CEOs Want Their Offices Back
wsj.com
wsj.com
* Desk area is for getting work done. Everyone agrees on this.
* We have "phone rooms" for small discussions. But we limit those usually to 1:1s or discussing office politics.
* Try to limit all discussions at the desk area to 5 people or less.
* If someone sighs loudly as they put on their headphones when you're having a discussion right behind them, then that is their signal to you to keep talking loudly, as their noise-canceling headphones will eliminate any trace of your conversation.
* You can usually carry a conversation at your desk at any volume, because other engineers will let you know if you're being too loud. Engineers tend to be extroverted and won't hesitate to let you know if you're bothering them.
* When someone first sits at their desk, it's polite to immediately engage them in a 30-minute conversation about their weekend or what they did last night. It eases their transition into work.
* A person working without headphones on, signifies that it's ok to tap them on the shoulder to ask them a question.
* A person working WITH headphones on, signifies that it's ok to tap them on the shoulder to ask them a question.
* If someone usually works off in quiet parts of the building, one should always remind them "you're never at your desk" with an accusatory tone.
CEO has the same desk as everybody else. But we also know to never book a certain conference room where he hangs out all day.
That's me. See the image below. Since I am almost always away from my desk, this is how I remind everyone / greet everyone.
http://imgur.com/a/4GzPl (redacted my cell #)
EDIT: I experimented with the (almost universally approved of) ATH-M50Xs but found I had to use a much louder volume to cancel out the noise, which causing ringing, so using NC is pretty much saving my hearing. Not sure how I could work here without them.
Where did you get your statistics on that one?
Edit: Then again, I was pulling a lot of engineering weight and was the one with headphones on all day...
what? headphones = NOT NOW! if you need something, email
The whole point of headphones is to not be disturbed. How does that indicate to you that i want you to suddenly disturb me by touching me unexpectedly.
I think the more open the place, the better. We are social animals. If people choose solitude, it's likely for wrong reasons. (Not saying that there aren't ever reasons for that, (almost) everybody needs some privacy every now and then.)
But yeah, all people must also think of others, people who don't do that are likely making work a bad experience.
Can you imagine paying everyone in San Francisco enough salary so they can afford a 2nd bedroom? Don't be silly.
And yes, working from home without a home office with a door is not the same as having a private office. People have roommates and kids and spouses and all sorts of things that are even worse than coworkers when it comes to focus.
Social is a big spectrum. Keep to your end of it and there won't be any problem.
Also, often the problem I'm working on requires focus. For example, how much talking has occurred during ANY math test you have ever taken?
This test was oral by the way, but took about an hour (or more?), professor and protocol person. Sure there was writing but also a lot of talking.
I think constraining our industry on solitude is also a reason for the low diversity.
http://iansommerville.com/software-engineering-book/web/work...
TLDR: 100 square feet of personal space is optimal. The highest I've ever had in tech was 81. I miss those days and I end up working from home a lot because of the current open floor plan. But square feet cost $$$ and switching to an open floor plan is an immediate cost cutter. Never mind what it's doing to overall productivity and future earnings, the analysts love $h!+ like this.
Fortunately, executives are not all idiots, so once the more insightful of them realize how much more they get done in private spaces, one or more of them will push back on this. And if employers start treating cubes and offices as a perk, I suspect they'll see lots of converts.
Leadership got called out at a recent company meeting by someone who commented that noise-cancelling headphone were critical. One of the C-suite evangelists was like "haha, yeah you're right next to my office aren't you." In other words, "I'm so oblivious, I think it's amusing that my loud conversations are negatively impacting my subordinates' ability to concentrate in this 'collaborative' environment'".
My team does not need a collaborative atmosphere. We're not marketers. We're quiet, introverted, methodical folks who need a quiet atmosphere where they can concentrate on writing ops code that won't bring down a production server in the middle of the day. We don't want to have to listen to overheard gossip, ostensibly private phone calls, etc. while we're trying to figure triage a complex issue. But more than anything, it's offensive that they won't just come out and admit that this is being done for financial reasons. We're all adults in a capitalist economy; we know the score.
