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The Open Office Is Destroying the Workplace
HughPickens.com writes: Lindsey Kaufman reports in the WaPo that despite its obvious problems, the open-office model has continued to encroach on workers across the country, with about 70 percent of U.S. offices having no or low partitions. Silicon Valley has led the way — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg enlisted famed architect Frank Gehry to design the largest open floor plan in the world, housing nearly 3,000 engineers within a single room that stretches 10 acres. Michael Bloomberg was another early adopter of the open-space trend, saying it promoted transparency and fairness. Bosses love the ability to keep a closer eye on their employees, ensuring clandestine porn-watching, constant social media-browsing and unlimited personal cellphone use isn't occupying billing hours.
But according to Kaufman, employers are getting a false sense of improved productivity. A 2013 study showed many workers in open offices are frustrated by distractions that lead to poorer work performance. Nearly half of the surveyed workers in open offices said the lack of sound privacy was a significant problem, and more than 30 percent complained about the lack of visual privacy. The New Yorker, in a review of research on this nouveau workplace design, determined that the benefits in building camaraderie simply mask the negative effects on work performance.
While employees feel like they're part of a laid-back, innovative enterprise, the environment ultimately damages workers' attention spans, productivity, creative thinking, and satisfaction says Kaufman. "Though multitasking millennials seem to be more open to distraction as a workplace norm, the wholehearted embrace of open offices may be ingraining a cycle of underperformance in their generation," writes Maria Konnikova. "They enjoy, build, and proselytize for open offices, but may also suffer the most from them in the long run."
But according to Kaufman, employers are getting a false sense of improved productivity. A 2013 study showed many workers in open offices are frustrated by distractions that lead to poorer work performance. Nearly half of the surveyed workers in open offices said the lack of sound privacy was a significant problem, and more than 30 percent complained about the lack of visual privacy. The New Yorker, in a review of research on this nouveau workplace design, determined that the benefits in building camaraderie simply mask the negative effects on work performance.
While employees feel like they're part of a laid-back, innovative enterprise, the environment ultimately damages workers' attention spans, productivity, creative thinking, and satisfaction says Kaufman. "Though multitasking millennials seem to be more open to distraction as a workplace norm, the wholehearted embrace of open offices may be ingraining a cycle of underperformance in their generation," writes Maria Konnikova. "They enjoy, build, and proselytize for open offices, but may also suffer the most from them in the long run."
The "open office" is just cost-reduction masquerading as some sort of innovation.
It's the march towards ever less expenses to allow more profit to funnel to the few.
And the many embrace it. The few have managed to get the many to embrace their own destruction.
Mostly random stuff.
Managers have no confidence in themselves-- they know they are incompetent at motivating people so they have to resort to big-brother intimidation techniques and vacuous pep rallys with inane slogans and sports metaphors. It then becomes self-fulfilling for the most part, you get what you pay for...
Constant noise and distraction, getting interrupted 1000 times by co-workers. It leads to starting some tasks over and over and forgetting about others.
Bad idea, created by "Twitter Generation"
*uninstalls OpenOffice and installs a crazy outdated version of StarOffice*
Peter Gibbons: Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door - that way Lumbergh can't see me, heh heh - and, uh, after that I just sorta space out for about an hour.
Bob Porter: Da-uh? Space out?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah, I just stare at my desk; but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
I had a programming job in an open office with the boss on the phone faking jovial, garrulous laughter in sales calls all day long when he wasn't coming over to refocus our efforts many times a day and ask how long that would take.
Needless to say, I got more productive development done (on my hobby project/next business) in the private office of the back seat of the bus for half hour in the morning and evening. A bus can be noisy (and you have to hang on to your laptop for fear of sudden stops), but it beats the open plan office by a long shot anyday.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Besides the distracting perpetual background noise, the feeling of being constantly on display is fairly unnerving.
Web browsing on company time is a self correcting problem. It's accepted (at least where I work) that quick breaks throughout the day are almost a necessity. I usually do so when I get hung up or frustrated by something. A quick glance through any one of several sites I frequent gives my brain a break, and then I find I can get back at it. People who abuse this excessively become less productive.
You don't need an open office to notice the guys who arn't pulling their weight. Whether it's because they are on facebook all day, or because they just arn't very good doesn't matter much. If they are still doing an appropriate amount of work for their grade, they'll probably stay on anyway but their career is going nowhere. If they arn't, they're probably out the door sooner or later. Ultimately the first performance enhancement meeting (not making that up) is usually a wakeup call.
... such as when working remotely or in a place away from distraction. It allows me to prioritize tasks that I need to accomplish vs tasks someone else wants me to do for something they need to accomplish. Mostly though my work is autonomous in nature and doesn't require a whole lot of collaboration. I can see how the open office is essential for teams where work is accomplished in a real time collaborative effort. I hear rumours my employer will soon move to the open office model, would be interestin to see how productivity is affected, for me personally and for the organization as a whole.
15 years ago the president of the company was all "This is the future! Ad hoc meetings when necessary everyone shuts up and does their work otherwise!"
Now it's incessant screaming over each other at the phone as people are trying to conference call, speaker phone call, crack up at jokes and argue with each other while trying to be louder than everyone else. And the president comes and paces back and forth behind me for minutes on end before I finally crack and ask him what he wants.
I didn't think our open office was that bad, but now that so many people are gone for the holidays, I found myself telling people how much more productive I have been. I think having less distractions would definitely help me get more done...
I was scrum master of a couple of teams and when the company moved, we designed the new office so that (open your imagination):
1- Cubicles were arranged in groups of 4, like a square with each person facing a corner. An extra chair for visitors.
2- Since scrum groups were about 8-12 people large, cubicle groups for the team were clustered close-by.
3- Depending on the number of attendees, Scrum meeting would be held in one cubicle or a conference room.
4- All cubicle walls were half-height.
5- It wasn't a big company, so the main walking path accessed every cubicle. And it was easy to raise our heads to see what was going on. An IM, a quick phone call, or a short walk was all that was needed to communicate with anyone.
