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I worked for a year at IBM's RTP campus. Everyone had their own dimly lit cube with 5-foot walls, no natural daylight, and white noise playing over speakers to

I worked for a year at IBM's RTP campus. Everyone had their own dimly lit cube with 5-foot walls, no natural daylight, and white noise playing over speakers to drown out conversation. The depressing undertone of the office was part of what pushed me to quit. My team at my present job works in an open setting with 8 people in the room and windows with natural daylight. It's quiet enough to focus but gives us the opportunity for interaction also. I think that team-sized rooms are a good compromise between a completely open and completely secluded workspace.

schiang 10y ago
Team sized rooms are definitely the way to go. You can avoid conversation from other teams that you don't care about. When there is a conversation in the room, it's probably related to what you're doing so it's not necessarily distracting you. I worked in a room with just my team and it worked out great. We were able to have discussions and draw stuff on white boards on the wall without distracting anyone else. It also helped with team bonding.
- vonmoltke 10y ago
  This probably works great if you have evenly-sized, relatively stable teams. The place I just left has teams that ranged from just me to the entire eight-persob company, and the teams could change on a month-to-month basis. In fact, it wasn't unusual to be working on two or three projects simultaneously.
  - cableshaft 10y ago
    Well, you could have a primary team you work for, and then get called on to work on other things for other teams periodically (while staying at your same desk). That's pretty much what we do here. My team lead is always the same person, but sometimes I do work for the other two team leads, especially when work is light in the current iteration for my normal project.
- taurath 10y ago
  I've had this and private offices... what happens is that difficult conversations can't take place except outside of the office (unless there is another space to go). Need to have a 1-1? Everyone else hears it. No meta conversations can take place unless someone is willing to go out for some coffee. The team banter ends up being trivial, and can be incredibly distracting if you need to buckle down to get something done.
  - namiller2 10y ago
    Your office doesn't have a single shared meeting room? Most places I've seen with open offices have some sort of meeting rooms to use for private conversations. How do you have a client call or anything of that matter?
    - combatentropy 10y ago
      If everyone has their own office, then someone coming into your office is an everyday affair. They could be talking about a programming problem, lunch, or something personal. You don't know, but you would go crazy wondering about it, because it happens all day. In an open room where half a dozen or so people sit, if two people stand up, walk into a conference room, and shut the door, that's weird and curious.
      - johannes1234321 10y ago
        > In an open room where half a dozen or so people sit, if two people stand up, walk into a conference room, and shut the door, that's weird and curious. This also happens all the time, thus not weird. (or people don't talk ...)
        vonmoltke 10y ago
        Or people just have non-sensitive conversations right at their desks.
      - tikhonj 10y ago
- taurath 10y ago
  I've had this and private offices... what happens is that difficult conversations can't take place except outside of the office (unless there is another space to go). Need to have a 1-1? Everyone else hears it. No meta conversations can take place unless someone is willing to go out for some coffee. The team banter ends up being trivial, and can be incredibly distracting if you need to buckle down to get something done.
- r_smart 10y ago
  >When there is a conversation in the room, it's probably related to what you're doing so it's not necessarily distracting you. My rebuttal to this point is the amount of time my previous co-workers would spend discussing lawn care strategies. Overall though, I agree with you. Team sized rooms are a livable compromise, and have some nice upsides while tamping down the downsides of a fully open office.
  - cwilkes 10y ago
    Not sure how that is a rebuttal unless you work for a lawn care company.
    - r_smart 10y ago
      You're conception of it being a rebuttal is exactly wrong. My point was, my team would spend a lot of time talking about things that weren't related to work or my interests, so it was indistinguishable from any of the myriad other distractions present in an open office. Basically: If you're co-located with 1 person or more, you will be subjected to distractions you have no interest in and serve no purpose for yourself or your team.
- geofft 10y ago
  That seems like a way to exacerbate Conway's law problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law . Most of the technical debt I try to fight off is based on my team doing something that makes sense for us based on what we're good at / what we think other teams want, but doesn't line up with what other teams want / what they think we can deliver; we end up essentially building abstraction layers around other teams, and they build abstraction layers around us. If you put everyone in a private office and default conversations to email lists / group chat (which is the model that basically the entire open source community uses), that's fine. If you have an open floor plan where it's easy to wander over to another team's area, that's also fine. But making it super easy for your own team to talk without other people hearing seems the worst of both worlds; you have all the distraction problems of open floor plans (every conversation concerns you), and you don't get the organic conversations that open floor plans are supposed to promote.
