Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about cubicles?
I would honestly rather change careers than work in a cubicle. They give me a feeling of deep existential dread. Do some actually prefer them?
I prefer them much more than open offices.
Is the open office layout dead?
201–210 of 373 posts
Re: Is the open office layout dead?
#202If open offices are so bad wouldn't it be easy to create a competitive advantage by going with some other layout?
Re: Is the open office layout dead?
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's simply horrible how expensive it would be to give private offices even to >3 people in our company. And how much does it cost to have your entire engineering team audibly and visually distracted and annoyed 100% of the time? Environmental factors that decrease engineer productivity may not show up on a balance sheet, but the cost is massive. Can you get an engineer an office for less than $40k/year? Then it's…
I would really encourage you to move on the interviewing as soon as you can. I was in your position, desperately unhappy with the working conditions, and now I'm in a small quiet office with 4 to 5 other people and I have never been happier in my work. In the meantime, get yourself a set of Bose Quiet Comfort 35s. An absolutely life changing piece of equipment for me at least. If nothing else you will comfortable enj…
> get yourself a set of Bose Quiet Comfort 35s
That's only if you like to listen to music while you work. If you just want quiet, get yourself a pair of the earmuffs that the airport ground crews wear out on the tarmac. I had a coworker who wore those and the only real downside was that he'd get horribly startled when people were trying to get his attention because they'd have to come up and touch him on the shoulder. Even basically yelling in the vicinity of his ears, he'd have no idea people were right behind him.
Re: Is the open office layout dead?
#204> No designated desks I hate hot desking. I know it's very subjective but when I come into an office for eight hours a day, five days a week, I like to personalise my workspace. I don't drive, I take public transport and walk, and hate carting my laptop and charger around with me. I want my own space, with meeting rooms and collaboration spaces for when I need those things. I may be alone in saying so, but I'd happil…
We've recently moved into new offices in Frankfurt/Germany and being the CTO of our 40 Person Startup gave me an in-depth look at all the calculations involved. It's simply horrible how expensive it would be to give private offices even to >3 people in our company. I've fought tooth and nail to keep everyone in small team offices( We've got two small rooms set aside as flex-desks(complete with 2 4K Monitors & Gigabit…
This might seem like a naive question but could you buy a child's play house with door and windows that is big enough for a desk and use those instead?
Re: Is the open office layout dead?
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
We've recently moved into new offices in Frankfurt/Germany and being the CTO of our 40 Person Startup gave me an in-depth look at all the calculations involved. It's simply horrible how expensive it would be to give private offices even to >3 people in our company. I've fought tooth and nail to keep everyone in small team offices( We've got two small rooms set aside as flex-desks(complete with 2 4K Monitors & Gigabit…
What about cubicles?
Cubicles are better for all the reasons other people mentioned.
They seem to have been replaced by cheaper long tables in offices that are genuinely paperless, since all any employee needs is a computer, monitor and chair. In my experience, cubicles usually have a file cabinet and other paper storage, utensil drawer, desk phone, wall calendar and other stuff I seldom see in modern tech offices.
And when it doesn't matter which computer is used by which employee, or everyone carries a laptop and phone with them, enter hotdesking.
Re: Is the open office layout dead?
#206> No designated desks I hate hot desking. I know it's very subjective but when I come into an office for eight hours a day, five days a week, I like to personalise my workspace. I don't drive, I take public transport and walk, and hate carting my laptop and charger around with me. I want my own space, with meeting rooms and collaboration spaces for when I need those things. I may be alone in saying so, but I'd happil…
What if they gave everybody a desk with wheels? Then you can wheel your desk with your tools wherever you want to work that day.
More realistic is a small (30cm square) table with drawers, which I think most people could move themselves.
Something like this. Sturdy, office-looking versions were common in my school:
Re: Is the open office layout dead?
