
Open plan offices attract highest levels of worker dissatisfaction - amerika_blog
http://theconversation.com/open-plan-offices-attract-highest-levels-of-worker-dissatisfaction-study-18246
======
fishtoaster
I don't think open offices are necessarily bad, but that they're harder to get
right. What you need is:

\- A a decent cultural protocol around it. One place I worked had the very
strong rule that you start all non-emergency communication asynchronously
(usually text chat), even if the person is right next to you. Another place I
worked at strongly respected headphones as the "don't bother me" signal. \- A
reasonable number of walled-off rooms for anyone to use. Need to take a phone
call? Have a quick 1-on-1? Debate something loudly with 3-5 people? You need
to have rooms, of varying sizes, to handle these use cases near at hand. \-
Minimal noise that's not related to collaboration. Eg, no loud ringing phones.
No phone-based customer support department in the same room as the devs. No
kitchen (full of dishwashers, coffee grinders, etc) area facing the open
workspace.

Open offices can work, but only if you go out of your way to make them work.
Just throwing a few dozen devs in a warehouse is a recipe for dissatisfaction.
I think that that happens more often than not, resulting in things like this
study.

~~~
aimhb
> One place I worked had the very strong rule that you start all non-emergency
> communication asynchronously (usually text chat), even if the person is
> right next to you.

A little bit off topic, but I too have experienced this, and I have to say,
it's awful for productivity, team building, and team assimilation. As a new
hire, I would send my mentor a question and it might be ten minutes to fifty
minutes before I would get a reply. By then, I'd all but forgotten what I was
asking about in the first place, since I had moved on because of not knowing
how long I'd have to wait. That led to wasted time and an overall loss of
focus.

No matter the environment, text-based and asynchronous communication just
aren't very effective compared to spoken communication, even when considering
the interrupted party momentarily losing their flow.

~~~
twistedpair
Amen. Worked in an open floor plan (30ft long rows with 8 people at each) and
now work in an office of cubes (6'x7'), so actual desk space is the same. I
found the developer collaboration and communication far better in the open
plan than the closed plan. People were always communicating the the former and
almost never pop their heads up for air in the later.

Today a coworker was IM'ing me and I then I realized that he was sitting
literally 18" from me behind a partition so I just starting talking out loud
to him. Seemed to unsettle him. Collaborate damn it!

~~~
eropple
_> Collaborate damn it!_

Do they want to hear you talking to him? I sure wouldn't want people talking
while I'm trying to concentrate.

"Collaboration" doesn't have to mean annoying your coworkers. If you need to
do things aloud, that's fine--I sometimes find it better too--but it's vastly
better go somewhere private for it.

~~~
mikevm
People collaborate on open source projects all the time without uttering a
damn word.

------
nilkn
It's increasingly becoming evident how ineffective offices can be as
workplaces, especially in light of better and better communication for
developers over the internet. Obviously this isn't true for all places and all
cultures, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't frequently question my basic
physical presence in the office sometimes. It is common for me to not talk to
a single coworker about work throughout the day. Meetings are rare, always
scheduled ahead of time, and always short. I feel like our office mostly
exists as a vestige of past tradition, a celebration of our success (it's
styled after our products), and also out of a deep-seated paranoia about the
productivity of workers you can't see, even though as developers we have very,
very concrete ways of measuring productivity.

(Also, the nondevelopers are in constant verbal communication.)

All that said, I'm not dissatisfied. Our office is always very quiet and cool.
The kitchen is stocked. The chairs are comfortable. It's not a bad set up at
all and I don't find that it really hinders my productivity too much. But it
does feel unnecessary, and I personally know I'd be more productive
telecommuting 3-4 days a week. Dressing up and behaving professionally for 8-9
hours straight does take a toll on my ability to output good code, albeit a
minor one, and the location of the office in the city certainly takes a huge
toll on my bank account (housing is 2-3x more expensive in this area, but the
commutes are horrible from far out).

~~~
PhasmaFelis
I thought telecommuting was a great idea until I tried it. I have enough
trouble focusing on my work _at_ work. At home, no one can tell that I'm
playing Team Fortress in my underwear as long as I keep the IM window open,
and my productivity basically craters. I'd like to think that I'm a grown-up
who doesn't need someone looking over his shoulder but, well, I'm not.

~~~
rwallace
Then you should work in an office. Different strokes for different folks. I
only object to the bullshit people sometimes throw out that just because they
personally are a better team player in an office, they assume everyone else
also must be.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
Oh, absolutely. If it works for you, that's awesome. Didn't mean to imply
otherwise.

------
aspensmonster
>An open plan workplace, in which enclosed rooms are eschewed in favour of
partitioned or non-partitioned desks arranged around a large room, are
supposed to promote interaction between workers and boost teamwork.

