We have an open floor plan, and it works like this:
* Desk area is for getting work done. Everyone agrees on this.
* We have "phone rooms" for small discussions. But we limit those usually to 1:1s or discussing office politics.
* Try to limit all discussions at the desk area to 5 people or less.
* If someone sighs loudly as they put on their headphones when you're having a discussion right behind them, then that is their signal to you to keep talking loudly, as their noise-canceling headphones will eliminate any trace of your conversation.
* You can usually carry a conversation at your desk at any volume, because other engineers will let you know if you're being too loud. Engineers tend to be extroverted and won't hesitate to let you know if you're bothering them.
* When someone first sits at their desk, it's polite to immediately engage them in a 30-minute conversation about their weekend or what they did last night. It eases their transition into work.
* A person working without headphones on, signifies that it's ok to tap them on the shoulder to ask them a question.
* A person working WITH headphones on, signifies that it's ok to tap them on the shoulder to ask them a question.
* If someone usually works off in quiet parts of the building, one should always remind them "you're never at your desk" with an accusatory tone.
Noise canceling headphones don't really work that way in my experience. They're good at canceling out droning background sounds to make the overall sound quieter, but they can't "predict" and cancel out less repetitive/droning sounds sounds like conversations and those godawful clacky keyboards some people insist on. In effect, noise canceling headphones make those sounds louder, relatively speaking, because they quiet other sounds.
Yeah but the progression was brilliant. Started out from "I disagree with this, but ....okay...." and then got progressively more absurd. It wasn't until #5 that I realized it was clearly satire, prior to that I figured it was one of those rationalization posts that tech CEOs make to defend these practices as somehow useful or beneficial.
I've got a set of ATH-ANC9s and as a programmer I work in an extremely noisy environment (next to the phones); by themselves they do little to drop the noise, but add some music and magic happens.
EDIT: I experimented with the (almost universally approved of) ATH-M50Xs but found I had to use a much louder volume to cancel out the noise, which causing ringing, so using NC is pretty much saving my hearing. Not sure how I could work here without them.
The parent comment is of course sarcasm, but I wonder… Are there any studies that significantly concludes that engineers are more extrovert of more introvert than the general population?
Probably none. There is also a thing about stuff like this changing overtime, between engineering branches and between places depending on local culture.
> A person working WITH headphones on, signifies that it's ok to tap them on the shoulder to ask them a question.
what? headphones = NOT NOW! if you need something, email
The whole point of headphones is to not be disturbed. How does that indicate to you that i want you to suddenly disturb me by touching me unexpectedly.
If single offices were the optimum, why aren't we all working from home in single apartments anyway?
I think the more open the place, the better. We are social animals. If people choose solitude, it's likely for wrong reasons. (Not saying that there aren't ever reasons for that, (almost) everybody needs some privacy every now and then.)
But yeah, all people must also think of others, people who don't do that are likely making work a bad experience.
> If single offices were the optimum, why aren't we all working from home in single apartments anyway?
Can you imagine paying everyone in San Francisco enough salary so they can afford a 2nd bedroom? Don't be silly.
And yes, working from home without a home office with a door is not the same as having a private office. People have roommates and kids and spouses and all sorts of things that are even worse than coworkers when it comes to focus.
One of the best tests I took in university, Theoretical Physics (E-Dynamics, QM, Thermo), was due to collaborative preparation. I learned together with another guy for 2-3 months. Interestingly he had a weaker background but we scored very well.
This test was oral by the way, but took about an hour (or more?), professor and protocol person. Sure there was writing but also a lot of talking.
I think constraining our industry on solitude is also a reason for the low diversity.
Why do CEO's think they're alone in the need for quiet spaces where they can focus? Sure some people can work in the noisy space where interruptions abound. The only thing in my office that works well with interruptions is my CPU. I'd rather have a Cube farm, but better yet, a small tiny phone booth as an office.
Just like the cargo cult Agile pandemic peaked a few years ago, I suspect we're reaching peak open floor plans right now. The overall negative effects of an open floor plan for a significant fraction of engineers (though not all) is self-evident and backed up by reams of data stretching back nearly 40 years:
TLDR: 100 square feet of personal space is optimal. The highest I've ever had in tech was 81. I miss those days and I end up working from home a lot because of the current open floor plan. But square feet cost $$$ and switching to an open floor plan is an immediate cost cutter. Never mind what it's doing to overall productivity and future earnings, the analysts love $h!+ like this.
Fortunately, executives are not all idiots, so once the more insightful of them realize how much more they get done in private spaces, one or more of them will push back on this. And if employers start treating cubes and offices as a perk, I suspect they'll see lots of converts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What's your point? Obviously developer pay is enviable. That's the problem (for management). High-status pay risks translating into actual high-status, with the influence and autonomy that implies. Hence the very low-status worker bee seating arrangements. I mean, thank god so many of these developers lean Objectivist or otherwise ultra-individualist or simply haven't given the politics of labor much thought, or they might organize and then businesses would have to do something to fight that, too. How inconvenient that would be for them.
I'm not crying, just observing. There's a risk of a new honest-to-god high-status profession emerging, and desire to avoid that is probably behind some of the "culture" filtering down from the big tech companies. It's barely-upper-middle-class-culturally-if-you-squint-a-little management not wanting to have subordinates who match or outrank them, socially. The smaller companies aren't in on it—they're just cargo-culting, of course. Investors and potential larger, acquiring companies sure do seem to expect those conditions when they get their tours, though, so there's that.
All I'm saying is I think you are making it a little more personal/deep than it might be. The seating arrangement in many/most instances may in fact just be a logistics issue of fitting a large number of people into a economical amount of space. Standard corporate structure/org charts determine who gets the offices. If one person serves as the buffer between management above them and the 10-20 developers below them, why shouldn't they? It would seem they would need a private space more often for meetings and such. Hopefully a lot of them sat out on the floor and did their time as well.
As I see it, with great risk comes great reward. Managers are held responsible for the the great successes or great failures of their team(s). I wouldn't work for a manager that I don't respect and feel deserves a position of management above me. If you do, thats your bad.
If you are concerned (or care) that your perceived status isn't living up to your expectations for the work you do and the value you provide, you could always try doing something else that people perceive as more respectable and worthy of awe and special treatment.
Well, the reason that is seen as an economical amount of space is because they can hire people that accept that tradeoff. If people didn't accept it, then businesses would provide office space.
Business will offer the least that people will accept, it's up to you to decide if you will accept it. Working with someone is a voluntary negotiation - that's a two way street. Business decisions about floor space are not sacrosanct, and enough discontent from employees would change norms as it would for anything not vital to company survival.
While I give startups some leeway, for large established companies like Apple or Facebook, already rich shareholders are loling all the way to the bank at workers' expense. I'll cry a river if additional accommodations result in falling a place or two on the most profitable companies in the world chart. According to YCharts, FB's quarterly profit margin was an astounding 38% (down slightly from the previous quarter): https://ycharts.com/companies/FB/profit_margin
To reap riches that insane, I consider it an obligation for the leadership of that company to accommodate their workers quite generously. You might argue it's already generous, but compare that to their executive class. The level of inequality is astounding, and this is amongst rich people.
RNs and Nurse Practioners make at least as much as the typical software engineers in SV. The $175-$250K+ that some of the senior guys at Google and FB make is not typical. Most of us in the rest of the country are probably making about $100K, and that's when we start becoming over-priced.
And teachers? I have respect for them, but I don't consider what they do necessarily difficult, especially in lower grades.
What people are complaining about is software engineering - which is supposedly in such high demand we need hundreds of thousands of foreigners to take up the lack of supply - being treated like blue collar labor, essentially another guy on the assembly line to be exchanged for another body if needed.
In contrast, lawyers, doctors, business execs, and most non-software engineers are treated as professionals. They have offices, expense accounts, professional dress codes, ability to attend conferences. Most professionals, after putting in their years, begin to partake in the company's profits, with access to the financials, hiring, and product strategy, and overall direction of the business.
Meanwhile, the typical developer, even at a company where software is the product, are never privy to the business. Instead, their access is limited strictly to a list of monkey-tasks or user stories on Jira. The MBAs, product managers, and execs keep all the interesting info to themselves. They're more likely to ask you for help resetting their password than they are in developing a sales pitch or project proposal.
Do you think a lawyer going to a job interview at some big firm gets to go through 2 days of quizzing over vague topics from 2nd year of law school? Instead, it is a professional discussion with peers about previous work.
Doctors, lawyers, and business people have a smooth, linear salary progression into their late 50s. A software engineer starts out well, but rapidly hits the glass ceiling at about 40. After that, you're an over-paid liability.
>And teachers? I have respect for them, but I don't consider what they do necessarily difficult, especially in lower grades.
There's a difference between a "teacher" and a great teacher. Even in the lower levels I think it's hard to know how much of an effect incentivizing great teachers to stick around could have on the world and economy. Grade school years are highly influential years of people's lives and for some, school is the only chance they have to see something different and break the mold of which they've been brought into.
Not GP, but I'm related to an RN, so I know a little bit about the sorts of things that nurses say about doctors when they're not around.
