24 ms·

Open offices are bad for us

464 points by eloycoto 10y ago

chrisbennet 10y ago
"We retain more information when we sit in one spot, says Sally Augustin, an environmental and design psychologist in La Grange Park, Illinois. It’s not so obvious to us each day, but we offload memories — often little details — into our surroundings, she says. These details — which could be anything from a quick idea we wanted to share to a colour change on a brochure we’re working on — can only be recalled in that setting."
- msie 10y ago
  That makes sense given the effectiveness of memory palaces.
grokas 10y ago
"Nearly 50% of people working in open offices are dissatisfied with their sound privacy" Should be: Nearly 50% of people working in open offices don't have good over-ear headphones.
- kdamken 10y ago
  No. Fuck that. I don't normally curse on here, but I think it's warranted. I own a great pair of over ear, noise cancelling headphones. But I shouldn't have to risk damaging my hearing because management thinks having developers sit in the middle of a bunch of salespeople and project managers is a good idea.
  - chinathrow 10y ago
    A million time this. Ear damage accumulates over time. I am sure that excessive headphone usage at work will be number one reason of hearing loss in a few years. Unless we turn things around.
    - daemoncoder 10y ago
      One doesn't actually have to listen to anything through the headphones. I've used noise cancelling without music in the past. I also have a set of earbud rubber thingies that have been stoppered with hot glue and a short piece of hollow lolly stick. Those fit better (don't feel itchy after long periods) and provide more isolation than the squishy yellow ear protectors.
      - Arizhel 10y ago
        Nose canceling headphones don't work for blocking conversations.
        chinathrow 10y ago
        Not all, but some achieve very nice results. E.g. Bose Quiet Comfort 20 are indeed good also for blocking more quiet conversations. https://www.amazon.com/Bose-QuietComfort-Acoustic-Cancelling-Headphones/dp/B00X9KV0HU https://www.amazon.com/Bose-QuietComfort-Acoustic-Cancelling...
        Arizhel 10y ago
        The only way NC headphones block conversations is because they are also acoustically isolating. That is, they would block conversations even with the NC feature turned off. The headphones you link to look like this: they're basically earplugs with headphones built in. Earplugs block conversations because they physically block sound waves from entering your ears. The same principle works with the big over-the-ear cans. It's not the NC feature that's helping, it's the fact that the headphones themselves are isolating your ears from the outside world.
        chinathrow 10y ago
        I own them so I can assure that having them plugged in without NC does not block conversation voices. Turn them on and they are gone or way quieter. Edit due to downrate: I own or owned multiple over ear medium size NC models and the mentioned in'ear ones win by large.
  - amyjess 10y ago
    > having developers sit in the middle of a bunch of salespeople and project managers So, about that... I work in a cube farm, and I love it. But because we're running out of space, they stuck me in the only open cube they had, and so I'm not sitting anywhere near my team or even my department. I'm in network engineering, but the other people on my row are sales engineers (for a product I have nothing to do with), the inside sales department sits on the three rows to my left, and the marketing department sits on the two rows to my right. As such, I'm now quite familiar with our sales pitches, and I pick up all kinds of juicy gossip from the inside sales team's daily standup. I'm at the point where "Net Promoter Score" no longer sounds like a real phrase (yay, semantic satiation!). I do have to admit that I've taken to listening to music on my headphones... not super loud, but it helps me get in the zone when the inside sales team is firing on all cylinders. I don't mind it too much... they're all fun people to talk to during our downtime, and I've actually become really close with one of the marketing guys, who I probably wouldn't have met if we didn't have space issues. And it's not going to last much longer. We just took over another suite in our building, we're putting the finishing touches on renovations, and as soon as that's done the whole sales organization is moving there (the move will probably happen next week, or maybe even this Friday), and my department will move to where sales used to be. I'm hoping I'll get to sit in mostly the same place (marketing isn't moving, and I like those people), though I'd love to take over the window cube behind me.
    - brokenmachine 10y ago
      The thing is, since you do different jobs, you can ignore the conversations around you if you need to concentrate. If you were working in close proximity to people doing a similar job, you wouldn't have that luxury. In my workplace, it seems rude to have headphones on.
  - toast0 10y ago
    Headphones don't damage your hearing, headphones at high volume damage hearing. If you're using noise cancelling (or just closed ear in most environments), you can listen to your audio at a reasonable volume, if you're listening at high volume to drown out other noise that could be dangerous.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - Arizhel 10y ago
      Noise-canceling headphones do not cancel out conversations, so you must listen at high volume to drown out that other noise. The only thing noise-canceling headphones are really good for is canceling out constant drone, for things such as fan noise and jet engine drone. That's why they're so popular for frequent airplane travelers. They do absolutely nothing if you're in an office surrounded by yapping coworkers (at least nothing more than a comparable set of non-noise-canceling headphones). In fact, I'll add that if I'm surrounded by a bunch of computers with fan noise, using noise-canceling headphones lets me hear coworkers' conversations even better.
      - cmdrfred 10y ago
        Your right. When you consider it there has been a few million years of iteration of the human ear to attune it to the sound of the human voice. A difficult problem to overcome to say the least.
        Arizhel 10y ago
        It's not just that, it has to do with the way noise cancellation circuits work. They work great on constant white-noise-like hums within a certain frequency band; they don't work on transients that cross a wide range of frequencies (as does human voice). They especially don't work well at higher frequencies because of the shorter wavelengths and the distance between the drivers and your eardrums (which can vary), and human voice has a lot of higher-frequency components. If you could stick the drivers right next to your eardrums with custom-fitted in-ear plugs, you could get far better performance, but that's neither economical nor desirable to most people for comfort reasons.
  - krzysg 10y ago
    True. I would like to listen to music when I like to, not when I have to. Anyway noise is not everything. It is so easy to be disrupted by people walking around.
    - kdamken 10y ago
      I'm continually surprised how the smallest people seem to stomp the loudest up and down the hallway.
  - grokas 10y ago
    Sorry your management sucks?
- kedean 10y ago
  That only looks at one side of the picture. Sound privacy is partially inbound, yes, and that can be solved with quality headphones. It's also outbound, though. If I'm on a conference call, I'd really rather not have to worry about other people listening to what I say. Also, not everyone wants to listen to music/podcasts/video/anything while they work. The solution shouldn't be "just isolate your ears!"
  - pacaro 10y ago
    Ironically, my only problem with individual offices is that people then seem to think it's ok to not use headphones, and to use speaker phone. The sound isolation between neighbouring offices is rarely good enough to allow this. The way the HVAC system in the Microsoft buildings that I worked in was plumbed, you tended to have great sound isolation from one neighbour and be intimately connected with the other.
  - grokas 10y ago
    Most of the time I'm not actually listening to anything, I just have my cans on as a sound buffer, and they're ready when/if I play something with audio.
- white-flame 10y ago
  The stability described in the article seems to be more visual, not aural. There's constant mental interruption when the mind has to process stuff going on all around you visually, determining if somebody's going to bump in you, vibrations through any shared desk structures, etc.
  - zimpenfish 10y ago
    I once had a foot-tapping chair-twirler on my left and a desk-drummer on my right. Very little work was accomplished until I moved away from them.
  - nine_k 10y ago
    Having 2-3 screens completely occupying your field of view helps! Maybe this is one of the key advantages multiple screens provide, besides displaying useful information.
  - callinyouin 10y ago
    > determining if somebody's going to bump in you I think the human aspect of that is a huge factor. I've always had a problem being around large crowds (anxiety, dizziness, mental strain). I think my nervous brain is constantly trying to determine how I might interact with the people around me, and when there are so many people I just get overwhelmed. Same thing happened in the (rather large) office I work at. For the first few days I was feeling mental strain only a few hours into the day, but after the office and the people in it became a known quantity I think my brain stopped trying to analyze everything.
- bigmanwalter 10y ago
  Except prolonged exposure to headphones makes you go deaf. I've got enough hearing loss as it is.
  - nine_k 10y ago
    Good headphones for such a setup are tightly closed, DJ-style ones. They isolate you from outside noise, so you can listen to e.g. quietly playing piano pieces (don't like Schubert? try Rick Wakeman) and concentrate.
  - hx87 10y ago
    It's not headphones, it's loudness. Just don't crank the volume on your headphones and you'll be fine.
  - grokas 10y ago
    Prolonged exposure to unhealthy volume levels makes you go deaf. FTFY Simply taking headphones out of the box they came in doesn't make you go deaf.
- VLM 10y ago
  To quote a former VP at a former employer, wearing headphones in the open operations center is direct and intentional insubordination and discipline will be applied as such, because the company is spending a lot of money to foster coordination and interoperation between teams. Its interesting that they had the will and the money to enforce architectural changes in the literal sense but not in the internal organization sense, we continued to primarily work against each other, merely closer together.
  - grokas 10y ago
    I take it this a (one, not the only) reason the employer was described as "former"?
- xenihn 10y ago
  I don't like to listen to music when concentrating on anything, with the exception of driving.
  - grokas 10y ago
    I use mine without anything playing about 70% of the time I have them on. They can block out ambient/office noise pretty well and can help concentration.
jMyles 10y ago
Am I the only one left on HN who prefers open plan? I've done some of my best work for open plan companies. I have a particularly fond memory of when Reelio rented space at Blueprint (healthcare incubator in NYC). We stayed up very late, listened to loud music, and did some of the best work of our lives. I remember one night in particular, listening to the soundtrack from "O Brother Where Art Thou," when asynchrony and mutexes finally really clicked for me.
- quanticle 10y ago
  No offense, but I would suggest that you are highly atypical as a programmer. The vast majority of programmers (including myself) that I've spoken with prefer quiet, static backgrounds. Now, that's not to say that you need your own office to provide a quiet, static background, but it's just a whole lot easier that way. I interviewed last year at a very "tech-bro" type office in downtown Seattle. It was exactly as you described your office. It was not even three in the afternoon, and they had some loud European techno playing. None of the people there seemed to be actually doing work - it looked like they were lounging around for the sake of appearances rather than actually working. I ended up ending the interview early (the first time I've ended up doing that) because it became very clear, very early that it was a bad fit. Now, that's not to say that the only form of work I'd tolerate is work-from-home or private offices. Open offices can work, as long as everyone sticks to a shared set of rules. My personal preference is "library rules": if it'd be considered rude to do in a library, it'll be considered rude to do in the office. I feel like that gets about 80-90% of the benefit of a private office, while still delivering the floor-plan efficiencies of an open office.
  - jMyles 10y ago
    > It was exactly as you described your office. It was not even three in the afternoon, and they had some loud European techno playing. ...but that's... not how I described the office in question.
    - cmdrfred 10y ago
      I dislike all music, not just in a programming setting. I would not be productive in such a situation.
WhiteSource1 10y ago