  - vonmoltke 10y ago
    It sounds like you are trying to compensate for a lack of systems engineering by changing the office layout. You shouldn't be relying on serendipitously overheard conversations for coordinating things like this.
    - reitanqild 10y ago
      I upvoted both you and parent: On one hand I totally agree with you. On the other hand Conways law exist for a reason. I see no reason why this shouldn't be another case of "[...] these ought you to have done, and not to leave the other undone."
    - geofft 10y ago
      Yeah, I am inclined to agree. However, part of systems engineering is figuring out where technical conversations happen. Apache has "if it didn't happen on the mailing list, it didn't happen" as a rule precisely because they want to avoid the unreliability of serendipitously overhearing conversations, precisely because that's important to how they engineer systems. I would be a fan of a system design / an office layout where everyone has a private room and all conversations default to happening in email or group chat, and in-person conversations (which are, on occasion, definitely needed!) require some activation energy. However, lots of in-person offices like these serendipitous conversations, and that's often pitched as an advantage of open plan layouts. That's also pitched as an advantage of getting lunch together, team outings, etc. etc. If you're going to decide to use this advantage (which I think is okay, but suboptimal), you had better put some systems engineering thought into how you want to use this advantage.
- mmagin 10y ago
  Short of a private office, this would be my top choice. But the big thing, I think -- Put a wall between the hallway and the work area. Too many irrelevant people have irrelevant conversations when they're walking by and it's distracting.
  - developer2 10y ago
    On a related note, people who have a job requiring them to be constantly on the phone should not be placed within earshot of people who need to focus. Sales and support need to have walls between them and developers. Trying to code while someone is on the phone 4-8 hours a day is debilitating.
    - mmagin 10y ago
      Also you don't really want customers hearing every ill-thought-out thing that comes out of developers mouths.
- serge2k 10y ago
  > Team sized rooms are definitely the way to go. No, individual areas are the way to go. Team rooms are still better than cramming people side by side row after row.
- exDM69 10y ago
  I work in a team sized room and much rather would have my own quiet space. I happen to sit next to a "key person" who is constantly having (important) discussions with coworkers that I don't need to or want to hear. I'm really distraction and noise sensitive so I really prefer working from home when there's code to be written.
  - restalis 10y ago
    I say there is a problem within your team (like that "key person" not knowing what is or isn't productive in what he does) that you are hoping to solve through seclusion. Excluding such bad quirks, assuming everyone is acting reasonably (in a tolerant frame of reference), I would say team sized spaces strike a good balance between the peer interaction accessibility and the bad effects of crowd noise.
    - exDM69 10y ago
      The problem with our team is that it's not really a team in the traditional sense. We're an engineering office for a multinational and we're a team only in the sense that we have a common manager but all of us pretty much work on different projects, with most of the collaborators being overseas (with a 10 hour timezone difference). The "key person" is really a key figure and his opinion is valued for a lot of different things, so he's talking a lot to different people. But almost none of it concerns me. Even if I worked together with the guys I sit next to, I'd prefer that there was a door between me and them. I prefer to work in silence and uninterrupted and if my opinion is required I'd rather work it out before/after lunch or schedule a time slot for it.
- exDM69 10y ago
  I work in a team sized room and much rather would have my own quiet space. I happen to sit next to a "key person" who is constantly having (important) discussions with coworkers that I don't need to or want to hear. I'm really distraction and noise sensitive so I really prefer working from home when there's code to be written.
- yoz-y 10y ago
  I would love to have a private office. Currently I spend most of my day blasting my ears because I simply can not concentrate with the constant Skype calling, people singing to themselves or random drive by meetings. And we are only 4-5 in the office.
- amyjess 10y ago
  I worked in a room like that at my last employer. There were four of us in one office (with room for a fifth). It was easily the worst arrangement I've ever worked in. I'd rather have either a cube farm or a two-person office with both our backs to the wall. I like my privacy.
rdtsc 10y ago
Heh. Except for no natural light, the 5-foot walls with white noise to drown out conversation actually doesn't seem bad.
- redwards510 10y ago
  Agreed! Our space has 3ft high cube walls and you hear every single conversation everyone has. It's incredibly distracting and I can no longer just throw headphones on to mask it. Now I find too much music distracting too.
  - andrewflnr 10y ago
    Have you tried playing white noise or something over your headphones?
    - eventualhorizon 10y ago
      I couldn't do anything in an open office without blocking the noise. Visual distractions are almost as bad but are harder to block. I use sox to generate audio. It is available for win/Mac/Linux. I set it for 90 minutes of brown noise which gives me a reminder to get up and walk around when it ends. I believe it can generate white or pink noise if you prefer. >play -n synth 90:00 brownnoise brownnoise
      - MaulingMonkey 10y ago
