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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 un

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.

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.