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The open-office trend is destroying the workplace (2014)

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Re: The open-office trend is destroying the workplace (2014)

#71

Post by ende »

tetraodonpuffer wrote: post #29
ttkeil wrote: post #19

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

The way around that is that nobody owns their peripherals. Monitors, keyboards, etc are part of the work station, not part of the worker's personal environment. Of course there's still opportunity for customization of individual stations, and if someone prefers the more private spaces they can lobby to have one customized to their taste.

Re: The open-office trend is destroying the workplace (2014)

#72

Post by ylhert »

rm999 wrote: post #32

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…

Peopleware advocates the 3-5 person office, and has some great research to back it up

Re: The open-office trend is destroying the workplace (2014)

#74

Post by notfreeyet »

paulcole wrote: post #64
taurath wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It tells me that you're not a valued professional, you're a line worker. There can't possibly be any reason why you'd need privacy to have difficult conversations or focus on important tasks.

My open office has a conference room for meetings. Otherwise I just focus at my desk. I manage to make do.

Some people would like to do their best work not merely "make do". Life is short and I don't want to waste it by not actively pushing myself to do my best.

While I may not be working on something that is very important, it is very important to me that I do my best work.

So when a company tells me to "make do" they're telling me I can't do my best work and so I should leave, because that's important to me.

Re: The open-office trend is destroying the workplace (2014)

#75

Post by ams6110 »

naranana wrote: post #9
adamnemecek wrote: post #4

It's good that people are finally talking about this. Like 7 years ago, people were commonly pretending that they liked it (or maybe they just didn't watch their productivity).

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.

I scoffed at standing desks until my new workspace installed them (the motorized kind, that adjust up or down) and I tried standing for a few days. I found I liked it a lot. I almost never sit at my desk now.

Re: The open-office trend is destroying the workplace (2014)

#76

Post by intrasight »

atemerev wrote: post #61
intrasight wrote: post #31

Once accustomed to working in home office in your PJs, it's very hard to contemplate going back to commuting to, parking at, and working in a noisy, stinky office.

...right until you have kids ;)

I did return to the noisy, stinky downtown office for a few years while my daughter was young ;)

Re: The open-office trend is destroying the workplace (2014)

#77

Post by orev »

jodrellblank wrote: post #54
nayuki wrote: post #22

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…

How do you know if the conversation concerns you, before you overhear it? 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?

It's impossible for the human brain to multitask, so what you mean by "background awareness" actually means "constant distraction".

Re: The open-office trend is destroying the workplace (2014)

#78

Post by quotemstr »

My preference order is:

  private offices > open office > team rooms
This ranking might sound odd, but bear with me: of course I like having a space to myself. It's not just the noise: having my own space affords me a degree of privacy. I don't like to feel watched. In environments where I don't have a private office, I end up doing most of my heavy-duty coding from home.

Now, let's look at completely open offices and team rooms. In both environments, I have to deal with add conversations, people chewing with their mouths open, doors opening and closing, and so on. In both environments, I pay a cognitive price. But, in a completely open office, I might overhear interesting conversations from other teams and become aware of interesting developments. In a team room, I'm isolated from everything except my team, so I don't learn much.

I'm very skeptical of the idea that team rooms facilitate collaboration. I've never been much for low-level high-frequency collaboration --- pair programming is punishment in the afterlife. Collaborating at a high level is fine, but that kind of collaboration is best done asynchronously over some kind of durable medium like email, not synchronously by shouting across a room.

If I can't have a private office, I'd prefer a completely open warehouse-like environment that at least maximizes the benefits of an open office. A team room has most of the same costs and few of the benefits.

Re: The open-office trend is destroying the workplace (2014)

#80

Post by ceras »

user5994461 wrote: post #47
danm07 wrote: post #27

I'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.

And what to do with people who have to grab the phone or talk? They have nowhere to isolate because it's a f------- open office.

At my company there are meeting rooms, phone rooms, focus rooms, and social common spaces like micro-kitchens you can go to.
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