        > Visual distractions are almost as bad but are harder to block. I find a second row of monitors helps for this.
        TeMPOraL 10y ago
        I run out of monitors already. My current office looks like this: | O|O ---+--- | O|O O|O | ---+--- X|O | +----| | | | | --+DDD+--+ |---------- | | X - me O - other people, DDD - doors. The +-like lines are desk areas, we have no dividers there; everyone is facing each other. I've managed to block off the two people in front of me with monitors, and the one to the right of me is hidden behind his own monitors. But I still struggle with the space to the left and behind me, and I'm seriously considering building a cubicle out of pizza boxes...
wyager 10y ago
There's an ideal middle ground, which is private offices with outdoor-facing windows and open workspaces available elsewhere. Sometimes you need to be alone and concentrate, sometimes you need to be surrounded by some activity and social interaction.
pkaye 10y ago
Team sized rooms sound good but what happens with a few more people are added and there is no room to easily expand?
- criddell 10y ago
  Move or risk having unhappy employees.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  That's a problem for planning of both headcount and space. A company should know its growth profile and plan accordingly. Having slack space (meeting cubes, shared space) which can be converted helps. Short answer: plan ahead. Rotating employees through different workgroups helps build stronger overall team cohesion. Gives people a chance to mix and match.
- serge2k 10y ago
  Why do team sized rooms make this worse?
- gertef 10y ago
  Flexible partions for walls.
- JBlue42 10y ago
  Running into this at work now. 7-8 person spaces. We're crunching down and rearranging things now to fit in more people where necessary. Currently in the process of attaining a new building. Reason I'm reading this article: new building plan is to put all 100+ folks in open office with concrete floors.
Ologn 10y ago
I don't know why this is not discussed more. People either talk about either open floor plans or complete private solo offices. Or cubicles, although no one seems to like that. A private office with your team of 4-5 people seems ideal. You don't get the interruptions and noise of open floor plans, or even cubicles. You're also not alone and isolated all day. Your team is right around you to discuss any issues. It also helps build team cohesion. It is the best setup in most cases I've seen. I've worked in open offices where I have to concentrate, but it is like Grand Central Station. Putting on earphones doesn't help much. So the work I was supposed to do gets pushed off to tomorrow, and then the day after tomorrow.
- kylec 10y ago
  Cubicles are a compromise - no one likes them because they're either still to open or not open enough depending on who you talk to. I'd still take a cubicle any day over an open plan though.
deleted 10y ago
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jrockway 10y ago
It's clear that there's no one-size-fits-all solution to office spaces. I would personally love working in a dark basement with lots of walls and minimal conversation. Introvert/extrovert strikes again!
- endtime 10y ago
  You? Introvert? I'm not so sure...
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Hah, I can believe. I consider myself an introvert too, even though a lot of people in my Hackerspace are utterly convinced I'm one of the more extroverted people they know. All because I can hold a conversation and like doing public talks every now and then. The best description of introvert / extrovert thing I found is that comic strip - http://imgur.com/76HUN http://imgur.com/76HUN. Being an introvert, social interactions cost me energy instead of giving it, and that's why it's easy to deliver public talks when you feel like it, while at the same time avoiding people for most of the day.
    - effie 10y ago
      The strip is great, thanks.
    - jrockway 10y ago
      Yeah, it's a cost of mental energy thing, not an inability to socialize.
    - endtime 10y ago
      Yeah, but Jon wanders over to my desk to chat on a regular basis. Often for an hour plus. I like Jon and am always happy to chat, just doesn't seem like introvert behavior. Not complaining. :)
nilkn 10y ago
Natural light is one of the most important aspects of an office to me. A few years ago I actually turned down an offer because I realized I'd be sitting in an interior team-sized room with no windows and just a door to a hallway, again with no windows. I would have been giving up a seat next to huge windows with light flooding into the room. I just knew that I'd end up depressed in those working conditions and decided to turn it down. Maybe this seems melodramatic, but sitting for 8+ hours in a small room with no natural lighting reminds me too much of high school. I was really unhappy during high school, and I honestly believe a lot of it was just the physical environment. If I can avoid it, I will. I still have that same seat described above next to huge windows and every day I'm so happy to come in and just bask in the sun's glory. Even if it's a cloudy or rainy day it's just great.
- arcanus 10y ago
  I worked for the better part of a decade on my phd in an office with no windows and no clocks on the wall, and a coffee machine. We liked to joke it was a near equivalent to a Vegas Casino for mathematicians.
  - pmiller2 10y ago
    I literally had a 4th floor corner office with a window in grad school. Unfortunately, the window measured about 10"x24", with a lousy view, and the office literally wasn't big enough to accommodate the three of us who shared it all at the same time. :P
    - Spooky23 10y ago
      I shared an office with a floor to ceiling set of windows. Some director of another division found out about it and literally had facilities remove the desks and put high cubes in so that we wouldn't have more window than him.
