
Why Open Offices? - gpresot
http://acesounderglass.com/2015/07/27/why-open-offices-synchronicity/
======
vessenes
IBM did a fair amount of research on this in the 1970s and 80s. They talk
about some of it in their Santa Teresa design paper I think:
[http://domino.research.ibm.com/tchjr/journalindex.nsf/9fe6a8...](http://domino.research.ibm.com/tchjr/journalindex.nsf/9fe6a820aae67ad785256547004d8af0/fb3c49ab2d463e1c85256bfa00685aec!OpenDocument)

The major takeaways I have from reading about this when I started in tech
entrepreneurship are:

1) Knowledge workers need 30 square feet of desk to get optimal efficiency

2) They need 100 square feet of space

3) cubicles are as good as an office if the walls are over 8 feet high (!)

4) small teams tend to want to talk at the same time, and be quiet at the same
time.

These together round up into recommended 400 or so square foot offices with
doors that close and house teams of four people, all working on the same thing
at the same time.

If teams are 2 or 3, they should have a smaller space. That's enough space for
desks, a couch, a whiteboard area, etc.

I have found over the years that this tracks fairly closely with my own
preferences. I really want to be able to talk and interrupt a team-mate when
we're working if we're working on the same thing. We also often are hacking
away and need silence, but instant access to whoever is in the know about a
certain bit of code is undeniably great, and provided we aren't breaking each-
other out of flow, is fine.

This system works really well when it's a small team and the team is working
on the same stuff. It breaks down when there are multiple things happening or
more than four or so people: interruptions abound, killing productivity.

I think you'll often see workers getting this situation when they really need
to be productive by commandeering a conference room and shutting the door.
But, it makes sense to provide it for teams in general, in my opinion.

~~~
tbrownaw
_1) Knowledge workers need 30 square feet of desk to get optimal efficiency_

I expect this to be different now, and possibly more dependent on _screen_
space than on physical _desk_ space.

 _I think you 'll often see workers getting this situation when they really
need to be productive by commandeering a conference room and shutting the
door. But, it makes sense to provide it for teams in general, in my opinion._

There have been a couple big projects where we flew in the remote people just
to get the whole team in a room together. So it's not only the workers that
know this; management does as well or they wouldn't approve the travel budget.

~~~
Bahamut
Maybe a little different, but having a lot of physical desk space is still
very important IMO. It feels great to have lots of desk space, it helps carve
out more privacy since there are less possible closer places other people's
desks can occupy. I dislike when people peek around my screen just because it
is convenient to.

------
buserror
I think the real reason is 'cost', and the loss of productivity isn't
quantifiable anyway; so whomever makes the decision can put an exact number on
how much he 'saved' while being able to ignore the side effects.

It's like people who buy solar panels in north england; they think it gives
them 'free' energy and they are being 'green', while ignoring completely the
carbon footprint of making that panel in the first place; while that panel
will /never/ repay itself with the energy it harvests.

Going back to open offices (and I'm typing this from one!) I think it's a
disaster. There are days when all I can really do is read HN, as there's about
3 loud conversations within 5 meters of me, including one Italian guy who's
yelling into his skype microphone.

~~~
rtpg
But couldn't that be solved through office culture? Simply telling people
"skype calls happen somewhere else"? Though obviously it would take a lot of
work to get everyone to agree that that is the "best" culture. Especially for
people who talk for a living (customer service, sales)

Surely you have an empty conference room somewhere

~~~
rayiner
Isn't that ironic? Advocating going to a _conference_ room so you can be alone
and concentrate?

~~~
brlewis
I read that as advocating going to a conference room to yell into your skype
microphone.