People need focus and the ability to control (increase and decrease) their stimulation. Open offices do not provide that and when people are distracted, just trying to focus on focusing, it's hard to make memories.
bobbark 10y ago
Unfortunately, a large (if not the largest) reason for open office plans that rarely comes up is space efficiency, ie packing more people into the same space. Sure, there are might be some folks who also think about creativity, but in my experience, a large portion of open space layouts have been driven by real estate cost considerations.
- amyjess 10y ago
  This is one reason I prefer to work in suburban office parks rather than urban mixed-use areas. Real estate is cheaper in the burbs, and I like my cube farms.
  - tgb 10y ago
    Sorry, I'm confused. If you like cube farms and cube farms are more likely in higher cost real estate and urban real estate is more expensive, wouldn't you prefer urban offices?
    - amyjess 10y ago
      I want to avoid open offices where people sit on long benches shoulder to shoulder or just have a bunch of desks jammed together. A guy I know who works at Dell recently got moved from a cube to one of those, he's posted pictures of his workspace, and just looking at those pictures set off my claustrophobia badly. The cubes at my company are huge. If company policy here didn't forbid photography, I'd show you. I'd guess they're about 6 feet by 6 feet. I have plenty of space to stretch out and more desk than I really need. The cubes are even designed to be able to support a visitor sitting on a bench without crowding out the occupant (it's nice for having design discussions with my coworkers... we can both have a conversation in one cube without being nose-to-nose).
      - tgb 10y ago
        I see, so cube farms are not open offices; my mistake.
      - 10y ago
Raphmedia 10y ago
Diseases and sickness are the worst part of open offices. One day one person gets sick. The second day the person to his left also gets sick. The day after, half of the open office is sick. After a week, the entire office is sick. You can almost track the migration of the disease across the room.
- dx034 10y ago
  That's why good managers will tell their employee to go home when they're ill. There are companies that have strict policies for that, to avoid exactly this problem. Even though it's a problem that probably mostly affects flexible working space. If you don't share your desk with anyone else, you should usually be >3ft away from other people, lowering the risk for contagion.
  - romanovcode 10y ago
    Yeah, and this should be encouraged by everyone, not only managers. You should definitely tell your workmate to go home if he is sick.
    - logfromblammo 10y ago
      My company does not provide sick leave or paid vacation. They replaced it with "PTO" to make it easier to treat a de jure salaried employee like a de facto hourly wage-earning employee. I have no time-card code to use for hours that I cannot work, due to being involuntarily banished from the office due to illness. So guess what, people? If I'm sick, and I feel like I can work, I'm coming in to the office. If I don't work 40 hours in a week, my pay gets docked. (Actually, the computerized system forces me to "request" that my own pay be docked.) And if I need to take PTO time for a sniffle, I can't use it later, in lieu of actual vacation. So if anyone orders me to go home, that order had better be accompanied by a check. If Sneezy McHackencoff gets the entire rest of the office sick, that is a direct consequence of the employer's worker-hostile HR policy. Don't blame the messenger. Your company consciously decided that it does not want to provide you with a salubrious work environment, in order to move inconvenient "future obligations" off their balance sheets. If they gave out sick leave and vacation, they would have to keep some money in the bank, to pay you when you use it. And you could use it at any time, so it has to be very liquid. Obviously, they would rather earn a higher rate of interest on that cash, if they have it, and also not have to pay it to you if you still have time left when you leave the company. Sick leave is just one of the benefits that even the simplest and weakest of collective-bargaining units can enforce, and one of the things that is becoming harder and harder to find around here. Back when I actually had sick leave, I used it appropriately. I'm very sorry about possibly making my peers sick now, but if you keep using your own energy to cover things up, management will never get any firsthand experience with the potential damage their stupid personnel policies can wreak on the business. I'm not trying to get you sick. I'm trying to get upper management and HR to reinstate sick leave, without getting "at will" fired for being an uppity peon. Getting each other sick is the only leverage we have. Don't go around sneezing on other people's keyboards. That's malicious intent. Just go in to work, and go about your business as usual. If anyone suggests that you should go home, say "I would have stayed home, but I have no sick leave, and I can't afford to not work today."
smelendez 10y ago
Open offices are awful, but they're here to stay for the same reason more adults are living with roommates and relatives: high real estate prices. Working remotely is one solution, but many companies don't think it would work for them. Personally, I'd make the shared area for solitary work only: no work discussions longer than a minute at work areas (use a conference room, take a walk or Slack), no eating at work areas, no audible media. I'd physically isolate people who have to make calls from their desks from other employees as much as possible. I'd also provide a break room for eating and install some retro phone booths in it for semiprivate personal calls on breaks. Also, a private room--not necessarily big--for breast feeding and pumping, taking medication, calling doctors' offices, and the like.
- JoeAltmaier 10y ago
  Strangely, open offices with cubicles can be more expensive than building drywall walls to make closed offices. And the much-vaunted flexibility of cubicles is way, way overrated. In my experience, cubicles sit in the same place for years. Any benefit of re-using them is lost. Also if the company is growing, new ones get bought all the time, so old ones aren't re-used anyway. Its obvious on the face of it: re-usable walls and shelving are going to be more expensive than simple stick construction. You have to be re-using it constantly (reformatting office space every month or quarter) to make it pay. And then you're tanking everybody's productivity. I think open-office is some brain virus that keeps infecting managers everywhere. We need some kind of vaccine to combat it.
  - dx034 10y ago
    Event though dry walls are cheap, you cannot just install them as you can do with cubicles. You'd have to change ventilation to work for all rooms, have proper lights for every cubicle, adhere to fire restrictions (probably alarms in every small room) and will likely need to use more space per employee. Cubicles or open plan is by far the cheapest way to set up an office since you only have one room that you need to set up. And that's the main reason people use it, it's just cheaper. If you look at flexible working spaces, desks in closed rooms often cost twice of what you pay for a desk in an open floor layout. I don't think there's a way to set up closed offices at even close the price of open offices. And I must admit as much as I don't like open offices, sitting in a tiny private office of the size you have to yourself in an open office would probably lead to anxiety.
wakkaflokka 10y ago
I'm in the corporate world, and my managers were thinking about jumping on the open-office bandwagon (albeit a decade too late). I'm very glad it never materialized, because I love having my own cubicle without distraction. Unlike my open lab in academia, where it was difficult to work because I could hear the guy next to me eating nachos while I was trying to work on my thesis project.
deleted 10y ago
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RUG3Y 10y ago
I can fart in my office without bother anyone and I really like that.
- tyfon 10y ago
  Until your manager comes on a surprise visit :)
ape4 10y ago
I wonder if companies would consider segregated music and quiet open offices.
g12mcgov 10y ago
This reminds me of a lot of Stack Overflow's commitment to private offices, which I read awhile back. They too have an interesting take on the anti-open office idea. https://stackoverflow.blog/2015/01/why-we-still-believe-in-private-offices/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2015/01/why-we-still-believe-in-p...
cnagele 10y ago
Hey everyone, Chris Nagele here from Wildbit. For some background, I wrote about our reasons for moving to a private office plan. In short, it's more than putting on some headphones. http://wildbit.com/blog/2015/03/06/wildbit-hq-ending-the-open-office-epidemic http://wildbit.com/blog/2015/03/06/wildbit-hq-ending-the-ope... And a tour of the office itself: http://wildbit.com/blog/2015/08/05/wildbit-office-tour http://wildbit.com/blog/2015/08/05/wildbit-office-tour
- rubidium 10y ago
  Can you provide an estimate of total build cost / employee? It's a nice looking space, but likely only attainable for high margin industries like software engineering.
  - blowski 10y ago
    Exactly. Where do you put your 10 junior developers in an office like that and still be profitable?
- jcims 10y ago
  The stairwell is a sound bus, you might consider rotating the column 90 degrees and leave room to wrap it in glass now or in the future.
- stuntmachine 10y ago
  I had the privilege of working in this environment and I can vouch for Chris here. The design of the Wildbit space works exponentially better than any open office layout could ever work. Communication was isolated to where it was needed, and conference rooms exist for when communications need to be had in private. It's the perfect mix. It may have cost more to do it right, but the bottom line wasn't money, it was productivity and the ability to have heads-down time to get real, meaningful work done.
  - danellis 10y ago
    > The design of the Wildbit space works exponentially better than any open office layout could ever work. By what metric?
mmmBacon 10y ago
I started a new job where I work in an open office. I don't really mind it. We do have more open conversations about work and that's a good thing. These are similar to hallway conversations I've had in other places. When I want to crank I put headphones on and get some music going. I've always done that though even when I had an office so it's not new for me. My biggest peeve with the open office is that I have no room for storage. If you work in HW there are these junk piles because there's no place to put anything. I still use books as reference and there's no place to put them. I'm not a neat freak but I can't stand the clutter.
- deleted 10y ago
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dx034 10y ago
One recommendation for everyone who suffers in an open office: BrainFM. Not affiliated with it, but saw it here on HN on a thread about music, tried it out and I love it. I listen to it daily, have probably heard each track at least a hundred times, but it still helps me to focus. With the right headphones (isolating so that volume can be low), I can zoom out and ignore everything around me. Haven't found any other music that can do that, especially when I really have to focus (e.g. reading complicated texts). Don't know if it really works or if it's just psychological, but I don't care as long as it helps me. Made my life in the office much easier.
- 404-universe 10y ago
  I've found that http://musicforprogramming.net/ http://musicforprogramming.net/ is also good working music, which I found from that same thread you mentioned.
Freak_NL 10y ago
Researcher Theo Compernolle wrote about the open office in his book Brainchains. To help anyone convince management and colleagues that the open plan office creates an environment detrimental to our well-being, he has published a free excerpt of his work: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByN-2IZSJqvxY0pyRnZhV0c0Qm8/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByN-2IZSJqvxY0pyRnZhV0c0Qm8... Useful if you are fighting for change in your work environment.
adrianlmm 10y ago
When the company I used to work with switched to an open Office layout it didn't look like a big problem at that time, but after a year I became more irritated and less happy, If I was at a very critical call with a customer the phone rings, laughts and chats diverged my attention, with the time I quit for other reasons, but open office have some influence in that desition.
louprado 10y ago
If we could all raise our standards on workplace manners open offices are good for us. PSA of the day: Please train yourself to fully exhale right before sneezing.
bane 10y ago
I came from a world with shared offices and team rooms (about 10 to a room) and found the team rooms the optimal way to work -- with the ability to dive out into an office if you needed intense focus on something or privacy. Open offices (note I'm meaning cubes here) can be done reasonably well, but I think they need lots of small huddle rooms you can dive into for focus, discussion and privacy and that everybody in your area of the open plan needs to be on the same page for noise and behavior. Where open plans seem to really fail is mixing different teams in the same space and not providing any personal space at all. The warehouse full of big tables almost universally seem to be hated.
