[coffeeski]

Why do CEO's think they're alone in the need for quiet spaces where they can focus? Sure some people can work in the noisy space where interruptions abound. The only thing in my office that works well with interruptions is my CPU. I'd rather have a Cube farm, but better yet, a small tiny phone booth as an office.

[varelse]

Just like the cargo cult Agile pandemic peaked a few years ago, I suspect we're reaching peak open floor plans right now. The overall negative effects of an open floor plan for a significant fraction of engineers (though not all) is self-evident and backed up by reams of data stretching back nearly 40 years:

http://iansommerville.com/software-engineering-book/web/work...

TLDR: 100 square feet of personal space is optimal. The highest I've ever had in tech was 81. I miss those days and I end up working from home a lot because of the current open floor plan. But square feet cost $$$ and switching to an open floor plan is an immediate cost cutter. Never mind what it's doing to overall productivity and future earnings, the analysts love $h!+ like this.

Fortunately, executives are not all idiots, so once the more insightful of them realize how much more they get done in private spaces, one or more of them will push back on this. And if employers start treating cubes and offices as a perk, I suspect they'll see lots of converts.

[hotsauceror]

Cargo Cult is exactly right. Our organization is selling us this right now. "We're creating a more collaborative atmosphere! Facebook does it, this must be what IT people want." (Any discussion of paying IT staff like FB, though, is "well, we're not an IT company, and besides we're mission driven!") Because they don't think we're mature enough to accept that they want to squeeze more bodies unto a smaller space, for purely financial reasons.

Leadership got called out at a recent company meeting by someone who commented that noise-cancelling headphone were critical. One of the C-suite evangelists was like "haha, yeah you're right next to my office aren't you." In other words, "I'm so oblivious, I think it's amusing that my loud conversations are negatively impacting my subordinates' ability to concentrate in this 'collaborative' environment'".

My team does not need a collaborative atmosphere. We're not marketers. We're quiet, introverted, methodical folks who need a quiet atmosphere where they can concentrate on writing ops code that won't bring down a production server in the middle of the day. We don't want to have to listen to overheard gossip, ostensibly private phone calls, etc. while we're trying to figure triage a complex issue. But more than anything, it's offensive that they won't just come out and admit that this is being done for financial reasons. We're all adults in a capitalist economy; we know the score.

[Declanomous]

I technically work in marketing, and even I don't think that open-offices are better. A private office is way more productive for the 75% of the time we aren't collaborating. It is a lot easier to write and design things when it is quiet. The idea that creative extroverted people work better the more riotous an environment is is absolute nonsense.

[hotsauceror]

No offense intended, of course. In my mental picture of a Marketing department, there's lots of creative back and forth and sort of, "brainstorming all the time" which is probably about as accurate as any stereotype. Everyone needs a time and a place to go heads-down.

[Declanomous]

None taken. It probably depends on the marketing department. There is a lot of brainstorming and back-and-forth, but I personally need my own space to brainstorm.

A lot of my conversations go like this:

Person A: Hey, have you decided what you want to do with [x] thing?

Person B: No, I was thinking [y], but I got stuck with [z].

Person A: That makes sense, what happens if we do [w]?

Person B: That's a good idea, but [v] might be a problem. I'll think about it and get back to you.

Person B sits down and works for a few more hours

If you have individual offices, that conversation might take ten minutes, and it only occupies 20 man-minutes. If you have an open-office with your entire marketing department, the conversation will probably take a full-man hour between all the people who get distracted and the other people who need to chime in.

Honestly, I think easy collaboration works better for programming/IT than it does for sales/marketing/communication, because the problems in IT are more concrete. So I think you are more likely to be able to chime in with a useful comment when the problem is "I'm getting this weird error" than when the problem is "does this have the tone we are looking for?"

In both cases, I think open offices are terrible. 2-3 people per office seems about right to me.

[Florin_Andrei]

> The idea that creative extroverted people work better the more riotous an environment is is absolute nonsense.

The only place where that worked well was the old-timey trading floor, as seen in Gary Cooper-era movies.

[Declanomous]

My dad worked on the floor of the Chicago Option Exchange for years. Even the craziest open-outcry pits were way more organized than any movie has made them seem.

I'm sure trading is way more productive now that it's done from a desk in an office, in the same way that auctions done online are probably more productive than auctions conducted in-person.

[kumar785]

I don't think it is a cargo cult. My guess is that the focus is to make these engineers replaceable. And "quiet, introverted, methodical folks" are difficult to replace. Dumbed down open office workers and brogrammers are easily replaceable with another recent graduate some place cheaper.

[ashark]

Definitely part of it. Businesses are afraid developers will come to regard themselves, and to be regarded, as real professionals, like doctors, lawyers, some categories of engineer (god forbid they stop cowering around the MBAs or start questioning the ethics of... well, anything, really!)

Systemically keeping their tastes and station "lower" than that is probably part of what's going on, especially with the bigger companies. Developer pay may (sometimes) approach or match upper-middle, professional-class level, but (self-)respect for developers can't be permitted to reach those heights. Better their conditions are kept closer to, say, mid-20th-century secretary pools.

[justforFranz]

Get yer cargo cult out of my bandwagon.

[MrTortoise]

Get her bandwagon out of my bikeshed

[pandaman]

I agree. It seems that Bloomberg "invented" it (there used to be open space offices before, of course, but I don't think they were this style of "all departments and even executives are in the same room without any divisions") and it appears to be content with high turnover.

[bsg75]

Its both.

[umanwizard]

I work for FB and I hate the open office.

(This has nothing to do with FB -- I've hated it everywhere I've worked.)

[cookiecaper]

>We're all adults in a capitalist economy; we know the score.

This is mostly false, and to the extent that it is true, it turns out that people much prefer to have the ability to retreat into ambiguity around management's thought process and incentives when it suits them, rather than for the executives to be explicit about it.

The most infamous example of an executive revealing something everyone already knew to be true is Gerald Ratner [0]. After jokingly stating that his company was able to sell things for such low prices because it was "total crap", they plummeted to the brink of collapse. The company was saved only after firing Ratner and changing its name.

Companies where ill-advised executive candor has turned fortunes downward are now said to be experiencing the "Ratner Effect".

Executives are, first and foremost, performers. Dropping the illusion is offensive to the audience. We like pretending.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner

[erobbins]

I work at FB. A LOT of us hate the open plan.

[varelse]

So can I assume that the perks, the projects, and the pay outweigh the annoyance of the floor plan?

[LoSboccacc]

Many large company will do but the large brunt of codetariat working for cash strapped business living and dying according to investors and customers will be keept in the open spaces: they looks cool in photos, convey a reassuring sense of "working bees" and sells well to visiting customers, so I fear the open plan it's here to stay.

