Posted and discussed before multiple times.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8815065

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9610075

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9404006

I think we've lost the war. I was even asked to meet with my company's architects and designers about a new space we were building out. I basically spent an hour telling them in every different form I could that what I wanted was a place I could go where people could find me, but they would have to knock on a door and open it to talk to me, and these people looked at me like I was from fucking Mars. They'd never heard anything so absurd in their whole life. I even pleaded for cubicles. I can't even remember what it was like to have dignity.

"What about a health clinic? Or a coffee bar instead?"

I found as many studies as I could about how awful these open office plans are, and printed them all out, and left them there. At the end of the day, on a whim I checked the recycle bin in the conference room they were in. Anyone want to guess what I found?

When I die and get to hell, there will be a Hermann Miller chair in an open office waiting for me. With free snacks and drinks in the kitchen.

The best work setup I've ever had by far was not private offices or cubicles (and definitely not an open office); it was a hybrid where our team of 3-5 people sat in a large private office. This increased collaboration while enforcing respect. It allowed our team to create a work culture democratically (how do we arrange seating? what noise levels are ok?) that simply isn't possible in an open seating arrangement.

I know this won't be popular here, but I find private offices problematic for a few reasons. First, they hurt collaboration and social interaction quite a bit. This is ok from a single developer's perspective (heavily skewed audience on HN), but it shows on cross-functional teams. I know this can be hacked into a private office setup ("my door is always open"), but in my experience there is a clear difference in collaboration when there is no physical separation between people who are working on a project together. Also, private offices create a hierarchy where some people get big corner window offices while others are in shitty interior offices or cubicles. My favorite thing about the trend towards open offices has been an egalitarianism where the CEO and founders sits at a similar desk as the interns.

On a related note, I noticed that cubicle offices are hardly better than open offices. The cubicle walls are tall enough to completely obscure the faces and bodies of your neighbors, but do nothing to block the sound. With no eye contact or awareness of your neighbors, it's easy to mistakenly believe that no one else can hear your sounds.

As a result, on a typical day at the office I would hear one coworker yap on personal calls (wife & home renovation) for half an hour (per day!), another coworker talk about company work for an hour on the phone with a distant teammate (with many words related to my work that trigger my attention), and the sound of phones ringing about 10 times (which is never my own phone).

Hearing all the office noise day after day, I thought about a notion called reverse privacy: If your conversation/notification doesn't concern me, then I don't want to hear it. I don't want it to grab my attention, be aware of it, or have to filter it out.

My office is switching to an open design. And none of the people who work there are happy about it. It was decided by the folks who own the company, several thousand miles away.

I think the real allure of open offices is how they look. Open offices look modern. They look like the kind of working area a hip, young, collaborative, industry-disrupting company would favor. But that's all bullshit. It's just a fairy tale that fools outsiders. Open offices look great to someone coming in for an interview or an executive visiting from company headquarters 3 states away. But at this point I think we can be reasonably sure that that's where the benefits end.

I don't think this change will damage my productivity much. I'll have headphones on all day, instead of 10-20% of the day. Seems like a lot of trouble for that kind of outcome. I'll probably enjoy shopping for some new headphones though.

While the open-office debate has been a recurring meme on HN for some time, it seems that offering a variety of options as well as unfettered personal choice is key.

For example, my current employer has wide-open office space with pods of desks, but they also offer numerous privacy rooms for escape. As a mild to mid introvert myself, this allows for the best of both worlds the majority of the time: I can benefit from those casual, spontaneous conversations that pop up in the open space, but I can also grab my own room for an entire afternoon to crank out some heads-down work.

I think what's most important is for companies to acknowledge and respect the variety of working styles of their employees, along with the trust that--regardless of how chatting in a pod or hiding away from others might appear--more often than not they're getting shit done.

edit: words

I think open-office is great.

It makes it much easier for independent developers to compete with large corporations.

I seem to be the odd one out in that I actually enjoy an open office setup.

I've had both and I feel there's so much more collaboration happening in an open office. I almost see it weekly that there's a LOT of learning through osmosis, listening in to conversations, ...

