221–230 of 483 posts
When 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.
The problem with the sales person is that there are room set aside for making phone calls (whether personal or business) and there are always some available, but apparently that is entirely too unreasonable to expect someone with a laptop to go find a room instead of letting everyone in a 30 foot radius listen in on the call.
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Epic Systems has a private office for each of their 9,000+ employees. Their campus is outside Madison, WI, so it's cheaper to do that there then it would be elsewhere. Private offices don't have to be large. I'm sure the money for private offices would appear if companies were sufficiently motivated to provide them.
I don't know if Epic is a private office nirvana for each of their employees, but to be fair, it does sound like the majority do have a private office. I only live in the area and hear stuff second- and third-hand, but I gather an increasing number of Epic employees are assigned to shared offices. The Boston Globe's glowing commentary on the campus concurs: "Most employees have a private office; some share one with a…
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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…
That seems like a way to exacerbate Conway's law problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law . Most of the technical debt I try to fight off is based on my team doing something that makes sense for us based on what we're good at / what we think other teams want, but doesn't line up with what other teams want / what they think we can deliver; we end up essentially building abstraction layers around other tea…
Abstraction layers around teams sounds like a good thing, as long as they abstraction layers make sense.
(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.
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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.
(I sit next to a window atm. It's a bit annoying when the sun shows up after lunch)
As 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.
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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.
Have you tried playing white noise or something over your headphones?
I use sox to generate audio. It is available for win/Mac/Linux. I set it for 90 minutes of brown noise which gives me a reminder to get up and walk around when it ends. I believe it can generate white or pink noise if you prefer.
>play -n synth 90:00 brownnoise brownnoise
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I always thought open offices became popular because it was literally the cheapest set up for facilities. For startups it worked because all you had to buy was desks. Somehow that got spun in to 'open offices are so sexy!' Open offices are horrible for productivity imo. Moved to a job with an office and it is so. much. better.
I agree with you here. I also believe that a lot of the current design trends in new spaces these days has this same origin. Light bulbs hanging by a cord, reclaimed wood walls and ceilings, keeping raw pipes, wires exposed etc. It does look kind of cool, but the genesis was small businesses and spaces just trying to save money.
As a counterpoint though, another office also went for industrial design, but they did it stylishly - just one visible aircon pipe, and instead of raw concrete, they sprayed it with a kind of foam or fiber that absorbs a lot of sound, in a somewhat dark color. That office has a beer tap, too.