I always thought open offices became popular because it was literally the cheapest set up for facilities. For startups it worked because all you had to buy was desks. Somehow that got spun in to 'open offices are so sexy!'
Open offices are horrible for productivity imo. Moved to a job with an office and it is so. much. better.
I worked for a "start-up" (if you can call a 15-year old company that was bought by a VC company a start-up) where the CEO was CONVINCED that open offices were the best thing ever. He made our content people write articles about how great they were and how much better they made our company than other companies in our field. One of our content people was like "this is the worst assignment ever, because it is literally impossible to find research that says open offices make you more productive."
To top that off, he used to talk to people across the office using a megaphone. I was over 100 feet away from him, and people I was on the phone with would ask me what was going on, "Is everything all right over there? Is somebody swearing?"
"Yeah, uh, that's just our CEO."
I don't work there anymore.
My productivity fell off a cliff at my new job when I got promoted and moved to a "nicer" desk. The desk probably has three times as much area as my old desk, but my old desk was in the back corner of an office that was split in half with a partition. I could work for hours without being interrupted. Now I'm in a cubicle right by a door, and I'm interrupted several times per hour. I think open offices just feel more productive -- more than one coworker has mentioned how great it is that they can drop by now without feeling like they are interrupting me.
The efficiency gain with open offices is that, for high-growth companies -- or ones that are uncertain about their long-term size, it's pretty easy to shuffle furniture around to squeeze in more people. When walls and doors get involved, you're committing to "each person gets X sq. ft", for a company that may grow from x to 2x employees.
Often teams that go from X to 2X end up getting less stuff done. There is an argument that startups should grow as fast as possible to pre-pay that debt, but getting less stuff done while burning 2+x the money is only seen as a good idea in SV.
And that possibility is worth more than letting people get work done? I mean, if people don't get enough work done, you're never going to get to the point where you need to shuffle things around.
They'll get the work done, at the expense of their sanity.
Also, market inefficiency works here too, I think - it can take years before a company tanks. So productivity drop can go unnoticed forever (even when a company fails, there will be enough other factors to blame). Not to mention that marketing can successfully paper over all kinds of crap; mediocre is the standard in our industry.
The Joel Test is sort of incorporated into Stack Overflow Jobs (previously Careers) in that a company has the option to include the results of their Joel Test when posting an ad on the site. However, there's no obvious way (at least that I could see) for a candidate to search for jobs that meet specific criteria in the test.
Also, the exact wording for the office part of the test is "Do programmers have quiet working conditions?" This usually means that working conditions might possibly be quiet if nobody else happened to be in the office at the same time as you. While many claim quiet working conditions, I've never seen one that actually provided private offices.
This is anecdotal of course, and just based on looking at photographs they've included on their website or Stack Overflow page, but every job I've viewed recently appears to have an open plan office. In some of the photos you even see people standing around having impromptu meetings in the middle of a group of desks where others are trying to work.
Remember this is just the companies that are actually claiming to provide programmers with quiet working conditions. I can't imagine what the noisy ones are like.
Yes, Stack Overflow Jobs does have the opportunity for employers to include their Joel Test score (including line items, not just the overall number) at the bottom of their postings.
I agree with you here. I also believe that a lot of the current design trends in new spaces these days has this same origin. Light bulbs hanging by a cord, reclaimed wood walls and ceilings, keeping raw pipes, wires exposed etc. It does look kind of cool, but the genesis was small businesses and spaces just trying to save money.
I've worked in an office like that; they had the audacity to make us work in an office with a broken concrete floor (with electrical guide pipes showing), open ceiling with the aircon dripping on my desk, and plywood walls, and call it "industrial design". At least be honest and say it's a temporary design because the whole floor will be repurposed within two years.
As a counterpoint though, another office also went for industrial design, but they did it stylishly - just one visible aircon pipe, and instead of raw concrete, they sprayed it with a kind of foam or fiber that absorbs a lot of sound, in a somewhat dark color. That office has a beer tap, too.
Individual productivity or team productivity? If you are optimizing for individual productivity - you could be hitting a local maxima...
I do say the above in half-jest: I would love to see any research done in this area. When I was a new joiner, it was convenient to swivel around/walk across the room and talk to someone. Sure, it sucks now that I'm an old hand and noobs keep taking me out of the zone. In addition, it is sometimes beneficial to listen in on ambient conversations (while waiting for compilation or taking a break), sometimes I even chip in when I have a contribution (roughly once a month). I'd like to think this saves my colleagues time. However, I work in a medium sized room (which houses 18 desks), so YMMV.
> Individual productivity or team productivity? If you are optimizing for individual productivity - you could be hitting a local maxima...
