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Ask HN: What are some tech companies that do not use an open floor plan?

• blabla_blublu 8y ago
  Several teams in Apple don't have an open floor plan. They pair two individuals in an office.
  • nbdev 8y ago
    I have one word for this, and I'm totally sincere and serious about it no matter how facetious it sounds: Farts.
  • ghostcluster 8y ago
    Except that the gigantic multibillion dollar new space ring was explicitly designed around big open office units, long tables with bench seating, and the 'privacy pods' are exposed clear glass on all sides..
    • hfdgiutdryg 8y ago
      long tables with bench seating So everyone at the table has to have identical ergonomics?
      • fzzzy 8y ago
        What an absolute nightmare.
        • piccolbo 8y ago
          You just need to hire engineers that fit the space (between 5'9" and 5'11" tall). What is the problem? Hiring is difficult anyway ...
      • rbonvall 8y ago
        And it sounds like it's identically awful ergonomics.
    • ebbv 8y ago
      Wow that sounds like a waking nightmare. If I had to sit on bench seating all day I'd probably quit after a week.
      • briandear 8y ago
        Except that isn’t true. Ergo is a really big deal at Apple. You get a standard chair, but you can have an ergo evaluation and they’ll buy you whatever chair you need if your existing chair isn’t correct. Nobody is spending their work day on benches; that’s a fact.
        • ebbv 8y ago
          This seems like something you should have replied to the parent with. I wasn't asserting what happens at Apple, I was reacting to what he said. If he is making stuff up, call him out not me.
          • briandear 8y ago
            You are correct. Apologies. My intent was to respond that you wouldn’t face such conditions. Def should have been on the parent comment though! I’d quit too if I had to work from a bench all day!
        • ghostcluster 8y ago
          > Ergo is a really big deal at Apple. Apparentlhy not, if you've ever used their new keyboards and touch bars on the premium laptops, or their awful, awful magic mouse.
    • yoda_sl 8y ago
      Slightly incorrect! The offices there vary in size from one person to up to a dozen. A lot of offices in various sections of the ring accommodate 2 persons. Yes there is a big glass/sliding door but from what I have seen when closing the door it is quite soundproof (unlike some small conference room). And they provide inside each section different zone with huge whiteboard and sofa/chairs to help facilitate brainstorming/discussion, even each area has its own Apple TV to project on a huge screen through AirPlay. So overall it is quite good from what I was able to see for the few hours I was there. Folks working there like it.
      • lawnchair_larry 8y ago
        No they don’t. They pretty famously refused to relocate to the new space and there was a lit of outrage and rebellion. It’s awful. https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/apple-employees-hate-apples-5-billion-open-plan-o.html https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/apple-employees-hate-appl... http://calnewport.com/blog/2017/09/01/apples-new-open-office-sparks-revolt/ http://calnewport.com/blog/2017/09/01/apples-new-open-office...
    • geekbird 8y ago
      Yuck. That sounds like hell. You can't pair/team with another person if your neighbor is literally an armlength away.
  • briandear 8y ago
    And lots of teams have single developer offices. Saying “at Apple” is meaningless because there are a wide variety of situations.
• stacksavings 8y ago
  why not just find remote work positions and set your own environment?
  • magduf 8y ago
    Easier said than done. For some specialties, remote positions simply don't exist or are extremely rare. I'm an embedded programmer and you don't see many remote jobs in this field. If you're a web dev, however, it's a very different story.
  • sametmax 8y ago
    I mostly remote work and love it. But it's not for everybody. It involves: - being able to motivate yourself; - being disciplined; - being autonomous; - being capable to communicate efficiently asynchronously, with time and space constrains on limiting medium; - accepting less social time; - juggling private and pro time/space. Which includes your friends and family. My GF still hasn't get used to the fact that when I'm home working, she should consider I'm not home. It makes things harder. Honestly, you should never, on hiring, accept remote work right away. First, assess the person on site on all those points for a few months, then make a short test of remote, then decide. And don't be afraid to say no. I know more devs that are not fit for remote that devs that are, despite most of them stating the contrary. Particularly, a lot of my colleagues can quickly work on a non priority topic if left unchecked, just because they don't have the client as a priority, but the tech. You can loose a lot of time to this.
    • raducu 8y ago
      I completely agree with your points. But I believe the real cause is not some personal defficiency but the shitty corporte/factory type of work where politics is a huge part of day to day job, where nobody really wants others to do meaningful, deep work, nobody wants to commit and give clear answers and offer personal responsibility. That's why devs need to communicate(read interrupt) so much in person with each others; add in "agile" which in 99% of the cases means nobody really knows or is imaginative enough to know how things should progress, what the requirements are, what resources should be available before the project starts.
• denimnerd 8y ago
  i work from home when i need to concentrate and go to the office occasionally. it’s prerty selfish really as the entire team can’t do that but whatever. it works for me.
• carlosdp 8y ago
  Fog Creek famously has a non-open office space [1] [1] https://medium.com/make-better-software/beyond-open-offices-the-new-fog-creek-headquarters-bc2f70d7c7dc https://medium.com/make-better-software/beyond-open-offices-...
  • ben1040 8y ago
    I don't know if Trello still works this way after the spinoff from Fog Creek and subsequent Atlassian acquisition, but I visited Trello's NYC office and they had a similar setup to Fog Creek's. Trello also has a significant number of remote employees.
    • thedufer 8y ago
      Trello shared an office with Fog Creek until last December or so, so no surprise that they're similar. I suspect Trello retained the offices layout since Fog Creek was the one that moved out.
