6 ms·

Open-plan office is the worst. Why can't we kill it?

107 points by zzaner 8y ago

mrhandy 8y ago
This is painfully relatable... Marketing and sales teams don't seem to mind much but as a developer I once had to quit a job because of this.
- zzaner 8y ago
  I actually worked in sales and trust me, we DO mind the noise. Imagine trying to talk to a client on the phone when you can barely hear yourself.
  - Irishsteve 8y ago
    Also gives me a pretty poor impression when I hear other sales people shouting over whoever I'm talking to. Feels like they are in some kinda boiler room selling me vapourware.
howard941 8y ago
> Treat your office like a library, not a kitchen. A VP at my fast growing and profitable Fortune 500 publicly ridiculed my proposal to let our smallish engineering team geek in empty, unused offices in the building, on grounds that the office was not a library. He was kicked upstairs and to another division, bless him.
- zzaner 8y ago
  Honestly, they only upside of an open office is economic. When you have empty offices in the building, putting up with it really makes no sense. Basecamp actually designed their office around "library rules": https://m.signalvnoise.com/library-rules-how-to-make-an-open-office-plan-work/ https://m.signalvnoise.com/library-rules-how-to-make-an-open...
  - jdsully 8y ago
    That office is mostly empty space, and with all the effort to noise damp one has to ask - why bother? Just add offices at that point. At Microsoft you could always chat in the halls and people would just close their doors.
    - MagnificRogue 8y ago
      Now everything is moving to open office or has already moved :(, I envy the people that still have their own office.
      - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
        I've noticed it's usually the management.
        nathanaldensr 8y ago
        They tend to say "Well, you know I have to occasionally participate in super-secret phone calls," which we all know is an excuse.
    - TheTruth1234 8y ago
      Did you read the part about 'Library Rules'? It's a cultural leap, but that would make all the difference. Christ, I'm sitting in an open plan office right now with two telephone conversations going on in my right ear. Thank the hardware overlords for headphones ...
      - Macross8299 8y ago
        Yeah, I wonder how much of the disdain for open offices is more of a company culture issue rather a problem with open offices. What causes people to whisper in libraries but talk loudly and disturb others in an open office plan? Perhaps some segmentation of open office plans would also be interesting -- a "loud" zone, a semi-quiet zone and a silent zone. I don't know how workable this would be for teams unless you had hot-desking, which is something else people seem to hate, but still. Engineers who need to work on a difficult problem for a while can use the silent zone, while groups who need lots of communication and the perennial extroverts are free to use the louder spaces.
- village-idiot 8y ago
  Public ridicule isn’t exactly the hallmark of a competent leader either.
  - howard941 8y ago
    It didn't go unnoticed. We were a tiny part of a large acquisition and just a blip in the company as a whole albeit the most profitable blip margin-wise. A sports bar environment sans booze is kinda baked into the corporate mothership's decidedly non-engineering culture.
DigiMortal 8y ago
Ideally, high ceilings and light are great. A hybrid office type is the best. Offering several different work areas has most advantages. I like to think of my college library, areas open and no noise restrictions. Other areas closed off/private for hard focus. Some private rooms for group meetings, private rooms for individual work. Mobile technology has been a great thing, offering all that extra flexibility
notjustanymike 8y ago
At least in NYC, it's because of rent.
- dcolkitt 8y ago
  Average compensation for software engineers in NYC is $150k+ a year. Add in benefits and payroll taxes, etc. and you're looking at $180k+ Office space leases for around $75/year in NYC. A cramped open floor plan requires 80 square feet per person. A spacious 2 window private office is 150 square feet. A company only saves about $5000 a year, even in the expensive NYC market. If an open floor plan results in an engineer being distracted for even 2 minutes an hour, it costs more in lost productivity than it saves in rent.
wlesieutre 8y ago
Because it's cheap. Less walls to build, more employees packed on to a floor. Do you lose more money than you're saving due to decreased productivity? Maybe. But that's hard to prove, and "This office proposal is $X million cheaper because we can lease three fewer floors" is very straightforward.
- paulddraper 8y ago
  I'd wager open office is 2/3 the cost of small cubicles, 1/2 the cost of large cubicles and 1/3 the cost of cubicles plus offices.
- jesuslop 8y ago
  absolutely, because it's dirtly comparatively cheaper. Period.
- village-idiot 8y ago
  That which can be measured gets managed. It’s very easy to measure the cost per employee, productivity is very hard to measure.
- drofmij 8y ago
  This. It's cheap and upper management doesn't care because they still get an office. Has there been any proper research on productivity loss / gains beyond the anecdotal? I have no idea and management doesn't read books anyway so we are stuck with open plans.
  - sulam 8y ago
    FWIW most of the large companies I've worked at in tech don't give offices to anyone. I realize it's not universal, and some companies have execs in dedicated conference rooms that might as well be an office, but that mostly seems like an efficiency win from the perspective of someone who's in back to back 30 minute meetings all day long. Still, a lot of places at least are consistent about it all the way up to the CEO.
- Reedx 8y ago
deltamidway 8y ago
Because it is the cheapest...
floren 8y ago
