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I would literally switch jobs (and perhaps careers, if every company was like this) if forced to work in an open office like this. I cannot work that way; I can

I would literally switch jobs (and perhaps careers, if every company was like this) if forced to work in an open office like this. I cannot work that way; I can't focus. I realize that I'm adding nothing constructive to this thread; I don't care. Maybe some manager somewhere will see this and a hundred other anecdotal opinions and think twice about open offices. I am the opposite of a prima donna. I just want to work. I want to make awesome stuff, keep my skills sharp and make the company some money. Preferably lots of it. I'd be fine with an office that's literally 5x5', a desk, a door, a wifi connection, and some shared working areas for when it's time to collaborate. Because yes, collaboration is crucial (and fun) but if I have to hunt all over the damn building for a bit of quiet space (that might not even be avaiable) when it's time to bear down and do some solo coding then this is not going to work. Hell, I'll even bring my own damn desk, chair, and laptop. Supplied my own laptop to my last two jobs. No big deal. I'm an engineer; I get paid decently. But I need a freaking place to focus for at least half of any given working week - and sometimes, for close to the entire week. I don't need: famous guest speakers, catered food, fancy architecture, anything. I wouldn't even care if the office was a poorly-insulated garage that gets cold in the winter. I'll bring my own $20 space heater that will heat a 5x5' office just fine. What I can't have, if you want me to get any work done, is multiple simultaneous conversations taking place five feet away from my head all day long.

