
Why We Still Believe in Private Offices - alexlmiller
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2015/01/why-we-still-believe-in-private-offices/
======
magsafe
Am I the only one that considers lunch to be a sacred, personal time that I
don't want to spend on small talk with coworkers? I need my lunch break to
recover from the day's stress and pace, so I can come back refreshed and ready
to code for 4-5 more hours. As an introvert, I find the team lunches to be
waay more stressful than actual work, and that eliminates any benefits of a
nicely cooked meal. If I end up in a team lunch situation, I find it hard to
be productive for the rest of the day (unless I take a separate mini-lunch
break by myself later).

The situation was especially bad at one recent job where the lunch
conversations always revolved around local sports, which I had no interest in,
or this guy remodeling his house, which was only interesting the first 3 times
he gave us an update. So I started bringing sandwiches to work, parking in the
garage beneath the building, and eating lunch all alone in my car in the dark,
listening to NPR or just enjoying the silence. It was the most refreshing hour
of my workday and I felt 200% more productive after that break than I would
after 30 minutes of small talk about sports.

I just want to point this out to people who think team lunches should be
mandatory. Not everyone enjoys them equally, and it's not always just about
the food.

~~~
jc4p
I'm really really glad you mentioned this, it's something I wanted to touch on
in the blog post but it was getting too side-tracked. I'm definitely in the
same boat as you, my previous job used to be in an open office environment (at
two different co-working places so it was LOTS of different teams worth of
open office environments) and my lunch hour would be the only alone time I
got.

Everything changed when I started at Stack though. As an introverted person I
don't _always_ want to be alone, but being alone is what makes me "recharge"
so to speak. What's nice about having a private office all the time is I can
choose to communicate with other people or not, there's always long-running
Google Hangouts I can drop into if I just want to talk to another human being,
or I can choose to be alone by myself for the entire day. Lunch though, is the
only time I get face to face with my coworkers and it turns out I kind of miss
that from being in an open office environment.

There's lots of people here that work on different teams and do drastically
different things than me which would make it so I wouldn't communicate with
them at all if I didn't simply grab lunch at the office and sit down at a
random table.

I definitely agree with you that lunch as a team should never be mandatory
though, it's asinine to steal an extra hour or whatever from everyone at your
company with the goal of "morale" or whatever they want to say behind it. I'm
super happy with the setup at Stack though, it works pretty well.

~~~
df07
I wrote the article and I probably end up working through lunch (or most of
lunch) at least 2-3 days a week. It's definitely optional.

------
JeremyMorgan
The 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.

~~~
GFischer
Consultants are also part of the problem.

I did a Master's degree that shared half its classes with the MBA, and we had
some case studies where a consultant was the hero by literally tearing down a
wall between sales and operations (the small company had communication and
"empathy" issues).

I always end up linking to this summary of Chapter 12 of Peopleware:

[http://javatroopers.com/Peopleware.html#Chapter_12](http://javatroopers.com/Peopleware.html#Chapter_12)

~~~
Terr_
I'm reminded of an old Dilbert comic--which I can't seem to find online--where
the CEO or consultant is hailed as visionary by alternately proposing
"centralize everything which is decentralized" and "decentralize everything
which is centralized."

I guess that could be applied to physical space...

~~~
m_myers
I believe it's a page from _Build a Better Life by Stealing Office Supplies_ ,
not an actual strip.

~~~
Terr_
I'm quite certain there was--if not a full strip--at least an illustration
involving the the CEO... Not the now-staple pointy-haired manager, but the
heavily-jowled guy who's been supplanted by the bullet-headed CEO in recent
years.

Each time, a diagram is behind him, either of a hub-and-spoke diagram or a
spread-out cloud of nodes.

~~~
m_myers
I remember exactly the illustrations you're talking about. They were on a
left-hand page of the book.

 _Build a Better Life_ is composed mostly of pages divided into quadrants, in
which Dogbert introduces the page's theme in the upper left and the next three
sections illustrate it.

------
programminggeek
There 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.

