I guess if I used Google the way this author did, I could write an article called, "Why Open Offices Are Great."
Why Open Offices Are Terrible
31–40 of 61 posts
Re: Why Open Offices Are Terrible
#32I found I was the most productive when I was in a small office with 2-3 other developers, with a door we could close. Everyone was setup this way, and people ended up decorating each of their rooms and every room had a "theme" (ours was called the lounge). This degree of personalization brought me closer to my co-workers whom I shared the office with, and as a result we worked better together. In the afternoons, we'd…
Product idea: if you work at a startup of just 4-5 people and it's pretty quiet in your little space, we'll rent out temporary fake co-workers, who will talk loudly about their weekends next to you, shoot nerf guns, and get on the phone with AT&T to dispute a charge. The premium plan will include a manager who walks the floor and asks you how things are going. You can rent the co-workers on a weekly basis, or even ju…
Hell, the investor themselves can demand this service. Call it empathy building, and remember, if you don't work 80 hours this week you get to go join the salt mine devs!
Re: Why Open Offices Are Terrible
#33Someone needs to write an article "why no one office plan will make everyone happy". Discussions around office layouts always devolve into different groups vehemently defending how everyone should love their preferred choice, and very few people recognizing that different people work differently . Some people thrive in an open office, while others can't function due to distraction, interruption, and an expectation of…
Yeah, that would be an important article to write. I think the compromise where everyone "wins" with the open office is more inter-team communication.
Re: Why Open Offices Are Terrible
#34If anyone would like a brief tour through Hell, I suggest visiting an open office call center.
I'd just like to interview whichever genius thought it would help anyone to have your reps struggling to hear their own call over the sounds of everyone around them and their calls.
Re: Why Open Offices Are Terrible
#35I found I was the most productive when I was in a small office with 2-3 other developers, with a door we could close. Everyone was setup this way, and people ended up decorating each of their rooms and every room had a "theme" (ours was called the lounge). This degree of personalization brought me closer to my co-workers whom I shared the office with, and as a result we worked better together. In the afternoons, we'd…
Product idea: if you work at a startup of just 4-5 people and it's pretty quiet in your little space, we'll rent out temporary fake co-workers, who will talk loudly about their weekends next to you, shoot nerf guns, and get on the phone with AT&T to dispute a charge. The premium plan will include a manager who walks the floor and asks you how things are going. You can rent the co-workers on a weekly basis, or even ju…
Awesome ;) Sign me up!
Re: Why Open Offices Are Terrible
#36I hate the fishbowl environment, every movement and facial expression is subject to the scrutiny and interpretation of others. My stomach makes funny noises sometimes, I can't control it. And so forth. One time I took a drink of a glass of water on my desk and my coworker made a remark about how I made some strange movement when I took the drink. To me this is hell, to have every single moment potentially under obser…
This! I used to have a coworker that said I scratched my back too much. I wanted to tell her she breathed too much.
I think the worst part was they said I used the bathroom too much. It was like being back in high school. I drink a lot of water. Geesh!
Re: Why Open Offices Are Terrible
#37I think this really depends on the type of work you do, what kind of personality you have and how exactly your open office is set up.
Sometimes, I just need quiet to get a lot of work done. For these days, I might work at home so people don't stop by my office. Even with an office, people stop by all the time to tell me little things. That can make concentrating on programming, design or other stuff really difficult. Each interruption can knock me out of focus for 15 minutes. There is also the non-stop ringing of my office phone.
On the other hand, when we are close to shipping something or in the earlier conceptual stages, it's nice to have a bunch of product people together without any walls. We might sit around a table with laptops and punch list and QA the rest of the product before we get ready to ship it.
Re: Why Open Offices Are Terrible
#38Here's an idea for a hybrid. Have a robotic X Y conveyor in the ceiling that will drop a soundproof box on top of a cubicle when the occupant needs silence, privacy, etc. The box will seal off air, so you only get about 10 minutes of the virtual private office.
Re: Why Open Offices Are Terrible
#39Someone needs to write an article "why no one office plan will make everyone happy". Discussions around office layouts always devolve into different groups vehemently defending how everyone should love their preferred choice, and very few people recognizing that different people work differently . Some people thrive in an open office, while others can't function due to distraction, interruption, and an expectation of…
Agreed. I personally work well in an open office. Half way through the article, or really it was just citing other peoples research with no other analysis, I got mad.
It just comes back to -- if you want to prove a point there will be data out there to help you justify it. This article is trying to pretend to be objective, but really is just citing a slew of studies that, presumably, had really small sample sizes. /rant
There is no one answer. IMO an ideal office would have both options.
Re: Why Open Offices Are Terrible
#40That really doesn't say anything about why they're terrible. They're just posting a bunch of random factoids without any kind of explanation for why those numbers might be. Seems like everything was cherry-picked pretty well.
Not to mention that some of these data sources are terrible and completely unscientific. Like "respondents to a Harvard Business Review survey". Or seriously.. "Percent rise observed by a Harvard professor" ???