~~~
ctdonath
Article describes author going into a conference room for quiet & isolation
(also notes people coming in to ask if that's why he's in there).

~~~
brlewis
Yes, but this comment subthread is about rtpg's "Surely there's a conference
room" reply to buserror, not about that part of the article.

------
RogerL
I don't buy the opening argument; essentially "rich people are smart". We've
endlessly witnessed stupid corporate acts. To name a few that have nothing to
do with open offices: Conglomerate building (if your name ain't Warren Buffett
you almost certainly destroyed value), corporate raiders (destruction of value
to line the raider's pockets), the 1999 bubble (let's throw billions of
dollars for 'eyeballs'), off-shoring, American automakers (do I have to get
into the details here), stack ranking, faulty risk assessment (nearly every
NYC banking/investment firm). Waterfall (the stupid kind, not the way it was
meant to be done, which is quite good for projects involving airplanes and
such). Agile (as it is practiced, the manifesto is nice for _certain kinds_ of
projects). Windows 8, or MS' ignoring the internet for a long time. I could
type all day.

Companies do stupid things all. the. time. They fly in the face of all
available evidence. People are put in charge that shouldn't be in charge. They
are driven by ego, or other measures that lead to sub-optimal decisions.
Sometimes they are really good, but just make mistakes. I'm a programmer, and
my compiler tells me I make 100 mistakes a day; I don't fault upper management
for the same. They just don't have that immediate feedback loop that we do. Of
course they will make expensive mistakes.

Heck we see it in this thread. Evidence shows that productivity is _lowered_
in open office environment, yet we read claims that it is improved.

~~~
juliangregorian
I kinda do. If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?

~~~
pmlnr
/off

Because one have a soul and may not want to rip off others?

~~~
koonsolo
Do you mean rich people don't have a soul and became rich because they rip off
others?

I would think most rich people got there because they created something
valuable enough for people to pay money for it.

~~~
gorena
Most rich people are rich because their parents gave them money.

~~~
bryanlarsen
That's so oversimplified that it's not true. mklim's comment is more accurate.

------
drewg123
I am an old curmudgeon who hated working in an open office (at Google in
Mountain View) for a few years.

My personal theory is that the open office trend at Google (and probably
Facebook, and others) was initially driven by the fact that the founders
jumped directly from school, and never had a "real job" with a normal, old-
school office when they were first starting.

Thus they have never personally seen the immense value of a real office, but
they HAVE seen the value to the "computer lab" sort of bullpen environment
that was common in the 90s (when almost everybody had to show up to the lab to
get their work done, as very few people had *nix machines elsewhere where they
could do their assignments).

~~~
bryanlarsen
Yes, that's my theory as well. As noted in other comments, some studies have
shown that an office of 4 people all working on the same project is the most
efficient, and other studies have shown that a single office is best for
companies with < 10 people.

And Zuckerberg and Brin and Page probably switched from mostly programming to
mostly management by the time their companies reached substantially more than
10 people. They probably have really fond memories from their time when their
companies were <10 people.

~~~
rjaco31
They also are probably smart enough to just seek the most efficient way? I
don't think hypothetical founder nostalgia is a strong enough explanation.

------
gerbilly
When a company hires you they are getting: your availability to work, and your
capacity to work.

When problems are well defined (you have workable requirements) then you
availability becomes less important, so your capacity to work becomes
relatively more important.

When problems are not well defined or written down, then availability becomes
more important, and capacity for work less important.

Given that most startups are working on simple CRUD apps, where their most
difficult problems usually stem from their own poor organizational skills
(poor build procedures, badly configured servers, technical debt in the code)
rather than a difficult problem domain it seems clear to me that availability
would become more important to employers than capacity for work.

Also managers prefer to be able to _see_ people working. (Never mind that the
work being done in a bullpen is not productive.)

Open offices are like hives: filled with busy looking, low cost replaceable
drones.

tl;dr: Maybe open offices are popular because most startups aren't working on
hard problems.

~~~
vonmoltke
> Given that most startups are working on simple CRUD apps, where their most
> difficult problems usually stem from their own poor organizational skills
> (poor build procedures, badly configured servers, technical debt in the
> code) rather than a difficult problem domain it seems clear to me that
> availability would become more important to employers than capacity for
> work.

Yet these startups hire people as if they had very difficult problem domains
to tackle, thus filtering for people who work better in the other environment
you mentioned.

------
deanCommie
I'm sick of the circle jerk hatred about open offices. Yes, let's discuss the
pros and cons and acknowledge that they don't work for everyone.

But no setup works for everyone. And we need to stop pretending that open
office plans are some poorly thought out pranks invented by clueless managers
that offer nothing to developers.

I am a developer. I am not an extrovert. I love working in an open office, and
the one job I had almost 10 years ago that was rows and rows of offices made
me MISERABLE. I almost quit but luckily was able to move to a team that had a
team area with an open plan.

Fact: In today's age of agility, rapid development, minimum viable products,
continuous deployment, and short iterations it is much more important that you
can discuss things with your coworkers and stakeholders quickly and figure out
if you are working on the right thing, rather than going away for 6 months
into some basement, close the door, and come back with a finished product.

Fact: Distractions are cultural not physical. Provide the team with good
quality headphones, shame people who have non-silent notifications on their
devices, create a policy where people can indicate when they're deep in
thought on something complex and would prefer not to be distracted (eg. Do Not
Disturb status on internal chat that you check before messaging someone or
tapping them on the shoulder), and provide flex space people can go to on a
case by case basis for privacy. Do this and all the problems with "focus" that
open-office haters complain about GO AWAY.

