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

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

#331

Post by oblio »

tomtheelder wrote: post #23
mcherm wrote: post #2

> And for what? Because a minority of people kinda like that configuration? Because it’ll look good in a few photos? Because it’ll impress strangers who visit the office? Somehow the author missed the primary reason for the open office configuration: "Because it cuts the costs of office space by a HUGE amount (certainly more than half)." I suppose "Because it makes it easier for managers to keep an eye on their emplo…

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.

Apple, Google, etc. could definitely afford team offices. Apple built almost all their campuses from scratch...

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

#332

Post by oblio »

bshoemaker wrote: post #308
pnw_hazor wrote: post #217

Companies treat programmers as costs that should be minimized. They manage programmers like children (toys and treats) or stenographers(typing pools) because it is cheap. Whereas, lawyers in law firms are considered revenue generators and they are treated that way. When I switched from programming to lawyering, one of the biggest differences I noticed was how the law firm staff and office manager were always trying t…

Ah yes, Google & Facebook et. al. really seem to be minimizing their costs by spending hundreds of thousands per developer on salary and millions upon millions in toys and perks. What world are you living in?

Toys and perks are cheap and high impact. They’re from “Tricking employees 101”.

Developer salaries are high but revenues per developer are huge for these companies.

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

#333

Post by pivo »

PurpleBoxDragon wrote: post #306
Chris_Jay wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why you can't tell them the reason you're leaving without burning a bridge - "I don't work well in an open-office environment, I found I was constantly distracted and inefficient. It's just not the right environment for me to thrive" isn't untrue or pointing fingers, and it's valuable feedback for your employer.

I think perhaps bigger than the open office problem is grand parent point seems obvious to me in our current society. Either you are 110% on board with what the company wants, or you aren't a team player (and implied a bad person/worker/resource). It is daring to question them, daring to say they did something imperfect.

Or more simply, if he wants to return to this employer in the future and they have the same or similar office space, they will surely ask him why he thinks that he will now, somehow, be able to work well in in that environment that was so problematic for him in the past.

Not criticizing this person, I despise my open office environment too. I also wouldn't (and didn't) tell tell my employer about this when I left for a few years in the past for the same reason.

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

#334

Post by ryandrake »

RandallBrown wrote: post #117

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 i…

Thanks, this point of view always seems to get lost when these open office threads pop up. I had a job with an office (with a door) shared with one other person. The loneliest, most depressing time at that job was when the guy left for a different company and I was by myself there. It was horrible. I basically moved my workspace to the break room so I could regularly encounter people and left the office empty.

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

#335

Post by throwawaymath »

rayiner wrote: post #98
zeveb wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.)

To pile on, I used to work in an office where a coworker's spouse sometimes showed up with their dog and newborn baby, in the middle of the day. Then I got to enjoy 20-40 minutes of high-pitched screeching in the office as the Slack channel was littered with things like, "WHERE IS THE LITTLE HUMAN. I MUST SEE THE LITTLE HUMAN" and "LOOK AT THE FLUFFER!"

Sartre was right. Hell is other people.

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

#336

Post by [deleted] »

jSully24 wrote: post #40
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…

Why can't the team agree on some norms of behavior for this very situation? We're supposed to be collaborating, so how about we all collaborate on where to take a phone call, what is and is not acceptable for noice in our work space? If we can or can not microwave fish leftovers and eat our desk? The important stuff. A critical piece of making the open space work is people being open with another. For watching big ev…

[deleted]

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

#337

Post by opo »

s3r3nity wrote: post #247

Every time I read these threads against the open-plan office, I think back to two arguments that an old boss put forth for them that I haven't been able to find a good answer for: 1) If it works for some of the most successful tech companies on the planet (Google / Facebook / Amazon,) why can't it work for us? 2) Prove to me that the loss in productivity is higher than the cost / investment necessary to build everyon…

>1) If it works for some of the most successful tech companies on the planet (Google / Facebook / Amazon,) why can't it work for us?

The open floor plans hurt their expensive worker's productivity, but they have the money to hire more people. A small company has to be more worried about worker productivity than a large mega corp.

>...2) Prove to me that the loss in productivity is higher than the cost / investment necessary to build everyone an office (or a semi-isolated cube) + value gained from collaboration.

There is pretty much overwhelming research that people are more productive and healthy at work when they have some privacy and don't have distractions. One example - a study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology of more than 40,000 workers in 300 US office buildings: "...Enclosed private offices clearly outperformed open-plan layouts in most aspects of IEQ (Indoor Environmental Quality), particularly in acoustics, privacy and the proxemics issues. Benefits of enhanced 'ease of interaction' were smaller than the penalties of increased noise level and decreased privacy resulting from open-plan office configuration."

https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/science-just-proved-that-...

This article talks about some of the other research on the negative health effects and other effects on productivity:

https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-open-office-...

Even the idea that there is any actual "value gained from collaboration" in an open floor plan is questionable and anyone claiming it should show some evidence for it. In a large company, the issues always seem to be between teams, not inside the individual teams. An open floor plan lets you hear every random conversations in your own team, but it really discourages people from going to another teams area to ask a casual question or have an impromptu discussion of what they are working on since they know they would be disrupting several people.

The best environments I have seen are when there are individual offices with plenty of open areas and conference rooms for people to meet.

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

#338

Post by nambit »

tombert wrote: post #185
watwut wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gotcha, thanks. > people are running/playing around and yelling like children at the office. It's not too uncommon for startups to have Nerf guns or something. I hate this sort of environment combined with expectation to stay late. It always seems to me that if people would work instead of playing, we might not have to stay late. And that we are not working as much as we brag about, because people play a lot.

I agree. I typically come in at about 9:15am, leave anywhere from 7pm-8pm, and it's not because I'm some great worker. It's because I need to finish up the sprint and too much crap is happening around the office. I don't know that I wouldn't work late even if I had a private office, but I do think that I'd be able to accomplish more.

I come in at 10-11am and leave at 4-5pm (including an hour of lunch). The rest of my work I complete from home. There's no need to be in the office for all of your "workday".

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

#340

Post by sctb »

bitwize wrote: post #228
binarymax wrote: post #10

Open 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…

Could you please not post shallow, inflammatory dismissals like this? The context for this discussion is a recent study (see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17448187) that ought to count as “running the numbers”.
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