(too bad I can't draw even in ASCII ;) )
That way, people worked in a sort of open office without too many distractions. Also, I thought it helped to create a sort of team spirit.
Just my 2c!
The cube farm was invented as response to the problems of the open office. Now the pendulum is swinging the other way and people wonder why problems are cropping up?
The office cubicle was created by designer Robert Propst for Herman Miller, and released in 1967 under the name "Action Office II". Although cubicles are often seen as being symbolic of work in a modern office setting due to their uniformity and blandness, they afford the employee a greater degree of privacy and personalization than in previous work environments, which often consisted of desks lined up in rows within an open room.
Cubicle
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
"Though multitasking millennials seem to be more open to distraction as a workplace norm.
More open to distraction, sure, but not more productive because of it. The brain just doesn't work that way.
At what point does a bad office layout drive you to seek new employment? It might seem ridiculous at first cut, but if you work in a terrible office, it really drags on you. And, better yet, how does one find out at a new job exactly what the work environment is like? Interviews are not usually done near the cube farm. Do you ask to see an example section of the building?
open offices can be quite productive & they are more humane
I think one of these would be helpful in an open work space.
Surprisingly there is not a one size fits all solution for laying out peoples work environments!
Believe it or not there are some jobs where open plan offices are significantly better than cube farms or closed personal offices. And there are jobs where half way setups, ie small open plan offices of teams work better than large spaces or singular offices.
If you are in a sales role then open plan works a large amount of the time. If you are in a role where you are primarily focussed on your screen and writing something then smaller offices tend to work better.
If you can realise that not everyone's job is even similar, let alone the same, you will be able to understand that different layout will suit some more than others.
Kill me with a rusty spoon...
I am absolutely fed up with the... what's it now? 3 year cycle? of what's productive?
I work in a 12 floor building with 3 wings. I've been on every floor of every wing.
Before this I worked for a much much bigger company that had 2 wings but only 1 floor. I sware to god I sat in every cube in that building for at least a week.
STOP MOVING ME
I don't care how tall my cube is, or how much privacy there is. I guarantee that, no matter where you sit me I'll be between that 70yr old dude that needs to stop by 3x per day to tell me how things weren't this bad back when he did Cobol... and by that kid that's an intern that refused to admit that Ruby on Rails isn't new and poised to take over the world. Just stop, I don't want to move anymore. I literally keep a red flag over my desk so the people that need to find me can find me. I just tell them the floor, they stand on their tippy toes and... oh... there's Charlie!!! That's ridiculous. I don't care where I sit, just stop changing where I sit!!! Preferably place be half way between the Coffee/Soda and the bathroom but otherwise I have no preference.
Is what employers get by using open office arrangements.... They want CONTROL, check that productivity level by OVERSEEING their "property", the worker... What the get instead is a mass of underpaid, brain dead slaves that SIMPLY CANNOT PERFORM EFFICIENTLY. If there is noise, visual distractions and plain INEFFICIENCY caused by some idiot who still thinks open offices are any good at ANYTHING at all....!
Lack of partitions is a dealbreaker for me. I will not work in a space where everyone sees everyone all the time and there is no private space. Period. I will not work on an open floor plan.
I'm not asking for my own office with a door that closes. I've never had that, and I don't expect it. I understand that I'm at work and that I have no real expectation of privacy. But we're all human, and I'm not comfortable sitting around where anyone can see what I'm doing at all times. Maybe I'm reading Slashdot for a few minutes, maybe I'm on StackExchange asking or answering something work-related, maybe I'm checking my personal email. Maybe I'm reading a white paper from a vendor, with my arm propped up on the desk while I gradually scroll through. As long as my work is being done and my employer is happy, there's no reason the rest of the floor should have a view of me, or vice versa.
Believe it or not, there's a happy medium. Partitions. Cubicles. They were implemented for a reason. I need some walls that extend several feet above my seated position and on all sides, which give me enough privacy to disregard the rest of the office for awhile. I'm never going to absorb a 30-page protocol spec if I'm exposed to every motion of everyone else around me. That's distracting. I have to have a bit of isolation in order to concentrate. I can mentally tune out things like telephones ringing, coworkers talking, etc. but in order to be truly productive, I need my cube partitions. I don't work in a restaurant, I don't want my workplace to resemble a restaurant.
This isn't about browsing porn at work, or spending all day on social media. I have no trouble with my company logging everything I do; I'm at work, after all. I just need some personal space to do what I'm paid for. I will not work on a big glass floor.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
As an enginner my ideal work environment would consist of communal spaces were you can talk and interact with other people to brainstorm and review ideas. Kind of like a coffee shop vibe with whiteboards and projectors or TV's where you can share your screen. Then also have places similar to quiet study rooms at college where you can hide away when you really need to focus on detailed tasks. I run relativly resource intensive CAD software and it easily runs these days on a $2k laptop. Any intensive FEA gets sent to a cluster anyway.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Every time I read an article that mentions Zuckerberg I know it is going to contain some idea, process or plan I am going to hate. Zuck is the worst possible CEO to have so much power which we know translates to the tech industry following his lead and also legislation. It is dbags like the Zuckerbergs that make me want to get out of tech since with people following their lead things are only going to get worse for the rest of us.
I've seen "open office" done well, and I've seen it done badly.
Where I work currently is the latter. There are low partitions, low enough to see over if you crane your neck up without actually standing up. There's music playing all the time, and people routinely call out to each other and have noisy, distracting conversations right there in the office. Morale is middling, but productivity is pants.
Ten years ago, I worked in a very different version. There were no partitions at all - the only things between me and the guy opposite were my monitor, and his. There was no sense of shoulder-surfing: if I wanted to spend whole days goofing off to read websites, that was up to me, and I never felt I had to conceal what I was doing - everyone knew I still had work to do, so precisely when and how I chose to do it was none of their business. And most importantly, there was a rigid code of near-total silence in the workplace. If I wanted to talk to the guy next to me, I tapped him on the shoulder and pointed to a meeting room. (Or we'd go to a pub, or a coffee shop, or whatever. And nobody would clock the time we spent there, either.) Morale was high, and the amount of work that got done was insane.
