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I work for a company whose entire office is on an open plan. Yes, even the CEO sits in a cubicle, as do all the senior management and stuff. And this is not a startup, mind you, its a mid size company. Although it was kinda scary at first, I've adapted to it, and can see the practical benefits. Not having special offices, there is a sense of egalitarianism amongst the workers and none of the usual rat-race for better…
For the people who do prefer them (and also spend most of their time writing code), I would be curious to know the following:
(1) How many years have you spent, total, working as a developer in an office environment every day?
(2) What percentage of those years were in open office layouts vs. sharing an office vs. having a private office?
(3) How many times a day, on average, do you interrupt other people with questions, vs. other people interrupting you?
I bring this up because I just really truly don't get the occasional open office boosterism here. My current theory is that most of it comes from people who are still in the honeymoon phase of their career (like, the first few years after college when everything about the workplace still has some novelty to it).
I say this because it seems like many/most of the people I talk to in person who like the open office idea have either literally never had a private office, or are relatively fresh out of college and get a job at Google (or a startup, or wherever), and they're still so excited about everything that even the things that are hassles (like open office plans?) seem like they're brimming with novelty.
Alternately, a lot of the people I talk to who like open offices tend to be those that are constantly pinging the people around them for help, but people rarely or never ping them for help. The only people I've known at my current company who want open offices (or even officemates) are these kinds of people. They don't even realize that they have an 'interruption deficit' (for lack of a better term) within their team, they just like the idea of everyone being more readily available to them and they don't pay the price for it since they rarely get interrupted themselves.
I work for a company whose entire office is on an open plan. Yes, even the CEO sits in a cubicle, as do all the senior management and stuff. And this is not a startup, mind you, its a mid size company. Although it was kinda scary at first, I've adapted to it, and can see the practical benefits. Not having special offices, there is a sense of egalitarianism amongst the workers and none of the usual rat-race for better…
If you have cubicles, I don't think that's an open office.
If its just a bunch of people sitting on tables without any sort of division ... I can see why that would be annoying.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes.
That's probably not affordable for a majority of companies.
So at some level of developer pay, N companies are profitable. At N+P, fewer companies are profitable, and at N-P, more. All else being equal.
If we cared as much about our desks as we do about our pay, we'd have more offices, and companies would either make less profit, or there would be fewer companies.
But we don't have offices, because we don't insist on it.
Next time you interview, make that as important as salary.
Everyone seems to hate open offices, but since it's all I've ever known, what's the alternative? Everyone get a 4-walled office?
Also, open-back visibility (that is, being visible from behind) does more damage than the noise itself, and there are no noise-canceling headphones for that.
Office space isn't that expensive, compared to the productivity loss of having everyone work in a crappy space. (Compared to a traditional office, open-plan saves about $300-450/month per employee in San Francisco, Class A commercial real estate. It's less if you're in Oakland, Brooklyn, or the Midwest) Open-plan is just another case of crappy HR (the norm in tech, sadly) "cutting" costs in a way that actually externalizes them; there are marginal savings on office space, but productivity plummets.
Everyone seems to hate open offices, but since it's all I've ever known, what's the alternative? Everyone get a 4-walled office?
Everyone seems to hate open offices, but since it's all I've ever known, what's the alternative? Everyone get a 4-walled office?
Perhaps this isn't optimal for every employee/company, but it's how I made the best of the situation for myself at this company...
Open office plans seem really polarizing on HN, but it surprises me how often people defend them here (or even evangelize them). For software development, it seems like something that has no upside at all (aside from saving money on office space), and tons of downsides. For the people who do prefer them (and also spend most of their time writing code), I would be curious to know the following: (1) How many years have…
Here's the simple algebra. Let's say (as the evidence seems to suggest) that if we interrupt a programmer, even for a minute, we're really blowing away 15 minutes of productivity. For this example, lets put two programmers, Jeff and Mutt, in open cubicles next to each other in a standard Dilbert veal-fattening farm. Mutt can't remember the name of the Unicode version of the strcpy function. He could look it up, which takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which takes 15 seconds. Since he's sitting right next to Jeff, he asks Jeff. Jeff gets distracted and loses 15 minutes of productivity (to save Mutt 15 seconds)."
(From http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000068.html)
I had one experience in an "open office" for approximately six months. It was terrible, constant shuffling of people to acquire the plethora of free food available. Nerf Gun wars and the constant click clack of ping pong approximately 30 ft. away. This article has offered me some vindication in my distaste for the "open office".
Seems like the problem wasn't the open office plan but grown-ups playing with nerf guns and ping pong when they're being paid to work.
Additionally, 'open-office' to me means OpenOffice, and while I can accept that it doesn't to everyone, be consistent. It's one of the rules of good journalism. The hyphen in the heading is not used in the article. Likewise, we have 'nineteen-fifties' versus '1997'. The ironic bit about spelling out 'nineteen-fifties' in a non-conventional, inconsistent manner... is the phrase in the article immediately following it...