Ask HN: Why are you against open plan offices?

I quite like open plan offices.

But it really depends on what your job/task is.

And how well designed the open plan area is: Break-out spaces, individual rooms for when someone needs to focus, have extensive telephone calls especially of a confidential nature, plenty of meeting rooms, cubicles (I hate cubicles, but that's me, some people like them). And plenty of natural light.

And if someone wants to work remotely, that's good. You're not me, and then I appreciate doing this sometimes. A lot of people prefer to not work remotely because of the work-life divide an office space benefits. And some enjoy the social environment.

I absolutely cannot work listening to music but am fine with osmosis of office chatter; make sure the printer's in a printer room, putting it on the floor is a special form of hell. And have a pantry for eating, I quite like the taste of aged fish but don't want to smell it.

In my experience hot-desking does not work. The benefit of people sitting together is there's a work-flow happening. People that need to talk to each other can. In hot-desking that all breaks down so what's the point at all other than when the whole office are individual contributors and office layout is irrelevant - many people have a relationship even with the plant that sits next to them.

Not everyone's the same. Provide options. It's a team effort. What works for the team as a whole? Measure what the team does, analyse it, reflect.

It's a nightmare for people with mental disorders such as ADHD.

I worked in an open office for 7 or 8 years, and now have been working from my spare room for 2 years. I miss exactly what you are talking about: collaboration is much harder, there is a dramatic lack of spontaneous conversations, and I can no longer overhear or be overheard and get drawn into a conversation organically that leads to a far, far better outcome than would have happened otherwise.

Some things that make the open office I experienced good: nearly the entire floor was developers with some managers, operations teams sat between developer teams, the ability to turn off overhead lighting and just let natural light in through large windows with two levels of shades on them, and there were conference rooms near by for louder conversations and white boarding. There were support folks who would need to take calls, but that was in a separate area. I never heard them. We also would have no problem saying, "hey, too loud" if a conversation good too loud or if something serious was going on. Another benefit was that when it was lunch time, just about everyone got lunch at the same time and ate together; 50-80 people in the kitchen talking shop or silly things, building rapport, hearing issues others are facing and offering help and solutions.

Sometimes, like at the end of the week, it might get too noisy with too many conversations. Then it was time for headphones for some. But we are talking like an hour or two a week.

> people working on similar stuff are physically proximate to one another in their workspace, and can get feedback on an idea they are working on now instantly from knowledgeable coworkers

Yeah, but the issue people arguing against open-space have, myself included, is that we explicitly don't want to have these interactions, at least not in unstructured form - because your request for feedback from me "now instantly" is actively preventing me from getting my work done.

I had a great office layout which was a large room with 10-25 developers and managers as the team grew. The key factors which made the office work well was: plenty of space per developer (L shaped desk about 8x8ft), generally courteous noise levels, and a a few other rooms for louder work or larger conversations (meeting room, lab, extra rooms).

Collaboration was great which was important for a new project. I think for an existing long running project less collaboration may be necessary and extra separation may be better for productivity.