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If you search for "open office" on HN there's a thread with a ton of comments in which one person described his ideal office setup as one that has an open/commu

• biot 10y ago
  On Bell Labs and open offices, Richard Hamming (retired Bell Labs scientist) said: "Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame." From http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
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  • michaelmrose 10y ago
    I'm sure he did good work but this is the intellectual equivalent to snack food. Its entirely possible to be open to outside influence without giving random coworkers visible permission to interrupt whenever.
    • marvy 10y ago
      > entirely possible But that's his point, isn't it? It sounds like it should be possible, yet he never saw it happen.
      • initram 10y ago
        Well, his definition appears to be that the people with closed doors did it "enough that they miss fame". Who's to say whether those people made extremely good contributions, but since they were introverts didn't seek out fame, or actively ran from it? The whole quote is just anecdotal stuff.
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  • cloudjacker 10y ago
    Because any of us here work anywhere for ten years right? We get our cliffs and we get liquidity and none of this workplace nuance matters. Your mere presence is elevated into importance because you got an exit. Being honest.
  • reitanqild 10y ago
    This get brought up again and again, yet: Those who had their doors open still had offices (and I guess a few of them sometimes closed the doors.) For us who have had to live in open offices where people come in to chat about guns[0] and cutting legs of dogs and daydreaming loudly about things so pervert that anything you have yet heard from big T (yet, at least, I have seen the news) pales and can make even native Norwegians blush... ...for us it is less about where we are in 10 years and more about where we are today. [0]: minor remark: I am as pro-gun as any of the locals it seems, just don't start chatting about them in the open floorplan where I sit to work.
  • svjsdjfnskj 10y ago
    It's not a binary thing! you can shut the door when you need to concentrate and open it when you want to be sociable. That's how it was in my last job and it worked great. Currently I'm in an open-plan office that's hot and noisy, so I work from home in the mornings when I do work that requires concentration and then I go into the office in the afternoon for easier work and chatting.
  • twelve40 10y ago
    This can clearly go the other way: people who make an impact are approached so much that it's hard to keep the door closed, doesn't mean it's their natural preference.
  • dredmorbius 10y ago
    John Seeley Brown, in The Social Life of Information, has a pair of anecdotes from Xerox's repair staff and either Xerox or Kodak (I think) customer service. The support techs used to have a morning coffee session before heading out into the field on their calls. These turned out to be hugely useful tech transfer opportunities as repairmen would share both their unsolvable problems (machines which had broken and couldn't be fixed) and "This One Weird Trick" solutions. The second anecdote involved customer service operators, who had previously, if I'm remembering this correctly, shared floor space with techs, but had been moved to their own space. Following the move, there were two specific operators who were able to help out customers by not following the specific scripts they'd been provided, but rather by supplying actual useful questions, diagnostics, and suggestions. When studied by management, it it turned out that one was a veteran of the former seating arrangement. The other, however, was a more recent hire. She did, however, sit next to the more senior rep, and had picked up tips listening and talking to the other employee. The lesson I'm drawing is that you don't need people to be interrupted all the time. But you do need them to have some opportunities for a free-wheeling exchange. Finding the right balance point between heads-down work (the Xerox techs, for example, were mostly on the road and at customer sites, so they wouldn't have had input from other techs), and exhange opportunities. In academia, there's the teaching vs. studying/research balance. A few days of lecture and sessions, with other time devoted to actual research, gives that balance of peturbing your own thinking and exposure to new ideas, and focusing on your own work. E.O. Wilson addresses that in his recent book, Letters to a Young Scientist (along with advice to avoid as much teaching and administrative responsibilities as possible).
    • taneq 10y ago
      A company I used to work for had expanded past its available office space, and so they had to rent another office nearby. They moved all the upper management, project managers, and engineers (basically the 'cool kids' / 'important people') over to the new office, leaving some admin staff behind at the main office with the workshop. The resulting loss of communication between workshop and everyone else caused havoc and a bunch of things went wrong.
