
Open Office Layout is Bad for Brain  - tszming
http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/08/open-office-layout
======
JoeAltmaier
I work on problems (code) that can take an hour to grok, another hour to get
the code state into my head, and then more minutes to surgically implant the
right change. Invite me into a meeting or chatter outside my cubicle, and I'm
derailed. So that's why I get most of my work done early, early in the morning
or after everybody else has left.

This article presents the most blindingly obvious case. Why is it even worthy
of discussion? Because folks who call themselves authorities have made
rediculous assertions (Open office plans are productive), written a book and
gotten the foolish notions somehow embedded. It takes an authority and a study
and a published report to undo the damage.

Or we could just rebel - No, I won't work in your echo chamber.

    
    
      -- guy currently suffering under Agile-zealot manager

~~~
jobu
My most productive hours are after 4pm, when everyone else is gone or busy
scrambling to finish things and get home.

The assertion I disagree with is that this is worse with an open office than a
cubicle farm. In my experience cubicle farms are terrible because people don't
see those around them that are being annoyed by an overly loud conversation.

------
buster
And there i was going to comment "But MS Office had the same layout for
years!".. until i clicked that link.

~~~
b2spirit
I also thought is was about OpenOffice.org until I read your comment.

------
joelmichael
Headphones are an integral part of the open office layout, especially for
developers. I recommend decent-quality sound-isolating earbuds which can give
you a personal audio environment at any time without irritating your
coworkers.

Using headphones is a sign you don't want to be disturbed, as well. This isn't
a sacrosanct rule, but it should be taken into consideration when you choose
to interact with someone, possibly interrupting them. If you think they are
focused on something, send them an IM instead.

Working from home a day or two a week, or working in the office before or
after everyone else arrives or leaves is another good way to avoid
interruption.

~~~
erikb
Headphones are a great idea for some people. I for myself work best in
silence. Even if there is music playing it disturbs my concetration. Maybe I
am especially weak at focussing, but I think to some degree this is true to
everybody who listens to music while working.

~~~
hessenwolf
I disagree. For certain tasks, certain types of music, ideally albums I have
heard many times before, help me to relax and stay focussed. For others, I
cannot concentrate with music.

I find it quite a disadvantage in my current office that when I need to do
something detailed in a rigorous way I do not get to wear headphones.

~~~
jamesbkel
>ideally albums I have heard many times before

I find this to be true also.

Additionally, I've noticed that during the planning stage music is less
helpful/possibly distracting. However, once I've more or less decided what to
do and am focused more on implementation music can help me focus.

~~~
LiveTheDream
Music is distracting when you need to be creative, because your creative brain
is effectively distracted by the music. I read about a study[1] recently that
presented a programming problem to two groups; one group listened to music
while they solved it and the other group had silence. While each group
performed acceptably with regards to creating a solution that conformed to the
spec, the music-listening group neglected to notice that a series of
transformations in the problem spec turned out to result in no changes
whatsoever. The group working in silence was able to make the connection and
came up with a more efficient program.

[1] Sorry, can't find the source. Will update if I find it.

~~~
Goladus
Pretty sure that study was mentioned in Peopleware, but didn't include a
citation reference.

~~~
LiveTheDream
I believe you are correct.

------
mahmud
Speaking of "Bad for Brain", InfoQ's website is the worst thing to happen to
exposition in computing since leet-speak.

I have seen better aesthetics in an government risk-mitigation newsletter.
They get rockstar speakers, but drab them in corduroy & loafers. Awful, just
awful.

------
TeMPOraL
I personally can't concentrate in any kind of open-space office. When I need
to focus, the very feeling of other people being present is a huge distraction
to me. It was true since early childhood - I couldn't do homework or learn
anything at home if I wasn't alone in a room with doors closed.

I don't really know how to explain it.

~~~
gaustin
Same here. Nobody believes me when I tell them I can feel others' presence in
a visceral way.

I have lesser but still significant problems in cube environments. Would love
to get out of the cube farm...and I believe I'd produce a lot more value if I
weren't stuck in an uncomfortable place.

~~~
pasbesoin
_Nobody believes me_

This is a very frustrating aspect of the experience.

After being coaxed/coerced for years to "be like everyone else", I finally
learned to take this as a sign -- as a _mandate_ \-- to GTFO.

