Why We Still Believe in Private Offices
blog.stackoverflow.com
Why We Still Believe in Private Offices
1–10 of 78 posts
Re: Why We Still Believe in Private Offices
#2I can't emphasize how important it is not to just barge in on somebody's office or workstation without pinging them online or on their phone first. Unexpected questions lead to incomplete, unsure, or downright incorrect answers, which can unintentionally alienate your employees/coworkers.
But it's also important that actual discussions do take place in person with undivided attention, not being distracted by things going on around you. Miscommunications lead to fallouts between coworkers or employers and bosses.
As I developer I need my focus space. But I also want a separate place to be able to discuss things with coworkers -- as long as my workstation remains my castle, I'm happy to come out and go to meetings, do trainings, ask/answer questions, and hang out during lunchtime or breaks.
In my last place of work, we had two main teams, and their rooms were separated by a shared commons room, but this led to a divided culture. Everyone had laptops and each desk had a couple monitors, so every week, a couple people swapped out from each room and mixed up the teams. That alone helped our productivity and intra-office culture.
Re: Why We Still Believe in Private Offices
#3The new offices my company is moving to will have an open floor plan and a foosball table.
Time to fight for remoting rights.
Re: Why We Still Believe in Private Offices
#4I like what Stackoverflow does with their offices. Certainly better than what is trendy right now (open plan) and better than a cube' farm also.
I will say I think Microsoft's little offices are better overall. The ones I've seen have four real walls, a wooden door, and a window to outside with a blind on it. So if you want to work in the dark, you can.
Stackoverflow's glass offices mean that you cannot shut out the light, have to deal with any glare, may get distracted with what is going on in the offices either side of yours, and it means people can look over your shoulder whenever they choose.
They would be perfectly good offices with full length blinds on them. But then the people next to you may complain that you're blocking their natural light. But overall they still aren't even near the worst around...
Re: Why We Still Believe in Private Offices
#5The thing to consider here is Stack Exchange is a company that serves geeks, and is built by geeks. Naturally the culture and values of the company are going revolve around developers. But for a huge chunk of the companies out there everything revolves around sales and marketing. The actual role and importance of developers varies from company to company but very few of them are going to revolve around them in the same way. At many they're an afterthought.
While there is no "typical manager" it's safe to say that if you sample any given company and take all their managers and executives you won't find a lot of coders. Executives don't sit around talking about Rust vs Go, because it really isn't that important to their business most of the time. So they really have no idea what it's like to be a coder, and probably don't take up a lot of cycles thinking about it.
Most jobs do benefit from collaboration. Development is no exception, however too much socialization and interruptions kill us. This is what they fail to understand on most levels. They see sales, marketing, and other groups that benefit from being able to swivel a chair and ask a question and automatically assume that it will help developers, since they "never meet their deadlines" anyway.
So in my opinion the push for open offices for coders is mostly out of touch thinking, a little need for micromanagement, and of course being able to show off work being done for people taking a walk through. How that affects developers is of little concern.
Re: Why We Still Believe in Private Offices
#6I liked the comment: "I’m a big advocate of remote work culture even if nobody works remote."
That really works: respect people's time even if you are in the shared, no-cube, open office world.
Re: Why We Still Believe in Private Offices
#7The thing to consider here is Stack Exchange is a company that serves geeks, and is built by geeks. Naturally the culture and values of the company are going revolve around developers. But for a huge chunk of the companies out there everything revolves around sales and marketing. The actual role and importance of developers varies from company to company but very few of them are going to revolve around them in the sa…
I do agree with what you're saying. However whenever any popular startup's offices are posted a lot of developers/coders down fawn over it, so there does seem to be a lot of developers who seem to like the concept of an open plan office even if they'd regret it once they actually started working there.
Re: Why We Still Believe in Private Offices
#8The thing to consider here is Stack Exchange is a company that serves geeks, and is built by geeks. Naturally the culture and values of the company are going revolve around developers. But for a huge chunk of the companies out there everything revolves around sales and marketing. The actual role and importance of developers varies from company to company but very few of them are going to revolve around them in the sa…
This line of thinking becomes even easier to justify internally when the open office answer is generally also the cheapest solution.
Re: Why We Still Believe in Private Offices
#9I like what Stackoverflow does with their offices. Certainly better than what is trendy right now (open plan) and better than a cube' farm also. I will say I think Microsoft's little offices are better overall. The ones I've seen have four real walls, a wooden door, and a window to outside with a blind on it. So if you want to work in the dark, you can. Stackoverflow's glass offices mean that you cannot shut out the…
I sit in one of our glass offices directly next to a lot of windows: http://i.imgur.com/FZmvSZB.jpg
I don't have any issues with glare or anything since all of our windows have nice blinds that anyone can adjust, some of them even have two sets of blinds (regular and complete block-out blinds) if you would like to make the surrounding area as dark as possible.
Not all walls of our offices are glass too, we should've mentioned that in the blog post but it seemed pedantic. All offices have glass doors but they also have walls (painted with white board paint!), here's what my office looks like from the door in the previous picture: http://i.imgur.com/2n3nDkc.jpg
The only way I could get distracted by something that's happening in an office on either side of mine is by climbing up and looking at the 12" of glass on the top of the wall that's designed for allowing light to enter rooms that aren't facing windows (which I've definitely done before, it freaks people out, hilarious)
To be honest though, compared to the open work environments I used to work at any amount of glare is worth the change :)
Re: Why We Still Believe in Private Offices
#10There is another possibility, that all offices are fundamentally flawed creations designed not to foster work so much as to create a dynamic of control.
When you pay someone and you control both their place and time for over 1/3 of their daily life, there are inherent problems. I'm not sure that any office plan is ever going to be super ideal because of the fundamental problems of power and control that come with an employer/employee relationship.
Open plans are designed to look cool and help recruiting. They also create a sense of "busyness" that owners and managers love. Busyness is proof they are still in charge.
Arguing about wether or not it is better for productivity is a red herring. It was never about productivity in the first place. Most of what happens in an office is only tangentially related to the idea of work efficiency.