8 ms·

The thing that surprises me is that, after paying these engineers seven figures, they're still sticking them in open plan offices (as far as I can tell from the

The thing that surprises me is that, after paying these engineers seven figures, they're still sticking them in open plan offices (as far as I can tell from the photos). Though I do know some people who can work effectively in that environment, it would be interesting to compare ever-so-slightly-cheaper engineers + a less-distracted work environment.

jnordwick 9y ago
I would be interested in knowing if better developers are more improved by having their own office above average developers or if they can handle the distraction more.
- sitepodmatt 9y ago
  I think a lot of people value having other people around and in their sight, even freelancers leave their home office and head to coworking spaces and claim productivity gains. Personally I think the office per person idea is overrated, however I've worked in many places where the draw backs of open office hit sometimes. I think the best combo is open office, with hot private offices, and with the extra space, sleep rooms, relax rooms, big working table rooms, even put hipster stuff like a standing desk area in maybe etc.. Oh and if an employees ask for NC headphones just buy them! Also if someone really in the zone on something that distractions could be problematic be okay if Fred say's do you mind if I work from home today on this problem.
  - fergie 9y ago
    I second this. I worked at a university for a few years, and lots of people were jealous of my private office in a distant building, but I just found it socially isolating. That said, I did get a lot done.
    - talmand 9y ago
      But at least you had the option to temporarily relocate yourself to a more social area. Then you could move back when you needed focus.
      - fergie 9y ago
        I actually didn't, there was no team.
        jnordwick 9y ago
        Not with that attitude.
- walshemj 9y ago
  IBM did some tests and they found about a 15% improvement and this was across the board so no change between average and high performers
  - benji-york 9y ago
    I'd love to read that study if you can find a reference.
    - walshemj 9y ago
      steve mcconnell rapid development mentions the study where I found the 15% figure quoted.
      - benji-york 9y ago
        Thanks!
SwellJoe 9y ago
I worked as a contractor for a while at a company that was pretty much entirely great developers, but they had one guy who had more experience than nearly everybody else put together (he was in his 50s, and had worked on all sorts of cool things in his career), who was also more productive than anyone else. The founders of the company knew he was their top producer, and so they gave him whatever he wanted (within the bounds of budget, etc.). What he wanted most was a private office, and he got it, despite no one else in the company having one (it was kind of smallish and closet like, but he had a door that closed, and that made him happy). I always suspected that was a big part of why he was so productive compared to everyone else; though the huge amount of experience and his seeming disinterest in anything but churning out code (all of his hobbies also involved code to some degree, and he was always way out front on various trends in software development) were also big contributors. It's also worth nothing that he didn't put in long hours. When it was crunch time in the office, he wouldn't be one of the people there on the weekend. Paradoxically, I think that's another contributing factor to his high productivity. So, yeah, I've often wondered whether Google/Microsoft/Facebook/etc. has internal metrics about this. Google is infamously an open plan office, Microsoft has offices, facebook is mixed (I think?). Surely, these companies who keep gigabytes of data about everybody on the planet has some idea about the relative productivity of offices vs. open plans.
- unkown-unknowns 9y ago
  > [...] were also bug contributors. It's also worth nothing [...] I think you have a couple of typos here. Probably you meant to say "big contributors" and "worth noting".
  - schrodinger 9y ago
    Swipe keyboard perhaps?
  - SwellJoe 9y ago
    Typos happen. I fixed /bug/big/ (I guess at the same time you responded), but didn't see "nothing" until after my edit link went away. You are correct in your interpretation.
KGIII 9y ago
Some people prefer them. We used to have small open offices available. They'd seat six to ten people comfortably. If the employee wasn't okay with that, there were smaller offices with room for one or two people. Depending on which facility you were at, there were larger workspaces available that also worked for meetings and our HQ also had a larger conference room space. It worked for us. Not everyone enjoys working in close proximity to other people and technologically creative people are sometimes introverts or have behaviors that aren't social normatives. I'm not sure why companies are forcing people into open office plans. Unless things have drastically changed, real estate isn't a very high percentage of overhead. This might be different in SV, but it's not just being done in SV. I'd also expect the increased productivity of happy workers to mitigate the increased real estate costs.
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  Six to ten is not an open office, those are team rooms which are fine - when you can have multiple teams in the same room, that's when you cross the threshold to an open office.
  - KGIII 9y ago
    Ah, so it has to cross teams in order to be considered an open office? I was not aware of that requirement, thanks.
kc10 9y ago
I personally love working close with my team in an open-setting. That's the reason I go to office every day even though my employer offers WFH. I just prefer turning around and asking a question or have a quick discussion. If everyone is working from home or in their personal offices, I hate having to get on a call or schedule a meeting to gather everyone to a meeting room for a quick discussion. Sure, at times it can be distracting - I usually put on my headset if my tasks demand uninterrupted attention. My team also understands this and won't disturb unless necessary.
