11 ms·

Why Open Offices?

107 points by gpresot 11y ago

FormFollowsFunc 11y ago
Maybe it's because developers don't run companies in general. For management cost and control would be more important considerations. I know of a local software company that's owned by 2 developers where they have individual offices. While 37 Signals kind of have an open office, it's meant to be as quiet as a library to avoid disruptions. People who manage probably don't need to concentrate as much as the people who create the stuff. I suppose my point is that people at the top call the shots, not the people at the bottom.
- amirmc 11y ago
  That comment is just a way of saying 'they' are not like 'me' (but trying to make it sound general). Facebook, led by a (former) dev, has gone all-in on open plan offices - which is a direct counterpoint. That people at the top call the shots is tautological. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinkruse/2012/08/25/facebook-unveils-new-campus-will-workers-be-sick-stressed-and-dissatisfied/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinkruse/2012/08/25/facebook-u...
  - frostmatthew 11y ago
    > Facebook, led by a (former) dev, has gone all-in on open plan offices As another comment[1] pointed out it may have been founded by a developer, but it was one who never worked anywhere other than the company he founded and grew. Things that work well for a company of ten or twenty don't necessarily work best when it grows into the hundreds or thousands of employees. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9968367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9968367
    - amirmc 11y ago
      My point was to refute the assertion that it's "because developers don't run companies in general." If we're going to add lots of caveats to what 'developer' means, then we're essentially making a 'No true scotsman argument' -- (i.e. Zuck hasn't worked anywhere else, and is ostensibly a manager now).
      - frostmatthew 11y ago
        Oh sorry, I certainly didn't mean to suggest he isn't a "true" developer - I'm sure he could code circles around me. I meant only that you were pointing to Facebook as a "direct counterpoint" to the suggestion that "developers don't run companies in general" - and it's not a great counterpoint because he's not going into the office every day and writing code, and hasn't since Facebook was a small/early-stage startup (where open layouts make the most sense). i.e. he isn't making the decision as a developer, he's making it as a manager and the comment you were originally replying to was suggesting "for management cost and control would be more important considerations." [Though I'm not sure I entirely agree with that, as pointed out in my own reply to that comment]
- frostmatthew 11y ago
  > People who manage probably don't need to concentrate as much as the people who create the stuff. That may be true but it's probably more of a case of the difference between the "Maker's Schedule" and the "Manager's Schedule"[1] - i.e. managers probably don't realize how much distractions or interruptions are bad for "maker's" productivity because a manager's day is mostly distractions or interruptions. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
buserror 11y ago
I think the real reason is 'cost', and the loss of productivity isn't quantifiable anyway; so whomever makes the decision can put an exact number on how much he 'saved' while being able to ignore the side effects. It's like people who buy solar panels in north england; they think it gives them 'free' energy and they are being 'green', while ignoring completely the carbon footprint of making that panel in the first place; while that panel will /never/ repay itself with the energy it harvests. Going back to open offices (and I'm typing this from one!) I think it's a disaster. There are days when all I can really do is read HN, as there's about 3 loud conversations within 5 meters of me, including one Italian guy who's yelling into his skype microphone.
- bane 11y ago
  This is basically it. There's a thing I've noticed, I like to call it the "inverted reason list". It's an upside-down ordered list of reasons to do something, delivered to a skeptical or hostile audience. The list is ordered such that reasons the audience will like are delivered first, as if they are the most important, and the reasons the audience will hate are delivered at the end, as a side-thought. "and oh....it turns out open offices will save us $5m a year in facilities costs." is usually delivered at the end, when nobody is paying attention anymore, because it was preceded by "free snacks at every 25th cube!" and "will allow you to configure seating to keep your team near you" For work that requires lots of talking (or not lots of deep thinking), they work "ok", but for knowledge work, they're basically the worst idea ever conceived outside of sending all your coders to rock concerts all work day and wondering why nothing is getting done. Where I work, most people get or split offices, but we can work in a few other places, including an open work area. Most people hate working there because it will inevitably have somebody on speaker phone having an argument with their health insurance over an unpaid bill, and that conversation will go on for 2 or 3 weeks solid. Appeals to management have basically been ignored, and now we're getting ready to move to a new facility that's all open space.
- rtpg 11y ago
  But couldn't that be solved through office culture? Simply telling people "skype calls happen somewhere else"? Though obviously it would take a lot of work to get everyone to agree that that is the "best" culture. Especially for people who talk for a living (customer service, sales) Surely you have an empty conference room somewhere
danieltillett 11y ago
It is a pity there is not easy experiment that people can do to prove to upper management that they are more productive in individual offices.
- eeww 11y ago
  I'm sure most managements would not care about those experiments anyway http://www.theguardian.com/money/work-blog/2014/sep/29/open-plan-office-health-productivity http://www.theguardian.com/money/work-blog/2014/sep/29/open-...
- frostmatthew 11y ago
  There's no shortage of studies that have been done on the issue. Here's a great New Yorker article[1] from last year that references a number of studies. This blog post[2] links to a couple others and addresses costs/alternatives. A "study of over 40,000 survey responses collected over a decade has found that the benefits for workers are quickly outweighed by the disadvantages"[3]. Here's a Washington Post article[4] discussing Facebook's huge open office layout, another Post piece[5] on office furniture designers realizing (citing multiple studies) "open-plan spaces are actually lousy for workers." A TIME article[6] highlighted decades of research that associated open layouts with "greater employee stress, poorer co-worker relations and reduced satisfaction with the physical environment." [1] http://www.newyorker.com/currency-tag/the-open-office-trap http://www.newyorker.com/currency-tag/the-open-office-trap [2] http://nathanmarz.com/blog/the-inexplicable-rise-of-open-floor-plans-in-tech-companies.html http://nathanmarz.com/blog/the-inexplicable-rise-of-open-flo... [3] http://theconversation.com/open-plan-offices-attract-highest-levels-of-worker-dissatisfaction-study-18246 http://theconversation.com/open-plan-offices-attract-highest... [4] http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/30/google-got-it-wrong-the-open-office-trend-is-destroying-the-workplace/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/30/g... [5] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-leadership/wp/2015/04/22/office-designers-find-open-plan-spaces-are-actually-lousy-for-workers/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-leadership/wp/2015/04... [6] http://ideas.time.com/2012/08/15/why-the-open-office-is-a-hotbed-of-stress/ http://ideas.time.com/2012/08/15/why-the-open-office-is-a-ho...
  - 11y ago
GreaterFool 11y ago
Personally I like open offices and working with people. I think the problem is not with the idea but with the implementation. Great open offices have some place where you can go and where nobody will bother you. So you can have the alone time you need! Unfortunately most open office have no such space. Not even the toilets (multiple cramped stalls? hell no!). Everywhere you go and at all times there are going to be people. I think that is the problem.
- leereeves 11y ago
  Open offices are like paradise for extroverts, and hell for introverts. I think office design should favor more of a compromise between the two groups.
  - carapat_virulat 11y ago
    I think that depends what kind of introvert you are. I like big open offices because I feel "anonymous" there and it's very easy for me to disconnect from what's going on around me and do my own thing for hours, and then speak with anybody from my team when I need to. If there's some person around with whom you don't connect very well no bad atmosphere is going to occur unless you force it. I don't need a big bubble for myself, I can create a small one easily. For me a small office with 2 or 3 people is more stressful, it makes me more aware about what's going on around me because it's a more personal space. If you don't connect with somebody in there, the bad atmosphere is going to fill the small office very fast. My bubble is going to trip onto somebody else's bubble more often than in a big space full of people because there's less neutral space around. Not sure if that makes sense at all... but it does to me.
  - logicfiction 11y ago
    It really comes down to this. One of my psychology textbooks characterized the basic distinction between extrovert and introvert as the following: Extroverts become uncomfortable with a lack of external stimuli and thus prefer to surround themselves with stimuli. Introverts become uncomfortable with too much external stimulus and thus prefer to isolate themselves from excessive stimulus. To me that basically directly quantifies why some people thrive in an open office and other suffer. I'm not sure what the solution is to requiring essentially two different environments depending on a person's makeup.
