11 ms·

Workplaces need more walls, not fewer (2014)

120 points by beedogs 10y ago

cs02rm0 10y ago
I think the open office trend might be accelerating remote working opportunities, which has to be a good thing. I don't mind going to an open office occasionally if 90% of my week is working from my own office with walls, a chair setup for me and some IT equipment that's actually had some investment.
- jon-wood 10y ago
  +1 to that. I work remotely, with a visit to the office once every two weeks, mostly spent in meetings and catching up with what the rest of the company are doing. For that sort of thing an open office is fine, just don't expect me to get any quality code written while I'm there.
  - sshagent 10y ago
    This rings so true, i had to check i hadn't written this last night. Whilst onsite on that once a fortnight visit, i can't do anything that involves real concentration. I detest open offices, but working from home has just made it worse.
    - toomuchtodo 10y ago
      Have been doing DevOps from home for almost three years now; its spoiled me. I'd never work in a traditional office setting again, open office or otherwise.
  - douche 10y ago
    I was doing a very similar schedule for about six months a year ago. Come in on Monday, do all the status meetings and email and planning work for the week, all the low-concentration, collaborative stuff, then work from home the other four days. It was probably the most productive I've ever been; unfortunately management likes having butts in seats for some reason, so it couldn't last.
- DanielBMarkham 10y ago
  Sounds cool. It looks like the core problem here is all-or-nothing thinking. On projects requiring a lot of creative thinking and multiple disciplines I like a small team all in one room working side-by-side. On projects not requiring much creative thinking but a lot of deep programming I like to be left alone. When I'm working on my business, I enjoy being in a coworking environment. Instead what gets implemented is these cafeteria-sized cattle rooms where you can't hear yourself think. Or everybody working in silos by themselves -- which over time destroys productivity, oddly enouh. It's the one-size-fits-all thinking that's the problem here, not the office furniture layout.
- pmlnr 10y ago
  I'm still stunned how badly companies believe being in an office equals to more interaction and more innovation. How could we show management how is it to use IRC, mailing lists or something like Github to collaborate?
  - cs02rm0 10y ago
    > How could we show management how is it to use IRC, mailing lists or something like Github to collaborate? I wish I knew the answer. My gut says to take someone experienced working with remote teams to run a trial, to show them the little tricks that can help make it a success. Quantifying success is often difficult even if we feel we know instinctively if it's working for us, or could be part time or with some changes. However, I've only worked for companies who had a negative attitude towards working remotely even if they half-heartedly tried it occasionally, or companies who were setup as remote-first. Traversing the gap seems to be hard.
  - throwanem 10y ago
    Wait twenty years for people who don't know to retire or die, and people who do to move up the ranks. Or find an organization that isn't so set in outdated ways. Sorry. I'd love to have a better answer, but I've been around a while and I'm not seeing one yet.
MichaelBurge 10y ago
It seems difficult to evaluate these articles. Employees want private offices, so they'll tend to view and upvote articles praising private offices. Besides biasing the likelihood of the article to occupy your attention, it could be an incentive for lower-quality news to publish them. I remember reading in Trump's Art of the Deal book that showing up on-site to regularly inspect the ongoing construction helped get the building done faster and under-budget. That doesn't mean the contractors liked having the client show up on-site every day, even if it worked. Ask yourself: If the science pointed towards sitting next to the loud sales guy, would you be as likely to upvote an article saying so? This is on the front page because people want it, not because they care about productivity. Same thing applies to remote working: Most people can't work remotely, even if they say they want to.
- pmlnr 10y ago
  > Employees want private offices Employees want a little privacy and most of the want a quiet are. It's not the same as a want of private offices. > If the science pointed towards sitting next to the loud sales guy "If". Show me the data ;) > Most people can't work remotely, even if they say they want to. That depends on the equipment you need to use. If it's a phone, a laptop, and an internet connection, you can, end of story. If you need specialized equipment it gets problematic indeed. EDIT: typo.
  - MichaelBurge 10y ago
    > That depends on the equipment you need to use. If it's a phone, a laptop, and an internet connection, you can, and of story. Have you tried to hire anyone to do remote work, even freelance work? Most people fail miserably if you don't give them structure(and being on-site is a type of structure). You can work around it by selecting for the small percentage of people who can work independently, but most people aren't in that small percentage. So success by being vigilant in selection would reinforce that it doesn't work on average. If this site was "Manager News" and everybody here was a manager, I'd be more likely to believe discussion praising allowing remote workers. As it is, I'm skeptical that people aren't believing what they want to hear. Personally, I find it quite plausible that the loud sales guy is hurting everyone's productivity. But lots of things are plausible, and it seems undisciplined to believe all the resulting discussion.
jeremysmyth 10y ago
"Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams" makes a very compelling argument on why open-plan workspaces give terrible results for knowledge workers. If you work as a team leader, manager, or senior programmer, it's absolutely a must-read. I can't recommend it more highly than that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Projects_and_Teams https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Project... https://blog.codinghorror.com/peopleware-revisited/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/peopleware-revisited/ http://new.joelonsoftware.com/navLinks/fog0000000262.html http://new.joelonsoftware.com/navLinks/fog0000000262.html
