The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea • Hacker News Board

Re: The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea

#91

Post by linuxftw » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 2:26 PM UTC

larrik wrote: post #73

maltalex wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That argument doesn't hold water. Employee time is usually a lot more expensive than the space they occupy. At least in tech. You could save quite a lot of money on furniture if everyone sat with their laptops on the floor. But in reality that would be more expensive since the difference in productivity will outweigh the furniture cost.

Ah, but accountants don't measure productivity, only cost. It doesn't matter if it takes 3 times as long to ship your product, the only way they'd justify the higher cost of the office is if it meant cutting jobs.

I agree, and often times is several engineering teams that have their own budgets for labor, verses an entirely different department (facilities) using a different pool of money. Each department has incentives to cut costs independently and often at the expense of other departments.

I would happily buy my own sodas (I don't drink them anyway), chips/snacks (I don't eat them at work), coffee (I do drink coffee!) if it meant I never had to sit in an open office environment again.

Re: The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea

#92

Post by geebee » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 2:27 PM UTC

sotojuan wrote: post #88

geebee wrote: post #87

Here's what I posted three years ago on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9760414 Is it time to get depressed yet? This has been a topic for such a long time. It was in peopleware in 1987. I thought I discovered the topic when Joel (On Sofware) wrote about it in 2000. While a few people seem to enjoy open offices, the overwhelming majority of developers I know, or who chime in on HN, value a quiet place…

Reminds me of Dan Luu's take: > This book seemed convincing when I read it in college. It even had all sorts of studies backing up what they said. No deadlines is better than having deadlines. Offices are better than cubicles. Basically all devs I talk to agree with this stuff. > But virtually every successful company is run the opposite way. Even Microsoft is remodeling buildings from individual offices to open plan…

That's a great point. The top companies are succeeding in spite of a practice developers say they despise. So isn't that evidence they're right, and the devs are wrong?

Here's the thing - how many industries rely so deeply on controlling their workforce's right to live and work in the United States? How many industries lobby congress so ferociously and constantly about a shortage of highly skilled workers?

Well, yeah, if an industry has the right to decide who is and isn't allowed to live in the United States, in a system where non-family based immigration is difficult and spots are hard to come by, then sure, they can be very successful imposing work conditions that people with personal and economic freedom of mobility would reject in favor of another profession. But if you really want to live in the US and Facebook controls whether you get and keep a work visa, then sure, you'll put up with an open office. And because of the way we allocate green cards (requiring a corporate sponsor, and greatly restricting how many are issued every year, with a long queue), you may have to put up with it for quite a while.

So another way to look at it is this: companies say they are in a desperate competition for key workers in critical shortage, and they can't recruit domestically no matter how good an offer they make. They also require working conditions that most developers say they despise. Uh, how about working conditions that most developers don't despise, have you tried that?

Re: The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea

#93

Post by rhapsodic » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 2:27 PM UTC

I'm old enough to remember when high-wall cubicles were standard fare, and they were mocked and derided as soul-crushing corporate cost-cutting measures. But they gave you a lot of privacy, relatively speaking. And you could still have spontaneous conversations with your neighbors.

And then when school-cafeteria-style open offices became de rigeur in the startup culture, people seemed hesitant to push back on the "but collaboration!" nonsense. It looks like the overton window for that is finally starting to shift.

Re: The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea

#94

Post by s-shellfish » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 2:29 PM UTC

mwcampbell wrote: post #75

Androider wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a penny wise, pound foolish decision though, considering engineering salaries. It's hard to quantify, and often an externalized cost to the facilities management and decision makers, but my own experience suggests open offices are incredibly expensive as a negative multiplier on the engineering output. The "actual work" starts getting done in the evenings, on planes, and on weekends, while the business hours are…

> I'm building my own company now, fully remote How do you counter the common argument that face-to-face communication is the most high-bandwidth and one shouldn't throw away that competitive advantage unnecessarily? I'm not a proponent of that position; on the contrary, I don't want to accept it. But a lot of people think that way.

It's not the most high bandwidth for all of us. More information doesn't always equal better.

