[andrew93101]

I think the successfulness of open space plans depends greatly on the work you're doing.

If you're working primarily alone on difficult engineering problems, with well-defined specifications and a clear division of who owns what part of the code, then (from my experience) solitary offices are more productive. Communication doesn't need to be as high-bandwidth, and concentration needs to be deep.

On the other hand, there are many environments that are different. If your organization intentionally has low-fidelity product requirements, the cost of communicating with business stakeholders needs to be low. If you intentionally eschew code ownership, engineers will frequently be working in areas of the codebase they haven't worked in before and need to talk to colleagues who know it better.

Open plans make concentration harder and communication easier. Closed office plans are the reverse. I think no office plan is "better" than the other, but rather our office plan should fit the work style of your organization.

[nessus42]

I've always had an office until the last few years. Now I work in a cubicle. My feeling is that communication was much easier for me in an environment with offices. The reason for this is that I could have in-depth conversation with others in an office. In a cubicle, I feel that having a conversation with someone else is antisocial because it will annoy everyone else.

The real reason for cubicles and open floor plans is that it makes the bean counters happier. Everything else is rationalization, IMHO.

[icebraining]

Are the two really opposed? At my job, we have an open floor plan and a couple of closed rooms where people go for conversations, talking on the phone, etc. Seems to work fine, although I don't have much of a gauge to measure by.

[nessus42]

We tend to call those "meetings" rather than "conversations".

[ericras]

What if two people need to work together on a computer and they only have desktops. The commom-area closed room doesn't do them any good.

[grannyg00se]

The common-area closed room should have a desktop computer in it.

[jlarocco]

I don't buy your arguments in favor of open space plans.

In my experience, clarifying a requirement or requesting a feature always takes far less time than coding it up. As a developer, I'd rather you call me over to your office and we spend 30 minutes discussing what you want, then I go back to my office and spend an hour working on it and get back to you if I have any more questions.

If the business stakeholders are changing requirements and coming up with new ones so often that they need constant communication, then there's a problem. Hold a meeting to get the requirements nailed down, then give the developers some quite time to work.

For developer-developer questions I've found it's almost always easier to ask questions via email, instant message or IRC because of copy/paste.

[mindcrime]

Open plans make concentration harder and communication easier. Closed office plans are the reverse. I think no office plan is "better" than the other, but rather our office plan should fit the work style of your organization.

I actually mostly agree with that in a sense. I won't deny that - at times - there can be advantages to the increased communications bandwidth of having everybody in one small space, communicating freely. I just don't think it's the optimal setup for all the time.

To elaborate on what I said above, if Fogbeam Labs had funding and employees and all that jazz, I would plan on putting employees in private offices. But, I'd also want to accompany that with plenty of open space, with tables, chairs, couches, and lots of big whiteboards-on-wheels, so that people would have a place to spontaneously self-organize into small groups to collaborate on an ad-hoc, as-needed basis. But yet, everyone would have the option of retreating to their private office for periods of deep thought and intense focus.

The thing is, I think that it would be better to put the open-space lounge like areas near the outside walls of the building, where the natural light is... which would mean putting individual offices near the core, away from the natural light. On that point, I'd love to hear the opinions of other HN'ers. What would you prefer, a private office with less access to natural light, and the lounge-like area described above near the windows, OR an office with a window, and the collaborative space in the middle, away from the natural light?

[nessus42]

Natural light in offices, lounges in center. A few nooks with natural light.

[MDCore]

You're missing out on a potentially happy medium: Small offices of up to (for example) four people. When you're all working together on a project, the communication is likely to be relevant to everyone in the small room. Better than being out in the open plan where unrelated people are having discussions that might be interesting, but are really just distracting.

[rhizome]

Open plans make concentration harder and communication easier

So in other words, all else equal, they reduce the signal to noise ratio.