As an employee in a small early-stage startup, the open-office arrangement suited me very well. Being able to at least eavesdrop on all of the verbal conversations from the tech challenges to product development to financial concerns kept the information flowing very well. Every member of the team could draw from the full context of our effort to strengthen their individual contribution. As a developer I felt I learned a lot more about the business and our customers than I would have if they had given me a quiet, productive office. I think it was a net win in the early years.
Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace
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Re: Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace
#22I wrote about this some time ago in a ranty way: http://georgestocker.com/2014/04/15/how-to-destroy-programme...
I really believe that the open office floor plan led me to leaving my former job -- I simply could not be as productive as I needed to be in an open floor plan environment.
I wouldn't be surprised if Open-Office floor plans cost more in productivity than they save in rent. I don't mean to 'hate' on it so much; but it's hard to explain just how distracting, noisy, and damaging to productivity it can be.
Re: Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace
#23Yup. Its impossible to really focus in an open-office work area. I have to meet with another team occasionally that's management bought into the open-office hypetrain. Its awful. The noise is overwhelming, there's constant distractions (even small noises like people shifting in their chairs can become overwhelming when its coming from you from every direction)
It sounds like the acoustics are pretty bad if small noices are that noticable. Can you get them to install sound dampening?
Whatever you do, don't do what my office did - they installed speakers that play pink noise. It helps with the noise (so much chatter) but it's annoying as hell.
Re: Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace
#24I'll play contrarian for a moment: the most productive office I've ever worked in was an open office layout. What worked for us:
* Separate clusters by function / noise level -- We didn't put sales people and developers next to one another. People who spent all day on the phone were near other people who spent all day on the phone.
* Keep clusters small -- We had 4 person "pods" of desks for most of our early lifecycle. You weren't constantly interrupted by a dozen people from every direction, but you had a few people you could bounce ideas off of when you needed to.
* Lots of breakout spaces -- If you need to have a conversation that lasts more than a minute or so, find a private space. It was nice to hear a snippet of a conversation and decide "I care about this topic, let's break out and discuss further" or "This is not relevant right now, I'm going to disregard."
* Be respectful of flow -- If someone is deep in focus, just leave a post-it on their desk or send a message via chat. (This was a good form of one-bit communication for us.)
I don't think it's impossible to create a great open office layout. People just copied the ceremony without the essence. It's no different than "Agile is broken! We have 20 minute standups 3 times a day and nothing gets done!" Maybe the reason is because you're doing it wrong.
Re: Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace
#25Many moons ago, interviewing for my first full-time job out of school, I visited a certain large aerospace company in the Seattle area :-) One of the things that turned me off and helped lead to my turning down their offer was their bullpen-style office arrangement. (Arguably even worse than today's incarnations, it was just a bunch of desks in a large open area though we seem to be heading back in that direction.) M…
I believe I interned for the same said company :)
A fun-fact(tm) proudly shared on a tour still haunts me to this day:
"Behold the largest office space (er...cubical farm) in the US... 5,000 or so seats."
Re: Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace
#26This keeps coming up every so often, so here's a different discussion I'd like to get into. How do we measure something as ambiguous as productivity? And I contest some of the points raised: For companies where people are mostly left to themselves save for meetings and sync ups, is it really about a supervisor's ability to monitor what you're doing? Collaboration is probably the driving force, which again raises the…
I think it's pretty easy. Can you honestly say you get more work done in a day with constant interruptions and distractions? Not only output is affected but the quality of the work completed. I might get the same volume of work out the door but if Im distracted I promise there are bit and pieces that have careless errors in it, which leads to re-work. This is something that you can easily ask your employees if they'd…
I'm not sure anyone really disputes the negative impact on individual productivity. The argument (other than reduced costs of course) is that open plans improve collaboration and therefore overall productivity. Personally I'm skeptical in most cases but measuring aggregate productivity is difficult given that it's really hard to make comparisons given all the other factors that come into play. (And the fact that "productivity" is a pretty squishy measure for a lot of activities anyway.)
Re: Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace
#27Open offices are type A/extroverted personality wet dreams. Everybody they need is within earshot and they can see EVERYTHING so they can properly control everything. However for introverts, people with noise sensitivity, or people with ADD this is an absolute nightmare. I find a lot of engineers tend to be either introverts or have some type of manageable ADD so it doesn't surprise me that many people would be negat…
Oh hey, I am/have all 3. Thank god I share a medium sized office with 2 other similar devs, one of whom is only in the office half the week instead of in the insane bullpen with everyone else or I may have quit.
Re: Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace
#28And there is also some evidence that open offices don't necessarily foster closer relationship among employees. [1]
Re: Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace
#29However
Communication between teams/etc IS IMPORTANT
And we need people to be able to be productive using other tools if they won't meet face to face (like HipChat, or others)
Re: Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace
#30At some point, open-offices will be the only thing that the majority of software developers know. If you've never experienced the productivity that comes from being able to think without interruption, you won't know what you are missing. At that point, the trend will probably be irreversible.
For me personally, this trend isn't all bad:
When I work someplace with this setup it's kind of nice to "hang out with my friends" even if it isn't nearly as productive.
When I'm working for myself, being able to think deeply gives me a competitive advantage over places with open-offices. :-)