~~~
Sir_Substance
>Fact: Distractions are cultural not physical. Provide the team with good
quality headphones, shame people who have non-silent notifications on their
devices, create a policy where people can indicate when they're deep in
thought on something complex and would prefer not to be distracted

Managers who deliberately create environments where headphones are mandatory
should be brought up on charges.

Basic rule of thumb: If your headphones are loud enough to block out ambient
conversation, they're damaging your ears. In 20 years, deafness is going to be
associated with programmers in the same way we associate black lung with coal
miners.

Also, I'm happy for you that your brain is only derailed by particularly loud
ringtones or people tapping you on the shoulder, you lucked out on that one!
But my brain is different:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misophonia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misophonia)

~~~
deanCommie
Oh for fuck's sakes. I wear headphones 90% of my day WITH NOTHING PLAYING IN
THEM.

We need to stop treating developers like precious children. You do not need
ABSOLUTE SILENCE to be able to do your work. 99% of us are not writing the
next PageRank or inventing the next Djkstra's Algorithm. And even when we are
99% of the time is spent on build environments and configuration and plumbing.

This does not require absolute uninterrupted focus surrounded by silence.
Making a mistake does not cause a bomb to go off or a plane to fall out of the
sky.

Put on a pair of comfortable headphones and do not plug them into anything and
75% of the noise around you is gone. Turn on some white noise or some gentle
ambient music of dozens of lyrics-free genres and it goes up to 95%. If the
only way you can work is if you can't hear any other noise outside of your own
head, you have failed as a human being because no other profession requires
that.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
It would appear that empathy is not your strong point.

No, most people don't need to work in an anechoic chamber.

But any distracting noise adds to cognitive load, and since you're being paid
to use your cognitive abilities, productivity suffers.

If you're paying people to do something and then making it harder for them to
do it, the problem is not with the people.

~~~
deanCommie
Everything is a tradeoff. Cognitive load decreases productivity. Open
communication and easy collaboration increases it. The argument is that it
makes up for it. The current popular opinion on HN is it doesn't.

I'm sorry I don't have empathy for bullshit rare disorders like
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misophonia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misophonia)

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Rationally, it doesn't matter whether you have empathy or not. But you need to
demonstrate rational understanding of the issues, and I don't think you've
done that here.

There's a lot of evidence that open offices destroy productivity, and almost
no evidence that they increase it.

So whatever your reasoning hiring people, paying them a lot of money, and then
making it harder for them to do their jobs is an irrational position.

------
michaelt

      One possibility is some people genuinely prefer them.  I 
      keep talking myself up to that, only to read another 
      article about how everyone is miserable and unproductive 
      in them. 
    

Given the choice between open plan and private office in San Francisco (where
office space costs ~$36/square foot) people say they'd rather have a private
office.

Given the choice between open plan in San Francisco and a private office in
Chattanooga, Tennessee (where office space costs ~$11/square foot) my guess is
you'd get more job applicants for the job in SF.

Perhaps this is a revealed preference for living in SF, and people are willing
to trade off private offices to get it.

~~~
cableshaft
Or option three: Given the choice between open plan in San Francisco and open
plan in Chattanooga, Tennessee, they choose the job in SF.

There's just as many open plan offices outside of SF. I'm in the Chicago area,
and I've never worked at, with, or interviewed with any company around here
that didn't have an open office plan (with one single exception, and it was a
game company, and they were split up into rooms of 6-8 people, no private
offices except for management).

------
moron4hire
> Moreover, engineers are really, really expensive, and making us less
> productive is costly. The extra space necessary for doors or cubicles could
> easily pay for itself.

The problem is, there is no good way to measure engineer productivity, but
it's extremely easy to figure out the cost of office furniture. Modern
corporations believe in optimizing what they can measure and completely
ignoring what they can't.

------
jmilloy
The one thing that kept blaring out at me to be addressed was that _your daily
productivity doesn 't matter_. The incentive here is to make the company as
productive as possible over the long term (relative to costs).

This is touched upon only slightly here when she considers replaceability.

I'm not saying that I think open offices are or are not great. But the issue
of personal productivity simply has to go away in the discussion for me to
take it seriously. Otherwise, you just sound like most software engineers I've
known who love to write gobs and gobs of code at the expense of everything
else.

