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Why must editors title articles this way? The article says: there are many ways in which open offices are not great. The headline says: they are destroying the workplace. The article doesn’t come close to making that claim, even if “destroy the workplace” were a meaningful idea.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This needs to be said more. I absolutely love being in an open office layout because it allows for easy collaboration as well as the occasional spontaneous fun interruption. People seem to get hung up on the interruptions as if they lose tons and tons of productivity. I just haven't experienced issues like that personally. I find that the interruptions are a welcome break to the monotony of staring at code for 8 hour…
"occasional spontaneous fun interruptions" I would prefer to choose when to have my interruptions.
I'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 lifecyc…
This needs to be said more. I absolutely love being in an open office layout because it allows for easy collaboration as well as the occasional spontaneous fun interruption. People seem to get hung up on the interruptions as if they lose tons and tons of productivity. I just haven't experienced issues like that personally. I find that the interruptions are a welcome break to the monotony of staring at code for 8 hour…
As someone who's had to run programming groups and do the programming work, I will say open floor plans are the worst idea ever.
If you need/want to get into the zone on a project and actually make progress, the open floor plan will keep you from doing that as much as possible. For breaks, the last thing I would be doing is going on facebook or checking email or doing other useless crap like that.
Your job sounds horrible if people can just walk up any time for any reason. And if you're spending time looking at cat gif's then I think you or your manager needs to revisit how you're spending your time. Doesn't sound like work to me. Sorry...
I think googles own Eric Schmidt had the best response to this. If open office's were bad for buisness or destroying the workspace the free market would bear that out. There are tangable benefits which is why companies move towards it. I understand some people hate it, but most don't so why do we keep getting the same articles every few months saying the same thing. We get it _you_ don't like the open office space ot…
Google makes 250k per employee, and can afford to have a thoughtful and spacious open office that has sound proofing and sufficient break-out rooms and meeting places.
On top of that, they can afford to be picky with their employees and hire thoughtful intelligent people.
Compare that with a standard company workplace.
First, they get excited about saving money by smashing more people into a smaller area. Second, they are following a trend and don't know to care about the 'small' things that make an open office livable (adequate side rooms, soundproofing, etc) Third they have whatever hierarchy they had before, which probably prevents people from collaborating easily because they'll be stealing time from their bosses projects etc. Next, they aren't hiring to Google's standards. After that, they might not be in a tech industry with quick feedback to failure and success and be filled with people who therefore optimizing for weirder goals. Finally, all those employees aren't used to the open office plan, resent it, and are filled with bad habits.
So in the end it's easy for me to see tons of terrible open office plans, while acknowledging they work terrifically for some people.
Not a single study she linked to is conclusive and applicable to all situations. The studies merely suggest that there may be drawbacks to open offices.
Additionally, she mentions the camaraderie among teammates masking lost productivity. Who's to say that this doesn't contribute to the overall well being of the office? Even if it does mean some near-term productivity is lost.
Each company is different, and each department within the company is different. We just moved into an office space, and our sales floor is much different than our dev area. Sweeping generalizations like the one made in this article aren't helpful for anybody.
I'm not going to take apart the article: there's simply too many errors to get into. I will say in the author's defense that many companies will jump onto a bandwagon without having any idea of why other people are riding or where it's going. [insert long list of good ideas that corporate america adopted and killed]
On a personal note, I do not like co-location. I also do not like open plan offices. I like it quiet, with my space, my music, my 3-screen development setup, and my door. Which I can shut.
And that's what makes this discussion so painful for me to both watch and participate in. You see, as somebody who helps teams perform better, for certain kinds of work -- creative work where there is a lot of change and risk -- open plan beats the hell out of other setups. It's not even close. [for the proper definition of open plan.]
In the past couple of years I have seen several teams that were unable to accomplish much of anything start working much more effectively by simply sitting beside each other and being there during the day. In some cases, they did nothing else: just sat beside each other. Still, work improved. The effect is so noticeable you could almost write a book and start a movement just on open floorplan.
The last misconception I'll address, since it seems to run rampant, is that open floor plan is not about productivity or cost savings. It's about having people work with each other. This may actually mean less work gets done; but it's the right work. Open floor plan is where the guy at the end of the table late on a Friday afternoon observes aloud to himself "You know, maybe we should be doing X instead of Y" and everybody has the social and emotional context to realize that you just changed the scope of the work from 10x to x. [insert many more examples here]
Yup. 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)
There's simply no denying it. Maybe these open space workplaces don't have situations like this. But in my line of work it's part of the job.
I think googles own Eric Schmidt had the best response to this. If open office's were bad for buisness or destroying the workspace the free market would bear that out. There are tangable benefits which is why companies move towards it. I understand some people hate it, but most don't so why do we keep getting the same articles every few months saying the same thing. We get it _you_ don't like the open office space ot…
Open 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…
"I want to see my fucking employees and grab them at any time," is the thinking here. Our productivity and comfort? They don't really matter because the competitors are doing the same thing. There's nowhere to flee to. There's no winning other than clawing your way up to management and hoping to god you can still do tech work once you get there.
This is always why I'm never shocked to hear about video games or operating systems or huge pieces of software written by one guy, alone, in a quiet space. Of course you can do those things when you have the proper space and drive. This is also how novels get written for that matter. Can you imagine writing novels the way we're making software? They'd never get done and the ones that do would just be terrible.