I would literally switch jobs (and perhaps careers, if every company was like this) if forced to work in an open office like this. I cannot work that way; I can't focus.
I realize that I'm adding nothing constructive to this thread; I don't care. Maybe some manager somewhere will see this and a hundred other anecdotal opinions and think twice about open offices.
I am the opposite of a prima donna. I just want to work. I want to make awesome stuff, keep my skills sharp and make the company some money. Preferably lots of it.
I'd be fine with an office that's literally 5x5', a desk, a door, a wifi connection, and some shared working areas for when it's time to collaborate. Because yes, collaboration is crucial (and fun) but if I have to hunt all over the damn building for a bit of quiet space (that might not even be avaiable) when it's time to bear down and do some solo coding then this is not going to work.
Hell, I'll even bring my own damn desk, chair, and laptop. Supplied my own laptop to my last two jobs. No big deal. I'm an engineer; I get paid decently. But I need a freaking place to focus for at least half of any given working week - and sometimes, for close to the entire week.
I don't need: famous guest speakers, catered food, fancy architecture, anything. I wouldn't even care if the office was a poorly-insulated garage that gets cold in the winter. I'll bring my own $20 space heater that will heat a 5x5' office just fine.
What I can't have, if you want me to get any work done, is multiple simultaneous conversations taking place five feet away from my head all day long.
Too many tech companies are up their own asses with how hip and cool their offices are. I just want to work when I want, how I want, and in an environment of my own choosing. I 100% understand that collaboration needs to take place at certain times and I really do enjoy the collaboration of remote work with other employees. However the "collaboration" that takes place in these types of offices is just wheel spinning and time wasting. It truly is the art of not working. It's all about how you look in front of managers (who are really only interested in asses in chairs and looking good to their managers...the cycle of doing nothing continues).
I really prefer having all hands with other remote employees 6-10 times per year where everyone is together in the same room. The meetings and collaboration that comes out of these is much more meaningful. Time is of the essence so we make it count.
"However the "collaboration" that takes place in these types of offices is just wheel spinning and time wasting."
I enjoyed how you phrased that. I work at a giant multinational and yes yes I know all about the stereotype that innovation only comes from the tiny little startups on HN, but innovation flows both ways, like it or not, and over the last decade one megacorp major cultural shift I've seen is collaboration only happens in email because its documented and highly accountable. If you really want to share opinions or idea or requirements or demands in a verifiable documented backed up permanent fashion then you put it in email. You don't have a "real" opinion until its written down and sent in email.
If you just want to talk about sports or the weather or gossip about colleagues or lie to someones face about a due date or product change or a spec, you exclusively do that verbally on the phone or in a meeting or text. Non email based collaboration is seen as a fake waste of time, because, lets face it, it is. If you're too much of a coward or crook to put your name to a statement, then its not worth reading. If someone refuses to document what they're saying in email or a bug ticket they are pretty much treated as liars or ignored. Its an interesting cultural shift. I have one older boss (yeah office space style I have a couple bosses, informally) who is all about the "personal" nature of a phone call or meeting, but its always super ineffective. He's still a nice guy and overall a good manager, but "old people thinking" is holding him back compared to the other mgmt who have moved on with the times.
It seems to work extremely well, especially with multi-office, multi-timezone, multi-national, multi-company teams. (edited to add, and this factors into the "scalability" mantra heard so often on HN... don't set yourself up to fail, operate like a big company from the start) And violating the "new way" by only communicating verbally or in meetings seems to dismally fail fairly often.
This large company innovation will probably spread to the smaller companies sooner or later.
This is interesting to me, because I work at a large company and I've found it to be orchestrated slightly differently. If you want/need something done here, the fastest way is to set up a face to face appointment and put yourself in someone else's calendar. If you don't, things will drag on for months of email back and forth. If you do, things might last two hours, you'll probably leave with a solid plan, and then usually someone sends a 'summary' email that lists every commitment made in that meeting (which keeps everyone honest) along with the dates people agreed to get them done by. If there's disputes about that, they're then handled there, but if you seem to always get the wrong idea from meetings (or always dispute what you said in them), it'd probably reflect badly on you.
I've worked with plenty of people who seem to believe that. It's really frustrating when someone derails an informative, productive, asynchronous email discussion with "let's just have a meeting" or "here, let me just call you" as though dropping everything and sitting around waiting for people to finish their sentences will somehow make the underlying problems easier to reason about.
I guess it must work for them, and I have gathered over the years that I must be something of an outlier in my comfort with and preference for communication via writing, but god I wish we could just cancel all meetings forever and just solve things simply and quickly via email.
This is one of the reasons working for Microsoft was an exercise in misery. People who haven't worked there have trouble believing me when I describe the amount of time people there routinely waste in bullshit status meetings. It was maddening.
Oh God, yes. I'm freelance working 100% remotely. I hate phone call meetings. For one, I am half-deaf in one ear from years of wearing headphones to block out noise in open-office floor plans in my previous life as an employee, and often I can't even hear what is being said. A bunch of people are sitting too far away from someone's smartphone set on speakerphone, and the timid mouse in the corner won't speak up. No matter how many times you ask, they go right back to whispering.
They'll ask me questions about how things work and I just don't think well on-the-spot like that about code I wrote 2 years ago. I remember it well enough that I could look it up and get them an answer in an email in 15 minutes, but they had to call to ask, so they want the answer NOW. They'll call at 7:30 at night and complain they couldn't get a hold of me. They won't leave a message. They could have sent an email and I would have an answer for them first thing in the morning. But they would rather call during off-hours, then wait until nearly the end of the next day to call back.
Then, they will say a bunch of stuff, nobody will write it down (except me, IFF I actually hear it). If they are bad ideas, I'll argue a little, but not having the time to research the pros and cons, I can't provide a good recommendation with alternatives (and I hate complaining without alternatives). So everyone will "agree" that it's the direction we (meaning I) should go. I'll bust my ass to get it done, present the changes, and they'll question why I would do things in such "confusing" ways, when what makes it confusing is what I complained about in the first place.
"Just brute force it!" They'll say, like it's somehow a magical incantation to turn a programmer from architecture astronaut to a pragmatic realist "like them". "No, we can't brute force it, because the problem is exponential and runtime explodes when we apply it to real data." "Don't quote that math mumbo jumbo to me, we just need to get it done, I don't care how good it is." Then later, "wow, this is really slow, maybe we should find someone else to be working on this."
Sorry, getting a little off topic there. But basically, I hate not working with people who know how to communicate properly, but I've learned to work within the system (or lack thereof, rather). I've just taken to agreeing to everything they say, then doing whatever the hell I want. I know what their goals are better than they do. I can make a better project then they know how to, and they never remember what they actually told me to do. I just tell them it was all their idea, and they don't have the documentation to contradict me, so it works great.
You should record your calls. (Assuming you live in a jurisdiction where only 1 party (you) need to know the conversation is recorded.)
I'm much more open to receiving phone calls now, because even if it's much harder to search an audio file, at least I have something to search. If I'm not sure if I forgot something, I can just open up the file and listen to it again. I would still rather get an email, but some people just NEED to take a phone for whatever reason.
Given that you have some trouble hearing, you can take the time you want to re-listen to a conversation with the volume as you like it.
As a bonus, it's also helpful to get a hold of a certain kind of people that thinks they can say anything and are not accountable because it's not in writing.
I work remotely. I'm pretty sure that no company has as cool an office as mine. My office looks out onto a private garden. The office is a new wooden building, climate controlled, reasonably spacious, with my own paintings on the walls, and a desk with two large monitors. When I want to chat with my colleagues, I turn to IRC or fire up a video conference on a dedicated extra screen (the 80 Mbps line to the office is more than enough for a high-quality video conference worldwide).
What you describe is a systemic lack of leadership.
It stems from a lack of understanding of systems and the way people fit into them and work together toward a genuine goal. This lack of understanding comes from beliefs in individual aptitude and attribution bias, among other things.
It doesn't have to be that way. Deming's system of profound knowledge provides a good start to undermine politics and ineffective work cultures.
What you're seeing is not a problem of office layout or design, is what I'm saying.
I work as a fairly senior SWE at Google, coming off 20+ years with private offices (some of that time full-time remote), and I agree with everything you said. I knew it would be hard going into the job. I actually get up at 5am so I can have a few quiet hours at my desk before the rest of the folks show up & it turns into a total zoo.
Having the top of the cream, Google/FB can allow themselves to have their engineers' performance be half of what these engineers can potentially produce. Too bad for the rest of us as our employers look at Google/FB and say "we want that success too" and make open floor offices too...
It has more to do with their sheer size IMO, not having the "cream". I've worked for ATT, Sprint, and a number of companies that are pretty big but not super big and somehow they function despite the idiocy that goes on. It's a form of "too big to fail" IMHO. There are just too many people to average out the slack and the ship has too much momentum. It's going to keep succeeding baring some huge market shift and/or gross negligence on managements part. I mean, seriously; there are a LOT of companies out there making TONS of money with no where near FB's or Google's reputation and desirability.
Wouldn't it be great if that effort was actually focused systematically? Exponential improvement.
Deming knew how to do it, and even outlined that the entire economy would rise because of improved management practices. I very much believe he is correct.
As a freelancer who works with a variety of teams, it is very hard getting a moment to 'get my own work done'. I also have a young daughter, and while she didn't say the following, I keep thinking about it to give me a slap in the face of perspective.
Child: Daddy, will you play wit me?
Dad: Sorry, I can't I have things to finish off from work.
I know, right? Early mornings (assuming one went to bed early enough and got enough sleep) are great and as I get older I'm more of a morning person anyway... my main challenge there is coordinating with my partner since our sleep schedules obviously are intertwined.
I did the same thing in 2013 when I worked at Google. I just shifted my working hours from 6:15am to 4pm and I had some quiet time, then the normal shared office environment.
I did the same thing at SAIC when I had a private office. Then my motivation was to have an hour or two for uninterrupted coding.
Except for 2013 I have worked remotely from home, which can be very good, but I do miss out on face time.
My question isn't necessarily specific to Google, but is it frowned upon if you bring noise-cancelling headphones?
I am a weirdly fluctuating person and some days I work best in total seclusion. Others I need to sit in the middle of a cafe and have the noise and people around me.
So my goal is to be as adaptive as possible without harming the day-to-day work life.
"but is it frowned upon if you bring noise-cancelling headphones"
Yes, at (former, thankfully) employer its the border between actionable offense (being written up) and merely being viciously trashed at review time. Management made the explicit decision to enforce collaboration (a 'la the whippings will continue until morale improves) and your actions are direct and intentional insubordination of that explicit formal requirement.
One person will get yelled at in front of everyone else (because its open office, duh) and nobody will dare to wear headphones again.
Its hard to find a more open and shut case description of intentional willful trivially documentable insubordination.
Noise cancelling doesn't work with speech that well. It's way better for steady background noise such as on a small plane if you're the pilot or on a large plane if you're a passenger.
I've tried one of those in the store once, they only work for constant background noise - fan hums, that kinda thing. For conversations they're ineffective, and regular in-ear things work better.
When we got moved into an open floorplan office, all engineers were issued Bose noise cancelling headphones. They're not perfect (you can still hear close conversations) but they're at least officially approved.
Having spent almost equal amount of time in open office and private office, my own anecdote is that productivity wasn't dramatically better with private offices. In open offices, I just used to put head phones on, listen to non-vocal music and be super focused for many hours. In fact that was much better than private office because others would see you wearing headphone and they don't want to bother you. In private office, anyone is welcome to distract me anytime and I have to entertain that because person walked all the way to my office no matter how focused I was on something.
Another thing is that teams with private offices suffer greatly in communication and more importantly in energy and passion. Teams in open office often go to lunch together, have more personal exchanges and have far more socialization. When people see their teams working hard around them, they have little excuse not to follow the suit. In private offices, I often see people catching up on news websites and FB and in fact I even knew a guy who freely admitted that he spent entire days on YouTube. These were smart people and it's not that they were slacking off but most people are actually fairly weak against distractions generated from their own computer. Those distractions in private offices far out number distractions by people in open office.
A 3 person team packed in to a private office is likely the best of both worlds. In private offices, you mostly rely on bumping in to someone in the lobby for serendipitous discussions. Unless your work is isolated and you don't need to talk to anyone, open office is usually better option generally speaking. However I agree that people working in open office have to establish proper norms such as don't talk loud, put phones on vibrate, for long talks go outside, don't disturb a person wearing headphone etc. In most places, I see these norms are generally established.
> When people see their teams working hard around them, they
> have little excuse not to follow the suit.
> In private offices... ...most people are actually fairly
> weak against distractions generated from their own computer
I think this is true. When left totally to my own with medium-term or long-term deadlines it's hard to resist the pull of distractions on the web.
But that is also fairly easily mitigated with methodologies like Scrum where you are frequently touching base with other team members. During the daily standup meetings you publicly commit to what you're going to do in the next day, and inform the team of what you did during the previous day (along with any roadblocks you hit, if any).
I don't find myself tempted to YouTube the day away when I know I've told the team I'm going to to X, Y, and Z today and that I'm going to have to stand up in front of them again tomorrow and let them know my progress (or lack thereof!)
> In private offices, you mostly rely on bumping in to someone
> in the lobby for serendipitous discussions.
