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Joel Spolesky has made this very point many times in the past: "Private offices with doors that close were absolutely required and not open to negotiation." I
by AvAn12 3y ago
Joel Spolesky has made this very point many times in the past: "Private offices with doors that close were absolutely required and not open to negotiation." I work on a Data Sci team that moved to an open floor plan in 2018. What happened? Anyone who needed to work intensively on a project would work from home instead of in the office.
- SnowProblem 3y agoAlternatively come in early or stay late. Joel did get it right. Open spaces are fine for light tasks but a huge drain on deep thinking.
- Tao3300 3y agoDon't even suggest that. Someone might see this.
- mywittyname 3y agoWhy not both?
- wombatpm 3y agoI had a boss who was a VP in sales. His philosophy was "On the days I go in late, I make up for it by leaving early".
- pc86 3y agoThis is pretty consistent with my experience with both salespeople and VPs regardless of department.
- CoastalCoder 3y agoI'm guessing that sales is pretty different from typical software dev, in the sense that sales productivity is very measurable. That probably sidesteps a lot of the guesswork about what makes a person most productive.
- SoftTalker 3y agoYes and if you're hitting or exceeding your sales goals, your boss won't care how much you are in the office. For at least some sales work, a substantial portion of it may take place outside of the office anyway.
- jasoncartwright 3y agohttps://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/07/30/private-offices-redux/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/07/30/private-offices-re... https://stackoverflow.blog/2015/01/16/why-we-still-believe-in-private-offices/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2015/01/16/why-we-still-believe-i...
- Zetice 3y agoIf all of this results in an office layout revolution that includes many individual offices opening into shared team spaces, I am 100% here for it.
- btbuildem 3y agoIt won't. The push for open-plan spaces was motivated by cost-cutting. Layouts with many closed offices would cost far more to build, and take up more square footage to host the same number of employees. At a time where savvy businesses have dropped their commercial leases / gone full remote, and the more conservative / less accepting of change ones are left holding the bag, I would not expect anyone to make big investments into office space.
- captainbland 3y agoTo be honest I think with hybrid, open offices make a lot of sense. Realistically you want to be able to hot desk because that's where the cost savings are made in a hybrid situation. You sort of fractional-reserve your office space. Of course it works only so long as nobody calls an in-person all hands. The in-office days are social collaboration days so it doesn't make sense to keep people in separate boxes for them. Then people's home office setups are their cubes if they want them, which most people seem to.
- jonhohle 3y agoWe had “hotelling” at Accenture in the early 2000’s and I hated it. It made sense their, because at any moment you could be called to an out of town assignment, but the lack of workspace consistency and the feeling of coming into the most generic workspace available was really draining).
- philwelch 3y ago> To be honest I think with hybrid, open offices make a lot of sense. Realistically you want to be able to hot desk because that's where the cost savings are made in a hybrid situation. This doesn’t sound like a stable equilibrium to me; more like a transition to full remote that you do when you’re waiting for your lease to run out. Not even having your own permanent desk sounds like utter hell.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- steveBK123 3y agoOpen floorplans are especially problematic if your team handles any mix of development & operational tasks. Wall Street tech it's pretty typical to do your own SRE/L3 and honestly even L2/L1. Everything from business user "hey how do I.." customer service questions down to "the server is on fire, alerts are coming in .. ". Open floorplans mean even if you have an agreed PagerDuty type rotation, everyone gets sucked into or distracted by it. It's hard not to want to lend a hand when you see your buddy getting blown up by some difficult user or your inbox/slack is getting filled up with alerts.
- btbuildem 3y agoOpen floor plans are even more problematic when the R&D team shares the space with sales / marketing. In that setting only one of the teams is getting any work done, I'll leave you to guess which one.