~~~
tbrownaw
_But the issue of personal productivity simply has to go away in the
discussion for me to take it seriously._

And yet, nothing can possibly get done without someone doing it.

I see lots of _insistence_ that without open offices people woild spemd so
much more time on wrong things that the lost productivity is more than made up
for by better focus. I also see no _evidence_ for these claims.

~~~
unprepare
I see this as businesses pushing off even more of their part of the early
employment process.

We've seen how requirements for entry level jobs have risen, colleges work
with businesses to try and produce workforce ready graduates but are met with
ever increasing minimums.

This is companies deciding that personal productivity isnt something they need
to worry about. If someone is not personally productive, then they aren't a
good fit.

Why should the business spend resources trying to facilitate a productive
environment when they can just hire people who will work in a disruptive
environment? Just as, why should a business spend resources training employees
when they can demand only employees with very specific experience.

With outsourcing, visas, and remote working a company has very little
restrictions on the level of employee they can seek and find with little
difficulty - especially when you include a weak economy in this whole mix.

I dont know, not something i've thought a lot about i could be totally off
base, but seems like it could be part of a wider trend to me

------
GreaterFool
Personally I like open offices and working with people. I think the problem is
not with the idea but with the implementation. Great open offices have some
place where you can go and where nobody will bother you. So you can have the
alone time you need!

Unfortunately most open office have no such space. Not even the toilets
(multiple cramped stalls? hell no!).

 _Everywhere_ you go and _at all times_ there are going to be people. I think
that is the problem.

~~~
leereeves
Open offices are like paradise for extroverts, and hell for introverts.

I think office design should favor more of a compromise between the two
groups.

~~~
carapat_virulat
I think that depends what kind of introvert you are. I like big open offices
because I feel "anonymous" there and it's very easy for me to disconnect from
what's going on around me and do my own thing for hours, and then speak with
anybody from my team when I need to. If there's some person around with whom
you don't connect very well no bad atmosphere is going to occur unless you
force it. I don't need a big bubble for myself, I can create a small one
easily.

For me a small office with 2 or 3 people is more stressful, it makes me more
aware about what's going on around me because it's a more personal space. If
you don't connect with somebody in there, the bad atmosphere is going to fill
the small office very fast. My bubble is going to trip onto somebody else's
bubble more often than in a big space full of people because there's less
neutral space around.

Not sure if that makes sense at all... but it does to me.

------
danieltillett
It is a pity there is not easy experiment that people can do to prove to upper
management that they are more productive in individual offices.

~~~
frostmatthew
There's no shortage of studies that have been done on the issue. Here's a
great New Yorker article[1] from last year that references a number of
studies. This blog post[2] links to a couple others and addresses
costs/alternatives. 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"[3]. Here's a Washington Post article[4] discussing Facebook's
huge open office layout, another Post piece[5] on office furniture designers
realizing (citing multiple studies) "open-plan spaces are actually lousy for
workers." A TIME article[6] highlighted decades of research that associated
open layouts with "greater employee stress, poorer co-worker relations and
reduced satisfaction with the physical environment."

[1] [http://www.newyorker.com/currency-tag/the-open-office-
trap](http://www.newyorker.com/currency-tag/the-open-office-trap)

[2] [http://nathanmarz.com/blog/the-inexplicable-rise-of-open-
flo...](http://nathanmarz.com/blog/the-inexplicable-rise-of-open-floor-plans-
in-tech-companies.html)

[3] [http://theconversation.com/open-plan-offices-attract-
highest...](http://theconversation.com/open-plan-offices-attract-highest-
levels-of-worker-dissatisfaction-study-18246)

[4]
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/30/g...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/30/google-
got-it-wrong-the-open-office-trend-is-destroying-the-workplace/)

[5] [http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-
leadership/wp/2015/04...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-
leadership/wp/2015/04/22/office-designers-find-open-plan-spaces-are-actually-
lousy-for-workers/)

