Previous discussion, 4 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8815065
Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace
11–20 of 123 posts
Re: Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace
#12Probably what's more important than the open office plan is the underlying idea : collaboration. Collaboration between various siloed parts of the organization. You can achieve that without creating open offices . When you force an open office where u actually were trying to encourage collaboration it may not always have the effect you were going for
Re: Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace
#13Open floorplans are worse than cubicles. Not worse than four people crammed into a sweaty two-person cubicle, but worse than 1-2 people in a cubicle. Significantly, obviously worse. We've gone from half-walls to no walls.
Personally, I find cubicles to be the worst of both worlds: too spread out for much collaboration with neighbors, but open enough go have nearly all the noise and distraction of an open office.
Re: Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace
#14counterpoint: https://hbr.org/2012/04/the-new-science-of-building-great-te... edit: In summary, the more pairwise interactions between people your team has, the more likely they are to be a productive, successful team. Open office plans lend themselves to more serendipitous interactions between people. My 2c, is that open office vs closed office is simply a matter of tradeoffs. It seems easier to 'opt-out' of distrac…
I'm a big proponent of ~3 people offices as opposed to an open floor plan. There are many ways to "opt-in" to interactions:
- lunch/dinner is done in a dining area
- I invite people out for a coffee break
- I can go hangout in a common area
- I can just walk in to someone's office just like I would walk to someone's desk in an open floor plan
- I bump into people while walking down the hall, grabbing a snack from the kitchen, etc.
There's just so many ways I interact with people at the office, that making sure I'm surrounded by people I can't look away from or mute all the time is completely unnecessary.
And I don't want to have to blast music into my ears all day and wear horse blinkers just to get some continuous hours of distraction-free creative thinking done.
Re: Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace
#15Absolutely agree, especially for think-intensive things like software development where "flow" is so important. Closed offices are marginally more expensive but the productivity improvements massively outweigh the investment. The lack of privacy is just uncomfortable. It always feels like you're being watched, even if you're not.
If the purpose of open-plan offices is to intimidate people into working, they backfire. I fuck around way more in an open-plan office than when I have privacy.
There are many reasons for it. The first is that I have a fixed amount of "goofing off" (which is just giving my mind some rest) that I'll do per day. In a private office, it might take 20 minutes and I'm done and back to work. In an open-plan office where I have to intersperse it with the appearance of working and it takes longer (and the goofing off is less mentally restful, so I do more). The second is that, contrary to what a lot of people say, I find that 15- to 30-minute slivers of time (between other engagements) can be very productive, but not in an open-plan office. So the meeting multiplier is more severe. If lunch is 12:00 then a meeting from 10 to 11 kills the rest of the morning, whereas with private offices you'd still have 45-55 minutes of useful time. The third is that I've always felt like if getting work done efficiently were important, I'd have a legitimate working environment to get it done in. Being visible from behind suggests low status, which suggests that the work isn't that important. So if I'm intellectually engaged or the work is helping my career, I'll do it very well... but if neither is true, the surrounding physical environment supports me in not caring. Fourth, of course, is the anxiety caused by the aggravating and unreliable work environment. It would be bad to deal with a constantly noisy environment, but that would at least be predictable. Open-offices add to the evil by failing you at unpredictable times. Someone might tap you on the shoulder. Broken. Someone might pair with the person sitting next to you. Broken. The person behind you might get a phone call. Broken.
Re: Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace
#16I was big promoter ofs smaller offices, but it is also wrong. Way forward is location independence and remote teams.
Re: Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace
#17counterpoint: https://hbr.org/2012/04/the-new-science-of-building-great-te... edit: In summary, the more pairwise interactions between people your team has, the more likely they are to be a productive, successful team. Open office plans lend themselves to more serendipitous interactions between people. My 2c, is that open office vs closed office is simply a matter of tradeoffs. It seems easier to 'opt-out' of distrac…
Open office plans lend themselves to more serendipitous interactions between people.
Open offices with the inevitable Loud Howard from Dilbert lead themselves to serendipitous interactions? Do they? Throw in Angry Dude, who goes through a Model M keyboard per month as well. You get interactions all right, but it's not the productive kind. The serendipitous interations happen in coffee kitchens, a fact that the best architects already know.
Re: Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace
#18The pendulum seems to swing on this issue every 20-25 years on this issue so it makes a lot of sense we are seeing so many articles about how the open plan is terrible now.
Wait 20 years and there will have been a big transformation in the workplace with more people working privately - likely with the addition of more work-from-home/remote arrangements. But there will be a push again at that point with new articles written about how people are typing away without any personal contact and how 'insert early adopter' is the devil and how they are crushing the souls of their workers.
Smart workplace design appropriately accommodates the needs of workers for the types of work they do as well as the needs of the worker as a human.
Total cop-out answer, but it really comes down to balance between communication and privacy.
I think workplace design needs to keep in mind a variety of factors, and they cannot always be optimized totally for the company itself or totally for the individual employees... which would be an impossible notion anyway.
We rave about how fast companies can scale up from small startups to have hundreds or thousands of employees, but I'd love to see that work in the Bay Area with all staff getting private offices. Quickly build more highrises? Not likely.
Not all employees want - or need - private offices in the first place. And even if there would be a benefit to providing them, maybe the company doesn't feel like optimizing individual productivity is the most important thing in the business.
All that said, there is likely a decent overlap in the Hacker News Venn Diagram of people who loathe open plans and people who start companies. I've wondered why we don't hear about more new companies who have adopted a privacy-first office strategy. Surely it would give them an edge in hiring those staff who desire such workplaces.
Re: Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace
#19Open floorplans are worse than cubicles. Not worse than four people crammed into a sweaty two-person cubicle, but worse than 1-2 people in a cubicle. Significantly, obviously worse. We've gone from half-walls to no walls.
Personally, I find cubicles to be the worst of both worlds: too spread out for much collaboration with neighbors, but open enough go have nearly all the noise and distraction of an open office.
Cubicles are horrible because they also don't deal with the worst aspect of these office spaces, which is visibility from behind. They typically have the worker facing a wall, not backed by a wall facing out. Cubes are to claustrophobia as open-plan spaces are to agoraphobia.
That said, comparing open-plan offices to cubicles is like comparing horse shit to pig shit. They're both low-status office arrangements and it's amazing to me that programmers tolerate them.
I actually don't think that open-plan offices are used because they're cheap or because they're effective (which they're clearly not). They market well. So much of the current "tech industry" is about marketing and the open-plan frat-house environment looks busy and vibrant. It just also happens to make for a terrible place to work.
Re: Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace
#20Yeah, but it's cheap.