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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 over

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.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  The trouble is that the distribution of work is not an even split between work that requires deep focus and other work that benefits from disruptive audio communication. Most engineering work requires deep focus. So if the office was designed to allow the majority of work to be private, quiet, and deeply focused, but with occasional meetings or break-out social rooms for the dynamic discussions, that would be great. Instead, it is designed in the wrong-headed, opposite way: all work is embedded into the dynamic, real-time audio distraction stream. You end up needing to compete for conference room reservations, or hide form people, or listen to music when you don't want to, or abuse a work-from-home privilege, just to get work done, because every day you need privacy and quiet for most of the day, and the default setting of the environment disallows it. I would agree with your comment if the work divide was more 50/50 between work that needs dynamic communication and work that needs privacy. But that's just not how reality actually functions. (A separate part of this which irks me is the assumption that employees can (or want to) 'just work from home' to solve it. It externalizes the costs of privacy onto workers with all kinds of trade-offs not in the employees favor. And a lot of companies actually micromanage this option and are bitterly strict about limiting work from home time.)
  - apatters 8y ago
    Your comment is not wrong but it's all problems and no solutions. If I was designing an engineering office I would not go open plan (or the open plan area would be small). But today we have a lot of open plan offices that inhibit productivity. I identified a way that a company can quickly and inexpensively improve productivity and happiness by creating more opportunities for deep focus. Perfect is the enemy of good.
    - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
      That is a fair point. My concern though is that when companies see an example in which someone deflects on addressing a real need for private space, and externalizes the cost onto the employee (via micromanaged work-from-home), it sets a precedent that further entrenches open plan designs for new offices later on, and also discounts the value of investing to rebuild office dividers and spending to change from an open plan back to offices. I’ve had fully remote jobs before and jobs where I could generally WFH when needed, but neither option provides a good solution. If your spouse lives with you, they might need to generate noise at home, especially if there are young children. Or you might just live in a cramped city apartment with no space for a desk, or noisy neighbors, etc. The point is that this pushes the costs onto the employee: “here, you figure this out.” But providing good tools to get the work done is the employer’s responsibility. WFH solutions let them try to absolve that duty, often without actually resulting in private or quiet space for the worker anyway. A better proposal might be that an employer will pay the cost to fully rent dedicated private offices at a coworking space, and then let the employees who want offices simply work from that company-rented private office space. This way the employer bears the costs, and doesn’t view it as “right” to just lob the grenade back at the employees by leaning on WFH as the only possible way to work in a quiet setting.
watwut 8y ago
There is middle ground where the team is together, but only the team and it means 4-10 collaborating people. You are not alone and you are not in one room with other teams (especially often calling teams) and not with over 40 people - which generates too much It should be not one extreme against another.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  In my experience, even when managing a team of engineers, it doesn't matter if the people in your nearby open environment are working on the same team or a different team. It's much more about the basic environmental factors (e.g. not having people walking around nearby, having adequate privacy, being able to customize your own lighting, have a personal window to glance out, etc.) Even when there are only 5-10 people nearby and they are all working on my same team, the open-plan environment is completely untenable and really damages productivity. I would say above all, you need privacy to get into states of flow, and after that, you need to know that you personally control your own schedule, and are in charge of planning when interruptions will possibly affect you. Whether someone can interrupt you with a relevant question about your team's work, or someone can interrupt you with annoying chatter about weekend golf plans, they both equally prevent flow and productivity.
  - watwut 8y ago