joaodlf 10y ago
I still think this is a dividing topic. I personally enjoy working in an open office. I think I would have a hard time working from home or in a singular office... I need people around me, I like being able to get up and communicate with colleagues. Yes, it can get annoying, but the pros outweigh the cons for me. This isn't the trend in tech, I have a lot of developer colleagues that would prefer to stay at home, or at the very least isolate the tech department from the rest of the company. A while ago my company moved developers into their own office. It didn't last for a long time (for a number of reasons), I saw no benefits in it and was very happy when the decision to move us back in was made.
- taneq 10y ago
  Maybe - and I know, this is going to sound crazy - maybe companies could provide a little variety and let their developers choose the working environment works best for them?
  - joaodlf 10y ago
    Small companies can't really offer that many options. Not everyone works for a large company with multiple offices, different room types, etc. The open office is a concept that saves space too. We have a large open plan office and a few extra meeting rooms people can book. If we were to start walling up the place - half our workers would have to go.
    - fsloth 10y ago
      " If we were to start walling up the place - half our workers would have to go." They would have to go to another office space? Companies move all the time. Floorspace adapts to company operations. Not the other way around - unless something is terribly broken.
      - redblacktree 10y ago
        He's saying he doesn't want to pay for more real estate, and so far his employees are putting up with it.
jasode 10y ago
As a remote worker that despises open offices, I don't believe that nodding in agreement with opinion pieces such as those by Lindsey Kaufman is helpful to the discussion about it. The 2 common cited reasons of "saves real estate costs" and "employee distrust" have become thought-stopping memes that prevents the analysis of executives who prefer working in open offices and became successful with it. I previously posted an example of Mark Zuckerberg's thinking: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13374848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13374848 Look at those old photos and then listen to him speak about his new 2015 open desk in the video. Contemplate whether he built the new open office to spy on everyone or... was it to recreate and extend the "open office" kitchen table at Harvard that let the team quickly iterate on software and get to $100 billion IPO? Would Lindsey's complaints sway him? She says: >A 2013 study found that many workers in open offices are frustrated by distractions that lead to poorer work performance. Nearly half of the surveyed workers in open offices said the lack of sound privacy was a significant problem for them and more than 30 percent complained about the lack of visual privacy. Why would Mark Z care about these surveys? Of those respondents that were dissatisfied, what did those workers who require private offices build that was great? He built a multi-billion dollar company with a cramped elbow-to-elbow open office. Opinion pieces about this topic are not convincing. Concrete business performance superior to everyone else based on private offices would be convincing.
- pmlnr 10y ago
  > Why would Mark Z care about these surveys? Of those respondents that were dissatisfied, what did those workers who require private offices build that was great? He built a multi-billion dollar company with a cramped elbow-to-elbow open office. Because companies shouldn't be planned for just a few years, while the initial excitement lasts. You'll be OK with discomfort if the benefits outweigh it, and in case of Facebook, I'm fairly certain this is what happened. When the work becomes less interesting and more traditional company like, you're toleration levels will start dropping as well. Early bird employees go and seek new challenges and the ones replacing them never experience the initial thrill only the vast, yet crowded, noisy, anti-privacy zone that is supposed to be the place to host extensive thinking.
- Joeri 10y ago
pjc50 10y ago
Even a little attention to acoustics could make the open or quasi-open office much better for workers. At the moment, you're expected to deal with this yourself by putting on headphones and overwriting the noise with music. The "modern" open-plan office in which I work is particularly bad at acoustics. The dining area has a dome, which looks nice but sounds like an echoing railway station. I avoid it because I can't make out conversations in that kind of environment. Said dining area is isolated from the rest of the office by a partial wall that does not go all the way up. All walls and ceiling surfaces are smooth and flat to maximise acoustic reflection. When we first moved in, the glass-fronted meeting rooms were echoing little boxes that were also impossible to hold conversations in, so we had to fit fabric acoustic suppressing wall hangings. Offices could do well to learn from the "modern bar vs. traditional pub" layout approach. The bar is open and loud; conversation requires either out-louding people or leaning into someone's ear. The traditional pub "snug" has wooden half-partitions into booths, lots of fabric on the seating, maybe a few wing chairs, and a twisty internal layout. The ambient volume is much quieter. An office laid out like a snug would still technically be "open" but would stop noise travelling across the office. Even just an acoustic suppressant ceiling would make a big difference.
- Chris2048 10y ago
  You are also at the mercy of where you are seated, not just wrt acoustics, but also how loud the people nearby are.
  - pjc50 10y ago
    Yes, but most adults tune themselves somewhat to the ambient level. So having a loud incoherent "murmur" from the rest of the office also makes your neighbours louder.
    - JBReefer 10y ago
      The sale guys seem to compete to be the loudest, not revert to the mean.
bonjurkes 10y ago
