
Why open floorplans are bad for programming - nreece
http://adevelopersvoice.com/2014/03/03/i-hate-open-floorplans-it-makes-roger-come-out/
======
netcan
This seems to be a favorite topic here. It gets discussed in a way that I find
strange, because it seems to me that most participants are being dishonest. At
least I think this is true in many cases.

On the side that decides on and pays for the offices, open floor plans are
cheaper and more convenient. They take less space per person. You can moved
stuff around and rearrange them. You don't have to decide on team sizes in
advance. You don't have to allocate office quality based on seniority.
Managers can get a feel for happenings just by being present. etc. Moving in
does not mean a big upfront cost and it is easier to make the decision. These
are price and convenience concerns. Those drive the decision most of the time.
There are a whole bunch of arguments that can be used to justify the decision.
knowledge flow, agility, egality, whatever. You can agree for disagree with
them but they're not honestly making up a significant part of the decision so
the argument is pointless.

On the other side are the people who work in the companies who mostly don't
like open floorplans. It seems to me we don't like them for the same reason we
don't want to live in a big dormitory. We want our own space. We want to
control our environment. Same thing every 14 year old wants. We spend half our
lives at work and we want a pleasant office for the same reason we want a
pleasant home. More space is more pleasant. These are "quality of life
reasons. This side has abstract arguments too. Quite. concentration. etc.

The whole argument is dishonest. One side wants to make life cheaper and
easier for themselves. The other wants to make life more pleasant. Both are
pretending to be discussing productivity, creativity and whatnot.

~~~
mattmanser
Calling everyone who needs peace and quiet to concentrate a petulant teenager
doesn't win an argument.

Walk into any open plan office with developers in it, they will _all_ have
headphones in. You think they _want_ to listen to music all day? 10s of
thousands of dollars in lost productivity disappearing down the drain right in
front of your nose but you're too blind to see.

~~~
kristiandupont
I'm in an open office at this moment. Nobody is wearing headphones. Everybody
is working, there is a tiny bit of chatter now and then but nothing
distracting. The feeling of other people working seems to affect my own
productivity positively (no, the irony of me being on HN is not lost on me.
I'm taking a five minute break).

But then, I also like to work in cafés. In fact, when I work from home I will
sometimes open www.rainycafe.com to "simulate" that feeling. As long as nobody
is speaking really loud or addressing me directly, it doesn't disturb me.

~~~
mattmanser
It will only take one sales person to shatter that.

If everyone is being quiet creative it's fine.

Introduce a person constantly on the phone and it's not.

The other ones, and god I hate them, are the pacing round the office while on
a mobile. Only topped by pacing round the office on a mobile who's route goes
behind your chair. The most distracting thing in the world to me.

~~~
jader201
Sorry, but I can top that. And this has happened to me. Multiple times (by the
same offender).

A manager that uses her speakerphone to call someone else.

Two cubes over.

Needless to say, I don't work there anymore.

~~~
xsmasher
I think cubes are actually worse than open plan; in a cube you can't see that
someone is working intently three feet away, and you don't see their death
glare.

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koopajah
I think the real title of the blog post "I Hate Open Floorplans, It Makes
Roger Come Out…" makes a lot more sense. I understand why open floorplans
don't work for some people but I personally enjoy working in one and always
have so I don't see them as bad for developers, only bad for _some_. The
conversations floating around, the noise and animation helps me focus a lot
more than in a closed office at work. I don't know exactly why but I work a
lot better with a lot of people around me. Also it is so much easier to follow
what is going on around in your team, who is stuck on something, who is
speaking about something new that might be useful to you.

I've always worked this way, focusing on something while a part of me was
processing what was said around and being able to "pause" what I was doing to
help around and get back to my work pretty easily. Of course it does not work
all the time and some times you just need to focus for a few hours and in this
case I just increase the volume of my music in my headphones and stop caring
about the rest.

For me the main issue with open floorplans is when other people assume they
can just come to your desk and ask you anything without thinking you could be
busy and/or in the zone as you describe it when having a closed office would
make them think twice before just dropping by unanounced. For me this was
easily solved by explaining that it is a lot easier to drop me a line by email
or chat and I'd get back to them as soon as I was available.

~~~
king_magic
"The conversations floating around, the noise and animation helps me focus a
lot more than in a closed office at work."