[varelse]

HR is driven by data. To kill open floor plans, start citing the floor plan as the primary reason for leaving. If that becomes a theme, IMO open floor plans will become cancer. It just takes time.

[koolba]

That violates rule number one of dealing with HR: Don't talk to HR.

It doesn't matter how innocuous the comment is. It can come back to bite you. Example:

You: "I don't like open floor plans."

HR: "Add a note to his file that he's anti-social. If he ever comes back here it'll be recorded already."

[varelse]

Yeah, I've got one of those "non-regretted depature" notes on my record at Google. So what? Google lost out, not me.

Jobs aren't scarce, but talent is. I've never gone for want of employment and Google blind-allocated me into a boring gig I hated. And yes, I'm very anti-social when I'm coding. I wouldn't want to work for a company that considered that a negative trait.

[hinkley]

non-regretted departure?

Is that something like "Quit my job at Google, middle fingers in the air," or what?

[dethswatch]

>HR is driven by data.

This is not my experience.

Maybe you've worked with better companies than I have.

[jrs235]

I would agree.

HR is driven by perceptions

[mrslave]

I would argue that HR is largely driven by legal obligation.

[hotsauceror]

Yeah, but by then you, and all the others, have already left. Plus, the costs of a re-remodel can be quite persuasive. Time is on the side of the folks who made the original decision to commit to the open floorplan concept in the first place.

[varelse]

Growing companies are adding new space all the time. That's when to schedule a transition like this.

[cmurf]

If talent has to quit to get HR to grok anything, the cancer in the company is HR. And good luck citing that as the reason for quitting, and good luck expecting HR to grant permission for your manager to give you a good recommendation.

[sidlls]

I find it's best to work as though HR is driven by one thing: their mission is to protect the company from adverse employee action. They are agents of the company, not of employees, and it's best to assume they view employees almost as adversaries. Not necessarily enemies, per see, but definitely not 100% aligned with the best interests of the company.

[bragh]

That is the crux of the issue, isn't it? Actual productivity does not matter that much on a grand scale, the perceived productivity and therefore sales is what matters.

[meddlepal]

I think we can have our cake and eat it too. The all-glass office style at We Work could be adopted. I wish the glass was a bit thicker but the small shared office or bullpen model is ideal IMO.

[evadne]

I am currently working from a WeWork location and can provide a data point, that all-glass offices are terrible with soundproofing. The other downside of having glass partitions is that you could see what your neighbours were doing (and vice versa), which in my opinion is no different from visual pollution.

[Jach]

A lot of engineers discount the impact of visibility and focus too much on the sound distractions. I think visibility is just important. It's all part of a violent transparency theme I think is captured pretty well here: https://web.archive.org/web/20150321053931/https://michaeloc... Even if you don't suffer from more-than-normal anxiety over it to the point of panic attacks, all the studies on normal people show open plans aren't great.

[edoceo]

Yea, I tried weWork to see if my employees would like it. In one of the meeting rooms a neighbor came over and warned us not to talk about any confidential information since everyone in their office could hear us. We sell B2, in a regulated industry. Leaky sound is a deal breaker.

So, we're in a suburb now, $/sqft is less, 2 devs in a quiet room, 2 sales in a different room.

I will not get open plan for my team. 2 persons per 144sqft office seems a good fit to me

[bshudi]

I am also at a WeWork location, but I find that the noise outside of our room is hardly noticed. That being said, I agree about the clear glass, I wish more of the glass was frosted.

[busterarm]

Personally, I hated my experience in the glass-door offices of WeWork. The cheaper communal areas they had were vastly more productive and everyone was was respectful of it being a public space for everyone to work (for the most part).

The actual offices on the other hand, had almost no sound deadening between them, the hallways way too narrow and it was all-party, all-the-time. People from other companies getting absolutely smashed on keg beer starting at noon was a daily problem. At the one building I went to that had entire floors of conference rooms, you could hear everything from 3 conference rooms over, making phone calls impossible.

[deepGem]

I worked at Sun Microsystems for a while and their private office layout was really nice. I can't ballpark the exact size but the office could hold 3 gigantic CRT monitors, 2 desk phones, and had space for 2 visitors.

I feel that a 2 person private office is quite optimal, since we are talking about teams. It's easier to pair program or discuss and even maintain silence when required. Office designers will have to pay attention to acoustics and ensure that there is not much echoing or significant noise transmission across walls or glass panels.

[ericd]

How would you feel about larger offices that fit ~8, and housed your entire immediate team, but no one else? Your manager would go to another room for their meetings with other parts of the organization, and you all would be free to collaborate as needed, or shut up as needed?

[opo]

>How would you feel about larger offices that fit ~8, and housed your entire immediate team, but no one else?

I've experienced that kind of environment and it is slightly better than the sea of tables filling a floor but is still very bad. A few of the things I've noticed:

- Collaboration inside an individual team was never a problem with individual offices and so it isn't noticeably improved

- Unless the programming/debugging work is very simple, it will often require intense concentration. With distractions an engineer is less productive

- People waste a lot of time looking for an area to have a private conversation, talk to their Dr on the phone, etc.

- When we had offices, people would tend to decorate them with pictures of their kids, awards, etc. With an open floor plan, the place looks very sterile and it seems like overall morale and interest in the company is lower than it used to be.

- The big issue with any organization (with more than say 10 people) is communication BETWEEN teams, not inside the team. This design of isolating each individual team has led to a lot of inefficiency as the sort of ad-hoc conversations people would have with others on other teams basically stops.

[ericd]

Thanks for the feedback on the idea. My main complaint with open floor plan is the level of background noise is very high, and of a very distracting type. Within teams, though, we'd often gather around to discuss solutions to tough problems before we coded them up. This was all ad-hoc, so it did help that we were all in the same area. The main thing I could have done without was the cross chatter from other teams.

Small call rooms were available throughout to address the private call issue, so there was never any sort of hunt.

[Corrado]

I think one of my best working environments had two pods of 4 people each in one closed off room. One pod had developers and the other had non developers (project leaders, DBAs, etc.) It combined just the right amount of togetherness and separate space and worked wonderfully!

Another great environment was inside an old bank vault. Me and one other developer. No windows, two doors, lights down low, thumping techno music. Ah, bliss...

[ericd]

Nice, I like 4, that's the number we had at my last startup, and it worked well. I figured that the max reasonable team size was 8, but I think your solution (two rooms of 4) strikes a nice balance of noise and allowing the entire team to be very close to each other when they need to be.

[cr0sh]

One of the best spaces I ever worked in was at my employer prior to my current employer.

