6 ms·

The offensive part is the people who say that open offices are MORE EFFICIENT than a traditional office. I have a hard time believing that one. Given how high

• pyre 12y ago
  > The offensive part is the people who say that open offices are MORE EFFICIENT than a traditional office. To be fair, I don't think everyone that uses the term "open office" is thinking "auditorium with 1000+ people." Attempting to extrapolate anything conclusions taken from open office environments of 4-10 people out to 1000+ people seems insane.
  • Igglyboo 12y ago
    I work in an open office space that usually has around 6 people but never more than 10 and I like it a lot. 1000 sounds like a nightmare.
  • sukilot 12y ago
    4-10 is team room, please don't confuse the conversation by calling it an open office. Don't be overly literal in mincing, let words have useful meaning.
    • pyre 12y ago
      Even if this is the case, I don't think anyone has ever stated that an auditorium of 1000+ people is an "open office" either.
• option 12y ago
  Just have some respect for yourself - do not accept job offer if you don't get an office (unless it is a very early stage startup)
  • fsk 12y ago
    The problem is that cuts out 99%+ of all employers. When was the last time you interviewed someplace that gave all programmers their own office?
    • hueving 12y ago
      Plenty of places give programmers their own office. The trick is finding one that gives each programmer a separate office.
      • JohnBooty 12y ago
        I'd be fine with this, actually. As long as there was someplace quiet and private to go when needed. I wouldn't mind if these spaces were just booths you could grab when needed. As long as there were enough to go around.
        • teacup50 12y ago
          How do I use a high-powered desktop with triple heads if I have to grab a booth on demand? I need focus and fast compile times, not a damn booth.
          • JohnBooty 12y ago
            I'm a fan of huge/multiple monitors too. There could easily be monitors in the "booths," that part's easy. As for desktop-level compute horsepower, hmmmm....
          • itsybitsycoder 12y ago
            At my workplace pretty much everything is on the network. All the important stuff and a lot of the personal, non-important stuff sits on a file server somewhere. It wouldn't be a huge jump for us to put everything on the network and make the machines dumb terminals. If you did that, you could just put high-powered desktops in each of the booths.
• ethanbond 12y ago
  > The introverts ... usually the best workers,... extroverts... usually the bosses That's an incredibly simplistic way to view an effective workforce.
  • ChristianBundy 12y ago
    I'd be willing to bet a large amount of money that fsk views himself as an introvert.
• rifung 12y ago
  "The introverts would prefer a quiet working space (and they're usually the best workers)" Uh what? I'm an extreme introvert but don't see any reason to believe introverts are usually the best workers. I am not even that convinced that introverts would prefer a quiet working space any more than extroverts do. After all, just because someone is extroverted doesn't mean they have an easier time concentrating in a noisy environment.
  • calinet6 12y ago
    Extrovert here, former introvert (yeah, it's not fixed). I appreciate the defense against what is at the very least a statement of extreme arrogance by the GP. I love a quiet workspace, and I also enjoy an open office plan. There's a need for the advantages of both environments—the ease of collaboration and the focused heads-down time—which is why this is such a difficult discussion to have.
    • Tiksi 12y ago
      >Extrovert here, former introvert (yeah, it's not fixed). Off topic, but how did you "convert"? Was it a conscious effort or did it just seem to happen? I ask mostly because I had a period of a few years where I felt like I leaned closer to extroversion, but now I'm pretty firmly an introvert, and I'd like to be able to push it back to the other side, but can't quite figure out how exactly to do that. As far as office plans go, as an introvert I really don't mind working in loud, distracting environments. I've gotten blocking out the outside world down to a science, and I'm pretty hard to distract unless someone is specifically talking to me, but I've found that an office with a door doesn't really stop that anyways. My ideal office is probably some variation of what I have at my current job, half-cubicles (4 pushed together) with 1-5 other people nearby. It's isolated enough, but still lets us collaborate and see other people enough to keep the madness at bay.
      • megablast 12y ago
        Probably someone just throwing the words introvert and extrovert around.
• Touche 12y ago
  >Given how high programmer salaries are This myth persists huh.
  • eru 12y ago
    Ever seen what normal people make? It's a pittance in comparison.
