about something (and in most cases the will know the answer when the have finished speaking). If you have a private office it acts as a barrier for such distractions.
As for distractions...are you such a precious princess that someone adjusting the light level or bumping into your chair completely removes your ability to be productive? How do you get by and achieve anything in this world?
Why are we optimizing to create work environments for such snobbery? What makes you assume that by default EVERY single problem that others might have is not worthy of an interruption enough that you need your own private office to protect yourself from the proletariat?
Sure, but that doesn't mean you just choose whatever because it won't be best for everyone. You pick what will work best for most people, and studies consistently show that is not an open office layout.
> In today's age of agility, rapid development, minimum viable products, continuous deployment, and short iterations
Not every developer is writing code for a seed stage startup trying to get an MVP out the door. In fact, most aren't. For small/early-stage startups I totally think open offices make the most sense.
> Provide the team with good quality headphones
Headphones help decrease audio distractions, but not nearly as much as offices or cubicles. They don't do anything for visual distractions. And not everyone is able to use them (many people find the music as, or more, distracting than the audio distractions they're trying to avoid).
Until recently I was sat next to someone who not only drummed on the desk and with his feet but spent half the day twirling around on his chair like it was a damned fairground ride. Since moving to a new desk, my office life is much less tense and I'm a lot more productive.
I don't think I would take a job anywhere that held these buzzwords in high regard. They have been discredited time and again as the wankery of company culture.
"age of agility"... No.
"MVP".... No!
"continuous deployment".... kill me now.
You mention stakeholders. At my last job, stakeholders were the biggest problem in the company. I had a desk in an open office, and for some reason that meant the project manager had an open invitation to walk up to my desk repeatedly throughout the day bugging me with brain-dead questions and pointless "standups". Yep, she wanted regular standups even though it was just her and myself for many of the minor projects. Jesus I'm glad I got out of there.
> "create a policy where people can indicate when they're deep in thought on something complex and would prefer not to be distracted"
What policy. Nobody does that.
This was the most hilarious part of my last company; they hadn't hired any coders yet and I was expected to do a standup meeting with myself and two of my managers. Daily. At my current company we have a daily standup meeting for everyone where the CTO is in on it (can you say micromanager?) and it's just a hassle because you know he's going to come back a few hours later to each of us and ask for a status report anyway.
Minimum Viable product just means get things into customer hands early and get feedback, and refine.
Continuous deployment means build quality verification into your process and automate it.
These aren't buzzwords this is where modern software development at any serious software company is small and large. These are not fads, these are evolutions. If you don't see that, I don't see a lot of promise in the rest of your career as you will only be able to find work at old-guards that are not working on anything meaningful or significant.
Every time when open offices are mentioned, there's a cure for people who prefer quiet working environment. Well, fuck headphones. I don't want to wear headphones all day just to be able to focus.
One possibility is some people genuinely prefer them. I
keep talking myself up to that, only to read another
article about how everyone is miserable and unproductive
in them.
Given the choice between open plan in San Francisco and a private office in Chattanooga, Tennessee (where office space costs ~$11/square foot) my guess is you'd get more job applicants for the job in SF.
Perhaps this is a revealed preference for living in SF, and people are willing to trade off private offices to get it.
There's just as many open plan offices outside of SF. I'm in the Chicago area, and I've never worked at, with, or interviewed with any company around here that didn't have an open office plan (with one single exception, and it was a game company, and they were split up into rooms of 6-8 people, no private offices except for management).
The problem is, there is no good way to measure engineer productivity, but it's extremely easy to figure out the cost of office furniture. Modern corporations believe in optimizing what they can measure and completely ignoring what they can't.
This is touched upon only slightly here when she considers replaceability.
I'm not saying that I think open offices are or are not great. But the issue of personal productivity simply has to go away in the discussion for me to take it seriously. Otherwise, you just sound like most software engineers I've known who love to write gobs and gobs of code at the expense of everything else.
And yet, nothing can possibly get done without someone doing it.
