Ask HN: Why are you against open plan offices?

I have 300 people on my floor, the group closest to us is from business and spends 2/4 hours a day on the phone. It saddens me because the largest openly claimed benefit of Open Plan offices is "increase collaboration". What I literally see is people locking themselves with headphones and trying to hide in rooms to get some silence. I mean, people literally have to walk around teams to go to the toilet or get a coffee.

I'd like team size cubicles. That would sound to me like a good compromise between collaboration, and deep work. I'm sure people would open up more. In fact, it is how it was setup at Bell Labs back in the time [1], not the pale copy we see everywhere today.

A bit like Agile has become Scrum I'm guessing :).

[1] https://aquicore.com/blog/bell-labs-office-design/

Some people can't handle being productive in a extremely loud, and extremely bright environment. It doesn't matter how much I destroyed my hearing by putting loud music over noise-cancelling headphones, I always felt tired after ~2 hours of work.

Open offices seem to start in companies with 10 people, and eventually turn out in floors with hundred of other workers screaming loudly so they can be heard over the existing noise. Ideally, an open office should have noise detectors over the office to remind people to keep their noise down.

As a positive, if I were 20 years older I'd probably have started working in cubicles, which have all the negatives of an open office but without any natural sunlight.

Think of a library.

I have not even brought up the visual or olfactory distractions, either.

This happens for sure

In my experience the ratio of beneficial to detrimental serendipitous and/or spontaneous conversations that result in any benefit is extremely low, so low in fact as to not being worth it. The problem is that people tend to remember the useful one conversation and forget the other 100.

At my current job, never have I ever been involved in anything that has resulted in a solved problem from a casual conversation, yet I was regularly interrupted by other people before I started working from home.

Or, then, you just don't trust your employees and want to watch over them all the time.

Neither of these reasons touch the actual reason why you are in the office - to create added value. Hence open plan office is an environment that the market has selected for all the other reasons, except to be a good place to work.

Some people like open offices, other don't.

The overall picture from literature and practice is that if the cadence of the work is "like in NASA flight control" then the easy communication aspect is an actual asset.

On the other hand, if you are mostly coding and doing other sort of deep work, then an open plan office is openly hostile to productivity.

For example, if noise level increases 10 dB it decreases productivity by 5% [0].

Personally, having worked in all sort of configs for two decades, my capability to concentrate, productivity, and happiness in an open plan settings plummets.

[0] Dean: Noise, Cognitive Function, and Worker Productivity "https://joshuatdean.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/NoiseCogn...

You're exposed to everything.

People will tap you on the shoulder.

While I'm the same as you, I don't particularly enjoy the feeling of having noise cancellation headphones on for the entire workday - it starts to feel a bit vertigo-ey.

Some people don't like making small talk.

In an open office all they have to do is vaguely wave their hand in the corner of my vision with "hey just a quick question" that inevitably turns into a 15 minute product revision meeting.

I can't do focused work with headphones and music. I get headaches because I have to put extra effort to focus and think. I've tried headphones, earphones, IEMs, and earbuds. That includes regular, audiophile, and noise cancelling. I just can't do it. I need quiet to think. Even noise cancelling headphones need music playing to block out noise an in office when you are next to people (e.g. sales, HR) who are in meetings all day.

Let me flip this another way. Imagine if a business decided that they were going to lower the temperature to 50F/10C to save money. Somebody then said "Well if you are cold just wear a thick jacket, gloves, etc. I do it and it's fine" A lot of people would be miserable and would have some parts of their bodies freezing and hurting (hands, feet) and other parts of their body (e.g. underarms) would be sweating and uncomfortable. How much focused work could you do in that situation?

Does the above situation sound ridiculous? Well that's exactly how I feel about the expectation that everybody can just put on headphones and focus.

I've been in private small cubicle offices in multiple jobs and done just fine. But the noise and visual distraction in open offices is just too much.

Secondly, however, is the inability to control my own environment. Some days I'd like it to be dark, some light. Sometimes I'm cold, sometimes I'm hot. Or I want loud music or silence. Etc. You might think these are all minor things and generally they are but if all of them slightly negatively impact you, you might end up being cranky and unproductive the entire day.

Cubicles are slightly worse because they suffer from the exact same issues but are much uglier.

Get rid of the open office! And all it took was a little virus that can decimate the human civilization.

If companies want to cram their employees together, and make them sit shoulder to shoulder on a little table, then just let us work from home. We don’t need to be smashed together like sardines in a can.

