8 ms·

Why We Still Believe in Private Offices

210 points by alexlmiller 12y ago

mholt 12y ago
I can't emphasize how important it is not to just barge in on somebody's office or workstation without pinging them online or on their phone first. Unexpected questions lead to incomplete, unsure, or downright incorrect answers, which can unintentionally alienate your employees/coworkers. But it's also important that actual discussions do take place in person with undivided attention, not being distracted by things going on around you. Miscommunications lead to fallouts between coworkers or employers and bosses. As I developer I need my focus space. But I also want a separate place to be able to discuss things with coworkers -- as long as my workstation remains my castle, I'm happy to come out and go to meetings, do trainings, ask/answer questions, and hang out during lunchtime or breaks. In my last place of work, we had two main teams, and their rooms were separated by a shared commons room, but this led to a divided culture. Everyone had laptops and each desk had a couple monitors, so every week, a couple people swapped out from each room and mixed up the teams. That alone helped our productivity and intra-office culture.
slashnull 12y ago
The new offices my company is moving to will have an open floor plan and a foosball table. Time to fight for remoting rights.
- normloman 12y ago
  Don't tell me. They want to put the foosball table next to your desk. When will they learn!
  - robwormald 12y ago
    We just got a foosball table in our office. It is 1 meter from my desk. It's horrible.
Someone1234 12y ago
I like what Stackoverflow does with their offices. Certainly better than what is trendy right now (open plan) and better than a cube' farm also. I will say I think Microsoft's little offices are better overall. The ones I've seen have four real walls, a wooden door, and a window to outside with a blind on it. So if you want to work in the dark, you can. Stackoverflow's glass offices mean that you cannot shut out the light, have to deal with any glare, may get distracted with what is going on in the offices either side of yours, and it means people can look over your shoulder whenever they choose. They would be perfectly good offices with full length blinds on them. But then the people next to you may complain that you're blocking their natural light. But overall they still aren't even near the worst around...
- jc4p 12y ago
  I sit in one of our glass offices directly next to a lot of windows: http://i.imgur.com/FZmvSZB.jpg http://i.imgur.com/FZmvSZB.jpg I don't have any issues with glare or anything since all of our windows have nice blinds that anyone can adjust, some of them even have two sets of blinds (regular and complete block-out blinds) if you would like to make the surrounding area as dark as possible. Not all walls of our offices are glass too, we should've mentioned that in the blog post but it seemed pedantic. All offices have glass doors but they also have walls (painted with white board paint!), here's what my office looks like from the door in the previous picture: http://i.imgur.com/2n3nDkc.jpg http://i.imgur.com/2n3nDkc.jpg The only way I could get distracted by something that's happening in an office on either side of mine is by climbing up and looking at the 12" of glass on the top of the wall that's designed for allowing light to enter rooms that aren't facing windows (which I've definitely done before, it freaks people out, hilarious) To be honest though, compared to the open work environments I used to work at any amount of glare is worth the change :)
JeremyMorgan 12y ago
The thing to consider here is Stack Exchange is a company that serves geeks, and is built by geeks. Naturally the culture and values of the company are going revolve around developers. But for a huge chunk of the companies out there everything revolves around sales and marketing. The actual role and importance of developers varies from company to company but very few of them are going to revolve around them in the same way. At many they're an afterthought. While there is no "typical manager" it's safe to say that if you sample any given company and take all their managers and executives you won't find a lot of coders. Executives don't sit around talking about Rust vs Go, because it really isn't that important to their business most of the time. So they really have no idea what it's like to be a coder, and probably don't take up a lot of cycles thinking about it. Most jobs do benefit from collaboration. Development is no exception, however too much socialization and interruptions kill us. This is what they fail to understand on most levels. They see sales, marketing, and other groups that benefit from being able to swivel a chair and ask a question and automatically assume that it will help developers, since they "never meet their deadlines" anyway. So in my opinion the push for open offices for coders is mostly out of touch thinking, a little need for micromanagement, and of course being able to show off work being done for people taking a walk through. How that affects developers is of little concern.
- Someone1234 12y ago
  I do agree with what you're saying. However whenever any popular startup's offices are posted a lot of developers/coders down fawn over it, so there does seem to be a lot of developers who seem to like the concept of an open plan office even if they'd regret it once they actually started working there.
