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Just a different opinion here. I have never worked in a single office space. I honestly can't imagine such a thing. But I do know how incredible good I am at distracting myself at home. Just having someone around, who are working on a different piece of the same puzzle is a major motivator.
At home, I can find ANYTHING to entertain me.
At work, when I have a group of motivated peers around me who are focused on the same goal, so am I.
Just a different opinion here. I have never worked in a single office space. I honestly can't imagine such a thing. But I do know how incredible good I am at distracting myself at home. Just having someone around, who are working on a different piece of the same puzzle is a major motivator.
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PeoplewareOnSharedSpaces
"enclosed offices need not be one-person offices. The two- or three- or four-person office makes a lot more sense, particularly if office groupings can be made to align with work groups. Even in open-plan offices, co-workers should be encouraged to modify the grid to put their areas together into small suites. When this is allowed, people become positively ingenious in laying out the area to serve all their needs: work space, meeting space, and social space. Since they tend to be in interaction mode together or simultaneously in flow mode, they have less noise clash with each other than they would with randomly selected neighbors."
Just a different opinion here. I have never worked in a single office space. I honestly can't imagine such a thing. But I do know how incredible good I am at distracting myself at home. Just having someone around, who are working on a different piece of the same puzzle is a major motivator.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Study after study show that open distraction office plans are bad for productivity, and increase stress and sick days -- even among those who like open office plans.
Your links to the studies aren't clickable.
It's the same as the "I can work 60 hours productivly" brigade. All the studies, for over a century (yes, century, not decades) have shown otherwise. They are studies that show that people delude themselves into thinking they are more productive than they are. And yet, no matter how many articles and papers you post, nope.
HN insists.
They are ingrained memes on HN that won't, despite all the evidence you ever post, go away.
So why bother? You can google it yourself, and then promptly ignore all the professional studies and still believe in open plan offices. It's simply not worth the effort.
But some things aren't easily measurable. Is it a coincidence that companies who pioneered the open office plan are also some of the most successful in the world? Show me how you'd even begin to disprove that and I'll show you a dozen confounding variables making it silly to even try. What is the true impact of an open office on a culture of collaborative interaction? And what's the impact of that type of interaction on success? Hard to measure.
Sometimes we look at the things we can easily make into numbers and assume they describe the whole truth. Not always so.
"The most important things are unmeasurable." —W. Edwards Deming
I truly dislike open offices. The constant sound of mechanical keyboards clacking really gets to me, and I'm not sure why. I wear headphones listening to loud music to cancel out the sounds of these damn keyboards.
I hate the modern corporate office environment. HR should just be upfront about what open plan offices are about: saving money. It lets you cram in as many people in as small an area as possible. That's it. Nevermind if they're productive or not. We're SAVING MONEY!
Everybody needs a balance between productive alone time and creative brainstorming time. Most companies I've seen achieve this with an open space and plenty of WFH for all employees. Basically we meet 2-3 times a week to organize and share ideas, and spend there rest of the week heads down at home, coding in whatever pace and setting we like. Closed private offices enable people to slack at work and pretend to work 8…
I would argue that if you cannot restrain yourself to be productive in a closed office, why would you be it from home? That said, I agree, evaluating on time at the office is the wrong metric, but for the vast majority of managers, they have no idea how to evaluate it otherwise because they do not understand the tasks at hand.
In the office not working constitutes mostly of playing dumb games or reading hacker news, the latter being kind of ok, but certainly it doesn't leave me refreshed and willing to go back to my not-so-hip-after-the-latest-js-framework code.
I don't think it's realistically possible to put a metric on one's performance, that would allow us to break from time-based evaluations completely. That being said, I see how my colleagues are progressing with their work and it has nothing to do with which are working from home, which from office and there is also no clear time-value correlation either. It has more to do with how motivated they are, what internally drives them and how skilled they are.
I have a friend at work who believes deeply in software craftsmanship principles and it's a privilege to see how he works. He stays at home more than most of us, but provides a steady and consistent stream of small, high-quality pull requests, all day, every day. I watch how not slacking at work can have a great impact on the project and on the team morale. It has very little to do with an open space, WFH, what kind of laptop you work on and what blend of coffee you are given. I grew to believe those are just excuses I (and others) are giving themselves to not fully focus on work. Once I admitted that to myself, I decided to spend my slacking time in a way that improves my performance later. I hope one day it will go away completely, or I will get organized enough to be consistent in my output regardless of interruptions.
I truly dislike open offices. The constant sound of mechanical keyboards clacking really gets to me, and I'm not sure why. I wear headphones listening to loud music to cancel out the sounds of these damn keyboards.
Then there is the open plan office, combined with the clean desk policy. That way you have to endure the inane yacking going on around you and god forbid you try and figure something out on a piece of paper while you're working and go grab a coffee without locking said piece of paper in a drawer or it's a written warning. I hate the modern corporate office environment. HR should just be upfront about what open plan o…