It seems every tech company has fallen for the open floor plan. I'd love to find a company that respects the desk as a workspace that facilitates concentration and deep-thought. It seems the answer to this problem has become headphones.<p>How is this acceptable?
I work for Viasat; all of our new-build offices in the past few years have been designed around what we call the neighborhood concept. A neighborhood is a set of individual offices (maybe 60sqft-ish?) with three solid walls, and one glass/wood wall with a sliding door. All the offices open into a central room that can be outfitted in a bunch of different ways. There are neighborhoods of different sizes, and basically, each team gets a neighborhood to themselves. The whole concept was developed through a series of experiments that took several years.<p>Some teams make use of the space better than others, of course, but for my group it's been a <i>huge</i> boon to our collaborative culture. The offices are well-insulated, so you don't need headphones to achieve quiet, but if you want to, you can leave your door open and hear what your teammates are discussing at any time.<p>Over time we're upgrading our older facilities to the same model, but in general there are few open-plan offices or cube farms in the company, and I highly doubt we're going to build more. Many years ago, our founders made it a company priority to give folks a door they can close, to get away from "it all" and focus.
Funny behaviors from an open office plan I experienced:<p>- tribes claiming spaces: there was a couch area where a natural affinity group formed based on common personality types typical of urban/suburban tribal divide. developed an in-group/out-group mentality. a counter group formed in a lunch area.<p>- posturing: top tech individual contributor used main boardroom for "really important video conference meetings," and it became his de facto office unless you had it booked.<p>- tragedy of the commons: with no private space other than common spaces, meeting rooms were booked up with standing meetings so that it became impossible to get one when you needed it.<p>- Callout/performative drama: challenging people would use the availability of earshot to try to draw others into their conflicts. Callout culture, where instead of addressing issues, people would call out others to demand explanations in front of teams, managers, or in main slack channels.<p>- lack of personal boundaries: technical managers with low charisma routinely embarrassed in open meetings where everyone felt they could table complaints and make others accountable in front of a group, further wrecking morale as result of perceived weak leadership.<p>Interior design wouldn't solve all these problems, but the aesthetic of a kindergarten or hipster daycare certainly exacerbated them. I may long form this post into something, as the anti-patterns in that org were an effect of its culture, which was expressed by aesthetics rooted in beliefs that would have benefited from more insight.
I get I'm part of the privileged few, but: I've been working for a small software company for almost 11 years, and EVERYONE at my company is remote. We don't lease any real estate anywhere, unless a mailbox and a colo rack count.<p>It's AWESOME, but there are caveats. The biggest one is that we can't really hire newbies; everyone we've brought in has to be mid-career at a minimum because the absence of the "water cooler effect" makes it harder to ramp up quickly. Folks with some experience handle this better.<p>The other drawback is mostly theoretical: I'm really not sure I could go back to working in an office. I control the music, the temp, the food, the coffee, when I take a break, whether or not I take a midday snooze, and my cats are everpresent. I mean, an office sounds like a dystopian hellscape by comparison.
If avoiding open-plan is a priority, I recommend you focus on negotiating for a remote work arrangement, rather than excluding good companies. My last two long-term engagements have been at Fortune 100 companies and I've worked remotely for both.<p>In the first case, I was the only remote employee in my business unit. I was hired because I had a high level of competency with a technology they were investing heavily in. When I first interviewed, they told me that the were only considering on-site, and that my rate was too high. So, they first hired an on-site employee at a lower rate, but he failed to deliver a working installation and the project got perilously behind schedule. When I re-approached them about two months later they were no longer hung up on my rate or request to work remote. It's worth noting that I took a gamble here and put in about 6 or 8 hours interview and follow-up process, after being told that remote was not an option, and then being given the initial "no". During the project, I did stop by their Silicon Valley campus for a few hours of meetings every month or two, which was probably 1% or less of my total billable hours.<p>In my current engagement, my entire team is remote, so it was a non-issue. The gig was secured for me by a recruiter who had previously contacted me about an on-site position, and I told her I was only considering remote (and followed up periodically).<p>Both of these positions had multiple technical screens which were very rigorous. Both resulted from initial contacts where I was given at least one "no". You can have a private office at any company if you negotiate for remote and set yourself up with the office you like (e.g. home, co-working, etc.)
I juuuust got off a catch-up call with an old college buddy who works at one of the big wireless companies. He described what I read about here on HN and in some blog posts: The company completely changed its "culture" in a desperate attempt to "attract millennials" (and be on trend). Moved to an open floor plan where nobody has an assigned desk. You literally cannot leave anything overnight or you get some sort of a citation. His words: "I spend my day with a headset covering one ear and my finger in the other ear, as I'm on calls most of the day." He also noted how they computerized the cafeteria so you don't have/get to interact with food workers anymore. "All my sandwiches have too much mayo now and I can't do anything about it."
