[abalone]

Suffers from the same flaw as most critiques of open plan: it focuses on individual productivity while failing to understand how it contributes to team productivity.

Cornell did a study of open plan awhile back that you should all read. I posted it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7507404

The misunderstanding here is that it's just about serendipitously "overhearing" other conversations.

1. Open plan makes it easier to ask questions. Those are "disruptions", yes, but what the Cornell study found is that in open plan it's actually easier to "read" a person and see if it's an ok time to ask a question, and to quickly reply or say ask me later, and so forth, to efficiently manage those disruptions. Compare that to offices where you are much less likely to ask questions, knock on a door, etc., and where when it does happen it may turn into a much longer disruption.

2. They found it also gives us more courage to ask potentially "silly" questions. Which can be the genesis of good ideas and help us get unstuck, contributing to team creativity and productivity.

3. They noted that developer reactions to office plans are often biased towards maximizing personal productivity in order to maximize (short-term) personal benefit, whereas the company benefits from a balance of personal and team productivity. That's a fancy way of saying we'd rather spend our time coding than helping others, so we may not instinctively appreciate the benefits of open plan as much. Which I think is the case here.

[msluyter]

I call your one study and raise you 100:

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. Compared with standard offices, employees experienced more uncontrolled interactions, higher levels of stress, and lower levels of concentration and motivation. When David Craig surveyed some thirty-eight thousand workers, he found that interruptions by colleagues were detrimental to productivity, and that the more senior the employee, the worse she fared.

Source: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/currency/2014/01/the-o...

Edited to add: the study by Matthew Davis referenced above is behind a paywall; if anyone can actually access it, I'd be curious to know for sure if this summary is accurate/correct.

[Anderkent]

It's not clear from the article if the study measures individual productivity or team results. The pdf is paywalled unfortunately, can anyone clarify?

[shaneofalltrad]

These studies are all great, but fall under what type of students and/or test subjects that already have been filtered in other ways before being tested. We all are different. Along your request to clarify, I would like to request any studies on a 7-9 man team.

I am one of those people who get distracted easily and am a new programmer. Working on a Scrum team of less than 10, I found this has grown into being very productive for the team and my growth, as I pick up the conversations, I am actually learning things and I throw my music on if the chatter is unproductive. I think the amount of dev's in the pit really can max out and that is what the writer of this article has probably experienced.

[cwal37]

Google cached what is presumably a draft or first submission of the article: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Im7GHQR...

[cwal37]

I spent a while trying to get it, went through the online library systems of two very different universities, which should theoretically cover almost every topic, and a lab. However, it seems that it's listed as an ebook in at least one of the systems, and it won't let me grab any specific article. I could request a physical or scanned copy I guess, but that would take longer than is probably worthwhile.

However, google search turned up that leeds link you probably came across in google scholar (or at least I did), and while the link appears to be dead, google has kept a cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Im7GHQR...

[briantakita]

> he found that interruptions by colleagues were detrimental to productivity, and that the more senior the employee, the worse she fared.

My personal take. Learning a craft is a lifelong endeavor. Experience builds. The path is organic & fractal-like.

If someone is senior, they have a context of experience that a more junior person does not have. Their brains are literally wired differently.

It's less satisfying to be around ignorant (I don't mean judgement, just lack of context) people. Especially ignorant people who affect how you do your job.

Being a senior person means there is an aspect of leadership involved. You mentor & lead the more junior people in your craft. However, masters don't spend most of their time mentoring. They spend most of their time growing their own personal craft. They try to instill this process of continuous improvement onto their students.

[abalone]

I'd be curious to read the study too.

One of the most fascinating observations by Cornell is how self-interested employees are biased towards maximum individual productivity to the detriment of team productivity. I wonder if the 100 other studies controlled for that. Cornell is a pretty reputable institution. You know what they say.. 1 great study is worth 100 good ones.

[Realskeptic]

woah, thanks for sharing

[lawnchair_larry]

This is pure hell for people who actually do work, and often repeated by managers who don't "get it." Silly questions are not the genesis of good ideas, they're a denial of service attack on good work.

Read Peopleware.

[j-b]

Agreed. Also, trying not to listen to others conversations about the latest TV shows, etc. whilst trying to code negatively affects productivity and can generate some hostility towards the chattier folks in the office. Good, closed-ear headphones are a must.

[gdilla]

know thyself. If proximity distractions are too much, go somewhere else where you can have privacy if you need heightened focus for some block of time - a couch, stay at home, the library, a conf room, etc.

[mh_yam]

Problem is, many of the places which have the worst types of open plan also seem to be the most allergic to things like working from home and quiet rooms. Also, many people who work in them don't have the luxury of going to a couch or quiet room.

[izacus]

Or... you know... your own office.

[ljak]

"Let them eat cakes"

[RyJones]

It's amazing all the managers get offices but the ICs get productivity-enhancing cubes.

[Crito]

Stratification. Putting "regulars" into an open floor plan and leaving managers with offices is this concept on steroids (yes, I've actually seen that).

I believe that there is an unplanned unorchestrated ongoing attempt throughout the industry to prevent programmers from being seen as professionals. Reverse dress codes (you'll get odd looks and questions if you aren't dressed casually, but instead throw on a suit or even just a tie), cubicles, and open office space are all ways that this is done.

[npsimons]

Seconded; it's a cost and politics issue to have open floor plans, and mostly to "put those uppity programmers in their place." Wouldn't want them asking for what they're worth, now would we? And hey, by having them constantly distracted and not able to concentrate, they won't be as productive and therefore not feel justified in asking for what they're worth! I mean, if open floor plans and cubicles were really that conducive to thinking work, you'd see it in many more places, such as research, doctors offices, law firms, etc, etc.