    • sgift 12y ago
      That depends on who is your measure for normal in comparison to programmers: Lawyers? Doctors? Waiters? Cleaners? After that is decided we can check whether you or the GP post is more correct.
      • itsybitsycoder 12y ago
        And what area you live in, too.
      • eru 12y ago
        Perhaps just look for the median employed person's income as a rough yardstick?
    • geebee 12y ago
      According to us news best jobs, in San Francisco, the median salary for a dental hygienist is $112,970. For a software developer, it is $114,400, and for a registered nurse, it is $126,670. Numbers are pulled from BLS data (check their methods page). http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/rankings/the-100-best-jobs http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/rankings/the-100-b... Doctors and Lawyers, of course, earn far more.
• calinet6 12y ago
  Not everything is an introvert/extrovert thing. Not even people. Signed, a former mostly-introvert, now mostly-extrovert, who remains an able and efficient member of my team, thank-you-very-much. Now, down to business, my office actually does have a 'quiet space' of substantial square footage, filled with bean bags, comfy chairs, and lots of nooks and crannies. It's highly effective to go work there when needed. The rest of the office remains an open floor plan. I find it useful to split my time between both places, one bearing all the advantages of human interaction (it's not so bad), the other providing concentration when required. This situation is remarkably balanced.
• logicallee 12y ago
  I love how $100 billion companies with a hair (~11%) shy pf a billion - a billion users, active, d-a-i-l-y and run by 9,199 employees (for a company value of $1 million per empoyee down to every last employee including someone taking out the trash, and likewise meaning each and every last employee has whole army divisions, a hundred thousand users, they account for --) - suddenly doesn't know as much - to an OFFENSIVE extent - about productivity as someone who has time to post 5 paragraphs about it. There is someonething offensive here indeed. * 3-4 month old figures: http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/ http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/
  • Iftheshoefits 12y ago
    You haven't established the link between wealth and an understanding of productivity so much as asserted that wealth is a proxy for knowledge/intelligence.
  • sgift 12y ago
    Congratulations, you just attributed luck to skill and established that when you had luck you somehow have any idea what you are doing. Nokia was very big once. Was.
  • sukilot 12y ago
    Facebook wasn't invented in an open office.
• cpeterso 12y ago
  As one of the comments on the Facebook page points out, DeMarco's Peopleware (1987) book has actual research documenting the problems with open office plans.
• Smoofer 12y ago
  This is like every tired introvert/extrovert stereotype all combined into one post. No one person is fully introverted/extroverted. Everyone appreciates alone/quiet time to an extent and appreciates other people's company to an extent. It's way more of a spectrum than it is a black and white status. I love meeting new people and going to social events, but I also have no problem spending time alone working on projects. What am I? A worker or a boss?
• eyeareque 12y ago
  It is more efficient because you can tell when people are at their desk or not, which adds accountability, maybe?
  • sgift 12y ago
    Sure, now you know when people are at their desks, which is irrelevant. You want to know when people work and that doesn't follow from "is at the desk".
  • _delirium 12y ago
    Another kind of efficiency is the pure real-estate economics angle. Open office plans typically allocate fewer sq ft per employee, are cheaper to maintain, and are more easily reconfigurable as divisions/headcount changes. This is probably less of a factor for Facebook, who built a bespoke office building and have a ton of cash, but it's definitely driving things elsewhere in the real-estate market. If you read what's being written in the architecture / office-consulting business, there is much touting of the cost/flexibility advantages of open-plan offices compared to "legacy" floorplans. Even boring old companies like ExxonMobil are moving towards open-plan offices in new construction mostly for this reason. And office buildings built speculatively by investors in the past 20 years almost never have actual structural offices like older buildings do, because that's seen as producing a rental inventory that's less flexible. Companies leasing space just get a big open floor space, and then have a choice between setting it up in open-plan or cube-farm style.
• kybernetikos 12y ago
  > the productivity loss due to open offices is almost definitely more than the office space savings. Individual productivity isn't the aim. I've seen research that suggests the most predictive factor in the success of a team is how much they communicate. Yes, you might lose out on lines of code productivity, but you might also find that you're writing much more of the right lines of code and your colleagues are too.
  • sukilot 12y ago
    100x 0 lines = 0 right lines