      - kalleboo 10y ago
        That almost sounds like something out of Office Space
mizchief2 10y ago
Exactly. The whole point of a "open" office is so that people who constantly work with each other can easily communicate. Not to be cheap bastards and cram as many workers into a small a space as possible to save money on office space and furniture.
teh_klev 10y ago
I work from home full time now in a dedicated office space, however over the years I've worked in variety of setups ranging from: 1) four to six desk offices - quite enjoyable, peaceful, reasonably sociable at appropriate times and lots of natural light. The occupants were always developers or sysadmins who know the value of a bit of peace and quiet. 2) ten to sixteen desk open plan offices - not terrible because the occupants were almost entirely developers plus or minus a few sysadmins. Meetings were always held in an adjoining dedicated meeting rooms. Again quite peaceful, reasonably sociable and again both these places had plenty of natural lighting. Letting developers have a peaceful environment was respected and project management and sales folks were located in the next set of offices along the way so they could yell and shout over the phone in their own bubble. 3) Massive open plan 30-40+ desks (a bank) - bloody awful depending on where you were allocated a seat. Space was also used hyper efficiently so no four desk pods or the like. Just rows and rows of tables. Several different teams were packed into an entire floor, the noise was quite distracting and was like working in a barn. Would never do this again. Ideally I like working in my own dedicated office space, but if I had to go back to working in an office again then options 1 & 2 above wouldn't be terrible provided phone calls and arsing about were kept to a minimum. However anything larger than that would be a turn off for me now. That said I've never worked in a cubicle farm, that might not be too terrible for me provided I could see daylight. These Facebook type "fun" open plan offices are a total turn off for me, but that's probably an age thing. Perhaps if I was in my 20's again it might be ok for a while. But then I've never had a desire to work for Facebook, Google et al.
dasmoth 10y ago
If I have to share, I'd rather it was with randoms from other parts of the organisation than with close colleagues. Less of a feeling that every conversation going on in the room is potentially important.
fivesigma 10y ago
I wonder if you could cheat natural daylight by using big RGB LED area lights emitting at just the right amount of Kelvin. The aural equivalent (https://rainymood.com/ https://rainymood.com/) certainly works for me.
- 21 10y ago
  It's not only the Kelvins, but the intensity also. Natural light is around 100K lux. That is crazily expensive to generate.
  - Domenic_S 10y ago
    They're common. https://www.amazon.com/Day-Light-Classic-Bright-Light-Therapy/dp/B0009MFUWC?th=1 https://www.amazon.com/Day-Light-Classic-Bright-Light-Therap...
    - fzzzy 10y ago
      10,000 != 100,000
      - Domenic_S 10y ago
        Yeah, I wasn't really talking about the lux level, but rather about "cheating natural daylight". Unless your office window is getting direct mid-day sun (so it's.. a skylight?) you aren't getting close to 100k lux.
  - Cthulhu_ 10y ago
    As a counterpoint, I wouldn't want to work in daylight / outside; still need to be able to view a monitor. (I sit next to a window atm. It's a bit annoying when the sun shows up after lunch)
- mgberlin 10y ago
  To make it seem like sunlight you have to simulate Rayleigh scattering. I remember seeing a company that was making artificial skylights that did this, but can't seem to find it anymore.
cjmoran 10y ago
Hah, that old server room on the second floor of 500? That place was incredibly depressing. I worked from home nearly every day (breaking the "two days per week maximum" policy) because I couldn't stand it in there and my team wasn't located in RTP anyway.
- caleblloyd 10y ago
  Yup, 2nd floor of the 500 building. I worked in a couple different cubes, the old server room, and a "war room" - all with no visible windows, all with extremely loud white noise. Not sure why they haven't done a big renovation, it's quite obvious that the Feng Shui in that place is as bad as it gets.
  - benwr 10y ago
    I worked on this floor for six months as a co-op! It was really awful, and a big reason I don't think I'll ever consider working at IBM again.
deanCommie 10y ago
Thank you. I'm scared of the virulent backlash against open offices from devs right now. Is "productivity" really the only measure of job satisfaction? I'm more than happy to sacrifice some of my productivity for the sake of feeling more connected to my team, more light, and a general sense of freedom. If my employer agrees, and is willing to tolerate this productivity decrease (as apparently most employers are), then this is a mutually beneficial arrangement! These devs complaining about open floor offices think that the alternative is every company springing for private offices with optional team areas. It's NOT. Most companies can't and won't afford this. The alternative that most of us would be facing is rows and rows of dimly lit cubicles, as was the convention in the 90's.
- justinlardinois 10y ago
  > Is "productivity" really the only measure of job satisfaction? Productivity is a side effect of good employees working in a good environment. Programmers aren't satisfied because they're productive; they're productive because they're satisfied.
  - deanCommie 10y ago
    Yes and "good environment" != "productive environment" for a lot of us if "productive environment" == "quiet dark and isolating". I'm much more satisfied with light and space, at the expense of noise and productivity.
groovy2shoes 10y ago
Out of curiosity, are you still working in NC?