• tbassetto 8y ago
  Cisco Norway (where I work) doesn't have open floor plans. Cisco San Jose (the HQ) is a different story though. Also, I doubt that Basecamp (formerly named 37signals) has open floor plans.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • icebraining 8y ago
    They do have open floor plans, but also five "team rooms": https://basecamp.com/about/office https://basecamp.com/about/office
    • briandear 8y ago
      And they also treat that open plan “like a library.” Vastly different than the frat house open plans of most companies.
• rifung 8y ago
  When I worked at Extrahop the engineers had offices with two to an office. It was a great place to work
• kayamon 8y ago
  Lots of (in fact most?) companies don't have an open plan office. When I used to work at Activision, they didn't and still don't. > How is this acceptable? Because it's totally fine. If you can't work with another human nearby you might want to get over yourself and think about what you're doing with your life.
  • dx034 8y ago
    I think it's more about the noise level. Open plan office means that there's constant noise from talking and phones. Some can ignore that noise but for others, noise cancelling headphones are the only solution. Easier communication is certainly a benefit but I'm not sure if it outweighs the loss in productivity, especially for people that don't constantly have to talk to others to do their job.
    • tintor 8y ago
      Noise cancelling headphones will cancel low frequency sounds like fans / AC, but not high frequency ones like talking and phones.
      • dtech 8y ago
        Have you tried one? Mine significantly dampens and distorts speech so that it becomes easy to ignore. It's a recent Sony top-model, which from reviews seems to be on the top together with Bose regarding NC technology at the moment.
        • slhck 8y ago
          I've found the opposite to be true. Got a pair of QC-35II that block everything but speech, which subjectively appears to become even louder, even when you listen to music. They're great for airplanes, trains, and low-frequency background noise, but for a crowded office where people are having chats and telcos, I'd rather use Shure in-ear monitors.
        • fyfy18 8y ago
• lgessler 8y ago
  Epic (the EMR vendor) has all employees in an office of at most two people, with one per office being the goal.
  • goda90 8y ago
    And the goal is practically reached. Almost every office without a window has one person unless otherwise requested.
• amriksohata 8y ago
  I work in a very open office plan where meeting rooms have no walls and even directors sit amongst the staff. It's noisy and distracting, I can never concentrate
  • maxxxxx 8y ago
    "even directors sit amongst the staff" At least they are eating their own dogfood. I have had several occasions where I was belittled when I complained about noise and lack of daylight by our managers who have private offices with windows.
    • jrootabega 8y ago
      They have no idea (or have forgotten) what doing Dev work is like. Their jobs are basically distraction, so to them there's no problem.
      • VLM 8y ago
        Its a social hierarchy thing; its baked into the cake of the architecture of the office. Something like: We don't care about the message it sends that "concentration workers" are prevented from working by the very architecture of the office yet we support "distraction workers". I guess "concentration workers" are a lower caste at that company and they find it amusing to enforce that value judgement. It is exactly like making certain races sit in the back of the bus. No matter how many times you claim it doesn't matter or everyone does it and its really trendy, the people subjected to it none the less understand exactly what message it is sending and are insulted. The point of open offices is literally insulting knowledge workers and not caring that they know their noses are being rubbed in it. Sort of an adult version of revenge of the nerds pranks and bullying.
        • geekbird 8y ago
          Bingo. The first time I got moved from an office to an open plan it felt like exactly what it was: a severe demotion. I was being told that I didn't rate an office or even a cube and the ability to concentrate without being interrupted like a low level clerical worker.
• e-_pusher 8y ago
  Microsoft is slowly switching to open floor plans, but for now a lot of folks have their own offices, or are doubling up at most.
  • jmspring 8y ago
    SVC is being redone in open floor plan. Those in Redmond being converted often have PMs and Engineers doubling up in the same office - two total separate use cases. Some roles mitigate this with remote work.
    • kabdib 8y ago
      The Studio buildings at MS were open plan when we moved in. Pods of six people sat in a kind giant cubical corraled by high walls, with these "six-packs" strung down the length of the building's wing. Managers and the privileged few received offices. When space got tight, they removed most of the interior partitioning and furniture in the six-packs and crammed more people in. The most I ever saw was ten people stuffed into a six-pack in the building's interior (no windows, ugh), and let's just say that the ventilation was not up to the task of servicing ten bodies and many computers and game consoles. Towards the end of a crunch-time it got pretty ripe. Facilities never budgets enough power. I think the planners assume "Excel" workers with a desktop computer and a phone, and ("yeah, yeah, okay") grudgingly double that number for engineers, while the actual engineers have a black market going in sufficient power strips to run all the hardware they need. Facilities ran additional power several times while I was working there, and this was just a software group . . .
      • crzwdjk 8y ago
        Each new major generation of NVIDIA GPU was accompanied by an upgrade to the power transformer to the building that the software teams sat in, because it turned out during bringup that the building was already exceeding the capacity of the transformer.
• wskemper 8y ago
  I work for Viasat; all of our new-build offices in the past few years have been designed around what we call the neighborhood concept. A neighborhood is a set of individual offices (maybe 60sqft-ish?) with three solid walls, and one glass/wood wall with a sliding door. All the offices open into a central room that can be outfitted in a bunch of different ways. There are neighborhoods of different sizes, and basically, each team gets a neighborhood to themselves. The whole concept was developed through a series of experiments that took several years. Some teams make use of the space better than others, of course, but for my group it's been a huge boon to our collaborative culture. The offices are well-insulated, so you don't need headphones to achieve quiet, but if you want to, you can leave your door open and hear what your teammates are discussing at any time. Over time we're upgrading our older facilities to the same model, but in general there are few open-plan offices or cube farms in the company, and I highly doubt we're going to build more. Many years ago, our founders made it a company priority to give folks a door they can close, to get away from "it all" and focus.
