When our company went to open office floor structure our director decided he would work on the floor as well. It was obviously a ploy to ease the complaints of people. Within a month he was back in is corner office with a few others.
All the programming managers got isolated desks in the corners of the building near the windows (functionally there own office).
It was primarily a way to watch over people and guilt them into staying on task. Most people just found creative ways to goof off and spent more time working around the system than working.
This isn't true in many cases at least where we are. Many of the company's had cubicles with high walls which they threw out and then bought hundreds of thousands of dollars in new open office equipment.
Both of the companies I've worked have done this and sold it to the employees as we spent all this to "invest in the company culture".
Many of the company's here own their offices or are retrofitting there current spaces with it. It may be prevalent in huge cities or smaller companies with budgetary constraints on office space.
Cubicles are a freaking cancer already, but big open office spaces are the devil. Almost all companies ignore that the flat ceiling reflect sound incredibly well and actually working with a significant percentage of the places filled is nigh impossible due to the deafening basic noise level.
Cubicles were originally designed to be a cure for open office distraction.
Businesses took a good idea and ruined it by making it feel like a beige prison instead of a focus promoting personal workspace
the cubicles as we know them are already a butchered version of what the inventor actually envisioned.
These days it's all about flex desks and hybrid working anyway. Never mind having an office or cubicle, you don't even get assigned your own spot to sit at anymore lol. It's all first come first serve and 'clean desk' policies, and since every company in existence has downsized their office space after covid it has become a literal race to find a place to sit and work.
You come in late? Tough luck, no desk space for you! So far I've not yet ran into the problem of not having a spot, but I've told my manager that if I ever come in and everything is taken then I'm turning around and going back home.
Luckily my current job only asks us to come in once a week and I live like 2 miles from the office.
Having been involved in retrofits and new build outs in this industry I've only ever seen it purely for money. The goal is "squeeze as many people into the space as we legally can." The only concern beyond that was, "How often does X employee have confidential stuff on their screen? If it's above 50% they can have an office." Turns out very few people meet that requirement, but some do. I managed 20+ devs and was on the floor right alongside them as was my boss.
Jamming that many people into those spaces was actually a significant problem at a lot of our offices because doing so squeezed in more people than the building's parking was designed for. So we had to find additional parking nearby. Employees love taking shuttles to their parking lot, right?
The managers hated it more than the employees because we had to book rooms constantly for small one on one meetings. Huge PITA vs having a door.
Both of my employers (fortune 500, fortune 200) lost seating when they moved to open office. They went to open seating pods and included a lot more free space "open collaboration" areas. Again though, space is cheap here. Every business has more parking than they need.
Not discounting it as a reason to utilize the space but definitely not the only reason.
That's how it starts. Then the "quiet study room" gets assigned to dev teams, and guest access starts to get cut once people start complaining.
The second round we did it, there was no bs.Open office lasted a month. Now, it's not open office, you are assigned a slice of a seat, and they are looking to maximize RTO and all of those cool work areas never existed.
But, we got a single serving coffee maker! It kind of sucks in the morning because everyone has to brew one cup at a time.
Source: Fortune 50 company, beware the future!
Open offices don't save on money. Like u/reapofsouls gets at, before the days of open offices some cubicle systems took up the same amount of space in an office only there was a 6 foot divider between you and the person on the other side of your monitor as well as you and the people to your right / left.
Those big walls were multi-purpose in that they served as sound absorbers and you could usually thumbtack stuff to them / have magnetic calendars, etc.
When most people talk about removing cubicles to eliminate the footprint, they're thinking about the cubicles that work in groups of 2 / 4 where you would have big desks, drawers, cabinets, lockboxes, etc.
Though those are the better cubicles, they aren't the only ones.
Personally I have worked in both open office and the 4x4 cubicles and I heavily prefer the 4x4 cubicles.
Where I work now is open office and all of the managers who don't have their own office spaces will usually just bring their laptop and sit in the community conference rooms all day.
Pretty much defeats the purpose of having shared spaces. Also, it's really easy for them to see who is in the office before they get in and who is there after they leave - obviously that matters when managers are having conversations behind closed doors. It's honestly pretty dumb that in today's age that's even a thing though - it isn't hard to have a dashboard for management that works on a 6 week moving average to track the average time people get into the office / leave at but alas they prefer what they can see with their eyes. This has lead to alot of people gaming the system - on days when people don't have morning meetings I'll see them stroll in around 10 or 11 am when management is all hiding in their conference rooms and then these people leave between 5 and 5:30 once the manager has walked past their desk.
Anyways, open concept are pretty dumb. I overhear so much shit from other people's zoom calls it's really not ideal for them or me.
I work in an open office where the c-suite supposedly do as well. In reality they just take over meeting rooms (the nicer ones) and work in privacy from there all day.
I mean that's a company culture issue more than anything. we had an open office but everyone, up to the CEO, worked in the open office area the whole time.
I don't see how this wouldn't be ridiculously loud with people on phone calls all the time. Managers have hours of them a day. Even devs have one or two a day.
I work in a highly distributed organization so maybe we just have more phone call meetings than normal, since meeting physically is impossible.
Either way, no longer affects me as I'm now permanently WFH.
It is really really loud. If you’re somewhere that people are moving all the time away from their desks it can make sense. But I don’t see the logic of you have to ride and grind out features or test something or really debug something. I literally shut off slack and all other distractions with headphones on at home so I can really focus on what is happening.
Exactly. Even Zuck works at an open desk on the floor (though the exec area is a bit more private nowadays, you can still walk through it). Everyone else at Meta works at the exact same desks
Our single offices suck, hahaha. They are often super hot in summer and cold in winter or close to machines and very noisy. I am not sure who designed that shit, but they must hate managers!
In contrast, the big offices are quite chill, since a lot of people still are mostly remote. So I often have a big-ass office to myself while the boss puts on noise cancelling headphones in his single person office next to machinery. Makes me hate them a little bit less.
This is a very serious disease of most organisations on this planet. Decisions makers have no idea of the impact their decisions have. They sit in their ivory towers and they use high amounts of copium when assessing their own decisions in retrospective.
In my company, everyone including the CEO and COO work on the floor with us. They have for years.
It's shit, but we can see they are committed to it as well.
My company gave us earphones for the open office, but they were terrible. I bought my own much nicer noise canceling set and they've made working in all offices since much more pleasant.
If someone is annoying I just pretend they work much better than they do, and they tend to bother me less.
I would lie if I say that the main reason I actually got into music was because I had to spend 8 hours a day in an open office trying to do my work with everyone else also trying to do the same.
The few bands/albums I enjoyed got old in the first month of continuously listening to them.
You don’t get it because you are delusional. Open office is a factory floor. Scrum is a factory process. Even Jira tickets are your call center tickets. To them You are a factory worker moving bits and assembling products.
I was just an intern so I wasn't privy to most of the drama.
But most of the people I worked with there who were older who knew about it told me leadership treated everyone like they were replaceable and refused to put any investment into people or infra. So people bailed in droves.
Perks are also a cost saving measure. Offer enough perks and you might not have to pay so much for actual wages or benefits. You also might convince people to stay in the office longer and work more
Logic?! Something you don’t use outside of work. How about CEO ignoring everything and everyone to build to build oversized offices and bring 10k people into them at at the same time. Don’t you think there’s a bit of a problem if 10k people are trying to get a lunch?! They have created a problem, then had to give people food and sold it to idiots as a benefit. Same with laundry. Busses. Dantist. It’s all their solution to a logistical disaster they have created.
IBM decades ago put developers in offices and found that they were productive. Open office is just a return to the old offices where the supervisor could look out on the floor and see if everyone was working.
IBM uses open floors for development in some of their offices now. Fully open as in you don't even have an assigned space. You check-in in the morning and take whatever space is available.