thrownaway2424 12y ago
Have heard the exact same sentiment from numerous Bookfaces in the months leading up to this move.
- JohnBooty 12y ago
  I wonder: are any of them excited about the move? Is anybody actually like, "Hell yeah... open offices!"
  - chmullig 12y ago
    Everyone at FB is already in open offices. It's just on the scale of a floor of a normal building, instead of a gigantic building.
zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
You would, for the right salary.
- JohnBooty 12y ago
  I would, yeah. To put a dollar value on it? Maybe 25%-50% more than I'd need to work at a similar company with working environment that encourages calm and focus. And I'd be perpetually ready to jump ship to another company with such an environment. I also wouldn't be nearly as productive as I could be otherwise. Those three things all have dollar values attached - in the tens of thousands of dollars, each.
  - zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
    Or you might find out that you don't mind the open floor plans that much after all and that it's largely compensated for by the people you work with, the project you work on and noise cancelling headphones. And who knows... crazy thought: you might end up enjoying the constant buzz and energy going around you during the day, knowing that you can choose to participate in it or just isolating yourself completely from it whenever you choose. Best of both worlds. Keep your mind open, give yourself the opportunity to try it one day, you might be surprised. Besides, it's pretty much a requirement if you ever look for a job in the Silicon Valley.
choppaface 12y ago
I've worked in an exclusively open format office and it can be hard at times. Ideally you can find 2-3 spots to work: your desk near your team, a reliably (tho perhaps non-reservable) quiet spot for focusing, and an (perhaps unreliable) quiet spot for super privacy (e.g. a conference room ). The most damaging part of the open format (for me) is that extroverted ops folk would fight fires all day and make tons of noise. It can be helpful to be part of that if you're also fighting fires, but not if you're coding intensely. The open format can also be really helpful for quick communication during a launch. Nevertheless, I found the open format significantly impaired the depth with which I could think through things. That's where the quiet spots helped out a lot. Unfortunately my company had ridiculous overcrowding issues (the fire marshal literally came after us) so quiet spots could be very hard to find (and you might even hurt yourself politically for taking them). It sounds like this office doesn't have a shortage of space, though. Most of my more introverted colleagues were able to adapt (max within about a month).
- paulftw 12y ago
  "Move fast and break things", there's no time for deep thoughts and too much uncertainty for carefully planned architectures.
  - danjayh 12y ago
    Pshh, so yesterday. It's "Move fast with stable infra" now. Even Zuckerberg had to grow up eventually.
- JohnBooty 12y ago
  > I've worked in an exclusively open format office and it > can be hard at times. Ideally you can find 2-3 spots to > work: your desk near your team, a reliably (tho perhaps > non-reservable) quiet spot for focusing, and an (perhaps > unreliable) quiet spot for super privacy (e.g. a > conference room ) Yeah this seems typical. And it seems so close to ideal, actually. That shared, collaborative space is very important. There just needs to be enough quiet space for every engineer to grab a "booth" or a "nook" whenever they need to focus and bear down. The average mid-level engineer in the U.S. makes something like $80K/year; it's obviously proportionally higher in tech hubs like the valley. It's just heartbreakingly, frustratingly comical to think of a highly-paid engineer losing hours and hours of work every week as they wander around looking for an actual spot in the office to, you know, work.
logicallee 12y ago
"Why don't you take a nice walk to clear your mind. Might I suggest our 9-acre roof which is a park?"
- benihana 12y ago
  The thought of going for a walk and only seeing my coworkers sounds horrible and not very clearing.
  - bdamm 12y ago
    9 acres can distribute quite a few scattershot engineers.
  - thezilch 12y ago
    You might try better co-workers? Seems odd you'll spend as much time as you will with your partner (and kids) as with co-workers and not develop a meaningful or similar relationships. Sounds horrible.
  - baddox 12y ago
    There are thousands of employees there, right? Surely you wouldn't recognize any significant portion of them on a given random walk in the park.
- JohnBooty 12y ago
  "I had a bunch of code to plow through, but unfortunately the conference rooms were full and it was raining so I couldn't code in the park"
  - schrodinger 12y ago
    It doesn't rain in California.
sporkenfang 12y ago
Agreed. The most important thing about an office or workspace, for me, is that there are minimal interruptions. Quiet is best, maybe punctuated by music through my headphones or a bout of pair programming with a colleague.
correctbattery 12y ago
I hear you. I work at Facebook, albeit in Seattle. Honestly, I'd prefer private offices too. I prefer complete silence for coding. (Okay, occasionally jazz, classical, or video game music.) I don't get that with our open plan office. BUT! 1) I can work from home as often as I want 2) we get free, very high quality headphones, and 3) there are quiet spaces I can use when necessary. Coming from Microsoft, I miss private offices more than I actually do. The way I look at it, I do my real coding at home, on an Amtrak sleeper car, or whatever, and come into the office to socialize about coding, a completely different activity.
- correctbattery 12y ago
  One reason I rent a two bedroom apartment is so that I can have an office at home.
  - teacup50 12y ago
    I hope Facebook is paying for your at-home office, then.
  - JohnBooty 12y ago
    Having some sort of dedicated home office space is soooooo key. Otherwise there's almost no boundary at all between work life and home life. It becomes hard to mentally get into "work mode" when the work day starts and it's hard to fully out of "work mode" when the work day is over. Over the years I've found that the vast majority of work-from-homers share this opinion. Almost unanimously.
    - correctbattery 12y ago
      You are seriously underestimating hoe awesome it is to code in bed under blankets on a cold winter day with a cup of hot chocolate beside you.
      - JohnBooty 12y ago
        That would kill my back! But heck yeah to everything else, and add some pets curled up at my feet. I got so much extra work done this winter when it snowed and I worked from home.
Jonovono 12y ago
I always think the best would be a bit of both. Having the option to go in a private room and do your work or work out in an open area with people where you can easily throw around ideas and what not. But i've never had a problem in an open space. You don't wear headphones or a way to indicate to others to not disturb you? And surely you can see where some of the other things you talk about are good for you right? 'catered lunches, well ventilation/heat' etc. If you don't have to worry about those things that's less for you to worry about and you can focus on working! :)
- JohnBooty 12y ago
  I totally agree: most engineers need to engage in both modes of work (solo and collaborative) in the course of their work week. The collaborative time is crucial: I've worked in places where there was no culture of collaboration; sometimes programmers working solo would "go dark," spend days going in the wrong direction, or spend inordinate amounts of time spinning their wheels because they were stuck on technical issues that other engineers could have helped them with very easily. So: yay collaboration! I'm only opposed to work environments that don't even allow engineers to have uninterrupted solo time when they need it. > But i've never had a problem in an open space. > You don't wear headphones or a way to indicate > to others to not disturb you? Of course. I have an expensive pair of active noise-canceling headphones that I love. It helps. :) But there are two issues. One is that people often don't respect this - either by intentionally interrupting you, or accidentally interrupting you by having conversations next to your desk that manage to be distracting despite the best efforts of the engineers that made the headphones. We could say that these people are simply being inconsiderate and we'd be right - but I've been doing this for nearly twenty years and sadly this is kind of a universal thing. The second issue is that open offices often involve a whole lot of visual distraction even if the noise is completely abated. A steady stream of coworkers having animated conversations mere feet away is pretty distracting even with no sound. > catered lunches, well ventilation/heat' etc. > If you don't have to worry about those things > that's less for you to worry about and you can > focus on working! Oh, those things are certainly nice! I am a fan of employee-supplied heating and cooling, especially... haha. But I see Silicon Valley companies who pay tens thousands of dollars per employee per year for catered food but don't give their engineers workplaces that encourage focus and concentration and I think: "Those priorities could really be improved..."
encoderer 12y ago
I think most individual engineers are more productive coders in a private room. And here, many of us retire often to a comfy chair or a quiet corner when we need uninterrupted focus. But my team is far more productive across non-coding tasks by being adjacent to each other. And anybody who felt very strongly about not sitting with the team would, in my opinion, not fit in as well here. My point is: the feeling would perhaps be mutual. And it's OK: every person is not made to work at every company.
- sukilot 12y ago
  Take care to distinguish "team room" from "open office".
- JohnBooty 12y ago
  I could never do my work in a vacuum: the time I spent collaborating with the rest of the team (and with other teams) is huge. I'm actually pretty extroverted. One key factor in switching jobs last year was the chance to work with a team of talented coders, instead of simply being the sole software engineer at my old company. What I (and others, I think) react strongly to is the concept of workplaces where there are no private workspaces (or not enough private workspaces) for those times when solo work is what's required.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
drewg123 12y ago