- user5994461 10y ago
  Agree. Offices for small team are the optimal solutions. Source: many years of experiences in open plan offices and team offices.
  - dasmoth 10y ago
    Do you have much experience of private offices?
    - user5994461 10y ago
      I have some, it's only okay if you work alone for an entire project (that's rather uncommon). I don't mind being with 1-3 people in an office even if I work alone, bigger office, nicer.
throw2016 10y ago
Open office is about economics and limits choice. Privacy does not preclude the freedom to socialize when required or work temporarily in common spaces for some project. The other way there is no choice. Most of us who have been to boarding schools have fond memories but that does not mean we prefer to live in dorms our whole life. Will the person negotiating deals or employee salaries be in a open office? No because there are certain kind of jobs that require privacy. Similarly creative thinking is not a group but solitary activity that requires privacy and warrants private space and programming and creating things from scratch is creative. Either the company does not perceive the work as creative or fails to respect its employees work needs. Usually these decisions are taken in arbitrary ways by a few folks in management who hang on to their privacy. And once these decisons are made it's difficult to reverse. Theoretically in capitalism if workers prefer private cabins companies who continue to offer them stand to attract a higher quality and volume of candidates but in the real world even before you can exercise that 'capitalist choice' its taken away from you by the race to the bottom, so you are effectively left with no choice.
ThomPete 10y ago
Open offices can be bad for you just like closed offices can. It mostly IMO depends on the size and the layout. Most places have both open spaces and places you can go to work in quite.
Allower 10y ago
duh
jim-jim-jim 10y ago
The overall din of my open office doesn't bother me so much, but people talking to themselves under their breath as they work the copy machine certainly does. I don't know why 90% of my co-workers do this.
- brokenmachine 10y ago
  This is so true. So many people just can't seem to think (or read) without talking out loud.
Zenst 10y ago
The workers have known this for eons and many issues from spread of illness thru to lack of privacy for work projects, so much against it. Odd as when I worked at the BBC they moved from a rather nice building with lots of office space to some open plan nightmare and many left. But the real teller is I have never ever in my entire 50 years of life met anybody who actually likes open plan offices, ever! That right there says it all for me.
bobochan 10y ago
I have a traditional office, but every day part of me misses being back in the giant cube farm that I used to work in. I still remember counting six rows down, then three blocks over, to get to the section of identical grey cubes where I sat. I had a computer just powerful enough to run a 3270 terminal emulator, a small bookcase, and a chair. What do I miss about that? Any time that someone was not deep into a program they would stand up to stretch their legs and you would see them over the top of the cube. That was the time set aside where you could ask them questions about a project, talk about last night's game, or make plans for lunch. Over the course of a day or a week, you almost always had time to talk to everyone and it encouraged a great atmosphere. We all knew what each other was working on, and everyone had a sense of who was good at what when the chips were down and we needed to fix something quickly. Those cubes are different from what I have seen in a truly "open office," but I would love to get back to that level of daily interaction. Productivity aside, being isolated in an office all day is really soul numbing.
- mixmastamyk 10y ago
  Why not walk around the office, sit in the commons with a laptop, collaborate in a conference room, etc? The office with a door is for when you need to focus, not meant to be a jail.
  - bobochan 10y ago
    Because then people say, "I stopped by your office and you were not there!" It is a big campus so there is a benefit to people being able to track me down.
    - mixmastamyk 10y ago
      IM, email, calendar, mobile could help, no? If people are stopping by often, perhaps you are not so isolated.
      - mixmastamyk 10y ago
        Just thought of something, a post-it on the door that says, "I'm in XYZ."
Maro 10y ago
I've been working in open office environments for the last 5+ years, also at one of AmaFaceGooSoft. I find it's a non-issue, it doesn't bother me or others, I can't recall a time in the last 1-2 years when someone complained about it. Saying that o.o. is not effective is a bit fishy given how successful some of the companies employing it are. I remember 10+ years ago at my first job we had a nice office building (it was an architectural CAD software company, so their offices were pretty okay). It was 4-6 people per room. In retrospect I wouldn't want that layout again, it kills XFN cooperation, eg. you have to go to another room and potentially knock just to talk to the UX or PM guy. I prefer o.o. because it's better for fast moving, constantly changing teams building product; everybody's on the same "floor", working on the same product.
- chris_7 10y ago
  Do you have a "shut up" rule, though? I have to endure shared music, discussions about sportsball or TV shows, people making calls, etc. while trying to use a debugger a meter away (pack 'em in!). I could possibly tolerate on-topic discussions, but off-topic stuff belongs in a break room.
  - Maro 10y ago
    Office is for work not play. At the really good/successful companies there's very strong work ethic, so people are not socializing on the floor, making calls, listening to music without headphones. In that case I'd say you have a culture/people management issue, not an office layout issue.
- cableshaft 10y ago
  > I can't recall a time in the last 1-2 years when someone complained about it. I personally wouldn't complain about it, just quietly endure it until I find something better (I have done that at several previous jobs, and this one even. There's enough other good things here that I just deal with it, but I don't like it). Just because no one is actively and loudly complaining about it doesn't mean there must be no one that has a problem with it. Perhaps every single other employee has a problem with it besides you, and they're just not speaking about it.
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tedmiston 10y ago
> Mullenix’s own office has sensors, placed 10 feet apart, that can track noise, temperature and population levels. Staff can log on to an app and can find the quietest spot in the room. This sounds awesome. It would be really cool to have this information for the coffee shops around town, similar to how Google tracks how busy a place is. IIRC, there was a Microsoft Research project like this once that distributed the audio collection over the microphones from smartphones present in a given place.
hasenj 10y ago
I like open offices because I want to feel like I'm working with people, not in solitary confinement. When I'm alone in a private room, I'm usually playing; not working. I find it incredibly difficult to get into working flow when in a private space. I'm sure I'm not the only one. That's why people go to cafes to work when they have to work "from home".
- BoorishBears 10y ago
  I think part of the difference for me as far as the atmosphere in a coffee shop (for example) vs an open office is the office has voices you recognize and listen to. If a voice I recognized said something in the general drone of a coffee shop I'd be momentarily distracted while I turned around to see where the voice came from. In my current open office I find myself working to filter out what people are saying a lot more than I would in a setting with the same amount of noise, but nothing concerning me.
- kylec 10y ago
  I feel like I'm the exact opposite. I'll spend a good amount of my time during the day at work browsing Reddit, HN, and doing work that doesn't require a lot of time or concentration. If I really need to focus and get something done, I'll work from home in the evening or head back in to the office after everyone has left so I can buckle down and concentrate.
- brokenmachine 10y ago
  > That's why people go to cafes to work when they have to work "from home". That's why some people (not me!) go to cafes to work when they have to work "from home". Or maybe those people just like coffee?
pmcollins 10y ago
You could just wear ear muffs and mostly solve the noisy office problem. I wear them when I'm not listening to music and have improved my productivity and happiness at work. (And this is at a cubicle office which is still quite noisy.) http://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/company-us/all-3m-products/~/3M-PELTOR-Optime-105-Over-the-Head-Earmuffs-H10A-10-EA-Case?N=5002385+8709322+8711405+3294758533&rt=rud http://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/company-us/all-3m-products/~/3M-P...
- ionised 10y ago
  You also have visual distractions in an open office. I've just had at least a dozen people walk past my line of sight in the last minute and and it's distracting as hell for me.
  - hx87 10y ago
    2x 35" screens for everyone!
  - ThrustVectoring 10y ago
    It's not just visual. You're often seated at a desk that's physically connected to another person's. I've been annoyingly distracted by the person across from me pulling on the desk to move their chair around, shaking my keyboard and monitors.
ericls 10y ago
Jobs are bad for us
chatwinra 10y ago
I hate to be negative but this article is frustrating because it makes an argument without backing it up with evidence that can be followed up by the reader. It makes claims such as 'it’s well documented that we rarely brainstorm brilliant ideas ... in a crowd.' but doesn't provide any link to these documents. The only links it provides are ones to other BBC articles. It also cites studies and references their data without providing a link to them. It's a shame as I'm sure there may be a strong case against open offices but this is pretty lazy journalism and indicative of some major problems (in my opinion, anyway) with how science is reported (and used) in online articles.
- mixmastamyk 10y ago
  Agreed, it assumes everyone has read Peopleware, but most haven't.
mti27 10y ago
Open offices SUCK SUCK SUCK. The worst thing is when someone wants you to answer a question which requires a few moments of concentrated research. So then they stand there waiting on you but talking to the person in the next cube about their weekend or the weather or whatever. You can't tell them to leave because they are not in your office, but it's majorly distracting.
- smnplk 10y ago
  this. Oh am I glad that I will never ever ever work in an open office again.
mti27 10y ago
Oh and here's another time when they SUCK: If they're not part of the "office culture" i.e. it's only IT who uses them. So, you have to play by both sets of rules. Get used to continuous interruptions because you'll be branded "not a team player" when you don't remove your headphones to say hi to everyone who comes into your area!
garrettdimon 10y ago
A lot of the comments here seem to focus on socialization and feeling like you're in a community, but closed offices don't preclude this. I work at Wildbit (the company referenced in the article), and we have family-style lunches around a big table and plenty of common areas where socialization happens in the mornings, during lunch, when people make coffee, and plenty of other times. The key is that when folks are working, they can do so in their office and stay focused. It's a balance of the two. Quiet space when folks need to focus and social space for other times. Having private offices and half the team working remotely doesn't affect socialization. We just tend to have better separation between the two so that they don't blur into each other or impact others who are trying to stay focused.
- mhsabbagh 10y ago
  Too bad it takes a lot of logic to understand such thing.
- GFischer 10y ago
  The Christopher Alexander solution described in Peopleware sounds like a good compromise, having both individual and group spaces. "People cannot work effectively if their workspace is too enclosed or too exposed. A good workspace strikes the balance." "fashion space explicitly around working groups. Each team needs identifiable public and semiprivate space and each individual needs protected private space. The team members and their space counselor could work out the possible ways their space could be arranged." http://web.archive.org/web/20150319051220/http://javatroopers.com/Peopleware.html http://web.archive.org/web/20150319051220/http://javatrooper...
  - zzgo 10y ago
    > space counselor Does anyone have a "space counselor" how is not their manager? I've always taken my "space counselor" issues to my direct manager.
    - db48x 10y ago