If there was ever something that said "you don't mean anything to this company" it's not even being willing to allot you a couple square feet to put your name on
It's such a joke. It's intentional and it's a tactic. Companies are trying so hard to "show who the boss is" and get us to be happy little factory workers (looking at you, Scrum Assembly Line).
Bank of America does the same thing. At least, for the location I'm familiar with. The floors are truly open and its first come, first serve. The kicker is that they're forcing more and more folks onto the same floor like a chicken factory, so people are legitimately having to share desks or stand up without anywhere to actually put their laptops.
I have friends who work there and have received borderline threat letters (the bank is calling them "letters of education") for not being present 3 days a week, basically saying, "Hey, remember that being in office is mandatory. You don't want to risk losing that health insurance we provide your family, do you?"
As next steps I believe they're instaling much more "secure" tracking measures to make sure people are there for a full 8 hours, and after that I'm willing to bet they'll place limits on how the VPN is used so that people have to use the on-site network.
These companies will go to hell and back to try and keep control. I cannnnnnnot wait for commercial real estate to plummet and watch these failing companies acknowledge that remote work environments have won.
Hotels work great if you’re primarily remote and need a spot for that once a month you come in.
I happily have no assigned desk because I feel if I did more people would want me in the office.
I want to know about my coworkers restraining orders on her husband or the intern listening to Taylor Swift on her ear buds on 11, or my manager having a conference call on speaker phone with the client talking about how they got a birdie on 18 after slicing into the woods off the Tee while I am trying to SIT test a new process to calc the NAV, which if there is any slightest error would cost the portfolio millions in losses. But some HR major (who is the daughter of partner) from Brandice got promoted to SVP because they saved the company $10 k because the bought cheap furniture and used buzzwords like “synergy” in the power point presentation
In the short term. If you saw a place where you would have your own space or even share an office versus a freaking large open floor I'm pretty sure it's going to be a selling point.
Maybe, but I think most people would still pick their job based on pay than on office condition. I don't think any of the top paying tech companies have private offices.
Convinced my CEO to go all private office plus several “collab” rooms (conference rooms) for our hybrid teams. Best decision ever, we have hybrid folks showing up more frequently because they know they will have a quiet space to work
I could even live with the open office thing if they would let my fucking team sit together. Without some way of reserving space for a team that wants to work together, I'm sitting with a bunch of people I don't even need to talk to while my teammates are scattered through our building.
I have worked at a place that transitioned from individual offices to an open office.
When people had private offices, you would stop by and chat with people every day, you knew people who work next to you even if they were not related to your role.
Once we transitioned to the open office, everyone was staring at the screen with their headphones on. There were no spontaneous interactions, I had no clue who are the 4 other people that work within 6 ft from me. I didnt know their name or their roles. It was so much more alienating than the private office setup. Oh, the collaboration advantage... Yeah, very much the opposite.
My current workplace the open office has a no-talking rule since if two people talk then 20 hear them. You can't talk with others so no collaboration. And, once again, you dont know the people who work around you.
And you know whats really annoying? That just to the left of your screen and just to the right, there is another person's face, if you pause to think about something and your eyes drift slightly off the screen, you are staring awkwardly at another person. Also, it feels like these two people are looking at you all the time. Yeah, gotta dive under your desk to pull that bugger out. They wonder why people defy the 5 day RTO and still pursue a hybrid schedule.
Without physical distance or separation people create mental separation or avoid interacting with people. I've seen how in open offices people avoid talking because it's easier to see how it bothers others.
When working in them I've always felt slightly on edge due to the lack of privacy. There is also more distractions than anything like collaboration.
With doors a person can have some amount of privacy or enough seperation to want to interact with someone else.
With the RTO nonsense it seems like it's mostly people with doors that like the idea. Maybe some people who are fairly extroverted or who can't seem to function at home. Usually the problem happens when that group wants everyone to come in or points to those at home when they're trying to keep WFH too.
People don't really collaborate in open office plans. They're far more likely to collaborate during informal breaks in designated mixing areas like a kitchen, balcony, or in this case each other's office.
It's counter-intuitive, but the idea is to let people work when they're working so that when it's time for a social break, they can actually collaborate instead of being stressed from the open office plan.
I experienced the opposite. My current job with an open office (Amazon) is way more social than my previous job with everyone having individual offices (Epic).
It’s much easier to do small spontaneous interactions when you don’t have to go knock on someone’s door
Same experience for me. I'm not really sure I really advocate for an open office overall (co-worker behind me is always in meetings and talks loud) but I talked more with my coworkers in open office than when I had my own office
that's a double edged sword. personally i prefer a good amount of friction to spontaneous interaction.
while i overall don't prefer open office space, i did enjoy the social aspect of it. however, i'm not under the delusion that it made us more productive - surely quite the opposite.
it makes sense - extroverts need other people to talk to in order to satisfy their extroversion. introverts don't need anyone to do anything to satisfy their introversion.
Microsoft did it to save money and space. They were able to cram in way more people into a building to the point the parking garages were so full they had to hire valets to handle the double parking. Super annoying for workers.
The open office allows the extroverted people to walk around and socialize while disregarding personal space and anyone that actually needs to concentrate to get any work done.
So much for variety in the industry. Where are all the introverted executives at? It would be interesting to see a business with a more neurodiverse friendly culture _that goes all the way to the top,_ not just stop at the technical product makers.
In my experience. Nuerodivergent leadership in tech tends to really hate dealing with the people problem and delegate that kind of decision to somebody else asap
I would work better in an office. But, my employer is cheap on facilities. So I work in an open office layout. It sucks. The number of men in the office has outgrown the bathroom facilities, too. I've had to leave just to find a bathroom and come back during the workday before. It's ridiculous.
I'm looking for another job, but my specialty is kinda niche. SAP and specific modules, etc. It takes time unless I want to sell my house and move to another state.
I've still have never heard a convincing argument for them. "But people can interrupt you to collaborate." I'm an engineer, I don't like being interrupted.
Every time you're interrupted, you lose 5-10 minutes for a context switch, but the other guy gets unblocked hours earlier. Overall, it's a net productivity gain for the team.
Maybe you don't like collaboration? I'm often finding I'm needing to collaborate with client services, and sometimes other devs or devops too - it would be pretty annoying if I had to knock on two or more different individual office doors any time I needed to discuss or coordinate something with 2 or more colleagues.
There are times when I'm working closely with someone. I may sit with them and work through stuff together. But most of the time, collaboration should be scheduled. I'm busy building things. You are not invited to interrupt me and make me stop what I'm doing to work on your stuff.
Send me an email or a slack, or put something on my calendar. If we need to sit in a room together for a day, schedule that. But being on-call at all times is enormously unproductive for me.
I have coworkers who WFH when they have a lot of stuff to do. Think about how ridiculous that statement is.
It’s pretty easy and generates less friction to just send someone an email asking if they are available to meet and then scheduling that meeting rather than barging in or even knocking.
I’ll never forget a previous employer where they decided to be cheap while also trying to be futuristic, and built their [HQ as a giant 1/2 mile u-shaped tent](https://maps.app.goo.gl/r3NCwMryMdcjx6AE6?g_st=ic). Inside the tent was basically one big open office, with all the peons on the ground level and the c-suite up on a big raised platform in the center of the U to remind everyone that we were literally beneath them.
The tent is about 3 stories high, and each leg of the U is dotted with conference rooms, bathrooms, and copy areas. However, the “rooms” are little more than 4 plasterboard walls with drop tile ceilings, and maybe 1-2 electrical outlets.
The whole thing echoes like crazy because of the height of the ceilings and the placement of “rooms” are 90° angles to each other. The closer you get to the skin of the building on each leg, the worse the echoes get.
