8 ms·

Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace

240 points by epenn 12y ago

a2tech 12y ago
Yup. Its impossible to really focus in an open-office work area. I have to meet with another team occasionally that's management bought into the open-office hypetrain. Its awful. The noise is overwhelming, there's constant distractions (even small noises like people shifting in their chairs can become overwhelming when its coming from you from every direction)
- kzrdude 12y ago
  It sounds like the acoustics are pretty bad if small noices are that noticable. Can you get them to install sound dampening?
  - a2tech 12y ago
    This is a large open space with small 'break spaces' (soft carpet covered cubicle walls left scattered around) that break up sound/spaces between different groups. They have the soft drop ceiling tiles to help absorb sound. The floors are carpeted. There's really only so much you can do with a hundred people in a large open space-there's a constant background hum of people moving, shifting, eating, listening to music that you just can't get rid of
  - nobodysfool 12y ago
    Whatever you do, don't do what my office did - they installed speakers that play pink noise. It helps with the noise (so much chatter) but it's annoying as hell.
    - a2tech 12y ago
      That sounds like the closest thing to work hell that I can imagine
- sixothree 12y ago
  As a programmer it's almost unavoidable to have conference calls with clients, vendors, etc. I've been on 4 and 8 hour conference calls before. Those calls are distracting to everyone around. I can't imagine anyone working productively while someone tries to coordinate with multiple teams on single call. Nevermind that when conferencing with people on speakerphone or with thick accents (or both) it is your tendency to speak louder and clearer. There's simply no denying it. Maybe these open space workplaces don't have situations like this. But in my line of work it's part of the job.
falcolas 12y ago
That anybody got it wrong is not the problem. That those same companies do not recognize the problems and just chalk it up to a failed experiment and restore offices is the real failure that is impacting workplaces.
- a2tech 12y ago
  Yup. When it becomes clear that it's not helping anyone actually get work done, companies just stick to their guns and refuse to change. Which helps illustrate that point that its never been about increased productivity and collaboration-its always been about cutting the cost of office space and increasing the supervisor's ability to monitor what you're doing every second of the day.
beachstartup 12y ago
i never thought anyone would come up with something worse than cubicles, but it turns out that's easy; just remove them.
mullingitover 12y ago
Open plan offices: 30% drop in productivity for a 20% drop in real estate costs.
- nilkn 12y ago
  Plus an approximately 0% chance of hiring anybody who currently has their own private office, unless you have something really special to offer (considerably above-market compensation or prestige or a position on a remarkably interesting project).
  - tjdetwiler 12y ago
    I went from private office to open floor plan when I switched jobs last. It was towards the bottom of things I cared about when I was considering the move. Private offices are definitely nice, but I also enjoy the positives of an open office
    - nilkn 12y ago
      I could see going from a private office to, say, a well-designed cubicle, but I definitely think for a lot of folks the transition to an open floor plan could be incredibly disruptive. I suppose it depends on the personality. Generally, though, with private offices, well-designed communal areas, and huddle rooms (plus larger conference rooms), it's hard to see how an open floor plan has any advantages other than supposed cost cutting. The crux of the issue, I think, is that it requires a rather special type of personality to be really productive in a more chaotic open floor plan, whereas it requires a much less special type of personality to be really productive when one has the option of retiring to an office. Really, what's most important to me is that one has the option of retiring to a private space when the extra concentration is needed. If one were to sit in an open space by default, but always was guaranteed a small private space when needed, I wouldn't see many issues. But I've seen very few open office plans that can legitimately offer that sort of dynamic. Headphones do not constitute a private space -- they're more of a bandaid.
      - 12y ago
zenogais 12y ago
This has been known to be a productivity killer for years, but I still haven't seen significant moves being made to change it. From a management standpoint I know an open layout allows you to pack a lot more people into the same space, so perhaps the costs outweigh the benefits for many businesses?
- robotkilla 12y ago
  An open floor plan is one of the big reasons I started abusing our work from home policy at my last job, and a huge reason for not wanting to return to the work force since leaving that job.
- citrin_ru 12y ago
  Office space saving is easy to measure. Productivity loss is hard to measure.
ghaff 12y ago
Many moons ago, interviewing for my first full-time job out of school, I visited a certain large aerospace company in the Seattle area :-) One of the things that turned me off and helped lead to my turning down their offer was their bullpen-style office arrangement. (Arguably even worse than today's incarnations, it was just a bunch of desks in a large open area though we seem to be heading back in that direction.) Mind you, it wasn't the only thing. Everything about the hiring process and people I spoke with screamed replaceable cog--they actually hired me solely based on my resume and only gave me a plant visit when I asked for one--but the bullpen office arrangement sure didn't help.
- double0jimb0 12y ago
  I believe I interned for the same said company :) A fun-fact(tm) proudly shared on a tour still haunts me to this day: "Behold the largest office space (er...cubical farm) in the US... 5,000 or so seats."
bdhe 12y ago
This keeps coming up every so often, so here's a different discussion I'd like to get into. How do we measure something as ambiguous as productivity? And I contest some of the points raised: For companies where people are mostly left to themselves save for meetings and sync ups, is it really about a supervisor's ability to monitor what you're doing? Collaboration is probably the driving force, which again raises the question as to how does one measure and evaluate such things?
- ProAm 12y ago
  I think it's pretty easy. Can you honestly say you get more work done in a day with constant interruptions and distractions? Not only output is affected but the quality of the work completed. I might get the same volume of work out the door but if Im distracted I promise there are bit and pieces that have careless errors in it, which leads to re-work. This is something that you can easily ask your employees if they'd like private working quarters vs open office.
  - ghaff 12y ago
    I'm not sure anyone really disputes the negative impact on individual productivity. The argument (other than reduced costs of course) is that open plans improve collaboration and therefore overall productivity. Personally I'm skeptical in most cases but measuring aggregate productivity is difficult given that it's really hard to make comparisons given all the other factors that come into play. (And the fact that "productivity" is a pretty squishy measure for a lot of activities anyway.)
    - ProAm 12y ago
      I agree, Ive never seen such open and constant collaboration work at scale. Most effective teams are small, but even if you have a large team Ive never seen long stretches where collaboration persists for extremely long periods of time. Good effective communication is an absolute must in business, but your collaboration is probably bothering the major of people around you who are not collaborating on what you are working on. Small conference/huddle rooms are good for this.
virmundi 12y ago
I wouldn't attribute the movement to Google, strictly speaking. I worked at a large insurance agency for a few year. They had partially open cubes (low walls). I don't presume they've ever been influenced by what Google does. The low walls were a blessing and a bane. My team worked well like that. None of us are particularly loud people. We all had headphones and quiet music. The flow of the pen allowed easy communication and rolling between each others cubes. The bane came from other teams around us. There was a woman that was going through an extremely messy divorce (attempted murder of herself and children by arson). She was understandably upset. Rather than taking family medical leave she would talk to her mother for hours in her cube. Her voice was particularly grating to me. I ended up leaving one day to buy a pair of firing range headphones and firing range earplugs. Sadly the headphone/earplugs only sort of worked. They're designed to reduce low noises like a gunshot. Her voice was higher. They did help. I was able to concentrate.
- hamitron 12y ago
  I used to have to work in an office with 2 industrial printers, a large cooling fan, and at least ten mailroom employees with no respect for indoor voices. My solution was I purchased professional musician custom fitted earplugs. They were a godsend.
- darkstar999 12y ago
  > large insurance agency > she would talk to her mother for hours in her cube Hello HR, they would be all over that.
  - virmundi 12y ago
    I know, but two things kept me from doing that. 1) I was a contractor. Historically that made me little better than dirt at the client. So I didn't want to rock the boat. 2) Given that her husband tried to kill her, I felt that the emotional toll on her having to get a talking to might be a bit much at that time. That was entirely an emotional argument, not a rational one. I could be wrong. On the plus side I have firing range headphones now. So I can go to the actual firing range a few blocks from my house. I am also prepared if I ever have a child. Crying gets to me. So I'll put those on and be one of the most loving fathers ever. I'll probably have music earbuds in too.
a2tech 12y ago
The best office setup I've ever worked in was a narrow building that had smallish offices (big enough for two people) on the outside (each had a small window) and open meeting space in the middle. Everyone had their own space (like to leave junk on your desk? clean freak? everyone is happy) and if you wanted to hang out or hold an impromptu meeting the common area was literally outside your door. Most of the time people's office doors were wide open so no one was closed off but if you wanted to really focus or take a call or listen to a video or just disconnect for a minute you could shut your door.
- kornakiewicz 12y ago
  The best one from my history was a startup (aprox. 15 people at this time) simply in house which was designed as home for 2+3: 2-3 people in a room, normal kitchen, front-yard and even attic for stuff. I don't get why we stuck in cookie-cutter office spaces which leads to everything expect producitivty.
  - galfarragem 12y ago
    +1 My experience as an architect and as an office worker confirm what you say. Somehow a mixed solution is the best. Spaces for small teams (max. 5 people), keep some privacy but also allow communication. Spaces of 15-20m2 are perfect for that, making a small house the best option. "Normal kitchen, front-yard and even attic for stuff" are also a great complement.
badmadrad 12y ago
