Then, given all that, you get the coworker two seats down Slacking you. If you're Slacking folks within 10 seconds walking distance then what's the point of being in the office at all.

I think the ideal would be commuting to the office one day a week to take care of meetings which are more productive in person such as sprint planning, grooming etc.

There was a study done on the interruption effect of e-mail https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/1328726018000...

seriously, lets just give up on the notion of assigned spaces, idk what value there is when we cant even collaborate because the 4 tiny meeting rooms for 100 people are sitting at the margins of the giant open office. and there aren't any other whiteboards or projectors to use to have conversations. everyone is already wearing headphones so they can try to have a thought to themselves.

there are lots of alternatives. assign rooms to projects and have the principals mostly hang out there. couch areas and pub areas and cubby areas...rooms where you really aren't supposed to talk or hum or do anything out loud.

we've given up any actual utility of the office and are just hanging on to the barest trapping.

Having worked at a company, where they had couch areas: Management will place the couch areas in the middle or adjacent to the desks and it will all be done in an open floor. A couch area with no walls is an invitation to have loud conversations/phone calls in the middle of the office.

If you’re not going to give people phones just take the phones away, not pack people in like sardines.

So when bosses realised they were throwing money away, they came up with the open office with flex-desks: no-one has a fixed place, you can sit whereever you want. And there are less desks than people.

That can work out quite well (I work in such an office) but it depends greatly on ehtics or rules: no TVs with soccer games, no speaker-phone (but only headset) and rooms available for discussions or phone calls. And there is a general area (quite large) where you can drink your coffee and discuss the soccer matches or Tour de France results...

For me it works, but I can imagine that without the requirements listed above it can be a cumbersome workenvironment.

If a company believes it will gain more from “saving money” on open plan offices or hot desking than it will from just paying more to facilitate more and better work from employees through buying the best tools (a private office is a tool like a keyboard or ergonomic chair), it’s self-evidently a company to get far, far away from.

Consider “flex keyboards.” Management realizes that not all keyboards are in use all day, because people are in meetings, at lunch, etc.

So nobody gets their own keyboard. You have to locate an unused keyboard at the times when you need to type.

This is no different than “flex desks.” In both cases (keyboards, desks), the unit cost of providing the dedicated resource to the employee is trivial compared to far more pressing concerns, like producing working software to increase revenue, or bullshit executive compensation.

Even real estate costs for private offices in dense urban areas are trivial by comparison.

I work mostly from home but I do have a cube in the local office. If we got tight for space, it would absolutely make sense to give away my space to someone who would use it more and have me just grab an open chair for those times I have meetings or other reasons to be in the office.

If I had a private office, I would still work from home most of the time. A private office doesn't eliminate a commute.

Why would this make more sense than moving to a bigger office or building more space for the new employee to have a desk without taking yours? Cost is absolutely not an answer.

If they can afford to hire more but not to expand and give each worker adequate space, it suggests the company is just wrong. They actually can’t afford to hire more and would be creating problems if they do. Rather, reinvest what would have been spent on crammed headcount into the ability to expand spatially and later increase headcount with adequate space.

If a company, even a sink-or-swim growth mode start-up, believes it needs to hire people faster than it can provide minimally adequate space for them, then the company is just wrong. That is just not a thing.

Costs do not affect revenue. Perhaps you mean profit?

I'm not arguing for hot-desking as a standard approach, which indeed likely negates any benefits to teams being co-located. But for people who are allocated space that they rarely use? Why not?

People who think cost drives open plan office choices seem to think corporate management are too stupid to ask, what is 10% of our total salary base for these workers. It makes no sense. People have been measuring productivity and morale in knowledge work for a hundred years. Of course they can directly compare cost savings on floor space with metrics correlated with productivity lost to worse workspace, and tie it to the bottom line.

The observable spending habits of companies suggest cost utterly cannot be a driving factor here.

