Office rents are based on floor space. Open offices require less floor space than closed offices, which means they’re cheaper. They’re also more scalable and agile. You can rearrange desks and even cram in more employees per desk when you need to quickly ramp up. Increasing collaboration is just the bullshit excuse.
Everywhere I work is an open office and we all wear our noise cancelling headphones, playing whatever music doesn’t break our concentration, and communicate via Slack.
Cheaper rent is definitely the driving factor in cities like NYC and SFO. But I think small private offices like those at Stack Overflow [1] don't really eat up that much more floorspace (maybe 1.5x-2x but then you need far fewer small conf rooms).
Saying "toughen up and use headphones" is such a dismissive response to noise that employers use. I'm extremely sensitive to noise distractions, and music is, for me, just as bad as coworker chatter. Even white-noise apps make me feel like I'm getting barraged with sound. I want "library quiet." It's amazing that "open office" workplaces don't generally have a policy to keep the space as quiet as possible so people can get real work done.
Honestly I think the noise and chaos of open offices are positives to executives because it creates the appearance of work.
I follow some of the executives of the company I work at (we have an open office) and they are constantly posting pictures of "teamwork and collaboration" that just have a bunch of people standing around each others desks talking. They see all the movement and noise and they love that it seems like everybody is hard at work, collaborating and discussing problems etc. But if you look a little closer, the people doing actual work are hunched over their desks with huge headphones on, and everybody standing around are either not talking about anything related to work or they are rehashing discussions that have already happened over IM/email/meetings. I expressed to my manager that I had a hard time working in this environment and would like the chance to work from home a more often but was dismissed because he "likes the open office" and our management has the view that if you are working from home you probably aren't working.
Your bit about executive perception is a great point. I think that's a huge reason why our offices and workdays look the way they look, why we spend so much time in meetings, why WFH has so much resistance.
The executives tend to be extroverted and at the top of the primate social-power higherarchy. Much of this is unconscious, or at least un-admitted, but the people in charge of our offices get a rush when their subordinates visably do the work. They enjoy people gathering around them and telling them about the issue of the day. To an extrovert at the top of the ladder, that power wouldn't feel as good if it was manifested solely as Jira tickets, slack pings, and performance dashboards in a home office. They would not feel nearly as important.
One open office I worked regularly flew in parent company executives from around the world so they could watch all that geeky brainpower under their command grinding away at our Macbooks.
I think this psychology has had a cumulative effect on creating our work culture. Did an individual executive decide to build your office based on how it made them feel? No probablly not, but when you take the psychological profiles of all business leaders together you get the open office, the business trip, and the all day meeting.
It made me think of another: perhaps executives wrongly assume that what's a productive environment for them and their tasks is appropriate for everyone in the organization.
> One open office I worked regularly flew in parent company executives from around the world so they could watch all that geeky brainpower under their command grinding away at our Macbooks.
Might as well put you all behind a big glass wall, with a placard underneath that says “Developers” and toss a few bananas in every once in a while.
At my office, our team IS behind a glass wall. We have four external facing 70" monitors displaying various dashboards, and we call this work area "the Fishbowl..."
Right, I think some people honestly think that software just magically leaps from developers’ fingertips onto store shelves. Product management, project management, operations, marketing, legal, sales, BD? They just sit in meetings and play Candy Crush all day...
I never claimed that everybody but software engineers are useless, I wrote that managers are mostly useless, as in you could reduce their number by perhaps 2/3 and you would get the same results (probably better).
Where do you work? I've rarely experienced this. Current and last company, both fast moving adtech firms, we are always desperate for good managers. BUT the key is only to have managers with, well, management skills. That does not mean promoting the best engineers to management, a common problem. In fact it is often specifically not that. They get promoted in the tech track.
The book "Managing Humans" is worth a read if you're so cynical about managers. Though the actual problem is corporate culture in my experience.
Funny anecdote about that: I briefly worked in one of those "startup inside a megacorp" companies, which had the typical trendy NYC startup look, open floor plan, free snacks and lunch, etc. Fairly often, you would see upper management types from the headquarters walking investors around. One of my coworkers, who worked for the company for many years, believed that we were basically just a zoo to look exciting for the investors compared to the stuffy corporate office. Good developer, here's a banana!
Of course I don't think that's necessarily 100% true, but it always stuck with me.