At my previous employer, I worked in an office with real walls and a real solid wood door, in a cubicle with a sliding plastic door, in a cubicle with no door, and in a couple of larger open areas with between zero and three other people sharing the space. The real office was by far the best, but having a cubicle with a couple cabinets and a sliding door was almost as good. I've experienced an "open plan" setup that worked; we based the setup on Bell Labs' Unix Room after visiting them. The Unix Room model is actually great, but it's different from your standard open-plan setup: * People in the Unix Room seemed to be largely working on either individual projects or projects involving only a few others. * The room itself was not actually very big, so you couldn't jam too many people in there * Workspace was pretty generous, you weren't expected to tuck your elbows in lest you rub up against your neighbor * Everyone in the Unix Room also had their own private office with a door, which I think was the key to success. The last point is the biggest challenge: implementing a good open-plan workspace is going to require even more space than a traditional cube farm. Edit: I work from home now, in a shed in the back yard. It's the size of a nice office, has doors and windows, and if I decide to work with the door open I get fresh air and birds chirping :)
- floren 8y ago
  Posting a follow-up rather than editing: I also wonder if open-plan offices are a symptom of the increasing centralization of tech companies. These days people seem to think the first step of starting a tech company is to move to the Bay Area. If we were founding companies in Redding, Rochester, Yakima, Grand Rapids, or Albuquerque, could we afford to give everyone an office with a real door for the same price as a San Jose hellhole? We've got better connectivity than ever before, but we insist on clustering up more and more. Cray was out in the Wisconsin woods. Microsoft got started in Albuquerque. DEC and Data General were both well outside Boston in small towns.
  - Latteland 8y ago
    People start companies in these clusters because there are lots of programmers (to a lesser extend vc money) in those places, and you are more likely to be able to recruit programmers to those places.
dwynings 8y ago
We just closed a lease on a new space where every employee will have their own office. Definitely atypical in Silicon Valley, which meant that buildings with a lot of build out are less desirable. That made it easier to negotiate the price.
mrob 8y ago
I think the real reason is that the bosses like watching all their subordinates at once. They can see that nobody is slacking (or at least everybody is pretending not to, which signals social submission almost as well), and enjoy the feeling of power. Productivity statistics don't produce the same feeling, partly because they're too abstract, and partly because they're evidence of submission to the organization as a whole, not to the boss personally.
- drofmij 8y ago
  I can slack off just as easily in the office as I could at home. :D or work just as hard at home as in the office.
  - loa-in-backup 8y ago
    You're lucky. I automated my deployments and test analysis, which were the most time consuming tasks (sequential process, with few quirks along the way) as a developer. This gave me reliably 30-40 minute forced breaks. Soon I got notices that there were complaints that I do not conform to the office norms, and that apparently I "sleep instead of working", and people "ask if they can work like I do" (never got any further explanation). I got passed the slip and I'm moving on to a different job next week.
    - crankylinuxuser 8y ago
      If you automate your job, DONT show it. Use it and hide it, unless your job is explicitly automation engineer or thereabouts. Most places don't value the work you saved via automation. It's the company's gain; it shouldn't be yours! And shame on you for not cranking the gear next to your computer keeping it working! /s Remember, the appearance of work matters more than actual work for almost every employee.
      - rommik 8y ago
        yup, that's why I carry a notepad and take notes down with a serious face and occasional frown... I doodle well too
carimura 8y ago
It's not just price. Think about how trends evolve over time and how long it takes larger companies to "catch up". The planning/facilities groups are still high-fiveing from the major work it took to spin up open layouts, ignoring the growing evidence that it was the wrong direction. And completely opening and shoving people in like cattle is way easier than "well-planned open" (as mentioned in other comments), or even closed offices. They're not about to embark on an expensive complicated project until it's unavoidable. Will be years if ever.
organsnyder 8y ago
Employee per square foot is an easier metric to quantify than knowledge worker happiness and productivity.
ionforce 8y ago
As with all questions like this, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of what this is optimizing for. It's only "the worst" from one perspective. But it is optimal for another. The tension is not realizing that difference.
NoblePublius 8y ago
Because real estate is expensive and your boss is cheap.
clra 8y ago
This article nails it: > Open offices clearly suck. So why are you (most likely) still working in one? Behind all the fluff, there is a simple explanation: they save insane amounts of money. In the beginning, there was a lot of talk about open offices producing more collaborative environments, and I'm willing to give this charitable credence and believe that some people might really have thought that at the time. It was an emerging idea and the complete ramifications were not really understood. These days though, I don't think anyone ingenuous would defend that idea anymore — it's all about money, and this is doubly so in dense tech hot spots like San Francisco where real estate commands a huge premium. My large company is entirely open office, and has even been known to downsize standard desk size in order to get more of them into the same area. It's annoying, and there's no question that it creates a large productivity tax (desks are packed tightly enough that even a small group of people having a conversation at normal voice levels three rows over is pretty disrupting), but it mostly works, and giving everyone their own office in our central location would be pretty much financially infeasible. You learn to start working around it as best you can with sound insulating headphones, working from home where possible, or even reserving the occasional meeting room when you can. I find some comedy in the fact that my parent's generation used to complain non-stop about being ousted form their offices and into cubicle farms. These days, my generation would kill for cubicles. Even a couple drawers to store a few personal items are a fantasy at this point.
- IshKebab 8y ago