schiang 10y ago

Team sized rooms are definitely the way to go. You can avoid conversation from other teams that you don't care about. When there is a conversation in the room, it's probably related to what you're doing so it's not necessarily distracting you. I worked in a room with just my team and it worked out great. We were able to have discussions and draw stuff on white boards on the wall without distracting anyone else. It also helped with team bonding.

vonmoltke 10y ago
This probably works great if you have evenly-sized, relatively stable teams. The place I just left has teams that ranged from just me to the entire eight-persob company, and the teams could change on a month-to-month basis. In fact, it wasn't unusual to be working on two or three projects simultaneously.
- cableshaft 10y ago
  Well, you could have a primary team you work for, and then get called on to work on other things for other teams periodically (while staying at your same desk). That's pretty much what we do here. My team lead is always the same person, but sometimes I do work for the other two team leads, especially when work is light in the current iteration for my normal project.
taurath 10y ago
I've had this and private offices... what happens is that difficult conversations can't take place except outside of the office (unless there is another space to go). Need to have a 1-1? Everyone else hears it. No meta conversations can take place unless someone is willing to go out for some coffee. The team banter ends up being trivial, and can be incredibly distracting if you need to buckle down to get something done.
- namiller2 10y ago
  Your office doesn't have a single shared meeting room? Most places I've seen with open offices have some sort of meeting rooms to use for private conversations. How do you have a client call or anything of that matter?
  - combatentropy 10y ago
    If everyone has their own office, then someone coming into your office is an everyday affair. They could be talking about a programming problem, lunch, or something personal. You don't know, but you would go crazy wondering about it, because it happens all day. In an open room where half a dozen or so people sit, if two people stand up, walk into a conference room, and shut the door, that's weird and curious.
    - johannes1234321 10y ago
      > In an open room where half a dozen or so people sit, if two people stand up, walk into a conference room, and shut the door, that's weird and curious. This also happens all the time, thus not weird. (or people don't talk ...)
      - vonmoltke 10y ago
        Or people just have non-sensitive conversations right at their desks.
    - tikhonj 10y ago
taurath 10y ago
I've had this and private offices... what happens is that difficult conversations can't take place except outside of the office (unless there is another space to go). Need to have a 1-1? Everyone else hears it. No meta conversations can take place unless someone is willing to go out for some coffee. The team banter ends up being trivial, and can be incredibly distracting if you need to buckle down to get something done.
r_smart 10y ago
>When there is a conversation in the room, it's probably related to what you're doing so it's not necessarily distracting you. My rebuttal to this point is the amount of time my previous co-workers would spend discussing lawn care strategies. Overall though, I agree with you. Team sized rooms are a livable compromise, and have some nice upsides while tamping down the downsides of a fully open office.
- cwilkes 10y ago
  Not sure how that is a rebuttal unless you work for a lawn care company.
  - r_smart 10y ago
    You're conception of it being a rebuttal is exactly wrong. My point was, my team would spend a lot of time talking about things that weren't related to work or my interests, so it was indistinguishable from any of the myriad other distractions present in an open office. Basically: If you're co-located with 1 person or more, you will be subjected to distractions you have no interest in and serve no purpose for yourself or your team.
geofft 10y ago
That seems like a way to exacerbate Conway's law problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law . Most of the technical debt I try to fight off is based on my team doing something that makes sense for us based on what we're good at / what we think other teams want, but doesn't line up with what other teams want / what they think we can deliver; we end up essentially building abstraction layers around other teams, and they build abstraction layers around us. If you put everyone in a private office and default conversations to email lists / group chat (which is the model that basically the entire open source community uses), that's fine. If you have an open floor plan where it's easy to wander over to another team's area, that's also fine. But making it super easy for your own team to talk without other people hearing seems the worst of both worlds; you have all the distraction problems of open floor plans (every conversation concerns you), and you don't get the organic conversations that open floor plans are supposed to promote.
- vonmoltke 10y ago
  It sounds like you are trying to compensate for a lack of systems engineering by changing the office layout. You shouldn't be relying on serendipitously overheard conversations for coordinating things like this.
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    I upvoted both you and parent: On one hand I totally agree with you. On the other hand Conways law exist for a reason. I see no reason why this shouldn't be another case of "[...] these ought you to have done, and not to leave the other undone."
  - geofft 10y ago
    Yeah, I am inclined to agree. However, part of systems engineering is figuring out where technical conversations happen. Apache has "if it didn't happen on the mailing list, it didn't happen" as a rule precisely because they want to avoid the unreliability of serendipitously overhearing conversations, precisely because that's important to how they engineer systems. I would be a fan of a system design / an office layout where everyone has a private room and all conversations default to happening in email or group chat, and in-person conversations (which are, on occasion, definitely needed!) require some activation energy. However, lots of in-person offices like these serendipitous conversations, and that's often pitched as an advantage of open plan layouts. That's also pitched as an advantage of getting lunch together, team outings, etc. etc. If you're going to decide to use this advantage (which I think is okay, but suboptimal), you had better put some systems engineering thought into how you want to use this advantage.
mmagin 10y ago
Short of a private office, this would be my top choice. But the big thing, I think -- Put a wall between the hallway and the work area. Too many irrelevant people have irrelevant conversations when they're walking by and it's distracting.
- developer2 10y ago
  On a related note, people who have a job requiring them to be constantly on the phone should not be placed within earshot of people who need to focus. Sales and support need to have walls between them and developers. Trying to code while someone is on the phone 4-8 hours a day is debilitating.
  - mmagin 10y ago
    Also you don't really want customers hearing every ill-thought-out thing that comes out of developers mouths.
serge2k 10y ago
> Team sized rooms are definitely the way to go. No, individual areas are the way to go. Team rooms are still better than cramming people side by side row after row.
exDM69 10y ago
I work in a team sized room and much rather would have my own quiet space. I happen to sit next to a "key person" who is constantly having (important) discussions with coworkers that I don't need to or want to hear. I'm really distraction and noise sensitive so I really prefer working from home when there's code to be written.
- restalis 10y ago
  I say there is a problem within your team (like that "key person" not knowing what is or isn't productive in what he does) that you are hoping to solve through seclusion. Excluding such bad quirks, assuming everyone is acting reasonably (in a tolerant frame of reference), I would say team sized spaces strike a good balance between the peer interaction accessibility and the bad effects of crowd noise.
  - exDM69 10y ago
    The problem with our team is that it's not really a team in the traditional sense. We're an engineering office for a multinational and we're a team only in the sense that we have a common manager but all of us pretty much work on different projects, with most of the collaborators being overseas (with a 10 hour timezone difference). The "key person" is really a key figure and his opinion is valued for a lot of different things, so he's talking a lot to different people. But almost none of it concerns me. Even if I worked together with the guys I sit next to, I'd prefer that there was a door between me and them. I prefer to work in silence and uninterrupted and if my opinion is required I'd rather work it out before/after lunch or schedule a time slot for it.
exDM69 10y ago
I work in a team sized room and much rather would have my own quiet space. I happen to sit next to a "key person" who is constantly having (important) discussions with coworkers that I don't need to or want to hear. I'm really distraction and noise sensitive so I really prefer working from home when there's code to be written.
yoz-y 10y ago
I would love to have a private office. Currently I spend most of my day blasting my ears because I simply can not concentrate with the constant Skype calling, people singing to themselves or random drive by meetings. And we are only 4-5 in the office.
amyjess 10y ago
I worked in a room like that at my last employer. There were four of us in one office (with room for a fifth). It was easily the worst arrangement I've ever worked in. I'd rather have either a cube farm or a two-person office with both our backs to the wall. I like my privacy.

