Productivity is going to plunge no matter what, with the possible exception of singles who don’t have roommates. There is no way that during an ad hoc and unorganized push to work remote (though necessary in this circumstance) can result in good productivity, monitoring or not. Under the best of circumstances it would take months for a mass of people to adjust and be productive.
The apex for open office design was reached and we’ll go back to something more normal. It’s funny people derided “cubicle farms” but we’re more or less okay being in a “bullpen” like setting cuz it was sold as being counter cultural and cool.
I'm surprised cubicles get so much hate. I loved mine at my first job. Oodles of desk space. Locking drawers and cabinets. There was a chair in the corner so a guest could sit. Made it easy to have 2 meetings without disturbing people.
less aesthetically pleasing in office photographs, but overall a much better work environment than any open plan I've experienced.
Cubicles got so much hate because they were worse than private offices that came before them. Now open floor plans are getting hate because they’re worse than cubicles so rose-colored glasses makes cubicles the nostalgic dream.
I don't think there was ever a time where every office worker had their own office. Only the big boss got their own office and everyone else had desks in a large room. The open floor plan we have now is pretty typical of what they used to look like.
There are plenty of places where offices were the norm some years ago. When I worked in Germany the standard was either single Offices or team offices With max 5 people. In the US IBM also had offices when I contracted there. Microsoft always talked about their offices as important. Developers sitting elbow to elbow in a room with dozens of people is a fairly recent development from what I have seen. The need for headsets to get some quiet also seems fairly new.
That's interesting, but I'm unsure how much we can generalize from some photos. For example, I wonder how much "photogenic bias" [0] and survivorship bias exist in such photographic evidence. How many photographers of the time would take a picture of a hallway of private offices? And what editor would keep such photographs for posterity?
I use to hate cubicles, but that was until I discovered open workspaces. For the past ten years, I've been in open workspace hell at 5 different jobs/contracts. I fucking miss the cubicle!
I've been living in cities and I think that is a big factor. Real estate is expensive. But make no mistake, open workspaces are miserable places. Cubicles still suck, but they're a massive step up from open floor plans.
I think it depends on the nature of your job. If you regularly need to interact verbally with colleagues, cubes are kind of a pain.
I forget where I saw this but there was a company that had set up what were basically "team offices" so teams that worked closely together each had their own closed room where they worked, so they could collaborate in their own manner.
Quiet when they needed it, loud when they needed it, and on their own schedule.
Having worked in one of these, we found those sorts of "team offices" hurt collaboration and innovation even more than open floor plans. Unless the company is pretty small, the random conversations between people from different teams is often the key to innovation and getting problems solved early. A team room means that to ask a co-worker on another team a simple question or to just see what they are working on becomes a big deal because you are now entering that other team's space and interrupting a dozen people. Unless you really know the other person well, we found people just are hesitant to do it.
In big companies, there usually isn't a problem with communicating within a team - the problems occur when teams aren't communicating with people in other teams. These team rooms ruin any informal inter-team collaboration and communication.
My past office was just like that. 10-20 people per room, but usually less than that because people worked from home. Sometimes more than one team per room, because there where smaller teams. My room had 3 teams but we worked in a similar area, so we could bounce ideas with other team members.
It's not a good middle, it's the best possible way to work.
I had something vaguely similar at an internship. Each team was in a separate room for security reasons (aerospace firm), so the co. was all groups of 6-10 people in little open-plan offices. I thought that was nice and quiet.
In the small sample size of my jobs, cubicles are getting much shorter.
In my pre 2010 job, the walls of the cube I had were quite tall and gave reasonable privacy. In my 2016 job, they were quite short for "enhanced collaboration". I didn't really feel "safe" in my short cube, for lack of a better word.
The cubes we had at Intel were fantastic - they were super tall.
The cubes we had at Lockheed were great because they were super big.
I've hated every "open office" layout I have ever had.
I especially liked having a shared office though, sitting back-to-back in a single office, with a door - What I liked about it was that my office mate and I both liked to work with the light off, and just let the natural light from the window through (floor to ceiling window)
When you have some sense of self-privacy, and ability to block people out, your productivity is higher.
The reason why the "open office" concept was pushed, is all about cost.
Its cheaper to give people a slot at the trough, as opposed to building them an office or cube.
(Source: Former Designer and implementation builder at some of the largest open-office-concept companies you have all heard of)
cubicles were a step down from individual offices, and was the manifestation of commoditization of the software engineering. The transition from cubicles to open offices was the part of that process going even further. Basically blue collar workers of 196x on a large factory floor.
