I think this has been a discussion going on for a long time now. What I believe to be true is it really depends on the person. If you're someone who is self-conscious then yes you'll feel like everyone is judging you all the time. If you have the ability to stay focused on your work without being around colleagues then you should be allowed to work from home.
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".
I think that the majority of unhappy open-office employees are more upset with distractions than with the lack of privacy.
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).
"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. "
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.
I run an office design website and I hardly ever see team rooms, which is very surprising and they seem like a good balance between collaborative space and privacy.
Those glass walls give me nightmares. I currently work for a company where once in a while I have to spend a whole day in an office with glass walls everywhere. By the end of the day I just want to lock myself in the bathroom, the feeling of constantly being on view and constantly seeing movement drives me completely nuts.
Glass walls are mostly used to ensure natural light is able to get into the innermost parts of the building. But your nightmare is my joy. This diversity in humans is one of the things which makes creating the idea work environment for all so difficult.
If you navigate to the photos section, there is a collection of photos 'brainstorm rooms' displaying a variety of ways those are installed.
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 "quarter that thinks its OK" is something of an understatement. Some of that quarter are self-employed people who still think it's so much better for their productivity to be around other people that they're prepared to pay money and sacrifice an hour commuting in order to sit at a desk in a big, trendily-decorated room with an assortment of other entirely-unrelated microbuses-owners rather than a desk in their own bedroom.
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.
"...to sit at a desk in a big, trendily-decorated room..."
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.
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.
Given the popularity of site-blocking apps like SelfControl, Freedom etc, yes, many people do need help with this. I don't use them, but I go through quite wide swings between ignoring many distractions to get work done to having trouble getting work done because of all the distractions (just plotting my HN comments alone would probably yield a nice sinusoidal wave).
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.
"Given the popularity of site-blocking apps like SelfControl, Freedom etc, yes, many people do need help with this."
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.
>what's stopping me from opening up news or playing video games? //
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.
But it's inevitable that any job will involve some amount of busy-work. Such is the nature of work.
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.
> 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.
Your comments in this thread continue to be rude and judgmental. Telling the moderator that they are being overly sensitive is not a good plan, and violates the guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, particularly in "Be civil"
I think you're much more self aware about how you solve problems than i am. Most problems are just exploring a configuration space. Stuff like using a hashtable instead of a set, because there's extra associated information, or traversing a datastructure in a different order. Perhaps complex, but ultimately understandable changes.
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.
That is part of my problem. When I get into those modes I want to pace and talk to myself as I go through the problem. Sharing space really puts a crimp in that.
"I think it's wrong to say "open offices are destroying the workplace"."
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.
"When I work from home what's stopping me from opening up news or playing video games?"
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.
Very true. There are both positives and negatives. What we really need is choice. Sometimes I want to code in peace, some times I want to stand and hear what everyone is doing.
The ultimate irony of open plan offices is that if you are considerate of your neighbors, you can't actually collaborate in the open part of the office. Every single time I want to talk to someone for an in depth period of time, we almost immediately move to a conference room so we don't disturb the people around us.
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.
People characterize DRM as something that doesn't deter criminals but punishes honest consumers. I've often thought of open office plans in the same way. Unless someone's a jerk, they're not going to want to talk to anyone about anything in the actual open office area, which is the whole point of "increasing collaboration". They're going to whisper (which impedes communication) or grab whoever they want to talk to and go someplace where they're not disturbing other people.
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.
It's distressing to me that I have the strong urge to move to a private area to talk to a coworker about their day because the guy next door immediately jumps in and has Opinions about Stuff, so the conversation immediately becomes about him.
Open offices are an immense waste. Guess much work I get done when the five people near me have visitors resulting in three separate concurrent discussions? I already have Bose noise cancelling headphones. They are amazing, but cannot be expected to stop that level of interruption.
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.
Absolutely agree, especially for think-intensive things like software development where "flow" is so important. Closed offices are marginally more expensive but the productivity improvements massively outweigh the investment.
The lack of privacy is just uncomfortable. It always feels like you're being watched, even if you're not.
If the purpose of open-plan offices is to intimidate people into working, they backfire. I fuck around way more in an open-plan office than when I have privacy.
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.
So, part of it is certainly that they're the cheap 'n' shitty option. However, when you weigh the money saved against the loss of productivity, they're not worth it.
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.
There are different kinds of collaboration and you're taking a very narrow view of it. Open offices might suck for explicit collaboration, like pairing, but for the type of collaboration that happens somewhat randomly, they're basically the only option. What I'm talking about mostly manifests itself in overheard conversations where someone who wasn't initially part of the conversation realizes they can add valuable context and joins in. It's really hard to quantify the benefits of something like this but, especially in software development, it can be very useful in leveraging past experiences of the entire team to avoid going down too many wrong paths. It also means that you don't have to put nearly as much effort into communicating context around your organization because employees pick it up naturally from conversations around them.
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.
"What I'm talking about mostly manifests itself in overheard conversations where someone who wasn't initially part of the conversation realizes they can add valuable context and joins in."
