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But Where Do People Work in This Office?

• tarikjn 12y ago
  Here is what I think about when someone says open office: http://www.belarus.by/relimages/000914_392548.jpg http://www.belarus.by/relimages/000914_392548.jpg
• kylec 12y ago
  Wherever my next job is, I'll make sure to take a tour of the working environment. If it looks anything like these photos, I'll decline an offer.
  • serve_yay 12y ago
    Good luck!
  • teddyh 12y ago
    That’s a good idea: “But I just couldn't stop thinking about one thing: the AT&T offices were dingy and dark, in some kind of a stone age office that smelled of 1930s bureaucracy. People were starting to look like mushrooms. There were torn Dilbert cartoons all over the cubicles. (Warning sign number one.) The furniture was falling apart. It was just nasty. But Viacom was in a nice, shiny, modern, bright office building that felt like lawyers' offices. It was clean and new and pleasant. I know I should have been thinking about something more substantial as I made my decision, but I just could not get over how unpleasant it would be to spend my days working in the AT&T dungeon.” — Joel Spolsky, Whaddaya Mean, You Can't Find Programmers?, June 2000 http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000050.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000050.html
• uniformlyrandom 12y ago
  It depends on your responsibilities. If you are in devops, ops or support, open office is great for you. If you are a coder, an engineer, or an architect, then open office is painful. If you are a manager, then open office is embarrassing.
  • bharath28 12y ago
    Why is an open office embarrassing for a manager? I am curious.
    • uniformlyrandom 12y ago
      Manager's responsibility is to talk to people. Often on the phone. People around you can hear everything you say. You have two options: - Spend half of your day in conference rooms; - Stop giving a single fuck about the privacy, and 'excel in transparency' (or whatever corporate bullshit is applicable).
    • analog31 12y ago
      Same reason as cubicles for the paeans. Status. But also, if there's a manager in the middle of the bullpen, people tend to clam up. I experienced this. Managers can have a very hard time handling the typical heated and frank discussions that can arise among engineers. At one time, we had the project manager in our cube maze along with the engineers. If he sensed that two engineers disagreed with one another, or that they were discussing a problem, he would step in to manage it. The obvious outcome was that the engineers found another place to hold our discussions.
  • scourge 12y ago
    > devops You keep using that word. I don't think you know what it means. (Coming from a contract 'devop') There is no such thing. Either you code, and your code helps a company's devops requirements. Or you're in ops because you can't code. I need to collaborate less than devs do. My clients know for a fact that most of my work is done more productively at home in the quiet. Yes we need to talk, plan, work with others (sometimes) but who doesn't?
    • tankenmate 12y ago
      The whole point of devops is that it combines development and operations; i.e. everyone works together to make sure that both development and operations are mutually supportive and co-ordinated. Most devops teams I have seen almost all the team are capable developers and sysadmins / operations.
• basicallydan 12y ago
  Check out Fog Creek's office: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/12/29.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/12/29.html > Gobs of well-lit perimeter offices. Every developer, tester, and program manager is in a private office; all except two have direct windows to the outside (the two that don't get plenty of daylight through two glass walls). The longer I spend in this environment (coming up to five years) the less I like it. I like the idea of having large, interesting open spaces for more social activities including work, but most of the work I do lends itself well to being not surrounded by people having conversations or - in some cases - literally just messing around all day. There's gotta be a balance.
  • gregd 12y ago
    I don't understand if you like Fog Creek's environment or you don't. At any rate, I'm so over the open floor plan/cubicle mazes. I get really distracted by the doppler effect that conversations (sometimes LOUD conversations) that pass by my cubicle, have. Perhaps I'm just a curmudgeon, but I much prefer the solitude that an office with a door provides.
    • basicallydan 12y ago
      Sorry, to be clear, I am very much in favour of Fog Creek's environment :)
    • ThrustVectoring 12y ago
      I've heard that cubicles are worse than open offices in terms of audio distraction. In an open office, you've got a constant visual reminder that people can hear you. People tend to be more mindful of their volume levels and where/how they make noise.
      • jerf 12y ago
        I work in an open floor plan. We have fairly standard carpet and ceiling acoustic tiles, the walls are drywall, so we haven't gone to extremes to soundproof but it's not tile and open warehouse ceilings either. We have a culture of being reasonably respectful, but will still have conversations at times. In practice... I find myself hardly remembering the people that exist even 20 feet from me. In theory I can see about 50 people, but I almost never actually remember that. I'm somewhat sensitive to conversation and extremely sensitive to music (can not stand music I'm not in control of), and I'm fine. I do have modestly nice passively acoustically isolated headphones and frequently use them, but I do that anyhow, not because I'm trying to dodge noise, and I can go hours without them just fine, usually putting them on because I want music, not isolation. I find myself wondering what percentage of open office complaints come from A: people who are simply psychologically unsuited to them under any circumstances B: people whose open office experiences involved tile floors, warehouse ceilings, and glass walls, which would be a completely different acoustic experience and C: people who haven't actually spent any time in a decent one and are just assuming they'd hate it. No sarcasm. For that matter the studies that keep asserting how bad they I find myself wondering about A and B... certainly you can construct an open space that does suck, but that doesn't mean they all do, and I've never dug into one enough to see what they specify as the "open space". And to be clear, I'm not asserting that they're obviously better and everybody should love them (and let me reiterate I completely believe in the existence of a set of people who will never like them), but my experience just doesn't seem to bear out the "they suck and can never work and why on Earth would any company ever put them in" attitude... at most it seems like they might be slightly worse on average but it may be below the noise threshold, and it would be the incredibly-perfectly well-run company for whom this would be their biggest problem.
• kateho 12y ago
  As much as it pains for me to say it, I do think small, quiet 1-2 person offices are great for thinking and getting real work done. I believe the IDEO offices in the Bay Area have a combination of a centralised area for discussions and collaboration, but a set of smaller offices for more focused work time. Something which would actually be quite nice to see more of ...
