Who would win:

- literally 100s of publications showing how disruptive and destructive to focus it is to be working in an open office work and how much distractions it brings:

https://theconversation.com/returning-to-the-workplace-heres...

https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-truth-about-open-offices

https://www.businessdit.com/distraction-work-statistics/

https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/minds-business/eve...

https://juliety.com/effects-of-distractions-at-work

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/11/why-open-offi...

- A bunch of extroverts who just can't wait to tell you what they did over the weekend. Backed, of course, by C-level dudes who simply can't bring themselves to believe work can be done if they PERSONALLY can't see you at your desk working.

Who wins? The CFO and corp real estate people (correctly) saying how much more expensive (and less flexible to changing team size) a building with enough private offices is.

Good news! They can let the coders work from home and massively cut down the amount spent on insurance, office space, and furniture!

Weirdly, that's not popular with the decision making extroverts either...

Or the friends of the C-suites who own all that real estate for some reason

They don't necessarily need to be big offices. It's just that corporations generally do seating based on seniority and status, not need. They have tiny cubes for worker bees and giant private offices for the queens.

Even small offices require more costly building materials than large cubicles. So even a high density might still be somewhat expensive. Fortunately, there are opportunities for cheaper commercial real estate these days, so someone has the opportunity to try something new.

> They have tiny cubes for worker bees [...]

Not sure if you're on the same page as this conversation.

Open offices don't really have cubicles.

Cube farms aren't really much better for programming work than true open-plan offices.

The article is about the split between "office with door" and "not that", not specifically open-plan offices, so talking about cube farms is absolutely valid.

What on earth are you talking about. No one is debating true offices are superior but a full height cube is about infinitely better than open office. Cubes are sound insulating, they're quiet, they're more spacious than open office. You have storage and three to three and a half walls. The only physical distraction is caused by people walking past the opening. It's not just possible, but quite likely to eliminate outside movement from your field of view.

I'll admit that plenty of cube farms are really just open offices in lipstick but true cube farms are far superior to open offices.

I worked for a few years in the full-height kind, and a few years in the lipstick kind. The full-height cube was awesome, I had as much privacy as I really needed but the barrier to interruption was just low enough that people weren’t afraid to come ask a question.

I think cube farms are substantially better than open office plans. I simply cannot function in an open office layout, but I can in a cube farm, albeit at the cost of productivity and the level of thinking I can accomplish.

Open plans have visual and auditory distractions. Cubicles with decent walls at least eliminate the visual distractions. On the other hand, glass-walled offices might have decent soundproofing but have the distraction of people constantly walking by.

There's also the question of form vs. function. A lot of people in leadership care a great deal about the workspace looking "modern" and care less about it being effective for the people working in it.

cubes have all the disadvantages of open plan offices and none of the advantages of private rooms. i prefer open-plan offices over cubes.

Having worked in both environments, cubicles are quieter. They also have much less visual distraction.

We have a floorplan with offices of all sizes. (Ok, the biggest ones are like a mini open space - mostly used by flexdesk people who come in only from time to time).

It was more expensive, but we have zero issues with seat allocation. We don't force it and make teams always sit together. People are free to choose and switch their places, so often a project is spread across several offices and mixed with other projects.

I think it's certainly superior to having an open space.

So you're saying programmers' time is not expensive enough?

It's probably closer to the outputs (and differences in output) not being measurable enough.

I had a private office setup in one place. It was phenomenal and by far the best work environment (physical and otherwise) I've ever had.

The biggest problem was: we couldn't double the size of the team without it being a half-year leasing and construction project. So, we'd sawtooth among "far too much space and lots of pent-up hiring; a Goldilocks zone; out of space; hiring freeze; lease/construct offices; loop".

My office now is whatever I want to do with my house. That's also good for heads-down work (and obviously for the commute), but terrible for collaborative whiteboard design work.

> but terrible for collaborative whiteboard design work.

Not at all.

If you think so, maybe try switching jobs to non-remote and let someone fine with virtual whiteboarding take your role on.

In my experience, there is nothing like being in a room with a team. There is something about the physicality of presence, the way the communication has both lower latency (because it is not intermediated by electronics) and higher bandwidth (because in person even things like the way someone shifts in his shoes or his eyelid quivers is information).

I have worked remotely for a significant portion of the past few decades. I work remotely. I anticipate working remotely for the remainder of my career. I enjoy working remotely. But working in-person has some real advantages. I just don’t believe that they outweigh the disadvantages.

Similar here. I expected to hate working remotely when my company decided to switch. It turns out that I love it overall once through the adaptation period (for individuals and for the company).

Even with that, I think there is an optimal number of times per year to get the team together in one physical space and that number is probably somewhere in the one to three range, but by my estimation it sure isn't zero.

I agree communication is better when everyone is present. If a remote team was required to be available that would solve most of the problems. It’s about the culture of WFH which currently assumes slow async responses.

That's a cultural thing. All my remote colleagues are present and responsive. I certainly do not think it's a healthy assumption.

WFH does not imply async.

Timezones do.

Ive always been very surprised at companies that want in-office but then spread the workforce across a handful of timezones

My new year resolution is to never do remote work at my next job. I wanna be that guy known for being always there, at his job, doing what he's paid to do.

This has seriously diminishing returns.

If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is around to hear it, did it fall?

If your the only one at work, did you work? Are you going to optimize to others view of your work habits or are you going to optimize to outcomes?

outcomes trumps all, however, I learned the hard way, as most of us do, that optics play a role.

