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Open offices are bad for us

bbc.com

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Re: Open offices are bad for us

#121

Post by gdulli »

smelendez wrote: post #21

Open offices are awful, but they're here to stay for the same reason more adults are living with roommates and relatives: high real estate prices. Working remotely is one solution, but many companies don't think it would work for them. Personally, I'd make the shared area for solitary work only: no work discussions longer than a minute at work areas (use a conference room, take a walk or Slack), no eating at work are…

> Working remotely is one solution, but many companies don't think it would work for them.

The problem for me is, I need to be generally around people during the day. I want to be able to work productively but have people to talk to face to face when I leave my office, go to meetings, lunch, etc. I don't dislike people and couldn't tolerate being too isolated. I just want a few walls around me.

Re: Open offices are bad for us

#122

Post by beachstartup »

gdulli wrote: post #121
smelendez wrote: post #21

Open offices are awful, but they're here to stay for the same reason more adults are living with roommates and relatives: high real estate prices. Working remotely is one solution, but many companies don't think it would work for them. Personally, I'd make the shared area for solitary work only: no work discussions longer than a minute at work areas (use a conference room, take a walk or Slack), no eating at work are…

> Working remotely is one solution, but many companies don't think it would work for them. The problem for me is, I need to be generally around people during the day. I want to be able to work productively but have people to talk to face to face when I leave my office, go to meetings, lunch, etc. I don't dislike people and couldn't tolerate being too isolated. I just want a few walls around me.

that's pretty much what everyone wants. the problem is it's expensive.

Re: Open offices are bad for us

#123

Post by [deleted] »

BjoernKW wrote: post #92
smelendez wrote: post #21

Open offices are awful, but they're here to stay for the same reason more adults are living with roommates and relatives: high real estate prices. Working remotely is one solution, but many companies don't think it would work for them. Personally, I'd make the shared area for solitary work only: no work discussions longer than a minute at work areas (use a conference room, take a walk or Slack), no eating at work are…

> Working remotely is one solution, but many companies don't think it would work for them. My prediction is those companies will go out of business eventually. Working remotely not only is more healthy in every possible way, it's also much more environmentally friendly. It's a key solution to a whole lot of societal problems in industrialised countries, not the least of which is traffic and all the negative side effe…

[deleted]

Re: Open offices are bad for us

#124

Post by curun1r »

jMyles wrote: post #4

Am I the only one left on HN who prefers open plan? I've done some of my best work for open plan companies. I have a particularly fond memory of when Reelio rented space at Blueprint (healthcare incubator in NYC). We stayed up very late, listened to loud music, and did some of the best work of our lives. I remember one night in particular, listening to the soundtrack from "O Brother Where Art Thou," when asynchrony a…

I'm somewhere in between. I prefer a shared office setup where offices are shared among 3-5 people. Ideally these are team members or people with a similar job function to mine.

This is the best setup that I've found for balancing the social isolation of private offices/WFH with the distractions of an open office setup.

Re: Open offices are bad for us

#126

Post by majewsky »

BjoernKW wrote: post #92
smelendez wrote: post #21

Open offices are awful, but they're here to stay for the same reason more adults are living with roommates and relatives: high real estate prices. Working remotely is one solution, but many companies don't think it would work for them. Personally, I'd make the shared area for solitary work only: no work discussions longer than a minute at work areas (use a conference room, take a walk or Slack), no eating at work are…

> Working remotely is one solution, but many companies don't think it would work for them. My prediction is those companies will go out of business eventually. Working remotely not only is more healthy in every possible way, it's also much more environmentally friendly. It's a key solution to a whole lot of societal problems in industrialised countries, not the least of which is traffic and all the negative side effe…

> Working remotely not only is more healthy in every possible way, it's also much more environmentally friendly.

You sure about that first part? Everyone working at their home office sounds like the next step of neoliberalism-induced isolation, with its horrible effects on mental health: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/12/neolib...

