
Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace - timr
http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/30/google-got-it-wrong-the-open-office-trend-is-destroying-the-workplace/
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qntmfred
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8815065](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8815065)

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ruffyen
I am pretty sure this article is missing the point. Companies like Google and
Facebook do in fact employ open work spaces. But they also deploy areas where
employees can work with a lot more space. Areas like the sleep pods etc that
Google is known for.

You can't just take the bits you like from a plan and throw out the stuff you
don't want to pay for. There is a yin and yang to office spaces. This is a
classic case of taking what you want and throwing out the rest because who
needs that hippy bullshit.

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justizin
Totally agree.

Also, if you have a flexible enough schedule, your desk is only a satellite
office. If you want to be alone and in the quiet all day, home is often great
for that.

I think some people miss out on the possibility that their employer pays more
for their office than they pay for rent!

The final note about feeling self conscious leaving right at 5, I get it, but
if you're effective, and the company is run with appropriate principles, that
shouldn't be a thing. Leave at 3, catch up mail at home, who cares?

It's not reasonable to keep a bunch of opaque walls separating all employees
so they can have flexible schedules while pretending not to. That is not
progress.

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siliconc0w
Between morning rituals, standups, meetings, breaks, and blocking tasks I'm
probably spending around 40% of my time on real work. Open offices probably
cut that in half.

The problem is most claimed benefits are really just poor project management -
which is really the biggest cause of low productivity. It isn't a good thing
that you can easily interrupt a neighbor to solve an issue. Because 9/10
neighbors won't complain and you'll keep on doing it because you keep getting
your issues solved. Interruptions should be difficult to encourage the
creation of self-service tools or processes to solve common problems. I've
seen the same person interrupted like 10 times in 30 minutes because he is so
damn good at fixing everyone else's problems.

Most places don't use available tracking software well and they hire non
technical people to manage technical projects. This leads to using multiple
task tracking systems poorly and poorly defined direction and tasks. There
aren't good processes in place to solve different types of issues so they
revert to the lowest common denominator (face to face or email) when they
could otherwise be handled asynchronously.

If everyone gets nice clearly defined tasks defined and managed in a single
place and there are tools in place so they can help themselves you get a bunch
better environment regardless of how people are sitting.

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Harimwakairi
Do people just throw the name "Google" into headlines now as a means to grab
attention? Google neither invented nor popularized the open office, which has
been around since the 1960's.

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Multiplayer
The perfect office is a combination of working from my home some days, coming
into an open office on others, then working remotely while traveling, and
sometimes working in an office at the office.

Done.

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swengw
There are rough corners, but there's also room for improvement:

"Now Herman Miller, the firm that, however unintentionally, started the shift
to cubicles, is trying to reshape the office yet again. The “Living Office” is
a new attempt to combine the best of private and social space. It looks rather
like a fancy hotel: open-plan but with desks set in friendly clusters and
separated by low, clear partitions. Workers can also perch at a counter-top
next to the coffee station, or lounge on sofas in a plaza or café-style
seating in a courtyard. Benches nicknamed “landing strips” are placed outside
conference rooms to encourage post-meeting chats. Pods are available for
concentrated work, and even for relaxation. Everywhere there are glass-encased
meeting rooms and a few solo spaces. About 30% of the staff have no permanent
desk.

Light streams in and sound is controlled with dividing walls and “pink
noise”—white noise focused on the frequencies of human speech, which can
reduce the distance at which a conversation is audible from 50 feet to 12-16
feet. The result, the firm says, is greater focus, accuracy and short-term
memory."

[http://www.economist.com/news/international/21637359-how-
wor...](http://www.economist.com/news/international/21637359-how-workers-
ended-up-cubesand-how-they-could-break-free-inside-box)

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jondubois
Yes, overall, I much prefer having a separate office. When I consider taking
on a new position, an open office is a huge negative and I expect a higher
salary/benefits to compensate for it.

It's true that there is a bit less communication happening when each employee
has a separate office but each interaction is MUCH more succinct and
productive. There is no chit-chat and employees don't get penalized for not
fitting in socially (you get more varied personality/thinking types). Also,
employees feel more valued if they have their own office and they are more
motivated to deliver results.

