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Ask HN: Why are you against open plan offices?
54 points by gmtx725 on May 12, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 149 comments
This topic seems to come up time and time again on here. As someone young and new to the industry I have only ever experienced open plan offices, so I don't really know what the alternative is like. However I'm inclined to say I don't think I would enjoy cubicles or private offices. I feel like you'd miss out on so much collaborative effort and serendipitous & spontaneous conversations with colleagues that solve problems out of the blue. I also think it's just plain isolating being on your own in a room all day. What's wrong with just putting some headphones on if you want to put your head down and do some deep, quiet work?

Having said all that as I admit I haven't experienced the alternative so I'm open to being convinced I'm wrong.




I'm not actually against open plan offices....at team level. I'm against open plan offices at large corp level.

I have 300 people on my floor, the group closest to us is from business and spends 2/4 hours a day on the phone. It saddens me because the largest openly claimed benefit of Open Plan offices is "increase collaboration". What I literally see is people locking themselves with headphones and trying to hide in rooms to get some silence. I mean, people literally have to walk around teams to go to the toilet or get a coffee.

I'd like team size cubicles. That would sound to me like a good compromise between collaboration, and deep work. I'm sure people would open up more. In fact, it is how it was setup at Bell Labs back in the time [1], not the pale copy we see everywhere today.

A bit like Agile has become Scrum I'm guessing :).

[1] https://aquicore.com/blog/bell-labs-office-design/


> I'd like team size cubicles.

Upvoting and quoting to emphasise this point. The alternative to open plan is not individual offices, it's team offices.


So... regular offices?

Because that's how most office building have been organized outside of tech for decades.


In one job we had large rooms where each team was housed. There were no closable doors so it felt open but gave us quiet so we could concentrate.

That doorway was a psychological deterrent to people coming to socialize or ask stupid questions. It made them stop no briefly.

The people who needed privacy due to sensitive nature of their work, like HR and legal, got offices with doors. I hear from people at other companies that this is not always the case.


I wasn't there to experience it first hand, but it seems like that's how it started as well. Extra collaboration in between teams, but small enough panel size in your direct surrounding. Were not meant to evolve constantly around 100s of people all day


How about something like the 1972 Centraal Beheer offices:

http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/central_beheer.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_xHQjBKbjo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rT1VQHcZOj0

https://www.ahh.nl/index.php/en/projects2/12-utiliteitsbouw/...


haha, het ziet zeker goed uit! I like the whole 'factory' look of it.


>I'm not actually against open plan offices....at team level.

Having now worked in one of these at a large company, we found those sorts of "team offices" hurt collaboration and innovation even more than open floor plans. Unless the company is relativley small, the random conversations between people from different teams is often the key to innovation and getting problems solved early without having having to have formal meetings and delays. A team room means that to ask a co-worker on another team a simple question (or to just see what they are working on) becomes a big deal because you are now entering that other team's space and interrupting a dozen people. Unless you really know the other person well, we found people just are very hesitant to do it.

In big companies, there usually isn't a problem with communicating within a team - the problems occur when teams aren't communicating with people in other teams. These team rooms ruin informal inter-team collaboration and communication.

With the pandemic it isn't hard to see that a small enclosed team room with people packed in it is also a pretty good way to guarantee a virus will be spread to others.


Yeah, I mean I'll leave pandemic out of the discussion simply because airco will make sure the virus is spread everywhere in the building, not just the team anyways.

I do agree with you in a way, that's one of the dangers. But I also see today that a lot of teams are not even sure what's being done just next to then, simply because everyone has headphones on all day. Creating a climate of inter exchange and communication in between teams is indeed key.


>Yeah, I mean I'll leave pandemic out of the discussion simply because airco will make sure the virus is spread everywhere in the building, not just the team anyways.

If the air con is recirculating the air like in the case of that restaurant in China, that is true. Otherwise the risk isn't as clear:

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/can-air-conditioning-...

>...But I also see today that a lot of teams are not even sure what's being done just next to then, simply because everyone has headphones on all day. Creating a climate of inter exchange and communication in between teams is indeed key.

I agree. The best environment I've seen for that is individual offices with shared collaboration spaces near the offices.


> A team room means that to ask a co-worker on another team a simple question (or to just see what they are working on) becomes a big deal because you are now entering that other team's space and interrupting a dozen people.

Which is better than interrupting the hundred plus people in the giant open-office space?


Unless they feel the need to yell, they are probably interrupting a small number of people and not hundred plus people. The difference in the open floor plan is that at least they aren't entering the private space of another team. What we saw is that when each team is in their own little silo, people are reluctant to go invade another team's private space unless they knew the person very well. Inter-team knowledge sharing and collaboration really dropped.

While team silos create additional problems, obviously the hundred plus style open floor plans are still pretty horrible. The best approach I have seen is individual offices with shared collaboration areas nearby. People can do deep work by closing their office door. People can pair-program, have someone look over their code, have a private conversation etc. by going to another's office without disturbing everyone else. A shared collaboration area allows for quick easy group discussion when helpful.


in a 100 people room there will always be people walking around. what an open office does is to train people to ignore the noise around them (pity those that can't adjust). you'll see people walking by and you'll ignore them. in a team room, if someone enters, you know that it's for the team, and everyone will perk up to see what the 'intruder' wants.


> A team room means that to ask a co-worker on another team a simple question (or to just see what they are working on) becomes a big deal because you are now entering that other team's space and interrupting a dozen people.

Isn't that kind of the point of having team offices?


>...Isn't that kind of the point of having team offices?

Having each team in their own silo isn't necessarily a good thing. They may feel they are getting more done in their daily standup meetings, but long term innovation often comes from inter-team collaboration and sharing of expertise.

As I said before, what I've seen is that random conversations between people from different teams is often the key to innovation and getting problems solved early without having having to have formal meetings and delays. I've also seen teams in their silo end up making poor choices in areas of technical design where they didn't have as much background.

If two companies are competing with each other, the one where there is great informal inter-team collaboration is going to have an advantage over the one where each team is in its own silo and at best ignores the other teams.


the question is, what is better for collaboration. if getting a question to another team is a such a big deal, then it will happen less and hurt interteam collaboration


once you have people working from home, or teams spread over multiple locations then any offline communication becomes a problem because the remote people are excluded. interteam communication is not an officelayout problem but a company communication culture problem.

changing the office layout may be one approach to address the problem, but it may not always make the problem go away.


> I'd like team size cubicles.

For a while we had 1st and 2nd line support on the other side of the aisle from us on a floor that had ~ 75 people working there, it was so hard to concentrate.

My boss was trying to get a room built for our team: 4 developers, 2 Analysts and 2 testers alas it never happened. Something about collaboration, despite the fact that our team was working an entirely new product line using a new technology (for the company).


> What I literally see is people locking themselves with headphones and trying to hide in rooms to get some silence. I mean, people literally have to walk around teams to go to the toilet or get a coffee.

This sentence describes me. I have my headphones plugged in almost all times because I cant focus with all the noise.


You are not alone in this. Many developers find noise to be a especially distracting factor. I am in this category.