[tieTYT]

Sounds like a conspiracy theory. Why would a company want its own employees to be unproductive?

I think it's more likely that open floor plans cost less per square foot or seem productive.

[npsimons]

I don't think it's a "conspiracy theory" in the traditional sense (although I do admit that my post was slanted a bit that way). I'm fairly certain it is as Crito said, "unplanned [and] unorchestrated". And there's no need for conspiracy: simple human nature in the aspects of politics and pettiness can easily explain it - it doesn't matter if you can prove what is more productive or cost effective, management ("owners" or their representatives) will continually push for more leverage and control over their workers, until they experience pushback, profits be damned.

[_kfb]

A company wouldn't. I posit that individual middle managers are the problem: whilst they do want the people working for them to be productive, they often subconsciously act to make sure they have the supposed "status" and that this comes (unknowingly, to them) at a cost.

[matwood]

I had to wear a tie my first few years of working. It sucked. I see dressing how I want as a sign of power, but I do agree with your overall point. Because I can dress how I want, doesn't mean I should look like a slob or unprofessional. I still wear nice clothes to work, just not corporate drone clothes anymore.

[Crito]

Dressing however you like is a great perk. However in my experience, many companies who say that they let their engineers dress however they like are actually requiring (although not explicitly) that their engineers dress down. If you are the sort of person who enjoys wearing a tie, you may find that doing so as an engineer is untenable at many tech companies.

Most people don't bother trying to dress that way so they never encounter the pushback and therefore never even realize that there is an unspoken rule in place. I recommend that everybody try to go to work on a monday with at least a white button up shirt with long sleeves and a tie. I think many of you who work places "without" dress codes will find the experience to be illuminating.

When I tried it, somebody from HR had a nice "chat" with me, explaining that the corporate culture was for engineers to dress casually.

[VLM]

Its the same chat that black people who didn't speak in dialect used to get, or who dared to learn to read, or get uppity in general. Its a pretty disturbing symptom of a sick workplace.

[matwood]

I haven't worn a tie to my current job, but routinely wear button up shirts and sport coats. The other engineers might joke if I have a job interview, but no one will tell you to not dress that way.

I'm not sure how I would respond if someone said I was not allowed to dress nice. It just seems like a completely foreign concept.

[bdunbar]

Not where I'm at, nor at my last job. At Last Employer it was true in the old building, where the floor plan was laid out in the late 90s.

When we moved to our new building, interior spaces were meeting rooms. Next layer out were manager cubes. Final layer out were the worker cubes, everyone faced the big floor-ceiling windows.

This actually had a drawback. There were cunning metal shades over the windows to keep out the sun. These worked great to block the sun. They also collected snow. Which, thanks to wind, and sun, melted into in a slant, like a roof. Our first Thaw in that building and the ice/snow ...

BONNNGGGGG through the building frame as the snow slides off and the shade vibrates like a giant tuning fork.

A few minutes later BONNNGGGGG as the next in line sheds snow.

And so on. This went on all .. day ... long.

[jaredmcateer]

Not mine. Everyone right up to Senior Director are embedded with the teams. The only exceptions that get an office and door is HR and Legal. When the CTO comes to our office, he also sits with us.

[twic]

Ditto. Except our HR people don't have their own offices. We don't have lawyers in-house. If i draw a line from the window through my desk to the far wall, it passes through a developer on another team, me, the product guy for another team, the CTO, a co-founder/head of sales, and two salespeople.

I routinely gain great value from speaking to the developer and product guy on either side of me, both of whom are immensely expert. The salespeople are fortunately far enough away and quiet enough that they're not a distraction.

[rhizome]

I'd take cubes over open floorplan any day.

[thejosh]

Great term, does that make when multiple people ask you questions a distributed denial of service?

[jami]

Meetings.

[thejosh]

Meetings you are expected to be able to handle a large amount of traffic because you are not doing any actual work.

[walshemj]

No the meeting is the work

[mh_yam]

Let me share some perspectives on the 'other side'.

1) I don't want people to be able to see me all the time. It's extremely nerve-racking and I feel like an animal in a zoo. And from my experience, people usually don't care whether I'm deep in some code or doing something less intense - they come over anyway. And people don't care whether their question is important enough to interrupt! As soon as someone taps my shoulder or calls my name, my concentration breaks completely and it takes me another half hour to get it back. Having offices makes people think harder and try to figure out the answer by themselves before going to someone else.

2) See above. The ratio of stupid questions that could have been resolved by Google or just another 2 minutes of thinking, to questions that ignited an interesting discussion is about 9 to 1.

3) How much work is going to get done by 'helping others'? 80-90% of a developer's work can be alone. Team productivity of course is important, but in development teams, this is really just the sum of individual developers' productivity.

[bigdubs]

Not only can the majority of a developers work can be done alone, but the majority of intra-team communication can be done over campfire/irc/im. You don't need to do meatspace communication to talk about code.

Unless there is an issue and things get heated, then it helps to sit people down in a room together. But this (should) happen rarely.

[hacknat]

Number 2 is totally accurate. I can't tell you the number of stupid questions I have fielded by our Junior devs, just because I'm in their site line.

I have the unique experience of having been both in offices and an open floor plan (most recently) for the same company. I can unequivocally state that I was more productive with an office. Junior devs had to measure the opportunity cost of coming to my office before asking me a Googleable question, I'm fairly certain one of them doesn't even use Google anymore.

[twic]

> I don't want people to be able to see me all the time. It's extremely nerve-[w]racking and I feel like an animal in a zoo.

