
Open-plan offices must die - MattRogish
http://mattrogish.com/blog/2012/03/17/open-plan-offices-must-die/
======
hkarthik
In 10 years of working with startups, small niche businesses, and large corps
I've been exposed to the following:

1) Cube Farms in large corps 2) Private offices for everyone in a startup
founded by Microsoft alumni. 3) Team Rooms of 3-5 people max. 4) Large open
areas with no cube walls at all. 5) Working from home (what I do right now)

Based on this experience, I think the optimal solution is the 3-5 person team
room. It works well because it allows for a high degree of collaboration while
keeping folks outside the team at arms length to limit distraction. In this
environment, we shipped a working product written from scratch within 3
months.

Open plan offices were by far the single most distracting environment.
Ironically, I was at the same company when we switched from a 3 person team
room to an open floor plan to cut costs. The productivity hit was enormous.

Cube farms are actually better than open floor plans. They're far less
impressive and drab, but the cube walls serve as a minor barrier to
interruption since they require getting up and walking to make eye contact.

Working from home is great for productivity as a single programmer, but
collaboration is more of a challenge, and it requires solid leadership capable
of defining problems very clearly and staying focused. That's a tall order for
most startups where the ground is constantly shifting.

Private offices were great for a single programmer working on a well defined
problem, but difficult to foster the right collaborative environment. It's
hard to institute concepts like pair programming and code review under this
setup.

~~~
mindcrime
_Based on this experience, I think the optimal solution is the 3-5 person team
room. It works well because it allows for a high degree of collaboration while
keeping folks outside the team at arms length to limit distraction. In this
environment, we shipped a working product written from scratch within 3
months._

I cannot even begin to imagine how anybody could find that desirable. 3-5
people in one room? So you still get distractions, lack of privacy, and the
room will probably be too damn hot more often than not (some companies get
this part right, most don't in my experience)... and unless you _entire_ team
is those 3-5 people, you still don't get the purported advantage of maximum
ability to communicate and collaborate without having to get up and walk
somewhere. This actually sounds like the worst of all worlds to me.

Then again, I'm strongly biased towards the belief that programmers should
have private offices with doors that close.

~~~
rocha
I don't think he meant 3-5 people working in a space the size of a one person
office. If that is what he meant, you are right. Otherwise, if the space is
big as 5 small offices, it does not sound bad.

~~~
nknight
Oh yes it does. I probably caused measurable damage to my hearing trying to
block out the conversations with headphones+music. It was horrific.

~~~
jim_h
I agree. Even with my nice sound isolating earbuds (Shure), it doesn't block
out all the external sounds unless I set the volume higher than I would like.

While playing music on headphones can help block out conversations, it is
still a distraction. It's just not as annoying as hearing other people talk.

~~~
hartez
And they've never invented (to my knowledge) smell-canceling headphones.

I've worked in places where it was an issue. And it's a very difficult one to
address. "Please be quieter" is much more socially acceptable than "Please use
deodorant".

~~~
dsr_
There are two ways to handle this reasonably gracefully, and a lot of ways
that suck.

1\. In private, tell the person "I don't think your deodorant is working well
enough. Just thought you ought to know."

2\. Go to their manager, and have the manager say pretty much the same thing,
not mentioning that anyone but the manager noticed anything.

Almost anything else comes off as boorish.

------
tzs
I like this kind of layout for a group of people in a department or project:

    
    
       +---------+---------+
       |         |         |
       |         |         |
       +-----+  -+-  +-----+
       |                   |
       |     |       |     |
       +-----+       +-----+
       |     |       |     |
       |                   |
       +-----+       +-----+
       |     |       |     |
       |                   |
       +-------|   |-------+
    

The area in the middle is a common area for the group. It can have a table or
two and chairs so people can hang out there, or even bring their laptops out
and work there, when they are feeling social.

The bottom and middle side rooms are private offices. They should have doors
that close and be reasonably insulated from sound, so that a worker can work
without disturbance when they want to. Ideally, the wall wall facing the
central area should have a big window (with drapes or blinds!) so that the
person in the office can see if anything interesting is going on in the
central area. Each office should have its own light switch capable of turning
off all lights in that office.

The top two rooms can be bigger offices, or conference rooms, or break rooms
for breaks that might be too noisy in the central area.

The break in the bottom wall is the connection to the hallway.

With this environment, you can easily work in private, no distraction mode (go
into your office, close the door, and close the blinds), or in full social
mode (take your laptop to the middle area), or in between (work in your
office, but leave the door and window open, so you can keep an ear and eye on
what's going on in the social area.

