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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

#301

Post by jamie_ca »

WWLink wrote: post #247
Izkata wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a missing stage in his description, that we're having issues with right now: in an open office plan, not having enough seats for everyone.

or parking! Lack of parking makes me irrationally angry for some reason.

Insufficient parking makes me feel like it's a scam done knowingly. If there's not enough stalls in the lot, it encourages you to go earlier so you'll find a stall available, which leads to a feedback loop of the entire workforce needing to show up earlier and earlier (and of course, with the expectation that they'll work when they get to their desk, and still stay til 5).

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

#302

Post by opo »

0xff00ffee wrote: post #241

'fad'? 30+ years working in cube farms for major Semiconductor and Operating System companies. (cough shmintel cough cough microshmoft ) They ain't going away. Why? Because offices with doors are extremely expensive compared to wide-open spaces. It isn't going away.

>...Because offices with doors are extremely expensive compared to wide-open spaces.

No not really. In the bay area (and likely lots of other places), the costs of employee salary, benefits, etc are a lot more than the costs for rent.

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

#303

Post by anon9001 »

Misdicorl wrote: post #253

Meta response. There has to be a better way to aggregate than having this same article (effectively) pop up every other week. And then like 30% of all hiring/firing/workplace discussions devolve into the open floor plan discussion. The responses are always the same and the conversation hasn't moved an inch in five years. No, its not that hard to just hide the submission and close the comment chains which veer. But my…

> There has to be a better way to aggregate than having this same article (effectively) pop up every other week.

I disagree. I think this is actually the best way HN can bring about change, even though the arguments haven't changed in years.

IMO the reason these posts get upvoted is out of protest and to raise awareness. HN is probably the most influential source in tech. If every time you look at HN there's threads complaining about something, it must be pretty important.

After watching memes travel around the internet and cross over into mainstream thinking, I put a lot of weight on how much HN's front page matters. Slashdot used to have a similar effect, then Digg, then Reddit, now HN.

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

#304

Post by techsupporter »

LordFast wrote: post #243
techsupporter wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For some people the idea of chatting someone who's sitting 5 feet away from them is super weird. This is exactly what happens in my employer's "pod rooms." There are 10 of us and inevitably someone will be all, "Jack; Jack!; HEY, JACK!!" and someone else says "he has his headphones on just send him an IM" and the first person replies "ugh!" and then gets up to walk over and stand at Jack's shoulder until Jack takes…

> Right now I can hear my neighbor upstairs walking around on the hardwood floors all of our apartments have with his hard-soled shoes like he's been doing for the past hour, the traffic outside because apparently density should only exist next to busy arterials in the city where I live, planes loudly going overhead because the cloud ceiling is lower and they're taking a more direct route to the airport, and now the…

> so the benefits of having a city is rapidly diminishing.

To be 100% clear, I still love living in the dense city where I do and I have no plans on moving away from it. But I don't think employers have yet figured out that taking away the quiet(er?) spots at work does a lot of harm because it means loss of hours of quiet.

I also readily admit that a good chunk of this is on me. I am increasingly a curmudgeon, probably because of changes at work, and so I take it out on the other parts of my environment by quietly being frustrated.

I've lived in the middle of nowhere before and hated it. I've lived in the "quiet" suburbs and hated it. At least living in the city, with the attendant noise, I get more out of it than I lose; I'm just still frustrated at my employer (and my industry) for taking away my office door.

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

#306

Post by dijit »

closeparen wrote: post #291
madhadron wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had this setup in academic environments a few times, and it's wonderful.

Lots of grad student offices are like this. We may have the money, but they have the workspace.

Seems like we should be able to trade some of our money for this. I’d be surprised to learn it was less productive too.

Any company would surely go for this.

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

#307

Post by svachalek »

JohnFen wrote: post #189
praptak wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I started out in defense and it was standard practice there, especially in regards to contract management. I had to take a formal training class in the process.

It was also the only process I learned in college ('94) and was strongly advocated in my classes.

Most attacks from the agile community probably are coming from a place of never having actually seen or practiced the real thing however. For example it does flow backwards at times, it's not the nonsense straight line process that gets straw-manned sometimes.

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

#308

Post by jesseryoung »

notduncansmith wrote: post #79

I work in an open office environment. I never thought I’d say this, but it works excellently; there’s always energy in the air, collaboration is easy, and it’s a great space to hold company all-hands meetings. I’d say there are 4 keys to making this work: 1) The founders have a great sense of aesthetic and our office is a beautiful space as a result (also stays very clean), meaning it stays less stressful and promote…

Same exact story here - worked in an open office that was awful that we slowly transformed into one that functioned extremely well.

Where I've always thought open offices break down is when you have the space filled with people who wouldn't normally talk to each other if they were in their own offices. Organizations that have roughly the same number of projects as they have developers.

Where it started to work extremely well, is when the only people within a 10 foot radius of me exclusively worked on the same project, codebase and backlog as me. If you're building a component for a developer that's sitting to the right of you, tested by a QA sitting to the left of you with business rules written by the BA sitting behind you it's incredible how fast you can move.

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

#309

Post by dualboot »

_y5hn wrote: post #287
dualboot wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a very narrow view of the world, friend. It's dangerous to presume that you have such a deep and wide perspective that you can instantly diagnose something so thoroughly.

Sorry for thinking and sharing my experience. Just go back to being socially anxious then! Nevermind other explanation models or opportunities. I've updated my comment to attempt to clarify the meaning better, in case that was miscommunicated.

The older I get, the more I realize that we really haven't figured out anything at all.

We just make up or prescribe to a set of rules that help us cope with that as best as possible.

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