I see lots of insistence that without open offices people woild spemd so much more time on wrong things that the lost productivity is more than made up for by better focus. I also see no evidence for these claims.
We've seen how requirements for entry level jobs have risen, colleges work with businesses to try and produce workforce ready graduates but are met with ever increasing minimums.
This is companies deciding that personal productivity isnt something they need to worry about. If someone is not personally productive, then they aren't a good fit.
Why should the business spend resources trying to facilitate a productive environment when they can just hire people who will work in a disruptive environment? Just as, why should a business spend resources training employees when they can demand only employees with very specific experience.
With outsourcing, visas, and remote working a company has very little restrictions on the level of employee they can seek and find with little difficulty - especially when you include a weak economy in this whole mix.
I dont know, not something i've thought a lot about i could be totally off base, but seems like it could be part of a wider trend to me
Secondly, the goal of a company is rarely to maximize aggregate employee productivity. If you can realize the same profits with fewer LOF, stories delivered, or whatever your employees "produce", why not?
Then again, where we might disagree is to what degree the same P can and should be applied to both individual employees and to companies. So often individuals project what they (like to) do onto the team as its primary purpose. "I make widgets, and there are less widgets at the end of the day than there could be, so the company must not be optimized." It might be, or you may overvalue widgets.
I think that's a questionable assumption.
If you do not even address the long-term value you provide to the company, then you can't possibly make a reasonable argument that open-offices are a detriment to that long-term value. For the record, I believe they probably are a detriment, so I have an incentive for the discourse and arguments to improve.
We have to use a more broad and nuanced perspective on the value we provide when we talk about how that value is affected by our work environment.
This sounds like "leveraging synergies". If it was possible to explain any tangible benefit to such an environment, the conversation would move forward. Really, with the Very Rare Case? Developers don't have enough work to do where they don't need to stop and talk every 10 minutes?
Unfortunately most open office have no such space. Not even the toilets (multiple cramped stalls? hell no!).
Everywhere you go and at all times there are going to be people. I think that is the problem.
I think office design should favor more of a compromise between the two groups.
For me a small office with 2 or 3 people is more stressful, it makes me more aware about what's going on around me because it's a more personal space. If you don't connect with somebody in there, the bad atmosphere is going to fill the small office very fast. My bubble is going to trip onto somebody else's bubble more often than in a big space full of people because there's less neutral space around.
Not sure if that makes sense at all... but it does to me.
Extroverts become uncomfortable with a lack of external stimuli and thus prefer to surround themselves with stimuli.
Introverts become uncomfortable with too much external stimulus and thus prefer to isolate themselves from excessive stimulus.
To me that basically directly quantifies why some people thrive in an open office and other suffer. I'm not sure what the solution is to requiring essentially two different environments depending on a person's makeup.
http://www.theguardian.com/money/work-blog/2014/sep/29/open-...
[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...
[5] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-leadership/wp/2015/04...
[6] http://ideas.time.com/2012/08/15/why-the-open-office-is-a-ho...
I chose an open office because I worked at a company for 9 years. In the first 5 it was an open office. I'm sure some work was suffered, but we had a culture, which is one thing the author seemingly deliberately avoids talking about. The remaining 4 years were stuffed in a cubicle and the office culture died. It became much easier to blame other people for faults because you no longer had a relationship with your co-workers.
I wouldn't say the author is wrong, just that he presents a slanted viewpoint that caters to other programmer introvert types and what their preferences are - but definitely not a fair assessment of the open office.
But, I'm tired of arguing against the hivemind on this one. So be it.
However, a cubicle might not be the best comparison. A cubicle is not the same as an office with a door that closes. As the IBM example elsewhere in these comments said, not all cubicles provide the benefit. A minimum height of the walls being one requirement.
On paper, the development of Color was productive, but in actuality it was a poorly thought out blunder that costed millions of dollars.