I am working for almost 6 years and all of my workplaces were (are) open office. But I believe there is a big difference as privacy at open office and private office. There are open offices with privacy (covers around your table) and just 10s of people sitting next to each other on a row with tiny tables. Problem with no privacy is, people tends to talk next to each other compared to open office with privacy (people use messengers more often then). This creates a lot of noise in the office which causes needing of headphones. And of course there is always some person that shouts from first to last row about some joke. If you are not giving constant smoking breaks your only breaks at work time is visiting some non-work website (facebook or news site etc.) and when you visit one of these sites, your colleagues just start eyeing up your monitor, or you get eye contact with your boss (Murphy's law). Thanks to big screens nowadays, someone can see your screen 3 rows behind you whenever you switch to not work related website. Having private office for everyone won't be possible on space wise and I believe author and other people just needs open office with covers around. Sitting at row of tables like at internet cafe is bad impact on your performance for sure (and also privacy wise). Last but not least, I should say that, because of productivity reasons (usage of personal phones, social sites etc.) is a big bs. for having open offices. As long as you do your duty on time with good quality, you should be allowed to use your personal phone or facebook or whatever. Blocking usage of these items or websites doesn't assure of better productivity.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >Having private office for everyone won't be possible on space wise and I believe author and other people just needs open office with covers around. We've regressed to worse than cubicles because it is not "possible space wise"? Considering the average salary of a programmer, it sounds totally possible space wise. Besides, how about they drop the ping pong room, the Nerf shooting range and the like first?
  - paki123 10y ago
    Honestly, what's so bad about cubicles?
  - bonjurkes 10y ago
erikbye 10y ago
The biggest mistake of any open office is putting tech people in the same room as sales, or in my case: tech people in the same room as support (phones). Way to go management.
- throwanem 10y ago
  I thought the same, but it could be worse. My team sits alongside one of the organization's helpdesks, and they're a hell of a lot less noisy than the open-plan web dev agency guys in the next suite over.
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dirtyhenry 10y ago
It's like languages in computer science, there's no "one fits all" in terms of office space organization. Some prefer open-office setups, some prefer being quiet in a private space. I actually like a mix of both. Or event of four types of workplaces: from home (no commute, no money spent on food, my vinyl record player), from an open-space (open connection with people you know), from a coffeeshop (connection with people you don't know) or from a private meeting room (private connection with people you know). We need a mix of all of those, and managers need to trust people: they know best where to work to be the most productive.
JotForm 10y ago
It's hardly possible to say that one is better than the other. Companies may opt to have both of these office types and transact the employees within according to their preferences on this matter.
xbmcuser 10y ago
Most of the open office complains and articles are anecdotal. From what I know Google is fanatical about data gathering for efficiency they probably have the data to support open work spaces otherwise they wouldn't be doing it.
- frostmatthew 10y ago
  > Most of the open office complains and articles are anecdotal. Anecdotal? There's a great New Yorker article[1] that references a number of studies. This blog post[2] links to a couple others and addresses costs/alternatives. A "study of over 40,000 survey responses collected over a decade has found that the benefits for workers are quickly outweighed by the disadvantages"[3]. Here's a Washington Post piece[4] on office furniture designers realizing (citing multiple studies) "open-plan spaces are actually lousy for workers." A TIME article[5] highlighted decades of research that associated open layouts with "greater employee stress, poorer co-worker relations and reduced satisfaction with the physical environment." [1] http://www.newyorker.com/currency-tag/the-open-office-trap http://www.newyorker.com/currency-tag/the-open-office-trap [2] http://nathanmarz.com/blog/the-inexplicable-rise-of-open-floor-plans-in-tech-companies.html http://nathanmarz.com/blog/the-inexplicable-rise-of-open-flo... [3] http://theconversation.com/open-plan-offices-attract-highest-levels-of-worker-dissatisfaction-study-18246 http://theconversation.com/open-plan-offices-attract-highest... [4] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-leadership/wp/2015/04/22/office-designers-find-open-plan-spaces-are-actually-lousy-for-workers/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-leadership/wp/2015/04... [5] http://ideas.time.com/2012/08/15/why-the-open-office-is-a-hotbed-of-stress/ http://ideas.time.com/2012/08/15/why-the-open-office-is-a-ho...
garrettrayj 10y ago
The biggest mistake I see in implementations of open office plans is work areas that are too small. The open office works best when it feels spacious and customizable, not cramped and fixed. Desks and whiteboards on wheels, choice of standing/sitting, and room for teams to self organize is fun and productive. The shoulder-to-shoulder seating at rows of fixed workstations common in off-the-shelf open plans is what's oppressive. In short, if a company is moving to an open floor plan to save on real estate, then they're doing it wrong.
karmacoda 10y ago
I've given up on my dev dept. I'm sitting in the finance dept.
padobson 10y ago
I was thinking about this the other day, and I sat down and designed an office space for a company built around paired programming. The design is focused around four-office bullpens like so: Two programmers share a 225 sqft office. Offices open into common spaces for collaboration and reception. Some sort of gatekeeper sit at a desk in the reception area, playing interference for anyone trying to interrupt programmers at work, either in their office or in a collaborative session. The offices themselves could have windows, and each bullpen would take up 1100 sqft or so. Here's a rough design of a bullpen: +---------------+----------+---------------+ office collab office +---------------+----------+---------------+ office reception office +---------------+----------+---------------+ entrance So, in a 2500 sqft space, you could provide a controlled work environment for 16 programmers.
