
The open-office trend is destroying the workplace (2014) - makwarth
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/30/google-got-it-wrong-the-open-office-trend-is-destroying-the-workplace/?tid=ss_tw
======
danielalmeida
Posted and discussed before multiple times.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8815065](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8815065)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9610075](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9610075)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9404006](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9404006)

~~~
arkem
and two other times even more recently:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13425159](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13425159)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10661581](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10661581)

------
davidmr
I think we've lost the war. I was even asked to meet with my company's
architects and designers about a new space we were building out. I basically
spent an hour telling them in every different form I could that what I wanted
was a place I could go where people could find me, but they would have to
knock on a door and open it to talk to me, and these people looked at me like
I was from fucking Mars. They'd never heard anything so absurd in their whole
life. I even pleaded for cubicles. I can't even remember what it was like to
have dignity.

"What about a health clinic? Or a coffee bar instead?"

I found as many studies as I could about how awful these open office plans
are, and printed them all out, and left them there. At the end of the day, on
a whim I checked the recycle bin in the conference room they were in. Anyone
want to guess what I found?

When I die and get to hell, there will be a Hermann Miller chair in an open
office waiting for me. With free snacks and drinks in the kitchen.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>When I die and get to hell, there will be a Hermann Miller chair in an open
office waiting for me. With free snacks and drinks in the kitchen.

You'll be allowed to wear headphones, and Hell will have a Slack channel, but
instead of using the Slack channel, everyone will just walk over to your desk
and talk to you.

While you're debugging.

~~~
donw
The good news is, you'll only end up there if you are guilty of the sin of
writing unreadable code.

~~~
prewett
Uh oh. Is there forgiveness available? When I was a kid, I tried to write all
kinds of games in BASIC (including an ASCII version of Super Mario Bros, a
distinct disappointment). Thing was, I had only ever seen one letter
variables. So all my variables were the first letter of what they stood for,
and if that letter was taken, I used the next available letter. I never
finished any of the games, because at some point I'd run into a bug, or have
not worked on it for a few weeks, and I had no idea what anything was doing.
It was only after getting a Peter Norton book for my birthday that I
discovered variables could be more than one letter. I found the programs
really annoying to type out, because of all the long variables, but it was a
whole lot more readable...

Although, I kind of like open office plans. Definitely better than cubicles,
which have relational isolation but no sound isolation. So you feel
disconnected with everyone, but you have to hear them anyway.

------
rm999
The best work setup I've ever had by far was not private offices or cubicles
(and definitely not an open office); it was a hybrid where our team of 3-5
people sat in a large private office. This increased collaboration while
enforcing respect. It allowed our team to create a work culture democratically
(how do we arrange seating? what noise levels are ok?) that simply isn't
possible in an open seating arrangement.

I know this won't be popular here, but I find private offices problematic for
a few reasons. First, they hurt collaboration and social interaction quite a
bit. This is ok from a single developer's perspective (heavily skewed audience
on HN), but it shows on cross-functional teams. I know this can be hacked into
a private office setup ("my door is always open"), but in my experience there
is a clear difference in collaboration when there is no physical separation
between people who are working on a project together. Also, private offices
create a hierarchy where some people get big corner window offices while
others are in shitty interior offices or cubicles. My favorite thing about the
trend towards open offices has been an egalitarianism where the CEO and
founders sits at a similar desk as the interns.

~~~
devmunchies
This is my favorite environment. A large office per team. It makes me still
fell like I have my own personal space while maintaining a team vibe. It's
like a research lab where everyone in the lab is focused on the same goals.

Like a pack mentality.

~~~
zebraflask
I've worked in that kind of arrangement, too, but it only works well if all
the people put into that office are predisposed to it or otherwise able to
develop that team atmosphere. Everyone has to be able to get along. That
doesn't happen for every group out there.

If it doesn't work out, it can quickly develop the same appeal as a holding
cell in a jail - all of the drawbacks of an open office plan in a confined
space.

Programmers and engineers are professionals, and in my opinion, it's very
unprofessional for a company to provide less than a reasonably private work
environment. That means a large cubicle, at minimum. For collaboration, there
should also be several open or group spaces. Requiring too much
"togetherness," however, is just a sign of poor management and lack of respect
for employees.

~~~
perseusprime11
Have you looked into caves and commons approach?