Office culture is more important than the product or service you're developing. There, I said it. And I stand by it. The fact of the matter is, I got into this work so I had something to wake to everyday that isn't a complete anti-social "productivity" sinkhole. Every cubicle, or siloed worker represents attrition to company culture. When we were the happiest in our work, we had community tied to it. Think about the classic examples of first economies - what did they all have in common? It wasn't productivity. It was a desire to build, or bake, or design - and it is these markets where happiness was at its height. Don't fool yourselves. You're being productive towards someone else's idea of happiness - not your own.
Second was that the engineers had offices with doors that closed.
As a programmer, I want to build solid, easy-to-use, impactful products that delight people. In order to do that I need to focus, and in order to focus I need long periods free of distraction. It's also satisfying to be able to get into a state of flow. I don't need that all the time, but I need and want it some of the time.
As a (hopefully!) future tech CEO, I want to work with people who want the same. As as Amiga Inc (and many others) have proved, small groups of people with private offices can produce wonderful things and still have a great corporate culture. I also want to make sure I spend my company's or my investors' money wisely and efficiently.
(As an aside, the reason that the Amiga had line-drawing built into hardware is because one of the software developers had experience with line-draw algorithms, recognized that it could be easily put into hardware, and convinced the hardware designer to do so. Which I offer as a counter to the people who think that private offices means people won't collaborate).
Finally, I'm rather taken aback that the director of a design agency would get onto a public forum and announce that he doesn't really care about productivity. Productivity relates to money spent; don't your customers care about how much it costs to engage you?
And sometimes that works well. Othertimes it's a hinderance. In this case, I'm arguing that it removes culture from the workplace. There's hardly anyway to deny that. There are also indicators that suggest lowering social interaction is linked with depression; which would have some effect on company culture.
> As a programmer,...
You mean, "you, as an individual person with individual needs", right?
> Finally, I'm rather taken aback that the director of a design agency would get onto a public forum and announce that he doesn't really care about productivity. Productivity relates to money spent; don't your customers care about how much it costs to engage you?
That's an oversimplification of my statement. Our clients pay for us to take our time, to welcome new ideas and research ways to innovate their message, goals or vision. They do care that we spend the extra time – in fact they knowingly pay for it.
If everyone is inside his or her own office, your company depends on having good email or message communication. Everyone should include the right persons when sending emails, planning meetings, etc ... . This is not impossible of course.
When you have an open office plan, your communication becomes 'in your face'. You might overhear things that are also relevant for you. You see or hear a lot more than through official communication channels alone. And that is probably the reason to their success. Of course interruptions etc are disadvantages, but nothing beats having good communication.
The key word is might. I remember a similar HN discussion a few months back someone mentioned that because they happened to overhear a conversation between two engineers they were able to save weeks of them working on the wrong thing.
Anecdotes like that aren't signs that open offices are successful or result in "having good communication" - it means you have horrible communication and you got lucky. What if that conversation happened while the person who serendipitously overheard it was in the bathroom? Or on vacation? Or in a meeting? Or wearing headphones? Good communication means not relying on chance to prevent engineers from wasting their time.
Like I said, it is possible to get communication right without having an open office plan. But at least with an open office plan, you have the bare minimum set up. And for big companies, the bare minimum is already better than average.
The same for small companies. If you are with 5 to 10 people, not everything will be officially communicated through email. You know stuff because it happened in the same room as everyone is sitting in.
I used to work from home, for 4 years. It's hard to deal with all the stupid shit you put up with in offices.
Because they are cheaper to build and outfit.
This will always be attractive to management incapable of looking beyond the current expense period. All other reasons are simply marketing to the captive audience.
I actually liked Open Office plans because there were more interruptions. When you have a family to get home to there is something wrong with realizing it's nearly 10pm and the last thing you remember before you started coding was eating lunch. The open office plans gave just enough background distraction to allow me to surface every once and a while.
It's only later on in the process when the company can buy office space and do some hires, when people start to get picky about where they work. I've had some of my most productive days on a borrowed old laptop and a folding table in a breakroom.
