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The open-office trend is destroying the workplace (2014)

by makwarth on 2/5/17, 7:18 PM with 226 comments

  • by danielalmeida on 2/5/17, 7:50 PM

  • by davidmr on 2/5/17, 8:29 PM

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

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

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

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

  • by rm999 on 2/5/17, 8:10 PM

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

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

  • by nayuki on 2/5/17, 8:02 PM

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

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

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

  • by tps5 on 2/5/17, 8:07 PM

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

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

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

  • by ttkeil on 2/5/17, 8:00 PM

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

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

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

    edit: words

  • by jankotek on 2/5/17, 7:51 PM

    I think open-office is great.

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

  • by rb2k_ on 2/5/17, 8:02 PM

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

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

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

  • by ThinkBeat on 2/5/17, 9:56 PM

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

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

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

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

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

  • by protomyth on 2/5/17, 7:54 PM

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

    Do these companies get payoffs from head phone manufactures?

  • by quotemstr on 2/5/17, 8:55 PM

    My preference order is:

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

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

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

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

  • by lordnacho on 2/5/17, 9:34 PM

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

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

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

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

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

  • by shams93 on 2/5/17, 8:43 PM

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

  • by intrasight on 2/5/17, 8:09 PM

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

  • by mnm1 on 2/5/17, 9:46 PM

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

  • by adamnemecek on 2/5/17, 7:50 PM

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

  • by hoodwink on 2/5/17, 8:04 PM

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

  • by mattnewton on 2/5/17, 7:49 PM

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

  • by dandare on 2/5/17, 8:19 PM

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

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

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

  • by Crito on 2/5/17, 11:01 PM

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

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

  • by sfilargi on 2/5/17, 8:10 PM

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

  • by yeukhon on 2/5/17, 8:01 PM

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

  • by danm07 on 2/5/17, 8:08 PM

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

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

  • by jodrellblank on 2/5/17, 8:33 PM

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

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

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

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

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

  • by dsfyu404ed on 2/5/17, 7:56 PM

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

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

  • by snissn on 2/5/17, 7:54 PM

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

  • by giancarlostoro on 2/5/17, 8:05 PM

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

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

    Edit:

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

  • by trhway on 2/5/17, 9:36 PM

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

  • by arjie on 2/5/17, 10:29 PM

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

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

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

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

  • by soyiuz on 2/5/17, 9:54 PM

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

  • by Someone on 2/5/17, 10:54 PM

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

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

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

  • by 65827 on 2/5/17, 8:10 PM

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

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

  • by nunez on 2/5/17, 11:57 PM

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

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

  • by kabdib on 2/6/17, 3:09 AM

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

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

  • by jjawssd on 2/5/17, 8:11 PM

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

  • by vacri on 2/5/17, 8:55 PM

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

  • by lazyjones on 2/5/17, 8:30 PM

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

  • by perseusprime11 on 2/5/17, 10:06 PM

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

  • by booleandilemma on 2/5/17, 10:10 PM

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

  • by pdkl95 on 2/5/17, 8:58 PM

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

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

  • by aphextron on 2/6/17, 3:33 AM

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

  • by rhizome on 2/5/17, 7:51 PM

    (2014)

  • by m1sta_ on 2/5/17, 10:32 PM

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

  • by drakonka on 2/5/17, 8:13 PM

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

  • by Theodores on 2/5/17, 8:38 PM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • by perseusprime11 on 2/6/17, 1:48 AM

    Why are we posting articles from 2014?

  • by facepalm on 2/5/17, 9:36 PM

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

  • by adrienne on 2/6/17, 1:34 AM

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

  • by paulcole on 2/5/17, 8:12 PM

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

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