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Ask HN: Why are you against open plan offices?

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Re: Ask HN: Why are you against open plan offices?

#71

Post by twic »

jlengrand wrote: post #6

I'm not actually against open plan offices....at team level. I'm against open plan offices at large corp level. I have 300 people on my floor, the group closest to us is from business and spends 2/4 hours a day on the phone. It saddens me because the largest openly claimed benefit of Open Plan offices is "increase collaboration". What I literally see is people locking themselves with headphones and trying to hide in…

How about something like the 1972 Centraal Beheer offices:

http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/central_beheer.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_xHQjBKbjo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rT1VQHcZOj0

https://www.ahh.nl/index.php/en/projects2/12-utiliteitsbouw/...

Re: Ask HN: Why are you against open plan offices?

#72

Post by peteforde »

I collect links on topics that interest me, sometimes over long periods. I have a list called "Open plan offices are bad".

https://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt...

https://www.mattblodgett.com/2015/06/just-wear-headphones.ht...

https://dandreamsofcoding.com/2014/06/17/science-superstitio...

http://nathanmarz.com/blog/the-inexplicable-rise-of-open-flo...

https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/09/10/developer-flow-state-a...

https://hackernoon.com/what-happened-to-software-development...

http://calnewport.com/blog/2016/10/09/is-facebooks-massive-o...

https://www.prdaily.com/report-u-s-workers-hate-open-office-...

https://www.citylab.com/design/2018/08/the-case-for-rooms/56...

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20191115-office-noise-a...

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/07/30/private-offices-re...

Just... could you click a little quieter, please?

Re: Ask HN: Why are you against open plan offices?

#73

Post by alanfranz »

I had written a post on my page some time ago:

https://www.franzoni.eu/productivity-the-office-and-an-open-...

TL;DR: the open office may not be a problem per se. Instead:

1) It's a problem if you get a very large open office with excessive employee density and/or with different kind of employees around. This usually results in a lot of noise and/or distractions from unrelated teams.

2) It's a problem if there're not other places where to go have video/phone calls, and/or if some people need to be constantly on their phone/meeting system.

Privacy, safety and a calm environment should be a must for an office. Otherwise, what's its purpose?

Re: Ask HN: Why are you against open plan offices?

#74

Post by dillonmckay »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #56
dillonmckay wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes sense, but also seems not too difficult to prove.

There was a paper or report floating around HN the other day, in which the Navy analyzed data from submarine crews, and could not reproduce the claimed effects of increased CO₂ concentrations in air. With that out there, I worry a definitive answer may not be so easy to establish.

Interesting. I will try to find that sub article.

Maybe open-offices that can’t install ERVs can use rebreathers instead?

I was reminded of this hackaday project...

https://hackaday.com/2018/05/29/monitoring-air-quality-one-s...

Re: Ask HN: Why are you against open plan offices?

#75

Post by peteforde »

fsloth wrote: post #51

Open-plan offices came about because they are mainly cheap. 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…

5% per 10dB of added noise floor? That seems really low to me. Think about it... 30dB is the difference between a quieter window fan and a train going by next door.

Re: Ask HN: Why are you against open plan offices?

#76

Post by sersi »

I sometimes think that the perfect office space would be a room for teams of around 10 with maybe 3-4 alcoves or smaller office rooms that people can retreat too when they have calls to make or when they want to have complete quite...

The idea is to keep the collaborative effort and spontaneous conversation while still having place to retreat for silence and while limiting the full amount of noise by limiting the total number of people.

My first experience working for a company was in a traditional Japanese house in Kyoto which approximates this a bit, there was a relatively big room where we often worked but I would sometimes retreat downstairs and gaze at the indoor garden while working in silence..

Obviously such a setup would cost a lot more to companies but I do think that the productivity gains would help...

Re: Ask HN: Why are you against open plan offices?

#77

Post by twic »

gmtx725 wrote: post #39
jlengrand wrote: post #6

I'm not actually against open plan offices....at team level. I'm against open plan offices at large corp level. I have 300 people on my floor, the group closest to us is from business and spends 2/4 hours a day on the phone. It saddens me because the largest openly claimed benefit of Open Plan offices is "increase collaboration". What I literally see is people locking themselves with headphones and trying to hide in…

Does that not just create silos though. So many things require cross-team working. If each team has its own private space then information bottlenecks will occur

This is what everyone assumes, but when you actually test that idea, it turns out not to be true:

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.201...

Re: Ask HN: Why are you against open plan offices?

#78

Post by gmtx725 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #66
gmtx725 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that not just create silos though. So many things require cross-team working. If each team has its own private space then information bottlenecks will occur

You have to compare the cost of potential information bottlenecks with the cost of no deeper work being done at all. To combat the bottlenecks, just include shared spaces - a kitchen with a water cooler, a foosball table, a customary time where people go to lunch as a group. Serendipity will happen there, and workstations can be reclaimed as places for concentration.

Maybe, i'm not convinced. In my experience social interactions in shared spaces like kitchens etc tend to be dominated by general niceties and non-work chat. Which is fine, obviously, but I don't think you get the benefits as when people working on similar stuff are physically proximate to one another in their workspace, and can get feedback on an idea they are working on now instantly from knowledgeable coworkers

Re: Ask HN: Why are you against open plan offices?

#79

Post by fsloth »

peteforde wrote: post #75
fsloth wrote: post #51

Open-plan offices came about because they are mainly cheap. 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…

5% per 10dB of added noise floor? That seems really low to me. Think about it... 30dB is the difference between a quieter window fan and a train going by next door.

Read the referred paper. It is fairly thorough :)

Re: Ask HN: Why are you against open plan offices?

#80

Post by rglullis »

Each interruption you get (colleagues asking you something, chat messages, impromptu meetings, even you catching with the corner of the eye two of your colleagues leaving their tables to grab a coffee) costs at least 15 minutes of your time to get back into a focused (i.e, productive) mental state.

> What's wrong with just putting some headphones on if you want to put your head down and do some deep, quiet work?

I don't know you, so don't try to take it personally, but I'd venture that your always-on generation and the constant expectation of immediate feedback led to most of the younger ones incapable of really deep focus. When 85% of the solutions to our problems is no more than 5 minutes of Googling around, it gets really hard to exercise that part of the brain where we set ourselves to dig through all the layers of abstraction and build a good mental map of the problem to be solved.

When you do get in such a deep state of focus, it is not a problem to be "plain isolating to be in a room all day" because you don't realize the time passing around you. Like reading a good book that you just can't drop until is finished, no one should feel bad for coming out of a 5-6 hour session of deep focus, productive work and "not having connected" during that time.

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