[https://hbr.org/2013/03/give-workers-the-power-to-choose-
cav...](https://hbr.org/2013/03/give-workers-the-power-to-choose-cave)

~~~
ci5er
That one is good. It cut down on the body count of a too rapidly growing
startup I was at about almost decades ago.

In theory, I like working at an office, quite a lot, but the open-office does
not work at all for me. Cubes are even fine, but that open elbow-to-elbow
thing? Nope.

Ideally (for me), we'd have 2~3 person offices, relatively plentiful small
(5~8 person) rooms scattered through, and a large gathering space with white-
boards all around (and not dominated by ping-pong).

------
nayuki
On a related note, I noticed that cubicle offices are hardly better than open
offices. The cubicle walls are tall enough to completely obscure the faces and
bodies of your neighbors, but do nothing to block the sound. With no eye
contact or awareness of your neighbors, it's easy to mistakenly believe that
no one else can hear your sounds.

As a result, on a typical day at the office I would hear one coworker yap on
personal calls (wife & home renovation) for half an hour (per day!), another
coworker talk about company work for an hour on the phone with a distant
teammate (with many words related to my work that trigger my attention), and
the sound of phones ringing about 10 times (which is never my own phone).

Hearing all the office noise day after day, I thought about a notion called
reverse privacy: If your conversation/notification doesn't concern me, then I
don't want to hear it. I don't want it to grab my attention, be aware of it,
or have to filter it out.

~~~
rhizome
Having worked in both open-plan offices and cubicle offices I beg to differ.
In open-plan, it's by definition that you can hear other people; in cubicles
it evolves into the one or a few congenitally loud people doing the noise.
"There goes Amy again."

The visual limitations of cubicles help here, because you have a little bit of
privacy that motivates people to respect personal space. _I 'm_ quieter in
cubicles, but not everybody else is, but in open-plan I have to adapt to
_everyone_ communicating loudly by being loud myself.

~~~
noir_lord
How about some kind of sound meter that is attached to the wall of every
cubicle, if it measures sustained sound over a preset level it notifies the
boss.

Can shoehorn IoT in there somewhere, then you have metrics for everyone in the
place and who is doing the distracting.

Could even have a red light on the top that goes off as well.

(Clearly I'm joking..but only just.).

~~~
nitemice
I'm sure the boss would love to come round every ten minutes to play school-
teacher, and tell the noisy kids to keep it down.

~~~
noir_lord
Well that's what the IoT aspect is for, so many noise events in a defined
period and you just send an automated email with a disciplinary notice (again,
I'm joking).

Though actually a distributed noise sensor that reports via a simple interface
might actually be a useful thing for businesses.

------
tps5
My office is switching to an open design. And none of the people who work
there are happy about it. It was decided by the folks who own the company,
several thousand miles away.

I think the real allure of open offices is how they look. Open offices look
_modern_. They look like the kind of working area a hip, young, collaborative,
industry-disrupting company would favor. But that's all bullshit. It's just a
fairy tale that fools outsiders. Open offices look great to someone coming in
for an interview or an executive visiting from company headquarters 3 states
away. But at this point I think we can be reasonably sure that that's where
the benefits end.

I don't think this change will damage my productivity much. I'll have
headphones on all day, instead of 10-20% of the day. Seems like a lot of
trouble for that kind of outcome. I'll probably enjoy shopping for some new
headphones though.

~~~
coldcode
To me open offices remind me of factories or cattle pens, where people are
forced into acting like machines. Unlike many you I cannot code while
listening to music as being a musician, my brain winds up analyzing what I am
hearing instead of concentrating on work. The worst thing of all is having
music piped into a huge room making it impossible to even use headphones if
you don't like the tunes. You may as well shoot me at that point.

~~~
rocqua
Try something like noisli. It still has that masking background-noise effect
without being music (i.e. without drawing your attention).

It basically allows you to play a configurable mix of background noises; e.g.
Wind blowing, rain faling, white noise, train tracks.

Heck, writing this makes me want to try it tomorrow again.

~~~
mistersquid
As someone who is sensitive to sound quality, I've been using a combination of
mid-range Shure 315 earbuds with custom ear sleeves which is low-fatigue
compared to over-the-ear.

Noise-cancelling equipment isn't as effective for human voices, so I've used
low-to-high volume music to mute out my coworker's voices. This works great
until early afternoon when. I. am. Just. Acoustically. Exhausted.

I'm susceptible to music and can only use it as background for 2-3 hours at a
time.

The other day I came across HN user's grahamburger's suggestion to "add in
some white noise on top of" using over-the-ear noise-cancelling headphones.
[0]

So, I did some research/shopping and am going to experiment with audio tracks
from "The Very Best Sound of Nature - Birds, Waves, Rain (with Forest, Creek,
Wind, Thunder) [Sound for Relaxation, Meditation, Healing, Massage, Deep
Sleep, Yoga]".

Also, as a result of your suggestion for Noisli, I'm going to try a
background-noise generating application. Thank you for the suggestion.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13564539](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13564539)

~~~
rocqua
I personally find white noise to aggressive, mostly due to the high pitch.
Pink noise works better, but it still keeps me on edge. That's why I like the
more natural background sounds. They still mask outside signal, but give me
less tension.

------
ttkeil
While the open-office debate has been a recurring meme on HN for some time, it
seems that offering a variety of options as well as unfettered personal choice
is key.

For example, my current employer has wide-open office space with pods of
desks, but they also offer numerous privacy rooms for escape. As a mild to mid
introvert myself, this allows for the best of both worlds the majority of the
time: I can benefit from those casual, spontaneous conversations that pop up
in the open space, but I can also grab my own room for an entire afternoon to
crank out some heads-down work.

I think what's most important is for companies to acknowledge and respect the
variety of working styles of their employees, along with the trust that--
regardless of how chatting in a pod or hiding away from others might appear--
more often than not they're getting shit done.

edit: words

~~~
tetraodonpuffer
> but I can also grab my own room for an entire afternoon to crank out some
> heads-down work.

that might work for people that work only on laptops, but it's not going to
work if you have multiple monitors and towers, and ergo keyboard and so on

~~~
ende
The way around that is that nobody owns their peripherals. Monitors,
keyboards, etc are part of the work station, not part of the worker's personal
environment. Of course there's still opportunity for customization of
individual stations, and if someone prefers the more private spaces they can
lobby to have one customized to their taste.