A lot of my conversations go like this:
Person A: Hey, have you decided what you want to do with [x] thing?
Person B: No, I was thinking [y], but I got stuck with [z].
Person A: That makes sense, what happens if we do [w]?
Person B: That's a good idea, but [v] might be a problem. I'll think about it and get back to you.
Person B sits down and works for a few more hours
If you have individual offices, that conversation might take ten minutes, and it only occupies 20 man-minutes. If you have an open-office with your entire marketing department, the conversation will probably take a full-man hour between all the people who get distracted and the other people who need to chime in.
Honestly, I think easy collaboration works better for programming/IT than it does for sales/marketing/communication, because the problems in IT are more concrete. So I think you are more likely to be able to chime in with a useful comment when the problem is "I'm getting this weird error" than when the problem is "does this have the tone we are looking for?"
In both cases, I think open offices are terrible. 2-3 people per office seems about right to me.
The only place where that worked well was the old-timey trading floor, as seen in Gary Cooper-era movies.
I'm sure trading is way more productive now that it's done from a desk in an office, in the same way that auctions done online are probably more productive than auctions conducted in-person.
Systemically keeping their tastes and station "lower" than that is probably part of what's going on, especially with the bigger companies. Developer pay may (sometimes) approach or match upper-middle, professional-class level, but (self-)respect for developers can't be permitted to reach those heights. Better their conditions are kept closer to, say, mid-20th-century secretary pools.
(This has nothing to do with FB -- I've hated it everywhere I've worked.)
This is mostly false, and to the extent that it is true, it turns out that people much prefer to have the ability to retreat into ambiguity around management's thought process and incentives when it suits them, rather than for the executives to be explicit about it.
The most infamous example of an executive revealing something everyone already knew to be true is Gerald Ratner [0]. After jokingly stating that his company was able to sell things for such low prices because it was "total crap", they plummeted to the brink of collapse. The company was saved only after firing Ratner and changing its name.
Companies where ill-advised executive candor has turned fortunes downward are now said to be experiencing the "Ratner Effect".
Executives are, first and foremost, performers. Dropping the illusion is offensive to the audience. We like pretending.
It doesn't matter how innocuous the comment is. It can come back to bite you. Example:
You: "I don't like open floor plans."
HR: "Add a note to his file that he's anti-social. If he ever comes back here it'll be recorded already."
Jobs aren't scarce, but talent is. I've never gone for want of employment and Google blind-allocated me into a boring gig I hated. And yes, I'm very anti-social when I'm coding. I wouldn't want to work for a company that considered that a negative trait.
This is not my experience.
Maybe you've worked with better companies than I have.
HR is driven by perceptions
So, we're in a suburb now, $/sqft is less, 2 devs in a quiet room, 2 sales in a different room.
I will not get open plan for my team. 2 persons per 144sqft office seems a good fit to me
The actual offices on the other hand, had almost no sound deadening between them, the hallways way too narrow and it was all-party, all-the-time. People from other companies getting absolutely smashed on keg beer starting at noon was a daily problem. At the one building I went to that had entire floors of conference rooms, you could hear everything from 3 conference rooms over, making phone calls impossible.
I feel that a 2 person private office is quite optimal, since we are talking about teams. It's easier to pair program or discuss and even maintain silence when required. Office designers will have to pay attention to acoustics and ensure that there is not much echoing or significant noise transmission across walls or glass panels.
I've experienced that kind of environment and it is slightly better than the sea of tables filling a floor but is still very bad. A few of the things I've noticed:
- Collaboration inside an individual team was never a problem with individual offices and so it isn't noticeably improved
- Unless the programming/debugging work is very simple, it will often require intense concentration. With distractions an engineer is less productive
- People waste a lot of time looking for an area to have a private conversation, talk to their Dr on the phone, etc.
- When we had offices, people would tend to decorate them with pictures of their kids, awards, etc. With an open floor plan, the place looks very sterile and it seems like overall morale and interest in the company is lower than it used to be.
