People have gotten to multi billion IPOs without open spaces.
It's just a random historical accident on Facebook's story, and it that sense it would be like considering PHP essential to Facebook's IPO, as if if they used Python or Ruby or anything similar, they wouldln't have made it.
>Why would Mark Z care about these surveys? Of those respondents that were dissatisfied, what did those workers who require private offices build that was great? He built a multi-billion dollar company with a cramped elbow-to-elbow open office.
People have built "multi-billion dollar companies" with all other kind of traits, including private offices (Microsoft, Apple) but also sexism, treating employees badly, death marches, poisonous work culture, etc.
It doesn't mean that companies should imitate all these to get to the "multi-billion dollar" part, any more than they should imitate open offices.
I'm not claiming open offices are superior nor am I recommending that people copy Facebook's practices.
Instead, I'm asking people to suspend the common Dilbert-PointyHairedBoss disadvantages about open offices and instead, really try to get inside the head of people like Mark Zuckerberg.
To exercise the notion of entertaining thoughts we don't agree with, let's write out a very uncomfortable sentence that might be uttered by Mark Z: "I don't want to build private offices because that would be a competitive disadvantage and handicap Facebook's ability to innovate."
Did that sentence make your eyeballs hurt? Good. If the programming community can't honestly engage with people executives who feel the truth of the above statement in their heart, the discussion on the topic will go nowhere. Showing news articles such as the one by Lindsey won't convince them.
>There are countless researches on the importance of focus and the impact of distractions.
Yes, of course uninterrupted focus and shielding from distractions is important. However, that factor will take a back seat if collaboration outweighs it. Unless that research shows that a _group_ of programmers in private offices outperform programmers in open offices, it means nothing to people like Zuckerberg.
If you watch the Mark Zuckerberg video, it is clear he prioritizes collaboration over disruptions. He's not stupid and knows that there will be inevitable distractions. He's optimized for collaboration because it matches his experience for success.
The way to counteract that thinking is to create a company with private offices that crushes Facebook (or one of Facebook's business units.) You need some type of business evidence that frightens him into building private offices.
Did that sentence make your eyeballs hurt? Good. If the programming community can't honestly engage with people executives who feel the truth of the above statement in their heart, the discussion on the topic will go nowhere. Showing news articles such as the one by Lindsey won't convince them.
An executive, including Mark, can be an arsehole and hold any kind of BS opinion (e.g. "I can't hire women and/or pay them the same, because they are not as good as men").
If they can't see why something is bad for their employees, fuck them. It's not like they run the only game in town.
And "it's good for the bottom line" is not an excuse. All kinds of shit can be good for the bottom line, including illegal practices (e.g. blackmailing foreign employees that you'll have them deported).
You don't need data to know that sexism, employee abuse and other social ills are are bad so that's not a good comparison.
Then the comment I was replying to missed TFA, because it gives pointers to research on the issue.
The research[1] that various journalists in Washington Post, Harvard Business Review, WSJ, etc are pointing to is a survey of employees' satisfaction levels and not an analysis comparing business results.
If that oft-cited survey is the best ammunition we have, it won't move the needle towards private offices. What we need is business evidence of private offices enabling productivity levels superior to everyone else with open offices.
[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272494413...
E.g.: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~gmark/CHI2005.pdf
Or:
"In 80 clinical trials, Dr. Glenn Wilson, a psychiatrist at King's College London University, monitored the IQ of workers throughout the day. He found the IQ of those who tried to juggle messages and work fell by 10 points -- the equivalent to missing a whole night's sleep and more than double the 4-point fall seen after smoking marijuana. "This is a very real and widespread phenomenon," Wilson said. "We have found that this obsession with looking at messages, if unchecked, will damage a worker's performance by reducing their mental sharpness."
You are disagreeing with people who may not actually disagree with you (I know I think open concept offices are terrible for most purposes).
Microsoft conquered the world with closed offices. You can find anecdotes either way. Maybe facebook are big despite open offices. How could you tell the difference?
And to your point about anecdotes supporting either narrative: Microsoft was defeated by open-office search company (Google vs Bing), defeated by open-office smartphone company (Apple iPhone vs Windows Phone), defeated by open-office cloud services company (Amazon AWS vs MS Azure). Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that Microsoft has transitioned away from private offices towards open plans in their newer buildings.[1]
I've been looking for compelling evidence that proves the superiority of private offices but haven't found any. The business case studies showing superior performance that's directly caused by private offices don't exist. Yeah, surveys of employees exist but not superior business results.
[1]http://www.geekwire.com/2014/microsoft-developer-division/
At least so far as Apple has adopted the open office craze, innovation and sales have dropped with Tim Cook taking a recent pay cut for poor performance.