I guess I have a pretty easy time keeping up concentration/flow. So in this case, it "works on my machine" :)

I was re-reading Snowcrash (a novel by Neal Stephenson). In this book there is a tangent about how aweful it is in the future to work for the government.

He goes over how horrible the work conditions were, with open offices, bosses always watching you, no fixed assigned spacing, first come first serve everything being tracked by computers. If you are late everyone knows it because your sit in the boonies.

When I read it for the first time I remember feeling a revulsion at it. Now when I read it, I was like "Um.. that is my job now"

At my company they have, /on purpose/ too few spaces for the number of employees. So early birds get all the spaces with powerplugs, monitors, network etc. The rest must fight it out on bench seats with no power etc.

I guess for the big bosses who spend all days in meetings its ok, but for grunts it sucks.

Nothing says we don't value you like being lined up in rows with no walls. They might as well elevate the manager offices like guard towers to complete the look in that photo.

Do these companies get payoffs from head phone manufactures?

My preference order is:

  private offices > open office > team rooms

This ranking might sound odd, but bear with me: of course I like having a space to myself. It's not just the noise: having my own space affords me a degree of privacy. I don't like to feel watched. In environments where I don't have a private office, I end up doing most of my heavy-duty coding from home.

Now, let's look at completely open offices and team rooms. In both environments, I have to deal with add conversations, people chewing with their mouths open, doors opening and closing, and so on. In both environments, I pay a cognitive price. But, in a completely open office, I might overhear interesting conversations from other teams and become aware of interesting developments. In a team room, I'm isolated from everything except my team, so I don't learn much.

I'm very skeptical of the idea that team rooms facilitate collaboration. I've never been much for low-level high-frequency collaboration --- pair programming is punishment in the afterlife. Collaborating at a high level is fine, but that kind of collaboration is best done asynchronously over some kind of durable medium like email, not synchronously by shouting across a room.

If I can't have a private office, I'd prefer a completely open warehouse-like environment that at least maximizes the benefits of an open office. A team room has most of the same costs and few of the benefits.

I wonder whether commentators are conflating "open" offices with "loud" offices.

I've never working in anything other than an open office, but the level of noise has varied a lot. Some offices have a culture where it's common for people to make a scene, ie when something happens people gather round a TV and start talking.

One place I worked at had a guy who would stand up and start a discussion about politics every day, and it wouldn't end until he was right. It's somewhat fun to have the old oxford union style banter, but it's a time sink and generally doesn't move anyone's opinion.

By contrast where I am now is as quiet as sitting alone at home, even though it's still in the financial industry and there's actually more people than the place I mentioned earlier.

One place was a macho atmosphere (all traders), and the other is intellectual (all coders), they both perform the same function in the market (market making). They both looked the same though; at least three screens per person, a wall of screens some places. You're close enough to touch your neighbour on either side if you stretch out your leg.

Founders want to see what you're doing at all times, they know that you have to out in remote double time to actual get anything done. I can't solve incredible engineering problems with 5 people talking at the same time for 6 hours, I wind up having to work 18 hour days with 8 hours of face time sitting and chatting to make the crew of kids happy. As a senior dev my workload is triple the juniors so it's not unusual for me to have to do 80-120 hours a week for 40 hours pay to not lose my gig.

Once accustomed to working in home office in your PJs, it's very hard to contemplate going back to commuting to, parking at, and working in a noisy, stinky office.

Some people need different accommodations than others and companies need to accommodate these requests, in many cases, by law. These include desks and chairs in addition to electronics. Many companies are still too cheap to buy proper desks and chairs for their engineers, let alone monitors and other peripherals. Almost none of the dozens or hundreds of open office plans I've ever seen promote healthy computing, often foregoing proper desks, chairs, and monitors for some kitchen table with a crappy chair and everyone working on laptops. That isn't healthy nor acceptable, and I hope that people realize that they don't have to accept such conditions (at least in the US). If employers are too cheap to listen, perhaps a continuing rise in worker's comp claims and ergonomic workstation prescriptions will get them to start listening. While this problem isn't exclusive to open offices, I see much more of this in open offices, especially at startups. If companies can't even get these basics right, it's unlikely they'll get anything else about the office right either, especially since they're not trying.