Can you think of reasons why maybe each student doesn't have their own helicopter but does have their own headset (assuming they were cleaned properly after each use and hygiene wasn't a concern)? Those same reasons apply to the office/keyboard situation.

Providing one office per knowledge worker would be cost-effective for companies.

Flight schools have a hard time surviving if they make grossly wasteful or negligent expenditures for the sake of politics and optics, because they are low-capitalized businesses with often much lower revenue per employee and less growth opportunity than highly capitalized tech companies.

A high capitalized tech company, on the other hand, can piss away money on dipshit open floor plan offices, roof decks, $500,000 Christmas parties, etc., and the executive committee doesn’t care. They have very little incentive to optimize that spending and often make spending choices based on the capricious and whimsical desires of an adult-baby CEO who is more like Veruca Salt than a competent business person.

The logic is that, compared to the salaries of software engineers and revenues of many tech companies, desks and keyboards are extremely cheap.

The cost of a ~$100k engineer spending 10m per day looking for a desk, with 8h day and 200k total employee cost to employer, is ~4k/yr. Paired with the cost the company pays in developer annoyance potentially causing higher turnover or lower productivity , buying more desks and office space is likely the cheaper option. One helicopter per student is obviously not so...

The open office I am in ATM is one such places where a handfull of people (loud, discussing totally not related to work, factually completly idiotic conversations) spoil it for all others. There is nothing to be done about these people since they've been with the company forever and a day and are thus basically exempt from all rules (be it noice or dresscode).

5 Years ago I have actively stoped working from home to segrate work from family. Now I have found myself to do at least 1, often 2 days from home again and planning to change employer. No I will not tell them the reason since I can not affort to burn that bridge.

TL;DR Manager A makes a good impression by saving some office space, Manager B looses employees but will never find out why.

Not criticizing this person, I despise my open office environment too. I also wouldn't (and didn't) tell tell my employer about this when I left for a few years in the past for the same reason.

Especially when some people eat at their desks.

Generic rubber dome keyboards are torture — chiclet style keyboards surely violate a bunch of Geneva conventions.

Never mind the filth and grime.

I will keep a mouse and keyboard in the office under lock and key somewhere if I end up in that situation.

Really though the cost of office space vs people making 100k/year means you don't actually need top optimize it that hard. The core problem is they tend to come out of separate budgets, so some middle manager can write down they saved x million on a review / resume while costing the company 3x that indirectly.

PS: Used Model S's are also something to keep an eye on.

It's just unfortunate that the commute here in the Bay Area has gotten so bad that a lot of people end up working from home.

All of it is completely unrelated with work. And sort of sad, although its a good thing, that no matter what happens, humans will needs humans.

There is no need in this.

This is the world they wanted, when they dissolved unions and other pillars of stability, one mans grape-vine over "Unreliable mercenaries" is another mans freedom of choice.

Here's to Sienna and Florence, their high towers may stand a thousand year or crumble under the siege tomorrow, no-one cares only the chests in the deep cellars are whats important.

All those walls build to create synthetic loyalty- be it out of fear of being law suited for knowledge transfer, or cartels to avoid the rising prices of mercenary's - if history tells us one thing - in the end the war always wins.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Wars

"Wes Brot ich ess, des Lied ich sing, wes Gold ich trag, des Tod ich bring."

Unless there's an urgency, or some complication that should be discussed in person; slack is the preferred method so as to allow the party you are interrupting a chance to change their focus in the least impactful manner.

If I go to someone directly, I am losing 10-15 minutes of my own productivity + the length of the conversation and that's multiplied by the number of people I interrupted.

Some people who I've worked with, love to have to have a face to face for questions or information that is not urgent and could easily be taken care of via slack. They seem to do so because they prefer to small talk, lament, debate or some other personal reason; they don't do it for technical reasons.

If your team can effectively communicate passively, on slack, your on a team that has a foundation from which a remote-work policy can easily be enacted.

Amen. We can work remotely. Let me work in my home office.