      Their idea of a "space counselor" wouldn't work in a startup or even a small company. In a large company like Google or IBM or Microsoft then having someone who just specializes in knowing where all the buildings are, their floorplans, and who is currently using which rooms would be quite important. When you form a team (of 3-5 people, ideally) in this company you would go to them and find a spot where you could all work together. They would help you pick out furniture, design the layout, recommend putting in a couch and coffee table, etc. They would basically be the front-end UI for the entire facilities department. This would indeed be happening completely independently of your normal manager (except that your manager probably told you where to find the space counselor, made an appointment for you, etc).
dalyons 10y ago
I personally love open offices. Collaboration benefits aside, I like people and I'd go insane working in a silent solo prison every day (been there!). The meme of "open offices are terrible for everyone and it's only evil management that likes them" is bullcrap. Myself and a lot of other people I know prefer them. Guess what, people are different!
- geoka9 10y ago
  Just curious, do you ever need to be "in the zone" to get your work done? If you do and you're distracted, is it hard for you to get back in the zone? Is it hard to do several times an hour?
known 10y ago
Open offices are worse for programmers
christophilus 10y ago
I've been working remotely for the past 2 years or so, and am never going back. If I really need to focus, phone and Slack are both off, and I stand at my personal whiteboard and think. It's almost impossible (for me) to think without quiet and guaranteed lack of interruption.
FrancoDiaz 10y ago
If I'm interested in a position, that's one of the first things I ask about. If they're open and don't have alternative accommodations for people that despise open office, I just pass.
bambax 10y ago
I hate open offices with a passion, for reasons well explained in the article (and many others that regularly pop up here). However, many companies that have open offices enjoyed an incredible success and some even achieved world domination (Facebook). How is that even possible is what I'd really like to know.
- paulryanrogers 10y ago
  "However, many companies that have open offices enjoyed an incredible success and some even achieved world domination (Facebook). How is that even possible is what I'd really like to know." Many civilizations also thrived on the backs of slave labor. We don't look to slavery as the way forward today. That being said, some people prefer the social aspects of working physically close to others. Ideally companies will provide what works best for each employee. At the end of the day business is both by and for people. EDIT: Corrected typo
- mixmastamyk 10y ago
  The success of FB is likely due to the networking effects of its users. Also, employees likely adjust by ducking into a conference room or working at home for a few hours to focus.
- brokenmachine 10y ago
  Imagine how big Facebook could have been if they allowed their employees to concentrate!!
ggame 10y ago
The reduction in productivity is not a bug, it's a feature. Your boss spends a lot of time in meeting justifying why he needs a bigger headcount. Having more productive employees makes his job much harder. Colloquially it's called 'Empire Building'
lightedman 10y ago
My open office is GREAT for my health. I don't know of any other open office where you climb literal mountains.
curtis 10y ago
I've worked a couple of jobs where I was working remote but the main office was open plan. In these cases, it seemed like the open plan offices really did help communication. Of course I was only there one week out of maybe every 6, and it didn't matter that I didn't get that much regular work done when I was in the office, since I was working from home the rest of the time. I don't know if there's a reasonable compromise. You could have a team that tries to get everybody into the office one week out of every three and where most people work remote the rest of the time. I don't know how well that would work, and I don't know if it would be worth the trouble, but it seems to me like it would be better than open plan all the time or remote all the time.
ChuckMcM 10y ago
I react to the headline in that I don't think open offices are "bad" for people any more than coffee shops are. But I certainly resonate with the notion that different people have different styles. My own story was going from an office with a door at NetApp to a quad cube at Google. If there ever was a place that could afford to give everyone an office (regardless of the cost of real estate) it is Google but they wanted the socialization aspects. My response was that I became able to completely ignore everything going on around me when I was working. That was helpful for me, but perplexing for some of my coworkers who could say something to me, mere feet away, and I would not react at all because it literally hadn't actually entered my consciousness. Basically I'm at the opposite end of the spectrum from the person who sits there and tracks all 6 to 10 conversations going on around them in real time. I find I can do that if I concentrate on it, but processing so much information which is irrelevant to what I'm trying to get done really feels like a waste.
gdubs 10y ago
Anyone wanting to dig deeper into some of this might be interested in reading Susan Cain's "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking". [1] It was a paradigm shifting book for me, made me understand some people in my life in profoundly new ways, and helped me discover stuff about my own personality. It's particularly interesting to think about introversion / extroversion in terms of managing energy levels. 1: https://www.amazon.com/Quiet-Power-Introverts-World-Talking/dp/0307352153 https://www.amazon.com/Quiet-Power-Introverts-World-Talking/...
- brokenmachine 10y ago
  I will check out the book, but I don't know how it could help someone trapped in a distracting open office hell. Maybe it'd help the homicidal thoughts go away.
donarb 10y ago
Joel Spoksky wrote about this multiple times on his blog, here's one of his first over 10 years ago. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/09/24/bionic-office/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/09/24/bionic-office/
sssilver 10y ago
I do my best work after everyone has left and the floor is completely empty. I hate distractions, and my brain is wired in a way where it processes every word spoken by a human to somehow be more important than abstract thoughts about an engineering problem. I wish I had a quiet room with blank walls void of decorations, and sound isolation. I'd be so much more productive. But alas, that is not hip.
- blowski 10y ago
  I think there's more to open plan offices than fashion. They are cheaper - you can pack a lot more people into the same place. If they're all juniors that's great. As you start hiring more seniors do you give each of them an office? That changes office culture because now everyone wants an office to feel important. Having worked in a few places hat went from 5-6 staff to more than a 100, I've seen how difficult these transitions can be. I agree that senior staff tend to be more productive in their own offices with fewer distractions, though.
  - tinalumfoil 10y ago
    If a senior dev cost 100k and an office increases productivity by 10% the office has to cost 10k for it not to be worth it. While I don't doubt
eicnix 10y ago
I like the solution from Microsoft for this problem in their new Munich building: They have seperatr spaces for intense work without any distraction, areas like the most common open offices and areas for group work and meetings. Each area is its own floor and your are free to move between the areas.
andrei_says_ 10y ago
Anyone working in an open office knows about the noise, distractions, interruption, attention fragmentation and unnerving lack of privacy. Unfortunately, the office layout is determined by budget numbers related to office layout only (not including "cost of lost productivity"), and by people who more often than not do have their own offices.
lacampbell 10y ago
The only times I've been in an open office, it's been with people who were answering phone calls all day. Wasn't a fan and my ears got sore form having headphones on all the time. I feel like sharing an office with a small handful of other devs could work. But not with people who answer phones all day.
OJFord 10y ago
Amusing to think that this was probably* written from an open office. *I used to commute through the BBC's White City campus; visible through large glass windows were open offices everywhere. (They were essentially open even to the outside!)
dajohnson89 10y ago
Frustration with open offices is perfectly understandable -- I work in an open office and overall I would prefer to have my own office (most people would). But the outrage about the trend towards open offices reeks of entitlement. Think of the assembly line worker -- he/she has even less privacy. And don't tell me that working on an assembly line isn't mentally exhausting. Try one shift and let me know how that goes. Think cook in a shady restaurant, think an illegal immigrant in San Antonio in July installing a new roof on somebody's McMansion. THOSE are difficult working environments.
- femiagbabiaka 10y ago
  yes.. they deserve dignity on the job too. we can have both, no need to choose
- paulryanrogers 10y ago
  "Think of the assembly line worker..." While I'm grateful to service workers who must be on-site because of the nature of their work, there is a case to be made that some workers are more productive and happy private settings. And if the overall costs are similar then why don't information workers have a choice?
- jrs235 10y ago
  I don't think the complaint is about difficult working environments but rather non-conducive working environments for knowledge workers. Programmers need the ability to focus and minimal distractions in order to keep the conceptual and logical model of their work loaded in their head. Anything that causes a momentary data dump and reboot is detrimental to their core function. A hot roof in the summer for a roofer is expected. If that roofer has to think about how to solve a [non standard] roofing issue while on the roof while thinking about the entire building's (complex) roof and how his solution will affect the other roofs he works on then I understand the complaint. And he should get down off the roof and sit someplace where he can reason and think out a proper solution with minimal distractions and external/physical stress.
blunte 10y ago
I knew this from years of experience, and I provided ample evidence (and research) on this problem to executive management at companies I worked for. The sad fact is that PHBs, even well-intentioned ones, simply do not know what it's like to create multi-layer models in your mind and then develop from those models. They hear the marketing guys bullshitting all day about clients and thing that _that_ is work, progress. In the end, it just means that the backbone of the modern company functions more poorly, and that revenues are potentially lower than they could be. Maybe the lower revenues are offset by the lower office rent costs; maybe the only real loss is the happiness (and loyalty/tenure) of the thought workers of the company. This leads to another problem that we all suffer (via bugs, hacks, viruses, and otherwise lack of software quality) - that people running companies really have no concept what software is. I see no solution to this problem, since ultimately even the companies started by geeks get absorbed by bigger companies run by PHBs...
devilirium 10y ago
I think a lot of us needs to think about how fortunate we are working ona field that is our passion and not standing in a pile of shit and sweat all day long. Having open offices that makes communication easier means that you could communicate your need for no distruption or talk with your mates who are loafing around and brainstorm about future problems. If you have the brain capacity to focus on ambient noises, then I guess you are not focusing enough and just whining about your current situation instead of doing what matters. I've seen workers who couldn't hear anything since they were too immersed. I myself use earphones when I want to get into it and close out the entire world. If you think that it's a real issue and don't see the value of savings and closeness to each other, then maybe it's time to quit your current workplace.
Corrado 10y ago
OK, I think the perfect solution would be a huge open area plus some other specialty areas (conference rooms, kitchen, bathrooms, etc.) The difference is an unending supply of something like Everblocks[0]. That way, management could have all the space they wanted but you could still build your own personal domain. And with different types of blocks (switches, display, whiteboard, etc.) you could customize your area with exactly how you, or your team, wants it. Heck, you could even change it every week if you wanted to. :) [0] http://www.everblocksystems.com/ http://www.everblocksystems.com/
douchelord 10y ago
This article made me laugh as ive often worked really late at BBCs very own broadcasting house because it's far too loud and distracting for me during the day.