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  I'd rather work in something like this (each char is about 4 ft high by 2 ft wide): ######@@@@####@@@@@@ # = 8'x12' office ######@@@@####@@@@@@ @ = 8'x12' office @@@@ @@@@#### #### % = 30"x6' tables (4) @@@@ %""""% #### = = wall @@@@ %%%%%% #### * = gatekeeper's desk #### @@@@ $ = 8'x14' kitchenette #### ====== @@@@ & = 8'x14' equipment #### @@@@ ^ = entry/egress &&&&&&& ** $$$$$$$ " = projection screen &&&&&&&**** $$$$$$$ ^^ That's 40'x40', but it also gives you space for the local printer, the fridge, sink, and microwave oven, and some local servers. The central area is about 16'x24', which is reasonable for 8 people, and cramped for 10. The accessible path is compliant with ADA guidelines, I think. I don't like shared offices. Outside of the basic 40'x40' pod, it would make sense for the kitchenettes to share a wet wall with bathrooms, and try to get at least one exterior window to the offices closest to the entry, like this: (each char is 10 ft high by 5 ft wide) ######## ######## # = 40'x40' office pod ######## ######## M = men's restroom (2+1) ######## ######## W = women's restroom (3) ########MMM######## . = corridor ................... ########WWW######## ######## ######## ######## ######## ######## ########
kartan 10y ago
> As an excessive water drinker, I feared my co-workers were tallying my frequent bathroom trips. At day’s end, I bid adieu to the 12 pairs of eyes I felt judging my 5:04 p.m. departure time. That's your problem then! If people is judging you for going to the bathroom or browsing Hacker News instead of your results, then what the company/employees value is the problem. People can browse internet at work, and if at the end of the year they are high performers I will give them an above average salary increase. If they are extra hours at the office, never look at Facebook but they don't perform well I will have a talk with them to see what's happening as that's not good.
- BoorishBears 10y ago
  12 eyes judging doesn't mean judging and penalizing, it means judging in a social sense. I think many people experience that where I work. When I walk past someone in our open office they tend to look at monitor with work on it even if they were just looking at something else on another one. Our management is the kind that could care less if we watched Youtube all day if we were keeping up performance, and I'm not even management (or close!) and yet people still feel a little bit of stress knowing someone is looking over their shoulder inadvertently.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- amag 10y ago
  For me, one thing is the feeling of being constantly watched (even when you're not) that's detrimental to both health (stress) and productivity. So even if I'm less likely to browse HN when in an open office (compiling!) my productivity is much lower compared to a private office. Of course this is also due to audio and visual disturbances. Interestingly one of the pros often mentioned for open office space is that it enables collaboration, I've never seen that work out in practice very well, though. At least I'm much less prone to start a discussion with someone in an open office because it will disturb everyone else who are not interested in the topic. More often than not other people will hush you and so on. So in the end an open office is detrimental to my health, happiness, productivity and (surprise) collaboration but hey I'm saving the company some thousand $$ each year, or am I?
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chiefalchemist 10y ago
To say that one size fits all is, at best, silly. A given (company) culture is the aggregation of: people hired, the environment they work in, how they are treated, etc. One person's "I'd never work there" is another's "I'd kill to work that." p.s. That said, perhaps the Washington Post is correct. The workplace should be either robots, or pseudo-enslaved humans. But Jeff isn't going to appreciate an article with that slant.
chiefalchemist 10y ago
So it's official, 2017 is the year of wall building :)
solatic 10y ago
Part of the reason why this is controversial, I think, comes down to the majority of the type of work that people are doing on a day-to-day basis. If you get to work, have a ten-minute standup, then go and try to hammer out code the vast majority of the rest of the day, then you need a default-private environment. Visual and auditory privacy, in a closed office, with multiple large monitors, correlates with success here. But if you spend most of your time bouncing ideas off each other, then the fluidity of verbal communication is much more efficient, for most people and use cases, than putting everything in writing first. With such constant change, keeping everyone in the loop is going to be at a higher priority than pure development speed. The balance is probably what kind of organization you have. Do you have a small start-up where the entire company can fit into one room? An open space (well, relative to its size) probably makes sense. Do you have a large organization where somebody writes spec and passes it to a programmer for implementation? Private offices for programmers are probably best. Do you have small feature teams where management gives feature requests to the team as a whole? Give the team its own private room, segregating them from other teams.
mindcrime 10y ago
FWIW, one of the main reasons I started Fogbeam Labs is because I want to build the company I always wanted to work at. So... if and when the day comes that we are successful enough to start hiring employees, and have a traditional office, one thing I absolutely intend to commit to is a "everyone gets a private office, with a door" policy. Now, that said... I'm starting to question the need for traditional offices in general, as technology improves our ability to work remotely. I don't know if I'd want to go for a 100% "work from home or wherever you want" policy or not, but it's not something I would unilaterally rule-out right now either. Sadly we're probably still a ways off from reaching the point where any of this will come into play. But we'll keep grinding, exactly because the world needs more companies that treat employees as people not fucking "resources". (Don't even get me started on how pissed off I get when I hear somebody refer to a person as a "resource").