Forum discussions like this one seem to be all about individual productivity. In my experience, open offices are really great for ad hoc collaboration and conversation. To combat interruptions, individual developers can easily take steps to not be interrupted when they are doing something that can't be interrupted. But tbh I don't spend 8 hours a day in such a way that I should never be interrupted as a rule. If anything, I like that my teammates feel comfortable to walk over to my desk (or, more commonly, IM me "are you free?" and then walk over) and talk as a default. A lot is gained when people are quick to ask others when they are stuck since that's often the quickest solution to getting unblocked.
All that "collaboration and conversation" lets your team combined productivity asymptoticaly approach the productivity of single developer in a quiet, private office :)
> If anything, I like that my teammates feel comfortable to walk over to my desk (or, more commonly, IM me "are you free?" and then walk over) and talk as a default.
They remind me of new York offices, like law offices with rows of paralegal looking through documents spread on endless tables.
It's something that was a financial necessity in expensive real estate, like Manhattan, FinDi in SF, etc. and someone got the idea to transplant that into suburban offices.
To add, I think it makes sense for a lean startup or a company going through a rough reorg, but once you're mature or overcome financial difficulties, it's not necessarily a good permanent layout.
I tend to agree. I think the whole part about "the absence of cubicles will foster creativity and productivity" was just spin used after the fact to justify this choice.
The other reason I think they are used is that they are cheap to reconfigure, you can usually shove more desks in to accommodate more head count and move groups around in order to try to reclaim the ever-shrinking space.
I have worked at startup where my group was moved every few months for some reason. Often times the layout seems to lack any alignment with job requirements.
For instances developers being place right next to marketing folks who spend a lot of time talking on the phone because that's what their job entails.
> That's why we have them... we literally can't afford to give everyone (or anyone for that matter) a private office.
You know, if a prospective employer was straight up with me about that, I'd give it serious consideration. I can understand that not every company can afford an endless supply of private offices in urban areas (although obviously this is not the case with companies like FB).
What bugs me the most about the open office fetish is how it causes productivity to plummet for most developers, at the same time the leadership is spouting off on how great it is for productivity. I mean, as that goofy reality judge said, don't piss on my shoes and tell me it's raining.
It's tempting to ask "leadership" "If it's so great for productivity, why doesn't leadership/management forego their private offices and sit in the middle of the open office floor plan?"
Epic Systems has a private office for each of their 9,000+ employees. Their campus is outside Madison, WI, so it's cheaper to do that there then it would be elsewhere. Private offices don't have to be large. I'm sure the money for private offices would appear if companies were sufficiently motivated to provide them.
I don't know if Epic is a private office nirvana for each of their employees, but to be fair, it does sound like the majority do have a private office. I only live in the area and hear stuff second- and third-hand, but I gather an increasing number of Epic employees are assigned to shared offices. The Boston Globe's glowing commentary on the campus concurs:
"Most employees have a private office; some share one with a colleague."
I've heard the same thing. From what I understand, the issue is that Epic is growing faster than buildings can be built. Regardless, while a shared office is worse than a private office, it's way better than almost any other option. I've worked in a shared office with a partition, a cubicle farm, and an open office, and the shared office was the best work environment by a huge margin.
Real estate is also really expensive. I can easily believe that if a company really went for it and tried to give private offices to several hundred engineers, the cost would start rivaling that of salaries.
This makes sense in context of the article. The article states Facebook pays 40-50% more. They've converted (some of) the savings from open office planning to higher salaries for their hires, making the company more attractive for job seekers.
* Look good in photo ops and publicity: "Look how much everyone is working together _all the time_. So much activity happening! We are not like those places with loners and antisocial people hiding in cubicles"
* Cubicles were used to be associated with boring, slow bureaucratic offices.
Those 4 things conspire to make them more popular. I think it is simpler a function of them being cheaper in general and everything else is just justification. But in case Facebook, can't imagine they don't have the money...
Well I am glad this is changing though. There seems to be a backlash against open offices lately.
> Cubicles were used to be associated with boring, slow bureaucratic offices.
Honestly, I'd rather work in a "boring, slow bureaucratic office" than at some hip modern startup. The "boring, slow bureaucratic office" probably takes better care of their employees and offers a less-stressful work environment.
It also keeps people working longer than maybe they want to. I've heard from several folks in one of our more open areas (15-20 people) that it's awkward to leave at the usual end of shift time because they have to walk across a room filled with people still grinding away.
The philosopher Michel Foucault actually cites the Panopticon alongside school, military, papal, and other work power structures as being efficient in human discipline.
It arguably worked well for prison power structure too with regards to rehabilitation, until gang infiltration in the late 1960's changed the power status quo.
>Is the idea to figure out who's not working and then Eliminate Them?