It's good that people are finally talking about this. Like 7 years ago, people were commonly pretending that they liked it (or maybe they just didn't watch their productivity).

The open versus closed office debate feels new, but it's a pendulum that has swung for decades from one extreme to the other. The reality is that most modern workers need access to a multitude of workspaces: open, social areas for collaboration and closed, private areas for concentration. A progressive company recognizes this and sets its people free to choose the workspace they need for the work at hand.

I suspect that google knows this, had made a calculation that the downsides are worth the real estate cost, and is spinning it in a more positive light.

I sincerely feel with those who can not concentrate in an open environment but all is not black and white. As a mild introvert I hate the whole social dance associated with entering someone's private office while I can go into a deep concentration wearing just over the ear headphones even if I forget to start the music.

(Ideal is the combination of open space with numerous meeting rooms and smaller pods for phone calls and occasional privacy.)

Productivity is not that important if you are producing the wrong thing in the first place.

I love open offices because in an open office it's easier for me to socialize while pretending to work. I greatly prefer socializing over working, so I prefer any office environment that facilitates this.

Some of my coworkers are a lot less social so they get annoyed with everybody around them chatting. They probably get more work done than me, but thankfully being less social means they get worse peer reviews than the rest of us.

Open or not, doesn't matter that much, IMHO. What is very important for me is a distraction free environment, no noise, no visual distractions.

I think open office is great for certain roles and not so much for certain occupations. For writer in this article having a private room is better because it takes a lot of focus and comfort to write. But in all fairness, I agree open office can become a diaster. Where I work now we have an open office settings but we are small and we don't have a long table sharing with a dozen coworkers. I think density is important - our desnity is not so high. Furthermore where I actually sit I only gave two coworkers in the area ao for me I don't get that much of noise. The most distracting part is just people stopping by or passing by my desk because it is one of the paths to the pathroom and conference rooms. But some of my other coworkers are stationed in worser part literally sitting across the kitchen so.... everyone considered my area to br the golden seat. I think, again, density is important. The upside of open office is the sense of you know people can be reached out and people aren't hiding inside a room with the curtain down.

I've been in a couple of co-working spaces uses the open-office concept. It's generally pretty good when everyone is a developer, but then there's the occasional sales/customer service person, which is what this article seems to allude to.

I think open-office is a great concept that just needs to be refined a little: i.e. stricter enforcement of phone/loudness etiquette.

Even though I dislike the feeling of an open office workplace, I'm now feeling that there's some big push by someone to make this topic keep coming back on HN like the proverbial 'suit is back'. OK a WAPO marketing person doesn't like her middle-school style coworkers ... so what?

I'll push back with a quote from Richard Hamming's famous talk "You and your research" (as I'm sure I have before): http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.pdf

"Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance.

He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame"

Are there any of these anti-open-office pieces which explicitly mention "I might not like it and might be less productive short term ... but that still could be a net win long term" ?

>Now, about 70 percent of U.S. offices have no or low partitions, according to the International Facility Management Association.

I'd really like to see how they define "office"

This is my favorite environment. A large office per team. It makes me still fell like I have my own personal space while maintaining a team vibe. It's like a research lab where everyone in the lab is focused on the same goals.

Like a pack mentality.

This is our setup in my gov't agency (NASA): 3-4 engineers per room, typically grouped by either project or functional area. We have a couple of regular conference rooms, and also have a few breakout/collaboration rooms that can't be reserved for meetings as well.

Apparently, it's how it worked in the 1960s too. My group just never went through the various workspace fads because we never had enough money to move or reconfigure the building. I guess that's one upside to moving as slow as the gov't sometimes does.

I did have a cubicle while working with another division, but they were still fairly private.

The downsides: infrastructure is equally as slow to get updated...