[6] [http://ideas.time.com/2012/08/15/why-the-open-office-is-a-
ho...](http://ideas.time.com/2012/08/15/why-the-open-office-is-a-hotbed-of-
stress/)

~~~
danieltillett
Yes I know there is a massive amount of studies that have shown this, but
management often believes that these don’t apply to their company. What is
needed is a simple experiment that can be performed at your company that show
your management how much money they are losing by using an open office layout.
Even the most obtuse pointy haired boss can understand that losing money is
bad.

------
tomkin
I find this argument slanted towards the introverted programmer. Fact is, the
introverted programmer is not the standard anymore. Our open office is a mix
of different types of people.

I chose an open office because I worked at a company for 9 years. In the first
5 it was an open office. I'm sure some work was suffered, but we had a
_culture_ , which is one thing the author seemingly deliberately avoids
talking about. The remaining 4 years were stuffed in a cubicle and the office
culture died. It became much easier to blame other people for faults because
you no longer had a relationship with your co-workers.

I wouldn't say the author is wrong, just that he presents a slanted viewpoint
that caters to other programmer introvert types and what their preferences are
- but definitely not a fair assessment of the open office.

~~~
mtviewdave
Everything I've read says that, in order to be maximally productive, software
developers needs to have long periods of quiet time where they can focus (I've
never seen anything to say this is true only of programmers who are
introverts). This, not supporting programmers' introversion, is the reason
people criticize open-office plans for software development work.

~~~
tomkin
See, for me that's the problem. This sense that productivity rules all. Why
did you become a programmer, or a designer? Was it to be "maximumly
productive"? I sure as heck didn't. Productivity is important, but I have to
wonder where you decided it was the absolute most important thing. If you dig
a bit, I bet that idea didn't come from you - I bet that idea comes from your
industry and the social structure around it.

On paper, the development of Color was productive, but in actuality it was a
poorly thought out blunder that costed millions of dollars.

Office culture is more important than the product or service you're
developing. There, I said it. And I stand by it. The fact of the matter is, I
got into this work so I had something to wake to everyday that isn't a
complete anti-social "productivity" sinkhole. Every cubicle, or siloed worker
represents attrition to company culture. When we were the happiest in our
work, we had community tied to it. Think about the classic examples of first
economies - what did they all have in common? It wasn't productivity. It was a
desire to build, or bake, or design - and it is these markets where happiness
was at its height. Don't fool yourselves. You're being productive towards
someone else's idea of happiness - not your own.

~~~
mtviewdave
Last weekend I was at the Amiga's 30th Anniversary event at the Computer
History Museum here in Mountain View. A lot of the original Amiga engineers
spoke. A couple of things stood out that are relevant here. First, the culture
of the company was so positive, and what they built was so impactful, that
even 30 years later, they considered it the highlight of their careers.

Second was that the engineers had offices with doors that closed.

As a programmer, I want to build solid, easy-to-use, impactful products that
delight people. In order to do that I need to focus, and in order to focus I
need long periods free of distraction. It's also satisfying to be able to get
into a state of flow. I don't need that all the time, but I need and want it
some of the time.

As a (hopefully!) future tech CEO, I want to work with people who want the
same. As as Amiga Inc (and many others) have proved, small groups of people
with private offices can produce wonderful things and still have a great
corporate culture. I also want to make sure I spend my company's or my
investors' money wisely and efficiently.

(As an aside, the reason that the Amiga had line-drawing built into hardware
is because one of the software developers had experience with line-draw
algorithms, recognized that it could be easily put into hardware, and
convinced the hardware designer to do so. Which I offer as a counter to the
people who think that private offices means people won't collaborate).

