6 ms·

One thing I cannot understand is why we have both: (a) a long history of research proving to us that principles like "High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent)

by mlthoughts2018 8y ago

One thing I cannot understand is why we have both: (a) a long history of research proving to us that principles like "High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)" are accurate and highly related to extracting the most economically valuable outputs from knowledge workers. (b) open plan offices. Maybe the tech industry is daunting for newcomers because we cram people into a sardine can, give them a ping pong paddle and a craft beer, and say "don't go home tonight until you've Disrupted Everything."

bpizzi 8y ago
My personal guess is that it's somehow related to fundamentals differences between introvert and extroverted personalities and that the people making theses decisions (floor plans) are mainly extroverted. Just my opinion.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  I agree this is part of it. For example, as a high-achieving and socially outgoing introvert who is very sensitive to background noise, I found this paper really depressing: < https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55dcde36e4b0df55a96ab220/t/55e5f374e4b04539eab51172/1441133428448/GrantGinoHofmann_Reversing.pdf https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55dcde36e4b0df55a96ab... >
Barrin92 8y ago
I'm split on this personally. I don't like the type of noisy open plan office where you work next to the ping-pong table while someone rides a bike through the office or something like that, but on the other hand, I don't feel like being in total isolation helps to focus either. I actually like a little bit of background activity, I work better when I listen to music (mostly classical or anything without vocals) or a not too noisy but not totally silent location like a library or a small open plan office with people spaced out
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  There have been studies going back as far as Peopleware and The Timeless Way of Building that suggest people are generally adversely affected when the noise is more than noise they personally generate (e.g. keyboard clicking), and not in their control (e.g. choosing to listen to music may be fine, but when you’re forced to listen to music because the alternative is a distracting conversation between teammates it has adverse effects). The other thing, especially mentioned in The Timeless Way of Building, is that you need privacy to reach a state of flow. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re isolated or that no one can interrupt you, but it means nothing in your immediate vicinity is triggering your peripheral vision or any sense of a fight vs flight reflex because someone’s walking around right behind you, etc. Most of that research advocates that individuals should be allowed to customize these aspects of their personal space, like privacy, quiet, lighting, ergonomics.. More generally though, it’s not about what works for you or for me. It’s about what we can empirically learn about states of flow, and on that front it’s utterly beyond dispute that open-plan offices are disastrously bad.
  - theoh 8y ago
    Christopher Alexander's work isn't based on empirical studies, though, is it? Never seen any. It's just his, uh, inspired opinion.
    - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
      In large part yes, you are right, his writing was more qualitative and sociological, sometimes philosophy. But seeing your comment made me start trying to dig up a 1987 paper from Alexander titled, "Toward a Personal Workplace," and I am actually amazed and unsettled by how hard it is to find anything online. That article surveys more empirical properties of office interiors. But yes, I would look to the studies cited in the Peopleware chapter called, "Bring Back the Door" for the empirical extensions of what Alexander had inspired. Here's the best link I could find on that thread of Alexander's work: < http://zeta.math.utsa.edu/~yxk833/Chris.furniture.html http://zeta.math.utsa.edu/~yxk833/Chris.furniture.html >
noonespecial 8y ago
I always just figured it's the "oil change" problem. The day after the oil change interval is up that you skipped, all the trucks are still running great and it feels like you just saved a bunch of money... It can be very difficult for a bean counter with a spreadsheet to connect the extra broken down trucks at the end of the year to the oil changes that were skipped in February. Every open office I've ever been in was to put more people in less space for less money. The subsequent burn-outs and defections were, of course, due to "the market" (and once, even uglier, "the poor millennial work ethic").
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  I don’t buy the argument that bean counters are unable to account for vaguer aspects of productivity loss. For one, bigger corporations invest huge amounts of money into productivity research and take the topic very seriously. They aren’t unsophisticated or naive and corporations will really study the internal incentives they create for cost cutting, to make sure they aren’t mistakenly cutting costs that actually lead to other, unanticipated costs. Sure, bureaucracy makes this imperfect, and some companies are worse than others, but it wouldn’t explain 80% or more of all companies shifting to known productivity-destroying office spaces. Plus, it’s widely and popularly disputed that open plans are actually cheaper, e.g. even in pop articles like this: < https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/blog/hr/2016/open-office-plans-are-a-lot-less-cost-effective-than-you-may-think https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/blog/hr/2016/... > I’ve also seen sources claiming that an open plan developer is less than 9% cheaper in real estate terms than a private office developer, without any consideration about interruptions, distractions, communicable disease, lower morale, changed vacation or sick time habits, etc. 9% might sound like a lot of savings on a naive glance, but when these employees are costing you $150K of wages and a bunch more in overhead & benefits, you would be hugely sensitive to big, publicly discussed sources of productivity reduction, because it’s immediately obvious, especially to corporate finance, that saving 9% on floor space means nothing if you’re losing 15% of labor ouput from distractions, 5% from increased sickness or vacation habits, 2% from widely reported morale issues, etc. I think really the issues are much more status driven, seeking to force flow-requiring knowledge work into a commodity, to push down the age and wages of employees. And part is cosmetic. If you think of a start-up itself as a product, and the investors as the user, and the VCs as the company, then VCs optimize cosmetic attractiveness to create start-ups they can sell for as little substance as possible. So if grand visions of hoodie-clad developers sipping craft coffee in an exposed brick, glass, ductwork open plan hell will convince the dimwitted actor or retired athlete to invest on visions of the next unicorn, then why would they care about worker productivity? The whole point is credential and cosmetics to lever up the known-to-be-unrealistic valuation to foster an inflated IPO or acquisition, and it’s not a function of actual economic product of employees. Then after some unicorns hammer this strategy, everyone else (including big corps trying yo look hip) just start cargo-cult copying it. My only remaining surprise is at how long this open plan bubble can persist before people realize these companies are not about any type of productivity.
blitmap 8y ago
I definitely learn things from people I don't expect to teach me anything. I'm used to pair programming being frustrating, but if you can put egos aside you pick up on different ways of thinking and way more exposure to life/programming experiences others have had. I think the shared office space is forced information exchange between people. It's not comfortable, it's not necessarily conducive to YOUR methods - but you put enough interesting people in the same space and you're bound to jumpstart something. Maybe an HR incident, but something.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  I actually am prevented from learning when I am forced to overhear exchanges between other teammates. Most of the exchanges are not relevant for me, often they are not discussing anything work-related as well. It also swiss-cheese's my schedule, because instead of setting aside dedicated time for pair programming and for information exchanges or meetings, like you would think you should do in a professional workplace, those events are now thrust upon me even when I might be trying to finish some other work or I might have to urgently focus on something else. The entire premise that continuous real-time audio is somehow synonymous with idea-sharing or collaboration is just insane. Sincere collaboration is respectful of each individual's time and planned work schedule, as well as individual preferences for quiet, privacy, etc. Sincere collaboration can be asynchronous, textual, visual, or auditory (or a mix), can be remote-friendly, etc. What you describe as "forced information exchange between people" is appropriate maybe for a trading floor or mission control, but the attempt to stylize a bullpen of software engineers in the same way is disaster, and at best it is superficial collaboration.
  - blitmap 8y ago
    I definitely agree that it's a balancing act between "find the right person to pair with this other person" and "I can't get anything done, this person is only giving me irrelevant information". Often times it's just forced, and arguably not successful.
    - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
dwcnnnghm 8y ago
The Cal Newport book on Deep Work that this article is based on has inspired a push for the Eudaimonia Machine [0] (an updated version by Newport himself here [1]). It’s a concept for an office that is designed to promote effective deep and shallow work. It’s a wonderful idea, though discussions on HN about it have pointed out that it’s difficult in startups, especially during high growth: allocating space for deep work (sound proofed rooms for individuals) takes up quite a bit of space that would be otherwise needed for a fast growing employee base. [0] https://medium.com/@jsmathison/i-cant-stop-dreaming-of-eudaimonia-84d9059b551c https://medium.com/@jsmathison/i-cant-stop-dreaming-of-eudai... [1] http://calnewport.com/blog/2016/10/19/the-opposite-of-the-open-office/ http://calnewport.com/blog/2016/10/19/the-opposite-of-the-op...
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  Thank you for sharing. Some of these design ideas remind me a lot of the discussions in The Timeless Way of Building, particularly the hub-and-spoke idea compared with Christopher Alexander's passages about the importance of windows, with examples from Scandinavian designs that prioritize surface area of new buildings to give more people dedicated, personal windows (at least at the time of his writing).
- mmt 8y ago
  > space that would be otherwise needed for a fast growing employee base I'm not sure what "otherwise" is supposed to mean here. Isn't the whole point of the "space" in the first place to enable the "employee base" to be more productive there than at home or remote? Maybe that employee base wouldn't need to grow so fast if the existing employees could be more productive by, say, using existing space more effectively. Lastly, it seems to be something of a cliche how hard and/or expensive it is for startups (especially, as you mention, when growing) to deal with space. I am, however, skeptical that the decision of having open plan offices is based on any kind of rigorous decision making rather than trend-following and following the path of least (initial) resistance.
0x445442 8y ago
The primary reason is middle an upper management's holy grail quest to commoditize knowledge work and turn software development into an automotive assembly line.
dragonwriter 8y ago