I work as a fairly senior SWE at Google, coming off 20+ years with private offices (some of that time full-time remote), and I agree with everything you said. I knew it would be hard going into the job. I actually get up at 5am so I can have a few quiet hours at my desk before the rest of the folks show up & it turns into a total zoo.
- JohnBooty 12y ago
  I know, right? Early mornings (assuming one went to bed early enough and got enough sleep) are great and as I get older I'm more of a morning person anyway... my main challenge there is coordinating with my partner since our sleep schedules obviously are intertwined.
- trhway 12y ago
  Having the top of the cream, Google/FB can allow themselves to have their engineers' performance be half of what these engineers can potentially produce. Too bad for the rest of us as our employers look at Google/FB and say "we want that success too" and make open floor offices too...
  - Rapzid 12y ago
    It has more to do with their sheer size IMO, not having the "cream". I've worked for ATT, Sprint, and a number of companies that are pretty big but not super big and somehow they function despite the idiocy that goes on. It's a form of "too big to fail" IMHO. There are just too many people to average out the slack and the ship has too much momentum. It's going to keep succeeding baring some huge market shift and/or gross negligence on managements part. I mean, seriously; there are a LOT of companies out there making TONS of money with no where near FB's or Google's reputation and desirability.
    - calinet6 12y ago
      Wouldn't it be great if that effort was actually focused systematically? Exponential improvement. Deming knew how to do it, and even outlined that the entire economy would rise because of improved management practices. I very much believe he is correct.
qq66 12y ago
As a counterpoint, I recently moved from an open-plan office to a private office at Microsoft, and I definitely prefer the open plan. I feel more energized in an open plan, and I now make it a point to walk around the halls and drop in on people who are open to it (green status light on the door).
- reedlaw 12y ago
  Sounds like a win-win to me. You can drop in on people who welcome interruptions and others can get their work done.
  - sgift 12y ago
    And people can change the status according to their current needs without any hassle. Perfect.
- JohnBooty 12y ago
  This is fascinating to hear. I'm curious: did the open-plan office have private spaces available for when you needed them? > I now make it a point to walk around the halls and > drop in on people who are open to it (green status > light on the door). That's funny and interesting that they have actual lights on their doors. When I ran my own consulting thing and worked from home a lot (often at odd hours) my partner and I joked about having a radio-style "ON AIR" light above the door so she'd know when I was working; sounds like Microsoft is actually doing something like that! In offices with "normal" doors sans lights I usually just use the time-honored system: completely shut door means "please don't interrupt unless you're telling me the building is on fire," a completely open door means it's party time, and if my door is open just a crack that means I'm working but you can come in and talk if you need me.
  - qq66 12y ago
    Not everyone has them, they're called the "Blynclight." They just sit outside your door and light up with the same color as your status in Microsoft Lync (red = busy, yellow = away, green = available). If you're in a Lync meeting, or on the phone, or have set "do not disturb," your light will be red.
pyrophane 12y ago
I have worked in both a private office and an open floor plan. I do really enjoy working around other people in an open office, and it makes impromptu planning more accessible, which I believe aids productivity for self organizing teams. The downside is, as you mentioned, that it can be really difficult to get focused work done. This is especially true if there are other teams sharing the same open space (project managers, designers, etc, etc). The thing that really made it better for me was to get a pair of noise canceling headphones and listen to the right music while I coded. That pretty effectively blocked out almost all of the external noise, or at least brought it down to a level where it wouldn't break into my head space and kill my concentration. There is still the problem of people feeling more free to interrupt you for every little thing if you are in an open office layout. The only way I've found to mitigate that has been to just try to inform people (in a nice way) how I work and what it does to my productivity when someone breaks in on me during the middle of something. I also try to have a couple of blocks of regular non-coding time during which I keep my headphones off, usually right after team meetings. That way everyone knows that when there is a good time to come talk to me. At the end of the day I do like the way collaboration works in an open office, but it does require some extra effort to stay productive when your job requires a lot of very directed concentration.
- qq66 12y ago
  I know of people who wear headphones at work not playing any music, just as a signal to other people not to disturb them.
  - anon4 12y ago
    I actually got so used to the feeling of headphones on my head, that I wear them when I'm alone at home and not listening to anything.
  - isaacdl 12y ago
    I've done this for years, even working on homework in my college cafeteria or other public space. It's actually an interesting social phenomenon: if I'm sitting at a table surrounded by textbooks, notes, and my laptop, people have absolutely no problem coming up and starting a conversation; if I'm sitting at an empty table with nothing but a plate of food in front of me, but with headphones in, not a soul will disturb me.
sytelus 12y ago
Having spent almost equal amount of time in open office and private office, my own anecdote is that productivity wasn't dramatically better with private offices. In open offices, I just used to put head phones on, listen to non-vocal music and be super focused for many hours. In fact that was much better than private office because others would see you wearing headphone and they don't want to bother you. In private office, anyone is welcome to distract me anytime and I have to entertain that because person walked all the way to my office no matter how focused I was on something. Another thing is that teams with private offices suffer greatly in communication and more importantly in energy and passion. Teams in open office often go to lunch together, have more personal exchanges and have far more socialization. When people see their teams working hard around them, they have little excuse not to follow the suit. In private offices, I often see people catching up on news websites and FB and in fact I even knew a guy who freely admitted that he spent entire days on YouTube. These were smart people and it's not that they were slacking off but most people are actually fairly weak against distractions generated from their own computer. Those distractions in private offices far out number distractions by people in open office. A 3 person team packed in to a private office is likely the best of both worlds. In private offices, you mostly rely on bumping in to someone in the lobby for serendipitous discussions. Unless your work is isolated and you don't need to talk to anyone, open office is usually better option generally speaking. However I agree that people working in open office have to establish proper norms such as don't talk loud, put phones on vibrate, for long talks go outside, don't disturb a person wearing headphone etc. In most places, I see these norms are generally established.
- JohnBooty 12y ago
  > When people see their teams working hard around them, they > have little excuse not to follow the suit. > In private offices... ...most people are actually fairly > weak against distractions generated from their own computer I think this is true. When left totally to my own with medium-term or long-term deadlines it's hard to resist the pull of distractions on the web. But that is also fairly easily mitigated with methodologies like Scrum where you are frequently touching base with other team members. During the daily standup meetings you publicly commit to what you're going to do in the next day, and inform the team of what you did during the previous day (along with any roadblocks you hit, if any). I don't find myself tempted to YouTube the day away when I know I've told the team I'm going to to X, Y, and Z today and that I'm going to have to stand up in front of them again tomorrow and let them know my progress (or lack thereof!) > In private offices, you mostly rely on bumping in to someone > in the lobby for serendipitous discussions. Collaboration is crucial! If private offices are so private that collaboration is discouraged, then that's a problem that needs to be solved somehow. > A 3 person team packed in to a private office is likely the best > of both worlds. I think I find this to be the worst of all worlds, hahaha. A conversation can be easier to ignore in a wide-open space (where it's part of the overall din) but there's no such aural camouflage in a 3-person office: it's just you, your work, and a noisy-ass conversation in close proximity.
ryanSrich 12y ago
This is why I only work remotely. Too many tech companies are up their own asses with how hip and cool their offices are. I just want to work when I want, how I want, and in an environment of my own choosing. I 100% understand that collaboration needs to take place at certain times and I really do enjoy the collaboration of remote work with other employees. However the "collaboration" that takes place in these types of offices is just wheel spinning and time wasting. It truly is the art of not working. It's all about how you look in front of managers (who are really only interested in asses in chairs and looking good to their managers...the cycle of doing nothing continues). I really prefer having all hands with other remote employees 6-10 times per year where everyone is together in the same room. The meetings and collaboration that comes out of these is much more meaningful. Time is of the essence so we make it count.
- deleted 12y ago
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- phatbyte 12y ago
  I'm not adding anything, I just want to subscribe to what you said here.
- calinet6 12y ago