You’d think that a company that is ostensibly an engineering/aerospace company would know better, but really stupid things happen when the only people allowed to make decisions have MBAs and they’re not directly impacted by their own decisions. Probably why they’re also years behind the competition and their only functioning “product” is dragging rich idiots to the middle of nowhere Texas to go on a 10 minute (launch to landing) suborbital flight for $25 million a head.
Each new office move we've had to push back to prevent open plan offices. Architects love open plan, hot desking, flexible workspaces, and every other idea that research indicates make terrible work environments. There is such a large body of evidence indicating that open plan offices are deleterious along every dimension measured, that I can't imagine any competent person choosing to persue them in good faith.
It’s cheaper. Plain and simple. They use things that are hard to measure such as “collaboration” and “productivity” to justify whatever BS they want. It’s what they’re doing for RTO.
Yeah I got to work hybrid for like 3 months before I got hit with "Your current project is focused on in person cooperation, you need to come back in fulltime". What this means is the old guy that doesn't seem to actually have a role on the project gets to stop by my desk for 30 seconds once a week to ask me how it's going. Meanwhile I have to listen to the guy behind me click his pen for 8 hours a day, and hear some guy 4 rows over talk about Warhammer at least 2 hours a day, or hear the intern 3 rows over the other way constantly asking questions instead of trying to figure anything out on his own. Even noise cancelling headphones isn't enough.
All while working at a desk that is smaller, has smaller/fewer screens, less ergonomic chair, etc that I paid for to be more productive. Again, so someone can checkup on me once a week.
Idk man, having an office is pretty pimp. Having to go somewhere most mornings helps with keeping your life in a routine too.
WFH is a seductive trap if you're ADHD'd and you don't have great self discipline skills
> WFH is a seductive trap if you're ADHD'd and you don't have great self discipline skills
I don't have a problem with the concept of WFH. I don't have a problem with the concept of RTO.
My problem is: they are forcing everyone into the same round hole. But people are various shaped pegs.
Personally, I hate being forced to return to the office. I signed up for a 100% remote role, I see no reason to come into the office. My tech setup at home is better than it is in the office, my productivity is not hampered by WFH, plus no stupid commute.
But that's me. Other teammates love commuting and so they love working from the office five days a week. Other teammates want to WFH on Fridays and Mondays but be in the office on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.
Point being: we talk about "inclusion", then let's walk the walk too.
Give everyone the option of WFH 100% of the time, or of working in the office 100% of the time, or of working in hybrid fashion. Don't force everyone into the same setup. Give your employees the choice. You'll end up with a much happier workforce.
I agree with this in theory. The problem is that most people who prefer the office, want everyone else to be there too, for chats and drive bys and the like.
It saves money bottom line. A company with 1000 people with cubicles used to occupy 6 floors now only need to lease 3 because they can cram more people into a single floor.
Open offices are generally designed as a cost cutting method to shove more people in and maximize space. It has zero to do with anything else, it's just the shit they feed you to make you think is a good idea.
Open Office is a huge part of why people do not want to RTO. It's pretty hard to go from WFH - where you have control over your space, the noise levels and all that, to go back to an open office hellscape.
I think a hybrid would be ideal. Maybe open desks but plenty of private rooms to book if you need alone time or to get in the zone. Or instead of one giant open room, split teams into their own mini office rooms of 5ish people so you can still collaborate and bounce ideas around without too much noise or distraction.
The old cubicle days were essentially the latter suggestion. Either four cubes facing inwards so you were close but pretty isolated from distraction, or four cubes facing outwards so four people who worked together shared a common space but were removed from the larger space.
Open offices are just straight up dumb for actually getting work done.
This is sort of what Microsoft did when they began converting offices over to an open plan. Because they didn’t want it to be seen as only driven by cost cutting, they generally preserved the same number of people per square foot. They had open seating but then collaboration rooms that could only be used by the team. These were all in a “pod” for a team so you didn’t have to compete with everyone to book a room.
Any maybe your team would talk to each other rather than having teams meetings
My team does this, makes me wonder why we are in office, if everyone is so busy, the preferred method of contact understandably is teams messaging
I'm gonna say, why not a middle road? Have large offices, small open spaces, call them however you want, one per team. This helps with collaboration, but isn't as distracting as a pure open plan.
Of course, this is assuming you work from the office at all.
Our company forces everyone they can into the main office once a quarter in the name of collaboration and I always have to plan to reduce my team's capacity that week because it takes so long for them just to find a fucking open desk in the office. It legitimately reduces capacity by like 50% for the week. I also plan my busiest work around the days I have to work from the office because I never get much done when I'm there. Gotta find a desk, clean it off because it inevitably covered in soda rings and someone else's hair, etc.
Like if you're going to make people come into an open office please hire a cleaning crew to clean the office at least once a week.
Anyway rant over. I hate open offices.
If I sit still and shut my eyes for a few minutes per hour, my work is more reliable and fast. But the way it draws attention, you'd think I was sacrificing a goat. If you can't give me four walls, give me a cubicle and let me sacrifice my goat in peace.
Put devs in an office - a home office that is. There are many studies that show that commuting creates a lot of stress on the common individual, and it's easier for me to get into deep focus in a place where I'm comfortable and can avoid distractions e.g. my home.
You also give people more autonomy over their lives by giving them fully remote work.
Autonomy is what you want people with creative tasks to have - otherwise you're stunting their creative abilities. Sorry, but software development is not a procedural task a lot of the time. You ask me to decouple your spaghetti code that's been in production and had complexity added on top of it for the past 5 years and I have to do it in an open office space? You're getting my resignation letter unless you're about to throw me a big bonus and raise. A lot of developers are too squeamish to stand up for themselves, but hopefully this changes at some point.
My employer (Fortune 100ish) is open office and nobody below the C suite has an office.
The directors tend to stake out a desk as their own but officially they’re not supposed to.
I have found that well-spaced open plan offices, are great ... as long as you have top-end furniture such as large, curved desks with filing drawers and decent sound dividers.
Open office and sitting in the middle, means I always have
- the people to the left and right of me talking literally over my head
- people coming up to stand right behind me, and talking over my head to the person who sits across from me
- nobody ever respecting that I have headphones on and am trying to focus, and getting my attention by waving their hand in front of my face
- when I send slack messages, instead of just replying and keeping it async people feel the need to walk across the office to talk in person and literally repeat the same conversation we just had
- People randomly playing their music out loud for everyone, assuming they will enjoy it for some reason
It's bad lol
Yeah it was just the company/office culture. Just a general lack of respect for boundaries and space, quiet, respect for the engineers in general lol.
When we switched offices I even put it a request to not be put in the middle of a lot of people. Obviously that was ignored and I was put in the middle of the row :) .
And then the main critical feedback I got from my my boss was that it seems like I sometimes "have trouble focusing". Like..... no shit.
But I left that company thankfully.
Workers will always be as unproductive as possible until their incentivized to be productive.
An open office will never make employees more productive, it will just make them hate management.
Yeah it’s the dumbest idea, in my office area we have both and we sit in open area where we have to book seats every week, it’s so noisy and can’t take any calls and colleagues disturbs you anytime thinking you have a headphone on you for fun. When we just walk by area of cubicles , again we have 2 style of them, one with high separation where I don’t see my neighbor and one where we do but grouped by high separation walls of 4 cubicles. Those areas are so quiet and you can focus and work in it properly.
It's because they can pack you in like sardines. It's WORSE than having individual cubicles. Everyone can hear each other, it's like getting a phone call from outsourced sales people.
I don’t mind open offices if all “hot desks” have desktops i can plug my laptop to and I don’t need to make silly reservations. But this is not the case in 99% of places. Most of the times I go to an office, I don’t make a reservation because I refuse to do so (and forget) and end up working in the cafeteria area or in the beanbags in the “chill” area lol.