I think this is pretty close to being 100% true. Expensive tech workers function more like office furniture in most companies, where the executives don’t actually care about productivity anyway, beyond a few senior engineers who decide everything anyway.
In a previous job I once had a VP make a quick run-through of the office to make sure everybody was at their desks doing something, anything. The reason being that they were about to walk clients through the space and wanted the appearance of hard work being done. The VP was very open about this reasoning with us as he was herding people into place. I believe a few people sat at different desks because their regular desks were away from the path.
Oh yeah I've been there as well. I've also seen upper management insist on adding more infrastructure monitors on the walls for the same reason: clients think they look cool!
Wow, I remember being a junior guy long ago and getting assigned this task. They brought in two huge (at the time) monitors and had me set them up to show “real time” graphs and plots. Didn’t matter what the data was, just find a computer, plug it into those monitors and show some techinal-looking ambiance for the 15 minutes that some investor or other big shot will be in the room.
At my first startup job upper management would explicitly tell everybody to come in early and look busy whenever there was a board meeting or investors around.
Lest someone think that description is hyperbolic, this is a real, recent event at IBM [1]. The audience was a marketing department, so the "spiff up the cubicles" talk isn't solely aimed at technical staff, it is everyone (except perhaps sales?).
/r/IBM is an IBM-controlled sub, and the original was deleted by the IBM-employed mod, hence the screencap.
> have a policy to keep the space as quiet as possible
I work in a similar dystopian open office panopticon, and I'm shocked, every day, that this isn't something that everybody is intrinsically aware of. But where I work, there are some Important People who have offices with doors - who leave the doors wide open, put their phones on speaker, and shout into conference calls all day, every day. The inconsiderateness of some people is really mind boggling.
When that happened to me, I got up, walked to their office, and closed their door. At the time, it felt a little like Rorschach saying, "no, you're locked in here with me". I was closing just one of the doors to my office.
Well, if you are like I was, you are already looking for other jobs, so by the time HR sits you down to discuss the incident, there's a reasonable possibility you might already have an offer in hand. That could be fun.
In my anecdotal experience, the same people that are loud in open offices are also the ones leaving dirty dishes in the sink. Some people are either unaware and/or don't care.
I wonder if this isn't a side effect of our moving to be a "less violent" society. Back in the day, that person would at least get punched for doing such a thing, and would not do it again. As it is, there's really no negative reinforcement to such actions, and so they don't see the point of not doing them.
No need to start punching. Just confront them on their behaviour. 90% of the time they'll back down if you call them out. They're just school-bullies grown up.
"Even white-noise apps make me feel like I'm getting barraged with sound. I want "library quiet.""
The middle ground I have is noise-cancelling headphones (bose qc20) with white noise app playing a low volume mix of grey noise and... maybe brown. The grey gives a low feeling, and helps mask out some frequencies that the noise cancelling headphones miss. It's not perfect, and it's not "library quiet", but I've found the combination is relatively calming most of the time.
Just a guess: some extroverts find "library day" just as unpleasant as others find non-library days?
I really like the way Amtrak handles this: At least on the Northeast Corridor, most of their trains have a "quiet car". Whether or not you sit in it is optional.
I would dearly love to see some class action lawsuits for hearing damage due to coerced headphone wearing. This is an occupational health hazard as much as anything else.
(and yes, noise cancelling headphones is still sound, even if it's out of phase! I even wonder if it's worse, as the effect might be constant sound pressure on the eardrum -- does anyone have the science on this?)
The reason noise cancelling headphones work is that, by being out of phase, the two sound sources sum to zero (or closer to it). It's not just a trick of the brain making you ignore the sound because an out of pass signal is also present. The out of phase signal causes the actual sound pressure level to decrease by cancellation. So yes, there is less sound pressure.
The fact that noise cancelling headphones cause me pain made me question that. I wonder if the wave interference does indeed sum to zero, or to a constant DC offset. Obviously there's no such thing as a constant pressure in acoustics, but something's happening...
It is possible that the cancellation is not perfect and there are still pressure waves hitting your ear at frequencies outside the range of human hearing. Or it's also possible that just having the cans over your ears is causing fatigue, separate from any actual sound pressure.
As far as a DC offset, that doesn't exist in actual sound pressure waves. That's an artifact of discrete representation of sound as an electrical signal. When a DC offset is connected to a speaker you don't actually get any sound pressure, because the sound pressure comes from the cone's movement pushing air (resulting in pressure waves in air).