  • moron4hire 12y ago
    I don't understand, why does that pain you to say? That sounds like a great idea.
• jayess 12y ago
  I look at those wide-open office spaces and get anxious. I need my lonely, quiet space to work.
• davidu 12y ago
  People do the open office floor plan because it's efficient and economical, not because it's the the best for the workers. We designed a ton of cubbies (like in your university library), 1 person private rooms, 2 person conference rooms, etc. in our office to accommodate for the fact that many people need to more privacy and quiet than just headphones. We also break up the main open plans to help quiet the noise and distraction. We have about 45,000 sq. ft today, and will be adding another 45,000 sq. ft this year. When we do, there will be much less open floor plan. I do think there's a happy medium, with team rooms of 6 to 15 people, depending on role and requirements.
  • teddyh 12y ago
    > it's efficient Efficient for what or who, I wonder?
    • gregd 12y ago
      It's efficient for people/sq foot.
      • bixmix 12y ago
        Supposedly (and I have yet to see this consistently work in action) the efficiency comes from collaboration that naturally happens when there are no physical barriers. What I generally see is I find out more about my co-workers lives and their interests than the increase in productivity and innovation from the team.
        • taeric 12y ago
          Bear in mind that the giants of our industry are built on open floor plans. So, in "real world" numbers they do hold up fairly well. I fully accept that there are confounding variables. But, I can't help but also accept that open plans are not the doomsday device that they are often painted as. They are yet another of the many variables that go into how a company is running.
    • benihana 12y ago
• motbob 12y ago
  Would collaboration be hurt by spreading things out?
• gdulli 12y ago
  I never thought I'd feel thankful for having high cubicle walls, but here we are.
  • artmageddon 12y ago
    I've been on both sides, cube vs open plan. I used to liken cubes to prisons, but now I look at them the same way a cat will look at a box that it tries to squeeze itself tightly into, because the cat wants to be there.
    • NittLion78 12y ago
      Yeah, I never realized how much I would miss having my own office with a door until I moved to an open floor plan. Utterly impossible to concentrate on things w/out headphones.
      • anon13839 12y ago
        I work in an open office, and everyone wears headphones for hours when they need to concentrate. The thing is, these people are doing irreversible damage to their hearing. Listening to headphones at a volume that will drown out conversation is not a good thing. Furthermore, I've never experienced as many migraines as I have before switching to an open office. I have to keep pills at my desk. Never had to do that before.
    • bduerst 12y ago
      Huh, I'm the opposite. I've had my own office, been in cubicles, and currently work in an open office. I would detest getting trapped in a stuffy, carpet-walled cubicle again, and kind of disliked how isolated the office makes you. I'm also a little clueless about all the disruptions that everyone is talking about - I think the team I work with now probably has some kind of has an unspoken rule to keep disruptions to a minimum. It's mostly heads down working all day, and when disruptions happen, I usually enjoy them because it's usually the break I need to get out of a mental tunnel.
• jarcane 12y ago
  Having worked in offices like these (in a call center, of all things), I really don't understand how the hell you could get any work done. We had people going home with migraines after two days in conditions like that Facebook photo, and that was just reading scripts into a phone headset for 8 hours. Actually producing anything like an intelligent thought in that kind of corporate tuna can is unthinkable to me. "We have our own indoor artisanal cheese maker! ... but our actual workspace looks like it was cobbled together after a day of frantic Costco purchases." How about sparing the free Sun Chips and putting some walls in, eh?
  • oinksoft 12y ago
    Having spent a day at Atlassian's office in SOMA when contracting for them recently, if this sort of setup is done right (with the additional caveat of having an energetic staff) the effect is positively electrifying. The "Costco purchases" jab is overly broad, because this office had very nice motorized standing desks for everybody. Also, the complex was large enough that you could escape into some personal space without feeling like you were hiding. On the other hand, Gannett attempted a setup like this, except it was out of cheapness (they wanted to lease office space in their Tysons HQ) and was carried out mindlessly. They mixed developers with technical support, managers, etc. thoughtlessly. And they installed "white noise" machines which made matters worse. Working in that place was almost impossible and I quit after a month.
    • MereInterest 12y ago
      As someone with flat feet, I certainly hope that they would have traditional sitting desks as well.
      • sp332 12y ago
        A motorized standing desk can be adjusted (up and down) with the push of a button. Or you can just leave it down without even pushing any buttons :)
        • deleted 12y ago
• snlacks 12y ago
  They are kept in Bull Pens because they treat their employees as sterile commodities to be herded around. You don't become WalMart/Facebook/Twitter by treating your employees well. You become big and profitable by cutting as many corners as you can and keeping revenue up. Publicly traded companies generally get into this-quarter frenzy that never leaves and kills any sort of long term viability as being a company of and for people.
  • Igglyboo 12y ago
    >You become big and profitable by cutting as many corners as you can and keeping revenue up. Then why would they be spending millions of dollars on the office perks and architecture? You're contradicting yourself, they're obviously spending a huge amount of money on the office.
    • deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    • falcolas 12y ago
      Perhaps for the visiting VCs, investors, and Executives?
    • thirdtruck 12y ago
      Your assertion -- "they're obviously spending a huge amount of money on the office" -- is compatible with the previous assertion. They're spending it on the office, while employees are still treated as fungible cogs to be plugged into said expensive office.
    • nilkn 12y ago
      The point of this post is that they spend money making the office look pretty (to get people to accept offers), but they spend almost nothing making it functional. The office has become a marketing ploy; the workers aren't actually treated very well, it just looks like they are because every surface is shiny.
