I've worked in private offices, private cubes, and open office.

As much as I personally prefer isolated offices/cubes, the last 4 years in a mostly open office have definitely given me sympathy to the argument for them. I personally have noted a level of collaboration and information sharing that just didn't happen in the more isolated environments. There is something pragmatically useful about having people be able to jump in with their feedback or expertise.

The more isolated people are the more you have to go out of your way to ensure information dissemination and feedback channels are available and utilized. It certainly can work, but I haven't seen it work as well.

Open rooms promote teaching, spontaneous design discussions, etc, that just doesn't happen in the same way over e-mail, chat, stand-up meetings, etc.

There are arguments to go both ways. I used to hate open offices, now I'm sympathetic to them.

A key to making the open office tolerable is that it should not mean no isolation. There are ways to address their concerns. eg, headphones are essential. Obscuring line of site is very helpful. My current situation has me in an area of "open rooms", where rooms with ~11 desks are arraigned in an open office-esque fashion. It's pretty decent. Not super-open, but people can "share space" with the people relevant to them.

> I personally have noted a level of collaboration and information sharing that just didn't happen in the more isolated environments

I think it's important that we don't overly focus on one isolated experience point like yours, because empirically this is highly disputed.

In my experience, information sharing has plummeted after moving to an open-plan layout. People are forced to use noise-cancelling headphones to avoid impromptu exchanges, because the impromptu exchanges are value-destructive in the first place. And when someone gets co-opted into an impromptu discussion, they try to keep it superficial and share less substantive info, to get away from the unplanned distraction as fast as possible.

Not to mention the huge increase of totally not-work-related or irrelevant distractions, like loud sales calls, product discussions that don't affect anything for my team, discussions about weekend plans, etc.

It's a very shallow notion of information sharing, which could happen asynchronously through code, documents, email, or with a scheduled video call, or a short scheduled meeting, etc.

As I mentioned elsewhere, this horribly misguided idea that somehow constant, real-time audio communication == sincere collaboration or information sharing, this idea is really destructive and doesn't map very well to how engineers actually work.

> I think it's important that we don't overly focus on one isolated experience point like yours, because empirically this is highly disputed.

I'm not saying my experience generalizes, I doubt every environment would see the same benefit. My point is that even though I started exclusively preferring one side, I can see value on the other side.

> It's a very shallow notion of information sharing, which could happen asynchronously through code, documents, email, or with a scheduled video call, or a short scheduled meeting, etc.

Far from shallow. Technically anything can be communicated in any environment, that's not very interesting. What's interesting is how pragmatically an environment actually works and what it's real life pros/cons are.

But an open-plan office layout assumes that all communication happens most effectively with only one possible type of communication: real-time, constantly preemptible audio streams.

It’s shallow to say that “information sharing” happens this way, since for many people it obviously impedes or completely prevents information sharing.

> “What's interesting is how pragmatically an environment actually works and what it's real life pros/cons are.”

I agree on this, which is why it only requires such a short analysis to see that open-plan offices fail so one-sidedly. They are empirically shown to be widely disliked, to lower morale, to lower producivity (both individually and overall), to lead to more superficial interaction and less deep communication, to lead to more defects in knowledge work outputs, to increase communicable disease transmission and negatively affect sick time and vacation time habits, all while entirely discounting the most pragmatic working styles of at least one huge group of people (introverts) and, when all is said and done, they don’t even save money except in the shallowest, short-term sense, and often companies spend on opulent luxury features in order for the workers to appear essentially as decorative office furniture for when investors or upper management walk by.

It is more than fair to call this phenomenon shallow.

I'm in a similar setup right now - open rooms with 12 people per room. We have huge desks that leave plenty of space between each other and dividers separating desks that face each other. You only see another person if you turn 90 degrees from your forward facing position. We also have private rooms of various sizes that can accommodate one, two or five people if you need to be alone. Some of my colleagues use the rooms a lot, I personally rarely do. Overall, I really really like it, my experience mirrors your own.

