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Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study

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Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study

#61

Post by generalpass »

jackfoxy wrote: post #34

35+ years in the IT workforce here. Yep, dumbest idea ever. The vast majority of my office time was in cubicles, which are pretty good. Usually enough privacy to get things done. I did have a glassed-in private office for about a year at one company. That was productivity heaven. In retrospect I was dumb to leave that company when I did, but they started demolishing offices for cubicles about 2 years later. It is all…

> It is all about efficient use of real estate.

In many cases the Federal tax code can also be the driver of these decisions because the amortization on building upgrades is way longer than cubicles. However, tables over cubicles is likely something else. To me, it's just cheap, like how call centers used to be (even they have cubicles now).

Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study

#62

Post by dehrmann »

jackfoxy wrote: post #34

35+ years in the IT workforce here. Yep, dumbest idea ever. The vast majority of my office time was in cubicles, which are pretty good. Usually enough privacy to get things done. I did have a glassed-in private office for about a year at one company. That was productivity heaven. In retrospect I was dumb to leave that company when I did, but they started demolishing offices for cubicles about 2 years later. It is all…

> The vast majority of my office time was in cubicles, which are pretty good.

I remember watching "Office Space" circa 2000 and it looked pretty soul crushing, and working in pre-FAANG big tech around 2006, it felt very mechanical and depressing. I get your gripes, but I think some is also rosy retrospection.

Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study

#63

Post by jodrellblank »

What happened to Joel Spolsky’s blog-famous push for private offices in Fog Creek Software, when he moved to StackExchange did they carry that idea on?

If open plan offices are so bad for “productivity”, why don’t they get selected out by market forces?

Is it Price’s Law, the square root of the number of employees do half the work, and the rest doesn’t matter if they have offices or cattle desks, high or low productivity - what most of us do doesn’t matter enough to matter?

Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study

#64

Post by commandlinefan »

venantius wrote: post #2

This article is from 2018 and gets posted pretty regularly. I happen to agree with its core thesis but I'm not sure we get anything out of having it on the front page again.

I can't think of any article that deserves to be regularly reposted more than this one.

Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study

#65

Post by ericwood »

bachmeier wrote: post #51
ryandrake wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to get the alternate view out there too: I had an office once with a door that closed. As an extrovert it was awful. I felt lonely all day. The only way to get any human contact besides email and text was to leave and go walk the halls or find some common area. I ended up pretty much never using it and instead worked from the break room. From time to time they’d give me an officemate to share the office, but the…

> Just to get the alternate view out there too This always comes up in these discussions. Extroverts say they prefer the open office format because they can talk to others. That's nice and all, but shouldn't you be working rather than satisfying your desire to talk to others? (The same goes for workers not in an open office not playing on HN all day.)

It's not necessarily just to idly chat with other people, but has more to do with where you get your energy. I find I'm most productive and energized when surrounded by other people. Conversation is a part of it, and the ability to collaborate on the fly is great. If I'm heads down on something it's fine to be isolated every so often, but if it's for more than a few days my energy level is sunk and my productivity actually decreases dramatically.

Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study

#66

Post by slumdev »

raindropm wrote: post #58

and here I am, at my newly renovate office with gasp open plan. We have some cliché things like table tennis desk, rock climbing space(that no one have a time to climb, of course) and garden plot with fresh vegetable(just for show off at new office opening day), that HR staff told us that employee can plant their own after that(good luck with that) Everything about it screams pretentious and dumb. What's better, we h…

> The only thing I can do is put on my trusty noise-cancelling headphones

That's not literally the only thing you could do. You could quit.

I'll never again make the mistake of hiring on somewhere without first seeing the working environment. Too many times...

Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study

#67

Post by bluGill »

bachmeier wrote: post #51
ryandrake wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to get the alternate view out there too: I had an office once with a door that closed. As an extrovert it was awful. I felt lonely all day. The only way to get any human contact besides email and text was to leave and go walk the halls or find some common area. I ended up pretty much never using it and instead worked from the break room. From time to time they’d give me an officemate to share the office, but the…

> Just to get the alternate view out there too This always comes up in these discussions. Extroverts say they prefer the open office format because they can talk to others. That's nice and all, but shouldn't you be working rather than satisfying your desire to talk to others? (The same goes for workers not in an open office not playing on HN all day.)

That depends on what they are talking about.

Extroverts think out loud, so they need someone to talk with just to think. So long as the other person is an extrovert that is okay because they both work the same way.

Extroverts - because they talk and ask questions are often the first to know. If the company has decided some project isn't doing the introverts can waste a lot of time continuing on a canceled project. Also extroverts can sometimes discover a quick/easy need to fill - a 10 minute script at the right time can sometimes be more valuable than a years of effort an introvert puts into the main project.

Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study

#68

Post by moron4hire »

jackfoxy wrote: post #34

35+ years in the IT workforce here. Yep, dumbest idea ever. The vast majority of my office time was in cubicles, which are pretty good. Usually enough privacy to get things done. I did have a glassed-in private office for about a year at one company. That was productivity heaven. In retrospect I was dumb to leave that company when I did, but they started demolishing offices for cubicles about 2 years later. It is all…

Yeah, all of the talk about "increased collaborations!" seems to be hand-waivey, pseudo-admittance of "we don't know how to communicate effectively!"

I work in a private office now. I almost never work from home, and it's never to "be productive", almost always because of some personal scheduling issue. I used to work in open-office environments and would try to work from home as much as possible. One of them was even at a company around the corner from where I am now, so it wasn't even a commuting issue.

We have weekly meetings scheduled to force the issue of getting everyone caught up. But mostly, I just take a daily walk around the floor, see folk and get caught up on everything. The meetings mostly become "catching up the one person who was out the rest of the week".

We don't do daily standups. Ugh, what a boondoggle Scrum became after The Suits found out about it. Who needs it, anyway? Just talk to people.

If you have to make up organizational excuses to get people to talk, you're making excuses for people who don't talk. It's not acceptable to be a team contributor and not know how to communicate effectively.

Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study

#69

Post by praptak »

LanceH wrote: post #44
agentultra wrote: post #21

More than Agile? Snark aside, I have a personal office and I love it. I don't like to listen to constant noise/music to cancel out the other noise/music. I like being able to have private calls without all of the noise in the background. If I'm working on something particularly difficult I like closing my door and having peace and quiet. I also enjoy the sense of ownership and prestige. It's nice feeling like I matte…

I understand you're joking about Agile, but the previous holy path was waterfall, which was a hideously expensive way to get to failure.

Except that Waterfall was never really advocated: https://davesquared.net/2008/01/contentious-myth-of-waterfal...

It was conceived as a straw man which was being dissed so vigorously that people started believing it was real.

Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study

#70

Post by moron4hire »

dehrmann wrote: post #62
jackfoxy wrote: post #34

35+ years in the IT workforce here. Yep, dumbest idea ever. The vast majority of my office time was in cubicles, which are pretty good. Usually enough privacy to get things done. I did have a glassed-in private office for about a year at one company. That was productivity heaven. In retrospect I was dumb to leave that company when I did, but they started demolishing offices for cubicles about 2 years later. It is all…

> The vast majority of my office time was in cubicles, which are pretty good. I remember watching "Office Space" circa 2000 and it looked pretty soul crushing, and working in pre-FAANG big tech around 2006, it felt very mechanical and depressing. I get your gripes, but I think some is also rosy retrospection.

I understand what you're saying, but it's really more that we didn't know just how bad it could get. Cubicle farms were "soul crushing", because they came about from the same management practices that eventually led to open-floor plans: treating people as cost centers rather than people, micromanaging measurable real-estate costs at the expense of unmeasurable productivity.

And while one can theoretically make good software in open-floor-plan-environment/current-whipping-boy-programming-language-of-the-month/etc., the existence of such things is a big sign on the door "we probably don't care about craft".

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