I wish I could say the same :) I get pulled into a million conversations
simply because I'm there and accessible. Open floorplans decimate focus, in my
experience.

~~~
koopajah
I think there's a difference between willingly join a conversation when you
know you can help and being pulled in the conversation by someone asking for
your opinion all the time. I agree that if the second one happens all day
that's a big issue for me too.

~~~
king_magic
Almost always the latter (being pulled into the convo by someone asking for
your opinion all the time).

~~~
koopajah
I've never been in a situation where I was working and people around would all
the time interrupt me and ask for my opinion for everything everyday. And I've
worked in big open floorplans. So I would not say it is always the latter
here.

~~~
king_magic
Consider yourself very, very lucky. I'm lucky if I get 20 minutes of solid
thinking time at my desk. I'm also an architect on a 60 person project, so it
may just be different for me.

------
irremediable
I'd be interested to hear if anyone else agrees with the author about
disliking it when people walk behind him. For some reason, I find having
people behind me _really_ distracting. I think it stems from having people
watch my screen while I try to code. Instant productivity killer.

Interestingly, I don't find this precludes open plan offices. It just means I
want to grab a corner desk.

~~~
luch
It's a primary reaction : animals dislike to show their back to "enemies",
even if coworkers aren't technically enemies (some aren't really allies
either).

I've noticed, when you invite a guest to sit in a room, the guest will almost
always takes the chair with the back facing the wall.

~~~
_kfb
Agreed, I intensely dislike having my back to a room (including in places such
as restaurants), and this was always my explanation, too.

(Actually, the explanation I give to people is that I'm terrified of
assassination attempts, which is related from a scientific point of view but
has the bonus of making my life sound much more exciting than it is.)

------
duiker101
This title is wrong, the real title is better. You don't like open floor. I
love it. I can get in the flow and I have my colleagues here with which I can
joke/interact/discuss. I think being isolated would make me feel bad. I think
that the most important factor here is that people need to know how to behave
on open floors. You can be distracted by a ringing phone everywhere.

~~~
mgkimsal
"You can be distracted by a ringing phone everywhere."

It's harder to be distracted by 5 ringing phones in a private office.

~~~
duiker101
That is true but I think that most people use headphones. Personally I made a
habit of wearing them even when I am not listening to anything. They are not
noise cancelling but it help to not listen to anything that is "out of scope".
But obviously you can't ignore your own phone.

~~~
pessimizer
Most people who don't have offices use headphones, yes. If you don't like to
wear headphones all day, that's another reason why you're uncomfortable in an
open office.

------
onion2k
Open floorplans are fine so long as there's an alternative option available.
Working in an environment where peace and quiet is _never_ available is not
going to make you as productive as you can possibly be - an open plan office
has to come with the authority and autonomy to take yourself off to a
different, quieter place to work from instead should the office get too
distracting.

It's very rare that one solution works all of the time.

------
raldi
_> I dislike working with people walking around behind me (I offer no
explanation, it just gives me the creeps)_

98% of feng shui is about avoiding that feeling.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Feng shui is to ergonomics what homeopathy is to medicine.

~~~
raldi
No, that's precisely the misconception I'm trying to address here. Taking
homeopathic treatments won't make any difference to your health. But following
the principles of feng shui (even if the beliefs behind them are bullshit)
_will,_ more often than not, lead to a psychologically-pleasing layout.

------
chrisbennet
Pffft, what a bunch of babies. We have an open floor plan where I work. I
don't have earphones and I have no problem concentrating. *

(*) As long as no one else is in the office.

------
mcv
I'm still not sure exactly what distinguishes an open floor plan from other
floor plans. I prefer working directly with the rest of my team in the same
room. I don't want a private room. But a room where people unrelated to the
team are constantly walking around and making noise and disturbing people is
bad.

~~~
mrweasel
Even sharing a room with your team can be a problem. My colleagues prefer to
have the radio on, which conflicts with my desire for an almost eerie silence.

I simply work better and more efficient if there's complete silence. I can
work with a low level of background noice, but if certain songs / types of
songs are playing on the radio I just stop until it's gone. My ears simply
won't tune out some sounds, such as a high pitch female singers. Also some
radio shows are just designed to have annoying sounds because it's "fun".

