Comment by mlthoughts2018 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mlthoughts2018 | Hacker News Reader

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> I personally have noted a level of collaboration and information sharing that just didn't happen in the more isolated environments

I think it's important that we don't overly focus on one isolated experience point like yours, because empirically this is highly disputed.

In my experience, information sharing has plummeted after moving to an open-plan layout. People are forced to use noise-cancelling headphones to avoid impromptu exchanges, because the impromptu exchanges are value-destructive in the first place. And when someone gets co-opted into an impromptu discussion, they try to keep it superficial and share less substantive info, to get away from the unplanned distraction as fast as possible.

Not to mention the huge increase of totally not-work-related or irrelevant distractions, like loud sales calls, product discussions that don't affect anything for my team, discussions about weekend plans, etc.

It's a very shallow notion of information sharing, which could happen asynchronously through code, documents, email, or with a scheduled video call, or a short scheduled meeting, etc.

As I mentioned elsewhere, this horribly misguided idea that somehow constant, real-time audio communication == sincere collaboration or information sharing, this idea is really destructive and doesn't map very well to how engineers actually work.

> I think it's important that we don't overly focus on one isolated experience point like yours, because empirically this is highly disputed.

I'm not saying my experience generalizes, I doubt every environment would see the same benefit. My point is that even though I started exclusively preferring one side, I can see value on the other side.

> It's a very shallow notion of information sharing, which could happen asynchronously through code, documents, email, or with a scheduled video call, or a short scheduled meeting, etc.

Far from shallow. Technically anything can be communicated in any environment, that's not very interesting. What's interesting is how pragmatically an environment actually works and what it's real life pros/cons are.

But an open-plan office layout assumes that all communication happens most effectively with only one possible type of communication: real-time, constantly preemptible audio streams.

It’s shallow to say that “information sharing” happens this way, since for many people it obviously impedes or completely prevents information sharing.

> “What's interesting is how pragmatically an environment actually works and what it's real life pros/cons are.”

I agree on this, which is why it only requires such a short analysis to see that open-plan offices fail so one-sidedly. They are empirically shown to be widely disliked, to lower morale, to lower producivity (both individually and overall), to lead to more superficial interaction and less deep communication, to lead to more defects in knowledge work outputs, to increase communicable disease transmission and negatively affect sick time and vacation time habits, all while entirely discounting the most pragmatic working styles of at least one huge group of people (introverts) and, when all is said and done, they don’t even save money except in the shallowest, short-term sense, and often companies spend on opulent luxury features in order for the workers to appear essentially as decorative office furniture for when investors or upper management walk by.

It is more than fair to call this phenomenon shallow.

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