I've written here quite a bit about my basic hatred for open offices. My personal opinion is that open offices are masked in lots of terms about "information flow" and "collaboration" when the reality is that it's about companies being cheap.
I also went to a high school built originally on a completely open plan. At some point they realized teachers shouting over each other didn't work, or the teacher next door giving a lecture while the next set of desks over were taking an exam or whatever, and they put up paper-thin walls to divide the spaces, but still left the doors open. So at least you didn't have to see the classroom next door even if you had to hear them. Absolute, obvious idiocy.
For some reason people have forgotten how to do basic reasoning about work environments and just subscribe to whatever cargo-cult office-space fad of the time without regard to the nature of the work environment. I've even seen spaces with rows of inside sales guys on phones cold calling two desks over from very frustrated developers. Or the worst are the "fish bowl" conference rooms in the middle of the open floor so you can't even have a proper meeting without feeling like you're on stage.
I can echo every single point in the article and the net effect of open offices is that the environments are either library-like tombs where nobody talks to one another for fear of disturbing the peace or they're full of people with headphones on, hiding behind monitors trying to scratch out an ounce of privacy and isolation. It's obvious to anybody who actually works in an open office that they don't succeed in their basic stated task of helping communication.
At one place I worked, people did lots of overseas travel and there were 3 large open-office areas. The number of people out sick at any one time was astronomical. At one point I went 6 solid months of perpetual minor illnesses before I finally decided to just look for a new job. It took me almost two years to really feel recovered physically from the constant assault on my immune system. My fitness levels also took a nose-dive during that time, either from being constantly ill or from stress loads so high that I'd simply come home and lock myself in my home office and not come out till I went to bed.
I think single (or 2 or 3 person) offices do inhibit communication.
The absolute best office configurations I've ever seen are the ones with team rooms that surround a central conference room. Each room sits 6-12 people, has a conference room and the ability to set their own office rules. Sales guys get piled into one bullpen and can make all the calls they want, customer support in another, scrum team 1 in a different one etc. Team leads must work in the team rooms to keep things from degenerating to antics. Teams can collaborate with each other in the central conference room as needed.
These aren't terribly expensive to build out and seem to provide the best possible productivity and combination of semi-privacy, local information sharing and cross-team information sharing. In the long-run the operating costs for facilities end up as a small fraction of salaries anyway. You should do everything possible to maximize your investment in salaries, even if your office space costs are a few percent higher...it'll pay off.
> I've even seen spaces with rows of inside sales guys on phones cold calling two desks over from very frustrated developers.
We have that. If there wasn't a short dividing wall between us, I could kick one of our sales directors in the shin. There's four more in that particular section.
Sometimes it's noisy and annoying, but at least I can put on headphones, turn on music and/or white noise, and ignore them - they don't even have that luxury most of the time, if they're on a call with a client. Devs being noisy? They have to deal with it. Their neighbor on another loud call? They have to deal with it.
It can suck for everyone, but at least we have more options for dealing with it.
I am also stuck adjacent to the sales group with not even the minimal cubicle walls separating desks. Their standard work process seems to be make a sales call, then chat and joke around for half an hour.
I was in a similar situation a few months ago. The worst part was there were two office whistlers. One had a Vice President role so you couldn't really kick him in the shins...
I think there are lots of quick and subtle communications that happen in a team while they're working. The quick "hey where did you check in the change for foo?" or "Let's do this task first, then the other tomorrow" or whatever, that happen in a team very quickly that I think happen better in a physical space then an IM chat or an email. Isolating a team from each other in separate spaces prevents that. But I can appreciate the need for single rooms for people to use on occasion when they need to really concentrate.
Central conference rooms are critical, but don't lend themselves well to casual, quick communications.
> "hey where did you check in the change for foo?"
... and you just took me out of the Zone.
I was about to be intensely productive on hard code for 30 minutes, but now I see it's only 15 minutes 'til lunch. Maybe I'll check email instead of building up that concentration level again.
That same shit happens to me in my open office. The difference is that it's easier for me to dick around for 3 hours instead of 15 minutes since nobody can see my screen or even see if I'm here.