Note that if you have two groups working on different things, but that have a
manager or senior engineer working with both, you can extend this concept and
put the two groups side by side, and shift and stretch one of the offices and
make it connect to both groups, so that common manager's office is in both
groups:

    
    
       +---------+---------+---------+---------+
       |         |         |         |         |
       |         |         |         |         |
       +-----+  -+-  +-----+-----+  -+-  +-----+
       |                   |                   |
       |     |       |     |     |       |     |
       +-----+       +-----+-----+       +-----+
       |     |                 |         |     |
       |               |                       |
       +-----+       +-----+-----+       +-----+
       |     |       |     |     |       |     |
       |                   |                   |
       +-------|   |-------+-------|   |-------+

~~~
ww520
BTW, did you use Emacs to draw those diagrams?

~~~
tzs
vim.

~~~
davidcuddeback
Have you seen <http://www.asciiflow.com/> ?

~~~
petepete
Also, asciio

[http://search.cpan.org/~nkh/App-
Asciio-1.02.71/lib/App/Ascii...](http://search.cpan.org/~nkh/App-
Asciio-1.02.71/lib/App/Asciio.pm)

------
lpolovets
TL;DR summary: I find open-plan offices very distracting, and I know some
other people do, therefore they are distracting for everyone and should be
eliminated.

I don't understand why there are so many blog posts describing how "X must
die" or "Y is the only good approach to doing Z." If something works well for
you, then that's wonderful! Please share it and explain the benefits and
downsides and convince me to give Your Favorite Method a try. Describing how
Your Favorite Method is actually The Only Reasonable Method (and by extension,
that I am wrong/stupid/naive/etc. to be doing anything else) will rarely win
me over.

~~~
thingie
This is actually quite sad. When you try to explain downsides of the open plan
office in noncontroversial terms and as rationally as possible, you get
ignored. You get positive response, universal agreement, but nothing actually
changes. When you use some speech figures to emphasize what your message, you
get discarded with nitpicking like this. Nothing happens either.

And nothing will ever happen, it's a bad environment, but it's easy to set up,
cheap and common everywhere. It still get the job done, though badly. You try
to find a job with something better, but then you just chose to live with it,
because it'd require different, worse sacrifices. That in turn sends a signal
that it's in fact ok and working office plan. Is there a way out? I'd like to
see a blogpost with this title, actually answering the question (preferably
with something else than no).

~~~
lpolovets
I think office layout advice is not always heeded because it is hard to
implement. Basically, if you have an open (closed) office, then switching to a
closed (open) office is a pain. Articles might sway you in one direction or
the other, but once your company is set up, it's a big hassle to shake things
up unless they are very broken. At best, you will try a different approach
if/when you start a new company.

For what it's worth, there are lots of successful companies that did fine with
offices (Microsoft) and lots of companies that did fine with open spaces
(Google).

I worked at LinkedIn while we moved through 3 office buildings. We had an open
space, then cubicles/offices, and then an open space again (each layout
decision was deliberate). Both layouts had their pros and their cons, and
that's why I'm not a fan of blog posts that dismiss the other side completely.
Office layout, like many other things, is not a problem with a one-size-fits-
all solution.

------
gruseom
Every time this subject comes up on HN, most people agree that open offices
suck. As a programmer, I don't understand this. I like collaborating. Software
is a team sport. I want a space that's optimized for teamwork.

Certainly sometimes I want to go away and think by myself. I want that option,
but not as the default.

If programmers don't work well together, then by Conway's Law neither will
their code. Beyond that, batting ideas around is just more fun than playing
the solitary genius - and produces more satisfying results.

The kind of open office I like, though, is one in which the people are all
working on the same system. I agree that noise and interference from unrelated
activity is a disaster. It's very simple: everything should be organized
around the team.

~~~
danellis
I can't think of any team sport where the members of the team need to spend
long periods of time concentrating hard, on their own, without distraction.
Can you?

~~~
gruseom
You're pushing the metaphor too hard. Most sports don't involve typing,
either.

The point is that complex enough software systems are beyond the capacity of a
single person to build, and once you have a team, the team becomes the most
important thing.

------
metajack
The book Peopleware backs up the failure of open plan offices with references
and data. For any kind of knowledge work, distraction is kryptonite.

I really enjoyed the book, and the info about open plan offices was really
interesting. I was previously a fan of the open plan, but now I think if I
ever design another office, it would be common areas and offices that close.

~~~
jtbigwoo
Peopleware has some great data about how listening to music can lower
distractions but also reduces problem solving ability. The upshot was that
test subjects could plow through code while listening to music, but tended to
miss optimizations and shortcuts.

~~~
nvarsj
I think Peopleware is a great book, but it makes bold claims with very little
experimental data. I personally find this hurts the integrity of the book and
would have preferred if the authors were a bit more humble.

The music vs silence point, for example, is based on a tiny experiment with a
small sample size. The kind of conclusions that are drawn from it in the book
are a stretch.

