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The obsession for open plan offices continues to amaze me. Companies that invest huge amounts in staffing and other strategic programmes don't seem to spend muc

The obsession for open plan offices continues to amaze me. Companies that invest huge amounts in staffing and other strategic programmes don't seem to spend much time challenging the default suggestion that 'openness = collaboration'. This article mentions high performance employees - but most knowledge workers (designers, programmers etc.) that I know all struggle with open plan office environments irrespective of their performance level. If anything, an open plan office is maybe less worrisome to the more executive people I know - their core work processes of communication & meetings are less negatively impacted by the inability to regularly get large blocks of quiet productive space. Some companies obviously get this need (e.g. FogCreek) but it really feels like sugar consumption or smoking. Once people really interrogate the status quo they are quick to realise how negative it is - but despite this the sub-optimal default approach has an unbelievable amount of momentum. My condolences to all the 'high performance people' surveyed who are desperately wishing for less disturbed work spaces!

organsnyder 10y ago
The collaborative nature of my open office environment helps me to generate tons of great ideas that I'll never have the focus to implement.
- taurath 10y ago
  Why don't you just stay late or come in early, don't you care about the company?!!
  - arca_vorago 10y ago
    You sound like my old boss. I'm a combat vet, and he said to me, before memorial day, "What's a holiday? I don't take holidays. I'm here all the time.." Pissed me off. Dude is the CEO and partial owner, so it's completely different. If they want to pretend to be Elon Musk and want me to as well, they better at least pay like it to justify the lack of work/life balance. I am a human being whose existence is entirely indepedent of whatever job I currently have. Crazy thought, I know. I am only a bit salty because having consulted across a wide array of industries and been the miracle worker one man show in some of them, I have seen it everywhere. Oh, and back on subject, of course at this place I was shoved into an open office with the devs...
    - technics256 10y ago
      As an American who moved to Germany, that mindset was completely removed here. Not only do people tell you to take your vacation time if you don't, they get worried if you are working too much or too hard. It's a great relief to be here and see a different mindset outside that of the "all work no holiday" cultures you can find in the states.
      - arca_vorago 10y ago
        Honestly I sometimes wonder how much my traveling and experiencing other cultures influenced my perception of this subject. Even in Iraq I feel like the Arab concept of time (flexible guidelines) really rubbed off on me, spent some time in Germany/France as well and loved how slow life could be. In this day and age I feel like all many people want is retired-style life but then they entangle themselves in debt and job quagmires they don't excape till they are 65. I also highly disagree with the characterization that retirement is sitting around doing nothing. Retirement to me is the chance to pursue your true passions and interests unencumbered by an unrelated need for finances supplied by a wage-slavery job.
        technics256 10y ago
        Totally agree. Germany has its ups and downs as you know, but I like it more since the approach to life and work life balance is much better. Whether it's the generous social systems or not is more of a political debate, but the focus on "living life" is much greater here, and I enjoy it. Come on over man. :)
      - oxryly1 10y ago
        Which is why world dominating tech companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, etc were naturally founded in Germany. I kid, I kiiid... no really that was both sarcastic and joking. Is the "all work no holiday" necessary for successful tech startups on the order of those?
        arca_vorago 10y ago
  - organsnyder 10y ago
    I actually have quite a bit of freedom to work from home. But I have three kids six and younger, so it's hard to concentrate there...
  - jrs235 10y ago
    9-5 is office hours. Be ready and willing to respond to any requests. When you get the actual assigned ans scheduled out work done is your problem. Perhaps you should work late, at home, at night, in the morning before "office hours". Drives me effing nuts! Salaried exempt doesn't mean slave labor. It means the work I do requires thinking and since I am always thinking it makes more sense to just pay me a predetermined amount instead of going hourly and trying to figure out if I should be compensated for the commute to and from the office when some of my greatest ideas and innovations occur. God forbid my idea comes while not on the clock! I might not choose to assign the IP over to you! I still only anticipate implementing ideas and performing tasks for approximately 40 hours per week. You're paying for my brains not my key pushing skills.