Open offices are type A/extroverted personality wet dreams. Everybody they need is within earshot and they can see EVERYTHING so they can properly control everything. However for introverts, people with noise sensitivity, or people with ADD this is an absolute nightmare. I find a lot of engineers tend to be either introverts or have some type of manageable ADD so it doesn't surprise me that many people would be negatively affected by an office layout like this.
- rjbwork 12y ago
  Oh hey, I am/have all 3. Thank god I share a medium sized office with 2 other similar devs, one of whom is only in the office half the week instead of in the insane bullpen with everyone else or I may have quit.
- davidgerard 12y ago
  Type A extrovert here. My open plan office pisses me off unbelievably. If I want to get any bloody work done, I need to work from home.
- laurent123456 12y ago
  There's also the fact that there's no more privacy when talking to colleagues. At some point I wanted to speak to my boss privately (to tell him I wanted to quit) but couldn't find a right time since there was always someone within hearing distance. Eventually, I've just sent him an email, so the open office layout definitely didn't help here with with ease of interaction.
  - trose 12y ago
    I think open office layouts need to be paired with easily accessed private rooms. The successful layouts I've seen will have a large area everyone works in with the outer walls lined with small and medium sized meeting rooms. Either for private conversations, personal phone calls, or if a team needs to meet and not disrupt everyone else. I can see how an open layout with literally no private space would be terrible.
- localhost 12y ago
mhomde 12y ago
Still relevant: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html
robotkilla 12y ago
Finally an article I can cite when people act like I'm just trying to hold on to the old ways of development when I complain about open floor plans. No one listens to the goddamn developers.
raldi 12y ago
The thing is, if you ask any rank-and-file Google engineer, they'll totally agree that the sweatshop layout -- oops, I mean the open-office layout -- is hugely detrimental to productivity and morale. So it's not like the company isn't aware; it's just that they seem to believe the negative effects aren't bad enough to offset the cost of more office space (or the opportunity cost of slower hiring)
DLarsen 12y ago
As an employee in a small early-stage startup, the open-office arrangement suited me very well. Being able to at least eavesdrop on all of the verbal conversations from the tech challenges to product development to financial concerns kept the information flowing very well. Every member of the team could draw from the full context of our effort to strengthen their individual contribution. As a developer I felt I learned a lot more about the business and our customers than I would have if they had given me a quiet, productive office. I think it was a net win in the early years.
gortok 12y ago
I wrote about this some time ago in a ranty way: http://georgestocker.com/2014/04/15/how-to-destroy-programmer-productivity/ http://georgestocker.com/2014/04/15/how-to-destroy-programme... I really believe that the open office floor plan led me to leaving my former job -- I simply could not be as productive as I needed to be in an open floor plan environment. I wouldn't be surprised if Open-Office floor plans cost more in productivity than they save in rent. I don't mean to 'hate' on it so much; but it's hard to explain just how distracting, noisy, and damaging to productivity it can be.
- a3n 12y ago
  Yeah, but the difference between rent and salary is that they're taxed differently (probably, I assume, I'm ignorant), and while the amount of space you get from a given amount of rent is constant, you can always coerce, shame, or threaten an employee to worker longer hours. For, you know, the crunch.
kyleashipley 12y ago
I'll play contrarian for a moment: the most productive office I've ever worked in was an open office layout. What worked for us: * Separate clusters by function / noise level -- We didn't put sales people and developers next to one another. People who spent all day on the phone were near other people who spent all day on the phone. * Keep clusters small -- We had 4 person "pods" of desks for most of our early lifecycle. You weren't constantly interrupted by a dozen people from every direction, but you had a few people you could bounce ideas off of when you needed to. * Lots of breakout spaces -- If you need to have a conversation that lasts more than a minute or so, find a private space. It was nice to hear a snippet of a conversation and decide "I care about this topic, let's break out and discuss further" or "This is not relevant right now, I'm going to disregard." * Be respectful of flow -- If someone is deep in focus, just leave a post-it on their desk or send a message via chat. (This was a good form of one-bit communication for us.) I don't think it's impossible to create a great open office layout. People just copied the ceremony without the essence. It's no different than "Agile is broken! We have 20 minute standups 3 times a day and nothing gets done!" Maybe the reason is because you're doing it wrong.
- trose 12y ago
  This needs to be said more. I absolutely love being in an open office layout because it allows for easy collaboration as well as the occasional spontaneous fun interruption. People seem to get hung up on the interruptions as if they lose tons and tons of productivity. I just haven't experienced issues like that personally. I find that the interruptions are a welcome break to the monotony of staring at code for 8 hours a day. The privacy issue also needs to be addressed on a cultural level as well. My first job was open layout but I had one of those nosey managers that wants to know what you're doing every 15 minutes. I got talked to for being on Facebook during my lunch break. In order to really have a successful open office layout you need to have everyone on board and prepared to "let go" a little. Yeah people goof off during the day. We aren't robots that can sit down at 8:30 and constantly type for the next 8 to 9 hours. At my current job no one really cares if they walk up to you to ask a question and you happen to be taking a couple minutes to clear your head and look at cat gifs. I think that's the way it should be.
trextrex 12y ago
And there is also some evidence that open offices don't necessarily foster closer relationship among employees. [1] [1] https://hbr.org/2011/07/who-moved-my-cube https://hbr.org/2011/07/who-moved-my-cube
raverbashing 12y ago
However Communication between teams/etc IS IMPORTANT And we need people to be able to be productive using other tools if they won't meet face to face (like HipChat, or others)
chrisbennet 12y ago
At some point, open-offices will be the only thing that the majority of software developers know. If you've never experienced the productivity that comes from being able to think without interruption, you won't know what you are missing. At that point, the trend will probably be irreversible. For me personally, this trend isn't all bad: When I work someplace with this setup it's kind of nice to "hang out with my friends" even if it isn't nearly as productive. When I'm working for myself, being able to think deeply gives me a competitive advantage over places with open-offices. :-)
- qwerta 12y ago
  Anyone who masters deep concentration will become good :-)
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  Work at home. Offices of programmers are going to diminish and disappear.
- je42 12y ago
  In most open office environments where I worked, it was either quiet like in a "Library" or there were meeting-rooms where you just could go and isolate yourself.
- sheepmullet 12y ago
  "If you've never experienced the productivity that comes from being able to think without interruption, you won't know what you are missing." I keep a diary of learning notes and have throughout my career. It's interesting to go through it and see that in my university days I was picking up concepts, tools, and techniques far faster than I do now despite the fact that I am considerably better and more experienced. I chalk it up to the fact that I can't just "go dark" for a week to properly learn something distraction free even if it would be in my companies best interests.
analog31 12y ago
Amusing historical note going back to 1939: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson_Wax_Headquarters http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson_Wax_Headquarters
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
cubano 12y ago
These new floor plans are ideal for maximizing a company’s space while minimizing costs. Bosses love the ability to keep a closer eye on their employees... From my limited experience working in these areas, I do believe this is the crucial insight and the real reason behind the movement...Occam's razor and all that. Where I last worked in an open-office environment, we had a fairly strict "no talking" policy, and were expected to use IM to communicate to the people next to us. I always thought, "well, isn't this defeating the purpose of the open floorplan?", and of course it does, unless you factor in the above insight.
lettergram 12y ago
I still firmly believe I work better from my house. Companies such as automattic seem to work fine in that setting. I know peraonally I block off 10am - 2pm for meetings in the office (early lunch at 10am, or late a 2pm). I then work from 3pm-5pm and 10pm-12pm at home. Im usually one of the most productive and it keeps me fresh. Fyi I have done this at several companies and my bosses always seem happy with it
jokoon 12y ago
I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that some people are introverts, and that those people work best when they're nobody around them. Also programming requires a minimum of focus, I might not consider programming a hard, highly intellectual task, but personally I'm very easily distracted. I also have a very hard time concentrating at something properly if I can sense I'm watched or analyzed. Maybe it has something to do with how people want team interaction. You could ask teams to meet at least twice a day, and they might prefer having their own office. The best way, I think, would be to always workers if they either prefer to have their own small office or to work in a open space. To me, the best is to use my laptop in a empty park, with or without internet access, preferably without. I just download any documentation, some article or tutorial, eventually some wikipedia offline browser, and I'm able to concentrate.
mwsherman 12y ago
Why must editors title articles this way? The article says: there are many ways in which open offices are not great. The headline says: they are destroying the workplace. The article doesn’t come close to making that claim, even if “destroy the workplace” were a meaningful idea.
- ksk 12y ago
  Probably because it works. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a newspaper that has survived using bland (read: accurate) headlines.
- normloman 12y ago
  Would you click on a link that said "There are many ways in which open offices are not great."?
at-fates-hands 12y ago
My best friend works for Cargill and they're going to an open floor plan for all of their offices. She said her and few of her co-workers are germ-a-fobes so they're going to have a ton of Purell around. I was pretty shocked since I thought the open office had been well debunked over the past 4 years or so.
ixtli 12y ago
This is just some writer who could easily do her job in a cave. Collaborative efforts require as few barriers to collaboration as possible. Some of us like to participate in things that are larger than we might be able to facilitate entirely on our own.
michaelochurch 12y ago
