One facet that never comes up in these anti-open office articles is that it is 100% impossible to design the perfect office for you as an individual, for every other individual, all while designing an office that is perfect for the organization.
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.
As Joel Spolsky noted, getting natural light to a large number of small rooms is basically a solved problem: how many hotel rooms do you see without a window? Sure, private offices are smaller than hotel rooms, but offices generally have large numbers of meeting rooms, labs and common areas that don't need windows.
Of course, that means that you need to build office buildings more like hotels; you can't so easily retrofit existing office buildings.
Hotels can do that because their revenue is directly dependent on the quality of their rooms. No hotel can sell rooms without windows, so every hotel has to invest in architecture that gives every room a window--either through exterior convolutions, or a giant hollow atrium to soak up useless interior space.
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?
Offices should do that because their revenue is directly dependent on the productivity and happiness of their employees. Likewise, no office builder should be able to sell offices without windows.
After all, you'll spend more conscious time in the office than in a hotel room.
Don't kid yourself. Take down walls, and people will still find ways to signal rank and hierarchy. People are the cause of this, not private working spaces.
At a large company I won't name, for the new buildings, the president ordered that no-one (except for the president of course) would have an enclosed office.
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.)
> 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.
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.
Small group offices of three to five people are the best working environments I've had. You could probably make it work up to eight, but having a single team larger than that is an organisational issue in itself.
The hierarchy is real and shouldn't be pretended away. Having the CEO hotdesk does not actually make the company more egalitarian.
It's not hard to check out equipment to work with for use offsite. Offsite work is a challenge, but at least for me, I'm probably doubly productive that way. Was the overall team doubly productive? I have no real way to know.
More likely is something mundane and not human spirit fulfilling like more "medium height" cubicle walls, high enough for privacy but low enough to not obstruct natural light.
"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.
very well put.
seems like the debate is always between offices vs everyone huddled around on bean bags (exaggeration). but what about open desks with some partial privacy while having accessible offices for meetings and calls. this setup has been working out well in the past 5 places i've worked at. It's good because when things come up (production issues or other teams having issues that may affect you later) you are not withdrawn from it. If your job is solitary and you shouldn't be bothered with daily stuff offices may be the way to go, but in my experience that has been quiet isolating for people and even managers.
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.
Group spaces are quite prevalent in Germany from what I can tell. It makes total sense, in Germany. There is a bit of a difference in the USA though, where employers think you get productivity out of surveillance. We are not a very deeply thinking society, so it makes sense on the face of it that if you can see people working they are being productive. What we miss though, is that all the surveillance and lack of protections and benefits leads to massive amounts of squandered energies and effort on busy work. Busy work is work that is noise which serves a couple different types of purposes. It can make you look like you are working because you are working on something; whether it is relevant, important, or useful is totally irrelevant though. It can serve to make the system as inefficient as possible in order to assure job security. There are other purposes but those are some of the most prevalent.
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.
> The site's already kind of embarrassingly styled
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.
The first 2 startups I worked for back in the early 2000's were open offices, though there were only 6 of us in one room at the first startup, and 3 at the other.
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.
I do wonder sometimes, if all the startups that followed Googs lead into open offices have been pranked, much like the interview folks who blindly followed Googs wacky and wanky interview questions, which have also been shown to be a useless idea.
There is probably a pranks team in Goog that publicises the ideas to see who will blindly follow.
6 and 3 in one room isn't bad at all, as long as everyone's working on the same project / the same tasks - that way, discussions you overhear are relevant to what you're working on at the time, and not a distraction / irrelevant noise.
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 truly dislike open offices. The constant sound of mechanical keyboards clacking really gets to me, and I'm not sure why. I wear headphones listening to loud music to cancel out the sounds of these damn keyboards.
Keyboards, random conversations, people getting up etc. so much noise and so many distractions. I also do the earphones thing, but it seems to be contributing to long-term hearing loss.
I escalate to noise cancelling earbuds worn inside noise cancelling headphones - when that's not enough, I throw a tatrum of go work in a library (or just go home and do something else).
I like my work colleagues, but sometimes I need to concentrate (or I'm just grumpy for some reason).