Also, I feel the need to comment on the widespread notion that the primary motivation for open-plan office is that "it facilitates collaboration" which in my opinion and experience is barely truthful in any way.

The reality is that open-office is motivated by the costs of rent -- it really is that simple.

The whole thing about "collaboration" is after-the-fact rationalizing because organizations lack the courage to admit that it really is about money.


> I'd like team size cubicles. That would sound to me like a good compromise between collaboration, and deep work.

I agree, but isn't that just a room? When I was doing research at my university, all of the offices were laid out this way -- each group had one room where they all worked so they could discuss things (and the building is one of the older buildings in our 200-year-old university). Also (though I work from home) when we have face-to-face meetings at my employer's offices, the offices are similarly laid out (2-6 people from the same team in a room).

I knew that the open offices thing was the new fad in "efficiency improvements to the workplace which are actually just a way to save money", but is it really so common now that people feel the need to reinvent the room and call it a "team sized cubicle"?


I'm not an expert on the matter, but I read that originally Bell Labs opened up those 'rooms' to create inter disciplinary collaboration.

In other words, exactly a room yes, but making sure that you as as chemist run into a geologist once in a while, or a computer scientist gets to meet a biologist. It was about alleyways and corridors, rather than rooms itself.

Of course, things have evolved with time and get used for other reasons (saving costs is indeed a big one) and we also tend to idealize the past so I won't make facts out of what I read but it makes sense to me.


Hotdesking often means team members can't sit near each other. I find it hilarious that you have people who spend their entire day on zoom calls with collegues in different parts of the buildings, who also claim they can't possibly work from home.


that's not hilarious. some people just need the occasional face to face interaction, and can't tolerate being alone. i used to work in a kind of hackerspace where i'd sometimes pick the large kitchen as my workspace with others there doing completely unrelated things just because it felt better than being locked up in my room.


> I'd like team size cubicles. That would sound to me like a good compromise between collaboration, and deep work.

Small clusters of real offices (i.e., floor to ceiling walls, doors, all lights under control of occupant) opening on a shared space might be better for that. I worked at a place like that once. There are some diagrams of the arrangement in this comment [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3730655


Does that not just create silos though. So many things require cross-team working. If each team has its own private space then information bottlenecks will occur


You have to compare the cost of potential information bottlenecks with the cost of no deeper work being done at all. To combat the bottlenecks, just include shared spaces - a kitchen with a water cooler, a foosball table, a customary time where people go to lunch as a group. Serendipity will happen there, and workstations can be reclaimed as places for concentration.


The best approach I have seen is individual offices with shared collaboration areas nearby. People can do deep work by closing their office door. People can pair-program, have someone look over their code, have a private conversation etc by going to another's office without disturbing everyone else. The shared collaboration area allows for quick easy group discussion when helpful. In terms of preventing information bottlenecks, it is easy for someone in another team to walk by and ask a question of someone or run an idea by them without it being a big deal.


Maybe, i'm not convinced. In my experience social interactions in shared spaces like kitchens etc tend to be dominated by general niceties and non-work chat. Which is fine, obviously, but I don't think you get the benefits as when people working on similar stuff are physically proximate to one another in their workspace, and can get feedback on an idea they are working on now instantly from knowledgeable coworkers


> people working on similar stuff are physically proximate to one another in their workspace, and can get feedback on an idea they are working on now instantly from knowledgeable coworkers

Yeah, but the issue people arguing against open-space have, myself included, is that we explicitly don't want to have these interactions, at least not in unstructured form - because your request for feedback from me "now instantly" is actively preventing me from getting my work done.


It's just that, a request. You are not obliged to help people straight away if you are deeply engaged in something. In fact most people are polite enough to not ask if it's clear you are busy. But if you're not, having access to that immediacy is a real boon IMO.


It's a request, but just issuing a request to a developer in a state of deep focus stands a good chance of kicking them out of that focused state, ruining anywhere between half an hour and the rest of the day for them. So you need to be really mindful of the cost of just asking someone if they have time.

The usual solutions I've employed or been subjected to in the past are: 1) headphones on == no interruptions of any kind, 2) direct questions and requests to IM (with notifications off), and 3) if you need someone's repeated help during the day, then note your questions on a list, and agree on a period (e.g. every hour on the clock) when you and that someone will go over the list together. In my experience, 3) is magical, because once you start noting questions down instead of asking for help immediately, you'll discover that before the hour is up, you'll have answered most of your questions yourself.


I feel like you're being a bit precious. If someone asks you 'hey, can you help out with this', and you respond 'no not right now i'm busy', that knocks you out for half an hour to the rest of the day???

FWIW I'm a pretty independent worker and I agree people should try and work things out on their own before asking for help


It's not necessarily about having that happen once though. That can happen the many times throughout the day, and 2-3 interruptions in one day can be a lot. I think a lot of the point of not doing open-plan is to engineer an environment where it happens less often.

That being said, it's entirely possible that some tasks will require absolute focus and having a 2 minute conversation will legitimately lose you a large amount of productive time. There may also be a subset of people who are more likely to get these particular tasks, and those people will feel the negative effects of an open plan office much more than others working on more easily interruptible tasks.


Yes, it is that bad for some people. But most importantly, even if it meant "just" 5 minutes to get back into flow, you still have an organization that doesn't know how to share information and you have a manager that is crippling team productivity without even knowing.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/02/12/human-task-switche...

> I agree people should try and work things out on their own before asking for help

That is far from ideal in two ways:

- knowledge sharing suffers. You do your research and solve your problem or you don't and you have to ask to someone else more experienced. Knowledge sharing is kept to an oral tradition. Teams quickly start depending on one or two key members and juniors are often with a feeling with being left alone.

- you still have this anxiety of "when is it okay to interrupt?" On both ends. Everyone's threshold is different, so there is always someone who will be annoyed by the interruption and suffer.

The way to fix this is by promoting collaboration (pair-programming sessions are great and both partners already expect the communication, so "flow" is easier to maintain, also it is terrible to do on open-floor plans) and having a clear written practice to share knowledge and documentation.

There is no single situation where an open plan office leads to more team and individual productivity.


In my experience, "Being able to be productive while not in The Zone" is a job skill like any other that can/should be learned and improved with practice. I used to be like that, where if you said peep to me while I was focused, I snapped out of it and couldn't work my way back up to productivity easily. This is kind of a "junior developer" problem that IMHO developers just need to overcome with practice. Having a kid helped me a lot. Suddenly there were distractions all day, and I was forced to learn how to be productive in 30 minute spurts.

As one gets more senior in their development career, their days will get more and more punctuated with meetings. You start gradually moving from the "maker" to "manager" schedule. So your reality will be a day with a handful of 1 hour time slots available for deep work. In my view you just need to deal with this reality and learn how to be productive in it.


> In my view you just need to deal with this reality and learn how to be productive in it.

IMO, senior developers who are “productive in it” are getting by on pattern matching.

Just like I can drive to my local mall without even thinking about it.

They haven’t actually learned how to be productive working this way.


>> Just like I can drive to my local mall without even thinking about it.

I have seen plenty of software that appears to have been written by someone who was 'not even thinking about it' and it is invariably problematic and expensive-to-maintain.