I'm sitting here now because there's scheduled railway maintenance going on. If not I prefer traveling to the office (it's more than 45 minutes each way.)

But as long as everyone can choose for themselves I think more people probably should work from home.

I have a coworker within ONE second of me, I can lean back a few inches and tap them on the shoulder. And I do, frequently, when they send me a 1:1 slack message.

"What's up?"

"Oh I had a question for you in Slack"

"I'm three feet away from you, I'm not doing this over slack, what's up?"

Obviously this is different if they send a code snippet or an app screenshot that I need to look at, but even then when we need to discuss the next steps relevant to that snippet or screenshot, I'll still tap them over the shoulder

"Hey, did you try x?"

"Oh no I didn't, lemme see what happens..." pause "Yup that worked, thanks!"

"No problem"

According to this study open offices do reduce face to face communications: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/373/1753/2017...

The only two rational factors why anyone would choose open office:

1. the floor space really is so expensive you can waste xx% of capital output of labour.

2. You inherit a dysfunctional organization or just a one you cannot trust, and want to "keep an eye" on everyone so they behave. Michael Bloomberg gave this rationale in New York.

3. Bonus round for hotdesking : You expect/have a fairly high churn rate. Why bother assigning people personal spaces since it's so much work to keep track of the facilities. Let the people find their own space. Besides, you might outsource xx% of your operations in near future so it's not like you plan on investing in long term team building.

So, any linear combination 1,2 or 3 should suffice as an explanation. Any serious publication which praises open offices is likely a piece by a consultant who makes a living out of peddling said solutions and are offering political propaganda to make the employees less resistant.

The most common irrational reason: You don't really have an opinion what consitutes a good working space but open offices seem to be trendy ("It's what the big boys are doing") and a consultant made you an offer to redesign your office space, so, why not.

I'm pretty sure the lemming see, lemming do explanation is one of the top actual reasons.

In general, let's not elevate anybody to superhuman status, no matter what Ayn Rand wants you to believe. It's never true, and it never ends well.

At least it ends. I work in a gigantic "airplane hangar" open office with no noise barriers of any kind stretching out to infinity. Everybody around me is on conference calls all day, every day. They put their phones on speaker and then yell louder and louder to be heard over each other. One of them is even one of the Important People with an office with a door that closes... which he leaves open all the time anyway.

You can listen to even fairly quiet music and you won't hear any conversations around you.

This is the big problem with headphones as a solution. You just trade sound disergonomy or physical discomfort, and it solves nothing. Like breaking your finger to distract from the pain of a gun shot wound.

Combine it with the fact that managers have repeatedly told me that wearing earplugs is “rude” and it’s just more of the no-win optics that drive open plan offices in the first place.

Glad I got out of that hellhole.

Thanks though.

I've found any earplug or headphone option will make my tinnitus worse - sometimes days afterwards.

I explain my tinnitus to non-sufferers as being on the threshold of noise intolerance 24/7.

I'm surprised there hasn't been a lawsuit against any of these companies that expect employees to damage their health just so they can save on floorspace?

Now I have a very faint one that "toggles" once or twice a week and ALWAYS when I wear earplugs.

After ignoring the warning signs and also having an ear infection which I never bothered getting medical help for it got much worse.

It's settled down to a manageable level for me now but heed the warnings, you may save yourself a lot of misery in the long run.

I had a random infection a few years ago and just waited for it to pass. Which it did, eventually, but my tinnitus became much worse afterwards. I'm guessing, because the infection did further damage which could maybe have been avoided?

I can't say whether you should stop wearing earplugs because you may sometimes be in a situation where they protect your hearing. But, for blocking out background noise in an office, they're probably not a good idea? [based purely on my own experience]

I think it's because when you double-stuff like I did, the only thing you can hear at that point is the ringing in your ears (and high heels on concrete floors). My brain seemed to lock in on the ringing at that point.