  What you describe is a systemic lack of leadership. It stems from a lack of understanding of systems and the way people fit into them and work together toward a genuine goal. This lack of understanding comes from beliefs in individual aptitude and attribution bias, among other things. It doesn't have to be that way. Deming's system of profound knowledge provides a good start to undermine politics and ineffective work cultures. What you're seeing is not a problem of office layout or design, is what I'm saying.
- rwmj 12y ago
  I work remotely. I'm pretty sure that no company has as cool an office as mine. My office looks out onto a private garden. The office is a new wooden building, climate controlled, reasonably spacious, with my own paintings on the walls, and a desk with two large monitors. When I want to chat with my colleagues, I turn to IRC or fire up a video conference on a dedicated extra screen (the 80 Mbps line to the office is more than enough for a high-quality video conference worldwide).
yashap 12y ago
Everybody's different, no solution will work for everyone. Personally, I work MUCH better in open spaces with some background noise, that's what puts me in the zone. If I had to work in a personal office/cubicle/whatever, I wouldn't be productive.
forrestthewoods 12y ago
Are there any pics of this giant open space? I'm inclined to agree with you, but I'd like to at least see it before passing judgement.
mc32 12y ago
What I see happen at these places too is that while in a hushed voice, people tend to gossip _a lot_ throughout the day. And the gossip has to be interspersed with citation, because a plain old chewing the fat without any authority is a waste of time, of course. And walk their dogs by... But I guess it doesn't matter much when money is aplenty. The other subtle thing is that you are being stripped of any privacy --we all get lumped together. Stripped naked of your individual humanity and sent into a human pen to do your work in a commune. It's great for some people, but one has to realize what is being taken away in the name of the unassailable communication and collaboration (and who in their right minds would want to go against that grain).
- sukilot 12y ago
  This is sophistry. I could say an office is a cage, and a pen is better than a cage.
  - mc32 12y ago
    But a cage protecting me from the other, rather than containing me.
richardw 12y ago
My SO bought noise-cancelling in-ear headphones. She turns them on without music sometimes, just for the (relative) silence. Easier than changing jobs and she seems happy with it? She enjoys the team vibe but also needs to block out people around her fairly often. The 'phones allow a lot more freedom to sit anywhere and still be able to work.
onewaystreet 12y ago
Isn't the notion that private offices are better than open floor plans disproven by reality? Tech companies predominantly use open floor plans and these same companies are some of the most successful in the world. What companies would proponents of private offices point to as counterexamples?
- atomwaffel 12y ago
  Stack Exchange has private offices for their developers, and it seems to work well enough for them. They wrote an interesting blog post about the how and why: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2015/01/why-we-still-believe-in-private-offices/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2015/01/why-we-still-believe-i...
- michaelochurch 12y ago
  There are a number of reasons to use open-plan offices, not all disreputable, as I explained here: https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2015/03/02/open-plan-offices-panic-attacks-all-in-the-game/ https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2015/03/02/open-plan-of... That said, a common reason for it is back-door age discrimination. Plenty of companies use open-plan offices without such an intent (they "look" busy, which pays off in marketing, and they're cheap) but the open-plan fetishism is all about "culture fit", meaning exclusion of the old, the female, the lower-than-upper-middle-class, and all disabilities except early stage alcoholism. Tech companies are, in general, very badly managed. It doesn't prevent them from being successful because technology is so powerful that it compensates for inept management. I see this as a good thing in the long term (imagine what this industry could do if it wasn't run by idiots) but, culturally, it's bad because the worst attributes of "startup culture" are infecting the whole economy.
  - wutbrodo 12y ago
    > There are a number of reasons to use open-plan offices, not all disreputable, as I explained here: https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2015/03/02/open-plan-of.. https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2015/03/02/open-plan-of.... That said, a common reason for it is back-door age discrimination. Wait, what? How do open office plans put women, older folks, and lower-income folks at a disadvantage?
4ydx 12y ago
I currently work in an office space in Japan that is shared with another company and, I have to say, I cannot stand all of the chatter. It has gotten to the point that I often wear earplugs just so that I can get something done.
- deleted 12y ago
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danpalmer 12y ago
I think this depends on the culture of the place you work in. I've worked in 4 small offices for companies ranging from 6-60 people, I need a quiet focused atmosphere to work in, and two of the offices provided that, despite being shared spaces. In one of them, (6-8 people) we always had quietly playing ambient music. Not to everyone's tastes and some people used headphones, but it meant no one tried to talk over desks, and if people needed to speak it set the tone as one a bit like a library. The office I'm in now (20 people) is much the same. We don't have any music, but through a strong example set by the founders and a culture of being able to ask people to be quiet politely and without repercussions, regardless of who it is, we have a very quiet working space and conduct most conversations over IM or in separate meeting rooms. Based on my experience in the other offices, I can see why many people would be against open offices, but I believe they can be done well. Whether Facebook's are or not I do not know.
huhtenberg 12y ago
Agreed, except for the catered food.
Cthulhu_ 12y ago
It used to be considered common for people to have their own office or personal space (cubicle), but that's gone out the window. Having to share an office with others is fine too imo - every team can determine their own levels of distraction and noise and whatnot. More than one team in one room is asking for trouble though.
leroy_masochist 12y ago
I'm in strong agreement with JohnBooty's comment. That said, we might bear in mind that not all open offices are created equal, and perhaps a better way of thinking about this is not just a binary "do I get my own office" but also in terms of square feet per employee. 6 people sharing 800 square feet is pretty nice, and you can actually have semi-private phone conversations in a space like that just due to the distance between you and your coworkers (especially if the space is broken up by half-walls, plants, etc). 100 people sharing 5,000 square feet, on the other hand, might work great for a trading floor but absolutely sucks if you're trying to write code or a thoughtful email to a customer. In any case, the thing that bothered me most about open offices wasn't the noise so much as the lingering feeling that other people were looking over my shoulder. I was often reluctant to voice this concern because (at least in my mind) the implication was that I had something to hide, but I know that others I worked with felt the same way.
- JohnBooty 12y ago
  Over the years I've found that many people share that feeling. Even in a private or semiprivate office, I don't like people standing behind me. Like you, I always felt kind of silly admitting it.
- sukilot 12y ago
  Conflating "team room" with "open office" is how we got into this "open office" mess in the first place. Quatity has a quality all its own.
abc_lisper 12y ago
This. I feel like we are being drowned in this open-office dick plans and without complaint, this is the way our future offices will be. Who the fuck thinks that a stock exchange like environment is good for productivity? May be some people like it, most of us(engineers) don't. Why?, do you ask. I will tell you. Lot of engineering(programming) work is built on trying to get a focus on the problem. How do I do that? Not by asking around, pulling shirts and generally being a nuisance. Now there are people like this, who would like nothing more than a open office plan, because the answer is only a shirt-pull away. We achieve focus on the problem by concentrating hard, building delicate structures in the mind, controlling certain variables, testing theories all in mind. When somebody pokes at me or laughs hard, this structure comes tumbling down. We can reconstruct it only with some effort and patience, but it is irritating. This irritation builds up over time, becomes chronic stress and makes you an unsavory person. For managers - Is it not enough for you that you box us in little time slots under the pretense of agile? You have to go all the way and give us a chicken coop to do our work?
fweespeech 12y ago
> I would literally switch jobs (and perhaps careers, if every company was like this) if forced to work in an open office like this. I cannot work that way; I can't focus. I agree completely. I don't have an open office space but I still have to keep my door open which leads to me overhearing people on the phone and the general work chatter anyway, so I end up with headphones. :P
jgrowl 12y ago
Clearly we just need cochlear implants so that we can turn off hearing went we need quiet. XD
galfarragem 12y ago
Last year I designed an office for a small business with 20 employees. Having worked in several offices (with different layouts) made me very "bearish" on open-offices so I advised the business owner against it. While explaining all my arguments to him, he told me: I completely agree with you but without an open layout how do I control my employees? And: With an open layout I can put more people in less space. This is what business people think. All the rest is poetry.
- sukilot 12y ago
  I would love to see this reposted non-anonymously, to cite to people. Also, what does it mean to "design" an open office? There is no architecture.
  - galfarragem 12y ago
    Architecture is about organizing space. Then if needed we build some walls to achieve this goal. The architect still needs to define corridors, toilets, meeting areas, etc, etc. The only difference is that he doesn't need to project many walls.