- steveBK123 3y agoYes - There is less than zero thought put into open floorplan seating charts. We had in sequential rows - Level1 support, R&D, Development. Sat like this for years. So R&D was sandwiched between the team that was constantly on contentious urgent calls, and the dev team they ran over to ask for help. Best open floorplan seat I ever had was in a far corner way off from most dev, sat near a trader who spent all day on the phone yakking. Just like a total storyteller kind of guy, incredible yarns were spun .. kind faded into interesting background music for me. Like leaving the History Channel on in the back. Philosophy, science, history, movies, politics.. etc.
- SpicyLemonZest 3y agoIs that a bad thing? Since we started WFH, I’ve heard a lot of stories of oncalls spending an hour on things that could have been handled in 5 seconds if the right person had gotten sucked in on the way back from coffee. “Oh, I recognize this bug from two years ago, here’s what you gotta do.” “That customer’s symptoms are impossible, ask for more details on how they’re doing suchandsuch because they must be leaving something out.”
- lr4444lr 3y agoI go back to reading "Joel on Software" from time to time... it's not my Bible or anything, but a lot of it has aged REALLY well.
- fmajid 3y agoIf you don't want Spolsky, you can also refer to Tom DeMarcos' excellent Peopleware.
- _gabe_ 3y agoAnd I'm also sure if Joel Spolsky created a company today it would most likely have a remote first policy. At least, I'd be disappointed if I found out he didn't support it with how forward thinking his companies have been.
- SoftTalker 3y agoI've worked in open plan spaces most of my career. I've had my own office a few times also. I don't hate all open plan arrangements, if it's a room with 4-6 developers and no sales or marketing or other functions going on, desks are large enough and spaced apart a little bit, it can be fine. Developers will mostly put on headphones and get into the zone. It can feel kind of nice to have other people around even if you aren't interacting with them.
- peatmoss 3y agoTo me it beggars belief that companies spend so much on humans only to put them in an environment where it’s impossible to concentrate. I reckon at some point someone will figure out that the physical environment can be modified to make knowledge workers more productive, and start walloping their competition. I am on a distributed team with no in-person interaction, and I love commuting even though I don’t see anyone I work with. But, I hate the physical space.
- rqtwteye 3y ago"To me it beggars belief that companies spend so much on humans only to put them in an environment where it’s impossible to concentrate." But "collaboration"....
- commandlinefan 3y agoThose hallway conversations where the real magic happens, man.
- solardev 3y agoAt least you have hallways, man. Our collaboration happens in the space between desks where the power strips go. It's not so bad if we reorient the monitors just right so they don't hit our heads.
- rqtwteye 3y agoBathrooms are best for quick discussions.
- esafak 3y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUdRhB_M7qk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUdRhB_M7qk (safe for work)
- pydry 3y agoAnecdotally I think a a lot of the IT work that requires extreme focus has become commodified. That is, it's either done by some open source library or a SaaS or something. I had a lot more of the stuff that required focus at the beginning of my career. In my last few jobs it's been more about hooking together subsystems from 11 different teams/companies in six different timezones. Most bugs seem to happen because of misalignments or miscommunication. Intense focus just isnt as important any more.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dathinab 3y agoI have worked in all of 1,3,4,20-35 office rooms and home office. I don't think single person rooms are necessary (but better), but open office is definitely not grate and without noise canceling headphones completely unbearable. With rooms with small number of people (2 or much worse 4) it also depends _a massive lot_ on the layout. But also the other person, i.e. do they constantly click their pens, do they interrupt you all the time, do they have ad-hoc meetings with other people at their desk etc. etc. The problem is such factors are hard to "control"/estimate/plan with. Through similar considerations apply to home office too, i.e. people need room in their home which can become office space. E.g. working in you bedroom comes with a huge number of problem, which can be overcome, sometimes, but it's IMHO not as simple as "just" having a proper desk and chair.