Collaboration is crucial! If private offices are so private that collaboration is discouraged, then that's a problem that needs to be solved somehow.
> A 3 person team packed in to a private office is likely the best
> of both worlds.
I think I find this to be the worst of all worlds, hahaha. A conversation can be easier to ignore in a wide-open space (where it's part of the overall din) but there's no such aural camouflage in a 3-person office: it's just you, your work, and a noisy-ass conversation in close proximity.
It's difficult for people to recognize that open offices exist for a reason, but they absolutely do. They are a systemic solution to communication, collaboration, and motivation problems. All three need different systemic solutions in a private office context, but those solutions would be more forced and less natural.
The open floor plan is also a huge cultural boon for that reason. The types of systems that enable communication, collaboration, and mutual motivation in a closed office are the ones that feel "old" and unnatural and corporate. Despite productivity decreases in day to day heads down work, open office collaboration feels very natural and genuine, and that has greater effects.
Plus, it turns out, most of the work in a company larger than a few dozen people is in that communication and collaboration space; not sitting at a desk typing.
How is the simplest cheapest emptiest thing a systematic solution to anything. It's starting to design a workspace, drawing the interior/exterior border, then getting an interruption and coming back an hour later and thinking you are done.
It would be excellent parody of the the hula hoop circle "you know, for kids" gag from that old movie.
Often the simplest, cheapest, emptiest things make pretty good systems. They reduce waste, and have certain advantages.
Your joke is funny, but I promise you that's not the reason for open floor plans.
The key is that even an open plan is a system—it's just a less constrained system, with fewer rules. You still have to view it as a system and study the effects and interactions involved.
[open offices] are a systemic solution to communication, collaboration,
and motivation problems. All three need different systemic solutions
in a private office context, but those solutions would be more forced
and less natural.
I don't understand how those three things require "systemic solutions" in an office environment. When I need to collaborate with a coworker I just travel ten feet to their office or click their name in HipChat.
The question is if the tradeoff in the reduction/change of collaboration is worth the increased productivity from the better layout. That's not an obvious question to answer, in fact—that's what I'm saying. You need to prove which system is actually superior, with data.
A 3-person team in a small office works well for me. The other two people are working on the same project, and since they're also developers they are quiet -- if a phone rings they step outside with it. The room is quiet, so people that walk in tend to be quiet as well.
Having been scrum master myself at different times, you would be surprised how many times people outright lie "What did you do yesterday" part. They are not necessarily evil or lazy or stupid. It's becoming just super hard for people to be disciplined and stay away from distractions from so many things. Comparatively, distractions by people around in open offices is nothing.
But that is also fairly easily mitigated with methodologies like Scrum where you are frequently touching base with other team members.
Seriously, FUCK THAT SCRUM SHIT. A daily status meeting isn't that bad, but "you can only work on it if it's in the backlog" and "sprints" and backlog grooming meetings and this brand of aggressive micromanagement that has revived itself in the name of "Agile"... all of that nonsense needs to die in a taint fire.
We do a pretty relaxed version of it; it's fun. It doesn't feel like micromanagement to me.
If I need to do something that doesn't have a task in the backlog, I just add one and then click "start" in Sprintly. No big deal. It's basically a shared to-do list, and I'm a to-do list kind of guy.
I like the daily stand up meetings. Specifically the emphasis on the fact that it shouldn't be more than 15 minutes in length.
You have my sympathies though. I can certainly see how some companies would implement Scrum in a way that is really anal-retentive and gets in the way.
Maybe that's how it works if you are doing it "right". But nobody ever seems to do Agile "right". If Agile is so hard to do right, and breaks down so badly when it's done wrong in a small way (like letting your manager in the scrum), then isn't that in itself a problem with Agile?
I don't see a problem in a manager participating. But what would the manager do if backlog is handled by the PO and work load by the dev team? I think any process would break down if a manager decides to fly solo and push extra work outside the framework, for example.
I did "Agile" for 1.5yrs and it was the least agile team I've been on so far. We never had a product owner (we were all expected to understand the user's needs enough to serve as "product owners"). We had devs and a manager, and a "scrum master"/team lead, who was one of the devs and reported directly to the manager. Our scrums were 30m+ long because the manager wanted to know every little detail, and there would be a lot of back-and-forth, most of which would be irrelevant to any given team member. Complexity poker involved guessing what number the manager wanted you to pick, and sprint reviews were two-day experiences in self-flagellation.
Not that all of this would have magically gone away if we weren't an "Agile" team but it did contribute to the problem. "Proper" Agile just doesn't fit well with the way most companies want to run their teams. So managers take Agile and make their own personal tweaks to it. Since their brand of Agile has 80% the same rules to what they read in the book, they expect to get 80-100% of the benefits of Agile. Any questioning of the actual results of this system is heresy, since Agile is a well-established management method used by many successful companies.
If that manager had picked up a management system that worked within the company's framework without making so many changes, or if there wasn't so much Agile-worship in the industry that an "Agile" setup was politically unquestionable, the situation would have been a lot easier to fix. As it is, it wasn't until our team completely collapsed that the company reassigned half of that manager's responsibilities to a new department, and the manager decided to retweak their personal brand of "Agile". Even that is probably too little too late; more and more projects are being moved from that dep't into others, to the point where I'm wondering what the devs there will actually have left to do.
So yeah. I'm very skeptical of anything calling itself "Agile", because it's such a nightmare when done wrong, and I'd bet dollars to donuts there are more places doing it wrong than right.
I actually believe that Scrum is a way to avoid micromanagement. There's no way of getting around the fact that the people who pay you want to see steady progress toward the thing they're paying you to do. One 15-minute meeting each morning to assuage that concern is a reasonable solution to me.
You're talking about standup, not Scrum. It's a common conflation to call a status meeting a "Scrum meeting".
Status reporting, if the overhead is around 3% (e.g. 15 minutes per day, or a one-hour weekly meeting) isn't so bad. I think it's actually good if it defuses the suspicions ("what does he do?") that, unchecked, can devolve into political behavior.
Scrum involves a lot more, like user stories and an explicit disallowance of working on things not in the backlog. By the book, you have to leave written records of what you did in insulting detail. It's horrible stuff. But I agree: 15 minutes per day for an all-team status meeting isn't that bad, and can be better than the alternative if that alternative is a culture of suspicion and resentment.
A culture of trust where engineers are treated as professionals and adults, not as children who have to justify weeks and days of their own working time. Open allocation as far as is possible within the confines of the needs of the business.
What? Of course private office is better. In an open office, I always have to worry about if my fart is too loud for the person next to me to hear. It's like every time I have to pass gas, it interrupts my train of thought so I get to let out a silent one. Or even better, some times I have headphones on, and totally forgot that I'm in an open office.
In a private office, I wouldn't have to worry about this.
>> Another thing is that teams with private offices suffer greatly in communication and more importantly in energy and passion.
I really wish people would stop repeating this. It's complete hogwash. It doesn't even stand up to the most basic of scrutiny. If it were true, how the hell did we ever get work done before the open office plan?
Suddenly transporting a failing team of globally located people into the same room together isn't going to magically make them into an effective team. People don't fail to communicate because they aren't sitting next to each other. People fail at communicating because they are terrible communicators. PROTIP: if they actually write "excellent communicator" on their resume, then they are not.
Similarly, suddenly scattering a succeeding team across the planet isn't going to make them fail. People who are good at communicating figure out how to communicate even under the worst conditions. Most of the developers on all of the big FOSS projects have never even heard each other's voices!
But no, let's treat people like cattle and make them hotbunk on workstations. If you have room to put up your own photos of your family at your desk, clearly you're wasting company resources and your desk could be smaller. You exist only at the pleasure of the company.
The problem in open offices is that I DON'T see people around me working hard. Instead they are talking about dogs, what kind of candy they prefer and how their friend found someone from Tinder. It's super hard not to listen, even with headphones on. The only thing that almost works are these noise-cancelling headphones, but you still need to blast some pretty loud music. I'd rather sit in a room coding :(
In open offices, I just used to put head phones on, listen to non-vocal music and be super focused for many hours.
Being visible from behind puts stress on you. You may not be aware of it, but it will catch up with you before you're 35. Headphones don't help for that. It's not just the noise that makes open-plan offices so terrible. Booth-style open-plan offices would be a step up, but nearly as expensive as private offices and since this open-plan thing is really about cheapness (and back-door age discrimination, in some cases) that does not sell it.
Teams in open office often go to lunch together, have more personal exchanges and have far more socialization
This has more to do with the people than the office layout. There are open-plan offices with eat-at-desk culture and there are private-office layouts where people eat lunch together and play board games after work. Private offices don't mean that there aren't open spaces when people want them.
In private offices, I often see people catching up on news websites and FB and in fact I even knew a guy who freely admitted that he spent entire days on YouTube.
I spend more time goofing off in open-plan offices, because I have to hide the goofing off. Here's how it works for me. I have a certain amount of goofing off that I need to do per day, just because I'm a curious person (it's not actual "goofing off", it's just not immediately work-related). In a private-office layout, it might be 10 minutes every 2 hours spent checking the news, on HN or Reddit, reading a poetry book on the internets, whatever. In an open-plan layout, it takes 20 minutes to get that 10 minutes of goofing off in, because even though I don't actually need to hide it (I'm senior enough that I could pull the "so fucking what" card, and no one cares anyway because everyone goofs off a little bit) I still feel that social pressure.
I once was working for a UK govt department as a contractor and was between tasks with nothing to do. The management thought it was easier to keep me on than to hire again when the work increased, so I was there with nothing to do. My manager and everyone around me knew I had nothing to do, but I still found it quite stressful doing things like reading Slashdot while at work (it was a long time ago). In the end I started my own project using the work development tools so it looked like I was working as normal, but after a while that was also too much so I found another contract.
I do agree about extra stress in open plan workspaces. I'm the kind of person that can't block out people around me like I notice some other people do, so everyone that walks past my desk I feel the need to glance up at them. In coffee shops I prefer the seating with my back to the wall. Music can be used to block out some of that distraction, but not all of it.
This. I feel like we are being drowned in this open-office dick plans and without complaint, this is the way our future offices will be.
Who the fuck thinks that a stock exchange like environment is good for productivity? May be some people like it, most of us(engineers) don't. Why?, do you ask. I will tell you.
Lot of engineering(programming) work is built on trying to get a focus on the problem. How do I do that? Not by asking around, pulling shirts and generally being a nuisance. Now there are people like this, who would like nothing more than a open office plan, because the answer is only a shirt-pull away. We achieve focus on the problem by concentrating hard, building delicate structures in the mind, controlling certain variables, testing theories all in mind. When somebody pokes at me or laughs hard, this structure comes tumbling down. We can reconstruct it only with some effort and patience, but it is irritating. This irritation builds up over time, becomes chronic stress and makes you an unsavory person.
For managers - Is it not enough for you that you box us in little time slots under the pretense of agile? You have to go all the way and give us a chicken coop to do our work?
I have worked in both a private office and an open floor plan. I do really enjoy working around other people in an open office, and it makes impromptu planning more accessible, which I believe aids productivity for self organizing teams.
The downside is, as you mentioned, that it can be really difficult to get focused work done. This is especially true if there are other teams sharing the same open space (project managers, designers, etc, etc). The thing that really made it better for me was to get a pair of noise canceling headphones and listen to the right music while I coded. That pretty effectively blocked out almost all of the external noise, or at least brought it down to a level where it wouldn't break into my head space and kill my concentration.
There is still the problem of people feeling more free to interrupt you for every little thing if you are in an open office layout. The only way I've found to mitigate that has been to just try to inform people (in a nice way) how I work and what it does to my productivity when someone breaks in on me during the middle of something. I also try to have a couple of blocks of regular non-coding time during which I keep my headphones off, usually right after team meetings. That way everyone knows that when there is a good time to come talk to me.
At the end of the day I do like the way collaboration works in an open office, but it does require some extra effort to stay productive when your job requires a lot of very directed concentration.
I've done this for years, even working on homework in my college cafeteria or other public space. It's actually an interesting social phenomenon: if I'm sitting at a table surrounded by textbooks, notes, and my laptop, people have absolutely no problem coming up and starting a conversation; if I'm sitting at an empty table with nothing but a plate of food in front of me, but with headphones in, not a soul will disturb me.
I've done this for years and it's kind of shocking how many people feel free to ignore the "hey, trying to work here" signal sent by headphones.
But I also have to admit that I've typically worked at companies where I was part of a smaller technology team in a larger company. As opposed to working at tech-oriented companies where the majority of my coworkers were fellow engineers who would (theoretically) be a little more understanding.
I hear you. I work at Facebook, albeit in Seattle. Honestly, I'd prefer private offices too. I prefer complete silence for coding. (Okay, occasionally jazz, classical, or video game music.) I don't get that with our open plan office. BUT! 1) I can work from home as often as I want 2) we get free, very high quality headphones, and 3) there are quiet spaces I can use when necessary. Coming from Microsoft, I miss private offices more than I actually do. The way I look at it, I do my real coding at home, on an Amtrak sleeper car, or whatever, and come into the office to socialize about coding, a completely different activity.
That seems like a good blend of collaborative and solo time. I once had a job where I worked from home two days a week and it worked quite well.
