I've experienced an "open plan" setup that worked; we based the setup on Bell Labs' Unix Room after visiting them. The Unix Room model is actually great, but it's different from your standard open-plan setup:

* People in the Unix Room seemed to be largely working on either individual projects or projects involving only a few others.

* The room itself was not actually very big, so you couldn't jam too many people in there

* Workspace was pretty generous, you weren't expected to tuck your elbows in lest you rub up against your neighbor

* Everyone in the Unix Room also had their own private office with a door, which I think was the key to success.

The last point is the biggest challenge: implementing a good open-plan workspace is going to require even more space than a traditional cube farm.

Edit: I work from home now, in a shed in the back yard. It's the size of a nice office, has doors and windows, and if I decide to work with the door open I get fresh air and birds chirping :)

Do you lose more money than you're saving due to decreased productivity? Maybe. But that's hard to prove, and "This office proposal is $X million cheaper because we can lease three fewer floors" is very straightforward.

> Open offices clearly suck. So why are you (most likely) still working in one? Behind all the fluff, there is a simple explanation: they save insane amounts of money.

In the beginning, there was a lot of talk about open offices producing more collaborative environments, and I'm willing to give this charitable credence and believe that some people might really have thought that at the time. It was an emerging idea and the complete ramifications were not really understood.

These days though, I don't think anyone ingenuous would defend that idea anymore — it's all about money, and this is doubly so in dense tech hot spots like San Francisco where real estate commands a huge premium.

My large company is entirely open office, and has even been known to downsize standard desk size in order to get more of them into the same area. It's annoying, and there's no question that it creates a large productivity tax (desks are packed tightly enough that even a small group of people having a conversation at normal voice levels three rows over is pretty disrupting), but it mostly works, and giving everyone their own office in our central location would be pretty much financially infeasible. You learn to start working around it as best you can with sound insulating headphones, working from home where possible, or even reserving the occasional meeting room when you can.

I find some comedy in the fact that my parent's generation used to complain non-stop about being ousted form their offices and into cubicle farms. These days, my generation would kill for cubicles. Even a couple drawers to store a few personal items are a fantasy at this point.

A VP at my fast growing and profitable Fortune 500 publicly ridiculed my proposal to let our smallish engineering team geek in empty, unused offices in the building, on grounds that the office was not a library. He was kicked upstairs and to another division, bless him.

I have basically given up on finding a job that would give me an office with a door that closes. I think it's much more likely that I could find a remote job. If I ask for an onsite office I would basically be laughed at or thought of as a prima donna.

However, don't discount the fact that other people exist that, gasp, actually like open-plan offices. Like myself! I'm one of those more sociable engineer types and I love the open plan bullpen at my current company, I love the bantering and conversations we have there, and I love that due to our social nature we have built a really cohesive TEAM that likes each other and supports each other. The atmosphere, friendliness, and fun, simply wouldn't be as great if we were all in cubicles or separate offices.

So now you have my anecdote too, which is of course not science. But I know there are plenty of others like me (unless I'm some sort of engineer unique snowflake out of the millions out there, which seems unlikely).

Instead of simply condemning "open-plan" as the "worst," why not try and understand why it works and helps some people and teams and why some others don't seem to like it. Maybe it's personality dependent, maybe it depends on the exact size of the open-plan area, there are hundreds of other factors that could make a difference here.

Yes pretty much. It's disappointing that companies cannot be honest with their employees and just say that simply. People can understand price per sq. foot, it's not inverting binary trees or building rockets.

But when they are told stuff like "We can _all_ collaborate better! Look at all this (busy) work happening!". It insults people's intelligence. It's like giving a kid who doesn't like potatoes, carrots and telling them they are just orange potatoes. Yes, I have tried that with my 2 year old and it works great. But doing it with engineers who you trust to build your product is just crazy.

It's such a massive perk I have no second thoughts about turning down jobs with a considerably higher salary. It helps that commute time and expenses are zero. Commute is essentially unpaid, unproductive labour; it's not your free time, it's something you do for the sake of your employer, and you don't get anything done except translate your corpse.

Think about how trends evolve over time and how long it takes larger companies to "catch up". The planning/facilities groups are still high-fiveing from the major work it took to spin up open layouts, ignoring the growing evidence that it was the wrong direction.

And completely opening and shoving people in like cattle is way easier than "well-planned open" (as mentioned in other comments), or even closed offices.

They're not about to embark on an expensive complicated project until it's unavoidable.

Will be years if ever.

Where I worked before I fought tooth and nail to get an office, by the time I was leaving I had the smallest office in the building crammed in with 2 others, while other (non-developers) had offices twice as big all for themselves.

Management wanted to cram 10 people into an office space the size of the office for the boss. HR put a stop to that plan luckily.

Tech support has a cubicle layout, but they are big cubes and assigned to each person. There's no sharing even across shifts.

In other departments, each team has a "pod". You enter through a swinging door from the hallway into the pod. Inside, you find a conference room with conference table, whiteboard, and TV for shared viewing of code, project boards, or presentations. Around the conference room are individual offices, up to ten or so of them, mostly with sliding doors. A few offices have swinging doors. The offices are big enough for a desk, filing cabinet, bookcase, and a visitor's chair or a small couch/futon. Not every office is on the outside of the building, but they all have windows at the top to get at least some reflected natural daylight.

