Ending the open office epidemic

Take an hour or so and get a hearing check done by an audiologist. This will give you a baseline. If there's nothing wrong, great, you can check again in 5-10 years. However, if there's problems you can alter your behaviour and hopefully preserve your hearing. And if "oh s*ht" results from such a test, you will find out that hearing aids cost 10-15x great earphones/headphones and insurance tends not to cover them. In North America at least.

The drop in center had three separate rooms. Two were loud rooms, with phones at each desk. One was a smaller "quiet room", with no phones, intended for people who do quiet, focused work. I suppose there was some "back visibility", since the workstations were set up on round (might have been hexagonal) tables, so it would have depended on where you sit. Another big factor in the success of a quiet room was an office manager who absolutely enforced the noise rules, since a lot of people who would push the limits if allowed (when spaces in the loud rooms were all taken)

There were also a few offices/small conf rooms for meetings and so forth.

I think it worked, but that's probably because it didn't have the same goals of "collaboration" or "openness" that modern open office proponents often claim to provide. Most importantly, the open office and quiet room was clearly not intended to keep an eye on workers in any way. It was a drop in center in the first place, so while you might see the same people around, nobody was really monitoring anyone else. Also, there was no status associated with where you sat - open seating, grab what you like. And of course, the quiet room showed a great respect for people like developers who need extended periods of quiet focus.

It's also clear that the "open office" quality of this drop in center wasn't based on flawed notions of increased communication or collaboration. At that time, developers at Sun had their own offices (well, I did, and I wasn't high on the org chart), so the drop in center was for convenience. It was set up so that people who had meetings in other spots, or who wanted to telecommute, had a place with a workstation if they needed it, and had a phone or a quiet room, depending on how they needed to work that day. The idea that the office would be a place for constant open communication wasn't part of the plan - in fact, the quiet room ensured that this sort of thing didn't constantly distract the developers.

Kind of depressing, now that I think about it, that the only time in my life I had my own office was my first job. The industry has really moved away from that model over the last 15 years. Facebook has moved into the old sun offices… did they tear them all out and replace them with open offices?

I also had shared offices quite a few times, and I enjoyed those (actually, I liked them more than my own office in many ways, provided I shared with another developer). Cubicles and open offices are pretty horrible, but I think that if we had a "quiet room" approach to them, they might not be so bad.

If the boss is not there, then it's not quite the open office; it's a slightly strawman version of the open office which doesn't quite include everyone. Even so, the boss can come out peek at the workspace at any time and tell at a glance who is there and who isn't, and who is doing what.