I don't feel I have some kind of mental safety in open office. Bell labs are best kinds of office where you have offices with hub common area for your team where you can go out and discuss stuff.
Ask HN: Why are you against open plan offices?
11–20 of 151 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why are you against open plan offices?
#12I think the term "open plan office" is too generic. The example @jlengrand provides is the form of torture that drives people who need to think and concentrate to distraction.
The most productive environments I have known are a modest sized room used as an open plan office where every person there was working on the same project. The managers had their own private offices on another floor. Under those sort of conditions collaboration and intelligent conversations can arise. So long as you manage to exclude the blabbermouths who are constantly asking stupid questions or making unnecessary commentary.
I think I have achieved the best compromise, work from home, turn off emails and all forms of social apps. Then once or twice a week go to the office specifically to have meetings, etc. That way I get the peace and quite to immerse into deep work (Cal Newport) and get the benefits of collaboration and brainstorming. I only check my emails after I have finished the day's deep work. My promise is that I answer all emails addressed to me within 36 hours. Nothing faster. If it's that important people have to text message which I will typically check 2-3 times a day max.
BTW I charge for specified units of work completed according to schedules and budgets that I agree to. Charging on the basis of hours worked just doesn't cut it for me.
Re: Ask HN: Why are you against open plan offices?
#13Working from home for the past 3 months taught me that a lot of my constant tiredness and apathy came from the constant noise you get in an open office.
Some people can't handle being productive in a extremely loud, and extremely bright environment. It doesn't matter how much I destroyed my hearing by putting loud music over noise-cancelling headphones, I always felt tired after ~2 hours of work.
Open offices seem to start in companies with 10 people, and eventually turn out in floors with hundred of other workers screaming loudly so they can be heard over the existing noise. Ideally, an open office should have noise detectors over the office to remind people to keep their noise down.
As a positive, if I were 20 years older I'd probably have started working in cubicles, which have all the negatives of an open office but without any natural sunlight.
Re: Ask HN: Why are you against open plan offices?
#14> I feel like you'd miss out on so much collaborative effort and serendipitous & spontaneous conversations with colleagues that solve problems out of the blue This happens for sure In my experience the ratio of beneficial to detrimental serendipitous and/or spontaneous conversations that result in any benefit is extremely low, so low in fact as to not being worth it. The problem is that people tend to remember the us…
I find the worst interrupters are not co-workers but impatient, micromanaging managers. Yup, the Dilbertian PHB's -- there just are too many of them out in the wild.
Re: Ask HN: Why are you against open plan offices?
#15Because it makes it too easy people to ask questions that they could have answered on their own if they'd has to stand up from their desk, walk down the hall to my office, knock on the door and obviously disrupt whatever I'm doing.
In an open office all they have to do is vaguely wave their hand in the corner of my vision with "hey just a quick question" that inevitably turns into a 15 minute product revision meeting.
Re: Ask HN: Why are you against open plan offices?
#16I'm not actually against open plan offices....at team level. I'm against open plan offices at large corp level. I have 300 people on my floor, the group closest to us is from business and spends 2/4 hours a day on the phone. It saddens me because the largest openly claimed benefit of Open Plan offices is "increase collaboration". What I literally see is people locking themselves with headphones and trying to hide in…
> I'd like team size cubicles.
For a while we had 1st and 2nd line support on the other side of the aisle from us on a floor that had ~ 75 people working there, it was so hard to concentrate.
My boss was trying to get a room built for our team: 4 developers, 2 Analysts and 2 testers alas it never happened. Something about collaboration, despite the fact that our team was working an entirely new product line using a new technology (for the company).
Re: Ask HN: Why are you against open plan offices?
#17I don't feel I have some kind of mental safety in open office. Bell labs are best kinds of office where you have offices with hub common area for your team where you can go out and discuss stuff.
My preference is to go to the pub to brainstorm over burgers and beer. I did work for a small biz where the owner would take us all out on Friday for that purpose. Most productive place I ever worked at. Eventually got bought out by a much bigger biz and it all went south.
Re: Ask HN: Why are you against open plan offices?
#18Never really had 'collaborative effort and serendipitous & spontaneous conversations with colleagues that solve problems out of the blue'.
Most of the time, i have someone next to me or close to me, who is on phone with someone else.
I had a 4 people office once and it was great. Close the door, noise is outside.
Re: Ask HN: Why are you against open plan offices?
#19Firstly it's that you seem available for interruption, either by managers or coworkers equally. Most people don't understand how harmful that is. Managers vs makers schedule explains this.
Secondly, however, is the inability to control my own environment. Some days I'd like it to be dark, some light. Sometimes I'm cold, sometimes I'm hot. Or I want loud music or silence. Etc. You might think these are all minor things and generally they are but if all of them slightly negatively impact you, you might end up being cranky and unproductive the entire day.
Cubicles are slightly worse because they suffer from the exact same issues but are much uglier.
Re: Ask HN: Why are you against open plan offices?
#20> As someone young and new to the industry Here's how open offices came about. The CFO made a spreadsheet, and the "open office" column was a nickel less than the alternatives.
It's far more than a nickel difference. Any useful private office is about 100 sq ft. In an open office you can do with about 20 sq ft per person. So you cram the workers into bull pens and the managers can have acres of offices with windows and still save money on mid-city rents.