~~~
radicalbyte
I don't want to touch a keyboard that someone has painted with ketchup and
____knows what else.

~~~
obstacle1
Carry Lysol wipes.

Or have the employee keep a container of them at each station (if they don't
already, which IME many do).

~~~
Crito
That's a shitty solution for a problem that shouldn't exist in the first
place.

~~~
obstacle1
If it is really such a 'shitty problem' to someone, they can easily solve the
problem by optimizing their job search for a high private:shared equipment
ratio.

People share equipment in every office everywhere. Germaphobes will need to
disinfect some stuff, they can't have private everything, and they can't
demand that people stop sharing things. Oh well, them's the breaks!

------
jankotek
I think open-office is great.

It makes it much easier for independent developers to compete with large
corporations.

~~~
secfirstmd
I too think it's great*

*Owns shares in headphone company

~~~
user5994461
I'd like to specify: Own shares in Bose*

*Empowering open offices with $300 noise cancelling headphones since 1964.

~~~
wott
Eh, you made it fancy to have to wear the same equipment as if you were on a
factory assembly line or using a jack-hammer. Nobody thought of that for
office work before.

And those who still object to wearing those are considered as retarded by the
headphone crew: just look at any Reddit thread about this matter, and you'll
see hundreds of guys who think that it is _the_ normal situation and will
thrash anyone dares say otherwise. And they truly believe that's cool and
they're cool... Perhaps battery cattle think they're cool too, dunno.

~~~
secfirstmd
It was sarcasm. I think the open office creating a need for headphone culture
when people are being paid to do deep thinking is stupid.

------
rb2k_
I seem to be the odd one out in that I actually enjoy an open office setup.

I've had both and I feel there's so much more collaboration happening in an
open office. I almost see it weekly that there's a LOT of learning through
osmosis, listening in to conversations, ...

I guess I have a pretty easy time keeping up concentration/flow. So in this
case, it "works on my machine" :)

~~~
alistairSH
How large a space and are you all colocated?

My employer is moving to an open office. Truly open, one giant space for 100+
developers, plus managers.

Half my team is remote, as are about half of the teams I work with. So, we are
all on the phone/Skype/something all day long. And not with the same people.
It's going to be like the Tower of Babel in the new space. I'm not looking
forward to it.

~~~
rb2k_
Lots of people. There are some cozies (Think 4 thick curtains and a few sofas
inside) or walls with meetings rooms between every 4-5 rows of desks.

Also: nobody really takes calls from their desk. If you want to do a VC call,
you get a conference/interview room. Same for long-winded discussions or
whiteboard sessions. You start conversations in the common area, but if it's a
larger undertaking people might move into a designated space.

------
ThinkBeat
I was re-reading Snowcrash (a novel by Neal Stephenson). In this book there is
a tangent about how aweful it is in the future to work for the government.

He goes over how horrible the work conditions were, with open offices, bosses
always watching you, no fixed assigned spacing, first come first serve
everything being tracked by computers. If you are late everyone knows it
because your sit in the boonies.

When I read it for the first time I remember feeling a revulsion at it. Now
when I read it, I was like "Um.. that is my job now"

At my company they have, /on purpose/ too few spaces for the number of
employees. So early birds get all the spaces with powerplugs, monitors,
network etc. The rest must fight it out on bench seats with no power etc.

I guess for the big bosses who spend all days in meetings its ok, but for
grunts it sucks.

~~~
50CNT
So in order to provide incentive for employees to come in 20 minutes early,
your company is willing to handicap a percentage of its workforce all day?
That doesn't just sound hostile, no, it sounds dumb.

~~~
RonanTheGrey
Sounds like someone higher up had a bad experience and wants to take it out on
everyone they can.

------
protomyth
Nothing says we don't value you like being lined up in rows with no walls.
They might as well elevate the manager offices like guard towers to complete
the look in that photo.

Do these companies get payoffs from head phone manufactures?