Do you really believe there are senior devs that are productive without even thinking about it?

That just strikes me as odd -- maybe they are working on stuff should be given to Juniors?


> Do you really believe there are senior devs that are productive without even thinking about it

All the time. I’ve done it myself plenty of times over my career.

> That just strikes me as odd -- maybe they are working on stuff should be given to Juniors?

Would you give a delivery job to a brand new driver or a driver who has done the required route dozens of times and could do it without thinking?


Yeah, after two kids I did manage to learn to deal better with interruptions, but I still feel a difference between "able to work" and "being in the zone". I am able to be interrupted in the middle of a list of actionable items and resume to it somewhat painlessly, but ask me to, e.g, plan a sprint or write a longer-term strategy doc and I will just wait until all the lights in the house (or office) are out.

I do disagree, however, about it being a problem related to lack of experience. It is good when someone can learn to handle interruptions, but it's even better when they don't have to. Handling interruptions and impediments are the main responsibility of a good manager, not of the developers.


This is what everyone assumes, but when you actually test that idea, it turns out not to be true:

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.201...


Thank you for the academic link providing a solid contradiction to the idea that open-plan facilitates or improves 'collaboration'.


this, the best office I worked at was in a Large room where me and 4 other engineers sat in an open office layout in 4 corners of the room. People from other teams would peek in and talk to us when they need us. When we need to have an engineering meeting people just gathered in our room and we closed the door.


Yup, a room for the team is perfect. And then a gatekeeper (team lead) at the door everything has to go through.


Working from home for the past 3 months taught me that a lot of my constant tiredness and apathy came from the constant noise you get in an open office.

Some people can't handle being productive in a extremely loud, and extremely bright environment. It doesn't matter how much I destroyed my hearing by putting loud music over noise-cancelling headphones, I always felt tired after ~2 hours of work.

Open offices seem to start in companies with 10 people, and eventually turn out in floors with hundred of other workers screaming loudly so they can be heard over the existing noise. Ideally, an open office should have noise detectors over the office to remind people to keep their noise down.

As a positive, if I were 20 years older I'd probably have started working in cubicles, which have all the negatives of an open office but without any natural sunlight.


In our elementary school cafeteria, we had a large traffic light that was sound activated.

Reasonable noise levels were green, but if we got too loud it would turn yellow to warn us to quiet down, but if it turned red, it would make a loud buzzing alert, and we were not allowed to speak during the red light.

If you did speak during a red light, you were written a ‘ticket’, and would not be going to recess that afternoon.

It would turn back to green after a specified time.


That sounds incredibly dystopian. I hate it.


Does it? I much prefer an objective measure of volume instead of a school staff member just writing individual kids up for being subjectively too loud---the machine should have much less bias.


Why do they need to be quiet? This is in a cafeteria, not in a classroom.


I remember the elementary and middle school cafeterias being host to an occasional screaming match, so I can see why they would want to keep it at a reasonable volume. It might be a little over the top to have the traffic light thing, but it's better than the subjective alternative.


We had a traffic light system as well, but I think it was controlled manually by a staff member, and there wasn't any penalty when it was red. It didn't last long.


Minus the "ticket", the same traffic light is in every kindergarten in Sweden, as well as a majority of public spaces.


It's also possible that higher co2 levels could be making you tired. I have been seeing more and more studies on high co2 levels in crowded offices causing measurable effects.


That makes sense, but also seems not too difficult to prove.


There was a paper or report floating around HN the other day, in which the Navy analyzed data from submarine crews, and could not reproduce the claimed effects of increased CO₂ concentrations in air. With that out there, I worry a definitive answer may not be so easy to establish.


Interesting. I will try to find that sub article.

Maybe open-offices that can’t install ERVs can use rebreathers instead?

I was reminded of this hackaday project...

https://hackaday.com/2018/05/29/monitoring-air-quality-one-s...


I last months I found out, that initial stress started with an early search of parking spot on the street. Only managers and other very important persons had their places in a garage.

Then this open office with bunch of fresh graduates solving problems and organizing meetings at their tables. No words left... and hiding in meeting rooms, labs and kitchen isn’t solution either. After pandemic is over, I’ll start at 100% remote startup. I can sacrifice 10% of my current pay for better working environment. It’s definitely worth it. Maybe even move to cheaper location one driving hour away, so I can still visit occasionally office.


> As a positive, if I were 20 years older I'd probably have started working in cubicles, which have all the negatives of an open office but without any natural sunlight.

Having worked in an environment that was essentially 'medium sized rooms with sizable cubicles', I would MUCH prefer that over open-office. In one environment I found particularly effective, cubicles were about 2m x 2m, with separator walls that were around 1.5m tall. This was great for reducing chatter and visual distraction, and offering a modicum of privacy, but readily enabled 'gophering' discussions and impromptu technical discussions. The cubicle walls allowed just enough friction to noticeably minimize social chatter while not preventing fruitful organic discussions.

Granted, this was in a nice building, with tons of windows and natural light. On the other end, I've worked in a cubicle-farm call center that had 'cubicles' that were really just shoulder-width dividers on long tables, all crammed into deep, dark cavernous office space. Having only suffered temporary exposure to open office environments, still not sure which I'd pick if given the choice, but it was definitely not a pleasant work experience/environment.

Guess point being, not all cubicles/cubicle environments are created equally, so at least for me, preferences are about more than just seating arrangement.


>Working from home for the past 3 months taught me that a lot of my constant tiredness and apathy came from the constant noise you get in an open office.

I can completely agree with this. I've had a lot of jobs, and I had one in a big (but crammed) open office space where I sat next to people in roles (e.g. HR) that required them to talk all day. The constant noise, movement, and loss of privacy just sucked out all my energy. Going home after work did nothing to refresh me because it was like recharging a battery that was at -80% to -60%. Ironically, it was the highest paying job I've ever had and also the one where I got the least accomplished in the time I was there due to that office.

Mind you, this was in NYC. Going outside into the chaos of NYC noise and traffic felt relaxing compared to that office.

>As a positive, if I were 20 years older I'd probably have started working in cubicles, which have all the negatives of an open office but without any natural sunlight.

I don't think cubicles have all the negatives of open offices. At one job I had a small cubicles where the dividers were about 5 feet high. Despite all the cubicles around me being people from tech support (who were on the phone all day), I just had a much greater sense of isolation and privacy. I was very productive in that environment. The tech support people were enterprise support people though, so their conversations had lots of pauses while somebody dug through log files, made config changes, etc. Might have been very different if they were support regular consumers.

I've seen cubicles where the dividers are chest/shoulder height. Those cubicles might as well be an open office, but at least you have some allocation of personal space on your desk.


> I destroyed my hearing by putting loud music over noise-cancelling headphones

Huh? The point of noise-cancelling headphones (at least to me) is that you can drown out the rest of the noise with fairly quiet music.


Noise-cancelling headphones aren't perfect, and if there's a lot of environmental noise, you'll need to do more than put on quiet music.

I've been in places where I wore in-ear phones (they have some passive noise-cancelling effect due to the silicone seal), _and_ with noise-cancelling headphones around those, in attempt to keep the noise out and be able to hear something.