Socializing about coding is actually my favorite part of my current job. At my previous position I was the only full-time engineer. One reason I took my current job was the chance to work with a team of talented people, most of whom are more experienced (with this technology stack) than me.
A two bedroom in Nebraska runs you $500 per month. Timezone is off by 2 hours. Internet is 30 down 5 up for $60 per month.
There is a reason why companies like http://www.hudl.com/ are killing it here. You can fight for years, or have a ranch with basement when you're a 26-year-old developer.
And then you finish up your work day only to find yourself stuck in Nebraska, with nothing but cornfields for hundreds of miles in every direction... so that'd better be one hell of an awesome ranch house.
Having some sort of dedicated home office space is soooooo key. Otherwise there's almost no boundary at all between work life and home life. It becomes hard to mentally get into "work mode" when the work day starts and it's hard to fully out of "work mode" when the work day is over.
Over the years I've found that the vast majority of work-from-homers share this opinion. Almost unanimously.
I rent a one-bedroom on my own, but it has a huge lounge with a desk, power points and cable connection on one side. Works brilliantly for me, though my iMac I have living on the desk is getting so long in the tooth I barely use it anymore. Bit of a shame really, I like having a dedicated desktop. I think I need to get a Mac Pro...
Sounds like Facebook is actually having people use their homes as their offices (claim that tax deduction!) and having an open office for meetings. But they are afraid to admit that individual work happens at home.
I was translating on the first tour of your office to some japanese exchange students, and if I recall correctly, you guys had different rooms that implied different levels of 'don't interrupt' vs 'really don't interrupt me', right?
I'm in strong agreement with JohnBooty's comment. That said, we might bear in mind that not all open offices are created equal, and perhaps a better way of thinking about this is not just a binary "do I get my own office" but also in terms of square feet per employee.
6 people sharing 800 square feet is pretty nice, and you can actually have semi-private phone conversations in a space like that just due to the distance between you and your coworkers (especially if the space is broken up by half-walls, plants, etc).
100 people sharing 5,000 square feet, on the other hand, might work great for a trading floor but absolutely sucks if you're trying to write code or a thoughtful email to a customer.
In any case, the thing that bothered me most about open offices wasn't the noise so much as the lingering feeling that other people were looking over my shoulder. I was often reluctant to voice this concern because (at least in my mind) the implication was that I had something to hide, but I know that others I worked with felt the same way.
Over the years I've found that many people share that feeling. Even in a private or semiprivate office, I don't like people standing behind me. Like you, I always felt kind of silly admitting it.
I've worked in an exclusively open format office and it can be hard at times. Ideally you can find 2-3 spots to work: your desk near your team, a reliably (tho perhaps non-reservable) quiet spot for focusing, and an (perhaps unreliable) quiet spot for super privacy (e.g. a conference room ). The most damaging part of the open format (for me) is that extroverted ops folk would fight fires all day and make tons of noise. It can be helpful to be part of that if you're also fighting fires, but not if you're coding intensely. The open format can also be really helpful for quick communication during a launch.
Nevertheless, I found the open format significantly impaired the depth with which I could think through things. That's where the quiet spots helped out a lot. Unfortunately my company had ridiculous overcrowding issues (the fire marshal literally came after us) so quiet spots could be very hard to find (and you might even hurt yourself politically for taking them). It sounds like this office doesn't have a shortage of space, though.
Most of my more introverted colleagues were able to adapt (max within about a month).
> I've worked in an exclusively open format office and it
> can be hard at times. Ideally you can find 2-3 spots to
> work: your desk near your team, a reliably (tho perhaps
> non-reservable) quiet spot for focusing, and an (perhaps
> unreliable) quiet spot for super privacy (e.g. a
> conference room )
Yeah this seems typical. And it seems so close to ideal, actually. That shared, collaborative space is very important. There just needs to be enough quiet space for every engineer to grab a "booth" or a "nook" whenever they need to focus and bear down.
The average mid-level engineer in the U.S. makes something like $80K/year; it's obviously proportionally higher in tech hubs like the valley.
It's just heartbreakingly, frustratingly comical to think of a highly-paid engineer losing hours and hours of work every week as they wander around looking for an actual spot in the office to, you know, work.
I like your 3-spot system, but JohnBooty is actually describing a 3-spot system too. He's just saying he wants to spend the majority of his time in the "quiet focus" spot rather than the "team collaboration" spot.
That's really the issue here: what should your default zone be?
I like your suggestion that the default location for your desk should be in the collaborative spot. Cornell studied this a few years back and made an interesting observation: We engineers tend to prioritize our personal productivity over team productivity. Left to our own devices, we prioritize offices for exactly the reasons JohnBooty states. Personal productivity is how we're most directly measured and rewarded. But if we do that, team collaboration plummets. It's a lot harder to pull ourselves out of our focus zones into collaboration mode than it is the other way.
So, I don't know if FB's new office has quiet spots (they should), but defaulting to collaborative seating acts as a good counterbalance to our innate biases.
Most of the quieter teams (e.g. the algorithms and data people) ended up with extra empty desks between them. This space enhanced privacy, encouraged quietness, and left room for interns when the summer came.
I actually would not necessarily recommend "defaulting" to the collaborative desk space. When I moved to a quiet space for a quarter, I was measurably more productive-- among other things I wrote almost twice as many ksloc.
If you want your engineers to excel, I think it's critical to have both strong collaborative and quiet places. During the first quarter or ramp-up, the collaborative space usually makes a good default. New grads will probably do well in shared space for the first 6-12 months. Beyond that, there needs to be quasi-offices (especially for ICs who have naturally introverted temperments). Personally I think it's helpful to put everybody through both arrangements because it encourages people to adapt and diversify in their communication modes and contributor roles.
My guess is that open seating at Facebook fits their core culture, and that open seating isn't necessarily a great fit for every team. If everybody puts on their noise-cancelling headphones and listens to a loop of crickets chirping (seriously this is what my colleagues did) then you need more space and/or need to rethink your layout.
I should have and could have been clearer: I'm actually okay with defaulting to collaborative space. Collaborating with other coders is valuable (and incidentally: fun!) for the reasons you said.
There are so many workplaces that don't even have the option of reliably obtaining distraction-free workspace, though, and that's insanely harmful.
> So, I don't know if FB's new office has
> quiet spots (they should)
A lot of offices seem to have lounge-style quiet spots: nooks with comfortable chairs or some such. These are great for some things, not great for others. I've worked at a few companies where grabbing a quiet place to work meant parking yourself in an empty conference room and bracing yourself for the inevitable interruption of some other group of people walking in and using the conference room for its intended purpose.
> It's a lot harder to pull ourselves out of our
> focus zones into collaboration mode than it is
> the other way.
Yes, absolutely yes. Engineers often go off the rails when left entirely to their own devices. Often, they're not even maximizing their personal productivity - they may "go dark", spend time building the wrong thing, or needlessly spin their wheels and waste time solving something that another engineer could have helped them with very quickly.
However, I also think those things are also fairly trivially solved by adopting a software development method that fosters collaboration. Scrum is popular for a reason and feels like it's almost always a good start. On top of that team leaders can also block out time for code reviews, show-and-tells, pair programming, etc.
My default zone should be a team office with a transparent door that shuts (preferably a big, heavy door, so people are subconsciously incentived to only bother opening it if they really need something).
The three-zone scheme sounds nice, but if you give me team offices and conference rooms of various sizes, I'm pretty sure we'll be unstoppable.
NB. I had this exact team-office+heavy clear door setup in my old office and it was awesome. When we moved to the new expensive space, it was just one loud big room, ugh.
As a counterpoint, I recently moved from an open-plan office to a private office at Microsoft, and I definitely prefer the open plan. I feel more energized in an open plan, and I now make it a point to walk around the halls and drop in on people who are open to it (green status light on the door).
This is fascinating to hear. I'm curious: did the open-plan office have private spaces available for when you needed them?
> I now make it a point to walk around the halls and
> drop in on people who are open to it (green status
> light on the door).
That's funny and interesting that they have actual lights on their doors. When I ran my own consulting thing and worked from home a lot (often at odd hours) my partner and I joked about having a radio-style "ON AIR" light above the door so she'd know when I was working; sounds like Microsoft is actually doing something like that!
In offices with "normal" doors sans lights I usually just use the time-honored system: completely shut door means "please don't interrupt unless you're telling me the building is on fire," a completely open door means it's party time, and if my door is open just a crack that means I'm working but you can come in and talk if you need me.
Not everyone has them, they're called the "Blynclight." They just sit outside your door and light up with the same color as your status in Microsoft Lync (red = busy, yellow = away, green = available). If you're in a Lync meeting, or on the phone, or have set "do not disturb," your light will be red.
The problem with that is that getting interrupted with an instant message isn't usually as bad as getting interrupted in person: I always turn all the IM notifications down to a minimum and so the only change will be a new color on the icon which I tend to notice in a couple minutes.
See, now, I had heard that Microsoft was moving to open "team" sections? Was that just for the Visual Studio guys and such? I'm a huge fan of team zones where everyone in the same area works on the same immediate issues, and can also get some privacy and quite time etc.
Agreed. The most important thing about an office or workspace, for me, is that there are minimal interruptions. Quiet is best, maybe punctuated by music through my headphones or a bout of pair programming with a colleague.
I always think the best would be a bit of both. Having the option to go in a private room and do your work or work out in an open area with people where you can easily throw around ideas and what not.
But i've never had a problem in an open space. You don't wear headphones or a way to indicate to others to not disturb you? And surely you can see where some of the other things you talk about are good for you right? 'catered lunches, well ventilation/heat' etc. If you don't have to worry about those things that's less for you to worry about and you can focus on working! :)
I totally agree: most engineers need to engage in both modes of work (solo and collaborative) in the course of their work week.
The collaborative time is crucial: I've worked in places where there was no culture of collaboration; sometimes programmers working solo would "go dark," spend days going in the wrong direction, or spend inordinate amounts of time spinning their wheels because they were stuck on technical issues that other engineers could have helped them with very easily.
So: yay collaboration! I'm only opposed to work environments that don't even allow engineers to have uninterrupted solo time when they need it.
> But i've never had a problem in an open space.
> You don't wear headphones or a way to indicate
> to others to not disturb you?
Of course. I have an expensive pair of active noise-canceling headphones that I love. It helps. :)
But there are two issues. One is that people often don't respect this - either by intentionally interrupting you, or accidentally interrupting you by having conversations next to your desk that manage to be distracting despite the best efforts of the engineers that made the headphones. We could say that these people are simply being inconsiderate and we'd be right - but I've been doing this for nearly twenty years and sadly this is kind of a universal thing.
The second issue is that open offices often involve a whole lot of visual distraction even if the noise is completely abated. A steady stream of coworkers having animated conversations mere feet away is pretty distracting even with no sound.
> catered lunches, well ventilation/heat' etc.
> If you don't have to worry about those things
> that's less for you to worry about and you can
> focus on working!
Oh, those things are certainly nice! I am a fan of employee-supplied heating and cooling, especially... haha. But I see Silicon Valley companies who pay tens thousands of dollars per employee per year for catered food but don't give their engineers workplaces that encourage focus and concentration and I think: "Those priorities could really be improved..."
>>sometimes programmers working solo would "go dark," spend days going in the wrong direction, or spend inordinate amounts of time spinning their wheels because they were stuck on technical issues that other engineers could have helped them with very easily.
If this sort of things aren't getting caught in your daily stand up meetings then your tech leads/managers to whom your paying big money salaries are working as nothing more than glorified email routers.
In which case merely flattening all walls in your office and creating a fish market is hardly going to solve any issues.
Ya, for sure! You can't quite block all the sounds and all the hustle and bustle is annoying and catches your attention and you have to investigate what's going on.
I wish more places that had open offices also had places you could lock yourself in where you know you would not be disturbed. Doesn't seem to be the focus for some reason, but I picture a bunch of smallish rooms you could go in and work or maybe nap around the perimeter.
I think this depends on the culture of the place you work in.
I've worked in 4 small offices for companies ranging from 6-60 people, I need a quiet focused atmosphere to work in, and two of the offices provided that, despite being shared spaces.
In one of them, (6-8 people) we always had quietly playing ambient music. Not to everyone's tastes and some people used headphones, but it meant no one tried to talk over desks, and if people needed to speak it set the tone as one a bit like a library.
The office I'm in now (20 people) is much the same. We don't have any music, but through a strong example set by the founders and a culture of being able to ask people to be quiet politely and without repercussions, regardless of who it is, we have a very quiet working space and conduct most conversations over IM or in separate meeting rooms.
Based on my experience in the other offices, I can see why many people would be against open offices, but I believe they can be done well. Whether Facebook's are or not I do not know.
My SO bought noise-cancelling in-ear headphones. She turns them on without music sometimes, just for the (relative) silence. Easier than changing jobs and she seems happy with it?
She enjoys the team vibe but also needs to block out people around her fairly often. The 'phones allow a lot more freedom to sit anywhere and still be able to work.
You might try better co-workers? Seems odd you'll spend as much time as you will with your partner (and kids) as with co-workers and not develop a meaningful or similar relationships. Sounds horrible.
What I see happen at these places too is that while in a hushed voice, people tend to gossip _a lot_ throughout the day. And the gossip has to be interspersed with citation, because a plain old chewing the fat without any authority is a waste of time, of course. And walk their dogs by...