First of all, Google isn't to blame for this trend and Google's open-plan offices, although flawed, are more spacious and better planned than what most companies use. I've seen startups and banks under the 100 SF/employee barrier. Second, it's not even the noise that wrecks people but visibility from behind ("open-back visibility"). That's not because people are constantly hiding things. It suggests low status and makes it hard (and stressful) to perform at one's best. There are environments where open-plan offices are better, but they're rare. One is a trading floor, where seconds matter (a lot) and information must be broadcast quickly and verbally (i.e. yelling). Unless there's a real-time sensitivity to what they're doing, programmers are better off with more privacy. If you are going to use an open-plan office, the least you can do is to give everyone a 7-foot wall at his or her back.
zedpm 12y ago
Ugh, open offices are toxic for development. Low cubicles are almost as bad, tall cubicles are almost tolerable. Barring private offices for everyone, my best experience was with a very large office occupied by my team (myself and two others). The shared space is much more tolerable when everyone is part of the same role (developer in this case), meaning approximately the same sensitivity to interruptions, the same frequency of phone conversations, etc. Contrast that with the open office I worked in, with Customer Service and Sales folks mixed in with sysadmins and developers. That environment isn't good for anyone: the devs are irritated by all the chatter from the CSR and Sales folks, who in turn feel guilty even though it's their job to be jabbering on the phone all day. Ironically, the office space was occupied largely by people who were rarely IN those offices because they were all in meetings constantly.
dschiptsov 12y ago
I thought it has been solved years ago. Open offices have the same benefits as huge halls in a 20th century industrial factories as long as workers are doing "routine, mechanical tasks". Filing forms, coding html, translating a small specifications into Java code, any kind of a "drone work" - repetitive tasks with a little or no variation - could be done in an open space with the best benefits/costs ratio for an employer. The only kind of work which cannot be done efficiently in a constant noise and distractions are these "engineering tasks" which require intense mental concentration (or what they usually call "meditating on a problem"). But such kind of high-skilled jobs are about 5% (and the best guys have their rooms, because they are worth it) so there is no wonder that 90% is an open space. An example of such a task, which requires a quiet place would be "analyzing and decomposing an unfamiliar problem domain into a reasonable, valid metrics/heuristics to be used within machine-learning algorithms, given that you have no PhD in ML or problem domain's field". Very common scenario, isn't it?
- trhway 12y ago
  yep, when programming had the status of academic or engineering discipline it was done in the offices, when it got down to "technical associate/stuff" it moved into cubicles, now it is just a blue collar job of the 21st century and thus it is done on an open factory floor.
nine_k 12y ago
I work on a large open-plan floor. My two 24" screens completely fill my field of view. My earphones block my ears and fill them with beautiful, not very loud, flow-inducing music. A low wall separate my desk from passing people. On the other hand, when I want to give my eyes some rest, I can focus on Manhattan high-rises in the window. When I need to talk to my colleagues face to face, or just see if they are at their desks, it is easy to do, too. If we need to talk for more than a minute, we could walk to the coffee point of to a meeting room. I can imagine an open space implemented badly: people cramped together, with little elbow room, phone-talking sales reps next to code-laden programmers next to number-crunching financial guys, and no meeting rooms. I won't like such a setup either. But from where I sit, the open space plan looks pretty okay.
fsloth 12y ago
Yeah, cutting costs and Taylorian big brotherism. Effectively companies trade productivity for higher transparency and cheaper office space. What happened to the need to actually maximize productivity? To give the benefit of doubt it is plausible people might confuse open plan offices with team rooms.
- marcosdumay 12y ago
  > What happened to the need to actually maximize productivity? It has gone away since governemnts started supporting specific companies all around.
FabianBeiner 12y ago
Nobody likes the feeling that someone is watching over your shoulder. Not at work, not at home, nowhere.
- anon4 12y ago
  Not everybody hates it. If you have the same interests as your manager, you won't worry or be reprimanded for posting on your faovourite knitting forum for 15 minutes of each day or answering an im from your friend who lives halfway across the globe. Some people really feel like they're doing nothing wrong and have nothing to hide and if you feel that way you're probably right.
  - FabianBeiner 12y ago
    See, this is your (and most peoples) mistake: Don’t mix up the fear of getting caught watching a cute little cat playing the piano on YouTube and a natural habit of around 95% of all people. A lot of companies which are using this concept are totally fine with you watching cats, they don’t even care.
dkhenry 12y ago
I think googles own Eric Schmidt had the best response to this. If open office's were bad for buisness or destroying the workspace the free market would bear that out. There are tangable benefits which is why companies move towards it. I understand some people hate it, but most don't so why do we keep getting the same articles every few months saying the same thing. We get it _you_ don't like the open office space others do. I am sorry your not able to have the office the way you like it, I am upset that no one else seems to like TV shows I find enjoyable and they keep getting canceled.
- sgt101 12y ago
  It's cheaper and the lost benefits of private offices don't show up on any spreadsheet. Which is not to say that they aren't there, it's just that private offices are not investable, so they won't happen any more. I wonder if Eric Schmidt believes that great art will be produced by the most efficient market, or if he thinks that breakthrough science will come out of the most popular lab?
- droopyEyelids 12y ago
  I take issue with this point of view- Open offices can be terrible for some businesses and terrific for others. So "the market" isn't going to make some simple decision for everyone. Google makes 250k per employee, and can afford to have a thoughtful and spacious open office that has sound proofing and sufficient break-out rooms and meeting places. On top of that, they can afford to be picky with their employees and hire thoughtful intelligent people. Compare that with a standard company workplace. First, they get excited about saving money by smashing more people into a smaller area. Second, they are following a trend and don't know to care about the 'small' things that make an open office livable (adequate side rooms, soundproofing, etc) Third they have whatever hierarchy they had before, which probably prevents people from collaborating easily because they'll be stealing time from their bosses projects etc. Next, they aren't hiring to Google's standards. After that, they might not be in a tech industry with quick feedback to failure and success and be filled with people who therefore optimizing for weirder goals. Finally, all those employees aren't used to the open office plan, resent it, and are filled with bad habits. So in the end it's easy for me to see tons of terrible open office plans, while acknowledging they work terrifically for some people.
harmonicon 12y ago
Open office is by no means a new thing Google invented. It existed a long, long time ago. http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/04/23/opinion/23rfd-image/23rfd-image-blogSpan.jpg http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/04/23/opinion/23rfd...
givan 12y ago
Open office + headphones was the best place work space for me, one big reason for me to have a job is to be surrounded by people and feel that I'm part of a team, otherwise I could just work from home instead of a stupid cubicle that makes me feel like a gear in a big machinery.
ryan90 12y ago
This article is a classic case of "link journalism". Not a single study she linked to is conclusive and applicable to all situations. The studies merely suggest that there may be drawbacks to open offices. Additionally, she mentions the camaraderie among teammates masking lost productivity. Who's to say that this doesn't contribute to the overall well being of the office? Even if it does mean some near-term productivity is lost. Each company is different, and each department within the company is different. We just moved into an office space, and our sales floor is much different than our dev area. Sweeping generalizations like the one made in this article aren't helpful for anybody.
- michaelfeathers 12y ago
  Yes, it is link journalism. I wish I could find another article on this that was on HN about a year ago. The takeaway was that closed and open offices each have their benefits and liabilities, and that the ideal is to have open areas with something like the study carrels in libraries that people can retreat to. I've never seen that in practice, but I'd love to try it out.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  "Near-term productivity"? What can that mean? If you are in an open office all day, every day, the it means "all productivity" is lost.
  - r00fus 12y ago
    Sounds like an extreme position you're taking. Anecdote to disprove your negative - one day I was talking with a customer about an issue, one of my open-office coworkers heard me then IM'd me an internal forum page that helped me seamlessly resolve the issue. Were I working from home or out of that persons earshot, I would have dug around for potentially hours or days before finding my solution. Were I heads down writing code a lot (I don't do that very often these days), I'd head over to the private (no-noise-policy) work rooms nearby.
    - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
DanielBMarkham 12y ago
Yay. Another "Let's argue about open floorplan offices" article. Never can have enough of those. I'm not going to take apart the article: there's simply too many errors to get into. I will say in the author's defense that many companies will jump onto a bandwagon without having any idea of why other people are riding or where it's going. [insert long list of good ideas that corporate america adopted and killed] On a personal note, I do not like co-location. I also do not like open plan offices. I like it quiet, with my space, my music, my 3-screen development setup, and my door. Which I can shut. And that's what makes this discussion so painful for me to both watch and participate in. You see, as somebody who helps teams perform better, for certain kinds of work -- creative work where there is a lot of change and risk -- open plan beats the hell out of other setups. It's not even close. [for the proper definition of open plan.] In the past couple of years I have seen several teams that were unable to accomplish much of anything start working much more effectively by simply sitting beside each other and being there during the day. In some cases, they did nothing else: just sat beside each other. Still, work improved. The effect is so noticeable you could almost write a book and start a movement just on open floorplan. The last misconception I'll address, since it seems to run rampant, is that open floor plan is not about productivity or cost savings. It's about having people work with each other. This may actually mean less work gets done; but it's the right work. Open floor plan is where the guy at the end of the table late on a Friday afternoon observes aloud to himself "You know, maybe we should be doing X instead of Y" and everybody has the social and emotional context to realize that you just changed the scope of the work from 10x to x. [insert many more examples here]