Re: Open offices are bad for us

#127

Post by jMyles »

chris_7 wrote: post #100
jMyles wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment doesn't resonate with me. Have you worked in an early- or mid-stage startup in NYC or the Bay Area in the past... 10 years? > No offense, but that sounds like some kind of boys club, not professional working environment That's a strange value judgment; I'm not really sure what to think about it. At the end of the day, the company is still growing and meeting its goals. It is also still facilitating the d…

If you're at the office at 1am, you probably need a union, not music. Work ends, at latest, 8 hours after you get there. People actually died for that a century ago, and now people are just throwing it away.

I enjoy long days. That doesn't mean I'm throwing anyone's efforts away.

I am able to demand very high compensation, even among programmers. I am able to demand a work schedule that fits me (5-12 day stretches of long days, followed by vacations of a length of my choosing).

My position is a mix of blessings, for which I am grateful, and work to gain the esteem and trust of the python (and larger programming-) communities.

My heart goes out to those who struggled (and in some cases gave their lives) for better working conditions; I am nowhere near their plight and can't even know their struggle.

Re: Open offices are bad for us

#128

Post by imgabe »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #30
smelendez wrote: post #21

Open offices are awful, but they're here to stay for the same reason more adults are living with roommates and relatives: high real estate prices. Working remotely is one solution, but many companies don't think it would work for them. Personally, I'd make the shared area for solitary work only: no work discussions longer than a minute at work areas (use a conference room, take a walk or Slack), no eating at work are…

Strangely, open offices with cubicles can be more expensive than building drywall walls to make closed offices. And the much-vaunted flexibility of cubicles is way, way overrated. In my experience, cubicles sit in the same place for years. Any benefit of re-using them is lost. Also if the company is growing, new ones get bought all the time, so old ones aren't re-used anyway. Its obvious on the face of it: re-usable…

There is a tax benefit as well. Cubicles are considered "furniture" which depreciates faster than walls. Companies get to deduct a greater percentage of the cost of cubicles each year than they would for the cost of building a wall.

Re: Open offices are bad for us

#129

Post by chatwinra »

I hate to be negative but this article is frustrating because it makes an argument without backing it up with evidence that can be followed up by the reader.

It makes claims such as 'it’s well documented that we rarely brainstorm brilliant ideas ... in a crowd.' but doesn't provide any link to these documents.

The only links it provides are ones to other BBC articles.

It also cites studies and references their data without providing a link to them.

It's a shame as I'm sure there may be a strong case against open offices but this is pretty lazy journalism and indicative of some major problems (in my opinion, anyway) with how science is reported (and used) in online articles.

Re: Open offices are bad for us

#130

Post by VLM »

Arizhel wrote: post #115
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strangely, open offices with cubicles can be more expensive than building drywall walls to make closed offices. And the much-vaunted flexibility of cubicles is way, way overrated. In my experience, cubicles sit in the same place for years. Any benefit of re-using them is lost. Also if the company is growing, new ones get bought all the time, so old ones aren't re-used anyway. Its obvious on the face of it: re-usable…

You might be comparing to the wrong thing. These days, lots of open offices I see do not involve expensive (low) cubicle walls and desks, they're just simple tables. You can't get much cheaper than simple fold-up tables.

What about the cost of those special collaboration rooms that no one wants to talk about?

At my previous cube farm employer, we had maybe 75 cubes, a giant 30x30 cafeteria/lunch/meeting room, oh 16 tables to eat lunch at least, a large conference room we literally called the large conference room of 20x20 and a small conf room we called the small conference room of 10x10 and there was an engineering team meeting operations room (really a lockable storage room / lab) that was 20x20. Because coats and boots "can't be stored in cubes" although we did anyway, there was a row of 50 feet by 3 feet of coat closet that was basically unused. That's a lot of square footage allocated to no individual therefore "saved" but offices would result in 2000 or so sq ft of shared space being eliminated. Now figure a 10x10 office shared by two people, thats 40 people's private offices just being wasted in the shared space required by cubicle life. So of the 75 people in that office 40 are in the new offices and 35 are distributed in the space formerly occupied by cubes. Certainly cube walls are slightly thinner than private office walls but the space savings won't be a factor of two. Definitely the employer was throwing away a considerable amount of expensive rent by using cubes and meeting rooms instead of private offices. If they junked the cubes and went private shared office they would have still had extra leftover space maybe for fancier larger offices or some people could have solitary private offices or maybe some "neutral ground" meeting rooms.

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