  - JeremyMorgan 12y ago
    Yeah it's not a hard rule, some people like it. Personally I have no problem with either layout and can adapt. But with most of the people I've worked with over the years, the constant interruptions and people looking over your shoulder drives them nuts.
- Phlarp 12y ago
dajobe 12y ago
I liked the comment: "I’m a big advocate of remote work culture even if nobody works remote." That really works: respect people's time even if you are in the shared, no-cube, open office world.
programminggeek 12y ago
There is another possibility, that all offices are fundamentally flawed creations designed not to foster work so much as to create a dynamic of control. When you pay someone and you control both their place and time for over 1/3 of their daily life, there are inherent problems. I'm not sure that any office plan is ever going to be super ideal because of the fundamental problems of power and control that come with an employer/employee relationship. Open plans are designed to look cool and help recruiting. They also create a sense of "busyness" that owners and managers love. Busyness is proof they are still in charge. Arguing about wether or not it is better for productivity is a red herring. It was never about productivity in the first place. Most of what happens in an office is only tangentially related to the idea of work efficiency.
- viewer5 12y ago
  Businesses exist to make money, not just to give people in power a place to harumph about. More productivity IS important, because without that, businesses are losing out on potential income, and that's not what businesses like to do.
  - programminggeek 12y ago
    You'd be surprised how much ego can factor into decisions that are about "making more money" or "making the business more productive". Things like saving face, not wanting to look stupid, or wanting to look cool to impress friends is a huge part of business.
  - GFischer 12y ago
    However, there are huge agency problems between the stated goals of a business (mainly, to make money for its shareholders), and the CEOs interests - where ego, power, and making money for himself might be more important than long-term decisions involving productivity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm Apparently most relocations are closer to the CEOs home, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8604202 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8604202 New buildings are also monuments to the CEO (or President, or whatever authority builds it).
gavreh 12y ago
I work at Esri where almost everyone gets their own office with a sliding door. Private offices are still alive here (Thanks Jack :)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- emodendroket 12y ago
  > Why does open plan become trendy every 20-30 years or so? Because it costs less. Plus people get sucked up into the hype about how it's great for "brainstorming." Anyone who's spent much time looking at business trends knows it doesn't really matter how much evidence is produced against something; look at the companies still paying through the nose for meaningless Myers-Briggs tests.
BerislavLopac 12y ago
One thing I don't understand -- in this time of laptops, tablets and ubiquitous internet access (whether in-office wi-fi or the mobile broadband), why do we still have this discussion? Are there any companies out there who have a heterogeneous office layout, with open-space areas, single-person rooms and anything in between which could then be used by anyone to their own preference? I would like to see a setup where I'm able to work together with my team in a small-group environment in the morning, and then retreat to a single-person office in the afternoon. In most companies, there is very little reason to be bound to a single desk throughout the day. I can imagine such a workplace, with team leads/managers being responsible to coordinating their teams when it comes to workplaces, and ideally the company would monitor the usage and constantly adapt and improve the workplace accordingly.
- aalear 12y ago
  The Stack Exchange office has a number of open areas where folks can (and do) work if they bring their laptop along. As a developer, though, I like my multiple monitors, my keyboard, etc. Once in a while a change in the environment is nice, but most times I find not working with my optimized setup is more annoying than anything. (Mind you, since our teams are distributed, there's often no such thing as "working together in a small-group environment" that doesn't involve being on a hangout, and everyone being in a private office helps immensely with that.)
- abecedarius 12y ago
  A private office, you can adapt to your own needs and practices. The arrangement you describe has advantages, but so does a space you can customize.
- spoondan 12y ago
  Have you actually worked in an environment like that? In my experience, hoteling as the only option is deeply unpleasant. People like to have a single place to go. They like to have a desk they can personalize. They like to have a place they can leave their stuff overnight. If you only provide hoteling, I think the majority of people will just claim a desk as theirs, and you effectively have no hoteling at all.
mwsherman 12y ago