The reason is because management is almost never driven by science or productivity maximization but maximization of either narrow subdivided metrics (like costs for a particular function) or absolute cargo cult conventional wisdom. Even when there is an empirical, data driven culture somewhere in an organization, it rarely extends to the board, often doesn't extend to the executive suite, and almost never extends into, say, facilitues management.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  I'm not sure I agree with this because if it were thus, I think 'most organizations' would be out of business quickly. I think the answer is more plain: shared offices cut cost, and and the resulting immediate an ongoing increase in profit is 'the most important of all benchmarks' for most companies, in fact it's not even a 'benchmark' ... it's 'the point'. So - essentially, 'private offices' are an 'investment' and an investment has to be clearly and obviously justified, otherwise the default is to go to open office plans. The vast majority of work simply is not deep work - and yes, even things like 'Marketing' - although most operational marketing people have a 'creative bone' - and brilliant marketers are as useful and brilliant as equivalent Engineer, the actual creative/deep thinking Marketing stuff is usually done in agencies, which are like architecture firms. Similarly I don't doubt creative financial structuring or deal making, 'deep time' is just not as consistent for them as it is for most Engineers. There is actually rather scarce 'deep work' to be done, and so, as so few companies willingly require people to be 'learning very important new skills' ... offices become less common due to the simple economics of it all.
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    “Deep work” is the vast majority of necessary work for software engineers and knowledge workers in most companies. In fact, these jobs are almost defined by the characteristic that almost all of the work is deep work, requiring privacy, and states of flow. I keep seeing this unsubstantiated claim that deep work is rare, or at least a 50/50 split with shallow work. But it’s flat untrue across the board.
tomtimtall 8y ago
I’ve worked both in private offices and in open plans. And my experience is that private offices are good for those occasional long deep work sessions but overall the team in total is more productive and happier in open plan. Not everything is about your personal productivity and it’s all too common to see separate team members deeply focused on non-aligned items which makes the joined work much much less than the sum of the parts.
- apatters 8y ago
  Absolutely, this discussion always devolves into good vs bad and understandably so because it's very frustrating when your work environment doesn't facilitate your performance. But the typical knowledge worker actually functions on some blend of the manager and maker schedules -- sometimes they need to do deep work without interruptions, sometimes they need to look up from their desk and communicate to make sure their output is aligned with the company. A private space free of distractions facilitates the former but an open plan is actually pretty good for the latter. The best solution (I'm surprised more companies have not implemented this) is to provide both environments and give the employee some guidance in terms of where they choose to work. Most knowledge workers will not benefit from the monastic strategy described in this article but almost all will benefit from a bimodal or rhythmic strategy. If you already have an open plan office this is as easy as telling the employee he/she can work remotely a few days a week as long as they select a quiet space that's free of distractions (so if they have kids running around at home during the day, maybe better to advise them to go to the library instead). The manager should provide some guidance in terms of how much time the employee spends remotely vs. "on the floor" with everyone else. Graham's maker vs. manager article is great on this topic,engineers often err a little too far in the direction of isolation, managers err too far in the direction of having everyone in the collaborative environment, the solution is a little dialogue. With very light guidance and very little additional cost to the business you can improve both productivity and morale this way. Our team functions best very far down the deep work end of the spectrum -- we have one day a week where everyone goes into the office or gets on calls and gets aligned. For the rest of the week communication is mostly async and work is mostly remote.
  - 8y ago
partycoder 8y ago
The tech industry is not rational. The tech industry right now is a gold rush and you are the shovel. The only thing people high up in the org-chart know is that if they dig hard enough they might find gold. Then, they don't even have to find the enough gold, they only need to make it seem that they will find gold and use that hype to raise money, be acquired or go public. And even if in the end 0 gold is found, a bunch of people will walk out with money and zero liability.
edanm 8y ago
Personally, I think it's because people don't really believe the research. I mean, sure, most people aren't aware of the research at all and just follow the herd, and there's a bunch of incentives problems here with people caring more about specific metrics like time saved, etc. And sure, you can't really say that most people are rational. But more importantly, I think this is one of those ideas that just doesn't really pass the sniff test. People think back to open plan offices, for various reasons believe that it actually worked well (e.g. most major companies started that way, wall street works that way, etc). And therefore, they treat the research like a curiosity - "oh you have some research? that's nice. But it's probably bullshit since I've seen open plan offices work great". And considering the replication crisis happening, it's not a crazy position, either.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  This may be part of it, but it’s hard to believe there isn’t a more insensitive / tone-deaf dismissal of the research in favor of different, superficial preferences. It’s such a widely and publicly disputed topic that it’s not a question of dismissing “mere research”. Rather it’s more like, “can I get away with not giving this important tool to workers?” and some degree of confirmation bias to avoid looking into it at all, like you say.

