It always annoyed me that they couldn't even be honest and say it was save rent, they had to make it seem like open floor plan was a positive thing because it "increases collaboration"

It's not enough you want to be cheap but you want to make it seem like you're doing it for our benefit.

I think a lot of founders and their friends are using the office as a replacement for a healthier separate social circle and social life that they lack (a lot of people lack that, and they do too), so for them they're really just hanging out and like the potential for “increased collaboration” for that reason

(1) Healthiest = great social circle at work that bleeds into social circle out of work

(2) Less healthy = great social circle at work, separate great social circle outside of work

(3) Even less healthy = no social circle at work (just a job), great social circle outside work

(4) Worse = great social circle at work, no social circle outside of work (I never seen this situation. If you have a great social circle at work it's practically inevitable you'll do things outside of work)

(5) No social circle anywhere

This being HN I know lots of people will rebel against (1) but there are tons of stories about friends starting companies together and you can be sure they loved spending time together both at work and outside of work.

Just to make it more concrete I can't personally imagine The Beatles just calling their music "a job" and not getting close to their fellow band members. Sure that's a band but it's not really different from other famous business friend founders. I'm pretty confident Larry and Sergei socialized with each other outside of work. Hewlett and Packard. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were certainly friends when starting Apple and socialized outside work.

(4) is common among people who move internationally more than once or twice. Making friends as an adult is already difficult, and knowing that you will move on after a couple of years makes it even more difficult. You have a reason to socialize with your coworkers, so they will become the center of your new social life. If you moved to a popular expat destination, you may be able to find other expats who are similarly disconnected from normal life. Beyond that, making friends requires crossing cultural barriers, which takes a lot of effort and extraversion.

Your rankings make no sense to me. I don't understand why you deem someone who has separate social circles inside and outside of work as "less healthy".

Agreed. This appears to be the most best, and also most resilient option.

God forbid you run into issues with your outside social circle, you've still got your work circle, and the other way around.

I've only had option #1 happen once, and it was when I encouraged a few friends to apply at my company, and even then, it didn't really merge the social circles, I just had some people which were in both. I wouldn't do it again, either.

It's great to have multiple groups of friends, they don't all need to be related through work.

Yeah; the few times I've suggested friends apply for jobs where I work, it's always been with the understanding "in a department different than mine". It's "hey, the culture, comp, and work here is pretty good, you might like it", not "let's work together".

I think what they suggested is actually the reverse: coworkers becoming friends, not friends becoming coworkers.

It makes sense in a way, when you spend 7+ hours a day with those people, you're bound to find some common interests that could bring you closer. What's hard is maintaining those friendships once they're no longer coworkers, as usually those "common interests" are mostly about the company's.

The comment I was responding to listed "and it was when I encouraged a few friends to apply at my company" as the only time they had #1 happen. I was responding to that.

I would put your choice (2) to be the healthiest. In my experience when you change jobs the social circle from work gradually atrophies.

100%. I've had...three people in my life who I stayed close to after changing jobs. Two of them I worked with in two different workplaces, which I think is a large reason why (the relationship necessarily was > a single workplace), but even then, I'm not working with them, have in fact moved across the country from them, and so the relationships have atrophied some (though we still talk periodically).

The third I married.

This seems a little too idealistic, I'm afraid. It'd be amazing to have friends from work with whom one could start companies outside etc. But most folks perceive a job as just "a source of income", nothing more. And that is healthy on its own, otherwise we're in a perpetual servitude of the employers, because we link our personal happiness to "the job".

Are you under 40? I think when I was in my 20s and early 30s I would agree on (1). But when I got married and had kids case (2) became optimal, because my social circle filled up with people who had kids of the same age / went to the same school.

The pandemic then pushed me between (2) and (3) - good social circle at work etc.

(4) is me, as I have a wife and young son. I have great friendships and relationships in work, but my non-work time is with my family. Not as rare as you’d think.

This entire list would only make sense to people who actually work in offices.

(1) Healthiest - Doing my morning work at a place where I know a few other coders who like to chat but don't bug me

(2) Less healthy - Same thing, but in the afternoon with beer.