A DC offset just means that the speaker is being held still at some offset from it's "zero" or resting position. But the speaker is still being held still, un-moving, so no pressure waves are created. The "pop" you sometimes hear when a DC offset is present is the transition from a neutral signal (no offset) to the DC offset. The immediate change in the signal causes the speaker to move as fast as physically possible to get to the new position, creating a short, often very strong pressure wave (the pop). But once the speaker is at the offset it doesn't move unless the signal changes.
As you say, there is no "constant pressure" in acoustics. Or more accurately, it's typically not a factor in sound reproduction. Technically we are all subject to the constant atmospheric pressure. But it's not the pressure that causes acoustic phenomena, it's the rapid fluctuations in pressure. It's even possible that the headphones are forming a seal around your ear and subjecting your ear to varying pressures as you move and the headphones shift on your head (too slowly to be perceived as sound).
Most likely it's high-frequency (ultrasound) noise cancellation artifacts that you don't exactly hear, but they might manifest in what you experience as pain.
You should differentiate between active noise cancelling and passive noise cancelling.
Active noise cancelling is what fancy Bose and Sony and (simply put) it involves cancelling outside sound out by playing the opposite sound. This shouldn't cause hearing damage because the opposite sound waves actually sum to 0, but I'm unaware of any studies about this so who knows.
Passive noise cancelling is when your headphones block out outside sounds the same way that typical ear protection does - by physically preventing it from getting inside the ears. Most headphones (excluding open-back headphones) will have some degree of passive noise cancelling just because they need to cover your ear.
You can buy headphones designed to passively block as much noise as possible. They are typically called IEMs (in ear monitors) because they are commonly used by musicians on stage to hear their instruments and what not.
This kind of noise cancelling will absolutely not damage your hearing or cause pain. In fact, because of the lower ambient noise while listening, you will be able to listen at lower levels. That will cause even less hearing loss and pain.
I've got a pair of these [1] Etymotic IEM's. I also use Etymotic's musicians earplugs and the IEM's block out pretty much the same amount of sound and fit in the ear the exact same way. Other notable brands are Shure and Westone.
If you want, you can go the extra mile and have custom molds made of your ears. Those will be far more comfortable than universal IEM's and will block more noise, too.
In two separate jobs, I had managers tell me it was “rude” for me to wear ear plugs, even after I explained to them that the office noise was unbearable and noise-cancelling headphones are painful for me to use.
It’s 100% about virtue signalling to management. Headphones fit the visual stereotype of a hacker, so it’s OK. Ear plugs carry a connotation that the stuff generating noise is somehow “a bother” or “a nuisance” ... which of course is true, but you’re not allowed to actually acknowledge that truth.
The physical feeling of wearing over-the-ear headphones, ear muffs, etc., is extremely uncomfortable for me. Even with very expensive “ergonomic” headphones, I can’t stand the feeling for more than a few minutes.
When I’m actually listening to music, only earbuds will work for me. I suppose I could try to get earplugs that look like decoy earbuds.
However, if your comment was meant seriously, i.e. that employees should do some noise-cancellation arms race song and dance with employers, that mildly terrifies me. How could any person actually think that it’s acceptable to let your employer treat you that way? It’s insane.
The actual best option is to first do excellent work that makes your employer respect you and really count on you to such a degree that firing you for expressing reasonable preferences is not realistic for them. Then once you have established that bar of credibility, find the right ways to constantly remind your manager and other managers that the workplace conditions are unacceptable. This requires political tact because outright grumbling or long-winded feedback sessions will be used against you. Rather instead, you have to find key moments to unassailably undermine your boss by visually demonstrating just how hard you’re working but keep pointing out that because of noise and distractions, nobody (not even good, old trustworthy you) can get the thing done on time or get the full set of features implemented, etc.
You have to convert your pain into your boss’s boss’s pain, or it will never change. Capitulating with headphone contortions is a terrible approach.
So was I. Above all else, capitulating to change the debate into a question of which type of headphones to wear is not practical, because it doesn’t address the underlying negative health effects. To qualify as “practical” an idea would first have to at least meet the criteria of alleviating the physical disergonomy of the situation, or at least contribute to that over the long term. Anything which proposes to just “put up with it” in some way or another would be as impractical as possible, because not putting up with it is the sole property required for anything to count as a productive approach.
