The Open Plan Office and the Extrovert Ideal

87 点作者 strangetimes超过 10 年前

15 条评论

gklitt超过 10 年前

Every time this debate pops up on HN, I find this quote from Bell Labs scientist Richard Hamming interesting to consider:I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, 'The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame.Source: <a href="http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html</a>

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bitwarrior超过 10 年前

As someone with the authority to make the necessary changes to our office environment, it frustrates me to read these kind of blog posts. I have read a couple dozen similar posts which merely complain about open offices, but offer absolutely nothing in the way of practical solutions.We don't have the opportunity or space to give everyone their own dedicated office, and cubicles I'm sure would be a living hell. I've looking into draping fabric from the ceiling, but you'd be surprised how challenging the logistics of setting something like that is (there are very few products in the market to support fabric like this, and we can't drape them from the drop ceiling due to weight). I've looked into free standing walls, but they tend not to have the sound absorption that is typically desired.I'd like, for once, to read an article about practical solutions to this problem rather than just another person complaining about open office spaces thinking they've stumbled upon some undiscovered idea.

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hapless超过 10 年前

We don't need pages of workplace psychology to explain the open plan office.Open plan just has lower visible costs. Twice as many workers per square foot is very compelling math.The cost of lost productivity is hidden. The reduced cost of your office lease is very visible.

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iamdave超过 10 年前

Anecdote: Working IT in an open cubicle environment is absolute pure fucking hell. Nevermind that the last guy left me with cable management that would make a three year old sick to their stomachs, not having an area that I can cordon off and close when I absolutely MUST shut out the world and focus on a task has been a mental and motivational drain. (This is compounded by being 1 IT staff in a company approaching 120, but that's a different affair)I agree with everyone who says "Sure you may be saving leasing costs but you're sacrificing so much more". A perfect example of this is my sales center: an open office plan with desks lined up and about 60 people in a room the size of a large 1br condo, all talking at once, not to mention this obsession with having music played over speakers during business hours and loud annoying gongs going off whenever someone makes a big sale-I may as well be working on a trading floor (first the dashboard TV makes a big gong, people applaud, and then the person who made the big sell goes and bangs a physical gong, more applause. If I were a sales person trying to work through all that I'd quit immediately. I wonder if an exit interview survey of the sales people we've lost in the last month alone would testify to "productivity" related causes for their departures, and in high numbers). Customers can rarely hear agents, agents can rarely hear customers; I looked at my last inventory purchase and we blew $2000 in a month on replacement headsets because people kept slamming theirs down in frustration, ultimately damaging them because of the inability to hear sales calls. If my Android sound meter app is accurate at all, fully staffed the sales wing reaches 92dB in ambient/background sound.And a litany of other problems that would be solved could I get senior management to take conditions as seriously as I do, and express a willingness to invest in the worker beyond a "Here's your paycheck, get back to work".Open spaces are good. A commons area lightly equipped, maybe with a phone and a tv for quick 'huddles', I'm all about. 100% open office however I can't wait to go away forever. Thankfully we're moving offices soon. Regrettably, it's just a larger "open" design.

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normloman超过 10 年前

Stop making this an introvert / extrovert thing. I don't care who you are. You can't concentrate when someone's talking on the phone.<a href="http://healthland.time.com/2013/03/14/why-overheard-cell-phone-conversations-are-so-annoying/" rel="nofollow">http://healthland.time.com/2013/03/14/why-overheard-cell-pho...</a>

methodover超过 10 年前

Someone at Dropbox made a great suggestion to me the other day. What about having something like the Quiet Car? (<a href="http://www.amtrak.com/onboard-the-train-quiet-car" rel="nofollow">http://www.amtrak.com/onboard-the-train-quiet-car</a>)Basically, you'd have a part of the office where you could take your laptop and go work in complete quiet. No conversations louder than a whisper, no music playing, no bringing food back to your desk. If you need to do any of those things, you go elsewhere.