  • testguy34 12y ago
    >You don't become WalMart/Facebook/Twitter by treating your employees well. Today's tech company employees are some of the most pampered in history. The list of perks Facebook and Twitter offer is huge (http://www.glassdoor.com/Benefits/Facebook-US-Benefits-EI_IE40772.0,8_IL.9,11_IN1.htm http://www.glassdoor.com/Benefits/Facebook-US-Benefits-EI_IE...). Comparing them to WalMart is ridiculous.
• chrisbennet 12y ago
  I like this trend toward giant open plan offices - it gives us folks who work in our own quite offices a competitive advantage. :-)
• gook 12y ago
  Has this guy even worked in any of these environments? I've worked at Facebook and it is surprisingly quiet. If people want to have meetings or talk, there are plenty of conference rooms to take advantage of. Worst case, the free Sennheisers in the tech vending machines takes care of any other noises that you might not like. I personally work better in an open office environment. I work off the energy of others and it allows me to focus more than being alone in an office. While I understand if people legitimately don't like an open office environment, this type of article seems like it is just trying to put down these companies with little knowledge about how loud it really is in these offices. And if you don't like the environment at Facebook/Google/Twitter/etc, just move to another company. Let's not pretend that it is hard to get another job with one of those companies on your resume.
  • strangetimes 12y ago
    The noise isn't the only consideration (though it is a big one). Visual distractions, lack of privacy, the feeling of being watched, people approaching from behind you, etc. The human animal is stressed by these things.
  • krschultz 12y ago
    That's the problem with large open plan offices. The only way for it to be workable for everyone is if everyone shuts up. I find it incredibly stifling. My ideal environment is the team I'm working on in one big room, the music going, everyone jamming on the project together. Getting shit done. That's probably what Zuckerberg et al remember from when they started the company, and that's why they want to recreate it for 3,000 people. Unfortunately, once you have more than 1 team in the room, it breaks down. You just shipped something awesome and want to shout about it? The other team gives you dirty looks and want you to just STFU because they're 3 days from shipping and in total crunch mode. Some people just like quiet all the time, they'll give you a dirty look when you get noisy. Thus the big rooms of people end up being completely silent, it's the only way to make it work. They are terrible for collaboration. The only conversations happen in conference rooms, otherwise you disturb 100+ people. In my mind small rooms, holding 4-10 people, are ideal. Each team gets a room. If the team likes it quiet, it will be quiet. If you want to bounce ideas around, you can do it without feeling like you are disturbing other teams. If you want to play music, you can play music. I think it's the feeling that the open plan offices are going for, but people haven't connected the productivity of open plan office with the actual size of the open room yet.
• Morgawr 12y ago
  I am currently working at Google as an intern and I'm probably going to be the contradicting opinion in this thread but I really appreciate the openspace office we have here. Maybe because it's my first "real" office job, but I do not find much of a problem working here. When I want to be on my own to think on stuff, I just put my headphones on (sometimes with music, sometimes without, since they are good at canceling noise anyway) and it's like being in my own isolated office. And if that is not enough, we have small cubicle-like mini-rooms where you can go and isolate yourself, most people use them to have phone conversations or do interviews, but nothing stops you from working in there with your laptop. All in all, though, maybe it's my floor that is very quiet but there's not much distraction or annoying background noise as most people are busy working. When they are not working, they go somewhere else (the pub, the relax rooms, etc etc). If they want to have a work-related conversation that lasts more than 5-10 minutes, we have open areas with whiteboards separated from the desk area, or we have separate conference rooms you can use. Most of the time, I enjoy taking my headphones off and listening to a couple of coworkers making remarks on stuff (either work or non-work related), it helps me relieve stress and boredom much more than just staring at a wall or reading some articles online. Ironically, the major source of annoyance in our floor recently has been the old AC system that sometimes starts making very loud noises and bothers everybody, but this is not the fault of the openspace office so it doesn't count :)
  • k__ 12y ago
    I liked them too, when I was an intern and the first few years of my real job. But after I acquired more knowledge it became more stressing, because everyone was asking me stuff all the time. Also I had to listen to all the communication that was going on around me. Headphones are but a crutch and a bad one too, since all I want is silence when working and no music or anything...
    • Bahamut 12y ago
      Agreed - there is something nice about having a quiet space to retreat to at work so you can focus on getting stuff done without any noise/distractions. I miss having a private office sorely since everyone just goes to me and asks me questions, making it harder for me to be productive. Oftentimes these questions are ones that if the developer did more research, he/she could have figured it out.
• txu 12y ago
  I wonder what do people who disagree with open floor plans think the desks should be like?
• skynetv2 12y ago
  I have a semi-private office (two of us) in a ~15X15 office with a door, I would not give it up for anything in the world. openspaces are terrible for productivity. too many distractions.
• skatenerd 12y ago
  Is this some extension / perversion of the original XP principles? I feel like XP Explained talks a lot about office layout and how it can foster communication and teamwork.
• austenallred 12y ago
  I think there's a balance to be struck. I used to think that programmers complaining about open office spaces were just nitpicking... then I learned how to program. Open offices are a reason for headphones at best and a nightmare at worst. That having been said, I've worked in spaces where everyone had their own private office. It was great for productivity, but I felt like I never got to know anyone. All communication was forced, which caused a lot of annoying and unnecessary meetings. I'm not sure what the answer is, but it's probably somewhere in the middle.
  • bmj 12y ago
    Having worked in a variety of office environments over the last 15 years, my favorite has been shared, closed office space. My employee moved into a relatively small building which had 2-3 person offices in it. The devs were one, QC in another, sales in another. It worked quite well. We could close our door, but still collaborate when we needed to. We also had several meeting rooms if we needed to talk between teams. I'm also not against the "pod"-style cubes (4 or so people in a large cube), assuming the pods aren't cramped on top of one another.