31reasons 12y ago
Why is it called open office ? It looks like factory floor to me.
sousousou 12y ago
For me, it really comes down to energy. It takes me lots of energy to ignore something. Like someone walking behind my computer monitor. Like someone having a loud unrelated conversation next to me. Like being conscious of my appearance and behavior (out of respect for others). And it takes energy to solve problems and write great code. I simply can't do it all every day, day in and day out. Monday is fine. I can work long hours on Monday in the office, getting lots of good work done. But on Tuesday, I am irritable and can't focus as well. By Wednesday, I'm useless. If I go into the office, I come home exhausted, unable to even speak. Fortunately I can work from home, but it's a heartbreaking trade. It's not as much fun (or productive) to collaborate over the internet as it is in person. I am definitely not going to accidentally end up going out to lunch or coffee with a new friend. Etc. Comments to the tune of "suck it up", "wear headphones", are nothing new to the ears of introverts. We've been dealing with this _extroverted culture_ all our lives. Extroverts thrive on stimulation. Introverts drown in it.
thejerz 12y ago
This debate is easily solved by simply asking people, "Which do you prefer: open offices or closed door offices?" 90% of people will answer the latter. Case closed.
- enjo 12y ago
  That needs a citation. When I polled my largeish team in 2007 it was nearly 100% hard wall office.
kabdib 12y ago
I work at a company where most people are in open areas. The key that makes this work IMHO is that the desks are trivially movable; just unplug two wires and wheel the desk elsewhere. Want to work next to Joe? Move there. Need to get away from a noisy cow-orker? Move his desk, or yours (both have happened). There is closed office space available, if you want it. Most people choose not to use it. Once you have mobility, you get to choose who you work with. You can get together in ad-hoc groups for a while, bring more people in as necessary, and leave for some other place when you need to. It sounds too simple and maybe too stupid to be as powerful as it actually is. I've also worked in open plans where you don't have a choice of where to sit. It sucked hard. I wouldn't do that again.
skizm 12y ago
I'm in an open office situation. It is the worst. I spend most of my time trying to adjust my posture so that my eyes don't meet anyone else's eyes.
bachmeier 12y ago
I'm not a big fan of these articles. It depends on what you're doing. I'm a professor, and in order to get certain tasks done, you need a private space. I don't even know how you could grade exams, for instance, without a private space in order to concentrate and prevent others from seeing what you're doing. When I'm working on a paper, on the other hand, it's way more productive to have my coauthors right next to me. The effect on productivity therefore cannot be determined without knowing what you're going to be doing. I do find these articles fascinating from the perspective of an economist. Economists frequently assume workers get paid based on their productivity. Then we see that in the real world employers are willing to adopt an open office model that workers hate, even one that can reduce productivity, because they want to monitor the workers to see what they are doing. If workers were paid according to productivity, it wouldn't matter how many times they checked Facebook between 8 am and 5 pm.
- piinbinary 12y ago
  > it's way more productive to have my coauthors right next to me. I think that principle is true in most enterprises: it helps to be in the same room with the people you work directly with. Having people you do not work with (and especially their conversations) in the same room is, as far as I can see, always harmful.
- sheepmullet 12y ago
  "When I'm working on a paper, on the other hand, it's way more productive to have my coauthors right next to me" And this is why a lot of startups work well in an open plan. When there are only 5 people in the company it can work well. It is a completely different situation than the typical 80-150 people per floor open plans of larger companies.
dang 12y ago
This is an opinion piece with a baity title that points to a New Yorker article which has had three extensive discussions on HN, including a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8696391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8696391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7832209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7832209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7024488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7024488
- stevesearer 12y ago
  This was the #1 story a few minutes ago but not to be found on any of the top pages anymore. Out of curiosity, do you mod down stories you feel aren't fitting and/or duplicate discussions?
  - dang 12y ago
    One task of HN moderation is penalizing stories that don't fit the mandate of the site. Duplicates are part of that, though of course a story can be a duplicate without being inappropriate. We demote duplicates, but if there are already comments on the thread, we leave the post open so discussion can continue.
LukeWalsh 12y ago
I'm fairly young but my experiences with open offices have been that they are more distracting, but it's possibile to minimize the distractions with headphones. It's difficult for me to listen to music while working so I use coffitivity which pipes in background noise from coffee shops. It sounds like hustle and bustle, but you can never actually latch on to a conversation since there are none. When I worked in a private office I found it hard to stay motivated. This is in contrast to an open office when I can look at the people around me all working hard on the same problem. It makes me feel motivated to keep working.
nchammas 12y ago
Nathan Marz (of Apache Storm fame) also wrote about this topic recently: "Now, I don't want to comment on the effectiveness of open floor plans for fields other than my own. But for software development, this is the single best way to sabotage the productivity of your entire engineering team." http://nathanmarz.com/blog/the-inexplicable-rise-of-open-floor-plans-in-tech-companies.html http://nathanmarz.com/blog/the-inexplicable-rise-of-open-flo...
labmixz 12y ago
I've been a developer for over a decade, where I'm currently employed they have adopted low-partitions (lets be honest, no partitions). I can hear people twitch, breathe, randomly talk with others 3 isles down. Every developer has on headphones trying to ignore all the movement/talking around them, it's just a horrible setup. I find myself being less confident in my work, because I can't concentrate due to a all the distractions around, wearing headphones/earbuds is a nice work-around, but not a solution, I would like to not have my earbuds on 6+ hours a day. While I see the advantages to open offices, not everyone works the same way, companies who want to maximize employee effectiveness should cater to both types of needs.
ar_turnbull 12y ago
Anyone have good tips for surviving in an open office? There are the obvious ones like noise-cancelling headphones — but are there any other good hacks for making an open space at least somewhat tolerable?
whiddershins 12y ago
It's really interesting. I think it has to do with whether the teamwork necessary to do the task is real, or only exists in the mind of managers. My first job was on a newspaper production floor. It was an open office clustered by role, with matching support people clustered nearby. I have never seen an environment that had the astonishing level of productivity per person of this team, and I mean by easily a factor of 10x. Any question I had I could get an answer in 2 seconds. We were using laughably old equipment, but there was no emailing anything, and there was no possibility of miscommunication. It was exhilarating. OTOH these were well defined tasks, with a deadline at the end of each day. So it was like running a team tough mudder every week. My next office job, years later, had a semi-open floorplan. It was an absolute nightmare. My coworkers would listen to Howard Stern every morning, and then leave the radio on afterwards. People would have protracted calls on speakerphone. Compared to the newspaper, it seemed like no one was ever actually working, instead they were just talking about nonsense, and torturing me in the process. Typically someone would send you an email, then immediately walk over to your desk and explain it to you with no regard for whether you were busy. But this work was complex, boring, intricate, different every time, and the deadlines were months away, the biggest challenge was planning and focus. There was much less reason for teamwork and a much greater need to delve in to your task and be left alone. So I think generalizing about open floorplans is difficult. It obviously has to do with company culture and the type of work.
abalone 12y ago
Really, open office leads to more flu infections?? Based on her utterly anecdotal evidence of a bunch of her co-workers got sick. If that's the standard for evidence for the rest of the claims in this article, I would cast it aside. Cornell did a study while back that found that communication gets worse with private offices. The pernicious thing is that employees' very perception of "frequent communication" changes depending on which kind of environment they're in. If they're in open plan it's several times a day often on the fly. If they have a private office, it plummets to "several times a week in a scheduled meeting". [1] So that's consistent with private office people saying everything's fine -- because their very perception of the standard for team interaction has vastly diminished. They also noted that office workers may be biased to favor plans that maximize their personal productivity even at the expense of team productivity, because their compensation is tied more to the former. Whereas management sees the bigger picture of both elements. That may go a long way towards explaining why employees and management are often at odds over how to arrange the office. (Having said that, by no means do I think that a constant barrage of noise in your face in a maximally open office is optimal. There are many degrees of openness, and I'm just pointing to evidence that private offices may swing too far in the other direction.) [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140615182702/http://iwsp.human.cornell.edu/file_uploads/office_ex2_1238259706.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20140615182702/http://iwsp.human...
galfarragem 12y ago
Last year I designed an office for a small business with 20 employees. Having worked in several offices (with different layouts) made me very "bearish" on open-offices so I advised the business owner against it. While explaining all my arguments to him, he told me: I completely agree with you but without an open layout how do I control my employees? And: With an open layout I can put more people in less space. This is what business people think. All the rest is poetry.
jerseyguy505 12y ago
Consider reading Peopleware by DeMarco and Lister
jerseyguy505 12y ago
Consider reading Peopleware by DeMarco and Lister

