15 ms·

You’re working in the wrong place if you’re working in an open office

126 points by walterclifford 9y ago

hb3b 9y ago
Peopleware debunked the myth that open office plans raise employee productivity. It should be required reading for all startup office managers. If there is a common struggle amongst employees with noise, demand a quiet room/area and a headphones subsidy.
- RandallBrown 9y ago
  I thought the point of open offices was to increase team productivity, not employee productivity.
  - throwanem 9y ago
    Increase the productivity of a team by reducing that of its members? How do you see that working?
    - ryandrake 9y ago
      Because when working in teams, 1 + 1 doesn't necessarily equal 2. Good, collaborating teams produce in excess of the sum of their parts. Companies will take a hit in individual productivity if they think overall productivity will be more than the sum of individual productivity.
      - valuearb 9y ago
        That’s great and likely true, but what does it have to do with open offices? The signal to noise ratio of open office areas is minuscule compared to the ratio of devs in private offices using Slack. I know cause I’ve done both.
    - RandallBrown 9y ago
      Have you ever heard the expression the sum is greater than its parts? Let's say one of my coworkers is working on some code I'm familiar. I may be able to sacrifice about 10% of my productivity (just from overhearing that they're working on something I know about) to double their productivity.
      - valuearb 9y ago
        How often does that have to happen? Literally you have to hear productivity doublers almost daily for it to work. What about the ones you miss? And how bad is your fellow developer that they not only need your help to double their productivity, but that they wouldn’t even think of asking for your input if they were in a private office. Like they can’t even operate Slack.
    - cstrahan 9y ago
      Chemotherapeutic agents are poisonous, and yet they’re administered to cancer patients. What is deletarious at a granular level is not necessarily deletarious for the system as a whole. A worker might be occasionally distracted in an open office (-1 to efficiency, say), but at the same time might benefit e.g. from more direct communication channels (+2 to efficiency). That’s a net win of +1 efficiency. Whether that’s how it actually works out, well... I have no horse I’m that race.
      - valuearb 9y ago
        I can’t disagree with you, open offices are just like cancer to productivity.
lancebeet 9y ago
For those who are interested, Joel Spolsky wrote about this a long time ago. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/07/30/private-offices-redux/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/07/30/private-offices-re...
ajeet_dhaliwal 9y ago
That picture of the Facebook offices in the article looks terrible. If anyone here works there is that the new office? Also is that how it's supposed to look or is it unfinished?
- calt 9y ago
  “It’s intended to be a symbol of what we believe at Facebook, which is that our work is unfinished,” said Lori Goler, vice president of people. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/11/30/what-these-photos-of-facebooks-new-headquarters-say-about-the-future-of-work https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/11/30...
  - throw-away-8 9y ago
    They should apply the same principle to their cafes. "Our food preparation is left incomplete as a symbol..."
  - kwillets 9y ago
    So do the engineers work on finishing the building too?
- ajeet_dhaliwal 9y ago
  I received a message from someone claiming to work at FB who says it is indeed the new building (20) and it is supposed to look like that, and that another one exactly like it is being built next door. Apparently the numbers on the beams can tell you whereabouts it was taken. He's not a fan either! The interior designers must have been paid well I'm guessing - this is successful company, perhaps the rest of us have poor taste and we will eventually grow to be dazzled by it.
- falcolas 9y ago
  This bothered me too. Open offices are bad enough; unfinished spaces are unforgivable. There's virtually nothing to dampen noise - you'd literally be trying to work in an echo chamber. And that doesn't even include the visual noise of exposed wiring, loose insulation, and exposed beams. Even the environmental controls are working harder than they have to - all of that empty space over everyone's heads has to be heated/cooled, and a lot of insulation potential from a simple drop ceiling is lost. In other words, worker productivity aside, Facebook is still losing a lot of money on that building. The last time I worked in a space like that was for Atari as a temp QA tester. It was as bad as advertised, though even Atari had cubicle walls and company-provided headphones for their testers.
hkmurakami 9y ago
The writers cabin reminded me of longtime Bay Area resident and Pulitzer prize winning novelist, Wallace Stegner's writing office (separate building from his home). http://ww4.hdnux.com/photos/11/23/76/2441099/7/1024x1024.jpg http://ww4.hdnux.com/photos/11/23/76/2441099/7/1024x1024.jpg
- js2 9y ago
  Michael Pollan (the author of Omnivore's Dilemma) also built his own writing cabin and wrote an article (and eventually a book too) about out it: http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/building-a-room-of-my-own/ http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/building-a-room-of...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- itronitron 9y ago
  you could fit a lot of small cabins (or tool sheds) into that huge Facebook openoffice space, one of my favorite lines is from the movie 'America's Sweethearts' where Billy Crystal is telling another person that a film editor (played by Christopher Walken) purchased the Unabomber's cabin from the FBI and now uses it as his editing studio...
marsrover 9y ago
After working in a cubicle I'd be reluctant to ever go back to an open office (I guess remote is the next step in this progression). Which is shitty because there are companies I'd like to work for but they have open offices. Even just looking at images of open offices and imagining having to work with my back turned against the entire floor gives me anxiety.
- mesozoic 9y ago
  I remember my first job was in a cubicle and I thought of it as cubicle hell. Now I pine for the days of the cubicle.
  - calt 9y ago
    I personally feel that cubicles are the worst of both worlds. You get none of the privacy and sound isolation of a private space, but you don't get the frictionless collaboration and socialization of an open office. I felt like I was socially isolated and living in the hell of hearing the conversation of the "that guy" through the wall without being able to give him any subtle social cues.
meritt 9y ago
> Before, I continue, I would like to call out that I am part of the ‘problem’ with open offices. I’m extroverted... While I still prefer a private office, open offices don't bother me precisely because I'm an introvert. Headphones plus some synthwave and you all disappear.
- chrisbennet 9y ago
  Someone downvoted you for stating your preference and how you feel. WTF???
  - ardme 9y ago
    It's OK, I balanced it out with an upvote for synthwave.
    - meritt 9y ago
      I can never decide if it's "synthwave" or "new retro wave". Is there a difference?
  - ryandrake 9y ago
    You must be new here :)
- deathanatos 9y ago