One would think that we've reached the peak of bad offices ... Well, i think some form of vertically stacked option is coming in the mid-term. In the short-term i think the next thing is the "cloud" style approach where no office desk is assigned permanently and coming into office you'd have to [find and]schedule a desk for yourself. That would allow to cut office space even more.
Some companies are already doing the 'hot desking' thing.
In ~2017 I did a contract with Ericsson, in their offices they had no assigned desks. Some days you'd show up in the morning and find another team had moved into your space, claiming that some other team had taken theirs. In those days we became desk refugees, wandering halls to find/take a space large enough for the team.
Mine has been hot-desking since we moved offices in 2013. There's general areas each department is supposed to stick to, but no enforcement - the groups are constantly encroaching on and intermingling with the neighboring ones.
The next stage, that we reached around 2016/2017, is "we're running out of seats; everyone should work from home one day a week to alleviate the problem". Good when you're at home, but the rest of the week becomes even more chaotic because you can't predict what the available seats will be like day-to-day.
> Well, i think some form of vertically stacked option is coming in the mid-term.
I'm fine with this. I'm surprised that airline seat manufacturers don't make versions for office use -- business class seats are much nicer than any open plan desk I've ever sat at. You are fully surrounded on all sides, your chair can turn into a bed, and inside an office you can probably stack them. Getting a couple of 30" monitors in there that are infinitely adjustable would be a challenge, and cleaning it sounds like a pain in the ass... but I'm sure these issues could be resolved if there is money in doing it.
I think people like open-plan offices because they're easy. You move into the space, have IKEA deliver a bunch of tables, and you're set up. It's cheap and it's easy.
I got to witness it first hand in a fairly large financial organization. It is first come, first served - i.e. early birds get nicer window seats and if you come late there is a chance you actually won't have a desk. If someone was eating at their desk yesterday you may get grimy, smelly keyboard and spots on the screen from them showing something on the monitor with dirty hands.
After a while you get to know that this spot - letter "E" and "Backspace" doesn't work, that spot - mouse right click doesn't work, third spot - second monitor flashes every 10min...
And then there is this constant "I don't belong here" feeling. Sure it is more "efficient" from the space and hardware utilization perspective. For call centers - I don't mind the setup, but good luck to you if you are planning to build software in such environment.
The alternative isn’t open plan but an office with window and daylight. Cubicles are a little better than open plan but in the end they are still crap.
Just the movement of people in my peripheral vision alone is distracting. Then there is the chatter and constant interruptions (which I welcome in a friendly way but deep down under I don't want to be interrupted).
Cubicles with a door would be great. The ceiling can be open and have sun light coming in. Maybe the walls should be white and there should be a lamp of my own (for notes).
Disagree. There are far more reasons for people to not be productive in the office than at home. Making excuses to get coffee, the need to go out for lunch, the drive-bys and time lost walking to/from meetings, moving up and down floors... if the main motivator in your work is the fact that people can swing by and look over your shoulder, then yeah, you're better in an office.
At home I wake up and log on at 8am. In the office, my 1.5 hour commute puts me in the office at 10am on a decent day. Because I have a kid and a pregnant wife, I cut out of the office around 4 every day because that's the only reasonable way I can get home and eat dinner with my family before my kid goes to bed... but when I'm WFH, I'm often staying online past 5 and sometimes 6. To me, the difference is literally more time spent working and more time spent seeing my child vs. spending 3-4 hours commuting daily and going day-long stretches without my one year old seeing me with her own two eyes.
Working from home, I can stay productive during meetings without bothering anyone -- I can mute myself, if it's one of those meetings, and keep working.
I think anyone who fails to be as productive, or more productive, from home is someone that doesn't like their job very much. I'm lucky that I enjoy the product I work on, and I enjoy dressing comfortably and eating lunch with my wife, and drinking my own coffee, and instantly joining/disconnecting from meetings, and physically distancing myself from "drive-bys" that my production is up.
I think you are greatly ignoring employees with children. It is hard for a 4 year old to understand that when mom & dad are home that it is not a work day. They just want to spend time with mom & dad. In addition, the only thing they know of computers is playing games, so it is hard to see mom & dad on a computer doing "work".
Think of the most annoying co-worker you've dealt with constantly coming up to you and asking the least relevant question you could imagine. Multiply that by infinity and you might get close to having small kids at home.