Your ears have a sort of physical gain control built in, so if you listen to quiet music the environmental sound (that still gets through the noise-cancelling headphones) will sound louder than if you listen to louder music.

I don't recommend actually loud music, as that causes serious damage in the long run. But some modest volume will add some additional masking on top of all the other things done to keep out the environmental sound.


But the notion that I need to "drown the noise out" is wrong.

Quiet should be the default state. If you want to be loud, go find a room where you can be, instead of forcing everyone else to block you out.


Great in theory, and I agree completely, but invariably you will have a set of people who live for getting attention and they are noisy.


Of course, but there are plenty more that only join in if it's easy, and reducing the easy of participation means you only have to think about the attention junkies.


> I feel like you'd miss out on so much collaborative effort and serendipitous & spontaneous conversations with colleagues that solve problems out of the blue

This happens for sure

In my experience the ratio of beneficial to detrimental serendipitous and/or spontaneous conversations that result in any benefit is extremely low, so low in fact as to not being worth it. The problem is that people tend to remember the useful one conversation and forget the other 100.

At my current job, never have I ever been involved in anything that has resulted in a solved problem from a casual conversation, yet I was regularly interrupted by other people before I started working from home.


I find the worst interrupters are not co-workers but impatient, micromanaging managers. Yup, the Dilbertian PHB's -- there just are too many of them out in the wild.


Coworkers can be a menace too. Two jobs before, I worked in a place where each team of ~8 people had their own room. On the floor, we had a bunch of "roamers" who would visit every room at random times to socialize. And then, within the team, we had the problem of everyone doing their own "break for cat memes" at a different time, and wanting to share the funny thing they saw immediately; we sort-of solved that by creating a dedicated IM chatroom for sharing off-topic posts, but then those would sometimes spill over into meatspace anyway, and suddenly you had half of the room discussing some stupid video while the other half tried to work. It was manageable at this level, though. An equilibrium.

(I have to admit that I did my own share of distracting my coworkers there; nobody was blameless in our room.)


Open-plan offices came about because they are mainly cheap.

Or, then, you just don't trust your employees and want to watch over them all the time.

Neither of these reasons touch the actual reason why you are in the office - to create added value. Hence open plan office is an environment that the market has selected for all the other reasons, except to be a good place to work.

Some people like open offices, other don't.

The overall picture from literature and practice is that if the cadence of the work is "like in NASA flight control" then the easy communication aspect is an actual asset.

On the other hand, if you are mostly coding and doing other sort of deep work, then an open plan office is openly hostile to productivity.

For example, if noise level increases 10 dB it decreases productivity by 5% [0].

Personally, having worked in all sort of configs for two decades, my capability to concentrate, productivity, and happiness in an open plan settings plummets.

[0] Dean: Noise, Cognitive Function, and Worker Productivity "https://joshuatdean.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/NoiseCogn...


5% per 10dB of added noise floor? That seems really low to me. Think about it... 30dB is the difference between a quieter window fan and a train going by next door.


Read the referred paper. It is fairly thorough :)


You can hear everything. Coughs and other sharp noises go straight through ANC headphones.

You're exposed to everything.

People will tap you on the shoulder.

While I'm the same as you, I don't particularly enjoy the feeling of having noise cancellation headphones on for the entire workday - it starts to feel a bit vertigo-ey.

Some people don't like making small talk.


> don't particularly enjoy the feeling of having noise cancellation headphones on for the entire workday - it starts to feel a bit vertigo-ey.

Ay. It shouldn't be acceptable that those who prefer / need quiet are expected to block out the outside world with headphones and earplugs and Phil the motormouth is allowed to run his jaw all day.

The default should be either Phil takes his chit chat to a private room (offices for everyone) or he shuts the fuck up unless it's a dedicated discussion time.


Totally agree.

With respect to the noise cancellation vertigo though - this varies with headphones ; apparently, some headphone response curve causes feeling of vertigo and/or pressure/vacuum on your eardrums. There was even research about that in the HN front page 4 months ago or so - will try to post it when I am not on phone.


In one line: It affects the ability to work deeply.

I'm not against the idea of the open office. I'm against the scale at which it is implemented. Open office for a team is okay (even good, when you're in the idea-bouncing among teammates phase). Open office on a large scale wherein often the entire floor can hear each other is terrible.

The core reason: the inability to work deeply for long intervals of time. Especially when you have grabbed a good idea and are trying to implement it before the flow gets broken.

At any office there will be people who by their nature will cause disturbances. On a larger scale, the probability that someone will break my flow is greatly increased.


Because being forced to don headphones I'd rather not wear is lame.

Because being people have meetings in the space right behind my desk.

Because I feel like cattle, which could explain why I have this beef XD


>What's wrong with just putting some headphones on if you want to put your head down and do some deep, quiet work?

I can't do focused work with headphones and music. I get headaches because I have to put extra effort to focus and think. I've tried headphones, earphones, IEMs, and earbuds. That includes regular, audiophile, and noise cancelling. I just can't do it. I need quiet to think. Even noise cancelling headphones need music playing to block out noise an in office when you are next to people (e.g. sales, HR) who are in meetings all day.

Let me flip this another way. Imagine if a business decided that they were going to lower the temperature to 50F/10C to save money. Somebody then said "Well if you are cold just wear a thick jacket, gloves, etc. I do it and it's fine" A lot of people would be miserable and would have some parts of their bodies freezing and hurting (hands, feet) and other parts of their body (e.g. underarms) would be sweating and uncomfortable. How much focused work could you do in that situation?

Does the above situation sound ridiculous? Well that's exactly how I feel about the expectation that everybody can just put on headphones and focus.

I've been in private small cubicle offices in multiple jobs and done just fine. But the noise and visual distraction in open offices is just too much.


Your analogy with the thermostat is BRILLIANT. Thank you for that.

But if they actually did that, they would say the reason was to "improve collaboration" not that it was to save money -- just like open-plan!


Firstly it's that you seem available for interruption, either by managers or coworkers equally. Most people don't understand how harmful that is. Managers vs makers schedule explains this.

Secondly, however, is the inability to control my own environment. Some days I'd like it to be dark, some light. Sometimes I'm cold, sometimes I'm hot. Or I want loud music or silence. Etc. You might think these are all minor things and generally they are but if all of them slightly negatively impact you, you might end up being cranky and unproductive the entire day.

Cubicles are slightly worse because they suffer from the exact same issues but are much uglier.


> Managers vs makers schedule explains this.

It's like Donald Knuth's argument for not using e-mail. "Most people need to stay on top of things, but I need to get to the bottom of things." The open office works great for staying on top of things, but is not a good environment for getting to the bottom of things.


Individual offices != "being on your own in a room all day"

The negatives are pretty well known. I've seen information like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_plan#Evaluation

> A systematic survey of research upon the effects of open-plan offices found frequent negative effects in some traditional workplaces: high levels of noise, stress, conflict, high blood pressure and a high staff turnover.[16][17]

> The noise level in open-plan offices greatly reduces productivity, which drops to one third relative to what it would be in quiet rooms.

since reading the chapter about it in Steve McConnell's "Rapid Development" in the 1990s.

