3 ms·

Ok, so why do you advocate open spaces? Personally I hate them because they destroy my productivity and that's the one thing I enjoy about work. The trade off

• balls187 12y ago
  > Ok, so why do you advocate open spaces? I like having my teams sit together, not isolated from each other because it increases collaboration. This was my experience back in 2007 when I first worked in a shared office with 3 other people. I empathize with you. The way we approach what you've discussed is to gently remind people when things get loud, that we have a "quiet library" policy. It's certainly not so I can monitor what my teams are doing. If I could design my own office it would be similar to Valve's model. Semi isolated areas with desks on wheels, so teams could sit together. There would also be "quiet" offices, where people can go work when they need complete isolation. This isn't too unlike what MSFT Google and FB already have today. My problem with offices is that no matter how you slice it, they always end up being a proxy for status. It's difficult to scale offices with the number of people, so you have to allocate them in some sort of "fair" fashion. At one company, offices were originally assigned by tenure. As the company expanded, a number of executives and upper level managers specifically wanted offices because of their "title." The company changed it's stance to instead allocate offices by each department, based on role, then tenure.