The Open-Office Trap

Yes, this definitely makes sense.

One of the companies I worked at did the Nerf gun thing. They meant well, but man, there's nothing more annoying than being on a deadline but you can't focus because you're never quite certain when a dart is going to fly at your head or into your coffee. I know companies don't want to be seen as stodgy or unfun, but its probably not a great idea to supply people with things to actively annoy each other...

> If you don't want interruptions, you put headphones on. It works well.

It works well for some people. While you may be able to code perfectly well with music blasting in your ears (loud enough to drown out nearby conversations) that is not the case for everyone.

I wear headphones at work but the volume (at which I can actually concentrate on my work) is only sufficient to drown out/filter random background noises (typing/mouse-clicks, HVAC, people walking by, etc) - if there are people having a conversation a few feet away my productivity plummets.

Polarizing is a good way to put it. For such a generally free thinking crowd, there's a lot of flat out hate for the open office here.

Personally, I've seen it work well (where I'm at now), and I've seen it work badly (two jobs ago). I've also seen the same in separate offices. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I don't really find that age or experience tends to matter that much as to where it works or doesn't. It's more about the work you're doing, and the company you're doing it for.

Some dev projects - those heavy on the back end especially, or requiring lots of sheer coding manpower over critical thinking, I think they definitely don't gain anything from the open office. The same could be said as well for the truly complex coding work out there - which, honestly, is less and less a reality.

If you're wiring up pages that do some middle tier logic or dealing with heavily interactive sites, which I think is what many of us do day to day, rather than the super intense, super difficult coding work that we all wish we did, I think the collaborative benefits can outweigh the risk of interruption.

If you're actually doing that big brain work, or really working on something that needs complete concentration, then yes, being able to zone in on it interruption free is definitely a good thing.

Like every other process, or tool, it depends on the context and the problem you're solving. And like most problems, you need the right person to use that tool or process. So does it work for every scenario, and every person? No, definitely not. The same can be said for a closed office as well.

Bottom line - right people, right place, for the right task at hand.

One thing I am wondering is how much of the perceived benefits of an open office are losses as the employees start to push back.

A couple of years ago I had the interesting opportunity to visit a new startups offices frequently. They employs was about 50% developers and 50% sales, where a lot of the sales was done on the phone. During a 1 year period their environment changed dramatically:

* They first started with only laptops and a clean desk policy (at the end of the work day one had to remove everything and take ones laptop home). They also wanted a paperless office.

* Soon one developer started using an active noise cancellation headphone. Some laugh at first, but during the next 3 months everyone got hold of a pair for them self.

* Many then moved away from the active noise cancellation headphones to full earmuffs originally meant for indoors firearms shooting.

* More and more of the developers demanded desktop computers, because thus cannot be easily moved so they would get a de facto fixed seat.

* To remove visual noise, some started wearing sunglasses and turned the brightness of their monitors to maximum, so they could only see their two monitors when they looked around.

* A couple of mount out one got hold of a bookshelf to store some computer parts. He sat in a corner and quickly made a third wall with his new bookshelf. Soon everyone else also demanded their own bookshelf to.

* People then started to erect walls using ad hook materials like plants, empty soda bootless, spear desks and rack servers that had become redundant when stuff got moved to the cloud.

* Some of the sale people started to hang out in small groups in their cars. There they could smoke cigarettes, talk loud on the phones and surround them self with printouts. They looked a lot happier doing so :)

* One developer quit citing all the noise as the only reason he left. Another refuses to come in to the office, and instead suggested that the company should rent an office for him at a startup incubator nearby (I believe they eventually made some kind of compromise where he would work 3 days from home and 2 days at the office).

* Eventually the company was bought by a larger entity, but things deteriorated further, so almost everyone eventually left. The owners had signed a particularly bad earn-out agreement that severely punished them if there were any decrease in revenue, so when everyone left they only got about 20% of what they would have gotten if the company had stayed afloat.

All in all I believe the end result could have been very different if they had had a better office layout. They sure at least did not save anything :)