Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

m.signalvnoise.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 461 posts

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

#111

Post by your-nanny »

WorkLifeBalance wrote: post #49
commandlinefan wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> bombarded with constant cheering At least it ends. I work in a gigantic "airplane hangar" open office with no noise barriers of any kind stretching out to infinity. Everybody around me is on conference calls all day, every day. They put their phones on speaker and then yell louder and louder to be heard over each other. One of them is even one of the Important People with an office with a door that closes... which…

Get any generic in-ear earphones and thread those under a pair of 3M peltor optime III ear defenders. You can listen to even fairly quiet music and you won't hear any conversations around you.

I've used typical ear plugs plus headphones playing whitenoise.

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

#112

Post by funkaster »

maltalex wrote: post #33
tomtheelder wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this is one of HN's favorite topics to bash on while completely ignoring the primary reason why the open office exists and persists. It's not about collaboration, it's not about socializing, it's about money. Just like all other business related decisions.

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.

You're missing the point that the people configuring the office (most of the time) do not take productivity as a major factor, unless is something extreme and unrealistic like your example. Now it's more like: "everyone is already used to this configuration, and it's 50% (or some big %) cheaper to setup now"

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

#113

Post by tombert »

jpindar wrote: post #99
Cyph0n wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

It is not unreasonable to ask people to move to an area where people aren't trying to work, even if the event is live. Many people do not care about ball and would like to work, and typically an office is the place where you are supposed to do that. Having the game on in the common work area is incredibly distracting with people cheering.

Many people who are trying to work do not care if the event is live. Even as someone who also enjoys watching rocket launches, I wouldn't cheer loudly when it took off, and I'd probably go to some kind of common area to watch it to begin with.

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

#116

Post by commandlinefan »

watwut wrote: post #71
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…

What is "grab-ass all over the office"? I tried to google it to find whether it is expression, but got tons of porn as result.

> but got tons of porn

Sure hope you're not googling it in an open-plan office...

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

#117

Post by RandallBrown »

To throw some more anecdotes in with the rest of the comments, I love open offices.

I've had my own office and found it lonely and boring. I never got less work done than at that job. Everything took longer because I had to stand up and walk to talk to my team. Instant messaging sort of worked, but if they didn't respond immediately, you didn't know if it was because they missed the message or they weren't actually in their office.

Because I hardly ever talked to my team members I never felt any real friendship or camaraderie with them. That made it harder to get help when I needed it and made my day a lot less enjoyable.

I find that I thrive in open offices. I don't even need headphones to concentrate. Everyone is different I guess.

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

#118

Post by ghaff »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #76
PietdeVries wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is that this working-from-home people significantly impact the efficiency of your office. It's a trend (could be the open-office space started it) but resulted in people easily working 2 or more days from home. That implies that any desk you have is empty about 40% of the time. Or: your entire office is not being used for 40%... So when bosses realised they were throwing money away, they came up with the op…

“flexdesks” or “hot desking” is just about the most juvenile reaction to working from home I can imagine. If a company believes it will gain more from “saving money” on open plan offices or hot desking than it will from just paying more to facilitate more and better work from employees through buying the best tools (a private office is a tool like a keyboard or ergonomic chair), it’s self-evidently a company to get f…

It really depends.

I work mostly from home but I do have a cube in the local office. If we got tight for space, it would absolutely make sense to give away my space to someone who would use it more and have me just grab an open chair for those times I have meetings or other reasons to be in the office.

If I had a private office, I would still work from home most of the time. A private office doesn't eliminate a commute.

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

#119

Post by tomjen3 »

WorkLifeBalance wrote: post #49
commandlinefan wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> bombarded with constant cheering At least it ends. I work in a gigantic "airplane hangar" open office with no noise barriers of any kind stretching out to infinity. Everybody around me is on conference calls all day, every day. They put their phones on speaker and then yell louder and louder to be heard over each other. One of them is even one of the Important People with an office with a door that closes... which…

Get any generic in-ear earphones and thread those under a pair of 3M peltor optime III ear defenders. You can listen to even fairly quiet music and you won't hear any conversations around you.

I consider a set of bluetooth headphones a part of any office now. I got a really good pair for personal use and work provided one set at work.

Wouldn't be necessary if we had actual offices, but there you go.

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

#120

Post by fblp »

collinf wrote: post #19

My biggest issue with my open floor office is that it seems like everyone just takes calls at their seats. We have private spaces and enclaves for that, but I am just bombarded with 4 people within 10 feet of my workspace on their phone. To counteract I throw on some Ambient music on my headphones, which sort of works but I still find I prefer to work in silence. Does it not seem like open-office etiquette to take a…

ask for some Zenbooths and create rule that calls must be taken in them. It makes the open office workable. www.zenbooth.net (I'm a founder there)
Post reply on HN