~~~
arctangent
> They might as well elevate the manager offices

I worked in a call centre a long time ago. At the end of each row of desks was
an elevated desk where the team managers sat, precisely to enable them to
watch each person on their team.

~~~
protomyth
I'm reminded of a phrase my Dad used on me as a youth "I am amazed and
appalled. I am amazed you even thought of it, and appalled you did it."

It says a lot about folks desperation for a job to deal with a boss with that
mindset. Sure, I'm fine with observation posts if I'm in danger and might need
help pronto. By all means, have an observation desk if I'm feeding crocodiles,
but not to monitor my daily work.

I thought have a cubicle in an office area built inside the old fuel bunker
for a power plant 50 feet underground where radio and cell didn't work and you
heard a wind noise beyond the wall to clear the air of potential fumes sucked.
I guess I was wrong.

~~~
closeparen
Call center is a customer service job, where the customers happen to not be in
the room.

I feel the same way about this as McDonalds managers directly observing the
kitchen and cashiers: nothing at all.

------
quotemstr
My preference order is:

    
    
      private offices > open office > team rooms
    

This ranking might sound odd, but bear with me: of course I like having a
space to myself. It's not just the noise: having my own space affords me a
degree of privacy. I don't like to feel watched. In environments where I don't
have a private office, I end up doing most of my heavy-duty coding from home.

Now, let's look at completely open offices and team rooms. In _both_
environments, I have to deal with add conversations, people chewing with their
mouths open, doors opening and closing, and so on. In both environments, I pay
a cognitive price. _But_ , in a completely open office, I might overhear
interesting conversations from other teams and become aware of interesting
developments. In a team room, I'm isolated from everything except my team, so
I don't learn much.

I'm very skeptical of the idea that team rooms facilitate collaboration. I've
never been much for low-level high-frequency collaboration --- pair
programming is punishment in the afterlife. Collaborating at a high level is
fine, but that kind of collaboration is best done asynchronously over some
kind of durable medium like email, not synchronously by shouting across a
room.

If I can't have a private office, I'd prefer a completely open warehouse-like
environment that at least maximizes the benefits of an open office. A team
room has most of the same costs and few of the benefits.

------
lordnacho
I wonder whether commentators are conflating "open" offices with "loud"
offices.

I've never working in anything other than an open office, but the level of
noise has varied a lot. Some offices have a culture where it's common for
people to make a scene, ie when something happens people gather round a TV and
start talking.

One place I worked at had a guy who would stand up and start a discussion
about politics every day, and it wouldn't end until he was right. It's
somewhat fun to have the old oxford union style banter, but it's a time sink
and generally doesn't move anyone's opinion.

By contrast where I am now is as quiet as sitting alone at home, even though
it's still in the financial industry and there's actually more people than the
place I mentioned earlier.

One place was a macho atmosphere (all traders), and the other is intellectual
(all coders), they both perform the same function in the market (market
making). They both looked the same though; at least three screens per person,
a wall of screens some places. You're close enough to touch your neighbour on
either side if you stretch out your leg.

------
shams93
Founders want to see what you're doing at all times, they know that you have
to out in remote double time to actual get anything done. I can't solve
incredible engineering problems with 5 people talking at the same time for 6
hours, I wind up having to work 18 hour days with 8 hours of face time sitting
and chatting to make the crew of kids happy. As a senior dev my workload is
triple the juniors so it's not unusual for me to have to do 80-120 hours a
week for 40 hours pay to not lose my gig.

~~~
obstacle1
>As a senior dev my workload is triple the juniors so it's not unusual for me
to have to do 80-120 hours a week for 40 hours pay to not lose my gig.

Your workload is triple the juniors and it takes you triple the time as them
to get your work done?

That's exactly equivalent to the productivity of the juniors. You just grind
more hours. Maybe you need to look for a more junior role.

------
intrasight
Once accustomed to working in home office in your PJs, it's very hard to
contemplate going back to commuting to, parking at, and working in a noisy,
stinky office.

~~~
atemerev
...right until you have kids ;)

~~~
intrasight
I did return to the noisy, stinky downtown office for a few years while my
daughter was young ;)

------
mnm1
Some people need different accommodations than others and companies need to
accommodate these requests, in many cases, by law. These include desks and
chairs in addition to electronics. Many companies are still too cheap to buy
proper desks and chairs for their engineers, let alone monitors and other
peripherals. Almost none of the dozens or hundreds of open office plans I've
ever seen promote healthy computing, often foregoing proper desks, chairs, and
monitors for some kitchen table with a crappy chair and everyone working on
laptops. That isn't healthy nor acceptable, and I hope that people realize
that they don't have to accept such conditions (at least in the US). If
employers are too cheap to listen, perhaps a continuing rise in worker's comp
claims and ergonomic workstation prescriptions will get them to start
listening. While this problem isn't exclusive to open offices, I see much more
of this in open offices, especially at startups. If companies can't even get
these basics right, it's unlikely they'll get anything else about the office
right either, especially since they're not trying.

------
adamnemecek
It's good that people are finally talking about this. Like 7 years ago, people
were commonly pretending that they liked it (or maybe they just didn't watch
their productivity).

~~~
naranana
It's normal: you make such a big investment (moving to an open office), you
have to pretend you didn't screw it up good.