Instead, everyone's too busy maintaining social facades for the entirety of
their day, day after day, rather than focusing on their work.

~~~
debt
My lord this is truth. I don't care what you did yesterday, what you're doing
tonight, what you're doing this weekend, why you're wearing what you're
wearing, who got you that thing, when you got in, when you leave, why you hate
brad, why you hate brad but love donna, why donna's nice but you'd prefer to
be home studying. did you get an extra $30 deducted from your paycheck?
doesn't that suck? it only takes me 20 minutes to get work, it use to take me
15.

I don't care. I've come here to work.

I enjoy interacting socially, but I really honest-to-goodness would rather
talk about work at work. _I really truly don 't care about your personal life
at work._ I would feel so relieved if I never had a conversation about
something personal at work.

It doesn't have to be Nazi Germany, but it doesn't need to be constant
chatter.

Yes I'm an engineer.

~~~
vectorjohn
Well, it sounds like you're mostly just an antisocial kind of person. I mean,
if you decide to put an arbitrary wall between you and your co-workers where
you are simply not allowed to make friends with anyone, that's a pretty sad
existence. I mean, this job takes up ~50% of your waking life, and during that
time you can't treat anyone around you as a friend?

If all your co-workers are such uninteresting people, maybe you're at the
wrong company.

~~~
debt
Whether or not my coworkers have unique and interesting lives shouldn't really
matter in a work environment, no? Shouldn't the thing we're all working on and
the goal were all striving towards be number one?

My bend at work is definitely more towards the antisocial simply because I
would like to focus on work. Bother me if it's work related otherwise maybe
wait until 5pm or whenever we're all wrapping up.

I'm down for making friends, but we don't need to talk _all week long_ about
the camping trip we're all going on this weekend. It's a thing, it's
happening. Why don't we talk about it after it happens?

Honestly, I know it sounds cheesy, but I wish so bad to have worked on an
Apollo mission or the Manhattan project. In my fantasy, those engineers just
showed up and talked about _the most interesting and fascinating and craziest
shit_ and then went and built it. At lunch people talked about the minutiae of
putting a dude on the moon or what the hell Rutherford scattering was and NOT
the perfect temperature to roast a coffee bean or why the iphone sucks.

I know, I know, some people want to decompress and unwind throughout the day
and not be so preoccupied with that intense shit all the time. I just think
it'd be cool if people were more like that.

~~~
thomaslangston
I think you answered your own question. If you're saving babies or firing a
moonshot, yes work is number one.

Otherwise work is a priority, but not the only priority and maybe not the top
priority. I love building things my customers love, but that's not the only
thing I love. I expect to share some of who I am and learn some about my
coworkers during the 9 to 5. The ability for my coworkers and I to click, on
multiple levels, is important. It helps both for building rapport among
teammates to solve business issues and as compensation in the form of a
positive work environment.

And while I expect many intense work environments are much more focused, I
also know some of the most intense environments still have small talk,
sometimes intentionally thrown in to diffuse that intensity. It helps people
view each other holistically as actual people, not just tools to solve
problems or obstacles to overcome.

~~~
debt
I agree. The problem occurs when the chatter occupies nearly 30% of my working
day. I'm okay if it's 10-15% I guess. But not really. Ideally it'd be like
0-5%.

I don't like feeling like an unproductive schlub at work.

 _Y 'all are paying me all this money to work, not to socialize._

Sorry it took so long to get to that point, but ultimately that's it. I'm
getting paid a lot of money _to work._ Not to socialize. And I will _gladly
work my ass off_ so don't think I need to socialize a whole bunch throughout
the day to get shit done or to enjoy myself.

~~~
dingaling
> I don't like feeling like an unproductive schlub at work.

I am very jealous. Some of us have very boring, unchallenging, crap corporate-
drone jobs in which the 30% social distraction is the only way to make it
through the day without going mad.

Feeling 'unproductive' doesn't factor into it when one's work seems
meaningless.

Quick riposte: 'just leave' doesn't pay the mortgage.

------
bane
Open plan offices are one of many signals that make me very wary of modern
management concepts. In trade publications 20 years ago, you'd read breathless
articles about the end of cubicles and the advent of minimalist, modern, open
office plans.

 _gasp!_ collaboration!

 _gasp!_ accountability!

 _gasp!_ blah blah

Now years later it's obvious why they took over the world, CEOs everywhere saw
the bright open office spaces, with just desks and

 _gasp!_ cost savings!

Open office plans are a way for a company to be cheap and that's about it. No
investment in offices needed, no investment in fussy cubicles, no interior
decorators needed (just expose the brick!). Rent a warehouse, buy desks at
IKEA , assemble and voila instant office.

These days management even tries to get strategic about open plans. I'll put
this department next to this one and this one so they can talk to each other
more freely and voila synergy!

Absolutely the worst environment for thinking jobs possible (the
contrapositive is, if it's a good environment for your job it's probably not a
thinking job).

~~~
sahglie
For me the thing that is really the worst about the open workspace is not the
noise--I can put in ear plugs and then noise reducing headphones. The worst is
seeing people move around in my peripheral vision, that just makes it
impossible to concentrate.