When I wear earplugs, the tinnitus is more prominent, so after I take them out, my brain is kind of "latched" on to it for a while.

I thought everyone has it.

As an added bonus the obvious rigamarole I have to go through when a coworker taps me on the shoulder makes them more likely to send an email next time.

With earplugs inside noise-canceling phones I still get two layers of sound isolation but have a layer of sound isolation between me and the phones, providing finer volume control so I can add just enough music to finish the job of drowning out loud people around me without hearing damage.

It seems the best solution is to not have loud people around.

[1] https://www.la-sight.com/services/lasik/lasik-results/ [2] https://www.la-sight.com/services/lasik/lasik-explained/fars...

Wouldn't be necessary if we had actual offices, but there you go.

We have a couple of mobprogramming stations with big televisions, each team has 1 or 2 of these so there are about 5 in a 20m radius from where I sit. When the first game that Sweden played all of a sudden 3 of the televisions are turned on and of course they are _not(!)_ in sync.

So here I am trying to do some work with three TVs games all slightly delayed from each other, meaning one cheer turns into three.

Now I work at a large newspaper and we sit 40m from the editorial staff so that adds to the background noise. To top it all of someone in the sports department thought it would be a good idea to @channel (usually reserved for "OMG the website is down what do we do!?") when some of the TVs stopped working (not really a job for the developers..).

That just killed whatever positive things I used to think about open offices.

Until I read that, the worst I’d ever heard was a friend who worked next to a slamming fire door. He had to wear hearing protection/ear muffs. Get this: he was the PhD physisist that did all the hard math coding for the company.

He has a private office where he works now thank goodness.

Yeah, they say it promotes more collaboration because you may overhear something where your input is relevant and join in. Or something like that. While that may be true, the increase in UNwanted distraction completely overwhelms any benefit. So then they tell us to be respectful of people around us and keep things quiet - we don't want people to overhear you. Wait wasn't that the point?

This probably depends where you are. An open office plan might well let you use less than half of the square footage per employee, which in somewhere like Manhattan would potentially be saving you on the order of $5-10k per employee. Depending on how significant the productivity hit is, that might well be worth it.

And, from personal experience, companies do it even when the cost per square foot is 1/10th of that of NY.

Relative to what? Here are some portable room dividers: https://www.screenflex.com/

You would be starting with a very tiny space if that doubles the square footage per employee. They completely eliminate visual distractions, give employees a feeling of privacy, and stop a lot of noise. Being portable, they can be changed around as needed, and you can easily create small groups.

Faster to deploy, wire, etc.

Since then I've heard they have installed what can only be described as rows of tables. They're not really desks. Just long rows of white tables where one row of employees faces another with an 8" glass divider between the two employees. You know; for privacy.

But that's just my experience. I've found it's difficult to underestimate management.

Is there anything less professional than watching a game at work? I really don't get why people do this, and why they think it's okay.

Granted, I don't like sports — but I like TV, and I wouldn't watch TV at work. I like computer games, but I wouldn't play computer games at work. It's just odd that sports fans think it's okay to distract people during work hours.

At least pop off down to the pub or something.

For reference, I work in a hardware engineering group. Some mesmerizing process would show up on screen, one person would stop and stare, and 5 minutes later we have a half dozen engineers who've stopped what they were doing to watch How It's Made.

Eventually we settled on Bob Ross as a happy medium in terms of "Pleasant Ambiance" and "Not Too Distracting."

Also, as stated, even if you love sports, if I were to turn on something like Die Hard and cheer at the screen every few minutes when Bruce Willis does something awesome, or play a video game and yell profanities because I died, people would (rightly) think I'm a jerk and distracting everyone. Even if I only did once every four years.

I don’t begrudge people their entertainment, but surely it’s polite not to foist it on others? I don’t play Minecraft let’s play videos for hours at the office, after all!

Should they just give me a break to watch TV at work?

I've worked places where we would watch live streams of rocket launches (back when launches were less routine than they are now).

