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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?

#71

Post by bryanlarsen »

saberience wrote: post #44

Every time this topic comes up there are a bunch of HN people saying open-plan is "clearly the worst" and that they want cubicles back. Note: this is hardly scientific. It's just your personal anecdote, ok, you don't like being around many other people and would prefer a cubicle or private office. That's fine. However, don't discount the fact that other people exist that, gasp, actually like open-plan offices. Like m…

    “Not every programmer in the world wants to work in a private office. In fact quite a few would tell you unequivocally that they prefer the camaraderie and easy information sharing of an open space. Don’t fall for it. They also want M&Ms for breakfast and a pony. Open space is fun but not productive.”

    — Joel Spolsky, co-founder of Trello and CEO of Stack Overflow

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

#72

Post by Latteland »

floren wrote: post #58
floren wrote: post #12

At my previous employer, I worked in an office with real walls and a real solid wood door, in a cubicle with a sliding plastic door, in a cubicle with no door, and in a couple of larger open areas with between zero and three other people sharing the space. The real office was by far the best, but having a cubicle with a couple cabinets and a sliding door was almost as good. I've experienced an "open plan" setup that…

Posting a follow-up rather than editing: I also wonder if open-plan offices are a symptom of the increasing centralization of tech companies. These days people seem to think the first step of starting a tech company is to move to the Bay Area. If we were founding companies in Redding, Rochester, Yakima, Grand Rapids, or Albuquerque, could we afford to give everyone an office with a real door for the same price as a S…

People start companies in these clusters because there are lots of programmers (to a lesser extend vc money) in those places, and you are more likely to be able to recruit programmers to those places.

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

#73

Post by Latteland »

maxxxxx wrote: post #45
andrewla wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do the 400k+ engineers at Google still work in open office elbow to elbow?

They work in open offices but ideally grouped together say 10-15 people grouped in an office with an open door.

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

#74

Post by sucrose »

jessemillar wrote: post #37
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.

Either way, there's still too many variables. If a company's ROI drops after changing to an open work-space... some variables off the top: decreased product quality/quantity, both/none, competition, consumer needs/wants, all of the above, etc.

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

#75

Post by jdsully »

TheTruth1234 wrote: post #31
jdsully wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ...

But its fun to talk in the halls! Or debug something verbally with someone at your computer. This is the worst of both worlds. All the drawbacks of a large open space and none of the communication benefits.

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

#76

Post by fatnoah »

jiveturkey wrote: post #65

I am so tired of this article. As far as HN goes, this is the new bi-weekly 'should I work at a startup?' post. As far as the general blogosphere (that's still a thing, yes?) goes, it's the latest click attractor. We all know by now why open-plan offices dominate. Cost. We don't need to belabor the point. This specific article is particularly annoying: > The reasoning behind the idea of an open office is simple and m…

> The reasoning behind the idea of an open office is simple and makes sense in theory: fewer physical barriers – more communication and collaboration.

To be fair to the author, this is always the reason I've heard given by management for having an open office plan, when the reality is, in fact, about cost.

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

#77

Post by ghaff »

floren wrote: post #58
floren wrote: post #12

At my previous employer, I worked in an office with real walls and a real solid wood door, in a cubicle with a sliding plastic door, in a cubicle with no door, and in a couple of larger open areas with between zero and three other people sharing the space. The real office was by far the best, but having a cubicle with a couple cabinets and a sliding door was almost as good. I've experienced an "open plan" setup that…

Posting a follow-up rather than editing: I also wonder if open-plan offices are a symptom of the increasing centralization of tech companies. These days people seem to think the first step of starting a tech company is to move to the Bay Area. If we were founding companies in Redding, Rochester, Yakima, Grand Rapids, or Albuquerque, could we afford to give everyone an office with a real door for the same price as a S…

In all fairness though, DEC and DG were part of the Route 128 cluster of computer companies. They were just mostly scattered in small towns around the region (as were their manufacturing and other smaller offices) because being located in a city was not really something that tech companies did at the time. [ADDED: AFAIK all of these companies mostly used the typical for the time mix of high cubicles and offices for managers.]