Every study ever done, every paper written by smart and productive people, says that knowledge workers need private spaces for concentration, and separate conference spaces for conferencing. The wide-open "collaborate all day" space sounds like hanging around the water cooler all day. At the cube farm I'm in now, I have a 7-foot wall between me and a main corridor; but people stop in the corridor junction and schmooze to the point that I can't hear myself think.
I worked at one place where the VP brought in Tim Lister for a 2-day "boot camp" seminar, and insisted that a new building have 1- or 2-person offices for engineering (no bigger than a typical cubicle or two, but an enclosed office!) (with common lab areas for test equipment). Heck, the accounting department and legal department and HR all got private offices (bigger ones) - why not the people doing the work that brought in money?
when I worked at Box in Los Altos a few years ago they had an open plan. lots of noise and hustle and bustle.
what a disaster!!! I could never concentrate. definitely never did any good work. every 20 seconds CLANG!!! what the fuck was I working on again?!?
also the (nearby) IT department would blast music during the day. it's really fun hearing Danger Zone and Daft Punk over and over.
each floor had a few little offices with doors, and other "collaborative lounge" spaces, but they were all in use all the time, for meetings and people trying to get work done...
so glad I am not in that environment any more.
We went from a mixed layout office that had grown up organically as the company grew, to a cube farm with offices for managers and a couple of meeting rooms. I appreciate the cubes when I'm head down, coding, and don't want to see someone walking by when I'm in the zone. That being said, I miss the open floor plan for our dept, which let us collaborate very easily and pair up for tasks.
I don't think having having a huge open floor plan for all depts (or maybe even teams, we aren't that big) would necessarily work, since different depts/teams have different personalities or work styles. For instance, in the cube farm, the member services dept was moved away from us (we're IT/Dev), since they were loud on the phones and even through the cubes you'd hear conversations going on all day, which were impossible to tune out.Heaven help us if Sales had moved in or Customer Support.
IOW, figure out what works for your team/dept, but be flexible enough to understand when it's not practical.
It doesn't have to be all one way or another.
Last job as a bench tech, I'd finish the required work, then do my own projects.
The in shelves were empty, the out shelves were full, customers were happy,
but the boss let me go.
Now I can listen to Frank Zappa loud through speakers instead of quiet ear buds.
"I'm a happy guy now on the day shift at the utility muffin research kitchen,
arrogantly twisting the sterile canvas snoot of a fully-charged icing anointment utensil."
Go well
I can only assume that "retina cubicles" will soon be distributed among the staff. They only hurt if you struggle.
Scrums are nothing but a waste of time and an annoying micro-management tool created by people who need to pretend that they have control over a project.
I was lucky to only spend a small amount of my career dealing with the cube farm, in do computer research work.
Everyone used closed-ear headphones. In theory, people were listening to music, but many people including myself, used them regardless to both block sound and visually indicate to others "I can't hear you".
According to this most people work better with some amount of distractions
Currently I have my own office and each of my coworkers has their own. We each naturally work mostly with one or two other people through the day - the two graphic designers work together, etc. Some coworkers spend MOST of their time in their associate's office visiting^H^H^H^H collaborating. Other's less so, but it seems most of us feel the need to get out of our office and go see another human face at some point in the day.
I think I preferred the setup at my previous company, where two or three people were in a large office, with their backs to each other. Nobody was looking at you, and you didn't see anyone, until you turned to talk to them. I could focus on my work, and they on theirs, but they could also easily ask me a question, and I could notice when one of my people was having a rough day, or just just a stressful hour. We could focus on our work, but when one person was clearly getting stressed about stupid customers we could go for some frozen custard and come back 15 minutes later in a better mood.
Where I am now, my boss's office is next to mine. We office shout to one another rather than using instant messenger or getting out of our chair. It'd be easier if she was eight feet away at the other end of a large office. On the other hand, maybe I wouldn't want my boss in my office all the time - at my last company I WAS the boss. :)
Facebook is having privacy problems on all fronts apparently.
Each engineer had a desk. No deviders or walls.
All of the desks faced the same direction.
At the front of the room was a raised platform (about 1 foot high). On that platform sat the managers.
Four engineers shared one phone. That phone was on a swing arm that would swing in a circle above the four desks.
Oh, and I forgot. Your desk had to be completely bare when you left in the afternoon. And you do not want to be caught reading a newspaper anytime after the whistle blows at 8 AM.
Most Respectfully Yours Mark Allyn Bellingham, Washington
it was about saving money on office space. With the economy tanking and all signs pointing to things only getting worse for workers employers can dump on them as much as their want. Don't like it? Good luck finding a new job.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
If it's a large company, say Boeing, Lockheed, GE, etc, you often have several business units in a particular site. Those BUs often pay rent to the main office for their floor space. Open offices greatly reduces these charges back helping them meet their profit goals. Reduce it enough and they can knock down/rebuild some walls and get the extra building space classified at a lower tax rate. It's all about them saving money. You can't win this fight in this case unless people start leaving. But at this point you're just considered a replaceable widget anyway.
Doesn't everybody on /. use LibreOffice nowdays
We had that discussion at work today over that article. Several people pointed out they were far more productive alone, with the lights off, in a corner, than at their desk and that it proved the open floor plan was bad.
(We're talking software engineers)
My personal take is: almost anyone (who doesn't need babysitting) will be more productive alone in a distraction free area. That is, more productive doing the part of the job that a monkey can do. I can bang out thousands of lines of code very quickly if no one's bothering me, sure.
But here's the catch: that's not the hard part of the job. (almost) anyone could do that. The hard part is the design, architecture, problem solving. Most of the time, those are better done in group. They may seem worse sometimes: arguing feels counterproductive and a waste of time. But no one's perfect and no one knows everything, so being able to bounce off ideas from the person next to you at will can prevent million dollar mistakes. Once the problem is solved, and just typing code as quick as possible is the only thing left to do, sure, work from home if you want, but don't fool yourself that you're doing anything worth a lot.
