[schiang]

Team sized rooms are definitely the way to go. You can avoid conversation from other teams that you don't care about. When there is a conversation in the room, it's probably related to what you're doing so it's not necessarily distracting you.

I worked in a room with just my team and it worked out great. We were able to have discussions and draw stuff on white boards on the wall without distracting anyone else. It also helped with team bonding.

[taurath]

I've had this and private offices... what happens is that difficult conversations can't take place except outside of the office (unless there is another space to go). Need to have a 1-1? Everyone else hears it. No meta conversations can take place unless someone is willing to go out for some coffee. The team banter ends up being trivial, and can be incredibly distracting if you need to buckle down to get something done.

[namiller2]

Your office doesn't have a single shared meeting room? Most places I've seen with open offices have some sort of meeting rooms to use for private conversations. How do you have a client call or anything of that matter?

[taurath]

It does, with shared walls with another meeting room (where one can hear a lot of what goes on in the next room). Its considered neutral ground, and honestly it doesn't work well for private conversations (everyone in the office knows you're both tense and holed up in a room). I find that conversations take a different tone in a shared rather than private environment.

Yes, people do use it for those conversations, but you have to walk past all the business/marketing/sales people and your boss(s). Outside the office is a place to confide - where an "official" meeting or neutral meeting room is a place that puts everyone on the defensive, more so than anywhere else.

The idea put forth by Mark Cuban that "there should be no secrets at a startup" is extremely unfounded in my opinion - unpopular opinions or contrary positions frequently only flow in privacy as to not cause embarrassment or hostility.

[combatentropy]

If everyone has their own office, then someone coming into your office is an everyday affair. They could be talking about a programming problem, lunch, or something personal. You don't know, but you would go crazy wondering about it, because it happens all day.

In an open room where half a dozen or so people sit, if two people stand up, walk into a conference room, and shut the door, that's weird and curious.

[tikhonj]

I work in an open office and grabbing a room with somebody is totally normal—it happens every day, for all sorts of boring reasons. We even have small rooms perfect for this purpose: three or four chairs and no tables or video conferencing equipment. People use them for anything from random conversations (technical or not), personal phone calls or even just a bit of extra privacy and quiet for solo work.

Personally, I've been very happy with the environment. It helps that the open part of the office is bright, quiet and pretty sparsely populate.

[johannes1234321]

> In an open room where half a dozen or so people sit, if two people stand up, walk into a conference room, and shut the door, that's weird and curious.

This also happens all the time, thus not weird. (or people don't talk ...)

[vonmoltke]

Or people just have non-sensitive conversations right at their desks.

[wolfgke]

> If everyone has their own office, then someone coming into your office is an everyday affair.

Why don't you introduce the rule that entering another office is only allowed for scheduled appointments and emergency cases (life is in danger or the production server crashed).

[vonmoltke]

The company I just left does not. The company I was at previously had so little meeting room space that it was almost impossible to get a room without booking days in advance.

[amyjess]

I know, right?

There were things I liked at that company (mostly the people), but everything about the way the offices were set up had me on edge all the time. No private meeting space, not a single person had their back to a wall, people were thrown into offices at random with no regard to who was on what team...

After I got laid off, I landed at a place where I work in a cube farm, and it's so much less stressful.

I hope your leaving was voluntary, though... if it was, then congrats on the new job!

(and, yeah, I figured out who you are from the about section on your profile... I used to sit right behind you)

[Symbiote]

Mine does, but you need to go through two doors to get to it.

That's a barrier compared to just chatting at someone's desk. Or the developer doesn't want to move their laptop, so they'd rather stay at their desk that go to the meeting room.

That leads to too many conversations in the open plan office.

[daemin]

There's also the problem of all the small meeting rooms being booked out and occupied all the time. Usually by people from sales or administration/hr.

[geofft]

That seems like a way to exacerbate Conway's law problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law . Most of the technical debt I try to fight off is based on my team doing something that makes sense for us based on what we're good at / what we think other teams want, but doesn't line up with what other teams want / what they think we can deliver; we end up essentially building abstraction layers around other teams, and they build abstraction layers around us.

If you put everyone in a private office and default conversations to email lists / group chat (which is the model that basically the entire open source community uses), that's fine. If you have an open floor plan where it's easy to wander over to another team's area, that's also fine. But making it super easy for your own team to talk without other people hearing seems the worst of both worlds; you have all the distraction problems of open floor plans (every conversation concerns you), and you don't get the organic conversations that open floor plans are supposed to promote.

[vonmoltke]

It sounds like you are trying to compensate for a lack of systems engineering by changing the office layout. You shouldn't be relying on serendipitously overheard conversations for coordinating things like this.

[reitanqild]

I upvoted both you and parent:

On one hand I totally agree with you. On the other hand Conways law exist for a reason.

I see no reason why this shouldn't be another case of "[...] these ought you to have done, and not to leave the other undone."