jkot 11y ago
Battle for open office is lost and irrelevant. Now it is about location independence and working remotely.
- a3n 11y ago
  Followed in some number of years by people in Africa doing the former jobs of people in San Francisco. If you in America can work remotely, there's no reason why someone with equivalent skills and 1/20 the cost can't work really remotely. You might point to stories of Indian contractors like Tata, and how badly that works out for anything that's not Telco CRUD. (Note, I'm talking about the business model, not individual Indians.) But that was just the first attempt. Software will figure it out, just as textiles figured it out.
inversionOf 11y ago
One factor of open offices that is seldom counted, but remains very important, is "fitting the organization to an image". If you're bringing bankers or investors or other external parties through, what is more "impressive": A floor full of hard working bees, a buzz of energy filling the air, whiteboards full of complex diagrams (that probably haven't been erased in months if not years) and quirky and crazy "personalizations" on all of the desks, or walking down a hall of quiet closed doors. Or, worse still (and the #1 reason why many companies don't allow remote work), no office really at all because everyone is everywhere. That "show off the empire" thing is absolutely a function of decisions. I was recently part of such a decision process where a group was looking to become startup-y, and cargo culting the media image of what such organizations look like reigned supreme.
- nazka 11y ago
  It seems to be common to do that... A friend of mine who was at a unicorn company in SF before it was a unicorn, had nice tables, furniture, and overpowered computers everywhere around the pathway from the entrance to the conference room. So when VCs and business angels came it looked very nice but everybody out of the pathway had nothing like that.
  - pjc50 11y ago
    Potemkin office! I'd never really considered the office as a form of stage set for the performance of the appearance of work before.
    - nazka 11y ago
      Ya I know... Like people in the front were able to have a budget of ~2000 dollars per person (hello Thunderbolt Displays!) but for others it was not even more than 300 dollars.
  - Too 11y ago
    It's not only for VCs, it's also for attracting new hires.
- 11y ago
martinald 11y ago
Does fogcreek still give everyone private offices? I remember years ago Joel Spolsky writing something similar. Wonder if they still stick to it.
- knowaveragejoe 11y ago
  They aren't "private" like you're probably thinking, they're more like rooms that 2 or 3 people share with glass walls on one side.
  - edem 11y ago
    See for yourself: https://picasaweb.google.com/spolsky/FogCreekSNewOffice# https://picasaweb.google.com/spolsky/FogCreekSNewOffice#
- krallja 11y ago
  Yes, all developers at Fog Creek HQ still get private offices. It's easier to do when over half your tech staff works from home.
mianos 11y ago
Also, add total hot desking to this for another bump down the productivity scale. Then, to make things worse, they usually oversubscribe the people to desks because at any one time quite a few people would be in meetings or not in the office. Net result, huge saving on rent. After a few days of sharing a desk with another guy and swapping power points to keep both our laptops charged, I complained and they looked at me like I was a freak of nature.
- dunmalg 11y ago
  It's amazing how many managers to this day are hell-bent on repeating the Chiat-Day fiasco http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/7.02/chiat_pr.html http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/7.02/chiat_pr.html
- dunmalg 11y ago
  It's amazing how many managers to this day are hell-bent on repeating the Chiat-Day fiasco http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/7.02/chiat_pr.html http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/7.02/chiat_pr.html
fit2rule 11y ago
Personally I feel that with varying degrees of effort I can work in either end of the spectrum: closed offices, cubicle farm, open office, coffeeshop, etc. Some people can't. Some people need a desk and a door to close. So for me from a founders perspective, the best kind of environment to get things started would be a company space that encourages setups like a cafe/lounge/coffeetable-style area for laptop users and those who need to be comfortable, focused, and relatively available with ease for discussion .. as well as areas of the workfloor where there are offices, for example, for those who need them, or hackylab environment for where its needed, etc. Alas, this kind of mixed-format personal workspace organization is not so economical, and it usually requires someone be responsible for the estate, rather than just having a cubicle-cleaning service, etc. etc. All kinds of legal hoops, too, whatever. But in my experience, this seems to be the case: the nicest 'kind' of workspace for a modern startup company in my opinion, is your average McMansion. (If you can fit and find one local to everyone else who has to commute to it.) I've seen great mixed-format startup scenarios in your average American mega-house, cubicle farm in the 4-car garage, massive lounge/rec-room space for the hackers, room #? of (4..6) bedrooms converted to shared office rooms, 2 or 3 to a room, for those who want 'a desktop' and a way to isolate themselves from the rest of the team, and so on. Of course, this works if the house is clean and maintained as a work environment, and indeed if people don't live there but rather treat it as their place of work. That can be difficult to do in some neighborhoods. Wouldn't it then be interesting to see some sort of 'office space plan' revolution occur in the broader sense, which accommodates all of these modes of operation, to implement a model you could name "Big Family Home"? Instead of cubical farms, you find interior spaces analog to a modern home plan, s/beds/desktops/, centered around a common room/kitchen/meeting area, etc. Generally the way I feel when I walk into a very large organization and its just endless row of cubicle, mind-numbing soviet khaki walls lit by brain-sucking illumination standards, all I want to do is go home. That is a hard impulse to resist all day. If, instead, I'm in a place that accommodates a large number of peoples needs with some consistent attention to variety, usually its pretty hard to go home at the end of the day .. I really like going to a business where people are working and comfortable because they know where the kitchen is, and someone is making lunch for everyone while code gets written, clients are met, teams are having meetings out on the deck in the sunshine, etc. I'm sure there are movements towards this; but the cubicle-farm seems to have persisted for decades, alas, and for this I guess we must thank the bean-counters.
moron4hire 11y ago
> Moreover, engineers are really, really expensive, and making us less productive is costly. The extra space necessary for doors or cubicles could easily pay for itself. The problem is, there is no good way to measure engineer productivity, but it's extremely easy to figure out the cost of office furniture. Modern corporations believe in optimizing what they can measure and completely ignoring what they can't.
deanCommie 11y ago
I'm sick of the circle jerk hatred about open offices. Yes, let's discuss the pros and cons and acknowledge that they don't work for everyone. But no setup works for everyone. And we need to stop pretending that open office plans are some poorly thought out pranks invented by clueless managers that offer nothing to developers. I am a developer. I am not an extrovert. I love working in an open office, and the one job I had almost 10 years ago that was rows and rows of offices made me MISERABLE. I almost quit but luckily was able to move to a team that had a team area with an open plan. Fact: In today's age of agility, rapid development, minimum viable products, continuous deployment, and short iterations it is much more important that you can discuss things with your coworkers and stakeholders quickly and figure out if you are working on the right thing, rather than going away for 6 months into some basement, close the door, and come back with a finished product. Fact: Distractions are cultural not physical. Provide the team with good quality headphones, shame people who have non-silent notifications on their devices, create a policy where people can indicate when they're deep in thought on something complex and would prefer not to be distracted (eg. Do Not Disturb status on internal chat that you check before messaging someone or tapping them on the shoulder), and provide flex space people can go to on a case by case basis for privacy. Do this and all the problems with "focus" that open-office haters complain about GO AWAY.
- honest_joe 11y ago
  BSHIT. I find your nick quite fitting to what you say. You are an extrovert that loves to keep his mouth open and chit chat a lot. The simple presence of people around you sucks your energy. I doubt you are a real engineer...you are most probably just a manager that tries to convince everyone about the benefits of an open office. Or you are a corporate sellout whore.
  - dang 11y ago
    Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News.
- a3n 11y ago
