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“Today we moved into our new Facebook building”

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Re: “Today we moved into our new Facebook building”

#371

Post by moron4hire »

sytelus wrote: post #264
JohnBooty wrote: post #160

I would literally switch jobs (and perhaps careers, if every company was like this) if forced to work in an open office like this. I cannot work that way; I can't focus. I realize that I'm adding nothing constructive to this thread; I don't care. Maybe some manager somewhere will see this and a hundred other anecdotal opinions and think twice about open offices. I am the opposite of a prima donna. I just want to work…

Having spent almost equal amount of time in open office and private office, my own anecdote is that productivity wasn't dramatically better with private offices. In open offices, I just used to put head phones on, listen to non-vocal music and be super focused for many hours. In fact that was much better than private office because others would see you wearing headphone and they don't want to bother you. In private o…

>> Another thing is that teams with private offices suffer greatly in communication and more importantly in energy and passion.

I really wish people would stop repeating this. It's complete hogwash. It doesn't even stand up to the most basic of scrutiny. If it were true, how the hell did we ever get work done before the open office plan?

Suddenly transporting a failing team of globally located people into the same room together isn't going to magically make them into an effective team. People don't fail to communicate because they aren't sitting next to each other. People fail at communicating because they are terrible communicators. PROTIP: if they actually write "excellent communicator" on their resume, then they are not.

Similarly, suddenly scattering a succeeding team across the planet isn't going to make them fail. People who are good at communicating figure out how to communicate even under the worst conditions. Most of the developers on all of the big FOSS projects have never even heard each other's voices!

But no, let's treat people like cattle and make them hotbunk on workstations. If you have room to put up your own photos of your family at your desk, clearly you're wasting company resources and your desk could be smaller. You exist only at the pleasure of the company.

Office-chair jockeys of the world, UNITE!

Re: “Today we moved into our new Facebook building”

#372

Post by mark_l_watson »

drewg123 wrote: post #246
JohnBooty wrote: post #160

I would literally switch jobs (and perhaps careers, if every company was like this) if forced to work in an open office like this. I cannot work that way; I can't focus. I realize that I'm adding nothing constructive to this thread; I don't care. Maybe some manager somewhere will see this and a hundred other anecdotal opinions and think twice about open offices. I am the opposite of a prima donna. I just want to work…

I work as a fairly senior SWE at Google, coming off 20+ years with private offices (some of that time full-time remote), and I agree with everything you said. I knew it would be hard going into the job. I actually get up at 5am so I can have a few quiet hours at my desk before the rest of the folks show up & it turns into a total zoo.

I did the same thing in 2013 when I worked at Google. I just shifted my working hours from 6:15am to 4pm and I had some quiet time, then the normal shared office environment.

I did the same thing at SAIC when I had a private office. Then my motivation was to have an hour or two for uninterrupted coding.

Except for 2013 I have worked remotely from home, which can be very good, but I do miss out on face time.

Re: “Today we moved into our new Facebook building”

#373

Post by leroy_masochist »

JohnBooty wrote: post #160

I would literally switch jobs (and perhaps careers, if every company was like this) if forced to work in an open office like this. I cannot work that way; I can't focus. I realize that I'm adding nothing constructive to this thread; I don't care. Maybe some manager somewhere will see this and a hundred other anecdotal opinions and think twice about open offices. I am the opposite of a prima donna. I just want to work…

I'm in strong agreement with JohnBooty's comment. That said, we might bear in mind that not all open offices are created equal, and perhaps a better way of thinking about this is not just a binary "do I get my own office" but also in terms of square feet per employee.

6 people sharing 800 square feet is pretty nice, and you can actually have semi-private phone conversations in a space like that just due to the distance between you and your coworkers (especially if the space is broken up by half-walls, plants, etc).

100 people sharing 5,000 square feet, on the other hand, might work great for a trading floor but absolutely sucks if you're trying to write code or a thoughtful email to a customer.

In any case, the thing that bothered me most about open offices wasn't the noise so much as the lingering feeling that other people were looking over my shoulder. I was often reluctant to voice this concern because (at least in my mind) the implication was that I had something to hide, but I know that others I worked with felt the same way.

Re: “Today we moved into our new Facebook building”

#374

Post by abc_lisper »

JohnBooty wrote: post #160

I would literally switch jobs (and perhaps careers, if every company was like this) if forced to work in an open office like this. I cannot work that way; I can't focus. I realize that I'm adding nothing constructive to this thread; I don't care. Maybe some manager somewhere will see this and a hundred other anecdotal opinions and think twice about open offices. I am the opposite of a prima donna. I just want to work…

This. I feel like we are being drowned in this open-office dick plans and without complaint, this is the way our future offices will be.