An important point is that focusing on online tools (instead of in-person encounters) improves communication. Everyone is on equal footing in terms of being exposed to conversations. In-person conversations, while arguably higher-bandwidth, are only shared by the participants. You had to have been there.
abecedarius 12y ago
It bums me out some to see the standard-bearer for private offices in our profession showing us floor-to-ceiling glass walls in a panopticon arc, "not as creepy as you think"[1]. The Overton window's shifted so far to the cage-free side that privacy isn't even in our frame? OK, a few companies still believe in offices with walls. I don't doubt that it's a fine place to work, likely nicer than the cubicles I've worked in, though maybe not better than my home office. But they're clearly not private. [1] From a caption on the original version of the page.
- mkozlows 12y ago
  Seriously, that looks like a developer zoo, and would make me twitchy and paranoid all the time.
- bokonist 12y ago
  The glass walls would be more tolerable if the mid-section was opaque/frosted glass, so you still get the light but you also get a degree of privacy.
  - abecedarius 12y ago
    Adjustable blinds would address my beef, too.
  - totalforge 12y ago
    Putting up transparent bubble wrap does a great job of blurring what's behind, while letting people see if you're in your office. Raid the shipping department.
- kylec 12y ago
  I wonder if you can turn around and face the glass walls when sitting, or if you have to have them to your back. If it's the latter, there's zero privacy advantage in this case to having a private office.
  - GeorgeBeech 12y ago
magsafe 12y ago
Am I the only one that considers lunch to be a sacred, personal time that I don't want to spend on small talk with coworkers? I need my lunch break to recover from the day's stress and pace, so I can come back refreshed and ready to code for 4-5 more hours. As an introvert, I find the team lunches to be waay more stressful than actual work, and that eliminates any benefits of a nicely cooked meal. If I end up in a team lunch situation, I find it hard to be productive for the rest of the day (unless I take a separate mini-lunch break by myself later). The situation was especially bad at one recent job where the lunch conversations always revolved around local sports, which I had no interest in, or this guy remodeling his house, which was only interesting the first 3 times he gave us an update. So I started bringing sandwiches to work, parking in the garage beneath the building, and eating lunch all alone in my car in the dark, listening to NPR or just enjoying the silence. It was the most refreshing hour of my workday and I felt 200% more productive after that break than I would after 30 minutes of small talk about sports. I just want to point this out to people who think team lunches should be mandatory. Not everyone enjoys them equally, and it's not always just about the food.
- jimbokun 12y ago
  My work environment has a high concentration of nerdy people with similar interests to mine, so I look forward to our lunchtime conversations, even though I'm also pretty strongly introverted.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- jc4p 12y ago
  I'm really really glad you mentioned this, it's something I wanted to touch on in the blog post but it was getting too side-tracked. I'm definitely in the same boat as you, my previous job used to be in an open office environment (at two different co-working places so it was LOTS of different teams worth of open office environments) and my lunch hour would be the only alone time I got. Everything changed when I started at Stack though. As an introverted person I don't always want to be alone, but being alone is what makes me "recharge" so to speak. What's nice about having a private office all the time is I can choose to communicate with other people or not, there's always long-running Google Hangouts I can drop into if I just want to talk to another human being, or I can choose to be alone by myself for the entire day. Lunch though, is the only time I get face to face with my coworkers and it turns out I kind of miss that from being in an open office environment. There's lots of people here that work on different teams and do drastically different things than me which would make it so I wouldn't communicate with them at all if I didn't simply grab lunch at the office and sit down at a random table. I definitely agree with you that lunch as a team should never be mandatory though, it's asinine to steal an extra hour or whatever from everyone at your company with the goal of "morale" or whatever they want to say behind it. I'm super happy with the setup at Stack though, it works pretty well.
danielalmeida 12y ago
I've been seriously annoyed about that since I started working in one of those open offices. I've read a few articles about it and cannot understand why would someone like to be in such an environment. Stack Exchange's organization/culture seems to be a quite balanced approach, providing both the common areas where people can be together working/relaxing AND a proper space for them to stay focused while working alone on something. Really good to know there are companies trying to get it right instead of cool.
eddie_31003 12y ago