120 points by beedogs 10y ago

I think the open office trend might be accelerating remote working opportunities, which has to be a good thing. I don't mind going to an open office occasionally if 90% of my week is working from my own office with walls, a chair setup for me and some IT equipment that's actually had some investment.

jon-wood 10y ago
+1 to that. I work remotely, with a visit to the office once every two weeks, mostly spent in meetings and catching up with what the rest of the company are doing. For that sort of thing an open office is fine, just don't expect me to get any quality code written while I'm there.
- sshagent 10y ago
  This rings so true, i had to check i hadn't written this last night. Whilst onsite on that once a fortnight visit, i can't do anything that involves real concentration. I detest open offices, but working from home has just made it worse.
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    Have been doing DevOps from home for almost three years now; its spoiled me. I'd never work in a traditional office setting again, open office or otherwise.
- douche 10y ago
  I was doing a very similar schedule for about six months a year ago. Come in on Monday, do all the status meetings and email and planning work for the week, all the low-concentration, collaborative stuff, then work from home the other four days. It was probably the most productive I've ever been; unfortunately management likes having butts in seats for some reason, so it couldn't last.
DanielBMarkham 10y ago
Sounds cool. It looks like the core problem here is all-or-nothing thinking. On projects requiring a lot of creative thinking and multiple disciplines I like a small team all in one room working side-by-side. On projects not requiring much creative thinking but a lot of deep programming I like to be left alone. When I'm working on my business, I enjoy being in a coworking environment. Instead what gets implemented is these cafeteria-sized cattle rooms where you can't hear yourself think. Or everybody working in silos by themselves -- which over time destroys productivity, oddly enouh. It's the one-size-fits-all thinking that's the problem here, not the office furniture layout.
pmlnr 10y ago
I'm still stunned how badly companies believe being in an office equals to more interaction and more innovation. How could we show management how is it to use IRC, mailing lists or something like Github to collaborate?
- cs02rm0 10y ago
  > How could we show management how is it to use IRC, mailing lists or something like Github to collaborate? I wish I knew the answer. My gut says to take someone experienced working with remote teams to run a trial, to show them the little tricks that can help make it a success. Quantifying success is often difficult even if we feel we know instinctively if it's working for us, or could be part time or with some changes. However, I've only worked for companies who had a negative attitude towards working remotely even if they half-heartedly tried it occasionally, or companies who were setup as remote-first. Traversing the gap seems to be hard.
- throwanem 10y ago
  Wait twenty years for people who don't know to retire or die, and people who do to move up the ranks. Or find an organization that isn't so set in outdated ways. Sorry. I'd love to have a better answer, but I've been around a while and I'm not seeing one yet.

MichaelBurge 10y ago

It seems difficult to evaluate these articles. Employees want private offices, so they'll tend to view and upvote articles praising private offices. Besides biasing the likelihood of the article to occupy your attention, it could be an incentive for lower-quality news to publish them. I remember reading in Trump's Art of the Deal book that showing up on-site to regularly inspect the ongoing construction helped get the building done faster and under-budget. That doesn't mean the contractors liked having the client show up on-site every day, even if it worked. Ask yourself: If the science pointed towards sitting next to the loud sales guy, would you be as likely to upvote an article saying so? This is on the front page because people want it, not because they care about productivity. Same thing applies to remote working: Most people can't work remotely, even if they say they want to.

pmlnr 10y ago
> Employees want private offices Employees want a little privacy and most of the want a quiet are. It's not the same as a want of private offices. > If the science pointed towards sitting next to the loud sales guy "If". Show me the data ;) > Most people can't work remotely, even if they say they want to. That depends on the equipment you need to use. If it's a phone, a laptop, and an internet connection, you can, end of story. If you need specialized equipment it gets problematic indeed. EDIT: typo.
- MichaelBurge 10y ago
  > That depends on the equipment you need to use. If it's a phone, a laptop, and an internet connection, you can, and of story. Have you tried to hire anyone to do remote work, even freelance work? Most people fail miserably if you don't give them structure(and being on-site is a type of structure). You can work around it by selecting for the small percentage of people who can work independently, but most people aren't in that small percentage. So success by being vigilant in selection would reinforce that it doesn't work on average. If this site was "Manager News" and everybody here was a manager, I'd be more likely to believe discussion praising allowing remote workers. As it is, I'm skeptical that people aren't believing what they want to hear. Personally, I find it quite plausible that the loud sales guy is hurting everyone's productivity. But lots of things are plausible, and it seems undisciplined to believe all the resulting discussion.

jeremysmyth 10y ago

"Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams" makes a very compelling argument on why open-plan workspaces give terrible results for knowledge workers. If you work as a team leader, manager, or senior programmer, it's absolutely a must-read. I can't recommend it more highly than that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Projects_and_Teams https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Project... https://blog.codinghorror.com/peopleware-revisited/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/peopleware-revisited/ http://new.joelonsoftware.com/navLinks/fog0000000262.html http://new.joelonsoftware.com/navLinks/fog0000000262.html

joaodlf 10y ago

I still think this is a dividing topic. I personally enjoy working in an open office. I think I would have a hard time working from home or in a singular office... I need people around me, I like being able to get up and communicate with colleagues. Yes, it can get annoying, but the pros outweigh the cons for me. This isn't the trend in tech, I have a lot of developer colleagues that would prefer to stay at home, or at the very least isolate the tech department from the rest of the company. A while ago my company moved developers into their own office. It didn't last for a long time (for a number of reasons), I saw no benefits in it and was very happy when the decision to move us back in was made.