~~~
viewer5
Businesses exist to make money, not just to give people in power a place to
harumph about. More productivity IS important, because without that,
businesses are losing out on potential income, and that's not what businesses
like to do.

~~~
GFischer
However, there are huge agency problems between the stated goals of a business
(mainly, to make money for its shareholders), and the CEOs interests - where
ego, power, and making money for himself might be more important than long-
term decisions involving productivity.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm)

Apparently most relocations are closer to the CEOs home, for example:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8604202](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8604202)

New buildings are also monuments to the CEO (or President, or whatever
authority builds it).

------
abecedarius
It bums me out some to see the standard-bearer for private offices in our
profession showing us floor-to-ceiling glass walls in a panopticon arc, "not
as creepy as you think"[1]. The Overton window's shifted so far to the cage-
free side that privacy isn't even in our frame? OK, a few companies still
believe in offices with walls.

I don't doubt that it's a fine place to work, likely nicer than the cubicles
I've worked in, though maybe not better than my home office. But they're
clearly not private.

[1] From a caption on the original version of the page.

~~~
bokonist
The glass walls would be more tolerable if the mid-section was opaque/frosted
glass, so you still get the light but you also get a degree of privacy.

~~~
totalforge
Putting up transparent bubble wrap does a great job of blurring what's behind,
while letting people see if you're in your office. Raid the shipping
department.

------
Someone1234
I 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...

~~~
jc4p
I sit in one of our glass offices directly next to a lot of windows:
[http://i.imgur.com/FZmvSZB.jpg](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](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 :)

------
mholt
I 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.

------
dajobe
I 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.

------
eddie_31003
I've recently left one organization for another. I was a Dev in a Cube for for
several years. I now have my own office with a large window. It couldn't be a
more pleasant experience.

I think with open plans you're sharing a lot more germs too. How many times
have your co-workers came into work sneezing? Even in a cube farm, those germs
just spread. At least with an office you can keep you and your germs better
confined.

------
BerislavLopac
One thing I don't understand -- in this time of laptops, tablets and
ubiquitous internet access (whether in-office wi-fi or the mobile broadband),
why do we still have this discussion?

Are there any companies out there who have a heterogeneous office layout, with
open-space areas, single-person rooms and anything in between which could then
be used by anyone to their own preference? I would like to see a setup where
I'm able to work together with my team in a small-group environment in the
morning, and then retreat to a single-person office in the afternoon. In most
companies, there is very little reason to be bound to a single desk throughout
the day.

I can imagine such a workplace, with team leads/managers being responsible to
coordinating their teams when it comes to workplaces, and ideally the company
would monitor the usage and constantly adapt and improve the workplace
accordingly.

~~~
spoondan
Have you actually worked in an environment like that? In my experience,
hoteling as the only option is deeply unpleasant. People like to have a single
place to go. They like to have a desk they can personalize. They like to have
a place they can leave their stuff overnight.

If you only provide hoteling, I think the majority of people will just claim a
desk as theirs, and you effectively have no hoteling at all.

~~~
BerislavLopac
"People like to have a single place to go."

I'm pretty sure some do, and I'm pretty sure some don't. Heck, some people
would prefer it for some time, and then not for some more. I certainly know
that describes me pretty well.

My idea is not hoteling-only; it's the option you can choose and request, like
any other you prefer; in case of any conflicts it would be up to the
leads/managers to make the decision.

"If you only provide hoteling, I think the majority of people will just claim
a desk as theirs, and you effectively have no hoteling at all."

The operating words being "I think". I think otherwise, and there is only one
way to find out.

------
gavreh
I work at Esri where almost everyone gets their own office with a sliding
door. Private offices are still alive here (Thanks Jack :)

------
danielalmeida
I've been seriously annoyed about that since I started working in one of those
open offices. I've read a few articles about it and cannot understand why
would someone like to be in such an environment. Stack Exchange's
organization/culture seems to be a quite balanced approach, providing both the
common areas where people can be together working/relaxing AND a proper space
for them to stay focused while working alone on something. Really good to know
there are companies trying to get it right instead of cool.

------
iillmaticc
It'd be nice if in an ideal setting there was a balance of both open and
closed perspectives. I guess I consider myself an introverted extrovert. While
I enjoy being around others and having physical interaction when the situation
precludes the necessity open is great. But I think as others have said what
the powers at be fail to realize is that in order to be productive SE's we
need longer, uninterrupted fragments of time throughout the day for deep,
intense, unadulterated focus...when this doesn't happen. Things go to Hell in
a hand basket rather quickly. More problematic for me than physical space
restriction was the timetable restriction that too many meetings and other
time sucks can have. Non-code pushers fail to understand that that question
they asked about in the 8 a.m. stand up hasn't been solved or even thought
about b/c we can't get a waking 2+ hours of fluid thought. Having worked in
pretty much every type of space I still can't say which I really prefer/which
makes me most productive!

