4 ms·

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 sci

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..
- saberience 8y ago
  The open-plan areas at my company are kept limited in size. Our area seats about a max of 14 people and right now we have 10 people. Everyone has their own movable standing desk and the company provides pretty good noise-cancelling headphones if you want. Given the limited amount of people and decent sized area, there is a good amount of space between desks and the noise level never really gets that high since there aren't really that many people around.
  - rpedela 8y ago
    I think we need another word for that. It isn't really the definition of "open office" that is usually discussed. Open office typically refers to 10s or 100s of people in the same room. <= 10 is something else because that is small enough for everyone to respect each other's space, ears, etc even when on top of each other. I have had a few jobs with that particular set up and I never had a problem with it. However I have never liked larger open offices.
bryanlarsen 8y ago
“Not every programmer in the world wants to work in a private office. In fact quite a few would tell you unequivocally that they prefer the camaraderie and easy information sharing of an open space. Don’t fall for it. They also want M&Ms for breakfast and a pony. Open space is fun but not productive.” — Joel Spolsky, co-founder of Trello and CEO of Stack Overflow
opo 8y ago
We don't need to rely on anecdotes. There are plenty of studies on open offices and how they affect productivity. For example: >...The design of the research was simple but incredibly clever. Study two Fortune 500 companies planning to make a switch to open-plan offices and compare how employees interact both before and after the new office design. >To do this, Harvard researchers Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban had 150 participating employees wear a gizmo called a sociometric badge. For three weeks before and after the redesign it recorded wearers' movement, location, posture and, via infrared and sound sensors, their every conversation with colleagues. The researchers also reviewed the number of text messages and emails subjects sent during the test period. >The results have just been published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. What did they show? In short, as walls came down, so did the number of interactions among co-workers. Simultaneously, the number of emails and text messages shot up. >"Overall, face-to-face time decreased by around 70 percent across the participating employees, on average, with email use increasing by between 22 percent and 50 percent (depending on the estimation method used)," says the British Psychological Society Research Digest blog, summing up the results. https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/new-harvard-study-you-open-plan-office-is-making-your-team-less-collaborative.html https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/new-harvard-study-you-o... >..A study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology of more than 40,000 workers in 300 US office buildings: "...Enclosed private offices clearly outperformed open-plan layouts in most aspects of IEQ (Indoor Environmental Quality), particularly in acoustics, privacy and the proxemics issues. Benefits of enhanced 'ease of interaction' were smaller than the penalties of increased noise level and decreased privacy resulting from open-plan office configuration." https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/science-just-proved-that-open-plan-offices-destroy-productivity.html https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/science-just-proved-that-... An article in the New Yorker summarizes some research on open offices. Besides the effects on productivity, there are also health effects. For example: >...In a recent study of more than twenty-four hundred employees in Denmark, Jan Pejtersen and his colleagues found that as the number of people working in a single room went up, the number of employees who took sick leave increased apace. >...In laboratory settings, noise has been repeatedly tied to reduced cognitive performance. The psychologist Nick Perham, who studies the effect of sound on how we think, has found that office commotion impairs workers’ ability to recall information, and even to do basic arithmetic. Listening to music to block out the office intrusion doesn’t help: even that, Perham found, impairs our mental acuity. Exposure to noise in an office may also take a toll on the health of employees. In a study by the Cornell University psychologists Gary Evans and Dana Johnson, clerical workers who were exposed to open-office noise for three hours had increased levels of epinephrine—a hormone that we often call adrenaline, associated with the so-called fight-or-flight response. https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-open-office-trap https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-open-office-...

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..

saberience 8y ago
The open-plan areas at my company are kept limited in size. Our area seats about a max of 14 people and right now we have 10 people. Everyone has their own movable standing desk and the company provides pretty good noise-cancelling headphones if you want. Given the limited amount of people and decent sized area, there is a good amount of space between desks and the noise level never really gets that high since there aren't really that many people around.
- rpedela 8y ago
  I think we need another word for that. It isn't really the definition of "open office" that is usually discussed. Open office typically refers to 10s or 100s of people in the same room. <= 10 is something else because that is small enough for everyone to respect each other's space, ears, etc even when on top of each other. I have had a few jobs with that particular set up and I never had a problem with it. However I have never liked larger open offices.

bryanlarsen 8y ago

“Not every programmer in the world wants to work in a private office. In fact quite a few would tell you unequivocally that they prefer the camaraderie and easy information sharing of an open space. Don’t fall for it. They also want M&Ms for breakfast and a pony. Open space is fun but not productive.” — Joel Spolsky, co-founder of Trello and CEO of Stack Overflow

opo 8y ago

We don't need to rely on anecdotes. There are plenty of studies on open offices and how they affect productivity. For example: >...The design of the research was simple but incredibly clever. Study two Fortune 500 companies planning to make a switch to open-plan offices and compare how employees interact both before and after the new office design. >To do this, Harvard researchers Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban had 150 participating employees wear a gizmo called a sociometric badge. For three weeks before and after the redesign it recorded wearers' movement, location, posture and, via infrared and sound sensors, their every conversation with colleagues. The researchers also reviewed the number of text messages and emails subjects sent during the test period. >The results have just been published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. What did they show? In short, as walls came down, so did the number of interactions among co-workers. Simultaneously, the number of emails and text messages shot up. >"Overall, face-to-face time decreased by around 70 percent across the participating employees, on average, with email use increasing by between 22 percent and 50 percent (depending on the estimation method used)," says the British Psychological Society Research Digest blog, summing up the results. https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/new-harvard-study-you-open-plan-office-is-making-your-team-less-collaborative.html https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/new-harvard-study-you-o... >..A study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology of more than 40,000 workers in 300 US office buildings: "...Enclosed private offices clearly outperformed open-plan layouts in most aspects of IEQ (Indoor Environmental Quality), particularly in acoustics, privacy and the proxemics issues. Benefits of enhanced 'ease of interaction' were smaller than the penalties of increased noise level and decreased privacy resulting from open-plan office configuration." https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/science-just-proved-that-open-plan-offices-destroy-productivity.html https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/science-just-proved-that-... An article in the New Yorker summarizes some research on open offices. Besides the effects on productivity, there are also health effects. For example: >...In a recent study of more than twenty-four hundred employees in Denmark, Jan Pejtersen and his colleagues found that as the number of people working in a single room went up, the number of employees who took sick leave increased apace. >...In laboratory settings, noise has been repeatedly tied to reduced cognitive performance. The psychologist Nick Perham, who studies the effect of sound on how we think, has found that office commotion impairs workers’ ability to recall information, and even to do basic arithmetic. Listening to music to block out the office intrusion doesn’t help: even that, Perham found, impairs our mental acuity. Exposure to noise in an office may also take a toll on the health of employees. In a study by the Cornell University psychologists Gary Evans and Dana Johnson, clerical workers who were exposed to open-office noise for three hours had increased levels of epinephrine—a hormone that we often call adrenaline, associated with the so-called fight-or-flight response. https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-open-office-trap https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-open-office-...