- The big issue with any organization (with more than say 10 people) is communication BETWEEN teams, not inside the team. This design of isolating each individual team has led to a lot of inefficiency as the sort of ad-hoc conversations people would have with others on other teams basically stops.
Small call rooms were available throughout to address the private call issue, so there was never any sort of hunt.
Another great environment was inside an old bank vault. Me and one other developer. No windows, two doors, lights down low, thumping techno music. Ah, bliss...
When I started work at the company, they had hired a couple of other guys as well, but they didn't have as much experience in software development for an employer (one had done mainly contract work alone, the other was fresh outta college but earned a compsci masters). They didn't have a cubical to put us each in (they were planning to move), so we three (plus one of their more experienced devs as a lead) stuck us in what we eventually termed "The Oven".
It used to be their "conference room" - maybe 10 feet or so on a side, one side glass with a door, the other three walls, no windows. In fact, it was where we each were interviewed. They set up a desk system, put two of us on one side, and two on the other. There wasn't a vent to the a/c system, unfortunately. Four computers blasting hot air, no air circulation save for some desk fans, and four guys in there hacking on code - well, you see where the name came from...
...but we did some amazing work inside that small room, and had a pretty damn good time doing it. We eventually got a portable A/C unit that we stuck in the corner and vented to the ceiling plenum. That helped immensely. Our lead had a weird spotify playlist - that became our music to listen to by day. The lights in the room were kept off, so we only had the glow of our monitors to light our way. In effect, it was a perfect development environment.
About a year passed, and the company moved to better digs. While the new location had certain amenities and such that made it more appealing, at the same time, it had horrible downsides:
Open office floor plan, concrete flooring, lights that were always one, west and south facing windows that guaranteed to pan the sun thru the blinds (which the managers and c-level guys always wanted to have open) and blind you. Massive echoing. Most of us took to using headphones all the time. While we got some good work done, nothing was ever the same, ultimately. The goofy thing is that half the office space was wasted; there was a good chunk that wasn't being used for anything, and we tried to make a case for moving the dev team over there, and spreading things out more so we could have a space to our own (and not have us bothering sales and customer support and vice-versa - who were also in the same space, of course). No dice, no moving on that.
I don't thing I'd want to do an open-office situation ever again, even if the money was better. For me, it just doesn't work.
I guess maybe the key to making this work is actually having teammates that like each other. A lot of devs seem to really hate working near other people, and are very particular about their setup, so I guess for them, individual offices are much better. But if you like your teammates, I'd much rather work in the same room with them than in a room all by myself.
There is a bit of social chat also, but whenever someone complains, it is immediately stopped - local culture is that way. I find it better then own office, because I would end up isolated there and it is not happening here.
Most of the day there is a silence.
You might be able to convince me that it's e 2.71828...
No "Duke" mascots were harmed in the process, though :-)
Lovely park on the roof, great amenities, but cluttered open-plan hell at every desk area.
You want your cube to be just slightly smaller than could uncomfortably fit two people. Otherwise, someday it will be uncomfortably fitting two people.
So if I envision a floor, do you just have rows of 2-person offices with hallways in between?
Requires a decent amount of space to do correctly, though.
That said, I think in the programming world, remote work will eventually become the new office because it's the ultimate cost cutter and greatly opens up the pool of applicants.
IMO a dorm suite like layout would be great... have a pod of offices supporting 20 people with a shared common area.
Wait, that peaked? That hasn't been my perception. I'm curious where you are seeing that.
Then again, I'm someone who's threatened to enact the 6 mph standup meeting wherein the second anyone drops below 6 mph on foot, the meeting's over because how can we practice Agile if we aren't agile? That wasn't received well.
Yeah, you guessed it. An agile meeting.
That said: a lot of places don't do it correctly and really do deserve being called cargo cults.
Still, some process is better than no process.
Versus:
>That said: a lot of places don't do it correctly and really do deserve being called cargo cults.
That's how it always goes, right? Company after company implements some kind of Scrum process, and when it doesn't work the problem is never Scrum itself.