The best for me was at a prior company with high partition walls blocking the office into large cubes each with 3 or 4 people in. It was flexible enough to reconfigure and as long as you were on the same wavelength as your cubemates regarding distractions, it offered the privacy to focus too. I think that company shifted to fully open plan with hot desking sometime after I left.

I've also worked in a variety of different floor designs, and have found open-plan to be dramatically inhibiting, not just for me but also for direct reports who tell me the open plan setup prevents them from getting things done most hours of the day.

What do you propose for developers whose jobs consist primarily of deep focus tasks that require quiet, privacy, and states of flow?

(I would argue this is the majority of developers, but that is beside the point. Even if it's a minority, yet their work output is very important for a given company, it would still seem that embedding them in an open-plan layout they must sit in for the majority of the time would clearly be throwing away more money they could possibly be saved on the real estate. Or you disagree?)

You say, "Not everything is about your personal productivity" but this seems mostly irrelevant, because we're in a section of the possible solution space that focuses on never accounting for developers' personal productivity. Separately, if you're on a team where developers have to invest deep focus into disparate parts of a system or disparate solution approaches (the majority of teams I've ever seen), then it does boil down to the sum of individual productivity for most things.

Absolutely, this discussion always devolves into good vs bad and understandably so because it's very frustrating when your work environment doesn't facilitate your performance. But the typical knowledge worker actually functions on some blend of the manager and maker schedules -- sometimes they need to do deep work without interruptions, sometimes they need to look up from their desk and communicate to make sure their output is aligned with the company. A private space free of distractions facilitates the former but an open plan is actually pretty good for the latter.

The best solution (I'm surprised more companies have not implemented this) is to provide both environments and give the employee some guidance in terms of where they choose to work. Most knowledge workers will not benefit from the monastic strategy described in this article but almost all will benefit from a bimodal or rhythmic strategy.

If you already have an open plan office this is as easy as telling the employee he/she can work remotely a few days a week as long as they select a quiet space that's free of distractions (so if they have kids running around at home during the day, maybe better to advise them to go to the library instead).

The manager should provide some guidance in terms of how much time the employee spends remotely vs. "on the floor" with everyone else. Graham's maker vs. manager article is great on this topic,engineers often err a little too far in the direction of isolation, managers err too far in the direction of having everyone in the collaborative environment, the solution is a little dialogue.

With very light guidance and very little additional cost to the business you can improve both productivity and morale this way. Our team functions best very far down the deep work end of the spectrum -- we have one day a week where everyone goes into the office or gets on calls and gets aligned. For the rest of the week communication is mostly async and work is mostly remote.

The trouble is that the distribution of work is not an even split between work that requires deep focus and other work that benefits from disruptive audio communication.

Most engineering work requires deep focus. So if the office was designed to allow the majority of work to be private, quiet, and deeply focused, but with occasional meetings or break-out social rooms for the dynamic discussions, that would be great.

Instead, it is designed in the wrong-headed, opposite way: all work is embedded into the dynamic, real-time audio distraction stream. You end up needing to compete for conference room reservations, or hide form people, or listen to music when you don't want to, or abuse a work-from-home privilege, just to get work done, because every day you need privacy and quiet for most of the day, and the default setting of the environment disallows it.

I would agree with your comment if the work divide was more 50/50 between work that needs dynamic communication and work that needs privacy.

But that's just not how reality actually functions.

(A separate part of this which irks me is the assumption that employees can (or want to) 'just work from home' to solve it. It externalizes the costs of privacy onto workers with all kinds of trade-offs not in the employees favor. And a lot of companies actually micromanage this option and are bitterly strict about limiting work from home time.)

Your comment is not wrong but it's all problems and no solutions. If I was designing an engineering office I would not go open plan (or the open plan area would be small). But today we have a lot of open plan offices that inhibit productivity. I identified a way that a company can quickly and inexpensively improve productivity and happiness by creating more opportunities for deep focus. Perfect is the enemy of good.