I've recently left one organization for another. I was a Dev in a Cube for for several years. I now have my own office with a large window. It couldn't be a more pleasant experience. I think with open plans you're sharing a lot more germs too. How many times have your co-workers came into work sneezing? Even in a cube farm, those germs just spread. At least with an office you can keep you and your germs better confined.
jimbokun 12y ago
So what other software companies have private offices? In addition to Stack Exchange, Microsoft was mentioned. When I worked as a developer at Carnegie Mellon, I had an office shared with one or two other people (which was a nice perk, given the pay was much lower than industry). Any others?
- ohast 12y ago
  I believe http://www.fogcreek.com/ http://www.fogcreek.com/, which is no surprise though since their affiliation with stackoverflow through Joel Spolsky.
scott_s 12y ago
This look like open plan to me: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.709036,-74.006763,3a,75y,268.95h,76.83t/data=!3m5!1e1!3m3!1sQAt2ZhdcRLgAAAQIt-NLVw!2e0!3e2?hl=en-US https://www.google.com/maps/@40.709036,-74.006763,3a,75y,268... I assume those aren't developers?
- mjibson 12y ago
  Correct. That's the sales bullpen.
  - scott_s 12y ago
    I want (and have) a private office. Why doesn't the argument extend to them as well? Also: using the URL in the article, I couldn't find the developer offices. Are they down the stairs? Google Maps didn't let me navigate down them.
    - thedufer 12y ago
      Yeah, those hexagonal offices are on the next floor down.
noir_lord 12y ago
I've worked in shared offices, open offices and for the last couple of years I've worked here http://imgur.com/a/13uvk http://imgur.com/a/13uvk (office on the cheap, it's my own company so I spend money only where it's important) For me there is zero comparison, I enjoyed a shared office, loathed an open office beyond measure and absolutely love the peace and quiet that comes from working in a private office. If my company isn't a success and I go back to regular employment I'm dreading that bit more than any other part of been employed.
0xbadcafebee 12y ago
(note: none of the following has anything to do with office layout) "Joel’s management philosophy is deceptively simple: hire smart people who get things done, and get the hell out of their way. The role of management is to give the people who actually do the work — the developers, designers, sysadmins, etc. — all the tools they need to get their jobs done, and then trust them to do the job!" Let's say you work directly with about 15 people. The majority of those people are remote, with some local. The manager hangs back in meetings and listens for problems, and hurriedly works to resolve roadblocks for their direct reports. They also chime in occasionally if people need a reminder of a pressing high priority item or objective. Now let's say those 15 people all come from different places and all have different ways of 'getting things done'. One person builds a unicycle in order to achieve the goal of 'transporting A to B'. Another person builds a bicycle. Yet another attempts to build a space shuttle. If you're really really lucky, all of these different inventions and methods will simply mesh, and there will be no friction within the team, and things just churn on forever. If you're dealing with smart, experienced people, there may be a lot of back-and-forth discussion while people try to figure out which kind of solution is the best. If you're dealing with egocentric 'rock stars', absolutely nothing gets done unless someone basically bullies someone else into caving on their method. Even if nobody actually ever voices a problem with the way someone else works, it is in a manager's interest to be invested in the past, present and future of the work produced. Legacy systems need to keep working, current designs need to be in-line with best practice, and planned work needs to be future-proof and maintainable. How do they do that by staying hands-off? Where do I think Joel's management philosophy leaves you? If you're lucky, with product that mirrors the quality of your employees combined with their ability to form a single cohesive unit where everyone's work complements each other. If you're not lucky, you get arguments, delays, and code that doesn't support the goals of the project or the group. --- On a completely unrelated note: Jesus would I love to have a full kitchen in my office. I would be inspired to try to cook creative dishes and share with my coworkers. And i'd spend more time in the office.
iillmaticc 12y ago
It'd be nice if in an ideal setting there was a balance of both open and closed perspectives. I guess I consider myself an introverted extrovert. While I enjoy being around others and having physical interaction when the situation precludes the necessity open is great. But I think as others have said what the powers at be fail to realize is that in order to be productive SE's we need longer, uninterrupted fragments of time throughout the day for deep, intense, unadulterated focus...when this doesn't happen. Things go to Hell in a hand basket rather quickly. More problematic for me than physical space restriction was the timetable restriction that too many meetings and other time sucks can have. Non-code pushers fail to understand that that question they asked about in the 8 a.m. stand up hasn't been solved or even thought about b/c we can't get a waking 2+ hours of fluid thought. Having worked in pretty much every type of space I still can't say which I really prefer/which makes me most productive!