------
MatthewPhillips
It surprises me how few companies, even in the start-up world, hire remote
developers. I personally get more work done at home in a couple of hours than
8 hours at an office. Simply knowing that you _might_ be distracted puts, at
least for me, a strain on what gets accomplished.

~~~
metajack
As someone who works remotely most of the time, I agree.

I've also started several companies that were mostly or partially distributed.
Getting funding for those is sometimes awkward depending on the investors.
Most VCs in particular are pretty skeptical of remote work, especially if any
of the founders are remote. Even VCs who have funded well known distributed
companies tend to be a little hesitant.

Another issue is that later rounds of investment are really difficult if you
don't have traction as the VCs will scrutinize everything you do that doesn't
look normal, and distribution of people is apparently pretty off the charts.

YC is itself a good example. Everyone must co-locate to San Francisco at the
same time. 500startups is the same way. At least in the case of incubators,
the centralization is temporary, but I have no idea if there is pressure to
co-locate post-YC. Perhaps someone who is post-YC can offer some similar
experiences.

~~~
jordanb
I like to call this the "work theater" factor. Some people like to be able to
_see_ the work "being done." A large office stuffed with people makes the
company seem more "real."

To that end, the (preferably open-plan) office is a set designed to
demonstrate that "work is being done here" and everyone required to arrive at
9:00AM to type into their company provided computers during normal business
hours are extras on the set.

------
mortenjorck
I think open-plan offices work if you have the right kind of HVAC system.
Seriously, hear me out:

I work in an open-plan office. I didn't realize it when I first started, but
there's actually quite a bit of white noise from the HVAC system. Maybe it's
the nature of white noise that it wasn't immediately apparent.

One day, about a month after I had started, someone changed the thermostat
settings. The constant white noise shut off. In the silence, the _sense of
space_ of the office immediately changed. Every footstep on the loft floor was
suddenly audible. All the design conversations and dev pairing suddenly seemed
much nearer, the words much harder to ignore. It was like the office had
_shrunk_.

We tried a few hours this way, and finally set the HVAC system back to how it
had been, filling the office once again with a constant, hushing whoosh. The
space was back to normal.

~~~
albertsun
Even better, our open plan office purportedly has active noise canceling
systems similar to what are in noise canceling headphones built into the
ceiling. This is to dampen noise from elsewhere in the office and keep
distractions elsewhere from being too distracting.

~~~
wpietri
If you think they really work, could you say who makes those?

~~~
albertsun
Unfortunately, I don't know anything about them really.

------
akeefer
At Guidewire we've worked in an open-plan office for basically the whole life
of the company (roughly 10 years), and it's worked really well for us (by
whatever metric you like: successful products, financial success, employee
retention). Yes, it can be distracting to people, so most people bring
headphones, and it's important for people to be considerate and move
discussions or phone calls into side offices and conference rooms.

At least with the type of software we build, though, communication is
absolutely critical, and it's amazing how much a difference of even 10 feet
makes in the frequency with which people talk. The optimum layout for us is
roughly 1 or 2 clusters of 4-6 desks per "pod" (i.e. a cross-functional team
consisting of developers, product managers, and qa that are all working on the
same area of the product). At that level, when people are talking about
something, what they're talking about is almost always relevant to you, so
it's not necessarily a distraction: they're talking about your code and your
project, so it's a good thing that you can overhear and participate in the
conversation if you wish. If you didn't hear those conversations, you'd be out
of the loop. It's often better to be a little more distracted and all on the
same page than have a team of 5 engineers plowing ahead in different
directions.

That's a common conflation when talking about software engineering in general:
it's not just how much you get done, it's what you get done. If you get a ton
of work done on the wrong thing, you might feel really productive, but you're
not actually creating any value. At least with our software, a high level of
communication is necessary for most projects to ensure that everyone is on the
same page and rowing in the same direction. When that communication breaks
down, projects start to fail.

Your mileage may vary, of course, depending on the size of your team and the
nature of what you're building. (And it goes without saying that a giant
warehouse with desks arranged like an 1890's cloth factory is a terrible idea;
you have to consider lines of sight, and acoustics, and other environmental
things. Not all open plan offices are the same.) But this assumption that open
plan offices have been "proven" to be sub-optimal flies in the face of plenty
of empirical evidence from companies like mine that have used them very
successfully.

~~~
enginous
I'm glad this is working for you. I agree that different teams will probably
respond in different ways to open-plan offices, and that not all such offices
are created equally.

However, your claim that this has worked "really well" for you "for basically
the whole life of the company ... by whatever metric" is not "plenty of
empirical evidence." It's anecdotal, and most importantly lacks a comparison
to a different arrangement (a control). You have no idea if any of your chosen
metrics (however debatable for team effectiveness) would be better for your
current team in a different set-up.

I also disagree that just because the conversations people hear are about the
product, constantly overhearing conversations is therefore productive. If you
need everyone in the team to talk about every decision at all times, this is
probably either brought on by too few conversations or a lacking framework for
productive communication.

> If you didn't hear those conversations, you'd be out of the loop.