- MR4D 10y ago
  You should put that on a bumper sticker and sell them for ten bucks each. You'd be rich before the end of the day just from the revenue off of HN readers alone! :)
mason240 10y ago
Our company is currently relocating to new office, and they want an open office plan in the space. We will pack in tight, and our cube walls will all be 3.5 feet high. We have adjustable standing desks that will coming with us, so when standing we will towering over every one and I already know it's going to be awkward for me. The best part is our 5 person IT team will be right next to 25 people who work phones for customer service.
- JustSomeNobody 10y ago
  > ...so when standing we will towering over every one... Because everyone likes to be the CoA. > The best part is our 5 person IT team will be right next to 25 people who work phones for customer service. Time to polish that resume.
- iamdave 10y ago
  The best part is our 5 person IT team will be right next to 25 people who work phones for customer service. Lemme guess, your company is the type of company that thinks the entirety of IT equals help desk, and therefore will be on the phone all day fielding tickets, so to whoever made this god awful decision, sticking IT right next to CS "just makes sense". I'm with the other guy here, run.
- ratsz 10y ago
  Be lucky you have cube walls. Many open plans don't even have those!
  - gozur88 10y ago
    3.5 feet is barely higher than a desk (a normal one). That's like leaving your waiter a penny tip.
    - mason240 10y ago
      That's exactly what they are going for - desk height.
    - 10y ago
hosh 10y ago
I am working my way through some material about "Inclusive Neurodiversity", which does question the open office plan. It works well (very well) for some people, and yet not others. How to get everyone working together well? https://salfreudenberg.wordpress.com/2016/05/12/the-case-for-neurodiversity/ https://salfreudenberg.wordpress.com/2016/05/12/the-case-for... http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/cucumber-podcast/cucumber/e/neurodiversity-and-inclusive-collaboration-48524027 http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/cucumber-podcast/cucumber/e/...
- dasmoth 10y ago
  How to get everyone working together well? Do we need to? Sure, many projects need multiple people, but few end up needing the whole organisation. So with a little flexibility on project assignments I feel most organisations can accommodate a range of working styles -- if they want to.
mmagin 10y ago
> The obsession for open plan offices continues to amaze me. Well, the decisions about these things are made by upper management (who probably get an office, and sit in meetings all day anyway) and/or facilities (who walk around a lot of the day dealing with various facility issues).
ww520 10y ago
Because the $ in per sqft is easy to measure while the $ in employee productivity is hard to measure.
ashark 10y ago
I think that, among other reasons for its existence, open offices (especially when coupled with office-having supervisors) are one of many weapons arrayed against programmers to keep them from properly entering the professional (high-middle) class, or even (following Fussell's categories here) high-prole. Middle or (ideally) mid-prole only.
- abc_lisper 10y ago
  There is a lot of truth to this. Image matters. Not giving a proper office for you to do your work is a slight, implying that you are not that valuable.
Bahamut 10y ago
One also has to wonder if a non-trivial percentage of engineers also end up as not high performers as a direct result of being in an open office and not having their own private spaces. I recommend private offices for engineers so they can get heads down and do their work, but sadly that suggestion tends to get ignored :( .
Clubber 10y ago
I can see the conversation now. "If we build this as an open office, it's cheaper AND better? That's a slam dunk!" 6 years later ... "Turns out it's only cheaper, not better. Hey, cheaper is better right?"
- pzh 10y ago
  Penny-wise and pound-foolish. If cheaper means throwing the time of your most expensive resource (engineers) down the drain to save some money on rent and Ikea furniture, then sure.
  - Arizhel 10y ago
    How is this foolish? This saves the company money, and helps executives get bigger bonuses. This might cause the company some problems in 5 years, but who cares? By then, the executives have already collected their bonuses and left.
