The Open Plan Office and the Extrovert Ideal

Anecdote: Working IT in an open cubicle environment is absolute pure fucking hell. Nevermind that the last guy left me with cable management that would make a three year old sick to their stomachs, not having an area that I can cordon off and close when I absolutely MUST shut out the world and focus on a task has been a mental and motivational drain. (This is compounded by being 1 IT staff in a company approaching 120, but that's a different affair)

I agree with everyone who says "Sure you may be saving leasing costs but you're sacrificing so much more". A perfect example of this is my sales center: an open office plan with desks lined up and about 60 people in a room the size of a large 1br condo, all talking at once, not to mention this obsession with having music played over speakers during business hours and loud annoying gongs going off whenever someone makes a big sale-I may as well be working on a trading floor (first the dashboard TV makes a big gong, people applaud, and then the person who made the big sell goes and bangs a physical gong, more applause. If I were a sales person trying to work through all that I'd quit immediately. I wonder if an exit interview survey of the sales people we've lost in the last month alone would testify to "productivity" related causes for their departures, and in high numbers). Customers can rarely hear agents, agents can rarely hear customers; I looked at my last inventory purchase and we blew $2000 in a month on replacement headsets because people kept slamming theirs down in frustration, ultimately damaging them because of the inability to hear sales calls. If my Android sound meter app is accurate at all, fully staffed the sales wing reaches 92dB in ambient/background sound.

And a litany of other problems that would be solved could I get senior management to take conditions as seriously as I do, and express a willingness to invest in the worker beyond a "Here's your paycheck, get back to work".

Open spaces are good. A commons area lightly equipped, maybe with a phone and a tv for quick 'huddles', I'm all about. 100% open office however I can't wait to go away forever. Thankfully we're moving offices soon. Regrettably, it's just a larger "open" design.

We had a presentation on the new "Studio" buildings at Microsoft. A snappy team from the folks responsible for designing them told us about color schemes and that each building had a theme, in stone and wood and so forth. They waxed eloquent about carpet and the cafeteria and I was thinking, what are they hiding?

Then they got to the places where we were going to work. "We call these six-packs." Pods of six people crammed into a small area with low partitions, very little space for personal items, and little regard to our actual work (e.g., whiteboard space, or room for equipment, or even sufficient power).

They tried to retract the word six-pack. "Oops, we weren't supposed to say that. We're supposed to call them 'Villas'".

Villas.

I called them "moo towns".

If you were lucky you were in a six-pack with people working on the same thing as you, and then the conversations around you probably had something to do with work. If you were randomly assigned a six-pack the chances were that you were being continually interrupted by stuff that you didn't care about.

And of course we ran out of space, and even the walls in the six-packs were removed, and all the book-cases, and now there were eight people in a space designed as a tight fit for six, and places in the building started to smell bad (I wish this was hyperbole). Let's not even talk about security, as in having to lock stuff up at night . . . um, where, exactly?

Open plans are horrible.

Nope, fully bootstrapped. Sacrificed location for the nice digs, though, so the commute was very annoying.

>Introversion—along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness—is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology. Introverts living under the Extrovert Ideal are like women in a man’s world, discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are. Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we’ve turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform.

I say this as a highly introverted person who spends most of his free time alone with this thoughts: Jesus. Are we just looking for ways that the world has been unfair to us? Is that what open offices are now? A way for the uncaring society to oppress us special snowflake introverts? That quote is so insulting to me as an introvert because it takes such a solipsistic and ego-stroking view of the world: that people who are successful are successful because they fit into the world better, not because they are comfortable and adapted to living in a world that isn't perfectly suited to them. I enjoy my quiet and find working in an open office discomforting. But I can't imagine the person who's so fragile that they have to invent ways the extroverts are oppressing them to deal with that discomfort.

>Is this a true story? I don’t know. Is it a bit overly dramatic to compare an open plan office to a sweatshop? Perhaps. But I think there’s a valid point in there: quality of life matters.

If you want people not to take our profession seriously, keep comparing what we do to working in a sweatshop. Software engineering by and large is one of the cushiest jobs around. Sitting in a chair (or realizing that sitting all day is too dangerous, so choosing to stand (on a padded mat)) in a climate controlled office with access to bathrooms, running water and in a lot of cases, food on demand is about the farthest away you can get from sweatshop. Our quality of life is so good, we're focusing on the last 1% of the problem; the fact that we're complaining that the layout of the office isn't ideal for our psyche should clue us in to that. Let's keep some perspective here.

I think I am in your same position in that I have the authority (CEO/Founder) but not the money. Our solution is to keep our workforce remote until we can afford the right office spaces.

This might not work for everyone but so far everyone is happy with it.