7 ms·

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 r

by 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.
  - quanticle 10y ago
    From the grandparent post: We stayed up very late, listened to loud music To me, the two are related. You stay late because there's loud music playing. If it was quiet, you'd get your work done and go home at a reasonable hour. Instead, you have to deal with loud music, co-workers playing foosball, people coming and going behind you, and as a result, you don't end up leaving until 9pm or later.
    - jMyles 10y ago
      > To me, the two are related. You stay late because there's loud music playing. That's a presumption, unstated in the comment, and it is incorrect. I have worked at... I don't know how many co-working and incubator spaces. And of those, some had a very socially lubricated environment at night that sometimes included loud- (or even live-) music. But never have I experienced loud music during the day except on some special occasion (ie holiday party or something).
- notahacker 10y ago
  > No offense, but I would suggest that you are highly atypical as a programmer. This is probably true, but whenever this subject comes up on HN people tend to forget that programmers tend to be fairly atypical people. Many people - mostly not programmers - find that a number of people around them with a shared purpose and even background noise actually helps them concentrate, and find casual conversations with people on adjacent desks motivating as well as useful for conveying work-relevant information. A working environment designed to the preferences of people who like listening to loud techno music is certainly an extreme way of catering for those tastes, but separate offices and silence is also an extreme. And the pervasive myth that the only reason anyone would choose to work in an open plan environment is cost-efficiency is rather dented by the number of self-employed people paying (and commuting) to work in shared office space when they could have had more peace and quiet staying at home.
  - cmdrfred 10y ago
    Two questions. > the only reason anyone would choose to work in an open plan environment is cost-efficiency is rather dented by the number of self-employed people paying (and commuting) to work in shared office space Does anyone have numbers for this. I doubt the majority of work from home employees use such a service. >more peace and quiet staying at home. Is this also true? Homes with children are rather loud places for example.
    - notahacker 10y ago
      The size and recent growth of the multibillion dollar coworking industry is a pretty good indication that the number of people wanting a big open shared workspace is pretty high. I mean, you've got a survey here finding over a million people using coworking spaces, of which more than half are single founders or freelancers. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/64387613/Coworking%20Survey%20Results/Slides%202016%20Coworking%20Forecast.pdf https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/64387613/Coworking%20Sur... I'm pretty sure most of them aren't there mainly to avoid noisy kids.
      - tristor 10y ago
white-flame 10y ago
If you're on some brand new project in a brand new space, it can be all exciting and you can rush forth into great productivity... in the short term. For longer term stability after the rush has worn off, and when individualized tasks branch off from what others are doing, having more physical isolation certainly is beneficial.
OpenDrapery 10y ago
The things that I enjoyed at 25 years old are not the same things that I enjoy at 40. Well, some are. But not all.
- AznHisoka 10y ago
  What things do you still enjoy?
- Arizhel 10y ago
  That's weird; the things I enjoyed at 25 are almost all the same things I enjoy now at 40. The only thing that's really different is that I eat better food now and I've cut out the sodas and junk food, and I'm more diligent about getting exercise (mainly on the weekends). I also seem to do better with dating for some reason than I did at 25. But my interests are pretty much all the same, from musical tastes to literary interests to hobbies (electronics, programming), though perhaps a little better developed.
kbart 10y ago
"We stayed up very late, listened to loud music, and did some of the best work of our lives." No offense, but that sounds like some kind of boys club, not professional working environment. Staying up late = no respect for private life (unless you've signed for it), loud arbitrary music = forced culture implications (why do I have to listen to the music you like?). Yes, probably our work place expectations differs immensely.
- peatmoss 10y ago
  "Hey let's all take turns picking the music that gets blasted. I choose Arnold Schoenberg." 5 minutes later... "Everyone, we've decided that music is a personal taste, and that to maintain a professional working environment, we will not be playing music over the sound system."
  - GotAnyMegadeth 10y ago
    I've made an app that fairly regulates this! http://playlistful.com/about http://playlistful.com/about Sorry, slightly unrelated to the discussion, but it could be used for open offices :-) Part of the inspiration was when I was taking it in turns I'd have to sit through loads of abrasive pop music and then when a beautiful death metal song came on everyone would complain and skip it.