nunez 10y ago
I personally love open floor plans. It is so easy to talk to people and get answers and ideas about projects and the like. I don't see how free flowing collaborating through cubes is possible. The best permutation of open spaces and privacy that I've seen is a wide open space with quiet rooms and sharable offices. Work in the open space when you want, or work in the quiet room when you need some privacy. I wish that more companies would adopt this.
- officelineback 10y ago
  The thing is I like to get my workstation ergonomically perfect for my issues (I have back and shoulder issues) and using a generic table with no extra monitors for my quiet intense work sucks. It should be the other way around...everyone gets a private office, but has an option to join the fray in an open office area.
  - bradstewart 10y ago
    I had this setup at my previous company and it was truly fantastic.
    - officelineback 10y ago
      Are you allowed to name names?
      - bradstewart 10y ago
        I don't see why not: Silicon Labs in Austin. All of the company's office space isn't setup like this, but my floor was.
  - nunez 10y ago
    If everyone had an open office, then very few would use the open space area. Also, providing offices for everyone is expensive, and it's harder to collect people sitting in different offices than it is when everyone's in an open space. I'm personally against everyone getting an office, but we'll agree to disagree :)
cname 10y ago
Hmm... so executives/managers aren't as affected by open office plans and also tend to lack empathy... so we get open office plans or maybe, if we're lucky, cube walls. I know I'm generalizing and not all managers lack empathy, but this seems like a reasonable explanation for the pervasiveness of arrangements that waste resources and hinder higher levels of productivity--maybe they just don't get it. I could never understand the cost argument since lower productivity means either more employees to do the same thing and/or a shittier product, which can translate into lost sales, more infrastructure, etc. (This might not apply to early stage startups and the like; I'm thinking of established organizations here.)
Delmania 10y ago
I've had exactly one experience with an open office space. That was enough to turn me off from any company that has it. It was loud and noisy. When I had a review, my supervisor told me that people didn't find me approachable because I head my headphones on. When I mentioned I need a quiet space, he told me to "deal with it". When I questioned him on whether he had worked in an open space, he said he had, because he had been a NOC manager. Different worlds, I soon left. That was the moment I realized I hated traditional corporate culture. Improved to startup, which I loved, until the "CEO" proved he was incompentent and furloughed us...
fmap 10y ago
This whole situation is ridiculous. I am working in a university and I have my own office. Turns out that employees are by far the most expensive part about doing research in computer science, and the cost of giving everyone their own office is easily offset by the (noticable) increase in productivity. Everyone I know who went on to an industry position is working in an open plan office... and it is not unusual to hear stories about people putting in a few days of home office to get some actual work done. This is obviously anecdotal, but based on other responses in this thread and elsewhere there is more than enough evidence to justify doing a real study. It is not difficult to measure changes in productivity over time accross a sufficiently large population and the amount of money being spent on engineers means that even a marginal increase in productivity will be worth the cost.
Joeri 10y ago
The trend towards open plan is a consequence of a bad incentive structure. Most companies put the management of the workplace inside the facilities department, which is viewed as all cost and no benefit. When profit margins are under pressure the facilities department is usually one of the first places senior management goes looking to cut costs. A private office layout averages up to 15 square meters per employee, while open plan moves that down to 9 square meters. This allows facilities to reduce the rented building area by a third, which is a major cost cutting. Of course, the other departments protest against this, but since the senior management sees only the reduction in cost, and does not (want to) see the costs incurred by the move to open plan, they usually approve the move. The big irony is that the facilities department often assigns themselves private offices. They're not idiots after all, and they need to get some real work done.