I couldnt disagree more. Maybe if your goal is to start a company with the people you work with this might be true...

But work friends should not be your main friends. It's like saying your main friends should be a group of bowlers but at any moment on any day your local bowling alley could decide you are banned or that if you decide another bowling alley is better you dont get to bring your new friends to it.

Having a social group at work is great but having boundaries between work and personal is much healthier.

> (1) Healthiest = great social circle at work that bleeds into social circle out of work

Lol, in my experience mixing groups of friends has rarely been a good idea.

This is horrible advice

I have nothing in common with most of my coworkers. We're all at different ages with different cultural backgrounds, and a split of men and women.

Work is not a place to make friends.

>(1) Healthiest = great social circle at work that bleeds into social circle out of work

seems like it would lead to dating and that could be problematic for various well known reasons.

I'll be #5 no matter what. At least WFH I can see my daughter when I'm not working.

You're not in situation (5), you're in (3).

So 5 is basically “the hole” in prison?

Do you have any sources for these claims? Especially regarding (1). And why (2) is less healthy?

Whatever people think of Myers-Briggs, the three I’ve been involved with the managers were always the extroverts.

So your choice is WFH micromanaging or keeping that seat in the cube warm.

Introversion/extroversion isn't a distinctive feature of Myers-Briggs - it shows up in more scientifically-respectable personality measures, like the five-factor (OCEAN) model.

Isn't it the very first letter?!

Yes, it features prominently in the MBTI, but my point is that "Whatever people think of Myers-Briggs [my experience is that extroversion is important]" doesn't make a lot of sense because introversion/extroversion is a widely-accepted concept that the MBTI uses, not a concept that comes from the MBTI.

I mean, Myers-Briggs is bollocks anyway so we shouldn't be using it for anything but funsies.

I have a dream that one day we will shit hard on that sort of stuff instead of validating it. See also "alpha male".

I don't understand the dichiotomy you're setting up here.

> So your choice is WFH micromanaging or keeping that seat in the cube warm.

Can't WFH work without micromanagement?

At least I can say that I never felt more free than during the work from home phase in the pandemic.

I guess the point of that post is that the same type of managers who want to keep the cube seat warm are the same type of managers who'll want to micromanage WFH; switching to remote won't change their desires and expectations.

When you’re 50 and have 10-50 reports, get back to us. :)

ITT fish speculating about why birds fly and concluding that it’s because they don’t know how to swim.

Amen.

Nobody has ever proved any benefits to open plan offices. Their pathologies however are well documented e.g. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2017.023...

Teams can thrive in same room. High cadence communication needs same room (NASA flight control). If the work is not actually about a team delivering value together - concretely, and the only rationale for open space is "hypothetically it would be nice if they collaborated more" open office will create negative multipliers to everything (except facility costs).

The pathology is statistical. On average open offices are bad. Individuals can love and thrive in open offices. I suppose that's why it's so hard to kill them - you can always find a few persons who claim honestly it's the best place for them.

The benefit of open floor plan is very well established: you can get far more employees into a given amount of space (and therefore rent) than you can with cubes or offices.

Announcing that it’s “for our benefit” over our screaming about how much we hate it and how harmful it is to comfort, productivity and deep work.

It is beyond insulting.

Pretty sure the open office was a response to the cubicle hell that was prevalent in so many offices. As a child my dad took me to his bring your kid to work day. We sat in his cubicle all day and I felt like I was in prison.

I feel bad that my dad had to deal with that BS. He went full remote as soon as he was able.

Actually I think they were sufficiently self-deluded to believe that "increases collaboration" rap all along.

the easiest way to lie to others is to lie to yourself and not look to critically at your reasoning.

Hard to tell sometimes. Every now and again I meet some or that seems genuinely sincere while being corporate

Agreed. It's like they don't really know what they believe.

You're telling me that the reason sweatshops were designed around open floor plans had nothing to do with facilitating serendipitous interactions?! :O

Man I'd love a return to cubicles at the least. With enough space open floor plans can feel less terrible but sound just carries across these big open rooms.