210 points by alexlmiller 12y ago

mholt 12y ago

I can't emphasize how important it is not to just barge in on somebody's office or workstation without pinging them online or on their phone first. Unexpected questions lead to incomplete, unsure, or downright incorrect answers, which can unintentionally alienate your employees/coworkers. But it's also important that actual discussions do take place in person with undivided attention, not being distracted by things going on around you. Miscommunications lead to fallouts between coworkers or employers and bosses. As I developer I need my focus space. But I also want a separate place to be able to discuss things with coworkers -- as long as my workstation remains my castle, I'm happy to come out and go to meetings, do trainings, ask/answer questions, and hang out during lunchtime or breaks. In my last place of work, we had two main teams, and their rooms were separated by a shared commons room, but this led to a divided culture. Everyone had laptops and each desk had a couple monitors, so every week, a couple people swapped out from each room and mixed up the teams. That alone helped our productivity and intra-office culture.

slashnull 12y ago

The new offices my company is moving to will have an open floor plan and a foosball table. Time to fight for remoting rights.

normloman 12y ago
Don't tell me. They want to put the foosball table next to your desk. When will they learn!
- robwormald 12y ago
  We just got a foosball table in our office. It is 1 meter from my desk. It's horrible.

Someone1234 12y ago

I like what Stackoverflow does with their offices. Certainly better than what is trendy right now (open plan) and better than a cube' farm also. I will say I think Microsoft's little offices are better overall. The ones I've seen have four real walls, a wooden door, and a window to outside with a blind on it. So if you want to work in the dark, you can. Stackoverflow's glass offices mean that you cannot shut out the light, have to deal with any glare, may get distracted with what is going on in the offices either side of yours, and it means people can look over your shoulder whenever they choose. They would be perfectly good offices with full length blinds on them. But then the people next to you may complain that you're blocking their natural light. But overall they still aren't even near the worst around...

jc4p 12y ago
I sit in one of our glass offices directly next to a lot of windows: http://i.imgur.com/FZmvSZB.jpg http://i.imgur.com/FZmvSZB.jpg I don't have any issues with glare or anything since all of our windows have nice blinds that anyone can adjust, some of them even have two sets of blinds (regular and complete block-out blinds) if you would like to make the surrounding area as dark as possible. Not all walls of our offices are glass too, we should've mentioned that in the blog post but it seemed pedantic. All offices have glass doors but they also have walls (painted with white board paint!), here's what my office looks like from the door in the previous picture: http://i.imgur.com/2n3nDkc.jpg http://i.imgur.com/2n3nDkc.jpg The only way I could get distracted by something that's happening in an office on either side of mine is by climbing up and looking at the 12" of glass on the top of the wall that's designed for allowing light to enter rooms that aren't facing windows (which I've definitely done before, it freaks people out, hilarious) To be honest though, compared to the open work environments I used to work at any amount of glare is worth the change :)

JeremyMorgan 12y ago

The thing to consider here is Stack Exchange is a company that serves geeks, and is built by geeks. Naturally the culture and values of the company are going revolve around developers. But for a huge chunk of the companies out there everything revolves around sales and marketing. The actual role and importance of developers varies from company to company but very few of them are going to revolve around them in the same way. At many they're an afterthought. While there is no "typical manager" it's safe to say that if you sample any given company and take all their managers and executives you won't find a lot of coders. Executives don't sit around talking about Rust vs Go, because it really isn't that important to their business most of the time. So they really have no idea what it's like to be a coder, and probably don't take up a lot of cycles thinking about it. Most jobs do benefit from collaboration. Development is no exception, however too much socialization and interruptions kill us. This is what they fail to understand on most levels. They see sales, marketing, and other groups that benefit from being able to swivel a chair and ask a question and automatically assume that it will help developers, since they "never meet their deadlines" anyway. So in my opinion the push for open offices for coders is mostly out of touch thinking, a little need for micromanagement, and of course being able to show off work being done for people taking a walk through. How that affects developers is of little concern.