    Environmental noise is much lower with 6 people then with 30. It is huge difference in amount of noise and interruptions. On average, 30 people generate five time as much "weekend golf" discussions and all on-topic debates of other teams are off-topic to you. It is also easier to police interruptions with around 6 people, unless they are jerks - but chance of jerk among 6 is still lower. By policing I mean saying something like: "you are noisy today and I cant focus, take it please elsewhere". You don't get zero interruptions, but there is significantly less of them and the barrier to communication in team is still small. Unless the colleges are very noisy, I would say that most people can focus in reasonably large room with 6 people. I guess it is individual, but the need to be completely alone with everything completely as you like it is rather on the more extreme side of spectrum. Most people can make compromise about lighting, are able to share window etc and can still focus. (I am absolutely cool with home office or whatever for those who cant. Just that the average worker should be both able to work in non-perfect privacy and simultaneously not to consistently disrupt those who are focused.) If the relevant questions happen too often and you are not an analyst or pm or senior responsible for teaching new person (in such case it is your job to answer questions as they arise to speed up process), then it warrants organizational discussion in team and bundling questions into one meeting. After all, if private office would stop them, then they are not that necessary and it should be possible to lower them down by discussion.
B-Con 8y ago
I've worked in private offices, private cubes, and open office. As much as I personally prefer isolated offices/cubes, the last 4 years in a mostly open office have definitely given me sympathy to the argument for them. I personally have noted a level of collaboration and information sharing that just didn't happen in the more isolated environments. There is something pragmatically useful about having people be able to jump in with their feedback or expertise. The more isolated people are the more you have to go out of your way to ensure information dissemination and feedback channels are available and utilized. It certainly can work, but I haven't seen it work as well. Open rooms promote teaching, spontaneous design discussions, etc, that just doesn't happen in the same way over e-mail, chat, stand-up meetings, etc. There are arguments to go both ways. I used to hate open offices, now I'm sympathetic to them. A key to making the open office tolerable is that it should not mean no isolation. There are ways to address their concerns. eg, headphones are essential. Obscuring line of site is very helpful. My current situation has me in an area of "open rooms", where rooms with ~11 desks are arraigned in an open office-esque fashion. It's pretty decent. Not super-open, but people can "share space" with the people relevant to them.
- gaius 8y ago
  The best for me was at a prior company with high partition walls blocking the office into large cubes each with 3 or 4 people in. It was flexible enough to reconfigure and as long as you were on the same wavelength as your cubemates regarding distractions, it offered the privacy to focus too. I think that company shifted to fully open plan with hot desking sometime after I left.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  > I personally have noted a level of collaboration and information sharing that just didn't happen in the more isolated environments I think it's important that we don't overly focus on one isolated experience point like yours, because empirically this is highly disputed. In my experience, information sharing has plummeted after moving to an open-plan layout. People are forced to use noise-cancelling headphones to avoid impromptu exchanges, because the impromptu exchanges are value-destructive in the first place. And when someone gets co-opted into an impromptu discussion, they try to keep it superficial and share less substantive info, to get away from the unplanned distraction as fast as possible. Not to mention the huge increase of totally not-work-related or irrelevant distractions, like loud sales calls, product discussions that don't affect anything for my team, discussions about weekend plans, etc. It's a very shallow notion of information sharing, which could happen asynchronously through code, documents, email, or with a scheduled video call, or a short scheduled meeting, etc. As I mentioned elsewhere, this horribly misguided idea that somehow constant, real-time audio communication == sincere collaboration or information sharing, this idea is really destructive and doesn't map very well to how engineers actually work.
mlthoughts2018 8y ago
I've also worked in a variety of different floor designs, and have found open-plan to be dramatically inhibiting, not just for me but also for direct reports who tell me the open plan setup prevents them from getting things done most hours of the day. What do you propose for developers whose jobs consist primarily of deep focus tasks that require quiet, privacy, and states of flow? (I would argue this is the majority of developers, but that is beside the point. Even if it's a minority, yet their work output is very important for a given company, it would still seem that embedding them in an open-plan layout they must sit in for the majority of the time would clearly be throwing away more money they could possibly be saved on the real estate. Or you disagree?) You say, "Not everything is about your personal productivity" but this seems mostly irrelevant, because we're in a section of the possible solution space that focuses on never accounting for developers' personal productivity. Separately, if you're on a team where developers have to invest deep focus into disparate parts of a system or disparate solution approaches (the majority of teams I've ever seen), then it does boil down to the sum of individual productivity for most things.