But I guess it doesn't matter much when money is aplenty.
The other subtle thing is that you are being stripped of any privacy --we all get lumped together. Stripped naked of your individual humanity and sent into a human pen to do your work in a commune. It's great for some people, but one has to realize what is being taken away in the name of the unassailable communication and collaboration (and who in their right minds would want to go against that grain).
Last year I designed an office for a small business with 20 employees. Having worked in several offices (with different layouts) made me very "bearish" on open-offices so I advised the business owner against it. While explaining all my arguments to him, he told me:
I completely agree with you but without an open layout how do I control my employees?
And:
With an open layout I can put more people in less space.
This is what business people think. All the rest is poetry.
Architecture is about organizing space. Then if needed we build some walls to achieve this goal. The architect still needs to define corridors, toilets, meeting areas, etc, etc. The only difference is that he doesn't need to project many walls.
Everybody's different, no solution will work for everyone. Personally, I work MUCH better in open spaces with some background noise, that's what puts me in the zone. If I had to work in a personal office/cubicle/whatever, I wouldn't be productive.
I think most individual engineers are more productive coders in a private room. And here, many of us retire often to a comfy chair or a quiet corner when we need uninterrupted focus.
But my team is far more productive across non-coding tasks by being adjacent to each other. And anybody who felt very strongly about not sitting with the team would, in my opinion, not fit in as well here.
My point is: the feeling would perhaps be mutual. And it's OK: every person is not made to work at every company.
I could never do my work in a vacuum: the time I spent collaborating with the rest of the team (and with other teams) is huge. I'm actually pretty extroverted.
One key factor in switching jobs last year was the chance to work with a team of talented coders, instead of simply being the sole software engineer at my old company.
What I (and others, I think) react strongly to is the concept of workplaces where there are no private workspaces (or not enough private workspaces) for those times when solo work is what's required.
> I would literally switch jobs (and perhaps careers, if every company was like this) if forced to work in an open office like this. I cannot work that way; I can't focus.
I agree completely. I don't have an open office space but I still have to keep my door open which leads to me overhearing people on the phone and the general work chatter anyway, so I end up with headphones. :P
It used to be considered common for people to have their own office or personal space (cubicle), but that's gone out the window.
Having to share an office with others is fine too imo - every team can determine their own levels of distraction and noise and whatnot. More than one team in one room is asking for trouble though.
To put a dollar value on it? Maybe 25%-50% more than I'd need to work at a similar company with working environment that encourages calm and focus. And I'd be perpetually ready to jump ship to another company with such an environment. I also wouldn't be nearly as productive as I could be otherwise.
Those three things all have dollar values attached - in the tens of thousands of dollars, each.
Or you might find out that you don't mind the open floor plans that much after all and that it's largely compensated for by the people you work with, the project you work on and noise cancelling headphones. And who knows... crazy thought: you might end up enjoying the constant buzz and energy going around you during the day, knowing that you can choose to participate in it or just isolating yourself completely from it whenever you choose.
Best of both worlds.
Keep your mind open, give yourself the opportunity to try it one day, you might be surprised. Besides, it's pretty much a requirement if you ever look for a job in the Silicon Valley.
I currently work in an office space in Japan that is shared with another company and, I have to say, I cannot stand all of the chatter. It has gotten to the point that I often wear earplugs just so that I can get something done.
Isn't the notion that private offices are better than open floor plans disproven by reality? Tech companies predominantly use open floor plans and these same companies are some of the most successful in the world. What companies would proponents of private offices point to as counterexamples?
That said, a common reason for it is back-door age discrimination. Plenty of companies use open-plan offices without such an intent (they "look" busy, which pays off in marketing, and they're cheap) but the open-plan fetishism is all about "culture fit", meaning exclusion of the old, the female, the lower-than-upper-middle-class, and all disabilities except early stage alcoholism.
Tech companies are, in general, very badly managed. It doesn't prevent them from being successful because technology is so powerful that it compensates for inept management. I see this as a good thing in the long term (imagine what this industry could do if it wasn't run by idiots) but, culturally, it's bad because the worst attributes of "startup culture" are infecting the whole economy.
Open-plan offices require you to trust strangers in a way that most people aren't comfortable with. Being visible to someone while working (i.e. doing an activity where your income depends as much on how you are perceived while doing it as on what you actually do) is a form of mandated trust of others.
It doesn't come naturally to people whose life experiences involve violations of trust, embarrassing illnesses, or physical danger. (With age, the percentage of people who have such experiences increases, and approaches 100%.) You have to still have that sense of immortality to be OK in an open-plan office.
Also, having children makes people less trusting of strangers, for obvious biological reasons. Having a helpless being that you must protect at all costs makes people less OK with the blind trust in strangers you're supposed to have if you want to fit in to the "I'm at one with everyone, man!" California culture.
Older people are also not able to take as much abuse of their fight-or-flight systems, and pregnancy has a similar effect on women.
Even if those correlations hold true and have the effect you're describing (I'm far from convinced that's the case, but it's moot), it strains credulity by a mile to claim that this is some byzantine plot for "backdoor age/sex/income-discrimination". That would mean that those making decisions about open offices are 1) thinking through the complex and frankly tenuous connections that you're describing, 2) finding them credible, and 3) deciding that the collateral damage to other employees' productivity and happiness is somehow worth the weak effect this would have on furthering discrimination. There are an infinite number of ways to backdoor-discriminate on those bases that are not very noticeable, far more effective,
I second this. For me it's not even about being watched. It's that unnerving feeling of presence of other people that often makes me unable to focus in open-space setting at work. I had that since forever - even as a kid I aways closed the door to my room. I'm usually the last person to leave the office and when I see a cow-orker of mine staying late I start to feel irritated (saying in my head "hey, this was supposed to be my time for focused work!").
Funny thing is - I'm not an antisocial person. I love people. Just not when I'm trying to focus on something. Then the very presence of others makes me nervous.
And yes, when I'm focused, I like to talk to myself out loud, lie down on a couch to think, rock to music and draw a lot (when designing something). All those things look silly and I'm uncomfortable doing any of it when not alone.
Being around people usually engages various parts of the brain that are involved in being aware of the local situation. Even if you're not interacting to someone, some amount of monitoring happens to maintain the brain's model of the local environment that we actually experience. This would include stuff like tracing the locations of people/stuff in the room, checks of stuff like body language or subtle social indicators, and probably a long list of other tiny checks that we never really notice consciously.
The problem is that some of the areas of the brain that do that processing are also used when handling other complex tasks such as programming. This overloading of processing areas will vary from person to person, of course.
This problem is the main reason I could never work in an open office, and have serious productivity problems even ion an office shared with only one other person. It's not that they are interrupting constantly or otherwise distracting in the commonly-used sense. If there are people around, I have to be aware of them, which wastes mental CPU time and introduces cache-flushing context switches at annoying times.
Now that you mention it, I wonder if this open-office culture - conditioning employees to accept little privacy in the workplace - was the reason the reprehensible "surveillance as a business model" became popular at so many tech companies.
Bingo! The whole thing is a plot for shoving people together, saving money and letting employees watch each other, and of course to please the management they love seeing a floor full of people click click click typing on their keyboards.
It just get wrapped in a bunch of politically correct fluff about "something something collaboration" ... "something something support and community" to make it difficult for people to oppose it.
God forbid you raise an objection and suddenly you are worse than Hitler and hate people and need therapy.
I have similar problems with anxiety and have come to partial terms with them this way: when I'm at work, I'm performing. If part of that performance is dancing around in my chair or putting my head down on the desk or reading irrelevant websites from time to time, so be it. This is my own self-expression. And anyone who gives a shit about it who isn't my boss can get fucked.
For me, I hate the feeling of BEING WATCHED. It's just unnerving.
Agree. It's practically abusive. Even if you're a great worker, pillar of the community, whatever, the fact remains that a surveillance state is an anxiety state.
The problem is that this industry is now fueled by the eagerness of clueless 22-year-olds who've never had a serious health problem or personal matter that interferes with work, who still think they're immortal, and buy into that "if you have nothing to hide" fallacy. Fuck that shit.
These "glass palace" offices may work for bankers or marketing teams. For programmers you could just as well plant their desks into the middle of a mall.
The offensive part is the people who say that open offices are MORE EFFICIENT than a traditional office. I have a hard time believing that one.
Given how high programmer salaries are, the productivity loss due to open offices is almost definitely more than the office space savings.
It seems like an introvert/extrovert thing. The introverts would prefer a quiet working space (and they're usually the best workers), but extroverts want the easy communication (and they're usually the bosses).
Even small team rooms of 4-10 people get annoying when the other person has a smelly meal, has a cold, prefers a different temperature, or listens to music on his headphones so loudly I can hear it.
One of my favorite jokes is when a job ad says "We provide headphones so you can concentrate!" as a serious job perk. How about a quiet space?
"The introverts would prefer a quiet working space (and they're usually the best workers)"
Uh what? I'm an extreme introvert but don't see any reason to believe introverts are usually the best workers. I am not even that convinced that introverts would prefer a quiet working space any more than extroverts do. After all, just because someone is extroverted doesn't mean they have an easier time concentrating in a noisy environment.
Extrovert here, former introvert (yeah, it's not fixed). I appreciate the defense against what is at the very least a statement of extreme arrogance by the GP.
I love a quiet workspace, and I also enjoy an open office plan. There's a need for the advantages of both environments—the ease of collaboration and the focused heads-down time—which is why this is such a difficult discussion to have.
>Extrovert here, former introvert (yeah, it's not fixed).
Off topic, but how did you "convert"? Was it a conscious effort or did it just seem to happen? I ask mostly because I had a period of a few years where I felt like I leaned closer to extroversion, but now I'm pretty firmly an introvert, and I'd like to be able to push it back to the other side, but can't quite figure out how exactly to do that.
As far as office plans go, as an introvert I really don't mind working in loud, distracting environments. I've gotten blocking out the outside world down to a science, and I'm pretty hard to distract unless someone is specifically talking to me, but I've found that an office with a door doesn't really stop that anyways. My ideal office is probably some variation of what I have at my current job, half-cubicles (4 pushed together) with 1-5 other people nearby. It's isolated enough, but still lets us collaborate and see other people enough to keep the madness at bay.
Yep! Gotta watch those darn words I learned to juggle for comedic effect. Definitely haven't taken the MBTI assessment multiple times in my life or anything. Or read Jung's books on personality that underpinned them. Nope, just heard those words used once in this article I read and people keep saying I done used them good so I keep doing it.
Then why the heck are we talking about introversion and extroversion with a straight face?
Seriously, they're antiquated descriptors. I was only pointing out how ridiculous it is to assume someone's lack of knowledge of terms.
They only persist because they provide a considerable amount of validation to behaviors of self-described introverts who desire permission for their personality. Most humans don't fall into either category absolutely.
I did several things, I think. And it does fluctuate.
- College in an extremely social club environment (marching band)
- Moved across the country to a new place, forced me to meet new people, change social skill set
- Moved from small companies to fast growing larger company, with mostly introverted people around me, I tended to fill out the gaps
- Role more focused on personal interactions
- New romantic relationship that allows for individualism, fulfillment, so I seek social interaction outside it (previous relationships were less balanced)
- Exercise, diet make me feel more positive and social in general
In short, my life has significantly changed since I considered myself an introvert. Most of it I attribute to just growing up and developing as a person. I could also see myself shifting back, depending on my situation. No biggie, both are good, and certainly I still have many introverted qualities.
If I'm not mistaken, you define introvert/extrovert by personal preference. e.g. when you need to recharge your batteries, would you rather be hanging out with 20 people, or alone on a walk?
What you described was your path to developing social skills, which is great.
I am an extremely social person. Many different groups of friends, very social at work, love going out and am always up for just about anything. I know I am an introvert because I need alone time in order to recharge.
I define introversion by the MBTI definition: "I like getting my energy from dealing with the ideas, pictures, memories, and reactions that are inside my head, in my inner world. I often prefer doing things alone or with one or two people I feel comfortable with. I take time to reflect so that I have a clear idea of what I'll be doing when I decide to act. Ideas are almost solid things for me. Sometimes I like the idea of something better than the real thing."
Similarly, I define extroversion by the MBTI definition: "I like getting my energy from active involvement in events and having a lot of different activities. I'm excited when I'm around people and I like to energize other people. I like moving into action and making things happen. I generally feel at home in the world. I often understand a problem better when I can talk out loud about it and hear what others have to say."
I define my personality shift from introversion to extroversion as a shift from primarily the first definition to the second. The shift is not in full: Meyers and Briggs not only recognized the spectrum between the two and the conditionality of both personalities, they accounted for it in their assessment.
I still have periods of overstimulation by crowds that require alone time to "recharge." I also have periods of overstimulation of introverted self-care, in which I require crowds and groups to "recharge."
Overall, I find the black-and-white dichotomy to be insufficient to describe the experience. The gray area is better, but I still think the presence of the opposing words does a disservice to the people attempting to define themselves and others in terms of them.
Not everything is an introvert/extrovert thing. Not even people.
Signed, a former mostly-introvert, now mostly-extrovert, who remains an able and efficient member of my team, thank-you-very-much.