Why aren't you keeping track of decisions and new information formally, e.g.
by e-mail? How do you keep employees functional after they get sick or go on a
leave? If you have processes for that, then it is _not_ absolutely essential
to hear those conversations; employees can read the important stuff at the end
of the day.

~~~
akeefer
The problem with all these debates about "optimal" office layouts is that
they're all a series of non-repeatable experiments: someone can always say
"Sure, you were successful doing X, but if you'd done Y instead you would have
been _more_ successful."

The hypothesis that Y is superior then becomes non-falsifiable: if someone
doing Y fails, it wasn't because they did Y it must have been another factor,
and if someone not doing Y succeeds, then they would have been better off
doing Y. At some point, the argument becomes completely unhinged from any
real-world experience.

So really, all I can say is: we have open-plan offices, and we've been
successful/productive/kept employees happy, so clearly it is possible for
open-plan offices to work. For someone that's convinced that open-plan offices
can't possibly be a good idea, and who rejects other people's real-world
experiences, what is there left to argue over? The hypothesis becomes non-
falsifiable and there's no point talking about it.

To your point about conversations, when people are sick or on leave or working
remotely those conversations _don't_ happen and we suffer as a result. We
haven't found any replacement for impromptu conversation, or for gaining
knowledge through overhead conversations, and so on.

Just as a stupid example (though this sort of thing happens all the time),
suppose Chris goes to ask Bob a question, and Alice is setting next to Bob.
Bob thinks the answer is that you have to do A, but Bob's wrong, and Alice
knows it: the right answer is now to do B. On top of that, Denise, who's also
sitting there, hears the answer as well, and just learned something
effectively by osmosis.

If Alice wasn't sitting there, able to hear the question, she wouldn't have
jumped in, and Chris would have gotten the wrong answer and wasted hours or
days doing the wrong thing. Denise also wouldn't be clued in to how things
should work either. If Bob had a private office that Chris went to, or it was
a one-off IM or phone call, you'd have the same problems. Did everyone get a
little distracted by overhearing that conversation? Yes. But ultimately, that
productivity hit was worth it, because Chris was saved a ton of time and
Denise and Bob gained useful knowledge.

If you can convince people to use something like Campfire where they route all
communication through such that people who are remote or momentarily absent
are included, I think that can take the place of overhearing those
conversations, but it's impossible (in my experience) to convince people to do
that when they're working in the same building: people would rather just go
chat face-to-face since it's much higher bandwidth than typing.

~~~
enginous
You're right, office conditions are notoriously hard to research because
variables are abundant. However, there are ways to measure it empirically. In
the design of an experiment like that, you'd want to use metrics that are
heavily dependent on the change. Measuring financial outcomes is no good,
because they are affected in significant ways by a number of other factors
(including a large factor of luck).

A better metric for this kind of research could be stress levels because they
are significantly dependent on changes in physical working environments.
Stress is affected by a number of other work factors, such as management,
work/life balance and workload, but these can be measured and controlled for.
The effects of stress on various performance outcomes are fairly well
understood, so this relationship can be used in tandem with other variables to
ensure that a change is having the hypothesized effect. Again, it's not
simple, but it's far removed from having no comparison.

I wouldn't suggest using online communications for every decision, but rather
recording the essence of each substantial conversation digitally. Tasking one
person with sending an e-mail containing the conclusion of a discussion takes
a fraction of the man-hours consumed by a conversation, especially if many
people are frequently involved (which I still advocate against).

Further, summarizing by e-mail is an aid to people's memories, helps avoid
miscommunication by establishing a mutual understanding, and chronicles
decisions and progress for later review or lookup.

------
GiraffeNecktie
Quiet introverts in an open plan office can work reasonably well but drop one
extrovert into the mix and watch the stress levels rise and productivity
plummet.

~~~
pivo
I think that's what most people don't understand. Actually, I'm not sure if
it's introverts vs. extroverts necessarily, but there are definitely some
people who thrive in a busy, loud environment but many people who don't, such
as my (admittedly introverted) self.

My boss was incredulous when I told him that his shiny new office environment
that packed 30+ people into a 30x24 ft. space was the worst environment I'd
ever worked in. He told me that they'd done this because people had complained
that the office was too quiet. <sigh>.

------
ChrisNorstrom
One day when I have a startup of my own. I'm going to have a mixture of small
offices with doors, and larger team rooms, and open space lobbies. Everyone
must have wheels on their entire desk. And they'll be able to move around to
whatever office suits them for that day, for that problem. That would be my
dream because that's what I would like myself. Having options and being able
to decide for myself.

~~~
oacgnol
From what I've read [1], Valve employs the desk-on-wheels configuration to
great success. The higher-order function to this is that teams can be fluid
and the process for reconfiguring for new projects is as easy as wheeling your
desk around.