By keeping us so close to one another, without physical distancing, and walls that block airflow and people’s germs, then I believe we have gotten sicker over time. Every season, I would always get sick, and I attribute it to the open office. The past 2 months of working from home, has been great, because I avoided getting the flu.

Their principle complaint, was that open offices save money. Well, here’s finally a way for them to save even more money! Remote telecommuting!

By nature, social activities need your brain to be focused on things happening around you.

Work activities need your brain to focus on that task at hand, and not on your surroundings. Hence your brain needs to overcome all the distraction to focus on work, if you're in an open (social) environment. No wonder people feel exhausted at the end of the day.

That said, I think having a completely closed office is equally bad. I think a good office is one that combines the best aspect of both.

Lots of small things get fixed and fail to grow into big things

When I work from home I get uninterrupted focus on the task at hand which is something that is almost impossible in the office but only get to hear about problems when they get big and urgent

I also feel that I am dropping out of the loop. There are too many messaging systems that I need to keep an eye on, email, chat, texts, whatsapp, slack to keep in touch. In office communications is basically email for clients or in person

If I have a solid piece of work to do the office is not the best place but only if you can do it by yourself. In the office I can see when I can or cannot interrupt someone. When working from home I have no idea if it is a good time to interrupt someone

But for me the open office is only 12-15 people. Large than that and communications become impossible and the noise to signal get worse. Also managers seem to do more 'managing' in bigger offices :(

Here's how open offices came about.

The CFO made a spreadsheet, and the "open office" column was a nickel less than the alternatives.

I can't work with music/headphones. I tried, but it doesn't seem to work for me as I tend to focus on the music.

Cons: Lack of focus. Dishonesty in how it's 'sold' to the workers; the cost is never openly acknowledged as the reason.

I don't hate it. But I do suspect that the net result makes it a false economy. While I do miss the cameraderie of being in an office while working from home I'm not missing the distractions of open-plan.

I'm not against the idea of the open office. I'm against the scale at which it is implemented. Open office for a team is okay (even good, when you're in the idea-bouncing among teammates phase). Open office on a large scale wherein often the entire floor can hear each other is terrible.

The core reason: the inability to work deeply for long intervals of time. Especially when you have grabbed a good idea and are trying to implement it before the flow gets broken.

At any office there will be people who by their nature will cause disturbances. On a larger scale, the probability that someone will break my flow is greatly increased.

Because being people have meetings in the space right behind my desk.

Because I feel like cattle, which could explain why I have this beef XD

The negatives are pretty well known. I've seen information like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_plan#Evaluation

> A systematic survey of research upon the effects of open-plan offices found frequent negative effects in some traditional workplaces: high levels of noise, stress, conflict, high blood pressure and a high staff turnover.[16][17]

> The noise level in open-plan offices greatly reduces productivity, which drops to one third relative to what it would be in quiet rooms.

since reading the chapter about it in Steve McConnell's "Rapid Development" in the 1990s.

Ahh, see chapter 30, "Productivity Environments", https://archive.org/details/rapiddevelopment00mcco/page/504/... . You'll need an archive.org account. It doesn't really cover open plan offices - that era was more about cubicles.

The best set-up I've ever had was when I had an office with just my team (and only the other engineers) so just the people who I was actually working with.

This meant discussions could actually be useful as we were working on very similar stuff, if not the same - and as they were other engineers we were all capable of offering solutions and not just being a distraction.

In my current open office the vast majority of the people have no idea what I even do and have such entirely different skillsets it's not like we can have productive work discussions. Therefore, it's just noise and distraction.

The most productive environments I have known are a modest sized room used as an open plan office where every person there was working on the same project. The managers had their own private offices on another floor. Under those sort of conditions collaboration and intelligent conversations can arise. So long as you manage to exclude the blabbermouths who are constantly asking stupid questions or making unnecessary commentary.

I think I have achieved the best compromise, work from home, turn off emails and all forms of social apps. Then once or twice a week go to the office specifically to have meetings, etc. That way I get the peace and quite to immerse into deep work (Cal Newport) and get the benefits of collaboration and brainstorming. I only check my emails after I have finished the day's deep work. My promise is that I answer all emails addressed to me within 36 hours. Nothing faster. If it's that important people have to text message which I will typically check 2-3 times a day max.

BTW I charge for specified units of work completed according to schedules and budgets that I agree to. Charging on the basis of hours worked just doesn't cut it for me.

Headphones don't filter out every distraction either, though, so there's that too. People constantly walking around or eating food you can smell or shuffling stuff on their desks or doing whatever else they are doing can be incredibly distracting when you need to concentrate.

