The Open-Office Trap

Re:The Open-Office Trap by vacri on Wednesday December 03, 2014 @05:26PM (#8696736)

The regular classroom, not the 'open classroom', is the analogue of the open office - a group of people with a common task, unseparated by walls. A private tutor would be the educational equivalent of a private office.

Additionally, 'open-office' to me means OpenOffice, and while I can accept that it doesn't to everyone, be consistent. It's one of the rules of good journalism. The hyphen in the heading is not used in the article. Likewise, we have 'nineteen-fifties' versus '1997'. The ironic bit about spelling out 'nineteen-fifties' in a non-conventional, inconsistent manner... is the phrase in the article immediately following it... </oldmanrant>

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Re:The Open-Office Trap by VLM on Wednesday December 03, 2014 @05:41PM (#8696820)

With all due respect, the open office educational analogy is the cafeteria study hall, with everyone walking around and gossiping and goofing off and basically getting nothing productive done other than putting on a show.

If the open office full of distractions is the ideal working environment, then when I get an emergency call from work, I assume I'll fix the emergency faster if I take my laptop to the neighborhood daycare center and sit down right in the highest chaos room. Oddly enough at home when no pretensions are necessary because there is nobody to show off to, people who have to actual work, pick a nice quiet closed door "office".

A lot of open office love comes from utterly incompetent management and its very politically incorrect to discuss this other than semi-anonymous forums like this. "I have no idea how to manage these people or how to convince them to do what I want, but at least I can see them all squashed together like sardines". If your standard of performance is low enough, mere visibility is at least better than nothing.

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Re:The Open-Office Trap by modoc on Wednesday December 03, 2014 @05:48PM (#8696854)

Your open office experiences and mine are massively different. I guess that's why two reasonable people can have different opinions on the subject.

I would go nuts if people were gossiping and being as chaotic as a daycare... Luckily I've never run into that. Actually the worst gossip-y company I ever worked at was a closed office/tall cubicle company.

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Re:The Open-Office Trap by watwut on Wednesday December 03, 2014 @05:59PM (#8696916)

When it comes to studying, most people I know seek a calm place without interruptions where you can concentrate on reading or solving hard exercise. Like your own room or a library. Office is equivalent of that.

Open office is equivalent of trying to study in a busy corridor where groups of people chat, come and go and every 15 minutes someone stops by to tell you hello.

Now, five or other small team in one room is a great thing. Kind of the best solution I would say. You can discuss when you need and it can be calm most of the time. However, open office is usually six such teams together overhearing each other while having next to zero chance to actually concentrate on anything.

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