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VLM超过 10 年前

A basically excellent post. With one minor nitpick:"A building filled with individual privates offices and no common areas would go all the way to the introvert end."I've been there, and the reality is people in extroverted moods crowd into one office, or schedule endless meetings in a conference room, or just hang out together.Also, its mood in addition to personality. I'm probably 90% introverted and 10% extroverted in feeling. I don't mind a quality meatspace discussion, just keep it to a reasonable fraction of my day, not all the time or when I'm trying to concentrate or when I'm trying to do actual productive work.I'm a bit miffed at the author for missing the obvious on-call analogy that if open plan offices are so great, then every time I get an "emergency" call at home or jump on a conference call when I'm out of the office, then I should run to the nearest playground or daycare and sit in the center of the loudest most disruptive room. After all, that noise is supposed to make me productive. I can only imagine in horror one the result of those architects redesigning the study areas or labs back at uni.When I'm doing my own work at home in an environment designed for me to be ideal, when I'm concentrating as hard as possible, it probably shocks some open office stockholm syndrome victims that my near perfect home conditions don't involve 25-50 televisions blasting reality TV at full volume, simultaneously, while I work.And there's also the denigration factor, not mentioned in the article. You mere proles don't really think, so you don't need conditions to think. Us managers are paid to do all the thinking so we have offices. You proles belong in your sweatshop, you losers. Its a very intense, negative message. Architecture has meaning, and designing a daily kick in the nuts into your office is just inhumane. I'm sure its very funny for our superiors to watch us suffer a la Mr Burns style (oh how cute, they think we care about how badly we're treating them, ha ha as he strokes his villain cat). Mixed offices of management in offices and proles in the inhumane open area results in feelings similar to having "regular" and "colored" water fountains back in the old days. "We know is sucks, but it keeps you lower animals in place."Its not just that open office advocates are wrong, its that they're so wrong that a thoughtful discussion will inevitably appear to be parody.

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mark-r超过 10 年前

The counterpoint he tries to consider at the end of the article is missing the point. No matter how those successful companies operate today, how did they operate when they first became successful? If it was an open plan, how many people were in the room, and how many different things were they doing?

mgkimsal超过 10 年前

"If getting a desired product of work requires collaboration, then people will collaborate."This is one of the main points of contention between the various parties, and defining whether or not something needs collaboration is often ignored.The entire project might need degrees of input from multiple parties, but often what's needed is for one person to actually get something done, the invite collaboration/feedback/input. Forcing people to work together at every single step to get "collaboration" is simply wrong, but it's one of the justifications for "everyone in the same room."

Marcus316超过 10 年前

There are a few comments here and directly at the article which mention the concept of a balanced work area, with open spaces as well as private spaces. So far, nobody has given an example of this.I happen to work in a balanced office. Our desks are all located in a former warehouse. We're all mostly developers in my area here. There's a culture of ambient noise and conversations, frequent interruptions for collaboration, etc ... all WITHIN the warehouse area.HOWEVER, we also have dozens of small phone booth (one person) rooms where people can go to take calls or work independently PLUS dozens of 4-6 person collaboration rooms PLUS adequate meeting rooms for larger groups PLUS a couple quiet rooms where anything louder than typing is heavily frowned upon PLUS a reasonable work-from-home policy when employees require it.Yes, this is Enterprise (so not that exciting, but they can afford to provide such a location). Yes, there are tradeoffs (you are still expected to be in the office a reasonable amount of time, dependent on your individual manager and management chain; sometimes the warehouse noise is pretty distracting; etc). Given all that COULD go wrong here, I have been pleasantly surprised by how RIGHT this company has gotten it. A good chunk of this has been the work culture allowing employees to adapt the available space to what is needed for each individual team.I'm sorry so many of you have experienced the horrible implementations of open office. I've been there previously. I only hope that more companies see wisdom in mixed and balanced work environments in the future.

mpdehaan2超过 10 年前

This is a GREAT article, not so much for the extrovert angle (I don't know, I'm extroverted sometimes -- I just can't concentrate over people yelling), but because of the headphone parts at the bottom. So many times does "just use headphones" get thrown at people who protest the open office reduction, but they don't realize that wearing headphones all day is uncomfortable (and probably dangerous), even if we love music - and it's also distracting.When we have things like IRC/Hipchat/Slack, email, and video chat, having a door is no more a problem, because we can get a hold of anyone asynchronously.Therefore, if anything, it should be EASIER to have doors now.Sadly, the best office environment I've seen was at AT&T in 2000-ish. Employees had HUGE cubes, with quite a lot of office space for managers. Cube size reduced significantly over the last decade and a half until now cubes are viewed as somehow decadent. We laughed at cubes relative to offices then, we would LOVE to have them back now.I'm looking for the work-from-home revolution to take over or companies to at least realize what they are doing with the open plan stuff for development. Technology makes doors not exist - so we should at least be able to have quiet.

