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The Open-office Trap

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Re: The Open-office Trap

#111

Post by YTowOnt9 »

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…

    > So when you plan your next office, leave the kitchen
    > open too - the scrape of chairs on the tiles, the
    > sound of the dishwasher being unloaded, the happy
    > PING of the microwave - not to mention the aromas of
    > hot food - all these things will make employees feel
    > right at home.
This is an accurate description of lunchtime at the digital shitshow where I work. An open plan kitchen really is the handiwork of the idiot. Sometimes I'm glad the toilets were prebuilt when we moved in, or else I fear we'd have open plan shitting as well.

Re: The Open-office Trap

#112

Post by liveoneggs »

fish2000 wrote: post #104
cookiecaper wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

small (permanent) war rooms for workgroups and private offices for management/shared offices for drones (2-3/office) is a great setup, imho.

I worked at a place that did big war rooms per project and had tons of empty "home" cubes where you went for an hour or two per day to do non-primary work. I think a fixed-time system in the groups would be best.

Re: The Open-office Trap

#113

Post by psychometry »

Can we stop pretending open offices are about anything more than spending a minimum on an office construction? Let's face it: it's much cheaper to convert an empty warehouse space into a office space than to buy or build a traditional one.

Re: The Open-office Trap

#114

Post by 33W »

pbiggar wrote: post #109
33W wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

Good to know! Thanks!

Re: The Open-office Trap

#115

Post by rl3 »

It's clear that both open and closed office plans have their advantages and disadvantages. Ditto hot desking.

I'm surprised that no hybrid solution to this problem exists, or at least one that's taken hold. The best solution we currently have seems to be giving everyone a private office and augmenting it with really good team collaboration software. In most cases however, this does not eliminate the need for direct human collaboration, which is partly why open office plans exist in the first place.

It seems you could accomplish a hybrid approach by somehow giving each employee the ability to toggle the privacy of their workspace on or off. How you would accomplish that remains an interesting question. Some ideas that come to mind:

a) Have two physical workspaces for the employee: one private, one open.

b) Some sort of The Jetsons-esque enclosure around the workspace that can be toggled. Might use technologies such as electronic smart glass (for privacy) and/or active noise cancellation.

c) Have two floors and lifts under each desk. Want privacy? Just ascend or descend into it. It could even support hot desking on both floors, provided the proper visual cues and safety features existed. The cool part about this approach is it could in theory make moving your desk much easier.

d) In the future it could just be a matter of telling your standard ocular and cochlear implants to filter your peripheral vision and hearing accordingly.

Disclaimer: Some of these are admittedly crazy.

Re: The Open-office Trap

#116

Post by collyw »

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…

I am in an office of 4. It used to be an office of two, which was great - most productive time of my working life.

Even with just 4 of us, it means there is a good chance someone will be asked something, and regularly the head comes down to discuss stuff with one of us (often me). I can deal with it for the standard bug fix type work, but trying to learn something new is really difficult with constant interruption.

Re: The Open-office Trap

#117

Post by chrisgd »

enraged_camel wrote: post #79
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.

What they call "multi-tasking" is actually an inability to stay focused on one task due to a combination of procrastination and sheer boredom. So if you keep switching between writing a sales report, reading incoming email and conversing with your neighbor, congratulations, you may not be getting anything done, but you are multi-tasking!

I am an expert multi-tasker!

Re: The Open-office Trap

#118

Post by mcguire »

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…

UT Austin, nearly 20 years ago. NFS and NIS and a locally-written authentication system meant you had the same home directory on any Unix machine you sat down at. Since your configuration was all in your home directory, personal configuration was also instant. A skilled and somewhat crazy sysadmin team meant that (almost) all of the programs that were available on one system were supported on all of them, so you had the same environment on any of about six different OS/hardware setups.

Re: The Open-office Trap

#119

Post by Florin_Andrei »

notahacker wrote: post #106
caw wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They've optimized the living daylights out of the whole thing.

Well, I'm sure the savings free up money for other, more valuable purposes.

Re: The Open-office Trap

#120

Post by Florin_Andrei »

stygiansonic wrote: post #101
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.

However, it works great if you just need to put up a façade.
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