Then, let's go with the assumption the above is not true: you're a god developer who never makes mistake and figures out everything on their own instantly. There's a lot of people who could use bouncing ideas off of YOU, who could discuss things with you, and may waste time, get blocked, or worse, make mistakes, if they can't get a hold of you in a timely manner. Sure, it will feel like you can't get anything done, but again, once the problem is solved, anyone can implement it: those "n00bs" that are pestering you will be able to do the easy part once they got the info they needed off of you.
And once an office reach a certain size, sending an email or an instant message then waiting 10 minutes so you can be in a good spot to answer adds up to a lot of wasted time. In the end, there's a reason some very successful businesses keep paying a fortune in engineer salaries in SF, Boston, NY or Seattle to keep a critical mass of devs together. There's no substitute and it can often be worth the insane markup.
Now there does come a time when you have to get the easy shit done, and there's a lot of easy shit to do. Library atmosphere sections in an office can take care of that. But if you're always there, or even if you're not but always have the noise cancelling headphones on because you're "OMG SO MUCH MORE PRODUCTIVE", you're honestly part of the problem. You're gonna look good in your yearly review, people may think you're fucking awesome. But as a small part of something bigger, you're just fucking everyone else over.
If I can't get the guy on my left to shut up, the guy on right won't shut up. The guy on my left pretends he's the boss, and must interrupt our work ever 10 minutes to ask a question, or he doesn't feel important. And he is NOT the boss. The guy on the left wants to talk about guns and ham radio.
I.. am... trying... to code / read a manual / deploy / or even, god forbid, eat lunch at my desk. Can you all PLEASE shut up? That's before all the walk-ups asking for help. File a ticket, stay in your seat, if I need to talk to you, I will come to you.
Oh, and there is a meeting room right on the left that people love to stand outside of and have a pre-meeting before their meeting...
And if you do manage to get to a tucked away quiet hidden corner, they bombard you with instant messages that the company makes you run.
Everyone... Shut. The. Hell. Up! Let me work on the things officially in my ticket queue!!!
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I bet if my workplace did this I could easily show how my ADD, combined with no way to visually exclude everyone, falls under the ADA and request specific accommodations. I work in a NOC though, so we're already kinda "open". I do have a cube upstairs, but I'm never actually in it. I think right now people have shoved various old desk chairs into it, the last time I cruised by there where four chairs in there, along with a note written on my whiteboard "I borrowed your screwdriver" from about 6 months ago. Oh, and print-outs of the "certificates" from our various required training. I sometimes use it to nap in, when I can't find an unlocked empty edge office...12 hour shifts make you do that after 3-4 of them in a row.
Well, maybe this might help? At least with this you can put on headphones and try to drown everyone else out: Ultimate Rain Sound Generator. I use it to take power naps all the time.
I can tell you how I react to prolonged social exposure without the ability to retreat. I get stressed out and snap at people. Sometimes I might even yell if I'm particularly stressed by some project and somebody is annoying me. I'm not normally like this at all. It's just very recently since my work environment has changed. I've never been one of those types of people, but suddenly I'm the office asshole though.
Having worked in both an "open" environment and a "closed" work environment, I would have have to say that I prefer the closed environment. However, most of the work that I do involves focusing on a "task." In my case I define "task" as doing research, writing, analyzing, formulating options. When I need to interact, I go to the person I want to talk to our grab a group to discuss in an open area. I can see the value of an "open" environment in a watch center environment or where the quick dissemination of shared information is important. When I need to focus, the open environment was horrible because there was not barrier to interruption. I think most open environments are setup backwards: The boss has a private area and the workers have privacy. I think a better model has the boss in an open area with the workers in private areas. That allows for a smooth flow information to the boss and the workers can concentrate on the assigned task.
Having an office or the ability to get one is incentive. I don't work well in a room full of people. I chose IT as a career largely because I don't like to work with people. I love server room stuff where my interactions with others is at a minimum. Having an office lets me get away from the noise, the gossip, the farting, the immature banter. I want to come into work, get my espressp from the cafe, retire to my small office, and fire up my terminal windows and work. Having a bunch of people talking would drive me mad.
I tried to google Open Office layouts, and they don't look too friendly to lots of whiteboards. How can anyone program without a bunch of whiteboards?
...management began converting standard cubicles to an open plan that looked more like picnic tables than workspace. They provided chairs, not benches,true. And most important, you booked your space on a daily or weekly basis. But the reasons:
- average actual occupancy in our building was 85%, and now have 65% more staff in the space.
A direct quote from a manager, two years after introduction, during an explanation of the benefits intended for other managers: "This was a pure real estate play for us". It's successful.
But it doesn't suit all workers
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I am a project manager that works at a company in the ecommerce software space.
The company had nice cubes when I started; When I interviewed, I was sitting in a glass-walled conference room and looking out at the cubes...they were small, about half the size of normal cubicles. I said to myself: "The working space gets smaller every year I'm in this industry".
I thought I may or may not be able to work in such a small working space...and that's when I noticed the name tag on one of the cubes...it was an Engineer whom had worked at a large real estate company (the largest real estate company in the U.S.) that I had, when I was supporting the company's J2ee "Skunkworks".
One morning, I had come into the office at this RE employer, and the entire IT department was going bananas due to some hacker performing full table scans of the listing DB through the public-facing real estate web portal. I had a lot of different hats at this RE company, and I was the "Webmaster" as one of my roles.
So I sat down with the log files and started grepping -- like all of you, I suck at regular expressions but somehow I was able to discover that the scans were coming from a bit of PERL code I was familiar with called 'Mech'. I can't remember exactly how I was able to tie that back to this guy's IP address, and I _really_ forget how I was able to find out the dude's name from those bits of information, but to make a long story short, in a few minutes I had his LinkedIn profile picture up on my screen. Turns out, the guy was a former Engineer at this RE company, and he had written a PERL program that accessed the public-facing RE portal site several times a night to pull down the real estate listings and then dumped them into a MySQL DB of his own that he then fashioned a front end for.
So basically, this programmer had his own searchable RE listings DB with every home for sale in Massachusetts on it...but his db differed from the public web portal in some important ways. If a listing was re-listed after being on the market and not selling, with a new MLS id, only _his_ private db would show that. This was priceless information for a home buyer.
