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The Open-office Trap

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Re: The Open-office Trap

#101

Post by stygiansonic »

chrisgd wrote: post #57

Interesting article. My favorite sentence is this though, "Open offices may seem better suited to younger workers, many of whom have been multitasking for the majority of their short careers." Despite what I want to believe and what I have been told (all companies only want to hire multitaskers!), multitasking is neither productive nor really possible. You can really only do one project at a time.

Spot on. What most people refer to as "multitasking" is really a constant partial-attention deficit.

Re: The Open-office Trap

#102

Post by woah »

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…

You sound like an angry person.

Re: The Open-office Trap

#103

Post by 33W »

pbiggar wrote: post #4

We've just moved into our first place where everyone has a private office. It's absolutely amazing! I had been complaining for years about open-plan offices [1], but I was actually surprised at just how much more productive it is to have a door that closes! [1] http://blog.circleci.com/silence-is-for-the-weak/

Do you have a source for the engineer to office ratios at Google and Microsoft?

Re: The Open-office Trap

#104

Post by fish2000 »

cookiecaper wrote: post #64
Touche wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of the hip news organization on House of Cards where everyone is sitting around on stair steps and such. I wonder how productive such an environment is for anyone , and whether the decision to design an office in such a way is solely for the sake of image.

Considering it's not a real office, yes, it's purely for image. It's meant to communicate "Slugline is so creative and forward-thinking that they don't even need non-beanbag furnishings!", and contrast against the Post's button-down, cubicle hell style. The sad part is that some people see things like that in TV shows and try to duplicate them in the real world, without realizing that devices that work to communicate…

Funny that – I often imagine that a nicely productive compromise would be a scheme like the SCDP office on “Mad Men“: mostly private offices, but with a pseudo-open “Creative Lounge“ that facilitates collaboration but retains basic human stuff like doors, for some sense of sonic isolation.

That particular plan is far from perfect – they have often used the lack of isolation (e.g. people peeping on neighbors through ceiling-level windows) as a plot device – but I still like the actual looks of it, based on actual experience with the open-plan-induced drudgery discussed in the article.

Re: The Open-office Trap

#105

Post by gdulli »

pbiggar wrote: post #4

We've just moved into our first place where everyone has a private office. It's absolutely amazing! I had been complaining for years about open-plan offices [1], but I was actually surprised at just how much more productive it is to have a door that closes! [1] http://blog.circleci.com/silence-is-for-the-weak/

My team recently moved to a quieter area within the same office. On the second day I powered through an annoying task I'd been putting off for a month. I realized after I finished that the main reason I'd been putting off the task was that I knew it would require the type of focus and uninterrupted time I wasn't going to be able to get. Since then I've been thinking a lot more about how the office space influences how, and when, and whether various types of work get done.

Re: The Open-office Trap

#106

Post by notahacker »

caw wrote: post #87
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…

One job I had went to hot desking for a campus of over 1000 people. The oversubscription ratio was 1.25 people to 1 station, with the assumption that every 5th person would be not in a desk for some reason (travel, vacation, sick, in meetings -- they actually measured this by taking headcounts). The idea is that if you were going to leave your desk for more than some specified amount of time you'd pack everything up.

My friend hot-desks in an oversubscribed office which solves the oversubscription problem with a work-from-home-day rota. The punchline: he's a quant for one of the world's biggest banks.

Re: The Open-office Trap

#107

Post by bronson »

burriko wrote: post #16
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…

Working alongside 2 or 3 other coworkers isn't really the same thing as an open-office though. At the moment I'm sitting in an office of approximately 30+ people. Working on my own in this environment is annoying. Working with my team (2-3 other people) is also annoying, as we can't speak without being overheard. And I'm sure when we're working as a team, and conversing a lot, we'll be annoying others who require som…

Not always... I've seen private offices so small two people can just sit in there. It's like Brazil (the movie) but better lit.

So, IFF your company has the money to devote a fair amount of real estate to each worker, yes, private offices are great.

Re: The Open-office Trap

#108

Post by squozzer »

At my last job I had a private office, my first. Now I work in the most open office I've had since leaving the Army - my office there was called "The Motor Pool"

I didn't find it as distracting as I thought - but I am someone who can tune out everything when watching TV.

I miss being able to break wind somewhat discreetly though.

Re: The Open-office Trap

#109

Post by pbiggar »

33W wrote: post #103
pbiggar wrote: post #4

We've just moved into our first place where everyone has a private office. It's absolutely amazing! I had been complaining for years about open-plan offices [1], but I was actually surprised at just how much more productive it is to have a door that closes! [1] http://blog.circleci.com/silence-is-for-the-weak/

Do you have a source for the engineer to office ratios at Google and Microsoft?

No, and I think I'm slightly wrong there. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7008214.

Re: The Open-office Trap

#110

Post by mutagen »

matwood wrote: post #49
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…

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…

This is a great idea! You could apply genetic algorithms to the process. Pick the most popular and productive computers and re-image from these, eventually identifying the optimal configuration. Popularity of a shared resource could have nothing to do with location, hardware specs, or other external factors. Likewise, productivity is only going to have a miniscule correlation with the actual person behind the computer as opposed to the configuration of the operating system. Forget individualized tooling, single licensing, and security. We want to encourage cross-pollination of skills. If the accounting package is available to everyone, well, they might just learn some accounting. Win - Win for everyone.

Hell, you might as well leave some of the viruses on there. Haven't some viruses integrated with the human genome? We want the same concepts to apply to our IT and office layout. Perhaps one of those viruses is closing security vulnerabilities and keeping other viruses out.

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