Pixar does not have an open floor plan. It's 2-3 folks to an office, and the animators are well known for decorating their offices in fairly quirky ways during the "off-season" when they have finished their portion of the work for a movie (<a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=pixar+animator+offices&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj3oZaqqMPaAhURBHwKHbG0AVkQ_AUICigB&biw=1309&bih=709" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?q=pixar+animator+offices&sourc...</a>)
It's not acceptable. I've moved from a dev background to having a go at sre/devops/something-or-other; work aside, the culture is excrutiating, with people shouting across the office all day. Best case, someone talking to themself hour after hour, as if anyone wants to hear that. The idea that open floor plans are productive is farce. I effectively have two jobs, the first being just trying to get any work done.
Fog Creek famously has a non-open office space [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://medium.com/make-better-software/beyond-open-offices-the-new-fog-creek-headquarters-bc2f70d7c7dc" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/make-better-software/beyond-open-offices-...</a>
Headphones are not good enough. It's much too easy to damage your hearing.<p>Sun Microsystems, Inc., had offices. More junior engineers would share offices, with two or three engineers per office, while more senior engineers would have private offices. Seniority also dictated office location (think of having windows vs. not). This worked <i>very</i> well. It's not that expensive either (it's certainly not why Sun died).
Virtually everyone has an individual office where I work. Our CEO has the motto "give them a door, a window and the fastest computer money can buy".
Well, a famous example is Microsoft. Though the recently built and renovated buildings are moving toward open plan offices, about 80% of the buildings in the Redmond campus are full of offices. Which office you get is purely based on tenure. I remember it took 11 years of tenure to get a window office in my old building. Some new hires were doubled up due to space constraints. But I was in the 70% of office holders who had a single office from the beginning. It was fun to be able to decorate my office. You could really see people's personalities in their offices. Offices would also double as quick meeting rooms for up to 5 people. No overhead for booking conference rooms. All in all, it was a great perk of the job. If only they had free food...<p>Even if you have offices, people would still barge in, cutting into your uninterrupted time. Funny enough, in the open-plan at Google, where I am currently, I get far fewer walk-up interruptions. It's always good to ping people on chat so they can respond async.
I feel your pain. I found this video from Vox very interesting, to see the rationale behind the original open office space, and contrast it with what modern organizations has made it into.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p6WWRarjNs" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p6WWRarjNs</a>
Bluewind is a small consulting company based in Italy (embedded systems). We switched from "almost all devs in a room" to 2/3 devs per room maximum while building our own offices recently. And common spaces for meetings, conferences and telephone calls. Encouraging to work from home when possible also. Interesting: working this way and adopting Agile principles makes enhances collaboration a lot, much more that in the previous open space where having everyone in the same room makes it almost impossible for people to talk each other when needed.
It's funny, about six or seven years ago, most of the companies I worked for had gone to an open floor plan. Within a few years, all of them had gone back to cubes for a number of reasons.<p>I just started at a large corporation three years ago and they spent millions going to an elaborate open office plan which was similar to what others have referred to as "neighborhoods". At first it was called "hoteling" where we just had a ton of desks with monitors and a dock so you didn't have a set place or cube to work.<p>After about six months, teams had taken over areas without telling anybody, they pushed other teams out to other areas. Then they shifted a ton more people to our building so now space was even more limited. They started moving desks into common areas meant for collaboration where people met and ate lunch in order to handle in the influx of new people. People started "squatting" on their desks, putting personal pics and their mouse and other stuff to claim their desks so nobody would/could sit there. This clearly was not what the architect/designer had in mind. I quickly got to the point where I was so frustrated, I just tapped out and now I work from home almost 100% of the time.<p>It's funny how they had this great idea and it was totally ruined by standard human behavior.
Best office I ever worked in (in both productivity AND developer happiness) was subdivided into 4m x 4m rooms each with two or three developers, wood panels between adjacent rooms, glass corridor walls with privacy frosting, and floor-to-ceiling glass exterior walls with Melbourne city and parkland views. Each space was decorated and equipped as the occupants pleased. Company was acquired in 2004 and that office sadly no longer exists.
The schools in our area are in the final phases of remodeling, getting rid of the open floor plan layout that was in vogue when many of the schools were built, and was such a disaster. Nice to see taxpayer money hard at work.<p>It's funny that a business as reactionary as the education system seems to have learned this lesson but tech companies haven't.
They're all going this way. I've had to started adding 'well, I can' t do the work here' in front of every 'when can you have this done' response.
I work in a very open office plan where meeting rooms have no walls and even directors sit amongst the staff. It's noisy and distracting, I can never concentrate
When I worked in academia (working for a high throughout computing research group at a large state university) we all had our own offices. I don't know if individual offices are all that common any more due to space issues at universities, but I think they're almost all shared offices or cubes at worst. I've never seen an open office plan at a University.<p>I work in healthcare now and share a "large" office with 3 other developers. It feels tight at times, but I still prefer it to the hot-seat style open office that was our other choice.
