People seem to either love or hate it. Has anyone ever worked in both an open layout they liked, and an open layout they disliked? If so, what was the difference?
Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
181–190 of 462 posts
Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
No way...a nice sized cubicle is 100 sqft, and Class A rents in Manhattan are under $100/sqft/y. So the actual office space is something like $10,000 or less per year. Of course there is other overhead, but space itself is in that range. So the max savings, in the most expensive market in the US, is under $10k per year.
But you don't rent by cubicle, you rent by floor or building. So adding a new employee when you have hit your max means you have to figure something out or sink a whole lot of money into a new building for one person.
Office in NYC was remodeled to open office, and the limits were determined by fire code, bathrooms, etc. In the end, a whole bunch of valuable floor space is sitting empty as relaxation rooms, a puzzle table, and funky couch areas that nobody wants to sit at because it’s next to a big boss’s office.
Practically speaking, most people are treating the shift as an implicit agreement that employees can work from home 90+% of the time.
Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
#18335+ 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…
Also WFH. I occasionally work from a coworking space when I need a change of scenery, but I plan those days knowing that my productivity will be much different (certain tasks lend themselves to open spaces better than others). Visits to the home office (a two-hour drive) are for connecting with colleagues rather than heads-down work time.
Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
#184There are definitely problems with the open office but one thing I can say is that there is truly a different energy to the office when it's open and people can chat spontaneously. Some of my best projects have started this way, as have all my office friendships. I'd definitely get more heads-down work done in a private office setting. However in that setting I'd mostly be annoyed I couldn't just work from my home of…
> when it's open and people can chat spontaneously
That so different from my experience at two companies using the open office scheme -- at both of those, spontaneous chatting was very, very rare because it so easily disturbs everyone not involved in the chatting.
When I've worked in both cube farms and companies that had real offices, spontaneous chatting was common.
Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
#185The other side of this is that a very large percentage of folks in our industry seem to have social anxiety-spectrum issues. Folks without those don't seem to understand how much energy is being burned through just being out in the open and on display for all of your coworkers. It's not something I, personally, have control over. The time I've spent in "open concept" work places, I finish every day frustrated with my…
I've had the opposite experience. I had a job where half the floor plan was cubicals and half was open plan where you had groups of 2-3 people in a sort of cove.
I started in the cubicle section. And I hated my job. Every day felt draining to the soul. I felt invisible and isolated and I hated it. I was making no progress in the organization. I'd constantly find excuses to leave my desk just to see another human face. My desk was a cluttered mess and I just hated my life. We got some new hires, so I got to shuffle over to one of the coves.
It was like getting a totally different job where all of a sudden I loved coming into work. I loved seeing people. We communicated efficiently, I organized my space effectively because it was so visible to everyone. I could catch errors others were making as they were going and pretty soon they'd come line up to get help on stuff. We were so much more efficient than letting people fail for longer, run up the client bill, and then have to redo everything. The lines of communication were opened up with me acting as a hub of sorts and so we came up with a lot of innovations in that time that made our processes more efficient.
And when we had to do overtime, it was a communal activity. The feeling was that of a team.
Open concept is my jam.
Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
#186I've worked in a variety of settings, and my favorite is a small team in a conference room/tiny open office. 3-8 people. People tend to be respectful of each other's concentration at that number of people. And since you're in the same team, most interruptions are likely to be useful to other members of the team. But if we wanted to just bother 1 specific person, we would just use instant message. Our manager worked i…
I agree. I found cubicles a bit soul-sucking and private offices too isolated. An open plan in a small area is fine for me, but 200 people on a floor is too many. If you're pair programming, you can get away with a lot more noise around you than if you're trying to concentrate by yourself. Also, people are less likely to interrupt a pair that is obviously hard at work than they are to bug an individual.
Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
#187Isn't increasing workspace density the real reason this is done with collaboration just used as the public rationale?
Pretty much. Real estate is expensive.
In Austin, I can get a modest 1-2 person private office for around $2k/month. At an annual salary of $120K, that's only 10-20% of developer costs. So the upper bound on the potential real estate savings of an open plan is on the order of 10-20%. Maybe a bit more if most devs are relatively inexperienced and therefore cheaper.
So while the savings is not nothing, when it's that small any potential productivity hit becomes even more of a big deal.
Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Except that Waterfall was never really advocated
I've heard countless people advocate for waterfall. I was formally taught waterfall years ago. It was how many people approached development for a long time, and how some people still approach it today.
Here's just one concrete example I could find in seconds - an article from 2006 advocating for its benefits https://www.techrepublic.com/article/understanding-the-pros-....
Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> It was conceived as a straw man which was being dissed so vigorously that people started believing it was real.
So much this.
I've been in the industry for about 30 years, and I've never once seen a place that used a methodology that could be called "waterfall" as described by many agile proponents.
Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never understand this line of reasoning. I have my own office. It's right next to most of my team's offices. My door is open 90% of the time. If someone wants to chat spontaneously, I don't think walking 15 feet is going to stop them.
Wouldn’t you agree it’s much more practical and inviting if you could just turn around a talk? I’d imagine that if I needed to get up, walk up there and knock on my coworker’s door, I’d rather just message him. And a text conversation and face to face one are very different and could lead it to different places.
My experience has been the opposite. People in open offices tend to avoid in-depth conversations because they don't want to disturb their neighbors; instead, they take conversations into conference rooms. The only people holding conversations in the open space are those talking about non-work topics (usually TV shows, movies, or sports), and seemingly lacking all awareness that they're disturbing the people trying to be productive.