I'm surprised that comments seem to focus so much on the impact on productivity but not the impact on workers' health.
Is Facebook’s Massive Open Office Scaring Away Developers?
181–190 of 483 posts
Re: Is Facebook’s Massive Open Office Scaring Away Developers?
#182I 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 are definitely the way to go. You can avoid conversation from other teams that you don't care about. When there is a conversation in the room, it's probably related to what you're doing so it's not necessarily distracting you. I worked in a room with just my team and it worked out great. We were able to have discussions and draw stuff on white boards on the wall without distracting anyone else. It al…
> Team sized rooms are definitely the way to go.
No, individual areas are the way to go.
Team rooms are still better than cramming people side by side row after row.
Re: Is Facebook’s Massive Open Office Scaring Away Developers?
#183I guess the main point is balance - not everybody agrees about the exact point where it is, but everybody agrees the extremes are bad.
An isolated room in a corner is not good - though it may be useful for "development sprints". An "auditorium" shared between sales, development, marketing, and sometimes even support - people which talk on the phone all the time - is terrible.
Best productivity I ever achieved was during a time I shared a room with 2 co-workers that shared similar knowledge but worked in slightly different areas of the product line, and one was not even working in the same project as me. So we did exchange ideas, but each one was doing each one's part of the equation independently.
I considered some other opportunities before joining my current employer, and some of them were discarded due to (among other reasons) the huge open offices with 30-40+ employees on the same floor.
Re: Is Facebook’s Massive Open Office Scaring Away Developers?
#184At my company they are changing open offices to open offices with shared desks. At least if you cannot stand it, you are allowed to work from home. Cheap, cheaper, cheapest -- for the company.
The fun part is when starry eyed managers are talking about this "upgrade", and call it "Future Work" project as if it was something great and innovative.
As Joel said, if you want to sell something, "take the most unfortunate truth about it, turn it upside down, and drill that lie home". http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000054.html
Re: Is Facebook’s Massive Open Office Scaring Away Developers?
#185I 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?
Why do team sized rooms make this worse?
Re: Is Facebook’s Massive Open Office Scaring Away Developers?
#186does anyone know what kind of light works best for offices ? I have heard of all colors ranging from 2700k to 5000k - I wonder what does facebook use.
Re: Is Facebook’s Massive Open Office Scaring Away Developers?
#187I guess the main point is balance - not everybody agrees about the exact point where it is, but everybody agrees the extremes are bad. An isolated room in a corner is not good - though it may be useful for "development sprints". An "auditorium" shared between sales, development, marketing, and sometimes even support - people which talk on the phone all the time - is terrible. Best productivity I ever achieved was dur…
> An isolated room in a corner is not good
Sure it is. It's called an office. Traditionally the corner ones are bigger and are given to management/execs.
Re: Is Facebook’s Massive Open Office Scaring Away Developers?
#188(Disclosure: FB employee) Most of the problems about overhearing conversations, etc, can be dealt with by a nice pair of headphones. Here, it's universally accepted as the 'do not disturb' signal.
If the employer provides super comfortable noise-cancelling headphones I would agree. Personally, listening to music all day gives me a headache and podcasts are too distracting. And I don't need these headphones for anything else (otherwise, I'd already have a pair!) I wonder what would come of it if I requested some.
There are several types of headphones in the free IT vending machines:
http://fortune.com/2011/07/06/facebooks-vending-machines-a-c...
Re: Is Facebook’s Massive Open Office Scaring Away Developers?
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Being able to easily start a design discussion with 4 or 5 engineers" means "easily break 4 or 5 engineers out of their flow" along with "easily create a distraction for the other 15 engineers within earshot of the easily-started discussion". I'm fine with coffee shops over home (and did the same in college), but coffeeshop noise is "white noise" -- whirring espresso grinders, a blur of conversations between people…
Maybe it depends on the domain. "Flow state" makes sense for something like a startup where single coders are writing huge diffs on their own. I work on a huge codebase where "figuring out what code to write" occupies dramatically more of our time than "writing code".
I think that is a difference. I have never worked in that kind of environment.
When I was at a large defense contractor the work was broken down into such small chunks that each engineer was essentially off on their own working on their piece of the system. In fact, that was the way all engineering, not just software engineering, was done there. There might be a point where two or three people would need to discuss an approach, but that wasn't the majority of the time.
The company I just finished at works multiple small contracts simultaneously. Because of the small scope it was very common to be the only person working on the code for a particular project, though there was more collaboration than at my previous company.
The place I am going seems to be more like what you describe, so it will be interesting to see if my opinions of open office layouts change after that.
Re: Is Facebook’s Massive Open Office Scaring Away Developers?
#190When my company moved to an open office plan we, the developers, tried to argue that we needed the ability to concentrate and that this would hinder that. We were told that every job required concentration and that we shouldn't be such prima donnas who think we are special snowflakes. Someday I'm going to get a special snowglobe and shove it down the throat of the sales lady who sits next to me who holds conference c…
Seems your wrath is better aimed at those who implemented an open floor plan, not the lady doing her job.