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Ending the open office epidemic

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Re: Ending the open office epidemic

#131

Post by cnagele »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #94

I hope they also publish a follow-up after living in their new office for a year. Specific things that I'm interested in: 1) How would folks relate the understanding of what is going on at the company now, and compared to before? 2) How do folks compare their effectiveness in getting things done for themselves? for others? as a group? 3) What is the one thing they would change? When I joined NetApp it had just acquir…

These are great questions. I'll be sure to do a follow up post in a year and see where we are. I know that the biggest reward when we went from 100% remote to having an office was the feeling of being in touch with what was going on. It was also the spontaneous conversation. I am hoping we don't lose that.

It's actually the biggest reason why we have a chef prepared lunch. We found that it forces everyone out of their desks at one time to hang out as a team. We usually don't even talk about work, which is the way it should be.

The other assumption is that the break out rooms will become longer term project team rooms. So if a couple of people are working on a feature for a few weeks they can take over a room to focus together.

I can say for sure that being a remote team enabled us to work around a lot of these concerns. It's easy to feel isolated when you are remote, so we work hard to make sure all communication happens asynchronously or in chat, even if we are in the same room. We also use video a lot, and my hope is that we can use it even more in the new office with remote team members.

Re: Ending the open office epidemic

#132

Post by ardacinar »

stephengillie wrote: post #79
rm445 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The middle ground is small group offices, and many (most?) people are fairly happy there. Actual giant open-plan offices can be distracting beyond what's tolerable.

Our open office of ~30 developers and engineers is fairly happy, once we got managers out of their offices and stuck the noisy client services/salespeople into the offices.

You're probably one of the outliers, then.

Re: Ending the open office epidemic

#133

Post by kazinator »

lowboy wrote: post #119
joesmo wrote: post #76

Another negative about open office plans that I don't see people mentioning is the hearing loss due to having to wear headphones up to eight hours a day. Headphones are generally not recommended to be used more than an hour a day and even then, they need to be at a low volume, something that's impossible in the open-office plans I've seen/worked in. "As a rule of thumb, you should only use MP3 devices at levels up to…

IIRC, it's just the dBs/time and not headphones specifically that contribute to hearing loss. If your ear drums are getting 100 dBs from speakers or 100 dBs from headphones, it should cause the same amount of damage over the same time. Also "60% of maximum volume" is a poor metric due to differences in headphone impedance and sensitivity.

60% of maximum volume is a poor metric due to a complete ignorance of decibels, power and how the two are related together.

If 60% means 0.6 times some maximum number of decibels, then this is not scale invariant. For instance 60 dB versus a maximum of 100 dB ("60%") is not the same power ratio as 30 dB versus 50 dB (also "60%"). In the dB scale, we subtract to show ratios; we don't indicate ratios between decibels. For instance, 10% of the maximum volume (in terms of power) means 10 dB below.

If 60% just means 60% of the volume position between 0 and MAX, that is also hokey because it depends on the actual taper curve. Analog volume pots use various ad-hoc "audio taper" curves. Digital volumes tend to be better: the steps based on dB increments. The increments are not always the same across the volume control range.

The maximum volume varies between amplifiers and headphones. What does that even mean? Maximum level at what percentage THD? Many sound systems can go a notch louder, if you accept greater distortion, and some people listen to rock that way.

A sensible starting guideline might be, say, "at least 20 dB below the maximum output intensity which 'typical' headphones can reproduce without distortion". That is still hokey in a number of ways, an important one of which is that the user usually has no interface for dialing in a 20 dB drop; such markings are only found on the controls of some pro audio gear.

Re: Ending the open office epidemic

#134

Post by tzs »

(This is an updated version of a comment from a similar discussion 3 years ago)

A layout I've worked in, and that I'd happily work in again, is this:

   +---------+---------+
   |         |         |
   |         |         |
   +-----+  -+-  +-----+
   |                   |
   |     |       |     |
   +-----+       +-----+
   |     |       |     |
   |                   |
   +-----+       +-----+
   |     |       |     |
   |                   |
   +-------|   |-------+
The area in the middle is a common area for the group. It can have a table or two and chairs so people can hang out there, or even bring their laptops out and work there, when they are feeling social.

The bottom and middle side rooms are private offices. They should have doors that close and be reasonably insulated from sound, so that a worker can work without disturbance when they want to. Ideally, the wall wall facing the central area should have a big window (with drapes or blinds!) so that the person in the office can see if anything interesting is going on in the central area. Each office should have its own light switch capable of turning off all lights in that office.

The top two rooms can be bigger offices, or conference rooms, or break rooms for breaks that might be too noisy in the central area. The gap in the bottom wall is the connection to the hallway.

With this environment, you can easily work in private, no distraction mode (go into your office, close the door, and close the blinds, and you can even play some music on speakers without disturbing others if that helps you work), or in full social mode (take your laptop to the middle area), or in between (work in your office, but leave the door and window open, so you can keep an ear and eye on what's going on in the social area.

