101–110 of 377 posts
"We retain more information when we sit in one spot, says Sally Augustin, an environmental and design psychologist in La Grange Park, Illinois. It’s not so obvious to us each day, but we offload memories — often little details — into our surroundings, she says. These details — which could be anything from a quick idea we wanted to share to a colour change on a brochure we’re working on — can only be recalled in that…
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Strangely, open offices with cubicles can be more expensive than building drywall walls to make closed offices. And the much-vaunted flexibility of cubicles is way, way overrated. In my experience, cubicles sit in the same place for years. Any benefit of re-using them is lost. Also if the company is growing, new ones get bought all the time, so old ones aren't re-used anyway. Its obvious on the face of it: re-usable…
This is one of those cases where middle management is harming the company's long term interests for personal benefits. An annual review or resume benefits from saved X$/year as long as other costs are hidden. Many managers also just like walking past the cube farm to their office.
I always got the feeling it came from some C-level exec giving the thumbs up to the Facilities exec's hateful (but ignorant!) Powerpoint about openness and collaboration and TCO and the fungibility of talent.
"Well of course we value openness and collaboration just as much as Facebook does, and they're open-plan!"
Am I the only one left on HN who prefers open plan? I've done some of my best work for open plan companies. I have a particularly fond memory of when Reelio rented space at Blueprint (healthcare incubator in NYC). We stayed up very late, listened to loud music, and did some of the best work of our lives. I remember one night in particular, listening to the soundtrack from "O Brother Where Art Thou," when asynchrony a…
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I've always got the feeling more often the reason is trust, they don't trust their employees to work without someone looking at them all the time.
Through many experiences I think you're right. However that is an issue that could be solved by being better at measuring productivity. If I can produce better results while playing games for 4 hours and working for 4 hours in a closed office than I could while "working diligently" for 8 hours in an open office, then it's hard to argue for the value of visually supervising someone.
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Sorry, I'm confused. If you like cube farms and cube farms are more likely in higher cost real estate and urban real estate is more expensive, wouldn't you prefer urban offices?
I want to avoid open offices where people sit on long benches shoulder to shoulder or just have a bunch of desks jammed together. A guy I know who works at Dell recently got moved from a cube to one of those, he's posted pictures of his workspace, and just looking at those pictures set off my claustrophobia badly. The cubes at my company are huge. If company policy here didn't forbid photography, I'd show you. I'd gu…
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"Hey let's all take turns picking the music that gets blasted. I choose Arnold Schoenberg." 5 minutes later... "Everyone, we've decided that music is a personal taste, and that to maintain a professional working environment, we will not be playing music over the sound system."
I've made an app that fairly regulates this! http://playlistful.com/about Sorry, slightly unrelated to the discussion, but it could be used for open offices :-) Part of the inspiration was when I was taking it in turns I'd have to sit through loads of abrasive pop music and then when a beautiful death metal song came on everyone would complain and skip it.
Open offices are awful, but they're here to stay for the same reason more adults are living with roommates and relatives: high real estate prices. Working remotely is one solution, but many companies don't think it would work for them. Personally, I'd make the shared area for solitary work only: no work discussions longer than a minute at work areas (use a conference room, take a walk or Slack), no eating at work are…
"We're doing this to increase collaboration, although we don't allow talking" So watch my bee style interpretive dance of how to reverse a linked list. ... On today's PBS Nature documentary, when the queen bee wiggles her abdomen thusly, that means push the current array index onto the stack and then ...
If you forbid working remotely, then force your employees to centrally work remotely, then you're doing it all wrong and capturing all the disadvantages while capturing none of the advantages.
Also if you junked the special purpose offices and break rooms and phone rooms and lactation rooms and meeting rooms you'd have plenty of space for individual private offices. I've seen this happen multiple times, the team meeting room gradually converts into the team office complete with closed door to get away from noise.
This sounds awesome.
It would be really cool to have this information for the coffee shops around town, similar to how Google tracks how busy a place is. IIRC, there was a Microsoft Research project like this once that distributed the audio collection over the microphones from smartphones present in a given place.
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No. Fuck that. I don't normally curse on here, but I think it's warranted. I own a great pair of over ear, noise cancelling headphones. But I shouldn't have to risk damaging my hearing because management thinks having developers sit in the middle of a bunch of salespeople and project managers is a good idea.
Headphones don't damage your hearing, headphones at high volume damage hearing. If you're using noise cancelling (or just closed ear in most environments), you can listen to your audio at a reasonable volume, if you're listening at high volume to drown out other noise that could be dangerous.
"Nearly 50% of people working in open offices are dissatisfied with their sound privacy" Should be: Nearly 50% of people working in open offices don't have good over-ear headphones.
No. Fuck that. I don't normally curse on here, but I think it's warranted. I own a great pair of over ear, noise cancelling headphones. But I shouldn't have to risk damaging my hearing because management thinks having developers sit in the middle of a bunch of salespeople and project managers is a good idea.