240 points by epenn 12y ago

Yup. Its impossible to really focus in an open-office work area. I have to meet with another team occasionally that's management bought into the open-office hypetrain. Its awful. The noise is overwhelming, there's constant distractions (even small noises like people shifting in their chairs can become overwhelming when its coming from you from every direction)

kzrdude 12y ago
It sounds like the acoustics are pretty bad if small noices are that noticable. Can you get them to install sound dampening?
- a2tech 12y ago
  This is a large open space with small 'break spaces' (soft carpet covered cubicle walls left scattered around) that break up sound/spaces between different groups. They have the soft drop ceiling tiles to help absorb sound. The floors are carpeted. There's really only so much you can do with a hundred people in a large open space-there's a constant background hum of people moving, shifting, eating, listening to music that you just can't get rid of
- nobodysfool 12y ago
  Whatever you do, don't do what my office did - they installed speakers that play pink noise. It helps with the noise (so much chatter) but it's annoying as hell.
  - a2tech 12y ago
    That sounds like the closest thing to work hell that I can imagine
sixothree 12y ago
As a programmer it's almost unavoidable to have conference calls with clients, vendors, etc. I've been on 4 and 8 hour conference calls before. Those calls are distracting to everyone around. I can't imagine anyone working productively while someone tries to coordinate with multiple teams on single call. Nevermind that when conferencing with people on speakerphone or with thick accents (or both) it is your tendency to speak louder and clearer. There's simply no denying it. Maybe these open space workplaces don't have situations like this. But in my line of work it's part of the job.

falcolas 12y ago

That anybody got it wrong is not the problem. That those same companies do not recognize the problems and just chalk it up to a failed experiment and restore offices is the real failure that is impacting workplaces.

a2tech 12y ago
Yup. When it becomes clear that it's not helping anyone actually get work done, companies just stick to their guns and refuse to change. Which helps illustrate that point that its never been about increased productivity and collaboration-its always been about cutting the cost of office space and increasing the supervisor's ability to monitor what you're doing every second of the day.

beachstartup 12y ago

i never thought anyone would come up with something worse than cubicles, but it turns out that's easy; just remove them.

mullingitover 12y ago

Open plan offices: 30% drop in productivity for a 20% drop in real estate costs.

nilkn 12y ago
Plus an approximately 0% chance of hiring anybody who currently has their own private office, unless you have something really special to offer (considerably above-market compensation or prestige or a position on a remarkably interesting project).
- tjdetwiler 12y ago
  I went from private office to open floor plan when I switched jobs last. It was towards the bottom of things I cared about when I was considering the move. Private offices are definitely nice, but I also enjoy the positives of an open office
  - nilkn 12y ago
    I could see going from a private office to, say, a well-designed cubicle, but I definitely think for a lot of folks the transition to an open floor plan could be incredibly disruptive. I suppose it depends on the personality. Generally, though, with private offices, well-designed communal areas, and huddle rooms (plus larger conference rooms), it's hard to see how an open floor plan has any advantages other than supposed cost cutting. The crux of the issue, I think, is that it requires a rather special type of personality to be really productive in a more chaotic open floor plan, whereas it requires a much less special type of personality to be really productive when one has the option of retiring to an office. Really, what's most important to me is that one has the option of retiring to a private space when the extra concentration is needed. If one were to sit in an open space by default, but always was guaranteed a small private space when needed, I wouldn't see many issues. But I've seen very few open office plans that can legitimately offer that sort of dynamic. Headphones do not constitute a private space -- they're more of a bandaid.
    - 12y ago

zenogais 12y ago

This has been known to be a productivity killer for years, but I still haven't seen significant moves being made to change it. From a management standpoint I know an open layout allows you to pack a lot more people into the same space, so perhaps the costs outweigh the benefits for many businesses?

robotkilla 12y ago
An open floor plan is one of the big reasons I started abusing our work from home policy at my last job, and a huge reason for not wanting to return to the work force since leaving that job.
citrin_ru 12y ago
Office space saving is easy to measure. Productivity loss is hard to measure.

ghaff 12y ago

Many moons ago, interviewing for my first full-time job out of school, I visited a certain large aerospace company in the Seattle area :-) One of the things that turned me off and helped lead to my turning down their offer was their bullpen-style office arrangement. (Arguably even worse than today's incarnations, it was just a bunch of desks in a large open area though we seem to be heading back in that direction.) Mind you, it wasn't the only thing. Everything about the hiring process and people I spoke with screamed replaceable cog--they actually hired me solely based on my resume and only gave me a plant visit when I asked for one--but the bullpen office arrangement sure didn't help.

double0jimb0 12y ago
I believe I interned for the same said company :) A fun-fact(tm) proudly shared on a tour still haunts me to this day: "Behold the largest office space (er...cubical farm) in the US... 5,000 or so seats."

bdhe 12y ago

This keeps coming up every so often, so here's a different discussion I'd like to get into. How do we measure something as ambiguous as productivity? And I contest some of the points raised: For companies where people are mostly left to themselves save for meetings and sync ups, is it really about a supervisor's ability to monitor what you're doing? Collaboration is probably the driving force, which again raises the question as to how does one measure and evaluate such things?

ProAm 12y ago
I think it's pretty easy. Can you honestly say you get more work done in a day with constant interruptions and distractions? Not only output is affected but the quality of the work completed. I might get the same volume of work out the door but if Im distracted I promise there are bit and pieces that have careless errors in it, which leads to re-work. This is something that you can easily ask your employees if they'd like private working quarters vs open office.
- ghaff 12y ago
  I'm not sure anyone really disputes the negative impact on individual productivity. The argument (other than reduced costs of course) is that open plans improve collaboration and therefore overall productivity. Personally I'm skeptical in most cases but measuring aggregate productivity is difficult given that it's really hard to make comparisons given all the other factors that come into play. (And the fact that "productivity" is a pretty squishy measure for a lot of activities anyway.)
  - ProAm 12y ago
    I agree, Ive never seen such open and constant collaboration work at scale. Most effective teams are small, but even if you have a large team Ive never seen long stretches where collaboration persists for extremely long periods of time. Good effective communication is an absolute must in business, but your collaboration is probably bothering the major of people around you who are not collaborating on what you are working on. Small conference/huddle rooms are good for this.

virmundi 12y ago

I wouldn't attribute the movement to Google, strictly speaking. I worked at a large insurance agency for a few year. They had partially open cubes (low walls). I don't presume they've ever been influenced by what Google does. The low walls were a blessing and a bane. My team worked well like that. None of us are particularly loud people. We all had headphones and quiet music. The flow of the pen allowed easy communication and rolling between each others cubes. The bane came from other teams around us. There was a woman that was going through an extremely messy divorce (attempted murder of herself and children by arson). She was understandably upset. Rather than taking family medical leave she would talk to her mother for hours in her cube. Her voice was particularly grating to me. I ended up leaving one day to buy a pair of firing range headphones and firing range earplugs. Sadly the headphone/earplugs only sort of worked. They're designed to reduce low noises like a gunshot. Her voice was higher. They did help. I was able to concentrate.

hamitron 12y ago
I used to have to work in an office with 2 industrial printers, a large cooling fan, and at least ten mailroom employees with no respect for indoor voices. My solution was I purchased professional musician custom fitted earplugs. They were a godsend.
darkstar999 12y ago
> large insurance agency > she would talk to her mother for hours in her cube Hello HR, they would be all over that.
- virmundi 12y ago
  I know, but two things kept me from doing that. 1) I was a contractor. Historically that made me little better than dirt at the client. So I didn't want to rock the boat. 2) Given that her husband tried to kill her, I felt that the emotional toll on her having to get a talking to might be a bit much at that time. That was entirely an emotional argument, not a rational one. I could be wrong. On the plus side I have firing range headphones now. So I can go to the actual firing range a few blocks from my house. I am also prepared if I ever have a child. Crying gets to me. So I'll put those on and be one of the most loving fathers ever. I'll probably have music earbuds in too.

a2tech 12y ago

The best office setup I've ever worked in was a narrow building that had smallish offices (big enough for two people) on the outside (each had a small window) and open meeting space in the middle. Everyone had their own space (like to leave junk on your desk? clean freak? everyone is happy) and if you wanted to hang out or hold an impromptu meeting the common area was literally outside your door. Most of the time people's office doors were wide open so no one was closed off but if you wanted to really focus or take a call or listen to a video or just disconnect for a minute you could shut your door.

kornakiewicz 12y ago
The best one from my history was a startup (aprox. 15 people at this time) simply in house which was designed as home for 2+3: 2-3 people in a room, normal kitchen, front-yard and even attic for stuff. I don't get why we stuck in cookie-cutter office spaces which leads to everything expect producitivty.
- galfarragem 12y ago
  +1 My experience as an architect and as an office worker confirm what you say. Somehow a mixed solution is the best. Spaces for small teams (max. 5 people), keep some privacy but also allow communication. Spaces of 15-20m2 are perfect for that, making a small house the best option. "Normal kitchen, front-yard and even attic for stuff" are also a great complement.