Active noise-cancelling only seems to work (in my very limited experience) with 'constant' noise though - predictable. Spoken conversations often aren't. But, I might've just had a bad experience with those in the store. I'll stick with passive noise cancelling / in-ear with foam things.
Currently working at a growing startup in Waterloo, it's an open office with a lot of people and it can quickly become very loud (picture 150 people in a big room).
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!
>With that setup I can't hear anything to the point where I get scared shitless if someone disturbs me.
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.
Then there is the open plan office, combined with the clean desk policy. That way you have to endure the inane yacking going on around you and god forbid you try and figure something out on a piece of paper while you're working and go grab a coffee without locking said piece of paper in a drawer or it's a written warning.
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!
This idea that open plan offices are about saving money needs to go in the bit bucket. If it was really about money, they'd have people working from home, which offers far greater cost savings. It's not about money, it's about power, the visible display of subservience.
There is also a policy of stuffing laptops in locked drawers or taking them home after work, although it's perfectly fine to leave one when going out for lunch.
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.
When i worked for Reed Elsevier in london I used to boot my laptop and go across the road to get breakfast in the 10-15 mins that took the laptop would have booted :-)
Am I the only one that experiences anxiety when imposing sensory deprivation on myself in a crowded environment?
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.
Yeah, I suspect the coworkers brought in their own mechs which makes them at fault here. Mechanical keyboards are loud enough to disturb others in a private office setting, I can't imagine hearing multiple nearby with no walls.
Try working in midtown Manhattan! The street noise will make a swarm of mechanical keyboards sound like a lullaby.
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 :)
Huh, that's cool that mechanical keyboards are that well-spread. I thought it was a fairly niche internet hobby I stumbled into, because I've had to be the mech evangelist among my friends.
Maybe you could sneakily suggest that they try an ergonomic keyboard. I haven't seen an ergonomic keyboard which is noisy and mechanical yet, at least.. :-)
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 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.
Have you at least provided feedback to the managers? Like cold, hard feedback "I cannot work like this, I and my colleagues are going to quit and you're fucked when we do" kinda feedback.
No one ever does this, unfortunately. Getting a group to band together and threaten collective action is something few people even consider - most people I know are scared of entertaining that idea.
It's not about making a collective threat, it's letting management know that the new conditions are making you consider options "up to and including departure", and that you think the other devs may be in the same boat.
> 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 :/
I'm a CTO and we moved to new offices a couple of months ago. There were glass-topped, full-height cubes in the center of the floor with natural light on one and a half sides. Not perfect but better than a bullpen. I explicitly asked and emailed the rest of management that we not alter the cubes. The developers prefer to huddle or break off into conf rooms and need the option of getting heads down. The result, the COO had the cubes trimmed to waist height for a open floor effect.
It's damn difficult to get non-IT people to change their POV.
Everybody needs a balance between productive alone time and creative brainstorming time. Most companies I've seen achieve this with an open space and plenty of WFH for all employees.
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.
I would argue that if you cannot restrain yourself to be productive in a closed office, why would you be it from home?
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.
At home nothing prevents me from not working and I often don't. The difference is, at home you can spend your time with a book, cooking, with kids or spouse - which all is refreshing and in general will improve your performance once you get back to work.
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.
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.
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.
Well, for this very reason an open space office should have enough conference rooms for everybody. I dread the moment when I will need to "walk through the door" to speak with a manager. That's intimidating and discourages people from communicating with them. While private rooms help them do the job on the same and above level, I don't believe it works well for their teams.
At my workplace, a little conference room was provided for one of the open office spaces... it lasted for a few months, whereupon one of the managers decided that she needed it.
Study after study show that open distraction office plans are bad for productivity, and increase stress and sick days -- even among those who like open office plans.
It's kinda tiresome, on HN there's is this rabid pro-open plan brigade, even though all the studies show otherwise.
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.
It's not a conspiracy, what tend to happen is you post a bunch of articles and then the parent starts picking at 1 point in 1 article as if that invalidates all of them and you get drawn into this long tiresome discussion with what is nothing but a crackpot using loads of anecdotes or worse, blog posts, against large scientific studies. And quite often it's nonsense any way, they just misunderstand it.
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.