thrownaway2424 12y ago

Have heard the exact same sentiment from numerous Bookfaces in the months leading up to this move.

JohnBooty 12y ago
I wonder: are any of them excited about the move? Is anybody actually like, "Hell yeah... open offices!"
- chmullig 12y ago
  Everyone at FB is already in open offices. It's just on the scale of a floor of a normal building, instead of a gigantic building.

zak_mc_kracken 12y ago

You would, for the right salary.

JohnBooty 12y ago
I would, yeah. To put a dollar value on it? Maybe 25%-50% more than I'd need to work at a similar company with working environment that encourages calm and focus. And I'd be perpetually ready to jump ship to another company with such an environment. I also wouldn't be nearly as productive as I could be otherwise. Those three things all have dollar values attached - in the tens of thousands of dollars, each.
- zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
  Or you might find out that you don't mind the open floor plans that much after all and that it's largely compensated for by the people you work with, the project you work on and noise cancelling headphones. And who knows... crazy thought: you might end up enjoying the constant buzz and energy going around you during the day, knowing that you can choose to participate in it or just isolating yourself completely from it whenever you choose. Best of both worlds. Keep your mind open, give yourself the opportunity to try it one day, you might be surprised. Besides, it's pretty much a requirement if you ever look for a job in the Silicon Valley.

choppaface 12y ago

I've worked in an exclusively open format office and it can be hard at times. Ideally you can find 2-3 spots to work: your desk near your team, a reliably (tho perhaps non-reservable) quiet spot for focusing, and an (perhaps unreliable) quiet spot for super privacy (e.g. a conference room ). The most damaging part of the open format (for me) is that extroverted ops folk would fight fires all day and make tons of noise. It can be helpful to be part of that if you're also fighting fires, but not if you're coding intensely. The open format can also be really helpful for quick communication during a launch. Nevertheless, I found the open format significantly impaired the depth with which I could think through things. That's where the quiet spots helped out a lot. Unfortunately my company had ridiculous overcrowding issues (the fire marshal literally came after us) so quiet spots could be very hard to find (and you might even hurt yourself politically for taking them). It sounds like this office doesn't have a shortage of space, though. Most of my more introverted colleagues were able to adapt (max within about a month).

paulftw 12y ago
"Move fast and break things", there's no time for deep thoughts and too much uncertainty for carefully planned architectures.
- danjayh 12y ago
  Pshh, so yesterday. It's "Move fast with stable infra" now. Even Zuckerberg had to grow up eventually.
JohnBooty 12y ago
> I've worked in an exclusively open format office and it > can be hard at times. Ideally you can find 2-3 spots to > work: your desk near your team, a reliably (tho perhaps > non-reservable) quiet spot for focusing, and an (perhaps > unreliable) quiet spot for super privacy (e.g. a > conference room ) Yeah this seems typical. And it seems so close to ideal, actually. That shared, collaborative space is very important. There just needs to be enough quiet space for every engineer to grab a "booth" or a "nook" whenever they need to focus and bear down. The average mid-level engineer in the U.S. makes something like $80K/year; it's obviously proportionally higher in tech hubs like the valley. It's just heartbreakingly, frustratingly comical to think of a highly-paid engineer losing hours and hours of work every week as they wander around looking for an actual spot in the office to, you know, work.

logicallee 12y ago

"Why don't you take a nice walk to clear your mind. Might I suggest our 9-acre roof which is a park?"

benihana 12y ago
The thought of going for a walk and only seeing my coworkers sounds horrible and not very clearing.
- bdamm 12y ago
  9 acres can distribute quite a few scattershot engineers.
- thezilch 12y ago
  You might try better co-workers? Seems odd you'll spend as much time as you will with your partner (and kids) as with co-workers and not develop a meaningful or similar relationships. Sounds horrible.
- baddox 12y ago
  There are thousands of employees there, right? Surely you wouldn't recognize any significant portion of them on a given random walk in the park.
JohnBooty 12y ago
"I had a bunch of code to plow through, but unfortunately the conference rooms were full and it was raining so I couldn't code in the park"
- schrodinger 12y ago
  It doesn't rain in California.

sporkenfang 12y ago

Agreed. The most important thing about an office or workspace, for me, is that there are minimal interruptions. Quiet is best, maybe punctuated by music through my headphones or a bout of pair programming with a colleague.

correctbattery 12y ago

I hear you. I work at Facebook, albeit in Seattle. Honestly, I'd prefer private offices too. I prefer complete silence for coding. (Okay, occasionally jazz, classical, or video game music.) I don't get that with our open plan office. BUT! 1) I can work from home as often as I want 2) we get free, very high quality headphones, and 3) there are quiet spaces I can use when necessary. Coming from Microsoft, I miss private offices more than I actually do. The way I look at it, I do my real coding at home, on an Amtrak sleeper car, or whatever, and come into the office to socialize about coding, a completely different activity.

correctbattery 12y ago
One reason I rent a two bedroom apartment is so that I can have an office at home.
- teacup50 12y ago
  I hope Facebook is paying for your at-home office, then.
- JohnBooty 12y ago
  Having some sort of dedicated home office space is soooooo key. Otherwise there's almost no boundary at all between work life and home life. It becomes hard to mentally get into "work mode" when the work day starts and it's hard to fully out of "work mode" when the work day is over. Over the years I've found that the vast majority of work-from-homers share this opinion. Almost unanimously.
  - correctbattery 12y ago
    You are seriously underestimating hoe awesome it is to code in bed under blankets on a cold winter day with a cup of hot chocolate beside you.
    - JohnBooty 12y ago
      That would kill my back! But heck yeah to everything else, and add some pets curled up at my feet. I got so much extra work done this winter when it snowed and I worked from home.