  > I almost quit but luckily was able to move to a team that had a team area with an open plan. I've worked on a team that had its own large cubicle, with four people in it. We all mostly worked on the same thing, and we could roll ourselves over to screens and have whiteboard discussions. That was great. I've had my own office, with a window. That was even better. Then I shared it with another person. That was still great. Then there were three of us. Conversation stopped. None of us worked on the same thing. And of course I've worked in cubes. What evs. I've never worked in an open office of long tables and no partitions. I know I'd hate not being able to raise my eyes and stare off into space without inadvertently staring at someone nearby. And the distractions would kill me. But I guess that's just me, and all I have to do is see that at the interview so I can say no; problem solved?
michaelt 11y ago
One possibility is some people genuinely prefer them. I keep talking myself up to that, only to read another article about how everyone is miserable and unproductive in them. Given the choice between open plan and private office in San Francisco (where office space costs ~$36/square foot) people say they'd rather have a private office. Given the choice between open plan in San Francisco and a private office in Chattanooga, Tennessee (where office space costs ~$11/square foot) my guess is you'd get more job applicants for the job in SF. Perhaps this is a revealed preference for living in SF, and people are willing to trade off private offices to get it.
- cableshaft 11y ago
  Or option three: Given the choice between open plan in San Francisco and open plan in Chattanooga, Tennessee, they choose the job in SF. There's just as many open plan offices outside of SF. I'm in the Chicago area, and I've never worked at, with, or interviewed with any company around here that didn't have an open office plan (with one single exception, and it was a game company, and they were split up into rooms of 6-8 people, no private offices except for management).
honest_joe 11y ago
Open Office + Home Office works for me. If i can choose 3 days to work at home and then come to work for meetings, brainstorming etc then it's ideal.
vessenes 11y ago
IBM did a fair amount of research on this in the 1970s and 80s. They talk about some of it in their Santa Teresa design paper I think: http://domino.research.ibm.com/tchjr/journalindex.nsf/9fe6a820aae67ad785256547004d8af0/fb3c49ab2d463e1c85256bfa00685aec!OpenDocument http://domino.research.ibm.com/tchjr/journalindex.nsf/9fe6a8... The major takeaways I have from reading about this when I started in tech entrepreneurship are: 1) Knowledge workers need 30 square feet of desk to get optimal efficiency 2) They need 100 square feet of space 3) cubicles are as good as an office if the walls are over 8 feet high (!) 4) small teams tend to want to talk at the same time, and be quiet at the same time. These together round up into recommended 400 or so square foot offices with doors that close and house teams of four people, all working on the same thing at the same time. If teams are 2 or 3, they should have a smaller space. That's enough space for desks, a couch, a whiteboard area, etc. I have found over the years that this tracks fairly closely with my own preferences. I really want to be able to talk and interrupt a team-mate when we're working if we're working on the same thing. We also often are hacking away and need silence, but instant access to whoever is in the know about a certain bit of code is undeniably great, and provided we aren't breaking each-other out of flow, is fine. This system works really well when it's a small team and the team is working on the same stuff. It breaks down when there are multiple things happening or more than four or so people: interruptions abound, killing productivity. I think you'll often see workers getting this situation when they really need to be productive by commandeering a conference room and shutting the door. But, it makes sense to provide it for teams in general, in my opinion.
- vollmond 11y ago
  I haven't had that exact structure yet, but what I have had tracks well. I've had fully open-plan, single cubicles, and 4-6 person super-cubes. The super-cubes definitely seemed like the best option. I had easy collaborative access to my immediate teammates, with a bit of visual and audio barrier between us and other teams. Open-plan was workable. Some sound pollution from other teams, but easy access to my team was good. Individual cubes make no sense to me at all. All the sound pollution of open-plan, with none of the easy access to teammates. I hate it.
  - 11y ago
asdfgtyuiohj 11y ago
It makes facilities management easy and cheap, so they can demonstrate superlative performance. Even flimsy movable dividing walls are in the same category. Makes re-configuring offices simple and cheap. The destruction of slow concentrated thought is difficult to measure and not in the facilities management budget, so doesn't trouble the accountants. In many large companies of my experience the director level folk do have individual offices. That shows they understand the value for themselves. Why they are then unable to work out who else is a thought worker and arrange offices for them as well escapes me.
zaphar 11y ago
I pretty much stay out of the whole Open Office debate since I seem to be pretty much unaffected. My powers of concentration are obscenely high so even without headphones I have to work to be interruptible. I actually liked Open Office plans because there were more interruptions. When you have a family to get home to there is something wrong with realizing it's nearly 10pm and the last thing you remember before you started coding was eating lunch. The open office plans gave just enough background distraction to allow me to surface every once and a while.
bluedino 11y ago
It really doesn't matter. Successful startup X could have began in a coffee shop, apartment, dorm room, open office...it was still going to be successful. People with the right drive are going to create and be productive despite their working environment, not because of it. It's only later on in the process when the company can buy office space and do some hires, when people start to get picky about where they work. I've had some of my most productive days on a borrowed old laptop and a folding table in a breakroom.
koonsolo 11y ago
Communication is probably the most important factor to success for both small and large companies. Most things that go wrong is a direct consequence of bad or no communication. If everyone is inside his or her own office, your company depends on having good email or message communication. Everyone should include the right persons when sending emails, planning meetings, etc ... . This is not impossible of course. When you have an open office plan, your communication becomes 'in your face'. You might overhear things that are also relevant for you. You see or hear a lot more than through official communication channels alone. And that is probably the reason to their success. Of course interruptions etc are disadvantages, but nothing beats having good communication.
- frostmatthew 11y ago
  > You might overhear things that are also relevant for you. The key word is might. I remember a similar HN discussion a few months back someone mentioned that because they happened to overhear a conversation between two engineers they were able to save weeks of them working on the wrong thing. Anecdotes like that aren't signs that open offices are successful or result in "having good communication" - it means you have horrible communication and you got lucky. What if that conversation happened while the person who serendipitously overheard it was in the bathroom? Or on vacation? Or in a meeting? Or wearing headphones? Good communication means not relying on chance to prevent engineers from wasting their time.
  - koonsolo 11y ago
    You are correct, but how many companies you worked for had 'good' communication? I worked for 5 companies, and have been outsourced to an extra 2. Communication is a real issue in companies, and the ones that already get this partly right will win over those who don't get it right. Like I said, it is possible to get communication right without having an open office plan. But at least with an open office plan, you have the bare minimum set up. And for big companies, the bare minimum is already better than average. The same for small companies. If you are with 5 to 10 people, not everything will be officially communicated through email. You know stuff because it happened in the same room as everyone is sitting in.
drewg123 11y ago
I am an old curmudgeon who hated working in an open office (at Google in Mountain View) for a few years. My personal theory is that the open office trend at Google (and probably Facebook, and others) was initially driven by the fact that the founders jumped directly from school, and never had a "real job" with a normal, old-school office when they were first starting. Thus they have never personally seen the immense value of a real office, but they HAVE seen the value to the "computer lab" sort of bullpen environment that was common in the 90s (when almost everybody had to show up to the lab to get their work done, as very few people had *nix machines elsewhere where they could do their assignments).
- bryanlarsen 11y ago
  Yes, that's my theory as well. As noted in other comments, some studies have shown that an office of 4 people all working on the same project is the most efficient, and other studies have shown that a single office is best for companies with < 10 people. And Zuckerberg and Brin and Page probably switched from mostly programming to mostly management by the time their companies reached substantially more than 10 people. They probably have really fond memories from their time when their companies were <10 people.
  - rjaco31 11y ago
    They also are probably smart enough to just seek the most efficient way? I don't think hypothetical founder nostalgia is a strong enough explanation.
RogerL 11y ago