  I've tried this, but while I consider myself an introvert, I just can't do the whole music thing all day. People still manage to interrupt, which makes the headphones come off, and I just never remember to put them back in. And noise still gets in, though I admit that I don't have those really nice sound-cancelling headphones, but FFS, how much of my own money do I need to drop to make up for the craptastic workplace the employer provides? While the headphones can fix the noise/distraction stuff, it doesn't magically make additional space appear. You can see in the image on the Medium article just how much space the author has at home; compare that to the Facebook office picture (I think I might actually have less space.) With more space, you might be able to do things like put up charts/diagrams, put a whiteboard on a wall (if I only had a wall) / have space to have one of those rolly ones like in the FB picture. (we lack the space for a WB…) Then there's the increased incidence in disease.
js2 9y ago
> At my most recent job, I did all of my best work at home. I would actively try to avoid the office for as long as possible. At home, I had two desks and complete control over my environment. Distractions and breaks were choices. Indeed. I've worked from home since around 2007. It started when the Sunnyvale-based startup I worked for acquired a company in NC. I had wanted to relocate back to the east coast and they generously paid for the move. I purchased a home a few miles from our NC office, to which I commuted daily. But most of the folks I was actually working on projects with were still in CA, so I was effectively working remotely from our NC office. My NC coworkers were primarily an impediment to my productivity. Sociable though I am, when I'm at work, I want to be working, not engaging in non-work related chit chat. So I experimented with working from home one day a week. One day became two, then three. My NC co-workers didn't seem to care and my CA co-workers didn't know the difference. So I started working from home full time. That company was eventually acquired by HP who shut down the NC location within 2 years and forced everyone to either re-locate or lose their job (no remote workers). I jumped ship to another startup in CA for which I worked remotely till they were acquired by another CA company who at the time had a CEO who'd made news for banning remote work. Turns out that wasn't 100% true. So here I am a decade later still working remotely.
- pmoriarty 9y ago
  "So here I am a decade later still working remotely." Do you feel there's any discrepancy in how far you've progressed in your company in those ten years compared to your colleagues who work in the office? At some companies you're likely to be passed over for promotions if you work remotely.
  - js2 9y ago
    At both the startup and my current employer my salary has increased and I've been promoted. I'm happy where I am professionally and my income supports my family. So I think I'm doing okay. I've been good about finding high impact projects that I can either handle mostly on my own or with a small team. I've also been fortunate to work for good companies, and had mostly good managers and coworkers. There are definitely some frustrations and downsides to working from home, but overall for me I prefer it and I believe I've contributed more value to the companies I've worked for than if I had been in the office every day. I just spent a week out in CA for my current employer, who has recently converted to a full open office plan and the environment seemed very chaotic to me. I certainly didn't get as much done than when I am at home (part of this is because I wasn't using my usual work-station). When I last worked full time in an office, we had half-height cubicles with 4 employees to a "pod" which worked okay for me at the time. But I was doing sysadmin/devops work then so I was used to constant interruptions. As a programmer now, I can't imagine getting anything done outside a quiet office. I can't even read a book anymore if I hear voices in the background. I wonder if the ability to do so has atrophied?
RickS 9y ago
I asked[1] awhile back if HN readers could recommend tech companies without open offices, and got no replies. From the traction this article is getting, it sounds like there's interest, so I'm going to plead one more time for leads on companies that respect their employees right to work in peace. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15503008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15503008
- lwhalen 9y ago
  Viasat gives their engineers private offices, from what I've seen.
- derefr 9y ago
  Cynical hypothesis: if your company has an open office, your productivity as an employee isn't actually a factor in the company's predicted bottom line. The company exists as a talent pool to be acquihired, and the work exists as an ongoing advertisement for that talent pool. If bootstrapped companies had a lower rate of open-office architecture than venture-backed companies, I'd take this as pretty good supporting evidence.
  - RickS 9y ago
    You: > if your company has an open office, your productivity as an employee isn't actually a factor in the company's predicted bottom line. The company exists as a talent pool to be acquihired, The article: >80 percent of all offices now have an open floor plan. Does that mean 80% of companies are aquihire plays whos employees don't factor into the bottom line? I have a hard time believing that. My cynical-but-less-cynical-than-that hypothesis is that it's cheap and hip. Doing the cheap popular thing is harder than the expensive unpopular thing.
  - throwaway287391 9y ago
    Google, Amazon, Facebook -- all still waiting for that one sweet acquihire offer to come along so they can finally cash out.
  - philipov 9y ago
arwhatever 9y ago
Is there no good way to collectively apply some reverse pressure back towards the job market? I often wonder as I see this, and even worse trends spreading.
- RickS 9y ago
  I'm not sure exactly how big the per-employee pay cut would have to be in the bay area (or elsewhere) to offset the increase in square footage costs, but I expect that it's monumental. Which is one of my pet peeves about open offices: how much it's phrased as "about collaboration". If open offices and private/pair/hub&spoke had identical costs, how many CEOs would choose to sit in the chaos? I expect the number is not the 80% that it is today. And to your point... 80% is a BIG number. Offices are slow moving things, and today, there are contractors building offices for use in the coming decade according to the whims of the day. Big lofty spaces with exposed ceilings and no damn walls. Much as I hate to say it, this is unlikely to improve on a time scale smaller than 5 years.
  - abecedarius 9y ago
    Let's see, a search turns up "price per square foot for office space in San Francisco reached $72.26 in the fourth quarter of 2015". (Per year, right?) Say a small private office takes 200 ft.^2 more than your share of a cattle pen would -- by my memory of Xerox PARC, many of the researchers' offices were smaller than that in total. Extrapolate to $100/ft^2 in the future and it's still $20k, a fraction of your salary. (If it's a monthly figure, than yeah, you need to move out of SF.)
    - valuearb 9y ago
      A private office shouldn’t be bigger than 100 SF, for a typical Frisco engineer that’s less than 5% of carrying cost. Being able to only need three engineers instead of four because of the greater productivity of private offices makes it a no brainer.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  If only there were some concept of, I don't know, a sort of collective bargaining between labour and management, including the issue of working conditions? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_union https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_union
byebyetech 9y ago
Every now and then i see article like this. It is common sense and majority of the engineers are complaining about open offices. BUT i don't see any news or changes happening in creating "focus friendly" work environment. When is it going to start?
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  Don't forget that modern work can only get done by at minimum 5 people collaborating while staring at the same screen. They also need headphones on. That changes once you are VP. Then you need an office with window to do work.