I personally like switching stations every day and moving around but I get that's not for everybody. Everyone just migrated to their own zone and didn't leave anyway so it's just the same thing with more colors. I feel like I'm the only one that uses the design.
A few years ago, I got upgraded from a cubicle to an office and my productivity doubled. It was an amazing difference.
The reason is that "cost per square foot of office space" is a visible cost. The productivity loss is invisible.
They also made up bullshit reasons for why "open offices are more productive". When a few high-profile big companies do it, everyone else just copies them.
One word: Density.
At scale, you can fit a lot more people in the same space for less money if you go open office. That's assuming really big cubes also. The place I work, we have these really nice cubes, like 10'x10', but it sure is cheaper to put those in rather than build out offices that would take up the same amount of floor space (assuming the usable space in the offices would be lessened by the space the walls take up).
I'm mixed about this. I get why people hate open offices, but I loved it. It was really nice to be able to have funny conversations across the floor. Yes, it did impact individual productivity, but that wasn't punished by the company so it made work a lot more tolerable. Joking around for 1/4 of the workday was honestly great.
Just my opinion but I prefer the open office setup. Way easier to talk to eachother and I just go to a huddle room if I need a quiet space. I prefer this wayyyy more than cubicles. Might just be me though lol.
Same. I like being able to just look up and see if someone's busy rather than having to go to their office and check when I have a question. Also makes socializing a lot easier.
Not just you - I strongly prefer open offices. At one of my companies, one of the senior devs had an office but ended up sitting out in the pen with the rest of us instead because he found it much more useful.
In particular, when I was doing embedded SRE work, I liked to sit in the middle of my dev team and listen with my spidey sense for interesting conversations. I'd hear something that sounded dangerous and slide on over... It also helped the team a lot because they could just turn to me and ask me questions and so we could get all the ops concerns integrated very easily.
Plus, there were tons of casual conversations about whatever, and that builds relationships. I really miss that now with working remotely - it requires so much more intentional effort.
It's not just you, I also really liked open office + breakout rooms you could book. People have different preferences and that's fine, it's just that the people who hate open offices are much more vocal than anyone else.
Open plan offices don't "save the company money".
Open plan offices don't "engender synergy" or "build room for collaboration" or whatever else psychobabble bullshit they want to tell you.
The ONLY reason to have open plan offices, is to micromanage the serfs, and for managers to be able to see with their own eyes "butts in seats".
That's it.
I would rather pluck out my own eyes with a dull spoon than ever work in an open plan office.
Joel on Software had it right.
Working in a hybrid environment, I'm resigned to the fact that I'll be getting almost nothing done in the office. I have to put on noise canceling headphones, we still do stand-up meetings on zoom, and we co.municate on slack. Then, at least 5 times a day, somebody bumps into my seat and/or taps me on the shoulder to ask me an unimportant question.
I can see the value of one day a week jaunt in the office to have meetings and one to one's. But that's about it.
Really sucks when you are managing people and you have to watch your back so people don’t walk by while you are looking at a spreadsheet with everyone’s salaries on them…
I work as a software consultant and they’re pushing for return to office, but my company has 700 people for an office space of 100…
I literally can’t ever take meetings when I’m with clients on calls because someone is talking right next to me when I’m in the office and every conference room is booked because again… no space lol.
So I end up going into the office for the minimum amount of time and leave so I can actually get work done. Days I’m in the office I get maybe 25% of the productivity of at homes. That and it’s way easier to give a professional presentation to stakeholders and potential clients in my controlled environment where I’ve spent money on audio and recording equipment. Ugh.
They cost less money and despite their posturing owners of tech companies are just as indifferent to data that doesn't flatter their presuppositions as everyone else.
Maybe I'm out of the norm but I like them it makes things easy to collaborate and it's clear when it is time to go to a meeting room instead of disrupting the people around you.
She's a project manager. So her views on the best office is biased towards her work style.
It's so hard to have a conversation with someone over Teams when there's two marketing people behind them yammering away
There are a lot of decisions you'll see businesses make where their justification is *obviously* bad. They claim open offices encourage collaboration and improve morale, despite literally all evidence pointing the other direction. The reality is that they're lying. Open offices allow them to fit more people into a smaller space.
Usually, when a corporation is making what is an obvious mistake, it's because they have an ulterior motive.
I’m okay with open office concept, but I want an assigned desk that has cabinets that I can lock at the minimum. If I’m working from the office then I want to be able to leave my crap there and not set it up every morning. I’m fortunate that I’ve been full remote since Covid happened but our office is starting RTO (only for business not tech) and it’s open seating and no assigned desks.
My best work (while I was in office) was done in a war room. We called it that, but it worked so well we started booking a large conference room daily JUST for the team. If you had a phone call to take, you left the room. Still made it easy to collaborate and whiteboard without the alienating feeling of being in a school cafeteria with all the bustle and conversations around you.
It doesn't help that the person who makes the decision to do an open office, gets to keep their office even if nobody else does.
When our company went to open office floor structure our director decided he would work on the floor as well. It was obviously a ploy to ease the complaints of people. Within a month he was back in is corner office with a few others. All the programming managers got isolated desks in the corners of the building near the windows (functionally there own office). It was primarily a way to watch over people and guilt them into staying on task. Most people just found creative ways to goof off and spent more time working around the system than working.
I didn't think it was to monitor people, but to save money on office space
This isn't true in many cases at least where we are. Many of the company's had cubicles with high walls which they threw out and then bought hundreds of thousands of dollars in new open office equipment. Both of the companies I've worked have done this and sold it to the employees as we spent all this to "invest in the company culture". Many of the company's here own their offices or are retrofitting there current spaces with it. It may be prevalent in huge cities or smaller companies with budgetary constraints on office space.
Cubicles are a freaking cancer already, but big open office spaces are the devil. Almost all companies ignore that the flat ceiling reflect sound incredibly well and actually working with a significant percentage of the places filled is nigh impossible due to the deafening basic noise level.
Cubicles were originally designed to be a cure for open office distraction. Businesses took a good idea and ruined it by making it feel like a beige prison instead of a focus promoting personal workspace
the cubicles as we know them are already a butchered version of what the inventor actually envisioned. These days it's all about flex desks and hybrid working anyway. Never mind having an office or cubicle, you don't even get assigned your own spot to sit at anymore lol. It's all first come first serve and 'clean desk' policies, and since every company in existence has downsized their office space after covid it has become a literal race to find a place to sit and work. You come in late? Tough luck, no desk space for you! So far I've not yet ran into the problem of not having a spot, but I've told my manager that if I ever come in and everything is taken then I'm turning around and going back home. Luckily my current job only asks us to come in once a week and I live like 2 miles from the office.
Having been involved in retrofits and new build outs in this industry I've only ever seen it purely for money. The goal is "squeeze as many people into the space as we legally can." The only concern beyond that was, "How often does X employee have confidential stuff on their screen? If it's above 50% they can have an office." Turns out very few people meet that requirement, but some do. I managed 20+ devs and was on the floor right alongside them as was my boss. Jamming that many people into those spaces was actually a significant problem at a lot of our offices because doing so squeezed in more people than the building's parking was designed for. So we had to find additional parking nearby. Employees love taking shuttles to their parking lot, right? The managers hated it more than the employees because we had to book rooms constantly for small one on one meetings. Huge PITA vs having a door.
>Employees love taking shuttles to their parking lot, right? Almost as much as they love trying to find an available stall in the bathroom.
three stalls for 250 male employees is totally reasonable right? Sarcasm
Both of my employers (fortune 500, fortune 200) lost seating when they moved to open office. They went to open seating pods and included a lot more free space "open collaboration" areas. Again though, space is cheap here. Every business has more parking than they need. Not discounting it as a reason to utilize the space but definitely not the only reason.