organsnyder 10y ago

The collaborative nature of my open office environment helps me to generate tons of great ideas that I'll never have the focus to implement.

taurath 10y ago
Why don't you just stay late or come in early, don't you care about the company?!!
- arca_vorago 10y ago
  You sound like my old boss. I'm a combat vet, and he said to me, before memorial day, "What's a holiday? I don't take holidays. I'm here all the time.." Pissed me off. Dude is the CEO and partial owner, so it's completely different. If they want to pretend to be Elon Musk and want me to as well, they better at least pay like it to justify the lack of work/life balance. I am a human being whose existence is entirely indepedent of whatever job I currently have. Crazy thought, I know. I am only a bit salty because having consulted across a wide array of industries and been the miracle worker one man show in some of them, I have seen it everywhere. Oh, and back on subject, of course at this place I was shoved into an open office with the devs...
  - technics256 10y ago
    As an American who moved to Germany, that mindset was completely removed here. Not only do people tell you to take your vacation time if you don't, they get worried if you are working too much or too hard. It's a great relief to be here and see a different mindset outside that of the "all work no holiday" cultures you can find in the states.
    - arca_vorago 10y ago
      Honestly I sometimes wonder how much my traveling and experiencing other cultures influenced my perception of this subject. Even in Iraq I feel like the Arab concept of time (flexible guidelines) really rubbed off on me, spent some time in Germany/France as well and loved how slow life could be. In this day and age I feel like all many people want is retired-style life but then they entangle themselves in debt and job quagmires they don't excape till they are 65. I also highly disagree with the characterization that retirement is sitting around doing nothing. Retirement to me is the chance to pursue your true passions and interests unencumbered by an unrelated need for finances supplied by a wage-slavery job.
      - technics256 10y ago
        Totally agree. Germany has its ups and downs as you know, but I like it more since the approach to life and work life balance is much better. Whether it's the generous social systems or not is more of a political debate, but the focus on "living life" is much greater here, and I enjoy it. Come on over man. :)
    - oxryly1 10y ago
      Which is why world dominating tech companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, etc were naturally founded in Germany. I kid, I kiiid... no really that was both sarcastic and joking. Is the "all work no holiday" necessary for successful tech startups on the order of those?
      - arca_vorago 10y ago
- organsnyder 10y ago
  I actually have quite a bit of freedom to work from home. But I have three kids six and younger, so it's hard to concentrate there...
- jrs235 10y ago
  9-5 is office hours. Be ready and willing to respond to any requests. When you get the actual assigned ans scheduled out work done is your problem. Perhaps you should work late, at home, at night, in the morning before "office hours". Drives me effing nuts! Salaried exempt doesn't mean slave labor. It means the work I do requires thinking and since I am always thinking it makes more sense to just pay me a predetermined amount instead of going hourly and trying to figure out if I should be compensated for the commute to and from the office when some of my greatest ideas and innovations occur. God forbid my idea comes while not on the clock! I might not choose to assign the IP over to you! I still only anticipate implementing ideas and performing tasks for approximately 40 hours per week. You're paying for my brains not my key pushing skills.
MR4D 10y ago
You should put that on a bumper sticker and sell them for ten bucks each. You'd be rich before the end of the day just from the revenue off of HN readers alone! :)

mason240 10y ago

Our company is currently relocating to new office, and they want an open office plan in the space. We will pack in tight, and our cube walls will all be 3.5 feet high. We have adjustable standing desks that will coming with us, so when standing we will towering over every one and I already know it's going to be awkward for me. The best part is our 5 person IT team will be right next to 25 people who work phones for customer service.

JustSomeNobody 10y ago
> ...so when standing we will towering over every one... Because everyone likes to be the CoA. > The best part is our 5 person IT team will be right next to 25 people who work phones for customer service. Time to polish that resume.
iamdave 10y ago
The best part is our 5 person IT team will be right next to 25 people who work phones for customer service. Lemme guess, your company is the type of company that thinks the entirety of IT equals help desk, and therefore will be on the phone all day fielding tickets, so to whoever made this god awful decision, sticking IT right next to CS "just makes sense". I'm with the other guy here, run.
ratsz 10y ago
Be lucky you have cube walls. Many open plans don't even have those!
- gozur88 10y ago
  3.5 feet is barely higher than a desk (a normal one). That's like leaving your waiter a penny tip.
  - mason240 10y ago
    That's exactly what they are going for - desk height.
  - 10y ago

hosh 10y ago

I am working my way through some material about "Inclusive Neurodiversity", which does question the open office plan. It works well (very well) for some people, and yet not others. How to get everyone working together well? https://salfreudenberg.wordpress.com/2016/05/12/the-case-for-neurodiversity/ https://salfreudenberg.wordpress.com/2016/05/12/the-case-for... http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/cucumber-podcast/cucumber/e/neurodiversity-and-inclusive-collaboration-48524027 http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/cucumber-podcast/cucumber/e/...

dasmoth 10y ago
How to get everyone working together well? Do we need to? Sure, many projects need multiple people, but few end up needing the whole organisation. So with a little flexibility on project assignments I feel most organisations can accommodate a range of working styles -- if they want to.

mmagin 10y ago

> The obsession for open plan offices continues to amaze me. Well, the decisions about these things are made by upper management (who probably get an office, and sit in meetings all day anyway) and/or facilities (who walk around a lot of the day dealing with various facility issues).

ww520 10y ago

Because the $ in per sqft is easy to measure while the $ in employee productivity is hard to measure.

ashark 10y ago

I think that, among other reasons for its existence, open offices (especially when coupled with office-having supervisors) are one of many weapons arrayed against programmers to keep them from properly entering the professional (high-middle) class, or even (following Fussell's categories here) high-prole. Middle or (ideally) mid-prole only.

abc_lisper 10y ago
There is a lot of truth to this. Image matters. Not giving a proper office for you to do your work is a slight, implying that you are not that valuable.