  • rdl 8y ago
    That's the office concept I've always wanted to build. It would be cool if someone from the company could document it/blog post/etc. -- might be good for recruiting too. (Especially since Viasat does pretty cool stuff -- excited about the new Exede sat expanding coverage...) I was thinking it would make sense to have roller doors or some other way to open the entire side of the office (on both sides -- "neighborhood" and "hallway" if the occupant wanted.)
    • sametmax 8y ago
      +1. I'm interested in a rough blueprint too.
    • blitzo 8y ago
      I find this https://imgur.com/CvtAHgZ https://imgur.com/CvtAHgZ IKEA Mandal divider turn-into cubicle reach a compromising middle ground between open and closed space.
      • 8y ago
• throwaway_18 8y ago
  At Netapp in Sunnyvale everyone has 6ft by 8ft cubicles, with full sized walls (66” high). Some people have combined cubicles which are 6ft by 12ft.
• davidmoffatt 8y ago
  Yes I too would love to see this. Noise canceling headphone seem to cancel everything but voices and that is the opposite of what you need.
  • raducu 8y ago
    I use industrial ear muffs over my in-ear headphones. Not very comfortable but they work great. Now I wish my work wouldn't suck so I could actually use all the focus I get this way :)
    • alexfringes 8y ago
      I’ve found that custom molded in-ear hearing protection combined with industrial ear muffs is the closest I can get to drowning out nearby conversations (including loud ones) without requiring a layer of music on top or bothering with headphones underneath the ear muffs.
      • KozmoNau7 8y ago
        I've been considering this as well, but it'll get really uncomfortable over the course of a day. And then you have the colleagues who think they can just interrupt you all the time, with minor questions. Or the ones who just hover around, waiting for you notice them.
      • loco5niner 8y ago
        Careful with this. I have tinnitus (arguably from 8 hours/day of headphone use), and when I doubled up as you described, my tinnitus became unbearable because it was the only thing I could hear and my brain "latched" on to it. I'm still trying to train my brain to stop listening...
  • smichel17 8y ago
    My preferred setup is earplugs with headphones over them. The headphones muffle outside noise to some degree and add music to drown out what they can't muffle. The earplugs create an end result of just muffled music, which is basically white noise if you pick the right type of songs. The only downside is that earplugs can get uncomfortable after a long period of wearing them.
• kamaal 8y ago
  Never understood the rationale behind open floor offices. I currently work in a cubicle set up, and people set up war rooms anytime they want close collaboration. Open offices seem to take this exceptional case and make it the norm. At the same time open floor offices cause a lot of trouble to people in non-exception situations.
  • Lammy 8y ago
    Follow the money. It’s cheaper to build, easy to shuffle, and people will put up with it. I know I do.
    • brann0 8y ago
      Cheaper in the short term. If your engineers productivity is constantly tanking because of noise and interruptions it will mean lots of wasted money. But you can't factor that in a spreadsheet, right?
      • kamaal 8y ago
        I wonder how many of these problems happen because of outdated management practices since the days of serfdom that treat people as two hands and with hours in a day whom they have to whip enough to pick as much cotton as they can. So many companies are full of upper management who think as engineering output the way one would run a chair manufacturing firm. Too many people think everything there is in a chair has been made, and the only scope left now is a little innovation here and there. All they have to do is get people to saw, hammer and glue as quickly as they can.
  • scruffyherder 8y ago
    Facilities gets a different budget than operations. It's OK to spend $150k for an engineer that can't concentrate from the noise, but $1k to make him productive is out of the question, and out from another budget!
  • rdl 8y ago
    1) Cheaper -- different budgets. Usually the people specing the office are judged on how cheaply they can deliver (partially), not on anything related to employee productivity. 2) Open offices look way better in photos/concepts -- so they'll get chosen over a boring all-offices layout 3) Much easier to reconfigure -- this is why a lot of startups or those in high-growth periods end up in them, even if they'd prefer offices. Even cubicles require some professional reconfiguring, but anything requiring permitted construction is a big deal.
• sametmax 8y ago
  Any companies whose business model is security may want to avoid open spaces. Among those I worked with, like some chip makers (gemalto, safran, etc), space agencies (the CNES comes to mind) or banks (labanquepostale/banque populaire have a few old school offices, bank of luxembourg has lots open plan though). I don't think founders think the geeks wellbeing is ever a criteria to choose a floor plan. Money, space and ability to check on your team mates are the first points.
  • FanaHOVA 8y ago
    I know from experience that a few banks have open office spaces with hot desks. (Clearly not for all employees, but part of their tech staff works like that)
    • sametmax 8y ago
      Yes, I didn't say "all", I said "some" that I visited.
  • pista 8y ago
    The worst place I've seen is the dev dept of a bank. It's not just that 200 persons were crammed in a single room, it was that the place was extremely noisy. I pity the guys that were sitting near the coffee machine. The idiot that interviewed me was proud of the environment. Fortunately they didn't accept me so I didn't need to make excuses to the recruiter.
• fbonawiede 8y ago
  I’m guessing it is a combination of cost and constant team growth. Liquidity is a scarce resource for startups and investing in a larger office than necessary for the time being requires too much capital. At our startup, Delibr, we try to combine these conditions with personal preferences. We are 6 people and 3 of us have our own rooms.
• hantonsen 8y ago
  I feel your pain. I found this video from Vox very interesting, to see the rationale behind the original open office space, and contrast it with what modern organizations has made it into. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p6WWRarjNs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p6WWRarjNs
• inopinatus 8y ago
  Best office I ever worked in (in both productivity AND developer happiness) was subdivided into 4m x 4m rooms each with two or three developers, wood panels between adjacent rooms, glass corridor walls with privacy frosting, and floor-to-ceiling glass exterior walls with Melbourne city and parkland views. Each space was decorated and equipped as the occupants pleased. Company was acquired in 2004 and that office sadly no longer exists.