Yes, Apple is moving to open offices in the new Cupertino headquarters, the "spaceship," but that is not how they achieved their big success with the iPhone.
I don't have the cites handy but my recollection is that the specific iPhone teams (hardware and software) were working long hours in the open around conference tables. That subgroup was isolated from the rest of Apple employees because of the secrecy so yes in that sense, they weren't "open" on the gigantic scale of Facebook.
Apple is sufficiently secretive that indeed some other teams might have been in open offices. Not the ones that I saw or interacted with. I was working on a key part of the iPhone and iPad technology.
Many of the teams are not (or only recently) switched to open offices. I think it's quite unrealistic to try and attribute bing/mobile performance to something that wasn't even largely rolled out at the onset of those competitions, as opposed to the occams razor of well discussed strategy issues in those markets. As much as I'm a proponent of private offices, to attribute business success to one or the other (and not just as an added cost function that may move the needle slightly) seems to be focusing on the more minor of all the things that could lead to a product success/failure. In that vein I think employee satisfaction _is_ key, as a longterm trend of unhappiness (from ANY source) CAN lead to the sort of things that do disrupt key product delivery. (see sister posts on the cost of turnover discussion, etc)
What is needed is an interventional study or a few.
I too have had great experiences doing productive new work in small open offices up to 6 people. I'm currently not enjoying my open office of >100 people. I'd be quite happy with a team-sized office with a door and decent internal sound damping.
Yes, but what he built was yet another banal social media site in php. Nothing that required deep thinking or innovation.
1) Give consumers what they want instead of what you think they want.
2) He used tools as intended. Instead of wasting time implementing Erlang trying to achieve the best messaging platform ever, he went with something that was popular and was easy to understand for everybody at the time, which was PHP. Then went on to improve the system as they needed with HHVM, React, React Native, etc.
3) As much as somebody can hate Facebook for being a social network/privacy leech, which is something a lot of programmers dismiss precisely because of the social part, just the fact they popularized React as one of the defacto front-end frameworks speaks volumes about how they can push real innovation for everybody else.
4) And even simple stuff like sharing pictures. I still remember vividly how awkward was to share pictures before Facebook. Sure, I think Flickr or similar stuff was there already, but nobody is going to keep clicking on your gallery so they can see how an amazing photographer you are. Sometimes the greatest innovation is in the simplest things, and if you ask me, this was THE feature they brought to the table.
It's obviously a conscious business decision.
When a site is focused on "social", like MySpace or Facebook, it comes across as invasive. When a site is focused on personal "marketing", like LinkedIn or dating networks, it can more be useful feedback on your reach.
EDIT: I hate the word "creepy"
This is the first time in my life that I have heard about mixi.jp. Facebook was able to capture not only the US but almost the whole world for that matter. Again, dismissing those achievements as if they were nothing really does not give them proper credit.
Because companies shouldn't be planned for just a few years, while the initial excitement lasts. You'll be OK with discomfort if the benefits outweigh it, and in case of Facebook, I'm fairly certain this is what happened. When the work becomes less interesting and more traditional company like, you're toleration levels will start dropping as well. Early bird employees go and seek new challenges and the ones replacing them never experience the initial thrill only the vast, yet crowded, noisy, anti-privacy zone that is supposed to be the place to host extensive thinking.
[1] I want to emphasize started not worked at.
To answer your question, Microsoft famously gave developers private offices through much of the 90s and I think early 00s while they were becoming successful enough to be sued under the antitrust laws. So, there's one example for you.
Clearly since we can't match these workers with a highly successful, innovative, billion dollar idea their opinions are worthless. After all, such things never happened until Mark invented the open office.
The 2 common cited reasons of "saves real estate costs" and "employee distrust" have become thought-stopping memes that prevents the analysis of executives who prefer working in open offices and became successful with it. I previously posted an example of Mark Zuckerberg's thinking:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13374848
Look at those old photos and then listen to him speak about his new 2015 open desk in the video. Contemplate whether he built the new open office to spy on everyone or... was it to recreate and extend the "open office" kitchen table at Harvard that let the team quickly iterate on software and get to $100 billion IPO?
Would Lindsey's complaints sway him? She says:
>A 2013 study found that 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 for them and more than 30 percent complained about the lack of visual privacy.
Why would Mark Z care about these surveys? Of those respondents that were dissatisfied, what did those workers who require private offices build that was great? He built a multi-billion dollar company with a cramped elbow-to-elbow open office.
Opinion pieces about this topic are not convincing. Concrete business performance superior to everyone else based on private offices would be convincing.