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Open plan offices attract highest levels of worker dissatisfaction

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Re: Open plan offices attract highest levels of worker dissatisfaction

#81

Post by zackbloom »

fishtoaster wrote: post #18

I don't think open offices are necessarily bad, but that they're harder to get right. What you need is: - A a decent cultural protocol around it. One place I worked had the very strong rule that you start all non-emergency communication asynchronously (usually text chat), even if the person is right next to you. Another place I worked at strongly respected headphones as the "don't bother me" signal. - A reasonable nu…

I completely agree, wrote up essentially the exact same thing: http://dev.hubspot.com/blog/open-plan-offices

Re: Open plan offices attract highest levels of worker dissatisfaction

#82

Post by twistedpair »

biot wrote: post #17
baddox wrote: post #7

I guess I should be saying "it's hard to argue with the numbers," and yet my temptation is precisely to argue against the numbers at least for my job (programming for a tech company). I just don't understand what I would be doing in my own office, other than wasting space and spending more time leaving my office to find coprogrammers I have questions for.

That you have to spend a lot of time with other programmers asking questions raises another question: why is this? If the other programmers were better able to concentrate and churn out specs/documentation for their work that you could consult at your leisure, would there be as much need for constantly interrupting each other with questions? If you had all the information you needed at your fingertips, why couldn't y…

Hmm... sufficiently define everything so that human contact is unnecessary? Genius idea. Now if only the customer knew exactly what they wanted a year out and the BA's perfectly captured that in absolutely unambiguous prose, and of course if nothing ever failed to go according to plan.

Re: Open plan offices attract highest levels of worker dissatisfaction

#83

Post by niels_olson »

abalone wrote: post #66
niels_olson wrote: post #50

Work spaces I have had * High school: desk in bedroom. Unaware there are worse options: Productivity: 9. * College, year 1: dorm with roommate, cop-style desks facing each other. Shut up! Productivity: 4. * College, years 2-4: two roommates, desk under bed. Vaguely cramped, but not bad. Productivity: 6. * First ship: Flight of the Intruder style aluminum desk/dresser/bookcase measuring 24" wide, aligned athwartships,…

What do you think it is about your current shared cubicle that makes it the most productive ever?

It's not better than the urgent care, but it's on the high end. Mainly, the work is quite interesting and there's lots of it. Case-report quality stuff comes across my desk daily and large studies are in the making. I have dual screen monitors, (also had that at the standing desk at the last job), but I have also customized my world a bit more: I have vim tuned better (works reasonably well with Dragon, but could be better). The office has windows with mini-blinds, which has a peculiar ability to really make the space feel expansive, yet safe from prying eyes. My microscope has dual heads so I put a Magnifi (arcturuslabs.com) on the second head and can take pics at my leisure (see http://reddit.com/r/pathology for unknowns) so that verges on a third screen. Plus my ipad. And I have been planning to move in here for over a year, so I have thought hard about what to do.

And, thanks in part to years of great posts on Hacker News, I'm much better at scripting mundane tasks than the average pathology resident.

I think another thing is that I took up surfing. I'm from Kansas. I go surfing with dolphins at least once a week. I own a home in SoCal, wife and kids are happy and smart. How did I get here?

Re: Open plan offices attract highest levels of worker dissatisfaction

#84

Post by mindcrime »

jusben1369 wrote: post #72

Anybody here feel like this might be a generational issue? I suspect the negative crowd is north of 30 and/or experienced non open spaces. But just a guess.

I dunno... I hated and despised "open plan" in my 20's, in my 30's, and now I still hate it at 40. shrug

Re: Open plan offices attract highest levels of worker dissatisfaction

#85

Post by baddox »

twistedpair wrote: post #82
biot wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That you have to spend a lot of time with other programmers asking questions raises another question: why is this? If the other programmers were better able to concentrate and churn out specs/documentation for their work that you could consult at your leisure, would there be as much need for constantly interrupting each other with questions? If you had all the information you needed at your fingertips, why couldn't y…

Hmm... sufficiently define everything so that human contact is unnecessary? Genius idea. Now if only the customer knew exactly what they wanted a year out and the BA's perfectly captured that in absolutely unambiguous prose, and of course if nothing ever failed to go according to plan.