• lowlevel 8y ago
  They're all going this way. I've had to started adding 'well, I can' t do the work here' in front of every 'when can you have this done' response.
  • KozmoNau7 8y ago
    It has gotten to the point where I'm seriously considering just working from home every day, even though that's strictly not allowed. Open-plan offices are absolutely maddening, I get pulled out of my thoughts constantly, and there's no effective way to shut it out. Earplugs aren't enough, and with headphones I would have to play music so loudly it would be annoying my colleagues, just in order to cut out the constant noise. We have so-called "focus rooms", but 1) there are far too few of them, and 2) they're supposed to only be used for short phone meetings and such. I raise this with my manager every time we have a "pit talk", as they're now called. But there is seemingly nothing he can do.
    • skriticos2 8y ago
      Use noise cancelling headphones. They shut out the world with a bit of quiet music. I love my qc35. Doesn't fix the primary issue, but makes it more bearable.
      • eeZah7Ux 8y ago
        > noise cancelling headphones They are very ineffective against voices! Passive insulating headphones are much better.
        • noway421 8y ago
          afaik qc35 does both
          • pdkl95 8y ago
            Assuming "qc35" == "Bose QuietComfort 35", it also eavesdrops on the metadata of everything you listen to and sends it to Bose (and segment.io). https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Bose-headphones-have-been-spying-on-customers-11086904.php https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Bose-headphones-have-bee...
• ericjang 8y ago
  Pixar does not have an open floor plan. It's 2-3 folks to an office, and the animators are well known for decorating their offices in fairly quirky ways during the "off-season" when they have finished their portion of the work for a movie (https://www.google.com/search?q=pixar+animator+offices&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj3oZaqqMPaAhURBHwKHbG0AVkQ_AUICigB&biw=1309&bih=709 https://www.google.com/search?q=pixar+animator+offices&sourc...)
• dijit 8y ago
  It doesn't help you, but I've never worked in non-open workspaces with desks shoulder to shoulder and head to head in rows. I legitimately don't know how it is.
• brongondwana 8y ago
  FastMail has 5 in a single office, because they chose to cluster there. The standard room is 3 people in 6x6m space, which is actually way too much for just our desks, but we have collaboration tables in the middle of each room where we can put laptops or paperwork when discussing things - plus tons of whiteboard space.
• arun_dev 8y ago
  I'm not totally against the open floor plan, it's all about the silence and flow, In libraries people are able to maintain focus, So solution for open floor plans is library rules in office, if you have budget you can always go for private offices.
• sedatk 8y ago
  Microsoft, before they started adopting open plans. I had my own office and I liked it a lot.
• dalbasal 8y ago
  Where I have found open floor to be fine is small companies of 5-15 people, as long as there are quite corners to retreat to. There are some collaboration advantages to open plan, and I feel that for some (small) size, these can outweigh the distraction and blender-brain effect. I always wonder why people don't split the difference, chop up the big company office into 5-10 person mini open plan offices.
  • dgacmu 8y ago
    Google Pittsburgh is like this in many places. I like it.
  • geekbird 8y ago
    I've always thought that the idea of a "team room" with mini cubicles around a central whiteboard and gathering space would be a good compromise. People could do heads down in cubes, the team as a whole could close their door at crunch time, but people could meet, collaborate and brainstorm when they needed to.
• m4tthumphrey 8y ago
  Our office is technically open plan. We have a about 3/4 of a floor (7500sqft). The 1/4 is still empty but my team are based in the section with the "fake" wall that separates the two. It is only us in this section so it kind of acts as it's own office. We still get distracted but it's much better than being in the thick of it.
• tomohawk 8y ago
  The schools in our area are in the final phases of remodeling, getting rid of the open floor plan layout that was in vogue when many of the schools were built, and was such a disaster. Nice to see taxpayer money hard at work. It's funny that a business as reactionary as the education system seems to have learned this lesson but tech companies haven't.
  • lnsru 8y ago
    German universiteties in Munich, Dresden and probably elsewhere have separate rooms for the staff. Usually 2-4 persons per room. It’s really nice and productive. Later I found similar setting during interview at Viavi Solutions. All other bigger enterprises had open space offices. Some with cubicles, some with glas walls and some with tables only.
    • nextos 8y ago
      Sadly many universities in Europe are shockingly moving to open plan spaces.
• amelius 8y ago
  Just find some plywood and build yourself a nice cubicle :)
  • eli 8y ago
    Cubicles are far worse than open plan IMHO
    • geekbird 8y ago
      Nope, IMSHO. I've worked in everything from a solo office to benching in an open plan. Open plan anything makes me nostalgic for the smallest cubicle I ever had (4ft x 5ft). Give me walls, even if they are short.
• stefanoco 8y ago
  Bluewind is a small consulting company based in Italy (embedded systems). We switched from "almost all devs in a room" to 2/3 devs per room maximum while building our own offices recently. And common spaces for meetings, conferences and telephone calls. Encouraging to work from home when possible also. Interesting: working this way and adopting Agile principles makes enhances collaboration a lot, much more that in the previous open space where having everyone in the same room makes it almost impossible for people to talk each other when needed.
• codeulike 8y ago
  Stackoverflow/Stackexchange https://stackoverflow.blog/2015/01/16/why-we-still-believe-in-private-offices/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2015/01/16/why-we-still-believe-i...