~~~
hammock
Have you tried blinders? Funny enough this ad says "Blinders, because she
shies at new ideas"

[http://www.matthewkressel.net/wp-
content/uploads/blinders.jp...](http://www.matthewkressel.net/wp-
content/uploads/blinders.jpg)

~~~
sahglie
LOL, I haven't. Thinking about a dev wearing those on top of noise reducing
headphones is a pretty great mental image though. :-)

------
peeters
I'm pretty happy with my current open environment, coming off of a fairly
negative open environment.

Here's what I think they did right:

\- High partitions around team cluster, low partitions within cluster. Means
you don't see just anybody who's standing, but can easily get eye contact with
the people you actually need to communicate with.

\- White noise generators. All ambient noise is suppressed--I can't hear the
people in the next cube if they're talking quietly. Only the shrillest beeps
or sneezes disrupt my concentration.

\- Lots of natural light. If you're going to do open concept, at least take
advantage of the #1 benefit.

\- Lots of small meeting rooms with whiteboards.

Even then, I noticed a massive difference in how much I enjoyed the open plan
when I transitioned from working on a project that was very collaborative
(pairing being the norm) to a project that required a lot of solo effort. I'm
very conscious of distractions now, and end up working later hours to take
advantage of the quiet when everyone's gone home.

So I think there's a lot to be said about the dynamic of your team. And in
that regard, my current employer again does well by giving QA, support, and
other "solo acts" individual high partitions.

------
bluedino
Are you in an environment where you're often working together and
collaborating on shit? Open plans are great.

Do you need quiet time where you're thinking for 5 hours a day and coding for
1? You need your own office.

Graphic designers, phone support, this kind of stuff seems to work great in an
open office. Crazy team trying to crank out something fast? Also works great.

But they just add to burnout and aren't a good fit for writers or programmers.
If this is the case, give everyone a small, modest office with drywall and a
drop ceiling, and then have LOTS of common areas or meeting rooms so people
can get together to chat or bang stuff out.

------
JumpCrisscross
I used to trade on the largest trading floor in the world. It's the ultimate
open office plan - MD next to associate director next to operations analyst
next to napping beer cart attendant. Information flowed like quicksilver, and
bureaucratic hurdles were resolved in a rapid sequence of huffs and grunts.
For pounding through a structured list of tasks, there was no match. For more
cerebral work, I hated it.

My most productive and cherished hours were those after the close, when I
could snap in headphones and burn through theoretically intense if P&L-vague
projects. Incidentally, it was those projects which made the bank's quarter
for every quarter I worked there.

There is a personality that thrives on open office plans. I, sometimes, am one
of them. But open layouts encourages rapid, myopic collaboration over deep
thinking. The ideal solution might be an open office layout with a "library"
retreat.

~~~
MamaDalton
I would die a thousand deaths in an open layout office. If offices must design
their spaces for max efficiency of desks rather than of work product then they
are not utilizing max efficiency of their greatest asset—their people. The
idea above of a 'library retreat' has some benefit; but what if you have 1/2
an office of folks who need quiet to produce? It would be vastly important I
think to include such questions on the interview...and to know how to answer
them for the interviewee.

------
klochner
Ways this could be biased:

    
    
      - higher skilled workers are in closed offices more often
        * and satisfaction varies by skill level
    
      - p(open office) varies by industry 
        * and satisfaction varies by industry
    
      - people feel more comfortable doing non-work items behind a door 
        * and they like getting personal tasks done
    

As a developer I'm happy in an open office, as long as I have enough space,
and I'm separated from the sales (phone) staff

~~~
bermanoid
I happened to read this right after the article on Simpson's Paradox, and you
put your finger on exactly what I was thinking - it's almost certain that
there are many hidden variables that predict whether or not you work in an
open office, and many of these likely correlate very strongly with job
satisfaction, potentially inverting the relationship just based on relative
employment rates in different areas. Just knowing that satisfaction correlates
with open floorplans doesn't tell us anything solid about whether you should
choose one or not.

------
jarjoura
I was lucky enough to have my own office at Apple even during all of the
pairing up when the company doubled, tripled, etc. the size of the engineering
team.

My most productive moments were when I could close the door and turn my music
up on my high end speakers and blast through the work.

My office was also cozy with an old chair that people came in and sat down for
impromptu meetings. No need to schedule conference rooms and we all had our
own white boards.

Jumping to startups that tout open spaces and the engineers I've met since
who've praised them, I wonder if it's because these engineers haven't worked
at companies who have actual real offices for everyone.

The collaboration is definitely different for sure, in open spaces you can
share in the tension and keep pace with everyone. Yet I find I need a day or
two a week to work from home to get in those purely productive days.

I'd love it if engineering culture went back to demanding offices as a perk,
but I fear those days are gone now that we demand living and working in
expensive cities.

------
nikatwork
And yet, despite all the studies and data, these things continue to spread
like a plague through the corporate world.

...because it makes upper management feel good to keep the peons in a bullpen.