[geofft]

Yeah, I am inclined to agree. However, part of systems engineering is figuring out where technical conversations happen. Apache has "if it didn't happen on the mailing list, it didn't happen" as a rule precisely because they want to avoid the unreliability of serendipitously overhearing conversations, precisely because that's important to how they engineer systems. I would be a fan of a system design / an office layout where everyone has a private room and all conversations default to happening in email or group chat, and in-person conversations (which are, on occasion, definitely needed!) require some activation energy.

However, lots of in-person offices like these serendipitous conversations, and that's often pitched as an advantage of open plan layouts. That's also pitched as an advantage of getting lunch together, team outings, etc. etc. If you're going to decide to use this advantage (which I think is okay, but suboptimal), you had better put some systems engineering thought into how you want to use this advantage.

[TheOtherHobbes]

That's a project management problem, not an interior design problem.

[tmorton]

I see Conway's Law as a statement about the world, not a class of problems. Team size is capped by human nature, and systems will develop to mirror team sizes. The only solution is to find lower-communication "seams" for both your team boundaries and your system boundaries.

Abstraction layers around teams sounds like a good thing, as long as they abstraction layers make sense.

[geofft]

Abstraction layers around systems are a good thing. Teams have all sorts of weird properties, like a manager's willingness to focus on problems or recruit certain types of people. In an ideal world, teams and systems line up; in practice they don't, and Conway's Law is that the system design starts to conform to the team structure instead of vice versa.

[r_smart]

>When there is a conversation in the room, it's probably related to what you're doing so it's not necessarily distracting you.

My rebuttal to this point is the amount of time my previous co-workers would spend discussing lawn care strategies.

Overall though, I agree with you. Team sized rooms are a livable compromise, and have some nice upsides while tamping down the downsides of a fully open office.

[cwilkes]

Not sure how that is a rebuttal unless you work for a lawn care company.

[r_smart]

You're conception of it being a rebuttal is exactly wrong. My point was, my team would spend a lot of time talking about things that weren't related to work or my interests, so it was indistinguishable from any of the myriad other distractions present in an open office. Basically: If you're co-located with 1 person or more, you will be subjected to distractions you have no interest in and serve no purpose for yourself or your team.

[vonmoltke]

This probably works great if you have evenly-sized, relatively stable teams. The place I just left has teams that ranged from just me to the entire eight-persob company, and the teams could change on a month-to-month basis. In fact, it wasn't unusual to be working on two or three projects simultaneously.

[cableshaft]

Well, you could have a primary team you work for, and then get called on to work on other things for other teams periodically (while staying at your same desk). That's pretty much what we do here. My team lead is always the same person, but sometimes I do work for the other two team leads, especially when work is light in the current iteration for my normal project.

[yoz-y]

I would love to have a private office. Currently I spend most of my day blasting my ears because I simply can not concentrate with the constant Skype calling, people singing to themselves or random drive by meetings. And we are only 4-5 in the office.

[exDM69]

I work in a team sized room and much rather would have my own quiet space. I happen to sit next to a "key person" who is constantly having (important) discussions with coworkers that I don't need to or want to hear.

I'm really distraction and noise sensitive so I really prefer working from home when there's code to be written.

[restalis]

I say there is a problem within your team (like that "key person" not knowing what is or isn't productive in what he does) that you are hoping to solve through seclusion. Excluding such bad quirks, assuming everyone is acting reasonably (in a tolerant frame of reference), I would say team sized spaces strike a good balance between the peer interaction accessibility and the bad effects of crowd noise.

[exDM69]

The problem with our team is that it's not really a team in the traditional sense. We're an engineering office for a multinational and we're a team only in the sense that we have a common manager but all of us pretty much work on different projects, with most of the collaborators being overseas (with a 10 hour timezone difference).

The "key person" is really a key figure and his opinion is valued for a lot of different things, so he's talking a lot to different people. But almost none of it concerns me.

Even if I worked together with the guys I sit next to, I'd prefer that there was a door between me and them. I prefer to work in silence and uninterrupted and if my opinion is required I'd rather work it out before/after lunch or schedule a time slot for it.

[mmagin]

Short of a private office, this would be my top choice.

But the big thing, I think -- Put a wall between the hallway and the work area. Too many irrelevant people have irrelevant conversations when they're walking by and it's distracting.

[developer2]

On a related note, people who have a job requiring them to be constantly on the phone should not be placed within earshot of people who need to focus. Sales and support need to have walls between them and developers. Trying to code while someone is on the phone 4-8 hours a day is debilitating.

[mmagin]

Also you don't really want customers hearing every ill-thought-out thing that comes out of developers mouths.

[serge2k]

> Team sized rooms are definitely the way to go.

No, individual areas are the way to go.

Team rooms are still better than cramming people side by side row after row.

[amyjess]

I worked in a room like that at my last employer. There were four of us in one office (with room for a fifth). It was easily the worst arrangement I've ever worked in.

I'd rather have either a cube farm or a two-person office with both our backs to the wall. I like my privacy.