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
Links are not clickable because it's 2015 and I (wrongly) assume you are capable of plunking 'open office plans productivity' into your search engine of choice.
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)).
Sure. It is intuitive that this would be the case. However those aren't the only important factors in a workplace. Team cohesion, collaboration, minimising politics etc. It also seems intuitive to me at least that these would be improved by an open plan office.
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.
My experience tells me that the open office plan, enables poor work ethics to ruin it collectively. I've been in open officies that worked just fine, because everybody had enough deciplin to make it work, and it was okay to tell people to move to a meeting room if they got too noisy.
The best model I've heard about is "work rooms" for everyone, with facilities to move to when you're collaborating.
"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"
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."
"War rooms" are a terrible idea, moreso than open offices. Ideally, they're rooms constructed specifically for that purpose. In reality, they're often re-purposed conference rooms not designed to house a team for days at a time.
BUT frequently this is actually done. One of my old professors works on positioning, and a client he did consulting for wanted to track their employees around the office; and then design new offices based on what came out of it.
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.
I'd be interested in reading that. However, it still doesn't take away from my point that this article wasn't much more than an opinion piece extrapolated to a massive overgeneralization.
We get it, HN is majority introvert, and really likes logical optimization using data.
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
Surely you don't actually need to measure anything. Just ask people what they prefer.
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.
I've found asking people to be notoriously unreliable. Folks want quiet and comfort, sure. But is that the best thing for productivity?
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.
I get what you're saying, but I think there's an easy solution: just ask people who've experienced both. That way you're not experiencing the classic but very real problem of people not knowing what they want until they've got it.
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.
That was my point. There are a lot of things that we measure (eg: productivity) when we should actually be looking at larger goals.
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.
I buy that, for some companies. As a developer, I can tell you that my productivity is shot/reduced 90% by a noisy open environment. So I always find a company that needs my skills, and houses me appropriately to capitalize on those skills. If I'm a low-level measurement that the company can do without, so they put me in open plan anyway, I'll leave.
> "The most important things are unmeasurable." —W. Edwards Deming
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 ?
"Is it a coincidence that companies who pioneered the open office plan are also some of the most successful in the world?"
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.
The success of these companies is largely irrelevant: they became successful before they started creating huge open office farms. Also, companies that exploit sweatshops and factories with atrocious working conditions are also successful.
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.
If two things correlate, it doesn't mean that there's a causal link between them; it means that there's a third thing that causes both of them.
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.
For all you know, it could be a successful attempt. It's extremely difficult to determine causality in a highly complex system such as a company. That's the point, and that's why I posed the question.
Then your argument degenerates. What you've said isn't factually incorrect, but it's boring; you've picked a property that no one can possibly prove or disprove (but that is obviously not true) and used that as an argument against the analytical method in general.
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.
That's the entire point: no one can possibly prove or disprove that open office plans are a significant contributing factor to company success, or if they're just correlated, or if they're entirely irrelevant.
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.
DeMarco and Lister (Peopleware) saw the problems with open offices decades ago. The notion that open offices were a bad idea is not a new discovery. Companies like them because they are initially a lot cheaper than giving people their own offices.
Initially? Not so much. My understanding from when a company I worked for built a building is that bespoke offices would have been cheaper - it's just a few (steel) studs, some sheetrock , wiring and labor.
Cubicles can be quite expensive. The appeal appears to be flexibility.
Actual open offices - no cubicles, just tables - approximate a continuous meeting.
"it's just a few (steel) studs, some sheetrock , wiring and labor"
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.
But are they successful because of the open office, or because they have a very good product at its base? Correlation / causation / etc. You can't judge the individual performance of 3000 people in an open office floor plan from a product.
> Is it a coincidence that companies who pioneered the open office plan are also some of the most successful in the world?
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).
Yes, the open office nature of Facebook may have been crucial to its early success. But that was when Facebook was less than 10 people! Many people consider small team offices to be more akin to private offices than to open plan offices.
Just a different opinion here. I have never worked in a single office space. I honestly can't imagine such a thing. But I do know how incredible good I am at distracting myself at home.
Just having someone around, who are working on a different piece of the same puzzle is a major motivator.
