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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?

#141

Post by opo »

photonios wrote: post #129
opo wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm not actually against open plan offices....at team level. Having now worked in one of these at a large company, we found those sorts of "team offices" hurt collaboration and innovation even more than open floor plans. Unless the company is relativley small, the random conversations between people from different teams is often the key to innovation and getting problems solved early without having having to have fo…

> A team room means that to ask a co-worker on another team a simple question (or to just see what they are working on) becomes a big deal because you are now entering that other team's space and interrupting a dozen people. Isn't that kind of the point of having team offices?

>...Isn't that kind of the point of having team offices?

Having each team in their own silo isn't necessarily a good thing. They may feel they are getting more done in their daily standup meetings, but long term innovation often comes from inter-team collaboration and sharing of expertise.

As I said before, what I've seen is that random conversations between people from different teams is often the key to innovation and getting problems solved early without having having to have formal meetings and delays. I've also seen teams in their silo end up making poor choices in areas of technical design where they didn't have as much background.

If two companies are competing with each other, the one where there is great informal inter-team collaboration is going to have an advantage over the one where each team is in its own silo and at best ignores the other teams.

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

#142

Post by opo »

arantius wrote: post #130
opo wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm not actually against open plan offices....at team level. Having now worked in one of these at a large company, we found those sorts of "team offices" hurt collaboration and innovation even more than open floor plans. Unless the company is relativley small, the random conversations between people from different teams is often the key to innovation and getting problems solved early without having having to have fo…

> A team room means that to ask a co-worker on another team a simple question (or to just see what they are working on) becomes a big deal because you are now entering that other team's space and interrupting a dozen people. Which is better than interrupting the hundred plus people in the giant open-office space?

Unless they feel the need to yell, they are probably interrupting a small number of people and not hundred plus people. The difference in the open floor plan is that at least they aren't entering the private space of another team. What we saw is that when each team is in their own little silo, people are reluctant to go invade another team's private space unless they knew the person very well. Inter-team knowledge sharing and collaboration really dropped.

While team silos create additional problems, obviously the hundred plus style open floor plans are still pretty horrible. The best approach I have seen is individual offices with shared collaboration areas nearby. People can do deep work by closing their office door. People can pair-program, have someone look over their code, have a private conversation etc. by going to another's office without disturbing everyone else. A shared collaboration area allows for quick easy group discussion when helpful.

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

#143

Post by nicholas73 »

Sometimes when I am wearing headphones, I get dissociated with the outside world and forget that my farts make sounds. So I fart without muffling it, and my neighbor thinks I'm just a jerk that toots openly. Then whenever he farts he toots openly too, in a game of one-buttsmanship. As a result, nobody is particularly comfortable working and I have to take walks when otherwise I would have been blissfully ignorant.

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

#144

Post by brtkdotse »

dillonmckay wrote: post #38
mFixman wrote: post #13

Working from home for the past 3 months taught me that a lot of my constant tiredness and apathy came from the constant noise you get in an open office. Some people can't handle being productive in a extremely loud, and extremely bright environment. It doesn't matter how much I destroyed my hearing by putting loud music over noise-cancelling headphones, I always felt tired after ~2 hours of work. Open offices seem to…

In our elementary school cafeteria, we had a large traffic light that was sound activated. Reasonable noise levels were green, but if we got too loud it would turn yellow to warn us to quiet down, but if it turned red, it would make a loud buzzing alert, and we were not allowed to speak during the red light. If you did speak during a red light, you were written a ‘ticket’, and would not be going to recess that aftern…

Minus the "ticket", the same traffic light is in every kindergarten in Sweden, as well as a majority of public spaces.

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

#145

Post by tanseydavid »

DedlySnek wrote: post #139
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…

> What I literally see is people locking themselves with headphones and trying to hide in rooms to get some silence. I mean, people literally have to walk around teams to go to the toilet or get a coffee. This sentence describes me. I have my headphones plugged in almost all times because I cant focus with all the noise.

You are not alone in this. Many developers find noise to be a especially distracting factor. I am in this category.

Also, I feel the need to comment on the widespread notion that the primary motivation for open-plan office is that "it facilitates collaboration" which in my opinion and experience is barely truthful in any way.

The reality is that open-office is motivated by the costs of rent -- it really is that simple.

The whole thing about "collaboration" is after-the-fact rationalizing because organizations lack the courage to admit that it really is about money.

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

#146

Post by tanseydavid »

iateanapple wrote: post #137
ryandrake wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, "Being able to be productive while not in The Zone" is a job skill like any other that can/should be learned and improved with practice. I used to be like that, where if you said peep to me while I was focused, I snapped out of it and couldn't work my way back up to productivity easily. This is kind of a "junior developer" problem that IMHO developers just need to overcome with practice. Having a ki…

> In my view you just need to deal with this reality and learn how to be productive in it. IMO, senior developers who are “productive in it” are getting by on pattern matching. Just like I can drive to my local mall without even thinking about it. They haven’t actually learned how to be productive working this way.

>> Just like I can drive to my local mall without even thinking about it.

I have seen plenty of software that appears to have been written by someone who was 'not even thinking about it' and it is invariably problematic and expensive-to-maintain.

Do you really believe there are senior devs that are productive without even thinking about it?

That just strikes me as odd -- maybe they are working on stuff should be given to Juniors?

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

#147

Post by tanseydavid »

twic wrote: post #77
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

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...

Thank you for the academic link providing a solid contradiction to the idea that open-plan facilitates or improves 'collaboration'.

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

#148

Post by tanseydavid »

apohn wrote: post #115

>What's wrong with just putting some headphones on if you want to put your head down and do some deep, quiet work? I can't do focused work with headphones and music. I get headaches because I have to put extra effort to focus and think. I've tried headphones, earphones, IEMs, and earbuds. That includes regular, audiophile, and noise cancelling. I just can't do it. I need quiet to think. Even noise cancelling headphon…

Your analogy with the thermostat is BRILLIANT. Thank you for that.

But if they actually did that, they would say the reason was to "improve collaboration" not that it was to save money -- just like open-plan!

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

#149

Post by tanseydavid »

matsemann wrote: post #92
huffmsa wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, except it happens every other day and all you do is "revise the product" and never build or ship the product. It's a one way express train to feature creep. It often doesn't involve all of the stakeholders, so then you're having multiple 15 minute meetings to get everyone in sync. Meetings are for meeting, not meetings are for shutting up and doing your assigned work.

> not meetings are for shutting up and doing your assigned work Like a mindless drone? Or are you advocating for more meetings?

>> Like a mindless drone?

Mindless drones do not get assigned software development work. It is thinking-work by its very nature.

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

#150

Post by tanseydavid »

gmtx725 wrote: post #46
dillonmckay wrote: post #32

Headphones don’t make things quiet. You are just replacing noises. Think of a library. I have not even brought up the visual or olfactory distractions, either.

Does it need to be completely quiet? I find I work best with low-level relaxing ambient background noise. Find it much easier to work in e.g. a coffee shop than a library

Personally, I would choose the library environment every single time for software design and dev -- if the option were available to me.

I know that my productivity is much, much closer to optimum when I work under these conditions. Sadly they are almost impossible to find or arrange.

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