Here's the simple algebra. Let's say (as the evidence seems to suggest) that if we interrupt a programmer, even for a minute, we're really blowing away 15 minutes of productivity. For this example, lets put two programmers, Jeff and Mutt, in open cubicles next to each other in a standard Dilbert veal-fattening farm. Mutt can't remember the name of the Unicode version of the strcpy function. He could look it up, which takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which takes 15 seconds. Since he's sitting right next to Jeff, he asks Jeff. Jeff gets distracted and loses 15 minutes of productivity (to save Mutt 15 seconds)."

(From http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000068.html)

And while yes, some discussions will still take place outside of the chat rooms, if this is your default way of working then there should be enough discussion of anything critical that everything makes it's way to chat eventually.

Once everyone's comfortable working this way you can encourage a lot more working from home (or working from wherever in the world you want to be, if your employees aren't all married with kids yet), etc. And that will save you even more on office space.

I thought the "light on two sides" was particularly clever.

One thing holding back enclosed offices in SF is the very high ceilings in many of the older buildings. would high walled cubes work?

> The monthly rent for our offices, when fully occupied, will run about $700 per employee.

That's $8,400 per year in Manhattan.

And these are shots from their new Denver office: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stackexchange/7776308984/in/set... http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/09/join-us-for-our-openin...

tl;dr there is at least some open-plan stuff. Which, really, just makes the most sense; a healthy mix of options is hard to argue with.

Further, the time when I did have my own office was when I got interrupted the most. My boss would come in all the time and talk to me about whatever, a lot of times not even work-related stuff. Now I work in a place where people will only ever try to interrupt you via Slack, and if you tell them you're busy they will go away. So I think there is a cultural aspect as well, if your company accepts people bothering you whenever, I don't honestly believe an office will put a stop to that.

All of the boosters I've run into have only known open offices. Having said that, I'm sure someone will chime in here who has experienced both and prefers open offices, but I have to believe such people are in the vast minority based on my completely anecdotal data

Having done both (as I'm old enough to have started working when open offices were pretty rare), it is kind of ridiculous how much less productive (and less happy) I am in an open office and how difficult it is to find a workplace that isn't open office these days.

Anecdotally, the managers always seem to manage to keep their private offices. Funny that...

1) 9 years

2) 1 year in shared office with only boss, 4 years in shared office with 4 other people, 4 years in a fully open office

3) In person I never interrupt others, but I will IM others about 3 times a day. As far as folks interrupting me, I spend 25% of my time managing folks, so I expect (and get) lots of interruptions, but people know to IM me first. Headphones help as a signaling mechanism for this, as well as blocking out noise.

I loved my office that was just me and my boss as it was quiet and also had a great view. I also love my current open office because it's a great space and facilitates easy conversation, plus my standing desk is next to a window. It's no honeymoon period, been a developer for 9 years and in the workforce for 15 years.

Also, I absolutely hated the shared office with 4 people. Just absolutely terrible to be in cubicles in a small space with none of the benefits of a private office or open office. And people constantly opening the door to go in and out until we finally everyone was just propping their doors open, so it was semi-open anyways.

Edit to note: I work for a great non-profit and it helps to be surrounded by people I love and who I know are working hard to make a positive change for the world. If I were working for a corporation I'm not sure if I would feel the same about an open office plan or not.

I really think this is a matter of personal taste to a large degree, but for my part I prefer the ability to ask questions readily and listen in on what my colleagues are working on. I think the point you're trying to make about an 'interruption deficit' is off the mark. Someone new to a team is going to ask many more questions than a veteran and it's certainly damaging to their ability to learn if asking questions is a chore or unwelcome socially. Email and messaging apps are alternatives of course, and are often the right choice when the question doesn't merit interruption. But sometimes a quick answer is needed to progress at all and being able to turn around and say something makes things faster.