Basically as bad as our power dynamic is, the esteem doctors hold for themselves and the disregard they have for RNs as people who couldn't finish their medical training is well known if not widely broadcast.
When you walk around acting like your organization could function without any of the people who do all of the work, there are gonna be problems. But at least for us those problems mostly don't include people dying.
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.
>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.
Many large company will do but the large brunt of codetariat working for cash strapped business living and dying according to investors and customers will be keept in the open spaces: they looks cool in photos, convey a reassuring sense of "working bees" and sells well to visiting customers, so I fear the open plan it's here to stay.
HR is driven by data. To kill open floor plans, start citing the floor plan as the primary reason for leaving. If that becomes a theme, IMO open floor plans will become cancer. It just takes time.
Yeah, I've got one of those "non-regretted depature" notes on my record at Google. So what? Google lost out, not me.
Jobs aren't scarce, but talent is. I've never gone for want of employment and Google blind-allocated me into a boring gig I hated. And yes, I'm very anti-social when I'm coding. I wouldn't want to work for a company that considered that a negative trait.
Disagreed (reasonably politely but persistently with lots of data) with upper management about what became a key technology to Google a year after I left. Got told to shut up about that technology or leave. Chose the latter and made a successful career out of being an expert in that technology. Found out later through my contacts that HR slammed the door behind me.
Yeah, but by then you, and all the others, have already left. Plus, the costs of a re-remodel can be quite persuasive. Time is on the side of the folks who made the original decision to commit to the open floorplan concept in the first place.
If talent has to quit to get HR to grok anything, the cancer in the company is HR. And good luck citing that as the reason for quitting, and good luck expecting HR to grant permission for your manager to give you a good recommendation.
I find it's best to work as though HR is driven by one thing: their mission is to protect the company from adverse employee action. They are agents of the company, not of employees, and it's best to assume they view employees almost as adversaries. Not necessarily enemies, per see, but definitely not 100% aligned with the best interests of the company.
That is the crux of the issue, isn't it? Actual productivity does not matter that much on a grand scale, the perceived productivity and therefore sales is what matters.
I think we can have our cake and eat it too. The all-glass office style at We Work could be adopted. I wish the glass was a bit thicker but the small shared office or bullpen model is ideal IMO.
I am currently working from a WeWork location and can provide a data point, that all-glass offices are terrible with soundproofing. The other downside of having glass partitions is that you could see what your neighbours were doing (and vice versa), which in my opinion is no different from visual pollution.
A lot of engineers discount the impact of visibility and focus too much on the sound distractions. I think visibility is just important. It's all part of a violent transparency theme I think is captured pretty well here: https://web.archive.org/web/20150321053931/https://michaeloc... Even if you don't suffer from more-than-normal anxiety over it to the point of panic attacks, all the studies on normal people show open plans aren't great.
Yea, I tried weWork to see if my employees would like it. In one of the meeting rooms a neighbor came over and warned us not to talk about any confidential information since everyone in their office could hear us. We sell B2, in a regulated industry. Leaky sound is a deal breaker.
So, we're in a suburb now, $/sqft is less, 2 devs in a quiet room, 2 sales in a different room.
I will not get open plan for my team. 2 persons per 144sqft office seems a good fit to me
I am also at a WeWork location, but I find that the noise outside of our room is hardly noticed. That being said, I agree about the clear glass, I wish more of the glass was frosted.
Personally, I hated my experience in the glass-door offices of WeWork. The cheaper communal areas they had were vastly more productive and everyone was was respectful of it being a public space for everyone to work (for the most part).
The actual offices on the other hand, had almost no sound deadening between them, the hallways way too narrow and it was all-party, all-the-time. People from other companies getting absolutely smashed on keg beer starting at noon was a daily problem. At the one building I went to that had entire floors of conference rooms, you could hear everything from 3 conference rooms over, making phone calls impossible.
I worked at Sun Microsystems for a while and their private office layout was really nice. I can't ballpark the exact size but the office could hold 3 gigantic CRT monitors, 2 desk phones, and had space for 2 visitors.
I feel that a 2 person private office is quite optimal, since we are talking about teams. It's easier to pair program or discuss and even maintain silence when required. Office designers will have to pay attention to acoustics and ensure that there is not much echoing or significant noise transmission across walls or glass panels.
How would you feel about larger offices that fit ~8, and housed your entire immediate team, but no one else? Your manager would go to another room for their meetings with other parts of the organization, and you all would be free to collaborate as needed, or shut up as needed?
>How would you feel about larger offices that fit ~8, and housed your entire immediate team, but no one else?
I've experienced that kind of environment and it is slightly better than the sea of tables filling a floor but is still very bad. A few of the things I've noticed:
- Collaboration inside an individual team was never a problem with individual offices and so it isn't noticeably improved
- Unless the programming/debugging work is very simple, it will often require intense concentration. With distractions an engineer is less productive
- People waste a lot of time looking for an area to have a private conversation, talk to their Dr on the phone, etc.
- When we had offices, people would tend to decorate them with pictures of their kids, awards, etc. With an open floor plan, the place looks very sterile and it seems like overall morale and interest in the company is lower than it used to be.
- The big issue with any organization (with more than say 10 people) is communication BETWEEN teams, not inside the team. This design of isolating each individual team has led to a lot of inefficiency as the sort of ad-hoc conversations people would have with others on other teams basically stops.
Thanks for the feedback on the idea. My main complaint with open floor plan is the level of background noise is very high, and of a very distracting type. Within teams, though, we'd often gather around to discuss solutions to tough problems before we coded them up. This was all ad-hoc, so it did help that we were all in the same area. The main thing I could have done without was the cross chatter from other teams.
Small call rooms were available throughout to address the private call issue, so there was never any sort of hunt.
I think one of my best working environments had two pods of 4 people each in one closed off room. One pod had developers and the other had non developers (project leaders, DBAs, etc.) It combined just the right amount of togetherness and separate space and worked wonderfully!
Another great environment was inside an old bank vault. Me and one other developer. No windows, two doors, lights down low, thumping techno music. Ah, bliss...
Nice, I like 4, that's the number we had at my last startup, and it worked well. I figured that the max reasonable team size was 8, but I think your solution (two rooms of 4) strikes a nice balance of noise and allowing the entire team to be very close to each other when they need to be.
One of the best spaces I ever worked in was at my employer prior to my current employer.
When I started work at the company, they had hired a couple of other guys as well, but they didn't have as much experience in software development for an employer (one had done mainly contract work alone, the other was fresh outta college but earned a compsci masters). They didn't have a cubical to put us each in (they were planning to move), so we three (plus one of their more experienced devs as a lead) stuck us in what we eventually termed "The Oven".
It used to be their "conference room" - maybe 10 feet or so on a side, one side glass with a door, the other three walls, no windows. In fact, it was where we each were interviewed. They set up a desk system, put two of us on one side, and two on the other. There wasn't a vent to the a/c system, unfortunately. Four computers blasting hot air, no air circulation save for some desk fans, and four guys in there hacking on code - well, you see where the name came from...
...but we did some amazing work inside that small room, and had a pretty damn good time doing it. We eventually got a portable A/C unit that we stuck in the corner and vented to the ceiling plenum. That helped immensely. Our lead had a weird spotify playlist - that became our music to listen to by day. The lights in the room were kept off, so we only had the glow of our monitors to light our way. In effect, it was a perfect development environment.
About a year passed, and the company moved to better digs. While the new location had certain amenities and such that made it more appealing, at the same time, it had horrible downsides:
Open office floor plan, concrete flooring, lights that were always one, west and south facing windows that guaranteed to pan the sun thru the blinds (which the managers and c-level guys always wanted to have open) and blind you. Massive echoing. Most of us took to using headphones all the time. While we got some good work done, nothing was ever the same, ultimately. The goofy thing is that half the office space was wasted; there was a good chunk that wasn't being used for anything, and we tried to make a case for moving the dev team over there, and spreading things out more so we could have a space to our own (and not have us bothering sales and customer support and vice-versa - who were also in the same space, of course). No dice, no moving on that.
I don't thing I'd want to do an open-office situation ever again, even if the money was better. For me, it just doesn't work.
So here's one of the reasons I dislike not having offices: I actually really like having the lights on. I want things to be nice and bright. I hate it when things are dark and dungeon like. If we had separate offices, we could each make our space as we wish. I could be lit, and you could be dark. No one would have to fight over the setup.
You might get exactly your way with environmental preferences, but you miss out on the collegial atmosphere of working in the same space with a few other people you really like. I love that aspect of small shared offices, and was one of the things I really enjoyed about working on a small startup.
I don't think I would miss out that much. For one, that environment, especially with a place called "The Oven" sounds absolutely awful to me. Second, it's not like people would lock themselves in their offices and never see each other.
Third, and I may not like to admit this, but I'd complain quite a lot about the setup in a place nicknamed "The Oven". It might start grating on other people, and ruining the atmosphere.
Haha that sounds awesome. Horribly sweaty, but a lot of fun, kind of like a little scrappy startup inside a bigger company. I'm guessing your guys' team spirit was off the charts. Thanks for sharing that.
