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Comment by noxToken | Hacker News Reader

>a huge part of craft is communication, and open offices are great for that.

Can you explain this to me? How does an open office lead to better communication than cubes or partitioned group work spaces?

I'm in an open office. A lot of communication is done via email and IM. When someone comes to my desk to ask a question, collaborate, or just say hey, I typically don't get up. If a group stops by, we'll usually move to a collaborative area or set up a meeting. This would be true no matter if I were in a cube or partitioned group area. If I have a private office, I may not even have to leave my desk.

The typical response I see to this is that open offices tend to have this implied notion of everyone is willing to communicate at any time. I'd argue that on an individual level for developers, that's more often false. Someone head-down probably doesn't want to be interrupted.

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> How does an open office lead to better communication than cubes or partitioned group work spaces?

It doesn't make sense because that's not the reason open-floor-plan exists. The reason is 100% cost-savings. "Communication" is just a post-hoc rationalization, created by management, parroted by employees too boorish to learn how to communicate politely and effectively.

He seems to have edited his comment because the part you’re replying to isn’t there any more, but you’re correct, open offices don’t improve communication and they can’t meaningfully improve communication. If you happen to need to “communicate” with any of the maximum four people you’re physically adjacent to, then yes, you can start a conversation without having to get up from your chair. Otherwise, you have to get up and walk across the room to where the other person is (or just IM them): exactly the same as with cubicles.

I hear a conversation relevant to me and jump in, a conversation stops being relevant I jump out

That simple interaction has added tons of value for me over the last few years of open offices.

We have a very simple way to indicate you don't want to be interrupted, headphones or a flag

There's also tons of huddle rooms you can go into if you want to hunker down in quiet

Everyone is different, some people feel switching from keyboard to mouse is a huge productivity drain and invest a lot in avoiding that transition

Maybe I'm just fortunate but it's never been an issue for me, people are pretty respectful of their coworkers where I've worked

>...Everyone is different, some people feel switching from keyboard to mouse is a huge productivity drain and invest a lot in avoiding that transition

And they are likely wrong. People believe a lot of things about themselves that don't hold up to scrutiny. For example, people think they can multitask, etc and studies show that the aren't nearly as productive doing that as they think they are. People think that open offices help collaboration, but that is not what the research shows. As the article says:

>...As my colleague Jessica Stillman pointed out last week, a new study from Harvard showed that when employees move from a traditional office to an open plan office, it doesn't cause them to interact more socially or more frequently.

>Instead, the opposite happens. They start using email and messaging with much greater frequency than before. In other words, even if collaboration were a great idea (it's a questionable notion), open plan offices are the worst possible way to make it happen.

>Previous studies of open plan offices have shown that they make people less productive, but most of those studies gave lip service to the notion that open plan offices would increase collaboration, thereby offsetting the damage.

https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/its-official-open-plan-of...

And I have a way of indicating I do want to be interrupted: I leave my door open, I walk around the floor and look for other open doors, I move to the break room and have lunch with everyone else. It would bug the shit out of me if someone interjected themselves into a conversation I was having with someone else in my office.

That's the problem with open-floor-plan. It presumes "my need to know what you're saying/doing is more important than you even getting the opportunity to consent to me knowing."

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