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Ending the open office epidemic

wildbit.com

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Re: Ending the open office epidemic

#31

Post by Florin_Andrei »

beamatronic wrote: post #11
rdtsc wrote: post #3

Open office "advantage" is the story owners who can't afford to pay for a better location tell the developers. Sort of like the guy whose car broke so he is taking his tractor to work. He would tell the world how tractors are so much better and have all these great advantages compared to regular cars.

I've seen managers with a huge budget rip out the tall cubicles and replace them with the small ones, to get these "advantages". Result: Everyone was unhappy

Kinda like when 'Office Space' and 'Idiocracy' had a bastard child.

Re: Ending the open office epidemic

#34

Post by cnagele »

kazinator wrote: post #23

Open offices instantly "out" anyone who comes late, leaves early, takes a 2.5 hour lunch breaks, or surfs the web instead of working. And that's really the whole point. It's why they are popular in Japan, together with the fact that thanks to the open structure, transgressor can apologize in front of everyone at once.

Chris from Wildbit here (author of the post).

Half of our team is remote. Using physical space for controlling productivity (or lack of) is not a solution. You and the rest of your team should keep each other accountable through performance metrics that are mutually agreed upon. Being a remote team for so long (15 years) has forced us to find alternatives to traditional office babysitting and it has helped us design our new office as well.

Re: Ending the open office epidemic

#35

Post by Florin_Andrei »

mattmanser wrote: post #27
shubb wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pair programming.

Pair programming with daily shame meetings where you have to justify your job by how much work you did yesterday.

While the whole thing takes place in a 3D wireframe beehive.

Re: Ending the open office epidemic

#36

Post by lallysingh »

I guess I'm in a real minority here, but I'm pretty happy with open-office.

Some qualifiers:

- The team has a good culture of respecting each other, and we're busy enough not to want to banter too much outside of certain times (e.g., lunch, when we see it already going on, etc.).

- I've got good headphones hooked to a 24-bit-DAC'd USB amp. I don't hear anyone unless I'm trying to.

- My screen's big enough where visual noise isn't an issue.

On the upside:

- Asking someone a quick question is really, really quick.

Downsides of my prior each-their-own-office experiences:

- I sometimes felt a bit lonely.

- I certainly felt disconnected from the rest of my team.

- I was disconnected from the rest of my team - there were always important conversations I would've liked to been part of.

[edited for getting the bullets formatted]

Re: Ending the open office epidemic

#37

Post by dba7dba »

The pics showing what-it-looks-like and what-it-feels-like made me chuckle. Very true.

I got to visit Autodesk in Northern California in mid 1990s. In that office each employee was in an enclosed office.

Down a long hallway were rows of offices with enough room for a desk/chair and 2 chairs in front of the desk for visitors. Wall facing the hallway was glass. Wall between rooms were actual dry walls.

I remember some friends who were even the most junior level engineers were given an office. When they were working late, they could just put down a sleeping bag under their desk and take a nap. None of the shared napping room non-sense.

I think that arrangement is the best.

Re: Ending the open office epidemic

#38

Post by koof »

lallysingh wrote: post #36

I guess I'm in a real minority here, but I'm pretty happy with open-office. Some qualifiers: - The team has a good culture of respecting each other, and we're busy enough not to want to banter too much outside of certain times (e.g., lunch, when we see it already going on, etc.). - I've got good headphones hooked to a 24-bit-DAC'd USB amp. I don't hear anyone unless I'm trying to. - My screen's big enough where visua…

If you are listening to headphones loud enough to block out other conversations, you are almost certainly going to damage your hearing.

Re: Ending the open office epidemic

#39

Post by VLM »

jobu wrote: post #5

"As a company grows, the cost of restructuring an office to accommodate more people in different layouts is time consuming and expensive. By having desks in an open plan and telephone rooms for quiet time, the idea is that you can solve the cost and flexibility problems while still offering a quiet place to retreat if needed. From a growth perspective this is smart. If I planned to add 30 employees to our office in t…

"the cost of restructuring an office to accommodate more people in different layouts"

From actual experience having been there, we saved money by simply not doing that. We did move cubes and offices on a fairly regular basis such that someone "tortured" by the air conditioner wouldn't suffer for long and likewise I only had a nice office for about a year.

WRT colocated teams, a long time ago I sat kitty corner to a guy who programmed FPGA based ISDN channel PBX cards for a living, and I should care why, exactly, as long as we were good neighbors to each other, which we were? I sat next to the guy who was in charge of OSPF internal routing despite my being a BGP guy and my BGP partner in crime sat fifty feet away, and it didn't really matter much because some of my BGP peers sat two thousand miles away? When I got a call in the middle of the night to fix something, I fixed it, not drive to one of my teammates houses so I can sit next to them before starting work.

Architecture decisions can help. All cubes must have a visitor chair preferably 2 or 3, although people "illegally" stacked manuals or threw coats on their chairs if they wanted to keep people out. A bit of work is necessary to stop people from sneaking up on you by orienting desks facing the cube entrance.

One of the most shocking things I've seen in open plan offices is the visual clutter. Its like working in the dirtiest most distracting looking house I've ever seen. I have junk laying around on my desk, but most open plans look like a tornado struck a Walmart. What a heap.

Re: Ending the open office epidemic

#40

Post by 33W »

shmerl wrote: post #30

Agreed. I don't get it, why are they so popular? Some psychologists came up with this lame idea and now everyone runs to implement it. Crowded open spaces are distracting any time you need to concentrate. They impose a feeling of a factory and monotonous work.

My understanding is accounting - furniture is depreciated or amortized at a different rate than offices, and it is beneficial to the bean counters.
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