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Is the open office layout dead?

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Re: Is the open office layout dead?

#241

Post by majewsky »

tome wrote: post #226
coldtea wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> "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." So they're interrupted more frequently that the time it takes to refocus and therefore never complete any task?

Sounds about right to me. /s

More seriously though, that "every 11 minutes" figure is most likely an average, so there will be intervals much longer than that.

Re: Is the open office layout dead?

#242

Post by tonyedgecombe »

throwaway0255 wrote: post #166
Roritharr wrote: post #64

Earlier 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…

I don't understand how it can be so expensive, I can rent a serviced office for two people locally for £400/month. This is without the economies of scale of an organisation.

Re: Is the open office layout dead?

#243

Post by spinningarrow »

davb wrote: post #7

> 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…

I definitely get the point about personalising (it's not for me, but I know many people like it), but having to cart your laptop + charger can easily be solved with lockers. The place I currently work at does hot desks, but everyone has lockers for their personal belongings and things they don't want to lug around which, so far, has been striking a happy balance.

Re: Is the open office layout dead?

#244

Post by sundvor »

mcny wrote: post #118
sundvor wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you. I'd love to try a 4k screen, and was even considering it - however in the end I took my home U3415W to work and bought the X34 for home (I might game 30 minutes a week or something; the extra hz are certainly nice for that, otherwise they are pretty much identical). I value actual real estate over PPI, preferring to run at 100% / unscaled which looks much nicer in Win10. The 109PPI (3440x1440) is de…

I am trying not to cargo cult here but I think if I need to scroll a file with 9 font on a 32"+ screen with 4k display it might be a sign of code smell (again, this should definitely not be a hard rule just saying it might be nice to stop and think why it is so long)?

Not arguing against that, however Visual Studio has lots of windows eg NCrunch runner, output, solution overview in addition to editor(s).

The ultrawide allows for this nicely; tests on the left, two actual editors, solution explorer on right, and output at the bottom under the editors.

Re: Is the open office layout dead?

#245

Post by tome »

curun1r wrote: post #203
northwest65 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Perhaps suggest he strategically places a mirror on his desk.

Re: Is the open office layout dead?

#246

Post by mattlondon »

gedy wrote: post #239
mattlondon wrote: post #224

> No designated desks We had an office where they tried this as an experiment. Each desk was sit-stand, had one or two 24inch monitors, a chromebox + mouse + keyboard, plenty of wall sockets easily accessible at the top of the desk and powered-USB port for charging etc. People either plugged their laptop in, or just logged in on the chromebox and were away. And it was awful. * People started to have "their" desk wher…

I'm curious what in holy hell did they say or think they were improving by using open seating?

I think the line of thinking was to try and reduce the number of desks/space needed.

The idea I think - and it is perfectly valid idea - is that most of the time only ever about 70-90% of people based in an office are actually physically there. The rest of the time they are on vacation/training/client-meetings/working from another office/working from home etc.

So there are a LOT of empty desks any day of the week, so why pay for office space to accommodate all of your staff when it is very, very rare for 100% of people to be there?

I understand the rationale, but in practice it really sucked.

Some suggestions for improving non-designated seating would be:

* Run things at a more generous margin (e.g. space for 90% of employees rather than 75% - made up numbers but you get the idea)

* Sort out issues with equipment - either through daily checks of everything or a more stream-lined approach to getting faults fixed (i.e. dont go through "raising a ticket" ball-ache, but something like put a rubber-duck on the desk or something then someone comes and checks out everything, or have floor-walkers who can be grabbed ad hoc)

* Have a STRICT no-camping policy, and clear the desks Every. Single. Day. so that anything left behind is put into lost property bins at the end of the day, then given to charity at the end of the month if not claimed.

* Clean & Tidy the desks up every day so it doesn't look like an explosion in a hacker's bedroom every morning.

* Anchor specific teams in specific area - i.e. allow people to go anywhere if they want, but give some teams designated spaces where they get priority - e.g. "This is the QA team area", or "This is the test team area".

* Allow people who need specialist equipment (e.g. developers) to have fixed desks with their equipment.

Re: Is the open office layout dead?

#247

Post by AriaMinaei »

I wish someone who works at Pixar could comment in this thread. They've had private offices ever since the steve jobs building, and often you hear that private, customized offices is one of the things that they love about their workplace.

The Steve Jobs building is designed to increase chance of random encounters between people to stimulate collaboration, but these encounters happen in the hallways and the designated collaborative spaces, rather than in people's private offices.

Some pictures: https://officesnapshots.com/2007/07/16/pixar-hq/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CX9OV43o4Ac

Edit: Private offices were first introduced since the Steve Jobs building

Re: Is the open office layout dead?

#248

Post by lawnchair_larry »

chairmanwow wrote: post #98
jasonjei wrote: post #4

How open is Dropbox to remote work? A lot of places of work "allow" or "tolerate it," but it feels hard to use this working mode for a consistent period. Working from home often has the same stigma as unlimited vacation days--you can do it, but it's often frowned upon...

I think that stems from the many people that "work from home" only to take their cat to the vet, get their car washed, go to the dentist, and pick up their dry-cleaning. Most of the time whenever I hear the term "working from home" I immediately assume they will not be home and will not be working.

That's a pretty silly assumption. Is that what you do when you work from home? If not, what makes you think everyone else does?

Re: Is the open office layout dead?

#249

Post by tome »

zeep wrote: post #195
tlogan wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But a private office is very very expensive. People might think I'm trolling but I honestly think that until "engineer > real estate" there will be no real progress. All this talk about "open space", "hot desks", etc. is because costs of private office space just does not make sense to any CTO or CEO.

Why not let them work from home and save even more then?

This sounds like the critical question in the whole thing.

Re: Is the open office layout dead?

#250

Post by falsedan »

slifin wrote: post #204
Roritharr wrote: post #64

Earlier 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…

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?

I love this idea but I feel that some engineers may interpret it as a message that you think they are childish/immature.
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