- elgenie 9y ago
  Of course it's an enjoyable setting for you. Your team "won't disturb unless necessary", but you have no problem disturbing them whenever you want to have "a quick discussion".
  - kc10 9y ago
    Not all tasks require uninterrupted attention all the time. Sure, if everyone is working on complex stuff everyone can put on their headsets; no one will disturb others unless required.
- aedron 9y ago
  I think people need to state what kind of work they do when offering their preferences in these discussion. Some complicated development tasks require 100% uninterrupted concentration for several minutes at a time. You're sitting there trying to build and maintain an extremely complicated model in your head, involving many complex parts, and their interactions along a time line, introducing permutations of that model to simulate the changes you are considering and simulating the outcome in your head. Then someone asks you something, or asks someone else something, or simply passes in your peripheral vision, and poof it's gone. There a many tasks that don't require that kind of concentration, and many jobs, even in software development, that never involve those kinds of tasks. But with a setup that encourages 'communication', in the form of forced non-stop interaction, you have effectively made sure that the developers will never reach those heights, and most likely not by conscious decision, but out of ignorance.
tryingagainbro 9y ago
Their system is already built, a slight tweak might increase the revenue by $100 million a year, paying for all the salaries. The top engineers don't need to sit down and code 9-5. Plus, this is also a Hail Mary strategy, every "Google" in China is aiming for their business.
paganel 9y ago
There's also this image (https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/i2FW30Wmwe2k/v1/-1x-1.jpg https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/i2FW30Wmwe2...) of some of their programmers doing work on their laptops which they hold, well, in their laps. After 10+ years of programming for a living I can't imagine myself typing code with elbows hanging in the air, I need to rest them on a desk while pressing the keys.
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  Some casual chat / browsing like that is fine, working? I can't do it.
fetbaffe 9y ago
Optimal size of team in one room is about 2 - 3 members. Any outside disturbance is likely to affect all team members. Trying to explain this to management can be very frustrating because they don't understand that coding is a focus intense task. And it does not matter if you cite research. Coincidentally, management usually have their own rooms. Some links in Swedish with Google Translate Worse working environment in open office landscape (2014) https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.svt.se%2Fnyheter%2Fvetenskap%2Fsamre-arbetsmiljo-i-oppna-kontorslandskap https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u... Opening office landscapes causes stress (2015) https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.svt.se%2Fnyheter%2Fvetenskap%2Foppna-kontorslandskap-orsakar-stress https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u... Open office gives higher sick leave (2008) https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.svt.se%2Fnyheter%2Flokalt%2Fjonkoping%2Foppna-kontor-ger-hogre-sjukfranvaro%3Fglobalmeny%3D1 https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u... Opening office landscapes leads to overtime (2014) https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.kollega.se%2Foppna-kontorslandskap-leder-till-overtid https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u...
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  [M]any sparrows died from exhaustion; citizens would bang pots and pans so that sparrows would not have the chance to rest on tree branches and would fall dead from the sky - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign
usrusr 9y ago
Playing devil's advocate a bit here: maybe the negative impact of open plan offices is much lower than typical if every single employee is feeling exceptionally motivated through far beyond market rate compensation? Of course there would be more boxes to check than just that, e.g. how often are people on the phone.
- nf05papsjfVbc 9y ago
  It is possible to demotivate people by not paying enough but it is unlikely that such strong motivation is achieved purely from greater pay. A frustrating work environment will eventually cause th motivation to fizzle. One might continue working to keep the paycheque coming but it is a tall ask to keep the motivation levels high.
  - js8 9y ago
    In other words, the only thing paycheck motivates people to do is to stay in the environment of low motivation for too long. If any company thinks that it can fix the motivation with paycheck, they are very wrong and it will actually be more costly in the end.
  - usrusr 9y ago
    Just giving a 20% raise across the board won't do much, and piecemeal rewards for visible successes will be even worse as they will cause more optimization for visibility than for success. I fully agree so far. But an engaging work environment with high pay will keep people a lot more motivated than the same environment with low pay. You can't fix a bad environment with higher wages, but higher wages make a good environment even better. As for open plan offices, it's not the open plan that is frustrating, it's the coworkers that the office is shared with. Nobody is a perfect office-mate all the time. But open plan multiplies not only negative but also positive morale, so I would not generally rule out the possibility that it can be net positive in places where all other factors are close enough to perfection and that the problems only really start when they are copied by the less exceptional. High pay would be an important contributing factor (maybe even one of many necessities), not a silver bullet solution.

