
Ask HN: What do you think of open office floor plans? - att159
Good for promoting collaboration, or merely an obstacle to privacy and productivity? Seems like it&#x27;s very difficult to find a Bay Area tech company these days which doesn&#x27;t use the open office plan. Facebook now has a 2800 person room in its headquarters, for example.
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chrisbennet
I'm not a fan of _working_ in a open plan office - but I think they are a
_great_ idea for the companies I compete against. ;-)

A tiny team (2-4 developers) with some sort of walls (so you aren't looking
over your monitor at someone else) is probably a good compromise between
getting things done (concentration) and "collaboration" i.e. keeping others
from concentrating.

I concentrate really well but it's still hard for my brain not to react to
hearing my boss asking another engineer in the next cubicle say "What's the
kind of matrix where the inverse is also its transpose?" That actually
happened to me once and I blurted out the answer. When he then asked me
directly, "Hey, you know about matrix math?" I smiled and told him "Not as far
as you know." :-)

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NameNickHN
I think it's poison for a developer. I work(ed) for two companies with open
floor plans as a freelancer and I try to minimize my onsite time as much as
possible. Either I get close to zero work done or I have a splitting headache
at the end of the day. Phones ringing, people talking, people walking, music
playing - it's distracting as heck.

In my home office, which is a couple of miles outside the city, all I hear is
birds chirping and rustling tree leaves. I guest I'm a bit spoiled in that way
but it's a great working environment.

In my opinon, open floor plans serve only two purposes: lowering the costs of
building and maintaining an office and keeping the staff monitored.

> Facebook now has a 2800 person room in its headquarters [...]

That sounds like a complete nightmare to me.

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staticautomatic
Some people really enjoy open floor plans and get a productivity boost out of
them, particularly if they are often working as part of a small team or across
multiple small teams. However, others much prefer and are more productive as
solitary workers and would legitimately benefit from having stable offices.
Sitting in an open area with your headphones on is not a serviceable
substitute for an office. Accordingly, I think a mixed floor plan including
both dedicated offices and some open space is ideal. I frankly don't
understand why so many people tend to approach these as mutually exclusive
things.

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tvm
Open office is a deal breaker for me, because it simply underlines the
ignorant approach of the company towards their employees - especially coders.

I have yet to see someone that performs better when constantly distracted or
interrupted. Socializing ? I do that in my free time at other places and with
people that I choose on my own.

Employee monitoring ? If you need such desperate measure to ensure that
workers actually do their work, there's something terribly wrong.

Best setup from my personal experience are small 2-4 person offices.

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rubyfan
I do my best work when uninterrupted for long periods.

My productivity suffers when I am interrupted seemingly at random by the needs
of those inconsiderate enough to assume their need trumps whatever I am
working on at the time.

Email, texting and instant message are controllable mediums. The only
acceptable barrier to the real world interruptions accompanying open concept
is a pair of headphones and that is too light a defense in my experience.

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sheepmullet
Part of the reason you get so many differences in opinion for these kinds of
questions is it depends on the type of work and environment.

For example there are thousands of HN users who work in companies with <20
people. I personally have more than 5x that number of people on my floor.

There are companies where anything not directly work related is discouraged
and then there are companies where having a 20min coffee break with co-
workers, or having weekly team events, etc is encouraged. In the first kind of
company it would be isolating to work in a private office, whereas in the
second kind of company it could work well.

Etc, etc. Personally I hate open offices... but I work next to sales people
and a few very loud co-workers.

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nazuk
I find that having about 20 people in room is a good number, above this many
people, after discussing with them, find that larger rooms makes you less
likely to collaborate due to being self-concious of so many people listening
to the conversation

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Avalaxy
I really love them. I may be a programmer, but I still like have SOME social
interaction and daylight. I could never work in a cubicle, that's really what
hell looks like to me.