Re: The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea

#95

Post by mlthoughts2018 » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 2:29 PM UTC

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #83

The author completely misses the point using straw man argumentation. The managers sign the leases not because the of nice-looking photos, "increased collaboration" and other ridiculous arguments, but because of the bottom line. Open-plan offices are cheaper and that's the sole reason. Whatever other reasons are communicated to employees they're just typical corporate internal PR. I haven't actually met anyone who re…

Do you have evidence that open plan spaces are actually cheaper, even just in plain real estate terms? I’ve always read that they end up being less than a few percent cheaper per person after all is said and done. To boot, a lot of companies spend millions on stupid, opulent office features like fountains, coffee stations, roof decks, beer, etc. How do you explain that they are willing to spend so much more on that stuff instead of spending that budget on giving healthy workplace privacy?

I worked for a company once that already had a huge office in Columbus, Ohio, with private offices for everyone. They had no engineering presence in that office and no plans to increase headcount in that office. It was an HR office primarily, and the workers there needed privacy everyday to be on the phone about sensitive topics like legal issues or salary.

The CEO announced in a company meeting once that they would be totally remodeling that office to change it into open plan seating (we found out later it came at a cost of $14 million, purely to destroy good privacy and turn it into open plan seats, in a building the company already owned, with no need to accomodate more head count).

The CEO just said, “We are an innovation company and that makes each and every one of you an innovator — and innovators love open spaces.”

So I think you’re wrong. Companies don’t care about open plan offices for saving money (and they often lose money on it).

It’s all about bullshit optics.

Re: The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea

#96

Post by mlthoughts2018 » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 2:30 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #57

flax wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe that works for you, but headphones do nothing for me for the stress caused by having my back exposed to people walking around.

All things considered you have a pretty amazing life if someone walking behind you constitutes "stress."

It’s an automatic reaction in all humans. It triggers a fight vs flight reflex.

Re: The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea

#97

Post by linuxftw » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 2:30 PM UTC

massenburger wrote: post #53

I'm sure this is just anecdotal, but we all kind of like our open office layout. We're not just at desks sitting shoulder to shoulder. They're more of these horseshoe-esque things, and you have plenty of room between you and the next person. We have an open ceiling, so the A/C provides some good, loud background noise to drown out conversations. And lastly, we're pretty strict about having people IM you before they c…

So, you have to sit there more or less quietly to not disturb others? In an nice cube farm, you can walk over to someone else cube and have a quiet discussion and not disturb the entire office.

If you're a relatively small office, I suppose no cubicles could work. Wait until you have offices in other parts of the country/world that you need to collaborate with remotely. Everyone is on a call for 25% of the day, and it's terrible. It's terrible to listen to 2/5 people next to you on a conference call, and it's terrible to listen to people that are in those environments on your conference call because they are trying to talk like they're in a library.

Re: The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea

#98

Post by rayiner » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 2:31 PM UTC

zeveb wrote: post #13

tombert wrote: post #6

The argument of "increased collaboration" that I keep hearing is kind of negated when people have the soccer game on and you're bombarded with constant cheering, which is my current situation. Even when soccer is over, you have to contend with people playing grab-ass all over the office, or jerks (like me) with annoyingly loud keyboards. The modicum of utility of me "jumping into a conversation" really goes out the w…

> The argument of "increased collaboration" that I keep hearing is kind of negated when people have the soccer game on and you're bombarded with constant cheering Is there anything less professional than watching a game at work? I really don't get why people do this, and why they think it's okay. Granted, I don't like sports — but I like TV, and I wouldn't watch TV at work. I like computer games, but I wouldn't play…

That and dogs in the office. Jesus what’s wrong with people. (The fact you’re being downvoted is proof we are living in the end times.)

Re: The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea

#99

Post by jpindar » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 2:35 PM UTC

Cyph0n wrote: post #79

ghosterrific wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I've been waiting for years for a bunch of new Anime releases and other shows. Should they just give me a break to watch TV at work?

Not really, because it's probably just you. Quite a few people in this thread really don't understand how big of an event thr World Cup is...

It seems they also don't realize that people are watching a LIVE event, which is completely different than watching a movie.

I've worked places where we would watch live streams of rocket launches (back when launches were less routine than they are now).

Re: The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea

#100

Post by dccoolgai » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 2:37 PM UTC

massenburger wrote: post #53

I'm sure this is just anecdotal, but we all kind of like our open office layout. We're not just at desks sitting shoulder to shoulder. They're more of these horseshoe-esque things, and you have plenty of room between you and the next person. We have an open ceiling, so the A/C provides some good, loud background noise to drown out conversations. And lastly, we're pretty strict about having people IM you before they c…

One cool thing I saw once was a company that had a "quiet room" for its developers set aside in the middle of an open office. Si they could kinda get the best of both worlds.