  - ajmurmann 9y ago
    "That changes once you are VP. Then you need an office with window to do work." While it seems convenient to some there are very real issues that require a private space for many management tasks. I prefer sitting in the open and do so whenever I can. I feel out of touch if i don't. However, for a substantial amount of my work I need to go into a more private space and I'm not at the VP level.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
amorphid 9y ago
For me personally, working in an open office is increasingly a non-issue, even with the ol' ADHD. I spend so much time in an office working with people who are remote, ~80% of my distractions come from my computer, not the physical space around me.
RandallBrown 9y ago
I have never been more unhappy at a job than when I had my own office. I hardly felt like a part of the team. I barely got to know anyone and communication between developers was horrible. I found it way easier to goof around and not actually do work. Sure, I get distracted more in an open office, but I always thought that was the point. When I overhear my coworker going down a particular rabbit hole that I've already been down, I can save them hours of work. I don't need to wander down a hallway hoping the person is actually there. I can just look up. I don't doubt that some people prefer their own office. I am not one of those people.
- superqd 9y ago
  > I found it way easier to goof around and not actually do work Why do you need someone to watch you in order to actually do your job? I work at a company where remote work is exceedingly common, almost half the company is remote, and those in the HQ city don't come in to the office everyday. We get amazing amounts of work done.
  - RandallBrown 9y ago
    Because everyone is different? I don't need someone watching me to get work done. I just find it easier to focus on work when I'm around other people doing the same thing.
    - valuearb 9y ago
      In a private office you are constantly around people doing the same thing. You have stand ups and meetings with them every day, you pair program when necessary. And you still have a door so you can focus when necessary without your field of vision constantly full of motion. If you have trouble getting things done in a private office environment either you had bad management that would have been worse in an open floor plan, or you are an edge case no work environment should be catered for.
  - dzhiurgis 9y ago
    IDK if you've noticed, but everyone in the office tend to sync into tomato intervals. 15 minutes of crunch follows 5 minutes of chatter, repeat
ilaksh 9y ago
They aren't using open office plans because they think it's cool. It's because giving most people an office isn't practical unless they want to get 5 times as much space which is not possible due to the high cost of space in the locations they choose. I think we will eventually see some workplaces offer micro-offices with high tech ventilation, fiber optic lights, sound proofing, and virtual windows. I also think that as self driving cars deploy people will realize they are able to work in the car. Then they will realize they could have just as easily stayed home to work.
- flukus 9y ago
  > I think we will eventually see some workplaces offer micro-offices with high tech ventilation, fiber optic lights, sound proofing, and virtual windows. We've had them for my entire working life and probably decades earlier: cubicles. They don't have to be dilbert esque cubicle farms in 90,000 square meter office floors.
  - ilaksh 9y ago
    Cubicles are better than open office and a lot simpler to implement than my fantasy micro-offices but they definitely are not a substitute for an office. That is why I would like to try to make really small offices tolerable like the ventilation and other ideas I mentioned.
  - itronitron 9y ago
    ideo designed a dream cubicle for dilbert a while back... https://youtu.be/iuzMTw37psg https://youtu.be/iuzMTw37psg
- johan_larson 9y ago
  Microsoft has long had a thing about private offices for their developers. Over time the offices have gotten smaller, but they still have them. I think at this point the newest ones fit a desk and a chair and that's all.
- itronitron 9y ago
  yeah, they can meet with their team in the parking lot 'circle the wagons' and have a standup from their cars. I envision a front windshield that retracts completely to ensure quality face-time
megaman22 9y ago
For a stretch, I went to the office on Monday, and worked from home the rest of the week. Never in my life have I been as happy with a work situation, or gotten anywhere near as much done. The one day in the office was enough to deal with staff meetings and do planning and other work that actually benefits from being co-located with other people. The other four days I could grind away and actually structure my day so that I could get the contiguous blocks of time necessary to actually get things done. Sometimes that meant I was awake at 4am and coded away madly until sunrise; other days I might take a nap or work on some stuff around the house in those afternoon hours when productivity is at a nadir. I probably ended up actually working somewhere close to 40-50 hours a week, instead of just being at the office for 40. These days, I've basically got that schedule flipped, except I'm working from home on Fridays. On average, I probably get an hour or two of real work done; there's just so much overhead and interruptions that make it damn near impossible to actually concentrate and do anything. On Friday when I work from home, I'm so burned out and used up that I can't get much accomplished then either; besides trying to steal time to deal with all of the errands and other business that it's my only opportunity to get done during business hours. It's really not a great setup. I've been thinking about trying to switch to working four tens instead of five eights; working seven to five would essentially double the amount of time I have to actually get work done, in those two hours before anybody else is in the office. Unfortunately bosses get itchy if they can't see that you're there in the office and they can't walk over at any moment and poke you.
- valuearb 9y ago
  I rarely work at home despite the open office because I want to be visibly available for leadership reasons, today I was forced to work from home (sick child). Oh my god! I couldn’t believe the difference in my productivity and quality of my code. I actually had forgotten how it is to regally think through a problem on depth.
temporallobe 9y ago
For me, the perfect solution was a cubicle with high walls. It was open enough to encourage collaboration when needed, but closed off enough to allow for privacy when needed. It was perfect because I was able to get into deep concentration modes and I learned and accomplished so much in those years. Now, I work in an open office area and I am really getting fed up with the distractions. Constant cross-talk and interruptions, especially by the coworker sitting right next to me who just won't shut the fuck up. He's one of those people that mumble any thought that comes to his head and expects you to respond to or acknowledge him in some way. He also constantly wants me to see something on his screen or has questions, requiring me to turn and face him to talk, breaking my concentration. Other coworkers just mosy on up to my desk to say hi or casually ask me for my input on various issues. Add to that several useless standup and status meetings, and my productivity basically becomes 0% until about 2 pm when everyone is finally quiet from food comas. The din starts back up in an hour or so and dors not die down again until most everyone leaves for the day. I stay until about 6pm and I get more done in those 2 hours than I do in the other 6-7 hours of the day. Open offices are not just a bad or failed idea, they're a fucking disaster.