~~~
joezydeco
Have you ever priced cubicle panels and hardware? How about erecting walls and
doors? There's a secondary benefit here.

~~~
JimmyL
There are also huge differences in the tax treatment of cubicles vs. walls,
which can have a non-trivial impact on the decision making if it's an office
of any size. Generally (and IANATL) cubicles and movable walls can be
considered office furniture, whereas walls and doors are structural
improvements - and those things have very different depreciation rates and
benefits.

~~~
cma
If you depreciate them, you have to either dispose of them at some point, or
sell them at a loss (and you can only depreciate the loss). Over time it could
cost more than walls, or have an extremely long depreciation schedule.

------
baddox
I guess I should be saying "it's hard to argue with the numbers," and yet my
temptation is precisely to argue against the numbers at least for my job
(programming for a tech company). I just don't understand what I would be
doing in my own office, other than wasting space and spending more time
leaving my office to find coprogrammers I have questions for.

~~~
biot
That you have to spend a lot of time with other programmers asking questions
raises another question: why is this? If the other programmers were better
able to concentrate and churn out specs/documentation for their work that you
could consult at your leisure, would there be as much need for constantly
interrupting each other with questions? If you had all the information you
needed at your fingertips, why couldn't you stay in your office and focus 100%
on developing your part of the software?

As an analogy, it's like saying "Who has time to implement safety measures
when we're so busy administering first aid because of all the accidents?"

~~~
twistedpair
Hmm... sufficiently define everything so that human contact is unnecessary?
Genius idea. Now if only the customer knew exactly what they wanted a year out
and the BA's perfectly captured that in absolutely unambiguous prose, and of
course if nothing ever failed to go according to plan.

~~~
jacques_chester
You're both right. It's a spectrum. Perfect documentation is impossible, but
good documentation is valuable.

------
prophetjohn
A lot of you guys would absolutely hate to work where I do. Next week is my
last week, but for unrelated reasons.

We're an open office plan and I love it. I couldn't imagine working in an
office where everyone is quietly tucked away in their offices. Worth
mentioning, is that we're a pair programming shop and everyone on the team is
a big fan of pairing all the time.

But it is loud as shit in the team room. We have a Spotify playlist constantly
going in the background. When a BA passes a story for completion, this is
signified by the ringing of a cowbell, at which point everyone will pound on
their desk and play with noise makers to celebrate. That happens a few times a
day. When a build breaks, a siren goes off and noises play from the build
computer to let everyone know.

I think part of it might be the pair programming. Before I started pairing, I
was a headphones kind of guy, too. I liked it quiet and I was easily
distracted. But when you're talking through a problem with your pair and you
have someone to help keep you on task, it's really easy to avoid being
distracted.

I guess the point is, in the right culture and with the right personalities,
open office can work really well. No one complains about it being hard to
focus on my team and it's rarely quiet. We also get shit done and everyone is
pretty happy.

In a couple weeks, I'm moving on to another pair programming shop in an open
office, but really only because I felt like it was time for me to see some
different challenges. When I'm ready to move on from there, I'll probably be
seeking a similar atmosphere.

p.s. I'm a pretty extreme introvert.

------
niels_olson
Work spaces I have had

* High school: desk in bedroom. Unaware there are worse options: Productivity: 9.

* College, year 1: dorm with roommate, cop-style desks facing each other. Shut up! Productivity: 4.

* College, years 2-4: two roommates, desk under bed. Vaguely cramped, but not bad. Productivity: 6.

* First ship: Flight of the Intruder style aluminum desk/dresser/bookcase measuring 24" wide, aligned athwartships, so every roll of that frigate dumped my work all over until I hacked some retaining straps in. ([http://www.maritime.org/tour/img/fbc/fbc-captain.jpg](http://www.maritime.org/tour/img/fbc/fbc-captain.jpg), except our bunks were 3 high). Productivity: 3.

* Second ship: Double-wide version of same but it's a carrier, no rolling. Productivity: NA because I also an actual office, with a door, and it was right next to wardroom. Downside: back wall of office was next to the trap wires. Had to wear double hearing protection during flight ops. Office productivity: 6-9.

* Staff at the Naval Academy, Annapolis: more desk acreage than I could use, huge vaulted window, rich blue carpet, could hide out all day. Productivity: 0-8. Home office: got an Ethan Allen desk on clearance. Productivity: 6.

* Med school, year 1: Katrina. 5' folding table next to the foldout couch two very kind University of Houston students let me sleep on all year. Still have that folding table. Not bad. Productivity: 6-8.

* Med school, years 2-4, New Orleans: Ethan Allen desk tried in every room of the house, but little kids make it impossible. Productivity at home: 0. Starbucks: 7.

* Internship. Same as above, but also had a cubicle in the 180 desk "resident storage facility". Had no desire to be there and rare could be. Productivity at cubicle: -1.

* First job as a doc: moved to San Diego, converted falling-apart cubicle desk in our office (incidentally the server closet, possibly the only reason it had an air conditioner) into a standing desk. Joy. Could work all day. Had a 34" stool that helped on occasion. 3 officemates: productivity: 5. A Navy clinic, "doctor's office" set up during the weekdays I took clinic, productivity: 4 (they seemed to feel doctors were cheaper than medical assistants). Starbucks: 7.

* Oh, during that job, worked at an urgent care on the weekends: sterile "doctor's office" with a desk and computer. 4 exam rooms. Highly routinized workflow seeing 30+ patients in 12 hours. Productivity: 11.

* Currently: professionally designed cubicle set up in an office with one office mate. We face opposite directions, neither face away from the door. Most productive ever. Productivity: 8-9. Starbucks 7. But also moved my Ethan Allen desk into my bedroom and installed a door lock. Home productivity: 4-8.

N=1