Like when people pretended they liked standing desks because they spent $1000
in one. Imagine standing still for eight hours a day.

~~~
madgar
> Imagine standing still for eight hours a day.

Imagine sitting perfectly still for eight hours a day.

I just imagined both, and I preferred the standing still nonsense to the
sitting still nonsense.

~~~
sharkweek
Just to throw it out there, I much prefer sitting at my desk, but I make it a
point to spend some time wandering around the office/outside the building for
at least a few minutes every hour.

I'm also not a developer though, so I don't need to be in focus mode for long
periods of time.

------
hoodwink
The open versus closed office debate feels new, but it's a pendulum that has
swung for decades from one extreme to the other. The reality is that most
modern workers need access to a multitude of workspaces: open, social areas
for collaboration and closed, private areas for concentration. A progressive
company recognizes this and sets its people free to choose the workspace they
need for the work at hand.

~~~
abecedarius
I started in the 80s, and the trend this whole time seems unidirectional.

~~~
hoodwink
The pendulum swings slowly. Here's what offices looked like for many white-
collar workers in the 1950s/1960s:

[http://sites.psu.edu/leadership/wp-
content/uploads/sites/806...](http://sites.psu.edu/leadership/wp-
content/uploads/sites/8069/2015/06/Steno-Pool.jpg)

The 1980s represented "peak cubicle". The tech industry ushered in open plans
in the 1990s.

------
mattnewton
I suspect that google knows this, had made a calculation that the downsides
are worth the real estate cost, and is spinning it in a more positive light.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Why pay $300k+ a year for a developer then just to go and save a few hundred a
month on real estate costs, sacrificing some percentage of productivity?

~~~
romanovcode
Because not everyone in Google (or any other open-office space) is a
developer. In fact, most are not, and most are getting way less pay.

~~~
kchoudhu
Then put _those_ people in open office plan, and give developers offices.

~~~
romanovcode
Then it's unfair to the others :)

~~~
x1798DE
If you're worried about fairness why pay the developers $300k and pay the
other people some much smaller fraction of that?

~~~
romanovcode
Others might not know you're getting 300k man

------
dandare
I sincerely feel with those who can not concentrate in an open environment but
all is not black and white. As a mild introvert I hate the whole social dance
associated with entering someone's private office while I can go into a deep
concentration wearing just over the ear headphones even if I forget to start
the music.

(Ideal is the combination of open space with numerous meeting rooms and
smaller pods for phone calls and occasional privacy.)

Productivity is not that important if you are producing the wrong thing in the
first place.

------
Crito
I love open offices because in an open office it's easier for me to socialize
while pretending to work. I greatly prefer socializing over working, so I
prefer any office environment that facilitates this.

Some of my coworkers are a lot less social so they get annoyed with everybody
around them chatting. They probably get more work done than me, but thankfully
being less social means they get worse peer reviews than the rest of us.

------
sfilargi
Open or not, doesn't matter that much, IMHO. What is very important for me is
a distraction free environment, no noise, no visual distractions.

------
yeukhon
I think open office is great for certain roles and not so much for certain
occupations. For writer in this article having a private room is better
because it takes a lot of focus and comfort to write. But in all fairness, I
agree open office can become a diaster. Where I work now we have an open
office settings but we are small and we don't have a long table sharing with a
dozen coworkers. I think density is important - our desnity is not so high.
Furthermore where I actually sit I only gave two coworkers in the area ao for
me I don't get that much of noise. The most distracting part is just people
stopping by or passing by my desk because it is one of the paths to the
pathroom and conference rooms. But some of my other coworkers are stationed in
worser part literally sitting across the kitchen so.... everyone considered my
area to br the golden seat. I think, again, density is important. The upside
of open office is the sense of you know people can be reached out and people
aren't hiding inside a room with the curtain down.

~~~
muzzio
I especially agree with the part about density. I feel like when upper
management hears about how open offices promote group collaboration, they
imagine all of their teams working in the same room together in close
proximity, when really the benefit mostly comes from being close with people
from your team. When done incorrectly it starts looking less like an open
office and more like a boiler room.

------
danm07
I've been in a couple of co-working spaces uses the open-office concept. It's
generally pretty good when everyone is a developer, but then there's the
occasional sales/customer service person, which is what this article seems to
allude to.

I think open-office is a great concept that just needs to be refined a little:
i.e. stricter enforcement of phone/loudness etiquette.

~~~
user5994461
And what to do with people who have to grab the phone or talk?

They have nowhere to isolate because it's a f------- open office.