taneq 10y ago
Maybe - and I know, this is going to sound crazy - maybe companies could provide a little variety and let their developers choose the working environment works best for them?
- joaodlf 10y ago
  Small companies can't really offer that many options. Not everyone works for a large company with multiple offices, different room types, etc. The open office is a concept that saves space too. We have a large open plan office and a few extra meeting rooms people can book. If we were to start walling up the place - half our workers would have to go.
  - fsloth 10y ago
    " If we were to start walling up the place - half our workers would have to go." They would have to go to another office space? Companies move all the time. Floorspace adapts to company operations. Not the other way around - unless something is terribly broken.
    - redblacktree 10y ago
      He's saying he doesn't want to pay for more real estate, and so far his employees are putting up with it.

jasode 10y ago

As a remote worker that despises open offices, I don't believe that nodding in agreement with opinion pieces such as those by Lindsey Kaufman is helpful to the discussion about it. The 2 common cited reasons of "saves real estate costs" and "employee distrust" have become thought-stopping memes that prevents the analysis of executives who prefer working in open offices and became successful with it. I previously posted an example of Mark Zuckerberg's thinking: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13374848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13374848 Look at those old photos and then listen to him speak about his new 2015 open desk in the video. Contemplate whether he built the new open office to spy on everyone or... was it to recreate and extend the "open office" kitchen table at Harvard that let the team quickly iterate on software and get to $100 billion IPO? Would Lindsey's complaints sway him? She says: >A 2013 study found that many workers in open offices are frustrated by distractions that lead to poorer work performance. Nearly half of the surveyed workers in open offices said the lack of sound privacy was a significant problem for them and more than 30 percent complained about the lack of visual privacy. Why would Mark Z care about these surveys? Of those respondents that were dissatisfied, what did those workers who require private offices build that was great? He built a multi-billion dollar company with a cramped elbow-to-elbow open office. Opinion pieces about this topic are not convincing. Concrete business performance superior to everyone else based on private offices would be convincing.

pmlnr 10y ago
> Why would Mark Z care about these surveys? Of those respondents that were dissatisfied, what did those workers who require private offices build that was great? He built a multi-billion dollar company with a cramped elbow-to-elbow open office. Because companies shouldn't be planned for just a few years, while the initial excitement lasts. You'll be OK with discomfort if the benefits outweigh it, and in case of Facebook, I'm fairly certain this is what happened. When the work becomes less interesting and more traditional company like, you're toleration levels will start dropping as well. Early bird employees go and seek new challenges and the ones replacing them never experience the initial thrill only the vast, yet crowded, noisy, anti-privacy zone that is supposed to be the place to host extensive thinking.
Joeri 10y ago

pjc50 10y ago

Even a little attention to acoustics could make the open or quasi-open office much better for workers. At the moment, you're expected to deal with this yourself by putting on headphones and overwriting the noise with music. The "modern" open-plan office in which I work is particularly bad at acoustics. The dining area has a dome, which looks nice but sounds like an echoing railway station. I avoid it because I can't make out conversations in that kind of environment. Said dining area is isolated from the rest of the office by a partial wall that does not go all the way up. All walls and ceiling surfaces are smooth and flat to maximise acoustic reflection. When we first moved in, the glass-fronted meeting rooms were echoing little boxes that were also impossible to hold conversations in, so we had to fit fabric acoustic suppressing wall hangings. Offices could do well to learn from the "modern bar vs. traditional pub" layout approach. The bar is open and loud; conversation requires either out-louding people or leaning into someone's ear. The traditional pub "snug" has wooden half-partitions into booths, lots of fabric on the seating, maybe a few wing chairs, and a twisty internal layout. The ambient volume is much quieter. An office laid out like a snug would still technically be "open" but would stop noise travelling across the office. Even just an acoustic suppressant ceiling would make a big difference.

Chris2048 10y ago
You are also at the mercy of where you are seated, not just wrt acoustics, but also how loud the people nearby are.
- pjc50 10y ago
  Yes, but most adults tune themselves somewhat to the ambient level. So having a loud incoherent "murmur" from the rest of the office also makes your neighbours louder.
  - JBReefer 10y ago
    The sale guys seem to compete to be the loudest, not revert to the mean.

