The Open Plan Office and the Extrovert Ideal

Post by collyw » Tue, Feb 03, 2015, 12:24 PM UTC

bryanlarsen wrote: post #49

collyw wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes sense in a library. Usually studying is a single person activity. However I am sure most software engineering / programming jobs require programming, as well as discussing the problem. That's a fairly essential part of the job, and you can't expect to do that in quiet. To me the ideal solution would be a library at work. I worked in an academic institute that had one. We had 5 or 6 people in an office. Fin…

"Usually studying is a single person activity." Really, what school did you go to? The main reason to go to the library to study was because there would be other people from your class studying there too. So lots of collaboration, working through problem sets together. Yet it managed to stay quiet.

We had tutorial rooms for that sort of thing. We were expected to be quiet in the library.

Post by mpdehaan2 » Sun, Feb 08, 2015, 2:59 PM UTC

This is a GREAT article, not so much for the extrovert angle (I don't know, I'm extroverted sometimes -- I just can't concentrate over people yelling), but because of the headphone parts at the bottom. So many times does "just use headphones" get thrown at people who protest the open office reduction, but they don't realize that wearing headphones all day is uncomfortable (and probably dangerous), even if we love music - and it's also distracting.

When we have things like IRC/Hipchat/Slack, email, and video chat, having a door is no more a problem, because we can get a hold of anyone asynchronously.

Therefore, if anything, it should be EASIER to have doors now.

Sadly, the best office environment I've seen was at AT&T in 2000-ish. Employees had HUGE cubes, with quite a lot of office space for managers. Cube size reduced significantly over the last decade and a half until now cubes are viewed as somehow decadent. We laughed at cubes relative to offices then, we would LOVE to have them back now.

I'm looking for the work-from-home revolution to take over or companies to at least realize what they are doing with the open plan stuff for development. Technology makes doors not exist - so we should at least be able to have quiet.

Re: The Open Plan Office and the Extrovert Ideal

Re: The Open Plan Office and the Extrovert Ideal