Someone1234 12y ago
I do agree with what you're saying. However whenever any popular startup's offices are posted a lot of developers/coders down fawn over it, so there does seem to be a lot of developers who seem to like the concept of an open plan office even if they'd regret it once they actually started working there.
- JeremyMorgan 12y ago
  Yeah it's not a hard rule, some people like it. Personally I have no problem with either layout and can adapt. But with most of the people I've worked with over the years, the constant interruptions and people looking over your shoulder drives them nuts.
Phlarp 12y ago

dajobe 12y ago

I liked the comment: "I’m a big advocate of remote work culture even if nobody works remote." That really works: respect people's time even if you are in the shared, no-cube, open office world.

programminggeek 12y ago

There is another possibility, that all offices are fundamentally flawed creations designed not to foster work so much as to create a dynamic of control. When you pay someone and you control both their place and time for over 1/3 of their daily life, there are inherent problems. I'm not sure that any office plan is ever going to be super ideal because of the fundamental problems of power and control that come with an employer/employee relationship. Open plans are designed to look cool and help recruiting. They also create a sense of "busyness" that owners and managers love. Busyness is proof they are still in charge. Arguing about wether or not it is better for productivity is a red herring. It was never about productivity in the first place. Most of what happens in an office is only tangentially related to the idea of work efficiency.

viewer5 12y ago
Businesses exist to make money, not just to give people in power a place to harumph about. More productivity IS important, because without that, businesses are losing out on potential income, and that's not what businesses like to do.
- programminggeek 12y ago
  You'd be surprised how much ego can factor into decisions that are about "making more money" or "making the business more productive". Things like saving face, not wanting to look stupid, or wanting to look cool to impress friends is a huge part of business.
- GFischer 12y ago
  However, there are huge agency problems between the stated goals of a business (mainly, to make money for its shareholders), and the CEOs interests - where ego, power, and making money for himself might be more important than long-term decisions involving productivity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm Apparently most relocations are closer to the CEOs home, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8604202 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8604202 New buildings are also monuments to the CEO (or President, or whatever authority builds it).

gavreh 12y ago

I work at Esri where almost everyone gets their own office with a sliding door. Private offices are still alive here (Thanks Jack :)

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

emodendroket 12y ago
> Why does open plan become trendy every 20-30 years or so? Because it costs less. Plus people get sucked up into the hype about how it's great for "brainstorming." Anyone who's spent much time looking at business trends knows it doesn't really matter how much evidence is produced against something; look at the companies still paying through the nose for meaningless Myers-Briggs tests.

BerislavLopac 12y ago

One thing I don't understand -- in this time of laptops, tablets and ubiquitous internet access (whether in-office wi-fi or the mobile broadband), why do we still have this discussion? Are there any companies out there who have a heterogeneous office layout, with open-space areas, single-person rooms and anything in between which could then be used by anyone to their own preference? I would like to see a setup where I'm able to work together with my team in a small-group environment in the morning, and then retreat to a single-person office in the afternoon. In most companies, there is very little reason to be bound to a single desk throughout the day. I can imagine such a workplace, with team leads/managers being responsible to coordinating their teams when it comes to workplaces, and ideally the company would monitor the usage and constantly adapt and improve the workplace accordingly.

aalear 12y ago
The Stack Exchange office has a number of open areas where folks can (and do) work if they bring their laptop along. As a developer, though, I like my multiple monitors, my keyboard, etc. Once in a while a change in the environment is nice, but most times I find not working with my optimized setup is more annoying than anything. (Mind you, since our teams are distributed, there's often no such thing as "working together in a small-group environment" that doesn't involve being on a hangout, and everyone being in a private office helps immensely with that.)
abecedarius 12y ago
A private office, you can adapt to your own needs and practices. The arrangement you describe has advantages, but so does a space you can customize.
spoondan 12y ago
Have you actually worked in an environment like that? In my experience, hoteling as the only option is deeply unpleasant. People like to have a single place to go. They like to have a desk they can personalize. They like to have a place they can leave their stuff overnight. If you only provide hoteling, I think the majority of people will just claim a desk as theirs, and you effectively have no hoteling at all.

mwsherman 12y ago

An important point is that focusing on online tools (instead of in-person encounters) improves communication. Everyone is on equal footing in terms of being exposed to conversations. In-person conversations, while arguably higher-bandwidth, are only shared by the participants. You had to have been there.