There are bigger conference rooms for bigger meetings, but a team can meet whenever without going searching for a room. They can have a hack session together or pair program right there in the pod. There's a break room on each floor. Besides drinks and snacks, the break rooms have power outlets, bar-style seating counters, tables, chairs for both heights, and great wifi coverage for anyone who wants to work in a more open environment or catch more hallway chatter.

Yes, the company had to expressly ask the architects for this layout. Yes, the architects originally thought our management was crazy. From what I've heard now the architecture firm has office pods and promotes the idea for their other clients.

Management also specified mostly redundant hospital-grade air handling systems that turn over the air in the building several times per day. We get not just minimum and maximum temperatures and humidity monitored and handled, but oxygen/carbon dioxide balance, too. There's no more drowsy afternoon mental fog from a literal lack of oxygen which many offices suffer.

The last time I interviewed with some Bay area companies, they tried to convince me that there are enough conference rooms to just duck into to get some peace and quiet. That, I think, defeats whatever purpose beyond being cheap that open offices are supposed to serve. I also think if you have enough extra rooms that are never booked that people can do this, you might as well put teams in those rooms instead of in a corral.

I like to think of my college library, areas open and no noise restrictions. Other areas closed off/private for hard focus. Some private rooms for group meetings, private rooms for individual work.

Mobile technology has been a great thing, offering all that extra flexibility

The tension is not realizing that difference.

No wonder I quit and started my own firm. I get hives just thinking about that.

One problem with offices is that it gets territorial. People get their office then its really difficult to move. Some offices have a better view or more/less sun. Do you take turns or goes to most experienced or senior person on the team? It becomes political and ripe for stupid games.

It's kind of the degenerate transition point between open-plan and a traditional office.

We all know by now why open-plan offices dominate. Cost. We don't need to belabor the point.

This specific article is particularly annoying:

> The reasoning behind the idea of an open office is simple and makes sense in theory: fewer physical barriers – more communication and collaboration.

The author knows damn well that isn't the case. The way he presents this false statement is annoying af. It's not setup as a false assumption to be torn down (which he proceeds to do), it's setup as an actually true statement. It's insulting to the reader because, nobody is so misinformed at this point in the game.

He then goes on to speak from a position of authority on the history of the open office plan, which of course he gets wrong. Wilkinson didn't create an open office for Google, he created glass-walled cubes.

Of course, the follow-on argument is typically "but we can't find enough sq ft of office space in one location!" to which I say: hundreds of businesses do this every day, what makes you special? Stop making excuses and invest in your assets.

The impact on productivity also depends on the type of work. I suspect it's a net loss in the long run for things that require or benefit from deep work.

I think it’s pretty obvious that you could have a hybrid approach where you have open areas for collaborating as well as a lot of private booths or rooms for people who actually need to get things done. But of course that wouldn’t be cheap..

    “Not every programmer in the world wants to work in a private office. In fact quite a few would tell you unequivocally that they prefer the camaraderie and easy information sharing of an open space. Don’t fall for it. They also want M&Ms for breakfast and a pony. Open space is fun but not productive.”

    — Joel Spolsky, co-founder of Trello and CEO of Stack Overflow

My company had an open plan warehouse in it's building before we went full remote. We had "break-out" rooms where we could work privately in an office. Some days people would work in them, I personally claimed one for myself to work permanently. Everyone else seemed to enjoy the open plan, I however, could not.

>...The design of the research was simple but incredibly clever. Study two Fortune 500 companies planning to make a switch to open-plan offices and compare how employees interact both before and after the new office design.

>To do this, Harvard researchers Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban had 150 participating employees wear a gizmo called a sociometric badge. For three weeks before and after the redesign it recorded wearers' movement, location, posture and, via infrared and sound sensors, their every conversation with colleagues. The researchers also reviewed the number of text messages and emails subjects sent during the test period.

>The results have just been published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. What did they show? In short, as walls came down, so did the number of interactions among co-workers. Simultaneously, the number of emails and text messages shot up.

>"Overall, face-to-face time decreased by around 70 percent across the participating employees, on average, with email use increasing by between 22 percent and 50 percent (depending on the estimation method used)," says the British Psychological Society Research Digest blog, summing up the results.

https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/new-harvard-study-you-o...

>..A study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology of more than 40,000 workers in 300 US office buildings: "...Enclosed private offices clearly outperformed open-plan layouts in most aspects of IEQ (Indoor Environmental Quality), particularly in acoustics, privacy and the proxemics issues. Benefits of enhanced 'ease of interaction' were smaller than the penalties of increased noise level and decreased privacy resulting from open-plan office configuration."

https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/science-just-proved-that-...

An article in the New Yorker summarizes some research on open offices. Besides the effects on productivity, there are also health effects. For example:

>...In a recent study of more than twenty-four hundred employees in Denmark, Jan Pejtersen and his colleagues found that as the number of people working in a single room went up, the number of employees who took sick leave increased apace.

>...In laboratory settings, noise has been repeatedly tied to reduced cognitive performance. The psychologist Nick Perham, who studies the effect of sound on how we think, has found that office commotion impairs workers’ ability to recall information, and even to do basic arithmetic. Listening to music to block out the office intrusion doesn’t help: even that, Perham found, impairs our mental acuity. Exposure to noise in an office may also take a toll on the health of employees. In a study by the Cornell University psychologists Gary Evans and Dana Johnson, clerical workers who were exposed to open-office noise for three hours had increased levels of epinephrine—a hormone that we often call adrenaline, associated with the so-called fight-or-flight response.

https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-open-office-...