Open offices mix work and social aspects together and it makes it difficult
for introverts to strive in the workplace.

It's OK for small startups but it's terrible for large companies. It's
discrimination against introverts - These people will either leave your
company or get fired because they won't be able to focus on their work
whenever someone walks behind them.

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balls187
> Bosses love the ability to keep a closer eye on their employees, ensuring
> clandestine porn-watching, constant social media-browsing and unlimited
> personal cellphone use isn’t occupying billing hours

As a boss, this is not why I advocate open spaces.

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pivo
Ok, so why do you advocate open spaces?

Personally I hate them because they destroy my productivity and that's the one
thing I enjoy about work.

The trade off is that I hear a lot more office gossip as well as lots of
details of my coworker's personal lives, including their children's play date
plans, personal health issues, etc. If that's what my boss is after then the
open office plan is working splendidly.

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balls187
> Ok, so why do you advocate open spaces?

I like having my teams sit together, not isolated from each other because it
increases collaboration. This was my experience back in 2007 when I first
worked in a shared office with 3 other people.

I empathize with you. The way we approach what you've discussed is to gently
remind people when things get loud, that we have a "quiet library" policy.

It's certainly not so I can monitor what my teams are doing.

If I could design my own office it would be similar to Valve's model. Semi
isolated areas with desks on wheels, so teams could sit together. There would
also be "quiet" offices, where people can go work when they need complete
isolation. This isn't too unlike what MSFT Google and FB already have today.

My problem with offices is that no matter how you slice it, they always end up
being a proxy for status. It's difficult to scale offices with the number of
people, so you have to allocate them in some sort of "fair" fashion. At one
company, offices were originally assigned by tenure. As the company expanded,
a number of executives and upper level managers specifically wanted offices
because of their "title." The company changed it's stance to instead allocate
offices by each department, based on role, then tenure.

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dangayle
I have the opposite yet same reaction to open office environments. I was
always the loud person in the group, and I have a hard time staying out of
conversations with others. I try to keep myself to myself, but I know that I
distract others around me.

Ironically, having a private office not only kept my noise from other people,
but I actually got quieter because it was simply the presence of the group
around me that got me loud. I got a lot more work done too, since I wasn't
constantly distracted from the discussions going on around me, work related or
not.

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abalone
Needless to say this is not a vigorously researched opinion piece. She claims
open plan leads to more _illness_ because "last flu season took down a
succession of my co-workers like dominoes" \-- the epitome of anecdotal
evidence.

As for the claim that communication's not a problem with private offices.
Cornell did a study awhile back that found something interesting. The standard
for team collaboration _changes_ depending on whether you have private or open
offices. With open plan "frequent communication" means several times a day,
often on the fly. But if you have a private office you concept of "frequent"
means "several times a week in a scheduled meeting". [1]

So that's consistent with private office people saying everything's fine --
because they've lowered their standard for team interaction.

Cornell also noted that office workers are usually incentivized to prioritize
their personal productivity over team productivity, because compensation is
only or mostly tied to the former. That goes a long way towards describing why
employees often complain that they can't focus and want to be left alone,
while management extolls the virtues of increased team collaboration.
Management are the ones that are properly incentivized to balance individual
and team productivity.

[1]
[https://web.archive.org/web/20140615182702/http://iwsp.human...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140615182702/http://iwsp.human.cornell.edu/file_uploads/office_ex2_1238259706.pdf)

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waterlesscloud
Do you have evidence that open office actually increases team productivity?
Not anecdotes, since as you point out those aren't worth much. And not team
interaction, which is tangential to the real goal- team productivity.

~~~
abalone
Do you have evidence that private offices do? I'd imagine that it's a hard
question for which to construct a perfectly controlled experiment in the real
world. The Cornell study is one of the better ones I've seen.

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Fizzadar
I work in an open office and it's certainly got a fair share of ups & downs.
It makes for a more sociable office resulting in a stronger 'team' feel.
However, the music/noise/chatter force me to wear headphones ( _and_ crank
them up). Even with the 'phones, I'm definitely more effective working from
home (even the team agrees).

I'd like to see companies implementing mixed layouts, perhaps where teams work
together in open offices, but not _the entire company /multiple teams_. Or -
as per the article - a mix between working in-open-office and from home.