jnordwick 9y ago

I would be interested in knowing if better developers are more improved by having their own office above average developers or if they can handle the distraction more.

sitepodmatt 9y ago
I think a lot of people value having other people around and in their sight, even freelancers leave their home office and head to coworking spaces and claim productivity gains. Personally I think the office per person idea is overrated, however I've worked in many places where the draw backs of open office hit sometimes. I think the best combo is open office, with hot private offices, and with the extra space, sleep rooms, relax rooms, big working table rooms, even put hipster stuff like a standing desk area in maybe etc.. Oh and if an employees ask for NC headphones just buy them! Also if someone really in the zone on something that distractions could be problematic be okay if Fred say's do you mind if I work from home today on this problem.
- fergie 9y ago
  I second this. I worked at a university for a few years, and lots of people were jealous of my private office in a distant building, but I just found it socially isolating. That said, I did get a lot done.
  - talmand 9y ago
    But at least you had the option to temporarily relocate yourself to a more social area. Then you could move back when you needed focus.
    - fergie 9y ago
      I actually didn't, there was no team.
      - jnordwick 9y ago
        Not with that attitude.
walshemj 9y ago
IBM did some tests and they found about a 15% improvement and this was across the board so no change between average and high performers
- benji-york 9y ago
  I'd love to read that study if you can find a reference.
  - walshemj 9y ago
    steve mcconnell rapid development mentions the study where I found the 15% figure quoted.
    - benji-york 9y ago
      Thanks!

SwellJoe 9y ago

I worked as a contractor for a while at a company that was pretty much entirely great developers, but they had one guy who had more experience than nearly everybody else put together (he was in his 50s, and had worked on all sorts of cool things in his career), who was also more productive than anyone else. The founders of the company knew he was their top producer, and so they gave him whatever he wanted (within the bounds of budget, etc.). What he wanted most was a private office, and he got it, despite no one else in the company having one (it was kind of smallish and closet like, but he had a door that closed, and that made him happy). I always suspected that was a big part of why he was so productive compared to everyone else; though the huge amount of experience and his seeming disinterest in anything but churning out code (all of his hobbies also involved code to some degree, and he was always way out front on various trends in software development) were also big contributors. It's also worth nothing that he didn't put in long hours. When it was crunch time in the office, he wouldn't be one of the people there on the weekend. Paradoxically, I think that's another contributing factor to his high productivity. So, yeah, I've often wondered whether Google/Microsoft/Facebook/etc. has internal metrics about this. Google is infamously an open plan office, Microsoft has offices, facebook is mixed (I think?). Surely, these companies who keep gigabytes of data about everybody on the planet has some idea about the relative productivity of offices vs. open plans.

unkown-unknowns 9y ago
> [...] were also bug contributors. It's also worth nothing [...] I think you have a couple of typos here. Probably you meant to say "big contributors" and "worth noting".
- schrodinger 9y ago
  Swipe keyboard perhaps?
- SwellJoe 9y ago
  Typos happen. I fixed /bug/big/ (I guess at the same time you responded), but didn't see "nothing" until after my edit link went away. You are correct in your interpretation.

KGIII 9y ago

Some people prefer them. We used to have small open offices available. They'd seat six to ten people comfortably. If the employee wasn't okay with that, there were smaller offices with room for one or two people. Depending on which facility you were at, there were larger workspaces available that also worked for meetings and our HQ also had a larger conference room space. It worked for us. Not everyone enjoys working in close proximity to other people and technologically creative people are sometimes introverts or have behaviors that aren't social normatives. I'm not sure why companies are forcing people into open office plans. Unless things have drastically changed, real estate isn't a very high percentage of overhead. This might be different in SV, but it's not just being done in SV. I'd also expect the increased productivity of happy workers to mitigate the increased real estate costs.