I love this idea and it immediately reminds me of the Crystal Clear methodology [1]. A whole team being isolated together means you get more collaboration, cross-pollination and natural communication. It's not perfect either though if you've got annoying people in your team.

[1] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Clear_(software_develo...)

Often, the most important element of my working space is just the abundance of natural light and windows. A few years ago, I turned down a job offer that would have placed me in a 3-5 person office. It would've been an interior office with no windows at all. I chose to stay at my current job, which had me sitting in a cubicle right next to a huge window with a nice view.

The benefits of a shared office are quite nice, but they can be made up for in a variety of ways. There's no way to make up for the lack of natural lighting and windows if you're stuck in an interior room all day long, every day.

That's exactly how Valve[1] sets up their office, for similar reasons.

[1] - http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...

Yes, the "small group office" is my favorite! I had that in 2006 and it was great for teamwork.

If I can't have that, I'll take a small private office with a door that closes. Although the least time I had that was, I think, in 2001?

Peopleware advocates the 3-5 person office, and has some great research to back it up

We have this. 5-7 people per area, some smaller, some larger. Moving to open office space in six months. I think the office culture will take a definite hit.

That's my favorite setup too. Three people sharing a room. You can collaborate and also have some good private conversations without the whole company knowing.

This is my second favorite environment - right behind working from home.

Having worked in both open-plan offices and cubicle offices I beg to differ. In open-plan, it's by definition that you can hear other people; in cubicles it evolves into the one or a few congenitally loud people doing the noise. "There goes Amy again."

The visual limitations of cubicles help here, because you have a little bit of privacy that motivates people to respect personal space. I'm quieter in cubicles, but not everybody else is, but in open-plan I have to adapt to everyone communicating loudly by being loud myself.

Even if that's the case, I'd prefer it over an open office; I'd have headphones on either way, but a cubicle ensures less visual distractions. Plus surely it dampens the sound people make, so it doesn't carry as far?

Cubicles are terrible. No privacy, a lot of noise and still no good way for talking to people. I also like to see something other than a gray wall the whole day.

How do you know if the conversation concerns you, before you overhear it?

Giving you a continuous background awareness of what's happening in the company around you ... isn't that part of the claimed benefits of open offices?

Cubicles keep the talking down.

To me open offices remind me of factories or cattle pens, where people are forced into acting like machines. Unlike many you I cannot code while listening to music as being a musician, my brain winds up analyzing what I am hearing instead of concentrating on work. The worst thing of all is having music piped into a huge room making it impossible to even use headphones if you don't like the tunes. You may as well shoot me at that point.

They've always been a big drawback for me whenever I go interview. It's hard to imagine going to actually work in the space when you don't know how annoying the people that would be around you are. It increases the amount of variables in the form of people's personalities - will you sit around the nice guy who won't ever shut up, the always distracted person, or does everyone have a good work mode but it's hard to break the silence?

For one it makes "meta" discussions about the workplace not happen except out of office. I've seen over time there's a lack of office improvements in open office situations compared to places with private spaces. People also treat others with a bit less professionalism.

It's about look, alright; the look of the balance sheet when you can cram more people into a cheaper space! Offices take up too much room, and even cubicles are inefficient. If you put people shoulder-to-shoulder at rows of back-to-back workstations, you can fit, like, a hundred of them in a room.

"Open offices look modern"

Yes, and perhaps the factor underlying that truth is that corporate management types are deeply and essentially conformists (selection pressure alone results in that). Management is almost entirely fashion-driven (which incidentally explains the egregiously semi-literate, antiscientific, ahistorical crap that dominates business/management best selling book lists).

Open offices don't look modern. The steno pool from a '50s enterprise was open office.

Open office allows companies to save dozens of dollars per employee in rent per month, which is visible and measurable. Creativity and productivity, on the other hand, is not.

>Open offices look modern

They look like "open plan" offices from the late 19th-early 20th century [0].

[0] http://www.officemuseum.com/photo_gallery_1900s.htm

Don't forget management and guests being able to walk in to see if everyone is working.

