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It all seems so backwards. Instead of having collaborative working spaces with private rooms for meetings, doesn't it make more sense to have private rooms for
by nemo44x 9y ago
It all seems so backwards. Instead of having collaborative working spaces with private rooms for meetings, doesn't it make more sense to have private rooms for working and collaborative meeting spaces?
- gervase 9y agoI suspect the thought process is something like, "Collaboration makes the office more productive. Therefore, if we force the employees to collaborate all the time, we can maximize productivity!"
- wlesieutre 9y agoMy company moved engineering into the same open office as sales and customer support, we can collaborate with everyone all the time! Definitely a negative to productivity on my individual work because it's so much noisier in here.
- loco5niner 9y agoYes, they put our desks right next to finance, with that one person who is our "laugh really loud, laugh at everything and I mean _everything_" person.
- moron4hire 9y agoWe should make an audio output for our build scripts to play a really loud woodchipper sound. "Sorry, can't be helped, part of the process, the machine has to grind the source code up into small bits to fit into the CPU."
- tiredwired 9y agoAt least that way you can hear the sales staff selling features that have not been developed yet.
- bad_user 9y agoCollaboration is essentially contention, like CPU threads racing for the same memory location, needing synchronization. Synchronization kills parallelism.
- Aqua_Geek 9y agoThe most productive days I've ever had at my current employer -- by a significant margin --- were when most of the company was not present (off-site or holiday). Being able to come in those days and work in a distraction-free environment was amazing. Open office floor plans are the worst.
- tomsthumb 9y agoRIP July 5th when no one came into the office. I'll miss you till next year.
- jotux 9y agoI suspect it's much simpler than that. Open floor plans give less square footage per person so you get more people per building. It's just cheaper to build open floor plans.
- notatoad 9y agoThe "it's cheaper" argument for open-plan offices only really works when the company hasn't spent $5bn+ on the building. They could probably have quadrupled the floor space for the same price.
- oxryly1 9y agoThey'd have to sacrifice their avant garde spaceship design, though.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- moron4hire 9y agoThis is enabled by the fact that, despite how hard we try, we don't actually know how to track productivity, say nothing about changes in it that can be traced back to organizational decisions, or have anything approaching a model of productivity so that we might start to have predictive capability for how decisions impact it. So lacking a real metric that means anything, we cling to the ones that don't and as long as the lines move in the right direction nobody cares.
- jotux 9y agoWe've known, at least since the 80s, the aproximate amount of space people need to work effectively. Chapter 9 of Peopleware [1] talks specifically about this: An excerpt: >Before drawing the plans for its new Santa Teresa facility, IBM violated all industry standards by carefully studying the work habits of those who would occupy the space. The study was designed by the architect Gerald McCue with the assistance of IBM area managers. Researchers observed the work processes in action in current workspaces and in mock-ups of proposed workspaces. They watched programmers, engineers, quality control workers, and managers go about their normal activities. From their studies, they concluded that a minimum accommodation for the mix of people slated to occupy the new space would be the following: - 100 square feet of dedicated space per worker - 30 square feet of work surface per person - noise protection in the form of enclosed offices or six-foot high partitions (they ended up with about half of all professional personnel in enclosed one- and two-person offices) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Projects_and_Teams https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Project...
- IBM 9y agoThe WSJ story has some pictures of what it looks like [1]. There seems to be offices with doors, but they look like it seats about 20 people. There are also common areas with long tables between them. https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-UF776_0817CO_1000RV_20170711160556.jpg https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-UF776_0817CO_1... https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-UF775_0817CO_1000RV_20170711160538.jpg https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-UF775_0817CO_1... https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-UF777_0817CO_1000RV_20170711160614.jpg https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-UF777_0817CO_1... [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-jony-ive-masterminded-apples-new-headquarters-1501063201 https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-jony-ive-masterminded-apple...
- JSONwebtoken 9y agoI don't get the complaints, that looks very cozy even if you have to share with what looks like a total of 4 engineers per room which is a reasonable number for collaboration. The second picture makes it look greater than 4, however. Assuming the cubicles are walled off, it'll just feel like a college library meeting room.
- quantum_magpie 9y agoOk, just at a glance: 1. No separators -- you see everyone, everyone sees you. All the time. 2. No separators between neighboring desks, thus every flinch your colleague next to you makes distracts you. 3. No shelves and drawers. Where do you put all your papers, books? 4. At least based on the pictures, reflections of light, coming from every single angle. 5. The tables are way too small. There is just no space for multiple monitors to be put at a reasonable distance, which fucks up the eyes really fast.
- tapatio 9y agoWhat a joke. Now I love my large private cube even more, lol.
- JSONwebtoken 9y agoI basically had to put up with that every day in the college library. I don't mind glass offices until I get the itch to pick my nose. I get that the optimal environment for programming work is at home or in a private office, but they did what they could at what appears to be an economical compromise. I agree with the desk space, there doesn't appear to be any room for an external monitor at all.
- whipoodle 9y agoDepends what you mean by "make sense". If you mean save money on office space per square ft, probably not. If you mean fit into Jony Ive's elite design sensibility, also probably not.
- chaostheory 9y agoRelevant: [audio] http://www.npr.org/2017/07/25/539092670/you-2-0-the-value-of-deep-work-in-an-age-of-distraction http://www.npr.org/2017/07/25/539092670/you-2-0-the-value-of...