Cthulhu_ 9y ago
Six to ten is not an open office, those are team rooms which are fine - when you can have multiple teams in the same room, that's when you cross the threshold to an open office.
- KGIII 9y ago
  Ah, so it has to cross teams in order to be considered an open office? I was not aware of that requirement, thanks.

kc10 9y ago

I personally love working close with my team in an open-setting. That's the reason I go to office every day even though my employer offers WFH. I just prefer turning around and asking a question or have a quick discussion. If everyone is working from home or in their personal offices, I hate having to get on a call or schedule a meeting to gather everyone to a meeting room for a quick discussion. Sure, at times it can be distracting - I usually put on my headset if my tasks demand uninterrupted attention. My team also understands this and won't disturb unless necessary.

elgenie 9y ago
Of course it's an enjoyable setting for you. Your team "won't disturb unless necessary", but you have no problem disturbing them whenever you want to have "a quick discussion".
- kc10 9y ago
  Not all tasks require uninterrupted attention all the time. Sure, if everyone is working on complex stuff everyone can put on their headsets; no one will disturb others unless required.
aedron 9y ago
I think people need to state what kind of work they do when offering their preferences in these discussion. Some complicated development tasks require 100% uninterrupted concentration for several minutes at a time. You're sitting there trying to build and maintain an extremely complicated model in your head, involving many complex parts, and their interactions along a time line, introducing permutations of that model to simulate the changes you are considering and simulating the outcome in your head. Then someone asks you something, or asks someone else something, or simply passes in your peripheral vision, and poof it's gone. There a many tasks that don't require that kind of concentration, and many jobs, even in software development, that never involve those kinds of tasks. But with a setup that encourages 'communication', in the form of forced non-stop interaction, you have effectively made sure that the developers will never reach those heights, and most likely not by conscious decision, but out of ignorance.

tryingagainbro 9y ago

Their system is already built, a slight tweak might increase the revenue by $100 million a year, paying for all the salaries. The top engineers don't need to sit down and code 9-5. Plus, this is also a Hail Mary strategy, every "Google" in China is aiming for their business.

paganel 9y ago

There's also this image (https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/i2FW30Wmwe2k/v1/-1x-1.jpg https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/i2FW30Wmwe2...) of some of their programmers doing work on their laptops which they hold, well, in their laps. After 10+ years of programming for a living I can't imagine myself typing code with elbows hanging in the air, I need to rest them on a desk while pressing the keys.

Cthulhu_ 9y ago
Some casual chat / browsing like that is fine, working? I can't do it.

fetbaffe 9y ago

Optimal size of team in one room is about 2 - 3 members. Any outside disturbance is likely to affect all team members. Trying to explain this to management can be very frustrating because they don't understand that coding is a focus intense task. And it does not matter if you cite research. Coincidentally, management usually have their own rooms. Some links in Swedish with Google Translate Worse working environment in open office landscape (2014) https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.svt.se%2Fnyheter%2Fvetenskap%2Fsamre-arbetsmiljo-i-oppna-kontorslandskap https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u... Opening office landscapes causes stress (2015) https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.svt.se%2Fnyheter%2Fvetenskap%2Foppna-kontorslandskap-orsakar-stress https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u... Open office gives higher sick leave (2008) https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.svt.se%2Fnyheter%2Flokalt%2Fjonkoping%2Foppna-kontor-ger-hogre-sjukfranvaro%3Fglobalmeny%3D1 https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u... Opening office landscapes leads to overtime (2014) https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.kollega.se%2Foppna-kontorslandskap-leder-till-overtid https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u...

Cthulhu_ 9y ago
[M]any sparrows died from exhaustion; citizens would bang pots and pans so that sparrows would not have the chance to rest on tree branches and would fall dead from the sky - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign

usrusr 9y ago

Playing devil's advocate a bit here: maybe the negative impact of open plan offices is much lower than typical if every single employee is feeling exceptionally motivated through far beyond market rate compensation? Of course there would be more boxes to check than just that, e.g. how often are people on the phone.

nf05papsjfVbc 9y ago
It is possible to demotivate people by not paying enough but it is unlikely that such strong motivation is achieved purely from greater pay. A frustrating work environment will eventually cause th motivation to fizzle. One might continue working to keep the paycheque coming but it is a tall ask to keep the motivation levels high.
- js8 9y ago
  In other words, the only thing paycheck motivates people to do is to stay in the environment of low motivation for too long. If any company thinks that it can fix the motivation with paycheck, they are very wrong and it will actually be more costly in the end.
- usrusr 9y ago
  Just giving a 20% raise across the board won't do much, and piecemeal rewards for visible successes will be even worse as they will cause more optimization for visibility than for success. I fully agree so far. But an engaging work environment with high pay will keep people a lot more motivated than the same environment with low pay. You can't fix a bad environment with higher wages, but higher wages make a good environment even better. As for open plan offices, it's not the open plan that is frustrating, it's the coworkers that the office is shared with. Nobody is a perfect office-mate all the time. But open plan multiplies not only negative but also positive morale, so I would not generally rule out the possibility that it can be net positive in places where all other factors are close enough to perfection and that the problems only really start when they are copied by the less exceptional. High pay would be an important contributing factor (maybe even one of many necessities), not a silver bullet solution.