    - zck 10y ago
      Why is the solution "everyone has to listen to some music that makes them not able to work"?
  - kbart 10y ago
    I doubt that many of my co-workers would endure Dark Funeral or the like that gets blasted at my home. It's for their sake I insist on music on headphones only.
  - chris_7 10y ago
    In practice what I've seen is a "music clique" develops. If I went to put on some ambient Eno or whatever (because it's the closest to "no music"), it would probably be weird because I'm not in the music clique. I'm not really sure how you get to be in it, it would feel weird to me to put on music, effectively saying "everyone else, you must listen to what I choose". Just so rude, I feel.
audunw 10y ago
There's plenty of people who like open plan. I think the main issue people have is the idea that open plan is superior, and how companies have adopted the plan without any thought or scrutiny (coming up with all sorts of bullshit reason, to rationalize a decision which is really about trying to save money) For a startup or small company doing mostly plain development, and especially if it's a tight-nit group that stay up late and have fun like you describe, it's probably great. For engineers working 9-17, with a family-life, with complex multi-faceted work.. it can be a nightmare. I prefer sharing an office with 1-3 others. You still get the social interaction, but without too much distraction. It's a pretty good compromise.
- bogomipz 10y ago
  >"coming up with all sorts of bullshit reason, to rationalize a decision which is really about trying to save money" Yep, the general line is "it fosters openness and collaboration"
- jMyles 10y ago
  I hear you. I prefer floor plans that cater to the mood of the team, rather than setting out some one-size-fits-all-every-day notion of productivity. Thus, it's nice to have open space, but also cozy, comfortable environs for solo- or small-team work. W+K in Portland accomplishes this masterfully.
  - chris_7 10y ago
    Have you considered that the team's mood might not actually be as good as you think that it is? It's generally inadvisable to bring up environmental things that are making you unhappy at work, it could mark you as "not a team player" or "not a culture fit". People might be keeping it internal and just waiting it out until they can leave (I'm doing this now, actually).
    - wccrawford 10y ago
      I've worked with quite a few programmers who absolutely wouldn't bring up things that put others in a bad light. I worked with a Chinese guy that routinely put up with many of the others making jokes (all nice, IIRC) about his ethnicity. I noticed that he didn't look happy about it, and tried to help, but he refused to do anything about it. He eventually stressed out and quit, and I can't help but think that was at least part of the reason. Likewise, I've seen it for noise, conversation, and even once someone finally snapped and complained about a co-worker would trim their finger and toe nails at work in his cubicle. He did it for quite a while before someone finally got fed up enough to say something. He shrugged it off and kept doing it, and nobody did anything about it. So yeah, I agree that many people simply won't do anything about the things that make them unhappy.
bryanlarsen 10y ago
How big were the companies you worked for? Some studies show that the benefits of open offices exceed the drawbacks for small companies.
unixhero 10y ago
Yeah. But then you like your colleagues. You don't have stress and you don't have a management layer stressing you
curun1r 10y ago
I'm somewhere in between. I prefer a shared office setup where offices are shared among 3-5 people. Ideally these are team members or people with a similar job function to mine. This is the best setup that I've found for balancing the social isolation of private offices/WFH with the distractions of an open office setup.
user5994461 10y ago
> We stayed up very late, listened to loud music, and did some of the best work of our lives. You must be kidding. What did the other 100 people in the office said when you put up the sound???
- jMyles 10y ago
  Well, after midnight, 75-90% of the people leave, typically. It's much easier to get 6-8 people to agree and enjoy on music than 60-80 people. :-)
brian_cunnie 10y ago
I prefer the open plan — I love it! In my 30+ years of corporate life, I have the smallest working space ever (36 inches of desk space), and I think it's awesome. I work at a place that does pair programming, so I'm always engaged in some form of communication. I worked from home on occasion, but I didn't like it: I got lonesome, and was easily distracted and my productivity suffered. Sometimes it gets really loud. Yesterday my pair said, "It's too loud; I can't think." I hadn't noticed. I'm not an epidemiologist — I don't know whether working closely makes people sick more often — but I do know that in the last 5 years I only took 3 hours of sick leave when I didn't feel good one afternoon. Other than that I've been has healthy as ever. I'm not a one-size-fits-all guy — I realize that an open plan doesn't work for many people (one of my talented peers is now working at Uber partly for that reason), but for some of us it's a godsend.