~~~
ceras
At my company there are meeting rooms, phone rooms, focus rooms, and social
common spaces like micro-kitchens you can go to.

~~~
user5994461
So you go there and they're already all taken.

Yep. Never seen an open office company with enough of those. It's a curse.

------
jodrellblank
Even though I dislike the feeling of an open office workplace, I'm now feeling
that there's some big push by _someone_ to make this topic keep coming back on
HN like the proverbial 'suit is back'. OK a WAPO marketing person doesn't like
her middle-school style coworkers ... so what?

I'll push back with a quote from Richard Hamming's famous talk "You and your
research" (as I'm sure I have before):
[http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.pdf](http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.pdf)

 _" Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts
about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if
you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and
tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow
you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard
work you do is sort of tangential in importance._

 _He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also
occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.
Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The
closed door is symbolic of a closed mind. '' I don't know. But I can say there
is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and
those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors
closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong
thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame"_

Are there any of these anti-open-office pieces which explicitly mention "I
might not like it and might be less productive short term ... but that still
could be a net win long term" ?

~~~
VLM
The modern equivalent to that open door is internet access. There's a whole
world on the internet, but only a tiny fraction of humanity outside my door.
You'll learn more in 5 clicks on the internet than by listening to hours of
Monday morning quarterbacking about the superbowl. That link is from 1986, at
that time the best (only) source of innovative new ideas was speech overheard
from other physically co-located humans, even long distance phone was like
$1/minute, now we have free port 80 across the entire world so virtually all
inspiration and innovation is reading visual and from the entire planet.

In 1986 it mattered if Einstein had a conversation outside your door, it
mattered in a big way, but decades later in 2017 it matters if you read
Einstein's blog and follow him on twitter.

Also note the rise of groupthink because in '86 only you had Einstein standing
in your doorway and only your doorway or at most a couple people, but in 2017
"everyone in the field" and lots of people outside the official field read,
perhaps, Aaronson's physics (although lately mostly politics) blog.

The push comes from expansion. If your company is poorly run maybe with enough
whipping everyone in the open office you'll survive maybe even thrive. But if
you want to succeed at the multi-office class of size, you'll need competent
management, and those along with the line workers are repelled by open offices
and can get jobs at non-open office employers. An open office selects for a
company that will struggle to survive past 100 people.

The biggest recent change I can think of is at the last open office I worked
at, it was a fireable offense to wear headphones; the company paid a lot of
money for the remodel and refusal to collaborate is being directly and
intentionally insubordinate. The beatings will continue until morale improves.
I admit I'm completely mystified, from what I read here everyone is visually
in sight "to collaborate" but everyone puts on headphones to drown out the
noise so they can work in order to eliminate all collaboration in practice,
which strikes me as complete nonsense.

Intense display of social signalling via architecture, the non-living parts of
the office are all open and free and the living parts of the office all have
headphones on and shush anyone who speaks, library style.

There might be an aspect of reverse psychology going on, with the whole "shush
people into silence" and headphones movement, open offices are knowingly anti-
collaborative and perhaps management wants it that way to eliminate palace
coups or something. I mean, they can't be so stupid as to think it increases
collaboration or productivity, so they must intentionally be sabotaging those
characteristics in favor of ...

------
dsfyu404ed
>Now, about 70 percent of U.S. offices have no or low partitions, according to
the International Facility Management Association.

I'd really like to see how they define "office"

~~~
coldcode
All of our managers have private offices thankfully. While seems like elitist
at least we don't have to listen to them be constantly on phone meetings all
day long. At one place with an open office they wanted to move our group
between the CEO and the sales team. Where on one hand we couldn't say anything
but had to listen to everything.

------
snissn
"Google got it wrong." What exactly did google say about open-offices?

------
giancarlostoro
This is all subjective to where you work, and who you work with I think? At my
job I came after the open office setup was in place, before that people who've
worked here for 7 years or more have told me it was awful, they actually
attribute getting more work done in the current setup than previously. It may
work for some, it may not. I was at one point trying to get a job at a place
that allowed you to either work in an open office format, or in your own
cubicle secluded from everyone else.

I personally find high value in that anyone I work with I can walk up to
without going through a maze, or if they're next to me I can just talk to them
as well and figure out what we need to do.

Edit:

Of course my office doesn't look like the one in the article, we have our own
desks still, just no heavy walls between us. There's also plenty of room
between employees, personal space should not be overlooked.

------
trhway
Until it is replaced by another, even more increasing density, trend. 3d desk
arrangement will give new meaning for "open space", and we'll be lamenting
about the good times of today's plain 2d open space office when buttocks/feet
of your office mates will be dangling in front of your face.

------
arjie
Hmm, interesting. For many people, it looks like their open office has people
taking phone calls at their desk. We take phone calls in rooms (which you book
on Google Calendar). If there are no rooms available when you book you
reschedule or take the call in the Team Room (which has no expectation of
noise-level).

If people are loud, you talk to them about it. It almost never happens since
your coworkers are respectful and since you've obviously kept the more noisy
jobs in a different part of the office from the engineers.

It seems to me that single person offices will suffer heavily from Conway's
law.

But we'll see. It looks to me like where I've just moved to has no call rooms
and no separation between engineering and the rest, so I'll see if those
factors alone will change me from pro-open-office to anti-open-office.

------
soyiuz
Theoretically (if the thesis of the article is correct and widely accepted), a
company willing to invest in closed offices should have a major competitive
advantage in hiring engineers (who would be attracted to the quality of work
life in the space).

------
Someone
If the thing on the photo accompanying that article is an open office, that
doesn't surprise me. In my eyes, it's a factory somebody threw some desks and
chairs in.

The open office I work in has 30-ish desks in a room; the room has windows on
two sides, uses lots of sound-dampening materials, doesn't do double-duty as a
corridor, has good lighting, and has six adjoining rooms to go to to have
phone calls or meetings or to work individually. That, to my surprise, works
fine.

(It shouldn't surprise anybody, but it isn't in the USA)

------
65827
I think archaeologists studying us in a few thousand years are going to be so
fucking confused by this discussion. Offices? Why?

It will seem more bizarre and alien to them than the Salem witch trials seem
to us.