- 52-6F-62 9y ago
  I have a similar situation. While it provides me plenty of space to concentrate, I don't find I mix very often, or run into people very often. I still don't know most of the people in my relevant departments. Most of my communiques occur via Slack, HipChat, Skype, email, and JIRA. I rarely meet face-to-face with people anymore. I'll have the odd chat with some of my coworkers, but we tend to work outward from our group rather than together so the calls to discuss work are limited. I still prefer the semi-private or private workstation but would love if there were more thought put into mixing or socializing employees without going overboard. However, much of that is probably more due to the structure of some departments in my office than the space itself.
mschuster91 9y ago
The problem is that company actions are usually dictated by the bean counters in accounting/finance. By forcing the company to an open-office layout, the CFO can claim an immediate reduction in rent cost (KPIs: short term profits, office space per worker) and the bonuses that go along with it. When it inevitably ends up hurting the company because people leave, they can shift the blame by saying "those who left (or who don't want to join the company any more once they hear that it's open office) are not culturally fitting to our new ultra-agile, ultra-communcation mantra any more, it was neccessary". And when shit really hits the fan (massive loss of staff/productivity), the CFO can still quietly depart, after all he likely already has pocketed the boni and stock options and whatnotelse. Or not depart at all by successfully attributing the problems to entirely unrelated things (e.g. a payment rise freeze, $new_attractive_startup opening up shop in the same city, rent risings forcing people out of town, ...). But by that point, it will be so much more expensive to shift back into a closed space layout... because the place that has been "won" might be rented out to another company or filled with new hires (thus making a rescale == a move of the entire office). The only places where open space layouts can work are places that have a strong remote culture by allowing those who suffer the most from open office layouts to simply work (more) from home or those with a CxO team with great managerial/psychological skills, where the leadership e.g. listens to the workers and installs plants as sound catchers or visual/audio barriers, so that the workers feel a subjective improvement in the kind of "meh, it sucks, but it's not so bad any more since we have the new plants and it doesn't suck enough to search for a new job". tl;dr: wrong/toxic KPI focus in management is the problem, and there is no KPI for "employee happiness/productivity" that can be scientifically measured without a doubt, while everyone with a calculator can determine savings in rent and office space per worker. Another thing that people often forget when discussing open-office plants is smell. Most focus on visual or audio distractions, but smell is an important factor, too. In a closed-space layout you stick the dog people with their dogs and those tolerant to dog smell into one office and be done, while the dog smell in an open space environment goes everywhere. This also applies to human odors and especially those of food - for example, I'm fine with nearly anything except fish. As soon as someone eats fish and I can smell it, I escape to somewhere where I cannot smell the fish any more. Other people react to other smells, and that may be something as simple as the colleague having jogged to the office and being sweaty.
HumanDrivenDev 9y ago
You might also be working in the wrong position. A programmer is a skilled IC, but an IC none the less. If even facebook stuffs mere programmers into open office, what makes you think other companies are likely to do better? NOTE: I am an IC with my own office in a small company. Pure luck.
Karupan 9y ago
I have been working more often from home in my last two jobs where there have been open offices. I didn't initially realise why, but its been increasingly clear that I just need the privacy to get work done. So typically I ended up going into office twice a week, and work from home the remaining days. I don't mind if the company has open office as long as they let me work from home.
m3kw9 9y ago
There are team intangibles that you get with open offices. You get to be more aware of what is happening, in a subconscious way. I’ve seen both open and cubicles, both have plus and minus. This dude clearly has his own taste and thinks he can speak for everyone
- leggomylibro 9y ago
  True, but a lot of people simply cannot work in an environment full of so much clutter, noise, and distractions. Not 'will not', 'cannot'. Their productivity will drop like a stone. Are your 'intangibles' worth disqualifying a significant portion of your potential workforce? I guess if you're in a leadership role that might seem like a loaded question, but...well, if that's the case then I sure wouldn't work for you. It takes a diverse set of minds and opinions to get the most out of a vision.
  - m3kw9 9y ago
    I was referring him making the article title sound like is gospel, i also blame the need to have a click bait title to get people to read it
- valuearb 9y ago
  What team intangibles does an open office full of headphone wearers get? How does their subconscious gain awareness when they can’t hear you? How hard is it to share at standup, on Slack and have regular planning meetings?
ulkesh 9y ago
Honestly, the only reason open offices exist can be described in a single word: control. It simply allows managers to hold sway over their employees by forcing them to look busy and be in their chair as much as possible, and causing undue stress. It also has the horrible downside of mashing together personalities that will conflict at some point without any guidance of how to resolve the conflicts as they arise. People are dicks no matter how hard they try not to be. Sure, we can try to act like adults, but people tend to defend themselves and their actions in front of an audience instead of talking things through like adults should — which is much more easily accomplished in a private office.
- carlivar 9y ago
  I agree it is one word but I think it is a different word: money. Open offices are cheaper.
  - ulkesh 9y ago
    Maybe it's both :)
jrochkind1 9y ago
The only reason open offices are popular is because they are cheaper. The rest is just bullshit to try to convince you they don't suck and aren't just chosen because they are cheaper.
oliwarner 9y ago
The irony is it's exactly this sort of all-or-nothing statement that leads companies astray. There are plenty of environments and team structures that worship the benefits they get from being able to work next to one another, from being able to just ask something rather than get up, or write an email. Even just for the comradely. Just as there are jobs and people and teams who need walls, either to put stuff on or relax (perhaps the wrong word) within the separation they provide. And how much people need one or the other changes over time, depending on what they're doing. There isn't one simple answer... Except that holding offices as status symbols is pretty toxic when the person who really wants one is actually better off without one. Perhaps a medium-term hot-desk/office allocation based on what people want and need. There are a couple of interesting models laid out here but seriously, before you turn your office into a warren-line Eudamonia Machine, please step back and talk to your employees. And if you are pushing for something like that... fire escapes, fire escapes, fire escapes.
zeveb 9y ago
That Eudæmonia Machine sounds completely brilliant. Why aren't more offices built like that? Heck, there's even something there for the C-suite types: the gallery and salon seem like just their element.

