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The inexplicable rise of open floor plans in tech companies

nathanmarz.com

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Re: The inexplicable rise of open floor plans in tech companies

#41

Post by ryanbrunner »

pekk wrote: post #32
abalone wrote: post #10

Suffers from the same flaw as most critiques of open plan: it focuses on individual productivity while failing to understand how it contributes to team productivity. Cornell did a study of open plan awhile back that you should all read. I posted it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7507404 The misunderstanding here is that it's just about serendipitously "overhearing" other conversations. 1. Open plan makes…

Wow. You think that time I spend coding features you asked for is not helping you? Then at the end of the week, I am still giving an accounting of why a feature isn't finished on a schedule given by the same people who were interrupting the work I was doing to satisfy their stated priorities. I'm amazed at how you totally ignore that this makes people miserable and contributes to bad management. Why not learn to use…

I don't think anyone is arguing that writing features isn't helping the company in general, and the individuals that asked for it - but that's not the only way developers can help other individuals within a company:

- Developers can ask other developers questions when they're stuck on a certain problem. In my experience, developers waste far more time when they're stuck on a problem then when they're interrupted.

- QA / PM / whoever is on your "team" can ask quick, simple questions, that are either too small for an e-mail, or would seriously slow them down if they had to write the e-mail, wait for a developer to check e-mail, write a response, etc. Again, in my experience, developers routinely underestimate how much inefficiency having QA / PM / whatever blocked while they wait for information from a developer generates.

E-mail has it's uses, and the fact that some questions are better suited to a quick face-to-face interruption doesn't mean that every question is, but there's definitely cases where it's not the right tool for the job.

Re: The inexplicable rise of open floor plans in tech companies

#42

Post by doktrin »

abalone wrote: post #10

Suffers from the same flaw as most critiques of open plan: it focuses on individual productivity while failing to understand how it contributes to team productivity. Cornell did a study of open plan awhile back that you should all read. I posted it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7507404 The misunderstanding here is that it's just about serendipitously "overhearing" other conversations. 1. Open plan makes…

I'm going to agree. Until last year, I had worked exclusively in open office plans. Some were good, some were pretty horrible. Not all open office plans are created equal, and this is a critical distinction.

In my experience, open office plans scale poorly. The only successful ones I have worked in had less than 10 employees. Co-locating teams that don't need to collaborate (e.g. engineering & marketing) is typically a bad idea.

More to the point, I've now worked in a private office for a year. It has its perks, but I find myself wishing for a small open office plan again. The cons of isolation outweigh the pros of occasional distraction, IMO.

Re: The inexplicable rise of open floor plans in tech companies

#43

Post by ryanbrunner »

danielweber wrote: post #22
abalone wrote: post #10

Suffers from the same flaw as most critiques of open plan: it focuses on individual productivity while failing to understand how it contributes to team productivity. Cornell did a study of open plan awhile back that you should all read. I posted it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7507404 The misunderstanding here is that it's just about serendipitously "overhearing" other conversations. 1. Open plan makes…

why_not_both.png ? People should have private offices so they can be alone to think when they need, and also have bullpen areas where they can collaborate.

This is really the best answer. Our office is open-plan as a rule, but there's plenty of "individually-sized" meeting rooms where you can work privately if you need to focus on something. It also serves as a good signal that you shouldn't be interrupted if you've taken one of those spots.

Obviously you need to have enough of these that there isn't competition for those rooms, but it can definitely work well.

Re: The inexplicable rise of open floor plans in tech companies

#44

Post by lifeisstillgood »

abalone wrote: post #10

Suffers from the same flaw as most critiques of open plan: it focuses on individual productivity while failing to understand how it contributes to team productivity. Cornell did a study of open plan awhile back that you should all read. I posted it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7507404 The misunderstanding here is that it's just about serendipitously "overhearing" other conversations. 1. Open plan makes…

I think some of the best and most productive days I have had have been where I have been in the same cramped office as the rest of my team and we were all working on different chunks of the same problem - "Bob - are you using a list or a dictionary to pass the foobars in?"

That's great for a single team all working on one thing - but I do not see the open plan office as a series of nicely appointed open plan offices for 4-8 people with sound-proofing.

I have worked in open plan offices with hundreds of people in the same open-plan - hearing birthdays, laughter, horror, lunchtimes and socialising that have nothing to do with me personally or professionally.

Cornell may have found that it is useful to know what the rest if your physically co-located team is working on - yes - but not hundreds of others that I need to filter out too.

If serendipity is valuable to you as a company, throw a Wednesday afternoon mixer and expect groups to form and make something new to try out. But give them team rooms for that wednesday.

I am a big fan of "team rooms", and a big big fan of remote working and always on video. But living in the middle of hundreds of others just teaches us to ignore everyone.