~~~
rifung
I really don't think so. Someone will see SV real estate prices and make sense
of it.

Then again, I don't see the Salem Witch Trials as that alien either.

------
nunez
I am a fan of completely open floor plan with quiet rooms. It's so much easier
to collaborate with people this way, and it offers a mechanism for temporary
privacy for those that need to focus on something.

I think offices are too isolating. They emanate a "fuck you; I'm busy and
important; don't talk to me" vibe, in my opinion. If I wanted 100% isolation
from people, I would rather work remote. If I form a company large enough to
require a decision like this, that is what I'll offer.

------
kabdib
I work in a place that has an open plan, but our desks are on wheels and we
can move them as we see fit. So people working on related projects can find a
spare room and move a project there. And if you _really_ need an office, or
just a quiet corner, those are available.

It's not always super great, but it's way better than having an open plan
where you're told where to sit, or an open plan where you don't have any
continuity, just a bin of stuff, like you had in grade school.

------
jjawssd
But they told us if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear

------
vacri
I can't help but think of the amusement of a factory worker, listening to HN
have its ongoing conniptions about being able to see your colleagues.

~~~
rileymat2
I suspect most people can differentiate between job requirements. For
instance, I can play basketball in a loud gym, but have trouble doing math
there.

------
lazyjones
I have never read as many "open offices are bad" and "why I like working in
trains/restaurants/coffee shops" as in the past 2 years, it baffles me a bit.
It also suggests that there is some correlation between bad employers and open
office spaces, but the latter isn't the real issue.

~~~
jodrellblank
People who work in coffee shops do so by choice, people who work in open
offices are forced into it by their employer.

People who work in coffee shops do so for a short time, not 8-10 hours every
day in the same shop at the same desk with the same people around for the
entire time. They know that nobody there is talking about work so the
background conversations are never going to be relevant or important. They
know that nobody is walking up to them to interrupt them, so almost any motion
they see can be ignored. They know that anybody looking at them is not a
manager judging their productivity right now. Big parts of their brain can
relax.

------
perseusprime11
Just read the entire article. It feels like an opinion column but no real data
to back it up. Open office or not, cubes do not facilitate collaboration. I am
curious if anybody really cracked the ultimate workspace, and maybe the real
answer is hire employees you can trust and let them work from anywhere.

------
booleandilemma
In all the companies I've worked at so far it's been management and
sales/marketing that get the offices. Right now I'm at a company where
developers get a desk with 1 wall, and we sit next to each other. Do
developers get offices anywhere?

------
pdkl95
The popularity of open-offices is obvious: unless you condition away their
sense of privacy, the engineers might complain about writing
spyw^H^H^H^Hanalytics.

// ok, that's not the only - or even primary - reason, but it is probably a
larger factor than we realize

------
aphextron
This is the number one thing that has made me lose all desire for working in
the SF startup scene. I simply cannot be productive at 9:00 a.m. sitting in a
chair, whispering distance to 4 other people, under fluorescent lighting.

------
rhizome
(2014)

------
m1sta_
I see the value in an old-school workplace where everyone has an office.
Cubical variations, no matter how pretty, just always feel a bit wrong unless
everyone is working on the same project.