If the ear plugs are for a “real” reason, like safety or even required OSHA regulations, then of course the workplace culture around it develops to lend it credibility.
Earplugs and brown noise. I can just, if I concentrate, make out _that there are people talking_. But since I completely can't parse it, it doesn't disturb me. The earplugs mean that I can listen to it at a much greater volume that would be comfortable/safe without them.
The downside is that every time someone wants to actually talk to me, I have to take my headphones off and take at least one earplug out.
It's not only that, just from having to have such a loud work environment and no ear protection. Because if you have a room with more than a dozen people in it, it can be whisper quiet sometimes, but then when one or two groups of people start talking it gets really loud really quickly.
Employees are still more expensive by far than floor space. It seems crazy to have all that investment in people and then not optimize the environment they work in.
They are different budgets (different buckets of money). I worked at one company that had no money for new computers, but had plenty of money to fix a broken computer... so... my computer happen to break one day so bad all the internals needed to be replaced. The case was old, but all the internals were brand new. Companies are often short sighted and don't look at the whole picture.
Well that and the people who make "open office" decisions are often immune from them. It's rare to see someone like Gordon Moore actually sitting on the floor in an open cube with everyone else. Making ED or MD (depending on location) in my company means getting an office, even in buildings that are otherwise strictly hoteling setups with no assigned desks. The higher up you go, the more dedicated resources you get.
That doesn't fit with my experience. 100% of managers who have tried to push me to an open office have tried to claim (among other things) that the company couldn't afford private offices for programmers -- but when I asked how much it was and offered to take it out of my salary, they all admitted it wasn't really about money at all.
Increasing collaboration is a bullshit excuse, but so is cost.
If you expect people to do the right thing, you are going to live in a world of disappointment.
The only way to avoid this is to have the chance (e.g financial and social opportunity) and to use the chance (e.g by working and choosing) to set yourself in the right environment for you. Wanting the environment you are in to change does not work.
Just like you don't get more money by negotiating with your current boss, but by negotiating with bosses in other companies.
You can, and my, decide it's your mission to change your environment. It's possible. But you usually can only one mission in life, so choose carefully.
I'm this person right now. I'm living in a world of disappointment, always trying to encourage people to communicate, collaborate, work together, do things better together. It seems I'm always doing it in places that don't appreciate it.
I've learned the hard way that you appear to be right, one can't change this alone and doing so is maddening, depressing and frustrating. Especially when the verbal outward presentation by people is that they want and value the things I mentioned, but the actions don't match up.
I think I need to change, but, I can't help feeling cynical, like I'm giving up and running every time I see such a situation. And then I wonder, if everyone follows the same pattern, how are we actually improving the situation on a bigger scale?
I guess a question is, is it better to stand whatever ground you are on to help encourage positive growth and values, or just find new ground, as you seem to be saying.
I'm getting older and I still haven't figured it out. I think you might be right, but it seems depressing to me to accept it.
I've had precisely the same experience as you're describing.
I don't have a total answer, but I suspect a basic problem is that we have too simplistic an understanding of human psychology.
It's also possible that it's a chasm you and/or I can never cross, because to effect the kind of improvements you're describing requires having a particular persona.
I'd love to hear any ideas people have on solving this issue.
My experience is that environment vastly trumps individual psychology. If you aren't in some way empowered to reshape the environment then the best you can do is swap environments. Environments resist change so it takes sigifigant leverage to change them.
What kind of growth and interaction are we talking about? If forced, it doesn’t surprise me that people are not willing to cooperate. Everyone views things differently and you shouldn’t have to change anyone. Change yourself or change your setting.
The challenge I see in my day-to-day work is that people talk much about wanting collaboration, openness, sharing, cooperation, etc. However, their actions do not follow their words, and they often revert to protectionist, silo'ed or defensive behaviors as some kind of response.
I agree completely and have no argument with change cannot be forced. And I also agree that most of the time, the thing you have more control over to change is yourself and your environment.
My only thought was, there must be some kind of equilibrium or balance that tips one way or another here. For example, if you're in a place that cannot achieve what you as an individual see as best - so you change your position - what if everyone does that and then nobody is left to do the work in that place?
