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The Open-office Trap

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Re: The Open-office Trap

#91

Post by marcosdumay »

sheepmullet wrote: post #20
greggman wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've personally had the opposite experience. I'm far more productive in a team environment. In video games my most product times are when an artist and/or designer and I sit together and work together. Even when we are not directly interacting with each other seeing stuff on each other's screens lets us see what each other is working on and communicate early and often. I understand that some people in certain roles w…

"I've personally had the opposite experience. I'm far more productive in a team environment. In video games my most product times are when an artist and/or designer and I sit together and work together." A few people working together on a single task is not an open office. In a "real" open office you couldn't actually talk to the artist and designer beyond a few sentences because if you did you would disturb the othe…

> if you did you would disturb the other 10-20 people within earshot.

10-20? There are about 80 here.

Re: The Open-office Trap

#92

Post by stox »

Open offices are awesome during a crisis. On the other hand, they really suck when you need to focus on a problem. They work well for young start-ups, as crises tend to be quite frequent, but as a company matures, I think they become more of a liability than an asset.

Re: The Open-office Trap

#93

Post by tbrownaw »

Spooky23 wrote: post #40
NateDad wrote: post #14

What's funny is that I actually have no idea what a non-open office would look like. I've worked for 15 years and have never even walked in an office that wasn't open. How do you give each person an office without using like 5x the space as a cubicle farm? That's the real reason that companies like open offices - because they can jam a lot more people in the same space. Someone who is ok with a 6x6 cubicle would feel…

The fully loaded cost of IT people is $50-75/hr. I worked in office space in NYC a few years ago that was $80/sqft. 6x6 cube is $3k/year. Using your assumption that an office is 5x bigger (not sure if that's accurate or not), you're looking at around $15k/year for an office. So the delta is $12k/year, equivalent to 160-240 hours/year or 8-16% of a salary. IMO, with many developers you'll regain productivity far in ex…

The fully loaded cost of IT people is $50-75/hr.

I had the impression that in some of the bigger (and higher cost-of-living) tech hubs, just their salary could easily be that much.

Re: The Open-office Trap

#94

Post by vonmoltke »

geebee wrote: post #89

This is another interesting and good article, and I'm glad to see it getting (yet more) mainstream attention. But eventually, I think we should probably look at this as a solved problem and try to figure out what's going on upstream. In other words, I'm completely convinced that open offices (and cubicle farms, where I work) are harmful. To me, the more pressing question is: why are they still so common?

> To me, the more pressing question is: why are they still so common?

To quote a very cynical and jaded friend of mine, "It increases shareholder value".

Yes, studies show that open plan offices, especially badly-designed open plan offices, hurt knowledge worker productivity. The problem is, knowledge worker productivity is not expressed as a nice, neat number on a balance sheet. Facilities cost is. Thus, when a business gets into the mode of increasing profits by decreasing costs, all they see with respect to this topic is that office space expense. Cue the management bullshit stream about "collaboration", switch to open plans, and watch that number drop. The productivity drop tends to lag, however. Since many executive suites can't see forward past the next earnings report, or backwards past the previous, they see a nice increase in margins for a quarter or two, followed by a drop in revenue, schedule slips, or increasing costs in other areas caused by the open plan switch. They then move on to fixing this "new" problem, not realizing they caused it with their previous "fix".

Re: The Open-office Trap

#95

Post by vonmoltke »

michaelochurch wrote: post #69
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was younger I could probably handle a weirdo office like this for a year or two. Now? No way. I need some level of quiet, non-social time, etc to be focused and get things done. I imagine environments like this are the equivalent of saying, "We don't hire anyone over 30."

Moreover, "We don't hire anyone over 30" means "We don't hire anyone good". That's not to say there aren't good people in their 20s. There are quite a few of them. But they want to learn from people who are better than they are. That's the trait of A players: they want to learn from the A+ players. If you don't have anyone over 30, then the good under-30 people you get will quickly leave.

> If you don't have anyone over 30, then the good under-30 people you get will quickly leave.

At least the ones who are actually good, as opposed to the ones who think they are $DEITY's gift to engineering.

Re: The Open-office Trap

#96

Post by nerfhammer »

geebee wrote: post #89

This is another interesting and good article, and I'm glad to see it getting (yet more) mainstream attention. But eventually, I think we should probably look at this as a solved problem and try to figure out what's going on upstream. In other words, I'm completely convinced that open offices (and cubicle farms, where I work) are harmful. To me, the more pressing question is: why are they still so common?

Because you can fit 2-4 times as many employees in the same floor space

Re: The Open-office Trap

#97

Post by pbreit »

I've already bought in to the notion that open arrangements may have short-comings.

But in the Bay Area circa 2014 what arrangements are being tried out and seeing advantages? Low cubes, high cubes, fully enclosed offices, bull pens, mini bull pens, periodic re-arrangement, unassigned?

Re: The Open-office Trap

#98

Post by lreeves »

stox wrote: post #92

Open offices are awesome during a crisis. On the other hand, they really suck when you need to focus on a problem. They work well for young start-ups, as crises tend to be quite frequent, but as a company matures, I think they become more of a liability than an asset.

I find them awful in a crisis; generally there are a few people that can actually fix and work on the crisis and people start hovering behind them trying to drive from the back.

Re: The Open-office Trap

#99

Post by Udo »

aeberbach wrote: post #35

Why stop at having an office merely "open"? Hot desking is the new thing - it's nothing to do with cost saving, it's all about "flexibility". Except that your organisation might also have a policy against working from home. There's no implicit message that you are simply a replaceable functional unit, not at all. You might even find there's no desk left when you arrive at work - who doesn't love the suspense of arriv…

I think my ideal office space would have both - little separate rooms for one person or, depending on preference and necessity, a small group. And then there'd be large and quirky open areas where people could go and sit down with their laptops randomly.

Because I have experienced both extremes (including my own startup) and they're not ideal. Having your own office is nice, but sometimes you want to ad-hoc with a small group of other people, or maybe you just want a quick change of scenery, maybe go to a place where there is some background activity. You shouldn't have to go find a Starbucks for that.

For me, these laptop-only environments don't work very well either, because at some point I want to have my desktop with a decent multi-screen setup.

Lastly, there should always be the option of working from home when appropriate.

So, if I ever start a company again, I'd try to just keep all these options available and let people find the right balance that works for them individually.

Re: The Open-office Trap

#100

Post by mgrouchy »

eloisant wrote: post #59
matwood wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hot desking is the new thing I visited a place that was a giant room of ~100 people working. No one had their own computer, instead you just sat down and whatever computer was there and started working. The guy running this insanity said they re-image all the machines all time taking settings from one of the machines that has been in use. His theory was that over time everyones preferences would merge. It was interes…

At my university, 15 years ago, we had network profiles. So you would log to any machine in the university, your home directory would be your own. That worked with dual boot Windows and Linux, so you'd get the same files on either platform. The machines were pretty much stateless. When you booted a machine you could choose between Windows, Linux, or reset the whole machine. The third one was what you did when the mac…

My university did this as well. I also worked on the software that handled the configuration management for these machines too. Really awesome setup. http://www.labnet.ca/MainPage/index.html
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