~~~
abalone
What do you think it is about your current shared cubicle that makes it the
most productive ever?

~~~
niels_olson
It's not better than the urgent care, but it's on the high end. Mainly, the
work is quite interesting and there's lots of it. Case-report quality stuff
comes across my desk daily and large studies are in the making. I have dual
screen monitors, (also had that at the standing desk at the last job), but I
have also customized my world a bit more: I have vim tuned better (works
reasonably well with Dragon, but could be better). The office has windows with
mini-blinds, which has a peculiar ability to really make the space feel
expansive, yet safe from prying eyes. My microscope has dual heads so I put a
Magnifi (arcturuslabs.com) on the second head and can take pics at my leisure
(see [http://reddit.com/r/pathology](http://reddit.com/r/pathology) for
unknowns) so that verges on a third screen. Plus my ipad. And I have been
planning to move in here for over a year, so I have thought hard about what to
do.

And, thanks in part to years of great posts on Hacker News, I'm much better at
scripting mundane tasks than the average pathology resident.

I think another thing is that I took up surfing. I'm from Kansas. I go surfing
with dolphins at least once a week. I own a home in SoCal, wife and kids are
happy and smart. How did I get here?

~~~
abalone
Cool, so sounds like having a dialed-in routine & setup is a big factor.

It's interesting your productivity goes up in Starbucks. I'm the same way too.
Distracting conversations are bad but white noise is fine. Plus there may be
something to the whole anonymity thing, in that you don't think about or
engage the people around you as much.

~~~
icebraining
It's completely true for me as well. I think knowing that someone might
interrupt me at any time (which is true both at work and at home, most of the
time) doesn't allow me to fully concentrate as well as I can in a place like a
coffee shop or a library.

------
ThomPete
Its not the open space per se that is the problem but rather the ratio of the
number of people occupying how much space.

I have now had 15 years of experience with different plans, 6 of those with my
own 60 people agency and a lot of time spent trying to figure out the optimal
space.

Its really simple. Size vs. number of people is the defining factor.

------
SCdF
You know, I've never worked in nor seen an office that wasn't "bullpit" style
with people grouped onto many desks.

Maybe this is just NZ. Is having your entire development team each having
their own private office something that actually happens in America (bar the
amazing fantasy land that Spolsky's office sounds like).

Also, it's worth mentioning that this is just a survey, and just addresses how
people "feel", not efficiency or anything like that. My ideal "work"
environment (i.e. a beach) doesn't necessarily line up with my most
productive.

~~~
RogerL
Yes. I am in my own office. I've more or less been in a single office since,
oh, 95 or so.

It's impossible to think in bullpen/cubes. Well, that's hyperbole, but it is
both wearying and distracting. I'm sure there are personality types that
thrive in that situation, but it is just really hard for me to be in an
environment like that for long. There's a reason there's a "no talking" rule
at libraries, after all.

~~~
SCdF
That's what my closed cans headphones are for :P

~~~
jacques_chester
I have ADHD. I find what's on my _own_ computer distracting enough. Put me in
a room of people moving and screens flicking and changing and