I thought it was genius programming. So I wrote a memo to my PHB's, explaining what the code did, what happened, and who the guy was. I pointed out that he had not violated the "Hacker Ethos", and had not violated the terms of the EULA for the site. (I know, I know, I was naive).
Anyways, I'm in the interview room, interviewing for this PM job, looking at their shitty little cubes and I see this guy's name on one of the cube's name plates. I literally decided right there that if that stallion worked at this company, it was good enough for my chino-clad ass. I'll sit in a shitty little cube too.
Two months in, they trash the cubes and put us all in an open office with "Paddocks", basically bullpens with no cube walls. I was shocked, as when I am programming I hate distractions. Say what you will about M$, but they were famous for years and years back in the 80's and 90's for giving programmers offices with a door that closed.
Now everybody wears headphones all day long. When you go up to ask somebody a question, they have to take out their headphones and it a big deal like you're really bothering them. You can't talk to anybody because I hate interruppting programmers, especially with a question that they don't need to field. chino-clad PMs like me call it "Cognitive switching costs", blah blah blah.
They ruined the entire company with the open office. WFH increased tremendously. Some of the programmers claim to come in at 7:00am so they can leave at 3:30 - 4:00pm. They actually get in at 8:45am -- they just can't wait to get out of there.
It's a petric dish for sickness and ill health, and it is as noisy as an airport terminal. The PHBs are all still in offices, and it is common to hear them slamming doors all day long. Conference room access is tight as you can imagine, as everybody needs to have a few minutes to actually get some work
Are there any tech companies in the bay area with private offices? I have a private office now but not in Cali. Would be nice to know what's out there if I ever need to relocate.
Also, Glassdoor is shit. It can't be that hard to start a site where we can document working conditions and salary around the world and know who's getting fucked over and who's not.
Every manager I've questioned about the shortcomings of cubicles has said that it's good for intra-office communication and creative collaboration . . . before walking into their private office and shutting the door behind them. Even in an organization where they made a point that managers didn't have private offices (though, senior managers and executives, of course, still did) most of the managers camped out in the few small conference rooms where employees were supposed to be able to go for "spontaneous collaborative sessions."
I guess this meant that they realized that they have nothing to offer intellectually or creatively to the work of the office.
I'm a software developer, and I take my laptop and work in the hardware lab. I have a plenty of chairs and lab bench there. There is so much white noise that I can't hear people talking. I really need a good stretch of uninterrupted time to absorb, design or debug software.
Seriously, spending the whole day in isolation and, except for a lucky few, away from natural light is depressing. Being able to holler a joke across the hallway or look at sunshine through a shared window makes all the difference. There are always noise cancelling headphones for when you need total concentration.
Working on the factory floor or a sweat shop is not the same as doing a job that involves person to person interaction.
For intellectual activities like programming you don't always need that second person. At my favorite previous employer we each had our own small office but two chairs for each. When useful two would pair up to accomplish something but usually we were in our own offices concentrating on different tasks. When stuck or needing a second pair of eyes one would invite someone over.
Of my dozen or so teammates we all preferred this arrangement. We visited a company we were acquiring and they had an open floor plan with lower partitions. Our manager thought it wonderful. We noticed nearly everyone had headphones to dampen the noise. The manager of the company we were visiting told us how they provide employees with the headphones of their choice. I thought how uncomfortable wearing headphones all day must be. I checked with colleagues later, they too thought them uncomfortable after an hour or two from gaming experience.
Our manager kept offering us the chance to move into a central area with bullpens. It was currently unused in our section of the building. We declined, he couldn't understand why. He had read a book and thought it a wonderful idea. I pointed out that when he was a developer he would work very early or very late to have some quality programming time when no one else was around. At the time he thought those hours his most productive.
Next job was in a big open bullpen. I enjoyed the interaction with others, I was very fortunate to work with talented people and I understand how rare this was. Still I thought it distracting and it reduced my focus and productivity. A lot less "getting into the zone" while coding. If I had not enjoyed and respected those I worked with I imagine it would have been painful.
Long ago I had a job where we were on an open floor but we had full height cubicles. That helped with noise and distraction. Not as nice as offices but I think it was much better than low walls.
I've seen cubicles with transparent upper portions that allow visibility but with full height to reduce noise. I expect that would be an improvement on low walls.
Saw one place where the workstations were wired and their network had a whitelist of technical and business related sites. It was quickly updated upon reasonable request. There was also a wifi network for personal use, BYOD. People just used their own devices for personal stuff. I was just there for a short contract but I didn't hear any grumbling and there was no rolling of the eyes when peers explained the policy. They developed stuff for the Windows platform and I was there to do a few small iOS and Android apps. When I went by IT and asked for some iOS and Android development related sites to be added to the whitelist it was done in a few minutes.
Cubicles are a joke and have been since at least 1989 when Dilbert came on the scene. People don't like being observed all the time and with no control over their own personal space. Design five man circular stations, sound and vision proofed from the other stations and entry through a pedestrian cul-de-sac. That way only people who want to engage with the occupants, will have reason to enter. Tell Zuckerberg that Scott Adams got rich making fun of cubicles.
@50000BTU_barbecue: 'The "open office" is just cost-reduction masquerading as some sort of innovation.'
...
Not only that, it's also dangerous, as in if your PHB crosses your live of sight you're liable to utter 'asshole' under your breath, and the very sensitive microphone would pick it up and the client on the other end of the phone might think you were referring to them. This really happened to a friend of mine
We are still basically monkeys. I don't think that we monkeys can possibly work well in a group of 3,000. I am willing to bet that in that facebook nightmare that people have banded together into little micro tribes and even littler squads. The natural numbers would be in the ballpark of 150 and 7.
So in an "open" office I would personally group people into small groups 5-7 in a single room and then cluster the rooms into a community of around 150 or less. Then basically don't depend on much real interaction between the communities except in the most general ways.