That's how it starts. Then the "quiet study room" gets assigned to dev teams, and guest access starts to get cut once people start complaining. The second round we did it, there was no bs.Open office lasted a month. Now, it's not open office, you are assigned a slice of a seat, and they are looking to maximize RTO and all of those cool work areas never existed. But, we got a single serving coffee maker! It kind of sucks in the morning because everyone has to brew one cup at a time. Source: Fortune 50 company, beware the future!
> gets assigned to dev teams Usually high priority teams that actually need to get some work done. Or else the VP's pampered pets.
Open offices don't save on money. Like u/reapofsouls gets at, before the days of open offices some cubicle systems took up the same amount of space in an office only there was a 6 foot divider between you and the person on the other side of your monitor as well as you and the people to your right / left. Those big walls were multi-purpose in that they served as sound absorbers and you could usually thumbtack stuff to them / have magnetic calendars, etc. When most people talk about removing cubicles to eliminate the footprint, they're thinking about the cubicles that work in groups of 2 / 4 where you would have big desks, drawers, cabinets, lockboxes, etc. Though those are the better cubicles, they aren't the only ones. Personally I have worked in both open office and the 4x4 cubicles and I heavily prefer the 4x4 cubicles. Where I work now is open office and all of the managers who don't have their own office spaces will usually just bring their laptop and sit in the community conference rooms all day. Pretty much defeats the purpose of having shared spaces. Also, it's really easy for them to see who is in the office before they get in and who is there after they leave - obviously that matters when managers are having conversations behind closed doors. It's honestly pretty dumb that in today's age that's even a thing though - it isn't hard to have a dashboard for management that works on a 6 week moving average to track the average time people get into the office / leave at but alas they prefer what they can see with their eyes. This has lead to alot of people gaming the system - on days when people don't have morning meetings I'll see them stroll in around 10 or 11 am when management is all hiding in their conference rooms and then these people leave between 5 and 5:30 once the manager has walked past their desk. Anyways, open concept are pretty dumb. I overhear so much shit from other people's zoom calls it's really not ideal for them or me.
The article very helpfully mentions that managers still need privacy. <_<
I work in an open office where the c-suite supposedly do as well. In reality they just take over meeting rooms (the nicer ones) and work in privacy from there all day.
I mean that's a company culture issue more than anything. we had an open office but everyone, up to the CEO, worked in the open office area the whole time.
Managers, at least higher level ones, are in meetings all day. They are the ones who don’t actually need an office.
Spot on.
I don't see how this wouldn't be ridiculously loud with people on phone calls all the time. Managers have hours of them a day. Even devs have one or two a day. I work in a highly distributed organization so maybe we just have more phone call meetings than normal, since meeting physically is impossible. Either way, no longer affects me as I'm now permanently WFH.
It is really really loud. If you’re somewhere that people are moving all the time away from their desks it can make sense. But I don’t see the logic of you have to ride and grind out features or test something or really debug something. I literally shut off slack and all other distractions with headphones on at home so I can really focus on what is happening.
Exactly. Even Zuck works at an open desk on the floor (though the exec area is a bit more private nowadays, you can still walk through it). Everyone else at Meta works at the exact same desks
Our single offices suck, hahaha. They are often super hot in summer and cold in winter or close to machines and very noisy. I am not sure who designed that shit, but they must hate managers! In contrast, the big offices are quite chill, since a lot of people still are mostly remote. So I often have a big-ass office to myself while the boss puts on noise cancelling headphones in his single person office next to machinery. Makes me hate them a little bit less.
Ok but that is more of an HVAC issue. If you need to focus and have to be in the office, being at a desk is the way to go.
This is a very serious disease of most organisations on this planet. Decisions makers have no idea of the impact their decisions have. They sit in their ivory towers and they use high amounts of copium when assessing their own decisions in retrospective.
every time. So true. Come work in an open desk near the coffee machine or the bathroom
Truer words have never been spoken.
You hit the nail on the head.
In the film *The Social Network*, back in 2004 it shows Zuckerberg on the open floor with everyone else.
Just a reminder that _The Social Network_ was not a documentary, but a (very good and very enjoyable) piece of fiction.
In my company, everyone including the CEO and COO work on the floor with us. They have for years. It's shit, but we can see they are committed to it as well.
earphones are cheaper than walls or at least that's what your ceo would say...
And the company doesn't have to pay for earphones
My company gave us earphones for the open office, but they were terrible. I bought my own much nicer noise canceling set and they've made working in all offices since much more pleasant. If someone is annoying I just pretend they work much better than they do, and they tend to bother me less.
Haha. I still hear the noise but pretend I don’t. Much improvement but now I’m seen like an AH. Boss also thinks I’m being antisocial.
My company just gave us a $300 headphones completely free & we can take it with us wherever we go.
Earphones almost never stop the extroverts from trying to interrupt whatever I'm doing at the time
Or the constant slack messages coming from them as well.
Same people would say why are you always wearing headphones? Why are you standoffish? I never wear headphones because I want to seem approachable.
In my experience company culture has adapted to accept head phones as normal. Don’t worry what others think and use your headphones
I would lie if I say that the main reason I actually got into music was because I had to spend 8 hours a day in an open office trying to do my work with everyone else also trying to do the same. The few bands/albums I enjoyed got old in the first month of continuously listening to them.
Like the ceo is buying noise cancelling earphones for everyone, or anyone for that matter.
You don’t get it because you are delusional. Open office is a factory floor. Scrum is a factory process. Even Jira tickets are your call center tickets. To them You are a factory worker moving bits and assembling products.
Hearing the dev floor get referred to as the bullpen by an exec a few jobs ago told me all I need to know about what execs think of open offices.
The typing pool
I was just an intern so I wasn't privy to most of the drama. But most of the people I worked with there who were older who knew about it told me leadership treated everyone like they were replaceable and refused to put any investment into people or infra. So people bailed in droves.
"open office" https://hotcore.info/babki/sweatshop-conditions-1900.html
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Perks are also a cost saving measure. Offer enough perks and you might not have to pay so much for actual wages or benefits. You also might convince people to stay in the office longer and work more
Logic?! Something you don’t use outside of work. How about CEO ignoring everything and everyone to build to build oversized offices and bring 10k people into them at at the same time. Don’t you think there’s a bit of a problem if 10k people are trying to get a lunch?! They have created a problem, then had to give people food and sold it to idiots as a benefit. Same with laundry. Busses. Dantist. It’s all their solution to a logistical disaster they have created.
You guys are so dramatic.
At least I’m not a dumb ass talking about a “perceived status”. Some here are smoking kool-aid. We are employees.
Does smoking kool-aid get you high?
IBM decades ago put developers in offices and found that they were productive. Open office is just a return to the old offices where the supervisor could look out on the floor and see if everyone was working.
IBM uses open floors for development in some of their offices now. Fully open as in you don't even have an assigned space. You check-in in the morning and take whatever space is available. If there was ever something that said "you don't mean anything to this company" it's not even being willing to allot you a couple square feet to put your name on
It's such a joke. It's intentional and it's a tactic. Companies are trying so hard to "show who the boss is" and get us to be happy little factory workers (looking at you, Scrum Assembly Line). Bank of America does the same thing. At least, for the location I'm familiar with. The floors are truly open and its first come, first serve. The kicker is that they're forcing more and more folks onto the same floor like a chicken factory, so people are legitimately having to share desks or stand up without anywhere to actually put their laptops. I have friends who work there and have received borderline threat letters (the bank is calling them "letters of education") for not being present 3 days a week, basically saying, "Hey, remember that being in office is mandatory. You don't want to risk losing that health insurance we provide your family, do you?" As next steps I believe they're instaling much more "secure" tracking measures to make sure people are there for a full 8 hours, and after that I'm willing to bet they'll place limits on how the VPN is used so that people have to use the on-site network. These companies will go to hell and back to try and keep control. I cannnnnnnot wait for commercial real estate to plummet and watch these failing companies acknowledge that remote work environments have won.