I don't feel like this at all. In fact, that seems like an unhealthy reaction to me (so apologies for being judgmental). May i ask if you feel like this in other environments where there are other people around? Like, in a restaurant, or on public transport?

[mh_yam]

No, because in public places there is a degree of anonymity.

At work, people all know each other. Inevitably, you get nosy and annoying people who constantly check out what others are doing and peer into their screens.

[lifeisstillgood]

I think some of the best and most productive days I have had have been where I have been in the same cramped office as the rest of my team and we were all working on different chunks of the same problem - "Bob - are you using a list or a dictionary to pass the foobars in?"

That's great for a single team all working on one thing - but I do not see the open plan office as a series of nicely appointed open plan offices for 4-8 people with sound-proofing.

I have worked in open plan offices with hundreds of people in the same open-plan - hearing birthdays, laughter, horror, lunchtimes and socialising that have nothing to do with me personally or professionally.

Cornell may have found that it is useful to know what the rest if your physically co-located team is working on - yes - but not hundreds of others that I need to filter out too.

If serendipity is valuable to you as a company, throw a Wednesday afternoon mixer and expect groups to form and make something new to try out. But give them team rooms for that wednesday.

I am a big fan of "team rooms", and a big big fan of remote working and always on video. But living in the middle of hundreds of others just teaches us to ignore everyone.

[matwood]

I agree, team rooms are really the best of both. I've worked in all sorts of environments.

When I started programming years ago I had to wear a tie to work, and shared an office with one other person. I've since worked in large open plans, at home, in cubes, and in what would be called team rooms with everyone from the intern to the boss sitting within earshot.

IHMO, team rooms really do work. They help facilitate communication while not bothering those working with undue noise. If the team is under a crunch then naturally non-work conversations are kept to a minimum because the whole team knows it is crunch time. When there is more free time then the team adjusts accordingly.

[maaaats]

I agree, team rooms is a suitable middle ground. You get the info and time-saving disrupting between members of the team, and get to ignore stuff from outside the team. If there's people running between all the rooms, a designated "contact person of the day" for each team is a good idea.

[gtirloni]

I think team rooms are a problem if, and only if, they are permanent. I've worked in cubicles, open floors and permanent team rooms and in the later all people did was to use the privacy to surf the web, talk about stupid stuff they would not dare to mention in a open floor. It made it very tricky to concentrate, but at least the problem was concentrate and a talk with the team leader / manager would usually quiet thing down for a while.

Ad-hoc team rooms sound like a very good idea though.

[doktrin]

> But living in the middle of hundreds of others just teaches us to ignore everyone.

This is an important point. For many of us who have worked in startups, "open office plan" really just means "team room". I enjoyed working in open office plans in smaller companies since it basically just meant 5-10 engineers sitting in the same space.

Last year I worked for a mid-size company of about ~200 employees, most of whom were crammed into a gigantic factory like space with endless arrays of fluorescent lights lining the ceiling.

The experience was among the most distracting I can remember. This was in no small part due to having to overhear loud conversations between people in different departments, such as marketing and sales, which require much more verbal communication than engineering. if I can help it I will never work in a similar environment again.

[lifeisstillgood]

That is probably the most important point - the reason startups go from a "team room" to massive open plan is because when it all began there were only 5 of them so open plan equaled sane. Add 20 more people and it's not sane anymore.

the reason startups do open plan offices is because no one is concentrating on managing the culture of the startup as it grows. Open plan is then I suspect both cause and symptom.

A campaign for team rooms is needed

[Cthulhu_]

But it's not just about personal productivity, it's also about enjoying your work.

Spending a day in the noise, getting distracted, and simply unable to get your head down and finish the one task you're assigned to gets highly annoying and draining. Which has negative effects on that person and the team as a whole; poor mood (and attitude by extension), bad work, and a higher inclination to simply pack up and leave.

I work in a ~20 people open floor plan; fridays feel the most productive, because it's the quietest. Some colleagues feel hugely relieved after spending a day working from home and, by their own words, getting some work done for the first time in forever.

tl;dr we're individual people, not team productivity numbers.

[mankyd]

This raises an interesting point about design. I've worked for small (<8 person) startups where the open floor plan worked well. I now work for a large company (~50 people on my floor). We still use what I would call an "open floor plan" at the large company, but it has been carefully designed such that I only have 6 or so people in my immediate vicinity. Despite both being "open", they very different in layout from the each other.

At the large company, I can't generally here what's being discussed by folks in the next group over, except maybe as low background noise. I don't generally get distracted and I am easily able to grab my teammates' attention when I need it.

[prawks]

In the Cornell study cited, it specifically discusses that open plans should be fit for purpose. "There's no silver bullet."

I would love to be able to sit around my coworkers while I answer emails, catch up on the projects going on around me, bounce ideas off of people, etc. and then have a designated, quieter space to do "heads-down" work.

Why can't you have both?

[calinet6]

This is what I want. I've seen it work very well in coworking spaces, but never seen it in a dedicated office.

Trying to get my company to make this happen...

[twic]

The trouble with this is that if you have a quiet space, then they have a quiet space, which means when you're sitting in the chatty space, most of your colleagues will be in quiet spaces, so you don't get the benefit the chatty space might offer.

[mikevm]

> 1. Open plan makes it easier to ask questions. Those are "disruptions", yes, but what the Cornell study found is that in open plan it's actually easier to "read" a person and see if it's an OK time to ask a question, and to quickly reply or say ask me later, and so forth, to efficiently manage those disruptions.

So just for the off-chance that someone could ask me a question, I have force myself to wear headphones every day just to get any work done? What the fuck? Maybe most people are not like me, and are not distracted by the moving, talking and noise making of other people around them -- but I am. I need as much silence as I can get.