Jonovono 12y ago

I always think the best would be a bit of both. Having the option to go in a private room and do your work or work out in an open area with people where you can easily throw around ideas and what not. But i've never had a problem in an open space. You don't wear headphones or a way to indicate to others to not disturb you? And surely you can see where some of the other things you talk about are good for you right? 'catered lunches, well ventilation/heat' etc. If you don't have to worry about those things that's less for you to worry about and you can focus on working! :)

JohnBooty 12y ago
I totally agree: most engineers need to engage in both modes of work (solo and collaborative) in the course of their work week. The collaborative time is crucial: I've worked in places where there was no culture of collaboration; sometimes programmers working solo would "go dark," spend days going in the wrong direction, or spend inordinate amounts of time spinning their wheels because they were stuck on technical issues that other engineers could have helped them with very easily. So: yay collaboration! I'm only opposed to work environments that don't even allow engineers to have uninterrupted solo time when they need it. > But i've never had a problem in an open space. > You don't wear headphones or a way to indicate > to others to not disturb you? Of course. I have an expensive pair of active noise-canceling headphones that I love. It helps. :) But there are two issues. One is that people often don't respect this - either by intentionally interrupting you, or accidentally interrupting you by having conversations next to your desk that manage to be distracting despite the best efforts of the engineers that made the headphones. We could say that these people are simply being inconsiderate and we'd be right - but I've been doing this for nearly twenty years and sadly this is kind of a universal thing. The second issue is that open offices often involve a whole lot of visual distraction even if the noise is completely abated. A steady stream of coworkers having animated conversations mere feet away is pretty distracting even with no sound. > catered lunches, well ventilation/heat' etc. > If you don't have to worry about those things > that's less for you to worry about and you can > focus on working! Oh, those things are certainly nice! I am a fan of employee-supplied heating and cooling, especially... haha. But I see Silicon Valley companies who pay tens thousands of dollars per employee per year for catered food but don't give their engineers workplaces that encourage focus and concentration and I think: "Those priorities could really be improved..."

encoderer 12y ago

I think most individual engineers are more productive coders in a private room. And here, many of us retire often to a comfy chair or a quiet corner when we need uninterrupted focus. But my team is far more productive across non-coding tasks by being adjacent to each other. And anybody who felt very strongly about not sitting with the team would, in my opinion, not fit in as well here. My point is: the feeling would perhaps be mutual. And it's OK: every person is not made to work at every company.

sukilot 12y ago
Take care to distinguish "team room" from "open office".
JohnBooty 12y ago
I could never do my work in a vacuum: the time I spent collaborating with the rest of the team (and with other teams) is huge. I'm actually pretty extroverted. One key factor in switching jobs last year was the chance to work with a team of talented coders, instead of simply being the sole software engineer at my old company. What I (and others, I think) react strongly to is the concept of workplaces where there are no private workspaces (or not enough private workspaces) for those times when solo work is what's required.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

drewg123 12y ago

I work as a fairly senior SWE at Google, coming off 20+ years with private offices (some of that time full-time remote), and I agree with everything you said. I knew it would be hard going into the job. I actually get up at 5am so I can have a few quiet hours at my desk before the rest of the folks show up & it turns into a total zoo.

JohnBooty 12y ago
I know, right? Early mornings (assuming one went to bed early enough and got enough sleep) are great and as I get older I'm more of a morning person anyway... my main challenge there is coordinating with my partner since our sleep schedules obviously are intertwined.
trhway 12y ago
Having the top of the cream, Google/FB can allow themselves to have their engineers' performance be half of what these engineers can potentially produce. Too bad for the rest of us as our employers look at Google/FB and say "we want that success too" and make open floor offices too...
- Rapzid 12y ago
  It has more to do with their sheer size IMO, not having the "cream". I've worked for ATT, Sprint, and a number of companies that are pretty big but not super big and somehow they function despite the idiocy that goes on. It's a form of "too big to fail" IMHO. There are just too many people to average out the slack and the ship has too much momentum. It's going to keep succeeding baring some huge market shift and/or gross negligence on managements part. I mean, seriously; there are a LOT of companies out there making TONS of money with no where near FB's or Google's reputation and desirability.
  - calinet6 12y ago
    Wouldn't it be great if that effort was actually focused systematically? Exponential improvement. Deming knew how to do it, and even outlined that the entire economy would rise because of improved management practices. I very much believe he is correct.

qq66 12y ago

As a counterpoint, I recently moved from an open-plan office to a private office at Microsoft, and I definitely prefer the open plan. I feel more energized in an open plan, and I now make it a point to walk around the halls and drop in on people who are open to it (green status light on the door).

reedlaw 12y ago
Sounds like a win-win to me. You can drop in on people who welcome interruptions and others can get their work done.
- sgift 12y ago
  And people can change the status according to their current needs without any hassle. Perfect.
JohnBooty 12y ago
This is fascinating to hear. I'm curious: did the open-plan office have private spaces available for when you needed them? > I now make it a point to walk around the halls and > drop in on people who are open to it (green status > light on the door). That's funny and interesting that they have actual lights on their doors. When I ran my own consulting thing and worked from home a lot (often at odd hours) my partner and I joked about having a radio-style "ON AIR" light above the door so she'd know when I was working; sounds like Microsoft is actually doing something like that! In offices with "normal" doors sans lights I usually just use the time-honored system: completely shut door means "please don't interrupt unless you're telling me the building is on fire," a completely open door means it's party time, and if my door is open just a crack that means I'm working but you can come in and talk if you need me.
- qq66 12y ago
  Not everyone has them, they're called the "Blynclight." They just sit outside your door and light up with the same color as your status in Microsoft Lync (red = busy, yellow = away, green = available). If you're in a Lync meeting, or on the phone, or have set "do not disturb," your light will be red.

pyrophane 12y ago

I have worked in both a private office and an open floor plan. I do really enjoy working around other people in an open office, and it makes impromptu planning more accessible, which I believe aids productivity for self organizing teams. The downside is, as you mentioned, that it can be really difficult to get focused work done. This is especially true if there are other teams sharing the same open space (project managers, designers, etc, etc). The thing that really made it better for me was to get a pair of noise canceling headphones and listen to the right music while I coded. That pretty effectively blocked out almost all of the external noise, or at least brought it down to a level where it wouldn't break into my head space and kill my concentration. There is still the problem of people feeling more free to interrupt you for every little thing if you are in an open office layout. The only way I've found to mitigate that has been to just try to inform people (in a nice way) how I work and what it does to my productivity when someone breaks in on me during the middle of something. I also try to have a couple of blocks of regular non-coding time during which I keep my headphones off, usually right after team meetings. That way everyone knows that when there is a good time to come talk to me. At the end of the day I do like the way collaboration works in an open office, but it does require some extra effort to stay productive when your job requires a lot of very directed concentration.