I went to this office one day a week. But guys in the neighboring cubicles were playing soccer. Not all day but during times of the day. They seriously had a soccer-ball they played with. I didn't know if I should laugh or cry but it was definitely a detriment to productivity. Collaboration. Soccer yeah

You could request them to not to play and be quiet, right.

Or maybe he already knows that the only thing worse than annoying co-workers are co-workers you have asked to keep quiet?

I once shared a space with a girl who played dance music quite loudly. I asked her to turn it down a bit and from her reaction you would think I had just kicked her new puppy to death.

The following few weeks were frosty, to say the least, and I ended up moving elsewhere.

Right in general you don't want people to hate you. You want to be polite. You don't want enemies. But if they behave that way to begin with it's not like a simple plea will change their behavior much except for a little while perhaps.

Soon they'll be back to their antics playing maybe baseball (just kidding, sounds crazy right but so does playing soccer in the office). They're just not concerned about other people's productivity. The general point is that open-office floor-plan easily leads to distractions like these and can even lead to animosity between co-workers.

I'm not sure if you're being serious or not. The kind of people who play soccer at work will definitely listen to you when you ask them not to do that.

These days I’ve found the office is so empty that none of the normal downsides apply. It seems like an unstable equilibrium because why would they keep paying rent for this giant office but I’m enjoying it while it lasts.

Honestly I started doing push ups and pull ups and squats at home during the pandemic. Not a ton. 6 sets of 8-12 during the day. A set takes me a minute or two. At this point I rarely break a sweat and just do them during the day whenever I get up for water or the bathroom.

My health is significantly better overall because of this. I would feel very odd doing this in an office. I have lots of other reasons why I don't like going into an office (mostly losing 1-2 hours a day to commuting) but this is at the top of the list of why I wont go back.

you don't like doing PDD? Panopticon-driven-development?

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. If so, you should be flattered indeed, because I'm stealing the hell out of this.

Oh yes, the boss can sit in the center and see everyone, and everyone can see the boss, but nobody can see each other. This is perfect.

Can't agree more. Privacy of a small room but having people around when you _need_ them is the best of both worlds.

It must be possible for all the remote workers to gather together and actually rent/make an office like this right (with like, 10 people in, 10 small offices and a shared lunchroom/kitchen)? If you’re not looking for a bunch of profit the rent would sort of remain bearable too.

Depends on the company, I think. Some companies are geographically remote, so that's not quite possible. For others yes, things like WeWork exist although might be a little pricey (but probably worth it!). Or just a warehouse-type location equipped with temporary walls that could be rented too :-)

Every picture I've ever seen of a place like WeWork has shown an open floor plan. They might have offices, but they're going to be extra expensive.

And since there's no such thing as "your desk" there, you will never feel at ease. Every day might bring someone that's incredibly annoying, and collaborating with your coworkers would mean either annoying others or booking a conference room.

In the end, it's easier to collaborate with them via video from home.

I think there are advantages to having an office, but I don't think collab work places have those advantages.

On their front-page, they advertise "Private, move-in ready offices" for "1-20+" people as one of the options, which is why I mentioned them. Of course, that could just mean "open-office space private to a particular company", and that's what makes it a bit confusing. But yes, other options are clearly just open-office space.

Yeah. My point in organizing it between the remote workers themselves was kind of so you could bypass places like WeWork.

The idea is to have a building/location with actual private offices after all.

Start your own company. Get your “boss” office, and roam the staff shared office when you want. Problem solved. Don’t ask your employer to fulfill your capricious dreams.

Exactly my thoughts, thanks for noting it! The only thing I don't agree on is that these dreams are somehow "capricious" (esp. given they were the norm just a little over 10 years ago or so; in that respect, "open office" is the capricious dream of the "modern" management) ;)

I don't owe my employer anything. They pay for my services and that is it. If I don't get enough back in terms of pay and comfort I go somewhere else.

Dreams? You are stuck in some weird emotional place.