bpizzi 8y ago

My personal guess is that it's somehow related to fundamentals differences between introvert and extroverted personalities and that the people making theses decisions (floor plans) are mainly extroverted. Just my opinion.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago
I agree this is part of it. For example, as a high-achieving and socially outgoing introvert who is very sensitive to background noise, I found this paper really depressing: < https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55dcde36e4b0df55a96ab220/t/55e5f374e4b04539eab51172/1441133428448/GrantGinoHofmann_Reversing.pdf https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55dcde36e4b0df55a96ab... >

Barrin92 8y ago

I'm split on this personally. I don't like the type of noisy open plan office where you work next to the ping-pong table while someone rides a bike through the office or something like that, but on the other hand, I don't feel like being in total isolation helps to focus either. I actually like a little bit of background activity, I work better when I listen to music (mostly classical or anything without vocals) or a not too noisy but not totally silent location like a library or a small open plan office with people spaced out

mlthoughts2018 8y ago
There have been studies going back as far as Peopleware and The Timeless Way of Building that suggest people are generally adversely affected when the noise is more than noise they personally generate (e.g. keyboard clicking), and not in their control (e.g. choosing to listen to music may be fine, but when you’re forced to listen to music because the alternative is a distracting conversation between teammates it has adverse effects). The other thing, especially mentioned in The Timeless Way of Building, is that you need privacy to reach a state of flow. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re isolated or that no one can interrupt you, but it means nothing in your immediate vicinity is triggering your peripheral vision or any sense of a fight vs flight reflex because someone’s walking around right behind you, etc. Most of that research advocates that individuals should be allowed to customize these aspects of their personal space, like privacy, quiet, lighting, ergonomics.. More generally though, it’s not about what works for you or for me. It’s about what we can empirically learn about states of flow, and on that front it’s utterly beyond dispute that open-plan offices are disastrously bad.
- theoh 8y ago
  Christopher Alexander's work isn't based on empirical studies, though, is it? Never seen any. It's just his, uh, inspired opinion.
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    In large part yes, you are right, his writing was more qualitative and sociological, sometimes philosophy. But seeing your comment made me start trying to dig up a 1987 paper from Alexander titled, "Toward a Personal Workplace," and I am actually amazed and unsettled by how hard it is to find anything online. That article surveys more empirical properties of office interiors. But yes, I would look to the studies cited in the Peopleware chapter called, "Bring Back the Door" for the empirical extensions of what Alexander had inspired. Here's the best link I could find on that thread of Alexander's work: < http://zeta.math.utsa.edu/~yxk833/Chris.furniture.html http://zeta.math.utsa.edu/~yxk833/Chris.furniture.html >