In open office spaces people are still able to work from a laptop somewhere else, put on headphones, or work from home. And having your own office doesn't mean you aren't interrupted. People would tend to come by for long periods of time when I had an office, seemingly because they were starved of social interaction.

A caveat to all this is that for a brief period I was in an overly crowded open office arrangement and that was very much detrimental to my work.

1) mislead by the initial sense of acomplishment and better communication.

it is like working in a war room. you get tons of stuff done, but it is crazy, stressful and you have lots of people working on a little thing that demands attention. your return for all those people is actually less, but you need a war room in some situations.

open office work the same way. you get a initial difficult thing done. but at the usual high cost of having lots of people working on it and ignoring/half-assing others.

2) people like micro-management.

there is no denying. open office plans and war rooms are perfect for the micro manager boss.

Personally, I've seen it work well (where I'm at now), and I've seen it work badly (two jobs ago). I've also seen the same in separate offices. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I don't really find that age or experience tends to matter that much as to where it works or doesn't. It's more about the work you're doing, and the company you're doing it for.

Some dev projects - those heavy on the back end especially, or requiring lots of sheer coding manpower over critical thinking, I think they definitely don't gain anything from the open office. The same could be said as well for the truly complex coding work out there - which, honestly, is less and less a reality.

If you're wiring up pages that do some middle tier logic or dealing with heavily interactive sites, which I think is what many of us do day to day, rather than the super intense, super difficult coding work that we all wish we did, I think the collaborative benefits can outweigh the risk of interruption.

If you're actually doing that big brain work, or really working on something that needs complete concentration, then yes, being able to zone in on it interruption free is definitely a good thing.

Like every other process, or tool, it depends on the context and the problem you're solving. And like most problems, you need the right person to use that tool or process. So does it work for every scenario, and every person? No, definitely not. The same can be said for a closed office as well.

Bottom line - right people, right place, for the right task at hand.

I've worked as a developer for about 12+ years, then as a product/project manager for about 4 years. As a developer, I worked about half that time in soft-walled cubicles of various heights and another half in open office environments. I spent a year or so in a shared walled office. As a project guy, I spent about 3 years in an open office and 1 in a shared walled office (2people).

With my dev lead and project management hats on, open offices wins hands down. Whenever I want I can stand up and do a quick and dirty eyeball scan of the office and gauge who's deep in thought and shouldn't be disturbed, who maybe needs help with something, who's picking their nose on Facebook. Project goals, milestones, etc. can be on prominent display on the walls, so everyone can easily reference them--no more "oh, I didn't know we were releasing next Monday" excuses. Whiteboards all over the place so people can get up and do a quick informal collaboration, then visually reference it later from their desks. Everyone sees everyone all day, bringing an extra bit of team unity, nobody gets to hidey-hole in their office, pretending to not be part of a team. Daily stand-up meeting is quick to set up and painless, it takes a minute for everyone to just get up and walk over to the scrum corner, as opposed to having to lose 10 minutes every time waiting for everyone to decide to come out of their hiding holes. If I do have a quick question, I can tell if they're in the middle of something concentrating by just glancing over their way rather than having to knock on their office door (guaranteeing that I disturb them).

With my developer hat on, it's a bit of a toss up. I can appreciate the benefit of having a quiet, closed-in space to go deep on a problem. And open offices, while they can be quiet if you set basic etiquette rules, will never match the volume level in closed offices. But, in an open office, there's zero friction if someone needs to come chat about the code, collaborate, bounce ideas off me, and vice versa. I've never been offended when someone stopped by to discuss a problem they're having, or ask to review their approach or code. Sure, it gets you out of "the zone" a bit, but you just get back into it. The whole business about having to waste an hour to get back into the zone after an interruption is, frankly, total BS. One thing I'll say though, is the cubicles are the worst of both worlds: You have the noise level of an open office combined with the high-friction human interaction, collaboration that's limited to online tools, and hidey-hole mentality. I'd take either option over a cubicle any day.

