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Is the open office layout dead?

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Re: Is the open office layout dead?

#271

Post by drunkenmonkey »

oldandtired wrote: post #30

As long as an office is considered a status symbol by management, then the open plan environment will stay. In a general sense, offices for any reason related to productivity is a non-starter today (has been so for a number of decades). Offices are considered a reward for climbing the hierarchy not for actual work by the plebs (you know, those who would actually need it or benefit from it for work purposes). And cert…

Needs quiet to focus => superior

Bad signals being sent here by any management that adopts this line.

Re: Is the open office layout dead?

#272

Post by regularfry »

gm-conspiracy wrote: post #270
Spooky23 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever had a bathroom remodeled? Construction sucks and is both a time and money sink. You can literally have a crew show up and build a big cube farm in 1-5 days. It's really the same argument as "why would anyone pay outrageous fees to Amazon for slow, shitty VMs?". The answer is that when you factor in the cost of a data center facility and the people to build and run it, it turns out that AWS is a good dea…

Are we running new sewer and water lines? Installing a drain pan? Retiling? I thought for an office, you need to frame w/ some metal studs and drywall, doors, and maybe blown-in insulation to abate sound. Not nearly as complex or skilled an endeavor.

Not as complex, but: electrics, lighting, networking, phone, smoke alarms, sprinkler system, ventilation, security... it does all add up.

Re: Is the open office layout dead?

#273

Post by quantumhobbit »

sogen wrote: post #221
mc32 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cubicles were maligned as passé ("cubicle farms") and staid so that managers and facilities could present open office spaces as au courant, forward and entrepreneurial so that in turn they could save in area per employee expenses. If they can call cubicles "farms" (echoing sharecropping, drudgery), then we could just as easily and aptly call open office layouts "sardine cans" with all the earned baggage that comes wi…

Some ideas: "Open cans" "Sweat farms" "Sweat cans" "Headphones farms"

I'm fond of "sneeze distribution center"

Re: Is the open office layout dead?

#275

Post by quantumhobbit »

primeblue wrote: post #228
throwaway0255 wrote: post #166

Earlier 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…

> keeping engineers crowded together like livestock in stables serves as a visual indicator of the inherent superiority of their managers Bad management and a sign the company is toxic.

True, but still very common in this industry.

Re: Is the open office layout dead?

#276

Post by xroche »

0xbear wrote: post #104

>> No designated desks I don't know about anyone else, but for me that would tank the productivity even worse than the open plan. I have to be at a particular place in order to get anywhere close to "the flow". There are currently two such places: my desk at work, and my desk in my man cave at home. Whenever we move offices, it takes me weeks to get back to 100% again. I suspect I'm not the only one. Simply put, with…

This. "No designated desks" is even more retarded than open plan offices.

I want my dual-screen setup. I want my mechanical keyboard. I want my optical mouse with high precision. I want my Herman-Miller chair. I want my tea pot and my mug. I want my notebook and my pens. I want my bluetooth audio headphone with the charger. I want my phone QI wireless charger where I just put my smartphone.

I don't care about open plan: yes, you're being interrupted, but that's the rule, and this does improve communication, even if I hate being interrupted.

Stay tuned, folks. In ten years, we'll have a "Is the no designated desks layout dead?" article on HN.

Re: Is the open office layout dead?

#277

Post by coldtea »

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?

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

No, they just never complete any task while FOCUSED.

They still complete tasks, but distracted, and thus in a sub-par and slower way.

Re: Is the open office layout dead?

#278

Post by Fifer82 »

dx034 wrote: post #266
Fifer82 wrote: post #230

As far as I am concerned the Office is dead, open or not in the tech field. I mean an office which you travel to, and work all day. No way am I going back to that for less than another 70k a year on top. It isn't 1930.

I'd think many companies would disagree with you. Slack and Skype still cannot replace face2face meetings so that working remotely (full time) is a non-starter for many jobs.

Let them disagree, I won't be working there anyway so it isn't a concern.

Re: Is the open office layout dead?

#279

Post by JohnBooty » 

    Perhaps the most powerful and popular trend in the 
    move away from open offices is an increased number 
    of small private spaces
My company upgraded our offices last year and "privacy pods + informal open spaces" has been a huge success. I don't have any hardcore productivity metrics but the reaction among our developers, including me, has been unanimously favorable.

Although, it must be said, we still prefer to work from home quite a bit. This is mostly due to our large number of remote employees in other countries. If I am working with remote people I don't typically commute to the office.

Re: Is the open office layout dead?

#280

Post by LaGrange »

cortesoft wrote: post #198
emerged wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Which part about it do you dislike? I have a feeling it is some association you have with cubicles, and not the cubicles themselves.

There are cubicles and, uh, tiny beige hellcubes.

I like cubicles because, frankly, my only experience actually working in them was when I was delegated to work for Genentech for a bit (I don't usually work in the US). The cubicles they had were large enough to have a second seat and a whiteboard — you could hold a face-to-face meeting with them, no problem. Oh, and they were designed in such a way that you had to get into one to look at someone's screen. As a bonus, mine actually had a window (I guess guest privilege?), but even the inner ones were fairly roomy.

On the other hand, I've seen places where I (I'm 6"2') just wouldn't fit so I'd have permanent leg pain. Oh, and the screens are easily visible to passers by. Just the pain itself would be enough to hate those.

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