When I started work at the company, they had hired a couple of other guys as well, but they didn't have as much experience in software development for an employer (one had done mainly contract work alone, the other was fresh outta college but earned a compsci masters). They didn't have a cubical to put us each in (they were planning to move), so we three (plus one of their more experienced devs as a lead) stuck us in what we eventually termed "The Oven".

It used to be their "conference room" - maybe 10 feet or so on a side, one side glass with a door, the other three walls, no windows. In fact, it was where we each were interviewed. They set up a desk system, put two of us on one side, and two on the other. There wasn't a vent to the a/c system, unfortunately. Four computers blasting hot air, no air circulation save for some desk fans, and four guys in there hacking on code - well, you see where the name came from...

...but we did some amazing work inside that small room, and had a pretty damn good time doing it. We eventually got a portable A/C unit that we stuck in the corner and vented to the ceiling plenum. That helped immensely. Our lead had a weird spotify playlist - that became our music to listen to by day. The lights in the room were kept off, so we only had the glow of our monitors to light our way. In effect, it was a perfect development environment.

About a year passed, and the company moved to better digs. While the new location had certain amenities and such that made it more appealing, at the same time, it had horrible downsides:

Open office floor plan, concrete flooring, lights that were always one, west and south facing windows that guaranteed to pan the sun thru the blinds (which the managers and c-level guys always wanted to have open) and blind you. Massive echoing. Most of us took to using headphones all the time. While we got some good work done, nothing was ever the same, ultimately. The goofy thing is that half the office space was wasted; there was a good chunk that wasn't being used for anything, and we tried to make a case for moving the dev team over there, and spreading things out more so we could have a space to our own (and not have us bothering sales and customer support and vice-versa - who were also in the same space, of course). No dice, no moving on that.

I don't thing I'd want to do an open-office situation ever again, even if the money was better. For me, it just doesn't work.

[s73ver]

So here's one of the reasons I dislike not having offices: I actually really like having the lights on. I want things to be nice and bright. I hate it when things are dark and dungeon like. If we had separate offices, we could each make our space as we wish. I could be lit, and you could be dark. No one would have to fight over the setup.

[ericd]

You might get exactly your way with environmental preferences, but you miss out on the collegial atmosphere of working in the same space with a few other people you really like. I love that aspect of small shared offices, and was one of the things I really enjoyed about working on a small startup.

[ericd]

Haha that sounds awesome. Horribly sweaty, but a lot of fun, kind of like a little scrappy startup inside a bigger company. I'm guessing your guys' team spirit was off the charts. Thanks for sharing that.

I guess maybe the key to making this work is actually having teammates that like each other. A lot of devs seem to really hate working near other people, and are very particular about their setup, so I guess for them, individual offices are much better. But if you like your teammates, I'd much rather work in the same room with them than in a room all by myself.

[watwut]

We are exactly 8 in office and it is pretty awesome. Meetings are in room directly, but they are not often (once in two weeks maybe) and sometimes it is even good to listen as I am learning that way. I can tune it with normal headphones only anyway.

There is a bit of social chat also, but whenever someone complains, it is immediately stopped - local culture is that way. I find it better then own office, because I would end up isolated there and it is not happening here.

Most of the day there is a silence.

[pseudalopex]

Team rooms are better than open plan, but 8 is enough for irrelevant discussions, mechanical keyboards, and crunchy snacks to reach critical mass.

[ericd]

Fair, maybe 4-6 is a better max. You can also shame the mechanical keyboard user mercilessly for bothering everyone else.

[pseudalopex]

Only if the majority are on your side.

[Tempest1981]

The optimal number of engineers sharing an office is closer to 2 than 8.

You might be able to convince me that it's e 2.71828...

[deepGem]

I think that'll fly, if you can really manage the no meetings clause :).

[matchagaucho]

The irony is that we (FB) came in and demolished all those awesome Sun offices to create "open space".

No "Duke" mascots were harmed in the process, though :-)

[wdb]

But do you have an assigned desk? Every morning I am hoping there is a desk free for me and don't need to squeeze in between two colleagues. No fun.

[abritinthebay]

It's even worse in the new building I think.

Lovely park on the roof, great amenities, but cluttered open-plan hell at every desk area.

[hinkley]

Lesson we learned before the original dot-bomb, both on the trip up and the path down:

You want your cube to be just slightly smaller than could uncomfortably fit two people. Otherwise, someday it will be uncomfortably fitting two people.

[dasmoth]

While they're clearly better than open plan, I don't really get two-person offices. They're not that much more space-efficient than single offices, and seem like a none-too-subtle "we don't really trust these coder types on their own" message.

[thedarkginger]

Have never worked in a non-open office plan so I can't really conceptualize this but sounds interesting.

So if I envision a floor, do you just have rows of 2-person offices with hallways in between?

[JonathonW]

The best layouts I've seen have had 1- or 2-person offices around the perimeter of the space, with shared spaces (open spaces for collaboration when you actually need to collaborate and for big stuff, conference rooms, break rooms, etc.) on the interior, because people shouldn't always be in them so they don't need natural light as urgently.

Requires a decent amount of space to do correctly, though.

[hajile]

In my experience semi-open layouts are the best. A handful people working in the same room on the same project generally seems to work well at encourage pair programming and exchange of information while having an actual room isolates from other distractions.

That said, I think in the programming world, remote work will eventually become the new office because it's the ultimate cost cutter and greatly opens up the pool of applicants.

[Spooky23]

I agree. My most productive environment was either 2 or 4 person offices. The weakness was the common space.

IMO a dorm suite like layout would be great... have a pod of offices supporting 20 people with a shared common area.

[maxxxxx]

Agree. 2 to 4 is very nice. That would be my setup too. It's not even necessary to work on the same things.

[r00fus]

I prefer the hybrid approach: common semi-open room, plentiful breakout areas that can double as part-time offices.

[bogomipz]

>"Just like the cargo cult Agile pandemic peaked a few years ago, I suspect we're reaching peak open floor plans right now."

Wait, that peaked? That hasn't been my perception. I'm curious where you are seeing that.

[varelse]

I'm not seeing anywhere near the $h!+storm of pointless standups I used to see every morning. I'm also seeing the return of the weekly status meeting. Give it time.

Then again, I'm someone who's threatened to enact the 6 mph standup meeting wherein the second anyone drops below 6 mph on foot, the meeting's over because how can we practice Agile if we aren't agile? That wasn't received well.

[brogrammernot]

Very rarely do I actually lol but I just chuckled so hard in a meeting.

Yeah, you guessed it. An agile meeting.

[robertlagrant]

Pretty sure you both mean Scrum.

[noarchy]

I haven't been seeing it, either. In fact, I dare say it is nearly impossible to find a software shop in my area that isn't knee-deep in some iteration of "Agile" management - usually some form of Scrum.

[kps]

Scrum is collectivized micromanagement.