• bunderbunder 12y ago
  My company recently built out a schmancy new open plan office and moved a bunch of people from my team there. Based on what I've seen so far the answer is that people don't work in that office. They work from home, because that's the only place you can get any actual work done. They do come into the office one or two days a week, but only so that management doesn't feel like they wasted money on all those ping-pong and pool tables.
  • dtech 12y ago
    You company already seems quite progressive in accepting so much being done from home.
• bixmix 12y ago
  Is it a generation gap? Old programmer vs new? The open office trend may be the death of my 2 decade career in writing software. I do not need a spacious office: a room with a door, a distinct lack of distracting windows, and a 4x6 desk and an overflow side table would be perfect. Closing a door means I can focus and block out traffic, noise and the general hubbub of an office.
• georgeecollins 12y ago
  Managers like bullpens because they are very cheap. They cram a lot of people into a small space. They don't require the maintence of door locks or even cube walls. People can be moved around very easily. I think they also like that everyone can look over everyone else's shoulder very easily, which creates peer pressure to work. In my experience, the maangers that advocate this are often the ones that are really spending all their time in special break-out rooms or conference rooms.
  • nilkn 12y ago
    I've always believed that the direct manager of a team should have to work in the same conditions as the team itself. I find it distasteful when the team members are crammed into cubicles or just open desks in some sort of bullpen while the manager has a spacious private office and becomes disconnected from the conditions that the rest of the workers experience. If you feel the need to delineate different power levels in the company with different working spaces, that's fine, but it needs to be done intelligently. Let executives who only work with other executives have their own offices. If you must put the workers in an open bullpen, though, then their immediate manager should be a part of it as well.
• ghshephard 12y ago
  We should have someone like Ben Horowitz who has been a line manager of engineers, CEO of a large company that cranks out code - both the pure "New technology" type code, as well as the "Lots of framework code" type engineering, comment on this. But, from memory, I think he said something like this: "Engineering productivity, counterintuitively, appears to increase as you move them out of private offices into contact with one another, both through cross-pollination of different ideas, as well as the energy inherent in working in a team environment. This graph of productivity, though, does have a maxima as density increases, until it begins to once again decrease as the distractions become a dominating effect. With that said, not all engineers are alike, and there are some individuals that are far more effective in a quiet room, than those who benefit from the open office layout. The efficient engineering organization should make opportunities for both types of engineers to excel."
  • Bahamut 12y ago
    I am in agreement here with that - there are benefits to both types of spaces. I am surprised there are not more companies willing to just let people pick their workspace smartly, whether it is a private office or open office.
• rilita 12y ago
  Generally software developers at any level are treated as the lowest level of person at companies, even when the company specializes in software. As a result, they are packed in wherever they fit. The theory seems that developers benefit from feeling like a frathouse of some sort, where they play in most of their area, but otherwise cram together to study for a bit, so that they can go back to goofing off afterwards. Developers are not treated as professionals. They are treated as animals; herded together to make them work, but otherwise just giving them big grassy fields.
  • meddlepal 12y ago
    Developers aren't treated like professionals because most of them don't act like professionals.
    • mgkimsal 12y ago
      it's a bit of a feeding cycle. When you're not treated as one, and it's not expected, you don't act like one. When there's a group, if they all want to act non-professionally, the one person who wants to is overruled or ostracized because they don't "fit in".
  • mgkimsal 12y ago
    My first reaction was that this was a bit over the top, but... on reflection, not really. Fog Creek's setup looks nice, but outside of that, I've rarely seen any company treat their developers like they treat their marketing folks, legal, financial and other areas. Financial/accountants aren't generally expected to sit in an open room with 15 other people with foosball games going on in their line of site. Should we encourage "pair accounting" and have accountants share a laptop screen to get their work done? There's an element of mentoring and support that can go on in those open environments - adhoc help, etc - but that seems to be partially a cover for the fact that many people aren't all that good at what they do, and the better people need to help train (sorry, "lead") the less experienced folk. My own experience in open plans, beyond the general noise, is that it's harder for people to admit they have a question, because it's visible to an entire group. Likewise, it's harder to call someone out for not pulling their weight in an open plan setting, without calling more attention to the interaction. "private by default" seems to work well for OO developers, just not when it comes to their office space.
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• markolschesky 12y ago
  I used to work at Epic (the Health IT company), which is known for its interesting office design and giving its staff individual offices [1]. Now that I've been working for startups, I've worked in more bullpen-type offices. A few things: 1) Having my own office did not mean that there weren't distractions. It's impractical to build sound-proof walls between offices and the guy across from me loved to try to sing opera for hours a day. I eventually moved offices to another part of campus for that reason. 2) Likewise, I've worked in open offices that were pretty monastic. Engineers are quiet, everyone is wired in and most people talk on Slack/HipChat. The only interruption was when the mailman would drop off the daily mail. 3) I think the worst thing about open offices are the logistics of staff that need to take phone calls. As a customer-facing programmer that does sales support and configuration assistance it's sub-optimal not having a dedicated space for phone calls. When the perfect storm arises of too many people needing to take calls, everything flies into anarchy where I'm forced to take a call in a common space and try to be quiet. A bullpen that has some separation and accommodation for those needs is ok. A bullpen that doesn't have that is not. [1] http://www.xconomy.com/wisconsin/2014/09/19/epic-hopes-wi-campus-can-help-in-talent-war-with-apple-facebook/ http://www.xconomy.com/wisconsin/2014/09/19/epic-hopes-wi-ca...
• k-mcgrady 12y ago
  Those office all look nice - until you get to the place where work actually takes place. I don't care if the foosball table is in a nice room or if the kitchen is fancy. I spend 95% of my time at my desk. Focus some energy on making that area bearable.