Such an environment will wear you down and eventually destroy you. The sooner
you leave it, the better.

(And, if we are indeed that good, leaving may be the best way of counter-
acting such attitudes, as the institutions we leave struggle to make do with
what is left. If this is not the case, you've nonetheless extracted yourself
from what, in my experience, is a personally self-destructive position.)

~~~
dredmorbius
I concur.

What's telling too is that people who want to get work done in such an
environment _stay home to do it_.

Including the zealots.

------
buff-a
None of the _research_ has been about open programming environments. The
article quotes two studies that did _not_ study open programming environments,
and the rest is opinion and speculation, albeit from some respected people.

So when they say "If you are just getting into some work and a phone goes off
in the back ground it ruins what you are concentrating on" they are talking
about a room full of people who answer phones as part of their business.

My most successful project was done in an "open" office, with the five
programmers' desks arranged in a circle, facing out. We could all concentrate
when required, but we could communicate immediately when there was a problem.
Sometimes an interruption was annoying. Most of the time the communication
paid of hugely. I think programmers are good at judging when to bug another
programmer. That said, we had an awesome team.

In my experience, a bunch of programmers in offices is a great way to get lots
of the wrong thing done. It may be because when I've been in this situation,
the team was not as experiences as the team above. Or it may be that offices
kill communication, discourage bouncing ideas around, and encourage "going
dark".

When I hear of open offices that didn't work, there's usually more shit policy
coming down from management and being imposed than just the open office.

That's the most important thing: What does the team want?

------
gaius
The problem is that the people who decide how to layout offices, don't do the
kind of "stateful" work that requires long periods of concentration, and don't
understand those that do. Their work is broken up into much more discrete
chunks. PG talks about this in his essay
<http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html>

------
praptak
I remember some research quoted by Christopher Alexander (of design patterns
fame.) although I cannot find the reference at the moment. I believe it was in
the justification section for the "half-open wall" pattern.

The gist of it was that people tend to prefer spaces that are about half
closed (I'm quoting from memory, I'm aware this quantification is imprecise) -
i.e. somewhere between a lone desk in the middle of a huge room (0% closed)
and a cubicle (almost 100% closed). Something striking the balance between the
feeling of being shielded (nobody likes open space behind their backs) and
being cramped (nobody likes a view-blocking wall in front of their nose.)

~~~
Triumvark
Hmm, according to that, it sounds like cubes should work better if the
employee is facing outward. Computer on the open side of the cube with the
screen facing into the cube, rather than computer on the far side of the cube.

Is this common anywhere?

~~~
danellis
How do you get out? Crawl under the desk?

~~~
Triumvark

      |--------|
      |        |
      |        |
      |DESK    |

------
humbledrone
I wonder if many of the same drawbacks of an open office layout affect cubicle
farms as well. I have worked in both situations, and I have not found that
cubicle walls significantly dampen office noise. Cubes probably lessen other
kinds of distractions, but visual distractions are easy to ignore anyway.

~~~
pasbesoin
I think many people regard cube farms as "open space". Especially with the
ever shrinking wall sizes and square-footage per person.

~~~
dredmorbius
Having seen start-up occupying warehouse-sized spaces with plastic foldable
tables set up next to one another filling the whole space, there are values of
"open space" greater than your typical cube-divided office space.

That office layout, and some technical problems (said shop's first Google
result was of a quarter-million passwords compromised by way of a developer's
poor password choice, neglecting to use RSAkey auth, and, well, cleartext
storage of user passwords), were chief among reasons I declined any further
interest in the opportunity. It still ranks high among horror stories I've
personally witnessed.

~~~
pasbesoin
"That office layout, _resulting in_ some technical problems..."

Fixed that for you. ;-)

~~~
dredmorbius
I suspect ultimate causality was sloppy thinking resulting in both the office
layout and the multiple security issues, though it's also quite likely that
this was something of a cascade failure.

------
pavel_lishin
Does anyone remember the article that showed researchers were more productive
when they had more lines-of-sight in their work space? Something about being
able to easy interact with people and exchange ideas, since they would often
come into visual contact with people.

Perhaps this all depends on what you're working on.

------
Sharlin
I can't be the only one who at first thought this would be about the UI layout
of OpenOffice.org...