What is absurd about this is that some companies make special "quiet zones" for people to go to and think, which means they implicitly admit that the actual work environment is not conductive to thinking.

You want to ask me a question? Send me an IM.

[Joeri]

In our company we combined the two, the developers sit in a large open floor plan which is a quiet zone, and to discuss something you go into a meeting room. The quiet zone is enforced through social pressure, a bit like a library reading room, except less perfectly quiet (people still periodically interrupt the silence). The result is a lack of team dynamics because people don't talk enough, AND a lack of personal productivity, because there are still enough distractions that you can't work for long uninterrupted stretches.

I've become convinced the best solution is the one from peopleware: 2 to 4 people offices, with a door.

[abalone]

People are generally a lot less likely to ask questions over IM. The Cornell study found a couple of things of note here:

1. Being able to "read" someone visually helps in determining whether it's an ok time to interrupt. "Unexpectedly.. more visual contact actually contributes to fewer unwanted interactions, not more, by changing not so much the frequency as the timing of conversations."

2. More frequent social interaction builds more trust. People felt more comfortable asking for help.

3. A lot of information is acquired through something called "tacit learning". That's info that's never written down that you pick up by observing others. You may not even know to ask about it or have an opportunity. Open plan greatly helps the spread of this.

4. Most damningly, it notes that self-interested developers are biased towards individual productivity more than team productivity. This often leads them to undervalue the benefits of "disruptions".

[mikevm]

> 1. Being able to "read" someone visually helps in determining whether it's an ok time to interrupt. "Unexpectedly.. more visual contact actually contributes to fewer unwanted interactions, not more, by changing not so much the frequency as the timing of conversations."

I don't mind being interrupted by someone who wants to ask me a question. The explicit interruptions are not what makes the open office a painful experience -- it's the background noise that comes with it. This is why many people work with headphones on. You shouldn't be listening to music just because you need to concentrate on your work.

> 2. More frequent social interaction builds more trust. People felt more comfortable asking for help.

Surely you could think of better ways to build trust between team members other than sitting everyone in an open space?

> 3. A lot of information is acquired through something called "tacit learning". That's info that's never written down that you pick up by observing others. You may not even know to ask about it or have an opportunity. Open plan greatly helps the spread of this.

I don't want to be observed while working. I'm not a lab rat.

[abalone]

The point is, people may not know that you don't mind. Seeing someone's face makes it easier to "read" someone and manage the timing of their interrupt. Not the case with IMs, doors and cubes. This is one reason why the bar for "frequent communication" plummets in closed plan offices.

As for not wanting to be observed.. of course you don't. It's not in your self interest. But it is in the interest of team productivity to promote tacit learning. Let other people more readily learn how to do what you do, your tips & tricks, the little things not written down and formally taught.

[waterlesscloud]

Calling me "self-interested" because I want an environment that makes me the most productive is not winning me over.

[abalone]

It is if it's at the detriment of overall team productivity.

Typically the more senior you get, the more important it is for you to allocate time to help others. A place I used to work at codified this. You had to have X percent helping-others time and X grew as you rose in the ranks. That's precisely because of the important of team vs. individual productivity.

[ScottBurson]

> You want to ask me a question? Send me an IM.

This is interesting, actually. Why is being interrupted by IM not as bad? I agree with you, it doesn't seem to be as much of a problem. But why? Is it just that the interaction isn't quite real-time -- I can ignore you for a few minutes if I'm in the middle of something?

Maybe someone should try the combination of private offices and a local chat server, to see if that's the best of both worlds, concentration and collaboration.

[mikevm]

> Is it just that the interaction isn't quite real-time -- I can ignore you for a few minutes if I'm in the middle of something?

That is exactly why.

[atlantic]

Speaking as a developer, I've worked for years both in open-plan spaces and in individual offices. My experience is that productivity is incomparably better in an individual office. There was no upside to open-plan; just constant interruption and frustration.

[Robin_Message]

> constant interruption and frustration.

The point of the post you are replying to is that the "constant interruption and frustration" enables other developers to be more productive, raising the overall productivity of the team.

Also, you probably remember the times when you were interrupted and it was annoying strongly, but do you remember the times you interrupted someone else and saved valuable time?

[riggins]

here's an almost comical excerpt from the Cornell study

http://iwsp.human.cornell.edu/file_uploads/offices1_12382569...

The data showed that younger workers liked these kinds of offices more than older workers. The reason was instructive: they felt they could learn more from their “officemates” in this kind of office. This makes sense, since in interviews a common reason for wanting to join a company was the opportunity to work with “great” people. Having great people around, whom you rarely see and even more rarely talk to, is not of real value. Respondents talked about the much greater learning opportunities in a more open environment. Older respondents, in contrast, found it harder to concentrate and more disruptive. It also seemed the case that older respondents were simply comfortable with how they had learned to do things over a number of years, and did well.

Hmm, that's one interpretation.

Here's a simpler interpretation.

Younger workers generally aren't going to know what they're doing and need to ask questions, so being able to ask questions is important to them. Older workers already know what they're doing and don't need to ask as many questions, so they don't really get anything out of it.

This BTW, squares exactly with my experience. All the benefit of open floor plans go to employees with the least expertise at the expense of the employees with the most expertise.

If you're the most talented, expert employee in an office, in general there's not going to be anyone in the office that can answer your questions, so an open office doesn't buy you anything.