• numlocked 12y ago
  I was the engineering manager at my previous employer and we were reconfiguring our office layout. I talked to the engineers and with one exception each person wanted private offices. We set up one floor of the office with high cubicle walls, and a lot of sound isolation. So not exactly private offices, but really a pretty nice setup (with the best equipment and furniture available). On a separate floor we had a bullpen with ops folks, people who were on the phone a lot, etc. One by one, each engineer gravitated towards the bullpen until no one spent more than perhaps 1 day per week in the dedicated office space. The part of the office that each engineer had claimed to want to work in became abandoned. I think, in spite of the theoretical want for quiet space and isolation, there's a very human need at work to be in the middle of the action -- to hear what's going on, and to be connected to your colleagues. There were certain tasks and problems for which engineers would walk downstairs and make use of the dedicated space, but it was ultimately not where folks wanted to be on a daily basis.
  • mgkimsal 12y ago
    "(with the best equipment and furniture available)." So... why insist on spending money on high end equipment and furniture while not giving people what they asked for? I was at a place years ago that was happy to spend tens of thousands of high-end chairs, but giving developers private offices (those who wanted them) "cost too much". Bear in mind that they'd custom built a second office with private offices that were sitting empty (and devs were in the second office). The "it costs too much" doesn't carry much water when that sort of money is spent on things that people aren't asking for.
  • droob 12y ago
    People tend to enjoy private alcoves with a view on the action, which is kinda best of both worlds. Christopher Alexander describes that pattern in _A Pattern Language_.
    • lotsofmangos 12y ago
      As do cats.
    • 12y ago
• edpichler 12y ago
  Am I the only one here that does not like too much silent offices? I like to feel my environment alive, I don't want silence, I want the low noise of smart people discussing, sharing and interacting.
  • penguat 12y ago
    I love that too - where I work I get it 9 - 9.30 and 17.30 - 18.00
• peterwwillis 12y ago
  Why do people like working in coffee shops? It's cramped. It's noisy. There's barely enough power outlets (if at all). Uncomfortable chairs. Annoying conversations. Hipster baristas. Yet people all over the world cram into coffee shops like Starbucks, sucking up the free wifi with a grande half-calf mocha latte, churning out a report or answering e-mails, sometimes even on a conference call. Conditions that could border on sweatshop if it weren't for the food and drink. It seems completely unintuitive. Are there benefits to this environment? Perhaps. For one thing, you don't know anyone there; nobody is going to interrupt you, or tell loud inappropriate jokes while tossing a football, and you are so close to people you are forced to focus on what is right in front of you. You get the comfort of being near other humans without any requirement to ever interact with them. Then there's the convenience of easy access to food, a bathroom, and that miracle drug we're all dependent on. Add the internet and a table and chair and it's like some utopian Japanese vision of the future of all offices. The music is a nice bonus. But there's one thing I think really makes the coffee shop an ideal place to work: no expectations. You can come and go as you please. No assigned seats. No meetings. No interruptions. Nothing but your coffee and chair and table space and internet. Who cares if it's loud? Who cares if it's impractical to stay there? If you just need to get something done and break away from the commitment to a typical monotonous working life, this is your hideaway. I think all offices should just be giant coffee shops.
• geebee 12y ago
  Open floor plan offices are generally pretty unpleasant, but some of the negative effects can be mitigated. I worked at Sun Micro a while ago (the place that is now Facebook), and we all had offices at the time. However, Sun had also started to create numerous drop-in work centers. One of them was in downtown SF, just south of market. This was an "open" office with three largish rooms with cubicles and desks, and a smaller number of offices with doors that close (reservable or walk in). Here's what made it work - one of the rooms was designated a "zone of silence", and it really was enforced. The two outer rooms had phones at each desk, the quiet room did not. Sales people and other workers who needed to make noise worked in the outer rooms, programmers and other heads down people worked in the quiet room. Not surprisingly, there were plenty of people who wanted to break the rules. This generally happened when all the desks in the loud room were taken. Then you'd get people trying to take phone calls in the quiet room on their cell phones. Some felt that as long as they spoke in a relatively hushed tone of voice, it would be ok (though everyone could still hear their conversation). Others figured that the phone could ring, and they could start their conversation in the room, as long as they were actively walking outside the room as they talked. What saved it was an office manager who simply wouldn't tolerate it. She would absolutely tell people that they couldn't do this, and that their right to work from the drop in center would be revoked if they continued to do it. She didn't care about their rank, or if they liked her. I did have a couple of ugly moments about it. I very politely asked people on a couple of occasions not to use their phones in the designated quiet room (with signs everywhere about it), and more than once, they started in on how much more important their work was than mine. But it was relatively rare, because the signage and vibe of the room really was pretty clear about it, and the office manager was very strict and just didn't have the kind of personality that was easily pushed around.
• sibelius7th 12y ago
  Why does it have to be either or? Why not provide a variety of different work environments, encourage employees to find the one that best suits them, and work there? I think back to my days at the University. Sometimes a louder, open space was great so I'd head to the student union or the group floor of the library. Or maybe I needed some isolated quiet time, find a private room in the library so I could think. I've worked in places that had only open spaces, and it was very difficult to find any quiet, more private rooms. There are times that I like a more open environment, and I get work done there, but when there are no quiet places I can retreat to when I need it, then it can become very frustrating to get any work done. And no, don't tell me you provide me headphones to 'block out' the noise. Sometimes its quiet I want, not louder noises to block out the existing noises (not to mention the fact that it doesn't block out visual stimulation which can be equally distracting).
  • perlgeek 12y ago
    > Why does it have to be either or? Thank you for writing that. It seems much this discussion is very black-or-white. I work in an office with four desks, though typically only three are occupied. It's a nice mixture between not being alone, and not being too loud either. In vacation time, when I'm the only one around, I do tend to feel a bit lonely after two days or so, even though I still do breaks, take lunch with other co-workers and so on.
  • mmagin 12y ago
    > Why does it have to be either or? Because the people who spend the money at a lot of companies don't want to spend any more than necessary.