464 points by eloycoto 10y ago

"We retain more information when we sit in one spot, says Sally Augustin, an environmental and design psychologist in La Grange Park, Illinois. It’s not so obvious to us each day, but we offload memories — often little details — into our surroundings, she says. These details — which could be anything from a quick idea we wanted to share to a colour change on a brochure we’re working on — can only be recalled in that setting."

msie 10y ago
That makes sense given the effectiveness of memory palaces.

grokas 10y ago

"Nearly 50% of people working in open offices are dissatisfied with their sound privacy" Should be: Nearly 50% of people working in open offices don't have good over-ear headphones.

kdamken 10y ago
No. Fuck that. I don't normally curse on here, but I think it's warranted. I own a great pair of over ear, noise cancelling headphones. But I shouldn't have to risk damaging my hearing because management thinks having developers sit in the middle of a bunch of salespeople and project managers is a good idea.
- chinathrow 10y ago
  A million time this. Ear damage accumulates over time. I am sure that excessive headphone usage at work will be number one reason of hearing loss in a few years. Unless we turn things around.
  - daemoncoder 10y ago
    One doesn't actually have to listen to anything through the headphones. I've used noise cancelling without music in the past. I also have a set of earbud rubber thingies that have been stoppered with hot glue and a short piece of hollow lolly stick. Those fit better (don't feel itchy after long periods) and provide more isolation than the squishy yellow ear protectors.
    - Arizhel 10y ago
      Nose canceling headphones don't work for blocking conversations.
      - chinathrow 10y ago
        Not all, but some achieve very nice results. E.g. Bose Quiet Comfort 20 are indeed good also for blocking more quiet conversations. https://www.amazon.com/Bose-QuietComfort-Acoustic-Cancelling-Headphones/dp/B00X9KV0HU https://www.amazon.com/Bose-QuietComfort-Acoustic-Cancelling...
        Arizhel 10y ago
        The only way NC headphones block conversations is because they are also acoustically isolating. That is, they would block conversations even with the NC feature turned off. The headphones you link to look like this: they're basically earplugs with headphones built in. Earplugs block conversations because they physically block sound waves from entering your ears. The same principle works with the big over-the-ear cans. It's not the NC feature that's helping, it's the fact that the headphones themselves are isolating your ears from the outside world.
        chinathrow 10y ago
        I own them so I can assure that having them plugged in without NC does not block conversation voices. Turn them on and they are gone or way quieter. Edit due to downrate: I own or owned multiple over ear medium size NC models and the mentioned in'ear ones win by large.
- amyjess 10y ago
  > having developers sit in the middle of a bunch of salespeople and project managers So, about that... I work in a cube farm, and I love it. But because we're running out of space, they stuck me in the only open cube they had, and so I'm not sitting anywhere near my team or even my department. I'm in network engineering, but the other people on my row are sales engineers (for a product I have nothing to do with), the inside sales department sits on the three rows to my left, and the marketing department sits on the two rows to my right. As such, I'm now quite familiar with our sales pitches, and I pick up all kinds of juicy gossip from the inside sales team's daily standup. I'm at the point where "Net Promoter Score" no longer sounds like a real phrase (yay, semantic satiation!). I do have to admit that I've taken to listening to music on my headphones... not super loud, but it helps me get in the zone when the inside sales team is firing on all cylinders. I don't mind it too much... they're all fun people to talk to during our downtime, and I've actually become really close with one of the marketing guys, who I probably wouldn't have met if we didn't have space issues. And it's not going to last much longer. We just took over another suite in our building, we're putting the finishing touches on renovations, and as soon as that's done the whole sales organization is moving there (the move will probably happen next week, or maybe even this Friday), and my department will move to where sales used to be. I'm hoping I'll get to sit in mostly the same place (marketing isn't moving, and I like those people), though I'd love to take over the window cube behind me.
  - brokenmachine 10y ago
    The thing is, since you do different jobs, you can ignore the conversations around you if you need to concentrate. If you were working in close proximity to people doing a similar job, you wouldn't have that luxury. In my workplace, it seems rude to have headphones on.
- toast0 10y ago
  Headphones don't damage your hearing, headphones at high volume damage hearing. If you're using noise cancelling (or just closed ear in most environments), you can listen to your audio at a reasonable volume, if you're listening at high volume to drown out other noise that could be dangerous.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - Arizhel 10y ago
    Noise-canceling headphones do not cancel out conversations, so you must listen at high volume to drown out that other noise. The only thing noise-canceling headphones are really good for is canceling out constant drone, for things such as fan noise and jet engine drone. That's why they're so popular for frequent airplane travelers. They do absolutely nothing if you're in an office surrounded by yapping coworkers (at least nothing more than a comparable set of non-noise-canceling headphones). In fact, I'll add that if I'm surrounded by a bunch of computers with fan noise, using noise-canceling headphones lets me hear coworkers' conversations even better.
    - cmdrfred 10y ago
      Your right. When you consider it there has been a few million years of iteration of the human ear to attune it to the sound of the human voice. A difficult problem to overcome to say the least.
      - Arizhel 10y ago
        It's not just that, it has to do with the way noise cancellation circuits work. They work great on constant white-noise-like hums within a certain frequency band; they don't work on transients that cross a wide range of frequencies (as does human voice). They especially don't work well at higher frequencies because of the shorter wavelengths and the distance between the drivers and your eardrums (which can vary), and human voice has a lot of higher-frequency components. If you could stick the drivers right next to your eardrums with custom-fitted in-ear plugs, you could get far better performance, but that's neither economical nor desirable to most people for comfort reasons.
- krzysg 10y ago
  True. I would like to listen to music when I like to, not when I have to. Anyway noise is not everything. It is so easy to be disrupted by people walking around.
  - kdamken 10y ago
    I'm continually surprised how the smallest people seem to stomp the loudest up and down the hallway.
- grokas 10y ago
  Sorry your management sucks?
kedean 10y ago
That only looks at one side of the picture. Sound privacy is partially inbound, yes, and that can be solved with quality headphones. It's also outbound, though. If I'm on a conference call, I'd really rather not have to worry about other people listening to what I say. Also, not everyone wants to listen to music/podcasts/video/anything while they work. The solution shouldn't be "just isolate your ears!"
- pacaro 10y ago
  Ironically, my only problem with individual offices is that people then seem to think it's ok to not use headphones, and to use speaker phone. The sound isolation between neighbouring offices is rarely good enough to allow this. The way the HVAC system in the Microsoft buildings that I worked in was plumbed, you tended to have great sound isolation from one neighbour and be intimately connected with the other.
- grokas 10y ago
  Most of the time I'm not actually listening to anything, I just have my cans on as a sound buffer, and they're ready when/if I play something with audio.
white-flame 10y ago
The stability described in the article seems to be more visual, not aural. There's constant mental interruption when the mind has to process stuff going on all around you visually, determining if somebody's going to bump in you, vibrations through any shared desk structures, etc.
- zimpenfish 10y ago
  I once had a foot-tapping chair-twirler on my left and a desk-drummer on my right. Very little work was accomplished until I moved away from them.
- nine_k 10y ago
  Having 2-3 screens completely occupying your field of view helps! Maybe this is one of the key advantages multiple screens provide, besides displaying useful information.
- callinyouin 10y ago
  > determining if somebody's going to bump in you I think the human aspect of that is a huge factor. I've always had a problem being around large crowds (anxiety, dizziness, mental strain). I think my nervous brain is constantly trying to determine how I might interact with the people around me, and when there are so many people I just get overwhelmed. Same thing happened in the (rather large) office I work at. For the first few days I was feeling mental strain only a few hours into the day, but after the office and the people in it became a known quantity I think my brain stopped trying to analyze everything.
bigmanwalter 10y ago
Except prolonged exposure to headphones makes you go deaf. I've got enough hearing loss as it is.
- nine_k 10y ago
  Good headphones for such a setup are tightly closed, DJ-style ones. They isolate you from outside noise, so you can listen to e.g. quietly playing piano pieces (don't like Schubert? try Rick Wakeman) and concentrate.
- hx87 10y ago
  It's not headphones, it's loudness. Just don't crank the volume on your headphones and you'll be fine.
- grokas 10y ago
  Prolonged exposure to unhealthy volume levels makes you go deaf. FTFY Simply taking headphones out of the box they came in doesn't make you go deaf.
VLM 10y ago
To quote a former VP at a former employer, wearing headphones in the open operations center is direct and intentional insubordination and discipline will be applied as such, because the company is spending a lot of money to foster coordination and interoperation between teams. Its interesting that they had the will and the money to enforce architectural changes in the literal sense but not in the internal organization sense, we continued to primarily work against each other, merely closer together.
- grokas 10y ago
  I take it this a (one, not the only) reason the employer was described as "former"?
xenihn 10y ago
I don't like to listen to music when concentrating on anything, with the exception of driving.
- grokas 10y ago
  I use mine without anything playing about 70% of the time I have them on. They can block out ambient/office noise pretty well and can help concentration.

jMyles 10y ago

Am I the only one left on HN who prefers open plan? I've done some of my best work for open plan companies. I have a particularly fond memory of when Reelio rented space at Blueprint (healthcare incubator in NYC). We stayed up very late, listened to loud music, and did some of the best work of our lives. I remember one night in particular, listening to the soundtrack from "O Brother Where Art Thou," when asynchrony and mutexes finally really clicked for me.

quanticle 10y ago
No offense, but I would suggest that you are highly atypical as a programmer. The vast majority of programmers (including myself) that I've spoken with prefer quiet, static backgrounds. Now, that's not to say that you need your own office to provide a quiet, static background, but it's just a whole lot easier that way. I interviewed last year at a very "tech-bro" type office in downtown Seattle. It was exactly as you described your office. It was not even three in the afternoon, and they had some loud European techno playing. None of the people there seemed to be actually doing work - it looked like they were lounging around for the sake of appearances rather than actually working. I ended up ending the interview early (the first time I've ended up doing that) because it became very clear, very early that it was a bad fit. Now, that's not to say that the only form of work I'd tolerate is work-from-home or private offices. Open offices can work, as long as everyone sticks to a shared set of rules. My personal preference is "library rules": if it'd be considered rude to do in a library, it'll be considered rude to do in the office. I feel like that gets about 80-90% of the benefit of a private office, while still delivering the floor-plan efficiencies of an open office.
- jMyles 10y ago
  > It was exactly as you described your office. It was not even three in the afternoon, and they had some loud European techno playing. ...but that's... not how I described the office in question.
  - cmdrfred 10y ago
    I dislike all music, not just in a programming setting. I would not be productive in such a situation.