That is a fair point.

My concern though is that when companies see an example in which someone deflects on addressing a real need for private space, and externalizes the cost onto the employee (via micromanaged work-from-home), it sets a precedent that further entrenches open plan designs for new offices later on, and also discounts the value of investing to rebuild office dividers and spending to change from an open plan back to offices.

I’ve had fully remote jobs before and jobs where I could generally WFH when needed, but neither option provides a good solution.

If your spouse lives with you, they might need to generate noise at home, especially if there are young children. Or you might just live in a cramped city apartment with no space for a desk, or noisy neighbors, etc.

The point is that this pushes the costs onto the employee: “here, you figure this out.” But providing good tools to get the work done is the employer’s responsibility. WFH solutions let them try to absolve that duty, often without actually resulting in private or quiet space for the worker anyway.

A better proposal might be that an employer will pay the cost to fully rent dedicated private offices at a coworking space, and then let the employees who want offices simply work from that company-rented private office space.

This way the employer bears the costs, and doesn’t view it as “right” to just lob the grenade back at the employees by leaning on WFH as the only possible way to work in a quiet setting.

There is middle ground where the team is together, but only the team and it means 4-10 collaborating people. You are not alone and you are not in one room with other teams (especially often calling teams) and not with over 40 people - which generates too much

It should be not one extreme against another.

In my experience, even when managing a team of engineers, it doesn't matter if the people in your nearby open environment are working on the same team or a different team. It's much more about the basic environmental factors (e.g. not having people walking around nearby, having adequate privacy, being able to customize your own lighting, have a personal window to glance out, etc.)

Even when there are only 5-10 people nearby and they are all working on my same team, the open-plan environment is completely untenable and really damages productivity. I would say above all, you need privacy to get into states of flow, and after that, you need to know that you personally control your own schedule, and are in charge of planning when interruptions will possibly affect you.

Whether someone can interrupt you with a relevant question about your team's work, or someone can interrupt you with annoying chatter about weekend golf plans, they both equally prevent flow and productivity.

Environmental noise is much lower with 6 people then with 30. It is huge difference in amount of noise and interruptions. On average, 30 people generate five time as much "weekend golf" discussions and all on-topic debates of other teams are off-topic to you. It is also easier to police interruptions with around 6 people, unless they are jerks - but chance of jerk among 6 is still lower. By policing I mean saying something like: "you are noisy today and I cant focus, take it please elsewhere".

You don't get zero interruptions, but there is significantly less of them and the barrier to communication in team is still small.

Unless the colleges are very noisy, I would say that most people can focus in reasonably large room with 6 people. I guess it is individual, but the need to be completely alone with everything completely as you like it is rather on the more extreme side of spectrum. Most people can make compromise about lighting, are able to share window etc and can still focus. (I am absolutely cool with home office or whatever for those who cant. Just that the average worker should be both able to work in non-perfect privacy and simultaneously not to consistently disrupt those who are focused.)

If the relevant questions happen too often and you are not an analyst or pm or senior responsible for teaching new person (in such case it is your job to answer questions as they arise to speed up process), then it warrants organizational discussion in team and bundling questions into one meeting. After all, if private office would stop them, then they are not that necessary and it should be possible to lower them down by discussion.

The example of colleges seems odd to me, since it’s a common resource at most colleges to get a study carel or private study room at the library, and it’s a place where even in common areas, there is rather strict enforcement of silence, lack of cell phones, and certainly nothing like modern open plan office noise or distraction.

Also, I think it misses the point to talk about whether or not people can make compromises. The question is about how to empower and enable workers to generate their best output.

For example, you could also say something like, “even though people like having two 27-inch monitors, I find they can make compromises and just use one 17-inch model.”

It’s myopic, because the question has nothing to do with whether or not workers can compromise. It’s about whether it’s cost-effective to pay for quality tools (monitors, offices, private workspace).