\-- SQUIRREL! --

... I won't be very productive.

~~~
SCdF
Heh, so the music I listen to tends to be pulsing non-vocal quiet electronic
music (currently listening to: Done by Robot Science) because it's not music
I'm going to sing or sitting-dance along too, and it's entirely ignorable, but
it also cuts out the noise of everything around me.

I can still see my coworker hacking SQL into some XML (wtf is he _doing_ ) out
of the corner of my eye, but I'm not sure wearing horse blinkers to work would
be socially acceptable.

------
com2kid
My team recently moved from dedicated offices to open offices and the cultural
changes have actually been quite interesting to watch.

Not being able to go into someone's office and talk for an hour cuts down on
one form of interpersonal bonding. On the flip side, having larger group
conversations encourages another type of bonding.

Arranging dinner and lunch outings is 100x easier, we go out as a team quite
often now.

Code reviews are fast and fluid. It is easy to get someone to walk on over and
take a look at something. Junior programmers worrying about their designs can
easily ask more senior members for help.

Productivity in some regards is down, noise level is higher for some things
(yes even with headphones), and there are certainly some days where it is hard
to think. On the other hand, really hard problems can get a lot of brain power
thrown at them really quickly and solved in a matter of minutes. No more of
that "well if I had known you were working on that, turns out I found a fix
for it yesterday, I could have saved you 4 hours!"

Time spent chit chatting is probably the same. I have gotten to know some
coworkers I didn't know before.

I'd say it has overall helped with code quality and team cohesion. Then again
our areas are not that small, 8x10, so we are by no means cramped. I have two
actual desks in my area so people on external teams can drop in with a laptop
if they need to work with me.

It is a royal pain when trying to focus on solving a really hard problem
however. Especially if doing pair programming on a super hard problem, when
two people's thoughts are all that should be occupying a space.

------
rcb
I've been going at this professionally for over 20 years, and in that time
have worked in all sorts of environments. Cubes, private offices, smoke-filled
private offices with good friends, and also open plans in both spacious and
cramped rooms. Oh, and I've also worked in a garage for a startup!

I've found that it's extraordinarily difficult for me to do my best work in a
cramped open space when there is activity surrounding me. From my own
experience, it seems that some % of our minds are actively processing movement
or sound, even if we're not consciously aware or distracted by it.

Unless I'm bootstrapping something, or working at an ~angel seeded company,
I'll refuse to work in an open space unless there is a flexible policy about
working from home, where I do have my own private office.

I'll agree with what others have said: Open spaces are about saving money, but
they're also a big part of the dog & pony show that tech company executives
put on when courting potential investors. This is possibly more important now
that most software deployments are no longer happening on accessible data
centers. Beyond that, open spaces provide an easier path to scaling
engineering headcount, often in a Fred Brooks-ian sort of way.

To me, more than anything these decisions speak to the engineering or C level
culture established within a business. If the talent feels the need to wear
noise canceling headphones to function, then there is a problem that isn't
being addressed.

If a company is FORCED to implement this because they have decided to base
their operations in an urban area with outrageous rent, then give the talent
the flexibility to work offsite. If the management doesn't trust their people
enough with that degree of autonomy, well, I guess that's a different
discussion altogether.

------
outside1234
From the "who would have guessed" files. Open plan has never been about the
workers -- its about the managers and cost.

~~~
evv
What, you have a problem working in a cafeteria?

You know, not everybody is young and cool enough for this lifestyle..

------
saosebastiao
I love my open plan office because it is open plan for my team, but still has
walls between us and other teams. It definitely facilitates collaboration.

I think the holy grail of offices would be to let you choose at any time where
you want to work...grabbing an isolated office some times and being in an open
area at others.

~~~
jacques_chester
As I recall, Microsoft designed X-shaped buildings with shared spaces towards
the middle.

Every developer has a private office with "a door that shuts". They all have a
view that doesn't look into another office. When they need to work alone, they
can work alone.

Each office is large enough that a second person can come in and work
alongside them, whiteboard together etc.

Social areas are placed towards the centre of the X. Offices are on the outer.
This controls the spread of noise from the social areas.

These buildings were inspired by IBM's Sillicon Valley Lab (née Santa Teresa
Lab), which itself was inspired by studies of programmer productivity which
found that private offices improved performance markedly over cubicles and
open-plan offices.

There's a discussion in _Peopleware_.

~~~
simplexion
Where's the evidence for these claims though? I know Joel Spolsky makes the
argument about "A door that shuts" but it's purely anecdotal.
[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/12/29.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/12/29.html)

~~~
jacques_chester
It seems that the X-shape exists as described, though not for all buildings:

[http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/ImageGallery/ImageDetails...](http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/ImageGallery/ImageDetails.mspx?id=C0CD43C4-7821-4DFC-A6E9-54A0F35FC222)

Some buildings aren't strictly cross-shaped but still use right-angled wings
for a similar effect:

[http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/ImageGallery/ImageDetails...](http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/ImageGallery/ImageDetails.mspx?id=48396B31-F664-43C8-BE79-160A36A0D7A8)

Compare STL/SVL:

[http://www.nfbcal.org/~anordley/IBM/Air/SVL/](http://www.nfbcal.org/~anordley/IBM/Air/SVL/)

IBM published a paper on STL/SVL in 1978; I haven't gotten around to piercing
the IEEE paywall to read it yet:
[http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?tp=&arnumb...](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?tp=&arnumber=5388028)

~~~
mindcrime
F%!#, what a ripoff. IEEE want $31.00 for that paper.. and sadly, it's the
same price whether you're an IEEE member or not. So much for the idea that one
of the advantage of being an IEEE member is that you get better pricing on
papers from journals you don't already subscribe to.