I'd contend that the reason things like Scrum are popular is that it gives non-technical managers things to play with: things like burndown charts, that gives them metrics to measure and show to their own managers. Devs aren't measured by lines of code generated per day anymore. Now it is all about "velocity" and burndown. Old wine in new bottles.
It's the only place I've ever worked in which the customer never registered a single bug. They even asked us if we could take over from a different supplier since they'd never managed to deliver anything that worked. When the tests were signed off (and they literally were; the tester signed their name against each test, data records were archived, the paper test steps and signatures were sealed in envelopes for customer inspection on demand) that software did its job from delivery day one.
Waterfall is really demanding and really hard to do well (and it also requires a high quality of customer; if your customers don't know what they want and simply cannot be guided into telling you, I suspect it's impossible), but it sure can deliver. I've never worked anywhere else that managed such high quality.
What sort of pseudocode were you using for this?
When I hear the above argument, I'm reminded of the Protestants versus Catholics scene in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.
This reminds me of the time companies used to try to save money by buying low powered computers. They didn't realize that carbon is more expensive than silicon.
There's a big manufacturing plant in town that's been around for decades. One day, a new company comes in and buys them out. The new managers look at the books, and say "Wow! Look at these crazy labor costs! There are way too many senior people here. Let's replace them with new guys, and we'll save a bundle."
So, they do that, and save a lot in labor costs.
After the first year, though, they run into a problem. The plant isn't working like it should. Output is down, and everyone's running around with their hair on fire, trying to figure out what the heck is wrong.
After two days of this, someone finally gets a bright idea: "Hey, why don't we bring in one of those old guys that we laid off?" So, they hunt down the most experienced guy they could find, and bring him in to take a look.
He shows up, and starts walking around the plant. He slowly walks up and down the whole plant, with a gaggle of concerned managers following his every move. Finally, he stops at a pipe at the back of the plant, and pulls out a hammer.
He lifts the hammer up, and whacks one joint really hard. Suddenly, the plant starts working again, and everyone is rejoicing.
The CEO is smiling, and pats the old-timer on the back, and tells him to send a bill for his work.
Well, the next day, the bill shows up. $10,000. "What!" he exclaims, pounding his desk. "Send me an itemized bill!"
The day after after that, a new bill arrives:
Hitting pipe with hammer: $5 Knowing which pipe to hit: $9,995
I doubt it simply because it's way way cheaper to have open floor plans than rooms. Savings on materials, easier compliance with fire safety, way higher density.
One day someone will look up and notice that whole unused third dimension in the office.
I used to joke that Ikea sold queen sized bunk beds (I dunno if they still do, but they did then), and that we could totally get a desk up on top of one of those...
Of course writing out programs by hand is also a long obsolete and useless skill — except for interviews at all the top companies, where it's vital.
For example:
>...In 2011, the organizational psychologist Matthew Davis reviewed more than a hundred studies about office environments. He found that, though open offices often fostered a symbolic sense of organizational mission, making employees feel like part of a more laid-back, innovative enterprise, they were damaging to the workers’ attention spans, productivity, creative thinking, and satisfaction.
http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-open-office-t...
- Some kind of informed consent (because quitting)
- Separation of space (to prevent jealousy)
- A good way to measure programmer skill (this one's harder)
- A lack of unquestioned dogma that open plan is better
It's not as easy as you make it out to be, but either big G or Fbook could probably do it, given the will (which i suspect is the actual problem).
EDIT: parentheses are hard to match
Open floor plans are simply a cost saving measure combined with a way to enforce the internal hierarchy.
Part of that early agile movement was Extreme Programming, which I'm pretty sure advocated for office space per-team and a communal working area with private office space around it.
Because markets. In sales you learn fairly quickly that price isn't determined by cost or value added but exclusively by what the market will bear. Since US labour has little negotiating power even a programmer will have to buy quiet space.
This is easy to do and only a little time-consuming. It's easier and faster when you take a cheap Bic pen, pull out the tip and ink tube, and use the body tube to press the spacers down on the stems - it's just the right diameter, and makes the job much faster.