bonjurkes 10y ago

I am working for almost 6 years and all of my workplaces were (are) open office. But I believe there is a big difference as privacy at open office and private office. There are open offices with privacy (covers around your table) and just 10s of people sitting next to each other on a row with tiny tables. Problem with no privacy is, people tends to talk next to each other compared to open office with privacy (people use messengers more often then). This creates a lot of noise in the office which causes needing of headphones. And of course there is always some person that shouts from first to last row about some joke. If you are not giving constant smoking breaks your only breaks at work time is visiting some non-work website (facebook or news site etc.) and when you visit one of these sites, your colleagues just start eyeing up your monitor, or you get eye contact with your boss (Murphy's law). Thanks to big screens nowadays, someone can see your screen 3 rows behind you whenever you switch to not work related website. Having private office for everyone won't be possible on space wise and I believe author and other people just needs open office with covers around. Sitting at row of tables like at internet cafe is bad impact on your performance for sure (and also privacy wise). Last but not least, I should say that, because of productivity reasons (usage of personal phones, social sites etc.) is a big bs. for having open offices. As long as you do your duty on time with good quality, you should be allowed to use your personal phone or facebook or whatever. Blocking usage of these items or websites doesn't assure of better productivity.

coldtea 10y ago
>Having private office for everyone won't be possible on space wise and I believe author and other people just needs open office with covers around. We've regressed to worse than cubicles because it is not "possible space wise"? Considering the average salary of a programmer, it sounds totally possible space wise. Besides, how about they drop the ping pong room, the Nerf shooting range and the like first?
- paki123 10y ago
  Honestly, what's so bad about cubicles?
- bonjurkes 10y ago

erikbye 10y ago

The biggest mistake of any open office is putting tech people in the same room as sales, or in my case: tech people in the same room as support (phones). Way to go management.

throwanem 10y ago
I thought the same, but it could be worse. My team sits alongside one of the organization's helpdesks, and they're a hell of a lot less noisy than the open-plan web dev agency guys in the next suite over.

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dirtyhenry 10y ago

It's like languages in computer science, there's no "one fits all" in terms of office space organization. Some prefer open-office setups, some prefer being quiet in a private space. I actually like a mix of both. Or event of four types of workplaces: from home (no commute, no money spent on food, my vinyl record player), from an open-space (open connection with people you know), from a coffeeshop (connection with people you don't know) or from a private meeting room (private connection with people you know). We need a mix of all of those, and managers need to trust people: they know best where to work to be the most productive.

JotForm 10y ago

It's hardly possible to say that one is better than the other. Companies may opt to have both of these office types and transact the employees within according to their preferences on this matter.

xbmcuser 10y ago

Most of the open office complains and articles are anecdotal. From what I know Google is fanatical about data gathering for efficiency they probably have the data to support open work spaces otherwise they wouldn't be doing it.

frostmatthew 10y ago
> Most of the open office complains and articles are anecdotal. Anecdotal? There's a great New Yorker article[1] that references a number of studies. This blog post[2] links to a couple others and addresses costs/alternatives. A "study of over 40,000 survey responses collected over a decade has found that the benefits for workers are quickly outweighed by the disadvantages"[3]. Here's a Washington Post piece[4] on office furniture designers realizing (citing multiple studies) "open-plan spaces are actually lousy for workers." A TIME article[5] highlighted decades of research that associated open layouts with "greater employee stress, poorer co-worker relations and reduced satisfaction with the physical environment." [1] http://www.newyorker.com/currency-tag/the-open-office-trap http://www.newyorker.com/currency-tag/the-open-office-trap [2] http://nathanmarz.com/blog/the-inexplicable-rise-of-open-floor-plans-in-tech-companies.html http://nathanmarz.com/blog/the-inexplicable-rise-of-open-flo... [3] http://theconversation.com/open-plan-offices-attract-highest-levels-of-worker-dissatisfaction-study-18246 http://theconversation.com/open-plan-offices-attract-highest... [4] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-leadership/wp/2015/04/22/office-designers-find-open-plan-spaces-are-actually-lousy-for-workers/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-leadership/wp/2015/04... [5] http://ideas.time.com/2012/08/15/why-the-open-office-is-a-hotbed-of-stress/ http://ideas.time.com/2012/08/15/why-the-open-office-is-a-ho...

garrettrayj 10y ago

The biggest mistake I see in implementations of open office plans is work areas that are too small. The open office works best when it feels spacious and customizable, not cramped and fixed. Desks and whiteboards on wheels, choice of standing/sitting, and room for teams to self organize is fun and productive. The shoulder-to-shoulder seating at rows of fixed workstations common in off-the-shelf open plans is what's oppressive. In short, if a company is moving to an open floor plan to save on real estate, then they're doing it wrong.

karmacoda 10y ago

I've given up on my dev dept. I'm sitting in the finance dept.

padobson 10y ago

I was thinking about this the other day, and I sat down and designed an office space for a company built around paired programming. The design is focused around four-office bullpens like so: Two programmers share a 225 sqft office. Offices open into common spaces for collaboration and reception. Some sort of gatekeeper sit at a desk in the reception area, playing interference for anyone trying to interrupt programmers at work, either in their office or in a collaborative session. The offices themselves could have windows, and each bullpen would take up 1100 sqft or so. Here's a rough design of a bullpen: +---------------+----------+---------------+ office collab office +---------------+----------+---------------+ office reception office +---------------+----------+---------------+ entrance So, in a 2500 sqft space, you could provide a controlled work environment for 16 programmers.

