I think open office is great for certain roles and not so much for certain occupations. For writer in this article having a private room is better because it takes a lot of focus and comfort to write. But in all fairness, I agree open office can become a diaster. Where I work now we have an open office settings but we are small and we don't have a long table sharing with a dozen coworkers. I think density is important - our desnity is not so high. Furthermore where I actually sit I only gave two coworkers in the area ao for me I don't get that much of noise. The most distracting part is just people stopping by or passing by my desk because it is one of the paths to the pathroom and conference rooms. But some of my other coworkers are stationed in worser part literally sitting across the kitchen so.... everyone considered my area to br the golden seat. I think, again, density is important. The upside of open office is the sense of you know people can be reached out and people aren't hiding inside a room with the curtain down.
The open-office trend is destroying the workplace (2014)
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Re: The open-office trend is destroying the workplace (2014)
#22On a related note, I noticed that cubicle offices are hardly better than open offices. The cubicle walls are tall enough to completely obscure the faces and bodies of your neighbors, but do nothing to block the sound. With no eye contact or awareness of your neighbors, it's easy to mistakenly believe that no one else can hear your sounds.
As a result, on a typical day at the office I would hear one coworker yap on personal calls (wife & home renovation) for half an hour (per day!), another coworker talk about company work for an hour on the phone with a distant teammate (with many words related to my work that trigger my attention), and the sound of phones ringing about 10 times (which is never my own phone).
Hearing all the office noise day after day, I thought about a notion called reverse privacy: If your conversation/notification doesn't concern me, then I don't want to hear it. I don't want it to grab my attention, be aware of it, or have to filter it out.
Re: The open-office trend is destroying the workplace (2014)
#23I seem to be the odd one out in that I actually enjoy an open office setup.
I've had both and I feel there's so much more collaboration happening in an open office. I almost see it weekly that there's a LOT of learning through osmosis, listening in to conversations, ...
I guess I have a pretty easy time keeping up concentration/flow. So in this case, it "works on my machine" :)
Re: The open-office trend is destroying the workplace (2014)
#24The open versus closed office debate feels new, but it's a pendulum that has swung for decades from one extreme to the other. The reality is that most modern workers need access to a multitude of workspaces: open, social areas for collaboration and closed, private areas for concentration. A progressive company recognizes this and sets its people free to choose the workspace they need for the work at hand.
Re: The open-office trend is destroying the workplace (2014)
#25This is all subjective to where you work, and who you work with I think? At my job I came after the open office setup was in place, before that people who've worked here for 7 years or more have told me it was awful, they actually attribute getting more work done in the current setup than previously. It may work for some, it may not. I was at one point trying to get a job at a place that allowed you to either work in an open office format, or in your own cubicle secluded from everyone else.
I personally find high value in that anyone I work with I can walk up to without going through a maze, or if they're next to me I can just talk to them as well and figure out what we need to do.
Edit:
Of course my office doesn't look like the one in the article, we have our own desks still, just no heavy walls between us. There's also plenty of room between employees, personal space should not be overlooked.
Re: The open-office trend is destroying the workplace (2014)
#26My office is switching to an open design. And none of the people who work there are happy about it. It was decided by the folks who own the company, several thousand miles away.
I think the real allure of open offices is how they look. Open offices look modern. They look like the kind of working area a hip, young, collaborative, industry-disrupting company would favor. But that's all bullshit. It's just a fairy tale that fools outsiders. Open offices look great to someone coming in for an interview or an executive visiting from company headquarters 3 states away. But at this point I think we can be reasonably sure that that's where the benefits end.
I don't think this change will damage my productivity much. I'll have headphones on all day, instead of 10-20% of the day. Seems like a lot of trouble for that kind of outcome. I'll probably enjoy shopping for some new headphones though.
Re: The open-office trend is destroying the workplace (2014)
#27I've been in a couple of co-working spaces uses the open-office concept. It's generally pretty good when everyone is a developer, but then there's the occasional sales/customer service person, which is what this article seems to allude to.
I think open-office is a great concept that just needs to be refined a little: i.e. stricter enforcement of phone/loudness etiquette.
Re: The open-office trend is destroying the workplace (2014)
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's normal: you make such a big investment (moving to an open office), you have to pretend you didn't screw it up good. Like when people pretended they liked standing desks because they spent $1000 in one. Imagine standing still for eight hours a day.
> Imagine standing still for eight hours a day. Imagine sitting perfectly still for eight hours a day. I just imagined both, and I preferred the standing still nonsense to the sitting still nonsense.
Just to throw it out there, I much prefer sitting at my desk, but I make it a point to spend some time wandering around the office/outside the building for at least a few minutes every hour.
I'm also not a developer though, so I don't need to be in focus mode for long periods of time.
Re: The open-office trend is destroying the workplace (2014)
#29While the open-office debate has been a recurring meme on HN for some time, it seems that offering a variety of options as well as unfettered personal choice is key. For example, my current employer has wide-open office space with pods of desks, but they also offer numerous privacy rooms for escape. As a mild to mid introvert myself, this allows for the best of both worlds the majority of the time: I can benefit from…
> but I can also grab my own room for an entire afternoon to crank out some heads-down work.
that might work for people that work only on laptops, but it's not going to work if you have multiple monitors and towers, and ergo keyboard and so on
Re: The open-office trend is destroying the workplace (2014)
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why pay $300k+ a year for a developer then just to go and save a few hundred a month on real estate costs, sacrificing some percentage of productivity?
Because not everyone in Google (or any other open-office space) is a developer. In fact, most are not, and most are getting way less pay.
Then put those people in open office plan, and give developers offices.