Ahh, see chapter 30, "Productivity Environments", https://archive.org/details/rapiddevelopment00mcco/page/504/... . You'll need an archive.org account. It doesn't really cover open plan offices - that era was more about cubicles.


I don't feel I have some kind of mental safety in open office. Bell labs are best kinds of office where you have offices with hub common area for your team where you can go out and discuss stuff.


My preference is to go to the pub to brainstorm over burgers and beer. I did work for a small biz where the owner would take us all out on Friday for that purpose. Most productive place I ever worked at. Eventually got bought out by a much bigger biz and it all went south.


Same! We had a small office round the corner from a pub, and we'd go there for lunch every friday. If we ever had to discuss that in front of clients, we referred to it as "meeting room P".


The COBRA meetings Her Majesty's cabinet sounds important, secretive, and just a bit ominous.

Its actually just meetings held in "Cabinet Office Briefing Room A".


It is. Gets you out of your head, and having a dedicated "idea discussion time" means you have all week to think on and refine your ideas. Less wasted breath on half cooked BS.


Finally! Bring back some sanity to the office!

Get rid of the open office! And all it took was a little virus that can decimate the human civilization.

If companies want to cram their employees together, and make them sit shoulder to shoulder on a little table, then just let us work from home. We don’t need to be smashed together like sardines in a can.

By keeping us so close to one another, without physical distancing, and walls that block airflow and people’s germs, then I believe we have gotten sicker over time. Every season, I would always get sick, and I attribute it to the open office. The past 2 months of working from home, has been great, because I avoided getting the flu.

Their principle complaint, was that open offices save money. Well, here’s finally a way for them to save even more money! Remote telecommuting!


What? and deprive the managers of being able to lord over their domain? They get the fits if they don't see hundreds bent over in servitude.


I don't want to be on my own all day.

The best set-up I've ever had was when I had an office with just my team (and only the other engineers) so just the people who I was actually working with.

This meant discussions could actually be useful as we were working on very similar stuff, if not the same - and as they were other engineers we were all capable of offering solutions and not just being a distraction.

In my current open office the vast majority of the people have no idea what I even do and have such entirely different skillsets it's not like we can have productive work discussions. Therefore, it's just noise and distraction.


Because working is a collaborative activity, not a social activity.

By nature, social activities need your brain to be focused on things happening around you.

Work activities need your brain to focus on that task at hand, and not on your surroundings. Hence your brain needs to overcome all the distraction to focus on work, if you're in an open (social) environment. No wonder people feel exhausted at the end of the day.

That said, I think having a completely closed office is equally bad. I think a good office is one that combines the best aspect of both.


> I think a good office is one that combines the best aspect of both.

Couldn't agree more. My last job was in a large organization, cubicles everywhere and almost quiet all the time. The current one is an open office, noise all the time. Overall, I dislike both of them, and just like you said, could use a combination of best aspects of both.


I think the term "open plan office" is too generic. The example @jlengrand provides is the form of torture that drives people who need to think and concentrate to distraction.

The most productive environments I have known are a modest sized room used as an open plan office where every person there was working on the same project. The managers had their own private offices on another floor. Under those sort of conditions collaboration and intelligent conversations can arise. So long as you manage to exclude the blabbermouths who are constantly asking stupid questions or making unnecessary commentary.

I think I have achieved the best compromise, work from home, turn off emails and all forms of social apps. Then once or twice a week go to the office specifically to have meetings, etc. That way I get the peace and quite to immerse into deep work (Cal Newport) and get the benefits of collaboration and brainstorming. I only check my emails after I have finished the day's deep work. My promise is that I answer all emails addressed to me within 36 hours. Nothing faster. If it's that important people have to text message which I will typically check 2-3 times a day max.

BTW I charge for specified units of work completed according to schedules and budgets that I agree to. Charging on the basis of hours worked just doesn't cut it for me.


Because it makes it too easy people to ask questions that they could have answered on their own if they'd has to stand up from their desk, walk down the hall to my office, knock on the door and obviously disrupt whatever I'm doing.

In an open office all they have to do is vaguely wave their hand in the corner of my vision with "hey just a quick question" that inevitably turns into a 15 minute product revision meeting.


Sounds like that discussion was needed, to me..


Yeah, except it happens every other day and all you do is "revise the product" and never build or ship the product.

It's a one way express train to feature creep. It often doesn't involve all of the stakeholders, so then you're having multiple 15 minute meetings to get everyone in sync.

Meetings are for meeting, not meetings are for shutting up and doing your assigned work.


> not meetings are for shutting up and doing your assigned work

Like a mindless drone? Or are you advocating for more meetings?


I'm saying timebox discussion like anything else. Have discussions regularly, but in a scheduled manner.

Meetings suck because people aren't prepared / the meeting isn't scoped or well defined. They don't suck "just because".

Treat your meetings just like any other assignments. Clearly define it and expect people to have their shit together. Then you don't have to have discussions all the time and you can actually execute on what's been discussed and planned.


>> Like a mindless drone?

Mindless drones do not get assigned software development work. It is thinking-work by its very nature.


Headphones don’t make things quiet. You are just replacing noises.

Think of a library.

I have not even brought up the visual or olfactory distractions, either.


Does it need to be completely quiet? I find I work best with low-level relaxing ambient background noise. Find it much easier to work in e.g. a coffee shop than a library


Personally, I would choose the library environment every single time for software design and dev -- if the option were available to me.

I know that my productivity is much, much closer to optimum when I work under these conditions. Sadly they are almost impossible to find or arrange.


A coffee shop is fine, working remotely as an individual, but I would argue an open office should not sound like a coffee shop, at least.

And if you need the ambient noise in a quiet environment, headphones with an ambient coffee shop track should work.


olfactory - we had a guy once with a food odor problem. HR had to step in.


As far as audio goes, either you need to play something in your headphones (which itself can be distracting) or sounds will go through (actually many will probably go through either way), and sometimes that's perfect for what you're working on, but sometimes it very much isn't. Also they're not an option when you're trying to talk to someone without both of you getting distracted or distracting others.

Headphones don't filter out every distraction either, though, so there's that too. People constantly walking around or eating food you can smell or shuffling stuff on their desks or doing whatever else they are doing can be incredibly distracting when you need to concentrate.

Also distractions are one thing, but I know lots of people want some privacy in the workplace too, even if it's not the first (or last) reason they'll list. It's kind of the elephant in the room. If you're the kind of person/robot who thinks privacy in the workplace is a fundamental oxymoron and who goes 4 or 9 hours straight without taking a bit of a break once in a while (whether it's just to check your personal email or social media, or to lay your head down for some time and rest a bit, or to make/receive a phone call, or whatever) then maybe you won't sympathize with this. But not feeling like people are continually observing you is something a lot of people value.

Also my ears can eventually sweat when I have headphones on for hours on end, and my headphones end up getting dirty, and their existence isn't exactly indistinguishable from their non-existence either, so there's that. Maybe this is too obvious? But an open-plan office where the solution is "wear a headphone" is practically a job that mandates that you wear a headphone.

I'm sure there's other stuff I'm not thinking of at the moment. And of course there are lots of benefits too; I just didn't list them since you seemed to already be aware of them.


