I'm certainly happy that I have my office, and if I need to talk to people, their offices (or their open plan, unfortunately) is usually not very far. But a lot of the time, I just need and want to focus a lot, and for that open plan is absolute cancer. My office seats two people, but it actually helps that the other person is not directly in my team.

I don't see what standing desks have to do with it, as offices can have standing desks as well, and ours do.

The last time I sat in open plan, I felt like an animal in a cage, to choose a seemingly paradoxical wording. It wasn't the walls closing in, but the distractions.

My $DAYJOB is for a big multinational corp that has embraced this insanity... my floor is all "open plan" except for a smattering of offices that are reserved for the elite VP level folks. But some of the other floors are cubicle based - sometimes I go down there and just wander around and dream of how nice it would be to have one of those cubicles.

"What cruel twist of fate", I wonder to myself, "led to me being banished to the eldritch and grotesque horrors of the land of endless noise, constant distractions, free-roaming viruses and germs, and - most terrifying of all - sheer and utter hours of non-productivity?"

Me? I don't want "role-crossover". I'm a coder, who wants to occasionally enter a state of flow by getting to code uninterrupted for longer than 3 minutes.

Perhaps you're right. But I will say this: when I tell people about (or show them) the bus, nearly everybody - I'm talking 90%+, say something like, "oh, I've always wanted to do that!" So maybe buses are more popular than cubicles. I don't know. :-)

> Me? I don't want "role-crossover". I'm a coder

I mean, OK. But much of the world has long since moved on to a DevOps style of engagement. I find it much more difficult to have awareness of the entire operation without frequent (even forced) social interaction with colleagues.

Of course I could be wrong, but you could be too. Don't cite anecdotal statistics with such an air of uncertainty.

The social interaction results in less work. Most of a programmers job is staring at a wall of text and trying to concentrate, anything that distracts has a serious impact on productivity. As for role crossover, I've got enough on my plate without being concerned about what other people are dealing with. Some cross-over might be good but there are many areas of a company that are completely disconnected and crossover is just noise.

> but one aspect of it that seems almost like fantasy is the idea that people primarily working on software might sit down in cramped cubicles and prefer fake privacy to real social interaction.

It's not so much fantasy as a portrayal of the time, the cramped cubicles are presented as bad because they replaced actual offices.

That is an extreme overgeneralization. For instance, plenty of programming jobs involve a significant amount of time spent on collaboration and communication with designers, other programmers, customers, and stakeholders. That’s perfectly normal, and I would argue that in many cases those are the product development teams that will make the best products.

Unless all of those people just happen to sit next to each other or they're shouting across the room then an open plan office does nothing to help that anyway, you'll have to organize meetings to collaborate or do it in other formats. For customers and stakeholders you'd be lucky if they worked in the same building at all.

Face to face communication is not the only form of collaborations and IMHO it's the worst and least scaleable one for technical fields. And when you're collaborating through a mailing list or something similar (that doesn't involve interrupting each other) that's just another wall of text.

You do realise that these people will disrupt the work of the 15 people around them?

That's what daily life is in an open office.

The health benefits of standing desks are speculative and unproven. What's healthy is walking away from yout sit-or-stand desk. https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/the-truth-behind-standin...

Why would a cubicle be more cramped than a seat at a cramped table?

Why is a cubicle privacy "fake" but a bullpen office "real" social interaction -- where you can't speak freely because dozens of people are eavesdropping on all your conversations?

The reboot of office space would have everyone in an open office, that is for certain.

And strategic positioning of computer screens (+ books and fillers) to kill line-of-sight to other people. My last open-office job, almost everyone did that quite naturally, probably even unconsciously. Not always possible, and were we sitting in the ridiculous shoulder-to-shoulder setting I see in photos of some hip software houses, I'm not sure how long I would last there.

Yes! I'm so glad you took the time to acknowledge that your personal lived experiences aren't necessarily representative of the experiences and perspectives of office employees as a who-

>seems almost like fantasy is the idea that people primarily working on software might sit down in cramped cubicles and prefer fake privacy to real social interaction.

Oh. Erm... I hate to break it to you, but a lot of us _do_ prefer this!

Literally the cubicles from Office Space?

Different people have different preferences.

I worked in the high cubicles like that once and they were not that bad. A full wrap around desk allowed me to have a PC, Sparc Station, and some test servers in my space. It was fairly quiet, but someone could get your attention by calling your name.

Meanwhile the majority of people, and certainly the majority of the executives and sales guys, are extraverts and simply can't understand why programmers hate open plan.

Also I think there is an asymmetry.

I think introverts can easily 'get' what extraverts prefer, because honestly extraverts are the majority[1], so when you are an introvert, you get to know extraverts pretty well because you live in an extravert world.

I don't think the reverse is true. Extraverts don't 'get' what introverts like because they don't have to, they are the majority and their preferences dictate how everything is built. Their preferences are the default, and are what is considered 'right.'

[1] They used to say the split was 75% extravert/25% introvert. Later studies report a 50/50 split but extraverts are more outgoing and vocal, so they may still be overrepresented in public debate/discourse.

There is a time and a place for social interaction in the office. But when I'm coding, I need to concentrate. People talking to me, talking to each other, walking behind me or around me, every bit pushes me further off the rails and takes me longer to get back into flow state. Cubicles aren't perfect, but they're a fuckload better than open plan.

Are you really naive enough to think that because in your small sphere of experience, people don't seem to like open plan, there aren't millions of people who love open plan? For an engineer that doesn't seem like logical thinking.

Your anecdote isn't data. I'm an engineer, I love my standing desk and open plan space. I know many engineers at our company who feel likewise, it's a huge improvement.

> Your anecdote isn't data. I'm an engineer, I love my standing desk and open plan space. I know many engineers at our company who feel likewise, it's a huge improvement.

You go off on him for stating what his experience is (backed by almost everyone else on this site, by the way) and then turn right around and do the same, just from your minority perspective, with the added idiocy of essentially stating you're somehow stating facts. Do you realize how hypocritical that seems?

You should take the downvotes to heart, honestly. Normally I think they don't really signal that much, but in this case (and all your other arrogant comments) they clearly signal that your view is the clear minority and your comments are very out of touch with reality.

Also, you don't seem to understand data or statistics yourself. The amount of people who would A) Be using HS, and B) Choose to comment on a post like this:

Is clearly not representative of engineers/programmers across the world. Most engineers at my company don't use HN period, and out of those that do, most won't comment.

I work at a company where standing desks were greeted with excitement across 90% of the engineering population and there was even friction between engineers because some people got them first and others had to wait. Again, just because you think HN represents the whole engineering world, doesn't make it the case, it's a bubble here.

Again, if you actually read my comment again I never said I was stating a fact. I'd love for you to show me where I said that! My point was that there are clearly engineers who prefer standing desks and open plan spaces, unless you're somehow asserting that I'm the only guy in the world that likes this...

"He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.[...] But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame."

--Richard Hamming, "You and Your Research " http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

Even though, an "open-door" office is still infinitely better than no office. You get to focus in between visits, and the visits are less frequent simply because the other party needs to lift their butt and walk to your office.

Two thirds of these qualities (social interaction/role crossover) are exactly what I don't want when trying to program.

In my experience, companies where social interaction/role crossover are required aren't working on any complex problems.