  I work in an open office and it is clearly more collaborative than if we were all in separate rooms. You can easily talk to people about things and interested parties often overhear and join the discussion when they wouldn't have even known it was happening otherwise. Also, being honest, I'd totally waste more time browsing the news if I had my own office. The key is: 1. Have plenty of space per person. We have big desks and are only at about 60% occupancy at the moment. 2. Don't make the offices enormous. I'd say never more than 100 people in one room. Ideally less. 3. Good acoustics. Carpets are essential. I used to work for Dyson and they had 1000 people (no joke, I counted) in one enormous office (actually it was a repurposed factory building) with no sound absorbing material at all and it was awful. Current company is just insanely better. The only issue I have is there is one guy with a really loud and penetrating voice... But it's not a deal breaker.
stunt 8y ago
For the same reason why airlines are giving you less and less leg room. Unfortunately, we sacrifice comfort for the sake of cost.
paddy_m 8y ago
I used to have a drive that required an hour drive each way in and out of Manhattan. When I arrived at the building, I shared a room with two other engineers who were team mates. I had so much energy after a day of work in that environment, including the drive, than I did at a regular NYC open office. Open office's suck energy through distraction. I have basically given up on finding a job that would give me an office with a door that closes. I think it's much more likely that I could find a remote job. If I ask for an onsite office I would basically be laughed at or thought of as a prima donna.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  " Open office's suck energy through distraction." that's how I feel. Since working in a cube farm I am totally shot when I come home. The noise, lack of daylight and visual distractions suck all energy out of me. There is no escape from the stress while I am at work.
jordache 8y ago
it's all anecdotal opinions
- deathanatos 8y ago
  No, it isn't; there have been studies done on open office floorplans, and they come to the same, obvious conclusion: they're bad on any metric you care to measure them on, except the one the article points out: if you ignore the productivity loss and all the other costs, they're cheaper. From the Wikipedia article on open floor plans, > A systematic survey of research upon the effects of open-plan offices found frequent negative effects in some traditional workplaces: high levels of noise, stress, conflict, high blood pressure and a high staff turnover. > Open-plan offices have been found to elevate the risk of employees needing to take time off for sickness. The article's citations will allow you to delve into the studies, if you wish. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_plan
  - jiveturkey 8y ago
    The cited studies all date circa 2011. But open office was trending well before then, and studies were done before then. For example, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272494405000538 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02724...
clarry 8y ago
I'm so glad to have a remote position. Less distraction than any office I've ever been to. And much more cozy, because I can choose exactly how to furnish my own space. It's such a massive perk I have no second thoughts about turning down jobs with a considerably higher salary. It helps that commute time and expenses are zero. Commute is essentially unpaid, unproductive labour; it's not your free time, it's something you do for the sake of your employer, and you don't get anything done except translate your corpse.
rdtsc 8y ago
> Behind all the fluff, there is a simple explanation: they save insane amounts of money. Yes pretty much. It's disappointing that companies cannot be honest with their employees and just say that simply. People can understand price per sq. foot, it's not inverting binary trees or building rockets. But when they are told stuff like "We can _all_ collaborate better! Look at all this (busy) work happening!". It insults people's intelligence. It's like giving a kid who doesn't like potatoes, carrots and telling them they are just orange potatoes. Yes, I have tried that with my 2 year old and it works great. But doing it with engineers who you trust to build your product is just crazy.
Kiro 8y ago
I feel like I'm the only one who likes open-plan offices.
- wmhorne 8y ago
  What do you like about them?
saberience 8y ago
Every time this topic comes up there are a bunch of HN people saying open-plan is "clearly the worst" and that they want cubicles back. Note: this is hardly scientific. It's just your personal anecdote, ok, you don't like being around many other people and would prefer a cubicle or private office. That's fine. However, don't discount the fact that other people exist that, gasp, actually like open-plan offices. Like myself! I'm one of those more sociable engineer types and I love the open plan bullpen at my current company, I love the bantering and conversations we have there, and I love that due to our social nature we have built a really cohesive TEAM that likes each other and supports each other. The atmosphere, friendliness, and fun, simply wouldn't be as great if we were all in cubicles or separate offices. So now you have my anecdote too, which is of course not science. But I know there are plenty of others like me (unless I'm some sort of engineer unique snowflake out of the millions out there, which seems unlikely). Instead of simply condemning "open-plan" as the "worst," why not try and understand why it works and helps some people and teams and why some others don't seem to like it. Maybe it's personality dependent, maybe it depends on the exact size of the open-plan area, there are hundreds of other factors that could make a difference here.
- s_y_n_t_a_x 8y ago
  It seems you either like open or not. My company had an open plan warehouse in it's building before we went full remote. We had "break-out" rooms where we could work privately in an office. Some days people would work in them, I personally claimed one for myself to work permanently. Everyone else seemed to enjoy the open plan, I however, could not.
- thatswrong0 8y ago
  I like bantering and chatting too, but I definitely don’t think it’s that conducive towards me being a productive engineer. Sometimes it’s nice being able to freely walk about and bounce ideas off others, and I’m sure this has resulted in some positive benefits, but 70+% of the time I really just need to go heads down on something and not be distracted. Always being near people who are talking is very distracting. As a result I get more done when I’m not in the office. I think it’s pretty obvious that you could have a hybrid approach where you have open areas for collaborating as well as a lot of private booths or rooms for people who actually need to get things done. But of course that wouldn’t be cheap..