There's a reason why noise cancelling headphones gained so much popularity.

If you enter an open plan office and see a bunch of people sitting with headphones on, it should be immediately clear to you that most of them are suffering from noise pollution. The headphones are usually a coping mechanism to keep out the noise, not primarily to enjoy some music.

The problem with open plan offices is usually the fact, that it gets incredibly noisy. increased noise levels lead to being distracted, which leads to exhaustion, which leads to lower productivity, which in some cases causes mental problems like burnout syndrome etc...

this might be not the case for every type of person, but i had the "pleasure" of experiencing the upper situation personally and a few times in other ex-coworkers who just couldn't cope with the constant noise.


Never really had 'collaborative effort and serendipitous & spontaneous conversations with colleagues that solve problems out of the blue'.

Most of the time, i have someone next to me or close to me, who is on phone with someone else.

I had a 4 people office once and it was great. Close the door, noise is outside.


The commute to my office is a few meters, and I really like that. It also has perks like private bathroom & fridge & coffee maker & oven, etc. I wouldn't want some company to have their open office so close to my bedroom.


I know your comment is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but, the most recent company I worked for (I work from home), build a really nice open office w a glass conference room off of the main area, a kitchenette, and a separate smaller office, connected to the main area.

However, there is a single toilet with shower for the entire space.

It is only accessible via the smaller office.

I would occasionally visit, but even w a few people, it was horrific.

At one point, they had two desks and folks working in the smaller room, but it became unbearable, after being able to experience your coworkers bathroom habits from less than 10 feet away.

When building the office, did I stress the need for a cohesive bathroom strategy? Yes.

I have many other work related stories like this, from all sorts of places.


Sounds like you have a dedicated home office. So do I.

Many people who work in offices live in highly expensive cities (on a $/sq-ft basis) and can't afford a "spare" room to work in. Many juniors can't even afford their own apartment. Indeed some at the bottom end of the payscale may even have to share a room

If remote work become the norm, people will be more confident about leaving expensive cities and moving to cheaper places, which don't have 50 different job opportunities within a 3 mile radius.


Most people can share their own experience; some people feel they are equally effective in an open space (compared to private / pair / small team office) but most feel they are not.

I have never heard a worker who requires concentration say they are MORE effective in an open space - only equal or less.

(I have heard sales people say that, and they mostly extol the virtues of being able to ask anyone around any question mid-sale-call and get an immediate answer; I suspect their co workers might have a different perspective)

I highly recommend reading “Peopleware”, which —- among many other subjects — has anecdotes and some real data about open spaces vs private vs small team offices.


I am against it because I have worked in a closed office environment before: I worked in Germany academia (Leibniz institute) for 3.5 years. I shared an office with 1 other person and later had my own office. It was GREAT for productivity / thinking and had no impact whatsoever in my interaction with other people when I needed that

For the last 8 years I've been working for "silicon valley culture startups" all of which push open offices, and even though when you have 3 to 6 ppl it makes sense, once you are more than that it becomes hell for people that need to focus.

In reality they are used because closed office space is more expensive.


Noise: In an open-office there's always going to be someone on a business or team call. Always some colleague having smalltalk with another. Always a phone ringing, a person yawning, someone's text notification buzzing on a table, someone typing very loudly. Not all the time, but at least every minute or few minutes. Many can't concentrate, and the notion to just put on headphones for 8 hours is not healthy.

Psychology: Many of us hate the idea that someone behind us might be looking at us, our screen, our work. That there may be someone walking behind us that we know. That the sound of footsteps behind you might be your boss, or a colleague you'd like to chat with. It might be anyone, and there's some desire to want to find out to get closure.

Open offices are okay if they're part of a range of choices. I enjoy working in open offices sometimes. Sometimes it drives me nuts and there's no escape. That's not okay. There must be balance and there must be options.

For example, semi-open is a great start, because it means sound doesn't bounce around in one big space of 60 people, but rather only in the space of 10, and gets limited in sound/light traveling due to e.g. plants, windows etc.

If there are meeting rooms to meet or organise calls, that means the high-impact activities can be separated. If there are team-rooms, it means you can collaborate without impacting people who you don't work with 9/10 times, while you can still seek them out in their team room or meeting rooms, or an open-space setting you happen to be in for part of the week, if you do want cross-team collaboration.

The idea that teamwork flows best by putting everyone in one giant cage without caring for sensitivity to sound and human psychology, is a joke that in any other field would be seen as a bruteforce idiotic idea. Besides, the economics of non-open offices aren't wildly different with the right approach. Sound-proofing to turn a giant area into a set of large areas by installing some glass has barely any impact on cost, but is already a semi-open improvement. There's lots of good ideas on the spectrum of every desk in a cubicles vs all desks on a giant football field, it's not one or the other and you need to provide balance and options.


I worked in an open office for 7 or 8 years, and now have been working from my spare room for 2 years. I miss exactly what you are talking about: collaboration is much harder, there is a dramatic lack of spontaneous conversations, and I can no longer overhear or be overheard and get drawn into a conversation organically that leads to a far, far better outcome than would have happened otherwise.

Some things that make the open office I experienced good: nearly the entire floor was developers with some managers, operations teams sat between developer teams, the ability to turn off overhead lighting and just let natural light in through large windows with two levels of shades on them, and there were conference rooms near by for louder conversations and white boarding. There were support folks who would need to take calls, but that was in a separate area. I never heard them. We also would have no problem saying, "hey, too loud" if a conversation good too loud or if something serious was going on. Another benefit was that when it was lunch time, just about everyone got lunch at the same time and ate together; 50-80 people in the kitchen talking shop or silly things, building rapport, hearing issues others are facing and offering help and solutions.

Sometimes, like at the end of the week, it might get too noisy with too many conversations. Then it was time for headphones for some. But we are talking like an hour or two a week.


Personally, my productivity drops when I get external stimuli. Movement? Lots of color? I won't get into a deep concentration and flow.

Fortunately, I work from home most of the time. I've build the antithesis to an open plan office: I've built an even smaller office in my office where I've essentially put up black curtains all round my desk. Working with a VR headset might be an option as well, but from what I hear they're not quite production ready yet for long term office/programming work.


I quite like open plan offices.

But it really depends on what your job/task is.

And how well designed the open plan area is: Break-out spaces, individual rooms for when someone needs to focus, have extensive telephone calls especially of a confidential nature, plenty of meeting rooms, cubicles (I hate cubicles, but that's me, some people like them). And plenty of natural light.

And if someone wants to work remotely, that's good. You're not me, and then I appreciate doing this sometimes. A lot of people prefer to not work remotely because of the work-life divide an office space benefits. And some enjoy the social environment.

I absolutely cannot work listening to music but am fine with osmosis of office chatter; make sure the printer's in a printer room, putting it on the floor is a special form of hell. And have a pantry for eating, I quite like the taste of aged fish but don't want to smell it.

In my experience hot-desking does not work. The benefit of people sitting together is there's a work-flow happening. People that need to talk to each other can. In hot-desking that all breaks down so what's the point at all other than when the whole office are individual contributors and office layout is irrelevant - many people have a relationship even with the plant that sits next to them.