[1] [http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-
article/where-t...](http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-
article/where-the-science-happens-the-penny-arcade-report-goes-for-a-tour-
though-th)

~~~
marshray
Looks nice!

I must admit when you said "desk-on-wheels" my first thought was that it
sounded like something from a Terry Gilliam movie.

------
gordonguthrie
This discussion starts from the premise that developer time is the most
critical thing for which you must optimize your organisation.

The most critical thing is usually the customer and optimizing for the
customer means doing things differently:

* having the developers take customer calls and help requests

* increasing the amount of time the developers spend understanding the users - in order to reduce the amount of irrelevelant work being done

* cultivating a culture of 'code not written'

Do you really think that cranking code is the most important thing your
organisation does?

~~~
jim_h
In my experience, the developers should NOT be taking customer calls.

Once a client knows that a developer will take calls, they will take advantage
of it and try to get in new features and changes. There should be a layer
between developers and clients. This helps the developers not get distracted
or waste their time by explaining things that someone could do also (or
better).

Yes, the developers should be aware of what the clients are having issues with
or what features they want, but there should be a 'firewall' between
developers and clients. Not all the time, but most of the time. The firewall
can be imaginary, but the client needs to believe it exists.

~~~
jrs235
I tend to agree with this point. There should be a firewall or layer between
customer -> developer communications. The firewall intercepts/takes/handles
incoming requests from the customer and forwards them on to the dev team or a
developer who, if needed, can/will contact the customer. The customers should
never have a direct line to developers unless you only want developers to work
on "urgent" (regardless of important or unimportant) issues and "small/easy"
features.

~~~
gordonguthrie
I am not saying that all developers should always be on customer support.

But all developers should sometimes be on customer support - maybe 1 day a
week, maybe more.

------
zinssmeister
I was never a fan of open-plan office space. As a programmer it's like trying
to get work done at a school cafeteria. Which doesn't work without a good pair
of head phones. How stupid, if you think about it, we all sit around with head
phones, trying to stay in the zone. Yeah I get work done in such environments,
but my best work was created in a 2-4 people office or at home, working on
problems by myself while connected to a team chat.

~~~
amackera
To me, it's more like working in a busy computer lab. This works well for me
since I was conditioned through university to be productive in a lab
environment, to get things done efficiently and to not be distracted by other
groups or people in a lab setting.

I think there should be both quiet isolation environments and communal lab-
type environments in software companies. It's surprising to me how there is so
much emphasis in hunkering down in one place and staying put.

------
noarchy
Most developers who I've known are easily-distracted from being in the "zone",
and I include myself in that list. I'm always more productive when working
remotely, where I can control my work environment. Second in order of
preference is having a private office. It doesn't matter if it is little more
than a closet with a door. I've been in nearly every scenario described by
folks here on HN, and the most toxic was working in an open office space, and
having an exit door behind me, to boot.

------
kruipen
That's the one thing that MSFT really got right: private offices with doors
that close.

------
mhd
I think it depends a lot on how the people work together. If you're doing a
lot of impromptu "meetings", pair programming, brainstorming sessions etc,
then this setup is probably an advantage.

Personally, I can cancel out most distractions by a large enough monitor and
headphones, but get really awkward when someone is standing behind me or
walking by. So I need to have my back to a wall, whether it's an open office
or not.

I think we all do agree that offices without fixed desks are a big no-no. Some
companies tried to do that a while ago, where you just have a cart with your
stuff and work where you're needed (with thin clients way back when, and
laptops a bit later). Yuck.

~~~
packetslave
Yes, but "impromptu meetings" are toxic for getting things done when you're
coding. An interrupt-driven culture makes it a nightmare to get into a flow
state and stay there without constantly having to context-switch because some
jerk has to have an answer RIGHT NOW and can't be bothered to send email.

~~~
mhd
Some teams benefit more from immediate responses than "flow state". If you're
running a operation where there's lots of small features and design niggles,
brainstorming them out with the rest of the team might be better than
achieving perfect zanshin, but still having no idea, or doing 8 hours of back-
and-forth intense coding then finding out that there's a standard library
function or better algorithm that your co-worker could have told you hours
ago.

Granted, this would mostly apply to teams who are either very newbie-heavy or
work on very small feature increments at a time - or both. And maybe some
designers, but I'm not qualified to talk about that. For most other purposes,
more isolated environments with a good tech solution for communication would
be preferable (IRC, Basecamp, Jabbber etc.)

~~~
devs1010
Even then, you can keep communication via email or IM, just send a message to
the person who may know, "hey, do we have any library for this, seems like we
might", etc and they get back to you when they can, you don't have to have
face to face to ask questions, as you said, mainly its important for newbies,
but more experienced dev's should know when to ping someone even if the
response won't be immediate.

------
CGamesPlay
I really enjoy working in an open plan office. The distractions don't really
bother me and I appreciate the energy level going around. I obviously use
headphones to cancel out noise when I need to focus, sometimes just playing
white noise tracks or no sound at all
(<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPoqNeR3_UA> is a personal favorite).