badmadrad 12y ago

Open offices are type A/extroverted personality wet dreams. Everybody they need is within earshot and they can see EVERYTHING so they can properly control everything. However for introverts, people with noise sensitivity, or people with ADD this is an absolute nightmare. I find a lot of engineers tend to be either introverts or have some type of manageable ADD so it doesn't surprise me that many people would be negatively affected by an office layout like this.

rjbwork 12y ago
Oh hey, I am/have all 3. Thank god I share a medium sized office with 2 other similar devs, one of whom is only in the office half the week instead of in the insane bullpen with everyone else or I may have quit.
davidgerard 12y ago
Type A extrovert here. My open plan office pisses me off unbelievably. If I want to get any bloody work done, I need to work from home.
laurent123456 12y ago
There's also the fact that there's no more privacy when talking to colleagues. At some point I wanted to speak to my boss privately (to tell him I wanted to quit) but couldn't find a right time since there was always someone within hearing distance. Eventually, I've just sent him an email, so the open office layout definitely didn't help here with with ease of interaction.
- trose 12y ago
  I think open office layouts need to be paired with easily accessed private rooms. The successful layouts I've seen will have a large area everyone works in with the outer walls lined with small and medium sized meeting rooms. Either for private conversations, personal phone calls, or if a team needs to meet and not disrupt everyone else. I can see how an open layout with literally no private space would be terrible.
localhost 12y ago

mhomde 12y ago

Still relevant: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html

robotkilla 12y ago

Finally an article I can cite when people act like I'm just trying to hold on to the old ways of development when I complain about open floor plans. No one listens to the goddamn developers.

raldi 12y ago

The thing is, if you ask any rank-and-file Google engineer, they'll totally agree that the sweatshop layout -- oops, I mean the open-office layout -- is hugely detrimental to productivity and morale. So it's not like the company isn't aware; it's just that they seem to believe the negative effects aren't bad enough to offset the cost of more office space (or the opportunity cost of slower hiring)

DLarsen 12y ago

As an employee in a small early-stage startup, the open-office arrangement suited me very well. Being able to at least eavesdrop on all of the verbal conversations from the tech challenges to product development to financial concerns kept the information flowing very well. Every member of the team could draw from the full context of our effort to strengthen their individual contribution. As a developer I felt I learned a lot more about the business and our customers than I would have if they had given me a quiet, productive office. I think it was a net win in the early years.

gortok 12y ago

I wrote about this some time ago in a ranty way: http://georgestocker.com/2014/04/15/how-to-destroy-programmer-productivity/ http://georgestocker.com/2014/04/15/how-to-destroy-programme... I really believe that the open office floor plan led me to leaving my former job -- I simply could not be as productive as I needed to be in an open floor plan environment. I wouldn't be surprised if Open-Office floor plans cost more in productivity than they save in rent. I don't mean to 'hate' on it so much; but it's hard to explain just how distracting, noisy, and damaging to productivity it can be.

a3n 12y ago
Yeah, but the difference between rent and salary is that they're taxed differently (probably, I assume, I'm ignorant), and while the amount of space you get from a given amount of rent is constant, you can always coerce, shame, or threaten an employee to worker longer hours. For, you know, the crunch.

kyleashipley 12y ago

I'll play contrarian for a moment: the most productive office I've ever worked in was an open office layout. What worked for us: * Separate clusters by function / noise level -- We didn't put sales people and developers next to one another. People who spent all day on the phone were near other people who spent all day on the phone. * Keep clusters small -- We had 4 person "pods" of desks for most of our early lifecycle. You weren't constantly interrupted by a dozen people from every direction, but you had a few people you could bounce ideas off of when you needed to. * Lots of breakout spaces -- If you need to have a conversation that lasts more than a minute or so, find a private space. It was nice to hear a snippet of a conversation and decide "I care about this topic, let's break out and discuss further" or "This is not relevant right now, I'm going to disregard." * Be respectful of flow -- If someone is deep in focus, just leave a post-it on their desk or send a message via chat. (This was a good form of one-bit communication for us.) I don't think it's impossible to create a great open office layout. People just copied the ceremony without the essence. It's no different than "Agile is broken! We have 20 minute standups 3 times a day and nothing gets done!" Maybe the reason is because you're doing it wrong.

trose 12y ago
This needs to be said more. I absolutely love being in an open office layout because it allows for easy collaboration as well as the occasional spontaneous fun interruption. People seem to get hung up on the interruptions as if they lose tons and tons of productivity. I just haven't experienced issues like that personally. I find that the interruptions are a welcome break to the monotony of staring at code for 8 hours a day. The privacy issue also needs to be addressed on a cultural level as well. My first job was open layout but I had one of those nosey managers that wants to know what you're doing every 15 minutes. I got talked to for being on Facebook during my lunch break. In order to really have a successful open office layout you need to have everyone on board and prepared to "let go" a little. Yeah people goof off during the day. We aren't robots that can sit down at 8:30 and constantly type for the next 8 to 9 hours. At my current job no one really cares if they walk up to you to ask a question and you happen to be taking a couple minutes to clear your head and look at cat gifs. I think that's the way it should be.

trextrex 12y ago

And there is also some evidence that open offices don't necessarily foster closer relationship among employees. [1] [1] https://hbr.org/2011/07/who-moved-my-cube https://hbr.org/2011/07/who-moved-my-cube

raverbashing 12y ago

However Communication between teams/etc IS IMPORTANT And we need people to be able to be productive using other tools if they won't meet face to face (like HipChat, or others)

chrisbennet 12y ago

At some point, open-offices will be the only thing that the majority of software developers know. If you've never experienced the productivity that comes from being able to think without interruption, you won't know what you are missing. At that point, the trend will probably be irreversible. For me personally, this trend isn't all bad: When I work someplace with this setup it's kind of nice to "hang out with my friends" even if it isn't nearly as productive. When I'm working for myself, being able to think deeply gives me a competitive advantage over places with open-offices. :-)

qwerta 12y ago
Anyone who masters deep concentration will become good :-)
JoeAltmaier 12y ago
Work at home. Offices of programmers are going to diminish and disappear.
je42 12y ago
In most open office environments where I worked, it was either quiet like in a "Library" or there were meeting-rooms where you just could go and isolate yourself.
sheepmullet 12y ago
"If you've never experienced the productivity that comes from being able to think without interruption, you won't know what you are missing." I keep a diary of learning notes and have throughout my career. It's interesting to go through it and see that in my university days I was picking up concepts, tools, and techniques far faster than I do now despite the fact that I am considerably better and more experienced. I chalk it up to the fact that I can't just "go dark" for a week to properly learn something distraction free even if it would be in my companies best interests.

analog31 12y ago

Amusing historical note going back to 1939: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson_Wax_Headquarters http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson_Wax_Headquarters

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

cubano 12y ago

These new floor plans are ideal for maximizing a company’s space while minimizing costs. Bosses love the ability to keep a closer eye on their employees... From my limited experience working in these areas, I do believe this is the crucial insight and the real reason behind the movement...Occam's razor and all that. Where I last worked in an open-office environment, we had a fairly strict "no talking" policy, and were expected to use IM to communicate to the people next to us. I always thought, "well, isn't this defeating the purpose of the open floorplan?", and of course it does, unless you factor in the above insight.

lettergram 12y ago

I still firmly believe I work better from my house. Companies such as automattic seem to work fine in that setting. I know peraonally I block off 10am - 2pm for meetings in the office (early lunch at 10am, or late a 2pm). I then work from 3pm-5pm and 10pm-12pm at home. Im usually one of the most productive and it keeps me fresh. Fyi I have done this at several companies and my bosses always seem happy with it

jokoon 12y ago

I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that some people are introverts, and that those people work best when they're nobody around them. Also programming requires a minimum of focus, I might not consider programming a hard, highly intellectual task, but personally I'm very easily distracted. I also have a very hard time concentrating at something properly if I can sense I'm watched or analyzed. Maybe it has something to do with how people want team interaction. You could ask teams to meet at least twice a day, and they might prefer having their own office. The best way, I think, would be to always workers if they either prefer to have their own small office or to work in a open space. To me, the best is to use my laptop in a empty park, with or without internet access, preferably without. I just download any documentation, some article or tutorial, eventually some wikipedia offline browser, and I'm able to concentrate.

mwsherman 12y ago

Why must editors title articles this way? The article says: there are many ways in which open offices are not great. The headline says: they are destroying the workplace. The article doesn’t come close to making that claim, even if “destroy the workplace” were a meaningful idea.

ksk 12y ago
Probably because it works. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a newspaper that has survived using bland (read: accurate) headlines.
normloman 12y ago
Would you click on a link that said "There are many ways in which open offices are not great."?

at-fates-hands 12y ago

My best friend works for Cargill and they're going to an open floor plan for all of their offices. She said her and few of her co-workers are germ-a-fobes so they're going to have a ton of Purell around. I was pretty shocked since I thought the open office had been well debunked over the past 4 years or so.