Also distractions are one thing, but I know lots of people want some privacy in the workplace too, even if it's not the first (or last) reason they'll list. It's kind of the elephant in the room. If you're the kind of person/robot who thinks privacy in the workplace is a fundamental oxymoron and who goes 4 or 9 hours straight without taking a bit of a break once in a while (whether it's just to check your personal email or social media, or to lay your head down for some time and rest a bit, or to make/receive a phone call, or whatever) then maybe you won't sympathize with this. But not feeling like people are continually observing you is something a lot of people value.

Also my ears can eventually sweat when I have headphones on for hours on end, and my headphones end up getting dirty, and their existence isn't exactly indistinguishable from their non-existence either, so there's that. Maybe this is too obvious? But an open-plan office where the solution is "wear a headphone" is practically a job that mandates that you wear a headphone.

I'm sure there's other stuff I'm not thinking of at the moment. And of course there are lots of benefits too; I just didn't list them since you seemed to already be aware of them.

If you enter an open plan office and see a bunch of people sitting with headphones on, it should be immediately clear to you that most of them are suffering from noise pollution. The headphones are usually a coping mechanism to keep out the noise, not primarily to enjoy some music.

The problem with open plan offices is usually the fact, that it gets incredibly noisy. increased noise levels lead to being distracted, which leads to exhaustion, which leads to lower productivity, which in some cases causes mental problems like burnout syndrome etc...

this might be not the case for every type of person, but i had the "pleasure" of experiencing the upper situation personally and a few times in other ex-coworkers who just couldn't cope with the constant noise.

Most of the time, i have someone next to me or close to me, who is on phone with someone else.

I had a 4 people office once and it was great. Close the door, noise is outside.

I have never heard a worker who requires concentration say they are MORE effective in an open space - only equal or less.

(I have heard sales people say that, and they mostly extol the virtues of being able to ask anyone around any question mid-sale-call and get an immediate answer; I suspect their co workers might have a different perspective)

I highly recommend reading “Peopleware”, which —- among many other subjects — has anecdotes and some real data about open spaces vs private vs small team offices.

For the last 8 years I've been working for "silicon valley culture startups" all of which push open offices, and even though when you have 3 to 6 ppl it makes sense, once you are more than that it becomes hell for people that need to focus.

In reality they are used because closed office space is more expensive.

Psychology: Many of us hate the idea that someone behind us might be looking at us, our screen, our work. That there may be someone walking behind us that we know. That the sound of footsteps behind you might be your boss, or a colleague you'd like to chat with. It might be anyone, and there's some desire to want to find out to get closure.

Open offices are okay if they're part of a range of choices. I enjoy working in open offices sometimes. Sometimes it drives me nuts and there's no escape. That's not okay. There must be balance and there must be options.

For example, semi-open is a great start, because it means sound doesn't bounce around in one big space of 60 people, but rather only in the space of 10, and gets limited in sound/light traveling due to e.g. plants, windows etc.

If there are meeting rooms to meet or organise calls, that means the high-impact activities can be separated. If there are team-rooms, it means you can collaborate without impacting people who you don't work with 9/10 times, while you can still seek them out in their team room or meeting rooms, or an open-space setting you happen to be in for part of the week, if you do want cross-team collaboration.

The idea that teamwork flows best by putting everyone in one giant cage without caring for sensitivity to sound and human psychology, is a joke that in any other field would be seen as a bruteforce idiotic idea. Besides, the economics of non-open offices aren't wildly different with the right approach. Sound-proofing to turn a giant area into a set of large areas by installing some glass has barely any impact on cost, but is already a semi-open improvement. There's lots of good ideas on the spectrum of every desk in a cubicles vs all desks on a giant football field, it's not one or the other and you need to provide balance and options.

Some things that make the open office I experienced good: nearly the entire floor was developers with some managers, operations teams sat between developer teams, the ability to turn off overhead lighting and just let natural light in through large windows with two levels of shades on them, and there were conference rooms near by for louder conversations and white boarding. There were support folks who would need to take calls, but that was in a separate area. I never heard them. We also would have no problem saying, "hey, too loud" if a conversation good too loud or if something serious was going on. Another benefit was that when it was lunch time, just about everyone got lunch at the same time and ate together; 50-80 people in the kitchen talking shop or silly things, building rapport, hearing issues others are facing and offering help and solutions.

Sometimes, like at the end of the week, it might get too noisy with too many conversations. Then it was time for headphones for some. But we are talking like an hour or two a week.