abecedarius 12y ago

It bums me out some to see the standard-bearer for private offices in our profession showing us floor-to-ceiling glass walls in a panopticon arc, "not as creepy as you think"[1]. The Overton window's shifted so far to the cage-free side that privacy isn't even in our frame? OK, a few companies still believe in offices with walls. I don't doubt that it's a fine place to work, likely nicer than the cubicles I've worked in, though maybe not better than my home office. But they're clearly not private. [1] From a caption on the original version of the page.

mkozlows 12y ago
Seriously, that looks like a developer zoo, and would make me twitchy and paranoid all the time.
bokonist 12y ago
The glass walls would be more tolerable if the mid-section was opaque/frosted glass, so you still get the light but you also get a degree of privacy.
- abecedarius 12y ago
  Adjustable blinds would address my beef, too.
- totalforge 12y ago
  Putting up transparent bubble wrap does a great job of blurring what's behind, while letting people see if you're in your office. Raid the shipping department.
kylec 12y ago
I wonder if you can turn around and face the glass walls when sitting, or if you have to have them to your back. If it's the latter, there's zero privacy advantage in this case to having a private office.
- GeorgeBeech 12y ago

magsafe 12y ago

Am I the only one that considers lunch to be a sacred, personal time that I don't want to spend on small talk with coworkers? I need my lunch break to recover from the day's stress and pace, so I can come back refreshed and ready to code for 4-5 more hours. As an introvert, I find the team lunches to be waay more stressful than actual work, and that eliminates any benefits of a nicely cooked meal. If I end up in a team lunch situation, I find it hard to be productive for the rest of the day (unless I take a separate mini-lunch break by myself later). The situation was especially bad at one recent job where the lunch conversations always revolved around local sports, which I had no interest in, or this guy remodeling his house, which was only interesting the first 3 times he gave us an update. So I started bringing sandwiches to work, parking in the garage beneath the building, and eating lunch all alone in my car in the dark, listening to NPR or just enjoying the silence. It was the most refreshing hour of my workday and I felt 200% more productive after that break than I would after 30 minutes of small talk about sports. I just want to point this out to people who think team lunches should be mandatory. Not everyone enjoys them equally, and it's not always just about the food.

jimbokun 12y ago
My work environment has a high concentration of nerdy people with similar interests to mine, so I look forward to our lunchtime conversations, even though I'm also pretty strongly introverted.
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jc4p 12y ago
I'm really really glad you mentioned this, it's something I wanted to touch on in the blog post but it was getting too side-tracked. I'm definitely in the same boat as you, my previous job used to be in an open office environment (at two different co-working places so it was LOTS of different teams worth of open office environments) and my lunch hour would be the only alone time I got. Everything changed when I started at Stack though. As an introverted person I don't always want to be alone, but being alone is what makes me "recharge" so to speak. What's nice about having a private office all the time is I can choose to communicate with other people or not, there's always long-running Google Hangouts I can drop into if I just want to talk to another human being, or I can choose to be alone by myself for the entire day. Lunch though, is the only time I get face to face with my coworkers and it turns out I kind of miss that from being in an open office environment. There's lots of people here that work on different teams and do drastically different things than me which would make it so I wouldn't communicate with them at all if I didn't simply grab lunch at the office and sit down at a random table. I definitely agree with you that lunch as a team should never be mandatory though, it's asinine to steal an extra hour or whatever from everyone at your company with the goal of "morale" or whatever they want to say behind it. I'm super happy with the setup at Stack though, it works pretty well.

danielalmeida 12y ago

I've been seriously annoyed about that since I started working in one of those open offices. I've read a few articles about it and cannot understand why would someone like to be in such an environment. Stack Exchange's organization/culture seems to be a quite balanced approach, providing both the common areas where people can be together working/relaxing AND a proper space for them to stay focused while working alone on something. Really good to know there are companies trying to get it right instead of cool.

eddie_31003 12y ago

I've recently left one organization for another. I was a Dev in a Cube for for several years. I now have my own office with a large window. It couldn't be a more pleasant experience. I think with open plans you're sharing a lot more germs too. How many times have your co-workers came into work sneezing? Even in a cube farm, those germs just spread. At least with an office you can keep you and your germs better confined.