Apparently you indeed have never worked in an office space. Because it's approximately 10% "working on a different piece of the same puzzle", and approximately 90% "talking about 'Age of Ultron' at top volume for hours straight".
"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 find the atmosphere in a room with 2, 3 or 4 people far more oppressive that a room with a 100. Probably something to do with being able to ignore people when they are a multitude, but things getting too personal when it's a small group.
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.
At my current workplace, we have a shared room for the developers and designers (5-9 people depending on the day and time), while the rest (~20 people) are spread in other bigger open spaces. I find that it works well, because we are mostly stationary and focused on a specific task, while the rest (sales, marketing, customer development, etc.) are constantly moving around, in meetings, visiting customers.
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.
Is this open office = for work of a highly creative and collaborative nature, the team owns their own workspace, which they customize as they choose, and folks on the team are in physical proximity?
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.
"Meanwhile, “ease of interaction” with colleagues — the problem that open offices profess to fix — was cited as a problem by fewer than 10 percent of workers in any type of office setting."
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.
Just imagine how "ease of interaction" is not a problem if you don't mind not to interact at all. That's another problem fixed forcefully by open offices. I like not being alone in my office, having the whole team of a dozen people in my reach. I don't like loud discussions either, but I can mute those with my ear plugs. I cannot unmute a solo office box.
After 14 years working remotely in a home office I worked at Google in 2013 in an open office. It was an adjustment but I enjoyed it. I shifted my work hours to 6:15am to 4pm for a few hours of quiet work time everyday. Also, there were many places to work away from my desk. Most managers seemed to have more private work spaces.
The best working environment I was ever part of in terms of productivity was set up with private offices, but at the team level. We'd have a team of people who were all working on the same component (five or six people) in a room with each other, but otherwise insulated from the bustle of the office. It was hugely helpful to be in a room with all of the people who were relevant to your work, and no other distractions. That may have just been due to having a good team, but I have a lot of good memories from that time.
Lots of people in our organisation equate non-open offices (in our case, cubes with high walls) with a we've-always-done-things-this-way attitude. And with a lack of transparency, the desire not to share 9and so remain vital) etc. However in our UK office we have the opposite - our development room is like a 1980s trading floor, impossible to focus for more than a few minutes at a time even with sweaty decent headphones.
Work-from-home is the way forward - LINQ combined with trust mean I can work in my pyjamas. Win!
Is it really that black and white? I prefer a nice combination where the workplace is relatively open, but people still have space for privacy. It's not like Google throws all their engineers into a room...
> 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.
Articles about how X doesn't work tend to use examples of where X is really badly implemented. In the case of this article, it seems the office she was working had a really toxic culture, with micromanaging managers, coworkers judging you when you leave, excessively noisy people, etc.
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.
Agree with all of it except the end. Don't fall for the "work from home" bit. Sure there is privacy, but it's also isolating and destroys the primary barrier to working around the clock.
How is this Google's fault? Google's name is used in the article title, but then it is basically not mentioned again apart from in a list of equally well-known companies?
My preference has always been a shared workspace with the option for coders to pick up their computer and head outside to a coffee shop or unoccupied conference room or something to hack away in the zone when they felt like it.
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.
Every few months there's an opinion piece on HN about open offices. Then everyone gets into the same debate over whether they like the open offices or not.
What I'd like to see are new STUDIES about open offices, not the rehashing of personal experiences and anecdotes.
> What I'd like to see are new STUDIES about open offices
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."
I'd further add that "agile" workspaces reminds me of sweatshops in India. It makes other "open" office plans look appealing. It puts the open concept on a gradient much to your point.
If you don't like this, why not go start your own company or find a new job? There is nothing forcing you to stay in this job. I for one have to agree that the communal aspect of working in an open office has its benefits and downfalls. But if one day I came in and didn't like it to the level you described - I'd quit and go find a job where I can get right with myself.
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.
If you don't like this article, why not go start your own website or find a new website to read? There's nothing forcing you to stay on this website.
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 think this is a good suggestion. I've given up on 'contracting' these days, solely because I hate open plan, and just consult freelance. I rent my own office to work in and it's lovely.
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.
Very good piece. I am sure the Author is quite a pleasant person and all, but I really hate her just for going to the Beats store. She got what she deserves.