> I think the real allure of open offices is how they look. Open offices look modern. They look like the kind of working area a hip, young, collaborative, industry-disrupting company would favor.

(I'm using a throwaway because my main is tied to my real-life identity, and I'm not comfortable talking about my current employer where anyone can google my username and find out what that employer is. And that goes double when I'm talking about my employer's politics. I hope that's OK with the mods.)

I guess this is why I'm strongly drawn to companies that are socially and culturally conservative.

I work in a cube farm at a mid-size (~500 employees) company in a conservative industry (B2B telecom). The TVs in the break room and the reception area are constantly tuned to Fox News. At the last holiday party, the VP of HR gave a speech where he went out of his way to say it was specifically a Christmas party.

And I love working here. While I'm politically liberal myself, it is my experience that the most conservative companies are the best companies to work for. They actually, you know, take care of their employees. That my company is conservative makes me like them more. I'd rather work in a cube farm at a conservative company than in an open office at a liberal company (because I love cube farms and hate open offices). It's a great working environment. And you know what? They never had a single problem with me being trans, which is more than I can say for the freewheeling liberal startup I worked for two and a half years ago.

I look for liberal politics in my friends and conservative politics in my employers. It's worked out pretty well for me, in terms of both friends and employers.

Research shows that listening to music engages the creativity part of the brain so it's not used for the work you do at the same time. Headphones are NOT an adequate substitute for a writer office for a creative knowledge worker.

No; they probably picked this design because it's cheaper to run and adds more space for more people (I.e. Pushing to employ more people)

> I'll have headphones on all day, instead of 10-20% of the day.

I worry about the damage that my office headphones have on my hearing. I wonder if there's some sort of OSHA regulation regarding it, and if I have recourse against my employer because I am forced to don headphones are be distracted.

And often the people cooking this up have a nice window office and their meeting rooms are along the windows.

That makes no sense. The non open-offices I had were all much better looking.

It's about packing in more workers per square foot of space.

The modern equivalent to that open door is internet access. There's a whole world on the internet, but only a tiny fraction of humanity outside my door. You'll learn more in 5 clicks on the internet than by listening to hours of Monday morning quarterbacking about the superbowl. That link is from 1986, at that time the best (only) source of innovative new ideas was speech overheard from other physically co-located humans, even long distance phone was like $1/minute, now we have free port 80 across the entire world so virtually all inspiration and innovation is reading visual and from the entire planet.

In 1986 it mattered if Einstein had a conversation outside your door, it mattered in a big way, but decades later in 2017 it matters if you read Einstein's blog and follow him on twitter.

Also note the rise of groupthink because in '86 only you had Einstein standing in your doorway and only your doorway or at most a couple people, but in 2017 "everyone in the field" and lots of people outside the official field read, perhaps, Aaronson's physics (although lately mostly politics) blog.

The push comes from expansion. If your company is poorly run maybe with enough whipping everyone in the open office you'll survive maybe even thrive. But if you want to succeed at the multi-office class of size, you'll need competent management, and those along with the line workers are repelled by open offices and can get jobs at non-open office employers. An open office selects for a company that will struggle to survive past 100 people.

The biggest recent change I can think of is at the last open office I worked at, it was a fireable offense to wear headphones; the company paid a lot of money for the remodel and refusal to collaborate is being directly and intentionally insubordinate. The beatings will continue until morale improves. I admit I'm completely mystified, from what I read here everyone is visually in sight "to collaborate" but everyone puts on headphones to drown out the noise so they can work in order to eliminate all collaboration in practice, which strikes me as complete nonsense.

Intense display of social signalling via architecture, the non-living parts of the office are all open and free and the living parts of the office all have headphones on and shush anyone who speaks, library style.

There might be an aspect of reverse psychology going on, with the whole "shush people into silence" and headphones movement, open offices are knowingly anti-collaborative and perhaps management wants it that way to eliminate palace coups or something. I mean, they can't be so stupid as to think it increases collaboration or productivity, so they must intentionally be sabotaging those characteristics in favor of ...

I don't think the kind of work Hamming is talking about has ever emerged from an open floor plan.