[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?