logfromblammo 10y ago
I'd rather work in something like this (each char is about 4 ft high by 2 ft wide): ######@@@@####@@@@@@ # = 8'x12' office ######@@@@####@@@@@@ @ = 8'x12' office @@@@ @@@@#### #### % = 30"x6' tables (4) @@@@ %""""% #### = = wall @@@@ %%%%%% #### * = gatekeeper's desk #### @@@@ $ = 8'x14' kitchenette #### ====== @@@@ & = 8'x14' equipment #### @@@@ ^ = entry/egress &&&&&&& ** $$$$$$$ " = projection screen &&&&&&&**** $$$$$$$ ^^ That's 40'x40', but it also gives you space for the local printer, the fridge, sink, and microwave oven, and some local servers. The central area is about 16'x24', which is reasonable for 8 people, and cramped for 10. The accessible path is compliant with ADA guidelines, I think. I don't like shared offices. Outside of the basic 40'x40' pod, it would make sense for the kitchenettes to share a wet wall with bathrooms, and try to get at least one exterior window to the offices closest to the entry, like this: (each char is 10 ft high by 5 ft wide) ######## ######## # = 40'x40' office pod ######## ######## M = men's restroom (2+1) ######## ######## W = women's restroom (3) ########MMM######## . = corridor ................... ########WWW######## ######## ######## ######## ######## ######## ########

kartan 10y ago

> As an excessive water drinker, I feared my co-workers were tallying my frequent bathroom trips. At day’s end, I bid adieu to the 12 pairs of eyes I felt judging my 5:04 p.m. departure time. That's your problem then! If people is judging you for going to the bathroom or browsing Hacker News instead of your results, then what the company/employees value is the problem. People can browse internet at work, and if at the end of the year they are high performers I will give them an above average salary increase. If they are extra hours at the office, never look at Facebook but they don't perform well I will have a talk with them to see what's happening as that's not good.

BoorishBears 10y ago
12 eyes judging doesn't mean judging and penalizing, it means judging in a social sense. I think many people experience that where I work. When I walk past someone in our open office they tend to look at monitor with work on it even if they were just looking at something else on another one. Our management is the kind that could care less if we watched Youtube all day if we were keeping up performance, and I'm not even management (or close!) and yet people still feel a little bit of stress knowing someone is looking over their shoulder inadvertently.
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amag 10y ago
For me, one thing is the feeling of being constantly watched (even when you're not) that's detrimental to both health (stress) and productivity. So even if I'm less likely to browse HN when in an open office (compiling!) my productivity is much lower compared to a private office. Of course this is also due to audio and visual disturbances. Interestingly one of the pros often mentioned for open office space is that it enables collaboration, I've never seen that work out in practice very well, though. At least I'm much less prone to start a discussion with someone in an open office because it will disturb everyone else who are not interested in the topic. More often than not other people will hush you and so on. So in the end an open office is detrimental to my health, happiness, productivity and (surprise) collaboration but hey I'm saving the company some thousand $$ each year, or am I?

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chiefalchemist 10y ago

To say that one size fits all is, at best, silly. A given (company) culture is the aggregation of: people hired, the environment they work in, how they are treated, etc. One person's "I'd never work there" is another's "I'd kill to work that." p.s. That said, perhaps the Washington Post is correct. The workplace should be either robots, or pseudo-enslaved humans. But Jeff isn't going to appreciate an article with that slant.

chiefalchemist 10y ago

So it's official, 2017 is the year of wall building :)

solatic 10y ago

Part of the reason why this is controversial, I think, comes down to the majority of the type of work that people are doing on a day-to-day basis. If you get to work, have a ten-minute standup, then go and try to hammer out code the vast majority of the rest of the day, then you need a default-private environment. Visual and auditory privacy, in a closed office, with multiple large monitors, correlates with success here. But if you spend most of your time bouncing ideas off each other, then the fluidity of verbal communication is much more efficient, for most people and use cases, than putting everything in writing first. With such constant change, keeping everyone in the loop is going to be at a higher priority than pure development speed. The balance is probably what kind of organization you have. Do you have a small start-up where the entire company can fit into one room? An open space (well, relative to its size) probably makes sense. Do you have a large organization where somebody writes spec and passes it to a programmer for implementation? Private offices for programmers are probably best. Do you have small feature teams where management gives feature requests to the team as a whole? Give the team its own private room, segregating them from other teams.

mindcrime 10y ago

FWIW, one of the main reasons I started Fogbeam Labs is because I want to build the company I always wanted to work at. So... if and when the day comes that we are successful enough to start hiring employees, and have a traditional office, one thing I absolutely intend to commit to is a "everyone gets a private office, with a door" policy. Now, that said... I'm starting to question the need for traditional offices in general, as technology improves our ability to work remotely. I don't know if I'd want to go for a 100% "work from home or wherever you want" policy or not, but it's not something I would unilaterally rule-out right now either. Sadly we're probably still a ways off from reaching the point where any of this will come into play. But we'll keep grinding, exactly because the world needs more companies that treat employees as people not fucking "resources". (Don't even get me started on how pissed off I get when I hear somebody refer to a person as a "resource").