Having a heavy distraction-oriented work flow forces you into a mode where you
segment your tasks as atomically as possible, for example using the pomodoro
technique. There are certainly times when a quiet space is necessary, and I
will retreat away from my desk to a library or quiet corner where I'm not near
people.

I wonder how much of this is because I am young (24). My generation has grown
up bombarded by distractions. So much so, in fact, that I find that there are
equally many distractions inside of my computer as there are coming from the
office plan.

~~~
joezydeco
It's a big help if everyone around you understands the rules and nuances.
Things like "If my headphones are on, do NOT talk to me or even tap me on the
shoulder"

It's when you try everything possible to shut out distractions (yes, including
the Les Nessman tape on the floor, you older folk will know what I'm talking
about) and it still doesn't work.

------
davidf18
Private offices are definitely the most productive. Developers should avoid
firms that do not understand this basic piece of information. Conversely,
those firms that understand that their success depends on getting the best
people will build office space to help recruit those people.

------
peacemaker
I'm currently working at a place which separates its programmers into offices
of 2 or 3 people. I'm used to working in open plan offices and so far my
current situation feels much like the worst of both worlds. Obviously someone,
somewhere thought this would make us more productive but I can't see it.

As with the article I agree that there should be some private space for
programmers to work alone. Perhaps not 100% of the time but instead have the
open plan aspect for communication and then a separate series of offices
people can move to and close the door for some privacy. Not sure how well
that'd work in some environments but it's something to think about.

~~~
marshray
That would feel weird being in a small space with just one or two other people
all the time.

Having worked in different arrangements, I must say that every developer
having their own office with a closable door is really the most productive.
Though I have seen very small close-knit teams work sitting around the same
table together.

But most companies prefer to give the offices to managers and put software
developers out in the cubes.

~~~
OneBytePerGreen
Ironic, isn't it. Managers whose jobs revolve around communication,
coordination, and staying on top of things get offices with doors where they
can isolate themselves. Developers whose job requires long stretches of focus
and concentration are kept in open spaces with numerous distractions.

~~~
philwelch
And CEO's--who spend the most time _outside_ the office--get the biggest
offices at all.

Offices aren't intended as workspace, they're intended as status symbols.

~~~
Drbble
I would never want work somewhere where the CEO had a large office. Unless
maybe CEO was owner and is buying the office with his own money.

At my last job, I had a bigger windowier office than the CEO, and our company
had millions in revenue.

~~~
philwelch
I don't think I've ever worked someplace where the CEO _didn't_ have the
biggest, nicest office in the company. Although in both cases the CEO was also
founder and owned upwards of half the company.

In any case, it doesn't really bother me as long as I have the resources to
get my work done. It's just an interesting observation.

------
wolframarnold
The most effective setups I've seen and experienced are those that keep noise
and distractions low, communication easy and incentives to drop into and stay
in the zone maximized. Incidentally these factors are not limited to just
workspace layout. I think overly focusing on work space at the expense of
other crucial factors is another case of "sub-optimization" and thereby not
"lean".

Some of these factors are:

* Gathering the team in one place and ideally at the same time. Standup meetings do this, as well as catered breakfasts and lunches.

* Open spaces that provide ready access to other folks, engineers, designers, product owners. It's amazing how high the hurdle of having to get up and open a door can be and how amazing the cost of inferior decisions made by coders is when asking someone requires overcoming hurdles. Remember that the desired behavior must also be the easiest behavior.

* No employee-specific workstations. The easier it is to move around and the more common the computer setup the better collaboration can ensue.

* Subdued noise levels. This can be accomplished through white noise generators, Dj Tiesto, sound swallowing wall fabrics and carpets, etc.

* Systems that capture project data in structured ways, minimizing the need and role of email.

* Separate gathering spaces for socializing, ping pong, lunches, meetings, phone calls to not disturb the main work area.

* A prevailing practice of pair programming and TDD.

Interestingly, some of the most successful development shops like Pivotal Labs
and Hashrocket do exactly that.

------
caublestone
I've always like Pixars office. Certain areas for people that need to work in
groups and offices in upstairs hall ways for people to work in private
offices. Sort of the best of both worlds.

[http://www.home-designing.com/2011/06/pixars-office-
interior...](http://www.home-designing.com/2011/06/pixars-office-interiors-2)

------
tonylemesmer
Slightly forced connection in the intro to the design of Apple stores. Open
plan offices have been around plenty longer than Apple shops.

It is good to have a mix of spaces, but designing people's main work space to
be a place for constant interruptions does seem to be a fundamental flaw.
Breakout rooms and private spaces should be in the mix.