qq66 12y ago
I know of people who wear headphones at work not playing any music, just as a signal to other people not to disturb them.
- anon4 12y ago
  I actually got so used to the feeling of headphones on my head, that I wear them when I'm alone at home and not listening to anything.
- isaacdl 12y ago
  I've done this for years, even working on homework in my college cafeteria or other public space. It's actually an interesting social phenomenon: if I'm sitting at a table surrounded by textbooks, notes, and my laptop, people have absolutely no problem coming up and starting a conversation; if I'm sitting at an empty table with nothing but a plate of food in front of me, but with headphones in, not a soul will disturb me.

sytelus 12y ago

Having spent almost equal amount of time in open office and private office, my own anecdote is that productivity wasn't dramatically better with private offices. In open offices, I just used to put head phones on, listen to non-vocal music and be super focused for many hours. In fact that was much better than private office because others would see you wearing headphone and they don't want to bother you. In private office, anyone is welcome to distract me anytime and I have to entertain that because person walked all the way to my office no matter how focused I was on something. Another thing is that teams with private offices suffer greatly in communication and more importantly in energy and passion. Teams in open office often go to lunch together, have more personal exchanges and have far more socialization. When people see their teams working hard around them, they have little excuse not to follow the suit. In private offices, I often see people catching up on news websites and FB and in fact I even knew a guy who freely admitted that he spent entire days on YouTube. These were smart people and it's not that they were slacking off but most people are actually fairly weak against distractions generated from their own computer. Those distractions in private offices far out number distractions by people in open office. A 3 person team packed in to a private office is likely the best of both worlds. In private offices, you mostly rely on bumping in to someone in the lobby for serendipitous discussions. Unless your work is isolated and you don't need to talk to anyone, open office is usually better option generally speaking. However I agree that people working in open office have to establish proper norms such as don't talk loud, put phones on vibrate, for long talks go outside, don't disturb a person wearing headphone etc. In most places, I see these norms are generally established.

JohnBooty 12y ago
> When people see their teams working hard around them, they > have little excuse not to follow the suit. > In private offices... ...most people are actually fairly > weak against distractions generated from their own computer I think this is true. When left totally to my own with medium-term or long-term deadlines it's hard to resist the pull of distractions on the web. But that is also fairly easily mitigated with methodologies like Scrum where you are frequently touching base with other team members. During the daily standup meetings you publicly commit to what you're going to do in the next day, and inform the team of what you did during the previous day (along with any roadblocks you hit, if any). I don't find myself tempted to YouTube the day away when I know I've told the team I'm going to to X, Y, and Z today and that I'm going to have to stand up in front of them again tomorrow and let them know my progress (or lack thereof!) > In private offices, you mostly rely on bumping in to someone > in the lobby for serendipitous discussions. Collaboration is crucial! If private offices are so private that collaboration is discouraged, then that's a problem that needs to be solved somehow. > A 3 person team packed in to a private office is likely the best > of both worlds. I think I find this to be the worst of all worlds, hahaha. A conversation can be easier to ignore in a wide-open space (where it's part of the overall din) but there's no such aural camouflage in a 3-person office: it's just you, your work, and a noisy-ass conversation in close proximity.

ryanSrich 12y ago

This is why I only work remotely. Too many tech companies are up their own asses with how hip and cool their offices are. I just want to work when I want, how I want, and in an environment of my own choosing. I 100% understand that collaboration needs to take place at certain times and I really do enjoy the collaboration of remote work with other employees. However the "collaboration" that takes place in these types of offices is just wheel spinning and time wasting. It truly is the art of not working. It's all about how you look in front of managers (who are really only interested in asses in chairs and looking good to their managers...the cycle of doing nothing continues). I really prefer having all hands with other remote employees 6-10 times per year where everyone is together in the same room. The meetings and collaboration that comes out of these is much more meaningful. Time is of the essence so we make it count.

deleted 12y ago
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phatbyte 12y ago
I'm not adding anything, I just want to subscribe to what you said here.
calinet6 12y ago
What you describe is a systemic lack of leadership. It stems from a lack of understanding of systems and the way people fit into them and work together toward a genuine goal. This lack of understanding comes from beliefs in individual aptitude and attribution bias, among other things. It doesn't have to be that way. Deming's system of profound knowledge provides a good start to undermine politics and ineffective work cultures. What you're seeing is not a problem of office layout or design, is what I'm saying.
rwmj 12y ago
I work remotely. I'm pretty sure that no company has as cool an office as mine. My office looks out onto a private garden. The office is a new wooden building, climate controlled, reasonably spacious, with my own paintings on the walls, and a desk with two large monitors. When I want to chat with my colleagues, I turn to IRC or fire up a video conference on a dedicated extra screen (the 80 Mbps line to the office is more than enough for a high-quality video conference worldwide).

yashap 12y ago

Everybody's different, no solution will work for everyone. Personally, I work MUCH better in open spaces with some background noise, that's what puts me in the zone. If I had to work in a personal office/cubicle/whatever, I wouldn't be productive.

forrestthewoods 12y ago

Are there any pics of this giant open space? I'm inclined to agree with you, but I'd like to at least see it before passing judgement.

mc32 12y ago

What I see happen at these places too is that while in a hushed voice, people tend to gossip _a lot_ throughout the day. And the gossip has to be interspersed with citation, because a plain old chewing the fat without any authority is a waste of time, of course. And walk their dogs by... But I guess it doesn't matter much when money is aplenty. The other subtle thing is that you are being stripped of any privacy --we all get lumped together. Stripped naked of your individual humanity and sent into a human pen to do your work in a commune. It's great for some people, but one has to realize what is being taken away in the name of the unassailable communication and collaboration (and who in their right minds would want to go against that grain).

sukilot 12y ago
This is sophistry. I could say an office is a cage, and a pen is better than a cage.
- mc32 12y ago
  But a cage protecting me from the other, rather than containing me.