I guess maybe the key to making this work is actually having teammates that like each other. A lot of devs seem to really hate working near other people, and are very particular about their setup, so I guess for them, individual offices are much better. But if you like your teammates, I'd much rather work in the same room with them than in a room all by myself.
We are exactly 8 in office and it is pretty awesome. Meetings are in room directly, but they are not often (once in two weeks maybe) and sometimes it is even good to listen as I am learning that way. I can tune it with normal headphones only anyway.
There is a bit of social chat also, but whenever someone complains, it is immediately stopped - local culture is that way. I find it better then own office, because I would end up isolated there and it is not happening here.
Lesson we learned before the original dot-bomb, both on the trip up and the path down:
You want your cube to be just slightly smaller than could uncomfortably fit two people. Otherwise, someday it will be uncomfortably fitting two people.
While they're clearly better than open plan, I don't really get two-person offices. They're not that much more space-efficient than single offices, and seem like a none-too-subtle "we don't really trust these coder types on their own" message.
The best layouts I've seen have had 1- or 2-person offices around the perimeter of the space, with shared spaces (open spaces for collaboration when you actually need to collaborate and for big stuff, conference rooms, break rooms, etc.) on the interior, because people shouldn't always be in them so they don't need natural light as urgently.
Requires a decent amount of space to do correctly, though.
In my experience semi-open layouts are the best. A handful people working in the same room on the same project generally seems to work well at encourage pair programming and exchange of information while having an actual room isolates from other distractions.
That said, I think in the programming world, remote work will eventually become the new office because it's the ultimate cost cutter and greatly opens up the pool of applicants.
I'm not seeing anywhere near the $h!+storm of pointless standups I used to see every morning. I'm also seeing the return of the weekly status meeting. Give it time.
Then again, I'm someone who's threatened to enact the 6 mph standup meeting wherein the second anyone drops below 6 mph on foot, the meeting's over because how can we practice Agile if we aren't agile? That wasn't received well.
I haven't been seeing it, either. In fact, I dare say it is nearly impossible to find a software shop in my area that isn't knee-deep in some iteration of "Agile" management - usually some form of Scrum.
Agile protects the C-level from being fired for poor planning by blame-shifting to developers who get fired for not reacting to poor planning from above fast enough. Agile is Executive Armor.
>That's because it works. There's a reason it's popular.
Versus:
>That said: a lot of places don't do it correctly and really do deserve being called cargo cults.
That's how it always goes, right? Company after company implements some kind of Scrum process, and when it doesn't work the problem is never Scrum itself.
I'd contend that the reason things like Scrum are popular is that it gives non-technical managers things to play with: things like burndown charts, that gives them metrics to measure and show to their own managers. Devs aren't measured by lines of code generated per day anymore. Now it is all about "velocity" and burndown. Old wine in new bottles.
To be fair (and probably downvoted), _The Agile Manifesto_ is a great read IMO. None of its 12 principles mandate open floor plans, scrum or daily standups.
I actually agree that the Agile Manifesto is a good read. That's why I tend to use air quotes when discussing "Agile" at any shop, because I think it rarely resembles anything in the Manifesto. But I'm not sure one can sell certification courses as easily based on the elegant-yet-simple principles outlined in the Manifesto.
There's being "agile" as in flexible and outlined in the Agile Manifesto, and there's being "Agile" as in Scrum. I've found myself, and others, referring to the later verbally as "capital-A Agile" to distinguish the two.
Really? Because one fantastically productive team I was once on implemented this practice by eating lunch together most of the time. I have never seen a more effective way of keeping everyone up to date and synced. Sure, they mostly talked about movies, TV, or WTFever, but whenever something critical was in play, it was all about work.
And of course, the manager of that team has not been promoted in over 1.5 decades.
Devs were always measured by velocity. It was just called "deadlines" or milestones in classical waterfall methods.
With Scrum (for example) that turns into a much more sane, smaller, easier to predict and adapt with metric. Which is due to smaller units of work and shorter turnaround times.
Scrum (and agile in general) isn't magic. It's just sane process improvements.
It's also not an all-in-one philosophy. You can take parts from it and still get benefits (usually ends up showing why you should be more agile however).
Simple daily standups, short sprints, and grooming+planning meetings each sprint will help most software companies a lot, even if they don't go full scrum/kaban/etc
>Devs were always measured by velocity. It was just called "deadlines" or milestones in classical waterfall methods.
I tend to think that the entire concept of waterfall is a great strawman. At some point, "rapid iteration" runs into the cold, hard reality of how companies tend to work. There are definitely still deadlines, even if no one wants to come out and call them that.
I don't want to suggest that I'm dismissing everything coming out of Scrum (and its cousins) out of hand. But I also think that there's sometimes too much salesmanship pushing it. This represents the commidifying of Agile itself, where now there is money to be made in coaching teams, and selling certifications, regardless of what the end result is.
You say salesmanship I say companies resistive to change ;)
The point of the manifesto and of training is to present the idealized form. All decent Scrum training will point out that, when the rubber meets the road, there are going to be compromises.
The idea is that it's more a frame of mind than a rigid system. If you approach the "cold, hard reality" with that frame of mind you'll still see improvement.
I'll give you a common real world example: having simple timeboxed sprints and daily 10 min standups is all many companies end up doing.
That's a shame but at the same time now that team has better team communication and better tracking of progress.
Will it be as good as it could be? No. Is it as bad as it could be? Also no.
It's a trade off.
The salesmanship that pisses off so many devs is because a truly Agile workplace requires buy in from all levels and know what helps get buy in from management? Certification, training, webinars, and enterprise-y biz-dev seminars.
There's a tendency of developers to think that every part of something that applies to them should be for them, but that's not true. That salesmanship is not aimed at you, it's useful training for you (I'm doing CSD training this summer for example), but that part is aimed at other parts of the company.
I worked somewhere that did waterfall, hardcore. For everything, requirements came first (sometimes, since moving on, I've even found myself suggesting in meetings that if we don't know what we're meant to be making, the odds of getting it right are pretty slim - obvious yet somehow it needs stating out loud more than it should be). Sometimes literal months were spent on getting them right. Then the design. Full on designs, full on design reviews, the whole lot. It wasn't impossible to come back afterwards and change things, but it was pretty rare. By the time coding came around, it wasn't much more than implementing the design (coded up in literal programming style, too, such that what was written turned into two separate sets, being beautiful latex-based documents interspersing the design and commentary of that design with the code implementing each piece of design, and the code for the compiler to eat); all the actual programming thinking had been done during the design. Then levels of testing, starting small and unit, moving up through the layers until the original requirements were being tested against.
It's the only place I've ever worked in which the customer never registered a single bug. They even asked us if we could take over from a different supplier since they'd never managed to deliver anything that worked. When the tests were signed off (and they literally were; the tester signed their name against each test, data records were archived, the paper test steps and signatures were sealed in envelopes for customer inspection on demand) that software did its job from delivery day one.
Waterfall is really demanding and really hard to do well (and it also requires a high quality of customer; if your customers don't know what they want and simply cannot be guided into telling you, I suspect it's impossible), but it sure can deliver. I've never worked anywhere else that managed such high quality.
An infinite ala carte menu of subsets of the parts you like about Agile, Waterfall, or any other methodology as long as you ship working code roughly on schedule.
When I hear the above argument, I'm reminded of the Protestants versus Catholics scene in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.
> But square feet cost $$$ and switching to an open floor plan is an immediate cost cutter.
This reminds me of the time companies used to try to save money by buying low powered computers. They didn't realize that carbon is more expensive than silicon.
There's a big manufacturing plant in town that's been around for decades. One day, a new company comes in and buys them out. The new managers look at the books, and say "Wow! Look at these crazy labor costs! There are way too many senior people here. Let's replace them with new guys, and we'll save a bundle."
So, they do that, and save a lot in labor costs.
After the first year, though, they run into a problem. The plant isn't working like it should. Output is down, and everyone's running around with their hair on fire, trying to figure out what the heck is wrong.
After two days of this, someone finally gets a bright idea: "Hey, why don't we bring in one of those old guys that we laid off?" So, they hunt down the most experienced guy they could find, and bring him in to take a look.
He shows up, and starts walking around the plant. He slowly walks up and down the whole plant, with a gaggle of concerned managers following his every move. Finally, he stops at a pipe at the back of the plant, and pulls out a hammer.
He lifts the hammer up, and whacks one joint really hard. Suddenly, the plant starts working again, and everyone is rejoicing.
The CEO is smiling, and pats the old-timer on the back, and tells him to send a bill for his work.
Well, the next day, the bill shows up. $10,000.
"What!" he exclaims, pounding his desk.
"Send me an itemized bill!"
The day after after that, a new bill arrives:
Hitting pipe with hammer: $5
Knowing which pipe to hit: $9,995
> I suspect we're reaching peak open floor plans right now
I doubt it simply because it's way way cheaper to have open floor plans than rooms. Savings on materials, easier compliance with fire safety, way higher density.
