Open offices were developed by people who don't have to really concentrate for their job. They're awful for developers.
It's so the MBA's can stand on a milk crate and look out over the developers to make sure all heads are down.
Is Facebook’s Massive Open Office Scaring Away Developers?
111–120 of 483 posts
Re: Is Facebook’s Massive Open Office Scaring Away Developers?
#112I worked for a year at IBM's RTP campus. Everyone had their own dimly lit cube with 5-foot walls, no natural daylight, and white noise playing over speakers to drown out conversation. The depressing undertone of the office was part of what pushed me to quit. My team at my present job works in an open setting with 8 people in the room and windows with natural daylight. It's quiet enough to focus but gives us the oppor…
Team sized rooms sound good but what happens with a few more people are added and there is no room to easily expand?
Move or risk having unhappy employees.
Re: Is Facebook’s Massive Open Office Scaring Away Developers?
#113I worked for a year at IBM's RTP campus. Everyone had their own dimly lit cube with 5-foot walls, no natural daylight, and white noise playing over speakers to drown out conversation. The depressing undertone of the office was part of what pushed me to quit. My team at my present job works in an open setting with 8 people in the room and windows with natural daylight. It's quiet enough to focus but gives us the oppor…
I work from home full time now in a dedicated office space, however over the years I've worked in variety of setups ranging from:
1) four to six desk offices - quite enjoyable, peaceful, reasonably sociable at appropriate times and lots of natural light. The occupants were always developers or sysadmins who know the value of a bit of peace and quiet.
2) ten to sixteen desk open plan offices - not terrible because the occupants were almost entirely developers plus or minus a few sysadmins. Meetings were always held in an adjoining dedicated meeting rooms. Again quite peaceful, reasonably sociable and again both these places had plenty of natural lighting. Letting developers have a peaceful environment was respected and project management and sales folks were located in the next set of offices along the way so they could yell and shout over the phone in their own bubble.
3) Massive open plan 30-40+ desks (a bank) - bloody awful depending on where you were allocated a seat. Space was also used hyper efficiently so no four desk pods or the like. Just rows and rows of tables. Several different teams were packed into an entire floor, the noise was quite distracting and was like working in a barn. Would never do this again.
Ideally I like working in my own dedicated office space, but if I had to go back to working in an office again then options 1 & 2 above wouldn't be terrible provided phone calls and arsing about were kept to a minimum. However anything larger than that would be a turn off for me now.
That said I've never worked in a cubicle farm, that might not be too terrible for me provided I could see daylight.
These Facebook type "fun" open plan offices are a total turn off for me, but that's probably an age thing. Perhaps if I was in my 20's again it might be ok for a while. But then I've never had a desire to work for Facebook, Google et al.
Re: Is Facebook’s Massive Open Office Scaring Away Developers?
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
People go to cafes to work. It is not closed cubicles there. And I think they are able to concentrate more. I know for one that I can.
Cafes offer an odd sort of privacy since none of the conversations mean anything to you - effectively white noise - so they're easy to filter out. In an open office, every conversation may apply to you at any point during the conversation, requiring conscious effort to monitor and filter the conversation.
[deleted]
Re: Is Facebook’s Massive Open Office Scaring Away Developers?
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's why we have them... we literally can't afford to give everyone (or anyone for that matter) a private office.
I don't buy that for a second. With what gets spent on salaries, the cost of offices is a drop in the bucket.
Also, if people in private offices are more productive, you can hire fewer people to do the same work, saving lots of money.
Re: Is Facebook’s Massive Open Office Scaring Away Developers?
#116Facebook is paying 40-50 percent more than other places, which is usually a sign developers don’t want to work there. More likely a sign of a high hiring bar and corresponding paycheck.
Simple supply and demand analysis shows that goods command higher prices when supply is lower.
And indeed the supply of good engineers is low.
If Facebook insists on hiring only them, then it makes sense that they're paying more on average.
Re: Is Facebook’s Massive Open Office Scaring Away Developers?
#117Well that, and not wanting to live in L.A..
LA is the best... :O
Re: Is Facebook’s Massive Open Office Scaring Away Developers?
#118As the moderator of a Reddit sub focused on comp sci careers, I don't think the open office is an issue for junior level developers. The worship of what we in that sub call the big 4 (some combo of Google, Facebook, Apple (or Microsoft), Amazon) is pretty much what you hear from every college senior, and I've never heard anyone even mention this as a negative. Of course these are mostly people who haven't had much ex…
I'm under the impression that Microsoft was The One Company of the big five that still gives its employees offices with doors.
My friends at Apple all have their own offices with doors.
Re: Is Facebook’s Massive Open Office Scaring Away Developers?
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
People go to cafes to work. It is not closed cubicles there. And I think they are able to concentrate more. I know for one that I can.
Because nobody is tapping you on the shoulder every 10 minutes asking "did you get the email I just sent out?". You also don't see long multi-person meetings in coffee shops (well, actually it does happen, and that's just as annoying). If you could train coworkers to respect the explicit and implicit signals that people give off when working and concentrating on something and use some fucking etiquette like keeping t…
This. Polite, business-like etiquette goes a long way to productivity.
Re: Is Facebook’s Massive Open Office Scaring Away Developers?
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
People go to cafes to work. It is not closed cubicles there. And I think they are able to concentrate more. I know for one that I can.
Because nobody is tapping you on the shoulder every 10 minutes asking "did you get the email I just sent out?". You also don't see long multi-person meetings in coffee shops (well, actually it does happen, and that's just as annoying). If you could train coworkers to respect the explicit and implicit signals that people give off when working and concentrating on something and use some fucking etiquette like keeping t…
[deleted]