The spacers are cheap, too, being simple silicone rubber O-rings, and as an extra benefit, the rubber eats up a lot of the bottoming-out force that'd otherwise be transmitted up the key into your fingers, which means you type more comfortably as well as more quietly.
So I'd say the problem is with both. The open office is the ultimate source of the issue, but it can be compounded by workers who make choices that exacerbate the situation. The reality is that an open office can be quite pleasant if the people working in it collectively make effective choices that take into account the well-being of the group.
I am easily distracted by sensory stimuli. It ruins my concentration. At home I have some nice in ear noise isolating ear buds and some of those ear muffs designed for yard work. My children can, and do, reenact world wars on the hard woods above me and I can't hear it.
If I ever were in an open office, when I do deep work, those things would stay on.
So I sympathize, but the open office puts knowledge workers who need to concentrate and type in a lose / lose environment.
As others have replied, the problem isn't my typing, it's <40 square feet of personal space and no noise partitioning whatsoever.
Personally I'd rather listen to mechanical keyboards rather than people having meetings at their desks, I can fairly easily tune out non-human sounds... Unfortunately not many people seem to have them despite my office being the 'geekiest' in the Seattle region. sigh
I have a mechanical keyboard at home (Corsair Gaming K95 RGB), but at work I use a Mac wired keyboard (on a PC). Super quiet and probably the best performing scissor switch keyboard.
edit: proper Mac keyboard type
I've had a friend on the wrong floor at one company who had to switch to MX Browns with o-ring dampeners.
If a company banned me from using a mech keyboard entirely, I'd start looking for another job.
If you don't like them, complain to your manager that you need walled offices.
I'm so glad I did it. If I can get just a few more hours of productivity each month then the upgrade pays for itself.
You certainly have never tried to write interruption handling code...
Slight tangent:
This isn't even true, context switch time has not scaled (equally) with improvements in processing power (IPC, freq and functional-unit parallelism). A PIII in 1999 spent proportionally less of its operating wall time performing a context switch compared to modern processing. Turns out flushing TLBs and the like is not fast. This is why managing interrupts properly is very important on server class hardware.
Cubes cost money, but Silly Valley CEOs have done such a great job convincing gullible young workers that they actually like open offices.
No, they just think they're more deserving of it.
But an office and the opportunity to live somewhere I can spend less than 50% of my income on a reasonable apartment, I'd take that offer in a heartbeat.
It's just a matter of fads and fashion. Cubicles are "so 90's", while crappy tables thrown together in a loud frat house romper room is "2000's".
I understand that each generation has an impulse to differentiate themselves from the previous one. But in this specific case, it is absolutely a productivity and quality-of-life downgrade. The purpose is for management to save money, period.
Is saving money the real purpose, or the fig leaf for the actual purpose?
If saving money is the real purpose, then Work From Home (WFH) drops putative facilities costs to zero. Forget shaving a square foot here or a tenth of a square meter there: send everyone to their home offices, drop it to zero, call it a day, and collect the bonus check on your way out. No leadership recognition of the valuation assigned to the negative productivity impact of open offices signals that there is no quantified impact for WFH either, despite claims to the contrary. One can't have it both ways, claiming one can measure the productivity impact of WFH and not open offices. In the absence of actual quantification, if saving money on physical plant/facilities was the real purpose, WFH would win.
Cubes can be setup properly. They don't need to be row after row after row of cubes. We have them setup in pods that hold 6-8 people, one pod for each dev team. Only one way in or out, so there's no traffic moving through, with a small table in the middle that's mainly used to eat lunch or store treats that people bring in.
Have you been in a cube? You don't have to watch other's pick their noses. It's way better than open workspaces.
~a CEO
Decisions like this make me seriously question the whole idea that our economy is populated by rational actors. Obviously polished concrete floors are a terrible idea in an office. Even if you believe that open plan works, there is no rational basis for having floors that will reflect rather than dampen noise.