In biot's analogy, human contact is analogous to first aid.

Re: Open plan offices attract highest levels of worker dissatisfaction

#86

Post by com2kid »

My team recently moved from dedicated offices to open offices and the cultural changes have actually been quite interesting to watch.

Not being able to go into someone's office and talk for an hour cuts down on one form of interpersonal bonding. On the flip side, having larger group conversations encourages another type of bonding.

Arranging dinner and lunch outings is 100x easier, we go out as a team quite often now.

Code reviews are fast and fluid. It is easy to get someone to walk on over and take a look at something. Junior programmers worrying about their designs can easily ask more senior members for help.

Productivity in some regards is down, noise level is higher for some things (yes even with headphones), and there are certainly some days where it is hard to think. On the other hand, really hard problems can get a lot of brain power thrown at them really quickly and solved in a matter of minutes. No more of that "well if I had known you were working on that, turns out I found a fix for it yesterday, I could have saved you 4 hours!"

Time spent chit chatting is probably the same. I have gotten to know some coworkers I didn't know before.

I'd say it has overall helped with code quality and team cohesion. Then again our areas are not that small, 8x10, so we are by no means cramped. I have two actual desks in my area so people on external teams can drop in with a laptop if they need to work with me.

It is a royal pain when trying to focus on solving a really hard problem however. Especially if doing pair programming on a super hard problem, when two people's thoughts are all that should be occupying a space.

Re: Open plan offices attract highest levels of worker dissatisfaction

#87

Post by loceng »

voidlogic wrote: post #45
loceng wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one benefit is the cost savings? More people in smaller area + large area for group chats when needed, etc?

Cost savings until Cold/Flu season hits. Watch that burn through the office...

If people are in the same office space overall, everyone will likely catch whatever's going around anyway.

Re: Open plan offices attract highest levels of worker dissatisfaction

#88

Post by gametheoretic »

abalone wrote: post #64
fishtoaster wrote: post #18

I don't think open offices are necessarily bad, but that they're harder to get right. What you need is: - A a decent cultural protocol around it. One place I worked had the very strong rule that you start all non-emergency communication asynchronously (usually text chat), even if the person is right next to you. Another place I worked at strongly respected headphones as the "don't bother me" signal. - A reasonable nu…

You mentioned headphones. Headphones seem to be an essential part of open plans. Not only do they send a don't-bother-me signal, they also drown out the noise. But that's also a really annoying part of it. I don't want to have to put on headphones all the time.

If the top post indicates anything, it's the high precedence the psyche places on framing. Switch around your default- and exception cases and see if that helps take your mind off it.

It's a real thing. This summer, because my room would get hot at night, I had to leave a fan on. At first, I couldn't sleep with the noise. But now that it's getting colder, I've tried leaving it off, and guess what. Ha. Now I need the noise.

Re: Open plan offices attract highest levels of worker dissatisfaction

#89

Post by gradstudent »

fishtoaster wrote: post #18

I don't think open offices are necessarily bad, but that they're harder to get right. What you need is: - A a decent cultural protocol around it. One place I worked had the very strong rule that you start all non-emergency communication asynchronously (usually text chat), even if the person is right next to you. Another place I worked at strongly respected headphones as the "don't bother me" signal. - A reasonable nu…

> Open offices can work, but only if you go out of your way to make them work. Just throwing a few dozen devs in a warehouse is a recipe for dissatisfaction. I think that that happens more often than not, resulting in things like this study.

No, they're universally bad. No door, no privacy and a constant stream of chatter from other people. Yuck.

Re: Open plan offices attract highest levels of worker dissatisfaction

#90

Post by MartinCron »

simplexion wrote: post #54
jacques_chester wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I recall, Microsoft designed X-shaped buildings with shared spaces towards the middle. Every developer has a private office with "a door that shuts". They all have a view that doesn't look into another office. When they need to work alone, they can work alone. Each office is large enough that a second person can come in and work alongside them, whiteboard together etc. Social areas are placed towards the centre of…

Where's the evidence for these claims though? I know Joel Spolsky makes the argument about "A door that shuts" but it's purely anecdotal. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/12/29.html

The study in Peopleware was individual coders working on well-defined toy projects. Whatever evidence taken from that may or may not translate to your real-world development organization.
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