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.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago
The trouble is that the distribution of work is not an even split between work that requires deep focus and other work that benefits from disruptive audio communication. Most engineering work requires deep focus. So if the office was designed to allow the majority of work to be private, quiet, and deeply focused, but with occasional meetings or break-out social rooms for the dynamic discussions, that would be great. Instead, it is designed in the wrong-headed, opposite way: all work is embedded into the dynamic, real-time audio distraction stream. You end up needing to compete for conference room reservations, or hide form people, or listen to music when you don't want to, or abuse a work-from-home privilege, just to get work done, because every day you need privacy and quiet for most of the day, and the default setting of the environment disallows it. I would agree with your comment if the work divide was more 50/50 between work that needs dynamic communication and work that needs privacy. But that's just not how reality actually functions. (A separate part of this which irks me is the assumption that employees can (or want to) 'just work from home' to solve it. It externalizes the costs of privacy onto workers with all kinds of trade-offs not in the employees favor. And a lot of companies actually micromanage this option and are bitterly strict about limiting work from home time.)
- apatters 8y ago
  Your comment is not wrong but it's all problems and no solutions. If I was designing an engineering office I would not go open plan (or the open plan area would be small). But today we have a lot of open plan offices that inhibit productivity. I identified a way that a company can quickly and inexpensively improve productivity and happiness by creating more opportunities for deep focus. Perfect is the enemy of good.
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    That is a fair point. My concern though is that when companies see an example in which someone deflects on addressing a real need for private space, and externalizes the cost onto the employee (via micromanaged work-from-home), it sets a precedent that further entrenches open plan designs for new offices later on, and also discounts the value of investing to rebuild office dividers and spending to change from an open plan back to offices. I’ve had fully remote jobs before and jobs where I could generally WFH when needed, but neither option provides a good solution. If your spouse lives with you, they might need to generate noise at home, especially if there are young children. Or you might just live in a cramped city apartment with no space for a desk, or noisy neighbors, etc. The point is that this pushes the costs onto the employee: “here, you figure this out.” But providing good tools to get the work done is the employer’s responsibility. WFH solutions let them try to absolve that duty, often without actually resulting in private or quiet space for the worker anyway. A better proposal might be that an employer will pay the cost to fully rent dedicated private offices at a coworking space, and then let the employees who want offices simply work from that company-rented private office space. This way the employer bears the costs, and doesn’t view it as “right” to just lob the grenade back at the employees by leaning on WFH as the only possible way to work in a quiet setting.

watwut 8y ago

There is middle ground where the team is together, but only the team and it means 4-10 collaborating people. You are not alone and you are not in one room with other teams (especially often calling teams) and not with over 40 people - which generates too much It should be not one extreme against another.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago
In my experience, even when managing a team of engineers, it doesn't matter if the people in your nearby open environment are working on the same team or a different team. It's much more about the basic environmental factors (e.g. not having people walking around nearby, having adequate privacy, being able to customize your own lighting, have a personal window to glance out, etc.) Even when there are only 5-10 people nearby and they are all working on my same team, the open-plan environment is completely untenable and really damages productivity. I would say above all, you need privacy to get into states of flow, and after that, you need to know that you personally control your own schedule, and are in charge of planning when interruptions will possibly affect you. Whether someone can interrupt you with a relevant question about your team's work, or someone can interrupt you with annoying chatter about weekend golf plans, they both equally prevent flow and productivity.
- watwut 8y ago
  Environmental noise is much lower with 6 people then with 30. It is huge difference in amount of noise and interruptions. On average, 30 people generate five time as much "weekend golf" discussions and all on-topic debates of other teams are off-topic to you. It is also easier to police interruptions with around 6 people, unless they are jerks - but chance of jerk among 6 is still lower. By policing I mean saying something like: "you are noisy today and I cant focus, take it please elsewhere". You don't get zero interruptions, but there is significantly less of them and the barrier to communication in team is still small. Unless the colleges are very noisy, I would say that most people can focus in reasonably large room with 6 people. I guess it is individual, but the need to be completely alone with everything completely as you like it is rather on the more extreme side of spectrum. Most people can make compromise about lighting, are able to share window etc and can still focus. (I am absolutely cool with home office or whatever for those who cant. Just that the average worker should be both able to work in non-perfect privacy and simultaneously not to consistently disrupt those who are focused.) If the relevant questions happen too often and you are not an analyst or pm or senior responsible for teaching new person (in such case it is your job to answer questions as they arise to speed up process), then it warrants organizational discussion in team and bundling questions into one meeting. After all, if private office would stop them, then they are not that necessary and it should be possible to lower them down by discussion.