------
bh42222
I half agree. I have found offices, real offices, to be _much_ more productive
than both cubicles and open layouts.

For me personally, cubicles and open layouts are both equally distracting, but
I prefer open layouts simply because I hate sitting in a box.

I'd much rater have a real office, but for me cubicles are in now way quieter
or less distracting then an open setup.

I wonder what kind of cubicles the people have, to whom the open setup is that
much worse? Maybe some kind of sound insulated luxury cubicle?

~~~
pavel_lishin
Depends on what I'm working on. A tough problem that could take me a full day
to complete? On those days, I miss my office-with-a-door. A relatively simple
debugging task that requires input and verification from my coworkers? It's so
much faster to just look up and say, "Hey John, can you glance at this?"
without having to walk through a hallway into someone else's office.

------
Zigurd
Interesting but all anecdotal. The office layout productivity study that
sticks in my mind showed that _any_ change in office layout improved
productivity for a short time. More light, dimmer light, higher cubicle walls,
no cubicle walls, etc. It all improved productivity. And then there was a
return to mean.

------
rodh257
What if you had a cubicle layout, but each of the walls could be slid up or
down. So it converts between open plan and concentration cubicle mode? Having
the walls up implies you are deep in concentration so people shouldn't disturb
you.

Though perhaps would just leave their walls up constantly

------
discreteevent
Its all about change and shared state. Humans (unlike, say, chickens or purely
functional systems) cache state in their heads about the world. In fact the
brain operates so slowly compared to a processor that without caching we could
not operate. For example, when we catch a ball the reason we are able to
predict its trajectory is not because we measure its current speed and
direction and then perform some calculation and repeat for every frame. It is
because we compare it with the cached (and to some extent abstracted) memory
of a thousand balls we caught before, find the closest match and do a little
extrapolation from it. The book 'On Intelligence' covers this. The phrase he
uses to describe the human brain is a "memory prediction machine" The problem
with state of course is not the state itself, but the fact that there is more
than one copy of it. In a purely functional program (or a chicken!) there is
only one copy which is passed around, nothing is retained. If you put your
hand over a chickens eyes they just go completely still, nothing in, nothing
out. In more stateful systems the best we can do is to minimise the sharing of
state i.e assign ownership of the state to certain subsystems. As humans are
stateful this also works out to be the best model for them. This means that
the optimum situation for quality in programming is to have one person develop
all of the code. Its not always possible to do this and so the next best thing
is to try to split the solution up into subsystems with well defined
interfaces. Even at this we often have to assign a small team to each
subsystem and we usually try to further decompose that but effectively at this
point we are sharing state between people. Everybody needs to update their
cache so that they all have a very similar mental model of the solution or
there will be problems. They need to update their cache all the time as it is
a model of a world that is being changed by the solution itself as the
objective of the solution is to change the world in some way. The problem is
that when the state of the world changes its not as simple as passing that
state value to one of the actors i.e. Its not like passing some simple value
like an integer around the place. The truth is that when the state of the
problem changes in some signifigant way then the people involved need to have
time, in peace and quiet, to update their complex model in a way that is
consistent with the change. They have to figure out what the new information
means in the context of the problem and more importantly they need to give
their brain time to come up with a solution that fits with the new state of
the problem. So there are two ways a system based on shared state between
people can fail. 1) Somebody fails to get notified of a state change. 2)
Somebody does not spend the time to properly integrate this into their
understanding. In either case that person will go around with a faulty model
of the system and that is when the bugs start to happen. As far as I can see
the agile guys seem to be primarly focused on 1) and neglect 2). I think you
need to work on both (given that you have no option but to work on a system
with many people in which you cannot completely isolate the functionality to
be implemented by each person). So what does this have to do with office
space? Have an open plan office but tell people to stay at home for the
morning, or tell people to stay at home every second day. i.e. Make sure they
are communication AND make sure they have time on their own to digest the
communication properly. The reason I know this works is that I worked like
this as a contractor for a while and it was easily the most productive period
I ever had. Much more productive that working in an open plan office all the
time and even slightly more productive than working on something completely
alone.

