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Comment by usaphp | Hacker News Reader

I don't know but for me working in an open office is a positive experience, I feel joy talking to coworkers from time to time, sitting in a separate room is quite depressing and might drop the productivity for some people even further then time you lose chatting with coworkers

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It's totally possible for people who are more extroverted to find an interactive setting more pleasant. You could round up all such folks and let them sit together, since they get energy from that.

But clearly for the people with more introverted working styles it won't work.

So let people pick. Want to sit in the communal workspace? OK, do so. Want your own office? OK done.

From time to time you'll need to intermix. Sometimes a social butterfly needs to tune out the distractions. Provide a place for it. Sometimes a hermit crab needs to sit with the team for 1/2 day and pair program. As Picard says, make it so.

This is not rocket science. The important part is that company management has to recognize that getting this right is one of the most important financial investments they will make. Instead of seeing space as a cost sink ... something to be standardized, minimized, and papered over with free lunch and dumbass "team building" shit, they need to recognize that of all the places to spend money, spending it on compensation for rewarding hard working employees is number one, and spending it on creating a humanity-affirming physical work environment is number 2. In visibly healthy companies, everything else hinges massively on those two things. Companies that have been so distorted away from humanity that they grind out success (generally for senior level people only) despite humanity-disaffirming workplaces ought to be seen as the frightening panopticons they are.

The thing is, open plans can be extremely non-interactive. I've been in several where it was almost always silent, everyone with headphones on, could not hear a pin drop, zero "collaboration" environments.

Plenty of collaboration happens in quiet environments. It's just often digital collaboration. In a lot of software settings, that is precisely how you want it to be. You don't want people using their meat flaps to hit your head with acoustical vibrations, except in certain scenarios where our meatputers still process things better that way. Like if emotions need to be considered, or if there are aspects of creative expression being lost in digital translation.

Sometimes it's the opposite, and you definitely do want meat flap acoustics often, and silent digital communication less so.

For any given company, you need to understand this. You can't just assert that an open floor plan "is collaborative." It is one kind of collaborative. It may not be the right kind for you. And worst of all will be to assert that it definitely is the necessary kind merely as an excuse when your real motivation is to minimize financial investment into physical space.

easier to opt-out of an open office via headphones than opt-in to a collaborative one by relocating your desk. i think this is the root of why open plans make sense.

Except that all of the studies suggest the headphones / earplugs option doesn't help very much. Most of the damage is done because of lack of privacy and noise is a secondary (though still large) effect.

The headphone solution is also insensitive to people with extreme aversions to distracting sounds, such as sufferers of misophonia. In a lot of cases, if you are embedded in an open plan, there is no such thing as "opting out." It's a fixed decision mandated upon you.

headphones don't let you opt out of an open office. there is still noise you can hear above the music, visual distractions, proximity, catching colds, 6 person meetings on neighbours desk, everyone cans see your screen etc.

Headphones are a shitty solution, and laptops make it easier to opt into whichever you want.

Opt out = permanently damage hearing?

everybody's jiggling! argh!

Having an office doesn't mean you don't talk to coworkers. It means you get to control when you talk to coworkers. You can easily have 1-1 meetings in your office, talk about personal things and actually really hash out problems without worrying about annoying or distracting the poor sap 2 seats down. All office areas have shared space as well - thats why people meet up around the water cooler. If you want to spend no time socializing in an open office, its better to have your own office. If you want to spend lots of time socializing, its better to have an office since you won't be annoying the people who don't want to or don't have the time to socialize.

Biggest hint: the door. Open? Come on in and chat. Closed? Send me an email or come back later.

Many of the older Oxford and Cambridge colleges have two doors in one doorway: the external one for the 'interruptible/not' signal, and the internal one to keep the heat in when the outer is open. We have a term for it: 'sporting one's oak'.

http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2008/02/sporting-the-oak.h...

This was a great system in medieval buildings where most doors opened directly to the outdoors, which in itself is a great privacy feature.

Except for when someone doesn't use that model. I work with people who keep their door closed all the time, but they're not in a "don't bother me" mood.

Then they suffer the concequences of people not going up to them. That, or they want people "to know" that the door closed means they can come in - those who they haven't told will shy away. Its kinda a way of filtering, or they're socially inept.

different strokes for different folks, the ideal "office environment" for me would be being able to teleport to a cabin in the middle of nowhere with just trees / nature to look at all day, and all work-related communication over email or IM.

It's really easy to find an extrovert-friendly workspace, much harder to find an introvert-friendly one, because pretty much all managers are extroverts (they have to be, to succeed at management) and they are the ones that decide the office layout.

Makes me wonder sometimes how deaf people can manage in today's vocal-collaboration oriented workplace, which is sad as the type of work we do lends itself extremely well to text-based communication.

Someone coming up to me and talking to me interrupts whatever I was doing and makes it hard to get back into that original context. In general the research is showing open spaces is less productive. Obviously there will be edge cases here but in general it's usually much worse.

I've seen my share of open floor plans where everyone has headphones on and is typing in Hipchat / Slack rooms sharing memes.

Have you considered a line of work more suited to an extrovert personality?

The funny thing is, in my experience the most extroverted people (the sales team) all have offices, and the introverted programmers are all stuck in a bullpen.

Status once again. There's actually quite a lot of formal research on this, such as here:

< http://homepages.se.edu/cvonbergen/files/2013/01/Reversing-t... >

Do you have an equivalent experience of working in offices to compare with? When I worked in offices I never had a problem talking with coworkers (about work or personal life).

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