Can this be dealt with, of course. But it takes time to get your kids to adjust to this. If you're kids are not used to you working from home, you can't just expect them to be okay with it.
We have a small house, which is fine because I work at the office, they're out at school, it's big enough for the times we need to be there ... oh wait.
Our upstairs is big enough for the beds, and a narrow space around each. Downstairs has no dividing walls/doors.
Now work expect equal output from me and I'm working in the kitchen with a just a gap between me and the room a toddler and 2 other children are occupying.
Perhaps if they weren't my kids, particularly my brain interrupts every time the toddler speaks, because that's how we're wired for young voices.
Now add in that the kids are used to running around screaming, literally screaming, to burn off energy .. it's not going well.
Meanwhile the bosses in their massive home offices, think everything is perfect and don't see why we shouldn't be _more_ productive than normal.
I'm waiting for when we go back wondering how their argument for why we're not allowed to home-work is going to go ...
The best and most effective way I've found to do this is to have a door that you can lock and a partner who can reassure the kids that dad/mom still cares but is just busy when the door is locked.
Of course, people who were not already setup for working remotely may not have a door they can lock and partner who can reassure.
Sure, now what about when both parents are attempting to work from home. It takes a lot more effort to coordinate when both parents need to be on a conference call to attempt to wrangle the kids away/keep quiet enough for the other to make that call.
Kids have routines, and having work-from-home parents can become part of that routine. It's not a light switch though, so training has to be given time to take hold. Probably about the time the seclusion orders are lifted if not longer.
When both parents work, it’s going to take a toll on productivity. One of the other or both parents will have to deal with all kinds of issues with small children up to maybe tweens. But even then unless they had home office setups there will be competition for space and resources —kids could be hogging the b/w and if you throttle it, whoever gets throttled is going to be unhappy with their telework or distance learning.
The parent comment could have phrased it better, but still made a good point. The grandparent comment dismissed any tricky situation with children, blaming lack of motivation to the person rather than the situation, so I think the sentiment of the parent still stands.
The grandparent is happy working from home with their 1-year old. However, they don't consider that other people's situation might be very different. For example, the 4 year old can actively try to find you.
Plus not all house layouts are the same. I've got a secluded space on a higher floor, however there are no doors and the floors/walls are paper thin, so I still hear everything that happens in the house unless I permanently use noise-cancelling headphones+music (which doesn't work that well for me).
Bullpen type offices get close to universal criticism. The only time I really see them praised is when people have variety to move to private offices when they want, to work off site, etc. When you only occasionally have to endure that environment and your productivity then isn't critical, it can be novel.
When it's a forced situation it's not something people love.
Random anecdote: I was involved with an office move once where we (a relatively small org) were choosing how to layout the new office. One individual was a fervent advocate that we needed a hip, cool open office for all that wonderful synergy, etc. So in the new space we made a hip, open space, and then classic cubicles, and everyone put in private requests where they wanted to be.
100% of the people chose cubicles. The person I mentioned chose probably the farthest away, most private cubicle.
It's not a particularly unique situation, but it's just another example that people are often full of shit. When we're imposing on other people some ideas can sound better, especially if they're trendy.
As to productivity, the majority of jobs are bullshit jobs. Reddit, HN, Slashdot in the old days have their heyday during the "work" day in the respective zones. If people achieved 5% productivity they would be more productive than they normally are in many cases.
> I think less than 5% of comments on open-office design, that I have ever seen, were positive.
It's basically taboo to say anything positive about open office spaces online. There are many, many legitimately terrible open office workspaces in the world. Suggesting that open offices aren't always bad feels like an attack on those who are miserable in their open office. So it's safer to just never bring it up.
In the real world, a lot of people do enjoy open office style environments. They're probably the same people who went to their University's library to study in college or joined a study group so they could sit with others who were working on the same topic. Many (not all, obvious) college students choose these open, social study environments organically during college. It's reasonable to expect that they'd carry their preferences into the working world.
I have a theory that the more someone prefers isolation and being alone, the more likely they are to participate in internet comment sections and online forums. As a result, the deeper you go into internet comment sections, the more unanimously people rail against open office floor plans.
In a perfect world, we'd have a mix of companies offering both working styles and people could choose their preferred style up front. Anecdotally, I worked for a company that advertised private offices as a perk, but nearly zero of our candidates seemed to care. People tend to choose whichever company pays the best, regardless of the working conditions. I can understand why companies choose to save money on open office floorplans.