ixtli 12y ago

This is just some writer who could easily do her job in a cave. Collaborative efforts require as few barriers to collaboration as possible. Some of us like to participate in things that are larger than we might be able to facilitate entirely on our own.

michaelochurch 12y ago

First of all, Google isn't to blame for this trend and Google's open-plan offices, although flawed, are more spacious and better planned than what most companies use. I've seen startups and banks under the 100 SF/employee barrier. Second, it's not even the noise that wrecks people but visibility from behind ("open-back visibility"). That's not because people are constantly hiding things. It suggests low status and makes it hard (and stressful) to perform at one's best. There are environments where open-plan offices are better, but they're rare. One is a trading floor, where seconds matter (a lot) and information must be broadcast quickly and verbally (i.e. yelling). Unless there's a real-time sensitivity to what they're doing, programmers are better off with more privacy. If you are going to use an open-plan office, the least you can do is to give everyone a 7-foot wall at his or her back.

zedpm 12y ago

Ugh, open offices are toxic for development. Low cubicles are almost as bad, tall cubicles are almost tolerable. Barring private offices for everyone, my best experience was with a very large office occupied by my team (myself and two others). The shared space is much more tolerable when everyone is part of the same role (developer in this case), meaning approximately the same sensitivity to interruptions, the same frequency of phone conversations, etc. Contrast that with the open office I worked in, with Customer Service and Sales folks mixed in with sysadmins and developers. That environment isn't good for anyone: the devs are irritated by all the chatter from the CSR and Sales folks, who in turn feel guilty even though it's their job to be jabbering on the phone all day. Ironically, the office space was occupied largely by people who were rarely IN those offices because they were all in meetings constantly.

dschiptsov 12y ago

I thought it has been solved years ago. Open offices have the same benefits as huge halls in a 20th century industrial factories as long as workers are doing "routine, mechanical tasks". Filing forms, coding html, translating a small specifications into Java code, any kind of a "drone work" - repetitive tasks with a little or no variation - could be done in an open space with the best benefits/costs ratio for an employer. The only kind of work which cannot be done efficiently in a constant noise and distractions are these "engineering tasks" which require intense mental concentration (or what they usually call "meditating on a problem"). But such kind of high-skilled jobs are about 5% (and the best guys have their rooms, because they are worth it) so there is no wonder that 90% is an open space. An example of such a task, which requires a quiet place would be "analyzing and decomposing an unfamiliar problem domain into a reasonable, valid metrics/heuristics to be used within machine-learning algorithms, given that you have no PhD in ML or problem domain's field". Very common scenario, isn't it?

trhway 12y ago
yep, when programming had the status of academic or engineering discipline it was done in the offices, when it got down to "technical associate/stuff" it moved into cubicles, now it is just a blue collar job of the 21st century and thus it is done on an open factory floor.

nine_k 12y ago

I work on a large open-plan floor. My two 24" screens completely fill my field of view. My earphones block my ears and fill them with beautiful, not very loud, flow-inducing music. A low wall separate my desk from passing people. On the other hand, when I want to give my eyes some rest, I can focus on Manhattan high-rises in the window. When I need to talk to my colleagues face to face, or just see if they are at their desks, it is easy to do, too. If we need to talk for more than a minute, we could walk to the coffee point of to a meeting room. I can imagine an open space implemented badly: people cramped together, with little elbow room, phone-talking sales reps next to code-laden programmers next to number-crunching financial guys, and no meeting rooms. I won't like such a setup either. But from where I sit, the open space plan looks pretty okay.

fsloth 12y ago

Yeah, cutting costs and Taylorian big brotherism. Effectively companies trade productivity for higher transparency and cheaper office space. What happened to the need to actually maximize productivity? To give the benefit of doubt it is plausible people might confuse open plan offices with team rooms.

marcosdumay 12y ago
> What happened to the need to actually maximize productivity? It has gone away since governemnts started supporting specific companies all around.

FabianBeiner 12y ago

Nobody likes the feeling that someone is watching over your shoulder. Not at work, not at home, nowhere.

anon4 12y ago
Not everybody hates it. If you have the same interests as your manager, you won't worry or be reprimanded for posting on your faovourite knitting forum for 15 minutes of each day or answering an im from your friend who lives halfway across the globe. Some people really feel like they're doing nothing wrong and have nothing to hide and if you feel that way you're probably right.
- FabianBeiner 12y ago
  See, this is your (and most peoples) mistake: Don’t mix up the fear of getting caught watching a cute little cat playing the piano on YouTube and a natural habit of around 95% of all people. A lot of companies which are using this concept are totally fine with you watching cats, they don’t even care.

dkhenry 12y ago

I think googles own Eric Schmidt had the best response to this. If open office's were bad for buisness or destroying the workspace the free market would bear that out. There are tangable benefits which is why companies move towards it. I understand some people hate it, but most don't so why do we keep getting the same articles every few months saying the same thing. We get it _you_ don't like the open office space others do. I am sorry your not able to have the office the way you like it, I am upset that no one else seems to like TV shows I find enjoyable and they keep getting canceled.

sgt101 12y ago
It's cheaper and the lost benefits of private offices don't show up on any spreadsheet. Which is not to say that they aren't there, it's just that private offices are not investable, so they won't happen any more. I wonder if Eric Schmidt believes that great art will be produced by the most efficient market, or if he thinks that breakthrough science will come out of the most popular lab?
droopyEyelids 12y ago
I take issue with this point of view- Open offices can be terrible for some businesses and terrific for others. So "the market" isn't going to make some simple decision for everyone. Google makes 250k per employee, and can afford to have a thoughtful and spacious open office that has sound proofing and sufficient break-out rooms and meeting places. On top of that, they can afford to be picky with their employees and hire thoughtful intelligent people. Compare that with a standard company workplace. First, they get excited about saving money by smashing more people into a smaller area. Second, they are following a trend and don't know to care about the 'small' things that make an open office livable (adequate side rooms, soundproofing, etc) Third they have whatever hierarchy they had before, which probably prevents people from collaborating easily because they'll be stealing time from their bosses projects etc. Next, they aren't hiring to Google's standards. After that, they might not be in a tech industry with quick feedback to failure and success and be filled with people who therefore optimizing for weirder goals. Finally, all those employees aren't used to the open office plan, resent it, and are filled with bad habits. So in the end it's easy for me to see tons of terrible open office plans, while acknowledging they work terrifically for some people.

harmonicon 12y ago

Open office is by no means a new thing Google invented. It existed a long, long time ago. http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/04/23/opinion/23rfd-image/23rfd-image-blogSpan.jpg http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/04/23/opinion/23rfd...

givan 12y ago

Open office + headphones was the best place work space for me, one big reason for me to have a job is to be surrounded by people and feel that I'm part of a team, otherwise I could just work from home instead of a stupid cubicle that makes me feel like a gear in a big machinery.

ryan90 12y ago

This article is a classic case of "link journalism". Not a single study she linked to is conclusive and applicable to all situations. The studies merely suggest that there may be drawbacks to open offices. Additionally, she mentions the camaraderie among teammates masking lost productivity. Who's to say that this doesn't contribute to the overall well being of the office? Even if it does mean some near-term productivity is lost. Each company is different, and each department within the company is different. We just moved into an office space, and our sales floor is much different than our dev area. Sweeping generalizations like the one made in this article aren't helpful for anybody.

michaelfeathers 12y ago
Yes, it is link journalism. I wish I could find another article on this that was on HN about a year ago. The takeaway was that closed and open offices each have their benefits and liabilities, and that the ideal is to have open areas with something like the study carrels in libraries that people can retreat to. I've never seen that in practice, but I'd love to try it out.
JoeAltmaier 12y ago
"Near-term productivity"? What can that mean? If you are in an open office all day, every day, the it means "all productivity" is lost.
- r00fus 12y ago
  Sounds like an extreme position you're taking. Anecdote to disprove your negative - one day I was talking with a customer about an issue, one of my open-office coworkers heard me then IM'd me an internal forum page that helped me seamlessly resolve the issue. Were I working from home or out of that persons earshot, I would have dug around for potentially hours or days before finding my solution. Were I heads down writing code a lot (I don't do that very often these days), I'd head over to the private (no-noise-policy) work rooms nearby.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago

DanielBMarkham 12y ago

Yay. Another "Let's argue about open floorplan offices" article. Never can have enough of those. I'm not going to take apart the article: there's simply too many errors to get into. I will say in the author's defense that many companies will jump onto a bandwagon without having any idea of why other people are riding or where it's going. [insert long list of good ideas that corporate america adopted and killed] On a personal note, I do not like co-location. I also do not like open plan offices. I like it quiet, with my space, my music, my 3-screen development setup, and my door. Which I can shut. And that's what makes this discussion so painful for me to both watch and participate in. You see, as somebody who helps teams perform better, for certain kinds of work -- creative work where there is a lot of change and risk -- open plan beats the hell out of other setups. It's not even close. [for the proper definition of open plan.] In the past couple of years I have seen several teams that were unable to accomplish much of anything start working much more effectively by simply sitting beside each other and being there during the day. In some cases, they did nothing else: just sat beside each other. Still, work improved. The effect is so noticeable you could almost write a book and start a movement just on open floorplan. The last misconception I'll address, since it seems to run rampant, is that open floor plan is not about productivity or cost savings. It's about having people work with each other. This may actually mean less work gets done; but it's the right work. Open floor plan is where the guy at the end of the table late on a Friday afternoon observes aloud to himself "You know, maybe we should be doing X instead of Y" and everybody has the social and emotional context to realize that you just changed the scope of the work from 10x to x. [insert many more examples here]