WhiteSource1 10y ago

People need focus and the ability to control (increase and decrease) their stimulation. Open offices do not provide that and when people are distracted, just trying to focus on focusing, it's hard to make memories.

bobbark 10y ago

Unfortunately, a large (if not the largest) reason for open office plans that rarely comes up is space efficiency, ie packing more people into the same space. Sure, there are might be some folks who also think about creativity, but in my experience, a large portion of open space layouts have been driven by real estate cost considerations.

amyjess 10y ago
This is one reason I prefer to work in suburban office parks rather than urban mixed-use areas. Real estate is cheaper in the burbs, and I like my cube farms.
- tgb 10y ago
  Sorry, I'm confused. If you like cube farms and cube farms are more likely in higher cost real estate and urban real estate is more expensive, wouldn't you prefer urban offices?
  - amyjess 10y ago
    I want to avoid open offices where people sit on long benches shoulder to shoulder or just have a bunch of desks jammed together. A guy I know who works at Dell recently got moved from a cube to one of those, he's posted pictures of his workspace, and just looking at those pictures set off my claustrophobia badly. The cubes at my company are huge. If company policy here didn't forbid photography, I'd show you. I'd guess they're about 6 feet by 6 feet. I have plenty of space to stretch out and more desk than I really need. The cubes are even designed to be able to support a visitor sitting on a bench without crowding out the occupant (it's nice for having design discussions with my coworkers... we can both have a conversation in one cube without being nose-to-nose).
    - tgb 10y ago
      I see, so cube farms are not open offices; my mistake.
    - 10y ago

Raphmedia 10y ago

Diseases and sickness are the worst part of open offices. One day one person gets sick. The second day the person to his left also gets sick. The day after, half of the open office is sick. After a week, the entire office is sick. You can almost track the migration of the disease across the room.

dx034 10y ago
That's why good managers will tell their employee to go home when they're ill. There are companies that have strict policies for that, to avoid exactly this problem. Even though it's a problem that probably mostly affects flexible working space. If you don't share your desk with anyone else, you should usually be >3ft away from other people, lowering the risk for contagion.
- romanovcode 10y ago
  Yeah, and this should be encouraged by everyone, not only managers. You should definitely tell your workmate to go home if he is sick.
  - logfromblammo 10y ago
    My company does not provide sick leave or paid vacation. They replaced it with "PTO" to make it easier to treat a de jure salaried employee like a de facto hourly wage-earning employee. I have no time-card code to use for hours that I cannot work, due to being involuntarily banished from the office due to illness. So guess what, people? If I'm sick, and I feel like I can work, I'm coming in to the office. If I don't work 40 hours in a week, my pay gets docked. (Actually, the computerized system forces me to "request" that my own pay be docked.) And if I need to take PTO time for a sniffle, I can't use it later, in lieu of actual vacation. So if anyone orders me to go home, that order had better be accompanied by a check. If Sneezy McHackencoff gets the entire rest of the office sick, that is a direct consequence of the employer's worker-hostile HR policy. Don't blame the messenger. Your company consciously decided that it does not want to provide you with a salubrious work environment, in order to move inconvenient "future obligations" off their balance sheets. If they gave out sick leave and vacation, they would have to keep some money in the bank, to pay you when you use it. And you could use it at any time, so it has to be very liquid. Obviously, they would rather earn a higher rate of interest on that cash, if they have it, and also not have to pay it to you if you still have time left when you leave the company. Sick leave is just one of the benefits that even the simplest and weakest of collective-bargaining units can enforce, and one of the things that is becoming harder and harder to find around here. Back when I actually had sick leave, I used it appropriately. I'm very sorry about possibly making my peers sick now, but if you keep using your own energy to cover things up, management will never get any firsthand experience with the potential damage their stupid personnel policies can wreak on the business. I'm not trying to get you sick. I'm trying to get upper management and HR to reinstate sick leave, without getting "at will" fired for being an uppity peon. Getting each other sick is the only leverage we have. Don't go around sneezing on other people's keyboards. That's malicious intent. Just go in to work, and go about your business as usual. If anyone suggests that you should go home, say "I would have stayed home, but I have no sick leave, and I can't afford to not work today."

smelendez 10y ago

Open offices are awful, but they're here to stay for the same reason more adults are living with roommates and relatives: high real estate prices. Working remotely is one solution, but many companies don't think it would work for them. Personally, I'd make the shared area for solitary work only: no work discussions longer than a minute at work areas (use a conference room, take a walk or Slack), no eating at work areas, no audible media. I'd physically isolate people who have to make calls from their desks from other employees as much as possible. I'd also provide a break room for eating and install some retro phone booths in it for semiprivate personal calls on breaks. Also, a private room--not necessarily big--for breast feeding and pumping, taking medication, calling doctors' offices, and the like.

JoeAltmaier 10y ago
Strangely, open offices with cubicles can be more expensive than building drywall walls to make closed offices. And the much-vaunted flexibility of cubicles is way, way overrated. In my experience, cubicles sit in the same place for years. Any benefit of re-using them is lost. Also if the company is growing, new ones get bought all the time, so old ones aren't re-used anyway. Its obvious on the face of it: re-usable walls and shelving are going to be more expensive than simple stick construction. You have to be re-using it constantly (reformatting office space every month or quarter) to make it pay. And then you're tanking everybody's productivity. I think open-office is some brain virus that keeps infecting managers everywhere. We need some kind of vaccine to combat it.
- dx034 10y ago
  Event though dry walls are cheap, you cannot just install them as you can do with cubicles. You'd have to change ventilation to work for all rooms, have proper lights for every cubicle, adhere to fire restrictions (probably alarms in every small room) and will likely need to use more space per employee. Cubicles or open plan is by far the cheapest way to set up an office since you only have one room that you need to set up. And that's the main reason people use it, it's just cheaper. If you look at flexible working spaces, desks in closed rooms often cost twice of what you pay for a desk in an open floor layout. I don't think there's a way to set up closed offices at even close the price of open offices. And I must admit as much as I don't like open offices, sitting in a tiny private office of the size you have to yourself in an open office would probably lead to anxiety.

wakkaflokka 10y ago

I'm in the corporate world, and my managers were thinking about jumping on the open-office bandwagon (albeit a decade too late). I'm very glad it never materialized, because I love having my own cubicle without distraction. Unlike my open lab in academia, where it was difficult to work because I could hear the guy next to me eating nachos while I was trying to work on my thesis project.

deleted 10y ago

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RUG3Y 10y ago

I can fart in my office without bother anyone and I really like that.

tyfon 10y ago
Until your manager comes on a surprise visit :)

ape4 10y ago

I wonder if companies would consider segregated music and quiet open offices.

g12mcgov 10y ago

This reminds me of a lot of Stack Overflow's commitment to private offices, which I read awhile back. They too have an interesting take on the anti-open office idea. https://stackoverflow.blog/2015/01/why-we-still-believe-in-private-offices/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2015/01/why-we-still-believe-in-p...

cnagele 10y ago

Hey everyone, Chris Nagele here from Wildbit. For some background, I wrote about our reasons for moving to a private office plan. In short, it's more than putting on some headphones. http://wildbit.com/blog/2015/03/06/wildbit-hq-ending-the-open-office-epidemic http://wildbit.com/blog/2015/03/06/wildbit-hq-ending-the-ope... And a tour of the office itself: http://wildbit.com/blog/2015/08/05/wildbit-office-tour http://wildbit.com/blog/2015/08/05/wildbit-office-tour

rubidium 10y ago
Can you provide an estimate of total build cost / employee? It's a nice looking space, but likely only attainable for high margin industries like software engineering.
- blowski 10y ago
  Exactly. Where do you put your 10 junior developers in an office like that and still be profitable?
jcims 10y ago
The stairwell is a sound bus, you might consider rotating the column 90 degrees and leave room to wrap it in glass now or in the future.
stuntmachine 10y ago
I had the privilege of working in this environment and I can vouch for Chris here. The design of the Wildbit space works exponentially better than any open office layout could ever work. Communication was isolated to where it was needed, and conference rooms exist for when communications need to be had in private. It's the perfect mix. It may have cost more to do it right, but the bottom line wasn't money, it was productivity and the ability to have heads-down time to get real, meaningful work done.
- danellis 10y ago
  > The design of the Wildbit space works exponentially better than any open office layout could ever work. By what metric?

mmmBacon 10y ago

I started a new job where I work in an open office. I don't really mind it. We do have more open conversations about work and that's a good thing. These are similar to hallway conversations I've had in other places. When I want to crank I put headphones on and get some music going. I've always done that though even when I had an office so it's not new for me. My biggest peeve with the open office is that I have no room for storage. If you work in HW there are these junk piles because there's no place to put anything. I still use books as reference and there's no place to put them. I'm not a neat freak but I can't stand the clutter.

deleted 10y ago
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dx034 10y ago

One recommendation for everyone who suffers in an open office: BrainFM. Not affiliated with it, but saw it here on HN on a thread about music, tried it out and I love it. I listen to it daily, have probably heard each track at least a hundred times, but it still helps me to focus. With the right headphones (isolating so that volume can be low), I can zoom out and ignore everything around me. Haven't found any other music that can do that, especially when I really have to focus (e.g. reading complicated texts). Don't know if it really works or if it's just psychological, but I don't care as long as it helps me. Made my life in the office much easier.

404-universe 10y ago
I've found that http://musicforprogramming.net/ http://musicforprogramming.net/ is also good working music, which I found from that same thread you mentioned.