rdtsc 10y ago

Heh. Except for no natural light, the 5-foot walls with white noise to drown out conversation actually doesn't seem bad.

redwards510 10y ago
Agreed! Our space has 3ft high cube walls and you hear every single conversation everyone has. It's incredibly distracting and I can no longer just throw headphones on to mask it. Now I find too much music distracting too.
- andrewflnr 10y ago
  Have you tried playing white noise or something over your headphones?
  - eventualhorizon 10y ago
    I couldn't do anything in an open office without blocking the noise. Visual distractions are almost as bad but are harder to block. I use sox to generate audio. It is available for win/Mac/Linux. I set it for 90 minutes of brown noise which gives me a reminder to get up and walk around when it ends. I believe it can generate white or pink noise if you prefer. >play -n synth 90:00 brownnoise brownnoise
    - MaulingMonkey 10y ago
      > Visual distractions are almost as bad but are harder to block. I find a second row of monitors helps for this.
      - TeMPOraL 10y ago
        I run out of monitors already. My current office looks like this: | O|O ---+--- | O|O O|O | ---+--- X|O | +----| | | | | --+DDD+--+ |---------- | | X - me O - other people, DDD - doors. The +-like lines are desk areas, we have no dividers there; everyone is facing each other. I've managed to block off the two people in front of me with monitors, and the one to the right of me is hidden behind his own monitors. But I still struggle with the space to the left and behind me, and I'm seriously considering building a cubicle out of pizza boxes...