You can be known for always being there, at your job, doing what you're paid to do, and still work remote. Just be there, at your job, doing what you're paid to do.

Fair enough. But I just can't replace real human interaction with remote communication. I just can't. Same way I could never get in a long distance relationship with someone. I need to be in the same room as them and look them in the eye when I'm explaining something to them. I actually like the 2-5 minutes of chit chat in the common kitchen every morning, talking about where my colleague went skiing that weekend.

And I am an introvert.

> But I just can't replace real human interaction with remote communication. I just can't.

That's entirely fair. You work best in a particular sort of arrangement, just as others work best in other sorts of arrangements. Nobody is wrong here.

For sure, I was just describing it the way I frame it for myself. I'm not gonna judge people who prefer to do nothing but remote

Honest question because I'm curious. What is your definition of an introvert and how do you know you are one?

I don't care to be in the center of attention I guess and I'm very comfortable with silence.

When I socialize with friends typically 1h is enough.

I don't "collect" friends. I only get close to people when it makes sense. I am not socially inept however, just selective

Since GP has replied, I'll now add: I think of the divide as "extroverts gain energy from group social interactions; introverts lose energy during group social interactions".

IMO, it's not shy vs open, as my wife is on the shy side but clearly extroverted, while I'm more visibly/apparently comfortable but I find it exhausting to be in groups for a long period of time.

> Not at all

The arrogance required to tell someone that their experience is false is something I have trouble wrapping my head around.

> The arrogance required to tell someone that their experience is false is something I have trouble wrapping my head around.

It's my least favorite thing about HN, but it's one of the opiates of the internet. Alternate phrasing like "not in my experience" might be slightly better.

I still think "downvote to grey" is a regression vs. simply letting popular comments be voted higher.

It's human nature to think that our personal experience and worldview is representative of the general population, even though it almost never actually is. It's a thing we have to consciously be on guard about.

"We tend to mistake the limits of our vision for the limits of the world."

If you allow the misperception to take hold, it's a short step to concluding that anyone who isn't like you is weird or wrong in some way.

Not sure why this is down voted. A decent virtual whiteboard can be better than physical. No more chicken-scratch text labels, plenty of pre-drawn widgets to drop in, easily shuffle things around, sticky arrows, everyone can have a different color pointer, etc. The learning curve is a bit higher than physical, yet worth the pain.

Also, no judgement about attire, eye contact, stance, or demands to stay during a fire alarm ("it's just a drill!").

Shame that Slack killed Screen Hero. Perhaps the founder's Pop.com effort will catch on.

I've been working remotely for most of my career and I intend to keep doing so, but if a "decent" virtual whiteboard can do that, I've yet to see it. FigJam, Miro, etc. all seem to be technically fine but unable to come up with flows that are as clearly obvious for collaboration as "two people standing there at a whiteboard". I can use all these tools quite effectively (I've got a LucidChart tab open right now) for solo use or semi-independently with close colleagues on the same board, but attempting to add other people creates chaos and a mess over the conference bridge because the affordances are so different from what people want out of rapid, high-bandwidth low-worrying-about-the-color-of-the-rectangle idea swapping.

Though I disagree with them and with you--I downvoted that post for its writer being a jerk, not for being subjectively wrong. "If you think virtual whiteboards maybe aren't very good you should give somebody else your remote job" is "man, shut up" territory.

When people are in a room you can have multiple voice conversations at once. When you are remote, you cannot. I know you can replace voice side channels with text, but this is a lossy proposition.

Turn-taking in general is better in person due to high bandwidth channels for nonverbal communication.

I say all of that as an autistic person who has trouble with all kinds of tacit communication (it may be that I have studied it so much in order to fit in that I really notice it), so yes there are downsides to being in person (I can pretend to make eye contact on a video), but I'm talking here about why the average developer or product person might have good reason to prefer in-person for a two pizza meeting.

Nice whiteboarding app affordances are great, but the low effort of onboarding to a physical whiteboard also encourages broader participation.

> A decent virtual whiteboard can be better than physical.

Interesting. I honestly assumed that virtual whiteboarding was universally considered worse than physical whiteboarding, purely because it is amongst everyone I've worked with.

It's interesting to learn otherwise.

When the execs of tech companies are still able to make several orders of magnitude more money than any of the programmers they employ, and their companies are able to make profits in the trillions, with a t, no; programmers' time is not priced appropriately for the amount of productivity we enable.

This doesn’t follow, at least not without a lot more analysis. The biggest tech companies have tens of thousands of engineers make anything from low 6-figures to low 7-figures. That’s a huge salary burden that dwarfs exec compensation. Systematically paying more could easily outstrip revenues if leadership is wrong about predicting the future, which would lead to either salary cuts or layoffs, neither of which is well received. And are you saying engineers deserve most of the value because they wrote the code? What about other functions, what do they deserve? These aren’t easy questions to answer. But the reality is we don’t have to because hiring is a market. You get paid what you negotiate. This is the same for execs as it is for worker bees, the only difference is the value of your skills according to whoever is holding the purse strings.

Thankfully there is nothing at all but entrenched competition preventing you from leaving and becoming one of those execs on your own.

This very website is here to help you achieve this dream.

The delta in your compensation to theirs is the effective price that you are willing to pay to not bother with that hassle.

Last time I checked, the data on offices vs cubes came down as offices being the same price or even slightly cheaper.