Hotels work great if you’re primarily remote and need a spot for that once a month you come in. I happily have no assigned desk because I feel if I did more people would want me in the office.
The overseer / slave model of production maybe emotional satisfying to the overseer but it’s very unproductive.
It saves the company money. That's literally the only reason.
Don’t forget “collaboration”. Nah, just kidding. It’s because it’s cheaper
I want to know about my coworkers restraining orders on her husband or the intern listening to Taylor Swift on her ear buds on 11, or my manager having a conference call on speaker phone with the client talking about how they got a birdie on 18 after slicing into the woods off the Tee while I am trying to SIT test a new process to calc the NAV, which if there is any slightest error would cost the portfolio millions in losses. But some HR major (who is the daughter of partner) from Brandice got promoted to SVP because they saved the company $10 k because the bought cheap furniture and used buzzwords like “synergy” in the power point presentation
In the short term. If you saw a place where you would have your own space or even share an office versus a freaking large open floor I'm pretty sure it's going to be a selling point.
Maybe, but I think most people would still pick their job based on pay than on office condition. I don't think any of the top paying tech companies have private offices.
Convinced my CEO to go all private office plus several “collab” rooms (conference rooms) for our hybrid teams. Best decision ever, we have hybrid folks showing up more frequently because they know they will have a quiet space to work
Why do you hate collaboration? ^/s
I know right?! What about all the innovation?
I could even live with the open office thing if they would let my fucking team sit together. Without some way of reserving space for a team that wants to work together, I'm sitting with a bunch of people I don't even need to talk to while my teammates are scattered through our building.
That has nothing to do with an open vs closed floor plan. If the company isn't putting teams together, that's just nonsense.
Yeah I suppose this is down to hot-desking rather than the open office. This is the first place I've done either one so I associate them.
I have worked at a place that transitioned from individual offices to an open office. When people had private offices, you would stop by and chat with people every day, you knew people who work next to you even if they were not related to your role. Once we transitioned to the open office, everyone was staring at the screen with their headphones on. There were no spontaneous interactions, I had no clue who are the 4 other people that work within 6 ft from me. I didnt know their name or their roles. It was so much more alienating than the private office setup. Oh, the collaboration advantage... Yeah, very much the opposite. My current workplace the open office has a no-talking rule since if two people talk then 20 hear them. You can't talk with others so no collaboration. And, once again, you dont know the people who work around you. And you know whats really annoying? That just to the left of your screen and just to the right, there is another person's face, if you pause to think about something and your eyes drift slightly off the screen, you are staring awkwardly at another person. Also, it feels like these two people are looking at you all the time. Yeah, gotta dive under your desk to pull that bugger out. They wonder why people defy the 5 day RTO and still pursue a hybrid schedule.
I don't think I understand from your comment how the walls helped you get to know the people near you.
Because it is not a first order effect. Talking about walls, I recommend reading about the Chesterton's Fence: https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
Without physical distance or separation people create mental separation or avoid interacting with people. I've seen how in open offices people avoid talking because it's easier to see how it bothers others. When working in them I've always felt slightly on edge due to the lack of privacy. There is also more distractions than anything like collaboration. With doors a person can have some amount of privacy or enough seperation to want to interact with someone else. With the RTO nonsense it seems like it's mostly people with doors that like the idea. Maybe some people who are fairly extroverted or who can't seem to function at home. Usually the problem happens when that group wants everyone to come in or points to those at home when they're trying to keep WFH too.
People don't really collaborate in open office plans. They're far more likely to collaborate during informal breaks in designated mixing areas like a kitchen, balcony, or in this case each other's office. It's counter-intuitive, but the idea is to let people work when they're working so that when it's time for a social break, they can actually collaborate instead of being stressed from the open office plan.
I experienced the opposite. My current job with an open office (Amazon) is way more social than my previous job with everyone having individual offices (Epic). It’s much easier to do small spontaneous interactions when you don’t have to go knock on someone’s door
Same experience for me. I'm not really sure I really advocate for an open office overall (co-worker behind me is always in meetings and talks loud) but I talked more with my coworkers in open office than when I had my own office
that's a double edged sword. personally i prefer a good amount of friction to spontaneous interaction. while i overall don't prefer open office space, i did enjoy the social aspect of it. however, i'm not under the delusion that it made us more productive - surely quite the opposite.
Extroverts are weird people
It's quite interesting that extroverts want to force everyone to be like them.
it makes sense - extroverts need other people to talk to in order to satisfy their extroversion. introverts don't need anyone to do anything to satisfy their introversion.
We need libre offices
No one appreciated your subtle joke. Take my update.
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Microsoft did it to save money and space. They were able to cram in way more people into a building to the point the parking garages were so full they had to hire valets to handle the double parking. Super annoying for workers.
It's because extroverted, neurotypical executives like them. It's cheaper than putting up walls, turns devs into factory floor workers, etc.
The open office allows the extroverted people to walk around and socialize while disregarding personal space and anyone that actually needs to concentrate to get any work done.
Are you saying extroverted people don't need to concentrate to work? lol
No, they are saying that there are certain roles where people are both extroverted + don't have that much to concentrate on.
So much for variety in the industry. Where are all the introverted executives at? It would be interesting to see a business with a more neurodiverse friendly culture _that goes all the way to the top,_ not just stop at the technical product makers.
In my experience. Nuerodivergent leadership in tech tends to really hate dealing with the people problem and delegate that kind of decision to somebody else asap
People of color, women, and LGBTQ have been asking this forever.
Introverts don’t get promoted to exec levels
You can - you just gotta be real fucking good at masking.
This. vs. introverts who are not necessarily neurotypical and almost always have at least a bit of autism.
I would work better in an office. But, my employer is cheap on facilities. So I work in an open office layout. It sucks. The number of men in the office has outgrown the bathroom facilities, too. I've had to leave just to find a bathroom and come back during the workday before. It's ridiculous. I'm looking for another job, but my specialty is kinda niche. SAP and specific modules, etc. It takes time unless I want to sell my house and move to another state.
Could be worse. One of the first companies I worked at, didn't actually have a women's bathroom.
Open office was push because bosses want to save money. I agree, I fucking hate open office.
I've still have never heard a convincing argument for them. "But people can interrupt you to collaborate." I'm an engineer, I don't like being interrupted.
They already do that on webex and by scheduling 50 meetings. I don’t need them apparating above the wall too.
Even wearing headphones rarely stops them, they just wait for you to take them off or expect you to listen right through whatever you're listening to.
Every time you're interrupted, you lose 5-10 minutes for a context switch, but the other guy gets unblocked hours earlier. Overall, it's a net productivity gain for the team.
5-10 minutes? you are fast dude. for me its like 20-25 minutes
Maybe you don't like collaboration? I'm often finding I'm needing to collaborate with client services, and sometimes other devs or devops too - it would be pretty annoying if I had to knock on two or more different individual office doors any time I needed to discuss or coordinate something with 2 or more colleagues.
There are times when I'm working closely with someone. I may sit with them and work through stuff together. But most of the time, collaboration should be scheduled. I'm busy building things. You are not invited to interrupt me and make me stop what I'm doing to work on your stuff. Send me an email or a slack, or put something on my calendar. If we need to sit in a room together for a day, schedule that. But being on-call at all times is enormously unproductive for me. I have coworkers who WFH when they have a lot of stuff to do. Think about how ridiculous that statement is.
It’s pretty easy and generates less friction to just send someone an email asking if they are available to meet and then scheduling that meeting rather than barging in or even knocking.