This seems to be about how we evolved. I would think that facebook would already have figured this out in that I don't care how many "friends" you have on facebook that very few people would stay in contact with more than 150 in any real way and probably only have around 7 solid friends at any given time.
Although there are probably a few outliers who do regularly stay in contact with many people and have a larger circle of friends but at the same time there would be a matching number on the other end of the bell curve who live a solitary existence. So unless a company is prepared to only hire from the 0.01% of humans who can manage 1,000s of lines of friendship then open plan is just wrong. It would be like working in an airport departure gate.
@Kazoo the Clown: "Managers have no confidence in themselves-- they know they are incompetent at motivating people so they have to resort to big-brother intimidation techniques and vacuous pep rallys with inane slogans and sports metaphors. It then becomes self-fulfilling for the most part, you get what you pay for"...
Not only incompetent at motivating people but incompetent at business in general. They do have the ability to claim credit for other peoples work and posses all the charm of the true sociopath. You can detect them as to how they go silent in the presence of real ability or the inordinate amount of staff turnover in their department. Oh - and also - they're usually the PHBs personal sidekick and snitch. They leave a trail of destruction behind them and can take down a whole business.
It has nothing to do with productivity. I have seen so many start ups in Silicon Valley use this open office model; it's absurd. No privacy! Imagine working for 10-12 hours every day in a crowded room, with the same people. It's almost inhumane. I don't care how many ping-pong tables or couches or other perks are made available, people need their own space. These cheap-ass, SOB, VCs and their ohurdes of young wannabe "entrepreneurs" are all on the same bandwagon; the VCs and shithead CEO's all want to look "hip" and be "just like 'that there other successful startup!' Idiots! Walk into any respectable VC (an oxymoron) office; do you see an open office plan? Duh! The swine with all the money in start up land feed at their own private troughs. The young, wannabe CEOs of "Start Up X" can leave the office any time they want; the developers, and QA, and marketing, and all the other drones can work in cattle car conditions - who cares? The media in Silicon Valley is just as stupid and idiotic as the VCs and wannabe young CEOs; they write articles about this of that "cool" open office in San Francisco's SOMA - yadda yadda. Fools! I would love to see the gaggle of lemming investors, wannabe CEO's, and pretend media completely disrupted. Idiots!
Personally I get sooo distracted with other co-workers running around, discussing stuff with each other (workrelated), having (work-related) phonecalls. When I was sitting in a large room with (only) 6 other people, i got less work done, and the work I did had much more bugs than when I was sitting alone or with only 1 other co-worker..
socially, yes it's much more fun, but from a business standpoint (at least for me), it's better to have no visual or audio distractions..
And let's not forget, some people are just much better as closing themselves off to their surrounding..
I'm in the UK and I've only ever workd in open plan offices. Never seen a cubicle in my life. We have entire open floors with maybe 500 people per floor. Everyone is on banks of desks, 4 each side facing each other, row after row. Quite often it's all hot desking anyway so very few people customise their space in any way. I did once, briefly but my stuff got pinched (prob cleaners or 'security'). We have breakout rooms for instant meetings but personally I find myself far more productive when I can just wander over and ask someone a question rather than wait for an IM or email to be responded to. Almost no one uses headphones and absolutely no one has audible music. Even having a ringtone is frowned upon, vibrate only. As I've never been in any other environment (and I'm now in my fifties) I really can't see the issue with concentration, you either tune out the chatter or find a breakout room for the rare times you really need to focus.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
I've only worked in open offices, only top level management get offices, ordinary managers sit with the other cattle
i think this is just an american issue.....the rest of the world seems to cope
Perhaps they should switch to the Libre-Office fork ;)
Would that be optional walls?
------- Mark
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The movie Gattaca shows a space agency, where a lot of the employees work on a single room, in desks aligned in files and rows without any walls between them - just like a school class. So I thought, "this is just thought-provoking science-fiction, there's no way the working environment is going to come out like that".-Ignacio Agulló
I've never worked in an open office. What's the protocol when you've eaten cabbage rolls the night before and have lots of farting to do before you're finally ready for your morning shit?
My solution at Bandley 3 was to wear my 31dB shooting muffs and use my Ferrari rear-view mirrors. Even my manager was polite in getting my attention.
When I started working in the 70s, my first three jobs were in open office areas. No partitions, Desks side by side. We ate our lunches in the break room, not at our desks. In fact, my third job did not allow us to have food at our desks, only drinks like coffee and water.
We got work done because we did our jobs. We had this thing called a 'work ethic'.
My current job has low partitions, and everyone seems to work just fine. We seem to also have a 'work ethic'. When people need to talk, they go to a conference room or the break room. Or speak quietly.
If people are not working, it's probably because they aren't doing their jobs, have a poor work ethic, or are just plain rude.
Not because they don't have partitions between them.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
In addition to practically vaporizing the need for in house IT infrastructure, ChromeOS is built around modern day collaborative in such a way as to be unobtrusive to concentration. Google Hangouts can be used in place of long winded email drafts to get the attention of your coworkers as their attention span becomes available for "getting".
My last job I had to walk the length of a football field to get manager feedback on design decisions or go miles down the wrong direction. They would throw away 8 hours of labor if they didn't like something a simple question could have resolved. They liked emails(Outlook)/Excel and .jpg images instead of Gmail, Google Drive, .easm files and IM.
Problem solving strategy: I bought my supervisor a Samsung Chromebook for Christmas. The idea was it would force him to modernize millennial-style. He returned it to me(Impropriety concerns) however I got a Chromebook out of the deal and got him to buy one for himself.
Happily ever after and all that, plus I didn't have to walk the football field to ask my supervisor questions any more.
Supposing you have a disability such as fear of open/closed spaces, or closeness to or isolation from your coworkers negatively affects you in some way. In UK and probably most places there is legislation to oblige the employer to make "reasonable adjustments" for that disability in the physical layout of the workplace.
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace." V.Stone, Microsoft Corporation
I work in an open office with about 30 other people and i'm really not fond of it. I sit near several very chatty people who try their best to talk at me too often, there's non-stop distractions from every direction, people who vocalise their every thought, no privacy and no walls or dividers i can pin things to. Honestly you don't realise how useful having a personal board to pin things on is until you've lost it.