I think my ideal office environment is open offices for everyone, but with small private workrooms here and there that people can reserve in 2hr blocks or so, where they can go away into if they really need that occasional alone time to get the job done.

I worked in an office like this onc- oh, no, what you're describing sounds more like 5th period English than an office. but seriously, it sounds like you're missing a lot of trust in the ability and autonomy of your reports. I feel bad for your reports, it sounds like you either need to let the axe swing and hire adults or learn to trust and delegate.

nobody gets to hidey-hole in their office, pretending to not be part of a team.

Seriously? That's what you think people are doing in their office: hiding from the team? I love being part of a good team. I love white-boarding broad design. I love sitting down and hammering out the nitty-gritty details. I even like pair programming and working one-on-one. But I am a classic introvert in that being around people is physically draining. I enjoy company and I'm good company, but it wears me out. Putting me in the same room with 5 other guys for 8 hours a day is a good way to get me burned out and exhausted with your project.

The whole business about having to waste an hour to get back into the zone after an interruption is, frankly, total BS.

This makes me seriously question the kind of work you've been doing. An hour may be on the long side, but there are lots of things I've worked on where an interruption will easily cost 15-30 minutes and have a much bigger impact on my willpower and focus. This is compounded by the fact that I'm mentally exhausted from constantly being in a room full of people.

Tracking a bug down through three layers of application, framework, and security code, for example. Writing that crypto implementation that has to be right the first time or customers get owned is another. Studying that new framework that you want the team to learn because it's the new shiny is another.

where they can go away into if they really need that occasional alone time

Look, I get that you're the boss and you get to tell me what to do. I want the team to succeed, so I'm not going to cause problems; I'll adapt to whatever you've decided we're going to do. But if you really want me at peak productivity you need to understand that alone time is my default mode, not something I need occasionally. I know I'm not the only one like this.

I'm curious if you've succeeded in finding an office environment that would let you work that way ?

Unless you're working from home most of the time, it seems like "the management" would generally not be too keen to this.

Looking back on my comment I was more harsh than I intended and a lot of that is because I am so frustrated with the current standard working environment. If I didn't have a family to take care of I would be extremely tempted to leave software as a profession entirely because of it.

When I was hired at my current job we had full-height cubes which are still not ideal, but workable. But now I've been shuffled into a new team working back in an open plan office. Many days after work I just want to go live in a cave and be left alone. It's not normal for me to be so socially drained and it's not a healthy dynamic for my family. I'm trying on the side to get my own company off the ground so that I can work the way I want to. We'll see.

I think one of the OPs points touches on this directly though. What is the ratio of questions asked to answers provided, or to put it another way, how many questions are you asking vs how many people come to you for help with their own question? I humbly submit that perhaps you are asking more questions than you are answering - and there's nothing wrong with that, but IMO it does explain a bit why we don't see eye to eye about this. Have you thought about asking one of your subordinates about their perspective on this?

With respect, I disagree about the cost of context switching being BS. I think it heavily depends on the complexity/sensitivity of the task being interrupted, but for any non-trivial task there is almost always a non-trivial cost as well.

> I've never been offended when someone stopped by to discuss a problem they're having...

I just wanted to clarify, I think it would be rather unreasonable to actually feel offended because someone asked your help or advice. I never feel offended in those situations. I do sometimes feel a bit frustrated or aggravated, but it's always about the fact that I was interrupted and never towards the colleague asking for help, and I take extra care to make sure that this frustration or aggravation never shines through to the person I'm helping because that would discourage them from asking for help and I would rather they asked for help than make an incorrect assumption (for example).

Their opinions matter too. Junior developers will probably suffer without easy access to those around them (yes, it's annoying for the senior devs, but that's part of the job). PM's, similarly, need to be effective; in a well-run company, they're there to help and if open-offices are important to that, well, there you go.