      • 10y ago
  • lazyjones 10y ago
    He may be right, but as an employer, your aim won't be to make all your programmers famous. The work better done behind closed doors is probably at least as important as that of the visionary with open doors: putting out fires, fixing bugs, meeting deadlines. As an employee, you'll surely want the "open door" work ...
  • dwc 10y ago
    Several times over the years I've had an office with a door. Normally I kept the door open, but I would close it if I had work that required extreme (for me) concentration, or if the environment outside was excessively distracting that day, etc. IME, this is quite common for other people as well. Since I have trouble concentrating when people are talking and get quite unhappy about it but managed to keep my door open the vast majority of the time, I have to wonder. Was Bell Labs an excessively noisy place, or were the closed door people there those kind of people?
• badsock 10y ago
  I've seen this called "cave and commons", and yeah, it seems like a very good setup. I first saw it mentioned in Stewart Brand's (highly recommended) book How Buildings Learn.
• blt 10y ago
  Because then it takes even more space than one or the other.
• ams6110 10y ago
  It isn't popular because it's more expensive. Cubicles are cheaper than offices, and desks in a row are cheaper than cubicles. It's a beancounter mentality, possibly understandable in a startup with limited funds for offices, but a false economy in the long run.
  • abalone 10y ago
    This is often repeated on HN threads as a plausible explanation for open plans, always without evidence. But it makes very little sense as a theory. Companies do not have a financial inventive to consciously cripple their very highly paid, very difficult to hire developers' productivity. People are their number one expense and asset, vastly moreso than office space. Far from cutting corners, many open plan companies also spend lavishly on amenities to keep engineers happy. A more plausible explanation is companies do open plan because they believe it will help foster collaboration, culture and team productivity. You may disagree but the "beancounter" theory makes no sense.
    • adrianN 10y ago
      It's easy to measure the money saved when you go from individual offices to an open plan. It is a lot harder to measure the lost productivity of your programmers.
      • abalone 10y ago
        That's not really true. You can look at developer velocity and bug fix rates, to name a couple of readily available metrics. It would not be some big mystery if open plan was killing productivity. Also, it does not explain why a "beancounter" mindset about office space would be paired with lavish expenses on free lunches and other de rigueur amenities in said offices, as is typical of open plan startups. Conclusion: it's not a beancounter mentality that drives the decision.
        • ZenoArrow 10y ago
          > "You can look at developer velocity and bug fix rates, to name a couple of readily available metrics." How? If an office starts out open plan (which many of them do), are you going to move to new offices just to test the theory that it'll make your employees more productive? Plus, bug fix rates are a bad metric, bugs are not equal in complexity, and even if you try and guess at the complexity before working on a bug that's only an estimate, and one that doesn't take into account other important factors such as the level of churn in the codebase and the level of familiarity the developer has with the part of the codebase they are asked to fix.
• InclinedPlane 10y ago
  Money. Open offices are cheaper. So if you can con your mostly 20-something and 30-something tech staff that it's the best way to go, then you're golden, you save a ton of money and your employees don't even realize they're being ripped off. As for "serendipity" it's the classic post-hoc fallacy problem. People think "oh, there was that one time" where something good happened in an open office, and they think that means nothing good would happen without open offices. Serendipity happens plenty with offices, but it happens amidst a background of much greater productivity and less annoyance at noisy office mates.
  • nickthemagicman 10y ago
    Short term money. If it kills productivity, they lose money in the long run.
    • theprotocol 10y ago
      Nearly every company these days falls for this. I suspect suits completely misunderstand the principle of time value of money, as they wrongly conflate "short term money" with "earlier money." And in finance, when it comes to inflows of money, earlier always trumps later (as it's assumed that you can thus will invest that money for longer when you get it earlier).
