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I hate open offices for many reasons. I am one of the fortunate people who can tune out the world around me an concentrate amongst the bustle. One thing is eve

• christkv 5y ago
  Open offices was so annoying, having to look for a couch where you could sit with your back to the wall, or a meeting room to answer sensitive work emails.
  • ithkuil 5y ago
    Did anybody try "inverted open offices" where people sit facing the center and have their back against a wall as you described? Not necessary like that, any configuration where people can't sneak behind you would work.
    • elric 5y ago
      I suggested this to $bossman, and he shot me down. I rather liked that setup when I was in school, basically a U shape, with every desk facing towards the middle of the U.
      • ithkuil 5y ago
        What was the rationale? You could hide what you were doing?
        • elric 5y ago
          It's not even that, he has a nice office (with a door, and a big desk, and an Aeron, of course) and can't physically watch us work anyway. He just has this idea in his head about how an office should look, and U-shapes are not it. I guess it's the management equivalent of bikeshedding.
    • robocat 5y ago
      Bosses like to see you are working. If yor screen is private, then you can surf the net, watch sports, use Facebook, play games, or any number of unproductive activities.
• city41 5y ago
  Over my career I've had private offices, cubicles and open offices. Of the three, I actually liked cubicles the best. They are far from perfect, but they offer the best balance between privacy and communication.
  • zwieback 5y ago
    Agreed, same for me. I do have high cubicle walls.
    • kazinator 5y ago
      Give me high cubicle walls, a moat and a vat of boiling oil ...
  • Arrath 5y ago
    Recently I was give then opportunity to relocate from the cube farm into an adjacent office, but I declined because I like being in the middle of my team and able to just talk over the walls and communicate with everyone easily. This is despite us already all being in a skype room together, sometimes verbal communication is easier or faster. Also the HVAC setup here is just wrong, my cube is decently comfortable while the office I was offered is either an ice box or blisteringly hot.
• toast0 5y ago
  > What an obnoxious, stupid way to make us work. Little did we know that cubicles were the NICE version of office work. When I started working, in cubicles, 20 years ago, people would complain and say we should have offices, not these awful cubicles. Now I'm wishing for cubicles. I pity the next generation that missing open offices because somehow something worse was foisted upon us.
  • maccard 5y ago
    How about "everyone has a laptop, so just take the first free desk when you get in in the morning?"
    • kevinmchugh 5y ago
      "hot-desking"/"hotelling". All the productivity downsides of open office, plus opaque social hierarchies
    • 908B64B197 5y ago
      Hint: if you hot-desk but never saw a full fare business class ticket paid by your employer, it's time to switch job; you are at a cost center.
    • cmckn 5y ago
      Clearly so many nightmarish things about this setup, but the one that makes my skin crawl is: my chair. Can you imagine having to sit in a different, random office chair every single day? It's like getting in your car every morning and someone has adjusted your seat and mirrors. I'd probably resort to hiding my favorite chair in a broom closet. Not to mention having to sit in the dried sweat and crumbs of who-knows-how-many other people all the time. shivers.
      • FalconSensei 5y ago
        Also monitor: brightness and contrast, positioning.
  • christophilus 5y ago
• manachar 5y ago
  Worth remembering that cubicles were invented as being good for workers as it replaced what amounted to the standard open office floor plan with the bossman looking over the workers. Cubicles provided privacy and focusing ability. Of course, like all technology, cubicles, work-from-home, and open floor plans all have pluses and minuses. Personally, I have started to consider the possibility that the problem is we keep thinking about The One Perfect Solution To Rule Them All rather than realizing that no system is good for 40 to 60 hours of work a week with the varied tasks and times needed at each. For most office work you need places for private and individual focus time, places for quick informal chats that don't disturb others, places for small meetings, places for small work groups to collaborate, places for larger meetings, and others. That's without getting into individual worker preference - some love cafe settings for focus, some want bright sunny windows, some dark basements, most will have different preferences for different work. I suppose with enough redundant space you could offer all those things, but that's expensive. Work from home, with proper infrastructure for meeting and collaboration spaces is likely the best fit for many office jobs, but I know from experience that such things also have "work" invade private life and time in ways that can be very off-putting (and vice-versa).