root_axis 8y ago
I find the open office preferable to a cubicle farm. Most cubicle setups don't offer much in the way of privacy, especially with regard to noise and conversation, but they are dreary and soul-draining to look upon. Obviously a private office for teams or individuals is ideal, but if it's between open office and cubicles, I'll pick the open office every time.
rb808 8y ago
One thing I do like about working in a hot desk environment is that its easy for people to move around regularly. Its nice to mix groups of people, work close with those your current project is with and even mix up your day. One problem with offices is that it gets territorial. People get their office then its really difficult to move. Some offices have a better view or more/less sun. Do you take turns or goes to most experienced or senior person on the team? It becomes political and ripe for stupid games.
hmottestad 8y ago
I have my own office. Very happy with this! Everyone where I work has an office, so not that special here. Where I worked before I fought tooth and nail to get an office, by the time I was leaving I had the smallest office in the building crammed in with 2 others, while other (non-developers) had offices twice as big all for themselves. Management wanted to cram 10 people into an office space the size of the office for the boss. HR put a stop to that plan luckily.
- paddy_m 8y ago
  Where do you work? Are they hiring?
- sys_64738 8y ago
  I used to have my own office but now my desk is in the basement.
georgewsinger 8y ago
Because maximizing local task performance ≠ maximizing group task performance.
- pseudalopex 8y ago
  What is the evidence it maximizes group performance?
jiveturkey 8y ago
I am so tired of this article. As far as HN goes, this is the new bi-weekly 'should I work at a startup?' post. As far as the general blogosphere (that's still a thing, yes?) goes, it's the latest click attractor. We all know by now why open-plan offices dominate. Cost. We don't need to belabor the point. This specific article is particularly annoying: > The reasoning behind the idea of an open office is simple and makes sense in theory: fewer physical barriers – more communication and collaboration. The author knows damn well that isn't the case. The way he presents this false statement is annoying af. It's not setup as a false assumption to be torn down (which he proceeds to do), it's setup as an actually true statement. It's insulting to the reader because, nobody is so misinformed at this point in the game. He then goes on to speak from a position of authority on the history of the open office plan, which of course he gets wrong. Wilkinson didn't create an open office for Google, he created glass-walled cubes.
- fatnoah 8y ago
  > The reasoning behind the idea of an open office is simple and makes sense in theory: fewer physical barriers – more communication and collaboration. To be fair to the author, this is always the reason I've heard given by management for having an open office plan, when the reality is, in fact, about cost.
cestith 8y ago
My employer has the opposite of an open office plan after moving from our old location to our current one a few years ago. Tech support has a cubicle layout, but they are big cubes and assigned to each person. There's no sharing even across shifts. In other departments, each team has a "pod". You enter through a swinging door from the hallway into the pod. Inside, you find a conference room with conference table, whiteboard, and TV for shared viewing of code, project boards, or presentations. Around the conference room are individual offices, up to ten or so of them, mostly with sliding doors. A few offices have swinging doors. The offices are big enough for a desk, filing cabinet, bookcase, and a visitor's chair or a small couch/futon. Not every office is on the outside of the building, but they all have windows at the top to get at least some reflected natural daylight. There are bigger conference rooms for bigger meetings, but a team can meet whenever without going searching for a room. They can have a hack session together or pair program right there in the pod. There's a break room on each floor. Besides drinks and snacks, the break rooms have power outlets, bar-style seating counters, tables, chairs for both heights, and great wifi coverage for anyone who wants to work in a more open environment or catch more hallway chatter. Yes, the company had to expressly ask the architects for this layout. Yes, the architects originally thought our management was crazy. From what I've heard now the architecture firm has office pods and promotes the idea for their other clients. Management also specified mostly redundant hospital-grade air handling systems that turn over the air in the building several times per day. We get not just minimum and maximum temperatures and humidity monitored and handled, but oxygen/carbon dioxide balance, too. There's no more drowsy afternoon mental fog from a literal lack of oxygen which many offices suffer. The last time I interviewed with some Bay area companies, they tried to convince me that there are enough conference rooms to just duck into to get some peace and quiet. That, I think, defeats whatever purpose beyond being cheap that open offices are supposed to serve. I also think if you have enough extra rooms that are never booked that people can do this, you might as well put teams in those rooms instead of in a corral.
- rommik 8y ago
  reading this with a mental fog in an afternoon... I feel a tear is coming or maybe just dry eyes from the hot air and high CO2 balance...
foxfired 8y ago
Office Space made me hate cubicles. Open-plan made me appreciate cubicles.
MR4D 8y ago
Great photo at the top. Replace the computer monitors in the photo with sewing machines, and you have my perfect idea of a sweatshop. No wonder I quit and started my own firm. I get hives just thinking about that.
souprock 8y ago
What should I call my situation? There are 2 people in a room with a door-free opening. It's probably 11x13 feet. It has drywall and a high drop-ceiling. There are a bunch of similar areas all off of a hallway. It's kind of the degenerate transition point between open-plan and a traditional office.

