Ask HN: Why are you against open plan offices?

Or, then, you just don't trust your employees and want to watch over them all the time.

Neither of these reasons touch the actual reason why you are in the office - to create added value. Hence open plan office is an environment that the market has selected for all the other reasons, except to be a good place to work.

Some people like open offices, other don't.

The overall picture from literature and practice is that if the cadence of the work is "like in NASA flight control" then the easy communication aspect is an actual asset.

On the other hand, if you are mostly coding and doing other sort of deep work, then an open plan office is openly hostile to productivity.

For example, if noise level increases 10 dB it decreases productivity by 5% [0].

Personally, having worked in all sort of configs for two decades, my capability to concentrate, productivity, and happiness in an open plan settings plummets.

[0] Dean: Noise, Cognitive Function, and Worker Productivity "https://joshuatdean.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/NoiseCogn...

Many people who work in offices live in highly expensive cities (on a $/sq-ft basis) and can't afford a "spare" room to work in. Many juniors can't even afford their own apartment. Indeed some at the bottom end of the payscale may even have to share a room

If remote work become the norm, people will be more confident about leaving expensive cities and moving to cheaper places, which don't have 50 different job opportunities within a 3 mile radius.

I get what you mean, I find you have to pick the right sort of music. For me minimal techno is perfect, because it's energetic so doesn't relax me too much like ambient music, but also monotonous/repetitive so I don't get too into it

Headphones don't filter out every distraction either, though, so there's that too. People constantly walking around or eating food you can smell or shuffling stuff on their desks or doing whatever else they are doing can be incredibly distracting when you need to concentrate.

Also distractions are one thing, but I know lots of people want some privacy in the workplace too, even if it's not the first (or last) reason they'll list. It's kind of the elephant in the room. If you're the kind of person/robot who thinks privacy in the workplace is a fundamental oxymoron and who goes 4 or 9 hours straight without taking a bit of a break once in a while (whether it's just to check your personal email or social media, or to lay your head down for some time and rest a bit, or to make/receive a phone call, or whatever) then maybe you won't sympathize with this. But not feeling like people are continually observing you is something a lot of people value.

Also my ears can eventually sweat when I have headphones on for hours on end, and my headphones end up getting dirty, and their existence isn't exactly indistinguishable from their non-existence either, so there's that. Maybe this is too obvious? But an open-plan office where the solution is "wear a headphone" is practically a job that mandates that you wear a headphone.

I'm sure there's other stuff I'm not thinking of at the moment. And of course there are lots of benefits too; I just didn't list them since you seemed to already be aware of them.

However, there is a single toilet with shower for the entire space.

It is only accessible via the smaller office.

I would occasionally visit, but even w a few people, it was horrific.

At one point, they had two desks and folks working in the smaller room, but it became unbearable, after being able to experience your coworkers bathroom habits from less than 10 feet away.

When building the office, did I stress the need for a cohesive bathroom strategy? Yes.

I have many other work related stories like this, from all sorts of places.