Cubes and open offices enable communication with people which companies value more than absolute productivity. Sure your best people get less done, but they often enable someone else to get more work down - or that is their claim.

That claim is dubious at best. I'm old enough to remember when devs had actual offices, and the amount of communication (even serendipitous communication) was the same as with any other sort of arrangement.

Second this. To be more concise the groups I was in had a norm where you'd leave your door open if you were down to chat or BS. Cubes take that choice away.

A lot of the popularity of open plans is driven by rapid hiring. When you are already large (think 2015 google/meta) and growing 50%/year it is very hard to manage the space for teams. Fixed offices make it nearly impossible.

It's not unusual if it takes 20 years for a software developer in the Bay Area to produce output equal in value to a 2-bedroom condo. Skimping on office space is not some kind of miserly bean-counting. Software development is just not all that valuable compared to Tier 1 urban real estate.

Real estate in the Bay Area is high valued because of it being a downstream stop on the trickle down of VC money being blasted everywhere by idiots in to a captive market.

AI does not need real estate, I wonder how hard they will battle it.

Well it needs server rooms but it is not office space in the city centers, maybe office space in city centers will be turned all out into server rooms.

> A bunch of extroverts who just can't wait to tell you what they did over the weekend and a bunch of C-level dudes who can't believe work can be done if they PERSONALLY can't see you at your desk working.

The sight of people in an open office plan is merely an expensive therapy session for these guys

Nothing more therapeutic than the sight of your worker bees, stuffed together in the noisy hive, making you dough.

Lord knows many of them hate their families.

Workaholism is a self soothe for those who should consider divorce.

“I can’t back it up with data, I just know I’m right “ of course

The asshats holding the bags of money, obviously

Bingo!

Yet people still make arguments based off the conceit that a profit motive means businesses act like rational hive minds.

You can actually act rationally on fake, imagined and fraudulent data.

idk who wins, but I'd assume extroverts need a quiet environment to be able to focus as much as anyone else.

Blaming extroverts/introverts is a red herring - it’s down to the nature of the work.

Whether they’re introverts or extroverts a programmer’s job tends to require a lot of solo focus. There’s collaborative aspects of course but it always requires windows of deep work that are deeply frustrated by distraction, introvert or not.

Many other areas of work (including much work in upper management) don’t require that focus. The work is often deeply collaborative and communicative, and it‘s work that can be dropped and picked up on a dime and iterated on without much loss of productivity. In a way it’s work that actively benefits from a “distracting” environment, because it’s often full of rapid-fire blockers best resolved by grabbing someone nearby.

The friction comes from the fact that the people who do either type of work don’t understand the other type if their whole career has only involved one type.

Most programmers understand the aspects of upper management work you described in my experience. And most upper managers choose to work in separate offices.

I wonder why...

The extroverts are always struggling to get conference room bookings. They'd be able to converse a lot more freely by just inviting people to their always-available offices.

Not if they have people facing roles. In that case their job IS talking to other people. Sure, they need to prepare, but the higher up they are, the more of that preparation is done by assistants.

I have an office with a nice, heavy door. I don't often close it, but just knowing that it's there and that I can close if I want to is a comforting thought. That said, I think if I did always close it, I'd be more productive by a significant margin....

Open plan worked for me when there was a very clear contract between every stakeholder.

Firstly, everyone had free, good quality, sound blocking headphones. Not just free as in standard equipment on your first day free. There were buckets of the things lying around and if you needed a new set you just grabbed some, no questions asked. VC funded opulence, yay!

Secondly, there was an understanding amongst everyone on the shop floor that “headphones on” meant do not disturb, just as much as a closed office door. Violations were not tolerated but it was a social norm thing not an HR write up thing. Maybe people were getting the latter behind the scenes though?

In return you end up with an office architecture that’s considerably easier to manage at the expense of turning the physical challenge of giving everyone an office into a — potentially intractable for some teams — people management challenge.

I’ve seen this work tolerably well in an open space that’s entirely engineers or similar roles, assuming there are enough conference rooms for people to peel off to for meetings and calls, and you can establish the culture of the main room having a library-esque hush.

As soon as people start having multi party conversations in the main space because the conference rooms are booked 100% of the time, or people whose jobs involve talking all day are seated there, it’s game over. Noise cancelling headphones are no match for the 25th “Hey Bob, this is Jason at Intertrode, do you have 5 minutes?” of the day.

ACCOUNTS PAYABLE THIS IS WILHELMINA SPEAKING

JUST A MOMENT

> “Hey Bob, this is Jason at Intertrode, do you have 5 minutes?”

It's funny how Office Space is still relevant almost 25 years later.

Mike Judge ended up with the same problem as South Park and The Onion.

Silicon Valley ended before NFT, AI, and GameStop. All far more ludicrous than anything in fiction.

Active noise cancellation is said to be improving, but it’s hard to go wrong with a big hunk of plastic if you can find a comfortable pair of closed-back circumaural phones. I’ve gone through about three pairs of HD 280. A former colleague would wear the same ear pro he uses at the gun range.

A coworker repeatedly ignored a person’s headphones and would interrupt them anyway. One day I put a bright post-it note on my headphones: “Joe, don’t bother me”. I was in middle of flow, making some huge changes, when I noticed Joe standing next to me, laughing. “Hahaha, someone put a post-it note on your headphones!” I coulda killed him.