107 points by zzaner 8y ago

This is painfully relatable... Marketing and sales teams don't seem to mind much but as a developer I once had to quit a job because of this.

zzaner 8y ago
I actually worked in sales and trust me, we DO mind the noise. Imagine trying to talk to a client on the phone when you can barely hear yourself.
- Irishsteve 8y ago
  Also gives me a pretty poor impression when I hear other sales people shouting over whoever I'm talking to. Feels like they are in some kinda boiler room selling me vapourware.

howard941 8y ago

> Treat your office like a library, not a kitchen. A VP at my fast growing and profitable Fortune 500 publicly ridiculed my proposal to let our smallish engineering team geek in empty, unused offices in the building, on grounds that the office was not a library. He was kicked upstairs and to another division, bless him.

zzaner 8y ago
Honestly, they only upside of an open office is economic. When you have empty offices in the building, putting up with it really makes no sense. Basecamp actually designed their office around "library rules": https://m.signalvnoise.com/library-rules-how-to-make-an-open-office-plan-work/ https://m.signalvnoise.com/library-rules-how-to-make-an-open...
- jdsully 8y ago
  That office is mostly empty space, and with all the effort to noise damp one has to ask - why bother? Just add offices at that point. At Microsoft you could always chat in the halls and people would just close their doors.
  - MagnificRogue 8y ago
    Now everything is moving to open office or has already moved :(, I envy the people that still have their own office.
    - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
      I've noticed it's usually the management.
      - nathanaldensr 8y ago
        They tend to say "Well, you know I have to occasionally participate in super-secret phone calls," which we all know is an excuse.
  - TheTruth1234 8y ago
    Did you read the part about 'Library Rules'? It's a cultural leap, but that would make all the difference. Christ, I'm sitting in an open plan office right now with two telephone conversations going on in my right ear. Thank the hardware overlords for headphones ...
    - Macross8299 8y ago
      Yeah, I wonder how much of the disdain for open offices is more of a company culture issue rather a problem with open offices. What causes people to whisper in libraries but talk loudly and disturb others in an open office plan? Perhaps some segmentation of open office plans would also be interesting -- a "loud" zone, a semi-quiet zone and a silent zone. I don't know how workable this would be for teams unless you had hot-desking, which is something else people seem to hate, but still. Engineers who need to work on a difficult problem for a while can use the silent zone, while groups who need lots of communication and the perennial extroverts are free to use the louder spaces.
village-idiot 8y ago
Public ridicule isn’t exactly the hallmark of a competent leader either.
- howard941 8y ago
  It didn't go unnoticed. We were a tiny part of a large acquisition and just a blip in the company as a whole albeit the most profitable blip margin-wise. A sports bar environment sans booze is kinda baked into the corporate mothership's decidedly non-engineering culture.

DigiMortal 8y ago

Ideally, high ceilings and light are great. A hybrid office type is the best. Offering several different work areas has most advantages. I like to think of my college library, areas open and no noise restrictions. Other areas closed off/private for hard focus. Some private rooms for group meetings, private rooms for individual work. Mobile technology has been a great thing, offering all that extra flexibility

notjustanymike 8y ago

At least in NYC, it's because of rent.

dcolkitt 8y ago
Average compensation for software engineers in NYC is $150k+ a year. Add in benefits and payroll taxes, etc. and you're looking at $180k+ Office space leases for around $75/year in NYC. A cramped open floor plan requires 80 square feet per person. A spacious 2 window private office is 150 square feet. A company only saves about $5000 a year, even in the expensive NYC market. If an open floor plan results in an engineer being distracted for even 2 minutes an hour, it costs more in lost productivity than it saves in rent.

wlesieutre 8y ago

Because it's cheap. Less walls to build, more employees packed on to a floor. Do you lose more money than you're saving due to decreased productivity? Maybe. But that's hard to prove, and "This office proposal is $X million cheaper because we can lease three fewer floors" is very straightforward.

paulddraper 8y ago
I'd wager open office is 2/3 the cost of small cubicles, 1/2 the cost of large cubicles and 1/3 the cost of cubicles plus offices.
jesuslop 8y ago
absolutely, because it's dirtly comparatively cheaper. Period.
village-idiot 8y ago
That which can be measured gets managed. It’s very easy to measure the cost per employee, productivity is very hard to measure.
drofmij 8y ago
This. It's cheap and upper management doesn't care because they still get an office. Has there been any proper research on productivity loss / gains beyond the anecdotal? I have no idea and management doesn't read books anyway so we are stuck with open plans.
- sulam 8y ago
  FWIW most of the large companies I've worked at in tech don't give offices to anyone. I realize it's not universal, and some companies have execs in dedicated conference rooms that might as well be an office, but that mostly seems like an efficiency win from the perspective of someone who's in back to back 30 minute meetings all day long. Still, a lot of places at least are consistent about it all the way up to the CEO.
Reedx 8y ago

deltamidway 8y ago

Because it is the cheapest...