I have been blessed to have a private office for the first 10 years of my career and wfh the last 10. Neither is perfect and I’d really like to work from an office 1-2 days per week. If I did, I wouldn’t mind open plan tbh. The whole reason to come in one day per week would be to be interrupted and interrupt others. And meetings. I still have 4 days for focus work, it would be ok. Going to be office to sit alone used to feel great, now it seems pointless. I’d plan for zero peace and quiet and zero privacy at the office but I’d see it as the whole point of going there.

2016 to 2018 I was at a company where most of the office was in person, but I was allowed hybrid unofficially. I'd end up coming in on most days, but usually around 11 or 12. And I'd occasionally leave early. When I was in the office I cherished seeing my coworkers, socializing, and solving problems together. I think that was my ideal work arrangement. Now I'm fully remote but it feels like I'm just paying the rent on my own office space. I'm chained to my desk for video calls and frequent Teams pings. My office is 2hrs away and I can't just go in. There's almost no camaraderie on the team. People do their jobs and log off. Not even basic water cooler discussion type stuff.

This is how I’m working currently. I go into the office 0-2 times a week depending on work load. When deadlines are really tight I work from home completely for focus when it’s more relaxed i go into the office once or twice a week which I enjoy because I get to spend time with my colleagues e.g having lunch together, shooting the breeze or even collaborating on work stuff.

My company reduced floor space in 2020, so the open-floor office I was sitting in previously doesn't exist anymore, but after working from home for some time, you notice just how noisy an office building really is - even when you are alone in a smaller room, you can hear people talking in the hallway, in the office next to you etc. etc. So that needs some getting used to too...

On The Media did a great segment about remote work and office design last week: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/promise-an...

I'm in a situation right now where my office is near by and open, but attendance is mostly optional and ad hoc. I find that days when I have lots of meetings are the best days to WFH because it's so much easier to talk over Zoom and not have to rush back and forth to meeting rooms. Having a chat window secondary to the out loud talking is also invaluable. The in-person situation is most valuable when I'm working on some tactical problem (ie coding) and want a second set of eyes or just to complain for a minute. It can be done over Slack, but it's less natural.

Make it known to your employer/s.

This is a hugely stupid move that companies made.

It was done because the benefits are tangible and immediate, and the costs are soft and indirect. CFO wins over HR.

People should recognize what a big deal this is.

I won't do it either.

lol, HR doesn't give a fuck.

Yes, the HR 'org' does not care, I just mean the 'notion' of it.

I hate open floor plans! Give me a proper cube, yes SPEND the money on your workers, don't just cheap out and throw in a picnic table in a big room and call it 'Collaboration', BS!

If you’ve ever been to AirBnb’s office you’d know it’s nothing like that. The AirBnb office is fairly open but it’s way nicer than most people’s homes.

Eh, I'll admit [1] looks very architect-designed but it seems more about looks than practicality.

Where are the external monitors? The laptop chargers? The plants? The photos of family? The screens in meeting rooms? The whiteboards?

They're missing all of those, there's a guy trying to work on a laptop while in a hammock?

I'll stick with my home office, thanks.

[1] https://officesnapshots.com/2019/01/29/airbnb-headquarters-s...

Obligatory reminder that this stance isn't universal and some people do like open floor plans (such as myself).

For sure - although it's always interesting to hear what people like or not about it, and how they work around issues like distractions/attention scatter and the pure "don't watch over my shoulder when I need to check HN". Maybe it all depends on personal sensitivity to such things and the ability to focus/zone in to the music, but that still feels like a coping mechanism rather than something that naturally comes to most (and I'm saying that despite being able to hyper-focus myself, after many years in an open environment).

I think it depends a lot on your emotional approach to work. For me, I'm a decently good engineer, but at my heart I'm quite extroverted and the thing I like most about working is being around smart people and making friends and stuff. The engineering itself is not the core of my existence, it's getting to live the role of the engineer. I guess I also don't mind putting headphones on and focusing, and I really like getting distracted out of that because, well, I like human interaction and helping people and stuff.

That's a good way to put it, thanks for sharing! Agreed that it may not be the same for extroverts vs introverts. I think it doesn't have to be "either-or" - both open-office and private-office plans need to co-exist, the trouble starts when everyone is bound to the same requirements.

TL;DR: Try a “pair programming” company.