I worked for the MITRE Corporation <a href="https://www.mitre.org" rel="nofollow">https://www.mitre.org</a> for many years, and can confirm they use offices. There are some open floor plan labs, but almost all employees have an office, usually shared with one other person.
Never understood the rationale behind open floor offices. I currently work in a cubicle set up, and people set up war rooms anytime they want close collaboration. Open offices seem to take this exceptional case and make it the norm.<p>At the same time open floor offices cause a lot of trouble to people in non-exception situations.
Every semiconductor co I've ever worked for, across 30 years, provided cubicles or offices for their employees. This includes both Fortune 500 firms and scrappy 8-person remote offices.
Any companies whose business model is security may want to avoid open spaces. Among those I worked with, like some chip makers (gemalto, safran, etc), space agencies (the CNES comes to mind) or banks (labanquepostale/banque populaire have a few old school offices, bank of luxembourg has lots open plan though).<p>I don't think founders think the geeks wellbeing is ever a criteria to choose a floor plan. Money, space and ability to check on your team mates are the first points.
Where I have found open floor to be fine is small companies of 5-15 people, as long as there are quite corners to retreat to. There are some collaboration advantages to open plan, and I feel that for some (small) size, these can outweigh the distraction and blender-brain effect.<p>I always wonder why people don't split the difference, chop up the big company office into 5-10 person mini open plan offices.
Cisco Norway (where I work) doesn't have open floor plans. Cisco San Jose (the HQ) is a different story though.<p>Also, I doubt that Basecamp (formerly named 37signals) has open floor plans.
FastMail has 5 in a single office, because they chose to cluster there.<p>The standard room is 3 people in 6x6m space, which is actually way too much for just our desks, but we have collaboration tables in the middle of each room where we can put laptops or paperwork when discussing things - plus tons of whiteboard space.
i work from home when i need to concentrate and go to the office occasionally. it’s prerty selfish really as the entire team can’t do that but whatever. it works for me.
In the '90s I worked for an audio/video compression company. We started out in a ramshackle open plan office. Tables thrown against walls, duct tape covering cords, computers stacked on bakers racks. Then some of our products really started moving, most video cards came with our MPEG player, the internet business was taking off and we had some money.<p>Everybody was excited as we could finally afford cubes.
My opinion: open floor plan is acceptable up to a certain room size (100/150m2), provided that the people inside do the same job (mixing devs and salesman is a sin), that the room is not too crammed (6-10m2 per person being the sweet spot) and that there're other meeting/recreational areas.
Not a "tech company" in the traditional sense, but everyone had an office (shared with one, maybe two, other people) when I was at a university lab. It was great because those really facilitated conversations, both work-related and otherwise.<p>I spent two years in a "tech company" after that, which had a cubicle setup, and I totally hated it.<p>I'm back in academia now with my own office, which is pretty sweet. "Non-office" setups are probably a dealbreaker for me at this point.
Here at Kensho we try to accommodate everyone's preferences. We've got single offices, 2-3 person offices, and open floor areas for whose who prefer that.
Our office is technically open plan. We have a about 3/4 of a floor (7500sqft). The 1/4 is still empty but my team are based in the section with the "fake" wall that separates the two. It is only us in this section so it kind of acts as it's own office. We still get distracted but it's much better than being in the thick of it.
I’m guessing it is a combination of cost and constant team growth. Liquidity is a scarce resource for startups and investing in a larger office than necessary for the time being requires too much capital.<p>At our startup, Delibr, we try to combine these conditions with personal preferences. We are 6 people and 3 of us have our own rooms.
SAS at the Cary, NC headquarters does not use open floor plans. I don't know about other office locations though. Pretty much everyone gets their own office with a door. Only time I've seen people without their own space was interns in their own cubicle or contractors in a shared office.
This is partly driven by costs. Where rents per square foot are less, more companies have opted to have offices.<p>Just like how in Mountain View some Googlers live in the parking lot. It's not cause they think parking lots are hip, space is expensive.
It doesn't help you, but I've never worked in non-open workspaces with desks shoulder to shoulder and head to head in rows.<p>I legitimately don't know how it is.
I'm currently working in a small open plan with 6 other people, but the company is moving in June and I'll be in the big open space with 40 people. At least it should only be developpers, so we won't have sales people shouting on the phone.
Is this thread to identify all companies that are still having sane offices in order to get "new wave" managers there to destroy them from inside as well? ;-)
One thing that also matters, that people tend to neglect, is ceiling height. In general when you need to do focused concentrated work, it’s best to work in a room with a low ceiling, the lower the better. Ideally it’s a ceiling you could almost touch.<p>If you need to do more creative thinking, it is better to have a high ceiling, the higher the better (think cathedrals), though there must be a ceiling at some point.