- akwiuehjt 3y agoI can tell what stage a project is in by which desks on my floor are empty. I go in to the office when I'm doing planning or review, but when I'm building I stay home where it's quiet and I won't be interrupted. Pretty much all of my department is the same way. I'm glad I have that freedom (and privilege) and from here on I probably won't consider jobs that don't give me that freedom.
- mattbrewsbytes 3y agoI believe this concept came from the PeopleWare book by Demarco/Lister. Its common sense that for work requiring deep periods of concentration, eliminating distractions is key. Easiest way to eliminate distractions in an office environment is being in a room behind a closed door. Cheapest way to do that these days is WFH, assuming people have that space where they live.
- JamesLeonis 3y agoThe title of chapter 12 is "Bring Back The Door"
- echelon 3y agoWhile I agree that in private offices would be amazing, the amount of space this would require seems huge. Ideally each room would be as big as a two-person conference room, and even that would feel a little claustrophobic after several hours. Companies can't fit enough of those in as it stands. How would they do it for every employee? The square footage needs would be huge. Open office floorplans take ~75 sqft per employee. An office would take ~150. I vaguely remember IBM cubicle farms from visiting their offices as a child. They took up a ton of space, requiring huge office towers. That means lots of elevator trips and conference room needs.
- wombat-man 3y agoYeah, whenever I need to concentrate it's earplugs + noise canceling headphones. For some reason there's a group of marketing people in the same big room as us. They are very chatty, especially in the mornings.
- technofiend 3y agoSince I don't have a colleague to rubber duck with, I talk to myself. Needless to say that can't happen in an open office floor plan because I don't want to be a distraction any more than I want to be distracted. Elsewhere boiled frog and class have both been mooted with regards to office. That's definitely my experience from working the last few decades. I started my career having an office for almost every job. But that slowly fell away as corporations discovered cubes save money and is now completely gone where I work now unless you are very senior indeed. We're talking there are only a handful of offices per floor vs nothing but offices on every floor. Class comes in to play because at least where I work the people setting policy for the average worker to sit at a cube not only have their own offices, they have their own building! One that you don't get access to by default. Yet, as cost-saving-measures we've enabled people to collaborate across regions and timezones to the point that coming in to work in a cube farm is actually counterproductive. Very few people are customer facing and need to get face time with clients to do deals. The rest of us can happily WFH. Perhaps as Wall Street slowly weans itself from CRE, that will in fact be the next benefit that's pulled back: sorry, you need to be really senior to come into the office / square footage is for closers. I can hardly wait.
- bradleyjg 3y agoI reckon at some point someone will figure out that the physical environment can be modified to make knowledge workers more productive, and start walloping their competition. I’ve tuned out the entire wfh debate for this reason. We just need some patience and we’ll have an answer. There’s no need for all the angry debates.
- lowbloodsugar 3y agoI think it was the Amazon CEO that said the "office" is great because you can just walk up to someone and ask them questions. Fuck no.
- ryantgtg 3y agoWe went into the office a few weeks ago, and I was much less productive due to us walking up to each other and asking questions. Rather than shoot chats to each other, or quick phone calls, each question/discussion was by far more disruptive to workflow. I didn't expect that, but it was undeniable!
- whateverman23 3y ago> "Private offices with doors that close were absolutely required and not open to negotiation." Where does this come from? It's something that sounds right, but then I look back at my parent's office jobs and pop culture from 20+ years ago and it doesn't line up. Open office spaces have been extremely common for a very very long time, with private offices reserved for higher level people.
- xtracto 3y agoBack in 2008 i worked at a Leibnitz institute in germany. First as a Wissenschafter and then as a Koordinator. In the first case I shard a closed door office with one other person. Each of us had a large desk, bookcase and great space. In the second case I had my own office with my own desk and even a table with two chairs for receiving people. I was pretty low in the institute food chain. Only the PhD students were lower, and they shared 2 or at most 3 person closed door offices . Its perfectly doable.
- kiney 3y agoThats because those buildings have a different public budget than personnel in germany