Many people who are trying to work do not care if the event is live. Even as someone who also enjoys watching rocket launches, I wouldn't cheer loudly when it took off, and I'd probably go to some kind of common area to watch it to begin with.

I was responding to a comment that compared watching a movie to following the World Cup live. The two are not comparable at all. I was also responding to other comments that were somehow dumbfounded by others wanting to watch the World Cup in general.

Plus of course all the normal games, etc.

Add it all up and there is fucking sports all the time.

Again not a problem as long as you don't drag me down to that level.

And some dogs are jerks. Worked in a place where the boss brought their loud dog to work. Barked constantly, disrupted work, growled whenever clients came into the office. The boss acted like she didn't hear anything.

I like dogs. I have dogs (they came with my wife). But I don’t want to work in a goddamn kennel.

Sartre was right. Hell is other people.

(That said, they had the most expensive and best coffee machine I've ever seen in an office, and a guy who used to make brilliant cocktails on a Friday afternoon - he also stands out in my memory as one of the few front-end developers I've met who couldn't write JavaScript or CSS. That was a surreal contract, it really was.)

When will they allow us to take our toddlers to work? Could really save on daycare costs :)

That same office (which, as I'm sure you have figured out, was an open office) allowed dogs. Mostly fine, I'd take our well-trained, quiet female pit bull into the office. She'd bug me to go play around outside more than I would have liked, but was otherwise inconspicuous. But as someone else in the thread has pointed out, dogs in the office doesn't scale. There's gonna be the one (or more) dog (much like the one child noted above) that doesn't belong in an office. One lady brought her other-dog-hating dog every day. "Bark, bark, bark" every time another dog was in sight. Etc., etc.

I guess my point is, yessh people, what happened to the professional work environment?

Maybe related to bullshit jobs since these people are obviously not doing any real work, just bringing their homelife to the office in order to make time pass quicker?

This thread of Hacker News kvetching has really lost focus on the case against open offices. This reads like a contest of who can be the most uptight in the office.

I go to work to well, work. I like my co-workers, don't mind talking with them a bit and am even friends with some of them. That doesn't mean I want them to bring all their distractions and things that bring them joy to the office. I want us all to get everything done quickly and correctly so that we can all go home and enjoy the things we like.

This sort of outlook might work for those of us that are workaholics, but for everyone else it's a major mental health hazard. Not everyone has wives or children or partners or scores of friends to spend their nights with. I wouldn't be so blase about taking all enjoyment out of the rest of the time those people are spending on this earth.

(Fun fact: Google is officially a dog company. Cats are highly discouraged.)

*Yeah, I know, live and let live, but that is basically impossible with the current sport fanatics around here.

In conclusion, have a down vote. Parent: have an upvote.

???

Do you work at Sterling Cooper Draper?

> people are running/playing around and yelling like children at the office. It's not too uncommon for startups to have Nerf guns or something.

I hate this sort of environment combined with expectation to stay late. It always seems to me that if people would work instead of playing, we might not have to stay late. And that we are not working as much as we brag about, because people play a lot.

I don't know that I wouldn't work late even if I had a private office, but I do think that I'd be able to accomplish more.

Of course then, I am tired also in the evening and that limits what I can do in the evening. (If I am too tired to code, I am also too tired to play logical game or learn something.)

One day I'll write that book I keep thinking about. It'll be glorious.

Sure hope you're not googling it in an open-plan office...

I closed tab very very fast.

Uncommon but not rare term where I grew up.

I wouldn't suggest changing the office layout if I were only distracted by events every four years. I get distracted by events related to the open office every single day; the latest one just happened to be the World Cup when I wrote that.

If you want to watch soccer, take a vacation day.

Didn't you know that you shouldn't use headphones in an open-plan office, because it prevents you from collaborating with others? /s

Riiight, because soccer and office work are so similar!

/s

EDIT: I get the point, that was a joke.