[andyking]

As a case in point, I opened up this BBC News page in an Elinks text-mode browser, so that I can read the content without the person at the other side of the office knowing I'm reading BBC News instead of doing whatever it is I'm supposed to be doing.

I'm far, far more efficient in my work when I have a bit of privacy, and I can relax and get on with things without thinking my screen is constantly being overlooked by colleagues. The constant feeling of being watched doesn't lead to more efficient work, just pointless stress.

A lot of people have 'strategically-placed' objects on their desks, between their monitors and other staff. Bags, boxes, and so on. No one wants to be in this type of office.

[speeder]

I remember when I worked into a large open plan office, people were obviously very "alt-tab jumpy" or were good in wasting time (ie: leave code on screen, and then do their best to not work while looking that they were working).

But soon one junior guy got tired of this, and decided to not even hide it, he just browsed comedic blogs and youtube at will...

Soon other people followed...

Soon the entire office was improductive with lots of people getting their attention drawn to other people youtube videos.

Then the firings started... and then the quittings started in retaliation to the firings. Yay, problem solved, because now there are so few employees that the empty computers are enough to block the vision of each other.

I wonder how they are doing now.

[Silhouette]

Your position seems strange to me. I'm all for keeping things light-hearted at the office and having a bit of downtime and socialisation during the working day, but if people are doing that all the time and not doing the job they are paid for, why shouldn't they be fired? Their attendance at the office and collection of pay is basically fraud. If others quit voluntarily in retaliation at firing people who don't do their job, then it's not a huge stretch to guess that the additional quitters weren't the most diligent staff in the organisation either. Maybe the employer is better off without them.

[speeder]

I am not saying that people should not be fired, some of the fired people did deserved it, since their productivity dropped a lot.

The thing is, their productivity dropped because the open plan office allowed other people to easily distract them. And before that, they were perfectly productive.

Also the quitters, were mostly high-level people (that started as junior coders and ended being managers) that were unhappy with how the most senior managers handled all the stuff.

If the office was not a wide open plan, people would not waste time alt-tabbing a lot (they would read whatever news they want, and then return to work) or distracting other people (ie: tired people that feared opening a news site would open a news site instead of drawing productive people into conversations), or by getting distracted by the junior programmer that decided to watch youtube and screw the alt-tab behavior.

Yes, it is a quite extreme example, a sort of outlier, not all open offices will have a massive loss of employees (either due to firings or quittings) but it is a good example of how the paranoia of being watched, and then the complete lack of it, can totally wreck the workplace.

[RyanZAG]

In general, people need about 5-15 mins of break for every 60 mins of work. The problem with the above situation is that everyone was taking those 5-15 mins at different times and distracting others. It's pretty clear that with enough people, there will always be someone taking a break and distracting others almost constantly.

The other option is to force people to never take a break, which leads to an immense number of other issues and lower productivity.

[Nursie]

I've even seen people with wing-mirrors attached to the monitor!

That said, I tend to get over it and browse what I feel like, even if my screen can be seen. Accusations of timewasting have rarely been forthcoming because I'm still very productive.

[johnward]

"No one wants to be in this type of office." I didn't want to be in a cube farm when I was there either but at least there was a bit of "privacy" even though someone was logging everything I did on my computer. The open office plan of my office doesn't bother me too much. I just started to ignore people seeing me browse. If someone says something (which no one has) I plan on making a point that I still get all of my work done. I still end up getting the most work done when I'm at home.