[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?

[varelse]

Disagreed (reasonably politely but persistently with lots of data) with upper management about what became a key technology to Google a year after I left. Got told to shut up about that technology or leave. Chose the latter and made a successful career out of being an expert in that technology. Found out later through my contacts that HR slammed the door behind me.

[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.

[s73ver]

I don't think I would miss out that much. For one, that environment, especially with a place called "The Oven" sounds absolutely awful to me. Second, it's not like people would lock themselves in their offices and never see each other.

Third, and I may not like to admit this, but I'd complain quite a lot about the setup in a place nicknamed "The Oven". It might start grating on other people, and ruining the atmosphere.

[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...

[noarchy]

I actually agree that the Agile Manifesto is a good read. That's why I tend to use air quotes when discussing "Agile" at any shop, because I think it rarely resembles anything in the Manifesto. But I'm not sure one can sell certification courses as easily based on the elegant-yet-simple principles outlined in the Manifesto.

[dasmoth]

I'd agree with most of that, but for me the point where it starts to go off the rails is

The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

No, not mandating stand ups and open offices, but it's used to justify those things...

[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

[noarchy]

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

I tend to think that the entire concept of waterfall is a great strawman. At some point, "rapid iteration" runs into the cold, hard reality of how companies tend to work. There are definitely still deadlines, even if no one wants to come out and call them that.

I don't want to suggest that I'm dismissing everything coming out of Scrum (and its cousins) out of hand. But I also think that there's sometimes too much salesmanship pushing it. This represents the commidifying of Agile itself, where now there is money to be made in coaching teams, and selling certifications, regardless of what the end result is.

[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!+`