    • InclinedPlane 10y ago
      That's true of a lot of practices, but when the feedback loop isn't as tight, it's easy for companies to ignore it. There are countless examples of big companies hemorrhaging talent because of their corporate culture, policies, etc. I've witnessed it many times with my own eyes. But that sort of thing doesn't manifest as the company burning to the ground in the next year and then people going "why did that happen? oh, it's because we lost Jim". Instead it looks like a failure to execute as well on big projects. But because there are always so many things changing from project to project, it's always easy to blame something else. And the management at most big corporations are loathe to blame themselves or their policies, so they always find some other convenient excuse. This is a big reason why companies change character of time and transition from being industry powerhouses to also-rans.
• borplk 10y ago
  It's about money. It was always about money, the collaboration thing is just a veil. Companies will always invent "happy vocabulary" to justify whatever it is that is in their interest to do. If they could pack their employees into little cardboard human boxes all separate from each other they would say "Our environment encourages strong focus and solitude." You can put a positive spin on anything.
  • BjoernKW 10y ago
    It's also about (perceived) control. Otherwise remote work would be pretty much the norm today - at least for software development and similar kinds of knowledge work. Development output isn't easily measurable. What's easily measurable though is people sitting in a chair and pretending to "work".
• Animats 10y ago
  I've seen the reverse of that at one part of Google - individual desks in the middle, many small glass-walled conference rooms around the perimeter.
  • gbin 10y ago
    Google has private offices ? Which building ?
• ap22213 10y ago
  Let's imagine a universe where research showed that factory workers gained significant productivity when they had private spaces to concentrate. Do you think that the factory owners would suddenly erect partitions? Of course not - at least not until they faced significant competition and were losing market share. Too many people doing software over-inflate their importance to management. The reason why there are few offices at tech companies is simple. Management views software developers as factory workers, and they want to 'see' them working hard for the money that they're spending.
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• thesimpsons1022 10y ago
  microsoft has that in some teams. one team specifically i knew was transitioned from offices to the open floor plan but their old offices remained empty. this allowed them to have both
• oldprogrammer2 10y ago
  When we moved our dev team to a new area, I chose this style of layout. Each developer has their own small office, which forms an outer perimeter. Each office also has a 4x4 window next to the door to keep the atmosphere open. In the middle is an open kitchen and a standup area, separated by the bathrooms. We have a conference room in the corner. All of this is behind key-access doors, giving the team a sense of sanctuary. Each office, as well as the standup area and the conference room, have a whiteboard wall. I would say that the general idea is that developers come together at standups, and typically plan out the day. If two or more developers determine a discussion is needed, they normally schedule right after the standup. Then the developers depart to their offices, and generally put their heads down and work in quiet. Most leave their doors open throughout the day, and close their doors when they have phone calls or small meetings. The arrangement works well. Adhoc conversations are not discouraged, and occur throughout the day as needed, but the separate offices keep the trivial conversations and disturbances to a minimum. From a cost perspective, this layout requires considerably more space than an open layout. And separate offices require separate HVAC ducts, and walls and doors are (obviously) additional expenses, too. I'm grateful that our team's contributions were recognized by the company (a non-tech company), such that the expense was considered worth it. it's certainly a cornerstone of my sales pitch for recruiting developers.
  • JohnBooty 10y ago
    I'm glad it's working out for you! Our company (also a non-tech company!) is investing in such a space for us and I'm very very excited. Excited and grateful.
  • existencebox 10y ago
    If it helps, let me put my vote of support for that sales pitch. Literally that fact alone had me going "I wonder where he works", and I'm in quite a good spot right now. I cannot express how much a motivator a sane office space has become for such a silly thing after the last few years of open-sardine-cans. I would love to see more companies recognize that certain acts of consideration to their eng (I don't mean the more transient stuff like "free dinners" "pool table") are a significant differentiator for my strata of less-extroverted devs.
• madmax108 10y ago
  This is EXACTLY how we have it at our office (Series D startup). On a daily basis, I pend about half my time in the open area with my team and everyone else dropping by, and the rest in a room where I can be plugged in at peace to get some concentrated coding done. The office rooms range from 1-2 person rooms to 6-10 person rooms, and all of them can be used at any time of day by anyone in office. It's funny how I never have to stretch timelines or have communication issues with this setup. +1, would recommend.