Freak_NL 10y ago

Researcher Theo Compernolle wrote about the open office in his book Brainchains. To help anyone convince management and colleagues that the open plan office creates an environment detrimental to our well-being, he has published a free excerpt of his work: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByN-2IZSJqvxY0pyRnZhV0c0Qm8/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByN-2IZSJqvxY0pyRnZhV0c0Qm8... Useful if you are fighting for change in your work environment.

adrianlmm 10y ago

When the company I used to work with switched to an open Office layout it didn't look like a big problem at that time, but after a year I became more irritated and less happy, If I was at a very critical call with a customer the phone rings, laughts and chats diverged my attention, with the time I quit for other reasons, but open office have some influence in that desition.

louprado 10y ago

If we could all raise our standards on workplace manners open offices are good for us. PSA of the day: Please train yourself to fully exhale right before sneezing.

bane 10y ago

I came from a world with shared offices and team rooms (about 10 to a room) and found the team rooms the optimal way to work -- with the ability to dive out into an office if you needed intense focus on something or privacy. Open offices (note I'm meaning cubes here) can be done reasonably well, but I think they need lots of small huddle rooms you can dive into for focus, discussion and privacy and that everybody in your area of the open plan needs to be on the same page for noise and behavior. Where open plans seem to really fail is mixing different teams in the same space and not providing any personal space at all. The warehouse full of big tables almost universally seem to be hated.

user5994461 10y ago
Agree. Offices for small team are the optimal solutions. Source: many years of experiences in open plan offices and team offices.
- dasmoth 10y ago
  Do you have much experience of private offices?
  - user5994461 10y ago
    I have some, it's only okay if you work alone for an entire project (that's rather uncommon). I don't mind being with 1-3 people in an office even if I work alone, bigger office, nicer.

throw2016 10y ago

Open office is about economics and limits choice. Privacy does not preclude the freedom to socialize when required or work temporarily in common spaces for some project. The other way there is no choice. Most of us who have been to boarding schools have fond memories but that does not mean we prefer to live in dorms our whole life. Will the person negotiating deals or employee salaries be in a open office? No because there are certain kind of jobs that require privacy. Similarly creative thinking is not a group but solitary activity that requires privacy and warrants private space and programming and creating things from scratch is creative. Either the company does not perceive the work as creative or fails to respect its employees work needs. Usually these decisions are taken in arbitrary ways by a few folks in management who hang on to their privacy. And once these decisons are made it's difficult to reverse. Theoretically in capitalism if workers prefer private cabins companies who continue to offer them stand to attract a higher quality and volume of candidates but in the real world even before you can exercise that 'capitalist choice' its taken away from you by the race to the bottom, so you are effectively left with no choice.

ThomPete 10y ago

Open offices can be bad for you just like closed offices can. It mostly IMO depends on the size and the layout. Most places have both open spaces and places you can go to work in quite.

Allower 10y ago

duh

jim-jim-jim 10y ago

The overall din of my open office doesn't bother me so much, but people talking to themselves under their breath as they work the copy machine certainly does. I don't know why 90% of my co-workers do this.

brokenmachine 10y ago
This is so true. So many people just can't seem to think (or read) without talking out loud.

Zenst 10y ago

The workers have known this for eons and many issues from spread of illness thru to lack of privacy for work projects, so much against it. Odd as when I worked at the BBC they moved from a rather nice building with lots of office space to some open plan nightmare and many left. But the real teller is I have never ever in my entire 50 years of life met anybody who actually likes open plan offices, ever! That right there says it all for me.

bobochan 10y ago

I have a traditional office, but every day part of me misses being back in the giant cube farm that I used to work in. I still remember counting six rows down, then three blocks over, to get to the section of identical grey cubes where I sat. I had a computer just powerful enough to run a 3270 terminal emulator, a small bookcase, and a chair. What do I miss about that? Any time that someone was not deep into a program they would stand up to stretch their legs and you would see them over the top of the cube. That was the time set aside where you could ask them questions about a project, talk about last night's game, or make plans for lunch. Over the course of a day or a week, you almost always had time to talk to everyone and it encouraged a great atmosphere. We all knew what each other was working on, and everyone had a sense of who was good at what when the chips were down and we needed to fix something quickly. Those cubes are different from what I have seen in a truly "open office," but I would love to get back to that level of daily interaction. Productivity aside, being isolated in an office all day is really soul numbing.

mixmastamyk 10y ago
Why not walk around the office, sit in the commons with a laptop, collaborate in a conference room, etc? The office with a door is for when you need to focus, not meant to be a jail.
- bobochan 10y ago
  Because then people say, "I stopped by your office and you were not there!" It is a big campus so there is a benefit to people being able to track me down.
  - mixmastamyk 10y ago
    IM, email, calendar, mobile could help, no? If people are stopping by often, perhaps you are not so isolated.
    - mixmastamyk 10y ago
      Just thought of something, a post-it on the door that says, "I'm in XYZ."

Maro 10y ago

I've been working in open office environments for the last 5+ years, also at one of AmaFaceGooSoft. I find it's a non-issue, it doesn't bother me or others, I can't recall a time in the last 1-2 years when someone complained about it. Saying that o.o. is not effective is a bit fishy given how successful some of the companies employing it are. I remember 10+ years ago at my first job we had a nice office building (it was an architectural CAD software company, so their offices were pretty okay). It was 4-6 people per room. In retrospect I wouldn't want that layout again, it kills XFN cooperation, eg. you have to go to another room and potentially knock just to talk to the UX or PM guy. I prefer o.o. because it's better for fast moving, constantly changing teams building product; everybody's on the same "floor", working on the same product.

chris_7 10y ago
Do you have a "shut up" rule, though? I have to endure shared music, discussions about sportsball or TV shows, people making calls, etc. while trying to use a debugger a meter away (pack 'em in!). I could possibly tolerate on-topic discussions, but off-topic stuff belongs in a break room.
- Maro 10y ago
  Office is for work not play. At the really good/successful companies there's very strong work ethic, so people are not socializing on the floor, making calls, listening to music without headphones. In that case I'd say you have a culture/people management issue, not an office layout issue.
cableshaft 10y ago
> I can't recall a time in the last 1-2 years when someone complained about it. I personally wouldn't complain about it, just quietly endure it until I find something better (I have done that at several previous jobs, and this one even. There's enough other good things here that I just deal with it, but I don't like it). Just because no one is actively and loudly complaining about it doesn't mean there must be no one that has a problem with it. Perhaps every single other employee has a problem with it besides you, and they're just not speaking about it.

deleted 10y ago

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tedmiston 10y ago

> Mullenix’s own office has sensors, placed 10 feet apart, that can track noise, temperature and population levels. Staff can log on to an app and can find the quietest spot in the room. This sounds awesome. It would be really cool to have this information for the coffee shops around town, similar to how Google tracks how busy a place is. IIRC, there was a Microsoft Research project like this once that distributed the audio collection over the microphones from smartphones present in a given place.

hasenj 10y ago

I like open offices because I want to feel like I'm working with people, not in solitary confinement. When I'm alone in a private room, I'm usually playing; not working. I find it incredibly difficult to get into working flow when in a private space. I'm sure I'm not the only one. That's why people go to cafes to work when they have to work "from home".

BoorishBears 10y ago
I think part of the difference for me as far as the atmosphere in a coffee shop (for example) vs an open office is the office has voices you recognize and listen to. If a voice I recognized said something in the general drone of a coffee shop I'd be momentarily distracted while I turned around to see where the voice came from. In my current open office I find myself working to filter out what people are saying a lot more than I would in a setting with the same amount of noise, but nothing concerning me.
kylec 10y ago
I feel like I'm the exact opposite. I'll spend a good amount of my time during the day at work browsing Reddit, HN, and doing work that doesn't require a lot of time or concentration. If I really need to focus and get something done, I'll work from home in the evening or head back in to the office after everyone has left so I can buckle down and concentrate.
brokenmachine 10y ago
> That's why people go to cafes to work when they have to work "from home". That's why some people (not me!) go to cafes to work when they have to work "from home". Or maybe those people just like coffee?

pmcollins 10y ago

You could just wear ear muffs and mostly solve the noisy office problem. I wear them when I'm not listening to music and have improved my productivity and happiness at work. (And this is at a cubicle office which is still quite noisy.) http://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/company-us/all-3m-products/~/3M-PELTOR-Optime-105-Over-the-Head-Earmuffs-H10A-10-EA-Case?N=5002385+8709322+8711405+3294758533&rt=rud http://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/company-us/all-3m-products/~/3M-P...

ionised 10y ago
You also have visual distractions in an open office. I've just had at least a dozen people walk past my line of sight in the last minute and and it's distracting as hell for me.
- hx87 10y ago
  2x 35" screens for everyone!
- ThrustVectoring 10y ago
  It's not just visual. You're often seated at a desk that's physically connected to another person's. I've been annoyingly distracted by the person across from me pulling on the desk to move their chair around, shaking my keyboard and monitors.

ericls 10y ago

Jobs are bad for us

chatwinra 10y ago

I hate to be negative but this article is frustrating because it makes an argument without backing it up with evidence that can be followed up by the reader. It makes claims such as 'it’s well documented that we rarely brainstorm brilliant ideas ... in a crowd.' but doesn't provide any link to these documents. The only links it provides are ones to other BBC articles. It also cites studies and references their data without providing a link to them. It's a shame as I'm sure there may be a strong case against open offices but this is pretty lazy journalism and indicative of some major problems (in my opinion, anyway) with how science is reported (and used) in online articles.

mixmastamyk 10y ago
Agreed, it assumes everyone has read Peopleware, but most haven't.

mti27 10y ago

Open offices SUCK SUCK SUCK. The worst thing is when someone wants you to answer a question which requires a few moments of concentrated research. So then they stand there waiting on you but talking to the person in the next cube about their weekend or the weather or whatever. You can't tell them to leave because they are not in your office, but it's majorly distracting.

smnplk 10y ago
this. Oh am I glad that I will never ever ever work in an open office again.

mti27 10y ago

Oh and here's another time when they SUCK: If they're not part of the "office culture" i.e. it's only IT who uses them. So, you have to play by both sets of rules. Get used to continuous interruptions because you'll be branded "not a team player" when you don't remove your headphones to say hi to everyone who comes into your area!

garrettdimon 10y ago

A lot of the comments here seem to focus on socialization and feeling like you're in a community, but closed offices don't preclude this. I work at Wildbit (the company referenced in the article), and we have family-style lunches around a big table and plenty of common areas where socialization happens in the mornings, during lunch, when people make coffee, and plenty of other times. The key is that when folks are working, they can do so in their office and stay focused. It's a balance of the two. Quiet space when folks need to focus and social space for other times. Having private offices and half the team working remotely doesn't affect socialization. We just tend to have better separation between the two so that they don't blur into each other or impact others who are trying to stay focused.