I'd be happier and able to work faster and with fewer mistakes if i were alone in a cubicle and left to work. As far as i'm concerned i go to work to work, not to socialise so let me get on with it in a distraction free environment.
For me, working in an office is about maximizing Communication.
I work for a global company, and collaborate with people around the planet. We're not going to be in one office, therefore an office is pointless.
Plus, your workspace is very much a showcase of your work, personality, and work habits, and I find it way easier to display it on the open planform "science fair" office than in the empty nest "cube farm" booth format.
My results are the showcase of my work. I'm paid for results, not a display of how neat my workspace is. I'm a network engineer, so maybe you're an interior designer and it makes sense.
If you really need privacy, grab a break-out room, or work from home that day. But for the most part, I find that work sucks more when there's not enough communication,
I work from home full-time. If it were practical to meet in an office, I'd do it 1-2 days a week max just for building relationships with coworkers. Still, a majority of my time is actually getting shit done.
As for communication, we have phones, IM chat, and online meetings. There is no shortage of ways to communicate requirements and goals. The only thing that suffers is the ability to grow relationships with people around the coffee maker, and again, that isn't going to happen when we live on opposite sides of this rock.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
I had participated in planning a new office. All the cubes were what I termed "Fuck you" cubes - low partitions - fully open.
But because I was part of I.T. I made absolutely sure that A) I.T. got it's own space completely and B) The cubes were full six feet high.
We all know that the end goal is to shove as many people into an area as possible. Office designers have foisted this belief on companies who really don't care very much about employee productivity as they do about overall G&A (General and Administrative) costs. Employee workspaces are G&A and companies look bad when G&A is too high. Never mind the fact that the CEO is making 50 to 100 times his average workers salary, G&A is bad so let's cram as many folks into the existing space as possible. More people in less space = more productive. Which of course is total bullshit. The reason it doesn't work is because of these reasons:
Of course we can wear headphones and get privacy screens for our computers but while we're social we also need personal space.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
I've worked in them with low-partitioned cubicles 27 years ago. I hated it then, I'd hate it now. You cannot get respite from office politics and all the assholes with their bullshit and talk about football and what was on television. Being watched means you are not trusted, that you are a slave. The symbol then - as now - of being "management" was getting your own glass-walled office with curtains. From then on, I looked for jobs where I knew I would get my own office. Privacy. Quiet. The ability to think hard and close the door without interruptions. Assholes, including bosses, had to knock before I let them in. For me this is more important than a higher salary. Even better: work from home. That I love!
from modern poultry farming systems. Lovely.
http://www.bigstockphoto.com/i...
As a matter of fact, I think its *illegal* to open office my job. I work in payroll. We have a divider, a locked door, our own machines, and our own storage. Sticking us in an open area is just asking for an eventual lawsuit.
"I've only worked in open offices"
So you don't know
getting a call from a headhunter. She'll say something and it will be completely unintelligible because some asshole next to her will be screaming his head off on the phone, or doing "team building" exercises. And at that point I'll politely tell her, "Sorry, but I only work with professional organizations. Please don't call back, I've blacklisted you."
Not that I was interested to begin with.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki...
Rubber duck debugging refers to telling someone else about a problem or question, and thereby coming to understand it - without the listener necessarily saying anything. The speaker may as well have been talking to a rubber duck, it was the act organizing ones thoughts and speaking them aloud that resulted in clarity.
The board and the (new)CEO handed down the "open concept directive"
100% of employees voiced issues ranging from visual distractions, to "how the hell are customer support employees supposed to talk to people on the phone?"
3 employees quit on the first day of "open concept"
Every "town hall" meeting included mostly questions about how to mitigate the negative effects of open concept.
The COO (of 13 years) blew up in a town hall meeting, confided in us that he fought it all the way, then he put in his resignation.
Our company was so paralyzed by it that we moved the developers to their own office building, because it was affecting deadlines to have constant interruptions and loud overheard phone calls by sales and support. It literally cost double, because we could no longer function in a single office.
Nothing's perfect, but it depends mightily on your line of work. I work in VFX where the age tends to be low and plugging into your music when you need to focus on your shot is extremely common. Otherwise it's more about being different from a warren of disconnected offices rather than always better or worse. I haven't worked from a sealed office in many many years and I don't miss it in the slightest. For the record, I'm not young. :-)
I work in an office with relatively high partition walls although low/no partitions are common at many facilities.
I regularly have problems conducting work at my desk and I regularly have to move from my desk to perform special assignments because background noise is too high at my desk.
Plus, I am CONSTANTLY interrupted by people who do not even bother to check whether I am on the phone or otherwise engaged before bursting in to my work station and rudely interrupting me. The fact that you WANT to speak with me NOW does not mean I am ABLE to speak with you NOW. And if I am typing on my computer while speaking into my headset I am probably NOT free at the moment.
Clueless, rude co-workers and out-of-touch facilities managers combined with unproven theories makes for a less productive working environment. But I have been dealing with this since 6th grade...
Brain chains
Brain hostile offices
I've found that those disgusting personal habits, such as picking boogers, requires a proper bathroom break. I am a bit disgusted by those that do not use a bathroom break to clean their nose (among other things).
Bad idea, created by "Twitter Generation"
You really need to review your history. The open office has been around for centuries, if not millennia. Mind you back then the Monks weren't allowed to speak. And that doesn't even touch on Dicksian nightmares and the middle of last century. What is new is people not shutting the fuck up and annoying everyone else.
100% Correct. After all, Slashdot was only founded in 1997. That is pretty new.
This is a very once sided view point. I prefer open plan offices, and so do all but one of my colleagues. I don't feel that the office layout is due to management either, but worker preference. If we wanted cubicles we could have them...
Old Dilbert cartoon: http:/// dilbert.com/strips/comic/1991-06-17/
It's way cheaper than cubes, and OFFICES? The mushrooms want OFFICES?