Who the fuck thinks that a stock exchange like environment is good for productivity? May be some people like it, most of us(engineers) don't. Why?, do you ask. I will tell you.

Lot of engineering(programming) work is built on trying to get a focus on the problem. How do I do that? Not by asking around, pulling shirts and generally being a nuisance. Now there are people like this, who would like nothing more than a open office plan, because the answer is only a shirt-pull away. We achieve focus on the problem by concentrating hard, building delicate structures in the mind, controlling certain variables, testing theories all in mind. When somebody pokes at me or laughs hard, this structure comes tumbling down. We can reconstruct it only with some effort and patience, but it is irritating. This irritation builds up over time, becomes chronic stress and makes you an unsavory person.

For managers - Is it not enough for you that you box us in little time slots under the pretense of agile? You have to go all the way and give us a chicken coop to do our work?

Re: “Today we moved into our new Facebook building”

#375

Post by spacefight »

neuronic wrote: post #344
drewg123 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work as a fairly senior SWE at Google, coming off 20+ years with private offices (some of that time full-time remote), and I agree with everything you said. I knew it would be hard going into the job. I actually get up at 5am so I can have a few quiet hours at my desk before the rest of the folks show up & it turns into a total zoo.

My question isn't necessarily specific to Google, but is it frowned upon if you bring noise-cancelling headphones? I am a weirdly fluctuating person and some days I work best in total seclusion. Others I need to sit in the middle of a cafe and have the noise and people around me. So my goal is to be as adaptive as possible without harming the day-to-day work life.

Noise cancelling doesn't work with speech that well. It's way better for steady background noise such as on a small plane if you're the pilot or on a large plane if you're a passenger.

Re: “Today we moved into our new Facebook building”

#377

Post by electronvolt »

VLM wrote: post #366
ryanSrich wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I only work remotely. Too many tech companies are up their own asses with how hip and cool their offices are. I just want to work when I want, how I want, and in an environment of my own choosing. I 100% understand that collaboration needs to take place at certain times and I really do enjoy the collaboration of remote work with other employees. However the "collaboration" that takes place in these types…

"However the "collaboration" that takes place in these types of offices is just wheel spinning and time wasting." I enjoyed how you phrased that. I work at a giant multinational and yes yes I know all about the stereotype that innovation only comes from the tiny little startups on HN, but innovation flows both ways, like it or not, and over the last decade one megacorp major cultural shift I've seen is collaboration…

This is interesting to me, because I work at a large company and I've found it to be orchestrated slightly differently. If you want/need something done here, the fastest way is to set up a face to face appointment and put yourself in someone else's calendar. If you don't, things will drag on for months of email back and forth. If you do, things might last two hours, you'll probably leave with a solid plan, and then usually someone sends a 'summary' email that lists every commitment made in that meeting (which keeps everyone honest) along with the dates people agreed to get them done by. If there's disputes about that, they're then handled there, but if you seem to always get the wrong idea from meetings (or always dispute what you said in them), it'd probably reflect badly on you.

Re: “Today we moved into our new Facebook building”

#378

Post by moron4hire »

VLM wrote: post #366
ryanSrich wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I only work remotely. Too many tech companies are up their own asses with how hip and cool their offices are. I just want to work when I want, how I want, and in an environment of my own choosing. I 100% understand that collaboration needs to take place at certain times and I really do enjoy the collaboration of remote work with other employees. However the "collaboration" that takes place in these types…

"However the "collaboration" that takes place in these types of offices is just wheel spinning and time wasting." I enjoyed how you phrased that. I work at a giant multinational and yes yes I know all about the stereotype that innovation only comes from the tiny little startups on HN, but innovation flows both ways, like it or not, and over the last decade one megacorp major cultural shift I've seen is collaboration…

Oh God, yes. I'm freelance working 100% remotely. I hate phone call meetings. For one, I am half-deaf in one ear from years of wearing headphones to block out noise in open-office floor plans in my previous life as an employee, and often I can't even hear what is being said. A bunch of people are sitting too far away from someone's smartphone set on speakerphone, and the timid mouse in the corner won't speak up. No matter how many times you ask, they go right back to whispering.