Worked a place where a third of our office had 20ft ceilings and we were running out of space for people.
I used to joke that Ikea sold queen sized bunk beds (I dunno if they still do, but they did then), and that we could totally get a desk up on top of one of those...
Using a study of programmers in the 1970s (where not punching the wrong hole in punch cards was a critical skill) for programmers in 2017 may not give you the most useful data.
Is there any study that shows that adding distractions to people and removing personal privacy makes them more productive and/or lowers stress hormones?
For example:
>...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.
Makes you wonder why more companies don't measure these things. Google and Facebook A/B test button colors, but can't be bothered to measure programmer productivity in any scientific way.
> Just like the cargo cult Agile pandemic peaked a few years ago
Part of that early agile movement was Extreme Programming, which I'm pretty sure advocated for office space per-team and a communal working area with private office space around it.
I would take a 10% paycut to have a small office that fits 2 monitors, a filing cabinet and some pictures, rather then dealing with constant clattering of the guy behind me that decided converting a type writer into a digital keyboard was a good idea.
I understand your sentiment entirely. I have thought the same way. However, I have to ask, why would you, or I, or any other person creating substantial value for a company, ever in their right mind take a 10% pay cut (or any other level of pay cut or reduction) in order to be MORE efficient? Our attitude in this industry drives me crazy lately. And really it has been my own attitude for a long time. We ask to be more efficient, to produce better and more valuable assets for our employer, we believe in their vision, and in return we have to beg and plead to help ourselves become more efficient, often to our own financial detriment. It's rather disheartening.
why would you, or I, or any other person creating substantial value for a company, ever in their right mind take a 10% pay cut
Because markets. In sales you learn fairly quickly that price isn't determined by cost or value added but exclusively by what the market will bear. Since US labour has little negotiating power even a programmer will have to buy quiet space.
All things being equal, yeah I'd love to keep 10% of my pay, but if I have to give up X to get private space, which would help my happiness at work, I would do that. My happiness is worth atleast 10% of my pay. Life is more then money
I couldn't care less for efficiency, I'm going to get roughly the same amount of work done in a shitty office and in a good one, that's just how I am - but it would make me a helluva lot happier and allow me to actually enjoy doing the job I should enjoy.
The noise is from bottoming out. Put spacers on the keycap stems, and it stops being a problem, no matter what kind of switch you use.
This is easy to do and only a little time-consuming. It's easier and faster when you take a cheap Bic pen, pull out the tip and ink tube, and use the body tube to press the spacers down on the stems - it's just the right diameter, and makes the job much faster.
The spacers are cheap, too, being simple silicone rubber O-rings, and as an extra benefit, the rubber eats up a lot of the bottoming-out force that'd otherwise be transmitted up the key into your fingers, which means you type more comfortably as well as more quietly.
Beats me, but if it comes down to a choice between reengineering people's behavior or reengineering their tools so they can do the same thing they've always done but not get such a poor result, I know which one I've seen to work and which one I haven't.
Thank you! I've been looking for a keyboard like that for years, ever since I had to get rid of my old Zeos mechanical to keep my wife from going insane in our shared office space. The Quiet Pro PC looks absolutely perfect.
Sorry, you're absolutely correct. Still, pain in the arse to get decent keysets for and I've always found the ALPS design to be 'wobbly'. Something about them is extremely uncomfortable to me.
In my opinion, if you know you're going to be working in an open office setting, you should try to be courteous and minimize the negative impact you have on your coworkers. I think you should be willing to make the choice to use a quieter keyboard that isn't necessarily your favorite.
So I'd say the problem is with both. The open office is the ultimate source of the issue, but it can be compounded by workers who make choices that exacerbate the situation. The reality is that an open office can be quite pleasant if the people working in it collectively make effective choices that take into account the well-being of the group.
I recently got one and I admit it's really loud. But this shouldn't be an issue in a decent workplace. I have several guys near me who have loud voices and talk a lot. That's worse than a loud keyboard. Open office plans are the problem, not keyboards or loud people.
I am distracted by your loud keyboard. Frequently, I find myself wishing that you had a quiet keyboard like everyone else in the office. I am particularly irritated by the noise of your keyboard each morning when you write long emails or posts. When you are coding and there are frequent long breaks when you are thinking, it is not quite as distracting, but I still don't like it.
I agree with you that open office plans are the problem, but your keyboard makes that problem worse.
In my parallel universe, you're also the one telling your coworkers about your weekend every Monday morning, but I agree with your point. :-)
> Open offices are just stupid. They cause conflict where there shouldn't be.
Yes.
I would kill someone for a walled office, even if there was a high risk of life imprisonment, as long as there was some assurance that the prison cell would have walls.
I was using a Model M when working in an open office in China. No one really cared, because the guy in the cubicle next to me had a sunflower/watermelon seed habit. Damn, no one should be de-shelling seeds in an open office! Or in the afternoon we would have fruit, and pear day everyone would be smacking and slurping (Chinese pears are much more watery than western pears, I hate pear day!), or everyone talking/arguing/whatever. Turns out my keyboard wasn't weird in what was already a high noise environment.
I had to invest in a pair of Bose noise cancellation headphone a long time ago.
This is true. But, if you're in an open office, don't you think the decent thing to do is to not speak loudly (and therefore not use a loud mechanical keyboard)?
There are mech keyboards with more quiet switches. At least use one of those.
But, if you're in an open office, don't you think the decent thing to do is to not speak loudly (and therefore not use a loud mechanical keyboard)?
No, that just shows tacit acceptance of the situation and exacerbates the problem over time. If you work in an open plan environment, the best thing to do is use the noisiest keyboard you can find, wear headphones that intentionally leak noise and listen to your music loud, do as many personal phone calls as you can from your desk, etc. And then, when people complain, point out that you didn't ask for an open plan office, and ask them to go to their manager and explain how horrible open plan is.
Worst case, you get fired. Big deal, now you have a chance to look for a place to work that isn't brain dead.
Pretty much every mechanical keyboard will be loud. I use a board with Cherry Red switches at work, and while it's much quieter than my board with Cherry Blue switches that I use at home, it is still louder than the rubber dome keyboard it replaced.
It doesn't bother my coworkers, but I also have an actual cube, so there's at least a little bit of fabric-covered foam inbetween us.
Heh. I had a former cow-orker who hated by Topre board. I told him if he'd (a) keep his computer volume off and (b) not hold impromptu, non-work meetings as his desk at bar-volumes, I'd try to use a crappy board for him.
He was offended. I kept my board.
Again, the root problem is the veal-fattening pens.
Sure. It's good to be courteous. But in the end it comes down to the fact that open offices are just plain stupid. I don't know what the motivation behind them is but it's certainly not to make a productive workplace.
I agree with you that open office is the problem, however my old mechanical keyboard is louder than most people with a loud voice and it would probably be used more often.
I have never suffered the tyranny of an open office. I do use a loud keyboard and honestly can't imagine going without it.
I am easily distracted by sensory stimuli. It ruins my concentration. At home I have some nice in ear noise isolating ear buds and some of those ear muffs designed for yard work. My children can, and do, reenact world wars on the hard woods above me and I can't hear it.
If I ever were in an open office, when I do deep work, those things would stay on.
So I sympathize, but the open office puts knowledge workers who need to concentrate and type in a lose / lose environment.
So you would prefer your coworkers develop RSI symptoms from straining to use a laptop keyboard? Not all of us can use laptops for extended periods of time. Now if I could type with my brain (and I don't mean by smashing my head repeatedly on the keyboard), that's Sam Altman status quo shattering next-level stuff, but I don't think we're there yet.
As others have replied, the problem isn't my typing, it's <40 square feet of personal space and no noise partitioning whatsoever.
The standard keyboard layout, which every mechanical keyboard I've ever seen (including my beloved model M) is terrible for your wrists. The people using mechanical keyboards are not saving themselves anything.
Get a proper ergonomic keyboard like the microsoft sculpt if you actually care about the health of you hands.
Mechanical keyboards are cool, which is why I own one, and when I had an office why I used one every day. But mechanical keyboards are like the loud exhaust that people put on their cars. Yeah, there is a reason that some cars have loud exhausts, but that isn't why you put that on your honda civic.
You appear to think that mechanical boards cannot be ergonomic. I agree that the Model M and friends are terrible, but that's hardly[1] the end[2] of the mechanical[3] ergo[4] story[5].
>If you type a lot over a prolonged period of time, yes. If you type in short bursts (like most programmers), no, mechanicals are actually useful.
Is this really how most programmers work, though? When I'm learning a new language or tool, sure, but after that it's mostly just the activity of writing the code.
> Is this really how most programmers work, though?
Yes, well, I guess it depends on how mundane the coding is. It is possible that a programmer spends a lot of time typing and not a lot of time thinking, but then it is probably brain dead boilerplate that should have been automated somehow.
> When I'm learning a new language or tool, sure, but after that it's mostly just the activity of writing the code.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "writing code".
Look, I'm not trying to get into an argument with you here, but:
1) You are not an authority on all programmers, or even most programmers.