“In startup land did CFO

A stately office plan decree:

Through EDM, the coders flow

Unless they were disturbed by Joe

Until we broke his knee.”

I printed out the infamous quote "Go away, or I will replace you with a small shell script." It was primarily meant for one specific employee known to have the gift of gab. Seeing how my job was to automate the most mundane/error prone tasks, it seemed to be pretty effective. I heard murmurings about how some thought it was rather rude, but I never had to speak to HR about it.

Make them fear the dark wizard’s powers.

I've often run into the "just wear headphones" argument and never been a fan of it. Do you code with noise cancellation in a sort of sensory deprivation mode? Or do you listen to music?

Listening to music while coding severely reduces my concentration, and I find it in no way to be a substitute for silence.

> Listening to music while coding severely reduces my concentration, and I find it in no way to be a substitute for silence.

Me too. I can't work with music in headphones as I inevitably start listening to it. It's weird that many people don't even consider this a possibility when recommending headphones. Well, I guess it's not weird as they just aren't affected by it the same way, but still.

We are all to "suck it up" because, for some reason, being constantly interrupted is something that we supposedly have to be okay with. I say no, let the busybodies and loudmouths adapt to us for a change.

> I say no, let the busybodies and loudmouths adapt to us for a change.

Hear Hear! Thought I've never had any luck with this.

I have found that NR + white noise works well to fully isolate my mind from external stimulus and focus on the code state inside.

Me neither. If I'm concentrating I don't want to wear headphones all day. Even with my very comfortable ones, it's not that comfortable and as you say, it's not the same as silence, or just the quiet of a room without human noise.

It's also the inverse problem as well though. Sometimes I want to listen to music, but I'm not doing anything that requires me to be unapproachable. Heck, sometimes I'm looking for a distraction, which is WHY I'm wearing the headphones, listening to something distracting!

The idea that wearing headphones should mean "leave me alone" just doesn't work for me, and when I want to be left alone, wearing headphones doesn't mean I can concentrate

Contra-opinion: music significantly improves my concentration, but it has to be instrumental or classical otherwise brain gets distracted processing the lyrics.

Your word-token-hardware is single-threaded.

Truly we are all unique snowflakes. I can't exist in complete silence (even while coding) it drives me nuts. I always have some sort of noise. Usually music without lyrics for coding.

that said... I don't like wearing headphones and certainly not for extended periods of time. So, "just wear headphones" doesn't work for me for an entirely different reason.

Sometimes I like music, most often not.

However I definitely get ear + head + hearing fatigue from wearing any kind of headphones for more than an hour or two.

Noise canceling is nice, but it seems to be hard on my ears somehow.

In a private (or home) office, I can play music through speakers and it seems to be better than headphones for me.

One thing that is both good and bad about offices is the loud air conditioning/ventilation (which of course is largely a good thing given covid, etc.) The white noise drowns out sound, but it is also fatiguing to my ears. I have been in offices during power outages when the AC/computers/etc. shut down, it's amazing how quiet it is.

I will never actually experience silence, due in part to listening to loud music way too often as a kid. Music or other low-interaction media is better than the constant high-pitch tone I hear ~16x7.

> Do you code with noise cancellation in a sort of sensory deprivation mode? Or do you listen to music?

Related to what dboreham wrote in his sibling comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38695799): under some specific circumstances specific kinds of music can increase the concentration for me when programming. If these circumstances are met, I do sometimes listen to music on my noise-cancelling headphones when programming.

But typically I love to program in sensory deprivation mode (the same holds for learning).

rainymood.com

Sorry that's just you. As an amateur musician myself, music helps me concentrate. Actually, if I have been writing code for a while without music, I would notice that "something is missing" and turn on my music. I know a number of colleagues who use their headphones all the time as well.

It's not "just" him. Just (yes, just) because you know some people who wear their headphones all day, doesn't make it the standard.

Lots of people (including me) don't like to wear headphones all day.

"that's just you" is dismissive and inaccurate. I can only listen to music when I'm slacking and if I begin to do real work the music I normally enjoy becomes an annoyance and I have to turn it off.

I’m not not a developer, I work in the IT space and require deep focus for a myriad of other tasks (like anyone else, I presume). I’m no longer a musician but consider myself to have a rich musical background. Music does wonders for my focus, but it also generates fatigue. So I’m often alternating between music and silence. Have you noticed the same thing or is this less common?

The type of music is very important on whether it works in this manner as well as individual personality types. I personally find anything with lyrics no different than listening to the chatter of the space you're trying to avoid.

Yes I can imagine Wagner or Cardi B being counter productive here. Musical white noise — plaid noise? — works wonders though. As another commenter said: EDM has been a key factor in my productivity as a software engineer over the years.

When I worked in an open office that required headphones for focus, I would put on white noise when music was too distracting.

I worked in an open office plan that did the headphones thing. I found that made it even more intolerable -- I can't stand being in a room with a bunch of people and being cut off from my senses. It makes me hyperaware, nervous, and even less able to work.

> Open plan might work great for some types of work […]

I'm curious to know: why types are, or people consider to be, good for open plan?

Generally, office type jobs tends to be one where people need to use their brains to concentrate on something, and open plans tend to be able to create / not block distractions, they would be antithetical to being able to concentrate.

Marketing? Where ideas and concepts need a lot of input and discussion. Basically anything that is very human and not zero or one.

Customer support via telephone support where not one agent knows everything. I.e., you tell customer to hold the line and then ask some other agent for a solution.