So when you say something like, “Just that the average worker should be both able to work in non-perfect privacy and simultaneously not to consistently disrupt those who are focused,” it just misses the mark.

The question is, why would a company wrongly think that providing “non-perfect” privacy is somehow good when empirically it’s known to be bad, even for the company’s own bottom line.

Lastly, I think it’s important to totally avoid framing the desire for adequate private space as if the worker wants “perfect” privacy or they are inflexible and uncompromising. This is a false and worker-unfriendly way to look at it.

Having a private office is not “perfect” or overly demanding to request. Rather an office is just a simple, cost-effective tool. Workers who use offices are still good at compromising to have good communication and collaboration, for example with open door policies, scheduled meetings, and all sorts of non-audio collaboration, in addition to getting to use their extra productive time for dedicated focus on things like code review, to directly collaborate in ways that help the whole team.

Open plan offices on the other hand represent zero willingness to compromise on the part of the employer. The employer is saying they will not invest in good tools for you, and instead dogmatically insist there is only one type of communication (real-time, constantly preemptible audio stream) that is permitted, and anything else has to require contortions and inconvenience on the part of the worker (e.g. working from home, using headphones when it is uncomfortable or distracting to do so, etc.)

So really, we have to move past the anti-employee attitude that a private office is some type of primadonna special request from someone who doesn’t compromise. That is what greedy employers would want us to falsely think.

In reality, an office is just a simple, cost-effective tool literallyno different than ergonomic desk chairs, monitors, or the company’s commuter benefits.

I can't imagine any non-senior employee (for instance) asking for a dedicated private office and not being laughed at, of course exempting any employees who require a private office to perform the core function of their job (not sure if any of these exist, though).

I can't imagine how you believe that private offices are not a luxury. Depending on where the company is operating out of, the rent for the floor space of their office could cost more than the company pays the employee.

This comment seems like pure provocation or something. What does it matter what you can imagine?

Stack Overflow, for instance, famously gives private offices to all developers, even junior ones, and even in Manhattan.

I worked previously at a defense research lab in the eastern US, and had my own office straight out of undergrad (it didn’t even occur to me to ask).

I have former colleagues or friends working in private offices in: computer graphics form film, defense research, hospital research, quantitative investing, adtech, large ecommerce retailer, and education tech.

Private offices are utterly not a luxury. They are a basic tool. One simple reason is because they are cost efficient, so you don’t spend more on offices in any sense but the most narrow-minded. Other reasons include all of the decades of research on their basic ergonomic benefits.

This would be like calling an ergonomic chair or a trackball mouse “a luxury” because they superficially appear to cost (slightly) more than basic alternatives, without accounting for the cost-savings they cause. And, like offices, it’s a trivial extra cost for the company.

> “Depending on where the company is operating out of, the rent for the floor space of their office could cost more than the company pays the employee.”

Given that this is not true in Manhattan (e.g. see Stack Overflow’s big write-ups on it), can you provide data to show where this is true?

You're absolutely right about the floor space, I had not considered 3x4m glass boxes, and I apologise that my post came across that way (pure provocation) -- perhaps I was in a sour mood. I have not worked for a significantly wealthy company in my history, and so it has never been the case that a private office has been the most cost-effective way to improve profits. To make a reasonable argument: Typically the equation is simply money-in vs money-out. If you can spend an extra 100k a year on private offices for developers and get 300k a year in chargeable services/development effort, vs spending 100k on another salesman and get an extra $1m in net profit, which would you choose? The choice here is clear and 2 monitors vs 1 monitor is a $100 cost for 1.5x efficiency, and is an absolute no-brainer. An office on the other hand is usually not the most cost-effective option, but if you have enough cash to fund all of the other more cost-effective strategies plus private offices, then it is another place in which management can increase profits.

Please follow up with your thoughts, and again, I apologise if what I wrote was inflammatory or came across that way. It was likely coming from a position of "unknown unknowns".