hb3b 9y ago

Peopleware debunked the myth that open office plans raise employee productivity. It should be required reading for all startup office managers. If there is a common struggle amongst employees with noise, demand a quiet room/area and a headphones subsidy.

RandallBrown 9y ago
I thought the point of open offices was to increase team productivity, not employee productivity.
- throwanem 9y ago
  Increase the productivity of a team by reducing that of its members? How do you see that working?
  - ryandrake 9y ago
    Because when working in teams, 1 + 1 doesn't necessarily equal 2. Good, collaborating teams produce in excess of the sum of their parts. Companies will take a hit in individual productivity if they think overall productivity will be more than the sum of individual productivity.
    - valuearb 9y ago
      That’s great and likely true, but what does it have to do with open offices? The signal to noise ratio of open office areas is minuscule compared to the ratio of devs in private offices using Slack. I know cause I’ve done both.
  - RandallBrown 9y ago
    Have you ever heard the expression the sum is greater than its parts? Let's say one of my coworkers is working on some code I'm familiar. I may be able to sacrifice about 10% of my productivity (just from overhearing that they're working on something I know about) to double their productivity.
    - valuearb 9y ago
      How often does that have to happen? Literally you have to hear productivity doublers almost daily for it to work. What about the ones you miss? And how bad is your fellow developer that they not only need your help to double their productivity, but that they wouldn’t even think of asking for your input if they were in a private office. Like they can’t even operate Slack.
  - cstrahan 9y ago
    Chemotherapeutic agents are poisonous, and yet they’re administered to cancer patients. What is deletarious at a granular level is not necessarily deletarious for the system as a whole. A worker might be occasionally distracted in an open office (-1 to efficiency, say), but at the same time might benefit e.g. from more direct communication channels (+2 to efficiency). That’s a net win of +1 efficiency. Whether that’s how it actually works out, well... I have no horse I’m that race.
    - valuearb 9y ago
      I can’t disagree with you, open offices are just like cancer to productivity.

lancebeet 9y ago

For those who are interested, Joel Spolsky wrote about this a long time ago. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/07/30/private-offices-redux/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/07/30/private-offices-re...

ajeet_dhaliwal 9y ago

That picture of the Facebook offices in the article looks terrible. If anyone here works there is that the new office? Also is that how it's supposed to look or is it unfinished?

calt 9y ago
“It’s intended to be a symbol of what we believe at Facebook, which is that our work is unfinished,” said Lori Goler, vice president of people. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/11/30/what-these-photos-of-facebooks-new-headquarters-say-about-the-future-of-work https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/11/30...
- throw-away-8 9y ago
  They should apply the same principle to their cafes. "Our food preparation is left incomplete as a symbol..."
- kwillets 9y ago
  So do the engineers work on finishing the building too?
ajeet_dhaliwal 9y ago
I received a message from someone claiming to work at FB who says it is indeed the new building (20) and it is supposed to look like that, and that another one exactly like it is being built next door. Apparently the numbers on the beams can tell you whereabouts it was taken. He's not a fan either! The interior designers must have been paid well I'm guessing - this is successful company, perhaps the rest of us have poor taste and we will eventually grow to be dazzled by it.
falcolas 9y ago
This bothered me too. Open offices are bad enough; unfinished spaces are unforgivable. There's virtually nothing to dampen noise - you'd literally be trying to work in an echo chamber. And that doesn't even include the visual noise of exposed wiring, loose insulation, and exposed beams. Even the environmental controls are working harder than they have to - all of that empty space over everyone's heads has to be heated/cooled, and a lot of insulation potential from a simple drop ceiling is lost. In other words, worker productivity aside, Facebook is still losing a lot of money on that building. The last time I worked in a space like that was for Atari as a temp QA tester. It was as bad as advertised, though even Atari had cubicle walls and company-provided headphones for their testers.

hkmurakami 9y ago

The writers cabin reminded me of longtime Bay Area resident and Pulitzer prize winning novelist, Wallace Stegner's writing office (separate building from his home). http://ww4.hdnux.com/photos/11/23/76/2441099/7/1024x1024.jpg http://ww4.hdnux.com/photos/11/23/76/2441099/7/1024x1024.jpg

js2 9y ago
Michael Pollan (the author of Omnivore's Dilemma) also built his own writing cabin and wrote an article (and eventually a book too) about out it: http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/building-a-room-of-my-own/ http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/building-a-room-of...
deleted 9y ago
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itronitron 9y ago
you could fit a lot of small cabins (or tool sheds) into that huge Facebook openoffice space, one of my favorite lines is from the movie 'America's Sweethearts' where Billy Crystal is telling another person that a film editor (played by Christopher Walken) purchased the Unabomber's cabin from the FBI and now uses it as his editing studio...

marsrover 9y ago

After working in a cubicle I'd be reluctant to ever go back to an open office (I guess remote is the next step in this progression). Which is shitty because there are companies I'd like to work for but they have open offices. Even just looking at images of open offices and imagining having to work with my back turned against the entire floor gives me anxiety.

mesozoic 9y ago
I remember my first job was in a cubicle and I thought of it as cubicle hell. Now I pine for the days of the cubicle.
- calt 9y ago
  I personally feel that cubicles are the worst of both worlds. You get none of the privacy and sound isolation of a private space, but you don't get the frictionless collaboration and socialization of an open office. I felt like I was socially isolated and living in the hell of hearing the conversation of the "that guy" through the wall without being able to give him any subtle social cues.

meritt 9y ago

> Before, I continue, I would like to call out that I am part of the ‘problem’ with open offices. I’m extroverted... While I still prefer a private office, open offices don't bother me precisely because I'm an introvert. Headphones plus some synthwave and you all disappear.