[cpwright]

"If you're the most talented, expert employee in an office, in general there's not going to be anyone in the office that can answer your questions, so an open office doesn't buy you anything." I've never worked at a place where I was the "most talented, expert employee" in an office, and as such there was nothing that I could learn from my co-workers. I consider myself to be a good developer, and believe that I benefit my coworkers with useful interactions. Similarly, I have co-workers who know things that I do not, and I can learn from them too.

[NoodleIncident]

If you're the most talented, expert employee in an office, then presumably you are being compensated proportionally. How much of that extra pay can you really earn by being the super-human solo coder, compared with how much can you earn by sharing your knowledge and raising the productivity of the entire team?

If you are not being compensated proportionately, that's a separate issue entirely...

[collyw]

Half of the time the rest of the team doesn't seem to give a shit about learning anything new.

[hibikir]

Or, arguably worse, they are only interested in new, shiny things, whether they work or not. Let's run scalaz streams in production. It compiles, so it must not have any performance problems!

[pitt1980]

that squares with my experience as well

the question though is who needs does it make sense for the business to cater to?

also, from my experience, sometimes getting good answers to those early questions makes young workers exponential more productive going into the future

[riggins]

everything you say makes sense.

My initial thought is the best setup would really depend on the task.

For really complex tasks I would guess that you'd want a more closed environment. As a concrete example, if you're trying to make a theoretical breakthrough in cryptography, I'd guess you need an environment where you can seriously concentrate.

For maybe a less complex task, one where execution matters the most, like web development, a more open plan where its easier to coordinate might be better.

And obviously the quality of your co-workers matters a lot. High quality co-workers will have less questions and the value of training them up will be greater.

[nknighthb]

It lowers the overall productivity, because the people who most need to be left alone are the people who do most of the work. Worse, it's a long-term detriment to each developer's individual capabilities, as it trains them not to use google or read documentation.

You can still interrupt someone without an open plan office, there's just a slightly higher bar that prevents most people from asking the knuckleheaded questions, and keeps constant non-conversational visual and auditory distractions to a minimum.

[empthought]

> do you remember the times you interrupted someone else and saved valuable time?

No, because I've never been so at a loss for things to do that I couldn't do something else productive while waiting for an email or IM question/answer response cycle to continue.

Interrupting is rude, full stop. Like other instances of rude behavior, it should not be undertaken lightly.

[collyw]

I have been at my place for around 3 years, and it was pretty new when I started. I was in an office with one other girl, so when she was speaking, it was usually to me. Now there are 4 of us in the same office, team leads like to discuss stuff with the developers in the office(despite having their own larger offices with tables for that sort of thing). Plus we have more people using my database, so I am getting way more interruptions. I would give my productivity about a quarter of what it was.

Open plan may be better for team productivity, but I doubt it will be 300% more productive.

I personally prefer emails. That way you have something to refer to rather than having to remembered all of the tiny details. Plus we change our mind so often I often can't remember what the final choice was. And tehy don't interrupt what you are doing.

[pekk]

Wow. You think that time I spend coding features you asked for is not helping you?

Then at the end of the week, I am still giving an accounting of why a feature isn't finished on a schedule given by the same people who were interrupting the work I was doing to satisfy their stated priorities.

I'm amazed at how you totally ignore that this makes people miserable and contributes to bad management.

Why not learn to use email to ask a question?

[ryanbrunner]

I don't think anyone is arguing that writing features isn't helping the company in general, and the individuals that asked for it - but that's not the only way developers can help other individuals within a company:

- Developers can ask other developers questions when they're stuck on a certain problem. In my experience, developers waste far more time when they're stuck on a problem then when they're interrupted.

- QA / PM / whoever is on your "team" can ask quick, simple questions, that are either too small for an e-mail, or would seriously slow them down if they had to write the e-mail, wait for a developer to check e-mail, write a response, etc. Again, in my experience, developers routinely underestimate how much inefficiency having QA / PM / whatever blocked while they wait for information from a developer generates.

E-mail has it's uses, and the fact that some questions are better suited to a quick face-to-face interruption doesn't mean that every question is, but there's definitely cases where it's not the right tool for the job.

[runako]

Do people not use IM/chat anymore? The problems with email you are describing are typically why I use chat.

[mh_yam]

QA / PM routinely underestimate how much inefficiency having developers blocked while they deal with queries from QA/PM generates.

[darkarmani]

> QA / PM / whoever is on your "team" can ask quick, simple questions, that are either too small for an e-mail, or would seriously slow them down if they had to write the e-mail, wait for a developer to check e-mail, write a response, etc. Again, in my experience, developers routinely underestimate how much inefficiency having QA / PM / whatever blocked while they wait for information from a developer generates.

It should slow them down. If they are blocked multiple times a day, it isn't the communication method that is the problem, it is the process. Interrupting developers multiple times a day is not the solution.

[logfromblammo]

Or better yet, an internal board or wiki, so the same question does not get asked repeatedly.

[Goladus]

Suffers from the same flaw as most critiques of open plan: it focuses on individual productivity while failing to understand how it contributes to team productivity.

For what it's worth, most of the open plan proponents have a similarly frustrating tendency to completely ignore the individual productivity trade-offs.

[bguthrie]

At most organizations I've worked at that use an open floor plan for programmers, we pair-programmed aggressively. Subjectively, a good pair more than offsets the distractive drawbacks of an open floor plan. If instead you hand each programmer a pair of headphones as they walk in the door then yes, productivity's going to take a hit compared to closed offices. Working in isolation in an open floor plan is worse than working in isolation in offices.

[prodigal_erik]

Pairing is an inescapable all-day distraction, so I would expect it to trump other distractions. If I were to accept never ever getting into the Zone at work, I wouldn't be frustrated and less productive at being pushed out of it. But I'd rather flip burgers than spend my entire career talking instead of pondering.