------
txttran
1\. Distractions are not always bad. Given the number of hours devs can work,
sometimes a short distraction is healthy. 2\. Every developer knows to invest
a good set of noise canceling headphones in an open office. This allows you to
be in 'heads-down' mode and your coworkers know not to bother you unless it's
work related.

~~~
jes5199
I hate wearing headphones even more than I hate being able to hear all 250 of
my coworkers at once.

------
jjcm
I'm at Microsoft right now. Microsoft has a policy that everyone gets their
own office, if they want it. They "if they want it" part there is key - myself
and everyone else on my team was given the choice to have either an open work
environment or an office environment. Most of my team and I chose to pursue
the open route (a lot of our team is composed of designers, not programmers).
I've enjoyed it quite a bit for meetings and other collaborative efforts. When
I need to get a lot of my own work done though, I escape somewhere else or do
it from home. The reverse is true as well - I know some people who chose to
have offices who will work a couple days a week out in the open, simply to
collaborate with others more closely.

Each has its benefits. Open-plan offices shouldn't die, but people need to
realize that they come with ups and downs.

------
brudgers
Open plan offices can solve some problems really well - providing fresh air
and daylight to a large number of people efficiently, when executed well.

They can provide a creative, collaborative and egalitarian studio like
environment, again when executed well.

What they struggle with primarily is sound isolation, attenuation, and
masking. Secondarily they struggle with visual and olfactory distractions.

Designing an open office to look like an Apple store is a mistake. Apple
stores are designed to be lively and animated - there's a reason for all those
hard surfaces, particularly the glass ceiling. That reason is that they
reflect sound. There's also a reason coffee shops provide big overstuffed
chairs and carpeted floors.

------
isb
The ideal setup that I've found is having two people per office that we have
at my current workplace:

\- cuts out distractions: you can only get distracted if you decide to talk
with your office-mate. If either of us wants to chat with someone else, we
move our discussion to a meeting room.

\- avoids the isolation and slacking off that a single person per office setup
generates.

\- if office-mates are chosen intelligently, it can result in good
collaboration for e.g. pairing a mentor with a junior programmer. A good idea
would be to change the pairs every few months.

------
growingconcern
There's one reason why open plan will always rule over individual offices or
3-4 person team rooms: you can fit more people into open plans. If square
footage matters to your bottom line (ie your office isn't out in the warehouse
district) then you can get more employees per sq ft. Bitch all you want, but
it ain't gonna change.

------
wpietri
I think it depends somewhat on how you do it.

We're very collaborative, so being locked away in rooms would be a pain. We
all sit together, but we reduce the pain of open-plan offices by being careful
to minimize distraction. E.g., phone calls happen in other rooms. Meetings
that don't involve the whole team go in the conference room.

------
teek
I wouldn't mind a low-height cubicle farm. That is nobody can see each other
if everyone is sitting down, if you stand up you can see people without
getting on your toes.

I would also arrange the cubicles such that your back is never to the
entrance. So you know when someone is walking into your space.

~~~
jw_
Such things exist and are horrible to work in.

I worked in a very large dev office that was essentially a gigantic low-height
cube farm and sound carried for-frigging-EVER - conversations 20m away may as
well have been in your lap. Plus, if you happen to be taller sitting down than
the wall height (as I was), then you also get the nice distraction of seeing
developers and other worker bees shuffling around the place.

If you are in such a space, then yes, snagging a desk that does not expose
your back to the entrance is key to maintaining some level of sanity. A better
solution long-term is to find a less brain-damaged environment to work in.

------
dfc
Absolutist hyperbolic linkbaity titles must die...

------
organico
I couldn't agree more. I need a quiet place alone to program, and I've just
recently moved into a coworking space. Total loss of productivity. I'm going
to start working from home again, at least 2-3 days a week...

------
watmough
One layout that works well is small / tiny offices around an external wall,
with conference rooms, bathrooms, corridors etc in the middle.

My current job is at quite old building (70's) with a floor laid out like
this, and it's just fantastic. I have enough space for some computers, a room
I can work in in peace and quiet, and just enough space for small meetings and
co-working when needed.

Any negative effects of being in a private office can be canceled by having
office communicator, Yahoo! chat etc.

Typical 70's office buildings seem to often be laid out like this.

------
URSpider94
What I would really like to see is a company where employees get to choose
from a variety of seating arrangements to pick one that meets their needs. I
know some people who absolutely thrive on the open-plan office; these are
probably the same people who did all of their homework with the TV on. I also
know people who have to wear aircraft-grade earmuffs to avoid being
disturbed/distracted by the sound of people walking by their office door.

------
jmduke
I don't understand how it's a confusing concept that one particular work setup
isn't universally beneficial.

I understand -- you don't like open-plan offices, you don't think that they're
an effective environment. That doesn't mean that they're universally terrible;
it may work for some companies, and it may fail for others.

------
bh42222
Offices, real offices for each developer are best. However, open-plan is still
better than cubicles. Cubicles share all the problems of open-plans + you
stare at the walls of your cubicle.