chrisbennet 9y ago
Someone downvoted you for stating your preference and how you feel. WTF???
- ardme 9y ago
  It's OK, I balanced it out with an upvote for synthwave.
  - meritt 9y ago
    I can never decide if it's "synthwave" or "new retro wave". Is there a difference?
- ryandrake 9y ago
  You must be new here :)
deathanatos 9y ago
I've tried this, but while I consider myself an introvert, I just can't do the whole music thing all day. People still manage to interrupt, which makes the headphones come off, and I just never remember to put them back in. And noise still gets in, though I admit that I don't have those really nice sound-cancelling headphones, but FFS, how much of my own money do I need to drop to make up for the craptastic workplace the employer provides? While the headphones can fix the noise/distraction stuff, it doesn't magically make additional space appear. You can see in the image on the Medium article just how much space the author has at home; compare that to the Facebook office picture (I think I might actually have less space.) With more space, you might be able to do things like put up charts/diagrams, put a whiteboard on a wall (if I only had a wall) / have space to have one of those rolly ones like in the FB picture. (we lack the space for a WB…) Then there's the increased incidence in disease.

js2 9y ago

> At my most recent job, I did all of my best work at home. I would actively try to avoid the office for as long as possible. At home, I had two desks and complete control over my environment. Distractions and breaks were choices. Indeed. I've worked from home since around 2007. It started when the Sunnyvale-based startup I worked for acquired a company in NC. I had wanted to relocate back to the east coast and they generously paid for the move. I purchased a home a few miles from our NC office, to which I commuted daily. But most of the folks I was actually working on projects with were still in CA, so I was effectively working remotely from our NC office. My NC coworkers were primarily an impediment to my productivity. Sociable though I am, when I'm at work, I want to be working, not engaging in non-work related chit chat. So I experimented with working from home one day a week. One day became two, then three. My NC co-workers didn't seem to care and my CA co-workers didn't know the difference. So I started working from home full time. That company was eventually acquired by HP who shut down the NC location within 2 years and forced everyone to either re-locate or lose their job (no remote workers). I jumped ship to another startup in CA for which I worked remotely till they were acquired by another CA company who at the time had a CEO who'd made news for banning remote work. Turns out that wasn't 100% true. So here I am a decade later still working remotely.

pmoriarty 9y ago
"So here I am a decade later still working remotely." Do you feel there's any discrepancy in how far you've progressed in your company in those ten years compared to your colleagues who work in the office? At some companies you're likely to be passed over for promotions if you work remotely.
- js2 9y ago
  At both the startup and my current employer my salary has increased and I've been promoted. I'm happy where I am professionally and my income supports my family. So I think I'm doing okay. I've been good about finding high impact projects that I can either handle mostly on my own or with a small team. I've also been fortunate to work for good companies, and had mostly good managers and coworkers. There are definitely some frustrations and downsides to working from home, but overall for me I prefer it and I believe I've contributed more value to the companies I've worked for than if I had been in the office every day. I just spent a week out in CA for my current employer, who has recently converted to a full open office plan and the environment seemed very chaotic to me. I certainly didn't get as much done than when I am at home (part of this is because I wasn't using my usual work-station). When I last worked full time in an office, we had half-height cubicles with 4 employees to a "pod" which worked okay for me at the time. But I was doing sysadmin/devops work then so I was used to constant interruptions. As a programmer now, I can't imagine getting anything done outside a quiet office. I can't even read a book anymore if I hear voices in the background. I wonder if the ability to do so has atrophied?

RickS 9y ago

I asked[1] awhile back if HN readers could recommend tech companies without open offices, and got no replies. From the traction this article is getting, it sounds like there's interest, so I'm going to plead one more time for leads on companies that respect their employees right to work in peace. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15503008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15503008

lwhalen 9y ago
Viasat gives their engineers private offices, from what I've seen.
derefr 9y ago
Cynical hypothesis: if your company has an open office, your productivity as an employee isn't actually a factor in the company's predicted bottom line. The company exists as a talent pool to be acquihired, and the work exists as an ongoing advertisement for that talent pool. If bootstrapped companies had a lower rate of open-office architecture than venture-backed companies, I'd take this as pretty good supporting evidence.
- RickS 9y ago
  You: > if your company has an open office, your productivity as an employee isn't actually a factor in the company's predicted bottom line. The company exists as a talent pool to be acquihired, The article: >80 percent of all offices now have an open floor plan. Does that mean 80% of companies are aquihire plays whos employees don't factor into the bottom line? I have a hard time believing that. My cynical-but-less-cynical-than-that hypothesis is that it's cheap and hip. Doing the cheap popular thing is harder than the expensive unpopular thing.
- throwaway287391 9y ago
  Google, Amazon, Facebook -- all still waiting for that one sweet acquihire offer to come along so they can finally cash out.
- philipov 9y ago

arwhatever 9y ago

Is there no good way to collectively apply some reverse pressure back towards the job market? I often wonder as I see this, and even worse trends spreading.

RickS 9y ago
I'm not sure exactly how big the per-employee pay cut would have to be in the bay area (or elsewhere) to offset the increase in square footage costs, but I expect that it's monumental. Which is one of my pet peeves about open offices: how much it's phrased as "about collaboration". If open offices and private/pair/hub&spoke had identical costs, how many CEOs would choose to sit in the chaos? I expect the number is not the 80% that it is today. And to your point... 80% is a BIG number. Offices are slow moving things, and today, there are contractors building offices for use in the coming decade according to the whims of the day. Big lofty spaces with exposed ceilings and no damn walls. Much as I hate to say it, this is unlikely to improve on a time scale smaller than 5 years.
- abecedarius 9y ago
  Let's see, a search turns up "price per square foot for office space in San Francisco reached $72.26 in the fourth quarter of 2015". (Per year, right?) Say a small private office takes 200 ft.^2 more than your share of a cattle pen would -- by my memory of Xerox PARC, many of the researchers' offices were smaller than that in total. Extrapolate to $100/ft^2 in the future and it's still $20k, a fraction of your salary. (If it's a monthly figure, than yeah, you need to move out of SF.)
  - valuearb 9y ago
    A private office shouldn’t be bigger than 100 SF, for a typical Frisco engineer that’s less than 5% of carrying cost. Being able to only need three engineers instead of four because of the greater productivity of private offices makes it a no brainer.
dredmorbius 9y ago
If only there were some concept of, I don't know, a sort of collective bargaining between labour and management, including the issue of working conditions? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_union https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_union

byebyetech 9y ago

Every now and then i see article like this. It is common sense and majority of the engineers are complaining about open offices. BUT i don't see any news or changes happening in creating "focus friendly" work environment. When is it going to start?

maxxxxx 9y ago
Don't forget that modern work can only get done by at minimum 5 people collaborating while staring at the same screen. They also need headphones on. That changes once you are VP. Then you need an office with window to do work.
- ajmurmann 9y ago
  "That changes once you are VP. Then you need an office with window to do work." While it seems convenient to some there are very real issues that require a private space for many management tasks. I prefer sitting in the open and do so whenever I can. I feel out of touch if i don't. However, for a substantial amount of my work I need to go into a more private space and I'm not at the VP level.

deleted 9y ago

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amorphid 9y ago

For me personally, working in an open office is increasingly a non-issue, even with the ol' ADHD. I spend so much time in an office working with people who are remote, ~80% of my distractions come from my computer, not the physical space around me.