jimbokun 12y ago

So what other software companies have private offices? In addition to Stack Exchange, Microsoft was mentioned. When I worked as a developer at Carnegie Mellon, I had an office shared with one or two other people (which was a nice perk, given the pay was much lower than industry). Any others?

ohast 12y ago
I believe http://www.fogcreek.com/ http://www.fogcreek.com/, which is no surprise though since their affiliation with stackoverflow through Joel Spolsky.

scott_s 12y ago

This look like open plan to me: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.709036,-74.006763,3a,75y,268.95h,76.83t/data=!3m5!1e1!3m3!1sQAt2ZhdcRLgAAAQIt-NLVw!2e0!3e2?hl=en-US https://www.google.com/maps/@40.709036,-74.006763,3a,75y,268... I assume those aren't developers?

mjibson 12y ago
Correct. That's the sales bullpen.
- scott_s 12y ago
  I want (and have) a private office. Why doesn't the argument extend to them as well? Also: using the URL in the article, I couldn't find the developer offices. Are they down the stairs? Google Maps didn't let me navigate down them.
  - thedufer 12y ago
    Yeah, those hexagonal offices are on the next floor down.

noir_lord 12y ago

I've worked in shared offices, open offices and for the last couple of years I've worked here http://imgur.com/a/13uvk http://imgur.com/a/13uvk (office on the cheap, it's my own company so I spend money only where it's important) For me there is zero comparison, I enjoyed a shared office, loathed an open office beyond measure and absolutely love the peace and quiet that comes from working in a private office. If my company isn't a success and I go back to regular employment I'm dreading that bit more than any other part of been employed.

0xbadcafebee 12y ago

(note: none of the following has anything to do with office layout) "Joel’s management philosophy is deceptively simple: hire smart people who get things done, and get the hell out of their way. The role of management is to give the people who actually do the work — the developers, designers, sysadmins, etc. — all the tools they need to get their jobs done, and then trust them to do the job!" Let's say you work directly with about 15 people. The majority of those people are remote, with some local. The manager hangs back in meetings and listens for problems, and hurriedly works to resolve roadblocks for their direct reports. They also chime in occasionally if people need a reminder of a pressing high priority item or objective. Now let's say those 15 people all come from different places and all have different ways of 'getting things done'. One person builds a unicycle in order to achieve the goal of 'transporting A to B'. Another person builds a bicycle. Yet another attempts to build a space shuttle. If you're really really lucky, all of these different inventions and methods will simply mesh, and there will be no friction within the team, and things just churn on forever. If you're dealing with smart, experienced people, there may be a lot of back-and-forth discussion while people try to figure out which kind of solution is the best. If you're dealing with egocentric 'rock stars', absolutely nothing gets done unless someone basically bullies someone else into caving on their method. Even if nobody actually ever voices a problem with the way someone else works, it is in a manager's interest to be invested in the past, present and future of the work produced. Legacy systems need to keep working, current designs need to be in-line with best practice, and planned work needs to be future-proof and maintainable. How do they do that by staying hands-off? Where do I think Joel's management philosophy leaves you? If you're lucky, with product that mirrors the quality of your employees combined with their ability to form a single cohesive unit where everyone's work complements each other. If you're not lucky, you get arguments, delays, and code that doesn't support the goals of the project or the group. --- On a completely unrelated note: Jesus would I love to have a full kitchen in my office. I would be inspired to try to cook creative dishes and share with my coworkers. And i'd spend more time in the office.

iillmaticc 12y ago

It'd be nice if in an ideal setting there was a balance of both open and closed perspectives. I guess I consider myself an introverted extrovert. While I enjoy being around others and having physical interaction when the situation precludes the necessity open is great. But I think as others have said what the powers at be fail to realize is that in order to be productive SE's we need longer, uninterrupted fragments of time throughout the day for deep, intense, unadulterated focus...when this doesn't happen. Things go to Hell in a hand basket rather quickly. More problematic for me than physical space restriction was the timetable restriction that too many meetings and other time sucks can have. Non-code pushers fail to understand that that question they asked about in the 8 a.m. stand up hasn't been solved or even thought about b/c we can't get a waking 2+ hours of fluid thought. Having worked in pretty much every type of space I still can't say which I really prefer/which makes me most productive!