Finally, I'm rather taken aback that the director of a design agency would get
onto a public forum and announce that he doesn't really care about
productivity. Productivity relates to money spent; don't your customers care
about how much it costs to engage you?

~~~
tomkin
> Second was that the engineers had offices with doors that closed.

And sometimes that works well. Othertimes it's a hinderance. In this case, I'm
arguing that it removes culture from the workplace. There's hardly anyway to
deny that. There are also indicators that suggest lowering social interaction
is linked with depression; which would have some effect on company culture.

> As a programmer,...

You mean, "you, as an individual person with individual needs", right?

> Finally, I'm rather taken aback that the director of a design agency would
> get onto a public forum and announce that he doesn't really care about
> productivity. Productivity relates to money spent; don't your customers care
> about how much it costs to engage you?

That's an oversimplification of my statement. Our clients pay for us to take
our time, to welcome new ideas and research ways to innovate their message,
goals or vision. They do care that we spend the extra time – in fact they
knowingly pay for it.

------
notacoward
I've seen dozens of these discussions over the years, and it never ceases to
amaze me when I see that the tax angle is being left out. At a prior company,
the CFO flat-out told me that tax concerns were the driving factor. To put it
simply, in many places the "open" space is subject to lower real estate taxes,
and depreciation on the partitions etc. within that space can lower tax bills
even further (out of all proportion to their actual cost). It's totally FUBAR,
like most tax-related stuff, but it looks good on a balance sheet. When the
benefits are in black and white but the drawbacks are nebulous - even if
they're practically certain to be greater - it's pretty predictable which way
execs and investors will go.

------
koonsolo
Communication is probably the most important factor to success for both small
and large companies. Most things that go wrong is a direct consequence of bad
or no communication.

If everyone is inside his or her own office, your company depends on having
good email or message communication. Everyone should include the right persons
when sending emails, planning meetings, etc ... . This is not impossible of
course.

When you have an open office plan, your communication becomes 'in your face'.
You might overhear things that are also relevant for you. You see or hear a
lot more than through official communication channels alone. And that is
probably the reason to their success. Of course interruptions etc are
disadvantages, but nothing beats having good communication.

~~~
frostmatthew
> You might overhear things that are also relevant for you.

The key word is _might_. I remember a similar HN discussion a few months back
someone mentioned that because they happened to overhear a conversation
between two engineers they were able to save weeks of them working on the
wrong thing.

Anecdotes like that aren't signs that open offices are successful or result in
"having good communication" \- it means you have _horrible_ communication and
you got lucky. What if that conversation happened while the person who
serendipitously overheard it was in the bathroom? Or on vacation? Or in a
meeting? Or wearing headphones? _Good_ communication means not relying on
chance to prevent engineers from wasting their time.

~~~
koonsolo
You are correct, but how many companies you worked for had 'good'
communication? I worked for 5 companies, and have been outsourced to an extra
2. Communication is a real issue in companies, and the ones that already get
this partly right will win over those who don't get it right.

Like I said, it is possible to get communication right without having an open
office plan. But at least with an open office plan, you have the bare minimum
set up. And for big companies, the bare minimum is already better than
average.

The same for small companies. If you are with 5 to 10 people, not everything
will be officially communicated through email. You know stuff because it
happened in the same room as everyone is sitting in.

------
martinald
Does fogcreek still give everyone private offices? I remember years ago Joel
Spolsky writing something similar. Wonder if they still stick to it.

~~~
knowaveragejoe
They aren't "private" like you're probably thinking, they're more like rooms
that 2 or 3 people share with glass walls on one side.

~~~
edem
See for yourself:
[https://picasaweb.google.com/spolsky/FogCreekSNewOffice#](https://picasaweb.google.com/spolsky/FogCreekSNewOffice#)

------
serve_yay
You won't catch me defending open offices, but they're even worse when they're
full and the meeting rooms are booked all the time. I even frequently can't
attend a standup or other meeting because someone is in the room who shouldn't
be. And of course they're always on a phone call with a customer, or some
other thing that can't be interrupted.

I used to work from home, for 4 years. It's hard to deal with all the stupid
shit you put up with in offices.

------
bsg75
> And yet everyone, including some exceptionally profitable companies, use
> them. Why?

Because they are cheaper to build and outfit.

This will always be attractive to management incapable of looking beyond the
current expense period. All other reasons are simply marketing to the captive
audience.

------
nhumrich
Sadly, I think a factor of why smaller orgs do this is simply because larger
orgs do. I was working at a smallish company that had a wonderful layout. The
customer support team had an open layout of mini cubes (walls between desks
but not extending past desk), which worked great for them, and the engineers
had a closed off room that was basically off limits to anyone who wasn't an
engineer. It was wonderful and productive. Then, the owners decided to change
everything to intermingled open for everyone. No more walls, just flat desks
everywhere. Why? All because they visited a couple other companies such as
Facebook, etc. And that is how they saw it done there. If it works for them it
must work for us, right?

------
zaphar
I pretty much stay out of the whole Open Office debate since I seem to be
pretty much unaffected. My powers of concentration are obscenely high so even
without headphones I have to work to be interruptible.

I actually liked Open Office plans _because_ there were more interruptions.
When you have a family to get home to there is something wrong with realizing
it's nearly 10pm and the last thing you remember before you started coding was
eating lunch. The open office plans gave just enough background distraction to
allow me to surface every once and a while.

------
bluedino
It really doesn't matter. Successful startup X could have began in a coffee
shop, apartment, dorm room, open office...it was still going to be successful.
People with the right drive are going to create and be productive despite
their working environment, not because of it.

It's only later on in the process when the company can buy office space and do
some hires, when people start to get picky about where they work. I've had
some of my most productive days on a borrowed old laptop and a folding table
in a breakroom.

------
mianos
Also, add total hot desking to this for another bump down the productivity
scale. Then, to make things worse, they usually oversubscribe the people to
desks because at any one time quite a few people would be in meetings or not
in the office. Net result, huge saving on rent. After a few days of sharing a
desk with another guy and swapping power points to keep both our laptops
charged, I complained and they looked at me like I was a freak of nature.

