"some" developers? I'd guess that's in fact "most".

In my experience the only people who like open office are those whose job is to talk all day long. Sales guys, visionaires, busy bodies etc. Everyone else just suffers.

This evergreen topic comes up enough that there will always be multiple sides to this topic. I've gone so far in past threads to imply that other devs were "wrong" about being more productive in open office plans, and got bashed for that. "Don't tell me how I'm more productive", etc.

There may never actually be hard data on this, because it's, at core, likely very hard to measure, but I'd love to read some research/findings on this issue more.

I'm in a coworking situation now, with a private space, and I'm always more productive in the private space. But I do relieve some stress and get energized by interacting with others in the common area. And in previous jobs, there's of course always times when you need to talk to colleagues about project issues, and that's a requirement.

To the folks (devs) who insist that they are "more productive" in open plan offices, I wonder if the rest of the folks in the room with you are equally as productive, or if the productivity is just being shifted from some people in the room to others.

I think there are at least two different kinds of productivity. One is the kind where you need to progress through a non-trivial body of work with a well-understood end-state. Your primary, if not sole, output is code. This is probably well suited for private offices and remote teams.

The other is where you're solving a problem that isn't in the first order a code problem. There are typically humans involved in these kinds of problems. Most instances where the problem is defined as "building the right thing for the customer" where part of the problem is coming up with "the right thing". This works well in open plan offices where multiple people can quickly give input/get feedback. Remote working is probably not a great idea. Most work in early startups is probably in this category, and that also offers a model to explain why open plan offices are so common in not-startups-anymore: these companies are very eager to retain the energy of their early days, and a lot of that energy is tied to the collaboration of the open plan office, even if not necessarily suited to the workloads of the more mature company.

Tl;dr: when people speak of being more or less productive under certain conditions, a lot probably hinges on what kind of work they are doing.

Unfortunately I think personal productivity overall in industry is less of a factor than people suggest. Everyone wants have high pay, use exciting technologies, work in comfort etc. but they don't see the bigger picture.

Investing in people at the end of they day has to make sense, otherwise other companies will out compete you. When it's hard to determine people skills, work varies highly in intensity, projects fail for any number of reasons, people don't stay very long at even the most "comfortable" companies etc. the personal productivity of any employee becomes marginal, at least in the lower ranks. This is true for most "craft" industries like newspapers, fashion or design.

There are also people other than coders in tech companies. I'm next door to a sales group for a tech company. They do a lot of yelling.

Yes, I agree that co-locating teams that aren't directly collaborating can be counterproductive. Loud sales teams, obviously, yes, but quieter teams will also have different patterns of buzz that will be disturbing to unrelated teams near them.

It's interesting. They get REALLY PISSED at the developers about stuff.

When I've worked in none-developer companies I've always found the office staff are fine as long as you don't rub it in their faces that you earn more and have more freedom.

Well except one place where the people in the office where just horrible (really toxic culture largly down to the 'office manager' been about one step short of invading Poland) so I just did as I pleased (wandering in at 10am wearing flip flops and combat shorts), I was pulling 60hr weeks so the boss didn't care and she hated me anyway because she had to do payroll and knew what I was earning, I was knackered from day one on that job.

What's interesting here is the sales group is from a different company. Their devs are at a different office. So I hear the stuff like a fly on the wall.

What I don't hear is the root cause of the angst. Is the sales team overpromising? I don't know. But when something's not ready for their demo it gets quite loud.

there is data on the subject and it is simply not possible to be more productive in an open office with distractions. It's impossible with the way our brains work

I said some because if I had said all or implied all I'd have gotten lots of "but I love open offices" responses and they do exist.

Indeed they do, I'm one of them.

But with a huge caveat:

I can largely turn off other sensory input. Some is nice: a breeze through the window, a buzz of others around, nice light and open plan but not vast open plan; no one is no more than 4 desks away from a window (a proper window that can be opened and that has some kind of view). And cubicles shouldn't have huge walls; can see the face or top of the head of the person next to you.

Also: Lots of small meeting rooms dotted around with almost assured availability of one at little notice. It could be for a sensitive call, impromptu conversation, or just to sit in the dark working something out.

I couldn't survive normally in one, nor in the other. However I default at open plan. If others want to default the other way, that's good too. There should be options.

I would be interested to hear what hardware you will buy. What's your ideal hardware? Just a MBP or something more interesting?

Was offered a tricked out iMac or similar but I'm a linux user through and through so I'll self-build.