B-Con 8y ago

I've worked in private offices, private cubes, and open office. As much as I personally prefer isolated offices/cubes, the last 4 years in a mostly open office have definitely given me sympathy to the argument for them. I personally have noted a level of collaboration and information sharing that just didn't happen in the more isolated environments. There is something pragmatically useful about having people be able to jump in with their feedback or expertise. The more isolated people are the more you have to go out of your way to ensure information dissemination and feedback channels are available and utilized. It certainly can work, but I haven't seen it work as well. Open rooms promote teaching, spontaneous design discussions, etc, that just doesn't happen in the same way over e-mail, chat, stand-up meetings, etc. There are arguments to go both ways. I used to hate open offices, now I'm sympathetic to them. A key to making the open office tolerable is that it should not mean no isolation. There are ways to address their concerns. eg, headphones are essential. Obscuring line of site is very helpful. My current situation has me in an area of "open rooms", where rooms with ~11 desks are arraigned in an open office-esque fashion. It's pretty decent. Not super-open, but people can "share space" with the people relevant to them.

gaius 8y ago
The best for me was at a prior company with high partition walls blocking the office into large cubes each with 3 or 4 people in. It was flexible enough to reconfigure and as long as you were on the same wavelength as your cubemates regarding distractions, it offered the privacy to focus too. I think that company shifted to fully open plan with hot desking sometime after I left.
mlthoughts2018 8y ago
> I personally have noted a level of collaboration and information sharing that just didn't happen in the more isolated environments I think it's important that we don't overly focus on one isolated experience point like yours, because empirically this is highly disputed. In my experience, information sharing has plummeted after moving to an open-plan layout. People are forced to use noise-cancelling headphones to avoid impromptu exchanges, because the impromptu exchanges are value-destructive in the first place. And when someone gets co-opted into an impromptu discussion, they try to keep it superficial and share less substantive info, to get away from the unplanned distraction as fast as possible. Not to mention the huge increase of totally not-work-related or irrelevant distractions, like loud sales calls, product discussions that don't affect anything for my team, discussions about weekend plans, etc. It's a very shallow notion of information sharing, which could happen asynchronously through code, documents, email, or with a scheduled video call, or a short scheduled meeting, etc. As I mentioned elsewhere, this horribly misguided idea that somehow constant, real-time audio communication == sincere collaboration or information sharing, this idea is really destructive and doesn't map very well to how engineers actually work.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago

I've also worked in a variety of different floor designs, and have found open-plan to be dramatically inhibiting, not just for me but also for direct reports who tell me the open plan setup prevents them from getting things done most hours of the day. What do you propose for developers whose jobs consist primarily of deep focus tasks that require quiet, privacy, and states of flow? (I would argue this is the majority of developers, but that is beside the point. Even if it's a minority, yet their work output is very important for a given company, it would still seem that embedding them in an open-plan layout they must sit in for the majority of the time would clearly be throwing away more money they could possibly be saved on the real estate. Or you disagree?) You say, "Not everything is about your personal productivity" but this seems mostly irrelevant, because we're in a section of the possible solution space that focuses on never accounting for developers' personal productivity. Separately, if you're on a team where developers have to invest deep focus into disparate parts of a system or disparate solution approaches (the majority of teams I've ever seen), then it does boil down to the sum of individual productivity for most things.