7 ms·

I suspect the thought process is something like, "Collaboration makes the office more productive. Therefore, if we force the employees to collaborate all the ti

I 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 ago
My 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 ago
  Yes, 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 ago
    We 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 ago
  At least that way you can hear the sales staff selling features that have not been developed yet.
bad_user 9y ago
Collaboration is essentially contention, like CPU threads racing for the same memory location, needing synchronization. Synchronization kills parallelism.
Aqua_Geek 9y ago
The 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 ago
  RIP July 5th when no one came into the office. I'll miss you till next year.
jotux 9y ago
I 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 ago
  The "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 ago
    They'd have to sacrifice their avant garde spaceship design, though.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- moron4hire 9y ago
  This 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 ago
    We'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...

I 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 ago

My 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 ago
Yes, 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 ago
  We 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 ago
At least that way you can hear the sales staff selling features that have not been developed yet.

bad_user 9y ago

Collaboration is essentially contention, like CPU threads racing for the same memory location, needing synchronization. Synchronization kills parallelism.

Aqua_Geek 9y ago

The 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 ago
RIP July 5th when no one came into the office. I'll miss you till next year.

jotux 9y ago

I 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 ago
The "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 ago
  They'd have to sacrifice their avant garde spaceship design, though.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
moron4hire 9y ago
This 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 ago
  We'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...