• dancalle 8y ago
  I worked for the MITRE Corporation https://www.mitre.org https://www.mitre.org for many years, and can confirm they use offices. There are some open floor plan labs, but almost all employees have an office, usually shared with one other person.
• alanfranzoni 8y ago
  My opinion: open floor plan is acceptable up to a certain room size (100/150m2), provided that the people inside do the same job (mixing devs and salesman is a sin), that the room is not too crammed (6-10m2 per person being the sweet spot) and that there're other meeting/recreational areas.
• Moodles 8y ago
  Have there been any studies on what kind of office floor plans are actually optimal for work?
  • sheepmullet 8y ago
    > Have there been any studies on what kind of office floor plans are actually optimal for work? It's hard - every study of individuals shows they are significantly less productive in an open office environment. But what second order effects are there? You might be less productive individually but it might encourage team work and make the team as a whole more effective.
    • fsloth 8y ago
      "You might be less productive individually but it might encourage team work and make the team as a whole more effective." Team room is not an open office. Open office is a place where a number of teams congregate. And open offices generally seem to hurt even team work, so the only thing speaking for an open office is that it's cheaper. Any other 'advantages' are just marketing by consultants whose business is to develop open offices and site managers (or the corresponding financially responsible party) who want to save on their budget. If you are employing fairly expensive software engineers I'm not sure you should implement savings on a less expensive resource that will just devalue the output from your expensive resource. http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20170105-open-offices-are-damaging-our-memories http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20170105-open-offices-are-d...
    • tbrownaw 8y ago
      So where does all that supposed extra productivity come from? How does something get done, without any individual having done it?
      • VLM 8y ago
        Distraction workers like managers measure productivity in issues handled and amount of talking. By definition they don't do things, things don't get done. This is maximized in an open office. Knowledge workers like devs (mostly) measure productivity by things getting done. Usually things getting done involves one individual passing unit tests and committing the corresponding working code, not turning every minor issue into a massive teambuilding exercise of endless talking and no doing. This kind of productivity is minimized in an open office. Its a classic talk about it vs do something about it argument. Both extremes are pretty bad, unfortunately at this moment in the industry we're at one extreme swing of the pendulum.
• hordeallergy 8y ago
  It's not acceptable. I've moved from a dev background to having a go at sre/devops/something-or-other; work aside, the culture is excrutiating, with people shouting across the office all day. Best case, someone talking to themself hour after hour, as if anyone wants to hear that. The idea that open floor plans are productive is farce. I effectively have two jobs, the first being just trying to get any work done.
  • nailer 8y ago
    SRE/DevOps should generally be like dev: if you're in an open office, headphones on. > Best case, someone talking to themself hour after hour, as if anyone wants to hear that. The person who is speaking usually needs to hear it. Sorry, I talk to myself every so often. :)
    • ajeet_dhaliwal 8y ago
      The 'headphones on' as if this should be standard behavior does not make sense to me when a simple dividor or wall would do. Especially when unless you listen to loud music or have special noise canceling ones you can still hear people. If you work with a Jackhammer you cannot avoid having to cover your ears, it's very loud, but why does someone in an office have to do this, especially for the entire day, the Jackhammer person doesn't do it all day long. Also if everyone spoke to themselves at the same time, you couldn't hear yourself either. I did not down vote you btw, just replying because I see how you're offering a solution but I don't think it is good enough.
      • nailer 8y ago
        > just replying because I see how you're offering a solution but I don't think it is good enough. Oh I agree, dedicated offices are superior to headphones - hence writing 'in an open office'. I'm merely pointing out that privacy should be the same in SRE/DevOps vs devops. I'm not particularly concerned with downvotes, I've been on HN a decade and am happy to lose karma while making an accurate point.
    • Traubenfuchs 8y ago
• kuon 8y ago
  This does not answer your question, but I concur, I need my office to be private.
• kgc 8y ago
  Microsoft
• benzesandbetter 8y ago
  If avoiding open-plan is a priority, I recommend you focus on negotiating for a remote work arrangement, rather than excluding good companies. My last two long-term engagements have been at Fortune 100 companies and I've worked remotely for both. In the first case, I was the only remote employee in my business unit. I was hired because I had a high level of competency with a technology they were investing heavily in. When I first interviewed, they told me that the were only considering on-site, and that my rate was too high. So, they first hired an on-site employee at a lower rate, but he failed to deliver a working installation and the project got perilously behind schedule. When I re-approached them about two months later they were no longer hung up on my rate or request to work remote. It's worth noting that I took a gamble here and put in about 6 or 8 hours interview and follow-up process, after being told that remote was not an option, and then being given the initial "no". During the project, I did stop by their Silicon Valley campus for a few hours of meetings every month or two, which was probably 1% or less of my total billable hours. In my current engagement, my entire team is remote, so it was a non-issue. The gig was secured for me by a recruiter who had previously contacted me about an on-site position, and I told her I was only considering remote (and followed up periodically). Both of these positions had multiple technical screens which were very rigorous. Both resulted from initial contacts where I was given at least one "no". You can have a private office at any company if you negotiate for remote and set yourself up with the office you like (e.g. home, co-working, etc.)
  • gdulli 8y ago
    Working alone at home would be a worse option for me than working in an unfavorable office environment. More like a non-starter than worse. I get that there are people who love the idea of being isolated. But I think there are more who want to be around people instead of alone. And there should be a reasonable option for them, not open plan.
    • jschwartzi 8y ago
      Remote does not mean isolated. I spend most nights and weekends out with friends and groups. When I worked in an office I would frequently be too tired from interacting with people to plan things.
• baud147258 8y ago
  I'm currently working in a small open plan with 6 other people, but the company is moving in June and I'll be in the big open space with 40 people. At least it should only be developpers, so we won't have sales people shouting on the phone.