~~~
erikb
There is a good chance there were paragraphs when he wrote it and HN ignored
it, because HN comments require an extra newline. Bad user or bad usability?

~~~
discreteevent
That was exactly what happened. I can hardly read the comment now myself and
its too late to edit it. At the risk of just adding noise to the thread here
it is with paragraphs:

Its all about change and shared state. Humans (unlike, say, chickens or purely
functional systems) cache state in their heads about the world. In fact the
brain operates so slowly compared to a processor that without caching we could
not operate. For example, when we catch a ball the reason we are able to
predict its trajectory is not because we measure its current speed and
direction and then perform some calculation and repeat for every frame. It is
because we compare it with the cached (and to some extent abstracted) memory
of a thousand balls we caught before, find the closest match and do a little
extrapolation from it. The book 'On Intelligence' covers this. The phrase he
uses to describe the human brain is a "memory prediction machine".

The problem with state of course is not the state itself, but the fact that
there is more than one copy of it. In a purely functional program (or a
chicken!) there is only one copy which is passed around, nothing is retained.
If you put your hand over a chickens eyes they just go completely still,
nothing in, nothing out. In more stateful systems the best we can do is to
minimise the sharing of state i.e assign ownership of the state to certain
subsystems. As humans are stateful this also works out to be the best model
for them. This means that the optimum situation for quality in programming is
to have one person develop all of the code. Its not always possible to do this
and so the next best thing is to try to split the solution up into subsystems
with well defined interfaces. Even at this we often have to assign a small
team to each subsystem and we usually try to further decompose that but
effectively at this point we are sharing state between people. Everybody needs
to update their cache so that they all have a very similar mental model of the
solution or there will be problems. They need to update their cache all the
time as it is a model of a world that is being changed by the solution itself
as the objective of the solution is to change the world in some way.

The problem is that when the state of the world changes its not as simple as
passing that state value to one of the actors i.e. Its not like passing some
simple value like an integer around the place. The truth is that when the
state of the problem changes in some signifigant way then the people involved
need to have time, in peace and quiet, to update their complex model in a way
that is consistent with the change. They have to figure out what the new
information means in the context of the problem and more importantly they need
to give their brain time to come up with a solution that fits with the new
state of the problem. So there are two ways a system based on shared state
between people can fail. 1) Somebody fails to get notified of a state change.
2) Somebody does not spend the time to properly integrate this into their
understanding. In either case that person will go around with a faulty model
of the system and that is when the bugs start to happen. As far as I can see
the agile guys seem to be primarly focused on 1) and neglect 2). I think you
need to work on both (given that you have no option but to work on a system
with many people in which you cannot completely isolate the functionality to
be implemented by each person).

So what does this have to do with office space? Have an open plan office but
tell people to stay at home for the morning, or tell people to stay at home
every second day. i.e. Make sure they are in communication AND make sure they
have time on their own to digest the communication properly. The reason I know
this works is that I worked like this as a contractor for a while and it was
easily the most productive period I ever had. Much more productive that
working in an open plan office all the time and even slightly more productive
than working on something completely alone.

~~~
ximeng
Slightly OT, but I've read that humans simplify ball catching by moving in
such a way as to keep the ball in the same place in their field of view. There
might be more details in the papers below, but paywalled so I don't know:

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/01679457939...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/016794579390020P)

[http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1014...](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1014420)

"the eyes and/or the head move so that the image of the moving object is
maintained at the same place on the fovea"

------
narad
A quick google search reveals that this is very old news.

[12 Jan 2009]
[http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5isNavMO9o...](http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5isNavMO9o6zbGyIt5rUipieaJdtA)

------
markokocic
Before I read the article I was sure he was talking about OpenOffice.org :(

~~~
erikb
the title really is confusing! I already thought about what I would want to
comment about OpenOffice.org.

------
mieses
Even with its problems, an open plan is preferable to small window-less
offices or cubicles.

~~~
ColinWright
I'm sure you have extensive research to support this conclusion - can you
share it with us? Sometimes the most obvious opinions and beliefs turn out to
be wrong, and it's useful to see the actual research.

Thanks.

~~~
danwolff
When categorizing information, it is possible to recognize personal opinions
as such and handle it appropriately.

~~~
innes
Link?

------
aneth
Personally, I find working in an open office environment terribly distracting.
It feels like a constant meeting and people always feel now is a good time for
a question or a chat.