[postfacto]

Agile protects the C-level from being fired for poor planning by blame-shifting to developers who get fired for not reacting to poor planning from above fast enough. Agile is Executive Armor.

[abritinthebay]

That's because it works. There's a reason it's popular.

That said: a lot of places don't do it correctly and really do deserve being called cargo cults.

Still, some process is better than no process.

[noarchy]

>That's because it works. There's a reason it's popular.

Versus:

>That said: a lot of places don't do it correctly and really do deserve being called cargo cults.

That's how it always goes, right? Company after company implements some kind of Scrum process, and when it doesn't work the problem is never Scrum itself.

I'd contend that the reason things like Scrum are popular is that it gives non-technical managers things to play with: things like burndown charts, that gives them metrics to measure and show to their own managers. Devs aren't measured by lines of code generated per day anymore. Now it is all about "velocity" and burndown. Old wine in new bottles.

[varelse]

To be fair (and probably downvoted), _The Agile Manifesto_ is a great read IMO. None of its 12 principles mandate open floor plans, scrum or daily standups.

https://www.smartsheet.com/comprehensive-guide-values-princi...

Combine these with Joel Spolsky's 12 steps to better code and I'd call that a winning culture.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...

But that's never how it turns out so "you're doing it wrong" is (and I hate to admit this) a valid objection. Sigh...

[abritinthebay]

Devs were always measured by velocity. It was just called "deadlines" or milestones in classical waterfall methods.

With Scrum (for example) that turns into a much more sane, smaller, easier to predict and adapt with metric. Which is due to smaller units of work and shorter turnaround times.

Scrum (and agile in general) isn't magic. It's just sane process improvements.

It's also not an all-in-one philosophy. You can take parts from it and still get benefits (usually ends up showing why you should be more agile however).

Simple daily standups, short sprints, and grooming+planning meetings each sprint will help most software companies a lot, even if they don't go full scrum/kaban/etc

[mlindner]

Honestly, what's the alternative to Agile? Waterfall? Hell no.

[EliRivers]

I worked somewhere that did waterfall, hardcore. For everything, requirements came first (sometimes, since moving on, I've even found myself suggesting in meetings that if we don't know what we're meant to be making, the odds of getting it right are pretty slim - obvious yet somehow it needs stating out loud more than it should be). Sometimes literal months were spent on getting them right. Then the design. Full on designs, full on design reviews, the whole lot. It wasn't impossible to come back afterwards and change things, but it was pretty rare. By the time coding came around, it wasn't much more than implementing the design (coded up in literal programming style, too, such that what was written turned into two separate sets, being beautiful latex-based documents interspersing the design and commentary of that design with the code implementing each piece of design, and the code for the compiler to eat); all the actual programming thinking had been done during the design. Then levels of testing, starting small and unit, moving up through the layers until the original requirements were being tested against.

It's the only place I've ever worked in which the customer never registered a single bug. They even asked us if we could take over from a different supplier since they'd never managed to deliver anything that worked. When the tests were signed off (and they literally were; the tester signed their name against each test, data records were archived, the paper test steps and signatures were sealed in envelopes for customer inspection on demand) that software did its job from delivery day one.

Waterfall is really demanding and really hard to do well (and it also requires a high quality of customer; if your customers don't know what they want and simply cannot be guided into telling you, I suspect it's impossible), but it sure can deliver. I've never worked anywhere else that managed such high quality.

[tonyedgecombe]

That would require an exceptional customer, in my experience nobody knows what they want until you put something in front of them.

[MockObject]

> implementing the design, coded up in literal programming style

What sort of pseudocode were you using for this?

[EliRivers]

Here's something I wrote about it before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10070549

[varelse]

An infinite ala carte menu of subsets of the parts you like about Agile, Waterfall, or any other methodology as long as you ship working code roughly on schedule.

When I hear the above argument, I'm reminded of the Protestants versus Catholics scene in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.

[empthought]

Over 20 years later, this is still a classic: https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff

[chaostheory]

> But square feet cost $$$ and switching to an open floor plan is an immediate cost cutter.

This reminds me of the time companies used to try to save money by buying low powered computers. They didn't realize that carbon is more expensive than silicon.

[rglovejoy]

I actually had a manager tell me that all I do is typing.

[richardthered]

This reminds me of an old parable:

There's a big manufacturing plant in town that's been around for decades. One day, a new company comes in and buys them out. The new managers look at the books, and say "Wow! Look at these crazy labor costs! There are way too many senior people here. Let's replace them with new guys, and we'll save a bundle."

So, they do that, and save a lot in labor costs.

After the first year, though, they run into a problem. The plant isn't working like it should. Output is down, and everyone's running around with their hair on fire, trying to figure out what the heck is wrong.

After two days of this, someone finally gets a bright idea: "Hey, why don't we bring in one of those old guys that we laid off?" So, they hunt down the most experienced guy they could find, and bring him in to take a look.

He shows up, and starts walking around the plant. He slowly walks up and down the whole plant, with a gaggle of concerned managers following his every move. Finally, he stops at a pipe at the back of the plant, and pulls out a hammer.

He lifts the hammer up, and whacks one joint really hard. Suddenly, the plant starts working again, and everyone is rejoicing.

The CEO is smiling, and pats the old-timer on the back, and tells him to send a bill for his work.

Well, the next day, the bill shows up. $10,000. "What!" he exclaims, pounding his desk. "Send me an itemized bill!"

The day after after that, a new bill arrives:

Hitting pipe with hammer: $5 Knowing which pipe to hit: $9,995

[sfifs]

> I suspect we're reaching peak open floor plans right now

I doubt it simply because it's way way cheaper to have open floor plans than rooms. Savings on materials, easier compliance with fire safety, way higher density.

[Florin_Andrei]

> higher density

One day someone will look up and notice that whole unused third dimension in the office.

[hinkley]

Worked a place where a third of our office had 20ft ceilings and we were running out of space for people.

I used to joke that Ikea sold queen sized bunk beds (I dunno if they still do, but they did then), and that we could totally get a desk up on top of one of those...

[umanwizard]

In many places this has already been done; e.g., I work on the 15th floor of a building.

[ig1]

Using a study of programmers in the 1970s (where not punching the wrong hole in punch cards was a critical skill) for programmers in 2017 may not give you the most useful data.

[kps]

Point of order: a punch card environment would have typists do the actual keypunching. Programmers wrote on paper coding forms by hand.

Of course writing out programs by hand is also a long obsolete and useless skill — except for interviews at all the top companies, where it's vital.

[opo]

Is there any study that shows that adding distractions to people and removing personal privacy makes them more productive and/or lowers stress hormones?