  • geekbird 8y ago
    My condolences.
• hiddentruth 8y ago
  National Instruments
• os72 8y ago
  Virtually everyone has an individual office where I work. Our CEO has the motto "give them a door, a window and the fastest computer money can buy".
  • exergy 8y ago
    Sounds like he read Jeff Atwood's Programmer Bill of Rights. May his tribe increase.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • gpvos 8y ago
    Which company is it? (If you didn't want to give away where you work, you could have named the company without saying you work there. That was the original question, after all.)
    • os72 8y ago
      Apologies. Here is a link: https://www.cmgl.ca/ https://www.cmgl.ca/
  • swebs 8y ago
    Where's that? It sounds like heaven.
  • shostack 8y ago
    This is very similar to where I work. We get people often need quiet, private spaces to do their best work, so we offer that to everyone. And a small office decorating budget to make it personalized. I made my space a relaxing place for myself with a chaise and fake tree and wood grained wallpaper. Super peaceful.
• eeks 8y ago
  IBM Research. Each researcher has his own office.
• doktrin 8y ago
  Not a 'tech company' per se, but at SEI / CERT research we had our own offices.
• sweettea 8y ago
  Red Hat's westford office has proper cubicles.
  • ghaff 8y ago
    Proper modern cubicles, which are sort of a hybrid between more traditional cubicles (i.e. ones with about 5 ft. high walls with about a 3 ft. opening) and an open office plan. So short walls on mostly 3 sides. It definitely gives you better isolation than a full open office plan but, for better or worse, it's not the clear delineation of Dilbert-style cubicles. (I guess it says something that cubicles like this are now something that people miss.)
• bcohen123 8y ago
  Here at Kensho we try to accommodate everyone's preferences. We've got single offices, 2-3 person offices, and open floor areas for whose who prefer that.
  • orips 8y ago
    If you weren't located at Ramat HaHayal that could almost become relevant.
    • bcohen123 8y ago
      We're in Cambridge MA, NYC and DC. Not sure where you got Israel from!
      • orips 8y ago
        I'm sorry. I've got you confused with Kenshoo (two Os).
    • socksy 8y ago
      Huh? https://www.kensho.com/careers https://www.kensho.com/careers says they are located in Harvard Square, NYC, DC, and LA.
• matte_black 8y ago
  One thing that also matters, that people tend to neglect, is ceiling height. In general when you need to do focused concentrated work, it’s best to work in a room with a low ceiling, the lower the better. Ideally it’s a ceiling you could almost touch. If you need to do more creative thinking, it is better to have a high ceiling, the higher the better (think cathedrals), though there must be a ceiling at some point.
  • gpvos 8y ago
    Citation needed.
    • Dangeranger 8y ago
      Here is an example article[0] and a research study from Oxford[1] which reinforce the claim. [0] https://www.fastcodesign.com/3043041/why-our-brains-love-high-ceilings https://www.fastcodesign.com/3043041/why-our-brains-love-hig... [1] http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/519146 http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/519146
  • ebbv 8y ago
    Seems a bit of a stretch to state this as a global fact. May be true for you, but personally I hate when ceiling's are too low, it makes me feel claustrophobic. One size fits all decrees like this are almost always baloney.
• bitL 8y ago
  Is this thread to identify all companies that are still having sane offices in order to get "new wave" managers there to destroy them from inside as well? ;-)
• cryptonector 8y ago
  Headphones are not good enough. It's much too easy to damage your hearing. Sun Microsystems, Inc., had offices. More junior engineers would share offices, with two or three engineers per office, while more senior engineers would have private offices. Seniority also dictated office location (think of having windows vs. not). This worked very well. It's not that expensive either (it's certainly not why Sun died).
  • therealdrag0 8y ago
    I don't like open office. But Bose QuietComfort work pretty well with music/noise on very low volume. (eg. https://asoftmurmur.com/ https://asoftmurmur.com/)
    • loco5niner 8y ago
      I use Bose QuietComfort 20's and even though they are awesome, they still not good enough. Active noise cancellation is great for airplane noise (predictable, repetitive), but not for voices.
      • cryptonector 8y ago
        And even for airplanes, it's not that good. All noise canceling headphones I've looked at or owned have a sampling frequency of 21KHz, which is a bit low, and results in high-frequency (if low amplitude) noise that I can hear, and it's annoying or even painful. I don't quite understand why there are no 44KHz noise-canceling headphones on the market...
• ubermonkey 8y ago
  I get I'm part of the privileged few, but: I've been working for a small software company for almost 11 years, and EVERYONE at my company is remote. We don't lease any real estate anywhere, unless a mailbox and a colo rack count. It's AWESOME, but there are caveats. The biggest one is that we can't really hire newbies; everyone we've brought in has to be mid-career at a minimum because the absence of the "water cooler effect" makes it harder to ramp up quickly. Folks with some experience handle this better. The other drawback is mostly theoretical: I'm really not sure I could go back to working in an office. I control the music, the temp, the food, the coffee, when I take a break, whether or not I take a midday snooze, and my cats are everpresent. I mean, an office sounds like a dystopian hellscape by comparison.
  • afoot 8y ago
    This is very interesting, because your office sounds like hell to me. Any time I work from home I'm absolutely desperate for meaningless social interaction, a walk and a chat while out for coffee, a beer with my team at lunch or after work and face to face discussion. I guess it's hard to find something that works for everyone.
    • bluntfang 8y ago
      coffee shops exist for this. rent a 5x5 desk in a coworking space. there are alternatives to home office for remote work.