Now, down to business, my office actually does have a 'quiet space' of substantial square footage, filled with bean bags, comfy chairs, and lots of nooks and crannies. It's highly effective to go work there when needed.
The rest of the office remains an open floor plan. I find it useful to split my time between both places, one bearing all the advantages of human interaction (it's not so bad), the other providing concentration when required.
As one of the comments on the Facebook page points out, DeMarco's Peopleware (1987) book has actual research documenting the problems with open office plans.
I love how $100 billion companies with a hair (~11%) shy pf a billion - a billion users, active, d-a-i-l-y and run by 9,199 employees (for a company value of $1 million per empoyee down to every last employee including someone taking out the trash, and likewise meaning each and every last employee has whole army divisions, a hundred thousand users, they account for --) - suddenly doesn't know as much - to an OFFENSIVE extent - about productivity as someone who has time to post 5 paragraphs about it. There is someonething offensive here indeed.
Congratulations, you just attributed luck to skill and established that when you had luck you somehow have any idea what you are doing. Nokia was very big once. Was.
You haven't established the link between wealth and an understanding of productivity so much as asserted that wealth is a proxy for knowledge/intelligence.
> the productivity loss due to open offices is almost definitely more than the office space savings.
Individual productivity isn't the aim. I've seen research that suggests the most predictive factor in the success of a team is how much they communicate. Yes, you might lose out on lines of code productivity, but you might also find that you're writing much more of the right lines of code and your colleagues are too.
I'd be fine with this, actually. As long as there was someplace quiet and private to go when needed. I wouldn't mind if these spaces were just booths you could grab when needed. As long as there were enough to go around.
At my workplace pretty much everything is on the network. All the important stuff and a lot of the personal, non-important stuff sits on a file server somewhere. It wouldn't be a huge jump for us to put everything on the network and make the machines dumb terminals. If you did that, you could just put high-powered desktops in each of the booths.
I'm a fan of huge/multiple monitors too. There could easily be monitors in the "booths," that part's easy. As for desktop-level compute horsepower, hmmmm....
1 programmer per office is pretty sparse. We have 3-4 here where I work, and it seems to be a nice equilibrium between privacy and ease of collaboration.
> The offensive part is the people who say that open offices are MORE EFFICIENT than a traditional office.
To be fair, I don't think everyone that uses the term "open office" is thinking "auditorium with 1000+ people." Attempting to extrapolate anything conclusions taken from open office environments of 4-10 people out to 1000+ people seems insane.
4-10 is team room, please don't confuse the conversation by calling it an open office. Don't be overly literal in mincing, let words have useful meaning.
This is like every tired introvert/extrovert stereotype all combined into one post.
No one person is fully introverted/extroverted. Everyone appreciates alone/quiet time to an extent and appreciates other people's company to an extent. It's way more of a spectrum than it is a black and white status.
I love meeting new people and going to social events, but I also have no problem spending time alone working on projects. What am I? A worker or a boss?
Another kind of efficiency is the pure real-estate economics angle. Open office plans typically allocate fewer sq ft per employee, are cheaper to maintain, and are more easily reconfigurable as divisions/headcount changes.
This is probably less of a factor for Facebook, who built a bespoke office building and have a ton of cash, but it's definitely driving things elsewhere in the real-estate market. If you read what's being written in the architecture / office-consulting business, there is much touting of the cost/flexibility advantages of open-plan offices compared to "legacy" floorplans. Even boring old companies like ExxonMobil are moving towards open-plan offices in new construction mostly for this reason. And office buildings built speculatively by investors in the past 20 years almost never have actual structural offices like older buildings do, because that's seen as producing a rental inventory that's less flexible. Companies leasing space just get a big open floor space, and then have a choice between setting it up in open-plan or cube-farm style.
Sure, now you know when people are at their desks, which is irrelevant. You want to know when people work and that doesn't follow from "is at the desk".
That depends on who is your measure for normal in comparison to programmers: Lawyers? Doctors? Waiters? Cleaners? After that is decided we can check whether you or the GP post is more correct.
According to us news best jobs, in San Francisco, the median salary for a dental hygienist is $112,970. For a software developer, it is $114,400, and for a registered nurse, it is $126,670. Numbers are pulled from BLS data (check their methods page).
This nightmare is so common that I'm worried people will never move away from it. The whole 'Agile everything' mentality has totally stuffed normal productivity where I work, and the entire programming and innovation floor is open plan with no set desks, meaning I have to pack up everything at the end of the day and put it all back at the start of the next. Give me a quiet office where I can leave my notes and stuff and let me work...
I am a quant in a bank and I work in similar massive open spaces. Being in such noisy places has actually helped me find my focus zone! No matter how noisy it gets, I seem to be able to find a calm place within my head
Facebook's new office is much bigger than that. However the space is broken up by meeting rooms, walls, stairwells, etc. From what I've seen the noise and distractions are probably better than many other open plan office I've worked in.
I dislike open offices but when it's this big it actually can work because all the noise just becomes white. In a small open office, you pretty much have to be silent but in a big one, you can speak freely. We (PayPal) had a big open office like this in Omaha and it actually kind of works better than some might think.
My boss asked me for input when scouting for a new office a while back. I asked for private offices, because for programmers working in an open space is like writing a math exam at a busy lunch restaurant. She said she understood. And then she signed us all up for an open space office anyway.
I don't know about Mark Zuckerberg, In general these show and tell offices are generally a sham. Even if they have a desk in the open work space I'm pretty darn sure its there just as a small time gossip catch up area with other colleagues.
Their actual office work, meetings, decision making and nearly everything else will be happening from a 'meeting room'. So in essence they will have a private office in which they will spend most of their time in.
> There’s a strong culture in Silicon Valley that requires you to jam a lot of programmers into a big open space, despite a preponderance of evidence that private offices are far more productive, something which I’ve covered repeatedly on this site. I’m not really getting through to people, I don’t think, because programmers kind of like being social, even if it means they are unproductive, so it’s an uphill battle.
I’ve even heard programmers say things like, “Yeah, we all work in cubicles, but everyone works in a cubicle—up to and including the CEO!”
“The CEO? Does the CEO really work in a cubicle?”
“Well, he has a cubicle, but actually now that you mention it there’s this one conference room that he goes to for all his important meetings…”
Mmmm hmmm. A fairly common Silicon Valley phenomenon is the CEO who makes a big show of working from a cubicle just like the hoi polloi, although somehow there’s this one conference room that he tends to make his own (“Only when there’s something private to be discussed,” he’ll claim, but half the time when you walk by that conference room there’s your CEO, all by himself, talking on the phone to his golf buddy, with his Cole Haans up on the conference table).
I've worked in open plan offices my entire career. I actually don't even like having the same desk every day. If I really want some isolation I work from home. No big deal. I'd rather take the extra money or other office perks over the boring cubicle you all seem to want.
There are more options than just "Entirely Open Concept" or "Individual Cubicles"! There can be a mix of the two, or other things. My ideal scenario would be majority open areas, but with plenty of more secluded rooms/areas where people can work in a quiet, distraction-free atmosphere if they choose. You don't need to have a dedicated desk, and can roam freely between the two.
So you work on a laptop? Not only do studies show that open offices decrease productivity, they ALSO show that less screen real-estate decreases productivity.
> I actually don't even like having the same desk every day.
I think the differences many of these arguments partially boil down to the differences in the nature of various lines of business. I have had four positions at two companies and have never had a situation where changing desks every day was feasible. Work from home has never been an option for me. Since I like the type of work I do, I want to do it in a real office (something I have yet to do).
The problem is that in an office such as mine, we don't get a constant work space and don't have the option of working from home. Not well thought out from a management point of view.
I'm really impressed by how non-gimmicky this Gehry building looks on the outside, and it seems like they really did a good job designing whatever space isn't consumed by the open plan.
YES. I was thinking the same thing. The last building I was in was converted from an old industrial space. There were noise cancelling devices in the ceiling. You couldn't hear the person sitting across the table from you.
Noise canceling? Got a link? I am aware of white noise machines but not noise-canceling. Presently building out a new office and would love to see details.
The foam devices serve to both absorb sound energy, and to scatter the remaining sound energy at a variety of angles, where much of it will collide with other reflected sound waves and cancel out.
I needed some acoustic foam for a small project at home and found this place. They seemed pretty affordable (and had lots of colors) compared to other places, though I'm far from an expert and I was only buying ~$40 of foam so I didn't exactly spent too much time comparison shopping: http://www.foambymail.com/acoustical-foam-products.html
I truly didn't; the use of the word "device" and the word "canceling" hints at something active. I've not heard of foam before referred to as a "device".
'Open floor plan' doesn't mean there's no leeway if you want to have a private discussion, or a meeting with more than 2-3 people for more than 5 minutes.
Really? We're that politically correct now that we can't have a joke meeting-room-ballpit to celebrate the opening of a new building without offending someone?
I'm not going to get into the debate of open floor plans vs individual offices since most people already have their opinions and I see pros & cons to both. That debate aside, I think that roof top green space is absolutely awesome. I would love to see more of those being built into new buildings.
Such a massive waste of space (not Facebook, others). Rooftops could easily house grass, solar and parking and yet is pretty much always completely wasted.
Having worked as researcher/dev in both private office and open space setup, I am absolutely convinced that private offices are way more productive than open office setup for researchers and developers. Most, if not all, of my colleagues feel the same. In fact, I don't think I will ever accept an offer from a mature company (not startup) which houses its developers in open space.
The only redeeming feature of open plan comes from Hamming's essay, you and your research:
Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the
door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work ✥
done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't ✥
know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in ✱
importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets
clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect ✞
sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can ✝
say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ✝
ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow ✲
they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame.
Text makes it much easier to share a link, refer to something in the code, etc. It's not ideal for in-depth discussions, but it can often be better for handling typical questions.
Sitting in an office with the door open to welcome impromptu conversation is very different from, and much preferable to, sitting in an open floor plan with no privacy whatsoever. Hamming's essay doesn't redeem the open plan at all.
I had a single office at my last job. I'm in a shared office today. At my current job I feel much less aware of what's going on around me because I spend all my time with headphones on.
I sort of half concluded that people with closed doors are more likely to be introverts and thus less likely to look for fame. :)
I'm not saying that you are saying the opposite, I'm just saying that the cause/effect is very much up in the air. I never thought it was as straight forward as asking "what is better?" (as he rightly asks too)
Personally, I never looked for fame (and I'm old enough to say that I likely never will look for it). In the end, what I want is: to be right. Even if it takes 100 wrongs to get there. With that in mind, I would be better off if I was an extrovert as I'd probably get through the wrongs quicker than if I preferred my solitude.
But as it stands, I like to be able to stare absentmindedly in a random direction without the risk of accidentally glancing at someone's new hat or haircut.
I don't know if I am slower or slightly wrong. I would not rule it out, though. :)
I think Hamming's quote pretty much sums up my personal experience with both open and closed offices. In a private office, your personal productivity is maximized; you get the most lines of code written, the most research done, the hardest problems solved. And yet the cumulative effect of that productivity seems to be much less than that of peers who write little, endure distractions, but are always in tune with which problems people are interested in.
I think the real problem is one of aligning incentives. I would welcome open plan offices much more if I was incentivized for team performance.
Instead I get forced into open collaboration-enhancing offices with the idea of increasing team productivity. But on scrums and all other things I am judged on the merits of personal productivity (tickets closed, issues resolved, whatever). This leaves me disgruntled because I have no way of showing to project managers that I've helped N people with their issues. They only care how many issues I closed.
This then shapes my personal values and how I judge myself as well. Which in turn makes me shun the open plan office. Which in turn ultimately makes me a worse engineer a few years down the line.
We, as an industry, need to start pushing employers to make job posts talk more about "Management measures your value to the company in these ways, and rewards them in these ways" and less about "We've got a kegerator and a ball pit."
I think that there are pros and cons with both, however, I believe that a developer should have at least a "choice". With this I mean, for some of the work I do I can sit in a noisy environment and get stuff done, take e.g. doing some HTML or something else mostly "visual", however, when I need to focus and I am going to be juggling loads of tiny details in short term memory I want an environment that is quiet so I can focus.
The problem with a noisy open space environment is that my environment is going to decide when I can do work. When I have the inspiration to fix a problem and I need to be able to focus, this has to be on "my terms", not that of my environment.
You and all the research seems to agree. Of course, the anecdotal evidence outliers will disagree, but I don't see how there's a debate anymore when you look at productivity.
Google yourself on pros and cons of open office. There are lots of studies on both.
I am yet to see practical solutions to noise and disease spread (e.g. flu season) problems.
I've seen the phrase "all the research" thrown around quite a lot in this thread. Would you mind linking to a few studies you refer to?
Mainly, I'm curious about how they define productivity. An office full of people performing completely independent tasks is almost certainly less productive than having separate offices; the advantage of open offices comes when everyone's work is interrelated. In an open environment, whenever I need to make a decision on implementation, I can easily ask someone intimately familiar with the area my code effects, and vice versa. The result is that people are more likely to make the better choices for the long-term future of the code base.
I'm also curious if there are any longitudinal studies that address moral. I wouldn't be surprised if people in open offices feel less like a cog in the system. I could also imagine it's a lot harder to develop a hatred of your coworkers and your boss if they're working right in front of you.