~~~
loup-vaillant
> _My ears simply won 't tune out some sounds, such as a high pitch female
> singers._

My first rule of music at work is: no human voice, unless you have autism.
(And even then, you may not be able to tune out _anything_.)

~~~
caw
All of my work music has vocalists. Most of what I listen to is rock w/female
vocalist. But basically there's consistency and familiarity in what I'm
listening to, as well as minimum interruption between songs so I'm able to
tune it out. I think radio would be super jarring going between songs and
commercials and morning shows, so I never listen to it unless I'm in the car.

------
yeukhon
What I need is simple: a large desk, a good char, a room with glass walls,
dry-erase markers, pen and papers. I also want to be able look outside.
Confine myself in a tiny room or on a floor full of people but no windows is a
torture. That's all. That's my dream workstation area.

------
rbobby
I'd like to see some science applied to this topic.

A decrease in productivity may not be an insurmountable business problem.
Private offices take up more square footage which has a direct annual cost.
Open floor plans have higher density, which might offset the decrease in
productivity. Open floorplans may/may not work well depending on the number of
folks involved (eg. a team of 100 vs a team of 10) and types of job functions
and size of the open floor plan area (maybe "pods" work better than one wide
open area).

I'm sure there's lots of interest questions that could be answered if some
rigor where applied to this issue.

------
arjie
As a counterpoint, interning at an open floor plan company is brilliant. If
you're considerate about your coworkers' space, it lowers barriers to
conversation (obviously you have to respect space) and just listening in on
other conversations helps pick up stuff.

We had private rooms too, and many engineers preferred working in quiet, but
I'm glad it wasn't all private offices. I can usually get more out of one
minute of conversation than five minutes of instant messaging.

It seems to me that most complaints stem from the fact that many people here
have worked with inconsiderate people.

------
ses
I think it is nonsense to say that what doesn't work for one person won't work
for another. The whole thing is completely context dependent. Here in Europe
most people feel cubicles are so isolating that you might as well be working
remotely because of the lack of interaction with your co-workers.

Don't get me wrong I think its really important to be able to 'plug in and get
on' without distraction as a programmer, but I'm just making the point not
everyone works well this way if they do it all the time.

------
vicaya
Open floorplans are great for hackathons and bugfixes for system integration
in fire-fighting mode. It's disastrous for actual feature implementation.

------
davidgerard
At this stage, we need someone to write an article about "Why open floor plans
being bad for programming will _never, ever_ be fixed."

------
Kurtz79
It doesn't make a lot of a difference to me.

The stuff I'm working on influences my ability to focus much more than the
environment.

If I'm doing something boring or uninteresting I could be in a monastic cell
and still manage to get distracted.

------
JazCE
more like: why open floorplans are bad for me personally.

this is not something you can blanket statement like: eating asbestos is bad
for your health

------
michaelochurch
Open-plan offices are backdoor age and health discrimination, also known as
"culture fit".

With all the project-management garbage (often in the name of "Agile")
designed to mash software down into chunks that can be done mindlessly by
CommodityJavaDrones, making software development superficially reliable (but
the product soulless) the job is easy, which the business wants. It's more
expensive to dumb down the job and hire idiots (legitimate 10x programmers
only cost 1.5-2x) but more reliable-- the risks are long-term and thus pushed
off to the next guy-- as they see it. So the attrition for promotion has to be
conducted by subjecting people to petty stresses, but in bulk, and seeing who
cracks first. When someone has the first panic attack, goes to the ER (a real
panic attack, if you don't know what it is, is terrifying) and one way or
another isn't working there in 3 months, that's part of the design.

Also, as one who suffers panic attacks, it's not the noise that makes people
sick (and, with enough time in an open-plan office, almost everyone will get
sick) because people will tune that out over time, but open-back visibility,
which is much harder to get used to. The creepy feeling of being watched is
what fucks peoples' health up. That could be fixed with booth-style seating if
regular offices can't be afforded, but you never see that either.

There's a false egalitarianism to it as well. Managers typically have desks in
the bullpen as well so they can say that it's a blanket policy, but that's
making an unfair comparison. Managers can come and go as they please,
typically only spend a couple hours per day in the bullpen, and don't have
much to fear from visibility anyway; but workers who take the side offices
"too often" draw suspicion and, even if they're getting a lot of work done,
have to worry about getting "culture fitted" (that is, no-hired or fired for
being old, sick, or female.)

I love programming itself but this is a fucking shitty industry and it's
goddamn time we rise up and take it the fuck back.