noonespecial 8y ago

I always just figured it's the "oil change" problem. The day after the oil change interval is up that you skipped, all the trucks are still running great and it feels like you just saved a bunch of money... It can be very difficult for a bean counter with a spreadsheet to connect the extra broken down trucks at the end of the year to the oil changes that were skipped in February. Every open office I've ever been in was to put more people in less space for less money. The subsequent burn-outs and defections were, of course, due to "the market" (and once, even uglier, "the poor millennial work ethic").

mlthoughts2018 8y ago
I don’t buy the argument that bean counters are unable to account for vaguer aspects of productivity loss. For one, bigger corporations invest huge amounts of money into productivity research and take the topic very seriously. They aren’t unsophisticated or naive and corporations will really study the internal incentives they create for cost cutting, to make sure they aren’t mistakenly cutting costs that actually lead to other, unanticipated costs. Sure, bureaucracy makes this imperfect, and some companies are worse than others, but it wouldn’t explain 80% or more of all companies shifting to known productivity-destroying office spaces. Plus, it’s widely and popularly disputed that open plans are actually cheaper, e.g. even in pop articles like this: < https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/blog/hr/2016/open-office-plans-are-a-lot-less-cost-effective-than-you-may-think https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/blog/hr/2016/... > I’ve also seen sources claiming that an open plan developer is less than 9% cheaper in real estate terms than a private office developer, without any consideration about interruptions, distractions, communicable disease, lower morale, changed vacation or sick time habits, etc. 9% might sound like a lot of savings on a naive glance, but when these employees are costing you $150K of wages and a bunch more in overhead & benefits, you would be hugely sensitive to big, publicly discussed sources of productivity reduction, because it’s immediately obvious, especially to corporate finance, that saving 9% on floor space means nothing if you’re losing 15% of labor ouput from distractions, 5% from increased sickness or vacation habits, 2% from widely reported morale issues, etc. I think really the issues are much more status driven, seeking to force flow-requiring knowledge work into a commodity, to push down the age and wages of employees. And part is cosmetic. If you think of a start-up itself as a product, and the investors as the user, and the VCs as the company, then VCs optimize cosmetic attractiveness to create start-ups they can sell for as little substance as possible. So if grand visions of hoodie-clad developers sipping craft coffee in an exposed brick, glass, ductwork open plan hell will convince the dimwitted actor or retired athlete to invest on visions of the next unicorn, then why would they care about worker productivity? The whole point is credential and cosmetics to lever up the known-to-be-unrealistic valuation to foster an inflated IPO or acquisition, and it’s not a function of actual economic product of employees. Then after some unicorns hammer this strategy, everyone else (including big corps trying yo look hip) just start cargo-cult copying it. My only remaining surprise is at how long this open plan bubble can persist before people realize these companies are not about any type of productivity.