2) The primary way that programmers express their work is by typing. The idea that programmers don't do very much typing, or that typing comfort/safety isn't relevant to programers is demonstrably absurd.
>"it is probably brain dead boilerplate that should have been automated somehow."
3) This thinly veiled derision is, imho, not constructive/rude. Do you consider the linux kernal "brain dead boilerplate"? Just some quick googling shows that the per developer code contribution is about 11,000 loc per release. That is code that was in the release, and doesn't even account for code that was typed, then removed, then retyped, etc.
Believe whatever you want, but I find the idea that programmers somehow don't need to care about ergonomics extremely shortsighted.
Again, there is plenty of opinion that programming is much more thinking than typing. Any programmer who says they code at even 20 wpm is probably BSing, or are caught doing a lot of transcription work.
You can write 11K lines of code without continuously typing a lot, especially over a few weeks.
I've been down this route many times. And after Dvorak, Kinesis, and a wide assortment of supposedly ergonomic keyboards, El-cheapo $15 Kensington USB keyboards and $20 Logitech trac-balls turn out to work best with my wrists, occasionally aided by Imax smartgloves.
I have a veritable museum of failed keyboards and pointing devices in my closet. IMO there is no silver bullet here. Also to extend your automotive metaphor, my nephew's late model diesel pickup gets 30+ mpg. Appearances and brand new shiny can be deceiving.
If someone were to lend me this combo for a couple weeks, I'd be happy to evaluate it, and if it worked, I'd buy a bunch of them. But I have a working solution right now so I'm not really in the market for an upgrade.
I need large mouses to not get hand pain, and the sculpt mouse has been the biggest mouse that I've found that fit that criteria for me quite well. It's even bigger than the mx master.
> Get a proper ergonomic keyboard like the microsoft sculpt if you actually care about the health of you hands.
I had this conversation with my coworker a few minutes ago who uses an ergonomic keyboard. I believe that the amount of stress you're going to have from a non-ergonomic keyboard is directly related to your posture, which is directly related to your anatomy. For instance my coworker is very wide and he prefers to spread his elbows out while typing.
I, on the other hand don't spread out my elbows that far out, so I don't really feel that must stress while typing for long hours.
One thing which I do notice is that I type by moving my right wrist around (and most people do that to keep their wrists free for grabbing mouse and other things). But if I try doing touch typing where I keep my fingers on the homerow, then my wrists hurt.
Maybe I'm going to give ergo-dox a shot to see what am I missing.
I love it SO much. I wouldn't be able to be a software engineer without it. The amount of neck, shoulder, elbow, forearm, wrist and hand pain I once had is now gone completely. Not to mention I am a much faster and more accurate typist.
I re-bought everything, chair, monitor stand, electronically raising desk, keyboard, two vertical mice - for left hand and right hand. I didn't find it that hard to use a left handed mouse as a right handed person but your mileage may vary. I swap between the two throughout the day.
I think out of all of those, having the monitor at the right height, vertical mouse, kinesis advantage and then using a pomodoro timer are the best bang for buck. The standing desk is nice but not really essential in my opinion. Just getting up and walking after a 25-30m pomodoro session is good enough.
I struggled a long time with RSI, and for me both the mechanical and ergonomic keyboards solve the problem. A model M fixed it, and then later a microsoft comfort curve also fixed it. The comfort curve is a lot more quiet, so out of respect for my coworkers I use that one, although I do miss the feel of the model M.
Drifting rather off-topic here, but why credit the "heighten the contradictions" strategy to a weird modern academic cult? Rebranding Leninist ideas about sabotage, I guess, makes it seem fresh to the rubes. Never mind that attempting to time social and political systems doesn't work much better than timing the market, and if you get it wrong, you're just being a horrible person. (Assuming your underlying goals are good ones to begin with.)
Personally I'd rather listen to mechanical keyboards rather than people having meetings at their desks, I can fairly easily tune out non-human sounds... Unfortunately not many people seem to have them despite my office being the 'geekiest' in the Seattle region. sigh
I have a mechanical keyboard at home (Corsair Gaming K95 RGB), but at work I use a Mac wired keyboard (on a PC). Super quiet and probably the best performing scissor switch keyboard.
Hey, I have the same keyboard! Do you actually use all the extra G keys or macros? I thought I would but the cognitive load of memorizing what each G key stands for is too much.
This is why I gave up my old IBM Model M for a quieter DAS Model S. I don't really want to type on cheaper mushy keyboards, so this is a nice compromise.
I have had mechanical keyboards four different offices (1 cube, 3 open workspaces) and got very lucky with people either not minding or, at one company, a co-worker saying "that's music to my hears."
I've had a friend on the wrong floor at one company who had to switch to MX Browns with o-ring dampeners.
If a company banned me from using a mech keyboard entirely, I'd start looking for another job.
Also be careful not to point out that "keyboard noise" is the crux of the issue, since then you'll end up with those employees being told they can't use their nice keyboards that they probably paid a lot for just to use at work, which will result in said employees really, really not liking you if they find out it was you that complained.
Anecdotes are the best you're going to get on that. Who's going to fund a serious scientific study on the effects of mechanical keyboards on RSI? The mechanical keyboard makers comprise a very small, niche industry these days.
The anecdotes are correct: with a proper mechanical keyboard, you don't have to bottom out on the keys, and only have to press enough to make them click. Once you retrain yourself to do that, then you're putting a lot less stress on your fingers, compared to rubber-dome keyboards where you're forced to mash the keys down until they bottom out.
Wait, that's a thing? (Quickly Googling...) OMG, that's a thing.
People in the office are still using old-school typewriters for certain official documents, so I expect I can get away with it. If I can't concentrate due to existing office noise, I may as well have some fun. Thanks!
I used to be the blue-vs-brown guy (mostly because my brown keyboard made a lot less sound that my coworker's blue), but then I tried his keyboard and let him try mine and it turned out that it wasn't about the keyboard switches, rather it was about the person using them. My blues made a lot less sound than his browns.
In most cases, it's the keys bottoming out rather the switches. Guy in our office with a membrane keyboard who smashes the keys into oblivion is far louder than the two mechanical keyboards in the same space.
By the way, I cannot type without bottoming out, and I suspect this is something many people simply cannot learn to do. My hands will just not cooperate. I use Topre switches, which are supposedly quite ideal for practicing this magical voodoo typing technique, and when pressing a key enough to activate it but not bottom out, I have about a 50-50 chance of not activating the key at all. It's not something that's ever going to get better with practice, and frankly, I'm not personally aware of any detrimental effects of my bad bottom-out typing.
I use a topre too, and I bottomed out too, as it turned out that blues a lot better in terms of teaching you not to bottom out (because they have an audible click which provides you about the feedback of the actuation point).
you can get o-rings to dampen the bottoming-out of the keycap.
I use green switches with o-rings in a semi-open office layout and the only people who have ever noticed it are other mech enthusiasts. Browns with o-rings would be even quieter than greens.
After some coworkers complained I bought some o-rings for my brown-switch keyboard. It's much quieter although there are now other keyboards in the room that aren't quietened.
Still I like the newer quietened version, so I'm considering buying some more for my home keyboard (it is an identical model).
Learning to type without bottoming out not only will mostly elliminate the noise of brown switches but also reduce the shock tranmitted to the fingers. Ever since I stopped bottoming out (except for the spacebar and pinky-operated backspace) my typing comfort went up a lot.
Funny thing about loud keyboards. A few years ago my company had a programming pit, and I could tell when ever one of my younger programmers was chatting with a friend rather than working. His typing rate would go from 20 wpm to 100 wpm.
FYI I quickly abandoned the programming pit, back to quite workspaces for all!
Working remotely is probably the most-likely trend to supplant open offices. It doesn't cost the company any hard cash (like real offices would), and any productivity differences are nearly invisible, as they are with open offices.
Make sure you ask for a ceiling as well. I asked for a small office and I got one. It doesn't have ceiling because my boss didn't want to put one, for whatever reason, so it is useless.
>The only thing in my office that works well with interruptions is my CPU.
Slight tangent:
This isn't even true, context switch time has not scaled (equally) with improvements in processing power (IPC, freq and functional-unit parallelism). A PIII in 1999 spent proportionally less of its operating wall time performing a context switch compared to modern processing. Turns out flushing TLBs and the like is not fast. This is why managing interrupts properly is very important on server class hardware.
I don't think it's realistic to put the masses in their own offices at any productivity level if it means you need more Silicon Valley or San Francisco square feet.
But an office and the opportunity to live somewhere I can spend less than 50% of my income on a reasonable apartment, I'd take that offer in a heartbeat.
For the life of me, I don't understand how "thousands of cubes" is somehow worse than "thousands of $15 Ikea tables".
It's just a matter of fads and fashion. Cubicles are "so 90's", while crappy tables thrown together in a loud frat house romper room is "2000's".
I understand that each generation has an impulse to differentiate themselves from the previous one. But in this specific case, it is absolutely a productivity and quality-of-life downgrade. The purpose is for management to save money, period.
> The purpose is for management to save money, period.
Is saving money the real purpose, or the fig leaf for the actual purpose?
