[lallysingh]

I guess I'm in a real minority here, but I'm pretty happy with open-office.

Some qualifiers:

- The team has a good culture of respecting each other, and we're busy enough not to want to banter too much outside of certain times (e.g., lunch, when we see it already going on, etc.).

- I've got good headphones hooked to a 24-bit-DAC'd USB amp. I don't hear anyone unless I'm trying to.

- My screen's big enough where visual noise isn't an issue.

On the upside:

- Asking someone a quick question is really, really quick.

Downsides of my prior each-their-own-office experiences:

- I sometimes felt a bit lonely.

- I certainly felt disconnected from the rest of my team.

- I was disconnected from the rest of my team - there were always important conversations I would've liked to been part of.

[edited for getting the bullets formatted]

[jared314]

> My screen's big enough where visual noise isn't an issue.

> I've got good headphones

You may not have issues with open-office plans, but you did find a way to add the walls back.

[trose]

sure, but they're more like screens that can be looked around or removed.

[skriticos2]

Asking someone a quick question while they are in the middle of something is a good way to break their focus. It takes a lot of effort to "get into the zone", so you will not only lower the productivity of the person you "ask a quick question", but you'll also make him frustrated. He may even get a head-ache. How can you live with yourself?

This mostly applies to jobs which involve a higher degree of complexity, like programming.. but as you are on HN, I assume you meant something IT related.

[trose]

I reject this assertion that people get ripped "out of the zone". What are you doing that is so complex that you can't jump right back into it?

I've met plenty of people that like to act like they're some super elite programmer that is juggling complex class structures and debugging them inside their head. In my experience so far, those people are full of shit and make overly complex spaghetti code. Idk though, maybe this is different between web development and something like game engine development.

[swift]

The phenomenon of being "in the zone" is considered real by most psychologists, as far as I'm aware. See here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_%28psychology%29

FWIW while I think interruptions are a real problem, I have certainly encountered some people who I think demand more quiet than is really needed. But some of this may just come down to differences in how tolerant people are of noise, or perhaps how stressed they are.

[TheOtherHobbes]

It seems there may also be a link between creativity and sensitivity to ambient noise.

http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2015/03/creat...

[nevir]

It doesn't matter whether I'm doing something simple or complex - for some reason it always takes me 5-10 minutes to refocus after being interrupted.

[josephschmoe]

Imagine you have a coworker who is always on the phone quite loudly nearby you with a very identifiable voice. That's what these people seek to avoid - specific distractions that humans have adapted for thousands of years to pick up on.

[warfangle]

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

Adults have it; amphetamines help but don't cure it; the ADA requires reasonable accommodations for it.

[dangerlibrary]

It comes down to how quickly you are working. If under time pressure, efficiently completing straightforward sets of tasks - even writing Rails or Java boilerplate in all the right places - is complicated enough that I don't want to be knocked out of a flow state. Of course I can do those things without intense focus, but I can't get them done in under an hour.

[pakled_engineer]

Everybody with headphones on never notices how loud they are eating/drinking/coughing/murmuring/adjusting things however. Seems extremely petty but work beside somebody long enough like this and you end up joining the headphone club yourself to block it out.

Where I work there's a group chat for low priority questions you can check whenever you're not totally immersed in something. It's also anonymous chat so nobody is embarrassed to ask "stupid" questions.

[yaddayadda]

> It's also anonymous chat so nobody is embarrassed to ask "stupid" questions.

That's awesome!

[nevir]

Wow, yeah, that's really smart!

(Though, I guess, with a small enough team it probably isn't all that anonymous)

[rm445]

The middle ground is small group offices, and many (most?) people are fairly happy there. Actual giant open-plan offices can be distracting beyond what's tolerable.

[marmot1101]

I thrive in the small group office. You get the flow of ideas that are trying to be achieved with the open plan, but without as much of the noise. And it's easier to call out one or two people for being difficult to work with than it is many. I hated a private cube(big effin cube with high walls and all) because I felt like I was in solitary. Sometimes I want to bullshit about what I did over the weekend, or discuss a philisophical question about what I'm doing. Seems weird to pop into someone else's private space to do so.

[sukilot]

So you prefer to shoot he breeze with 100 people at once (80 of whom are trying to work at that moment) than with one other person who wants a break?

[stephengillie]

Our open office of ~30 developers and engineers is fairly happy, once we got managers out of their offices and stuck the noisy client services/salespeople into the offices.

[ardacinar]

You're probably one of the outliers, then.

[dmitrygr]

> "Asking someone a quick question is really, really quick."

Ever wonder why that someone then complains about distractions and lack of productivity? This is why

[fsk]

I'm wondering if open offices are good for junior people (who need to ask for help more often) but bad for senior people (who get interrupted more often).

For me, it's almost so bad that I don't bother trying to get in the zone/flow, because I know I'm going to be interrupted.

[lallysingh]

A quick glance on their screen and facial expression, and you can tell if they're busy. If they're busy or if I'm not sure, I'll just ping them on chat. When they're ready, they look up, and we talk. Quite fast.

[pauleastlund]

Yeah, I agree with this. I worked at a big software company with big open office spaces. I really didn't experience the constant frustration with interruptions -- I didn't feel it much and I didn't hear other people grumble about it too much, either. Everyone understood that asking questions makes the whole group more efficient, and everyone appreciated getting a chance to help their teammates.

Lots of people are commenting to your post and others about the inefficiency of frequently interrupted work, but I actually think the efficiency argument runs the other way. let's say I'm working on some problem and I run into some really obscure issue coming up from a system I've never dealt with. I might kill 10 minutes of your productivity by asking you, but I could also easily kill 30 minutes digging into stack traces on various servers I've never heard of before looking for an answer you know off the top of your head.

Also, usually in a fairly close-knit team most people know who is going to be irritated by the interruption and who isn't, and they go to the folks who are friendly about being interrupted. I get these theoretical concerns about open office spaces but in real life I just don't encounter them that often.

[girvo]

I agree with all your points. I don't mind open-plan either, but my noise cancelling headphones and three 27" monitors do well to block everything out when I need it. It's quite good, because I can join into collaboration on the fly if I want to, but ignore everything otherwise.

[rnovak]

    - The team has a good culture of respecting....

The problems I've personally found with the open office setting is that there are a lot of people out there who don't respect the quiet and peace of others.

For instance, in my office, there is someone here who will literally speak to their team members despite having an ongoing LYNC chat open with them, in a voice that you can hear from a football field away (opposed to a whisper/quiet/ "inside voice").

I think respect and consideration could go a LONG way to making open office plans tolerable for most.

[lewisl9029]

Personally, I loved working in an open office at my last job (a software consultancy).

Knowledge sharing by osmosis was a very real phenomenon there. I can't count the number of times I discovered interesting new technologies or was enlightened on some architecture tradeoffs thanks to a discussion taking place around me.

I realize that the whole experience around open-offices is very YMMV but I feel it can have many tangible and valuable benefits for the right kinds of people (i.e. those who are not too easily distracted and/or can easily context-switch back and forth).

[sukilot]

You are conflating a small "team room" with a 50+ person "open office"

[koof]

If you are listening to headphones loud enough to block out other conversations, you are almost certainly going to damage your hearing.

[lallysingh]

Etymotics. They're also part ear-plug. I run them at very low levels.

[aqme28]

Not if the headphones are good at noise isolation, which most are.

[blumkvist]

I wonder how people are so confident when they spew bullshit.