• mbesto 12y ago
  1. These are clearly marketing pictures taken by professional photographers. Well done ones I might add. They are meant to demonstrate (perception/reality) what daily life of an any employee is. Not every big tech company is a composed of 99% engineers. Cassandra and HHVM were built there (or somewhere similar), yet people whose only evidence is a bunch of marketing pictures decide to question the design decisions of people with intimate knowledge about their company's organization. 2. There is yet to be conclusive evidence that open offices work or don't work, and I don't expect this to change anytime soon. What is clear to me is that the correlation between good code and office does not exist. Think of how much code has been written in kitchens, garages, vans, etc that may have changed the world...
  • bane 12y ago
    > 2. There is yet to be conclusive evidence that open offices work or don't work There's actually quite a few studies that show that they most definitely do not work. Here's a meta-study that reviewed hundreds of specific studies [1] and the conclusion is inescapable. Here's a survey of tens of thousands of workers [2] And here's a New Yorker article collecting lots of this [3]. It includes a reference to a study that found actual measurable health detriment to open offices. Arguing that issues with open offices are ambiguous is a bit like arguing that global climate change isn't happening. 1 - http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781119992592.ch6/summary http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781119992592.ch6... 2 - http://lubswww.leeds.ac.uk/fileadmin/webfiles/cstsd/Images/PowerPoint_Presentations/Time_use_and_time_loss_-_DEGW_7Aug2010_-_FINAL.pdf http://lubswww.leeds.ac.uk/fileadmin/webfiles/cstsd/Images/P... 3 - http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-open-office-trap http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-open-office-t...
    • sgustard 12y ago
      It's staggering to think, if you are right, how much more profitable Facebook or Twitter or Dropbox would be if they had productive office space, don't you think?
      • mbesto 12y ago
• ThrustVectoring 12y ago
  I code in an open office. My solution: headphones, and three 27 inch monitors angled inward. It's not quite as good as walls, but it cuts out enough visual distraction that it works well enough. I've also got an adjustable-height desk that I leave at standing height, so there's not much going on above monitor height. A big chunk of the benefit of having an office is keeping your visual field entirely work-related.
• codingdave 12y ago
  My favorite space was the one we laid out for our startup back in the dotcom boom. We had large cubicles that housed 4 developers each. We each had a corner, and there was a small conference table in the middle so we could just turn around and collaborate. It was a great mix of a shared environment and private, where it was easy to talk to the folks on your team, but also easy for everyone to just work quietly for much of the time.
  • patrickmay 12y ago
    This works better for me personally when there are a few high-walled cubes or offices opening into a shared area. I have Billy the Kid syndrome and really, REALLY hate having my back to the room or door.
• jim_greco 12y ago
  There's few if any private offices in trading. Even those who have them don't use them except for meetings. As an introvert I can understand the need for quiet time, but part of what makes work 'fun' (and frankly tolerable) is the interaction with your teammates who are working on similarly challenging problems. I definitely miss the back and forth now that it's just me and my co-founder in a private office.
• bane 12y ago
  I'm currently working at a place where I have 4 locations I can work from: 1 - my office (shared with one other person) 2 - a team room, about 10 people right now 3 - an office across from my client, it's a "guest cube" in a cube farm 4 - from home Plus the normal mix of conference rooms. I find that in any given week, I'll rotate through about 3 of those pretty comfortably. My officemate also has a similar work schedule, so I'm alone in my office most of the time, so I use it for deep concentration. It's too isolated though to spend all my time there. The team room is great if I need to collaborate, or get my energy up. It's also not too bad if I need to concentrate as everybody there is working. The guest cube is where I go if I need to do document editing, presentations, client meetings...stuff that's so distracting I can't get any technical work done anyway. And home, because well, who doesn't want to work from home every once in a while? So far, it's the best workplace I've ever been, and this includes about 5 years of working from home, various client sites, cubes, personal offices, open floor plans. The best part is that it doesn't cost the company a fortune, but I get flexibility, privacy when I need it, collaboration when I need it, different work contexts etc. I've been more productive in the few months I've been here than I've been anywhere else in my career.
  • Morgawr 12y ago
    Do you have a workstation in each spot to go work on? Or do you work specifically on your laptop? I find that even with a company-issued laptop, as awesome as it is, it can't compare to a 2-3 monitors workstation if I really need to work on something complex that requires multiple applications up next to each other.
    • bane 12y ago
      Everybody, top-to-bottom is issued a laptop. We get a choice from about a half dozen models of Dells and a couple Macs. About 1/3 of the company is transitioning to using Macs. The sales/BD guys tend to get the lighter machines, the MB Airs, that sort of thing, while the designers/writers tend to go for bigger screens. Engineers tend to go for RAM and SSDs or max out on disk space depending. I think there are a few folks who've asked for desktops simply because they don't want to carry something around and they know they'll never move, it's mostly secretaries. We're all also given very nice laptop bags to carry our stuff around in. My office, the team room and the guest cube all have monitors we can plug into. All my monitors at home are occupied at the moment. They standardized on Dells until last year when they started offering Macs. This means that every possible workplace is full of standardized Dell Docs. So if you have a Dell, you just plop it in and you're wired up to network, monitor, power, keyboard, mouse etc. It's a bit more fuss with the Macs and all the display port dongles and power bricks, but on the flip side, the machines themselves are physically lighter, thinner and generally nicer to use on their own than the Dells. For example, if I forget my mouse (I use a rMBP) it's not a big deal since the trackpad is very good, but my Dell using colleagues are kind of SOL since the trackpad works so poorly. Also the equivalent Dell to my rMBP (15") weighs something like 11 pounds and is about 3 times as thick. In general the philosophy seems to be to offer workplace flexibility while making each choice as good as possible.