> I've seen the phrase "all the research" thrown around quite a lot in this thread. Would you mind linking to a few studies you refer to?
There's a good New Yorker article[1] from last year that references a number of studies. This blog post[2] links to a couple others and addresses costs/alternatives. Also, "a study of over 40,000 survey responses collected over a decade has found that the benefits for workers are quickly outweighed by the disadvantages"[3]. Here's a Washington Post article[4] referencing Facebook's new building and linking to a few other studies.
Of course you can certainly decide to dismiss the research and base your opinion on anecdotes or assumptions, but don't judge research as being poorly done just because you disagree with the findings.
I don't know if the research is that crystal clear right now.
I have no doubt that developers will write more code whilst in offices free of distraction. But the question is do they miss out on key business knowledge by not being around other people. Especially if they are in Agile feature teams.
When I was working in offices I felt the cross pollination was actually superior in that environment. I could have a long (hours long) talk with a co-worker in their office or mine and really dig down into something and share a lot of knowledge (either general or tribal). Whereas with an open office you tend to try to keep things short because you tend to be interrupting many people instead of just one, and because you lack the almost conspiratorial intimacy that you can have with an office the sorts of discussions you have are comparatively constrained.
Again the trend seems to be mixed plan. Open plan offices with private areas.
In which case you can not argue that there is significant money/effort involved. It's either the cost of headphones and the effort of walking tens of metres. Developers are going to need better arguments than that to convince HR/Management that this is not a trend worth doing.
> Again the trend seems to be mixed plan. Open plan offices with private areas.
What do you mean, "again"? This statement is the first mention of such in this sub-discussion. Also, I'm not going on a tangent about the joke that the "private areas" in such offices turn into or how infeasible this design is for many lines of business.
> In which case you can not argue that there is significant money/effort involved.
"Significant money and effort" as in the sum total devoted to finding solutions to the problem of distracting, sub-optimal environments being foisted upon engineers, not the cost to a single hypothetical engineer.
> It's either the cost of headphones and the effort of walking tens of metres.
That statement presumes: a) headphones are allowed; b) headphones work for everyone; c) people have work they can pick up and move; d) that private areas actually exist in sufficient quantity for those who want them; e) that private areas are not appropriated permanently by people up the political food chain.
> Developers are going to need better arguments than that to convince HR/Management that this is not a trend worth doing.
That statement assumes HR and Management care about any argument besides cost.
Also, you completely ignored the point I was actually making, which is that throwing engineers together into a giant room does not give you the cross-pollination that so many management consultants claim you get.
If I have to walk tens of meters to meet in a private space with anyone I want to talk to, then 1) the supposed serendipitous transfer of knowledge does not happen, and 2) we could just as easily have had this encounter in my or their private office space.
Maybe you can train your Agile developers to write down "key business knowledge" in complete sentences. You don't prefer to live under the tyranny of oral tradition, do you?
The debate isn't whether or not collaborative work is highly beneficial. It is highly beneficial. Crucial, even.
The debate is about whether or not we want to force employees to exclusively in a collaborative way, with no reliable option for quiet solo work -- as many of these "open office" workplaces do -- is a good idea.
The trend in most modern workspaces is to have mixed use. Generally open plan for most day-to-day work and then a variety of private areas. For example offices and cubicles that are shared.
Development is always tricky because often you need clear air to solve problems but then occasionally collaboration is required.
It'd be helpful if there was some way for people to collaborate using computers, or if facetime is what you want, some sort of shared room where you can talk without disturbing others who are working.
It's not really that tricky- there are many tools for collaboration including IRC. And you can always go to another developers office, in the ideal one developer-per office situation.
I work in an open-ish office and have two problems with this:
1. I have glasses and a hearing aid (cochlear implant) and have yet to find headphones that don't make my left ear/head throb with pain after more than six hours.
2. Visual distractions: people walking through, people seemingly approaching me (but actually approaching someone nearby), people waving, etc. are all just as bad as auditory distractions, if not worse for me personally since I tend to rely heavily on vision to replace what I can't hear.
Open office + headphones negates some of the "pluses" touted by open office advocates. When I worked at Skype, the office in Palo Alto got some kudos for the "design" -- http://www.designblitzsf.com/projects/skype-hq/ being one such URL.
As far as noise goes, even with audio engineers on staff, the level of disruptive noise was horrible. People having calls at their desks, testing mobile notifications, etc. Thankfully, I worked at home 50+% of the time as getting productive work done in the office was incredibly difficult. Large open space + open office = bad idea.
Our office in Stockholm, while an open office, had many smaller sections offset by walls, break rooms, etc. It was a much better experience overall, but still not optimal.
Yes, that's what many devs do. That is of varied efficiency to different people. In laboratory settings, noise has been repeatedly tied to reduced cognitive performance [1].
Also, what happens during flu season? How many people are gone and how often vs private office setting? I'd love to see a study on this.
I don't see how that's true, but I'm open to having my mind changed. But a comfortable listening level with well-insulated headphones/IEMs for prolonged hours shouldn't be damaging. It can be tiring but having periods of quiet (home life, sleep) re-invigorates them.
A private office means you can have a meeting (scheduled or not) with up to 2 or 3 other people without having to bother looking for a conference room.
And when you allow for private working areas it is going to be very difficult for developers et al to argue against this trend. Everything has seemingly been thought of e.g. if you are sick give free flu shots and health checks to employees.
I am working in a company that is redesigning the building to be more open plan. It is clear that HR is driving the decision not architects or interior designers.
I believe that this whole "open office" concept is driven by the idea that an observed worker is a "productive" worker and that it's actually true to a certain extent. Sure, you may be less productive in an open office when you're actually bearing down on something but the management is assured that you're doing something work related within the boundaries of the company's cultural definition of "productive".
It's an old-school, assembly line style of thinking. An open floorplan gives the impression of vulnerability, you won't goof off on HN or reddit when you know somebody could be looking. A loss in crunchtime productivity may be worth it if the employees would otherwise spend 2 hours a day wasting time privately. The culture determines the amount of time spent socializing in plain view but the open office completely kills any attempt to spend company time on non-work activities in private.
I work outside the tech bubble but even with my limited experience, I know that the more company provided distractions (a 9 acre park, free snacks in the breakroom, etc), the less you'll be allowed to actually do anything but work.
It's like we're going back to the industrial golden age where all a companies workers would get subsidized cookiecutter housing and certain amenities close to the plant. You never have to leave your employer bubble now.
The conditions have never been better to work remotely, yet I guess another way to eliminate commutes is to make your workplace so livable you never leave (much). :)
I've worked in offices with cubes, in co-working spaces, remotely (for a long time), and now in an open plan with around 200 people.. I have never been more productive than the time I worked remotely. The constant distractions in an open plan are bad enough with 200, I can't even imagine how it is with thousands.
I don't like people looking at my screens. I've never had a problem with the quality or quantity of my work, but as soon as someone see youtube open blasting out music. Hackernews, reddit, facebook all open, someone soon complains. That's just how I work.
I think of it like a sausage factory, the boss loves the product but doesn't want to know how it's made. Leave me to work in my own way.
I've never worked in an open floor plan with more that like 100 people. But I seem to recall only being bothered by people within a few cube sections from me in any direction. I would imagine that at some point the rest of the people in the "room" are far enough away that it doesn't really matter.
The collaboration that an open floor plan is supposed to promote has for me more or less translated to 'i can clearly see you so that is an open invitation to come interrupt you'. For me it's mostly that plus the constant movement in your peripheral vision nearby and far away that makes it bad.
> Our goal was to create the perfect engineering space for our teams to work together. [...] To do this, we designed the largest open floor plan in the world — a single room that fits thousands of people.
Almost reads like an Onion article. I'm sure that they thought this through though before spending so much money.
Not being snide, but I REALLY do want to see a picture of a work desk (imagine it would be one of those standing/sitting electronic ones) and a chair and a computer! Or is that confidential info?
Reminds me of the episode of "Better Off Ted" where they invent an itchy chair and it increases productivity because workers can't get too comfortable. In focus group testing, they find a maximum limit of uncomfortableness before people start jumping out of windows.
I keep thinking the latest announcement of "gigantic open floor plan" is going to be that stroke too far. But I have also learned to be disappointed.
My least and most favorite topic rears it's head again. The open floor plan. Here's what I've come to think is about perfect:
The open floor plan, with +-3 hour start/end time to your 8 hour work day (from say, 8:30-5), with optional hour lunch (paid or unpaid depending on policy/culture).
Think about it.. there are definitely collaboration benefits to be had with the open floorplan. The contrast to that is always the "engineer needs alone time" bit. I get it, I work well both ways, but as others have said, you can't do all of either all of the time. That's where true flexibility in working schedule comes in.
Like your quiet time? Come in at 6 and leave at 3. Or come in at 11, and leave at 7. The bulk of the office will tend to come in near the societal norm of 9-5, especially those who like the collaborative bit the most, and that leaves you the ends to pick from. Entire office likes to get together for group hour long lunches? Skip it and work. The idea is, if you honestly can't fit the work you need to do into blocks of time at the ends or middle of the day when the office naturally quiets down, you've got a bigger problem than the distractions of the office. The idea that you must have 8 hours of quiet or near quiet to do your job means you're not that good at doing your job, or your job role is too demanding for a reasonable person to do. If it's truly the case, you're likely SO good at what you do someone's noticed and you're getting what you want already.
The "MBA dicks" didn't start this, we did, like it or not. All the agile, write stuff on sticky-notes, stand up meetings did this, not managers looking to cut costs. They may have benefited, embraced an idea, and exploited it, for sure, but this didn't come from higher up.
The problem is, they do work - for a lot of people. Things are getting done, at the biggest companies (case in point, the original article). People can complain and I'm right there with you - I love my quiet, but you have to adapt, and an engineer that can't adapt isn't much of an engineer, in my opinion. There's an army of people who can adapt working at these "god forsaken hideous open offices" which must then be "gender discriminating experienced engineers" when they can't work like it's 1990 anymore.
This is the new reality. We don't have to write COBOL or VB or Pascal anymore, we don't have to wear suits, and most of us are paid really well, taken very seriously as a profession and in high demand.
That comes with a little bit of give for all that take.
I currently work with people across the world, Indians, Chinese, French and people from various other nationalities. This open office thing makes it just worst. The most annoying thing I have come to face until now is the part where people from the same country start aggregating in groups over the floor talking in their own native languages. Constant chatter over simplest and silliest of the issues, previous night's dinner, pranks they played with their room mates and what not.
Over a period of I've noticed the best way to handle has been to just tune out. I mean just be completely irresponsive to anything happening around you. Unfortunately I've been told many times by my manager that certain cultures can consider as being rude.
Its almost like the office is now a community center for people to just gather around and chat.
The fact they're not speaking English is not relevant, so I think this just boils down to "having to hear other languages makes me uncomfortable". If you just didn't want to have distracting talking happen around you, then you would not have included the bit about the languages. Simply from a distraction standpoint, foreign languages that sound nothing like English are probably better, since you lose your ability to eavesdrop.
It would make collaboration tough though. The whole point of open office plans is to improve communication (actually it's so the boss can look over your shoulder, but I digress).
I'm genuinely worried about people with sensory oversensitivity problems. Personally I shudder to even think about spending time in a building like that one; those uneven lines painted in the common rooms, bright orange walls, breathtaking vertical spaces - I mean, sure, they do look impressive in photographs, but what about employees who get nauseous and/or dizzy just from looking at that kind of architecture all day long? This may sound silly, but considering how a significant portion of the IT workforce comes from the intersection of extreme introversion and Asperger's, this should be a genuine concern for any equal opportunity employee, especially in that sector.
Okay, this is not really on-topic at all. But someone has finally given me the opening to rant about the state of public restroom design :-)
I spend a lot of time working out of cafes, both for my job and when I'm working on some personal project. ~4-8 hours a day in a cafe plus a coffee every 90 minutes or so and plenty of water means I have a lot of experience with coffee shop public restrooms. And almost all of them are terribly designed.
The worst problem, common to almost all cafes, is that a place with a capacity of ~40 people or so will have two single-user gendered restrooms. By this I mean there is a label or picture on each door indicating "Male" or "Female". This is a problem for a number of reasons, including that it creates issues for trans and genderqueer people, but also that it inevitably creates situations where there is a queue for one restroom (because of a user who is taking their time, for whatever reason) while the other is empty. Of course, someone could jump out of the queue and use the empty restroom, but there's a social norm that we generally must abide that forbids this.
Another inefficiency is that faucets for washing up tend to be locked in the same single-user room as toilets. This causes backups when a person needs to use the faucet but someone else is using the toilet or vice versa. Plenty of people just pop into a single-user restroom to adjust their hair or wash their hands or whatever.
In something like 9 years of working consistently out of cafes, I've seen just two that have what I consider to be well-designed restroom facilities: the Starbucks at Main & Olympic in Santa Monica, CA, USA and Sightglass Coffee in SoMa, San Franciso, CA, USA. Each have an open, shared sink area with a glut of faucets and two to four single-user toilets behind locked doors opening out into it. I've never seen a line for the restrooms at these cafes, although I don't know if that's because of good design or because no one wants to use such weird restrooms ;-)
Where are you based? San Francisco "strongly urges" single-occupancy restrooms to be unisex. I've worked out of a fair number of SF cafes and I think this is noticeably less of a problem there than in other cities.