I'd love to have an office but I prefer open plans over cubicles.

~~~
amackera
I hate cubicles. Cubicles are soul-crushing abominations.

------
nirvana
Before I quit working for other people I used this as a barometer of whether a
company was run by idiots or not. IF they had an open plan office, and were
apologetic about it, then they might be redeemable. IF they were proud of it,
then idiots. Seriously. Sales guys in a big room, they probably benefit from
the vibe. Programmers need distractions to be productive? Really?

In fact, the last company I worked at had hired way too young, and they had a
bunch of kids who thought that being in your office writing code was somehow
"Bad" because you were "siloed away". They liked to hang out all together at
one big table, and chat away all day long with their laptops out.

In the time I was there, I don't think they ever realized they were getting
nothing done. (I was curious as to whether they were onto something or not, so
I tracked the number of stories and features they committed vs. me and my
officemate who at 26 was the "old man" of the bunch, though still much younger
than me he was old enough to know what flow was.)

Result: the two of us were about 4 times more productive than the 5 of them.

One of those five, though, was the "director of engineering" (20 years old)
and was constantly chastising us for spending too much time in our offices.

When it became clear that this was going to affect my evaluation, I chose to
exit that company. (They folded about a year later, never having accomplished
the short term goal they were working on while I was there.)

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe some people are more productive in groups of 2-3.
That's fine. Set up offices for them to work that way.

Just let me have some damn peace and quiet so I can get work done! (and I
never seem to have a problem hooking up with other engineers to talk about
architecture or what have you to keep us coordinated, though often this is via
email or chat... which is much less interrupting than a tap on the shoulder.)

\-----------

On further thought-- maybe designers and people whose job is to sling HTML or
javascript don't need to have "Flow". Maybe the jobs for these people are
light enough that there is no context switching cost or the cost is low.
That's not the case for my work or my career. There's often a very large
amount of stuff I need to track in my head... because I'm generally solving
hard problems on the back end, rather than making UIs or web pages.

~~~
ricardobeat
> people whose job is to sling HTML or javascript

What was that? Coding HTML or programming in javascript might not be as
mentally hard (most of the time), but is just as much work as anything else.

~~~
nirvana
And where exactly did I say it wasn't work? I said that it might not have the
same interruptions costs, and I said this as a way of acknowledging the people
in this thread who say that they think open plan offices are great.

So, what you did, was, you cut out a few words, removing all context, and then
pretended like there was no context, and put words in my mouth implying I
denigrated a certain type of work.

In short, you told a lie.

Disagree with me if you like. In fact, the whole point of that addendum was to
acknowledge that some will disagree with me.

But lying about what I said like that? In an attempt to pretend like I said
something offensive so you can be offended?

Childish.

~~~
ricardobeat
Wow. I think this conversation ends here.

------
CPlatypus
Hey, crazy idea: why don't more employers give workers a _choice_? As a quick
read of this thread will show, some people like quiet so they can concentrate,
while others like the interaction and "energy" of being with others. That's
fine. Live and let live. A startup might have to choose one kind of space, but
you don't have to get all that large before it becomes possible to have
separate areas/floors for different work styles. It seems like such a no-
brainer, but I've only ever seen companies do "one size fits all" or
segregation by status. Any employer who let me _choose_ whether to work in a
private office or a 2-5 person office or a big open area would definitely get
some extra points from me.

~~~
keithpeter
Could be tricky getting the choices sorted out - will you have enough people
who want the open plan arrangements? will people just go for private offices
on a status basis?

In teaching we have various 'learning style' audits. A common one is the VARK
profile

<http://www.vark-learn.com/english/page.asp?p=questionnaire>

Could you imagine what a 'preferred productive environment' questionnaire
might look like? Would this help make sensible choices and slot people in to
existing teams?

~~~
v0cab
I thought that 'learning styles' stuff was discredited.

~~~
keithpeter
[http://www.sportscoachuk.org/sites/default/files/Coffield%20...](http://www.sportscoachuk.org/sites/default/files/Coffield%20\(2004a\)%20Should%20we%20be%20using%20learning%20styles.pdf)

Frank Coffield and team evaluated the field some time ago. VARK was one of the
few that they found had some merit. I find that a visual explanation can help
some students over the 'textbook' verbal/arithmetical presentation. See

[http://www.slideshare.net/keithpeter/reverse-percentages-
a-v...](http://www.slideshare.net/keithpeter/reverse-percentages-a-visual-
approach-presentation)

(Rendering oddly in Firefox, slideshare used to be so useful...)

------
funkah
This preoccupation with "flow" is getting to be a bit much, I think. It's
important to be able to focus on your work, but it's also important not to
become like "The Princess and the Pea". You need to be able to do good work
when conditions are not 100% exactly the way you want.

~~~
philwelch
Okay, but I still don't see this as a relevant or useful contribution to the
discussion about how to lay out an office. I really don't like the attitude of
"we're going to deliberately make it harder for you to do your job, and we
expect you to man up and deal with it."