• l-jenkins 12y ago
  We are set up in offices with 2-5 developers per room. Works out nicely. If work styles don't meld, you can request to move (given there is space).
• rodeoclown 12y ago
  Scalability is a reason that many growing companies use open floors. When you are growing rapidly, you're often put in a situation where you need the most flexible possible floor plan, otherwise you have to move offices. Having way more offices than employees sitting empty waiting for the hiring to happen in the next few years feels too much like a waste of space. This makes the open office plan very seductive when making decisions about how to lay out the floors.
  • mmagin 12y ago
    The problem with this argument is that aside from work space and meeting space, there aren't many other uses to which most places are going to allocate the surplus space. And furthermore, I've seen non-load-bearing partition walls in existing buildings go up just about as fast as I've seen cube farm put in.
• njloof 12y ago
  And bathrooms. Why are there never enough bathrooms in tech companies?
  • wellactually 12y ago
    Bathrooms are the limiting factor in most self-respecting venues. Yet as you state, there are never enough bathrooms, and I'd add they're never private enough. I do not want to hear or smell when other people are doing their business, and I certainly don't want them to hear or smell mine. Why aren't there more private bathrooms? Is it taboo to discuss bathrooms? edit: But Where Do People Do Their Business In This Office?
    • lotharbot 12y ago
      Related: bathrooms tend to be all tile without much ambient cover noise, which just amplifies the sounds from the next stall. A big, noisy fan would solve a lot of the problem.
• Haul4ss 12y ago
  If those office layouts don't appeal to you, it's because those companies don't want to recruit you. Deep-pocketed companies like Facebook (who surely have enough money to build any kind of office space) choose to build open layouts as a signal. They want to attract a certain kind of developer, and they probably have a platoon of operations researchers telling them they need to arrange their offices like this to get them. If you like quiet private offices then you will not work at Facebook. But that's okay because Facebook doesn't want you anyway.
  • mynameishere 12y ago
    Nice theory but a lot of shittier companies use open plans as well.
    • Haul4ss 12y ago
      Most companies (the ones who lease space, anyway) are at the mercy of the commercial real estate agencies they rent from. They don't always have the money to raze the whole space they rent and build a developer's utopia in its place. I was referring specifically to companies who have the money to build any kind of office space, and choose to build sardine cans with arcades.
  • gohrt 12y ago
    > have a platoon of operations researchers telling them they need to arrange their offices like this to get them. There's a name for the fallacy that assuming something happens for a reason, that there must be a good reason, because the obvious reason is so bad.
• diziet 12y ago
  I am not sure if the author visited any of the offices in question, but they do have plenty of rooms/floors/isolated areas where people do work.
  • abecedarius 12y ago
    I've visited Twitter and Dropbox and am unconvinced that's enough: for best flow you need a personalized space.
• jheriko 12y ago
  clearly the author does not understand how important both vanity and greed are to most people - especially decision makers. XD
• sogen 12y ago
  Introverts prefer a quiet place to be able to focus and work, a lot.
• blktiger 12y ago
  The author is incredulous that any of these companies get any work done. Yet. All of these companies are tremendously successful and produce great software. Obviously there is quite a bit of disconnect between what the author thinks and what happens in reality. Personally I think it's because none of these places are about productivity. In fact I think it's the exact opposite. Take Google for instance. If you think about working on improving Google search what kinds of things do you think are important? Productivity? Or Creativity? My bet is on creativity which I think is where these kinds of workspaces excel. You are in a room full of smart people who are all collaborating on the same set of problems. Innovative solutions are more likely to occur in that environment than closed off in a personal office. Personally, I like the trend of offering both kinds of workspaces. Private offices for when you just need some time to think. Public workspaces for collaboration and creativity. Conference rooms for meetings. Leave it up to the individual to determine when they need to work in each space.
  • sapek 12y ago
    I think private offices are better for collaboration too. When I don't worry about distracting everyone around me I feel much freer to engage in a long discussion with one or two other developers in my office.
  • OneMoreGoogler 12y ago
    I am in a room full of people, none of whom are working on anything related to what I'm doing. The idea that my seating will help "foster collaboration" is ludicrous. It's all about maximizing the number of warm bodies per square foot.
  • gohrt 12y ago
    > All of these companies are tremendously successful and produce great software. Well, they were. More recently (since the headcounts exploded and the open-office fad picked up) they've been coasting along with the S&P500 overall performance and upseting users. > If you think about working on improving Google search I thnk about concentrating to deeply analyzing lots of subtle data using advanced mathematics, not spitballing cool ideas. > Productivity? Or Creativity? Lots of creativity with no productivity: great idea that never launch, or launch with fatal flaws that never get fixed, and products that get shuttered. > smart people who are all collaborating Most humans can barely remember the identities of 100 people at once. How can they be "all collaborating" all day in the office. Hmm.
• benihana 12y ago
  This resonates with me so much. I currently work in a 'creative' and 'collaborative' open office and I just don't enjoy it. It's loud, distracting, frustrating and worst of all, it makes me a hypocrite. I hate the noise, but I am just as much a part of the problem as everyone else. I talk to teammates and make jokes when other people are working, just as they do when I'm working. I can't keep count of how many times per day I'm deep in thought and then get startlingly pulled out of it when I notice my line-of-sight goes right through someone and they're looking at me. I find myself coming up with reasons to work from home, where I am much more productive, much more comfortable and (I think) much more creative. I can take the time I need, I can think out loud, I can pace, I can drop to the floor and do some pushups (which I find helps reset my brain state and get a new line of thoughts flowing) without distracting other people. A private or semi private office wouldn't fix all these issues, but it would go a long way in making me want to come into the office.