31reasons 12y ago

Why is it called open office ? It looks like factory floor to me.

sousousou 12y ago

For me, it really comes down to energy. It takes me lots of energy to ignore something. Like someone walking behind my computer monitor. Like someone having a loud unrelated conversation next to me. Like being conscious of my appearance and behavior (out of respect for others). And it takes energy to solve problems and write great code. I simply can't do it all every day, day in and day out. Monday is fine. I can work long hours on Monday in the office, getting lots of good work done. But on Tuesday, I am irritable and can't focus as well. By Wednesday, I'm useless. If I go into the office, I come home exhausted, unable to even speak. Fortunately I can work from home, but it's a heartbreaking trade. It's not as much fun (or productive) to collaborate over the internet as it is in person. I am definitely not going to accidentally end up going out to lunch or coffee with a new friend. Etc. Comments to the tune of "suck it up", "wear headphones", are nothing new to the ears of introverts. We've been dealing with this _extroverted culture_ all our lives. Extroverts thrive on stimulation. Introverts drown in it.

thejerz 12y ago

This debate is easily solved by simply asking people, "Which do you prefer: open offices or closed door offices?" 90% of people will answer the latter. Case closed.

enjo 12y ago
That needs a citation. When I polled my largeish team in 2007 it was nearly 100% hard wall office.

kabdib 12y ago

I work at a company where most people are in open areas. The key that makes this work IMHO is that the desks are trivially movable; just unplug two wires and wheel the desk elsewhere. Want to work next to Joe? Move there. Need to get away from a noisy cow-orker? Move his desk, or yours (both have happened). There is closed office space available, if you want it. Most people choose not to use it. Once you have mobility, you get to choose who you work with. You can get together in ad-hoc groups for a while, bring more people in as necessary, and leave for some other place when you need to. It sounds too simple and maybe too stupid to be as powerful as it actually is. I've also worked in open plans where you don't have a choice of where to sit. It sucked hard. I wouldn't do that again.

skizm 12y ago

I'm in an open office situation. It is the worst. I spend most of my time trying to adjust my posture so that my eyes don't meet anyone else's eyes.

bachmeier 12y ago

I'm not a big fan of these articles. It depends on what you're doing. I'm a professor, and in order to get certain tasks done, you need a private space. I don't even know how you could grade exams, for instance, without a private space in order to concentrate and prevent others from seeing what you're doing. When I'm working on a paper, on the other hand, it's way more productive to have my coauthors right next to me. The effect on productivity therefore cannot be determined without knowing what you're going to be doing. I do find these articles fascinating from the perspective of an economist. Economists frequently assume workers get paid based on their productivity. Then we see that in the real world employers are willing to adopt an open office model that workers hate, even one that can reduce productivity, because they want to monitor the workers to see what they are doing. If workers were paid according to productivity, it wouldn't matter how many times they checked Facebook between 8 am and 5 pm.

piinbinary 12y ago
> it's way more productive to have my coauthors right next to me. I think that principle is true in most enterprises: it helps to be in the same room with the people you work directly with. Having people you do not work with (and especially their conversations) in the same room is, as far as I can see, always harmful.
sheepmullet 12y ago
"When I'm working on a paper, on the other hand, it's way more productive to have my coauthors right next to me" And this is why a lot of startups work well in an open plan. When there are only 5 people in the company it can work well. It is a completely different situation than the typical 80-150 people per floor open plans of larger companies.

dang 12y ago

This is an opinion piece with a baity title that points to a New Yorker article which has had three extensive discussions on HN, including a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8696391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8696391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7832209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7832209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7024488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7024488

stevesearer 12y ago
This was the #1 story a few minutes ago but not to be found on any of the top pages anymore. Out of curiosity, do you mod down stories you feel aren't fitting and/or duplicate discussions?
- dang 12y ago
  One task of HN moderation is penalizing stories that don't fit the mandate of the site. Duplicates are part of that, though of course a story can be a duplicate without being inappropriate. We demote duplicates, but if there are already comments on the thread, we leave the post open so discussion can continue.

LukeWalsh 12y ago

I'm fairly young but my experiences with open offices have been that they are more distracting, but it's possibile to minimize the distractions with headphones. It's difficult for me to listen to music while working so I use coffitivity which pipes in background noise from coffee shops. It sounds like hustle and bustle, but you can never actually latch on to a conversation since there are none. When I worked in a private office I found it hard to stay motivated. This is in contrast to an open office when I can look at the people around me all working hard on the same problem. It makes me feel motivated to keep working.

nchammas 12y ago

Nathan Marz (of Apache Storm fame) also wrote about this topic recently: "Now, I don't want to comment on the effectiveness of open floor plans for fields other than my own. But for software development, this is the single best way to sabotage the productivity of your entire engineering team." http://nathanmarz.com/blog/the-inexplicable-rise-of-open-floor-plans-in-tech-companies.html http://nathanmarz.com/blog/the-inexplicable-rise-of-open-flo...

labmixz 12y ago

I've been a developer for over a decade, where I'm currently employed they have adopted low-partitions (lets be honest, no partitions). I can hear people twitch, breathe, randomly talk with others 3 isles down. Every developer has on headphones trying to ignore all the movement/talking around them, it's just a horrible setup. I find myself being less confident in my work, because I can't concentrate due to a all the distractions around, wearing headphones/earbuds is a nice work-around, but not a solution, I would like to not have my earbuds on 6+ hours a day. While I see the advantages to open offices, not everyone works the same way, companies who want to maximize employee effectiveness should cater to both types of needs.

ar_turnbull 12y ago

Anyone have good tips for surviving in an open office? There are the obvious ones like noise-cancelling headphones — but are there any other good hacks for making an open space at least somewhat tolerable?

whiddershins 12y ago

It's really interesting. I think it has to do with whether the teamwork necessary to do the task is real, or only exists in the mind of managers. My first job was on a newspaper production floor. It was an open office clustered by role, with matching support people clustered nearby. I have never seen an environment that had the astonishing level of productivity per person of this team, and I mean by easily a factor of 10x. Any question I had I could get an answer in 2 seconds. We were using laughably old equipment, but there was no emailing anything, and there was no possibility of miscommunication. It was exhilarating. OTOH these were well defined tasks, with a deadline at the end of each day. So it was like running a team tough mudder every week. My next office job, years later, had a semi-open floorplan. It was an absolute nightmare. My coworkers would listen to Howard Stern every morning, and then leave the radio on afterwards. People would have protracted calls on speakerphone. Compared to the newspaper, it seemed like no one was ever actually working, instead they were just talking about nonsense, and torturing me in the process. Typically someone would send you an email, then immediately walk over to your desk and explain it to you with no regard for whether you were busy. But this work was complex, boring, intricate, different every time, and the deadlines were months away, the biggest challenge was planning and focus. There was much less reason for teamwork and a much greater need to delve in to your task and be left alone. So I think generalizing about open floorplans is difficult. It obviously has to do with company culture and the type of work.

abalone 12y ago

Really, open office leads to more flu infections?? Based on her utterly anecdotal evidence of a bunch of her co-workers got sick. If that's the standard for evidence for the rest of the claims in this article, I would cast it aside. Cornell did a study while back that found that communication gets worse with private offices. The pernicious thing is that employees' very perception of "frequent communication" changes depending on which kind of environment they're in. If they're in open plan it's several times a day often on the fly. If they have a private office, it plummets to "several times a week in a scheduled meeting". [1] So that's consistent with private office people saying everything's fine -- because their very perception of the standard for team interaction has vastly diminished. They also noted that office workers may be biased to favor plans that maximize their personal productivity even at the expense of team productivity, because their compensation is tied more to the former. Whereas management sees the bigger picture of both elements. That may go a long way towards explaining why employees and management are often at odds over how to arrange the office. (Having said that, by no means do I think that a constant barrage of noise in your face in a maximally open office is optimal. There are many degrees of openness, and I'm just pointing to evidence that private offices may swing too far in the other direction.) [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140615182702/http://iwsp.human.cornell.edu/file_uploads/office_ex2_1238259706.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20140615182702/http://iwsp.human...

galfarragem 12y ago

Last year I designed an office for a small business with 20 employees. Having worked in several offices (with different layouts) made me very "bearish" on open-offices so I advised the business owner against it. While explaining all my arguments to him, he told me: I completely agree with you but without an open layout how do I control my employees? And: With an open layout I can put more people in less space. This is what business people think. All the rest is poetry.

jerseyguy505 12y ago

Consider reading Peopleware by DeMarco and Lister

jerseyguy505 12y ago

Consider reading Peopleware by DeMarco and Lister