Not everyone's the same. Provide options. It's a team effort. What works for the team as a whole? Measure what the team does, analyse it, reflect.


When I work in an open office I am always been up to date with what is going on. We have been able to squash problems when they were small because we could overhear people having problems with the systems. Problems that would be too small to bother us with if we are working from home. Communication in the office is quicker, we can get to the root of something fast. People who might known something will overhear and chip in

Lots of small things get fixed and fail to grow into big things

When I work from home I get uninterrupted focus on the task at hand which is something that is almost impossible in the office but only get to hear about problems when they get big and urgent

I also feel that I am dropping out of the loop. There are too many messaging systems that I need to keep an eye on, email, chat, texts, whatsapp, slack to keep in touch. In office communications is basically email for clients or in person

If I have a solid piece of work to do the office is not the best place but only if you can do it by yourself. In the office I can see when I can or cannot interrupt someone. When working from home I have no idea if it is a good time to interrupt someone

But for me the open office is only 12-15 people. Large than that and communications become impossible and the noise to signal get worse. Also managers seem to do more 'managing' in bigger offices :(


> But for me the open office is only 12-15 people.

Yeah, that's called redefinition. And it muddles the conversation. Open office space is a whole floor converted into stripped down cubicles.

What you are describing is an office for a team. I worked in similar environment (bit smaller) and it is indeed great for collaboration and productivity.


>I feel like you'd miss out on so much collaborative effort and serendipitous & spontaneous conversations with colleagues that solve problems out of the blue.

It's easier to get more connected than less connected.

For example facilitate social discussions by adding shared spaces, as it relies on the estates department. Comparatively, noise and interruptions are a lot harder to hchange as it relies on behaviour.

Solving hard problems requires focus time. You constantly fight against focus time in an open office.


As someone who has worked in private offices, cube farms and open offices, I have to say the private office space allowed me to think deeply about things in a deliciously uninterrupted way. But then again ... I once spent the whole day thinking about a class I was designing, making just a few marks on a white board. The modern approach, AFAICT is to whip up a test and start coding. I don't believe it's better, but it is the current fashion.


The constant "threat" of interruption is exhausting. Even on quiet days, it's mentally very difficult to force myself to focus when I know that somebody can break my focus at any moment.

I'm lucky because I have an awesome home-office, so when I need to focus more, I can just work from home. But many people don't have that luxury, so open offices probably end up being quite harmful to overall productivity.


Why?

Noise, everyone around me talking on different conference calls and trying to concentrate on my own. Constant distractions both audio and visual. People don't respect the "headphones so stop bothering me" rule.

Yeah the collaboration is a plus, but it's just hard when you really need to get some serious work done.

I started working in 2000 and even as an intern I had my own office. It was a lot more productive.


Open office plans for software developers is like the worst thing ever, unless your culture is one where people are quiet and put their headphones in and get to work.

I had that experience at one company, but others were a total mess.

A software developer needs at least a good 3-4 hour block of uninterruption to produce something valuable. Context switching and distractions are a productivity killer when it comes to building software.

At one company, we would have upper management come into our shared office (5 desks) where we had 3 developers working, and they would have their personal and business calls right next to us. Total disregard for people's personal space, peace of mind, and work environment.

For shared open offices to work, you need a strong culture and understanding that unless you are to be quiet and work on your tasks, you need to get out of the shared office and go discuss group matters in a conference room.


I sometimes think that the perfect office space would be a room for teams of around 10 with maybe 3-4 alcoves or smaller office rooms that people can retreat too when they have calls to make or when they want to have complete quite...

The idea is to keep the collaborative effort and spontaneous conversation while still having place to retreat for silence and while limiting the full amount of noise by limiting the total number of people.

My first experience working for a company was in a traditional Japanese house in Kyoto which approximates this a bit, there was a relatively big room where we often worked but I would sometimes retreat downstairs and gaze at the indoor garden while working in silence..

Obviously such a setup would cost a lot more to companies but I do think that the productivity gains would help...


The open plan office was the norm until the cubicle was invented (by Herman Miller I believe) as a tool of liberation in the 1960s. Just look at any film from the 50s (like The Apartment or Desk Set) to see.

Some research institutions, inspired by academia, had offices (IBM, PARC, IAS, Bell Labs..) and mingling areas it that was less common.

I saw open plan offices reappear around 2000 when the price of Palo Alto real estate started shooting up and frankly it shocked me. It’s crazy to me that this is considered savings given how much it costs to recruit and pay a person. I can’t concentrate with noise or visual clutter (people moving in my field of view).

Some jobs do do better with an open plan, like sales teams. It’s a cultural issue.


I'm a team lead and every single person on my team has told me they feel much more productive and able to focus since lockdown and 100% remote work started. One of the people on my team would normally work in our office's "chill room" because he found it slightly easier to focus in there compared to his actual desk.

In my opinion an open plan office for developers (or anyone, really) would ideally be an option, but you would have to opt-in. There are situations where being able to shout over your laptop at your coworkers is going to be beneficial, but there are also situations where people should be able to zone out and concentrate (zone in?) for several hours at a time without having to blast white noise in their headphones.


I personally like them a lot, and I know plenty of people who range from also liking them to being indifferent about them. It’s just one of the topics HN shows a very strong groupthink about. Wrong opinions on open plan offices are downvoted very aggressively, and complaints about them are comically exaggerated.

I think most people who complain about them here haven’t experienced the alternatives. The most likely alternative is cubicle farms, which are soul crushingly terrible, or a number of different solutions which all require use of much more floor space. The economics of a more-floor-space approach would reasonably make everybody about $20,000-$50,000/year more expensive to employ, and well you can guess where that money would come from...


I have worked in private offices, team spaces, and open plan.

Having a private office was great, but a team space I shared a few years ago - rented just for that team, for around three months - was astonishingly productive for all of us, with almost none of the downsides of open plan.

As far as open plan goes: it is worse for mental health, productivity, and creativity. There is ample evidence to support those assertions ( https://theconversation.com/a-new-study-should-be-the-final-...).

The only advantage open plan has is that it is cheaper, per person, than any alternative - if you only factor in the cost of office space.


> This topic seems to come up time and time again on here. As someone young and new to the industry I have only ever experienced open plan offices, so I don't really know what the alternative is like.

I appreciate your open mind on the subject!

> However I'm inclined to say I don't think I would enjoy cubicles or private offices. I feel like you'd miss out on so much collaborative effort and serendipitous & spontaneous conversations with colleagues that solve problems out of the blue.

This is very unsettling to hear: That's the exact kind of hand-wavy argument that managers make.

Truthfully, I can't help but think of Stockholm syndrome when I read that sentence.

Here's the clencher: If you can't collaborate effectively in a private office or from home, there's a systemic mechanism failure. If your team or company isn't setup for effective communication, you will find yourself trapped in an open office plan and believing they're the only way to work.

However, the real problem is buried: Your team/company either cannot effectively collaborate outside of an artificial environment, or at least believes that to be the case. Assuming this is true: Why?

