3 ms·

1. These are clearly marketing pictures taken by professional photographers. Well done ones I might add. They are meant to demonstrate (perception/reality) what

by 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
    Yup, agreed! Precisely my point above - for a bunch of companies who pride themselves on engineering efficiency and see progress as a result, it would seem very odd that they would chose to actively defy an irrefutable claim on productivity...
  - bane 12y ago
    Higher productivity does not always translate into higher profitability.
  - nerfhammer 12y ago
    These companies have golden egg-laying geese products and 15% more or less productivity won't make a big difference in making or breaking the market for them. Think about it this way: did Google beat Altavista because its employees were 15% more productive? Meanwhile, Microsoft, Google, etc. have whole huge divisions that don't make any money.
- mbesto 12y ago
  I've got a list of articles that say the same thing and refute it again. Happy to share, but I think it's only going make this discussion go in more circles. The Leed study you reference in particular has so many biases in it's approach, that I don't know where to start in refuting it. > Here's a meta-study that reviewed hundreds of specific studies [1] and the conclusion is inescapable. If the conclusion is inescapable, then what's the explanation for why so many companies chose to implement it? Especially ones with highly disposable cash flows (a la Facebook/Twitter) where money and desk efficiency isn't a problem. The only real conclusion I can draw at this point is that this topic is a merry-go-round of anecdotes, imperfect studies, and agendas.
  - bane 12y ago
    The only reasons open offices are popular is because they're cheap and flexible (w/r to layout). That's it. People responsible for office layout make the wrong prioritization, that office space is expensive vs. knowledge worker productivity. But this keeps being demonstrated to be flatly wrong. Humans make dumb prioritizations all the time, even when there's ample data refuting it. Open offices exist basically because of broken belief systems. Knock yourself out with some studies showing that open offices offer higher productivity. From anecdotes to data, it's been shown over and over and over agains that, in the general knowledge worker sense, they don't...and the body of studies that keep showing this is growing faster than any that show it's a good idea to pile a bunch of people who's job it is to think into a noisy crowded cluttered space full of distractions. There are specific cases where they might, call-centers for example, but that's simply because you can pack more people making more calls per square-meter and thus productivity is easy to measure. But call-center workers are basically the same as production-line workers, they're measured in calls-per-hour in the way a worker at a car factory is measured in body panels mounted per hour. There's been a very long road in management science, a road that's still being walked, where each step along the way, the field comes to the realization that knowledge workers are not in fact the same as production-line workers. You can't measure a software developer's productivity in KLoCs/unit time, and you can't make development go faster by throwing more people at it. I'm using software here, but any knowledge job works the same way. If you need to think to do your job, things that distract you from thinking will cause you to not be able to do your job.
conradfr 12y ago
Well it seems at some point the HHVM guys isolate themselves from distractions. http://www.wired.com/2013/06/facebook-hhvm-saga/all/ http://www.wired.com/2013/06/facebook-hhvm-saga/all/

by mbesto 12y ago

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
  Yup, agreed! Precisely my point above - for a bunch of companies who pride themselves on engineering efficiency and see progress as a result, it would seem very odd that they would chose to actively defy an irrefutable claim on productivity...
- bane 12y ago
  Higher productivity does not always translate into higher profitability.
- nerfhammer 12y ago
  These companies have golden egg-laying geese products and 15% more or less productivity won't make a big difference in making or breaking the market for them. Think about it this way: did Google beat Altavista because its employees were 15% more productive? Meanwhile, Microsoft, Google, etc. have whole huge divisions that don't make any money.
mbesto 12y ago
I've got a list of articles that say the same thing and refute it again. Happy to share, but I think it's only going make this discussion go in more circles. The Leed study you reference in particular has so many biases in it's approach, that I don't know where to start in refuting it. > Here's a meta-study that reviewed hundreds of specific studies [1] and the conclusion is inescapable. If the conclusion is inescapable, then what's the explanation for why so many companies chose to implement it? Especially ones with highly disposable cash flows (a la Facebook/Twitter) where money and desk efficiency isn't a problem. The only real conclusion I can draw at this point is that this topic is a merry-go-round of anecdotes, imperfect studies, and agendas.
- bane 12y ago
  The only reasons open offices are popular is because they're cheap and flexible (w/r to layout). That's it. People responsible for office layout make the wrong prioritization, that office space is expensive vs. knowledge worker productivity. But this keeps being demonstrated to be flatly wrong. Humans make dumb prioritizations all the time, even when there's ample data refuting it. Open offices exist basically because of broken belief systems. Knock yourself out with some studies showing that open offices offer higher productivity. From anecdotes to data, it's been shown over and over and over agains that, in the general knowledge worker sense, they don't...and the body of studies that keep showing this is growing faster than any that show it's a good idea to pile a bunch of people who's job it is to think into a noisy crowded cluttered space full of distractions. There are specific cases where they might, call-centers for example, but that's simply because you can pack more people making more calls per square-meter and thus productivity is easy to measure. But call-center workers are basically the same as production-line workers, they're measured in calls-per-hour in the way a worker at a car factory is measured in body panels mounted per hour. There's been a very long road in management science, a road that's still being walked, where each step along the way, the field comes to the realization that knowledge workers are not in fact the same as production-line workers. You can't measure a software developer's productivity in KLoCs/unit time, and you can't make development go faster by throwing more people at it. I'm using software here, but any knowledge job works the same way. If you need to think to do your job, things that distract you from thinking will cause you to not be able to do your job.

conradfr 12y ago

Well it seems at some point the HHVM guys isolate themselves from distractions. http://www.wired.com/2013/06/facebook-hhvm-saga/all/ http://www.wired.com/2013/06/facebook-hhvm-saga/all/