Even sadder, IBM _used_ to publish their journal archives online, available to
anyone, for free. IBM Systems Journal wasn't always behind some shitty IEEE
paywall.

Yet sadder still, the price to subscribe to IBM Systems Journal through IEEE?
$1,400 USD for a one year sub.

Frack... I now remember why I'm sometimes ashamed to admit to being a member
of IEEE. Guess it's time to get move involved in the elections and leadership
stuff... _sigh_

~~~
jacques_chester
I agree. It's extremely annoying how IEEE carefully segment their library
access to maximise revenue instead of member value.

~~~
MichaelGG
Shit, I even got an insurance (car, I think) offer co-branded from my IEEE
membership. I've not renewed.

------
morgante
I don't know many people who like their open office plan.

Yet, why are startups trumpeting these as great places to work? Particularly
as an engineer, having a door I can close is essential. (That's why I love
working on Fridays, when nearly everyone else works from home.)

The biggest stressor for me in an open office is overhearing personal
conversations. It's not the noise that bothers me, but the fact that I hear
things I really just feel awkward hearing.

My ideal office is just lots and lots of rooms. Maybe you could do an open
office if complete silence were enforced on the floor and all meetings were
held in adjourning rooms, but that'll never get buy-in.

------
mathrat
I used to think this. And then I went to work in an open plan office... and
discovered I love it! The office is surprisingly quiet, considering there's
about 50 people in the open plan. When conversation does spring up, it's often
really interesting and worth listening in on. When it's not, I find I have no
trouble tuning it out. Other people seem to more trouble, and they bring
noise-canceling headphones.

Not saying that this can work for everyone at every organization. But I for
one was pleasantly surprised. Fwiw I'm a pretty introverted guy who deeply
values his privacy.

~~~
mahyarm
This really is organization dependent. Do your managers look over your
shoulder and micromanage you? Would they get upset if they see HN in your web
browser more than once or twice a day? Do you worry about them 'catching' you?
Are you surrounded by 4 dozen people with multiple loud passionate discussions
guaranteed to happen per day? Possibly in a language you don't understand most
of the time? And whenever they do this making it very difficult to
concentrate? Do they ignore your social requests to move it to a conference
room, since they only last a few minutes and they're hunched over someones
desk looking at something?

Do you know some people get a minor feeling of background anxiety when their
back is to an open space with people talking and walking around? Their
peripheral vision and senses conflict with the deep concentration required for
software work.

Those noise cancelling headphones are meant to take out droning noises, such
as AC system fans or jet engines in airplanes. Conversations with their lack
of repetitiveness and human vocal ranges are not filtered out well, if at all.
The music they will have to listen to filter you out is distracting in its own
right.

Open Offices also decrease the barriers for interruption. Managers like it
because they make their jobs a lot easier, because they get to hear what is
happening and get status on their workers progress passively.

This is what open office means to many people.

~~~
mathrat
Agreed it's totally organization dependent. Basically fishtoaster said what I
wanted to say more clearly than I did. It requires thoughtful management to
get right. But I think the same is true of any office environment, open plan
or no. I think the article is a bit unfair and essentially saying "badly
managed open plan offices are bad."

~~~
mahyarm
It's like the Java argument. It's less likely for founders and managers
setting the culture to screw up private offices or small group offices than
open offices.

------
DanielBMarkham
"...However, a study of over 40,000 survey responses collected over a decade
has found that the benefits for workers are quickly outweighed by the
disadvantages..."

"...The productivity benefits of teams working together have been used to sell
the open plan office for decades. Yet, if you do these evaluations and
actually talk to occupants of open plan offices, very few people think that
they are productive spaces..."

Note the moving the goalposts here. The survey shows people don't like the
noise and interruptions caused by open plan offices. Okay fine, I get that.
But the article promises that the benefits are far outweighed by the
disadvantages, and then by way of disadvantage tells us that people don't like
them that much. There is no data whatsoever on the benefits or drawbacks
overall, just opinions from people working in open plan offices.

Is it not possible that open plan offices annoy people and are also more
productive? We don't know. This entire article just tells us most people would
rather have their own space to work and not be annoyed so much, which most of
us should know already, right?

"Things that achieve a goal" and "Things we like doing" are overlapping sets.
They are not identical.

------
crusso
My ideal environment allows for free and spontaneous clustering of small
groups of developers in spaces that have some noise blocking partitions
between clusters.

You get a good balance of people sitting together to work on things while not
being distracted by dozens of others in the same office.

~~~
alistairSH
This is close to my current office environment.

I have a typical cube, located in a typical cube farm, if I want some relative
peace and quiet.

And the team has a dedicated "lab" where I spend most of my day. It's not a
totally open-plan area - just a conference room. Never more than 6-7
developers, of whom 4 are on my team, and the rest are transients from other
teams working on related projects.