I don't buy the opening argument; essentially "rich people are smart". We've endlessly witnessed stupid corporate acts. To name a few that have nothing to do with open offices: Conglomerate building (if your name ain't Warren Buffett you almost certainly destroyed value), corporate raiders (destruction of value to line the raider's pockets), the 1999 bubble (let's throw billions of dollars for 'eyeballs'), off-shoring, American automakers (do I have to get into the details here), stack ranking, faulty risk assessment (nearly every NYC banking/investment firm). Waterfall (the stupid kind, not the way it was meant to be done, which is quite good for projects involving airplanes and such). Agile (as it is practiced, the manifesto is nice for certain kinds of projects). Windows 8, or MS' ignoring the internet for a long time. I could type all day. Companies do stupid things all. the. time. They fly in the face of all available evidence. People are put in charge that shouldn't be in charge. They are driven by ego, or other measures that lead to sub-optimal decisions. Sometimes they are really good, but just make mistakes. I'm a programmer, and my compiler tells me I make 100 mistakes a day; I don't fault upper management for the same. They just don't have that immediate feedback loop that we do. Of course they will make expensive mistakes. Heck we see it in this thread. Evidence shows that productivity is lowered in open office environment, yet we read claims that it is improved.
- juliangregorian 11y ago
  I kinda do. If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?
  - pmlnr 11y ago
    /off Because one have a soul and may not want to rip off others?
    - juliangregorian 11y ago
      Sounds like the excuses a loser would make.
    - koonsolo 11y ago
      Do you mean rich people don't have a soul and became rich because they rip off others? I would think most rich people got there because they created something valuable enough for people to pay money for it.
jmilloy 11y ago
The one thing that kept blaring out at me to be addressed was that your daily productivity doesn't matter. The incentive here is to make the company as productive as possible over the long term (relative to costs). This is touched upon only slightly here when she considers replaceability. I'm not saying that I think open offices are or are not great. But the issue of personal productivity simply has to go away in the discussion for me to take it seriously. Otherwise, you just sound like most software engineers I've known who love to write gobs and gobs of code at the expense of everything else.
- tbrownaw 11y ago
  But the issue of personal productivity simply has to go away in the discussion for me to take it seriously. And yet, nothing can possibly get done without someone doing it. I see lots of insistence that without open offices people woild spemd so much more time on wrong things that the lost productivity is more than made up for by better focus. I also see no evidence for these claims.
  - unprepare 11y ago
    I see this as businesses pushing off even more of their part of the early employment process. We've seen how requirements for entry level jobs have risen, colleges work with businesses to try and produce workforce ready graduates but are met with ever increasing minimums. This is companies deciding that personal productivity isnt something they need to worry about. If someone is not personally productive, then they aren't a good fit. Why should the business spend resources trying to facilitate a productive environment when they can just hire people who will work in a disruptive environment? Just as, why should a business spend resources training employees when they can demand only employees with very specific experience. With outsourcing, visas, and remote working a company has very little restrictions on the level of employee they can seek and find with little difficulty - especially when you include a weak economy in this whole mix. I dont know, not something i've thought a lot about i could be totally off base, but seems like it could be part of a wider trend to me
- pjc50 11y ago
gerbilly 11y ago
When a company hires you they are getting: your availability to work, and your capacity to work. When problems are well defined (you have workable requirements) then you availability becomes less important, so your capacity to work becomes relatively more important. When problems are not well defined or written down, then availability becomes more important, and capacity for work less important. Given that most startups are working on simple CRUD apps, where their most difficult problems usually stem from their own poor organizational skills (poor build procedures, badly configured servers, technical debt in the code) rather than a difficult problem domain it seems clear to me that availability would become more important to employers than capacity for work. Also managers prefer to be able to _see_ people working. (Never mind that the work being done in a bullpen is not productive.) Open offices are like hives: filled with busy looking, low cost replaceable drones. tl;dr: Maybe open offices are popular because most startups aren't working on hard problems.
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  > Given that most startups are working on simple CRUD apps, where their most difficult problems usually stem from their own poor organizational skills (poor build procedures, badly configured servers, technical debt in the code) rather than a difficult problem domain it seems clear to me that availability would become more important to employers than capacity for work. Yet these startups hire people as if they had very difficult problem domains to tackle, thus filtering for people who work better in the other environment you mentioned.
serve_yay 11y ago
You won't catch me defending open offices, but they're even worse when they're full and the meeting rooms are booked all the time. I even frequently can't attend a standup or other meeting because someone is in the room who shouldn't be. And of course they're always on a phone call with a customer, or some other thing that can't be interrupted. I used to work from home, for 4 years. It's hard to deal with all the stupid shit you put up with in offices.
tomkin 11y ago
I find this argument slanted towards the introverted programmer. Fact is, the introverted programmer is not the standard anymore. Our open office is a mix of different types of people. I chose an open office because I worked at a company for 9 years. In the first 5 it was an open office. I'm sure some work was suffered, but we had a culture, which is one thing the author seemingly deliberately avoids talking about. The remaining 4 years were stuffed in a cubicle and the office culture died. It became much easier to blame other people for faults because you no longer had a relationship with your co-workers. I wouldn't say the author is wrong, just that he presents a slanted viewpoint that caters to other programmer introvert types and what their preferences are - but definitely not a fair assessment of the open office.
- calinet6 11y ago
  Agree, I take the opposite side of this argument as well, and the author is very biased toward a certain personality type. I love open office plans and I think they have intangible benefits that many people discount. But, I'm tired of arguing against the hivemind on this one. So be it.
- dean 11y ago
  Well, he's talking about productivity. You seem to be in a good position to answer that question. Where were you more productive, in the open office, or in the cubicle? However, a cubicle might not be the best comparison. A cubicle is not the same as an office with a door that closes. As the IBM example elsewhere in these comments said, not all cubicles provide the benefit. A minimum height of the walls being one requirement.
- mtviewdave 11y ago
  Everything I've read says that, in order to be maximally productive, software developers needs to have long periods of quiet time where they can focus (I've never seen anything to say this is true only of programmers who are introverts). This, not supporting programmers' introversion, is the reason people criticize open-office plans for software development work.
  - 11y ago
davidgrenier 11y ago
This piece nails it down.
bsg75 11y ago
> And yet everyone, including some exceptionally profitable companies, use them. Why? Because they are cheaper to build and outfit. This will always be attractive to management incapable of looking beyond the current expense period. All other reasons are simply marketing to the captive audience.
nhumrich 11y ago
Sadly, I think a factor of why smaller orgs do this is simply because larger orgs do. I was working at a smallish company that had a wonderful layout. The customer support team had an open layout of mini cubes (walls between desks but not extending past desk), which worked great for them, and the engineers had a closed off room that was basically off limits to anyone who wasn't an engineer. It was wonderful and productive. Then, the owners decided to change everything to intermingled open for everyone. No more walls, just flat desks everywhere. Why? All because they visited a couple other companies such as Facebook, etc. And that is how they saw it done there. If it works for them it must work for us, right?
kdamken 11y ago
Open offices are not my favorite - I prefer silence or music of my choosing when I'm working. There's nothing worse than a loud sales meeting going on 10 feet away from you when you're trying to code.
notacoward 11y ago
I've seen dozens of these discussions over the years, and it never ceases to amaze me when I see that the tax angle is being left out. At a prior company, the CFO flat-out told me that tax concerns were the driving factor. To put it simply, in many places the "open" space is subject to lower real estate taxes, and depreciation on the partitions etc. within that space can lower tax bills even further (out of all proportion to their actual cost). It's totally FUBAR, like most tax-related stuff, but it looks good on a balance sheet. When the benefits are in black and white but the drawbacks are nebulous - even if they're practically certain to be greater - it's pretty predictable which way execs and investors will go.