[ebiester]

That's fine in a team room situation. It's not fine when unrelated people are around.

[felideon]

Great, except your performance evaluation is done individually. Try to explain to your manager that the QA asks you dumb questions incessantly, interrupting any attempt to remain or even begin to be "in the zone".

Non-programmers generally never know how to read whether it is a good time to interrupt or not, unless it's obvious you're just reading an article or something.

[collyw]

I complained about having too many meeting and other distractions to get any coding done recently. Result was a meeting about it (no joke). We discussed it asked people not to interrupt, but two weeks later is is back to the same.

[nthj]

> unless it's obvious you're just reading an article or something.

Generally agree with you, although just because I'm reading an article doesn't mean it's a good time to ask me a question. Right now, my brain is working on a weird problem while my tests run and I browse HN. I look like I'm goofing off, but I still wouldn't appreciate a context switch to another problem.

The polite question if you must interrupt a programmer is “Would now be a good time for a context switch?”

[pitt1980]

I find it interesting that open offices are too distracting

what would be the reaction if the internet was cut off because that was too distracting?

[doktrin]

I'm going to agree. Until last year, I had worked exclusively in open office plans. Some were good, some were pretty horrible. Not all open office plans are created equal, and this is a critical distinction.

In my experience, open office plans scale poorly. The only successful ones I have worked in had less than 10 employees. Co-locating teams that don't need to collaborate (e.g. engineering & marketing) is typically a bad idea.

More to the point, I've now worked in a private office for a year. It has its perks, but I find myself wishing for a small open office plan again. The cons of isolation outweigh the pros of occasional distraction, IMO.

[empthought]

That link about the Cornell study is comically bad. Where are the raw data tables?

Doing a little background research it seems they were comparing open floor plans to cubicles. They didn't even consider the obvious alternatives to the panopticon, such as remote work or the tried-and-true office with a door.

[riggins]

That link about the Cornell study is comically bad. Where are the raw data tables?

It was a link to a summary of the actual study. With that said I went and skimmed the original study and that looked just as bad. Here's the original study.

http://iwsp.human.cornell.edu/file_uploads/offices1_12382569...

Forget the fact that they didn't have the raw data. They don't clearly explain on what basis they reach their conclusions.

How are they measuring the 'success' of an open floor plan? For that matter, how can you even measure the 'success' of an open floor plan versus a close floor plan?

[sutterbomb]

I don't think "office with a door" is an obvious alternative, because it's prohibitively expensive to build out a space with individual offices for every single employee.

It's like saying a study that compared air travel to high speed rail is comically bad because it didn't even consider teleportation. (Extreme hyperbole, but I think it conveys my point.)

[JoeAltmaier]

Not that more expensive. Those cubicles cost nearly as much. I've built out spaces before, and offices are absolutely worth the expense, especially if you consider the improved work performance.

Its like saying light bulbs are comically bad because the sun is there for free. :)

[sutterbomb]

Haha fair enough re: light bulbs.

I still have a hard time imagining that building individual offices, with the additional wiring, AC/heat, individual lighting etc. would be even close to a cubicle build out. Haven't built a space myself though and don't have hard data, so guess I'll take your word for it.

[JoeAltmaier]

Cubicles are wicked expensive. Their price rose to almost that of building an office. Free market principle - charge what the market will support.

Now, you can re-use and re-configure cubicles, so that's often used as excuse to buy them. But moving them around is also expensive - rewiring, mechanical work, they're fragile to begin with.

So I call cubicles a dead loss to the bottom line. That's been my experience.

[empthought]

It's only prohibitively expensive if you have too many employees.

[npsimons]

If this were true, then why don't managers and Chief Officer types have their workspaces in open plans? Just think of the productivity increases that could be gained!

No, open plans are almost always for two reasons, ignoring any harm or benefit:

1) To reduce costs.

2) Politics/motivation - you have to work hard or be important to get an office.

And I'll see your one study and raise you a "Peopleware" by DeMarco and Lister; IMHO it should be required reading for everyone (especially those who decide on space layouts for knowledge workers).

[briantakita]

Why not use asynchronous communication? The askee can answer at their convenience instead of having someone with something "important" (a marketing person with an idea) interrupting something "unimportant" (the programmer working).

I worked in environments that optimize the team, rather than the individual, for years. It is a breath of fresh air to work from home & optimize my environment for me. I'm happier, healthier, more productive, can get my business taken care of, etc. It's pretty much a total win.

I also have some "eccentric" behavior. I happen to pace & otherwise move when I think. I cannot do that with other people around.

The architecture of the software I'm working on is more coherent. I'm able to collaborate with teammates. Things are progressing quite well. I've never been happier.

Sorry, I don't have a study. Just my anecdotal experience.

[tonetheman]

WhatI have found is that open environments are great for managers and planners. Those who code do not get more productive in noisy environments.

I immensely dislike open work areas. I do not know many coders who like them either.

The people who benefit the most are the headphone makers. :)

[jimmaswell]

I'd hate having everyone able to stare at my screen all the time. It'd make me feel uneasy and less productive for sure.

[iSnow]

I think the sad truth is that it makes you uneasy and more productive. But I know I hate it too.

[jimmaswell]

I don't really know, in any situation I've been in where people are watching me code anything I haven't been able to do it as well as when I'm alone. Even if I know they're not constantly looking.

[weland]

> but what the Cornell study found is that in open plan it's actually easier to "read" a person and see if it's an ok time to ask a question, and to quickly reply or say ask me later, and so forth, to efficiently manage those disruptions.

The Cornell study does not account for the fact that most people suck at "reading" a person. Yes, it's easier to do in an open space. Most people who don't work also ignore the result of that reading.