blitmap 8y ago

I definitely learn things from people I don't expect to teach me anything. I'm used to pair programming being frustrating, but if you can put egos aside you pick up on different ways of thinking and way more exposure to life/programming experiences others have had. I think the shared office space is forced information exchange between people. It's not comfortable, it's not necessarily conducive to YOUR methods - but you put enough interesting people in the same space and you're bound to jumpstart something. Maybe an HR incident, but something.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago
I actually am prevented from learning when I am forced to overhear exchanges between other teammates. Most of the exchanges are not relevant for me, often they are not discussing anything work-related as well. It also swiss-cheese's my schedule, because instead of setting aside dedicated time for pair programming and for information exchanges or meetings, like you would think you should do in a professional workplace, those events are now thrust upon me even when I might be trying to finish some other work or I might have to urgently focus on something else. The entire premise that continuous real-time audio is somehow synonymous with idea-sharing or collaboration is just insane. Sincere collaboration is respectful of each individual's time and planned work schedule, as well as individual preferences for quiet, privacy, etc. Sincere collaboration can be asynchronous, textual, visual, or auditory (or a mix), can be remote-friendly, etc. What you describe as "forced information exchange between people" is appropriate maybe for a trading floor or mission control, but the attempt to stylize a bullpen of software engineers in the same way is disaster, and at best it is superficial collaboration.
- blitmap 8y ago
  I definitely agree that it's a balancing act between "find the right person to pair with this other person" and "I can't get anything done, this person is only giving me irrelevant information". Often times it's just forced, and arguably not successful.
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago

dwcnnnghm 8y ago

The Cal Newport book on Deep Work that this article is based on has inspired a push for the Eudaimonia Machine [0] (an updated version by Newport himself here [1]). It’s a concept for an office that is designed to promote effective deep and shallow work. It’s a wonderful idea, though discussions on HN about it have pointed out that it’s difficult in startups, especially during high growth: allocating space for deep work (sound proofed rooms for individuals) takes up quite a bit of space that would be otherwise needed for a fast growing employee base. [0] https://medium.com/@jsmathison/i-cant-stop-dreaming-of-eudaimonia-84d9059b551c https://medium.com/@jsmathison/i-cant-stop-dreaming-of-eudai... [1] http://calnewport.com/blog/2016/10/19/the-opposite-of-the-open-office/ http://calnewport.com/blog/2016/10/19/the-opposite-of-the-op...

mlthoughts2018 8y ago
Thank you for sharing. Some of these design ideas remind me a lot of the discussions in The Timeless Way of Building, particularly the hub-and-spoke idea compared with Christopher Alexander's passages about the importance of windows, with examples from Scandinavian designs that prioritize surface area of new buildings to give more people dedicated, personal windows (at least at the time of his writing).
mmt 8y ago
> space that would be otherwise needed for a fast growing employee base I'm not sure what "otherwise" is supposed to mean here. Isn't the whole point of the "space" in the first place to enable the "employee base" to be more productive there than at home or remote? Maybe that employee base wouldn't need to grow so fast if the existing employees could be more productive by, say, using existing space more effectively. Lastly, it seems to be something of a cliche how hard and/or expensive it is for startups (especially, as you mention, when growing) to deal with space. I am, however, skeptical that the decision of having open plan offices is based on any kind of rigorous decision making rather than trend-following and following the path of least (initial) resistance.

0x445442 8y ago

The primary reason is middle an upper management's holy grail quest to commoditize knowledge work and turn software development into an automotive assembly line.

dragonwriter 8y ago

The reason is because management is almost never driven by science or productivity maximization but maximization of either narrow subdivided metrics (like costs for a particular function) or absolute cargo cult conventional wisdom. Even when there is an empirical, data driven culture somewhere in an organization, it rarely extends to the board, often doesn't extend to the executive suite, and almost never extends into, say, facilitues management.

