Pretty much. Drama finds a way. You can find similar horror stories from any layout.
I mean, I take no particular position on this subject and and not personally a fan of open plans. But there's an important distinction between office combatants using the terrain to their advantage and blaming the war on the geography.
I think drama comes from uncertainty and power vacuums, which I would say are artifacts of the terrain.
EDIT: oh. Are you saying Afghanistan?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15725493 Certainly not a productive comment.
A quick scan of that users's history seems to indicate fairly reasonable stuff:
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=xiphias&next=1582220... (among others)
Given a lot of other reasonable posts, (apparently) one low value comment seems to be able to get a user shadowbanned. That strikes me as a bit excessive.
If you've checked the comment history and the comments seem ok I guess you can email the mods to let them know.
I have vouched for perhaps hundreds of shadowbanned comments, is that what you mean? Or vouching for a user directly?
While it definitely sounds like the open floor plan was weaponized for this, that is definitely its own problem that can be observed anywhere leadership doesn't specifically root it out.
LOL, that's an amazing description.
The tragedy of the commons part, though, looks like a structural problem to me. It's pretty common to want a discussion with 3-5 people for 5-10 minutes. With offices or even cubes, you can just have that in the workspace. With open plan, you either annoy everyone around you or book a conference room, which takes it away from standard users.
I'm not sure what anyone at the peon or even manager level can do about this, except try to keep meetings short or relegate them to slack/email. It really is a design issue.
I can't really find much meaning in "aesthetic of a kindergarten or hipster daycare" though. People tend to fill hipster with an image of all the qualities they dislike in people. It's a modern scapegoat that has wide appeal because everyone thinks the other guy is the hipster. I think in a lot of peoples minds hipster means immature and facile which helps the reader to feel better about themselves as mature, dutiful and more deeply insightful. I'm sure you weren't using it so divisively but imo that is how it works.
What exactly was the space like?
The more important you were the longer you left conference room doors open after conference started and the louder you slammed the door when you finally got asked to close.
Extra points for speaker phone at absolute max volume.
I'm in an open plan office and people are quite respectful. I'm maybe 95% as productive as I'd be in an office, mostly due to conversations that happen occasionally.
- tribes claiming spaces: there was a couch area where a natural affinity group formed based on common personality types typical of urban/suburban tribal divide. developed an in-group/out-group mentality. a counter group formed in a lunch area.
- posturing: top tech individual contributor used main boardroom for "really important video conference meetings," and it became his de facto office unless you had it booked.
- tragedy of the commons: with no private space other than common spaces, meeting rooms were booked up with standing meetings so that it became impossible to get one when you needed it.
- Callout/performative drama: challenging people would use the availability of earshot to try to draw others into their conflicts. Callout culture, where instead of addressing issues, people would call out others to demand explanations in front of teams, managers, or in main slack channels.
- lack of personal boundaries: technical managers with low charisma routinely embarrassed in open meetings where everyone felt they could table complaints and make others accountable in front of a group, further wrecking morale as result of perceived weak leadership.
Interior design wouldn't solve all these problems, but the aesthetic of a kindergarten or hipster daycare certainly exacerbated them. I may long form this post into something, as the anti-patterns in that org were an effect of its culture, which was expressed by aesthetics rooted in beliefs that would have benefited from more insight.