7 ms·

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

by 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?

by biot 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

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.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

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?