The relevant twist: An office manager felt the adjustable height desks weren't aesthetically pleasing. He set them all to the same height, removed the adjustment cranks, and sent out an email instructing us to not adjust the desks or to change monitor heights.
This policy lasted about a week before disgruntled employees with neck pain got in contact with folks responsible for employer liability.
I have never forgotten the lesson that workspaces are not always constructed with employees in mind.
Yeah, sure. Ok.
How do CEOs become this blind to obvious organizational cruft?
Reality: everybody is sitting with their headphones on. The only way to get their attention is via Slack or by throwing objects at them.
Said communication happens where it ought to be: in rec room or cafeteria.
Becoming less true by the day, I'm afraid.
As one of the old farts who started when even the lowliest peon had an office the fact CEOs are discovering forcing people to do their work in a large, loud, noisy space doesn't work isn't terribly surprising. Nor does the fact that 30+ years later almost everyone above a certain level still gets an office even in the cube farm environments. At Shell you could instantly tell the rank of a person by the size of their office. Fast forward to today and you must be an ED to rank an office where I work now. It's a status symbol.
Thankfully, I was recently hired onto a 100% remote development team and put in my 2 weeks. I'm done with open office floor plans and hope to never again work at a company that uses them for developers.
LOL. "Isn't there some gadget at OfficeMax we can use instead?"
The most bizarre part of these stories is that cheap, used cubicles are as common as tennis shoes.
Here is a good blog post on office design that supports deep work: http://strongproject.com/blog/how-cal-newports-deep-work-con...
If I ever get a chance to design an office, it will be something like the above. Small risk of that, however.
At the risk of sounding like I want to dehumanize work (quite the opposite, actually), I'd like to point out that anybody thinking of adding, say, a new milling machine to a machine shop, would look at how much space you need for it and around it to work productively and have quick access to the necessary accessories. Yet, we don't put any analysis at all into what it takes to maximize the productivity of people. And too often, we go for one-size-fits-all solutions. I can imagine a high-functioning dev-ops team really benefiting from the instantaneous communication of having all 8 people on the team sitting within a short chair roll of each other in a common space. For the people who need long blocks of unbroken concentration, that kind of space is not as functional. "Interrupt driven" work and "deep though" work are two different kinds of work, and it should be no surprise that a single space is not optimal for both.
Did your team-members enjoy you turning around and interrupting them?
Is it really that hard to get up and walk to another office so you don't disturb 8 other people with a question they don't care about? Walking around occasionally in the day is actually good for us.
And two person offices are a mild improvement over cubicles, which are a significant improvement over open offices. But neither is remotely as good as a one person office.
> Did your team-members enjoy you turning around and interrupting them?
I don't think it's fair to call all conversations "interruptions" and my co-workers were all very conscious of causing any unwanted interruptions.
> Is it really that hard to get up and walk to another office so you don't disturb 8 other people with a question they don't care about?
It wasn't, and I often did walk around as I regularly needed to interact with other teams. 99% of people had headphones on through all parts of the day.
As a side note, this workplace was comprised of mostly men and women under the age of 35 with quite a few right out of college. We regularly got comments from the interns that we hired that they chose to work their because of the open environment. Age may play a factor here I suppose.
Lots (most?) of developers don't like having their focus interrupted. You assume because they are cordial that they were fine with the interruption. As their team lead and SA, they don't really have a choice.
As a side note, we're all idiots fresh out of college. We hear about things that seem good, but don't have the experience to make a proper value judgement. Lots of college kids have group study sessions and think they are great. The reality is that they are great for socializing, but generally terrible for studying. Open offices appeal for the same social reasons (with the same kind if issues). With no real life/work experience, its little wonder that this is preferred.
I have one cool little experience which was an open office that switched to a closed office space during my stay. Productivity went down regardless of the boundaries put in place because now the leads and managers have their offices closed for meetings and therefore engineering staff is next in line to handle emergencies/data requests. Granted this is due to our workflow as well, however the point I'm making isn't that one setup is always better than the other but that it probably depends on multiple things and if you think you're gonna get 4 hours of golden time in a real, moving business then that's very naive or you have been very lucky yourself.
