131–140 of 161 posts
Not sure what the definition of open-office is. In our office, we have gazillion cubicles (the classic valley office). No sound proofing. And people of a team don't sit near each other. This means that you can end up with sales guys around who are constantly on the call and meetings. What's worse is that they keep pitching the same lines over and over again and you have to listen to it. It makes you empathize about a…
Old news. If work is boring, routine or extremely exhausting open spaces are great cause' you can talk to each other and lift each others spirits. If work is any type of creative, where you need to concentrate, it's better to have your own space.
And of course this immediately leads to the situation that the workers are out to exploit the company merely to rebel against this situation. Or at least, that's the attitude it brings out in me.
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…
Anyone here not ever work in an open-office since professional employment? I was going to say that I had never had an office, including my stints in food service and construction...and I had never even had a real cubicle, i.e. partitions where I couldn't see the person across from me. But that's not true...I had about a year in the "dungeon" when I was moved to my newspaper's online multimedia team, in a windowless b…
http://midcenturymodernist.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/Ma...
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> A private office for me would totally kill any social interaction I have with anyone. Perhaps a better working environment would allow your day to be spent more efficiently and leave you with spare time and energy to get an actual social life, instead of requiring your job to double as your social life and end up performing both functions badly?
You are likely to spend more than half of your time awake in your workplace. You might as well try to make it a pleasant place to be. And being sociable at work is hardly likely to exhaust you to the point of preventing an social life outside work.
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.
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.
"What’s more, Evans and Johnson discovered that people in noisy environments made fewer ergonomic adjustments than they would in private, causing increased physical strain."
Once a story has had significant attention, reposts are treated as duplicates for about a year.
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So go hang out in other people's offices to regain that experience. Back when I worked in offices I'd do that or have coworkers do that all the time.
The once mandatory "visitors chair" in every workspace and most people had two or three. Folks younger than a certain age miss out knowing the social etiquette relating to visitors chairs, such as stacking "stuff" or coats on your visitor chair is anti-social and very strongly frowned upon. Also it was socially acceptable, standard even, to simply walk into someone's cube and sit down in their (visitor) chair and wai…
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"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.