For example:

>...In 2011, the organizational psychologist Matthew Davis reviewed more than a hundred studies about office environments. He found that, though open offices often fostered a symbolic sense of organizational mission, making employees feel like part of a more laid-back, innovative enterprise, they were damaging to the workers’ attention spans, productivity, creative thinking, and satisfaction.

http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-open-office-t...

[spcelzrd]

Makes you wonder why more companies don't measure these things. Google and Facebook A/B test button colors, but can't be bothered to measure programmer productivity in any scientific way.

[disgruntledphd2]

To be fair, its not easy. You would need:

- Some kind of informed consent (because quitting)

- Separation of space (to prevent jealousy)

- A good way to measure programmer skill (this one's harder)

- A lack of unquestioned dogma that open plan is better

It's not as easy as you make it out to be, but either big G or Fbook could probably do it, given the will (which i suspect is the actual problem).

EDIT: parentheses are hard to match

[x0x0]

It's not a cargo cult -- cargo cults are done as pure imitation.

Open floor plans are simply a cost saving measure combined with a way to enforce the internal hierarchy.

[danellis]

> Just like the cargo cult Agile pandemic peaked a few years ago

Part of that early agile movement was Extreme Programming, which I'm pretty sure advocated for office space per-team and a communal working area with private office space around it.

[dba7dba]

Point for teaching me `$h!+`

[coffeeski]

I would take a 10% paycut to have a small office that fits 2 monitors, a filing cabinet and some pictures, rather then dealing with constant clattering of the guy behind me that decided converting a type writer into a digital keyboard was a good idea.

[trcollinson]

I understand your sentiment entirely. I have thought the same way. However, I have to ask, why would you, or I, or any other person creating substantial value for a company, ever in their right mind take a 10% pay cut (or any other level of pay cut or reduction) in order to be MORE efficient? Our attitude in this industry drives me crazy lately. And really it has been my own attitude for a long time. We ask to be more efficient, to produce better and more valuable assets for our employer, we believe in their vision, and in return we have to beg and plead to help ourselves become more efficient, often to our own financial detriment. It's rather disheartening.

[HarryHirsch]

why would you, or I, or any other person creating substantial value for a company, ever in their right mind take a 10% pay cut

Because markets. In sales you learn fairly quickly that price isn't determined by cost or value added but exclusively by what the market will bear. Since US labour has little negotiating power even a programmer will have to buy quiet space.

[coffeeski]

All things being equal, yeah I'd love to keep 10% of my pay, but if I have to give up X to get private space, which would help my happiness at work, I would do that. My happiness is worth atleast 10% of my pay. Life is more then money

[NTripleOne]

I couldn't care less for efficiency, I'm going to get roughly the same amount of work done in a shitty office and in a good one, that's just how I am - but it would make me a helluva lot happier and allow me to actually enjoy doing the job I should enjoy.

[ddlatham]

Because it makes me happier.

[ronnier]

The mechanical keyboard people in open offices bother me.

[jcadam]

The problem is the open office, not the mechanical keyboards (which are awesome, btw).

[throwanem]

The noise is from bottoming out. Put spacers on the keycap stems, and it stops being a problem, no matter what kind of switch you use.

This is easy to do and only a little time-consuming. It's easier and faster when you take a cheap Bic pen, pull out the tip and ink tube, and use the body tube to press the spacers down on the stems - it's just the right diameter, and makes the job much faster.

The spacers are cheap, too, being simple silicone rubber O-rings, and as an extra benefit, the rubber eats up a lot of the bottoming-out force that'd otherwise be transmitted up the key into your fingers, which means you type more comfortably as well as more quietly.

[cr0sh]

> The noise is from bottoming out.

Not with my Model M!

/buckling springs ftw...

[throwanem]

I remember my Model Ms with fond nostalgia. I have no desire whatsoever to give up my MX Blues and return to them.

[abritinthebay]

Or people could just type with less force?

I'm not sure where the cultural norm of beating up a keyboard comes from but it's a very inefficient way to type.

[throwanem]

Beats me, but if it comes down to a choice between reengineering people's behavior or reengineering their tools so they can do the same thing they've always done but not get such a poor result, I know which one I've seen to work and which one I haven't.

[cdegroot]

I'm a nice guy, I paid the extra $$ for silent mechanical keys (http://matias.ca/switches/quiet/) ;-)

[mark-r]

Thank you! I've been looking for a keyboard like that for years, ever since I had to get rid of my old Zeos mechanical to keep my wife from going insane in our shared office space. The Quiet Pro PC looks absolutely perfect.

[busterarm]

Yeah, but then you have to have those terrible, bastard ALPS switches. Sorry, strong personal preference here.

I use Topre anyway.

[mark-r]

The switches are their own, they only use ALPS for the keytops. Unless they contract out to ALPS for manufacturing and I missed it.

[nilkn]

In my opinion, if you know you're going to be working in an open office setting, you should try to be courteous and minimize the negative impact you have on your coworkers. I think you should be willing to make the choice to use a quieter keyboard that isn't necessarily your favorite.

So I'd say the problem is with both. The open office is the ultimate source of the issue, but it can be compounded by workers who make choices that exacerbate the situation. The reality is that an open office can be quite pleasant if the people working in it collectively make effective choices that take into account the well-being of the group.

[maxxxxx]

I recently got one and I admit it's really loud. But this shouldn't be an issue in a decent workplace. I have several guys near me who have loud voices and talk a lot. That's worse than a loud keyboard. Open office plans are the problem, not keyboards or loud people.

[drewolbrich]

I am distracted by your loud keyboard. Frequently, I find myself wishing that you had a quiet keyboard like everyone else in the office. I am particularly irritated by the noise of your keyboard each morning when you write long emails or posts. When you are coding and there are frequent long breaks when you are thinking, it is not quite as distracting, but I still don't like it.

I agree with you that open office plans are the problem, but your keyboard makes that problem worse.

[maxxxxx]

"I am particularly irritated by the noise of your keyboard each morning when you write long emails or posts."

My E-mails are pretty short :-). However, I don't enjoy you telling your coworkers about your weekend every Monday morning.

Open offices are just stupid. They cause conflict where there shouldn't be.

[drewolbrich]

In my parallel universe, you're also the one telling your coworkers about your weekend every Monday morning, but I agree with your point. :-)

> Open offices are just stupid. They cause conflict where there shouldn't be.

Yes.

I would kill someone for a walled office, even if there was a high risk of life imprisonment, as long as there was some assurance that the prison cell would have walls.

[s73ver]

At the same time, other people being inconsiderate doesn't excuse you being inconsiderate as well.

[seanmcdirmid]

I was using a Model M when working in an open office in China. No one really cared, because the guy in the cubicle next to me had a sunflower/watermelon seed habit. Damn, no one should be de-shelling seeds in an open office! Or in the afternoon we would have fruit, and pear day everyone would be smacking and slurping (Chinese pears are much more watery than western pears, I hate pear day!), or everyone talking/arguing/whatever. Turns out my keyboard wasn't weird in what was already a high noise environment.