floren 8y ago

At my previous employer, I worked in an office with real walls and a real solid wood door, in a cubicle with a sliding plastic door, in a cubicle with no door, and in a couple of larger open areas with between zero and three other people sharing the space. The real office was by far the best, but having a cubicle with a couple cabinets and a sliding door was almost as good. I've experienced an "open plan" setup that worked; we based the setup on Bell Labs' Unix Room after visiting them. The Unix Room model is actually great, but it's different from your standard open-plan setup: * People in the Unix Room seemed to be largely working on either individual projects or projects involving only a few others. * The room itself was not actually very big, so you couldn't jam too many people in there * Workspace was pretty generous, you weren't expected to tuck your elbows in lest you rub up against your neighbor * Everyone in the Unix Room also had their own private office with a door, which I think was the key to success. The last point is the biggest challenge: implementing a good open-plan workspace is going to require even more space than a traditional cube farm. Edit: I work from home now, in a shed in the back yard. It's the size of a nice office, has doors and windows, and if I decide to work with the door open I get fresh air and birds chirping :)

floren 8y ago
Posting a follow-up rather than editing: I also wonder if open-plan offices are a symptom of the increasing centralization of tech companies. These days people seem to think the first step of starting a tech company is to move to the Bay Area. If we were founding companies in Redding, Rochester, Yakima, Grand Rapids, or Albuquerque, could we afford to give everyone an office with a real door for the same price as a San Jose hellhole? We've got better connectivity than ever before, but we insist on clustering up more and more. Cray was out in the Wisconsin woods. Microsoft got started in Albuquerque. DEC and Data General were both well outside Boston in small towns.
- Latteland 8y ago
  People start companies in these clusters because there are lots of programmers (to a lesser extend vc money) in those places, and you are more likely to be able to recruit programmers to those places.

dwynings 8y ago

We just closed a lease on a new space where every employee will have their own office. Definitely atypical in Silicon Valley, which meant that buildings with a lot of build out are less desirable. That made it easier to negotiate the price.

mrob 8y ago

I think the real reason is that the bosses like watching all their subordinates at once. They can see that nobody is slacking (or at least everybody is pretending not to, which signals social submission almost as well), and enjoy the feeling of power. Productivity statistics don't produce the same feeling, partly because they're too abstract, and partly because they're evidence of submission to the organization as a whole, not to the boss personally.

drofmij 8y ago
I can slack off just as easily in the office as I could at home. :D or work just as hard at home as in the office.
- loa-in-backup 8y ago
  You're lucky. I automated my deployments and test analysis, which were the most time consuming tasks (sequential process, with few quirks along the way) as a developer. This gave me reliably 30-40 minute forced breaks. Soon I got notices that there were complaints that I do not conform to the office norms, and that apparently I "sleep instead of working", and people "ask if they can work like I do" (never got any further explanation). I got passed the slip and I'm moving on to a different job next week.
  - crankylinuxuser 8y ago
    If you automate your job, DONT show it. Use it and hide it, unless your job is explicitly automation engineer or thereabouts. Most places don't value the work you saved via automation. It's the company's gain; it shouldn't be yours! And shame on you for not cranking the gear next to your computer keeping it working! /s Remember, the appearance of work matters more than actual work for almost every employee.
    - rommik 8y ago
      yup, that's why I carry a notepad and take notes down with a serious face and occasional frown... I doodle well too

carimura 8y ago

It's not just price. Think about how trends evolve over time and how long it takes larger companies to "catch up". The planning/facilities groups are still high-fiveing from the major work it took to spin up open layouts, ignoring the growing evidence that it was the wrong direction. And completely opening and shoving people in like cattle is way easier than "well-planned open" (as mentioned in other comments), or even closed offices. They're not about to embark on an expensive complicated project until it's unavoidable. Will be years if ever.

organsnyder 8y ago

Employee per square foot is an easier metric to quantify than knowledge worker happiness and productivity.

ionforce 8y ago

As with all questions like this, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of what this is optimizing for. It's only "the worst" from one perspective. But it is optimal for another. The tension is not realizing that difference.

NoblePublius 8y ago

Because real estate is expensive and your boss is cheap.

clra 8y ago

This article nails it: > Open offices clearly suck. So why are you (most likely) still working in one? Behind all the fluff, there is a simple explanation: they save insane amounts of money. In the beginning, there was a lot of talk about open offices producing more collaborative environments, and I'm willing to give this charitable credence and believe that some people might really have thought that at the time. It was an emerging idea and the complete ramifications were not really understood. These days though, I don't think anyone ingenuous would defend that idea anymore — it's all about money, and this is doubly so in dense tech hot spots like San Francisco where real estate commands a huge premium. My large company is entirely open office, and has even been known to downsize standard desk size in order to get more of them into the same area. It's annoying, and there's no question that it creates a large productivity tax (desks are packed tightly enough that even a small group of people having a conversation at normal voice levels three rows over is pretty disrupting), but it mostly works, and giving everyone their own office in our central location would be pretty much financially infeasible. You learn to start working around it as best you can with sound insulating headphones, working from home where possible, or even reserving the occasional meeting room when you can. I find some comedy in the fact that my parent's generation used to complain non-stop about being ousted form their offices and into cubicle farms. These days, my generation would kill for cubicles. Even a couple drawers to store a few personal items are a fantasy at this point.