I prefer the lab and only head down to the cube if I need to take client
calls. Several of the developers prefer the cubes and spend most of their day
there, only coming to the lab for a few hours/day.

------
djhworld
I'm currently on training on higher floor in the office, it's such a contrast
to my usual desk. On the higher floor they have LOTS of natural light and
there are only about 30-40 people on the floor with huge desks and lots of
space in between each desk. It's so nice and quiet too.

On my floor (much lower down the building) there are about 100-120 people
crammed into tiny little desks with hardly any natural light. It's so noisy
with everyone in close proximity you can hardly hear yourself think, let alone
getting on with coding.

------
njharman
Working in several at different companies with 15 to 100 people (in the open
space) I can attest to at least three kinds of people (and people being are
the variable, not furniture not headphones, not culture, not etc.)

1\. People who LOATH open spaces, can't handle distractions, work alone.

2\. People who like open spaces, feed off the energy and "action", who aren't
easily distracted (or can refocus quickly), can tune out noise.

3\. People who are ambivalent.

Your success, level of complaints, productivity will depend entirely on mix of
these three groups.

------
codex_irl
I cannot stand open plan offices, to many visual & noise distractions....even
just people walking around distracts me (at they coming over to talk with me?
I hope not!) Call me crazy, but I much prefer having a small / private office
with the door open 70-90% of the time....it is not like I am going to be less
accountable (git log anyone)

------
debacle
The only open plan office I ever worked in dedicated ~200 square feet of space
per employee, which is probably unlike most open plan offices.

It was probably the most productive I ever was - you were able to get up and
just go talk to someone, but you couldn't talk to them from your desk without
disrupting everyone else.

------
bennyg
What's the official term for my team, and my team only, in an open room where
we can whiteboard problems, shoot the shit, play guitar, shoot each other with
Nerf guns and churn out more work on average than my entire organization?
Cause I love what I have now.

------
simplexion
This study does not look at actual productivity. It is very hard to measure
productivity in a study though. Does anyone have any links to open plan vs.
offices for developers (actual studies)? Considering you can in some way
measure productivity for developers.

------
_pmf_
I don't care about people who do less for the same money in my company. I do
care about people who do less for the same money in my company while loudly
preventing others from doing their work and generally bullshitting around in a
very obnoxious way.

------
smtddr
Well, I personally love the open plan and would never go back. I like the
social atmosphere and I'm surprised so many people don't like it. Wasn't it
trendy to take your laptop to Starbucks just for that kind of environment to
work in?

~~~
peferron
I love it too and would hate being confined in a closed office, ugh. I'm
currently working from home 3 weeks out of 4 because of external reasons, and
I'd gladly go back to the office full-time if I could. At home, I manage to
stay motivated and productive, but at a constant effort. At the office I just
have to immerse myself in the studious atmosphere, and motivation and
productivity come without even thinking about it. Sprinkle on top of that some
human interaction, and days are much lighter on the soul than they are
grinding alone at home.

That being said, I have to say that I enjoy my colleagues very much and that
they definitely don't spend their day doing distracting shit in the office. If
I really need to focus extra hard (or just want some music), I'll put my
headphones on and that's it. If anyone wants to talk to me, I'll see them
coming in my peripheral vision a few seconds in advance and take the
headphones off so the conversation starts naturally. I don't get disturbed by
drive-bys enough to significantly affect my productivity - at least it's
definitely not worse than the productivity drop I get by having to self-
motivate myself at home.

I enjoyed a lot too my previous job where I shared an office with 3-5
colleagues. As a whole, all my experience at offices and workplaces have been
great so far. All the common tales of workplace hell, with assholish managers,
backstabbing colleagues and so on are completely incredible to me. I feel very
lucky.

------
zackbloom
I wrote up a blog post trying to explain my company's position on it:
[http://dev.hubspot.com/blog/open-plan-
offices](http://dev.hubspot.com/blog/open-plan-offices)

------
coldcode
We are moving from open plan and little tables, where I have like 10 sq feet
to work in so it's more smushed plan, to a new office with real cubes and
furniture and various collaboration areas. Much better.

------
VladRussian2
engineers - offices, techical staff - cubicles, blue collar workers - open
plan factory floor ..err.. office space. It is just a reflection of software
engineering status as a profession.

------
wmeredith
Can we all stop pretending that the collaborative open office emperor actually
has clothes? Open office plans are about cost savings at the expense of
privacy and respect.

------
jusben1369
Anybody here feel like this might be a generational issue? I suspect the
negative crowd is north of 30 and/or experienced non open spaces. But just a
guess.

~~~
mindcrime
I dunno... I hated and despised "open plan" in my 20's, in my 30's, and now I
still hate it at 40. _shrug_

------
niels_olson
What's up with that abstract? Can you imagine a medical abstract where N and
key parameters of the results aren't in the abstract?