107 points by gpresot 11y ago

Maybe it's because developers don't run companies in general. For management cost and control would be more important considerations. I know of a local software company that's owned by 2 developers where they have individual offices. While 37 Signals kind of have an open office, it's meant to be as quiet as a library to avoid disruptions. People who manage probably don't need to concentrate as much as the people who create the stuff. I suppose my point is that people at the top call the shots, not the people at the bottom.

amirmc 11y ago
That comment is just a way of saying 'they' are not like 'me' (but trying to make it sound general). Facebook, led by a (former) dev, has gone all-in on open plan offices - which is a direct counterpoint. That people at the top call the shots is tautological. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinkruse/2012/08/25/facebook-unveils-new-campus-will-workers-be-sick-stressed-and-dissatisfied/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinkruse/2012/08/25/facebook-u...
- frostmatthew 11y ago
  > Facebook, led by a (former) dev, has gone all-in on open plan offices As another comment[1] pointed out it may have been founded by a developer, but it was one who never worked anywhere other than the company he founded and grew. Things that work well for a company of ten or twenty don't necessarily work best when it grows into the hundreds or thousands of employees. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9968367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9968367
  - amirmc 11y ago
    My point was to refute the assertion that it's "because developers don't run companies in general." If we're going to add lots of caveats to what 'developer' means, then we're essentially making a 'No true scotsman argument' -- (i.e. Zuck hasn't worked anywhere else, and is ostensibly a manager now).
    - frostmatthew 11y ago
      Oh sorry, I certainly didn't mean to suggest he isn't a "true" developer - I'm sure he could code circles around me. I meant only that you were pointing to Facebook as a "direct counterpoint" to the suggestion that "developers don't run companies in general" - and it's not a great counterpoint because he's not going into the office every day and writing code, and hasn't since Facebook was a small/early-stage startup (where open layouts make the most sense). i.e. he isn't making the decision as a developer, he's making it as a manager and the comment you were originally replying to was suggesting "for management cost and control would be more important considerations." [Though I'm not sure I entirely agree with that, as pointed out in my own reply to that comment]
frostmatthew 11y ago
> People who manage probably don't need to concentrate as much as the people who create the stuff. That may be true but it's probably more of a case of the difference between the "Maker's Schedule" and the "Manager's Schedule"[1] - i.e. managers probably don't realize how much distractions or interruptions are bad for "maker's" productivity because a manager's day is mostly distractions or interruptions. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

buserror 11y ago

I think the real reason is 'cost', and the loss of productivity isn't quantifiable anyway; so whomever makes the decision can put an exact number on how much he 'saved' while being able to ignore the side effects. It's like people who buy solar panels in north england; they think it gives them 'free' energy and they are being 'green', while ignoring completely the carbon footprint of making that panel in the first place; while that panel will /never/ repay itself with the energy it harvests. Going back to open offices (and I'm typing this from one!) I think it's a disaster. There are days when all I can really do is read HN, as there's about 3 loud conversations within 5 meters of me, including one Italian guy who's yelling into his skype microphone.

bane 11y ago
This is basically it. There's a thing I've noticed, I like to call it the "inverted reason list". It's an upside-down ordered list of reasons to do something, delivered to a skeptical or hostile audience. The list is ordered such that reasons the audience will like are delivered first, as if they are the most important, and the reasons the audience will hate are delivered at the end, as a side-thought. "and oh....it turns out open offices will save us $5m a year in facilities costs." is usually delivered at the end, when nobody is paying attention anymore, because it was preceded by "free snacks at every 25th cube!" and "will allow you to configure seating to keep your team near you" For work that requires lots of talking (or not lots of deep thinking), they work "ok", but for knowledge work, they're basically the worst idea ever conceived outside of sending all your coders to rock concerts all work day and wondering why nothing is getting done. Where I work, most people get or split offices, but we can work in a few other places, including an open work area. Most people hate working there because it will inevitably have somebody on speaker phone having an argument with their health insurance over an unpaid bill, and that conversation will go on for 2 or 3 weeks solid. Appeals to management have basically been ignored, and now we're getting ready to move to a new facility that's all open space.
rtpg 11y ago
But couldn't that be solved through office culture? Simply telling people "skype calls happen somewhere else"? Though obviously it would take a lot of work to get everyone to agree that that is the "best" culture. Especially for people who talk for a living (customer service, sales) Surely you have an empty conference room somewhere

danieltillett 11y ago

It is a pity there is not easy experiment that people can do to prove to upper management that they are more productive in individual offices.

eeww 11y ago
I'm sure most managements would not care about those experiments anyway http://www.theguardian.com/money/work-blog/2014/sep/29/open-plan-office-health-productivity http://www.theguardian.com/money/work-blog/2014/sep/29/open-...
frostmatthew 11y ago
There's no shortage of studies that have been done on the issue. Here's a great New Yorker article[1] from last year that references a number of studies. This blog post[2] links to a couple others and addresses costs/alternatives. A "study of over 40,000 survey responses collected over a decade has found that the benefits for workers are quickly outweighed by the disadvantages"[3]. Here's a Washington Post article[4] discussing Facebook's huge open office layout, another Post piece[5] on office furniture designers realizing (citing multiple studies) "open-plan spaces are actually lousy for workers." A TIME article[6] highlighted decades of research that associated open layouts with "greater employee stress, poorer co-worker relations and reduced satisfaction with the physical environment." [1] http://www.newyorker.com/currency-tag/the-open-office-trap http://www.newyorker.com/currency-tag/the-open-office-trap [2] http://nathanmarz.com/blog/the-inexplicable-rise-of-open-floor-plans-in-tech-companies.html http://nathanmarz.com/blog/the-inexplicable-rise-of-open-flo... [3] http://theconversation.com/open-plan-offices-attract-highest-levels-of-worker-dissatisfaction-study-18246 http://theconversation.com/open-plan-offices-attract-highest... [4] http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/30/google-got-it-wrong-the-open-office-trend-is-destroying-the-workplace/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/30/g... [5] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-leadership/wp/2015/04/22/office-designers-find-open-plan-spaces-are-actually-lousy-for-workers/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-leadership/wp/2015/04... [6] http://ideas.time.com/2012/08/15/why-the-open-office-is-a-hotbed-of-stress/ http://ideas.time.com/2012/08/15/why-the-open-office-is-a-ho...
- 11y ago

GreaterFool 11y ago

Personally I like open offices and working with people. I think the problem is not with the idea but with the implementation. Great open offices have some place where you can go and where nobody will bother you. So you can have the alone time you need! Unfortunately most open office have no such space. Not even the toilets (multiple cramped stalls? hell no!). Everywhere you go and at all times there are going to be people. I think that is the problem.

leereeves 11y ago
Open offices are like paradise for extroverts, and hell for introverts. I think office design should favor more of a compromise between the two groups.
- carapat_virulat 11y ago
  I think that depends what kind of introvert you are. I like big open offices because I feel "anonymous" there and it's very easy for me to disconnect from what's going on around me and do my own thing for hours, and then speak with anybody from my team when I need to. If there's some person around with whom you don't connect very well no bad atmosphere is going to occur unless you force it. I don't need a big bubble for myself, I can create a small one easily. For me a small office with 2 or 3 people is more stressful, it makes me more aware about what's going on around me because it's a more personal space. If you don't connect with somebody in there, the bad atmosphere is going to fill the small office very fast. My bubble is going to trip onto somebody else's bubble more often than in a big space full of people because there's less neutral space around. Not sure if that makes sense at all... but it does to me.
- logicfiction 11y ago
  It really comes down to this. One of my psychology textbooks characterized the basic distinction between extrovert and introvert as the following: Extroverts become uncomfortable with a lack of external stimuli and thus prefer to surround themselves with stimuli. Introverts become uncomfortable with too much external stimulus and thus prefer to isolate themselves from excessive stimulus. To me that basically directly quantifies why some people thrive in an open office and other suffer. I'm not sure what the solution is to requiring essentially two different environments depending on a person's makeup.