------
slashnull
The new offices my company is moving to will have an open floor plan _and_ a
foosball table.

Time to fight for remoting rights.

~~~
normloman
Don't tell me. They want to put the foosball table next to your desk. When
will they learn!

~~~
robwormald
We just got a foosball table in our office. It is 1 meter from my desk. It's
horrible.

------
jimbokun
So what other software companies have private offices?

In addition to Stack Exchange, Microsoft was mentioned.

When I worked as a developer at Carnegie Mellon, I had an office shared with
one or two other people (which was a nice perk, given the pay was much lower
than industry).

Any others?

~~~
ohast
I believe [http://www.fogcreek.com/](http://www.fogcreek.com/), which is no
surprise though since their affiliation with stackoverflow through Joel
Spolsky.

------
noir_lord
I've worked in shared offices, open offices and for the last couple of years
I've worked here [http://imgur.com/a/13uvk](http://imgur.com/a/13uvk) (office
on the cheap, it's my own company so I spend money only where it's important)

For me there is zero comparison, I enjoyed a shared office, loathed an open
office beyond measure and absolutely love the peace and quiet that comes from
working in a private office.

If my company isn't a success and I go back to regular employment I'm dreading
that bit more than any other part of been employed.

------
scott_s
This look like open plan to me:
[https://www.google.com/maps/@40.709036,-74.006763,3a,75y,268...](https://www.google.com/maps/@40.709036,-74.006763,3a,75y,268.95h,76.83t/data=!3m5!1e1!3m3!1sQAt2ZhdcRLgAAAQIt-
NLVw!2e0!3e2?hl=en-US)

I assume those aren't developers?

~~~
mjibson
Correct. That's the sales bullpen.

~~~
scott_s
I want (and have) a private office. Why doesn't the argument extend to them as
well?

Also: using the URL in the article, I couldn't find the developer offices. Are
they down the stairs? Google Maps didn't let me navigate down them.

~~~
thedufer
Yeah, those hexagonal offices are on the next floor down.

------
mwsherman
An important point is that focusing on online tools (instead of in-person
encounters) _improves_ communication. Everyone is on equal footing in terms of
being exposed to conversations.

In-person conversations, while arguably higher-bandwidth, are only shared by
the participants. You had to have been there.

------
peterwwillis
(note: none of the following has anything to do with office layout)

 _" Joel’s management philosophy is deceptively simple: hire smart people who
get things done, and get the hell out of their way. The role of management is
to give the people who actually do the work — the developers, designers,
sysadmins, etc. — all the tools they need to get their jobs done, and then
trust them to do the job!"_

Let's say you work directly with about 15 people. The majority of those people
are remote, with some local. The manager hangs back in meetings and listens
for problems, and hurriedly works to resolve roadblocks for their direct
reports. They also chime in occasionally if people need a reminder of a
pressing high priority item or objective.

Now let's say those 15 people all come from different places and all have
different ways of 'getting things done'. One person builds a unicycle in order
to achieve the goal of 'transporting A to B'. Another person builds a bicycle.
Yet another attempts to build a space shuttle.

If you're really really lucky, all of these different inventions and methods
will simply mesh, and there will be no friction within the team, and things
just churn on forever.

If you're dealing with smart, experienced people, there may be a lot of back-
and-forth discussion while people try to figure out which kind of solution is
the best.

If you're dealing with egocentric 'rock stars', absolutely nothing gets done
unless someone basically bullies someone else into caving on their method.

Even if nobody actually ever voices a problem with the way someone else works,
it is in a manager's interest to be invested in the past, present and future
of the work produced. Legacy systems need to keep working, current designs
need to be in-line with best practice, and planned work needs to be future-
proof and maintainable. How do they do that by staying hands-off?

Where do I think Joel's management philosophy leaves you? If you're lucky,
with product that mirrors the quality of your employees combined with their
ability to form a single cohesive unit where everyone's work complements each
other. If you're not lucky, you get arguments, delays, and code that doesn't
support the goals of the project or the group.

\---

On a completely unrelated note: Jesus would I love to have a full kitchen in
my office. I would be inspired to try to cook creative dishes and share with
my coworkers. And i'd spend more time in the office.