They'll ask me questions about how things work and I just don't think well on-the-spot like that about code I wrote 2 years ago. I remember it well enough that I could look it up and get them an answer in an email in 15 minutes, but they had to call to ask, so they want the answer NOW. They'll call at 7:30 at night and complain they couldn't get a hold of me. They won't leave a message. They could have sent an email and I would have an answer for them first thing in the morning. But they would rather call during off-hours, then wait until nearly the end of the next day to call back.

Then, they will say a bunch of stuff, nobody will write it down (except me, IFF I actually hear it). If they are bad ideas, I'll argue a little, but not having the time to research the pros and cons, I can't provide a good recommendation with alternatives (and I hate complaining without alternatives). So everyone will "agree" that it's the direction we (meaning I) should go. I'll bust my ass to get it done, present the changes, and they'll question why I would do things in such "confusing" ways, when what makes it confusing is what I complained about in the first place.

"Just brute force it!" They'll say, like it's somehow a magical incantation to turn a programmer from architecture astronaut to a pragmatic realist "like them". "No, we can't brute force it, because the problem is exponential and runtime explodes when we apply it to real data." "Don't quote that math mumbo jumbo to me, we just need to get it done, I don't care how good it is." Then later, "wow, this is really slow, maybe we should find someone else to be working on this."

Sorry, getting a little off topic there. But basically, I hate not working with people who know how to communicate properly, but I've learned to work within the system (or lack thereof, rather). I've just taken to agreeing to everything they say, then doing whatever the hell I want. I know what their goals are better than they do. I can make a better project then they know how to, and they never remember what they actually told me to do. I just tell them it was all their idea, and they don't have the documentation to contradict me, so it works great.

Re: “Today we moved into our new Facebook building”

#379

Post by frostmatthew »

unholiness wrote: post #314
noddingham wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You and all the research seems to agree. Of course, the anecdotal evidence outliers will disagree, but I don't see how there's a debate anymore when you look at productivity.

I've seen the phrase "all the research" thrown around quite a lot in this thread. Would you mind linking to a few studies you refer to? Mainly, I'm curious about how they define productivity. An office full of people performing completely independent tasks is almost certainly less productive than having separate offices; the advantage of open offices comes when everyone's work is interrelated. In an open environment,…

> I've seen the phrase "all the research" thrown around quite a lot in this thread. Would you mind linking to a few studies you refer to?

There's a good New Yorker article[1] from last year that references a number of studies. This blog post[2] links to a couple others and addresses costs/alternatives. Also, "a study of over 40,000 survey responses collected over a decade has found that the benefits for workers are quickly outweighed by the disadvantages"[3]. Here's a Washington Post article[4] referencing Facebook's new building and linking to a few other studies.

Of course you can certainly decide to dismiss the research and base your opinion on anecdotes or assumptions, but don't judge research as being poorly done just because you disagree with the findings.

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/currency-tag/the-open-office-trap

[2] http://nathanmarz.com/blog/the-inexplicable-rise-of-open-flo...

[3] http://theconversation.com/open-plan-offices-attract-highest...

[4] http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/30/g...

Re: “Today we moved into our new Facebook building”

#380

Post by Frozenlock »

moron4hire wrote: post #378
VLM wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"However the "collaboration" that takes place in these types of offices is just wheel spinning and time wasting." I enjoyed how you phrased that. I work at a giant multinational and yes yes I know all about the stereotype that innovation only comes from the tiny little startups on HN, but innovation flows both ways, like it or not, and over the last decade one megacorp major cultural shift I've seen is collaboration…

Oh God, yes. I'm freelance working 100% remotely. I hate phone call meetings. For one, I am half-deaf in one ear from years of wearing headphones to block out noise in open-office floor plans in my previous life as an employee, and often I can't even hear what is being said. A bunch of people are sitting too far away from someone's smartphone set on speakerphone, and the timid mouse in the corner won't speak up. No m…

You should record your calls. (Assuming you live in a jurisdiction where only 1 party (you) need to know the conversation is recorded.)

I'm much more open to receiving phone calls now, because even if it's much harder to search an audio file, at least I have something to search. If I'm not sure if I forgot something, I can just open up the file and listen to it again. I would still rather get an email, but some people just NEED to take a phone for whatever reason.

Given that you have some trouble hearing, you can take the time you want to re-listen to a conversation with the volume as you like it.

As a bonus, it's also helpful to get a hold of a certain kind of people that thinks they can say anything and are not accountable because it's not in writing.

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