I think the reason I liked open offices is because when I needed to rethink an algorithm and analyze it I had at least 3 people that could offer their commentary. And while study groups may not work for reading a book, they damn sure work on designing algorithms when you need to openly discuss the tradeoffs and goals. Just my 0.02 on the whole thing but TL;DR sounds like open offices don't work for some places, but work great for others.
EDIT: to add to this, the open office we had was not noisey. There weren't massive conversations happening all the time and it was normally just inside voice levels of noise. I haven't experienced what I am imagining as the restaurant equivalent of an office.
It really isn't normal to be constantly interrupted. I'm a developer managing 2 other devs and dealing with stakeholders and still manage to go many hours without interruptions. It's all about respect and being organized. Most urgent things only become urgent because somebody dropped the ball. Improve the way people work and organize that work, and the urgencies go away. You do need to retrain some people a bit to be respectful of your time, but mostly it works out because mostly people mean to do right by each other.
> As a side note, this workplace was comprised of mostly men and women under the age of 35 with quite a few right out of college.
I'm not sure how this is relevant. One might as easily conclude that these folks don't know any better due to youth and inexperience as that "it's just a different age and culture."
Must be quite frustrating to sit in a nearly empty building and have everyone sardined into one large room.
It's unlikely that many of them had competing offers from a company that offered private offices, given how few companies actually offer private offices. Most likely they were just indoctrinated / brainwashed into drinking the Open Plan Koolaid and are just parroting a stock line.
Yes I've found that to be true as well. I myself typically wear expensive noise cancelling headphones all day and blast music, damaging my hearing, in order to drown out distractions. Fuck open offices.
I DO NOT understand why cubes get so much hate.
That is the simplest way I can think of by which we might come to the usual "cubicle hell" scenario where workers are stuck from 9 to 5 in their cubicles while being occasionally nagged by management (as in Office Space).
They just don't look as "cool" or "hip" as a long, open table.
Open office plans are soul crushing and noisy. They are not explicitly given to disorganization and distraction, but prone to it.
Cubicles are soul crushing and organized. They are not explicitly private, but prone to it.
Not all spaces are created equally. Most are bad, but some are appalling. If you find one that is "good" you probably don't work there. Give it time, and it will suck eventually. They all do. None of them are actually Home.
So I find cubicles to be the worst of both worlds: not private enough to have quiet but not loud enough to tune everything out.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/07/nassim-nicholas-taleb...
I like popping on my headphones and going to town... but I'll admit, distractions often overcome even my headphones. That's where working from home comes in.
Quite.
They get bonuses because they "saved" the companies millions by cramming more workers in a smaller space. Then they get another bonus to figure out how to cram more workers in, because for some weird reason productivity has gone downhill.
I fail to understand why do you need your team to sit next to each other when you have modern day collaboration tools like Slack, hipchat etc. The management folks who argue that open office increases collaboration fail to understand that engineers don't collaborate whole day long. They collaborate for an hour or so and then they need to focus and build things. The ideal ratio would be 80:20. An engineer wants 80% productivity and 20% collaboration. By this it makes sense to have a closed office spaces and have collboration areas around the office. Having an open office and few personal areas scattered around the office promotes 80% collaboration and 20% productivity. As an organization are you really aiming for that?
But at scale, this is a ridiculous setup and one that breeds interruptions. In a small team, what one person knows is often useful to another. In a larger team there are many more independent parts, and entangling communication is a waste of attention. Worse, I think it causes people to deliberately adopt a default-closed mentality to avoid overload.
Companies don't easily outgrow their early cultures; they think what got them there will continue to serve them -- in fact, they want to go back and "capture the magic" that were there in the early days. It's a form of corporate nostalgia that is one symptom of becoming sclerotic.