I had to invest in a pair of Bose noise cancellation headphone a long time ago.

[rhino369]

I won't even use my model M and I have a personal office (that I usually leave the door open to). It's loud as hell. I'm skeptical nobody cared.

But typing on a model M is pure sex.

[softawre]

This is true. But, if you're in an open office, don't you think the decent thing to do is to not speak loudly (and therefore not use a loud mechanical keyboard)?

There are mech keyboards with more quiet switches. At least use one of those.

[mindcrime]

But, if you're in an open office, don't you think the decent thing to do is to not speak loudly (and therefore not use a loud mechanical keyboard)?

No, that just shows tacit acceptance of the situation and exacerbates the problem over time. If you work in an open plan environment, the best thing to do is use the noisiest keyboard you can find, wear headphones that intentionally leak noise and listen to your music loud, do as many personal phone calls as you can from your desk, etc. And then, when people complain, point out that you didn't ask for an open plan office, and ask them to go to their manager and explain how horrible open plan is.

Worst case, you get fired. Big deal, now you have a chance to look for a place to work that isn't brain dead.

[Declanomous]

Pretty much every mechanical keyboard will be loud. I use a board with Cherry Red switches at work, and while it's much quieter than my board with Cherry Blue switches that I use at home, it is still louder than the rubber dome keyboard it replaced.

It doesn't bother my coworkers, but I also have an actual cube, so there's at least a little bit of fabric-covered foam inbetween us.

[nsxwolf]

If someone is complaining about Cherry Reds, I think they're asking for too much. Perhaps they should look for work in the library sciences.

[maxxxxx]

Sure. It's good to be courteous. But in the end it comes down to the fact that open offices are just plain stupid. I don't know what the motivation behind them is but it's certainly not to make a productive workplace.

[tomjen3]

I agree with you that open office is the problem, however my old mechanical keyboard is louder than most people with a loud voice and it would probably be used more often.

[bitexploder]

I have never suffered the tyranny of an open office. I do use a loud keyboard and honestly can't imagine going without it.

I am easily distracted by sensory stimuli. It ruins my concentration. At home I have some nice in ear noise isolating ear buds and some of those ear muffs designed for yard work. My children can, and do, reenact world wars on the hard woods above me and I can't hear it.

If I ever were in an open office, when I do deep work, those things would stay on.

So I sympathize, but the open office puts knowledge workers who need to concentrate and type in a lose / lose environment.

[varelse]

So you would prefer your coworkers develop RSI symptoms from straining to use a laptop keyboard? Not all of us can use laptops for extended periods of time. Now if I could type with my brain (and I don't mean by smashing my head repeatedly on the keyboard), that's Sam Altman status quo shattering next-level stuff, but I don't think we're there yet.

As others have replied, the problem isn't my typing, it's <40 square feet of personal space and no noise partitioning whatsoever.

[blhack]

The standard keyboard layout, which every mechanical keyboard I've ever seen (including my beloved model M) is terrible for your wrists. The people using mechanical keyboards are not saving themselves anything.

Get a proper ergonomic keyboard like the microsoft sculpt if you actually care about the health of you hands.

Mechanical keyboards are cool, which is why I own one, and when I had an office why I used one every day. But mechanical keyboards are like the loud exhaust that people put on their cars. Yeah, there is a reason that some cars have loud exhausts, but that isn't why you put that on your honda civic.

[_jal]

You appear to think that mechanical boards cannot be ergonomic. I agree that the Model M and friends are terrible, but that's hardly[1] the end[2] of the mechanical[3] ergo[4] story[5].

[1] https://ergodox-ez.com/ [2] https://atreus.technomancy.us/ [3] https://trulyergonomic.com/store/index.php [4] https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/649yo0... [5] http://matias.ca/ergopro/pc/

[blhack]

Fair point. There are some ergonomic mechanical keyboards. I have never personally seen one in use. It's always stuff like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/6cnfta...

Which are beautiful, and make wonderful noises, but are certainly not built to prevent the type of RSI that comes with typing.

[seanmcdirmid]

> The standard keyboard layout, which every mechanical keyboard I've ever seen (including my beloved model M) is terrible for your wrists.

If you type a lot over a prolonged period of time, yes. If you type in short bursts (like most programmers), no, mechanicals are actually useful.

> Get a proper ergonomic keyboard like the microsoft sculpt if you actually care about the health of you hands.

Again, if you are an old fashioned typist working on memos, this advice holds, otherwise....

[blhack]

>If you type a lot over a prolonged period of time, yes. If you type in short bursts (like most programmers), no, mechanicals are actually useful.

Is this really how most programmers work, though? When I'm learning a new language or tool, sure, but after that it's mostly just the activity of writing the code.

[varelse]

I've been down this route many times. And after Dvorak, Kinesis, and a wide assortment of supposedly ergonomic keyboards, El-cheapo $15 Kensington USB keyboards and $20 Logitech trac-balls turn out to work best with my wrists, occasionally aided by Imax smartgloves.

I have a veritable museum of failed keyboards and pointing devices in my closet. IMO there is no silver bullet here. Also to extend your automotive metaphor, my nephew's late model diesel pickup gets 30+ mpg. Appearances and brand new shiny can be deceiving.

[blhack]

Have you tried the sculpt? I was having wrist pain that was preventing me from working up until about a week after mine arrived.

[splintercell]

> Get a proper ergonomic keyboard like the microsoft sculpt if you actually care about the health of you hands.

I had this conversation with my coworker a few minutes ago who uses an ergonomic keyboard. I believe that the amount of stress you're going to have from a non-ergonomic keyboard is directly related to your posture, which is directly related to your anatomy. For instance my coworker is very wide and he prefers to spread his elbows out while typing.

I, on the other hand don't spread out my elbows that far out, so I don't really feel that must stress while typing for long hours.

One thing which I do notice is that I type by moving my right wrist around (and most people do that to keep their wrists free for grabbing mouse and other things). But if I try doing touch typing where I keep my fingers on the homerow, then my wrists hurt.

Maybe I'm going to give ergo-dox a shot to see what am I missing.

[givemefive]

I have a proper keyboard[1], thank you very much. It also destroys a Microsoft Sculpt in terms of ergonomics.

1. https://www.kinesis-ergo.com/shop/advantage2/

[blhack]

How do you like this keyboard?

[Joeri]

I struggled a long time with RSI, and for me both the mechanical and ergonomic keyboards solve the problem. A model M fixed it, and then later a microsoft comfort curve also fixed it. The comfort curve is a lot more quiet, so out of respect for my coworkers I use that one, although I do miss the feel of the model M.

