Live data from Hacker News

The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea

m.signalvnoise.com

171–180 of 461 posts

Re: The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea

#171
post #127
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe companies should just be honest about why they run open offices instead of trying to sell it as something they do for the employees.

I work in a place with younger developers, who basically run things themselves with management's blessing. They love the open-plan office layout. I think a lot of this is generational: younger programmers are much more social and like noisy environments where they can chat and banter endlessly.

Personal preferences vary but, yeah, a lot of overall preferences are probably age-related. I remember in a long-ago job I had for quite a few years (with an old-style high cubicle arrangement), we had a lot of walking the hallways F2F informal catchups, ate lunch together, had sports teams, etc.

These days I mostly work remote by choice and am good with that. Some of it is better tech to work remote; I didn't even have broadband for most of my time in that former job. But it's also that I have no particular interest in spending a lot of time with coworkers generally beyond what I need to get my job done.

Re: The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this is one of HN's favorite topics to bash on while completely ignoring the primary reason why the open office exists and persists. It's not about collaboration, it's not about socializing, it's about money. Just like all other business related decisions.

It's a penny wise, pound foolish decision though, considering engineering salaries. It's hard to quantify, and often an externalized cost to the facilities management and decision makers, but my own experience suggests open offices are incredibly expensive as a negative multiplier on the engineering output. The "actual work" starts getting done in the evenings, on planes, and on weekends, while the business hours are…

"It's a penny wise, pound foolish decision" Yes, and repeated infinitely throughout the global corporate world. Basically saying over and over again: corporations care more about dollars than their people, and the people must change or leave - if you want this job at all. What? you're the top in your field? So what, you're not special. Get to work.

Re: The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people are hyper-reactive to certain types of information. Whether you want to call it a preference or a handicap, I don't know. I personally have PTSD. I will nearly instinctively read things into faces that I can never be sure is there. This is perpetually confusing and often overloading for me, not to mention a useless waste of thinking cycles. It's taken me years to learn how to be less reactive, but it's al…

Thanks for that. So I gather that audio is also more difficult for you than text, but less difficult than face-to-face.

Audio in a business environment, at least from my experience, is more predictable and algorithmic, so my sensitivity to that has reduced significantly. Every face to face interaction in my organization routinely feels like a disaster I can't understand in entirety, during or locally near the experience. Reasoning out of it (grounding) is often challenging, I prefer focusing on inanimate objects to ground myself as this ties me to a structured reality, as well as focusing on math and logic because I need those reasoning systems to maintain self direction. It has gotten better in some ways and more difficult in others.

I have some folks I'm very close with where this is not the case. But that's taken a very long time for me, and it is something that has required a lot of patience, understanding, communication, tolerance, forgiveness, hope, and perseverence. It's still something that is just about, the opposite of easy, for every new person I'm introduced to. I am generally told that I'm a reasonably easy to get along with person casually, aquaintance wise, although I consistently apologize for random social behaviors, masking them over with the words awkward, impulsed, compulsed etc. I have a tendency to ramble about technical things and this is bad when I have a tendency to be hypercritical over software (as I'm never sure how my preferences about code may approve or reject the preferences of those I talk to, but that's getting off track). There'stuff that just goes down to the core of us that is intrinsic to our orderings, organizations, and structurings of information - which I'm sure you understand from being blind. In my experience, attempting to change these things is more costly than the benefit 'correction' would provide.

But that's me, PTSD and an understanding of psychology has made me a better software developer by refining my understanding of automation, as well as helping me remove myself from the headspace of what originally was so painful to experience. It doesn't go away, but it gets easier to live with, some days are harder than others, but I still consider myself fairly lucky given everything I've been able to do with what I have.

Text is just crystal clear. I have a tendency to ramble on the internet and I've gone into that wormhole of introspection of 'what will this do to me if I say this', some variant of the halting problem, recurrent infinite descending chains of when minds decide to stop inferencing using limited, selective sets of information, but, shrug. People have said I'm good at writing, and I hope my tendency to overthink has only led to improvement.

Re: The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea

#177
Ever time this gets brought up, everyone agrees with this, but, yet, no matter what, damn near every -- and I mean EVERY -- employer I've worked at, and even interviewed for since -- probably 2002 has gone to open plan offices.

I can look at the engineering area at any given day and see every member of the engineering team with headphones/earbuds on. Slack/IRC/Skype for Business gets ignored...why? It allows us to focus on the task at hand, without the noise of the office around us.

One of the best startups that I've worked at -- culture wise -- had a policy of two days a week, there would be no meetings, chatter around the office, or loud noises in the afternoon, and they'd play something that was rather chill/relaxing that everyone would agree on...and it really helped with productivity: the number of commits went up on Tuesdays and Thursdays because we were able to get things done without the hassle of anyone bothering us but the tasks at hand.

If open plan offices were designed with sound masking/dampening, the correct number of bathrooms per person (because, they were originally designed for cubes, not open seating, there are never enough bathrooms, it seems), the correct network planning (limiting your DevOps guys to one network drop always sucks when we're the ones pushing around gb+ images), and parking (because open plan seating usually implies that they're trying to stuff more people into a smaller space, so, there's never usually enough parking for the area) I would not really have an issue with open plan offices. I have a great pair of noise cancelling headphones and they work well for me.

Re: The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea

#178

To throw some more anecdotes in with the rest of the comments, I love open offices. I've had my own office and found it lonely and boring. I never got less work done than at that job. Everything took longer because I had to stand up and walk to talk to my team. Instant messaging sort of worked, but if they didn't respond immediately, you didn't know if it was because they missed the message or they weren't actually i…

insteresting point of view that kinda explains it.

now I imagine dilbert's boss being sad in an office, looking at all the workers in cublicles and thinking of ways to make friends :D

Re: The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> bombarded with constant cheering At least it ends. I work in a gigantic "airplane hangar" open office with no noise barriers of any kind stretching out to infinity. Everybody around me is on conference calls all day, every day. They put their phones on speaker and then yell louder and louder to be heard over each other. One of them is even one of the Important People with an office with a door that closes... which…

Get any generic in-ear earphones and thread those under a pair of 3M peltor optime III ear defenders. You can listen to even fairly quiet music and you won't hear any conversations around you.

Any passive, over-ear firearm hearing protection also works (and most are cheaper than $40).

Re: The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for that. So I gather that audio is also more difficult for you than text, but less difficult than face-to-face.

Audio in a business environment, at least from my experience, is more predictable and algorithmic, so my sensitivity to that has reduced significantly. Every face to face interaction in my organization routinely feels like a disaster I can't understand in entirety, during or locally near the experience. Reasoning out of it (grounding) is often challenging, I prefer focusing on inanimate objects to ground myself as th…

Do you think you would be happy in an environment where all business and technical communication was text? Do you think that could even be productive? Or is some amount of spoken communication practically necessary?

This whole exchange has been interesting. Thanks again.

Post reply on HN