> They found it also gives us more courage to ask potentially "silly" questions.

Which can also non-intrusively be asked by e-mail, the communication medium that has carried more silly questions than air has done in generations.

> They noted that developer reactions to office plans are often biased towards maximizing personal productivity in order to maximize (short-term) personal benefit, whereas the company benefits from a balance of personal and team productivity.

This says nothing about the underlying mechanism. Yes, I am biased towards maximizing personal productivity, which means that I will gladly and reliably avoid obnoxious co-workers. Closed spaces help me do that.

[chaostheory]

It's not really the questions that disrupt me. It's the constant amount of movement. People getting up and sitting down. People walking across you or moving towards you, and also having to acknowledge them. It's constantly very visually distracting. This doesn't help the team or me.

Maybe there is a good middle ground? Shared cubes of 2-4 people or a single room for a single team?

[crusso]

it focuses on individual productivity

This is one of those "beat the drum" issues on HN where we keep seeing article after article trying to drive the same one-sided point home. When I see this as the top article on HN, I just have to wonder if many of the people who come to HN are looking to disrupt the startup community.

I've worked in environments that run the gamut from individual offices, to cubes, to small working group rooms, to large open spaces. I've managed people in all of those environments as well, and I can tell you that openness leads to more synergy and more overall productivity. Maybe one or two in ten people have trouble working in that environment because they're too distracted. Sometimes you need to find hybrid arrangements to give people with trouble focusing a little more space -- but to just blanket claim that it's all about floorspace cost (as this article did) is akin to political advocacy.

[Goladus]

I've managed people in all of those environments as well, and I can tell you that openness leads to more synergy and more overall productivity.

In my experience, synergy and productivity is far more closely tied to clarity of goals and effective leadership than floor plan. Open floor plan advocacy, when it involves dragging people out of the offices they are quite happy with, is often a sign of leadership with misplaced priorities.

[mtkd]

> Maybe one or two in ten people have trouble working in that environment

In my experience they are the one or two that do all the heavy lifting.

[bigtunacan]

In my experience they were the lazy ones.

See what I just did there?

[bigtunacan]

To the anonymous down voter without a sense of humor...

I was trying to illustrate anecdotal evidence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence

[mh_yam]

"Maybe one or two in ten people have trouble working in that environment because they're too distracted."

How do you know? Did you actually ask everyone "Do you have trouble working in this environment because of the distractions?" People are afraid of being seen as "anti-team" and "anti-open plan", and they won't tell you the truth. And others fake it, even if they really hate working in such an environment (I'm one of them) because it seems like a necessary evil these days. So the reality is, maybe that number is higher than you think.

[crusso]

Did you actually ask everyone

Yeah, I did communicate with people about the efficacy of the working environment. Plus, for the past 12 years or so, everyone I've worked with has had a laptop that they could always (and did at times) take to quiet places when they needed alone time. They self-identified as needing quiet. Most others self-identified as liking the more collaborative working spaces.

I'm one of them

If you're working in an environment that is unproductive for you (that you hate) and you're not able to say something, then you should consider departing from it or addressing your own inability to have frank conversations with the people for whom you work.

[nknighthb]

"Take your laptop to a quiet space" is insane unless that "quiet space" is setup with a decent desk, external monitor, keyboard, and mouse. In fact, it's a great invitation for a lawsuit. I think I'd file it myself the moment I heard that, just to scare the HR and legal department into explicitly banning such an absurd excuse from ever being used again.

[mh_yam]

Having the ability to retreat to a quiet area is critical. Many people don't have the option of going to a 'quiet room'. It's just one big, chaotic workspace.

Personally I have discussed this with coworkers/managers, but the environment is not going to change. Wherever I go next, I'll be on the lookout for quiet&privacy.

[collyw]

I like that idea, but I can see an immediate trade off between the large screen of my desktop and the lack of distractions of taking my laptop somewhere.

[calibraxis]

Maybe I'm misreading, but that sounds like a questionable response to someone critiquing managerial blindspots. Shows blindness to corporate power structure. Also perhaps lack of understanding why people really take jobs. (One of the things bosses accept is that their subordinates lie to them. For instance, this is a driving force behind bad estimates.)

(I don't have a firm opinion on open vs. private offices, except I'd prefer to choose depending on what's best for the day).

[sutterbomb]

In my experience, it's not accurate to say outright lying is a driving force behind bad estimates. Estimates are actually a difficult problem. "Padding" an estimate is not a lie, it's a tool to be more accurate in the aggregate, because it helps account for the 1 in X instances where a task is significantly more time-consuming than you ever could have reliably estimated.

[rimantas]

mmm, synergy. I also suspect that some think of "we talk a lot about our product" as a productivity.

[danielweber]

why_not_both.png ?

People should have private offices so they can be alone to think when they need, and also have bullpen areas where they can collaborate.

[ryanbrunner]

This is really the best answer. Our office is open-plan as a rule, but there's plenty of "individually-sized" meeting rooms where you can work privately if you need to focus on something. It also serves as a good signal that you shouldn't be interrupted if you've taken one of those spots.

Obviously you need to have enough of these that there isn't competition for those rooms, but it can definitely work well.

[_kfb]

However, there are environments in which there is a social pressure to not take those spots and in fact be present at your desk regardless.

Am I more productive in an isolated room? Absolutely. Do I feel comfortable doing it? No, not necessarily.

[jmzbond]

Interesting, but I think that comfort speaks to a different issue. The office culture then is indirectly creating an environment that pressures you to act in a certain way and not acknowledging individual preference.

I agree that both is the way to go. You can find a study backing up either approach because they are important in different ways for different people.