jkot 11y ago

Battle for open office is lost and irrelevant. Now it is about location independence and working remotely.

a3n 11y ago
Followed in some number of years by people in Africa doing the former jobs of people in San Francisco. If you in America can work remotely, there's no reason why someone with equivalent skills and 1/20 the cost can't work really remotely. You might point to stories of Indian contractors like Tata, and how badly that works out for anything that's not Telco CRUD. (Note, I'm talking about the business model, not individual Indians.) But that was just the first attempt. Software will figure it out, just as textiles figured it out.

inversionOf 11y ago

One factor of open offices that is seldom counted, but remains very important, is "fitting the organization to an image". If you're bringing bankers or investors or other external parties through, what is more "impressive": A floor full of hard working bees, a buzz of energy filling the air, whiteboards full of complex diagrams (that probably haven't been erased in months if not years) and quirky and crazy "personalizations" on all of the desks, or walking down a hall of quiet closed doors. Or, worse still (and the #1 reason why many companies don't allow remote work), no office really at all because everyone is everywhere. That "show off the empire" thing is absolutely a function of decisions. I was recently part of such a decision process where a group was looking to become startup-y, and cargo culting the media image of what such organizations look like reigned supreme.

nazka 11y ago
It seems to be common to do that... A friend of mine who was at a unicorn company in SF before it was a unicorn, had nice tables, furniture, and overpowered computers everywhere around the pathway from the entrance to the conference room. So when VCs and business angels came it looked very nice but everybody out of the pathway had nothing like that.
- pjc50 11y ago
  Potemkin office! I'd never really considered the office as a form of stage set for the performance of the appearance of work before.
  - nazka 11y ago
    Ya I know... Like people in the front were able to have a budget of ~2000 dollars per person (hello Thunderbolt Displays!) but for others it was not even more than 300 dollars.
- Too 11y ago
  It's not only for VCs, it's also for attracting new hires.
11y ago

martinald 11y ago

Does fogcreek still give everyone private offices? I remember years ago Joel Spolsky writing something similar. Wonder if they still stick to it.

knowaveragejoe 11y ago
They aren't "private" like you're probably thinking, they're more like rooms that 2 or 3 people share with glass walls on one side.
- edem 11y ago
  See for yourself: https://picasaweb.google.com/spolsky/FogCreekSNewOffice# https://picasaweb.google.com/spolsky/FogCreekSNewOffice#
krallja 11y ago
Yes, all developers at Fog Creek HQ still get private offices. It's easier to do when over half your tech staff works from home.

mianos 11y ago

Also, add total hot desking to this for another bump down the productivity scale. Then, to make things worse, they usually oversubscribe the people to desks because at any one time quite a few people would be in meetings or not in the office. Net result, huge saving on rent. After a few days of sharing a desk with another guy and swapping power points to keep both our laptops charged, I complained and they looked at me like I was a freak of nature.

dunmalg 11y ago
It's amazing how many managers to this day are hell-bent on repeating the Chiat-Day fiasco http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/7.02/chiat_pr.html http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/7.02/chiat_pr.html
dunmalg 11y ago
It's amazing how many managers to this day are hell-bent on repeating the Chiat-Day fiasco http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/7.02/chiat_pr.html http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/7.02/chiat_pr.html

fit2rule 11y ago

Personally I feel that with varying degrees of effort I can work in either end of the spectrum: closed offices, cubicle farm, open office, coffeeshop, etc. Some people can't. Some people need a desk and a door to close. So for me from a founders perspective, the best kind of environment to get things started would be a company space that encourages setups like a cafe/lounge/coffeetable-style area for laptop users and those who need to be comfortable, focused, and relatively available with ease for discussion .. as well as areas of the workfloor where there are offices, for example, for those who need them, or hackylab environment for where its needed, etc. Alas, this kind of mixed-format personal workspace organization is not so economical, and it usually requires someone be responsible for the estate, rather than just having a cubicle-cleaning service, etc. etc. All kinds of legal hoops, too, whatever. But in my experience, this seems to be the case: the nicest 'kind' of workspace for a modern startup company in my opinion, is your average McMansion. (If you can fit and find one local to everyone else who has to commute to it.) I've seen great mixed-format startup scenarios in your average American mega-house, cubicle farm in the 4-car garage, massive lounge/rec-room space for the hackers, room #? of (4..6) bedrooms converted to shared office rooms, 2 or 3 to a room, for those who want 'a desktop' and a way to isolate themselves from the rest of the team, and so on. Of course, this works if the house is clean and maintained as a work environment, and indeed if people don't live there but rather treat it as their place of work. That can be difficult to do in some neighborhoods. Wouldn't it then be interesting to see some sort of 'office space plan' revolution occur in the broader sense, which accommodates all of these modes of operation, to implement a model you could name "Big Family Home"? Instead of cubical farms, you find interior spaces analog to a modern home plan, s/beds/desktops/, centered around a common room/kitchen/meeting area, etc. Generally the way I feel when I walk into a very large organization and its just endless row of cubicle, mind-numbing soviet khaki walls lit by brain-sucking illumination standards, all I want to do is go home. That is a hard impulse to resist all day. If, instead, I'm in a place that accommodates a large number of peoples needs with some consistent attention to variety, usually its pretty hard to go home at the end of the day .. I really like going to a business where people are working and comfortable because they know where the kitchen is, and someone is making lunch for everyone while code gets written, clients are met, teams are having meetings out on the deck in the sunshine, etc. I'm sure there are movements towards this; but the cubicle-farm seems to have persisted for decades, alas, and for this I guess we must thank the bean-counters.

moron4hire 11y ago

> Moreover, engineers are really, really expensive, and making us less productive is costly. The extra space necessary for doors or cubicles could easily pay for itself. The problem is, there is no good way to measure engineer productivity, but it's extremely easy to figure out the cost of office furniture. Modern corporations believe in optimizing what they can measure and completely ignoring what they can't.

deanCommie 11y ago

I'm sick of the circle jerk hatred about open offices. Yes, let's discuss the pros and cons and acknowledge that they don't work for everyone. But no setup works for everyone. And we need to stop pretending that open office plans are some poorly thought out pranks invented by clueless managers that offer nothing to developers. I am a developer. I am not an extrovert. I love working in an open office, and the one job I had almost 10 years ago that was rows and rows of offices made me MISERABLE. I almost quit but luckily was able to move to a team that had a team area with an open plan. Fact: In today's age of agility, rapid development, minimum viable products, continuous deployment, and short iterations it is much more important that you can discuss things with your coworkers and stakeholders quickly and figure out if you are working on the right thing, rather than going away for 6 months into some basement, close the door, and come back with a finished product. Fact: Distractions are cultural not physical. Provide the team with good quality headphones, shame people who have non-silent notifications on their devices, create a policy where people can indicate when they're deep in thought on something complex and would prefer not to be distracted (eg. Do Not Disturb status on internal chat that you check before messaging someone or tapping them on the shoulder), and provide flex space people can go to on a case by case basis for privacy. Do this and all the problems with "focus" that open-office haters complain about GO AWAY.