It's not really about open floor plan vs. cubicles. I recall the first time I visited HP's vast cube farm at their silicon valley headquarters. It was vast, drab, mostly quiet, and absolutely soul-deadening. OTOH the Dropbox headquarters in SF was open floor plan and absolutely cramped, yet buzzing with youthful energy. Lots of people were using headphones. I could see how it would be an exciting place for a young person. On the one hand the buzzing energy is a potential distractor, but it's also an energy booster. It makes your heart beat a little faster. It makes you feel like you're in a place where things are happening.
With age, my powers of concentration have waned a bit and I cannot power through distractions like I did when younger. A cube farm would be very demotivating. An open floor plan would be highly distracting, but likely somewhat better. But the best is to avoid large environments like that entirely, and stick with a smaller group where the interruptions are actually useful, where a shared office and a shared mission produce energy and focus.
One open workspace was intentionally planned so that the micro-managing CEO could readily see if the employees -- mostly attorneys, mind you -- were hard at work or hardly working. Nothing was private, especially not the condescending beratement from said CEO. I quit and started my own law firm, requiring work from home for my subsequent hires and leasing shared office space.
That firm was acquired by a client, and I was again forced to commute to work since I would be directing a large on-site team of attorneys and paralegals. It was another open workspace but, thankfully, the C-suite enjoyed perimeter offices. I don't understanding why they realized that we needed offices to avoid distractions and to keep confidential conversations in confidence, but failed to consider the effect of the open space on other employees -- also mostly attorneys and licensing guys.
I've since had a successful exit and again get to enjoy "working" from home.
Open space implies that cadence is "daily", but for workers who create intellectual property, that cadence is more realistically every 5-10 days.
The need for in-person "check and balance" varies with experience. I work with remote teams of Sr Engineers that meet in-person 1-2 times per year. Minimal communication issues.
But if apprentice-level Engineers are being groomed, then the frequency of in-person meetings needs to be daily/weekly/monthly.
I'm not saying there's not a better way, but that's the justification. Anybody trying to convince others that open floor plans are more productive is living in crazy town.
And I think it's because we natural pay attention to humans and look for patterns. You can't really do that when there are multiple conversations. And the brain doesn't bother trying when there are too many voices.
So one conversation is fine. If there's already one conversation and you need to speak to somebody, use Slack or get a room or set up a meeting or wait.
As I've been at WeWorks lately, I've noticed that they have all glass walls on the offices. This means that everybody has natural light and a sense of openness, but with a locking door and quiet. A more general question to people in such all-glass private offices - is it the best of both worlds? Or, is more privacy needed than all-glass walls?
I think it's a reasonable trade-off. It attempts to give the best of both worlds, incorporating one advantage of open office spaces is there is more team motivation because it's more obvious if you are slacking.
Meh, I completely disagree. Management doesn't know what you're doing if they're standing behind you the entire work day. That's why they're managers. And more to the point, net-surfing, playing 2048, chatting, etc. are not things that need to be restricted. The reality is, no developer (or probably any creative person) is going to be productive for 8 solid hours a day, straight through. We need idle time to separate the bursts of productivity and give the brain time to reset.
is more team motivation because it's more obvious if you are slacking.
There are much easier ways to tell if someone is slacking. You don't even really need to do anything special. The team will know who is carrying their weight and who isn't.
I have found the next step down though where I work - hot desks. Basically you get a locker for your stuff, no reserved desk location and a virtual terminal to a desktop on a server. This really does suck.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2017/05/apple-park-new-silicon-valley-...
I wonder if per-team offices of 2-5 people around a central hub would actually hit the right balance between interaction and think time.
In an open environment, literally everything is a distraction. The only time I've been content-ish in an open environment is when I happened to be facing a corner.
But also note that the Steelcase CEO's quotes are shaped to help sell their office pod systems. He's really not going to share his personal preferences, he's going to push their product.
Well, actually, I WFH, but I sympathize with open floor plan workers.
OK maybe I just need to learn to look at the link.
Edit: for science, I enabled JavaScript and loaded the WSJ page with a cold cache. The text jumped 3 times over the 22 seconds it took to fully load the page.
Does anyone actually like it? It's super noisy. It's become pretty popular in cafes around here, and they're almost unbearable at busy times.