Fortunately, I work from home most of the time. I've build the antithesis to an open plan office: I've built an even smaller office in my office where I've essentially put up black curtains all round my desk. Working with a VR headset might be an option as well, but from what I hear they're not quite production ready yet for long term office/programming work.

But it really depends on what your job/task is.

And how well designed the open plan area is: Break-out spaces, individual rooms for when someone needs to focus, have extensive telephone calls especially of a confidential nature, plenty of meeting rooms, cubicles (I hate cubicles, but that's me, some people like them). And plenty of natural light.

And if someone wants to work remotely, that's good. You're not me, and then I appreciate doing this sometimes. A lot of people prefer to not work remotely because of the work-life divide an office space benefits. And some enjoy the social environment.

I absolutely cannot work listening to music but am fine with osmosis of office chatter; make sure the printer's in a printer room, putting it on the floor is a special form of hell. And have a pantry for eating, I quite like the taste of aged fish but don't want to smell it.

In my experience hot-desking does not work. The benefit of people sitting together is there's a work-flow happening. People that need to talk to each other can. In hot-desking that all breaks down so what's the point at all other than when the whole office are individual contributors and office layout is irrelevant - many people have a relationship even with the plant that sits next to them.

Not everyone's the same. Provide options. It's a team effort. What works for the team as a whole? Measure what the team does, analyse it, reflect.

It's easier to get more connected than less connected.

For example facilitate social discussions by adding shared spaces, as it relies on the estates department. Comparatively, noise and interruptions are a lot harder to hchange as it relies on behaviour.

Solving hard problems requires focus time. You constantly fight against focus time in an open office.

I'm lucky because I have an awesome home-office, so when I need to focus more, I can just work from home. But many people don't have that luxury, so open offices probably end up being quite harmful to overall productivity.

Noise, everyone around me talking on different conference calls and trying to concentrate on my own. Constant distractions both audio and visual. People don't respect the "headphones so stop bothering me" rule.

Yeah the collaboration is a plus, but it's just hard when you really need to get some serious work done.

I started working in 2000 and even as an intern I had my own office. It was a lot more productive.

I had that experience at one company, but others were a total mess.

A software developer needs at least a good 3-4 hour block of uninterruption to produce something valuable. Context switching and distractions are a productivity killer when it comes to building software.

At one company, we would have upper management come into our shared office (5 desks) where we had 3 developers working, and they would have their personal and business calls right next to us. Total disregard for people's personal space, peace of mind, and work environment.

For shared open offices to work, you need a strong culture and understanding that unless you are to be quiet and work on your tasks, you need to get out of the shared office and go discuss group matters in a conference room.

The idea is to keep the collaborative effort and spontaneous conversation while still having place to retreat for silence and while limiting the full amount of noise by limiting the total number of people.

My first experience working for a company was in a traditional Japanese house in Kyoto which approximates this a bit, there was a relatively big room where we often worked but I would sometimes retreat downstairs and gaze at the indoor garden while working in silence..

Obviously such a setup would cost a lot more to companies but I do think that the productivity gains would help...

Some research institutions, inspired by academia, had offices (IBM, PARC, IAS, Bell Labs..) and mingling areas it that was less common.

I saw open plan offices reappear around 2000 when the price of Palo Alto real estate started shooting up and frankly it shocked me. It’s crazy to me that this is considered savings given how much it costs to recruit and pay a person. I can’t concentrate with noise or visual clutter (people moving in my field of view).

Some jobs do do better with an open plan, like sales teams. It’s a cultural issue.

In my opinion an open plan office for developers (or anyone, really) would ideally be an option, but you would have to opt-in. There are situations where being able to shout over your laptop at your coworkers is going to be beneficial, but there are also situations where people should be able to zone out and concentrate (zone in?) for several hours at a time without having to blast white noise in their headphones.

I think most people who complain about them here haven’t experienced the alternatives. The most likely alternative is cubicle farms, which are soul crushingly terrible, or a number of different solutions which all require use of much more floor space. The economics of a more-floor-space approach would reasonably make everybody about $20,000-$50,000/year more expensive to employ, and well you can guess where that money would come from...

Having a private office was great, but a team space I shared a few years ago - rented just for that team, for around three months - was astonishingly productive for all of us, with almost none of the downsides of open plan.

As far as open plan goes: it is worse for mental health, productivity, and creativity. There is ample evidence to support those assertions ( https://theconversation.com/a-new-study-should-be-the-final-...).