honest_joe 11y ago
BSHIT. I find your nick quite fitting to what you say. You are an extrovert that loves to keep his mouth open and chit chat a lot. The simple presence of people around you sucks your energy. I doubt you are a real engineer...you are most probably just a manager that tries to convince everyone about the benefits of an open office. Or you are a corporate sellout whore.
- dang 11y ago
  Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News.
a3n 11y ago
> I almost quit but luckily was able to move to a team that had a team area with an open plan. I've worked on a team that had its own large cubicle, with four people in it. We all mostly worked on the same thing, and we could roll ourselves over to screens and have whiteboard discussions. That was great. I've had my own office, with a window. That was even better. Then I shared it with another person. That was still great. Then there were three of us. Conversation stopped. None of us worked on the same thing. And of course I've worked in cubes. What evs. I've never worked in an open office of long tables and no partitions. I know I'd hate not being able to raise my eyes and stare off into space without inadvertently staring at someone nearby. And the distractions would kill me. But I guess that's just me, and all I have to do is see that at the interview so I can say no; problem solved?

michaelt 11y ago

One possibility is some people genuinely prefer them. I keep talking myself up to that, only to read another article about how everyone is miserable and unproductive in them. Given the choice between open plan and private office in San Francisco (where office space costs ~$36/square foot) people say they'd rather have a private office. Given the choice between open plan in San Francisco and a private office in Chattanooga, Tennessee (where office space costs ~$11/square foot) my guess is you'd get more job applicants for the job in SF. Perhaps this is a revealed preference for living in SF, and people are willing to trade off private offices to get it.

cableshaft 11y ago
Or option three: Given the choice between open plan in San Francisco and open plan in Chattanooga, Tennessee, they choose the job in SF. There's just as many open plan offices outside of SF. I'm in the Chicago area, and I've never worked at, with, or interviewed with any company around here that didn't have an open office plan (with one single exception, and it was a game company, and they were split up into rooms of 6-8 people, no private offices except for management).

honest_joe 11y ago

Open Office + Home Office works for me. If i can choose 3 days to work at home and then come to work for meetings, brainstorming etc then it's ideal.

vessenes 11y ago

IBM did a fair amount of research on this in the 1970s and 80s. They talk about some of it in their Santa Teresa design paper I think: http://domino.research.ibm.com/tchjr/journalindex.nsf/9fe6a820aae67ad785256547004d8af0/fb3c49ab2d463e1c85256bfa00685aec!OpenDocument http://domino.research.ibm.com/tchjr/journalindex.nsf/9fe6a8... The major takeaways I have from reading about this when I started in tech entrepreneurship are: 1) Knowledge workers need 30 square feet of desk to get optimal efficiency 2) They need 100 square feet of space 3) cubicles are as good as an office if the walls are over 8 feet high (!) 4) small teams tend to want to talk at the same time, and be quiet at the same time. These together round up into recommended 400 or so square foot offices with doors that close and house teams of four people, all working on the same thing at the same time. If teams are 2 or 3, they should have a smaller space. That's enough space for desks, a couch, a whiteboard area, etc. I have found over the years that this tracks fairly closely with my own preferences. I really want to be able to talk and interrupt a team-mate when we're working if we're working on the same thing. We also often are hacking away and need silence, but instant access to whoever is in the know about a certain bit of code is undeniably great, and provided we aren't breaking each-other out of flow, is fine. This system works really well when it's a small team and the team is working on the same stuff. It breaks down when there are multiple things happening or more than four or so people: interruptions abound, killing productivity. I think you'll often see workers getting this situation when they really need to be productive by commandeering a conference room and shutting the door. But, it makes sense to provide it for teams in general, in my opinion.

vollmond 11y ago
I haven't had that exact structure yet, but what I have had tracks well. I've had fully open-plan, single cubicles, and 4-6 person super-cubes. The super-cubes definitely seemed like the best option. I had easy collaborative access to my immediate teammates, with a bit of visual and audio barrier between us and other teams. Open-plan was workable. Some sound pollution from other teams, but easy access to my team was good. Individual cubes make no sense to me at all. All the sound pollution of open-plan, with none of the easy access to teammates. I hate it.
- 11y ago

asdfgtyuiohj 11y ago

It makes facilities management easy and cheap, so they can demonstrate superlative performance. Even flimsy movable dividing walls are in the same category. Makes re-configuring offices simple and cheap. The destruction of slow concentrated thought is difficult to measure and not in the facilities management budget, so doesn't trouble the accountants. In many large companies of my experience the director level folk do have individual offices. That shows they understand the value for themselves. Why they are then unable to work out who else is a thought worker and arrange offices for them as well escapes me.

zaphar 11y ago

I pretty much stay out of the whole Open Office debate since I seem to be pretty much unaffected. My powers of concentration are obscenely high so even without headphones I have to work to be interruptible. I actually liked Open Office plans because there were more interruptions. When you have a family to get home to there is something wrong with realizing it's nearly 10pm and the last thing you remember before you started coding was eating lunch. The open office plans gave just enough background distraction to allow me to surface every once and a while.

bluedino 11y ago

It really doesn't matter. Successful startup X could have began in a coffee shop, apartment, dorm room, open office...it was still going to be successful. People with the right drive are going to create and be productive despite their working environment, not because of it. It's only later on in the process when the company can buy office space and do some hires, when people start to get picky about where they work. I've had some of my most productive days on a borrowed old laptop and a folding table in a breakroom.

koonsolo 11y ago

Communication is probably the most important factor to success for both small and large companies. Most things that go wrong is a direct consequence of bad or no communication. If everyone is inside his or her own office, your company depends on having good email or message communication. Everyone should include the right persons when sending emails, planning meetings, etc ... . This is not impossible of course. When you have an open office plan, your communication becomes 'in your face'. You might overhear things that are also relevant for you. You see or hear a lot more than through official communication channels alone. And that is probably the reason to their success. Of course interruptions etc are disadvantages, but nothing beats having good communication.

frostmatthew 11y ago
> You might overhear things that are also relevant for you. The key word is might. I remember a similar HN discussion a few months back someone mentioned that because they happened to overhear a conversation between two engineers they were able to save weeks of them working on the wrong thing. Anecdotes like that aren't signs that open offices are successful or result in "having good communication" - it means you have horrible communication and you got lucky. What if that conversation happened while the person who serendipitously overheard it was in the bathroom? Or on vacation? Or in a meeting? Or wearing headphones? Good communication means not relying on chance to prevent engineers from wasting their time.
- koonsolo 11y ago
  You are correct, but how many companies you worked for had 'good' communication? I worked for 5 companies, and have been outsourced to an extra 2. Communication is a real issue in companies, and the ones that already get this partly right will win over those who don't get it right. Like I said, it is possible to get communication right without having an open office plan. But at least with an open office plan, you have the bare minimum set up. And for big companies, the bare minimum is already better than average. The same for small companies. If you are with 5 to 10 people, not everything will be officially communicated through email. You know stuff because it happened in the same room as everyone is sitting in.

drewg123 11y ago

I am an old curmudgeon who hated working in an open office (at Google in Mountain View) for a few years. My personal theory is that the open office trend at Google (and probably Facebook, and others) was initially driven by the fact that the founders jumped directly from school, and never had a "real job" with a normal, old-school office when they were first starting. Thus they have never personally seen the immense value of a real office, but they HAVE seen the value to the "computer lab" sort of bullpen environment that was common in the 90s (when almost everybody had to show up to the lab to get their work done, as very few people had *nix machines elsewhere where they could do their assignments).

bryanlarsen 11y ago
Yes, that's my theory as well. As noted in other comments, some studies have shown that an office of 4 people all working on the same project is the most efficient, and other studies have shown that a single office is best for companies with < 10 people. And Zuckerberg and Brin and Page probably switched from mostly programming to mostly management by the time their companies reached substantially more than 10 people. They probably have really fond memories from their time when their companies were <10 people.
- rjaco31 11y ago
  They also are probably smart enough to just seek the most efficient way? I don't think hypothetical founder nostalgia is a strong enough explanation.