RandallBrown 9y ago

I have never been more unhappy at a job than when I had my own office. I hardly felt like a part of the team. I barely got to know anyone and communication between developers was horrible. I found it way easier to goof around and not actually do work. Sure, I get distracted more in an open office, but I always thought that was the point. When I overhear my coworker going down a particular rabbit hole that I've already been down, I can save them hours of work. I don't need to wander down a hallway hoping the person is actually there. I can just look up. I don't doubt that some people prefer their own office. I am not one of those people.

superqd 9y ago
> I found it way easier to goof around and not actually do work Why do you need someone to watch you in order to actually do your job? I work at a company where remote work is exceedingly common, almost half the company is remote, and those in the HQ city don't come in to the office everyday. We get amazing amounts of work done.
- RandallBrown 9y ago
  Because everyone is different? I don't need someone watching me to get work done. I just find it easier to focus on work when I'm around other people doing the same thing.
  - valuearb 9y ago
    In a private office you are constantly around people doing the same thing. You have stand ups and meetings with them every day, you pair program when necessary. And you still have a door so you can focus when necessary without your field of vision constantly full of motion. If you have trouble getting things done in a private office environment either you had bad management that would have been worse in an open floor plan, or you are an edge case no work environment should be catered for.
- dzhiurgis 9y ago
  IDK if you've noticed, but everyone in the office tend to sync into tomato intervals. 15 minutes of crunch follows 5 minutes of chatter, repeat

ilaksh 9y ago

They aren't using open office plans because they think it's cool. It's because giving most people an office isn't practical unless they want to get 5 times as much space which is not possible due to the high cost of space in the locations they choose. I think we will eventually see some workplaces offer micro-offices with high tech ventilation, fiber optic lights, sound proofing, and virtual windows. I also think that as self driving cars deploy people will realize they are able to work in the car. Then they will realize they could have just as easily stayed home to work.

flukus 9y ago
> I think we will eventually see some workplaces offer micro-offices with high tech ventilation, fiber optic lights, sound proofing, and virtual windows. We've had them for my entire working life and probably decades earlier: cubicles. They don't have to be dilbert esque cubicle farms in 90,000 square meter office floors.
- ilaksh 9y ago
  Cubicles are better than open office and a lot simpler to implement than my fantasy micro-offices but they definitely are not a substitute for an office. That is why I would like to try to make really small offices tolerable like the ventilation and other ideas I mentioned.
- itronitron 9y ago
  ideo designed a dream cubicle for dilbert a while back... https://youtu.be/iuzMTw37psg https://youtu.be/iuzMTw37psg
johan_larson 9y ago
Microsoft has long had a thing about private offices for their developers. Over time the offices have gotten smaller, but they still have them. I think at this point the newest ones fit a desk and a chair and that's all.
itronitron 9y ago
yeah, they can meet with their team in the parking lot 'circle the wagons' and have a standup from their cars. I envision a front windshield that retracts completely to ensure quality face-time

megaman22 9y ago

For a stretch, I went to the office on Monday, and worked from home the rest of the week. Never in my life have I been as happy with a work situation, or gotten anywhere near as much done. The one day in the office was enough to deal with staff meetings and do planning and other work that actually benefits from being co-located with other people. The other four days I could grind away and actually structure my day so that I could get the contiguous blocks of time necessary to actually get things done. Sometimes that meant I was awake at 4am and coded away madly until sunrise; other days I might take a nap or work on some stuff around the house in those afternoon hours when productivity is at a nadir. I probably ended up actually working somewhere close to 40-50 hours a week, instead of just being at the office for 40. These days, I've basically got that schedule flipped, except I'm working from home on Fridays. On average, I probably get an hour or two of real work done; there's just so much overhead and interruptions that make it damn near impossible to actually concentrate and do anything. On Friday when I work from home, I'm so burned out and used up that I can't get much accomplished then either; besides trying to steal time to deal with all of the errands and other business that it's my only opportunity to get done during business hours. It's really not a great setup. I've been thinking about trying to switch to working four tens instead of five eights; working seven to five would essentially double the amount of time I have to actually get work done, in those two hours before anybody else is in the office. Unfortunately bosses get itchy if they can't see that you're there in the office and they can't walk over at any moment and poke you.

valuearb 9y ago
I rarely work at home despite the open office because I want to be visibly available for leadership reasons, today I was forced to work from home (sick child). Oh my god! I couldn’t believe the difference in my productivity and quality of my code. I actually had forgotten how it is to regally think through a problem on depth.

temporallobe 9y ago

For me, the perfect solution was a cubicle with high walls. It was open enough to encourage collaboration when needed, but closed off enough to allow for privacy when needed. It was perfect because I was able to get into deep concentration modes and I learned and accomplished so much in those years. Now, I work in an open office area and I am really getting fed up with the distractions. Constant cross-talk and interruptions, especially by the coworker sitting right next to me who just won't shut the fuck up. He's one of those people that mumble any thought that comes to his head and expects you to respond to or acknowledge him in some way. He also constantly wants me to see something on his screen or has questions, requiring me to turn and face him to talk, breaking my concentration. Other coworkers just mosy on up to my desk to say hi or casually ask me for my input on various issues. Add to that several useless standup and status meetings, and my productivity basically becomes 0% until about 2 pm when everyone is finally quiet from food comas. The din starts back up in an hour or so and dors not die down again until most everyone leaves for the day. I stay until about 6pm and I get more done in those 2 hours than I do in the other 6-7 hours of the day. Open offices are not just a bad or failed idea, they're a fucking disaster.

