It occurs to me that we haven't quite done away with cubicles, we have instead shrunk them down to the size of our heads, in the form of noise cancelling headphones.
The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea
321–330 of 461 posts
Re: The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea
#322I am going to be the contrarian here. I think open office plan does work well. But given these caveats:
- Give enough desk space: i.e, 2 monitor, laptop, enough space for a few books and papers, and 2 feet of space to move my chair in each direction.
- No people making calls. Have sound-insulated single person, non-bookable, meeting rooms/call booths for calls. Also anyone playing anything on their computer without headphones must be prohibited. Basically no one should be hearing any one-way conversations.
- Strict rules on two-way conversations. Anything that's taking more than 5 mins to discuss and does not involve the whole area should go to a meeting room.
With this arrangement, open office has worked for me. I am able to provide solutions when I hear something about which I know something, other people are able to provide me solutions, I get to hear about stuff that effects me sooner (e.g, hey the commits aren't going through due to test failures). I have found that the number of noises that bother me is actually very few in reality, and I have my trusty insulated headphones for that.
Re: The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 commu…
> “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.” Why would this make more sense than moving to a bigger office or building more space for the new employee to have a desk without taking yours? Cost is absolutely not an answer.
Cost is absolutely an answer. If I'm not really using space and am completely indifferent to whether I have a permanent desk or not, why on earth would it be rational for the company to spend the money, time, and disruption associated with adding additional real estate?
I'm not arguing for hot-desking as a standard approach, which indeed likely negates any benefits to teams being co-located. But for people who are allocated space that they rarely use? Why not?
Re: The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea
#324Open plan offices have been known to be bad since at least 1987, when the first edition of Peopleware was published. A good portion of the book discusses issues with employee distraction and its inverse relationship to productivity. They use evidence from the field to discuss office layout, and also other issues like office wide paging systems (that used to be a thing!), phone calls, and email.
Have the authors of Peopleware actually run the numbers? If they are such a bad idea, why do open offices proliferate? It seems to me like the backlash against open offices is a small minority of programmers with autism spectrum disorders and chapped-ass syndrome. Your job is not to have your whims catered to so you can be maximally productive. Your job is to bring value to the company . And that means working well i…
>...It seems to me like the backlash against open offices is a small minority of programmers with autism spectrum disorders and chapped-ass syndrome.
What makes you say that? The vast majority of the comments on this thread are from people who have had bad experiences with open floor plans. While there may be some who have been diagnosed on the autism spectrum, none have mentioned, that.
>...Your job is to bring value to the company. And that means working well in an open-office environment since that seems to work best for the company.
If you find something that makes yourself and your team less productive, the way you bring value to the company is to let people know. For example, if your work machine is 10 years old and takes N times longer to do a build than a new machine would, don't pretend you are being a good employee by not mentioning it to the company. Same goes for other parts of the work environment.
Re: The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea
#325The 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…
> 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…
Have you tried just closing his door for him?
Re: The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean? The nature of needing to customize your space is fundamentally incompatible with sitting in a large open plan space. How could you “set [your] stuff up” in an open plan area? For example, suppose there is harsh overhead fluorescent lighting above your desk. But you require soft lighting from a desk lamp for eye comfort. In a private office, you can bring in a lamp. If you bring in a lamp to your ope…
Lighting is certainly trickier, but if it's that big of a deal, work with the people around you and/or your manager to move to a darker part of the office where you can set up your own lighting. I have worked in multiple open offices where people didn't want harsh fluorescent light and they worked with the team/facilities/whoever to get the lights dimmed/removed/changed to be more compatible with what people wanted.
> “I have worked in multiple open offices where people didn't want harsh fluorescent light and they worked with the team/facilities/whoever to get the lights dimmed/removed/changed to be more compatible with what people wanted.”
I’ve never seen an open-plan office where this would be possible, do you have any links?
In the open plan offices I’ve worked in, the overhead lighting could not be dimmed, and it would not be possible to only dim lights for part of the floor and not others, because there was no barrier, wall, corner, etc., separating one group of people from another. If you dim the lights directly overhead, it’s still way too harshly bright from the lights 3 or 4 rows over from you anyway.
Re: The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea
#327To 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 i…
I also love open offices but I do find it heavily depends on who you sit around with. I'm pretty fortunate because everyone prefers deep work and if they do want to chat we just do it over Slack even if we're right next to each other and if we needed something more urgent we'd just give them a look haha.
Re: The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 commu…
> “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.” Why would this make more sense than moving to a bigger office or building more space for the new employee to have a desk without taking yours? Cost is absolutely not an answer.
Because moving to a bigger office has a whole bunch of costs beyond rent. Costs which negatively affect revenue!
Re: The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea
#329Which YC companies do not have open offices?
Re: The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea
#330The 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…
> I assume that labor is the most expensive part of any big-ish company, so it feels like the "offices are cheaper" argument shouldn't work. This probably depends where you are. An open office plan might well let you use less than half of the square footage per employee, which in somewhere like Manhattan would potentially be saving you on the order of $5-10k per employee. Depending on how significant the productivity…
> An open office plan might well let you use less than half of the square footage per employee
Relative to what? Here are some portable room dividers: https://www.screenflex.com/
You would be starting with a very tiny space if that doubles the square footage per employee. They completely eliminate visual distractions, give employees a feeling of privacy, and stop a lot of noise. Being portable, they can be changed around as needed, and you can easily create small groups.