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There's good and bad ways to do open offices. I've worked in both. Good open offices still segregate noisy from quiet environments- i.e. nobody should be putti

There's good and bad ways to do open offices. I've worked in both. Good open offices still segregate noisy from quiet environments- i.e. nobody should be putting the lunchroom, games or sales people near engineers. They provide enough desk space that you aren't right on top of anyone else. Lots of smaller meeting rooms nearby for people to pair or have extended conversations. Quick collaboration is easy, and you can physically see when someone doesn't want to be disturbed. Bad open offices lump different departments together, cram you in and make you listen to the microwave constantly ding and smell that one guy's leftover fish every day. They invite constant distractions. That said, I've moved out of the city and i would need an unrealistic amount of money to be convinced into taking a job that wasn't fully remote again.

closeparen 3y ago
It’s really easy to accidentally get more concurrent meetings than meeting rooms (for any realistic number of meeting rooms) and then you’ve got to either not talk to each other or call into Zoom from desks. Most companies choose the latter. Worse with distributed or partial remote companies where a lot of people need to be the only one in the building joining a particular call. At the limit you need as many phone booths as desks, which is just private offices with extra steps.
opportune 3y ago
By this metric, I’ve only ever worked in good open offices, but I still dislike them all the same. Yeah, they could be worse, but the noise and movement are unavoidably distracting for me even if it’s “just” engineers chatting. The benefits of an open office require a culture of significantly more collaboration than my team (and I wager most teams) have in practice. With cubicles or actual offices I think it wouldn’t in practice change the rate at which people stare at the same screen to show others’ stuff, because we aren’t doing it on a super impromptu basis so as not to interrupt each other as we work.
- zdragnar 3y ago
  That's fair. My good experience with open office was at a company that originally had cubicles. I hated it at first, but quickly warmed to it. A few things made me change my mind. The first was that we also reorganized how our teams were structured, which ended up with people working on the same projects sitting close to each other. Being able to just scoot your chair over a bit made collaboration more fluid than having to get up and walk across half the office to talk to someone. The second bit was realizing that, for the most part, people spoke more quietly in the open office than they did in cubicle land, so the overall noise level really didn't change much. Starting out in cubicles and moving to open office may have made people more cognizant of the need to change, or perhaps cubicle walls simply didn't block as much noise as I'd initially thought. The last was that, due to people having more visibility of what I was doing, I ended up with fewer messages on the team chat (pre-slack days). Either they'd stop over for a quick question while I was already in a conversation, or if I had a "heads down" sign up on a little stand on my desk, they'd leave me be. I felt more productive, because I didn't have a constant slew of conversations to stay on top of every time I looked at the computer screen.
acdha 3y ago
The approach I’ve seen work best was mostly in academic settings, where there were a bunch of real offices with 2-4 people, designated social space, and a few larger conference rooms. The cost isn’t that much higher but it meant that you could put people working on the same things together without the noise interrupting other work, and the common social space allowed for serendipitous conversations without feeling guilty about disrupting work.

closeparen 3y ago

It’s really easy to accidentally get more concurrent meetings than meeting rooms (for any realistic number of meeting rooms) and then you’ve got to either not talk to each other or call into Zoom from desks. Most companies choose the latter. Worse with distributed or partial remote companies where a lot of people need to be the only one in the building joining a particular call. At the limit you need as many phone booths as desks, which is just private offices with extra steps.

opportune 3y ago

By this metric, I’ve only ever worked in good open offices, but I still dislike them all the same. Yeah, they could be worse, but the noise and movement are unavoidably distracting for me even if it’s “just” engineers chatting. The benefits of an open office require a culture of significantly more collaboration than my team (and I wager most teams) have in practice. With cubicles or actual offices I think it wouldn’t in practice change the rate at which people stare at the same screen to show others’ stuff, because we aren’t doing it on a super impromptu basis so as not to interrupt each other as we work.

zdragnar 3y ago
That's fair. My good experience with open office was at a company that originally had cubicles. I hated it at first, but quickly warmed to it. A few things made me change my mind. The first was that we also reorganized how our teams were structured, which ended up with people working on the same projects sitting close to each other. Being able to just scoot your chair over a bit made collaboration more fluid than having to get up and walk across half the office to talk to someone. The second bit was realizing that, for the most part, people spoke more quietly in the open office than they did in cubicle land, so the overall noise level really didn't change much. Starting out in cubicles and moving to open office may have made people more cognizant of the need to change, or perhaps cubicle walls simply didn't block as much noise as I'd initially thought. The last was that, due to people having more visibility of what I was doing, I ended up with fewer messages on the team chat (pre-slack days). Either they'd stop over for a quick question while I was already in a conversation, or if I had a "heads down" sign up on a little stand on my desk, they'd leave me be. I felt more productive, because I didn't have a constant slew of conversations to stay on top of every time I looked at the computer screen.

acdha 3y ago

The approach I’ve seen work best was mostly in academic settings, where there were a bunch of real offices with 2-4 people, designated social space, and a few larger conference rooms. The cost isn’t that much higher but it meant that you could put people working on the same things together without the noise interrupting other work, and the common social space allowed for serendipitous conversations without feeling guilty about disrupting work.