[cpwright]

I have a Kinesis ergonomic keyboard with Cherry Red mechanical switches, without it I get wrist pain.

[amorphid]

Anything noisy in an open office, including me when forget to lower my voice, is bothersome :)

[d883kd8]

They are like Accelerationists, bringing about the end of an undesirable system by increasing the damage it causes until it cannot be ignored.

[_jal]

Drifting rather off-topic here, but why credit the "heighten the contradictions" strategy to a weird modern academic cult? Rebranding Leninist ideas about sabotage, I guess, makes it seem fresh to the rubes. Never mind that attempting to time social and political systems doesn't work much better than timing the market, and if you get it wrong, you're just being a horrible person. (Assuming your underlying goals are good ones to begin with.)

[mahyarm]

I've seen the concept mentioned in writing from the 1800s, and you can probably see it even further back. I don't know if it's that modern ;)

[abritinthebay]

Because it's a cute one word term?

[Jach]

"Hey everyone, I'm working!"

Personally I'd rather listen to mechanical keyboards rather than people having meetings at their desks, I can fairly easily tune out non-human sounds... Unfortunately not many people seem to have them despite my office being the 'geekiest' in the Seattle region. sigh

[strictnein]

Agreed.

I have a mechanical keyboard at home (Corsair Gaming K95 RGB), but at work I use a Mac wired keyboard (on a PC). Super quiet and probably the best performing scissor switch keyboard.

edit: proper Mac keyboard type

[arkitaip]

Hey, I have the same keyboard! Do you actually use all the extra G keys or macros? I thought I would but the cognitive load of memorizing what each G key stands for is too much.

[strictnein]

I've tried to, but I'm in the same boat as you I think.

[kentt]

I'm guessing you mean scissor switch not membrane.

[strictnein]

Ahh, yes, you're correct.

[seanmcdirmid]

This is why I gave up my old IBM Model M for a quieter DAS Model S. I don't really want to type on cheaper mushy keyboards, so this is a nice compromise.

[djsumdog]

I have had mechanical keyboards four different offices (1 cube, 3 open workspaces) and got very lucky with people either not minding or, at one company, a co-worker saying "that's music to my hears."

I've had a friend on the wrong floor at one company who had to switch to MX Browns with o-ring dampeners.

If a company banned me from using a mech keyboard entirely, I'd start looking for another job.

[bitmapbrother]

If you're going to use a mechanical keyboard in an open office have the courtesy to at least install dampeners.

[Arizhel]

Mechanical keyboards are better for RSI and general comfort.

If you don't like them, complain to your manager that you need walled offices.

[NTripleOne]

Also be careful not to point out that "keyboard noise" is the crux of the issue, since then you'll end up with those employees being told they can't use their nice keyboards that they probably paid a lot for just to use at work, which will result in said employees really, really not liking you if they find out it was you that complained.

[Arizhel]

Exactly. That's a great way to poison a relationship with a coworker.

[martinknafve]

Any source for the statement on RSI? I googled but just found anecdotes.

[Arizhel]

Anecdotes are the best you're going to get on that. Who's going to fund a serious scientific study on the effects of mechanical keyboards on RSI? The mechanical keyboard makers comprise a very small, niche industry these days.

The anecdotes are correct: with a proper mechanical keyboard, you don't have to bottom out on the keys, and only have to press enough to make them click. Once you retrain yourself to do that, then you're putting a lot less stress on your fingers, compared to rubber-dome keyboards where you're forced to mash the keys down until they bottom out.

[dralley]

Brown-type switches are OK, it's the blue-type keys that are problematic.

[teemwerk]

Yeah, but he's talking about the conversion kits to digitize input on a typewriter. That's next level annoying.

[QuantumGravy]

Wait, that's a thing? (Quickly Googling...) OMG, that's a thing.

People in the office are still using old-school typewriters for certain official documents, so I expect I can get away with it. If I can't concentrate due to existing office noise, I may as well have some fun. Thanks!

[rublev]

I used to work in a room with over 300 Model M's. I think I have PTSD from it. Machine gun fire from 9am til 5pm.

[splintercell]

I used to be the blue-vs-brown guy (mostly because my brown keyboard made a lot less sound that my coworker's blue), but then I tried his keyboard and let him try mine and it turned out that it wasn't about the keyboard switches, rather it was about the person using them. My blues made a lot less sound than his browns.

[markatkinson]

I was told my brown switches were horrendous :(

[maccard]

In most cases, it's the keys bottoming out rather the switches. Guy in our office with a membrane keyboard who smashes the keys into oblivion is far louder than the two mechanical keyboards in the same space.

[nsxwolf]

By the way, I cannot type without bottoming out, and I suspect this is something many people simply cannot learn to do. My hands will just not cooperate. I use Topre switches, which are supposedly quite ideal for practicing this magical voodoo typing technique, and when pressing a key enough to activate it but not bottom out, I have about a 50-50 chance of not activating the key at all. It's not something that's ever going to get better with practice, and frankly, I'm not personally aware of any detrimental effects of my bad bottom-out typing.

[splintercell]

I use a topre too, and I bottomed out too, as it turned out that blues a lot better in terms of teaching you not to bottom out (because they have an audible click which provides you about the feedback of the actuation point).

I'd recommend to get used blue and try it out.

[Phlarp]

you can get o-rings to dampen the bottoming-out of the keycap.

I use green switches with o-rings in a semi-open office layout and the only people who have ever noticed it are other mech enthusiasts. Browns with o-rings would be even quieter than greens.

[JustSomeNobody]

I have brown keys and bottoming out is definitely the noisy part.

[NTripleOne]

Buy some o-rings, they really do help with the bottoming out noise. Alternatively, train yourself not to bottom out.

[ferongr]

Learning to type without bottoming out not only will mostly elliminate the noise of brown switches but also reduce the shock tranmitted to the fingers. Ever since I stopped bottoming out (except for the spacebar and pinky-operated backspace) my typing comfort went up a lot.

[falcolas]

It's the keys bottoming out. Add some rubber o-rings to dampen that sound.

[rhinoceraptor]

That only works for some keycap profiles, if you use DSA or SA profile then you can't really dampen them well.

[wastedhours]

Was once commended on my hard work since a manager could hear my constant typing on my Browns. Annoyed a lot of people in the process, of course.

[BatFastard]

Funny thing about loud keyboards. A few years ago my company had a programming pit, and I could tell when ever one of my younger programmers was chatting with a friend rather than working. His typing rate would go from 20 wpm to 100 wpm. FYI I quickly abandoned the programming pit, back to quite workspaces for all!

[atemerev]

I have all that, and the best part is I don't need to commute. :) Working remotely is perfect.

