201–210 of 483 posts
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Heh. Except for no natural light, the 5-foot walls with white noise to drown out conversation actually doesn't seem bad.
Agreed! Our space has 3ft high cube walls and you hear every single conversation everyone has. It's incredibly distracting and I can no longer just throw headphones on to mask it. Now I find too much music distracting too.
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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…
This probably works great if you have evenly-sized, relatively stable teams. The place I just left has teams that ranged from just me to the entire eight-persob company, and the teams could change on a month-to-month basis. In fact, it wasn't unusual to be working on two or three projects simultaneously.
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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.
Is there anyone here who likes open offices more than a floorplan divised into smaller rooms? I ask because I've worked in an open office setting as a developer for years (the place is otherwise nice) and thoroughly despise it as a workspace. Yet some people don't seem to mind it. I don't mind serendipity. The problem is I serendiptously overhear everyones discussion which is incredibly disruptive for deep work. Fact…
I prefer open offices. You get a pretty significant echo chamber effect on articles like this because people who don't like it turn out to comment. Personally, I have no difficulty with noise (I prefer working in coffee shops to at home), and being able to easily start a design discussion with 4 or 5 engineers when necessary is extremely valuable. I totally get why some people don't like it though.
That "easy conversation" is not scheduled, and now I need to stop what I am doing, listen to you for an hour, and still finish the rest of my tasking on time.
I 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…
Natural light is one of the most important aspects of an office to me. A few years ago I actually turned down an offer because I realized I'd be sitting in an interior team-sized room with no windows and just a door to a hallway, again with no windows. I would have been giving up a seat next to huge windows with light flooding into the room. I just knew that I'd end up depressed in those working conditions and decide…
This is why office buildings in most of Western Europe aren't as massive and square as in countries like the US.
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I wonder if you could cheat natural daylight by using big RGB LED area lights emitting at just the right amount of Kelvin. The aural equivalent ( https://rainymood.com/ ) certainly works for me.
It's not only the Kelvins, but the intensity also. Natural light is around 100K lux. That is crazily expensive to generate.
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We need a job site that lists companies that provide your own office. I would only apply there.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html #8 joel used to (still does?) host a job board that used Joel Test as a factor. Maybe it died when StackOverflow launched.
Also, the exact wording for the office part of the test is "Do programmers have quiet working conditions?" This usually means that working conditions might possibly be quiet if nobody else happened to be in the office at the same time as you. While many claim quiet working conditions, I've never seen one that actually provided private offices.
This is anecdotal of course, and just based on looking at photographs they've included on their website or Stack Overflow page, but every job I've viewed recently appears to have an open plan office. In some of the photos you even see people standing around having impromptu meetings in the middle of a group of desks where others are trying to work.
Remember this is just the companies that are actually claiming to provide programmers with quiet working conditions. I can't imagine what the noisy ones are like.
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> That's why we have them... we literally can't afford to give everyone (or anyone for that matter) a private office. You know, if a prospective employer was straight up with me about that, I'd give it serious consideration. I can understand that not every company can afford an endless supply of private offices in urban areas (although obviously this is not the case with companies like FB). What bugs me the most abou…
It's tempting to ask "leadership" "If it's so great for productivity, why doesn't leadership/management forego their private offices and sit in the middle of the open office floor plan?"