Why does it have to be either/or? Is it really that hard for an employer to offer both?
If each team (of 7-10 people) has a scrum room/war room, plus some number of cubes (4-5) available on an as-needed basis, wouldn't that meet the needs of employee happiness, collaboration, etc?
Need to make a call? Go to a cube.
Deadline to meet? Go to a cube.
Mid-project, lots of design/analysis occurring? Stay in the open room.
Cubes still suck. They have most of the same noise issues as open floor plans. Assholes on speakerphone conference calls...
Also your plan requires that everyone work primarily on laptops (unless you expect to lug your desktop and monitors to a cube when you need to concentrate). And you've basically allocated double the space (cubes for half the team plus a room big enough for the whole team). Why not just cut the space up more efficiently and give everyone a private space?
This seems like a bad deal for everyone. Workers still feel like they have no privacy and are constantly distracted, and the company is paying for a lot of extra space.
> Why not just cut the space up more efficiently and give everyone a private space? ... Workers still feel like they have no privacy and are constantly distracted
Maybe it's just me, but for me it's not just about the privacy, it's about having a place for my things.
Having a desk and some drawers, some desktop space that is mine to leave papers on, etc. makes me feel a lot more at home and productive. Having to keep everything in a bag I can tote around leaves me feeling kind of uneasy and like the situation is impermanent, much like staying somewhere and living out of a duffel bag.
I'm a lot more inclined to do good work if it's for a company I feel like I'm at home at, that I'm going to stay at, than one that feels like I'll be gone from any moment now.
Only if you have a laptop that's beefy enough to replace a desktop and you also have monitors to connect it to when you're at work. A single 13" screen is decidedly nonoptimal.
Does anybody work for a software company that doesn't issue laptops as the primary PC? I haven't had a desktop in 10 years and just assumed that was the norm.
Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo all provide a desktop and two monitors (or one 30" one), or did the last time I worked for or interviewed at these companies. They might also provide laptops, but they aren't the primary device for dev work. I seem to recall the same for Amazon, but am not certain.
I actually don't understand this belief that a laptop should be the primary device given the body of research that shows the usefulness of multiple large monitors (unless you're just docking the laptop).
Of course you're "docking" it. Nobody sane hunches over a laptop all day every day.
The advantage to the laptop is you can have your core machine with you everywhere -- home, office, or traveling. But when you're in the two places you spend the most time -- the office or at home -- you plug it into an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
Where I work (a software company), only people who travel a lot have laptops as their primary PCs. People can easily connect to their desktop machines from home using the VPN.
I couldn't see myself working on a laptop all day unless it had an external monitor, keyboard and mouse. It would just be too physically painful.
> People can easily connect to their desktop machines from home using the VPN.
And use what to interact with it? VNC? I'd lose my mind. That's not an efficient user experience, it's slow and finicky and fucks up keyboard shortcuts.
> I couldn't see myself working on a laptop all day unless it had an external monitor, keyboard and mouse.
Which is exactly what we do. What lunatics do you work with that use laptops as primary work machines without doing this?
I've never worked for a company which didn't issue desktops as primary development machines, and I haven't used a single-display desktop machine since 2007.
Lack of psychological territoriality. Still unhappy, but better. Oh if only I had a job where my boss thought I was important enough that I could have a picture of my kids in my cube, you know, a Real job.
Also I've seen this tried and inevitably rules have to be put in place because no one wants to sit in the big room and everyone wants to sit in the cubes to do work. So you get people arguing about who's work is important enough to require the cubes. Which is not terribly motivating to people demoted to working sullenly, silently, in the big room.
>Also I've seen this tried and inevitably rules have to be put in place because no one wants to sit in the big room and everyone wants to sit in the cubes to do work. So you get people arguing about who's work is important enough to require the cubes. Which is not terribly motivating to people demoted to working sullenly, silently, in the big room.
Bingo.
The next time you see an open floor plan office, look at the 'quiet area' or the 'heads down space' or whatever they call it. Dollars to doughnuts the most senior person that doesn't have an office has claimed it as their personal domain.
You end up needing someone to go around and evict people, or a big shared calendar where everyone has to schedule their important work time, or...
The best solution is for the company to provide a private office for everyone and enough space for teams to work in one room as needed. Unfortunately it's also the most expensive solution.
It's the universal truth of open floor plans. I still remember trying to decide if I wanted to annoy the owner, tech lead, or lead designer when it came time to kick one of them out of the conference rooms so some developers could get on a conference call.
That's what is so funny about this whole discussion on open floor plans: it comes up over and over again even though scientific evidence overwhelmingly shows they are bad, employee satisfaction is shockingly low with them... but we can't seem to kick the habit!
Work at home / coffee shop / park is a pretty cheap option. Give the boss an enormous office big enough to hold the whole team at some discomfort, but its only used for team meetings or the occasional (rare) large team effort. Head down grinding is done at home or somewhere else.
Also sub-team meetings often happen at a coffee shop. Three dudes at starbucks not the whole dept or whatever.
I've also seen people working at the public library, although its difficult because so many parent use it as a day care center drop off site. Aside from the homeless shelter antics.
Those are all very decent options as well. The better companies I've worked at understand that programming is neither 100% solo work or 100% collaboration, and trust me to chose accordingly. This means some days I'd come in to work and spend time planning/brainstorming with the team, and other times I wouldn't come in at all because I was grinding away.
Thinking back, those were also the companies that didn't force me into a giant open floor plan with a ton of other people... the ones that did tended to be much more focused around "cars in the parking lot by 8:30, butts in the chairs until 5".
If each team (of 7-10 people) has a scrum room/war room, plus some number of cubes (4-5) available on an as-needed basis, wouldn't that meet the needs of employee happiness, collaboration, etc?
Need to make a call? Go to a cube. Deadline to meet? Go to a cube. Mid-project, lots of design/analysis occurring? Stay in the open room.
Seems like a no-brainer?