IshKebab 8y ago
I work in an open office and it is clearly more collaborative than if we were all in separate rooms. You can easily talk to people about things and interested parties often overhear and join the discussion when they wouldn't have even known it was happening otherwise. Also, being honest, I'd totally waste more time browsing the news if I had my own office. The key is: 1. Have plenty of space per person. We have big desks and are only at about 60% occupancy at the moment. 2. Don't make the offices enormous. I'd say never more than 100 people in one room. Ideally less. 3. Good acoustics. Carpets are essential. I used to work for Dyson and they had 1000 people (no joke, I counted) in one enormous office (actually it was a repurposed factory building) with no sound absorbing material at all and it was awful. Current company is just insanely better. The only issue I have is there is one guy with a really loud and penetrating voice... But it's not a deal breaker.

stunt 8y ago

For the same reason why airlines are giving you less and less leg room. Unfortunately, we sacrifice comfort for the sake of cost.

paddy_m 8y ago

I used to have a drive that required an hour drive each way in and out of Manhattan. When I arrived at the building, I shared a room with two other engineers who were team mates. I had so much energy after a day of work in that environment, including the drive, than I did at a regular NYC open office. Open office's suck energy through distraction. I have basically given up on finding a job that would give me an office with a door that closes. I think it's much more likely that I could find a remote job. If I ask for an onsite office I would basically be laughed at or thought of as a prima donna.

maxxxxx 8y ago
" Open office's suck energy through distraction." that's how I feel. Since working in a cube farm I am totally shot when I come home. The noise, lack of daylight and visual distractions suck all energy out of me. There is no escape from the stress while I am at work.

jordache 8y ago

it's all anecdotal opinions

deathanatos 8y ago
No, it isn't; there have been studies done on open office floorplans, and they come to the same, obvious conclusion: they're bad on any metric you care to measure them on, except the one the article points out: if you ignore the productivity loss and all the other costs, they're cheaper. From the Wikipedia article on open floor plans, > A systematic survey of research upon the effects of open-plan offices found frequent negative effects in some traditional workplaces: high levels of noise, stress, conflict, high blood pressure and a high staff turnover. > Open-plan offices have been found to elevate the risk of employees needing to take time off for sickness. The article's citations will allow you to delve into the studies, if you wish. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_plan
- jiveturkey 8y ago
  The cited studies all date circa 2011. But open office was trending well before then, and studies were done before then. For example, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272494405000538 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02724...

clarry 8y ago

I'm so glad to have a remote position. Less distraction than any office I've ever been to. And much more cozy, because I can choose exactly how to furnish my own space. It's such a massive perk I have no second thoughts about turning down jobs with a considerably higher salary. It helps that commute time and expenses are zero. Commute is essentially unpaid, unproductive labour; it's not your free time, it's something you do for the sake of your employer, and you don't get anything done except translate your corpse.

rdtsc 8y ago

> Behind all the fluff, there is a simple explanation: they save insane amounts of money. Yes pretty much. It's disappointing that companies cannot be honest with their employees and just say that simply. People can understand price per sq. foot, it's not inverting binary trees or building rockets. But when they are told stuff like "We can _all_ collaborate better! Look at all this (busy) work happening!". It insults people's intelligence. It's like giving a kid who doesn't like potatoes, carrots and telling them they are just orange potatoes. Yes, I have tried that with my 2 year old and it works great. But doing it with engineers who you trust to build your product is just crazy.

Kiro 8y ago

I feel like I'm the only one who likes open-plan offices.

wmhorne 8y ago
What do you like about them?

saberience 8y ago

Every time this topic comes up there are a bunch of HN people saying open-plan is "clearly the worst" and that they want cubicles back. Note: this is hardly scientific. It's just your personal anecdote, ok, you don't like being around many other people and would prefer a cubicle or private office. That's fine. However, don't discount the fact that other people exist that, gasp, actually like open-plan offices. Like myself! I'm one of those more sociable engineer types and I love the open plan bullpen at my current company, I love the bantering and conversations we have there, and I love that due to our social nature we have built a really cohesive TEAM that likes each other and supports each other. The atmosphere, friendliness, and fun, simply wouldn't be as great if we were all in cubicles or separate offices. So now you have my anecdote too, which is of course not science. But I know there are plenty of others like me (unless I'm some sort of engineer unique snowflake out of the millions out there, which seems unlikely). Instead of simply condemning "open-plan" as the "worst," why not try and understand why it works and helps some people and teams and why some others don't seem to like it. Maybe it's personality dependent, maybe it depends on the exact size of the open-plan area, there are hundreds of other factors that could make a difference here.

s_y_n_t_a_x 8y ago
It seems you either like open or not. My company had an open plan warehouse in it's building before we went full remote. We had "break-out" rooms where we could work privately in an office. Some days people would work in them, I personally claimed one for myself to work permanently. Everyone else seemed to enjoy the open plan, I however, could not.
thatswrong0 8y ago
I like bantering and chatting too, but I definitely don’t think it’s that conducive towards me being a productive engineer. Sometimes it’s nice being able to freely walk about and bounce ideas off others, and I’m sure this has resulted in some positive benefits, but 70+% of the time I really just need to go heads down on something and not be distracted. Always being near people who are talking is very distracting. As a result I get more done when I’m not in the office. I think it’s pretty obvious that you could have a hybrid approach where you have open areas for collaborating as well as a lot of private booths or rooms for people who actually need to get things done. But of course that wouldn’t be cheap..

