5 ms·

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

• 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
        I work in an open office and grabbing a room with somebody is totally normal—it happens every day, for all sorts of boring reasons. We even have small rooms perfect for this purpose: three or four chairs and no tables or video conferencing equipment. People use them for anything from random conversations (technical or not), personal phone calls or even just a bit of extra privacy and quiet for solo work. Personally, I've been very happy with the environment. It helps that the open part of the office is bright, quiet and pretty sparsely populate.
      • wolfgke 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.