richardw 12y ago

My SO bought noise-cancelling in-ear headphones. She turns them on without music sometimes, just for the (relative) silence. Easier than changing jobs and she seems happy with it? She enjoys the team vibe but also needs to block out people around her fairly often. The 'phones allow a lot more freedom to sit anywhere and still be able to work.

onewaystreet 12y ago

Isn't the notion that private offices are better than open floor plans disproven by reality? Tech companies predominantly use open floor plans and these same companies are some of the most successful in the world. What companies would proponents of private offices point to as counterexamples?

atomwaffel 12y ago
Stack Exchange has private offices for their developers, and it seems to work well enough for them. They wrote an interesting blog post about the how and why: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2015/01/why-we-still-believe-in-private-offices/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2015/01/why-we-still-believe-i...
michaelochurch 12y ago
There are a number of reasons to use open-plan offices, not all disreputable, as I explained here: https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2015/03/02/open-plan-offices-panic-attacks-all-in-the-game/ https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2015/03/02/open-plan-of... That said, a common reason for it is back-door age discrimination. Plenty of companies use open-plan offices without such an intent (they "look" busy, which pays off in marketing, and they're cheap) but the open-plan fetishism is all about "culture fit", meaning exclusion of the old, the female, the lower-than-upper-middle-class, and all disabilities except early stage alcoholism. Tech companies are, in general, very badly managed. It doesn't prevent them from being successful because technology is so powerful that it compensates for inept management. I see this as a good thing in the long term (imagine what this industry could do if it wasn't run by idiots) but, culturally, it's bad because the worst attributes of "startup culture" are infecting the whole economy.
- wutbrodo 12y ago
  > There are a number of reasons to use open-plan offices, not all disreputable, as I explained here: https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2015/03/02/open-plan-of.. https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2015/03/02/open-plan-of.... That said, a common reason for it is back-door age discrimination. Wait, what? How do open office plans put women, older folks, and lower-income folks at a disadvantage?

4ydx 12y ago

I currently work in an office space in Japan that is shared with another company and, I have to say, I cannot stand all of the chatter. It has gotten to the point that I often wear earplugs just so that I can get something done.

deleted 12y ago
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danpalmer 12y ago

I think this depends on the culture of the place you work in. I've worked in 4 small offices for companies ranging from 6-60 people, I need a quiet focused atmosphere to work in, and two of the offices provided that, despite being shared spaces. In one of them, (6-8 people) we always had quietly playing ambient music. Not to everyone's tastes and some people used headphones, but it meant no one tried to talk over desks, and if people needed to speak it set the tone as one a bit like a library. The office I'm in now (20 people) is much the same. We don't have any music, but through a strong example set by the founders and a culture of being able to ask people to be quiet politely and without repercussions, regardless of who it is, we have a very quiet working space and conduct most conversations over IM or in separate meeting rooms. Based on my experience in the other offices, I can see why many people would be against open offices, but I believe they can be done well. Whether Facebook's are or not I do not know.

huhtenberg 12y ago

Agreed, except for the catered food.

Cthulhu_ 12y ago

It used to be considered common for people to have their own office or personal space (cubicle), but that's gone out the window. Having to share an office with others is fine too imo - every team can determine their own levels of distraction and noise and whatnot. More than one team in one room is asking for trouble though.

leroy_masochist 12y ago

I'm in strong agreement with JohnBooty's comment. That said, we might bear in mind that not all open offices are created equal, and perhaps a better way of thinking about this is not just a binary "do I get my own office" but also in terms of square feet per employee. 6 people sharing 800 square feet is pretty nice, and you can actually have semi-private phone conversations in a space like that just due to the distance between you and your coworkers (especially if the space is broken up by half-walls, plants, etc). 100 people sharing 5,000 square feet, on the other hand, might work great for a trading floor but absolutely sucks if you're trying to write code or a thoughtful email to a customer. In any case, the thing that bothered me most about open offices wasn't the noise so much as the lingering feeling that other people were looking over my shoulder. I was often reluctant to voice this concern because (at least in my mind) the implication was that I had something to hide, but I know that others I worked with felt the same way.

JohnBooty 12y ago
Over the years I've found that many people share that feeling. Even in a private or semiprivate office, I don't like people standing behind me. Like you, I always felt kind of silly admitting it.
sukilot 12y ago
Conflating "team room" with "open office" is how we got into this "open office" mess in the first place. Quatity has a quality all its own.

abc_lisper 12y ago

This. I feel like we are being drowned in this open-office dick plans and without complaint, this is the way our future offices will be. Who the fuck thinks that a stock exchange like environment is good for productivity? May be some people like it, most of us(engineers) don't. Why?, do you ask. I will tell you. Lot of engineering(programming) work is built on trying to get a focus on the problem. How do I do that? Not by asking around, pulling shirts and generally being a nuisance. Now there are people like this, who would like nothing more than a open office plan, because the answer is only a shirt-pull away. We achieve focus on the problem by concentrating hard, building delicate structures in the mind, controlling certain variables, testing theories all in mind. When somebody pokes at me or laughs hard, this structure comes tumbling down. We can reconstruct it only with some effort and patience, but it is irritating. This irritation builds up over time, becomes chronic stress and makes you an unsavory person. For managers - Is it not enough for you that you box us in little time slots under the pretense of agile? You have to go all the way and give us a chicken coop to do our work?

fweespeech 12y ago

> I would literally switch jobs (and perhaps careers, if every company was like this) if forced to work in an open office like this. I cannot work that way; I can't focus. I agree completely. I don't have an open office space but I still have to keep my door open which leads to me overhearing people on the phone and the general work chatter anyway, so I end up with headphones. :P

jgrowl 12y ago

Clearly we just need cochlear implants so that we can turn off hearing went we need quiet. XD

galfarragem 12y ago

Last year I designed an office for a small business with 20 employees. Having worked in several offices (with different layouts) made me very "bearish" on open-offices so I advised the business owner against it. While explaining all my arguments to him, he told me: I completely agree with you but without an open layout how do I control my employees? And: With an open layout I can put more people in less space. This is what business people think. All the rest is poetry.

sukilot 12y ago
I would love to see this reposted non-anonymously, to cite to people. Also, what does it mean to "design" an open office? There is no architecture.
- galfarragem 12y ago
  Architecture is about organizing space. Then if needed we build some walls to achieve this goal. The architect still needs to define corridors, toilets, meeting areas, etc, etc. The only difference is that he doesn't need to project many walls.