sonnyblarney 8y ago
I'm not sure I agree with this because if it were thus, I think 'most organizations' would be out of business quickly. I think the answer is more plain: shared offices cut cost, and and the resulting immediate an ongoing increase in profit is 'the most important of all benchmarks' for most companies, in fact it's not even a 'benchmark' ... it's 'the point'. So - essentially, 'private offices' are an 'investment' and an investment has to be clearly and obviously justified, otherwise the default is to go to open office plans. The vast majority of work simply is not deep work - and yes, even things like 'Marketing' - although most operational marketing people have a 'creative bone' - and brilliant marketers are as useful and brilliant as equivalent Engineer, the actual creative/deep thinking Marketing stuff is usually done in agencies, which are like architecture firms. Similarly I don't doubt creative financial structuring or deal making, 'deep time' is just not as consistent for them as it is for most Engineers. There is actually rather scarce 'deep work' to be done, and so, as so few companies willingly require people to be 'learning very important new skills' ... offices become less common due to the simple economics of it all.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  “Deep work” is the vast majority of necessary work for software engineers and knowledge workers in most companies. In fact, these jobs are almost defined by the characteristic that almost all of the work is deep work, requiring privacy, and states of flow. I keep seeing this unsubstantiated claim that deep work is rare, or at least a 50/50 split with shallow work. But it’s flat untrue across the board.

tomtimtall 8y ago

I’ve worked both in private offices and in open plans. And my experience is that private offices are good for those occasional long deep work sessions but overall the team in total is more productive and happier in open plan. Not everything is about your personal productivity and it’s all too common to see separate team members deeply focused on non-aligned items which makes the joined work much much less than the sum of the parts.

apatters 8y ago
Absolutely, this discussion always devolves into good vs bad and understandably so because it's very frustrating when your work environment doesn't facilitate your performance. But the typical knowledge worker actually functions on some blend of the manager and maker schedules -- sometimes they need to do deep work without interruptions, sometimes they need to look up from their desk and communicate to make sure their output is aligned with the company. A private space free of distractions facilitates the former but an open plan is actually pretty good for the latter. The best solution (I'm surprised more companies have not implemented this) is to provide both environments and give the employee some guidance in terms of where they choose to work. Most knowledge workers will not benefit from the monastic strategy described in this article but almost all will benefit from a bimodal or rhythmic strategy. If you already have an open plan office this is as easy as telling the employee he/she can work remotely a few days a week as long as they select a quiet space that's free of distractions (so if they have kids running around at home during the day, maybe better to advise them to go to the library instead). The manager should provide some guidance in terms of how much time the employee spends remotely vs. "on the floor" with everyone else. Graham's maker vs. manager article is great on this topic,engineers often err a little too far in the direction of isolation, managers err too far in the direction of having everyone in the collaborative environment, the solution is a little dialogue. With very light guidance and very little additional cost to the business you can improve both productivity and morale this way. Our team functions best very far down the deep work end of the spectrum -- we have one day a week where everyone goes into the office or gets on calls and gets aligned. For the rest of the week communication is mostly async and work is mostly remote.
- 8y ago

partycoder 8y ago

The tech industry is not rational. The tech industry right now is a gold rush and you are the shovel. The only thing people high up in the org-chart know is that if they dig hard enough they might find gold. Then, they don't even have to find the enough gold, they only need to make it seem that they will find gold and use that hype to raise money, be acquired or go public. And even if in the end 0 gold is found, a bunch of people will walk out with money and zero liability.

edanm 8y ago

Personally, I think it's because people don't really believe the research. I mean, sure, most people aren't aware of the research at all and just follow the herd, and there's a bunch of incentives problems here with people caring more about specific metrics like time saved, etc. And sure, you can't really say that most people are rational. But more importantly, I think this is one of those ideas that just doesn't really pass the sniff test. People think back to open plan offices, for various reasons believe that it actually worked well (e.g. most major companies started that way, wall street works that way, etc). And therefore, they treat the research like a curiosity - "oh you have some research? that's nice. But it's probably bullshit since I've seen open plan offices work great". And considering the replication crisis happening, it's not a crazy position, either.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago
This may be part of it, but it’s hard to believe there isn’t a more insensitive / tone-deaf dismissal of the research in favor of different, superficial preferences. It’s such a widely and publicly disputed topic that it’s not a question of dismissing “mere research”. Rather it’s more like, “can I get away with not giving this important tool to workers?” and some degree of confirmation bias to avoid looking into it at all, like you say.