If saving money is the real purpose, then Work From Home (WFH) drops putative facilities costs to zero. Forget shaving a square foot here or a tenth of a square meter there: send everyone to their home offices, drop it to zero, call it a day, and collect the bonus check on your way out. No leadership recognition of the valuation assigned to the negative productivity impact of open offices signals that there is no quantified impact for WFH either, despite claims to the contrary. One can't have it both ways, claiming one can measure the productivity impact of WFH and not open offices. In the absence of actual quantification, if saving money on physical plant/facilities was the real purpose, WFH would win.
Well yes, there are also elements of power and control. Management worries that employees will do less work if they are not present and under observation (sad truth: for the bottom 90% of employees, they're probably correct). And open floor plans, as the high-tech sweatshop model that they are, provide the lowest cost and maximum observation.
But to my point about the degree to which fads and fashion come into play... it's bizarre that so many peers either:
(1) argue in favor of open floor plans ("More collaborative! More fun! Not all old and stuffy like cubes!"), or
(2) argue in favor of work-from-home ("More productive! Less distractions! Not all old and stuffy like cubes!"), or
(3) both, from one sentence to the next.
Open floor plans and work from home are POLAR OPPOSITES. The only thing they have in common is that they're both "not cubes". So it's bizarre to me that there aren't more moderate voices calling for on-prem workplaces of higher quality.
I suspect what is happening is no management team of a category killer company exists that comes out and says, "we treat our developers right, that is our key to success", or even a softer version of that, sufficiently to develop cargo culting by management in other companies. I don't think quantification will help in this situation, and thus even higher quality on-prem workplaces lose out, as the productivity metrics are confounded by too many factors, and are not simple to communicate to finance.
If I was on a management team of a category killer that figured out doing the opposite of what everyone else was doing was helping my company, then I wouldn't be broadcasting that. In this case, if I figured out that high quality workplaces (whether at home or on-prem) conferred substantial competitive advantages, then I sure wouldn't be telling my competitors that.
If it came out that Apple for example, consistently put in high quality workplaces for the teams that developed their category-killing products, and took steps to hide that fact from the world because they recognized its competitive advantage, then there might be some recognition and cargo culting. Much of management is a social activity as much as an analytical activity.
I want a cube because it's not the noise that bothers me but the constant motion on the periphery of my vision.
Cubes can be setup properly. They don't need to be row after row after row of cubes. We have them setup in pods that hold 6-8 people, one pod for each dev team. Only one way in or out, so there's no traffic moving through, with a small table in the middle that's mainly used to eat lunch or store treats that people bring in.
That. My previous employer was a subsidiary of a large US company. The subsidiary was all hip and open plan and I hated our office, even after I got some mild adaptations done (moved team assignments to "positive space" islands and install a 20" sound partition between teams' desks so at least teams had some privacy). The mothership had these neat Herman Miller layouts with team pods. It looked (to my European design sensitivities) butt-ugly, but I loved sitting there. So quiet, and the only bit of interruption you had was probably relevant because it came out of your team. Not a random sales guy strolling by (sorry, sales peeps - love you, but you're a noisy bunch ;-))
I've worked in tons of cubes for the first seven years of my career. I thought nothing could be worse, until I discovered the hell of open plan offices. I've been stuck in them for the past six years and it's a new level of hell.
Have you been in a cube? You don't have to watch other's pick their noses. It's way better than open workspaces.
> The lofty building Jordan Hamad moved his tech-advisory firm into four years ago had the trappings of a startup idyll: open floor plan, polished concrete floors, custom-built communal tables.
Decisions like this make me seriously question the whole idea that our economy is populated by rational actors. Obviously polished concrete floors are a terrible idea in an office. Even if you believe that open plan works, there is no rational basis for having floors that will reflect rather than dampen noise.
I worked in a highly visible operations center at a particular Fortune 50 company during the first dot-com go-around. Dedicated NOC designed to look somewhat like NASA MCC. Fishbowl facing a common area; very much on display for visiting executives who would often cluster outside the glass and watch Operations Being Done.
The relevant twist: An office manager felt the adjustable height desks weren't aesthetically pleasing. He set them all to the same height, removed the adjustment cranks, and sent out an email instructing us to not adjust the desks or to change monitor heights.
This policy lasted about a week before disgruntled employees with neck pain got in contact with folks responsible for employer liability.
I have never forgotten the lesson that workspaces are not always constructed with employees in mind.
Markets != people, last I checked. If you're talking about the efficiency or rationality of a market, you're talking about some statistical measure of the market. If you're talking about one guy making a bad choice of flooring material, that's just one idiot.
What's good for markets isn't necessarily good for people. eg, Slavery was pretty efficient. Takes awhile for people to rise up and explain to the markets they're not as rational as they think they are.
Depends on the other surfaces. If the ceiling is hang tiles, rough wood, or fabric panels, there is such thing as too well damped. Most rooms have a happy zone of about 30-60% reflectivity. More sounds like a bathroom, but less can be equally unnerving to people. Also, polished concrete is ubiq due to it being cheap, easy, and looking decent for a long time. That 4x4 carpet is not much better, and is the similarly priced, equally soulless, alternative.
He has since moved to a 5-by-8-foot pod in the company’s innovation center. He retreats to it when he needs to focus or switch mental gears between meetings. [...] “It’s not about status or privilege,” he says of the pod, a prototype with still-exposed two-by-fours. “This is a space where you do certain kinds of work.”
Which is so very weird because you would think that the genius CEO would want his people to work as efficiently as possible, like himself. But no, open offices are a must so productivity be damned.
How do CEOs become this blind to obvious organizational cruft?
I'm a PhD student, and I am in an open office floor plan at the moment. Albeit smaller than I have seen at tech companies, offices in my program have 8-10 people in them.
When I was at Shell we were in the Houston medical center (near it, really) so Shell built a hospital and jammed their people into it in case they ever needed to sell the building. The company didn't bother buying real desks: we used full sized party tables and two people sat in a space designed to be a private hospital room. It was so tight I had to get up and leave to let my office mate in or out. I'd still rather sit there over a dog bone or trader desk setup you find today.
As one of the old farts who started when even the lowliest peon had an office the fact CEOs are discovering forcing people to do their work in a large, loud, noisy space doesn't work isn't terribly surprising. Nor does the fact that 30+ years later almost everyone above a certain level still gets an office even in the cube farm environments. At Shell you could instantly tell the rank of a person by the size of their office. Fast forward to today and you must be an ED to rank an office where I work now. It's a status symbol.
For over a year, our dev team has been begging management to fix our open-office. It's loud, distracting, and negatively impacts our productivity. The team wants 1/2 height cloth cubicles that would provide a limited measure of privacy and personal space while also helping to dampen the noise. Their response: Buy on-desk semi-transparent plastic partitions that just provide another noise-amplifying hard surface...
Thankfully, I was recently hired onto a 100% remote development team and put in my 2 weeks. I'm done with open office floor plans and hope to never again work at a company that uses them for developers.
Our solution was to use flattened cardboard boxes as extra walls in our way-to-small cubes. It looked horrible but it worked. Management didn't seem to mind...
If I ever get a chance to design an office, it will be something like the above. Small risk of that, however.
At the risk of sounding like I want to dehumanize work (quite the opposite, actually), I'd like to point out that anybody thinking of adding, say, a new milling machine to a machine shop, would look at how much space you need for it and around it to work productively and have quick access to the necessary accessories. Yet, we don't put any analysis at all into what it takes to maximize the productivity of people. And too often, we go for one-size-fits-all solutions. I can imagine a high-functioning dev-ops team really benefiting from the instantaneous communication of having all 8 people on the team sitting within a short chair roll of each other in a common space. For the people who need long blocks of unbroken concentration, that kind of space is not as functional. "Interrupt driven" work and "deep though" work are two different kinds of work, and it should be no surprise that a single space is not optimal for both.
It seems like when "Open Office" articles come out there seem to be quite a few people talking ill of them. I recently switched jobs and with it switched from an open concept (large room with whiteboards separating teams) to an office (shared with one other coworker.) Maybe I was conditioned to like it (I certainly didn't like it at first) but I really did prefer the open concept when working on a team of 8 or 9 people. I never missed a conversation my team was having and if I ever needed anything all I needed to do was turn around. I guess I get the noise issues, but even in an office with my door open I can still hear conversations in the hallways so I still wear my noise canceling headphones.
Did your team-members enjoy you turning around and interrupting them?
Is it really that hard to get up and walk to another office so you don't disturb 8 other people with a question they don't care about? Walking around occasionally in the day is actually good for us.
And two person offices are a mild improvement over cubicles, which are a significant improvement over open offices. But neither is remotely as good as a one person office.
> Did your team-members enjoy you turning around and
interrupting them?
I don't think it's fair to call all conversations "interruptions" and my co-workers were all very conscious of causing any unwanted interruptions.
> Is it really that hard to get up and walk to another office so you don't disturb 8 other people with a question they don't care about?
It wasn't, and I often did walk around as I regularly needed to interact with other teams. 99% of people had headphones on through all parts of the day.