~~~
dunmalg
It's amazing how many managers to this day are hell-bent on repeating the
Chiat-Day fiasco

[http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/7.02/chiat_pr.html](http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/7.02/chiat_pr.html)

------
kdamken
Open offices are not my favorite - I prefer silence or music of my choosing
when I'm working. There's nothing worse than a loud sales meeting going on 10
feet away from you when you're trying to code.

------
FormFollowsFunc
Maybe it's because developers don't run companies in general. For management
cost and control would be more important considerations. I know of a local
software company that's owned by 2 developers where they have individual
offices. While 37 Signals kind of have an open office, it's meant to be as
quiet as a library to avoid disruptions. People who manage probably don't need
to concentrate as much as the people who create the stuff. I suppose my point
is that people at the top call the shots, not the people at the bottom.

~~~
amirmc
That comment is just a way of saying 'they' are not like 'me' (but trying to
make it sound general).

Facebook, led by a (former) dev, has gone all-in on open plan offices - which
is a direct counterpoint. That people at the top call the shots is
tautological.

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinkruse/2012/08/25/facebook-u...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinkruse/2012/08/25/facebook-
unveils-new-campus-will-workers-be-sick-stressed-and-dissatisfied/)

~~~
frostmatthew
> Facebook, led by a (former) dev, has gone all-in on open plan offices

As another comment[1] pointed out it may have been founded by a developer, but
it was one who never worked anywhere other than the company he founded and
grew. Things that work well for a company of ten or twenty don't necessarily
work best when it grows into the hundreds or thousands of employees.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9968367](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9968367)

~~~
amirmc
My point was to refute the assertion that it's "because developers don't run
companies in general." If we're going to add lots of caveats to what
'developer' means, then we're essentially making a 'No true scotsman argument'
\-- (i.e. Zuck hasn't worked anywhere else, and is ostensibly a manager now).

~~~
frostmatthew
Oh sorry, I certainly didn't mean to suggest he isn't a "true" developer - I'm
sure he could code circles around me. I meant only that you were pointing to
Facebook as a "direct counterpoint" to the suggestion that "developers don't
run companies in general" \- and it's not a great counterpoint because he's
not going into the office every day and writing code, and hasn't since
Facebook was a small/early-stage startup (where open layouts make the most
sense).

i.e. he isn't making the decision as a developer, he's making it as a manager
and the comment you were originally replying to was suggesting "for management
cost and control would be more important considerations." [Though I'm not sure
I entirely agree with that, as pointed out in my own reply to that comment]