“don’t mind focusing [but] really like getting distracted out of that … interaction … helping … and stuff”

This sounds annoying to at least 50% of your peers, and destructive to focus for almost everyone.

Engineering (as opposed to, say, “coding” that just transcribes requirements into code) usually requires building systems in one’s mind then factoring them into well-architected structure and describing that literately in code. This is not a social hang-out (“hey, wassup, can I help w anything?”) activity.

Certainly system conception and architecture can happen great at a whiteboard, but the steps after that tend to go better focused, alternating with iterative collaborative feedback syncs that don’t break concentration for anyone in the system-to-literate-artifact time consuming phase.

Think 3 to 4 hour cycles: 2 to 3 hrs uninterrupted focus, 30 mins break, 30 mins collab for ideation and review, back into focus. Shorten either the morning or afternoon focus cycle depending when you focus most productively, allocate the extra to lunch/learn/whatever. 2x3hrs+1hr lunch = 30 hr work, 5 hrs lunch, per week. Beyond that you probably don’t engineer productively and should enjoy non workplace environments to recharge / defrag.

Since focus time is the phase with most time, it means at any given moment most people need library quiet, and the reflective syncs should be elsewhere.

- Privacy by default with collab spaces allows focus and interaction, without interaction annoying or destructive to anyone. (It’s by-and-large only annoying to (a) profit-over-productivity accountants who think it’s expensive, (b) micro-managers who adore management by walking around, aka getting paid executive pay to chit chat everyone’s focus away, and (c) people who haven’t yet learned how to deep focus consistently.)

- Collab by default without (or with only limited) private focus space prevents this beyond whatever threshold of private space availability. That said, allowing people to pick their own work-start times helps distribute focus and collab usage. The less private space, the more flexible working hours and location must be.

Effectively zero people can translate systems to code while “human-interacting and helping people and such” the way you describe, advocating for that as default is literally counter productivity.

There’s a solution though: devs craving continuous interaction can seek out a company (correctly) believing in “XP” aka eXtreme Programming or paired programming. In this model, the default private spaces have two engineers who program symbiotically. Research suggests 1+1 = 2.5 or 3 or more. For some problems, 10x.

Not only co-thinkers thrive in XP. Standard deviations of engineers need fewer iterations till correctness, meaning, produce higher quality faster. It’s been shown this helps introverted thinkers too, even if they only pair with a rubber duck to explain their thinking aloud to!

Thats called the break room

It is really strange to me that anti-open-office people (and in general anti-office people) often don't understand (or don't believe?) that other people just have radically different preferences to them.

A “closed” office design includes private inner sanctums, small group common areas, and large group common areas. Think academia: my grad student friends have shared or sometimes private offices in little clusters of 5 that surround a small conference room or lounge. Then down the hall is the big department lounge. A much greater range of preferences are satisfiable with this layout. The same people are also allowed to have varying preferences depending on the time of day or phase of project, and to wander with their laptops.

I'm not arguing that offices shouldn't have closed spaces, I'm arguing that there exist people who like open offices, despite the weird remarks in this thread from people who think that, like, only managers would.

I do too. I think a lot of people who spend work hours browsing the web don't like them.

Found the management.

Cynical comment, don't you think? I like open offices and I'm a dev. It's not that inconceivable that people have different preferences, right?

The person to whom you're responding probably made that comment because of GP's statement "I think a lot of people who spend work hours browsing the web don't like them." Which in itself is pretty cynical.

As a fellow dev, I dislike open office plans, but not because I spend my day browsing the web. I dislike them because I'm rather noise-sensitive, and it's hard for me to tune out the sound of ping-pong balls being batted back and forth. I can't just put on headphones, because my team pair-programs extensively. With WFH, I can pair program and not deal with that or the myriad of other aural distractions.

That said, I appreciate your comments on this post and yes, I wholeheartedly agree that the preferences of folks who prefer WFO are just as valid as those of us who prefer WHF. Plenty of room for both in the world. :-)

And with that, I'm off to play today's Wordle while half-listening to a Zoom meeting.

Who said that browsing HN or other tech sources on-your-own is less productive than regular "work"? :P