I used to be in marketing (but now developer) and not really (of course depends on the specific role). Sure, parts of marketing is meetings and discussions stuff but so is software development (need to discuss requirements, architecture, etc) - the rest of the job is deep work and execution on ideas (just like coding).

The best mix imho is to have spaces where people can individualise their time - to focus.

Small booths or mini meeting rooms or even large kitchens area with tables - alone amongst people.

Because it's not black and white, everyone needs focus but also communication with others.

Mostly everything that is not creative: creativity needs focus. Take any job that isn't creating something, anything related to customer, operations, support, ... and one can do it in almost any conditions.

MacGyver-style support needs very creative solutions because no budget.

Creativity doesn't require solitude. Is pair programming not at all creative?

I wasn't talking about solitude, but focus: you can focus in a quiet room with other people sitting and doing their stuff, but it is not possible in a room with people moving around, with people speaking, with intense external noises like construction works nearby, ...

Trading floors would be one.

Manufacturing, close to the floor, where you often need to react fast and start in the morning with no idea what you will be doing that day, yet will still have more work than hours.

Open plan is good for collaboration/communication heavy types of jobs. In this kind of jobs, disruptions is a way to propagate "just in time" information through the organization. You can still eliminate disruptions in such setting, and it superficially leads to a high "productivity" in terms of LOC produced, but you act on outdated/misleading information (or you deny that information to others), which often leads to working on wrong things in wrong ways.

People often argue this can be fixed by just not needing to communicate. Like all user stories have all necessary information prepared. All the (functional, non-functional) acceptance criteria are defined, all the design documents are perfectly specified etc. But that's a pipe dream, which leads to other kinds of productivity losses.

> People often argue this can be fixed by just not needing to communicate.

They do? I don't think I've ever heard someone make this argument.

Apologies, I left out the word "synchronously" in front of "communicate". Synchronous communication is either planned meetings or unplanned disruptions, which many people strongly dislike. A complete lack of communication is of course impossible, so these people strongly prefer asynchronous communication - very detailed spec in advance, emails with the implicit expectation they might get answered with a day-long delay etc.

Sales and marketing bullpens. Some IT roles (NOC / SOC).

In the case of where I work, the marketing team seem to work better in groups, they oftent colaborate and (I hate that they do this) all crowd round one laptop to discuss ideas and thoughts - why they dont arrange a metting and do this in the appropriate room is anyones guess but its gone on for years, and is one of the main reasons open plan for developers failed at the place I work.

Thankfully our place is very much pro WFH but we do have an office with a 'quiet room' (basically a room with less desks) and a few pods for when you need to concentrate. The open plan areas are almost always 100% marketing folks though.

Private rooms are not cheap and it would be hard to justify for junior programmers. And having private space just for middle level folks is bad for morale and learning of junior folks.

But yeah for companies which just employs senior folks this should be the norm.

One private room per team works very well for programmers without the expense justification. The two most productive jobs I've ever had in an office were with that arrangement, not cubicles or open offices.

Cubicles are OK as long as there isn't a lot of chatter, people being on the phone all the time, talking loud, etc. Though of course id rather be in my own room no doubt.

Cancelling sound distractions with NC headsets isn't that bad. Cubicles will most likely help with visual distraction i have in an open floor plan.

> Cancelling sound distractions with NC headsets isn't that bad

For you. For many others (myself included), using NC headphones is even worse than putting up with the noise.

I never saw headphones mask voice adequately without playing music or other sound. Or wearable all day without discomfort.

same. you're basically getting earplugs at that point, or keeping something on in the background as a low drone

I usually put some 8~10 hour youtube lofi stream on when working.

I have no issues with NC headphones could even sleep with them, it has pretty much become a part of me.

how do you justify the salary of a junior programmer if you can't justify giving them the space they need to perform? isn't this just throwing money away?

note that private office rooms aren't the first or only option, but rather work from home

Junior dev left to his own devices will start reimplementing Linux kernel.

Skilled labor isn't cheap.

The buildings were put there to serve the people, not the other way around.

Even if you pay $1k per office per programmer that's still less than 5-10% of the cost of their salary, and would likely yield a performance improvement of greater than 5-10%.

You say you can't afford to, I say you can't afford not to!

> Even if you pay $1k per office per programmer

You mean per year? Private office costs are much higher than that.

If you mean per month, then you are assuming salary to be average of $100k-200k.

I meant per month.

Yes, that is indeed the average salary for a programmer in my area, that's the low end.

It's never been a problem for me

The work was done by IBM in 1975. You need lots of space to keep the noise down and you need offices with doors that close.

Why are we still having this discussion fifty years later?

The costs of offices are easier to quantify than the benefits.

Because we work in different ways now than we did in 1975? The work people do is also different. And, the people themselves have also changed. A person born in 1980s may be more used to 24/7 noise from tv and devices. A 30 year old worker in 1975 grew up in a quieter home.

That generalization certainly doesn't fit with this 1977 edition human. The loudest 24/7 thing in my house is the compressor on my fridge. Silence (and office doors) are priceless.

Aren't you just reinforcing the point?

"A person born in 1980s may be more used to 24/7 noise"

"1977 edition human" (born in 1977 for those who didn't grasp my turn-a-phrase. I hope that's close enough to 1980)

And I'm not used to constant noise. So, no.

I don't think people and how they work are much different now than in 1975. I have no data, though. That would be an interesting study. Do you have data?