  • Skunkleton 5y ago
    > realizing that no system is good for 40 to 60 hours of work a week with the varied tasks and times needed at each. 40-60 hours? Shouldn't we be going the other way here?
    • tobmlt 5y ago
      I am with you. I started out at 55-90 hrs over 5-6 days and occasionally 7 days a week after being promised 4-10hr days a week. I was pretty sure I was paying excessive dues. This was entry level engineering after all. Later got a 32 hr a week job. Should have stopped right damn there. Ah the fool I was. Bumped it to 40. Then left for “growth” - a “startup within” a megaCorp. Now doing “every waking minute I can stand without breaking”. Sweatshop corporate slavery on both ends of the experience/skill ladder. Credentials and experience mean nothing to work life balance.
• elric 5y ago
  My biggest gripe with open plan offices is that they often seem to lead to tiny desks. Maybe because the mindset that leads to open plan offices eventually also leads to maximizing the butts-in-seats:floorspace ratio. If desks are wide enough, people next to you can't readily stare at your screen, and it's more feasible to add dividers between desks. When they're narrow, ugh, horrible.
• mc32 5y ago
  Open Offices are horrible for all the reasons we all know... There is one thing I do not get. Why did and do so many people who had and have to work in such environment so enthusiastically embrace it? It was so incongruous to see. People I knew and know of all types so eager to get on board with this new movement. Unfortunately I think they got taken in by the fact that it was the so called cool companies that wanted to expand fast and save on space that espoused it. So everyone* became a believer despite the obvious issues. It was fascinating to see this happen (as well as the frowns for not being on-board with this) I'm happy to see pushback on this miserable layout.
  • rrauenza 5y ago
    In the early 90's in college I worked in an open plan in a small software company - 10 developers? Management kept proposing cubes and we argued against it. I can't imagine why we argued against it now? Maybe we had fewer personal items on our screens due to the internet not being used all that much? We argued that it was nice to be able to turn around and ask someone a question. Maybe it's just because we were such a small close knit team? On the other hand, we also had fairly large desks as well.
    • mc32 5y ago
      There are full height cubes, half height and cubes with "visibility shields" or whatever they call them. I think the half height ones are a decent compromise. You stand up and you can see the people around you. If you sit, you have your privacy. With stand up desks this can be different, but you can orient desks so that people aren't looking at you from behind. I can see where if a team grew organically that an open office can work --but you never know when that will change (team changes, management changes, etc.)
  • elric 5y ago
    They can seem like a good idea at first. If you've never worked in such an environment before, you might not notice how shitty it truly is. At least not until the day you're desperately trying to concentrate, but Steve who is sat next you keeps talking about his pet porcupine, and Fiona breathes so loud the elves could have shot her in the dark, all the while people at the edge of your field of vision are constantly walking to and fro the coffee maker.
• Apocryphon 5y ago
  I wonder if people hated cubicles because they looked and felt cheaper than actual private offices, thus giving the Office Space/Dilbert/Matrix/Fight Club effect of feeling like an office drone, even if the actual work experience is preferable to open offices.
  • abraxas 5y ago
    It's precisely this. Later on when the pivot to open offices took hold the management joined in deriding cubicles as oppressive and stifling. Well, mission accomplished. They are now mostly a rarity and a perk at those places that still have them.
• blaze33 5y ago
  > everyone to your left, right, and behind you being able to see your screen This always bugged me, did some research while writing this answer, so TIL it's called the audience effect [1]: when a person’s behavior changes because they believe someone else is watching them. At some level it reminds me of the double-slit experiment and how the interference pattern disappears once you start measuring through which slit the particle goes. Do some results fundamentally require their process to stay hidden to the observer if they're ever to see the light of day? Still wondering... [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5095155/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5095155/ Edit: above link about the audience effect emphasizes the belief of being watched: horse blinders, by constraining your wide field of view to your screen may certainly limit the distractions of whatever motion your hardwired brain would have noticed in your peripheral vision, however, is the illusion of privacy sufficient to limit the audience effect? Certainly, you'll stay aware that the coworker on your left will keep looking at your screen even if you can't see them? (unless you don't believe in object permanence but let's keep it simple). So, maybe it works for horses but even there, quoting wikipedia: "Not all horses can stand blinders, some get very nervous if they can't see their surroundings."