52-6F-62 9y ago
I have a similar situation. While it provides me plenty of space to concentrate, I don't find I mix very often, or run into people very often. I still don't know most of the people in my relevant departments. Most of my communiques occur via Slack, HipChat, Skype, email, and JIRA. I rarely meet face-to-face with people anymore. I'll have the odd chat with some of my coworkers, but we tend to work outward from our group rather than together so the calls to discuss work are limited. I still prefer the semi-private or private workstation but would love if there were more thought put into mixing or socializing employees without going overboard. However, much of that is probably more due to the structure of some departments in my office than the space itself.

mschuster91 9y ago

The problem is that company actions are usually dictated by the bean counters in accounting/finance. By forcing the company to an open-office layout, the CFO can claim an immediate reduction in rent cost (KPIs: short term profits, office space per worker) and the bonuses that go along with it. When it inevitably ends up hurting the company because people leave, they can shift the blame by saying "those who left (or who don't want to join the company any more once they hear that it's open office) are not culturally fitting to our new ultra-agile, ultra-communcation mantra any more, it was neccessary". And when shit really hits the fan (massive loss of staff/productivity), the CFO can still quietly depart, after all he likely already has pocketed the boni and stock options and whatnotelse. Or not depart at all by successfully attributing the problems to entirely unrelated things (e.g. a payment rise freeze, $new_attractive_startup opening up shop in the same city, rent risings forcing people out of town, ...). But by that point, it will be so much more expensive to shift back into a closed space layout... because the place that has been "won" might be rented out to another company or filled with new hires (thus making a rescale == a move of the entire office). The only places where open space layouts can work are places that have a strong remote culture by allowing those who suffer the most from open office layouts to simply work (more) from home or those with a CxO team with great managerial/psychological skills, where the leadership e.g. listens to the workers and installs plants as sound catchers or visual/audio barriers, so that the workers feel a subjective improvement in the kind of "meh, it sucks, but it's not so bad any more since we have the new plants and it doesn't suck enough to search for a new job". tl;dr: wrong/toxic KPI focus in management is the problem, and there is no KPI for "employee happiness/productivity" that can be scientifically measured without a doubt, while everyone with a calculator can determine savings in rent and office space per worker. Another thing that people often forget when discussing open-office plants is smell. Most focus on visual or audio distractions, but smell is an important factor, too. In a closed-space layout you stick the dog people with their dogs and those tolerant to dog smell into one office and be done, while the dog smell in an open space environment goes everywhere. This also applies to human odors and especially those of food - for example, I'm fine with nearly anything except fish. As soon as someone eats fish and I can smell it, I escape to somewhere where I cannot smell the fish any more. Other people react to other smells, and that may be something as simple as the colleague having jogged to the office and being sweaty.

HumanDrivenDev 9y ago

You might also be working in the wrong position. A programmer is a skilled IC, but an IC none the less. If even facebook stuffs mere programmers into open office, what makes you think other companies are likely to do better? NOTE: I am an IC with my own office in a small company. Pure luck.

Karupan 9y ago

I have been working more often from home in my last two jobs where there have been open offices. I didn't initially realise why, but its been increasingly clear that I just need the privacy to get work done. So typically I ended up going into office twice a week, and work from home the remaining days. I don't mind if the company has open office as long as they let me work from home.

m3kw9 9y ago

There are team intangibles that you get with open offices. You get to be more aware of what is happening, in a subconscious way. I’ve seen both open and cubicles, both have plus and minus. This dude clearly has his own taste and thinks he can speak for everyone

leggomylibro 9y ago
True, but a lot of people simply cannot work in an environment full of so much clutter, noise, and distractions. Not 'will not', 'cannot'. Their productivity will drop like a stone. Are your 'intangibles' worth disqualifying a significant portion of your potential workforce? I guess if you're in a leadership role that might seem like a loaded question, but...well, if that's the case then I sure wouldn't work for you. It takes a diverse set of minds and opinions to get the most out of a vision.
- m3kw9 9y ago
  I was referring him making the article title sound like is gospel, i also blame the need to have a click bait title to get people to read it
valuearb 9y ago
What team intangibles does an open office full of headphone wearers get? How does their subconscious gain awareness when they can’t hear you? How hard is it to share at standup, on Slack and have regular planning meetings?

ulkesh 9y ago

Honestly, the only reason open offices exist can be described in a single word: control. It simply allows managers to hold sway over their employees by forcing them to look busy and be in their chair as much as possible, and causing undue stress. It also has the horrible downside of mashing together personalities that will conflict at some point without any guidance of how to resolve the conflicts as they arise. People are dicks no matter how hard they try not to be. Sure, we can try to act like adults, but people tend to defend themselves and their actions in front of an audience instead of talking things through like adults should — which is much more easily accomplished in a private office.

carlivar 9y ago
I agree it is one word but I think it is a different word: money. Open offices are cheaper.
- ulkesh 9y ago
  Maybe it's both :)

jrochkind1 9y ago

The only reason open offices are popular is because they are cheaper. The rest is just bullshit to try to convince you they don't suck and aren't just chosen because they are cheaper.

oliwarner 9y ago

The irony is it's exactly this sort of all-or-nothing statement that leads companies astray. There are plenty of environments and team structures that worship the benefits they get from being able to work next to one another, from being able to just ask something rather than get up, or write an email. Even just for the comradely. Just as there are jobs and people and teams who need walls, either to put stuff on or relax (perhaps the wrong word) within the separation they provide. And how much people need one or the other changes over time, depending on what they're doing. There isn't one simple answer... Except that holding offices as status symbols is pretty toxic when the person who really wants one is actually better off without one. Perhaps a medium-term hot-desk/office allocation based on what people want and need. There are a couple of interesting models laid out here but seriously, before you turn your office into a warren-line Eudamonia Machine, please step back and talk to your employees. And if you are pushing for something like that... fire escapes, fire escapes, fire escapes.

zeveb 9y ago

That Eudæmonia Machine sounds completely brilliant. Why aren't more offices built like that? Heck, there's even something there for the C-suite types: the gallery and salon seem like just their element.