RogerL 11y ago

I don't buy the opening argument; essentially "rich people are smart". We've endlessly witnessed stupid corporate acts. To name a few that have nothing to do with open offices: Conglomerate building (if your name ain't Warren Buffett you almost certainly destroyed value), corporate raiders (destruction of value to line the raider's pockets), the 1999 bubble (let's throw billions of dollars for 'eyeballs'), off-shoring, American automakers (do I have to get into the details here), stack ranking, faulty risk assessment (nearly every NYC banking/investment firm). Waterfall (the stupid kind, not the way it was meant to be done, which is quite good for projects involving airplanes and such). Agile (as it is practiced, the manifesto is nice for certain kinds of projects). Windows 8, or MS' ignoring the internet for a long time. I could type all day. Companies do stupid things all. the. time. They fly in the face of all available evidence. People are put in charge that shouldn't be in charge. They are driven by ego, or other measures that lead to sub-optimal decisions. Sometimes they are really good, but just make mistakes. I'm a programmer, and my compiler tells me I make 100 mistakes a day; I don't fault upper management for the same. They just don't have that immediate feedback loop that we do. Of course they will make expensive mistakes. Heck we see it in this thread. Evidence shows that productivity is lowered in open office environment, yet we read claims that it is improved.

juliangregorian 11y ago
I kinda do. If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?
- pmlnr 11y ago
  /off Because one have a soul and may not want to rip off others?
  - juliangregorian 11y ago
    Sounds like the excuses a loser would make.
  - koonsolo 11y ago
    Do you mean rich people don't have a soul and became rich because they rip off others? I would think most rich people got there because they created something valuable enough for people to pay money for it.

jmilloy 11y ago

The one thing that kept blaring out at me to be addressed was that your daily productivity doesn't matter. The incentive here is to make the company as productive as possible over the long term (relative to costs). This is touched upon only slightly here when she considers replaceability. I'm not saying that I think open offices are or are not great. But the issue of personal productivity simply has to go away in the discussion for me to take it seriously. Otherwise, you just sound like most software engineers I've known who love to write gobs and gobs of code at the expense of everything else.

tbrownaw 11y ago
But the issue of personal productivity simply has to go away in the discussion for me to take it seriously. And yet, nothing can possibly get done without someone doing it. I see lots of insistence that without open offices people woild spemd so much more time on wrong things that the lost productivity is more than made up for by better focus. I also see no evidence for these claims.
- unprepare 11y ago
  I see this as businesses pushing off even more of their part of the early employment process. We've seen how requirements for entry level jobs have risen, colleges work with businesses to try and produce workforce ready graduates but are met with ever increasing minimums. This is companies deciding that personal productivity isnt something they need to worry about. If someone is not personally productive, then they aren't a good fit. Why should the business spend resources trying to facilitate a productive environment when they can just hire people who will work in a disruptive environment? Just as, why should a business spend resources training employees when they can demand only employees with very specific experience. With outsourcing, visas, and remote working a company has very little restrictions on the level of employee they can seek and find with little difficulty - especially when you include a weak economy in this whole mix. I dont know, not something i've thought a lot about i could be totally off base, but seems like it could be part of a wider trend to me
pjc50 11y ago

gerbilly 11y ago

When a company hires you they are getting: your availability to work, and your capacity to work. When problems are well defined (you have workable requirements) then you availability becomes less important, so your capacity to work becomes relatively more important. When problems are not well defined or written down, then availability becomes more important, and capacity for work less important. Given that most startups are working on simple CRUD apps, where their most difficult problems usually stem from their own poor organizational skills (poor build procedures, badly configured servers, technical debt in the code) rather than a difficult problem domain it seems clear to me that availability would become more important to employers than capacity for work. Also managers prefer to be able to _see_ people working. (Never mind that the work being done in a bullpen is not productive.) Open offices are like hives: filled with busy looking, low cost replaceable drones. tl;dr: Maybe open offices are popular because most startups aren't working on hard problems.

vonmoltke 11y ago
> Given that most startups are working on simple CRUD apps, where their most difficult problems usually stem from their own poor organizational skills (poor build procedures, badly configured servers, technical debt in the code) rather than a difficult problem domain it seems clear to me that availability would become more important to employers than capacity for work. Yet these startups hire people as if they had very difficult problem domains to tackle, thus filtering for people who work better in the other environment you mentioned.

serve_yay 11y ago

You won't catch me defending open offices, but they're even worse when they're full and the meeting rooms are booked all the time. I even frequently can't attend a standup or other meeting because someone is in the room who shouldn't be. And of course they're always on a phone call with a customer, or some other thing that can't be interrupted. I used to work from home, for 4 years. It's hard to deal with all the stupid shit you put up with in offices.

tomkin 11y ago

I find this argument slanted towards the introverted programmer. Fact is, the introverted programmer is not the standard anymore. Our open office is a mix of different types of people. I chose an open office because I worked at a company for 9 years. In the first 5 it was an open office. I'm sure some work was suffered, but we had a culture, which is one thing the author seemingly deliberately avoids talking about. The remaining 4 years were stuffed in a cubicle and the office culture died. It became much easier to blame other people for faults because you no longer had a relationship with your co-workers. I wouldn't say the author is wrong, just that he presents a slanted viewpoint that caters to other programmer introvert types and what their preferences are - but definitely not a fair assessment of the open office.

calinet6 11y ago
Agree, I take the opposite side of this argument as well, and the author is very biased toward a certain personality type. I love open office plans and I think they have intangible benefits that many people discount. But, I'm tired of arguing against the hivemind on this one. So be it.
dean 11y ago
Well, he's talking about productivity. You seem to be in a good position to answer that question. Where were you more productive, in the open office, or in the cubicle? However, a cubicle might not be the best comparison. A cubicle is not the same as an office with a door that closes. As the IBM example elsewhere in these comments said, not all cubicles provide the benefit. A minimum height of the walls being one requirement.
mtviewdave 11y ago
Everything I've read says that, in order to be maximally productive, software developers needs to have long periods of quiet time where they can focus (I've never seen anything to say this is true only of programmers who are introverts). This, not supporting programmers' introversion, is the reason people criticize open-office plans for software development work.
- 11y ago

davidgrenier 11y ago

This piece nails it down.

bsg75 11y ago

> And yet everyone, including some exceptionally profitable companies, use them. Why? Because they are cheaper to build and outfit. This will always be attractive to management incapable of looking beyond the current expense period. All other reasons are simply marketing to the captive audience.

nhumrich 11y ago

Sadly, I think a factor of why smaller orgs do this is simply because larger orgs do. I was working at a smallish company that had a wonderful layout. The customer support team had an open layout of mini cubes (walls between desks but not extending past desk), which worked great for them, and the engineers had a closed off room that was basically off limits to anyone who wasn't an engineer. It was wonderful and productive. Then, the owners decided to change everything to intermingled open for everyone. No more walls, just flat desks everywhere. Why? All because they visited a couple other companies such as Facebook, etc. And that is how they saw it done there. If it works for them it must work for us, right?

kdamken 11y ago

Open offices are not my favorite - I prefer silence or music of my choosing when I'm working. There's nothing worse than a loud sales meeting going on 10 feet away from you when you're trying to code.

notacoward 11y ago

I've seen dozens of these discussions over the years, and it never ceases to amaze me when I see that the tax angle is being left out. At a prior company, the CFO flat-out told me that tax concerns were the driving factor. To put it simply, in many places the "open" space is subject to lower real estate taxes, and depreciation on the partitions etc. within that space can lower tax bills even further (out of all proportion to their actual cost). It's totally FUBAR, like most tax-related stuff, but it looks good on a balance sheet. When the benefits are in black and white but the drawbacks are nebulous - even if they're practically certain to be greater - it's pretty predictable which way execs and investors will go.