Boston metro was still losing population up to around the late 90s and, when Teradyne moved out, that was basically the last major tech employer in the city proper.

The current fascination with urban living (in certain specific cities) by a certain young professional demographic is mostly quite recent.

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

#78

Post by howard941 »

village-idiot wrote: post #21
howard941 wrote: post #4

> Treat your office like a library, not a kitchen. A VP at my fast growing and profitable Fortune 500 publicly ridiculed my proposal to let our smallish engineering team geek in empty, unused offices in the building, on grounds that the office was not a library. He was kicked upstairs and to another division, bless him.

Public ridicule isn’t exactly the hallmark of a competent leader either.

It didn't go unnoticed. We were a tiny part of a large acquisition and just a blip in the company as a whole albeit the most profitable blip margin-wise. A sports bar environment sans booze is kinda baked into the corporate mothership's decidedly non-engineering culture.

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

#79

Post by howard941 »

zzaner wrote: post #5
howard941 wrote: post #4

> Treat your office like a library, not a kitchen. A VP at my fast growing and profitable Fortune 500 publicly ridiculed my proposal to let our smallish engineering team geek in empty, unused offices in the building, on grounds that the office was not a library. He was kicked upstairs and to another division, bless him.

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...

Even minimal noise damping would be awesome. We're in a big room in a bigger warehouse so add to the usual loud conversations a team of forklifts honking and beeping until 4PM every day.

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

#80

Post by opo »

saberience wrote: post #44

Every time this topic comes up there are a bunch of HN people saying open-plan is "clearly the worst" and that they want cubicles back. Note: this is hardly scientific. It's just your personal anecdote, ok, you don't like being around many other people and would prefer a cubicle or private office. That's fine. However, don't discount the fact that other people exist that, gasp, actually like open-plan offices. Like m…

We don't need to rely on anecdotes. There are plenty of studies on open offices and how they affect productivity. For example:

>...The design of the research was simple but incredibly clever. Study two Fortune 500 companies planning to make a switch to open-plan offices and compare how employees interact both before and after the new office design.

>To do this, Harvard researchers Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban had 150 participating employees wear a gizmo called a sociometric badge. For three weeks before and after the redesign it recorded wearers' movement, location, posture and, via infrared and sound sensors, their every conversation with colleagues. The researchers also reviewed the number of text messages and emails subjects sent during the test period.

>The results have just been published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. What did they show? In short, as walls came down, so did the number of interactions among co-workers. Simultaneously, the number of emails and text messages shot up.

>"Overall, face-to-face time decreased by around 70 percent across the participating employees, on average, with email use increasing by between 22 percent and 50 percent (depending on the estimation method used)," says the British Psychological Society Research Digest blog, summing up the results.

https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/new-harvard-study-you-o...

>..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-...

An article in the New Yorker summarizes some research on open offices. Besides the effects on productivity, there are also health effects. For example:

>...In a recent study of more than twenty-four hundred employees in Denmark, Jan Pejtersen and his colleagues found that as the number of people working in a single room went up, the number of employees who took sick leave increased apace.

>...In laboratory settings, noise has been repeatedly tied to reduced cognitive performance. The psychologist Nick Perham, who studies the effect of sound on how we think, has found that office commotion impairs workers’ ability to recall information, and even to do basic arithmetic. Listening to music to block out the office intrusion doesn’t help: even that, Perham found, impairs our mental acuity. Exposure to noise in an office may also take a toll on the health of employees. In a study by the Cornell University psychologists Gary Evans and Dana Johnson, clerical workers who were exposed to open-office noise for three hours had increased levels of epinephrine—a hormone that we often call adrenaline, associated with the so-called fight-or-flight response.

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

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