Which only works when staff are half listening to most conversations. Which means they are distracted for pretty much the entire day.
Intimidating people into working simply fails if you're hiring the kind of people your company ought to be hiring. The intimidation is a distraction - you get people to focus on the problem of social pressure at work rather than the technical problems they want to work on.
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.
Yep. Open-plan benefits are few and far between and to me just feels like forced teamwork and socialization. It certainly depends on the industry/team but most of the time, people don't need to chat with each other all day and instead need to just get shit done.
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".
I started my career working at a team room, which was exclusive for the technical people and had no more than 7 people at its peak. Then progressively went from open-office to open-office.
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? :)
Open floorplans are worse than cubicles. Not worse than four people crammed into a sweaty two-person cubicle, but worse than 1-2 people in a cubicle. Significantly, obviously worse.
I've recently entertained the heretical thought that cubicles, as much as everyone seems to love to hate them, represent a good compromise between private offices and open floor plans. Particularly when you talk about cubicles with "medium height" walls (around 53", from a little Googling), there's some acoustic and visual privacy from your neighbors, but there's still a good sense of openness.
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.
When you add standing desks, 53'' is not enough to stop acoustic abuse from people doing things like concalls.
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.
Personally, I find cubicles to be the worst of both worlds: too spread out for much collaboration with neighbors, but open enough go have nearly all the noise and distraction of an open office.
Can you explain what collaborative benefits an open office plan brings when trying to concentrate on fixing code? Currently I work in a place with 66" high walls and I find that true collaboration happens regardless of the wall height, via instant messaging, email and walking into someone's cube. I've worked in places with low cube walls and I've absolutely hated it - I felt so uncomfortable I couldn't wait to leave by the end of the day. In the end, I feel low cube walls hurt privacy-minded people more than they help "collaborative" types.
I work on a rather large system: it is not uncommon that when when a couple of people are talking (out loud, not digitally) about a problem, another co-worker, who wrote or otherwise has much more experience with the module we are discussing, joins the discussion and adds insight.
P.S. I find that there are three levels of noise: library-like silence, individual conversations and coffee-shop blur of conversation.
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)
I've learned that for the kind of stuff I do face to face communication next to a whiteboard is the best place to discuss complex technical topics.
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.
I generally work at home before lunch, then in a (cramped) group office after lunch. This way I get to work by myself for considerable chunks, get to do all my meals at home (good for budgeting), and still get to interact/collaborate with colleagues basically every day.
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.
Cubicles are horrible because they also don't deal with the worst aspect of these office spaces, which is visibility from behind. They typically have the worker facing a wall, not backed by a wall facing out. Cubes are to claustrophobia as open-plan spaces are to agoraphobia.
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.
Things are getting so insane that even some top universities have open-plan offices. Am I supposed to prove theorems or to write Lisp in such an environment? Seriously?
I saw an anecdote on a different thread here yesterday saying that assistant professors are basically becoming managers. Their job is to write grant proposals and have meetings with other faculty and staff all day, and navigate the political systems of academia in order to secure approvals and funding, while their graduate students do all the actual research work.
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.
Open offices are primarily designed to save money, and they save a ton of money when compared with private offices combined with collaborative working spaces (fancy word for conference rooms/areas). It is very easy to quantify this cost difference, and this cost savings is immediate. It is much more difficult to quantify productivity impact vs costs, and this would not be realized clearly and immediately.
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.
Bingo. This is what these discussions so often miss: open office floorpans translate to immediate savings on the company's balance sheets. They permit companies to stuff more workers into fewer square feet, and those square feet are how commercial real estate is priced. All of the stated benefits of open office floor plans (culture, collaboration, communication, etc) are subordinate to, or justification for, those savings.
I've never worked in anything other than open plan offices. Some are definitely better than others. The worst are offices without breakaway spaces, which cause impromptu meetings to happen at desks, which can be immensely distracting.
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.
Another give-away against open-offices is that people who decides them usually reserve a single office for thy selves.
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.
I'm a big proponent of ~3 people offices as opposed to an open floor plan. There are many ways to "opt-in" to interactions:
- 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.
> It seems easier to 'opt-out' of distractions (by putting on headphones)
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.
Open office plans lend themselves to more serendipitous interactions between people.
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.
I'm in my 40's and I thought going from cubes to open office was going to be hard. I couldn't have been more wrong: I love it. I guess I don't need headphones to be productive, and I don't care if someone sees what I'm doing on my screen, because I'm already at the office > 10 hrs a day, plus at home, so they can judge all they want if I have Facebook up in one window.
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.
This seriously depends on the person. I personally hate having to commute to an office and would much prefer to work remotely from home, but I know plenty of folks who enjoy the social interaction at an open (or closed) work space. Besides, open, close, or remote work place is much more of a personal preference (like preference for different IDEs) than some inherently right or wrong decision a company can make (like decreeing no employee is allowed to become pregnant). So the smart company should leave the choice of whether to work at the open office, in a closed cubicle, or remotely at home up to the employee so that the details of how an employee maximizes his productivity is left to him, instead of handed down from up-top based upon statistical studies. After all, if you as an employer is going to trust your employees to be able to properly optimize your dataflows, innovate new databases techniques, not "drop table users", etc., why not also trust your employees to know what work environment works best for him?