root_axis 8y ago

I find the open office preferable to a cubicle farm. Most cubicle setups don't offer much in the way of privacy, especially with regard to noise and conversation, but they are dreary and soul-draining to look upon. Obviously a private office for teams or individuals is ideal, but if it's between open office and cubicles, I'll pick the open office every time.

rb808 8y ago

One thing I do like about working in a hot desk environment is that its easy for people to move around regularly. Its nice to mix groups of people, work close with those your current project is with and even mix up your day. One problem with offices is that it gets territorial. People get their office then its really difficult to move. Some offices have a better view or more/less sun. Do you take turns or goes to most experienced or senior person on the team? It becomes political and ripe for stupid games.

hmottestad 8y ago

I have my own office. Very happy with this! Everyone where I work has an office, so not that special here. Where I worked before I fought tooth and nail to get an office, by the time I was leaving I had the smallest office in the building crammed in with 2 others, while other (non-developers) had offices twice as big all for themselves. Management wanted to cram 10 people into an office space the size of the office for the boss. HR put a stop to that plan luckily.

paddy_m 8y ago
Where do you work? Are they hiring?
sys_64738 8y ago
I used to have my own office but now my desk is in the basement.

georgewsinger 8y ago

Because maximizing local task performance ≠ maximizing group task performance.

pseudalopex 8y ago
What is the evidence it maximizes group performance?

jiveturkey 8y ago

I am so tired of this article. As far as HN goes, this is the new bi-weekly 'should I work at a startup?' post. As far as the general blogosphere (that's still a thing, yes?) goes, it's the latest click attractor. We all know by now why open-plan offices dominate. Cost. We don't need to belabor the point. This specific article is particularly annoying: > The reasoning behind the idea of an open office is simple and makes sense in theory: fewer physical barriers – more communication and collaboration. The author knows damn well that isn't the case. The way he presents this false statement is annoying af. It's not setup as a false assumption to be torn down (which he proceeds to do), it's setup as an actually true statement. It's insulting to the reader because, nobody is so misinformed at this point in the game. He then goes on to speak from a position of authority on the history of the open office plan, which of course he gets wrong. Wilkinson didn't create an open office for Google, he created glass-walled cubes.

fatnoah 8y ago
> The reasoning behind the idea of an open office is simple and makes sense in theory: fewer physical barriers – more communication and collaboration. To be fair to the author, this is always the reason I've heard given by management for having an open office plan, when the reality is, in fact, about cost.

cestith 8y ago

My employer has the opposite of an open office plan after moving from our old location to our current one a few years ago. Tech support has a cubicle layout, but they are big cubes and assigned to each person. There's no sharing even across shifts. In other departments, each team has a "pod". You enter through a swinging door from the hallway into the pod. Inside, you find a conference room with conference table, whiteboard, and TV for shared viewing of code, project boards, or presentations. Around the conference room are individual offices, up to ten or so of them, mostly with sliding doors. A few offices have swinging doors. The offices are big enough for a desk, filing cabinet, bookcase, and a visitor's chair or a small couch/futon. Not every office is on the outside of the building, but they all have windows at the top to get at least some reflected natural daylight. There are bigger conference rooms for bigger meetings, but a team can meet whenever without going searching for a room. They can have a hack session together or pair program right there in the pod. There's a break room on each floor. Besides drinks and snacks, the break rooms have power outlets, bar-style seating counters, tables, chairs for both heights, and great wifi coverage for anyone who wants to work in a more open environment or catch more hallway chatter. Yes, the company had to expressly ask the architects for this layout. Yes, the architects originally thought our management was crazy. From what I've heard now the architecture firm has office pods and promotes the idea for their other clients. Management also specified mostly redundant hospital-grade air handling systems that turn over the air in the building several times per day. We get not just minimum and maximum temperatures and humidity monitored and handled, but oxygen/carbon dioxide balance, too. There's no more drowsy afternoon mental fog from a literal lack of oxygen which many offices suffer. The last time I interviewed with some Bay area companies, they tried to convince me that there are enough conference rooms to just duck into to get some peace and quiet. That, I think, defeats whatever purpose beyond being cheap that open offices are supposed to serve. I also think if you have enough extra rooms that are never booked that people can do this, you might as well put teams in those rooms instead of in a corral.

rommik 8y ago
reading this with a mental fog in an afternoon... I feel a tear is coming or maybe just dry eyes from the hot air and high CO2 balance...

foxfired 8y ago

Office Space made me hate cubicles. Open-plan made me appreciate cubicles.

MR4D 8y ago

Great photo at the top. Replace the computer monitors in the photo with sewing machines, and you have my perfect idea of a sweatshop. No wonder I quit and started my own firm. I get hives just thinking about that.

souprock 8y ago

What should I call my situation? There are 2 people in a room with a door-free opening. It's probably 11x13 feet. It has drywall and a high drop-ceiling. There are a bunch of similar areas all off of a hallway. It's kind of the degenerate transition point between open-plan and a traditional office.