Hacker News Reader

Comment by badmadrad | Hacker News Reader

Open offices are type A/extroverted personality wet dreams. Everybody they need is within earshot and they can see EVERYTHING so they can properly control everything. However for introverts, people with noise sensitivity, or people with ADD this is an absolute nightmare. I find a lot of engineers tend to be either introverts or have some type of manageable ADD so it doesn't surprise me that many people would be negatively affected by an office layout like this.

View on HN

This is my thinking as well. I think this is further proof that business culture from top to bottom is dictated by what the upper level guys and gals want for themselves, and not via this hard nosed skepticism and productivity research. They're all type-A social manipulators and go-getters. They have little to nothing in common with the type-b geeky introverts that actually do the tech work.

"I want to see my fucking employees and grab them at any time," is the thinking here. Our productivity and comfort? They don't really matter because the competitors are doing the same thing. There's nowhere to flee to. There's no winning other than clawing your way up to management and hoping to god you can still do tech work once you get there.

This is always why I'm never shocked to hear about video games or operating systems or huge pieces of software written by one guy, alone, in a quiet space. Of course you can do those things when you have the proper space and drive. This is also how novels get written for that matter. Can you imagine writing novels the way we're making software? They'd never get done and the ones that do would just be terrible.

Type A extrovert here. My open plan office pisses me off unbelievably. If I want to get any bloody work done, I need to work from home.

As someone with a mild amount of ADD, I disagree completely here. The Internet is way more distracting than people moving around in my field of vision. Having a private office gives me the privacy that I need to "Internet" and that winds up driving down productivity more than I would care to admit. While I haven't actually experienced an open office plan recently, I actually welcome the change to see what effect it would have on my productivity.

You not being able to control your own internet surfing is a personal problem though, not an external factor.

I'm one of those type A people. And no, open office plans still suck.

Here's why bosses like them:

1. They're cheap. 2. Other businesses are doing it.

This exactly. For me it's manageable (I'm mostly extrovert), but I can completely understand how some people would not work well in such an environment.

At our workplace we have some "meeting rooms" that are effectively small offices. Some of our team who don't like the hustle and bustle of a more open workspace effectively commandeer such rooms almost every day (on days they're not working from home).

Given how email/IM based we are, it seems to all work out fine (for me). For others or folks who don't have the proper layout (i.e., private 1-2 person room available ) then it could indeed suck.

There's also the fact that there's no more privacy when talking to colleagues. At some point I wanted to speak to my boss privately (to tell him I wanted to quit) but couldn't find a right time since there was always someone within hearing distance. Eventually, I've just sent him an email, so the open office layout definitely didn't help here with with ease of interaction.

I think open office layouts need to be paired with easily accessed private rooms. The successful layouts I've seen will have a large area everyone works in with the outer walls lined with small and medium sized meeting rooms. Either for private conversations, personal phone calls, or if a team needs to meet and not disrupt everyone else. I can see how an open layout with literally no private space would be terrible.

Oh hey, I am/have all 3. Thank god I share a medium sized office with 2 other similar devs, one of whom is only in the office half the week instead of in the insane bullpen with everyone else or I may have quit.

I don't feel this way at all, and judging from the number of similar comments that popped up while writing this, I don't think I'm in the minority either. Why can't an introvert put on headphones or simply disregard irrelevant conversations in an open office? Why do type A extroverts feel the need to control things they happen to be nearby?

"Why can't an introvert put on headphones or simply disregard irrelevant conversations"

The whole point with the office (for me) is to provide an environment to maximize developer output of value.

I do not need to serendeptiously eavesdrop on every discussion on the floor with 40 people to provide maximum ouput. What I do need, is quiet.

Vice versa it is fair to ask why cant the people who yearn extra stimulus to install disco lights in their offices and play some bazar tape from their headphones :)

Why can't an introvert put on headphones or simply disregard irrelevant conversations in an open office?

It has nothing to do with introvert / extrovert from what I can see. But I don't understand why people keep thinking that headphones are some magic cure all. Sometimes you need quiet so you can focus, and just replacing one source of noise with another does absolutely nothing. Not to mention that "open plan" allows a constant stream of visual and tactile distractions as well as auditory.

Really, open plan offices have no redeeming qualities at all that I can see. They're optimized to disrupt productivity to the greatest possible degree, while providing a superior illusion of collaboration. In my experience, they're a complete joke.

> Why can't an introvert put on headphones or simply disregard irrelevant conversations in an open office?

You can't disregard your peripheral vision. People walking behind me all day stresses me out in a predictable fashion, as it does with most introverts I've worked with. Unfortunately for me, most startup programmers these days seem to be extroverts. Which makes sense, I suppose, given the large percentage of apps focused on all things social.

That is the point of an open office: you can't disregard what is going on around you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com