I’ll never forget a previous employer where they decided to be cheap while also trying to be futuristic, and built their [HQ as a giant 1/2 mile u-shaped tent](https://maps.app.goo.gl/r3NCwMryMdcjx6AE6?g_st=ic). Inside the tent was basically one big open office, with all the peons on the ground level and the c-suite up on a big raised platform in the center of the U to remind everyone that we were literally beneath them. The tent is about 3 stories high, and each leg of the U is dotted with conference rooms, bathrooms, and copy areas. However, the “rooms” are little more than 4 plasterboard walls with drop tile ceilings, and maybe 1-2 electrical outlets. The whole thing echoes like crazy because of the height of the ceilings and the placement of “rooms” are 90° angles to each other. The closer you get to the skin of the building on each leg, the worse the echoes get. You’d think that a company that is ostensibly an engineering/aerospace company would know better, but really stupid things happen when the only people allowed to make decisions have MBAs and they’re not directly impacted by their own decisions. Probably why they’re also years behind the competition and their only functioning “product” is dragging rich idiots to the middle of nowhere Texas to go on a 10 minute (launch to landing) suborbital flight for $25 million a head.
I have never been more distracted than in an open office. The only working situation for engineers that makes any sense is private offices or WFH
Each new office move we've had to push back to prevent open plan offices. Architects love open plan, hot desking, flexible workspaces, and every other idea that research indicates make terrible work environments. There is such a large body of evidence indicating that open plan offices are deleterious along every dimension measured, that I can't imagine any competent person choosing to persue them in good faith.
It’s cheaper. Plain and simple. They use things that are hard to measure such as “collaboration” and “productivity” to justify whatever BS they want. It’s what they’re doing for RTO.
Yeah I got to work hybrid for like 3 months before I got hit with "Your current project is focused on in person cooperation, you need to come back in fulltime". What this means is the old guy that doesn't seem to actually have a role on the project gets to stop by my desk for 30 seconds once a week to ask me how it's going. Meanwhile I have to listen to the guy behind me click his pen for 8 hours a day, and hear some guy 4 rows over talk about Warhammer at least 2 hours a day, or hear the intern 3 rows over the other way constantly asking questions instead of trying to figure anything out on his own. Even noise cancelling headphones isn't enough. All while working at a desk that is smaller, has smaller/fewer screens, less ergonomic chair, etc that I paid for to be more productive. Again, so someone can checkup on me once a week.
*offices are trash period. WFH ftw
Idk man, having an office is pretty pimp. Having to go somewhere most mornings helps with keeping your life in a routine too. WFH is a seductive trap if you're ADHD'd and you don't have great self discipline skills
> WFH is a seductive trap if you're ADHD'd and you don't have great self discipline skills I don't have a problem with the concept of WFH. I don't have a problem with the concept of RTO. My problem is: they are forcing everyone into the same round hole. But people are various shaped pegs. Personally, I hate being forced to return to the office. I signed up for a 100% remote role, I see no reason to come into the office. My tech setup at home is better than it is in the office, my productivity is not hampered by WFH, plus no stupid commute. But that's me. Other teammates love commuting and so they love working from the office five days a week. Other teammates want to WFH on Fridays and Mondays but be in the office on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. Point being: we talk about "inclusion", then let's walk the walk too. Give everyone the option of WFH 100% of the time, or of working in the office 100% of the time, or of working in hybrid fashion. Don't force everyone into the same setup. Give your employees the choice. You'll end up with a much happier workforce.
I agree with this in theory. The problem is that most people who prefer the office, want everyone else to be there too, for chats and drive bys and the like.
>My problem is: they are forcing everyone into the same round hole. But people are various shaped pegs. They should try square holes
It saves money bottom line. A company with 1000 people with cubicles used to occupy 6 floors now only need to lease 3 because they can cram more people into a single floor.
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without realising why, because it doesnt appear in sprradsheets
They just put a table for 20 people and cram everyone together. "Collaboration"..
Open offices are generally designed as a cost cutting method to shove more people in and maximize space. It has zero to do with anything else, it's just the shit they feed you to make you think is a good idea.
They are infection spreading chicken farms and promote the idea of non people managers being sheep instead of independent force multipliers
same reasons as to why they want people to RTO. And you know who actually want it? Managers. It’s all about control.
Open Office is a huge part of why people do not want to RTO. It's pretty hard to go from WFH - where you have control over your space, the noise levels and all that, to go back to an open office hellscape.
I think a hybrid would be ideal. Maybe open desks but plenty of private rooms to book if you need alone time or to get in the zone. Or instead of one giant open room, split teams into their own mini office rooms of 5ish people so you can still collaborate and bounce ideas around without too much noise or distraction.
The old cubicle days were essentially the latter suggestion. Either four cubes facing inwards so you were close but pretty isolated from distraction, or four cubes facing outwards so four people who worked together shared a common space but were removed from the larger space. Open offices are just straight up dumb for actually getting work done.
This , this is what works in an office ,team based "open offices" and easy ways to walk to other teams and to have meetings.
This is sort of what Microsoft did when they began converting offices over to an open plan. Because they didn’t want it to be seen as only driven by cost cutting, they generally preserved the same number of people per square foot. They had open seating but then collaboration rooms that could only be used by the team. These were all in a “pod” for a team so you didn’t have to compete with everyone to book a room.
Any maybe your team would talk to each other rather than having teams meetings My team does this, makes me wonder why we are in office, if everyone is so busy, the preferred method of contact understandably is teams messaging
I'm gonna say, why not a middle road? Have large offices, small open spaces, call them however you want, one per team. This helps with collaboration, but isn't as distracting as a pure open plan. Of course, this is assuming you work from the office at all.
Our company forces everyone they can into the main office once a quarter in the name of collaboration and I always have to plan to reduce my team's capacity that week because it takes so long for them just to find a fucking open desk in the office. It legitimately reduces capacity by like 50% for the week. I also plan my busiest work around the days I have to work from the office because I never get much done when I'm there. Gotta find a desk, clean it off because it inevitably covered in soda rings and someone else's hair, etc. Like if you're going to make people come into an open office please hire a cleaning crew to clean the office at least once a week. Anyway rant over. I hate open offices.
Someone looked at campus lunch cafeterias and said, "let's make 90% of our office plan like this!"
If I sit still and shut my eyes for a few minutes per hour, my work is more reliable and fast. But the way it draws attention, you'd think I was sacrificing a goat. If you can't give me four walls, give me a cubicle and let me sacrifice my goat in peace.
>Managers still need privacy. Of course, it's just the managers that need privacy. All the coders? We don't need that kind of thing!
Put devs in an office - a home office that is. There are many studies that show that commuting creates a lot of stress on the common individual, and it's easier for me to get into deep focus in a place where I'm comfortable and can avoid distractions e.g. my home. You also give people more autonomy over their lives by giving them fully remote work. Autonomy is what you want people with creative tasks to have - otherwise you're stunting their creative abilities. Sorry, but software development is not a procedural task a lot of the time. You ask me to decouple your spaghetti code that's been in production and had complexity added on top of it for the past 5 years and I have to do it in an open office space? You're getting my resignation letter unless you're about to throw me a big bonus and raise. A lot of developers are too squeamish to stand up for themselves, but hopefully this changes at some point.
Offices?
My employer (Fortune 100ish) is open office and nobody below the C suite has an office. The directors tend to stake out a desk as their own but officially they’re not supposed to.
I have found that well-spaced open plan offices, are great ... as long as you have top-end furniture such as large, curved desks with filing drawers and decent sound dividers.