As a side note, this workplace was comprised of mostly men and women under the age of 35 with quite a few right out of college. We regularly got comments from the interns
that we hired that they chose to work their because of the open environment. Age may play a factor here I suppose.
Sounds like you haven't been on the other side often enough. Most of a programmer's added value to a company happens in the 4 hours (give or take) that they are "zoned in" to what they're doing. As tech lead, when you knock them out of the zone early, you cost your company a lot of money because it's usually going to be a while before things ramp up again.
Lots (most?) of developers don't like having their focus interrupted. You assume because they are cordial that they were fine with the interruption. As their team lead and SA, they don't really have a choice.
As a side note, we're all idiots fresh out of college. We hear about things that seem good, but don't have the experience to make a proper value judgement. Lots of college kids have group study sessions and think they are great. The reality is that they are great for socializing, but generally terrible for studying. Open offices appeal for the same social reasons (with the same kind if issues). With no real life/work experience, its little wonder that this is preferred.
You made me think of something interesting. My 4 hours NEVER happens and I'm in a cube-farm/closed space. Interruptions happen all the damn time. Sure we don't like our focus interrupted, but that's what work is. It's dealing with the managers and leads that need to ask you something urgent while managing your deadlines and dealing with noise which is still very much present in a closed-office area unless you are the board members that get to work remote.
I have one cool little experience which was an open office that switched to a closed office space during my stay. Productivity went down regardless of the boundaries put in place because now the leads and managers have their offices closed for meetings and therefore engineering staff is next in line to handle emergencies/data requests. Granted this is due to our workflow as well, however the point I'm making isn't that one setup is always better than the other but that it probably depends on multiple things and if you think you're gonna get 4 hours of golden time in a real, moving business then that's very naive or you have been very lucky yourself.
I think the reason I liked open offices is because when I needed to rethink an algorithm and analyze it I had at least 3 people that could offer their commentary. And while study groups may not work for reading a book, they damn sure work on designing algorithms when you need to openly discuss the tradeoffs and goals. Just my 0.02 on the whole thing but TL;DR sounds like open offices don't work for some places, but work great for others.
EDIT:
to add to this, the open office we had was not noisey. There weren't massive conversations happening all the time and it was normally just inside voice levels of noise. I haven't experienced what I am imagining as the restaurant equivalent of an office.
Sure we don't like our focus interrupted, but that's what work is. It's dealing with the managers and leads that need to ask you something urgent while managing your deadlines and dealing with noise which is still very much present in a closed-office area unless you are the board members that get to work remote.
It really isn't normal to be constantly interrupted. I'm a developer managing 2 other devs and dealing with stakeholders and still manage to go many hours without interruptions. It's all about respect and being organized. Most urgent things only become urgent because somebody dropped the ball. Improve the way people work and organize that work, and the urgencies go away. You do need to retrain some people a bit to be respectful of your time, but mostly it works out because mostly people mean to do right by each other.
You don't consider that your position of authority affected a different dynamic than if you were a lower ranked individual contributor?
> As a side note, this workplace was comprised of mostly men and women under the age of 35 with quite a few right out of college.
I'm not sure how this is relevant. One might as easily conclude that these folks don't know any better due to youth and inexperience as that "it's just a different age and culture."
I had this exact thing happen. I was consulting for a team that just acquired a small company. They had this huge building, but got most people into a large open area. The lead was certain it was so useful, he was tuned in, everyone loved it. Plus "they can go into offices if they need it". In personal interviews with employees, nearly everyone hated it and wished they could just permanently have an office and only come out at times, but didn't want to say anything.
We regularly got comments from the interns that we hired that they chose to work their because of the open environment.
It's unlikely that many of them had competing offers from a company that offered private offices, given how few companies actually offer private offices. Most likely they were just indoctrinated / brainwashed into drinking the Open Plan Koolaid and are just parroting a stock line.
> 99% of people had headphones on through all parts of the day.
Yes I've found that to be true as well. I myself typically wear expensive noise cancelling headphones all day and blast music, damaging my hearing, in order to drown out distractions. Fuck open offices.
This is why I actually like cubicles. you are physically close to your team, if your space is organized well you are on a common isle with people you work with, but you still have at least a little bit of isolation in your personal workspace.
Possibly because having cubicles for each employee creates the expectation that each employee will stay at their cubicle. Walking up to a colleague's cubicle to chat about a work-related project can be misconstrued by an uninformed observer as "not working". This incentivizes employees to stay in their own cubicles.
That is the simplest way I can think of by which we might come to the usual "cubicle hell" scenario where workers are stuck from 9 to 5 in their cubicles while being occasionally nagged by management (as in Office Space).
I should add that we did not have long open tables. Each person had their own mobile sit/stand desk and mobile filing cabinet for personal belongings. There was quite a few people who positioned themselves facing a corner for that reason.
I prefer cubes as long as they have 6ft walls or more. I once worked in a open plan where I had 12 sq ft of space. At least with carpet and walls you get some sound damping but can still ask hear what's going on if you need to.
Slight differences in cubes make a big difference to me. I was just moved to a cube where the only feasible setup is having my back to foot traffic and it drives me nuts.
Open office plans are soul crushing and noisy. They are not explicitly given to disorganization and distraction, but prone to it.
Cubicles are soul crushing and organized. They are not explicitly private, but prone to it.
Not all spaces are created equally. Most are bad, but some are appalling. If you find one that is "good" you probably don't work there. Give it time, and it will suck eventually. They all do. None of them are actually Home.
I find that if there are enough conversations in an open-plan office the conversations blend together and I can tune them out (similarly to a coffee shop). At the cube-farm I worked at there would often be exactly one conversation happening at a time making it difficult for me to focus on anything else.
So I find cubicles to be the worst of both worlds: not private enough to have quiet but not loud enough to tune everything out.
That is a culture issue. We are a remote heavy team. Like GitLab, we have made it a part of our company DNA to write everything down. It is just about the norms of the organization. Writing everything down takes disicpline, but pays off in the long run.
I'd be curious to see what people think of when they say "open office". The description from you and others of < 12 people in a common space doesn't fit my definition. The open offices I've experienced are ~100 people separated by rolling whiteboards at best.
CEOs also typically believe they are the only resource that isn't replaceable or outsource-able. But, if they're good at what they do, and the buck truly stops with them... I'm fine with that level of responsibility vs benefit. This is mostly because I imagine the CEO doing a bunch of jobs that I do not _want_ to do.
I like popping on my headphones and going to town... but I'll admit, distractions often overcome even my headphones. That's where working from home comes in.
Curiously, in my experience it's been senior management (including CEOs) who've fought for open plan offices in the first place. Cost benefits aside, they do wax lyrical about all the reason why open plan is great.
Elites of any description are usually in favour of measures that cut costs and increase surveillance and control, until those same measures are applied to them. At that point, they don't reverse the measures in question, they use special pleading to justify carving out an exemption for themselves.
Because they have allowed tail functions like HR and Building Services to set company policy with no thought to the wider effect on the company. Aka I got my bonus and I don't care if I have F%$Ked up the company
At a previous job, I was sent to a partner company who was building a web site we'd take over. This company had a wide open floor plan (except for the execs). I remember one day our HR VP visiting and exclaiming how wonderful this is. She said she wanted to implement it where we worked. She asked me what I thought with this beatific smile, and I said I found the never ending movement and ad-hoc meetings around me to be distracting. The smile on her face dropped and she said, "You'll get used to it", as she walked away.
CFO's don't get bonuses for increasing productivity.
They get bonuses because they "saved" the companies millions by cramming more workers in a smaller space. Then they get another bonus to figure out how to cram more workers in, because for some weird reason productivity has gone downhill.
Same here. Interestingly their meeting rooms whre they spend most of their time aren't open space and have nice big windows. They also have nice offices for themselves.
I think this whole collaborative workspace bullshit was oversold and overbrought. The only thing it does serve is the ego of an insecured management who doesn't trust its employees that they are working in closed spaces. That is the reason they want open office spaces and support Agile.
I fail to understand why do you need your team to sit next to each other when you have modern day collaboration tools like Slack, hipchat etc. The management folks who argue that open office increases collaboration fail to understand that engineers don't collaborate whole day long. They collaborate for an hour or so and then they need to focus and build things. The ideal ratio would be 80:20. An engineer wants 80% productivity and 20% collaboration. By this it makes sense to have a closed office spaces and have collboration areas around the office. Having an open office and few personal areas scattered around the office promotes 80% collaboration and 20% productivity. As an organization are you really aiming for that?
A very small startup team does benefit from an open plan, such as shared desks or a shared office. This scales to maybe 6 people. I think this is the environment that larger companies are trying to capture.
But at scale, this is a ridiculous setup and one that breeds interruptions. In a small team, what one person knows is often useful to another. In a larger team there are many more independent parts, and entangling communication is a waste of attention. Worse, I think it causes people to deliberately adopt a default-closed mentality to avoid overload.
Companies don't easily outgrow their early cultures; they think what got them there will continue to serve them -- in fact, they want to go back and "capture the magic" that were there in the early days. It's a form of corporate nostalgia that is one symptom of becoming sclerotic.