I'm a fan of slack etc, but I'm also an extravert. If I'm not talking to others as a part of my job, I'm going to be miserable and leave. I don't think I'm the only one.

It's important to point out though that if you make asking questions too easy for new employees, they can end up leaning on that as a crutch instead of developing the troubleshooting skills necessary to solve problems independently.

I've been on both sides of this fence. I've been that new colleague hunting for info that isn't clearly documented, and I've also been the senior colleague who was the go-to person whenever a problem came up that didn't have an immediately-clear answer. I was lucky in that shortly after I started my only senior resigned leaving me with nobody to ask, which forced me to get good at that kind of troubleshooting.

It makes me wonder if new colleagues should be given a time period for when they are allowed to ask any question no matter how stupid. After that time, they can of course still ask questions but it's expected that they try to find an answer before asking. Along the same lines of pair-programming for colleagues who have been here less than 1 year.

  After 22 years in software development, I have to say I am tired of all the new tools that supposedly solve all the world problems only to be abandoned in the next quarter.
  There is nothing wrong to talk to somebody when you want to tell them something. A lot of times it's more efficient then email, IMs or other more fancier tools.

For you maybe, for them no. That's not to say you should not talk to them, but your interruption of their workflow has a cost you may not perceive.

there's your opinion and then there's science which actually goes out and sees how the real world works (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interruption_science)

I was in a pretty big company with super huge open floors, but globally everyone was quite, you would easily prefer to IM a person 10m away than to try to talk directly. Projects would have group IM sessions and it was the polite way to ask or share information.

If some difficult point arises, there was a meeting space at 10 or 20 meters away, or there's the coffee corner otherwise.

When discussion that atmosphere with people working in other fields, retail for instance, they would find it unhuman and creepy, but I think it really strikes the right balance. I moved to another company more 'startup' like in the athmosphere, with people cracking jokes Here and there, and it's just pure hell from a work POV.

Or are younger people able to handle more distractions? I don't mean that in the sense of "those kids these days", but as a more general developmental thing.

In college I remember doing homework while watching TV with the sound off so I could listen to music and chat with friends on the computer. Over the last few years at work it seems much more difficult to refocus after distractions from coworkers or text messages from friends and family. Has anyone else noticed this? The reason I ask is it's difficult to tell if this is an aging brain issue, or a side-effect of the projects being so much bigger and more complex than anything in highschool, college, and even early-career.

But what I will say is that distraction is bad for everyone, and being objective about ones performance is very difficult. A lot of people claim to be good at multi-tasking because that is what a lot of work environments demand, and so people learn to cope, but on the other side of the coin, many of these supposed multi-taskers have never sat down and thought deeply with enough focus to really solve a difficult problem the right away.

Software development is one field where the rigor forces you to learn this or eventually be exposed as incompetent, but I believe it is useful in any professional work that involves solving problems. Great solutions do not come from raw intelligence, they come from intelligence applied over time. If you can't focus and construct a persistent mental model then you might have a 200 IQ but still not be able to design a good system.

  I work as a software engineer for the last 22 years. ~4 of them as engineer manager, the rest as an individual contributor. 
  I hate offices. I worked in Microsoft in an office and it was hell. I was alone. It was not a team. It was me. It was sometimes better to email somebody then walk around to talk to them.
  I love open office plans. Yes, it's disruptive. But if I want to tell somebody something, I lift my head and talk. Everybody can hear what is going on and they can tune in if they are interested. For people that have distraction problems, usually headphones work quite well.
  Of course, I assume that people talk quietly and not scream their head off.
  BTW, I am usually the one that give advice and information instead the other way around.

1.) I've been a developer (in some context, this also includes "startup founder", "tech lead", and about a year total of internships) for about 10.5 years.

2.) Private office for 1 year total (across 2 companies). Shared office for 1 year (2 companies). Worked from home for a total of 2.2 years (2 companies). Private cube for 1.25 years (3 companies). Shared cube for 1.5 years. Open-floorplan for 20 months (Google), and war-room (same team in a large, 5-10 person office) for 2.5 years.