Not at all - Foucault looked at discipline in the sense of humans being molded to become skilled and efficient at work - observing everything from monks to boarding schools in an effort to analyze power structures for discipline.
With panopticon, the power model is the all seeing eye, which is necessary to scale to so many prison inmates. With the open office structure, the power structure is more with your work peers, which is more similar to the group/tribal type of power structure.
I've worked most of my career in cube farm configurations and had little reason to complain. At my last job of 15 years, the 26 yr old newly appointed manager announced that we were moving to 'an open, war room atmosphere'. Exit imminent, fortunately I ended up working from home. Privacy, natural light, open ended schedule to be productive. Best thing to ever happen to me
Cafes offer an odd sort of privacy since none of the conversations mean anything to you - effectively white noise - so they're easy to filter out. In an open office, every conversation may apply to you at any point during the conversation, requiring conscious effort to monitor and filter the conversation.
This. It's the otheredness of the conversations which happen at a cafe that makes it work. If you found yourself at a cafe sitting next to, say, the co-worker you can't stand, the director you've heard is trying to kill your project, an ex-partner and their new partner, I suspect the scene could get quite distracting rather quickly.
That's why you never date your co-worker. And if you couldn't help it and fell in love then you should quit your job first and ask him/her on date later.
My point was that an ex-partner, regardless of co-worker status, is a distraction. Having to encounter one at work all the more so, yes, but that wasn't what I was limiting my example to.
So much this. I want to wear my headphones to focus, but at the same time I never know when they're talking about a project behind me that might pertain to what I'm doing....which happens a lot because of our fairly open setup.
Other people at the cafe, I don't care what they're talking about. And it's away from home where I might have other distractions.
Because nobody is tapping you on the shoulder every 10 minutes asking "did you get the email I just sent out?". You also don't see long multi-person meetings in coffee shops (well, actually it does happen, and that's just as annoying).
If you could train coworkers to respect the explicit and implicit signals that people give off when working and concentrating on something and use some fucking etiquette like keeping the shouting to a minimum or taking long conversations elsewhere, this wouldn't be a problem.
I too loathe the disruptiveness of my employer's open office plan, but have found I can easily focus in a cafe. In part, I suspect this stems from mentally being able to classify cafe conversations as "ignorable noise of strangers", whereas in the office, any conversation I hear both comes from a familiar voice and is likely related to the work at hand. Some portion of my mind inevitably tunes-in to these cues.
Libraries and study areas are more representative of what people need to concentrate.
I expect the cafe is more akin to white noise, not the sort of conversations you'd hear in a dev open office. Sometimes when you overhear some devs talking you can't help get sucked into the conversation. Especially when they are wrong.
I read this sentiment often in these discussions. It isn't true for me, however. I can't not pay attention to conversations or noises around me. Sometimes I can't even focus on someone talking directly to me in those kind of environments.
I actually find most open office environments to be better than cafes. Cafes tend to be very loud, have lots of movement, and I get distracted by people slurping their coffee, munching on food, etc. I've also noticed people at cafes who talk on the phone talk much louder than I've experienced people talking on the phone in open offices.
I much prefer the library setting where you're expected to be quiet and there is little movement around you.
What are the alternatives to open offices for companies with hundreds or thousands of developers? Do you have offices with dozens of people split up by team?
I've been to the AWS headquarters in Seattle and I think that's what their setup is like but I didn't get too much of a chance to look around.
I've worked on systems administrations teams that had their own office and being able to close the door was awesome.
I worked for a company which had one office for every two employees, with a total number of employees around 1,500. It wasn't that hard; it was still a campus, it just took an extra building to house everyone.
So many open office plans leave enough floor space for walls and hallways; they just don't put them in place.
Amazon generally has team aisles with 7 (iirc) foot walls between teams which blocked out most conversations from neighbouring teams and desks placed against 4-5 foot walls breaking up the aisle into sections. Each aisle had a window at the far end from the hallway and meeting rooms, bathrooms, office supplies, etc. were in the middle of the floor.
A much nicer setup IMO than Google which had a fairly haphazard cube farm resulting in distance from a window being basically luck of the draw.
> What are the alternatives to open offices for companies with hundreds or thousands of developers? Do you have offices with dozens of people split up by team?
Offices. Team Rooms. Decent cubicles.
Microsoft has offices for developers. Even they are somewhat jumping on the Open Office bandwagon (or team rooms).
> One does not have to be an especially perceptive critic to realize that AO II is definitely not a system which produces an environment gratifying for people in general. But it is admirable for planners looking for ways of cramming in a maximum number of bodies, for "employees" (as against individuals), for "personnel," corporate zombies, the walking dead, the silent majority. A large market.