I do. The data would be computer sales to businesses. The data indicates computer use is now a regular part of many jobs, whereas very few jobs in 1970 involved working on a computer, based on computer sales data.

You may not recognize the difference, but our brains haven't evolved (nature) much in the last couple decades or probably centuries. There's little to no chance we have truly adapted (nurture) to this 24/7 noise, even plants have problems with it: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/plants-are-... -> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S143917912...

> Plants in the traffic noise treatment group were exposed to 16 h of road traffic noise each day for a total of 15 days, while the control group was kept under complete silence. Traffic noise exposure led to significant decrease in growth indices of both plant species.

Human change does not require Darwinian selection. Look across cultures. That people might tolerate or be most comfortable in noisier environments could vary for non-heritable reasons. Some people like less stimulation, some more. Autism rates have changed faster than our genetics also.

Because in the short term it's cheaper to do other stuff.

And ain't nobody going in between this year's bonus and executives.

Let's not pretend that we are something special, and we need to focus so much more than other creative workers.

For the majority of work of an average programmer in an average corporation, deep focus is highly overrated.

Those workers deserve environments that promote deep focus, as well.

> quite litterally the worst possible working environment you could be providing

Just for fun, let me try to one-up that: working outside, in a scorching desert, hung upside down, just barely reaching your laptop on the sand, with scorpions crawling over the keyboard.

But thinking about it, even in that situation, I guess I would still prefer not to have to deal with people having unrelated conversations around me.

At least the scorpions don't have the unreasonable expectation for you to not freak out when they interrupt you.

It is also acceptable to shoo away the scorpions. Much less acceptable with Bonnie from HR.

Yes, Bonnie from HR gives me the shudders. The enthusiasm!

Recent experience at a fairly young startup has shown me that open office culture has also started to breed a very different type of programmer.

People will often be pairing nearly all day long, any claim that you need a moment to focus and think about a problem is met with perplexity, every idea should be shipped to prod asap, while tests exist the idea of performing basic QA/manual testing on your own work is only used in the most extreme cases.

Contemporary startup engineering culture is best described as frenetic. It certainly feels hyper productive (if not extremely exhausting for a more traditional, introverted programmer), but I've started to notice a fairly large amount of that "productivity" is fixing mistakes a more focused programmer would have avoided.

I suspect the long-term impact of open offices my be even more deleterious than it's impact on the focus of individual programmers.

> .... a fairly large amount of that "productivity" is fixing mistakes a more focused programmer would have avoided

Holy cow this hits home. I've been on a number of teams like this going back years (decades) and ... I just don't get it. Had I been 'allowed' another 30 minutes, or an hour, or a day, on problem X... we'd have avoided weeks of unraveling problems later. But... no - gotta keep pressing on, hitting those pre-defined deadlines at all costs.

Deadline Driven Development is foolish. Deadlines are good to have, but you cannot force good functioning software if more time is needed to craft it. You get what you pay for, you reap what you sow. If you just want to churn out code in unrealistic time spans instead of extended efforts, you're going to get a bad product. Instead, cut things that can come out later, have developers focus on polish. I would rather a very stable and polished MVP over a rushed dumpster fire as a dev an end-user who has seen some awful.

I was raised by the focused type of programmer, and modern startup culture is horrifying to me (and him). I have left that world and now am solo engineer in a non-profit where I'm responsible for a list of results, not a pile of Jira tickets someone made up to look busy.

That sounds like my ideal job. The longer I've been a developer, the more I've come to dislike work that doesn't address problems faced by end-users/the org.

Yeah, humans have a major need of purpose.

I couldn't be happier. I am the in-house expert in my field, I replaced an agency that was far more expensive and incompetent, and I have great hours (9-4:30!) and benefits. Oh, and I'm fully remote in an org that's been remote since 2013.

As a former programmer and now EM, I agree with this. Open offices definitely felt a lot more productive since everyone was always frantically working and communicating. I think people actually have gotten more done since WFH started, though.

The sweet spot is don't force people to work a certain way. I was in an open office place before 2020, was remote friendly, we mostly would come in except when we needed personal time or whatever, but if I wanted to focus, I'd pop in headphones and crank out code, as would anyone else. If I wanted to peer program I could, and if anyone wanted a quick laugh, we'd just talk for about five minutes, because sitting staring at code non-stop in an office environment can be draining too. I prefer WFH, and I can peer program with devs by calling them on Teams and screen sharing, but if I have to be in an office, it wont make much different to me, just the risk / wasted time from the commute.

I love WFH for this. It’s so much easier to plan my day according what best works for me like focus moments and current environment. We still do all the meetings and pair programming is so immensely better over a call with screen sharing.

All the energy I’d normally expend on “shielding” myself from the office environment can now go into focus and actual creativity.

I think the sweet spot is, let teams decide how often to meet if you're going that route. For example, last place I worked at we were mostly from various parts of the states, so we were considered remote, whilst others lived nearby and had to commute. I think managers should decide wholly how their teams work. If managers need to be onsite, that's reasonable too, though I would assume not always especially if their teams are remote.

I feel like the less technical teams might benefit more from face to face, but developers, a lot of us do our coding at home before our careers even start. It is a hacker's career path.

>felt a lot more productive

This is the crux. There are people who want this feeling, at all costs seemingly, despite no data backing up the assumption that returning to the office makes a materially positive difference and produces positive outcomes.