The pendulum seems to swing on this issue every 20-25 years on this issue so it makes a lot of sense we are seeing so many articles about how the open plan is terrible now.
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.
Office space in the Bay Area is expensive, so is construction (even indoors). When you can put employees into 6x6 plots in an open space, everything else looks egregiously expensive.
When I worked at an office with cubicles, it wasn't any less noisy than the open office I work in. You could hear everyone talking and it was impossible to tell who was in the office and who wasn't.
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.
I can't help thinking this whole trend started with the industry which epitomises the values that our working society holds, that is finance, and the trading floor. I worked on one of these for 15 years - it was fantastic for getting deals done and increasing teamwork when sales, trading, and research all need to work together. Indeed it was when research was moved off the trading floor in around 2005 that I decided to leave, because in that industry, not being "in the thick of it" a huge disadvantage. I think a lot of the open plan idea comes from a misguided view that if trading floors can make so many millions, then they must be extended everywhere.
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.
I currently work in an office made of small-ish rooms, each with 5 to 10 persons in an open floor plan. The people sharing a room are in the same team. I don't think I could go from this to having a private office, the cold and quiet loneliness would be depressing. I love the banter that comes up while waiting for a test suite to complete, and the ability to quickly do some pair programming or have an impromptu team meeting. At any time, we can simply turn around to face each other instead of the desk.
I have said it before here, but the best office layout I saw was at Autodesk HQ in mid 1990's.
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.
It all depends on the culture and dynamics of the workplace I think. If everyone keeps their voices low (I don't mean whispering, just not booming), and are concious that when people have their headphones and have a look of deep concentration they shouldn't be disturbed, then it really is not that bad. Then again, I'm the sort of person that prefers to work with a bit of background noise rather than in deathly silence where each tiny sounds causes me to jump.
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...
I've worked in closed-off private offices, and I'm working in an open office right, and there are definitely plusses and minuses to both, IMO. Especially if you're all working on the same product, there is something really nice feeling about being physically around everybody; it creates a sense togetherness.
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.
They'll probably tell you there are security considerations against that. The next time you interview with Google, if you get a building tour, pay attention to the "no photography past these point" and similar notices...
Give me a dark cave where I can munch my thoughts in private without seeing or listening to anybody else unless I choose to do so, and you've got yourself a winner employee here.
Office layout is certainly an area where one size does not fit all.
I totally agree with this piece. Some may prefer an open office space, and that's fine for them - but they can probably still work well in a private office. For those who are noise-sensitive, though, it can be a huge distraction. I've started working from home a lot more just because of how loud it is in the office. A lot of our developers and admins have voices that ... carry, to say the least.
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.
The biggest bias in the discussion that occurs on HN, is that most people commenting are engineers. Programming is inherently heads down, whereas a large number of professional jobs are not.
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.
I love open offices, but then, everyone on my floor is part of the same team. Yes, I get a lot more walk up traffic from other team members than I did when I had a private office, but I don't see that as a bad thing. If people are looking for my help, they probably need it, and I'm happy to give it.
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.
Probably what's more important than the open office plan is the underlying idea : collaboration. Collaboration between various siloed parts of the organization. You can achieve that without creating open offices . When you force an open office where u actually were trying to encourage collaboration it may not always have the effect you were going for
It's about noise and distractions. Programming takes concentration and in an open office layout all you see is people trying their best to not be distracted. Why not let good architecture solve that problem instead? Let the experts, architects, do their job and stop second-guessing them.
Both is probably the answer here. There is a range of characteristics in people and ideally you need to accommodate them, so if you want to get the best out of your employees you need a range of work environments. The ideal office building would probably be fairly fractal.
you're right, but at some point one needs to describe what a team do - I'm not a native English speaker, and I use what I learned. I accept alternatives, especially if they don't involve a ten word paraphrase of that.
you can have multiple smaller teams working on different aspect of the same project, I've seen project with 50+ devs and I wouldn't put the full project on a single room. but I see your point, it works for small projects, I'll figure out something on those lines.
We have an ongoing joke about issuing 20p fines for using stupid phrases like, "going forward, I'm leveraging the stakeholders for additional resource to in-flight the next key deliverable". That one's worth at least £1.20. What's wrong with "I'll ask for another developer to work on this project"?
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".
Fair enough; I'm all for mocking bullshit language, it's just that deliverable never striked me as such. Then again, I don't work in English-speaking corporations.
Open plan offices are another bad idea dishonestly sold to tech workers. They aren't more "collaborative". The low-level anxiety and misanthropy that they foster is being informally called "open plan syndrome" by psychiatrists in the Bay Area. People collaborate less in open-plan offices and, while some think their purpose is to intimidate people into working, people actually fuck around way more.
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.
