
Open-Plan Offices Are Making Us Less Social - mancerayder
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-07-04/open-plan-offices-are-making-us-less-social
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betadreamer
I’m not sure if it makes us less social but I noticed that open plan creates
one of the two environments:

1) Super distracting. Everyone is talking the whole time and it’s hard to
focus. Your team member bugs you all the time and you realize that your team
is part of the noise.

2) Slack driven communication. No one bothers anyone and all the conversation
is done on Slack. You slack a person even if they are sitting next to you.
Pretty awkward and can be time consuming.

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oblio
Can companies just come out and say it? They’re all adopting open offices
because they’re cheaper and the cogs are easy to move around.

Though it baffles me why Facebook, Google, etc., companies that can afford it,
don’t switch to 2-4-6-8 person offices. Best option: not too isolated, not too
bunched up together.

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Felz
I feel like optimizing for manageability is a great way to run a tech company
into the ground.

And I notice that Microsoft, which gives its programmers offices, seems like
the only tech megacompany that can still produce software.

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bgorman
Microsoft Windows is probably the worst software product of all time. All
Microsoft has is lawyers and a good marketing department

~~~
oblio
Many people have been using Windows successfully since at least 95.

There’s definitely worse products out there.

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sidibe
This and preferring ads to subscriptions are the two topics I feel like I
disagree with 99% of HN.

I much prefer open offices and I don't mind my neighbors having conversations.
Sometimes it turns out to be pretty useful what you overhear by accident.
Otherwise headphones work.

~~~
derekp7
Same here -- it's not too noisy, and it is really useful to overhear someone
having an issue and then jumping in to help. Only on relatively few occasions
is it a problem, specifically when one of my team members who speaks English
as a second language is having trouble with HP support, he tends to get a bit
louder and more excited. At that point I just take a quick tea break.

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hyperrail
Here's the academic paper on which this article is based:
[http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/373/1753/2017...](http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/373/1753/20170239)

and here is the HN discussion of that paper from a couple days ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17448187](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17448187)