Note that if you have two groups working on different things, but that have a manager or senior engineer working with both, you can extend this concept and put the two groups side by side, with a large office (or more) in the middle connecting to both:

   +---------+---------+---------+---------+
   |         |         |         |         |
   |         |         |         |         |
   +-----+  -+-  +-----+-----+  -+-  +-----+
   |                   |                   |
   |     |       |     |     |       |     |
   +-----+       +-----+-----+       +-----+
   |     |                   |       |     |
   |             |                         |
   +-----+       +-----+-----+       +-----+
   |     |       |     |     |       |     |
   |                   |                   |
   +-------|   |-------+-------|   |-------+

Re: Ending the open office epidemic

#135

Post by pauleastlund »

lallysingh wrote: post #36

I guess I'm in a real minority here, but I'm pretty happy with open-office. Some qualifiers: - The team has a good culture of respecting each other, and we're busy enough not to want to banter too much outside of certain times (e.g., lunch, when we see it already going on, etc.). - I've got good headphones hooked to a 24-bit-DAC'd USB amp. I don't hear anyone unless I'm trying to. - My screen's big enough where visua…

Yeah, I agree with this. I worked at a big software company with big open office spaces. I really didn't experience the constant frustration with interruptions -- I didn't feel it much and I didn't hear other people grumble about it too much, either. Everyone understood that asking questions makes the whole group more efficient, and everyone appreciated getting a chance to help their teammates.

Lots of people are commenting to your post and others about the inefficiency of frequently interrupted work, but I actually think the efficiency argument runs the other way. let's say I'm working on some problem and I run into some really obscure issue coming up from a system I've never dealt with. I might kill 10 minutes of your productivity by asking you, but I could also easily kill 30 minutes digging into stack traces on various servers I've never heard of before looking for an answer you know off the top of your head.

Also, usually in a fairly close-knit team most people know who is going to be irritated by the interruption and who isn't, and they go to the folks who are friendly about being interrupted. I get these theoretical concerns about open office spaces but in real life I just don't encounter them that often.

Re: Ending the open office epidemic

#136

Post by lewisl9029 »

lallysingh wrote: post #36

I guess I'm in a real minority here, but I'm pretty happy with open-office. Some qualifiers: - The team has a good culture of respecting each other, and we're busy enough not to want to banter too much outside of certain times (e.g., lunch, when we see it already going on, etc.). - I've got good headphones hooked to a 24-bit-DAC'd USB amp. I don't hear anyone unless I'm trying to. - My screen's big enough where visua…

Personally, I loved working in an open office at my last job (a software consultancy).

Knowledge sharing by osmosis was a very real phenomenon there. I can't count the number of times I discovered interesting new technologies or was enlightened on some architecture tradeoffs thanks to a discussion taking place around me.

I realize that the whole experience around open-offices is very YMMV but I feel it can have many tangible and valuable benefits for the right kinds of people (i.e. those who are not too easily distracted and/or can easily context-switch back and forth).

Re: Ending the open office epidemic

#137

Post by ThrustVectoring »

warfangle wrote: post #130
ThrustVectoring wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I manage that with three 27-inch monitors, arrayed slightly concave towards me.

I'm jealous that your workplace springs for such luxurious accommodations :)

I could get them for $250 each, so combined they came in cheaper than the standard Apple branded monitor.

Re: Ending the open office epidemic

#138

Post by sukilot »

lallysingh wrote: post #36

I guess I'm in a real minority here, but I'm pretty happy with open-office. Some qualifiers: - The team has a good culture of respecting each other, and we're busy enough not to want to banter too much outside of certain times (e.g., lunch, when we see it already going on, etc.). - I've got good headphones hooked to a 24-bit-DAC'd USB amp. I don't hear anyone unless I'm trying to. - My screen's big enough where visua…

You are conflating a small "team room" with a 50+ person "open office"

Re: Ending the open office epidemic

#139

Post by sukilot »

marmot1101 wrote: post #80
rm445 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The middle ground is small group offices, and many (most?) people are fairly happy there. Actual giant open-plan offices can be distracting beyond what's tolerable.

I thrive in the small group office. You get the flow of ideas that are trying to be achieved with the open plan, but without as much of the noise. And it's easier to call out one or two people for being difficult to work with than it is many. I hated a private cube(big effin cube with high walls and all) because I felt like I was in solitary. Sometimes I want to bullshit about what I did over the weekend, or discuss…

So you prefer to shoot he breeze with 100 people at once (80 of whom are trying to work at that moment) than with one other person who wants a break?

Re: Ending the open office epidemic

#140

Post by sukilot »

j_baker wrote: post #110

I think there's more to the open office epidemic than mere cost. Facebook is pouring tons of money into the largest open office in the world. Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg wrote in "How Google Works" that offices should be (and I wish I were making this up) "crowded, messy, and a petri dish for creativity". I think many companies use open office formats out of principle . Misguided principles, but principles no…

Note that Schmidt and Rosenberg never worked in open offices -- they just decided they liked the idea after they bubbled off the top of the company and stopped doing any sort of desk job.
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