wyager 10y ago

There's an ideal middle ground, which is private offices with outdoor-facing windows and open workspaces available elsewhere. Sometimes you need to be alone and concentrate, sometimes you need to be surrounded by some activity and social interaction.

pkaye 10y ago

Team sized rooms sound good but what happens with a few more people are added and there is no room to easily expand?

criddell 10y ago
Move or risk having unhappy employees.
dredmorbius 10y ago
That's a problem for planning of both headcount and space. A company should know its growth profile and plan accordingly. Having slack space (meeting cubes, shared space) which can be converted helps. Short answer: plan ahead. Rotating employees through different workgroups helps build stronger overall team cohesion. Gives people a chance to mix and match.
serge2k 10y ago
Why do team sized rooms make this worse?
gertef 10y ago
Flexible partions for walls.
JBlue42 10y ago
Running into this at work now. 7-8 person spaces. We're crunching down and rearranging things now to fit in more people where necessary. Currently in the process of attaining a new building. Reason I'm reading this article: new building plan is to put all 100+ folks in open office with concrete floors.

Ologn 10y ago

I don't know why this is not discussed more. People either talk about either open floor plans or complete private solo offices. Or cubicles, although no one seems to like that. A private office with your team of 4-5 people seems ideal. You don't get the interruptions and noise of open floor plans, or even cubicles. You're also not alone and isolated all day. Your team is right around you to discuss any issues. It also helps build team cohesion. It is the best setup in most cases I've seen. I've worked in open offices where I have to concentrate, but it is like Grand Central Station. Putting on earphones doesn't help much. So the work I was supposed to do gets pushed off to tomorrow, and then the day after tomorrow.

kylec 10y ago
Cubicles are a compromise - no one likes them because they're either still to open or not open enough depending on who you talk to. I'd still take a cubicle any day over an open plan though.

deleted 10y ago

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jrockway 10y ago

It's clear that there's no one-size-fits-all solution to office spaces. I would personally love working in a dark basement with lots of walls and minimal conversation. Introvert/extrovert strikes again!

endtime 10y ago
You? Introvert? I'm not so sure...
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Hah, I can believe. I consider myself an introvert too, even though a lot of people in my Hackerspace are utterly convinced I'm one of the more extroverted people they know. All because I can hold a conversation and like doing public talks every now and then. The best description of introvert / extrovert thing I found is that comic strip - http://imgur.com/76HUN http://imgur.com/76HUN. Being an introvert, social interactions cost me energy instead of giving it, and that's why it's easy to deliver public talks when you feel like it, while at the same time avoiding people for most of the day.
  - effie 10y ago
    The strip is great, thanks.
  - jrockway 10y ago
    Yeah, it's a cost of mental energy thing, not an inability to socialize.
  - endtime 10y ago
    Yeah, but Jon wanders over to my desk to chat on a regular basis. Often for an hour plus. I like Jon and am always happy to chat, just doesn't seem like introvert behavior. Not complaining. :)

nilkn 10y ago

Natural light is one of the most important aspects of an office to me. A few years ago I actually turned down an offer because I realized I'd be sitting in an interior team-sized room with no windows and just a door to a hallway, again with no windows. I would have been giving up a seat next to huge windows with light flooding into the room. I just knew that I'd end up depressed in those working conditions and decided to turn it down. Maybe this seems melodramatic, but sitting for 8+ hours in a small room with no natural lighting reminds me too much of high school. I was really unhappy during high school, and I honestly believe a lot of it was just the physical environment. If I can avoid it, I will. I still have that same seat described above next to huge windows and every day I'm so happy to come in and just bask in the sun's glory. Even if it's a cloudy or rainy day it's just great.

arcanus 10y ago
I worked for the better part of a decade on my phd in an office with no windows and no clocks on the wall, and a coffee machine. We liked to joke it was a near equivalent to a Vegas Casino for mathematicians.
- pmiller2 10y ago
  I literally had a 4th floor corner office with a window in grad school. Unfortunately, the window measured about 10"x24", with a lousy view, and the office literally wasn't big enough to accommodate the three of us who shared it all at the same time. :P
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    I shared an office with a floor to ceiling set of windows. Some director of another division found out about it and literally had facilities remove the desks and put high cubes in so that we wouldn't have more window than him.
    - kalleboo 10y ago
      That almost sounds like something out of Office Space

mizchief2 10y ago

Exactly. The whole point of a "open" office is so that people who constantly work with each other can easily communicate. Not to be cheap bastards and cram as many workers into a small a space as possible to save money on office space and furniture.