      • gdulli 8y ago
        Personally either of those options would be better for me than working out of my home. But it's a curious alternative to working in an office. You're still surrounded by people and get the downsides of you're sensitive to them (I'm not) but you don't get the social benefits.
        • techn0lojesus 8y ago
          In a dev shop social benefits are synonymous to distractions. I don't care to talk to bizops people every time they walk by me. I don't want to hear females stomping on the floor with their heels like fucking mech warriors. I also tend to work in sprints that do not conform to 9-5 work days because DevOps/SRE people are typically coding/R&D during the day, and releasing/unfucking defects at night depending on intrusive maintenance windows. I can do it all from the comfort of wherever I choose and have working internet. Some days I work from the park, or work from a bar until I'm buzzed and need to go home. Also the monetary value of not having to spend money on daily transportation, don't need a huge clothing allowance so you have something decent to wear every day so you don't look like a slob, don't have to waste money on food if your employer doesn't feed you and don't have to waste time preparing meals if you don't want to eat out. If you need that much socializing time you probably don't have enough work to do, or need a hug.
• la6470 8y ago
  Really f* open office and scabies on the ones who thought of them
• a-dub 8y ago
  In the '90s I worked for an audio/video compression company. We started out in a ramshackle open plan office. Tables thrown against walls, duct tape covering cords, computers stacked on bakers racks. Then some of our products really started moving, most video cards came with our MPEG player, the internet business was taking off and we had some money. Everybody was excited as we could finally afford cubes.
• DisruptiveDave 8y ago
  I juuuust got off a catch-up call with an old college buddy who works at one of the big wireless companies. He described what I read about here on HN and in some blog posts: The company completely changed its "culture" in a desperate attempt to "attract millennials" (and be on trend). Moved to an open floor plan where nobody has an assigned desk. You literally cannot leave anything overnight or you get some sort of a citation. His words: "I spend my day with a headset covering one ear and my finger in the other ear, as I'm on calls most of the day." He also noted how they computerized the cafeteria so you don't have/get to interact with food workers anymore. "All my sandwiches have too much mayo now and I can't do anything about it."
  • PeterStuer 8y ago
    It's called 'hot-desking'. In practice everyone still sits in the same place every day, and sublimizes their territorial marking. Sitting in 'someone else's' spot is seriously frowned upon. This trend happened when the 'open plan' needed a next level of hell.
    • Bartweiss 8y ago
      > This trend happened when the 'open plan' needed a next level of hell. I seem to remember Dilbert explaining this as a way to ensure employees felt more like company-owned sacks of potatoes than actual humans. Hot-desking really does seem like one of the most dehumanizing office designs I can think of. I know the supposed benefits of open offices, but I'm not even sure what hot-desking claims to achieve? Except in call centers I guess, where it's explicitly "to speed up firing people".
      • amyjess 8y ago
        > I know the supposed benefits of open offices, but I'm not even sure what hot-desking claims to achieve? Except in call centers I guess, where it's explicitly "to speed up firing people". In call centers, there's another reason: if the company gets big enough, they may have more employees than desks. Since call centers work on shifts, not everyone is going to be in the office at the same time, and so they just lay down a policy of "nobody has their own desk".
• amyjess 8y ago
  I work for Masergy. We're a cube farm. I love it. Give me a conservative cube farm over a hipster open office any day.
• motohagiography 8y ago
  Funny behaviors from an open office plan I experienced: - tribes claiming spaces: there was a couch area where a natural affinity group formed based on common personality types typical of urban/suburban tribal divide. developed an in-group/out-group mentality. a counter group formed in a lunch area. - posturing: top tech individual contributor used main boardroom for "really important video conference meetings," and it became his de facto office unless you had it booked. - tragedy of the commons: with no private space other than common spaces, meeting rooms were booked up with standing meetings so that it became impossible to get one when you needed it. - Callout/performative drama: challenging people would use the availability of earshot to try to draw others into their conflicts. Callout culture, where instead of addressing issues, people would call out others to demand explanations in front of teams, managers, or in main slack channels. - lack of personal boundaries: technical managers with low charisma routinely embarrassed in open meetings where everyone felt they could table complaints and make others accountable in front of a group, further wrecking morale as result of perceived weak leadership. Interior design wouldn't solve all these problems, but the aesthetic of a kindergarten or hipster daycare certainly exacerbated them. I may long form this post into something, as the anti-patterns in that org were an effect of its culture, which was expressed by aesthetics rooted in beliefs that would have benefited from more insight.
  • farnsworthy 8y ago
    Beautiful. I wonder if a business publication would be interested in an expanded version of this...
  • 3uclid 8y ago
    >Interior design wouldn't solve all these problems, but the aesthetic of a kindergarten or hipster daycare certainly exacerbated them. LOL, that's an amazing description.
  • hamandchris 8y ago
    > Callout culture, where instead of addressing issues, people would call out others to demand explanations in front of teams, managers, or in main slack channels. While it definitely sounds like the open floor plan was weaponized for this, that is definitely its own problem that can be observed anywhere leadership doesn't specifically root it out.
• dcchambers 8y ago
  When I worked in academia (working for a high throughout computing research group at a large state university) we all had our own offices. I don't know if individual offices are all that common any more due to space issues at universities, but I think they're almost all shared offices or cubes at worst. I've never seen an open office plan at a University. I work in healthcare now and share a "large" office with 3 other developers. It feels tight at times, but I still prefer it to the hot-seat style open office that was our other choice.
  • dsign 8y ago
    My only experience with an open floor plan was in academia :-) ... terrible thing, I suffered a lot and made other people suffer as well, since I'm a loud typist ... I have never understood how some people think open floor plans are a good idea for getting work done.