------
jkot
Battle for open office is lost and irrelevant. Now it is about location
independence and working remotely.

~~~
a3n
Followed in some number of years by people in Africa doing the former jobs of
people in San Francisco. If you in America can work remotely, there's no
reason why someone with equivalent skills and 1/20 the cost can't work
_really_ remotely.

You might point to stories of Indian contractors like Tata, and how badly that
works out for anything that's not Telco CRUD. (Note, I'm talking about the
business model, not individual Indians.) But that was just the first attempt.
Software will figure it out, just as textiles figured it out.

------
fit2rule
Personally I feel that with varying degrees of effort I can work in either end
of the spectrum: closed offices, cubicle farm, open office, coffeeshop, etc.
Some people can't. Some people need a desk and a door to close.

So for me from a founders perspective, the best kind of environment to get
things started would be a company space that encourages setups like a
cafe/lounge/coffeetable-style area for laptop users and those who need to be
comfortable, focused, and relatively available with ease for discussion .. as
well as areas of the workfloor where there are offices, for example, for those
who need them, or hackylab environment for where its needed, etc.

Alas, this kind of mixed-format personal workspace organization is not so
economical, and it usually requires someone be responsible for the estate,
rather than just having a cubicle-cleaning service, etc. etc. All kinds of
legal hoops, too, whatever.

But in my experience, this seems to be the case: the nicest 'kind' of
workspace for a modern startup company in my opinion, is your average
McMansion.

(If you can fit and find one local to everyone else who has to commute to it.)

I've seen great mixed-format startup scenarios in your average American mega-
house, cubicle farm in the 4-car garage, massive lounge/rec-room space for the
hackers, room #? of (4..6) bedrooms converted to shared office rooms, 2 or 3
to a room, for those who want 'a desktop' and a way to isolate themselves from
the rest of the team, and so on.

Of course, this works if the house is clean and maintained as a work
environment, and indeed if people don't live there but rather treat it as
their place of work. That can be difficult to do in some neighborhoods.

Wouldn't it then be interesting to see some sort of 'office space plan'
revolution occur in the broader sense, which accommodates all of these modes
of operation, to implement a model you could name "Big Family Home"?

Instead of cubical farms, you find interior spaces analog to a modern home
plan, s/beds/desktops/, centered around a common room/kitchen/meeting area,
etc.

Generally the way I feel when I walk into a very large organization and its
just endless row of cubicle, mind-numbing soviet khaki walls lit by brain-
sucking illumination standards, all I want to do is go home.

That is a hard impulse to resist all day. If, instead, I'm in a place that
accommodates a large number of peoples needs with some consistent attention to
variety, usually its pretty hard to go home at the end of the day .. I really
like going to a business where people are working and comfortable because they
know where the kitchen is, and someone is making lunch for everyone while code
gets written, clients are met, teams are having meetings out on the deck in
the sunshine, etc. I'm sure there are movements towards this; but the cubicle-
farm seems to have persisted for decades, alas, and for this I guess we must
thank the bean-counters.

~~~
anders30
I think the McMansion idea is great.

I had a flashback of playing the board game Clue
([http://www.hasbro.com/common/instruct/clue_%282002%29.pdf](http://www.hasbro.com/common/instruct/clue_%282002%29.pdf))
with my siblings when I was younger. Specifically, I imagined a small team of
developers in a large McMansion-Office trying to debug a large application
saying things like, "I suggest the bug was commit'd in the kitchen, by Tom
with his Custom Arch Laptop."

~~~
fit2rule
Clue and Arch, incongruous. ;P

------
davidgrenier
This piece nails it down.

------
inversionOf
One factor of open offices that is seldom counted, but remains very important,
is "fitting the organization to an image". If you're bringing bankers or
investors or other external parties through, what is more "impressive": A
floor full of hard working bees, a buzz of energy filling the air, whiteboards
full of complex diagrams (that probably haven't been erased in months if not
years) and quirky and crazy "personalizations" on all of the desks, or walking
down a hall of quiet closed doors. Or, worse still (and the #1 reason why many
companies don't allow remote work), no office really at all because everyone
is everywhere.

That "show off the empire" thing is absolutely a function of decisions. I was
recently part of such a decision process where a group was looking to become
startup-y, and cargo culting the media image of what such organizations look
like reigned supreme.

~~~
nazka
It seems to be common to do that... A friend of mine who was at a unicorn
company in SF before it was a unicorn, had nice tables, furniture, and
overpowered computers everywhere around the pathway from the entrance to the
conference room. So when VCs and business angels came it looked very nice but
everybody out of the pathway had nothing like that.

~~~
pjc50
Potemkin office! I'd never really considered the office as a form of stage set
for the performance of the appearance of work before.

~~~
nazka
Ya I know... Like people in the front were able to have a budget of ~2000
dollars per person (hello Thunderbolt Displays!) but for others it was not
even more than 300 dollars.

------
honest_joe
Open Office + Home Office works for me. If i can choose 3 days to work at home
and then come to work for meetings, brainstorming etc then it's ideal.