The fact that working from home means I avoid wanting to put a rifle round through my skull during a commute to the office is pretty strong data that return to office doesn’t work for me

I once heard and now love the phrase "Don't confuse motion with progress".

A lot of us are constantly busy but get nothing important done!

That's a scary depiction of the scene. I haven't experienced things that extreme, but close enough that I don't doubt you.

It might even be a significant part of why software quality isn't where it should be these days.

Inside Facebooks' offices in Seattle circa 2019: "Overcrowded pig sty" is an accurate description. The smell was overpowering. Two pairs of bathrooms for an entire floor of developers packed shoulder to shoulder in an open plan hellscape.

I actually really loved the Dexter building. Yes it was all that, but I’m an extrovert and some part of my work day needs have been unmet for 4 years now.

Great! Go work in an office somewhere.

Guess what? I'm not an extrovert and most of my work day needs for about 15 years have been unmet.

Since Covid they are being met.

The awesome thing about modern programming culture is that rework due to the initial thing you shipped being rushed and shoddy actually looks really good on Tableau. Because you can assign more story points to fixing all the mistakes you made during the last 1-2 days of every sprint.

Bugs and unintentional design deficiencies get zero story points at my job. It's actually something I fought for because it's faux-progress - it's work that's actually a part of the original (likely underestimated) story someone already earned points for.

Everyone has a different take on story points, but the original idea was for them to record _effort_, not value.. more story points are actually worse. Delivered value is better. So digging a ditch and filling it in would get a bunch of story points but have zero value.

But managers want to look at the numbers they have, which is story points.

Doesn't that make it impossible to use story points for estimating effort and ensuring people aren't overcommitted?

There's no such thing for us. We don't work in "sprints". We have a giant list of things to do. If you need something to do, you take something off the top of the pile and do it. When you're done, however long it takes, you take another thing off the top and work on that.

What purpose do the story points serve, then?

There's a circle of hell for anyone who uses story points as a productivity measure and not a work-in-progress limit internal to the team.

This is a war room approach that is reactive during the course of building.

Imagine insane last minute issues or something being entirely down.

Not just startups. I was once hired as a contractor for a major bank in Toronto who were desperate to ship a product, which was way past its promised delivery date. The AVP got an idea to put all of us in a conference room huddled around a conference table , because obviously us lazy programmers were slacking off in our cubicles and the crappy almost daily changing requirements were not to blame. The entire team began falling sick one by one (pre covid era). This was also where I learnt the hard way that it is possible to get the flu twice in the same flu season. It was a hilarious mess. Curiously enough the AVP got promoted to VP the next year.

And the following year, the whole office switched to open office plan. I think the ability to micro manage people and the power trip for managers explains this logic.

My experience with Canadian “business man, doing business” culture supports this.

Their lives are mostly modeling what business is supposed to look like. Nevermind it achieves nothing.

When I go home to downtown Vancouver I’m startled at damn good-looking everyone is in their suits and pomade-hair, in great offices exuding power and dignity. But their GDP per capita is crap compared to us schlubs in Seattle.

They must have learned performative-salaryman from the British.

Those programmers just don't get that they are part of a managerial Broadway musical. They won't even talk, and if they do not talk, how can they siiing.

Chat gpt write me a musical about micro management in software in 3 acts.

I once had a manager consistently try to pressure me and a few other developers to work in a "war room" setting to complete a project that was slipping past the deadline. He wanted to be part of it too, despite being non-technical and consistently slowing us down with impossible prescriptive solutions. It took a non-trivial amount pushback from all of us that that was the least productive way to get the project completed. He was later laid off.

> Contemporary startup engineering culture is best described as frenetic.

Also, like... not really engineering per se

last time I worked in an open office I had big over the ear noise cancelling headphones on the entire time, it was fine

I felt both afraid and privileged when most of my day was waiting for the IDE or CI/CD to compile because it was quite idle

Yeah, this definitely gets at something. There's a sizable (or just noisy?) contingent of devs who prioritize activity above actual quality because quality is hard and not immediately measureable (supposedly). And it feels designed to be overtly anti-intellectual, as if the act of engineering is a mostly social act punctuated by the annoying demands made by the compiler, the runtime, and customers.

I suspect it's championed at some places because you're "leveling everyone up."

Follow the incentives.

Open plan offices took off in larger companies in the mid-2000s, and I think it's a classic example of a cargo cult.

Executive management looked at the handful of hugely successful startups who had open plan offices and thought, "It must be these open plan offices, that's their secret sauce! We just need to copy that and we'll be successful too!"

...ignoring survivor bias, because for every hugely successful startup who did open plan out of necessity, there was a big graveyard of startups who had the same practice and failed.

Is anyone trying to hire only introverted, spectrumy, possibly older developers for their startup? Seems like it could be a big competitive advantage if you have smart managers and don’t do foot-guns like open-plan and pairing.

I worked for a guy (who is actually a great guy) who, while excitedly showing me the floor plan for the proposed open plan for our team, exclaimed, "I want to create a vibrant, energetic atmosphere." and asked me what I thought.

All I could think was, "What you see as vibrant is really your employees shooting the shit and not getting any actual work done."

He went with the plan and I found myself staying until 7pm and 8pm most days because I got more work done in those 2-3 hours at the end of the day than I did the other eight because of all the interruptions.

> "What you see as vibrant is really your employees shooting the shit and not getting any actual work done."