3.) It's varied throughout my career. As a startup founder, I neither interrupt people nor get interrupted, since I'm working from home and am the only developer on the project. When I was a tech lead, I did literally nothing but get interrupted; incoming requests outnumbered outgoing by roughly 10:1. As an individual dev, typically I'd be interrupted about 2-3 times for every time I asked someone else a question (my preference is usually much more toward figuring out something for myself than asking questions...probably moreso than it should be).

I am mildly in favor of open-plan offices, and here's why: most of the interesting stuff is happening outside of your head. I'll grant that open-plan offices are a huge distraction, they pull you out of flow, and as a result, you will write a lot less code than you would in a private office. However, here's where I say something controversial: code is a liability, not an asset. The goal of a developer is to solve problems, and you will solve more problems if you know what the pressing problems are than if you just put your head down and code up what your boss tells you to. It really sucks to slave away at a masterpiece of technology for a year or two, and then find that nobody uses it because you weren't solving the right problem to begin with.

Here's another statistic: in those 10.5 years of experience, I've implemented 30 projects (as in, working code delivered to boss/cofounder/teammates/market). Of those, 10 were successes, where I define "success" as either "used by > 1 million people", "at least 6 internal teams use it", or "made money for employer". The successes included 2 shared offices, 3 warrooms, 2 shared cubes, 2 open floorplans, and 1 private cube. The failures included 5 private cubes, 2 private office, 2 shared office, 7 open floorplans, and 4 works from home. (Interestingly, this seems to reproduce what I've heard in the literature of "same team in an office" > "private office" > "unrelated teams in an open floorplan".)

I'm curious, do folks in favor of private offices consider a project to be successful when it is delivered according to spec to your boss? Or is it successful when it makes it to market and makes a profit for the company? If it's the former, that would explain the differing views right there: it's quite possible for private offices to help you efficiently produce the wrong product.

Personally I think you need to interrupt coding frequently, for health and for cognitive freshness. When I've been tech lead, often the most heads-down devs produced the most problematic code if you didn't check in on them. My belief was along the lines of "if you don't throw away everything and start over at least once you're doing it wrong," with the idea being that coding too fast results in complex, un-elegant solutions. Finally, in a fast-paced environment, you simply have to check in with each other, and having to schedule meetings or calls just sucks. The team I'm in right now is not co-located and we're losing tons of productivity.

And yet. When I work at a remote location (not home but near-home, not at the main site), I get TONS more coding, research, writing, and shit work done. No comparison. The work I'm doing now is perhaps more amenable to sole-contributor stuff, but I recall in the faster-paced jobs this was also true.

It seems like flexibility is needed. Open-plan is great, but maybe rotating offices would be good, where people can spend a day in them cranking some stuff out, and then come up for air for the rest of the week.

Commercial real estate is about $3/SF (per month) in San Francisco (Class A) and $4/SF in Manhattan. Open plan offices save about 75-100 SF per employee (more, if you're looking to be sadistic and impractical, but at this point, the productivity loss is obvious.) So the employer is saving, at absolute most, $5000 per employee per year. It's not worth it.

I bring this up because I just really truly don't get the occasional open office boosterism here. My current theory is that most of it comes from people who are still in the honeymoon phase of their career (like, the first few years after college when everything about the workplace still has some novelty to it).

That's basically what it is. The open-plan layout is reminiscent of college and the all-nighters in the computer lab. But work is not college. A bad grade on an assignment is much more fixable than getting fired. The stakes are higher, and that's why a certain brand of professionalism (or, more bluntly, divorcing oneself from behaviors that are acceptable for 18- to 21-year-olds) is necessary.