In 1987, I was working at the Scummy Mortgage Co in Austin, TX (real name available upon request). I shared a wedge-shaped room with four others, no cube, just deskdeskdesk (other side) deskdeskdesk. Two of the folks were the sr. programmer and the systems analyst, and they were on the phones about 50% of the time. At one point, I was listening to some training tapes on a portable tape player; after a couple of days, having gotten through the tapes, I brought in some music. A day or two later, my boss walked by, and asked me if I'd finished the training. I told him I had, and that I'd brought music, to increase my productivity. He told me to take off the headphones and increase my productivity.
This is after the old VP of DP reitred. Before he did, he'd walk into the room occasionally, and stare at us. I asked another programmer, and she told me he used to do that when they'd had keypunchers, to make sure they were working, and seemed to expect us to be the same.
When I first started college, lo, these many years ago, at an orientation, one of the first things they told us was to find somewhere QUIET to do homework and studying.
It's cheap bullshit, all of it. And the managers, who mostly don't have a freakin' clue what we do, or even how to do their own jobs, want to stare at you to make sure you're working.
But us computer folks don't need a union to stop this sh*t, we'll put up with anything. As mushrooms, all they need to do is feed us bullshit, and keep us in the dark....
mark
Get a nice pair of noise-cancelling headphones if you absolutely must be thrust into this environment.
Another appeal to popularity... and it's doubtful that "the rest of the world" even does this.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
http://www.makespacework.com/Resources-pdf/Architects/Office%20workspace_perceptions%20&%20outcomes%20by%20the%20journal%20of%20environmental%20psychology.pdf
This is not a cheerocracy, I am the cheertator, I will make the cheercisions around here, and I will deal with the cheerconsequences! STFU, AC!
California now requires egg-laying chickens to have at least 116 sq in of floor space.
A little more office downsizing and a little more chicken coop expansion and California will be able to pass a single law to cover both chickens and office workers.
Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.
The kinds of people who do best at any kind of super-detailed work often have mild to moderate Asperger's, whether they know it or not. So, an open floor plan is one of the worst things one can do to them.
Not only do the corporate officers deserve offices, as per their name, they exist on different floors from the rabble. You go up (always up) from the constant din into a land of tranquil silence where secretaries walking by soundlessly on the thick carpeting gaze at you quizzically while the great ones dream their great dreams without the rudeness of reality to awaken them.
Eliminate the partitions between the stalls in the bathroom, let the men urge each other on. Good for morale.
I question if this working 60-80hrs per week being the badge of honor in the US seems to value so highly is skewing those results, along with the culture of not taking holiday/vacation (or the guilt of taking it). And even though, I'd also question the amount of hours worked (on paper) vs. the actual number of hours worked. If you are working 40/wk, but if you actually put in more hours (either unpaid overtime, flex time that is never taken, telecommute work from home, etc.) you have skewed results. Often the numbers do not reflect the true numbers. Time off in the EU is encouraged, in the US, time off is certainly not encourage in the same way that the EU does. I also think it would be interesting to see what the productivity vs. quality of life would compare? Is productivity the measure that should be so highly valued? I suppose it depends on what your perspective is.
Buggars... I also forgot to mention, after a brief review of the article that you mentioned....
Open office is just another name for a bullpen. I worked in one in the 60s, too many distractions for productivity.
Brick and mortar will morph into hoteling space and virtual office space. With today's technology collaboration, productivity, and business performance are easily fostered and managed. Hoteling affords temporary space when in office time is necessary. Hopefully, soon brick and mortar will go the way of snail mail.
It has nothing to do with productivity.
I was under the impression that productivity was king at a startup.
The closest I've been to an open office was a four person cube with a round table in the center. All four were working on the same project and it was the most productive environment I've been in. If you had a question, you could roll your chair back to the table, have an impromptu meeting and get right back to work.
The only problem we had were the lookie-loos that decided they could just walk into our cube and start a conversation.
that people are willing to immerse themselves in this kind of hell.
But that's why these kinds of workers make the big bucks, right ?
Any truly productive and interesting work environment I've ever been in didn't have an open floorplan or cubicle farms, didn't have acres of florescent lights, and didn't have mangers that were the only ones with any semblance of privacy.
The workers at these types of places have made it this way. You're sheep.
I am amused. I started to read this thread to figure out how (Apache) OpenOffice was destroying worker productivity. Oh, not that kind of open office.
Banco Garantia, in a purpose-built open plan completed in 1994 for all of its 300 key staff to work together in one room in São Paulo, was one of the most productive organizations imaginable. I vaguely remember estimated annual profit from these 300 people as US$300 million.
Or Michael Bloomberg?
If not, then they are full of shit.
For some managers it is not enough to be a manager. They have to let everyone else KNOW that they are a manager. They have to separate themselves from the masses. How? Wearing a tie is one way. Or having the fanciest computer. Sitting in an office with a door is another way. It lets everyone else know that you are a manager and they are not.
As others have mentioned, managers are usually extroverts and extroverts often have inferiority complexes. This is why it is important for them to be seen as superior to others. In the outside world it is manifested by the kind of car you drive (BMW, Mercedes, etc.) or the watch you wear (Rolex instead of Casio) or where you live (gated subdivision). In the workplace, this means having a bigger office, or a corner office, or a reserved parking space. Or some other perk.
Paradoxically, it is the programmers - the introverts - that really need an office with a door. These are the people doing the work that requires quiet and concentration. Yet they are thrown into the mosh pit with the other programmers. Hardly a productive work environment.
Have you ever noticed that a lot of managers are hardly ever in their office? They are in meetings most of the day. Or out meeting with clients. Or traveling somewhere. So the office goes largely unused.
If things made any sense in an office - and I'm not pretending for one moment that it does - the programmers would get the offices and the managers would be in cubicles. But that will never happen. Partly because managers make the rules and partly due to elitism.
removable partitions ?
They don't want efficiency. They want innovation.
They don't want to innovate. They want to control the commercialization of new technologies.
Everybody in charge focuses on control first. Since they don't thoroughly follow what you're doing, they monitor by watching you do it.
They don't want anybody else doing what they do.
Were the first to do it, that should tell you something.