by jMyles 10y ago

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.
- quanticle 10y ago
  From the grandparent post: We stayed up very late, listened to loud music To me, the two are related. You stay late because there's loud music playing. If it was quiet, you'd get your work done and go home at a reasonable hour. Instead, you have to deal with loud music, co-workers playing foosball, people coming and going behind you, and as a result, you don't end up leaving until 9pm or later.
  - jMyles 10y ago
    > To me, the two are related. You stay late because there's loud music playing. That's a presumption, unstated in the comment, and it is incorrect. I have worked at... I don't know how many co-working and incubator spaces. And of those, some had a very socially lubricated environment at night that sometimes included loud- (or even live-) music. But never have I experienced loud music during the day except on some special occasion (ie holiday party or something).
notahacker 10y ago
> No offense, but I would suggest that you are highly atypical as a programmer. This is probably true, but whenever this subject comes up on HN people tend to forget that programmers tend to be fairly atypical people. Many people - mostly not programmers - find that a number of people around them with a shared purpose and even background noise actually helps them concentrate, and find casual conversations with people on adjacent desks motivating as well as useful for conveying work-relevant information. A working environment designed to the preferences of people who like listening to loud techno music is certainly an extreme way of catering for those tastes, but separate offices and silence is also an extreme. And the pervasive myth that the only reason anyone would choose to work in an open plan environment is cost-efficiency is rather dented by the number of self-employed people paying (and commuting) to work in shared office space when they could have had more peace and quiet staying at home.
- cmdrfred 10y ago
  Two questions. > the only reason anyone would choose to work in an open plan environment is cost-efficiency is rather dented by the number of self-employed people paying (and commuting) to work in shared office space Does anyone have numbers for this. I doubt the majority of work from home employees use such a service. >more peace and quiet staying at home. Is this also true? Homes with children are rather loud places for example.
  - notahacker 10y ago
    The size and recent growth of the multibillion dollar coworking industry is a pretty good indication that the number of people wanting a big open shared workspace is pretty high. I mean, you've got a survey here finding over a million people using coworking spaces, of which more than half are single founders or freelancers. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/64387613/Coworking%20Survey%20Results/Slides%202016%20Coworking%20Forecast.pdf https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/64387613/Coworking%20Sur... I'm pretty sure most of them aren't there mainly to avoid noisy kids.
    - tristor 10y ago

white-flame 10y ago

If you're on some brand new project in a brand new space, it can be all exciting and you can rush forth into great productivity... in the short term. For longer term stability after the rush has worn off, and when individualized tasks branch off from what others are doing, having more physical isolation certainly is beneficial.

OpenDrapery 10y ago

The things that I enjoyed at 25 years old are not the same things that I enjoy at 40. Well, some are. But not all.

AznHisoka 10y ago
What things do you still enjoy?
Arizhel 10y ago
That's weird; the things I enjoyed at 25 are almost all the same things I enjoy now at 40. The only thing that's really different is that I eat better food now and I've cut out the sodas and junk food, and I'm more diligent about getting exercise (mainly on the weekends). I also seem to do better with dating for some reason than I did at 25. But my interests are pretty much all the same, from musical tastes to literary interests to hobbies (electronics, programming), though perhaps a little better developed.

kbart 10y ago

"We stayed up very late, listened to loud music, and did some of the best work of our lives." No offense, but that sounds like some kind of boys club, not professional working environment. Staying up late = no respect for private life (unless you've signed for it), loud arbitrary music = forced culture implications (why do I have to listen to the music you like?). Yes, probably our work place expectations differs immensely.

peatmoss 10y ago
"Hey let's all take turns picking the music that gets blasted. I choose Arnold Schoenberg." 5 minutes later... "Everyone, we've decided that music is a personal taste, and that to maintain a professional working environment, we will not be playing music over the sound system."
- GotAnyMegadeth 10y ago
  I've made an app that fairly regulates this! http://playlistful.com/about http://playlistful.com/about Sorry, slightly unrelated to the discussion, but it could be used for open offices :-) Part of the inspiration was when I was taking it in turns I'd have to sit through loads of abrasive pop music and then when a beautiful death metal song came on everyone would complain and skip it.
  - zck 10y ago
    Why is the solution "everyone has to listen to some music that makes them not able to work"?
- kbart 10y ago
  I doubt that many of my co-workers would endure Dark Funeral or the like that gets blasted at my home. It's for their sake I insist on music on headphones only.
- chris_7 10y ago
  In practice what I've seen is a "music clique" develops. If I went to put on some ambient Eno or whatever (because it's the closest to "no music"), it would probably be weird because I'm not in the music clique. I'm not really sure how you get to be in it, it would feel weird to me to put on music, effectively saying "everyone else, you must listen to what I choose". Just so rude, I feel.

