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Open-plan office is the worst. Why can't we kill it?

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Re: Open-plan office is the worst. Why can't we kill it?

#31

Post by TheTruth1234 »

jdsully wrote: post #10
zzaner wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, they only upside of an open office is economic. When you have empty offices in the building, putting up with it really makes no sense. Basecamp actually designed their office around "library rules": https://m.signalvnoise.com/library-rules-how-to-make-an-open...

That office is mostly empty space, and with all the effort to noise damp one has to ask - why bother? Just add offices at that point. At Microsoft you could always chat in the halls and people would just close their doors.

Did you read the part about 'Library Rules'? It's a cultural leap, but that would make all the difference.

Christ, I'm sitting in an open plan office right now with two telephone conversations going on in my right ear.

Thank the hardware overlords for headphones ...

Re: Open-plan office is the worst. Why can't we kill it?

#33

Post by clarry »

I'm so glad to have a remote position. Less distraction than any office I've ever been to. And much more cozy, because I can choose exactly how to furnish my own space.

It's such a massive perk I have no second thoughts about turning down jobs with a considerably higher salary. It helps that commute time and expenses are zero. Commute is essentially unpaid, unproductive labour; it's not your free time, it's something you do for the sake of your employer, and you don't get anything done except translate your corpse.

Re: Open-plan office is the worst. Why can't we kill it?

#34

Post by colordrops »

Reedx wrote: post #28
wlesieutre wrote: post #8

Because it's cheap. Less walls to build, more employees packed on to a floor. Do you lose more money than you're saving due to decreased productivity? Maybe. But that's hard to prove, and "This office proposal is $X million cheaper because we can lease three fewer floors" is very straightforward.

Exactly. The impact on productivity also depends on the type of work. I suspect it's a net loss in the long run for things that require or benefit from deep work.

SpaceX uses tightly packed open plan.

Re: Open-plan office is the worst. Why can't we kill it?

#35

Post by barrkel »

Reedx wrote: post #28
wlesieutre wrote: post #8

Because it's cheap. Less walls to build, more employees packed on to a floor. Do you lose more money than you're saving due to decreased productivity? Maybe. But that's hard to prove, and "This office proposal is $X million cheaper because we can lease three fewer floors" is very straightforward.

Exactly. The impact on productivity also depends on the type of work. I suspect it's a net loss in the long run for things that require or benefit from deep work.

The transition from more waterfall-like projects to more agile-like, with feature-factory bitesize nibbles of work, seems to me to be predicated on less deep work. The unit of delivery is smaller, so it cannot be meaningfully transformative.

Personally I think it's a model that scales better (ie supports more developers being applied to a problem) but requires more brute force modularity to contain the lack of system design that comes from lack of deep thinking (and thus we get microservices).

Re: Open-plan office is the worst. Why can't we kill it?

#36

Post by isostatic »

mrob wrote: post #17

I think the real reason is that the bosses like watching all their subordinates at once. They can see that nobody is slacking (or at least everybody is pretending not to, which signals social submission almost as well), and enjoy the feeling of power. Productivity statistics don't produce the same feeling, partly because they're too abstract, and partly because they're evidence of submission to the organization as a…

> They can see that nobody is slacking

How else would I communicate with my (remote) team mates?

Re: Open-plan office is the worst. Why can't we kill it?

#37

Post by jessemillar »

wlesieutre wrote: post #8

Because it's cheap. Less walls to build, more employees packed on to a floor. Do you lose more money than you're saving due to decreased productivity? Maybe. But that's hard to prove, and "This office proposal is $X million cheaper because we can lease three fewer floors" is very straightforward.

My illogical hope is that one day we'll have the ability to run "simulations" in parallel universes so we actually can prove that option X was better in the long term than option Y.

Re: Open-plan office is the worst. Why can't we kill it?

#38

Post by izzydata »

colordrops wrote: post #34
Reedx wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. The impact on productivity also depends on the type of work. I suspect it's a net loss in the long run for things that require or benefit from deep work.

SpaceX uses tightly packed open plan.

Unfortunate. We'd already be living on Mars if they got their own cubes / offices.

Re: Open-plan office is the worst. Why can't we kill it?

#39

Post by andrewla »

wlesieutre wrote: post #8

Because it's cheap. Less walls to build, more employees packed on to a floor. Do you lose more money than you're saving due to decreased productivity? Maybe. But that's hard to prove, and "This office proposal is $X million cheaper because we can lease three fewer floors" is very straightforward.

I think there's also a cargo cult mentality that is really hard to deal with. Many successful companies today started on a shoestring, where the money saved by cramming everyone into the same space allowed the company to grow headcount quickly, and it is really hard to separate the things that contributed to the company's success from the incidentals that arose from its founding.

Re: Open-plan office is the worst. Why can't we kill it?

#40

Post by sulam »

drofmij wrote: post #24
wlesieutre wrote: post #8

Because it's cheap. Less walls to build, more employees packed on to a floor. Do you lose more money than you're saving due to decreased productivity? Maybe. But that's hard to prove, and "This office proposal is $X million cheaper because we can lease three fewer floors" is very straightforward.

This. It's cheap and upper management doesn't care because they still get an office. Has there been any proper research on productivity loss / gains beyond the anecdotal? I have no idea and management doesn't read books anyway so we are stuck with open plans.

FWIW most of the large companies I've worked at in tech don't give offices to anyone. I realize it's not universal, and some companies have execs in dedicated conference rooms that might as well be an office, but that mostly seems like an efficiency win from the perspective of someone who's in back to back 30 minute meetings all day long.

Still, a lot of places at least are consistent about it all the way up to the CEO.

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