Facebook, led by a (former) dev, has gone all-in on open plan offices - which is a direct counterpoint. That people at the top call the shots is tautological.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinkruse/2012/08/25/facebook-u...
As another comment[1] pointed out it may have been founded by a developer, but it was one who never worked anywhere other than the company he founded and grew. Things that work well for a company of ten or twenty don't necessarily work best when it grows into the hundreds or thousands of employees.
i.e. he isn't making the decision as a developer, he's making it as a manager and the comment you were originally replying to was suggesting "for management cost and control would be more important considerations." [Though I'm not sure I entirely agree with that, as pointed out in my own reply to that comment]
That may be true but it's probably more of a case of the difference between the "Maker's Schedule" and the "Manager's Schedule"[1] - i.e. managers probably don't realize how much distractions or interruptions are bad for "maker's" productivity because a manager's day is mostly distractions or interruptions.
You might point to stories of Indian contractors like Tata, and how badly that works out for anything that's not Telco CRUD. (Note, I'm talking about the business model, not individual Indians.) But that was just the first attempt. Software will figure it out, just as textiles figured it out.
So for me from a founders perspective, the best kind of environment to get things started would be a company space that encourages setups like a cafe/lounge/coffeetable-style area for laptop users and those who need to be comfortable, focused, and relatively available with ease for discussion .. as well as areas of the workfloor where there are offices, for example, for those who need them, or hackylab environment for where its needed, etc.
Alas, this kind of mixed-format personal workspace organization is not so economical, and it usually requires someone be responsible for the estate, rather than just having a cubicle-cleaning service, etc. etc. All kinds of legal hoops, too, whatever.
But in my experience, this seems to be the case: the nicest 'kind' of workspace for a modern startup company in my opinion, is your average McMansion.
(If you can fit and find one local to everyone else who has to commute to it.)
I've seen great mixed-format startup scenarios in your average American mega-house, cubicle farm in the 4-car garage, massive lounge/rec-room space for the hackers, room #? of (4..6) bedrooms converted to shared office rooms, 2 or 3 to a room, for those who want 'a desktop' and a way to isolate themselves from the rest of the team, and so on.
Of course, this works if the house is clean and maintained as a work environment, and indeed if people don't live there but rather treat it as their place of work. That can be difficult to do in some neighborhoods.
Wouldn't it then be interesting to see some sort of 'office space plan' revolution occur in the broader sense, which accommodates all of these modes of operation, to implement a model you could name "Big Family Home"?
Instead of cubical farms, you find interior spaces analog to a modern home plan, s/beds/desktops/, centered around a common room/kitchen/meeting area, etc.
Generally the way I feel when I walk into a very large organization and its just endless row of cubicle, mind-numbing soviet khaki walls lit by brain-sucking illumination standards, all I want to do is go home.
That is a hard impulse to resist all day. If, instead, I'm in a place that accommodates a large number of peoples needs with some consistent attention to variety, usually its pretty hard to go home at the end of the day .. I really like going to a business where people are working and comfortable because they know where the kitchen is, and someone is making lunch for everyone while code gets written, clients are met, teams are having meetings out on the deck in the sunshine, etc. I'm sure there are movements towards this; but the cubicle-farm seems to have persisted for decades, alas, and for this I guess we must thank the bean-counters.
I had a flashback of playing the board game Clue (http://www.hasbro.com/common/instruct/clue_%282002%29.pdf) with my siblings when I was younger. Specifically, I imagined a small team of developers in a large McMansion-Office trying to debug a large application saying things like, "I suggest the bug was commit'd in the kitchen, by Tom with his Custom Arch Laptop."
That "show off the empire" thing is absolutely a function of decisions. I was recently part of such a decision process where a group was looking to become startup-y, and cargo culting the media image of what such organizations look like reigned supreme.
For example, why have an office full of workers when you can outsource most of your work and save a ton?
I've seen a lot of articles arguing against the productivity losses of an open office. Unfortunately I can't remember seeing solid numbers on whether or not those productivity losses (or possibly gains) translate to more or less profit.