audunw 10y ago

There's plenty of people who like open plan. I think the main issue people have is the idea that open plan is superior, and how companies have adopted the plan without any thought or scrutiny (coming up with all sorts of bullshit reason, to rationalize a decision which is really about trying to save money) For a startup or small company doing mostly plain development, and especially if it's a tight-nit group that stay up late and have fun like you describe, it's probably great. For engineers working 9-17, with a family-life, with complex multi-faceted work.. it can be a nightmare. I prefer sharing an office with 1-3 others. You still get the social interaction, but without too much distraction. It's a pretty good compromise.

bogomipz 10y ago
>"coming up with all sorts of bullshit reason, to rationalize a decision which is really about trying to save money" Yep, the general line is "it fosters openness and collaboration"
jMyles 10y ago
I hear you. I prefer floor plans that cater to the mood of the team, rather than setting out some one-size-fits-all-every-day notion of productivity. Thus, it's nice to have open space, but also cozy, comfortable environs for solo- or small-team work. W+K in Portland accomplishes this masterfully.
- chris_7 10y ago
  Have you considered that the team's mood might not actually be as good as you think that it is? It's generally inadvisable to bring up environmental things that are making you unhappy at work, it could mark you as "not a team player" or "not a culture fit". People might be keeping it internal and just waiting it out until they can leave (I'm doing this now, actually).
  - wccrawford 10y ago
    I've worked with quite a few programmers who absolutely wouldn't bring up things that put others in a bad light. I worked with a Chinese guy that routinely put up with many of the others making jokes (all nice, IIRC) about his ethnicity. I noticed that he didn't look happy about it, and tried to help, but he refused to do anything about it. He eventually stressed out and quit, and I can't help but think that was at least part of the reason. Likewise, I've seen it for noise, conversation, and even once someone finally snapped and complained about a co-worker would trim their finger and toe nails at work in his cubicle. He did it for quite a while before someone finally got fed up enough to say something. He shrugged it off and kept doing it, and nobody did anything about it. So yeah, I agree that many people simply won't do anything about the things that make them unhappy.

bryanlarsen 10y ago

How big were the companies you worked for? Some studies show that the benefits of open offices exceed the drawbacks for small companies.

unixhero 10y ago

Yeah. But then you like your colleagues. You don't have stress and you don't have a management layer stressing you

curun1r 10y ago

I'm somewhere in between. I prefer a shared office setup where offices are shared among 3-5 people. Ideally these are team members or people with a similar job function to mine. This is the best setup that I've found for balancing the social isolation of private offices/WFH with the distractions of an open office setup.

user5994461 10y ago

> We stayed up very late, listened to loud music, and did some of the best work of our lives. You must be kidding. What did the other 100 people in the office said when you put up the sound???

jMyles 10y ago
Well, after midnight, 75-90% of the people leave, typically. It's much easier to get 6-8 people to agree and enjoy on music than 60-80 people. :-)

brian_cunnie 10y ago

I prefer the open plan — I love it! In my 30+ years of corporate life, I have the smallest working space ever (36 inches of desk space), and I think it's awesome. I work at a place that does pair programming, so I'm always engaged in some form of communication. I worked from home on occasion, but I didn't like it: I got lonesome, and was easily distracted and my productivity suffered. Sometimes it gets really loud. Yesterday my pair said, "It's too loud; I can't think." I hadn't noticed. I'm not an epidemiologist — I don't know whether working closely makes people sick more often — but I do know that in the last 5 years I only took 3 hours of sick leave when I didn't feel good one afternoon. Other than that I've been has healthy as ever. I'm not a one-size-fits-all guy — I realize that an open plan doesn't work for many people (one of my talented peers is now working at Uber partly for that reason), but for some of us it's a godsend.