It's not really about open floor plan vs. cubicles. I recall the first time I visited HP's vast cube farm at their silicon valley headquarters. It was vast, drab, mostly quiet, and absolutely soul-deadening. OTOH the Dropbox headquarters in SF was open floor plan and absolutely cramped, yet buzzing with youthful energy. Lots of people were using headphones. I could see how it would be an exciting place for a young person. On the one hand the buzzing energy is a potential distractor, but it's also an energy booster. It makes your heart beat a little faster. It makes you feel like you're in a place where things are happening.
With age, my powers of concentration have waned a bit and I cannot power through distractions like I did when younger. A cube farm would be very demotivating. An open floor plan would be highly distracting, but likely somewhat better. But the best is to avoid large environments like that entirely, and stick with a smaller group where the interruptions are actually useful, where a shared office and a shared mission produce energy and focus.
I've worked at a few places with open workspaces. In the field of law, open workspaces make zero sense. You're always on the phone or always attempting to fully concentrate on the task at hand. Open workspaces allow distractions to fester.
One open workspace was intentionally planned so that the micro-managing CEO could readily see if the employees -- mostly attorneys, mind you -- were hard at work or hardly working. Nothing was private, especially not the condescending beratement from said CEO. I quit and started my own law firm, requiring work from home for my subsequent hires and leasing shared office space.
That firm was acquired by a client, and I was again forced to commute to work since I would be directing a large on-site team of attorneys and paralegals. It was another open workspace but, thankfully, the C-suite enjoyed perimeter offices. I don't understanding why they realized that we needed offices to avoid distractions and to keep confidential conversations in confidence, but failed to consider the effect of the open space on other employees -- also mostly attorneys and licensing guys.
I've since had a successful exit and again get to enjoy "working" from home.
Ultimately, each team has its own optimal cadence that oscillates between face-to-face and secluded concentration.
Open space implies that cadence is "daily", but for workers who create intellectual property, that cadence is more realistically every 5-10 days.
The need for in-person "check and balance" varies with experience. I work with remote teams of Sr Engineers that meet in-person 1-2 times per year. Minimal communication issues.
But if apprentice-level Engineers are being groomed, then the frequency of in-person meetings needs to be daily/weekly/monthly.
I think people forget, or maybe don't realize, open floor plans were popularized in the startup world because of their cost savings. It's very hard/expensive to rent office space with enough rooms for everyone, or build one out that way. It's way easier to put a bunch of IKEA desks next to each other.
I'm not saying there's not a better way, but that's the justification. Anybody trying to convince others that open floor plans are more productive is living in crazy town.
I can handle one conversation. Or many. But two or three going on is really annoying.
And I think it's because we natural pay attention to humans and look for patterns. You can't really do that when there are multiple conversations. And the brain doesn't bother trying when there are too many voices.
So one conversation is fine. If there's already one conversation and you need to speak to somebody, use Slack or get a room or set up a meeting or wait.
Individual contributors want private offices. Companies want "openness and collaboration".
As I've been at WeWorks lately, I've noticed that they have all glass walls on the offices. This means that everybody has natural light and a sense of openness, but with a locking door and quiet. A more general question to people in such all-glass private offices - is it the best of both worlds? Or, is more privacy needed than all-glass walls?
The "downside" of private offices is that management doesn't know what you are doing in there. Lots of glass is an attempt to keep people connected and restrict the net surfing, game playing and time wasting that management fears will happen with private offices.
I think it's a reasonable trade-off. It attempts to give the best of both worlds, incorporating one advantage of open office spaces is there is more team motivation because it's more obvious if you are slacking.
Meh, I completely disagree. Management doesn't know what you're doing if they're standing behind you the entire work day. That's why they're managers. And more to the point, net-surfing, playing 2048, chatting, etc. are not things that need to be restricted. The reality is, no developer (or probably any creative person) is going to be productive for 8 solid hours a day, straight through. We need idle time to separate the bursts of productivity and give the brain time to reset.
is more team motivation because it's more obvious if you are slacking.
There are much easier ways to tell if someone is slacking. You don't even really need to do anything special. The team will know who is carrying their weight and who isn't.
I've worked in open offices my whole career. To me its normal and I'm used to it, probably I dont want an office locked away.
I have found the next step down though where I work - hot desks. Basically you get a locker for your stuff, no reserved desk location and a virtual terminal to a desktop on a server. This really does suck.
The penjulum of "things startups are wrong about" and/or "you succeed despite this rather than because of it" open plan offices will shift back the other way in the next decade to "deep work" and "closed door productivity". Joel Spolsky & co are just two decades ahead.
Oh really? How many hundred years will it take until they find out that "regular" workers also have declined performance in large offices? I find them a disgrace. I don't need a single office for me - but 3-6 People is enough.
I really want to know how Apple's laying out the new campus. I've read something about different types of "pods".[1] Is the idea you can float among different types of spaces (quiet vs collaborative)? Who gets a door? Does anyone know more details?
Sometimes I wonder if this open office thing is pushed on people because of the high real estate cost in San Francisco. Anything can be spinned into a great thing.
I think that's globally true: it's been known since the 1970s that open-plan offices aren't good for productivity but they're undeniably cheaper and, in many cases, also has the unstated advantage of making it clear where people rank on the status hierarchy in organizations where only management above a certain rank are allowed offices.
I was dead wrong about the open office layout: I was an advocate, but I now see that over time, for any company larger than a garage startup, it ends becoming a way to cut costs and pack more employees per square foot. It isn't worse than cube-farms, but it isn't much better.
I wonder if per-team offices of 2-5 people around a central hub would actually hit the right balance between interaction and think time.
I think its worse than cube farms, way worse. In a cube you have some modicum of isolation, even if its just a physical barrier to keep from seeing 100% of the movement/traffic around your workspace.
In an open environment, literally everything is a distraction. The only time I've been content-ish in an open environment is when I happened to be facing a corner.
Solution is simple. "Make sure you reply to company wide messenger. Make all open area conversation via messengers. Make any conversations that benefit vocal speaking in a separate room. Give everyone an option to book private rooms for occasions where you need long phone conversation"
But also note that the Steelcase CEO's quotes are shaped to help sell their office pod systems. He's really not going to share his personal preferences, he's going to push their product.
As a CEO I mostly don't work from the same space as the rest of the team as my work tends to be multi-person meetings and phone calls. We mostly share our meals together, however.
Is there a HN facility where I could just block these pay-walled articles? I have nothing against someone trying to make a buck, but there is insignificant chance that I will 'subscribe' or login to read a wsj article. I just want to save me some time and wsj some bandwidth.
OK maybe I just need to learn to look at the link.
Maybe it is? Idk, I'm no ethicist so I wouldn't be able to justify it. But is it any different than using the web link to get a google redirect when you didn't really come from google? Or using incognito mode? Perhaps the better discussion is about how a community forum handles articles which only a subset of people can access.
It's one thing to find a loophole in their paywall to view their content on their site. It seems to me that it's quite another to scrape their content and serve it up somewhere else in its entirety.
Outline is just the new readability. I'm not sure they're even aware that they're serving paywalled content. To me, the end user, the effect is the same. They're both just loopholes.
I'm not here to defend it, but as a paying digital subscriber to WSJ (and other papers), this link is useful! WSJ signed me out (they often do), and to sign in again I have to re-enable JavaScript which means their site gets slower and the text bounces all over as things load. I'm happy to pay for quality content but news sites have to stop degrading the digital experience if they want me to keep forking over $30/month.
Edit: for science, I enabled JavaScript and loaded the WSJ page with a cold cache. The text jumped 3 times over the 22 seconds it took to fully load the page.
Who said I want to read them? Most people will not pay a subscription fee to read the article. So it does little use to that demographic. I am not implying they are not credible source of information. It's just that we will be restricted. That's all. But thanks for the downvote, reminds me that I should have given this reasoning before.
I do want my office back. My office is the land around us, and NIMBY idiots along with people that don't understand individual-level mining (which is very low impact) keeps me out of that office.
* Desk area is for getting work done. Everyone agrees on this.
* We have "phone rooms" for small discussions. But we limit those usually to 1:1s or discussing office politics.
* Try to limit all discussions at the desk area to 5 people or less.
* If someone sighs loudly as they put on their headphones when you're having a discussion right behind them, then that is their signal to you to keep talking loudly, as their noise-canceling headphones will eliminate any trace of your conversation.
* You can usually carry a conversation at your desk at any volume, because other engineers will let you know if you're being too loud. Engineers tend to be extroverted and won't hesitate to let you know if you're bothering them.
* When someone first sits at their desk, it's polite to immediately engage them in a 30-minute conversation about their weekend or what they did last night. It eases their transition into work.
* A person working without headphones on, signifies that it's ok to tap them on the shoulder to ask them a question.
* A person working WITH headphones on, signifies that it's ok to tap them on the shoulder to ask them a question.
* If someone usually works off in quiet parts of the building, one should always remind them "you're never at your desk" with an accusatory tone.