------
drakonka
I understand that in practical terms giving every employee their own private
office might be unrealistic. I would love to just sit in a smaller room with
my immediate team/subteam.

~~~
amag
I don't think it's unrealistic, it's just that our expectations have gone
(way) down after years of abuse. The cost of an employee is at least a
magnitude larger than the extra cost that comes with giving them a private
office. So if it makes an employee at least 10% more productive (in my
experience the gain is definitely more than 10% but YMMV) it's a financial
win.

------
Theodores
I am automating my noisy colleagues out of existence. I automate the bits of
their jobs they need to talk about with better customer service delivered in
the process. The meetings they need to have nowadays have far fewer bullet
points on the list as so much has been automated out of existence.

Some managers who manage no people have to do reports for other managers, they
badger people for data and then their final work - the report only goes up the
chain. All of this activity can be removed if the report is fully automated
and cc'd to everyone in the team. That day a month (or days) doing reporting
now gone. Then make all those things that needed to be reported on not need to
be reported on by automating even more. Reduce human tasks to simple yes/no
approval buttons.

User experience matters too, reduce the need for anyone to call by making sure
the website has the information they need, sure in the knowledge they will
look there first.

A good ticketing system also helps, try and get other teams using the same
tools with simple forms for the wider company to submit problems that need
fixing in such a way that all useful information is given, e.g. dates,
codes...

In my experience it has not been a problem automating large chunks of work or
backward processes, once the changeover had been made it then seems a
ludicrous idea to go back to the old way, plus the staff resources have gone.

Admin jobs can be automated in such a way that the computer does all the
required filtering before sending an email on to whomever needs the
information.

Depending on your product, whole sales teams can be eradicated with a really
good B2B site.

Managers with staff can also be made surplus if they no longer have teams of
people to manage. Whole mini-empires can also be bypassed by the computer
doing the reporting and sending it out democratically, without manager input.

So, if you want a less bothersome office and are prepared to put in the
required work to get things automated then you can eradicate whole swathes of
surplus people. This is never really as miserable as it seems, automation is
necessary to scale that aspect of the business and those 'surplus' people can
move up the value chain if they want. Also, if the business grows (because it
can) then the remainder of their work that cannot be automated will grow to
become full time skilled, pro-active work, not reactive or mundane dogsbody
work.

In this way I think you can transform an office of lousy noisy timewasters
into something more like a university library... (I often whether the noisy
people in the office are the ones that never sat in university lectures).

------
perseusprime11
Why are we posting articles from 2014?

~~~
grzm
The "News" of Hacker News is misleading. Any topic that might appeal to HN
community members, regardless of age, is appropriate.

That said, this particular article was on HN 20 days ago and generated 116
comments:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13425159](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13425159)

It's been featured on HN quite a few times in the past:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=The%20open-
office%20trend%20is...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=The%20open-
office%20trend%20is%20destroying%20the%20workplace&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)

Kinda amazing that this submission already has over 170. I guess people have a
lot to say on the topic.

------
facepalm
I guess in the future workers will wear VR headgear all the time, so the
surroundings will matter less?

------
adrienne
Women who put up with this aren't "saints", they're just being exploited by
their partners.

~~~
sidlls
My wife chooses to have a job that she does full time from home. We are very
much of means to provide a full time live-in nanny or day care for our
children on our current income. If she chose she could get a much better
paying "butt in the seat" job and we'd have even more means. She doesn't "put
up" with anything in the pejorative sense you mean, and is most certainly not
being exploited by me. Shame on you.

However we are extraordinarily lucky. My mother, for example, was a single mom
who sometimes had three jobs just to make ends meet. She didn't have any real
choice. She was exploited by the system and her ex-husband both.

~~~
adrienne
If you had a full-time nanny you'd just be exploiting someone _else_ , and
that's not really better! (Although at least she'd be getting paid.)

~~~
adrienne
More seriously: You complain that your kids bother you any time you try to
work from home, and how that's just intolerable. But your wife apparently puts
up with it every day. They probably bug the shit out of her too - she's just
doing that without whining to you about how _haaarrrd_ it is. Implying that
what makes her a "saint" isn't "putting up with her kids" so much as it is
"putting up with _you_ ".

~~~
dang
This sort of personal attack is a bannable offense on HN, and you've done it
repeatedly. Your comments to HN have also frequently been uncivil, often
egregiously so. Since we asked you to stop breaking the site rules and instead
the problem has gotten worse, I've banned your account, at least until we get
some indication that it won't happen again.

------
paulcole
Despite what every open office critic says, it's very possible to be
productive at work in an environment that is not designed to meet their very
exacting needs.

You're not painting the Mona Lisa, you're working on some app or spreadsheet.
It's called work for a reason. Learn to make do.

~~~
drakonka
While it is possible to put up with a lot and still churn out work, many tech
companies nowadays try to make their office and facilities a perk of the job.
"Look how cool our office is. We have twenty coffee machines on each floor, a
massive beautiful kitchen and bar, meeting rooms with couches! A game room.
Come work for us!"

Companies that treat their office as a selling point for employees should
expect to be criticised when that selling point falls short in the most
important area of all - where the people they are trying to attract actually
sit and work all day.

~~~
VLM
My advice for young devs is to pay very close attention at interview time to
who's using those perks.

Ah nice k-cup machine collection but no k-cups have to bring those from home.
Nice bar with beer keg tap, pity its a firing offense to drink on the job and
that kegger is only for sales execs to woo customers. Nice couches in the
meeting rooms, those managers and directors sitting in meetings sure look
comfortable sitting there. I worked at a place with a genuine foozball table
and getting caught playing foozball was a euphemism for getting downsized the
next quarter, the thing seriously had dust on it like it was cursed. Maybe it
was. All of that stuff is supposed to be for the trendy software dev, but its
not.

Its sort of the democratization of the executive washroom. We no longer have
solid marble and gold plated toilets for the executive washroom, that's so
last century, today we have couches that only director level and above can sit
on during meetings and kegerators that only customers can drink out of and
foozball tables that no one uses. Looks nice though, doesn't it?