For background, I've worked remote for most of my career, but at the start, I had an open office job (and a two hour commute each way, consisting of an hour walk to the nearest bus stop and an hour bus ride to downtown Orlando, because the job didn't pay well enough to consider purchasing a car). In hindsight, it was a miserable experience, but at the time I just coped with it.

> I also think it's just plain isolating being on your own in a room all day.

Easy lifehack: Don't do that. Working remote doesn't require you do that. Working in a private office doesn't require you do that.

If you have a private office, you can also schedule 1:1 meetings in your office.

If you're working from home, take regular breaks to talk to your family/neighbors/etc. Pet your dogs. Dogs need love too!

> What's wrong with just putting some headphones on if you want to put your head down and do some deep, quiet work?

What's wrong with putting your jams on the speakers, rather than headphones, in your home office and standing up to dance when a good song comes on your playlist to get your blood flowing?

Different strokes.


As a developer, you really don't spend a lot of time in spontaneous conversations about work. The open office is a money saving scheme for management who views coders as typists.

That said I wish they were popular - for my competitors. :-)


https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/07/30/private-offices-re...


I had a great office layout which was a large room with 10-25 developers and managers as the team grew. The key factors which made the office work well was: plenty of space per developer (L shaped desk about 8x8ft), generally courteous noise levels, and a a few other rooms for louder work or larger conversations (meeting room, lab, extra rooms).

Collaboration was great which was important for a new project. I think for an existing long running project less collaboration may be necessary and extra separation may be better for productivity.


> I would enjoy cubicles or private offices. I feel like you'd miss out on so much collaborative effort and serendipitous & spontaneous conversations with colleagues that solve problems out of the blue.

Private office does not have to mean that single person is in the room. We have offices big enough to hold whole cooperating team, in general of 3-8 people, occasionally more.

So you get debate, but debates from other teams and you dont have to worry that you are disturbing other teams.


The most objectionable part for me is noise level, followed by the fact that my seat faces the big windows, which are frequently too bright. They are also often too warm for my comfort, though too cold for others. I don't want to listen to music or have hot ears from headphones. I started working life in open plan but quieter than nowadays but best was working in a 4 person office. I'm currently happier working in my study at home.


> As someone young and new to the industry

Here's how open offices came about.

The CFO made a spreadsheet, and the "open office" column was a nickel less than the alternatives.


It's far more than a nickel difference. Any useful private office is about 100 sq ft. In an open office you can do with about 20 sq ft per person. So you cram the workers into bull pens and the managers can have acres of offices with windows and still save money on mid-city rents.


I'm an introvert and like to have a quiet place of my own. I work way better this way. I'm not alone in my office, though, we're 2 in the same room, and the door is always open, and everyone else in keeps his office's door open unless they need privacy. Best of both worlds.

I can't work with music/headphones. I tried, but it doesn't seem to work for me as I tend to focus on the music.


> t doesn't seem to work for me as I tend to focus on the music

I get what you mean, I find you have to pick the right sort of music. For me minimal techno is perfect, because it's energetic so doesn't relax me too much like ambient music, but also monotonous/repetitive so I don't get too into it


Pros: Situational awareness. It's cheaper.

Cons: Lack of focus. Dishonesty in how it's 'sold' to the workers; the cost is never openly acknowledged as the reason.

I don't hate it. But I do suspect that the net result makes it a false economy. While I do miss the cameraderie of being in an office while working from home I'm not missing the distractions of open-plan.


Now if you want me to really get my hackles up, ask me about hot-desking. There's a policy invented by someone who had never met any actual human beings! :)


Each interruption you get (colleagues asking you something, chat messages, impromptu meetings, even you catching with the corner of the eye two of your colleagues leaving their tables to grab a coffee) costs at least 15 minutes of your time to get back into a focused (i.e, productive) mental state.

> What's wrong with just putting some headphones on if you want to put your head down and do some deep, quiet work?

I don't know you, so don't try to take it personally, but I'd venture that your always-on generation and the constant expectation of immediate feedback led to most of the younger ones incapable of really deep focus. When 85% of the solutions to our problems is no more than 5 minutes of Googling around, it gets really hard to exercise that part of the brain where we set ourselves to dig through all the layers of abstraction and build a good mental map of the problem to be solved.

When you do get in such a deep state of focus, it is not a problem to be "plain isolating to be in a room all day" because you don't realize the time passing around you. Like reading a good book that you just can't drop until is finished, no one should feel bad for coming out of a 5-6 hour session of deep focus, productive work and "not having connected" during that time.


Just like working from home is a mixed bag, so are the open offices. I think the main issue is that ultimately we are dealing with people. Some like things that other's don't.

And usually it's only those who don't like a thing that talk about it.


I see sound. Open offices have lots of it. I think visually. This doesn't mix well.


It’s great to see this many opinions. I suggest you take a look at the book Peopleware. Part II of the book goes over the office environment and cites several studies and makes a really good case against open plan offices.


I collect links on topics that interest me, sometimes over long periods. I have a list called "Open plan offices are bad".

https://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt...

https://www.mattblodgett.com/2015/06/just-wear-headphones.ht...

https://dandreamsofcoding.com/2014/06/17/science-superstitio...

http://nathanmarz.com/blog/the-inexplicable-rise-of-open-flo...

https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/09/10/developer-flow-state-a...

https://hackernoon.com/what-happened-to-software-development...

http://calnewport.com/blog/2016/10/09/is-facebooks-massive-o...

https://www.prdaily.com/report-u-s-workers-hate-open-office-...

https://www.citylab.com/design/2018/08/the-case-for-rooms/56...

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20191115-office-noise-a...

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/07/30/private-offices-re...

Just... could you click a little quieter, please?


As an aside, when I'm working in a cubicle and people talk in the hallway right outside of my office I tell them:

"Hey guys, can move it down the hall, I'm trying to sleep here."


serendipitous & spontaneous conversations with colleagues that solve problems out of the blue

In my experience those "solutions" are usually wrong in the sense that they only solve the immediate problem without giving due consideration to the wider project. If you leave out a lot of people involved most problems are easy to solve, because you're ignoring all the nuance and the things that make it hard. The solutions are also very rarely documented, so after the discussion people walk away with different ideas of what was discussed and different solutions in mind. In short, they might feel good, but they're often quite bad for the project.


Sometimes when I am wearing headphones, I get dissociated with the outside world and forget that my farts make sounds. So I fart without muffling it, and my neighbor thinks I'm just a jerk that toots openly. Then whenever he farts he toots openly too, in a game of one-buttsmanship. As a result, nobody is particularly comfortable working and I have to take walks when otherwise I would have been blissfully ignorant.


It's a nightmare for people with mental disorders such as ADHD.


I had written a post on my page some time ago:

https://www.franzoni.eu/productivity-the-office-and-an-open-...

TL;DR: the open office may not be a problem per se. Instead:

1) It's a problem if you get a very large open office with excessive employee density and/or with different kind of employees around. This usually results in a lot of noise and/or distractions from unrelated teams.

2) It's a problem if there're not other places where to go have video/phone calls, and/or if some people need to be constantly on their phone/meeting system.

Privacy, safety and a calm environment should be a must for an office. Otherwise, what's its purpose?


Because interruptions. Lots of them. Of all kinds.




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