So now you have to coordinate on Slack to go to one of the shared team meeting rooms instead. At that point you might as well have your conversation in Slack, even if the person is sitting right next to you. And that's the state of open offices today, co-located but void of any actual collaboration.

I've worked in single person offices, 2-3 person offices and open offices. 2-3 person offices where everyone works on the same thing is the best, by far. Remote work is the new private office, not quite as good as a 2-3 person office, but infinitely better than an open office.

Everyone wears headphones at my place if they're trying to focus. Last job literally handed out construction ear muffs.

Also, all the rooms are taken up by meetings. Mostly by business/product. There's no rooms left for engineers to hash things out, frequently.

I cannot adequately describe the horror this sentence induces in me.

I haven't really been in a startup office that wasn't this way in quite a while. First startup I was at played music all the time - that wasn't great. Second place (not a startup) had engineers stationed next to sales people who had to be on the phone all the time at their desks. Third one - the sales folks were further away but everyone not in engineering was so loud that they gave those muffs out (lots of customer service reps sat near engineering too - lots of phone calls). And now I am at one where everyone is next to everyone even at a billion dollar company. Each person gets a 60"x30" desk (it might be smaller actually) and they shove 6-8 of them together in groups of 2x3 or 2x4. Then put them in really close proximity where you have about 12-18" between your chair at your desk and the person behind you. Not uncommon to run into the person behind you. This is for a company with over $100mil in funding. There's about 100 people in the office. It's not a very large office at all.

Most people just don't join the company if it's an issue - but I don't think anyone has cited that as an issue yet. Most people complain more about the terrible codebase or poor management or bad numbers or poor compensation. (Inclusive or)

This doesn't work for a lot of people, including myself. Being sonically cut off from the environment causes many people a great deal of anxiety and stress.

White noise generators and proper office design mitigate nearly all of your concerns. There is obviously etiquette to having quick conversations around colleagues and meeting rooms are always available for deeper collaboration. For the most part our work is planned out carefully, most problems can be resolved via a couple of quick Slack messages.

I feel socialized and look forward to coming to work. If I worked in a small 2-3 person silo I'd feel like an instrument of industry rather than a family member. I know that sounds trite but it's true, feeling part of a larger team / the business as a whole is incredibly motivating.

I admit my concept of small private offices is marred by my own experiences of those work environments which have all been just soulless bad places to work. I know that is not the rule for cube/small office workplace design.

Long conversations do deserve private space, but this can be resolved by having ample meeting spaces.

People want to have conversations when they want to; at other times, they want silence. I think there was an effect where no one wanted to interrupt others' silence, so they just emailed or chatted when a simple walk-over-and-chat would suffice...if we had had more space and more individuals with offices, I think a lot more productive collaboration would've occurred.

So, in summary, the noise/distraction was already so bad, we didn't want to make it worse.

I remember one office design where they had these tables placed between desks faced back to back, on the theory that people would use those tables for collaborative work. Instead, the tables just became oversized bookshelves. People couldn't have a conversation over them because conversations make noise.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1uCYK6wnjk

Consider the opposite extreme of private offices. An impromptu meeting involves some walking, but otherwise the meeting stays between just those directly-involved. There's no cost to anyone else.

Keeping this distracting effect in mind, silent communication (messaging) looks more attractive.

And woe to those who need to take a conference call with multiple of their desk neighbors but no conference rooms are available. Nothing like a bunch of people all sitting next to each other talking on the same phone call.

Why companies would implement an open office without a plethora of private meeting spaces is beyond me.

3/3 found that the meeting rooms were inadequate before they even filled the open floor plan seating.

Open floor plans mean meeting rooms become mandatory for just about every interaction. The promised ease of interaction doesnt happen when everyone is in headphones and the polite people dont want to talk while in close quarters with others NOT in the conversation.

As you said, when everyone has an office, only meetings of more than a handful of people need a separate conference room.

I've never had any problem making a phone call in an open office.

Well first of, if I just turn my chair around, I'm talking to the wall.

Secondly, I could yell at another develop from one table and they might not even realise because they're wearing noise-cancelling headphones. I mean, of course they are, they are in a room with 30+ other people.

If I want to collaborate in an open office, I need to get up from my desk, walk to someone else's desk, tap them on the shoulder to get them to remove their headphones and then stand there and talk to the other person + 10 people around them.

For a "hey there" conversation, most teammates have to get up and walk over to someone else... tap them to shake them out of their focus and get them to take their headphones off.

Don't think any of us resort to email, but then again I'm only on one of many teams. We do use Slack but again I don't know how many private Slack conversations occur. (Most of my team is not located here, so everything is Slack, and most of it is in a team channel.)

I'm not sure I have a solid takeaway, but I can say that I'm much, much more engaged with my remote teammates than my local ones.

I think it's pretty tough to read if it's okay to interrupt when your teammate is wearing headphones (especially if, as you said, everyone wears them most of the day). Sometimes I'm just wearing headphones to listen to some music while doing something easy and tedious, which would be okay to interrupt. But if I'm diving deep into some system to find a mystery bug, then I'd be annoyed if interrupted.

I'm currently working on a project exploring physical interruptions and would appreciate hearing about your (and other HN users') experiences: https://forms.gle/syL1XrLAauxd57hr7

90+% of the messages were private, and we had pretty good activity on public channels.

Managers should trust their employees to get stuff done, and not micromanage their time. Employees should get stuff done whether their managers are watching their every move or not, and, trust their managers to not be micromanaging their time. We both need to create a trustworthy relationship.

I have no sympathy for employees who do not do work without being forced to any more than I do for bosses who want to micromanage every minute of employee time or every website they visit. You're both hurting all of us.

But personalities who don't experience the world this way interpret it under the simplistic moral judgment of "laziness", thus perpetuating the very incentive structure that causes it in the first place.

I find it highly dubious that there's a significant fraction of humans who are basically not industrious. That just doesn't seem possible or adaptive in the context of a tribe of hunter-gatherers eeking out survival on the savannah. Rather it seems that we're clinging to unsophisticated organizational structures from the Industrial Revolution, which enabled a highly technical society to emerge in the first place but were never iterated to handle things like psychological diversity or the explosion of highly specialized knowledge work. That’s why we have insanities like software designers working factory shifts, in noisy distracting settings, taking marching orders from people who have no idea what they do.

Proper results oriented approaches can help for both parties. At the end of the day throughput is what matters for productivity not how hard they work. But that is logistically nontrivial to set up and calibrate properly, let alone other temptations and pressure to try to "optimize" beyond the ability to be sustained. Knowledge work in even the lowliest sense isn't optimal like an assembly line.

Making matters worse as usual for any would be reformers are inertia and politics of course. It is the ultimate "dancing monkey" but instead of being between security and the monkey choosing the latter, the choice is practical and wise decisions or politically pleasing ones.

By definition, there can only be max four people (usually less) you can just “turn your chair around and talk to” without shouting over somebody else’s head - or just getting up and walking over to where they are just as you would if people had cubes. Your insinuation that this is possible or meaningful is so obviously disingenuous that I’m having a hard time you’re making it in good faith: if you’d tried it for even a few hours you’d be able to see the flaw in it.

I have observed two main reasons for this.

1. More people now have headphones on to keep them focused. So people send IM's so as not to distract them.

2. It is easy to disturb others when having face to face conversations in the open area.