University libraries are silent. Focus is the first-class activity; groups that want to work together must book a conference room or go to a dedicated collaboration floor. You might go with your friends for company, but you’re only going to speak on e.g. trips down from the workspace to the attached coffee shop.
A “library rules” open office would be just fine. That’s not what happens, though. The point of an open office is that everyone is talking all the time. If you don’t want to hear every conversation everyone in your company is having, it’s your own responsibility to jam those signals, or leave.
Ha. University library silence seems to be in serious decline these days. Not long ago I was in one I'd describe as a cocktail party atmosphere. My theory is that universities have become more desperate to ply their students with various perks and services, they're more reluctant to crack the whip on anything that smacks of discipline.
It was the other students who would take your head off, at my school anyway. Given that there were abundant collaboration-allowed spaces, talking on a quiet floor was seen as horribly rude.
This is not universally true. I've done a lot of working in university libraries recently, and many of them have switched to allowing collaboration in the main spaces.
> A “library rules” open office would be just fine.
This still wouldn't work for me personally. I listen to music pretty much all the time while working, and get really sick of wearing headphones all the time. The only option is a private office. (I've gotten this by becoming a remote worker.)
Well that’s horrifying. I quite liked mine. Although only one two floors were officially collaboration, there was an informal agreement that higher floors were more strictly silent. And then there were single desks scattered throughout the stacks. You had a lot of control over the noise level based on where you choose to sit. Never needed headphones there.
This is accurate. My university has silent floors, "quiet floors" (rarely enforced), and a few well used open collaboration areas with movable furniture.
This comment is spot on. The few times I brought up open offices (which I don't like) with my coworkers, most of them favored them. They liked being able to easily have a brief chat with someone, and generally having a more social feel to the office. They worried that in an environment with private offices, it would be harder to interrupt someone with a question, and that collaboration would suffer as a result. I feel like I almost never read this perspective on Hacker News, but it's very common in the real world.
I actually enjoy open office plans despite not liking group work/study.
I prefer being alone. I don't really see people other than my wife outside of work. Work is my only chance to socialize, which makes an open office plan ideal for me. It's very easy to start conversations with the people near me and have them turn into fun group discussions.
Once you give up on the idea of having long unbroken periods of productivity, the open office plan can be a lot of fun.
I like the idea of a non-judgmental, studious open space like libraries. The idea that no one cares what I work on makes it easy to take a couple quick breaks throughout the day, and those breaks help maintain focus during the other periods. I dislike the idea that someone can "catch" me on HN in an open office.
I like working on stuff at tech meetups. I always bring my laptop, mostly because the speakers can be boring and being in a room like that helps me focus on personal projects. I use to go to writing meetups too.
That being said, I absolutely hate open layouts. I would much rather prefer a cubical.
I'm not sure if this generalization would hold out if you surveyed people, but it might. I'd be curious.
I LOVE open offices. If you need something, you can ask. If you want to pair program with someone, they can just turn around or scoot over. You can tell if the person you need to get help from is busy without leaving your chair. Hell, even the distractions are nice. I've never felt closer to coworkers than when I've worked in an open office. I like the occasional nerf dart whizzing past my head. Work is 8 hours of your day, it should be enjoyed.
I've had my own office and it was miserable. It was lonely and I felt like I never got to know my coworkers. If I needed face to face time with someone I'd have to physically walk down the hall and hope they were in their office. It also put a larger barrier to asking for help, which slows things down.
I'm well aware that not everyone is like me and some people don't like open offices. That's fine, but it doesn't mean that open offices are inherently bad.
I don't hate open offices exactly, as long as management agrees that I'm going to be 25% less productive that way. It's kind of working on a VT-100 instead of a 28" monitor. Unfortunately, in my experience, that's a condition that's lost on most managers.
Sadly I feel this is very true. IT was the last refuge of the introverts and social awkwards/outcasts. Now that the extroverts have taken over and tend to be the ones making the rules, IT is becoming more and more unbearable. Couldn't just let us have this one thing?
As a former pm I can't think of a single colleague who loved open plan. We at best tolerated but I think every one of us would have been a happy recipient of an office!
Open offices are great if you don't optimize for people per square meter. I did my onboarding in Boston. The company just moved to this office so there was a ton of space. Teams were far apart so it wasn't noisy. And this open space just felt great. I never worked in an open office so I was sold
A year later when I visited there were twice as many people. It was still okay to work there but noisier.
The last time when I visited was really bad. Desks everywhere, people 1 meter apart. I couldn't really work there in a productive way.
We should start to build offices for "free range" engineers.