mhsabbagh 10y ago
Too bad it takes a lot of logic to understand such thing.
GFischer 10y ago
The Christopher Alexander solution described in Peopleware sounds like a good compromise, having both individual and group spaces. "People cannot work effectively if their workspace is too enclosed or too exposed. A good workspace strikes the balance." "fashion space explicitly around working groups. Each team needs identifiable public and semiprivate space and each individual needs protected private space. The team members and their space counselor could work out the possible ways their space could be arranged." http://web.archive.org/web/20150319051220/http://javatroopers.com/Peopleware.html http://web.archive.org/web/20150319051220/http://javatrooper...
- zzgo 10y ago
  > space counselor Does anyone have a "space counselor" how is not their manager? I've always taken my "space counselor" issues to my direct manager.
  - db48x 10y ago
    Their idea of a "space counselor" wouldn't work in a startup or even a small company. In a large company like Google or IBM or Microsoft then having someone who just specializes in knowing where all the buildings are, their floorplans, and who is currently using which rooms would be quite important. When you form a team (of 3-5 people, ideally) in this company you would go to them and find a spot where you could all work together. They would help you pick out furniture, design the layout, recommend putting in a couch and coffee table, etc. They would basically be the front-end UI for the entire facilities department. This would indeed be happening completely independently of your normal manager (except that your manager probably told you where to find the space counselor, made an appointment for you, etc).

dalyons 10y ago

I personally love open offices. Collaboration benefits aside, I like people and I'd go insane working in a silent solo prison every day (been there!). The meme of "open offices are terrible for everyone and it's only evil management that likes them" is bullcrap. Myself and a lot of other people I know prefer them. Guess what, people are different!

geoka9 10y ago
Just curious, do you ever need to be "in the zone" to get your work done? If you do and you're distracted, is it hard for you to get back in the zone? Is it hard to do several times an hour?

known 10y ago

Open offices are worse for programmers

christophilus 10y ago

I've been working remotely for the past 2 years or so, and am never going back. If I really need to focus, phone and Slack are both off, and I stand at my personal whiteboard and think. It's almost impossible (for me) to think without quiet and guaranteed lack of interruption.

FrancoDiaz 10y ago

If I'm interested in a position, that's one of the first things I ask about. If they're open and don't have alternative accommodations for people that despise open office, I just pass.

bambax 10y ago

I hate open offices with a passion, for reasons well explained in the article (and many others that regularly pop up here). However, many companies that have open offices enjoyed an incredible success and some even achieved world domination (Facebook). How is that even possible is what I'd really like to know.

paulryanrogers 10y ago
"However, many companies that have open offices enjoyed an incredible success and some even achieved world domination (Facebook). How is that even possible is what I'd really like to know." Many civilizations also thrived on the backs of slave labor. We don't look to slavery as the way forward today. That being said, some people prefer the social aspects of working physically close to others. Ideally companies will provide what works best for each employee. At the end of the day business is both by and for people. EDIT: Corrected typo
mixmastamyk 10y ago
The success of FB is likely due to the networking effects of its users. Also, employees likely adjust by ducking into a conference room or working at home for a few hours to focus.
brokenmachine 10y ago
Imagine how big Facebook could have been if they allowed their employees to concentrate!!

ggame 10y ago

The reduction in productivity is not a bug, it's a feature. Your boss spends a lot of time in meeting justifying why he needs a bigger headcount. Having more productive employees makes his job much harder. Colloquially it's called 'Empire Building'

lightedman 10y ago

My open office is GREAT for my health. I don't know of any other open office where you climb literal mountains.

curtis 10y ago

I've worked a couple of jobs where I was working remote but the main office was open plan. In these cases, it seemed like the open plan offices really did help communication. Of course I was only there one week out of maybe every 6, and it didn't matter that I didn't get that much regular work done when I was in the office, since I was working from home the rest of the time. I don't know if there's a reasonable compromise. You could have a team that tries to get everybody into the office one week out of every three and where most people work remote the rest of the time. I don't know how well that would work, and I don't know if it would be worth the trouble, but it seems to me like it would be better than open plan all the time or remote all the time.

ChuckMcM 10y ago

I react to the headline in that I don't think open offices are "bad" for people any more than coffee shops are. But I certainly resonate with the notion that different people have different styles. My own story was going from an office with a door at NetApp to a quad cube at Google. If there ever was a place that could afford to give everyone an office (regardless of the cost of real estate) it is Google but they wanted the socialization aspects. My response was that I became able to completely ignore everything going on around me when I was working. That was helpful for me, but perplexing for some of my coworkers who could say something to me, mere feet away, and I would not react at all because it literally hadn't actually entered my consciousness. Basically I'm at the opposite end of the spectrum from the person who sits there and tracks all 6 to 10 conversations going on around them in real time. I find I can do that if I concentrate on it, but processing so much information which is irrelevant to what I'm trying to get done really feels like a waste.

gdubs 10y ago

Anyone wanting to dig deeper into some of this might be interested in reading Susan Cain's "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking". [1] It was a paradigm shifting book for me, made me understand some people in my life in profoundly new ways, and helped me discover stuff about my own personality. It's particularly interesting to think about introversion / extroversion in terms of managing energy levels. 1: https://www.amazon.com/Quiet-Power-Introverts-World-Talking/dp/0307352153 https://www.amazon.com/Quiet-Power-Introverts-World-Talking/...

brokenmachine 10y ago
I will check out the book, but I don't know how it could help someone trapped in a distracting open office hell. Maybe it'd help the homicidal thoughts go away.

donarb 10y ago

Joel Spoksky wrote about this multiple times on his blog, here's one of his first over 10 years ago. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/09/24/bionic-office/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/09/24/bionic-office/

sssilver 10y ago

I do my best work after everyone has left and the floor is completely empty. I hate distractions, and my brain is wired in a way where it processes every word spoken by a human to somehow be more important than abstract thoughts about an engineering problem. I wish I had a quiet room with blank walls void of decorations, and sound isolation. I'd be so much more productive. But alas, that is not hip.

blowski 10y ago
I think there's more to open plan offices than fashion. They are cheaper - you can pack a lot more people into the same place. If they're all juniors that's great. As you start hiring more seniors do you give each of them an office? That changes office culture because now everyone wants an office to feel important. Having worked in a few places hat went from 5-6 staff to more than a 100, I've seen how difficult these transitions can be. I agree that senior staff tend to be more productive in their own offices with fewer distractions, though.
- tinalumfoil 10y ago
  If a senior dev cost 100k and an office increases productivity by 10% the office has to cost 10k for it not to be worth it. While I don't doubt

eicnix 10y ago

I like the solution from Microsoft for this problem in their new Munich building: They have seperatr spaces for intense work without any distraction, areas like the most common open offices and areas for group work and meetings. Each area is its own floor and your are free to move between the areas.

andrei_says_ 10y ago

Anyone working in an open office knows about the noise, distractions, interruption, attention fragmentation and unnerving lack of privacy. Unfortunately, the office layout is determined by budget numbers related to office layout only (not including "cost of lost productivity"), and by people who more often than not do have their own offices.

lacampbell 10y ago

The only times I've been in an open office, it's been with people who were answering phone calls all day. Wasn't a fan and my ears got sore form having headphones on all the time. I feel like sharing an office with a small handful of other devs could work. But not with people who answer phones all day.

OJFord 10y ago

Amusing to think that this was probably* written from an open office. *I used to commute through the BBC's White City campus; visible through large glass windows were open offices everywhere. (They were essentially open even to the outside!)

dajohnson89 10y ago

Frustration with open offices is perfectly understandable -- I work in an open office and overall I would prefer to have my own office (most people would). But the outrage about the trend towards open offices reeks of entitlement. Think of the assembly line worker -- he/she has even less privacy. And don't tell me that working on an assembly line isn't mentally exhausting. Try one shift and let me know how that goes. Think cook in a shady restaurant, think an illegal immigrant in San Antonio in July installing a new roof on somebody's McMansion. THOSE are difficult working environments.

femiagbabiaka 10y ago
yes.. they deserve dignity on the job too. we can have both, no need to choose
paulryanrogers 10y ago
"Think of the assembly line worker..." While I'm grateful to service workers who must be on-site because of the nature of their work, there is a case to be made that some workers are more productive and happy private settings. And if the overall costs are similar then why don't information workers have a choice?
jrs235 10y ago
I don't think the complaint is about difficult working environments but rather non-conducive working environments for knowledge workers. Programmers need the ability to focus and minimal distractions in order to keep the conceptual and logical model of their work loaded in their head. Anything that causes a momentary data dump and reboot is detrimental to their core function. A hot roof in the summer for a roofer is expected. If that roofer has to think about how to solve a [non standard] roofing issue while on the roof while thinking about the entire building's (complex) roof and how his solution will affect the other roofs he works on then I understand the complaint. And he should get down off the roof and sit someplace where he can reason and think out a proper solution with minimal distractions and external/physical stress.

blunte 10y ago

I knew this from years of experience, and I provided ample evidence (and research) on this problem to executive management at companies I worked for. The sad fact is that PHBs, even well-intentioned ones, simply do not know what it's like to create multi-layer models in your mind and then develop from those models. They hear the marketing guys bullshitting all day about clients and thing that _that_ is work, progress. In the end, it just means that the backbone of the modern company functions more poorly, and that revenues are potentially lower than they could be. Maybe the lower revenues are offset by the lower office rent costs; maybe the only real loss is the happiness (and loyalty/tenure) of the thought workers of the company. This leads to another problem that we all suffer (via bugs, hacks, viruses, and otherwise lack of software quality) - that people running companies really have no concept what software is. I see no solution to this problem, since ultimately even the companies started by geeks get absorbed by bigger companies run by PHBs...

devilirium 10y ago

I think a lot of us needs to think about how fortunate we are working ona field that is our passion and not standing in a pile of shit and sweat all day long. Having open offices that makes communication easier means that you could communicate your need for no distruption or talk with your mates who are loafing around and brainstorm about future problems. If you have the brain capacity to focus on ambient noises, then I guess you are not focusing enough and just whining about your current situation instead of doing what matters. I've seen workers who couldn't hear anything since they were too immersed. I myself use earphones when I want to get into it and close out the entire world. If you think that it's a real issue and don't see the value of savings and closeness to each other, then maybe it's time to quit your current workplace.

Corrado 10y ago

OK, I think the perfect solution would be a huge open area plus some other specialty areas (conference rooms, kitchen, bathrooms, etc.) The difference is an unending supply of something like Everblocks[0]. That way, management could have all the space they wanted but you could still build your own personal domain. And with different types of blocks (switches, display, whiteboard, etc.) you could customize your area with exactly how you, or your team, wants it. Heck, you could even change it every week if you wanted to. :) [0] http://www.everblocksystems.com/ http://www.everblocksystems.com/

douchelord 10y ago

This article made me laugh as ive often worked really late at BBCs very own broadcasting house because it's far too loud and distracting for me during the day.