Current plan is Ryzen 1700(possibly X)/32GB DDR4 (2x16GB, board supports 4 slots so can upgrade if needed) (going to need a lot of virtualisation capability to handle dealing with multiple legacy systems, windows for interop and 8 cores with 16 threads at that price is a hard match from Intel), 500GB SSD with 1TB WD Black and a pair of decent monitors, comes in about half what the tricked out iMac comes in at, RX550 (I don't care about 3D but I want to be able to drive the screens without onboard graphics and ATI will support the RX550 for some time since it's new and the linux drivers are excellent these days for ATI).

MS Ergo 4000 keyboard and a decent mouse.

I asked the boss and he said "I don't have a clue on hardware, just send me a shopping list link and I'll order it".

I think I'm going to like this new place :)

Given the budget is top of the line iMac I could have gone to 1800X and 64GB of RAM but why kick the arse out of it and I'm into diminishing returns with either of those. Current systems are 32GB desktops and I rarely wish I had more but I do find the i5-xxxxK's limiting since once you load a couple of vagrant machines, an instance of Windows for Edge testing and Intellij things start to slow down quite quickly, it's not an IPC thing (the cores are fast enough, just not enough of them).

I'll move to a standing desk but I'll built that myself since I know exactly what I want (I built my current one) down the line.

I did consider a good Thinkpad with doc/screens but since I'll spend 95% of my time in the office the trade off of performance/comfort for the 5% of the time I'll be in a meeting made no sense, basically any cheap thinkpad or similar will do for meetings.

I know some people prefer not having to sync between machines and just pick up and go with everything but work is for work, everything else is for not work.

I put a fair amount of thought into the hardware, since I'm in-house developer #1 at this place I'll be an army of one for a while, I wanted a machine that was fast enough to be to do multiple things while I work, I want to be be able to run integration and unit tests while continuing to work (at least locally until I tame the main codebase and get it under proper CI).

It's a fun engineering challenge because their underlying business is complex and highly bespoke and their existing 'main' system was written over many years in a style that was obsolete when it was written.

I'm seriously looking forwards to it and they are nice folks.

That sounds like a great dev build and a really wonderful job/company/work environment. Hope that everything turns out well for you.

Thank you, that's nice (I love HN for that, not much nice left) I hope so too, I'm coming off the back of 4yrs of crushing workloads and a failed (though not for technical reasons, government killed the renewable installer incentives which killed the market for the product) startup so getting to work on interesting technical problems in a much lower stress environment is something I really want!.

If you're running linux you can use the lxc plugin for Vagrant[1], I'm on the devops side of thing so end up needing to spin up a lot of machines from time to time to test clustering etc... and the lxc plugin has been a saviour as you can get much higher density of "machines".

The only caveat is you can't do things modify kernel params etc... but that's usually ok for my use YMMV obviously. Also they don't update Atlas with new images so you need to build your own but that's really easy[2].

1. https://github.com/fgrehm/vagrant-lxc 2. https://github.com/obnoxxx/vagrant-lxc-base-boxes

That sounds interesting, I generally deploy to vagrant via ansible using the same config as production (just a different file with configuration variables) since that allows as close as possible replication of the deploy environment (particularly for older projects on 14.04 when I'm running 16.04 on the dev machine), lxc would be useful for those "I need to simulate lots of machines" configurations though.

I wasn't aware that it had gotten as good as those links look so thanks! :).

> I'll move to a standing desk but I'll build that myself since I know exactly what I want (I built my current one) down the line.

Interesting. Something like that would be absolutely impossible here in Germany. I recall that we weren't allowed to buy any furniture from Ikea because office furniture must be certified to a certain level of fire-resistance, and Ikea doesn't bother with those certifications. There are dedicated vendors for office furniture for that reason.

Interesting.

Small/Medium companies here don't really care about that stuff in fact I don't think anywhere I've worked has ever considered that stuff.

This was the one I built where I am now http://imgur.com/a/H7fxb

> MS Ergo 4000 keyboard and a decent mouse.

Currently typing on one of these. I hate the loud clicking noise though, especially with co-workers around me. Are there any similar but less noisy versions of it?

Not that are specifically the same as the 4000, there is the new microsoft ergo keyboard which is quieter but I don't like the key travel.

The 4000 isn't really that loud (I found it was louder with the front edge on as it creates a void space under the keyboard like a speaker) especially compared to the mechanical I was using before.

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/accessories/en-gb/products/keyboar...

I know people who've used those and love them, I personally didn't too much like a laptop keyboard the travel feels wrong.

Thank you - now if only the numblock would be attached :)

Thanks for the write up. Interesting.