I say this because it seems like many/most of the people I talk to in person who like the open office idea have either literally never had a private office, or are relatively fresh out of college and get a job at Google (or a startup, or wherever), and they're still so excited about everything that even the things that are hassles (like open office plans?) seem like they're brimming with novelty.

Well, private offices make nerf-gun battles harder. And you hear less juicy gossip. And you don't have an audience for self-important rants about Lena Dunham. It might get so "boring" (in the sense of a lack of distractions) that you might be tempted to actually work to pass the time.

Actually building these things is non trivial. It's not just walls, it's air con vents, electrics, etc. I also think you may be underestimating the extra space required to make an office not feel like a closet.

Then there is natural light. In a big open plan space light travels to the entire space. With offices you either need to build on the edge of the building and have a window, or make at least one wall out of glass (expensive). Even doing that you still can't just take a big room and turn it into partitioned offices.

The capital outlay for a company to fit out a space with individual offices is actually really high and it all comes in one big hit. I'm sure if it was a matter of just paying 5k per employee extra per year the story would be different, but that isn't really a reality.

Amazingly this is also an argument from working from home. I've been at two companies during a WFH transition and they act surprised at the increase in productivity. Often times it's this very reason, less babbling and nerf-gun fights and more actual work.

Of course this doesn't cover those who "work from home" by watching Netflix and jiggling the mouse on their laptop every ten minutes or so. I'm talking about the more responsible people.

It's probably still more productive because now they are not distracting anyone.

And yet not only are employers embracing it but extending the model with hoteling and virtual desktops. A good friend of mine at Shell checks into his locker every morning and then goes and finds a random desk to work from for the day. I'll give you 10:1 the guy whose idea that was isn't sitting at a cube.

You also run into tax and other accounting issues by making permanent improvements to the office vs. buying modular cubes and such. Portable equipment gets deducted over a few years... permanent improvements get depreciated over long periods of time (30+ years!)... So you get to pay taxes on profits that you didn't make.

Most companies don't have the cash flow to pay a 30% premium in a high tax state on expensive construction, so cubes are a no brainer.

I work from home 75% now. When I'm in the office, I get next to nothing done.

I still don't think that sort of generalization is fair, though. I think a normal, sane office could be open, but without the ongoings that seem to be present in the environments you and the parent witnessed. Well, I can definitely vouch for that being the case in the office I work in.

They said they had trouble finding senior people. If I had been more aggressive I would have told them "have you considered having an adults table?"

At one SF shared workspace area, this guy always brought his dog in. Damn thing would go sniffing around and most people thought it was cute. I found it very annoying, especially when I had food. While I could tell him to piss off and keep his dog away, then I'd come off as the dick.

[1] http://www.mnn.com/family/pets/photos/10-companies-that-let-... [2] http://www.quora.com/What-San-Francisco-startups-allow-emplo...

Of course it doesn't. Most of them have no choice.

I think you're off by quite a bit with your price-per-square-foot estimates: http://therealdeal.com/blog/2013/10/01/manhattan-leasing-str...

That is from last year and the average price in Manhattan was about $60/sf.

$60/sf/yr works out to $5/sf/month, not far from your parent poster's assertion.

But opinions aside if we look at actual studies (at least among the research I've seen, some of which is referenced in this article) far more often than not they point to open offices being an overall negative for knowledge workers.

For me the two are very similar. I work in an open plan office and enjoy being able to talk to my co-workers - often someone will pull their chair up to someone else's to pair program for a while, or just discuss the issue they're having.

If you don't want interruptions, you put headphones on. It works well.

It works well for some people. While you may be able to code perfectly well with music blasting in your ears (loud enough to drown out nearby conversations) that is not the case for everyone.

I wear headphones at work but the volume (at which I can actually concentrate on my work) is only sufficient to drown out/filter random background noises (typing/mouse-clicks, HVAC, people walking by, etc) - if there are people having a conversation a few feet away my productivity plummets.

Headphones may be at best a distraction mitigation, but what they really are is evidence that your environment is crap.