sibelius7th超过 10 年前

You know what I really liked about my time at University? There was a wealth of options to suit your study style. Imagine your University only had open floor plan libraries, where the only place they gave you to study was a loud, visually distracting environment. Or, you could go the other way where the only place to go to study was the quiet floor of the library. Universities are great places to study because they cater to many different personal styles of study. Your goal is to learn and they provide different styles of learning environments in which to study. It baffles my mind that employers, most of whom, one would assume, went to University, then create a single style of work environment, and think their jobs done. Providing many different styles of office spaces for the many different types of people in your employ would seem to be a prudent decision. Allow your employees to find the style that works best for them instead of forcing a one size fits all solution.

SimeVidas超过 10 年前

Multiple comments are mentioning wearing headphones with loud music. But what about earplugs (the disposable foam type)? I’ve worn them during physical work (with loud machines) and, at least for me, they were very effective. I felt I had more energy and focus. Has someone tried them for office work?

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benihana超过 10 年前

>Introversion—along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness—is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology. Introverts living under the Extrovert Ideal are like women in a man’s world, discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are. Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we’ve turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform.I say this as a highly introverted person who spends most of his free time alone with this thoughts: Jesus. Are we just looking for ways that the world has been unfair to us? Is that what open offices are now? A way for the uncaring society to oppress us special snowflake introverts? That quote is so insulting to me as an introvert because it takes such a solipsistic and ego-stroking view of the world: that people who are successful are successful because they fit into the world better, not because they are comfortable and adapted to living in a world that isn't perfectly suited to them. I enjoy my quiet and find working in an open office discomforting. But I can't imagine the person who's so fragile that they have to invent ways the extroverts are oppressing them to deal with that discomfort.>Is this a true story? I don’t know. Is it a bit overly dramatic to compare an open plan office to a sweatshop? Perhaps. But I think there’s a valid point in there: quality of life matters.If you want people not to take our profession seriously, keep comparing what we do to working in a sweatshop. Software engineering by and large is one of the cushiest jobs around. Sitting in a chair (or realizing that sitting all day is too dangerous, so choosing to stand (on a padded mat)) in a climate controlled office with access to bathrooms, running water and in a lot of cases, food on demand is about the farthest away you can get from sweatshop. Our quality of life is so good, we're focusing on the last 1% of the problem; the fact that we're complaining that the layout of the office isn't ideal for our psyche should clue us in to that. Let's keep some perspective here.

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michaelochurch超过 10 年前

There's one place where an open-plan office makes sense: a trading floor. This applies even to many species of algorithmic trading. That's because you have cases where a message (such as "our quotefeed is giving us stale data") needs to get out quickly.The trading day is also, I'll note, only 6.5 hours long. And people who don't get 25% raises (or more) per year leave. It's a stressful job and unless you're making $750k+ after 6-8 years in, it's not worth it to deal with the negatives of being on a trading floor.Open-plan began to go into vogue as a backdoor mechanism for age discrimination, due to studies showing that older people were quick to associate them (and visibility from behind) with low status and therefore leave. Two decades later, I doubt the intention behind tech companies using these plans (and almost all do) is so negative as that. I don't think there's any negative intent anymore; it's just something that's done because (a) it's cheaper, (b) it's more tolerant of rapid growth, and (c) it's how things have "always" been done.As long as people can step away without stigma or punishment, I don't think that open-plan offices are inherently evil. The problem is that few offices have enough quiet space to allow for that.As for "the extrovert ideal", I don't know what to do about that. It seems to be human nature. People with families, non-drinkers, introverts, women except through the immense effort needed to be socially available but not seen as available in other ways... are never going to be "the cool kids". What I've learned, though, is that while "cool kids" get a quick start, they don't hold it and "cool" doesn't last. It's not useful to envy them because, while they may appear to be moving fast at one time, the 5-year picture is not especially desirable.