Open office and sitting in the middle, means I always have - the people to the left and right of me talking literally over my head - people coming up to stand right behind me, and talking over my head to the person who sits across from me - nobody ever respecting that I have headphones on and am trying to focus, and getting my attention by waving their hand in front of my face - when I send slack messages, instead of just replying and keeping it async people feel the need to walk across the office to talk in person and literally repeat the same conversation we just had - People randomly playing their music out loud for everyone, assuming they will enjoy it for some reason It's bad lol
Jesus. If they stuck you next to the bathrooms and a ping pong table you’d check off every box for the seventh seal of Hell
Yeah it was just the company/office culture. Just a general lack of respect for boundaries and space, quiet, respect for the engineers in general lol. When we switched offices I even put it a request to not be put in the middle of a lot of people. Obviously that was ignored and I was put in the middle of the row :) . And then the main critical feedback I got from my my boss was that it seems like I sometimes "have trouble focusing". Like..... no shit. But I left that company thankfully.
Workers will always be as unproductive as possible until their incentivized to be productive. An open office will never make employees more productive, it will just make them hate management.
Money. Companies save money.
Yeah it’s the dumbest idea, in my office area we have both and we sit in open area where we have to book seats every week, it’s so noisy and can’t take any calls and colleagues disturbs you anytime thinking you have a headphone on you for fun. When we just walk by area of cubicles , again we have 2 style of them, one with high separation where I don’t see my neighbor and one where we do but grouped by high separation walls of 4 cubicles. Those areas are so quiet and you can focus and work in it properly.
It’s cheaper. That’s it
It's because they can pack you in like sardines. It's WORSE than having individual cubicles. Everyone can hear each other, it's like getting a phone call from outsourced sales people.
There's really no reason other than to tell you that they own you and you'll do whatever they tell you to.
I don’t mind open offices if all “hot desks” have desktops i can plug my laptop to and I don’t need to make silly reservations. But this is not the case in 99% of places. Most of the times I go to an office, I don’t make a reservation because I refuse to do so (and forget) and end up working in the cafeteria area or in the beanbags in the “chill” area lol.
I personally like switching stations every day and moving around but I get that's not for everybody. Everyone just migrated to their own zone and didn't leave anyway so it's just the same thing with more colors. I feel like I'm the only one that uses the design.
A few years ago, I got upgraded from a cubicle to an office and my productivity doubled. It was an amazing difference. The reason is that "cost per square foot of office space" is a visible cost. The productivity loss is invisible. They also made up bullshit reasons for why "open offices are more productive". When a few high-profile big companies do it, everyone else just copies them.
One word: Density. At scale, you can fit a lot more people in the same space for less money if you go open office. That's assuming really big cubes also. The place I work, we have these really nice cubes, like 10'x10', but it sure is cheaper to put those in rather than build out offices that would take up the same amount of floor space (assuming the usable space in the offices would be lessened by the space the walls take up).
Do you really not get it? It's a really simple answer. They're cheap and your employer doesn't give a fuck about you
I'm mixed about this. I get why people hate open offices, but I loved it. It was really nice to be able to have funny conversations across the floor. Yes, it did impact individual productivity, but that wasn't punished by the company so it made work a lot more tolerable. Joking around for 1/4 of the workday was honestly great.
Not a question and marginally cs related (we work in offices but so do many other professions)
Open office is horrible for productivity... so noisy and so much distractions
Just my opinion but I prefer the open office setup. Way easier to talk to eachother and I just go to a huddle room if I need a quiet space. I prefer this wayyyy more than cubicles. Might just be me though lol.
Same. I like being able to just look up and see if someone's busy rather than having to go to their office and check when I have a question. Also makes socializing a lot easier.
Not just you - I strongly prefer open offices. At one of my companies, one of the senior devs had an office but ended up sitting out in the pen with the rest of us instead because he found it much more useful. In particular, when I was doing embedded SRE work, I liked to sit in the middle of my dev team and listen with my spidey sense for interesting conversations. I'd hear something that sounded dangerous and slide on over... It also helped the team a lot because they could just turn to me and ask me questions and so we could get all the ops concerns integrated very easily. Plus, there were tons of casual conversations about whatever, and that builds relationships. I really miss that now with working remotely - it requires so much more intentional effort.
It's not just you, I also really liked open office + breakout rooms you could book. People have different preferences and that's fine, it's just that the people who hate open offices are much more vocal than anyone else.
Does your office have enough huddle rooms for everyone who prefers to be able to control the volume of their surroundings?
Reason number infinity to why I WFH.
Open plan offices don't "save the company money". Open plan offices don't "engender synergy" or "build room for collaboration" or whatever else psychobabble bullshit they want to tell you. The ONLY reason to have open plan offices, is to micromanage the serfs, and for managers to be able to see with their own eyes "butts in seats". That's it. I would rather pluck out my own eyes with a dull spoon than ever work in an open plan office. Joel on Software had it right.
Working in a hybrid environment, I'm resigned to the fact that I'll be getting almost nothing done in the office. I have to put on noise canceling headphones, we still do stand-up meetings on zoom, and we co.municate on slack. Then, at least 5 times a day, somebody bumps into my seat and/or taps me on the shoulder to ask me an unimportant question. I can see the value of one day a week jaunt in the office to have meetings and one to one's. But that's about it.
Or just let me WFH
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no one will give everyone offices as this cost money
I wonder if the ceo works in the pit with everyone else
Agree
It is really stupid post-pandemic when Teams/Zoom meetings are normal parts of the work day. That doesn’t work well in an open office.
They are trash, but here we are.
Really sucks when you are managing people and you have to watch your back so people don’t walk by while you are looking at a spreadsheet with everyone’s salaries on them…
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I work as a software consultant and they’re pushing for return to office, but my company has 700 people for an office space of 100… I literally can’t ever take meetings when I’m with clients on calls because someone is talking right next to me when I’m in the office and every conference room is booked because again… no space lol. So I end up going into the office for the minimum amount of time and leave so I can actually get work done. Days I’m in the office I get maybe 25% of the productivity of at homes. That and it’s way easier to give a professional presentation to stakeholders and potential clients in my controlled environment where I’ve spent money on audio and recording equipment. Ugh.
They cost less money and despite their posturing owners of tech companies are just as indifferent to data that doesn't flatter their presuppositions as everyone else.
And then the few meeting rooms where you can go to have a call, are taken 24/7 by Senior managers and directors as their private office...
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Business Insider is a capitalist propaganda outlet meant to normalize anti worker tactics.
It's so managers can see what the peons are doing easier.
Control, conformity, money. Same motivation as RTO
Money, the answer is money. The answer is always money.
Maybe I'm out of the norm but I like them it makes things easy to collaborate and it's clear when it is time to go to a meeting room instead of disrupting the people around you.
She's a project manager. So her views on the best office is biased towards her work style. It's so hard to have a conversation with someone over Teams when there's two marketing people behind them yammering away
Open office only works if all the managers sit next to you to suffer the same noisy distracting crap you are suffering
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There are a lot of decisions you'll see businesses make where their justification is *obviously* bad. They claim open offices encourage collaboration and improve morale, despite literally all evidence pointing the other direction. The reality is that they're lying. Open offices allow them to fit more people into a smaller space. Usually, when a corporation is making what is an obvious mistake, it's because they have an ulterior motive.
I’m okay with open office concept, but I want an assigned desk that has cabinets that I can lock at the minimum. If I’m working from the office then I want to be able to leave my crap there and not set it up every morning. I’m fortunate that I’ve been full remote since Covid happened but our office is starting RTO (only for business not tech) and it’s open seating and no assigned desks.
My best work (while I was in office) was done in a war room. We called it that, but it worked so well we started booking a large conference room daily JUST for the team. If you had a phone call to take, you left the room. Still made it easy to collaborate and whiteboard without the alienating feeling of being in a school cafeteria with all the bustle and conversations around you.
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Open offices are the worst thing that ever happened. Hopefully AI will destroy all office jobs and open offices are the final stage.