I'm based out of Santa Monica and Los Angeles. Sightglass is the only large cafe I've been to in San Francisco. I'm glad to hear this is the norm up there!
Here in Southern California, West Hollywood recently passed a similar ordinance that prohibits gendered single-user restrooms in public spaces and businesses.
No, I think the future is in vertically stacking employees, Japanese capsule hotel style:
http://capsuleinn.com/info/img/thum_05.jpg
Also, no names needed, just numbers.
Besides the productivity aspect, its a reflection of single dimensional focus of Zuckerberg. If facebook continues to be a platform of social collaboration between people, then the team building it has to live it as well. Given that the developers spend major part of their day at office, this idea would be unconsciously forced into them every day. They would be more social and collaborative in presence of other human beings (or will learn to be). This is what facebook is about.
A 9 acre open work space sounds awful. With Facebook's money and Gehry's skills it's sad that a big box store and surface parking lot is what came out in the end.
Everytime I see this kind of "new building" news, I'm reminded of the genial "Plans and Plants" chapter of the Parkinson's Law book (by C. Northcote Parkinson, natch).
On the general discussion of open vs closed work space:
IMO there are four types of mutually exclusive workspaces in a tech office setting: Open collaboration, library time, telephone booths, and small to large general assembly.
These four, while briefly explained, highlight their purpose for optimal productivity in the day to day workflow.
Specifically, library time would be an open space for work but with an implied quiet noise level. In contrast open collaboration is similar but without the noise level restriction. Both spaces would live in separate areas not near each other for understood respect in work style.
My gripe with open plan offices is that I spend a lot of the day overhearing a bunch of shit I have zero interest in.
I used to work at a consulting company, and I'd be in an open plan office with 5 other teams, working on 5 other projects. Everyone was working through engineering decisions that were unrelated to my own.
If everyone's on the same team, at least, there is some saving grace to the open plan office - you overhear stuff that you might be able to contribute to.
I wonder how you get around the giant room, and how its space is demarcated. How do you meet up with someone else who is in a faraway part of the room?
They could divide the space with cubes/walkways using a BSP algorithm [1] and provide Roguelike movement between openspace areas (we'll call them "rooms")
I know. I was being a bit flippant on purpose. Having every body in one giant room doesn't mean there is no rhyme or reason to how things are laid out and labeled. Instead of moving between Building 1 & Building 4, you might go from Section 1 to Section 4. Only people that work there are going to need to know where Sections 1 & 4 are.
Facebook has Wayfinders that provide an interactive touch screen map all over campus. Type in a name and it shows you where they are, relative to where you are. Super handy.
I think the type of office space needs to meet the group's work. If solitary quiet work is required, you need either lots of quiet spots or a liberal telecommuting policy. If you need lots of communication, open is fine.
I'm surprised that open works there, but Zuckerberg is a developer and has hired most of the senior team. They must have data that it works for them.
> Facebook's engineering director Jocelyn Goldfein spoke about open office plans during her recent talk at Stanford. She explicitly stated that it decreases her team's productivity, but that it was embraced because it promotes "openness" which is a core value at Facebook.
Hasn't this been open for a long time? I was there a few months ago and it was so bizarre. Like being at Disney Land or on a movie set, everything was perfect. I got pretty creeped out after spending the day there, that being said I could probably get used to working there, but could never deal with an open office.
I also hate open office plans. Everyone needs a little bit of privacy if not much during their work.
I won't feel good if my manager/co-worker comes to my desk at the time when I was just switching to some music on youtube. It can give a wrong impression of you even when you know you were not doing the wrong thing.
I will never work in an open office plan. It's one of the items on my "prima donna" list. Despite the name I'm pretty serious, and while some of this list represents things that others might not be able to avoid, or even agree with because they are personal preferences, all of the items are the result of bad experiences or missteps I've experienced directly at a job in the past.
I know some may object to these. That's ok, this is my list. I'll answer questions though and I'm open to suggestions.
Here's my list, developed over 25 years working for companies, mostly startups:
Never work...
0. where you're not getting equity along with a paycheck, or where you can't ask the CFO how many shares are outstanding on a fully diluted basis, and get an answer, during your interview.
1. for a manager who is not an engineer, unless you're the CTO.
2. Think twice working for any "tech" company where the CEO is not an engineer, or technically proficient. (Tim Cook is technically proficient, Jeff Bezos is not.)
3. in an open office plan.
4. for a company that shows disrespect for employees in other ways. Companies try to hide so you have to look close.
5. for a company that uses cult behavior, eg: "magic phrases" like Amazon's "Today is Day One!!", or that has a management book that all employees are supposed to read (if said book is of the pop-management variety)
6. for a company that doesn't provide you a convenient parking space at their expense (you should be working remote anyway!)
7. for a company that doesn't provide flex hours. Flex needs to really mean flex. Midnight to 8AM is an acceptable work schedule.
8. for any company with standup meetings, or other pointless meetings. (yeah yeah, all of the previous "SCRUM" teams have been "doing it wrong", so that just means nobodies doing it "right")
9. on a team where mandatory meetings happen more than twice a year
10. for a company that employs stack ranking, in any form.
11. for less than 3 weeks of vacation a year
12. for a "starter" salary that will be "made up later", unless this is a startup and you're getting a significant chunk of equity- eg: shares valued at most recent round of investment, or a $1M valuation if no investment, EXCEEDS the lost income.
12. for equity with a vesting schedule with an initial cliff longer than 90 days, (30 days is appropriate)
13. for equity with a vesting schedule over 4 years (and only 4 for > %5 equity)
14. for a company that has taken money from dishonest or unethical VCs (I know a lot of the bad ones but check "the funded" for reviews)
15. for a company that doesn't hire ops engineers, but expects developers to be "on call"
16. for a company that has a lot of restrictions about vacation and doesn't treat it as real (eg: you don't get all your days when you leave, bad PTO policies, etc)
17. in any office without adequate bathrooms, this includes any buildings where people are packed like sardines. combine the gender ratio of tech companies with more than %100 occupancy and the bathrooms are insufficient
18. in any setup with less than a dual thunderbolt display, or single 35"4k monitory.
> How do you go through life being so rigid on such relatively trivial issues?
At a guess: after spending enough of that life to realize that those 'trivial' issues can make all the difference between feeling good in the longer term or feeling miserable.
Yeah, no kidding. I started thinking, "What makes you so fucking cool and unique to deserve all of this? Have you seen what people in India have to put up with to get a tech job? Why do you consider yourself better than them?"
That's not a very convincing line of reasoning at all. It's just the classic "there are starving children in Africa" slippery slope argument. What happened to striving for better? There's nothing wrong with that.
Worse, it seems to unfairly distort things as well. On what basis have you concluded that this person thinks he's better than people from India?
And I think except for a few bullet points he's not asking for much that isn't pretty normal in the US. My first job out of college satisfied bullet points
1,2,3,4,5,6,8,10,11,12A,14,15,16,17,18,19,20.
I left out most of the equity-based ones simply because the company didn't do equity. I left off 7 even though we had very flexible hours. They just weren't so flexible that you could work at night.
That's not what a slippery slope argument is. I am not arguing that some event must follow inevitably from the other without presenting an argument for why this follows.
Anyway, what bugs me so much is the entitlement. Sure, maybe you can find a job like that. But what makes you think that you deserve it?
And yes, there is a problem with being entitled. The world is already too full of selfish assholes. I really would not want to work with someone who is looking for so many reasons to be unhappy with a job.
I suppose I really don't understand your argument. You're suggesting that someone in a position to strive for more shouldn't do so because there are other people who aren't in such a position?
If nobody tries to raise the standard, then it will never be raised. Based on his other posts, this guy is the CTO of a small startup. Maybe in a year or two he'll be hiring and providing these benefits to others. How's that a bad thing?
I understand being turned off by entitlement. But, really, calling the guy who's advocating for better environments for workers and employees an asshole seems backwards. If we're going to call anyone an asshole, surely it would be the people fighting in the opposite direction.
I think you're taking for granted the centuries of work that it's taken to get even to where we are now. Read about what working conditions were like a century ago or more. Go read about the horrors of being a chimney sweep. We don't have to endure that sort of treatment anymore because people were entitled and whiny and constantly strove for better conditions. Let's do the same for those who will follow us another 200 years from now.
Also, whoever is going on a downvote spree on everyone here, I invite you to simply enter the discussion instead. I've downvoted nobody.
The problem with the list is the attitude. I would rather not work with people who have lists like this.
I'm not a special snowflake. I like solving problems and doing meaningful work that contributes to the well being of others in some way. Those are my only requirements. Everything else is flexible.
I completely understand where you're coming from. I've had a coworker like that before and it can be a real downer to be around someone who just seems like nothing is ever quite good enough.
I guess I was trying to give the person the benefit of the doubt and not assume that he's like that on the job. Maybe he is. But he also might just be picky about where he works but great once he's made a decision. I guess I don't see the point of worrying about which way it is because it doesn't matter -- his point is only to list red flags about companies that he's built from experience, and I see value in sharing that with others.
That's the thing, our jobs are already super easy and super low-risk compared to the chimney sweeps of yester year. We sit down and just write stuff down on a computer. There's no heavy lifting, no angry foremen, lots of job security, frequently there's even some time for personal projects on the job... everything is already mostly awesome. We have already achieved a society of leisure. It already is the future. We do almost no work. Most things are automated and easy. We already have George Jetson's job.
And despite all of this, no, not enough, now we must campaign for no more than 2 mandatory meetings per year?
Let me rephrase: being around such a person would probably rub me the wrong way, but I wouldn't refuse to work in a company with assholes, because every company has an unpleasant person once in a while.
Every item on my list is a red flag that the company is poorly managed. Poorly managed startups are less likely to succeed, and thus more likely to waste my time and not pay me for it (if the equity becomes worthless.)
You can call that entitled, I call it experienced enough not to be a sucker.
That you think I'm an asshole for listing red flags that indicate systemic problems in companies, in my opinion, reveals more about yourself than me.
Jealousy as in "X is 'entitlement' if I want X, but do not anticipate having the ability to get it."
Because if you simply didn't want X, it would just be a matter of taste. So instead, you think it is unreasonable to want X, as you don't think anyone should have it before you unless they are to take some kind of social penalty.
Maybe I do, maybe I don't, but I'm not demanding all of that crap for a job. My demand is more modest: any job I take must not contribute to the proliferation of non-free software and the company I work for must not attempt to control or mistreat its customers. And if I can't find such a job, I'll work as a waiter.
Beyond that, having enough of a salary to live on is all a person really needs. Having such an inflexible laundry list of demands just ends up making a person unhappy. I bet there are more hidden demands beyond this list. This just reeks of bad attitude, selfishness, and entitlement.
The happiest people are those who desire the least.
You just ruled out far more companies, and for far more arbitrary reasons-- eg: you want to get paid but you won't let any company you work for sell software in order to pay you.
Lots of free software is sold. I didn't say the software couldn't be sold. I didn't mean without a price. I meant without restriction and without control.
I will not work at a company that mistreats its customers. A license manager, software whose purpose is to inhibit the use of another piece of software, is an example of such abuse. Having been on the receiving end of such abuse, my condition is to not force that abuse on anyone else.
Facebook's engineering culture is a hindrance at this point. They're not a tech company, they're a social network. Their UI is really so-so considering that vast resources they've dedicated to the platform. Any product-oriented company needs to be driven by UX, not tech.
I generally agree with this (although who fucking cares if the company doesn't give you parking but pays you $1k/mo more; if 90% of people use transit in SF, I'm fine with paying parking).
I think you underestimate Bezos's technical clue, though.
And a 1y cliff is pretty standard. There's no real downside to that.
Parking-- problem is, when you have to source it yourself you can end up working for a company where there is not enough parking in the area. Spent a year dealing with this, couldn't get a spot to rent on a monthly basis, there was more demand than parking supply in the area. The company got a deal on the office rental and so ignored this. Them having to source it forces them to take it into account.
Convenient to transit plus a transit pass can work for some employees and having that as an option would work for me some of the time. The situation that caused this to go on the list was one where there was no convenient access to transit and I lived in a place without access to transit. A better phrasing would be "have transportation and parking if necessary be convenient and not a significant distraction from work."
I worked with Bezos dealt with him on tickets etc.
1 year cliff is terrible when you get "laid off" in month 11. There's absolutely no reason for it, really. It's not like it takes a year to figure out if an employee is any good or not. It's just greed. It may be "standard" but so are open office plans and I'm no longer interested in "standard".
I could take or leave about half of your list, but parking...I'll never work for a company that doesn't provide parking for their employees. Either get space in a building with free parking, rent a space for your employees (it's not that much even in big cities) or give the option of heavily subsidized mass transit.
My last place rented near a subway station, 2hr on-street parking, no nearby garages, would only cover $250/year for parking. Running out of the office every 2 hours to spend 10 minutes driving around looking for another open spot is a stupid way to spend your workday. Spending $4k-$5k for personal parking is a stupid thing to ask employees to do.
The offered free mass transit at another office, but wouldn't provide any subsidy at mine until there was a virtual walk out and then they offered what was basically 3 days worth of transit subsidies.