Re: The inexplicable rise of open floor plans in tech companies

#45

Post by doktrin »

jusben1369 wrote: post #30
mmcconnell1618 wrote: post #3

I think the best arrangement is private offices / cubes surrounding a central team area where more interaction can occur. Pixar had a really cool idea where Steve Jobs put all of the bathrooms on one side of the building in a central area so people were forced to bump into each other spontaneously throughout the day but only when they were already interrupted.

Really? Most people go to the bathroom once or twice a day. The chances of you timing that to coincide with someone else for whom it's beneficial that you start to spontaneously chat seems kind of low. To put it another way if Steve thought it was important to have that I suspect he would have found a different mechanism that the one above.

> To put it another way if Steve thought it was important to have that I suspect he would have found a different mechanism that the one above.

Maybe, but that particular mechanism was implemented. It actually received some negative feedback from a pregnant woman who felt she was forced to walk an undue amount to the bathroom.

The point of the parent was that the Pixar offices are designed around encouraging unplanned team member interaction. Their leadership believe this is crucial to encouraging creativity.

Re: The inexplicable rise of open floor plans in tech companies

#46

Post by FollowSteph3 »

The problem is, and always will be, that the 9.2% cost difference is very visible whereas to non-technical people whereas the productivity differences aren't. And unfortunately more often than not it's the non-technical people making the decisions on office space...

Re: The inexplicable rise of open floor plans in tech companies

#47

Post by jimmaswell »

abalone wrote: post #10

Suffers from the same flaw as most critiques of open plan: it focuses on individual productivity while failing to understand how it contributes to team productivity. Cornell did a study of open plan awhile back that you should all read. I posted it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7507404 The misunderstanding here is that it's just about serendipitously "overhearing" other conversations. 1. Open plan makes…

I'd hate having everyone able to stare at my screen all the time. It'd make me feel uneasy and less productive for sure.

Re: The inexplicable rise of open floor plans in tech companies

#48

Post by runako »

ryanbrunner wrote: post #41
pekk wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. You think that time I spend coding features you asked for is not helping you? Then at the end of the week, I am still giving an accounting of why a feature isn't finished on a schedule given by the same people who were interrupting the work I was doing to satisfy their stated priorities. I'm amazed at how you totally ignore that this makes people miserable and contributes to bad management. Why not learn to use…

I don't think anyone is arguing that writing features isn't helping the company in general, and the individuals that asked for it - but that's not the only way developers can help other individuals within a company: - Developers can ask other developers questions when they're stuck on a certain problem. In my experience, developers waste far more time when they're stuck on a problem then when they're interrupted. - Q…

Do people not use IM/chat anymore? The problems with email you are describing are typically why I use chat.

Re: The inexplicable rise of open floor plans in tech companies

#49

Post by mh_yam »

abalone wrote: post #10

Suffers from the same flaw as most critiques of open plan: it focuses on individual productivity while failing to understand how it contributes to team productivity. Cornell did a study of open plan awhile back that you should all read. I posted it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7507404 The misunderstanding here is that it's just about serendipitously "overhearing" other conversations. 1. Open plan makes…

Let me share some perspectives on the 'other side'.

1) I don't want people to be able to see me all the time. It's extremely nerve-racking and I feel like an animal in a zoo. And from my experience, people usually don't care whether I'm deep in some code or doing something less intense - they come over anyway. And people don't care whether their question is important enough to interrupt! As soon as someone taps my shoulder or calls my name, my concentration breaks completely and it takes me another half hour to get it back. Having offices makes people think harder and try to figure out the answer by themselves before going to someone else.

2) See above. The ratio of stupid questions that could have been resolved by Google or just another 2 minutes of thinking, to questions that ignited an interesting discussion is about 9 to 1.

3) How much work is going to get done by 'helping others'? 80-90% of a developer's work can be alone. Team productivity of course is important, but in development teams, this is really just the sum of individual developers' productivity.

Re: The inexplicable rise of open floor plans in tech companies

#50

Post by Cthulhu_ »

abalone wrote: post #10

Suffers from the same flaw as most critiques of open plan: it focuses on individual productivity while failing to understand how it contributes to team productivity. Cornell did a study of open plan awhile back that you should all read. I posted it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7507404 The misunderstanding here is that it's just about serendipitously "overhearing" other conversations. 1. Open plan makes…

But it's not just about personal productivity, it's also about enjoying your work.

Spending a day in the noise, getting distracted, and simply unable to get your head down and finish the one task you're assigned to gets highly annoying and draining. Which has negative effects on that person and the team as a whole; poor mood (and attitude by extension), bad work, and a higher inclination to simply pack up and leave.

I work in a ~20 people open floor plan; fridays feel the most productive, because it's the quietest. Some colleagues feel hugely relieved after spending a day working from home and, by their own words, getting some work done for the first time in forever.

tl;dr we're individual people, not team productivity numbers.

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