Bahamut 10y ago

One also has to wonder if a non-trivial percentage of engineers also end up as not high performers as a direct result of being in an open office and not having their own private spaces. I recommend private offices for engineers so they can get heads down and do their work, but sadly that suggestion tends to get ignored :( .

Clubber 10y ago

I can see the conversation now. "If we build this as an open office, it's cheaper AND better? That's a slam dunk!" 6 years later ... "Turns out it's only cheaper, not better. Hey, cheaper is better right?"

pzh 10y ago
Penny-wise and pound-foolish. If cheaper means throwing the time of your most expensive resource (engineers) down the drain to save some money on rent and Ikea furniture, then sure.
- Arizhel 10y ago
  How is this foolish? This saves the company money, and helps executives get bigger bonuses. This might cause the company some problems in 5 years, but who cares? By then, the executives have already collected their bonuses and left.

nunez 10y ago

I personally love open floor plans. It is so easy to talk to people and get answers and ideas about projects and the like. I don't see how free flowing collaborating through cubes is possible. The best permutation of open spaces and privacy that I've seen is a wide open space with quiet rooms and sharable offices. Work in the open space when you want, or work in the quiet room when you need some privacy. I wish that more companies would adopt this.

officelineback 10y ago
The thing is I like to get my workstation ergonomically perfect for my issues (I have back and shoulder issues) and using a generic table with no extra monitors for my quiet intense work sucks. It should be the other way around...everyone gets a private office, but has an option to join the fray in an open office area.
- bradstewart 10y ago
  I had this setup at my previous company and it was truly fantastic.
  - officelineback 10y ago
    Are you allowed to name names?
    - bradstewart 10y ago
      I don't see why not: Silicon Labs in Austin. All of the company's office space isn't setup like this, but my floor was.
- nunez 10y ago
  If everyone had an open office, then very few would use the open space area. Also, providing offices for everyone is expensive, and it's harder to collect people sitting in different offices than it is when everyone's in an open space. I'm personally against everyone getting an office, but we'll agree to disagree :)

cname 10y ago

Hmm... so executives/managers aren't as affected by open office plans and also tend to lack empathy... so we get open office plans or maybe, if we're lucky, cube walls. I know I'm generalizing and not all managers lack empathy, but this seems like a reasonable explanation for the pervasiveness of arrangements that waste resources and hinder higher levels of productivity--maybe they just don't get it. I could never understand the cost argument since lower productivity means either more employees to do the same thing and/or a shittier product, which can translate into lost sales, more infrastructure, etc. (This might not apply to early stage startups and the like; I'm thinking of established organizations here.)

Delmania 10y ago

I've had exactly one experience with an open office space. That was enough to turn me off from any company that has it. It was loud and noisy. When I had a review, my supervisor told me that people didn't find me approachable because I head my headphones on. When I mentioned I need a quiet space, he told me to "deal with it". When I questioned him on whether he had worked in an open space, he said he had, because he had been a NOC manager. Different worlds, I soon left. That was the moment I realized I hated traditional corporate culture. Improved to startup, which I loved, until the "CEO" proved he was incompentent and furloughed us...

fmap 10y ago

This whole situation is ridiculous. I am working in a university and I have my own office. Turns out that employees are by far the most expensive part about doing research in computer science, and the cost of giving everyone their own office is easily offset by the (noticable) increase in productivity. Everyone I know who went on to an industry position is working in an open plan office... and it is not unusual to hear stories about people putting in a few days of home office to get some actual work done. This is obviously anecdotal, but based on other responses in this thread and elsewhere there is more than enough evidence to justify doing a real study. It is not difficult to measure changes in productivity over time accross a sufficiently large population and the amount of money being spent on engineers means that even a marginal increase in productivity will be worth the cost.

Joeri 10y ago

The trend towards open plan is a consequence of a bad incentive structure. Most companies put the management of the workplace inside the facilities department, which is viewed as all cost and no benefit. When profit margins are under pressure the facilities department is usually one of the first places senior management goes looking to cut costs. A private office layout averages up to 15 square meters per employee, while open plan moves that down to 9 square meters. This allows facilities to reduce the rented building area by a third, which is a major cost cutting. Of course, the other departments protest against this, but since the senior management sees only the reduction in cost, and does not (want to) see the costs incurred by the move to open plan, they usually approve the move. The big irony is that the facilities department often assigns themselves private offices. They're not idiots after all, and they need to get some real work done.