• eugenez 12y ago
  It's not about individual productivity - it's about team and company productivity. I doubt anyone questions whether individual effectiveness suffers from an open layout. However open layouts have several benefits that more than compensate: - Impromptu conversations are easy. The barrier to ask someone a question is lower - it's faster to get unblocked. - Shared context. With conversations happening in the open, others will often overhear, sometimes learn, and often will choose to participate. - Impromptu socialization leads to better morale. Someone drops by to chat socially, others join in, people build personal relationships. - Function-specific spaces. The space saved by having a denser desk layout is allocated to having everything from kitchens to massage chair rooms to ping-pong tables. At the same cost per employee, an open space layout has more 'perks'. I've worked in both offices and open spaces and I far prefer open spaces with a good etiquette about when to interrupt someone.
• morgante 12y ago
  Unfortunately corporate culture has shifted to the point that it's seen as incredibly wasteful to give people private offices. Literally the only technology company I know of which provides private offices for everyone is Fog Creek. Moreover, even if a startups wants to give their engineers private offices, external forces make it challenging. VCs think it's unnecessary overhead, and even some developers are turned off by the prospect when recruiting (particularly new grads). So far the solution we've found is to have a separate "sanctuary" room. It's located right next to our main office, but it's kept completely silent. All conversations have to be kept out in the open office or conference rooms. So far it's working pretty well—when you want to hunker down and work, there's space for that but we can also collaborate easily. It's also interesting to see where people have set up their "desk" (ie. default location, with their monitor). The majority of the company gravitates towards the open office by default, but a few writers and one engineer default to the sanctuary. Perhaps the open office is more attractive, even if it's less productive. Personally, I put my desk in the sanctuary but end up spending most of my time in the open office.
• abecedarius 12y ago
  That Dropbox office was a big damper on my enthusiasm interviewing there. "Wow, this is the most beautiful office I've seen... but how do you all concentrate?" They had some answers, fwiw, and maybe I'd have adapted, though my experience of similar setups over a few months says no. This is a real problem for recruiting if the recruitee is me.
• Kiro 12y ago
  I don't see the problem. When I put on my headphones it's like I'm sitting in a private office.
  • RogerL 12y ago
    People are different. I can't work with music, for the most part. Some can hardly work without it.
• noir_lord 12y ago
  I can't stand open plan offices, I can just about cope with a shared office as long as phone calls are very rare/none existent. My current office http://imgur.com/a/KmHEO http://imgur.com/a/KmHEO is about perfect, Apart from the computer I spent essentially nothing on it, the desk was off freecycle, the chair inherited from previous tenant etc. It's warm and quiet and beyond that I'm not fussed about architectural masterpieces.
• aswanson 12y ago
  It's funny how most of these places hire the top cs grads and dont realize they're implemented an n^2 noise generation (audio and visual) algorithm for their developers, deoptimizing the very thing you hired them for: concentrated brain power. Maybe the best thing to do is layout things like a microprocessor, where everyone gets their own isolated location (ram/register address), a place where people who need to be associated come together periodically (a local cache), and a meeting place for larger groups (an ALU) for bigger operations.
• TheRealDunkirk 12y ago
  As I commented on the article: I used to work at DeveloperTown (http://developertown.com http://developertown.com) in Indianapolis. Their "house" setup is both unique and awesome. Any article discussing office space for programmers and designers needs to reference them.
• mellery451 12y ago
  I've worked in a bunch of these kinds of spaces - all utterly distracting. Turns out I'm more productive in my own quiet space at home. If you are doing this to your workers, give 'em the option to work from home and save the rent.
• tessierashpool 12y ago
  As a remote worker, I sometimes work at my desk, I sometimes work at coffee shops, and I get a nice blend that way. Sometimes I log into IRC, sometimes I don't, and again, I'm able to find the balance which works for me personally. Background noise is up to me. Interacting with co-workers is up to me (to a point, of course). Some of my rent will be tax-deductible for me personally, none of it will be an expense for my employer. Meanwhile, none of the existing research supports open-plan offices. Yet it's the norm in the industry.
• deleted 12y ago
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• jedanbik 12y ago
  I've done some impressive work... From my bed.
• spinlock 12y ago
  I put on headphones if I want quiet. What I really need to get away from is flowdock/hipchat/etc... invading my screen. That kills my flow worse than anything else.
• IshKebab 12y ago
  Ha, this is where I work: http://news.images.itv.com/image/file/257809/image_update_b4cb6308c19d7173_1378406786_9j-4aaqsk.jpeg http://news.images.itv.com/image/file/257809/image_update_b4... That photo is quite old. There are about 80% more desks in that room now (around 1000 in total). It's pretty loud. I put up with it though because the job is otherwise pretty awesome.
• segmondy 12y ago
  I work in an open office and I love it, when this space was designed, we all hated it, we cried, we moaned and grunted about it. We left our nice comfy cozy private spaces and have to rub elbows with others. More than a year later, I will pick it any day over any other space, collaboration at it's best. For the first time I find myself enjoying to work more with others than to work alone. So whilst some may not like it, please do realize that there are those of us that love it.
• deleted 12y ago
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• TheSageMage 12y ago
  Personally, I think that most office designers take the concept of open offices too far. From what I've seen of several offices, as a Software Engineer, is that Open Office is meant to be entirely open. This means that the only dividers/partitions are for things like meeting rooms. The rest of the office is open, such as halls, cafeterias/break rooms, etc. This is what causes my hatred of open offices. I am on the fence about cubicles/private offices, because I do like the fact that my team is close by and I can have a conversation by turning around and talking to them. The annoying noise for me is all the idle chatter from people in meeting rooms near by coming out of their meeting and deciding to carry on a conversation right outside the meeting room, or while walking back to their desk. Ideally, I'd like an open office to mean that it's open for my team, where we are partition/sectioned together, but that there is a door or some way of keeping out all the ambient office noise/sights. I believe if I had this, I would be able to get a lot more work done as I'm not having to wear headphones to cut out the general clutter of distractions from my environment.