I'm surprised no one has really brought up the introversion vs. extroversion angle. I just read Susan Cain's Quiet, and feel a wealth of clarity re: our general cultural stereotype that extroversion is better and therefore, so must be environments that are conducive to it (e.g., open floor plan. I don't have any illusions that corporations do that to save money, $ has never been a concern).

I work at a huge startup (300 people) that still has a very open floor plan and I basically work outside when it's not raining so that I can concentrate better. But the woman sitting next to me thrives in the activity and she can't work anywhere else.

I'm glad that the culture allows us to take freedom and ownership in how we channel our own productivity.

[archonjobs]

Agreed, the either-or mindset is unnecessary. This hybrid arrangement based on days of the week works well for us: http://www.archonsystems.com/devblog/2013/09/19/open-offices...

[analog31]

Interesting point. My concern about item #3 is that we're maximizing personal productivity because the company is still mainly rewarding personal productivity. I work at a company where only one person in each group can get an above-miserable raise every year.

[hacknat]

Team productivity? What is team productivity other than the aggregate of individual productiveness? You could argue that open floor plans help bring the weakest programmers up a bit, but at the cost of bringing down your strong programmers down. Presumably your stronger programmers are more productive, so even in this argument it brings "team productivity" down.

I have worked on a code base for the last 6 months in which I am the sole committer. A lot of my coworkers are the same. We have brief sprints where we are in each others' faces, the majority of the time we only need concrete pieces of high-context information from each other that have nothing to do with serendipity.

[rdtsc]

Unless working is a constant stream of asking silly questions then no this is a stupid idea. You can irc someone, look through their office window to see if they are busy or not.

> Those are "disruptions", yes

But that is a huge deal. I would say disruptions many time outweigh the benefits of open spaces.

> the company benefits from a balance of personal and team productivity.

Without individual productivity there can be no company success. If someone is constantly interrupting others then they probably need more focused training or a class.

Imagine you are surgeon and while you perform surgery you doctor buddy from across the hall comes in and asks you some question about how to hold a scalpel or something like that.

[lnanek2]

This varies by the individual as well, however. There are some guys at work here who will ask the tech lead how to merge a source code change into the master branch every single time - one guy has done it three times in a row about a week apart each time and needed personal assistance every time. There are other people who just read the internal wiki and do it without needing hand holding every time. If you are one of the latter, you are penalized more and helped less for being in an open office. You are also penalized by being in a work situation that encourages the former bad behavior.

[collyw]

git is a pain in the arse to get started with

[genericuser9999]

That Cornel study is pretty poor. Better studies have been done over longer periods of time and don't just rely on interviews that they decide to interpret the way they want.

Having worked in a company where engineers had individual offices, and now work in an open floor plan, I can assure you that sick days have gone up, the noise level is many times what it was and overall productivity is noticeably lower - guess what - if you lower everyone's productivity, then the team productivity goes down. Big surprise that NONE of the managers are in the open floor plan.

Open floor plans are simply a way for managers to feel better about themselves by hurting other people.

[zaidf]

I'm much more likely to ask questions on IM than face to face. The latter not only interrupts the person I am asking the question, but also interrupts my own flow.

May be just me.

[collyw]

Email or IM also has the benefit that it is still there half an hour later. "Did he say a or b?" Just scroll back.

[nyrulez]

What if I told you I've experienced both and found your observations to be untrue. Is it possible that it depends on the context, nature of role and the team ?

[jf22]

I've love to see a study whereas everybody was given noise cancelling headphones.

Even with nothing but white noise going through them I'm totally able to ignore 99% of all the open floor plan distractions.

[BrownBuffalo]

Nailed it. A lot of "collaboration" is not derived from isolated silos of knowledge but when its "shared". People who can't operate in an open environment lack the focus required for such an activity in the first place. I'd rather blame a lack of "integration" into an environment like this on HR than the business owner / layout designer. There is a reason why start-up thought process is injection molded into an office "feel". So ... if you lack the ability to concentrate ... you lack the ability to function for a successful company.

[mh_yam]

I have no problem concentrating / focusing given there are no constant conversations / noise, people moving around, music, sales guy on the phone 8 hours a day, etc.

It's absurd to expect human beings, especially software engineers--who tend to be quieter, more introverted, and loner-types--to be herded like cattle into a crowded, noisy open-plan office and expect them to have the razor-sharp focus needed for high quality software development.

If you only hire people who thrive in noisy / distracting environments, I won't be surprised if you end up hiring the wrong people for actually getting the job done-because often times, the people who take on the most work, resolve the most difficult problems, and carry the most weight are those people who can't stand working in a place like that.

[walshemj]

Really what about those of us with conditions like dyslexia which are negatively effected by interruptions far more than the average person?

And you might want to Google "flow state" and how that applies to development work.

[BrownBuffalo]

So you think the needs of the [one] outweight the needs the of the [many]? That's the foundation of your sympathy card, right? Look, accomidations are made in any environment - but doesn't mean it's going to stop the idea that open-floor space is "bad" on the whole. Mihaly is in the minority, btw. The top things that motivate employees are not individualistic, silo achievement but rather derives from group/team building and worth of cultural acceptance into an environment. He's a nut - I took one of his lectures in my graduate program :) He's more interested in happiness than achievement in the end. I don't hire people to be "happy". I hire them to achieve things and become part of my culture.

[walshemj]

So your saying that Steve McConnell and many other experienced developers are wrong.

Back in the 80's I was the core programmer on a map-reduce system that formed a part of one of the only 3 products British telecom sold internationally my CTO was one of Vint Cerfs reports.

what have you shipped or done?