51–60 of 237 posts
Despite what every open office critic says, it's very possible to be productive at work in an environment that is not designed to meet their very exacting needs. You're not painting the Mona Lisa, you're working on some app or spreadsheet. It's called work for a reason. Learn to make do.
On 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 pe…
The visual limitations of cubicles help here, because you have a little bit of privacy that motivates people to respect personal space. I'm quieter in cubicles, but not everybody else is, but in open-plan I have to adapt to everyone communicating loudly by being loud myself.
The best work setup I've ever had by far was not private offices or cubicles (and definitely not an open office); it was a hybrid where our team of 3-5 people sat in a large private office. This increased collaboration while enforcing respect. It allowed our team to create a work culture democratically (how do we arrange seating? what noise levels are ok?) that simply isn't possible in an open seating arrangement. I…
Like a pack mentality.
On 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 pe…
Giving you a continuous background awareness of what's happening in the company around you ... isn't that part of the claimed benefits of open offices?
"What about a health clinic? Or a coffee bar instead?"
I found as many studies as I could about how awful these open office plans are, and printed them all out, and left them there. At the end of the day, on a whim I checked the recycle bin in the conference room they were in. Anyone want to guess what I found?
When I die and get to hell, there will be a Hermann Miller chair in an open office waiting for me. With free snacks and drinks in the kitchen.
Despite what every open office critic says, it's very possible to be productive at work in an environment that is not designed to meet their very exacting needs. You're not painting the Mona Lisa, you're working on some app or spreadsheet. It's called work for a reason. Learn to make do.
Taking notes does jackshit. Best I could muster were construction noise isolating headphones.
Mona Lisa was a one time, frontend job :)
While 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
My 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…
I'll push back with a quote from Richard Hamming's famous talk "You and your research" (as I'm sure I have before): http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.pdf
"Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance.
He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame"
Are there any of these anti-open-office pieces which explicitly mention "I might not like it and might be less productive short term ... but that still could be a net win long term" ?