[ljw1001]

Working remotely is probably the most-likely trend to supplant open offices. It doesn't cost the company any hard cash (like real offices would), and any productivity differences are nearly invisible, as they are with open offices.

[gk1]

I used to work out of an open-floor co-working space. I just moved to a new space that's 2x the price, just because it comes with an enclosed office.

I'm so glad I did it. If I can get just a few more hours of productivity each month then the upgrade pays for itself.

[goshx]

Make sure you ask for a ceiling as well. I asked for a small office and I got one. It doesn't have ceiling because my boss didn't want to put one, for whatever reason, so it is useless.

[marcosdumay]

> The only thing in my office that works well with interruptions is my CPU.

You certainly have never tried to write interruption handling code...

[voidlogic]

>The only thing in my office that works well with interruptions is my CPU.

Slight tangent:

This isn't even true, context switch time has not scaled (equally) with improvements in processing power (IPC, freq and functional-unit parallelism). A PIII in 1999 spent proportionally less of its operating wall time performing a context switch compared to modern processing. Turns out flushing TLBs and the like is not fast. This is why managing interrupts properly is very important on server class hardware.

[wcummings]

>I'd rather have a Cube farm

Cubes cost money, but Silly Valley CEOs have done such a great job convincing gullible young workers that they actually like open offices.

[Florin_Andrei]

> Why do CEO's think they're alone in the need for quiet spaces where they can focus?

No, they just think they're more deserving of it.

[adamnemecek]

It's from wsj. They consider you replaceable.

[closeparen]

I don't think it's realistic to put the masses in their own offices at any productivity level if it means you need more Silicon Valley or San Francisco square feet.

But an office and the opportunity to live somewhere I can spend less than 50% of my income on a reasonable apartment, I'd take that offer in a heartbeat.

[rotten]

I've often thought about taking my laptop into a bathroom stall so I could get some work done for a few minutes.

[solnyshok]

careful what you wish for. I also like silence. But I'd rather use noise cancelling headphones than work in the booth among thousands other booths.

[StevePerkins]

For the life of me, I don't understand how "thousands of cubes" is somehow worse than "thousands of $15 Ikea tables".

It's just a matter of fads and fashion. Cubicles are "so 90's", while crappy tables thrown together in a loud frat house romper room is "2000's".

I understand that each generation has an impulse to differentiate themselves from the previous one. But in this specific case, it is absolutely a productivity and quality-of-life downgrade. The purpose is for management to save money, period.

[yourapostasy]

> The purpose is for management to save money, period.

Is saving money the real purpose, or the fig leaf for the actual purpose?

If saving money is the real purpose, then Work From Home (WFH) drops putative facilities costs to zero. Forget shaving a square foot here or a tenth of a square meter there: send everyone to their home offices, drop it to zero, call it a day, and collect the bonus check on your way out. No leadership recognition of the valuation assigned to the negative productivity impact of open offices signals that there is no quantified impact for WFH either, despite claims to the contrary. One can't have it both ways, claiming one can measure the productivity impact of WFH and not open offices. In the absence of actual quantification, if saving money on physical plant/facilities was the real purpose, WFH would win.

[StevePerkins]

Well yes, there are also elements of power and control. Management worries that employees will do less work if they are not present and under observation (sad truth: for the bottom 90% of employees, they're probably correct). And open floor plans, as the high-tech sweatshop model that they are, provide the lowest cost and maximum observation.

But to my point about the degree to which fads and fashion come into play... it's bizarre that so many peers either:

(1) argue in favor of open floor plans ("More collaborative! More fun! Not all old and stuffy like cubes!"), or

(2) argue in favor of work-from-home ("More productive! Less distractions! Not all old and stuffy like cubes!"), or

(3) both, from one sentence to the next.

Open floor plans and work from home are POLAR OPPOSITES. The only thing they have in common is that they're both "not cubes". So it's bizarre to me that there aren't more moderate voices calling for on-prem workplaces of higher quality.

[yourapostasy]

I suspect what is happening is no management team of a category killer company exists that comes out and says, "we treat our developers right, that is our key to success", or even a softer version of that, sufficiently to develop cargo culting by management in other companies. I don't think quantification will help in this situation, and thus even higher quality on-prem workplaces lose out, as the productivity metrics are confounded by too many factors, and are not simple to communicate to finance.

If I was on a management team of a category killer that figured out doing the opposite of what everyone else was doing was helping my company, then I wouldn't be broadcasting that. In this case, if I figured out that high quality workplaces (whether at home or on-prem) conferred substantial competitive advantages, then I sure wouldn't be telling my competitors that.

If it came out that Apple for example, consistently put in high quality workplaces for the teams that developed their category-killing products, and took steps to hide that fact from the world because they recognized its competitive advantage, then there might be some recognition and cargo culting. Much of management is a social activity as much as an analytical activity.

[strictnein]

I want a cube because it's not the noise that bothers me but the constant motion on the periphery of my vision.

Cubes can be setup properly. They don't need to be row after row after row of cubes. We have them setup in pods that hold 6-8 people, one pod for each dev team. Only one way in or out, so there's no traffic moving through, with a small table in the middle that's mainly used to eat lunch or store treats that people bring in.

[cdegroot]

That. My previous employer was a subsidiary of a large US company. The subsidiary was all hip and open plan and I hated our office, even after I got some mild adaptations done (moved team assignments to "positive space" islands and install a 20" sound partition between teams' desks so at least teams had some privacy). The mothership had these neat Herman Miller layouts with team pods. It looked (to my European design sensitivities) butt-ugly, but I loved sitting there. So quiet, and the only bit of interruption you had was probably relevant because it came out of your team. Not a random sales guy strolling by (sorry, sales peeps - love you, but you're a noisy bunch ;-))

[jlebrech]

maybe you need a cube-aware voice chat system. or just a contact list inside of noise cancelling headphones.

[strictnein]

How would that help limit movement in my peripheral vision?

[djsumdog]

I've worked in tons of cubes for the first seven years of my career. I thought nothing could be worse, until I discovered the hell of open plan offices. I've been stuck in them for the past six years and it's a new level of hell.

Have you been in a cube? You don't have to watch other's pick their noses. It's way better than open workspaces.

[Deinos]

I appreciate a nice pair of noise-cancelling headphones, but they tend to cause pain and irritation when worn for long periods of time.

[Already__Taken]

Consider finding some pilots headsets, now that's fancy quality.

[jschwartzi]

Or studio monitor headphones. I can wear mine for hours.

[Aeolun]

Everyone can work in a noisy space where interruptions abound. They're just going to be hella unproductive.

[mmaunder]

WSJ thinks that. Not CEOs.

~a CEO

[draw_down]

"If you're reading it, it's for you."