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
We've recently moved into new offices in Frankfurt/Germany and being the CTO of our 40 Person Startup gave me an in-depth look at all the calculations involved. It's simply horrible how expensive it would be to give private offices even to >3 people in our company. I've fought tooth and nail to keep everyone in small team offices( We've got two small rooms set aside as flex-desks(complete with 2 4K Monitors & Gigabit…
> It's simply horrible how expensive it would be to give private offices even to >3 people in our company. And how much does it cost to have your entire engineering team audibly and visually distracted and annoyed 100% of the time? Environmental factors that decrease engineer productivity may not show up on a balance sheet, but the cost is massive. Can you get an engineer an office for less than $40k/year? Then it's…
> And how much does it cost to have your entire engineering team audibly and visually distracted and annoyed 100% of the time?
No one has any idea, because that isnt a cost which is tracked by the accounting department...
therefore it has zero cost, right?
Right?
> So again, the costs don't show up on your balance sheet, and every person on your team could fucking hate this open office shit and work at half capacity, and you would never have any idea.
If only the managers could... I don't know... manage ? And pay attention to what's going on in their company?
Nah... a good percentage of managers I've worked for spend 75% of their time doing management politics / make-work. Getting things done is a low, low, priority.
Re: Is the open office layout dead?
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's funny, I work in a coworking space, and we technically have hot desks, but everyone always ends up sitting in the same place every day. It really throws me if someone takes my seat, usually it's someone new, who hasn't figured out the seating plan yet. It's almost like high school, where you don't have a designated lunch table, but you always sit at the same table. Or at least that's what the movies show, we did…
Humans are creatures of habit.
It's also simply more efficient, it's one less thing to think about instead of searching for a table every time.
Re: Is the open office layout dead?
#209For fun, let's slippery slope this trend into the setting for a story. At some point the workplace will just end up an unlivable hellscape where people have to walk to work 20 miles from their triple bunked dorms, and then stand inches from each other for 16 hour double shifts wearing nothing but VR goggles and chord boards. The 12th floor walkup, non-temperature controlled "office" warehouse will smell like fear and…
Set this in Shibuya good extra sci-fi goodness.
Or Frisco, if you want to sell to Hollywood. Mike Judge coulf buy this as a spin-off to Silicon Valley.
Re: Is the open office layout dead?
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's simply horrible how expensive it would be to give private offices even to >3 people in our company How do you quantify the loss in productivity and quality that could be associated with a noisy work environment?
It's quantified, along with the gains from ease of access to everyone and the increased communications and social geling of everyone. Individual offices are simply not worth it, financially, culturally and physically.
Really? Who did the quantification? Citation needed.
Probably you missed the "increasing body of research" mentioned in TFA then...
"According to a study on the cost of interrupted work, a typical office worker is interrupted every 11 minutes. Even worse, people often take up to 25 minutes to refocus on the original task."
"Researchers have found that the loss of productivity due to noise distraction doubles in open office layouts compared to private offices, and open office noise reduces the ability to recall information, and even to do basic arithmetic."
"In a 2013 study about the privacy-communication trade-off in open offices, 60% of cubicle workers and half of all employees in partitionless offices said the lack of sound privacy was a significant problem."
" A study on the association between sick days and open office plans found that people working in open offices took 62% more sick days than those in private offices. And remember all those interruptions that workers experience in open offices? In a survey in the International Journal of Stress Management, employees who were frequently interrupted reported 9% higher rates of exhaustion."
"Clearly, open office layouts aren’t the hotbeds of creativity designers originally hoped they would be. And with office space at a premium, private offices for everyone isn’t a realistic alternative, nor is it ideal. The ebb and flow of effective collaboration requires several types of spaces. As workplace experts outlined in the Harvard Business Review, employees tend to generate ideas and process information alone or in pairs, then come together in a larger group to build on those ideas, and then disperse again to take the next steps."
https://hbr.org/2013/11/research-cubicles-are-the-absolute-w...
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272494413...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21528171
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-biggest-office-interruption...
https://hbr.org/2014/10/balancing-we-and-me-the-best-collabo...