I think it is people who control purse strings. One big problem is that majority of today's management is indulged in a bad faith argument of collaboration and innovation as benefit of open office. Management can own up and say its gonna save them money and it will continue with open office policy.
At that point employees may not like it but it would make clear that they need to put money where their mouth is and demand a separate cube etc at work as part of job offer. Not getting it would be like so many other compromises that we make in life and has to be endured.
When I worked at reddit, we all sat in a single conference room in the corner of the Wired office. There were five of us doing engineering. A huge whiteboard on one wall (with a couch underneath for naps), windows on two walls, and the fourth wall was the door.
It was great. We all had headphones so we could work when we want. When some people needed to collaborate on the whiteboard, we just got up and did it. Usually everyone else ended up joining in, unless they were already deep in their work and didn't notice.
It was the perfect balance of collaboration and privacy.
But it probably worked so well because "the boss" was more like a peer, so you didn't feel watched. He was working on code right beside you.
And when we played games, it was great because you screen cheat off of Steve and he couldn't tell. ;)
That wasn't really an open office. The usual open office is one open space for 50+ and sometimes hundreds of people. It's an awful place to work. There is usually a lot of distracting noise.
What you described is something like I worked in. We had separate rooms for most teams(15 people or less). You could collaborate with fellow team members, which usually relevant for the whole team, but wasn't distracted by other teams. As you said it's the perfect balance of collaboration and privacy.
I said something about how bad open offices are recently IRL to my girlfriend and was a little surprised when she said she likes them, given how hated they are on HN. But I think the key factor is that her work typically involves coordinating and collaborating with a bunch of different people throughout the day, pretty much the opposite of what I do as a remote software dev.
I think that open offices are bad for most of the jobs people on HN have, but are probably fine for certain others.
I’m single with no roommates and my productivity is wayy down due to the mental stresses of both the times we’re in and the huge drop of social fulfillment (used to play hockey 5x a week, other group things 2x, and individual friend hangouts too) - zoom chats just aren’t the same.
I also very much need that “work” space to switch my brain into focus mode. My place has never been setup for work-focus as I work at a place that encourages not taking your work home with you - though I am thankful that now we are fully enabled to WFH rather than lose that paycheck.
Single person with no roommates, I can confirm that my mental health is slipping and it's really hard to maintain a positive attitude at work. Productivity will slip and employers just need to adjust their expectations.
I think mental health and productivity is slipping for everyone for reasons unrelated to remote work as well. Namely there is a global pandemic, a good chunk of the economy is shut down, and the flaw of "many out of work and many working overtime" has been exacerbated. Not to mention the denial of many closed non-essential outlets.
I'll counter this with my enjoying the extra 90 minutes a day from no commute and how much healthier I'm eating by not going out to restaurants all the time. WFH means I can get up at noon and go stretch or workout and I have time to cook a real breakfast or lunch.
Stress levels are lower, my back feels better, and my home workouts are going great!
I'm married with two children and I can assure you that not only has my mental state slipped because of the stresses of home life, but I also lost an enormous amount of social activity that I intentionally maintained in order to keep my brain and health at optimal levels.
Not trying to one-up you here as having a family brings different forms of stress I can't speak to, but it's really hard to go for a week without interacting with another human being. Social connection is core to who we are as humans; cutting that off is like removing a limb.
It's interesting, family meets a distinct need. I've started working with technical peers and it's wonderful to be with others who can stretch your understanding, even just know what you're on about if you talk technically.
Entirely different to the mentoring, caring, parenting, intimate interactions with kids (and my wife).
I'm living with my partner. We both work remote. Not sure about her, because her job (teaching) is not super-well suited for remote work, but my productivity remains about as high as before. Granted, I tended to be remote 1 day / week even before All This. I would also guess that if I didn't have my partner sharing the flat with me, my mental health & therefore productivity would be lower.
(As for monitoring, yeah, stuff like that mentioned in the article would never fly here in Finland. We have very strict privacy laws, and the employer cannot do whatever they please.)
Productivity is going to plunge no matter what, with the possible exception of singles who don’t have roommates. There is no way that during an ad hoc and unorganized push to work remote (though necessary in this circumstance) can result in good productivity, monitoring or not. Under the best of circumstances it would take months for a mass of people to adjust and be productive.
The apex for open office design was reached and we’ll go back to something more normal. It’s funny people derided “cubicle farms” but we’re more or less okay being in a “bullpen” like setting cuz it was sold as being counter cultural and cool.