That is better than getting work on the wrong thing done. People who sit in their office and never interact with others tend to work on projects the company thought was canceled months ago.

You are saying it's normal to use "water cooler" talk to find what you should be working on?

The sad thing is that probably for some organizations, that's the norm. Management is incapable of creating clear vision and clear communication channels, and you end up with a bunch of people gathering like a crowd in front of the town hall, trying to figure out what's going on. Hard pass on that!

The West is doomed.

If that happens, that’s rather the fault of the company and the managers of not communicating the current affairs clearly enough. You shouldn’t need to rely on informal channels to find out what the company considers canceled.

While you are not wrong, making those formal channels is expensive in itself. If the informal channels work they can be a lot cheaper. Well maybe, I don't think anyone has really studied this including all the subtle issues.

You have pretty noisy and messy environments where technically challenging programming and other taxing work happens successfully (e.g., some trading floor). How much do think the whole issue is self selection into preferred work environments?

There is a reason the stereotypical image of these guys is them chainsmoking, doing copious amount of drugs (to take the edge off), and throwing themselves out of high places.

Work happening "successfully" and people making money doesn't mean it's the most efficient or healthy way of working. I am happy to throw a % or two of productivity in the short term if my workers don't burn out in the long term.

Luckily, research clearly shows that the most successful work and the happiest employees happen in quiet places with deep focus.

That stereotypical image is wrong. Also, there is real complex stuff created there. Some people like such environments and wouldn't like sitting in quiet places - being where stuff happens has its benefits, too.

How is success defined in those studies? Honestly curious.

It is crazy that companies will pay someone $300k a year to sit in an open office and then wonder why the conference rooms are over booked all the time. And then they don’t understand why they don’t want to RTO.

If you can't give me my own office with a door, at minimum I want a cube with 6ft walls that have excellent noise dampening (I don't want to be able to clearly hear a normal conversation next door), a large enough work space such that I can stand up and walk over to my own whiteboard, a pair of ultra comfortable noise cancelling headphones, and being able to have some natural daylight coming into the space (but not necessarily direct line of sight to a window from my chair).

I'm fully aware that commercial real estate is expensive and that old office floorplans are not entirely conducive to offering everyone an office with a door. There are certainly compromises that need to be made when renovating the office to give people what they want without simply moving to a brand new building. While I'd prefer my own office, just having a noise-proof cube where I don't have to stare at everyone walking past would be a huge step up from the picnic table style desks where it feels like you're sitting at a library computer desk. There are plenty of ways to track productivity that don't involve a manager being able to stare at everyone working like a sweatshop foreman.

> There are plenty of ways to track productivity that don't involve a manager being able to stare at everyone working like a sweatshop foreman.

I have called those kind of managers "glorified taskmasters" in the past, but "sweatshop foreman" is a good enough phrase make me want to add it to my repertoire!

It's insulting to me to treat knowledge workers as cogs in a machine or workers in a factory. Humans are not made to be crammed with other humans in tiny, noisy and poorly ventilated and lit spaces with no natural light.

We are told to "suck it up" but we are not paid the bills when panic attacks, burnout and other health problems start showing up.

As a person who has fought management tooth and nail to give myself and my teams the ability to work remotely and a have a 4 day work week while paid the same as before, I can tell you, it's infinitely better to have time and space, and your productivity, creativity and communication doesn't suffer at all (we measured it, and many others have done as well).

It's all a question of whether your corporate overlords trust you enough.

The best we can get is horse blinders and noise cancelling headphones.

> if you're employing programmers and making them sit in an openplan office you're willingly and knowingly making their job significantly harder, and their day worse.

I think it’s more fair to say that they’re making some of their jobs significantly harder and improving the experience for others. Plenty of jobs aren’t interested in optimizing for anyone’s personal productivity and happiness — they’re optimizing for their business goals.

> There's a reason that many programmers prefer to work from home

I think there’s many reasons this seems to be true (I say seems because the ones who prefer it are very vocal about it and tend to (at best) shout down those who disagree) and maximizing productivity is probably one of those reasons that they’re willing to tell their employers.

I liken open offices to a situation where I'm balancing a pile of plates in both hands and hundreds of other people are in the kitchen and can trip me or shove me at will, causing a mental stack crash.

Open offices exist for the same reason WFH doesn't work, at least where it won't work.

I have worked in older organizations, and the culture there is that the most productive workers spend relatively more time on their work chairs. That is the only way managers have traditionally known to get work done from their teams.

An open office is a natural way to ensure everyone is working, at least in how those organizations measure productivity.

If these companies move to a closed office, they will have to change how they measure productivity, and their culture may not allow that.

The one time I had a heavy dev job (I mostly take sysadmin type roles) in an open floorplan, I ended up buying a motorcycle helmet with built in audio to isolate myself from distractions...it was mostly gregarious sporty (it was a sporting goods company), young people (I was the second oldest at the company at 32).

I was not well-liked at that job and was happy when they let me go.

I love that so many people answer this with "well, just get headphones" ... which just seems like an admission of a design mistake to me.

I think the real reason open floorplans are popular is money. It's MUCH cheaper to cram 20 people into 200 square feet than to let 3 people sit in offices (in the same square footage).

Now you know why 50% haven't returned to office spaces like corporate america (and specifically corporate real-estate owners) would have hoped.

I’ve tried working in the middle of nerf gun fights every afternoon for a year. Let’s just say I enjoy Home Office a lot.