teh_klev 10y ago

I work from home full time now in a dedicated office space, however over the years I've worked in variety of setups ranging from: 1) four to six desk offices - quite enjoyable, peaceful, reasonably sociable at appropriate times and lots of natural light. The occupants were always developers or sysadmins who know the value of a bit of peace and quiet. 2) ten to sixteen desk open plan offices - not terrible because the occupants were almost entirely developers plus or minus a few sysadmins. Meetings were always held in an adjoining dedicated meeting rooms. Again quite peaceful, reasonably sociable and again both these places had plenty of natural lighting. Letting developers have a peaceful environment was respected and project management and sales folks were located in the next set of offices along the way so they could yell and shout over the phone in their own bubble. 3) Massive open plan 30-40+ desks (a bank) - bloody awful depending on where you were allocated a seat. Space was also used hyper efficiently so no four desk pods or the like. Just rows and rows of tables. Several different teams were packed into an entire floor, the noise was quite distracting and was like working in a barn. Would never do this again. Ideally I like working in my own dedicated office space, but if I had to go back to working in an office again then options 1 & 2 above wouldn't be terrible provided phone calls and arsing about were kept to a minimum. However anything larger than that would be a turn off for me now. That said I've never worked in a cubicle farm, that might not be too terrible for me provided I could see daylight. These Facebook type "fun" open plan offices are a total turn off for me, but that's probably an age thing. Perhaps if I was in my 20's again it might be ok for a while. But then I've never had a desire to work for Facebook, Google et al.

dasmoth 10y ago

If I have to share, I'd rather it was with randoms from other parts of the organisation than with close colleagues. Less of a feeling that every conversation going on in the room is potentially important.

fivesigma 10y ago

I wonder if you could cheat natural daylight by using big RGB LED area lights emitting at just the right amount of Kelvin. The aural equivalent (https://rainymood.com/ https://rainymood.com/) certainly works for me.

21 10y ago
It's not only the Kelvins, but the intensity also. Natural light is around 100K lux. That is crazily expensive to generate.
- Domenic_S 10y ago
  They're common. https://www.amazon.com/Day-Light-Classic-Bright-Light-Therapy/dp/B0009MFUWC?th=1 https://www.amazon.com/Day-Light-Classic-Bright-Light-Therap...
  - fzzzy 10y ago
    10,000 != 100,000
    - Domenic_S 10y ago
      Yeah, I wasn't really talking about the lux level, but rather about "cheating natural daylight". Unless your office window is getting direct mid-day sun (so it's.. a skylight?) you aren't getting close to 100k lux.
- Cthulhu_ 10y ago
  As a counterpoint, I wouldn't want to work in daylight / outside; still need to be able to view a monitor. (I sit next to a window atm. It's a bit annoying when the sun shows up after lunch)
mgberlin 10y ago
To make it seem like sunlight you have to simulate Rayleigh scattering. I remember seeing a company that was making artificial skylights that did this, but can't seem to find it anymore.

cjmoran 10y ago

Hah, that old server room on the second floor of 500? That place was incredibly depressing. I worked from home nearly every day (breaking the "two days per week maximum" policy) because I couldn't stand it in there and my team wasn't located in RTP anyway.

caleblloyd 10y ago
Yup, 2nd floor of the 500 building. I worked in a couple different cubes, the old server room, and a "war room" - all with no visible windows, all with extremely loud white noise. Not sure why they haven't done a big renovation, it's quite obvious that the Feng Shui in that place is as bad as it gets.
- benwr 10y ago
  I worked on this floor for six months as a co-op! It was really awful, and a big reason I don't think I'll ever consider working at IBM again.

deanCommie 10y ago

Thank you. I'm scared of the virulent backlash against open offices from devs right now. Is "productivity" really the only measure of job satisfaction? I'm more than happy to sacrifice some of my productivity for the sake of feeling more connected to my team, more light, and a general sense of freedom. If my employer agrees, and is willing to tolerate this productivity decrease (as apparently most employers are), then this is a mutually beneficial arrangement! These devs complaining about open floor offices think that the alternative is every company springing for private offices with optional team areas. It's NOT. Most companies can't and won't afford this. The alternative that most of us would be facing is rows and rows of dimly lit cubicles, as was the convention in the 90's.

justinlardinois 10y ago
> Is "productivity" really the only measure of job satisfaction? Productivity is a side effect of good employees working in a good environment. Programmers aren't satisfied because they're productive; they're productive because they're satisfied.
- deanCommie 10y ago
  Yes and "good environment" != "productive environment" for a lot of us if "productive environment" == "quiet dark and isolating". I'm much more satisfied with light and space, at the expense of noise and productivity.

groovy2shoes 10y ago

Out of curiosity, are you still working in NC?