  • geekbird 8y ago
    Stanford University is moving toward an open plan office setup when it moves its IT staff to Redwood City next year. (Professors, of course, still get offices. So do managers.) Some buildings are already open plan. This is very bad for morale, or course, and very problematic for people who work with PII or PHI. It's a good thing that there is a medical center branch on the grounds, because illnesses will go up too.
• mud_dauber 8y ago
  Every semiconductor co I've ever worked for, across 30 years, provided cubicles or offices for their employees. This includes both Fortune 500 firms and scrappy 8-person remote offices.
• at-fates-hands 8y ago
  It's funny, about six or seven years ago, most of the companies I worked for had gone to an open floor plan. Within a few years, all of them had gone back to cubes for a number of reasons. I just started at a large corporation three years ago and they spent millions going to an elaborate open office plan which was similar to what others have referred to as "neighborhoods". At first it was called "hoteling" where we just had a ton of desks with monitors and a dock so you didn't have a set place or cube to work. After about six months, teams had taken over areas without telling anybody, they pushed other teams out to other areas. Then they shifted a ton more people to our building so now space was even more limited. They started moving desks into common areas meant for collaboration where people met and ate lunch in order to handle in the influx of new people. People started "squatting" on their desks, putting personal pics and their mouse and other stuff to claim their desks so nobody would/could sit there. This clearly was not what the architect/designer had in mind. I quickly got to the point where I was so frustrated, I just tapped out and now I work from home almost 100% of the time. It's funny how they had this great idea and it was totally ruined by standard human behavior.
  • mattmanser 8y ago
    More like it's funny how designers have no clue about basic human needs. Our brain is wired for habits. We form them to ease our cognitive burden, it's a built in mechanism. You don't have to think about reversing out your driveway because of habits, brushing your teeth, checking your email, etc. People don't want to hunt for a desk every morning because it is fundamentally incompatible with how our brain works, not because they're being difficult. So they adopt a desk. And then someone takes 'their' desk, which is a burden, a bit of thinking they shouldn't be doing. So they naturally mark out 'their' desk. So in reality, it's a stupid idea because of the way the human mind works. Might as well rage at the tides.
• the_snooze 8y ago
  Not a "tech company" in the traditional sense, but everyone had an office (shared with one, maybe two, other people) when I was at a university lab. It was great because those really facilitated conversations, both work-related and otherwise. I spent two years in a "tech company" after that, which had a cubicle setup, and I totally hated it. I'm back in academia now with my own office, which is pretty sweet. "Non-office" setups are probably a dealbreaker for me at this point.
• smashface 8y ago
  SAS at the Cary, NC headquarters does not use open floor plans. I don't know about other office locations though. Pretty much everyone gets their own office with a door. Only time I've seen people without their own space was interns in their own cubicle or contractors in a shared office.
• vippy 8y ago
  Our team has bays, which aren't perfect, but at least we have walls between teams. We're a software shop. At Applied Security Inc. in Reston Virginia, most people have individual offices; there are, at most, two or three people per office.
• carapace 8y ago
  I've told people that I'll knock $20,000 off of my pay for an office with a door that closes. Everyone treats it like a joke.
  • theandrewbailey 8y ago
    Then when your productivity shoots through the roof, you can ask for a $20,000 raise. :P
• pradn 8y ago
  Well, a famous example is Microsoft. Though the recently built and renovated buildings are moving toward open plan offices, about 80% of the buildings in the Redmond campus are full of offices. Which office you get is purely based on tenure. I remember it took 11 years of tenure to get a window office in my old building. Some new hires were doubled up due to space constraints. But I was in the 70% of office holders who had a single office from the beginning. It was fun to be able to decorate my office. You could really see people's personalities in their offices. Offices would also double as quick meeting rooms for up to 5 people. No overhead for booking conference rooms. All in all, it was a great perk of the job. If only they had free food... Even if you have offices, people would still barge in, cutting into your uninterrupted time. Funny enough, in the open-plan at Google, where I am currently, I get far fewer walk-up interruptions. It's always good to ping people on chat so they can respond async.
• SabertoothLamb 8y ago
  Not to mention the security issues. Its hard to call security on a suspect person in a secure area when you have 50 people, plus 2000 possible visiting corporate employees, plus customers, vendors, girlfriend (NO GIRLFRIENDS!!! GIRLFRIEND=SPY). I say everyone should have a walled office with walls that go all the way to a real ceiling not just tiles and a chambered entrance to the office and marine antifouling paint and faraday cage inside the walls and automated badge reading gun turrets at hallway intersections.
• aaronang 8y ago
  At PARC everyone has their own office.
• nix0n 8y ago
  Look for older (relative to tech) companies. My current employer was founded in the 80s and still uses cubicles.
• resalisbury 8y ago
  This is partly driven by costs. Where rents per square foot are less, more companies have opted to have offices. Just like how in Mountain View some Googlers live in the parking lot. It's not cause they think parking lots are hip, space is expensive.
  • geekbird 8y ago
    But the cost "savings", even in high rent areas like San Francisco, are eaten up by a significant loss of productivity. In a high rent market like SF, a programmer's salary plus benefits and employer taxes (loaded labor) is about $200K. Open plans have an anywhere from 25% to 50% productivity hit from increased distractions and sick time (sorry, I can't look up the studies right now.) So while you might save $30K/year/dev going from offices to open plan in an expensive market, you will lose $50K/year/dev in productivity. Since those come from different budget buckets, and management never really sees the productivity hit, management thinks they've saved money and convinced people that open plan is "hip", "open" and "collaborative", when in reality most people are unproductive, stressed, unhappy and now despise their noisy, smelly and messy coworkers.