I think, it depends largely on how people work together. In some occasions, when people really work on similar problems on the same part of a project, it could really be like you described. But I have seen that in really rare cases and seldom with more than may be 3 or 4 persons. Not ten persons and also not scrum teams. In scrum teams (as I have seen them), the tasks of the persons are so different, that you seldom have that kind of communications. Also when the micro-communications, that you talked about are between two or may be three people -- there it would be better, if the three work together in one office or if they could go out of the office and meet somewhere where they don't disturb others. In such cases, I would opt for offices of 3-4 persons that work in the same areas.
I would really opt for offices of 3-4 persons. Scrum offices, or team of ten offices are to noisy for my opinion and most of the discussions will be non-interesting for the other peoples (for example developers are not interested in the managers talk or the product owner will not be interested in details from developers work .... also documentation people will not be interested in). If others could be interested or should say something about a topic, it is always better to have a spontaneous meeting.
I've always wondered what would happen if I told management "you guys made us work in a Dickensian sweatshop floor plan? Okay, how about I bring my own cubicle from home, and install it around my place here? I'm pretty good with DIY projects, you guys don't have to spend anything, I'll just fix the problem on my own. I'll paint it in the corporate colors and all, don't you worry."
You joke, but the powers that be installed a TV in our office blaring CNBC just feet away from where developers are trying to work. This was considered an "upgrade" to our space.
Team leads must work in the team rooms to keep things from degenerating to antics.
Why? Why can't we be adults and get the job done? And if we have shown that we get the job done with the desired level of quality in the desired time frame, what's wrong with having fun as well?
It benefits both the workers and the manager/lead to be in the same space. Having your manager float in once a day or so and then take time out of your work to get them up to speed on what they would know if they were just in the room is silly. It also makes the manager more cognizant of issues faster and forces them to keep production moving forward.
Nobody said it can't be fun, the occasional break is fine. But I've seen team rooms degenerate into multi-hour wrestling nerf gun matches that costs thousands of dollars.
I also went to a high school built originally on a completely open plan. At some point they realized teachers shouting over each other didn't work, or the teacher next door giving a lecture while the next set of desks over were taking an exam or whatever, and they put up paper-thin walls to divide the spaces, but still left the doors open. So at least you didn't have to see the classroom next door even if you had to hear them. Absolute, obvious idiocy.
For some reason people have forgotten how to do basic reasoning about work environments and just subscribe to whatever cargo-cult office-space fad of the time without regard to the nature of the work environment. I've even seen spaces with rows of inside sales guys on phones cold calling two desks over from very frustrated developers. Or the worst are the "fish bowl" conference rooms in the middle of the open floor so you can't even have a proper meeting without feeling like you're on stage.
I can echo every single point in the article and the net effect of open offices is that the environments are either library-like tombs where nobody talks to one another for fear of disturbing the peace or they're full of people with headphones on, hiding behind monitors trying to scratch out an ounce of privacy and isolation. It's obvious to anybody who actually works in an open office that they don't succeed in their basic stated task of helping communication.
At one place I worked, people did lots of overseas travel and there were 3 large open-office areas. The number of people out sick at any one time was astronomical. At one point I went 6 solid months of perpetual minor illnesses before I finally decided to just look for a new job. It took me almost two years to really feel recovered physically from the constant assault on my immune system. My fitness levels also took a nose-dive during that time, either from being constantly ill or from stress loads so high that I'd simply come home and lock myself in my home office and not come out till I went to bed.
I think single (or 2 or 3 person) offices do inhibit communication.
The absolute best office configurations I've ever seen are the ones with team rooms that surround a central conference room. Each room sits 6-12 people, has a conference room and the ability to set their own office rules. Sales guys get piled into one bullpen and can make all the calls they want, customer support in another, scrum team 1 in a different one etc. Team leads must work in the team rooms to keep things from degenerating to antics. Teams can collaborate with each other in the central conference room as needed.
These aren't terribly expensive to build out and seem to provide the best possible productivity and combination of semi-privacy, local information sharing and cross-team information sharing. In the long-run the operating costs for facilities end up as a small fraction of salaries anyway. You should do everything possible to maximize your investment in salaries, even if your office space costs are a few percent higher...it'll pay off.