The only advantage open plan has is that it is cheaper, per person, than any alternative - if you only factor in the cost of office space.

I appreciate your open mind on the subject!

> However I'm inclined to say I don't think I would enjoy cubicles or private offices. I feel like you'd miss out on so much collaborative effort and serendipitous & spontaneous conversations with colleagues that solve problems out of the blue.

This is very unsettling to hear: That's the exact kind of hand-wavy argument that managers make.

Truthfully, I can't help but think of Stockholm syndrome when I read that sentence.

Here's the clencher: If you can't collaborate effectively in a private office or from home, there's a systemic mechanism failure. If your team or company isn't setup for effective communication, you will find yourself trapped in an open office plan and believing they're the only way to work.

However, the real problem is buried: Your team/company either cannot effectively collaborate outside of an artificial environment, or at least believes that to be the case. Assuming this is true: Why?

For background, I've worked remote for most of my career, but at the start, I had an open office job (and a two hour commute each way, consisting of an hour walk to the nearest bus stop and an hour bus ride to downtown Orlando, because the job didn't pay well enough to consider purchasing a car). In hindsight, it was a miserable experience, but at the time I just coped with it.

> I also think it's just plain isolating being on your own in a room all day.

Easy lifehack: Don't do that. Working remote doesn't require you do that. Working in a private office doesn't require you do that.

If you have a private office, you can also schedule 1:1 meetings in your office.

If you're working from home, take regular breaks to talk to your family/neighbors/etc. Pet your dogs. Dogs need love too!

> What's wrong with just putting some headphones on if you want to put your head down and do some deep, quiet work?

What's wrong with putting your jams on the speakers, rather than headphones, in your home office and standing up to dance when a good song comes on your playlist to get your blood flowing?

Different strokes.

That said I wish they were popular - for my competitors. :-)

Collaboration was great which was important for a new project. I think for an existing long running project less collaboration may be necessary and extra separation may be better for productivity.

Private office does not have to mean that single person is in the room. We have offices big enough to hold whole cooperating team, in general of 3-8 people, occasionally more.

So you get debate, but debates from other teams and you dont have to worry that you are disturbing other teams.

> What's wrong with just putting some headphones on if you want to put your head down and do some deep, quiet work?

I don't know you, so don't try to take it personally, but I'd venture that your always-on generation and the constant expectation of immediate feedback led to most of the younger ones incapable of really deep focus. When 85% of the solutions to our problems is no more than 5 minutes of Googling around, it gets really hard to exercise that part of the brain where we set ourselves to dig through all the layers of abstraction and build a good mental map of the problem to be solved.

When you do get in such a deep state of focus, it is not a problem to be "plain isolating to be in a room all day" because you don't realize the time passing around you. Like reading a good book that you just can't drop until is finished, no one should feel bad for coming out of a 5-6 hour session of deep focus, productive work and "not having connected" during that time.

And usually it's only those who don't like a thing that talk about it.

https://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt...

https://www.mattblodgett.com/2015/06/just-wear-headphones.ht...

https://dandreamsofcoding.com/2014/06/17/science-superstitio...

http://nathanmarz.com/blog/the-inexplicable-rise-of-open-flo...

https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/09/10/developer-flow-state-a...

https://hackernoon.com/what-happened-to-software-development...

http://calnewport.com/blog/2016/10/09/is-facebooks-massive-o...

https://www.prdaily.com/report-u-s-workers-hate-open-office-...

https://www.citylab.com/design/2018/08/the-case-for-rooms/56...

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20191115-office-noise-a...

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/07/30/private-offices-re...

Just... could you click a little quieter, please?

"Hey guys, can move it down the hall, I'm trying to sleep here."

In my experience those "solutions" are usually wrong in the sense that they only solve the immediate problem without giving due consideration to the wider project. If you leave out a lot of people involved most problems are easy to solve, because you're ignoring all the nuance and the things that make it hard. The solutions are also very rarely documented, so after the discussion people walk away with different ideas of what was discussed and different solutions in mind. In short, they might feel good, but they're often quite bad for the project.

https://www.franzoni.eu/productivity-the-office-and-an-open-...

TL;DR: the open office may not be a problem per se. Instead:

1) It's a problem if you get a very large open office with excessive employee density and/or with different kind of employees around. This usually results in a lot of noise and/or distractions from unrelated teams.

2) It's a problem if there're not other places where to go have video/phone calls, and/or if some people need to be constantly on their phone/meeting system.

Privacy, safety and a calm environment should be a must for an office. Otherwise, what's its purpose?