And then they wondered why they could never get any customers to visit their office for meetings.
Seriously, get office space your employees can actually get to. I'll never make that mistake again.
CloudFlare is at 665 3rd St; it's 3rd/Townsend. 90% of the employees live nearby, take Chariot or other services, take BART (20-25 min walk), or take Caltrain (3 minute talk). 5 of us drive and park.
I am paying $260/mo for my parking spot. It's not awesome, but it's not the end of the world.
Do you think it'd be okay to rent your computer from your company and pay for your office space and desk? Or split the costs of their servers or cloud costs with their employees? No, nobody sane thinks this.
My point is that parking (or some reasonable transit alternative) should be figured into the operating costs for the company. Acting like employees don't need to actually get to work is not a good way to run a business.
It should be $0/mo for your parking, your company should be getting you the space as part of your overall compensation/operating costs.
I should add, the office I worked at now sits empty, every single employee who worked there left (including myself).
Real companies understand that as part of their facility costs, they need to provide this stuff. So they pay for a parking lot when land is cheap, or pay for monthly parking in cities. Or they pay to subsidize mass transit. If a company doesn't want to pay for the cost of running a business in a place with expensive parking, then they should office where parking is cheap. If they don't want to pay for the cost of actually running their business, they shouldn't be in it.
It's the employee's cost to figure out how to get to work, it's the company's cost to figure out what to do with them once they get there.
When deciding between two offers just monetize all perks that you expect to use including convenience factor. Parking not provided? Subtract (Daily parking rate + parking_timehourly_rate)200 / (1-marginal_tax_rate) from salary.
Provides CalTrain pass? Add $45 dollars to salary (I expect to use it 3 times/year).
It's about the wasted time dealing with a parking space.
The companies that don't provide parking often locate in places where you spend an hour a day, in aggregate, dealing with parking one way or another-- looking for a space, walking to the building from the space, etc.
I don't know why equity would be a dealbreaker for you. There is some $X where getting $X extra would make up for no equity (considering equity is usually worth $0).
Instead of equity, you could ask to be paid $20k more, go to a casino, and bet it all on one spin of roulette at 36:1. If you win the first spin, let half of it ride on another 36:1 bet. That would give you a better payout distribution than is likely from equity.
Your point is valid, but the reason for the equity is not about compensation, but about alignment of interests. If things do go really well, then I need skin in the game. But I also need to be treated like a part owner, not a disposable employee.
The equity thing is about the mindset of the boss, more than compensation.
The Windows and Mac rules are much more personal opinions than the rest. There's no great insight there, especially for someone who prefers Windows, but it adds a dimension of partisanship.
Feel free to swap out Windows/Mac/Linux for your preferred OS configurations and make your own rules. I'm not trying to start a debate on what is best-- except maybe to say to give your employees the option.
Of course if you're building windows software you're going to be working on a windows machine, same thing with iOS. But if you're building stuff to run on linux servers, seems wrong to make your employees do it on windows (since it's not unix.) Sure if some employee prefers to do it on windows (since it has ssh, etc.) more power to them!
Excellent point. That's there I just forgot to list it.
I did that once. Once. Then it went on the list. Over 20 years ago.
22. for a company with an employee handbook that is all about protecting and absolving the company while imposing an undue burden of petty rules on the employees, including interfering with things that are none of the companies business such as alcohol consumption outside of work.
I actually like your list, except for 19/20 which I personally don't care about.
I personally believe that benefits should be a la carte.. pick what you want, get cash for ones you don't want. The "free food" thing is a big one for me. I don't like 90% of the food offered, I'd rather just have the cash.
You make an excellent point on al la carte benefits. Most companies really put so little tiem/thought into these.
For instance, most 401k plans only let you invest in terrible expensive investments (like index funds. Fine as an option but these are not actually good investments for people who can manage their own money.)
Jeff Bezos is a trained engineer and analyst that has built one the most successful and beloved companies ever, and made thousands of employees wealthy.
There are plenty of employees who should rightly hate their jobs, but they work in shipping, not corporate.
How did you get through the first two decades of your career without a 4k monitor?
My list is nearly the same as yours, except I don't hate meetings and Windows as much as you do and I'm also willing to work for salary alone and no equity, as long as the salary is market level. I definitely don't want daily scrum meetings, but I don't mind monthly meetings, etc., as long as they're well-designed and purposeful.
Re: office plans, I'm fine with a cubicle as long as it's tastefully done, developers are segregated from sales people, etc. I want to see that thought has went into it. I understand that sometimes a company truly can't afford private offices for somebody, so what it really comes down to, for me, is whether they care about their working environment in a legitimate, thoughtful way (as opposed to a bandwagony way).
I suggest you shorten your list just a bit. Then the interviewer can show you the way out much sooner.
Although some of your "requirements" are perfectly reasonable, I would never hire you. Good engineering is all about compromise and working with reality.
"where my development machine can't be a Mac"? Seriously?
> "where my development machine can't be a Mac"? Seriously?
I'd actually agree with this. You want to give your employees the best possible machine to work with -- machines are cheap compared to salaries. If he wants a Mac, I'd buy him a Mac.
On the face of it, that's true. In reality, it's not...
Your work machine is not your personal computer. The best possible machine is anything that makes you more productive and reduces friction for whatever you happen to do at work. That may very well be a Mac, or may very well be something else. If you company gives you a Mac but everyone else uses Windows and Outlook, that will increase friction and make you less productive, not more.
It's like asking for a red computer, because you like red.
I absolutely hate Linux on the desktop, yet I happily use Linux for work. It works just fine for work and reduces friction in a lot of ways. When I leave work, I switch to my personal Mac. It is actually better this way, I don't feel like I'm working when I'm using my personal machine.
My point is just this: if you impose a hardcoded set of requirements instead of finding our what works best for each particular context, you're probably as fixed-minded when actually working. Nobody wants a fixed-minded employee.
IF everybody else is using Windows, Outlook and Excel then the company is stuck in the 1990s and their other business practices (eg: emailing RTFs for specs instead of putting them in version control) are also going to be out of date.
But as someone who has used a Mac in an office full of people using Windows and Outlook, it didn't increase friction. And I was even using OS X.
Your perspective forgets that you can run Windows on a Mac. I said "Let me use a Mac", I didn't say I wouldn't dual boot into windows (though having to use windows all the time is a separate requirement.)
I put that down there because it is the machine that makes me more productive.
You're saying forcing me to use windows, which isn't even unix, makes me more productive simply because my pointy haired boss uses it?
I'm positive that there are many companies out there using Windows, Outlook and Excel being very successful in producing the kind of software that runs our world while being very innovative at that.
There are also many companies populated by "prima donnas" with their Macs on their standing desks being very productive at nothing that actually matters.
I fail to follow your reasoning. I also fail to follow your reasoning that this kind of trivialities implies something about the prospective employer (as I said, there are other items in your list that are perfectly reasonable). It does not, but it may imply something about the prospective employee.
I don't know you, so I'm not making a judgment on you personally. I am, however, making a judgment based on your list. Just like any potential employer would do (even those that would otherwise happily comply with all of the items). If you have to argue against this, therein lies the problem.
Several people have said "I would never hire you"... but you see, that isn't an insult, that just shows the list is working. Every single item on this list is about respecting employees and the work. Every one of them is about making me more productive when working for you.
So yes, please don't hire me if you're just going to then turn around and wasted my time (by making me work on windows or Linux on the desktop, for instance.)
I understand compromise and working with reality-- and the reality is no company may be able to make all the points on this list. That's why it's facetiously called the "Prima Donna" list.
But if you're not interested in facilitating good engineering then I'm not interested in wasting time TRYING to work for you.
A lot of this was fixed by working remote, and being a founder of the company.
I'm CTO of a very small startup, and we're experimenting with an organizational structure based on the causes of this list and a bunch of other stuff-- found a CEO whose really all about the love- there is no other word for it.
If you get there, I'll be interested to see your org get to 20+ people and if you can keep all your rules. No more than 2 mandatory meetings a year seems tough to me. The limits on flex time seem tough as well, especially for leaders. Sometimes your team is going to want to actually talk to you.
If the meetings are worthwhile, they don't need to be mandatory. Quarterly company review? Ok, make it good, and I'll be there. Mandatory is used to excuse bad meeting making. Mandatory safety meeting? Ok, that's one of your two.
Yeah, the rules are different for founders, etc. More meetings, more availability, etc.
Why didn't you go the co-CEO route instead? From my experience CEO has a tendency at some point to dominate other CxOs for whatever reasons (usually business guys view tech as inferior).
That's sort of what our relationship is-- from my view-- but I believe that at some point someone has to make a decision. Some of them are coin flips, or can be changed before too long if they turn out to be mistakes. I don't want to spend time on a lot of stuff that's not about building the product.
The CEO is also the domain expert in this situation, and we have a great personality fit.
Ideally I think engineers should be CEOs. Engineers can learn business a lot easier than biz guys can learn engineering. But it's not always going to be the right choice.
I really hope it would work for you and you found a reliable CEO. Just recently a friend of mine, CTO of a startup, was cheated out of equity by CEO & CFO of the company he founded (while being assured all the time they are BFFs and bros). That's one of the reasons I would never go for less than co-CEO and a legal requirement to have my approval required for any decision... I would also love to see more engineers as CEOs.
So what is this giant open space going to look like when people begin to work VR displays primarily? When most people work with opaque glasses silent and staring off...
(co?)incidentally that could make such a room almost bearable as a work environment, personally...
Yes but how will I smell them?? hmm app idea. There could be places like that... one could be in several spaces, like chatrooms/channels. Most lobbies on the internet are filled with noobs and cat memes though...
I guess it fits well with the platform attitude. Employees are just another component of the platform. Make them happy, keep them at work longer hours, derive more value from them.
Remember folks that if you are in open plan offices, most of the time they pump white noise through speakers in the ceiling to prevent sound travel. Think about that for a second.
Grass and trees don't weigh a lot, compared to dirt, or earth, or water-laden earth. Compare a moderate snowfall of a couple of feet with a foot of dirt and some rainfall.
Call it what you want, Zuck. It's still a giant warehouse sweatshop. I work in an open office now. Never. Again. Fuck that. Could you imagine the sound of a hundred conversations going on, at once? "Wear headphones." Thanks, but I'd rather not damage my hearing. Where is OSHA when you need them. This is a factory and you need hearing protectors. Not headphones. 85 dBA. If you can't hear a person four feet away for most of the day, your employer is breaking the law.
I'm surprised that I'm the only one to mention the (in this case, young, preening, "hip" and twinkish) elephant in the room behind this open-plan nonsense. Age discrimination. In a Daniel Day-Lewis There Will Be Blood voice, "Aaaaagggge discrimination, Eli, you boy!"
Companies use these horrible office layouts for a number of reasons, and not all are so distasteful: everyone else is doing it, they're cheap, and they take good pictures for marketing because they "look busy". But, when you get to the core of it and the leadership behind this open-plan fetishism, it's all about age discrimination.
Life changes make people less able to handle the chronic visibility (especially from behind) that these offices inflict. For women, pregnancy will do the trick. Men tend to like open-plan offices less after having children as well, because when you have kids you no longer perceive the world as free of danger, due to having a biological imperative to protect another creature, and you stop believing in the "nothing to hide" bullshit that convinces people to accept such invasions into their privacy. But even in childless people, the ability to handle the needless stress inflicted by open-plan offices seems to decline around age 30.
There's also a stress that comes from incoherent noise when it comes from all angles. This is something that scuba divers are aware of, because of the way water plays with sound. It can exacerbate the "blue orb phenomenon" that can cause an open-water freak-out (which sounds, presumably unintentionally, similar to an open-office panic attack).
This is especially bad for technology. The cruelty of software's age discrimination is that it takes 10-20 years just to be good at this stuff. People are pressured to leave the industry long before their prime.
Oh, and there's a 1 to 2 percent per year chance, even in healthy people, that you get a life-altering anxiety or panic disorder if you do knowledge work in an open-plan office. (They aren't as bad for less cognitively intense tasks.) That doesn't show up in the marketing materials, and the casualty rate is low enough that few people talk about it, but it's a factor as well.
I realize that I'm adding nothing constructive to this thread; I don't care. Maybe some manager somewhere will see this and a hundred other anecdotal opinions and think twice about open offices.
I am the opposite of a prima donna. I just want to work. I want to make awesome stuff, keep my skills sharp and make the company some money. Preferably lots of it.
I'd be fine with an office that's literally 5x5', a desk, a door, a wifi connection, and some shared working areas for when it's time to collaborate. Because yes, collaboration is crucial (and fun) but if I have to hunt all over the damn building for a bit of quiet space (that might not even be avaiable) when it's time to bear down and do some solo coding then this is not going to work.
Hell, I'll even bring my own damn desk, chair, and laptop. Supplied my own laptop to my last two jobs. No big deal. I'm an engineer; I get paid decently. But I need a freaking place to focus for at least half of any given working week - and sometimes, for close to the entire week.
I don't need: famous guest speakers, catered food, fancy architecture, anything. I wouldn't even care if the office was a poorly-insulated garage that gets cold in the winter. I'll bring my own $20 space heater that will heat a 5x5' office just fine.
What I can't have, if you want me to get any work done, is multiple simultaneous conversations taking place five feet away from my head all day long.