That might force the place to change. Or, it might just attract people who don't care about how that place is. So in that regard, while it might have been better for you as an individual, and in a sense, by leaving you did that place a favor by demonstrating your convictions, you also didn't stay to work through the challenges and maybe improve the place you were.
So, I'm saying that, if everyone does that, is anyone staying to fix things in place? Or does the world really work if everyone gravitates to only the places where everything is working well and we leave behind the places where things don't work so well?
In that particular case, some people can't pull it off. They need the job or don't have that many opportunities. Some, like as both the chance to be able to, and have the mean to. That's a combination of luck and the result of your previous choices.
Now, does the cost outweigh the benefit is a personal evaluation. Personally I will decline working for a company with an open floor plan unless I can work remotely. It's on of my important items.
For some people, the prestige, the project, the team or the money can override this.
Between the dirty dishes, the nasty pee-on-the-floor urinals, the condition of my desk used as a hotel when I'm away/WFH, etc. I question the accuracy of that statement.
The cost argument makes sense until you look at the numbers. Giving closed, private offices to each employee is expensive, but there are other options. You can surround each employee with portable walls eight feet high for $2000 or less. If the lifetime of the wall is ten years, that's $200/employee a year. If you're working for a company that is so strapped for cash that it can't afford that, you should be looking for a new job, because your next paycheck isn't going to clear.
I wonder how much of a pay cut the average programmer would accept for different working conditions?
I suspect cubicles effectively cost more than $200/year because they eat more space than open-plan desks, which forms the real cost. But even so, I suspect you could find a lot of people who would give up $1000/year of salary for that benefit.
And even closed offices could probably be offset on a salary level. I think a lot of mid-career or later devs would probably give up an annual raise in return for a private office if they were offered an explicit choice.
I could be wrong about specifics, maybe it's not cost effective to offer. But I seriously doubt that's how the choice is being made - I think a lot of people really do believe the hype about 'better collaboration', or just want to look like other companies.
I wonder how much of a pay cut the average programmer would accept for different working conditions?
Somewhere else on this page is a comment from me that I'd take $20K/year less for an office with a door. I got my wish. There are other aspects to the job that make it appealing (short commute, laid back atmosphere, etc.), but if it were open office, I wouldn't have taken the job for the money it pays.
One small place I worked made walls out of pairs of tall bookcases. The "cubicles" were along the perimeter of a large room, separated by the pairs of bookcases. Each cubicle was bounded by sets of bookcases and one wall, with one side open to the center of the room.
A little more spending would have obtained traditional cubicle walls to close off the open side, but it worked pretty well in practice.
On the other side of the room were a whiteboard and a conference table, and lunch was typically eaten at that conference table.
That said there were only like 5 desks in that room, and I'm not sure how well it would scale.
They eliminate all visual distractions, provide privacy, block some noise, prevent others from talking to you directly, and force others to move discussions to a more appropriate place. And they have an advantage over a private office - others don't knock on your door to see if you're available.
We soon filled the collaboration spaces with desks. The large isles though help put people farther apart so it’s slightly harder to here conversations of people nearby.
> Office rents are based on floor space. Open offices require less floor space than closed offices, which means they’re cheaper.
Just note that the kind of "open space" that's designed to both maintain/boost individual "deep concentration"/research work and boost collaboration requires more space pr worker than individual offices.
In the typical "cramped open" setup; either any one on one conversation will disturb everyone, so people are polite and don't collaborate that way as easily as dropping by an office with an open door; Or people gets lots of collaboration done, but no "deep work" done.
In the US we mainly just have fire codes, usually set locally, which dictate the number of people that can be in a building, but this is more about how fast the building can be evacuated in the case of an emergency than how much space each person has to work in. It's possible some local zoning laws dictate the density of the office, but again that's mainly about traffic and parking, not about workers' wellbeing.
I completely agree that cost is the driving force, absolutely, be it floor, reconfig, density, etc.
BUT, why the elaborate dance around that fact? It’s always dressed up as something else? It comes across as a sham explanation when anything but cost is attributed.
I'm not really convinced cost is the driving force. A lot of tech companies with open-plan offices throw around money pretty lavishly, and programmers feel so strongly about focus that I suspect many would accept a direct offer of "no raises this year, but you all get cubes/offices instead".
If you're taking the whole company on an international vacation, or paying to do their laundry and offer daycare, or offering whatever other widely-mocked perk you care to name, it's hard to imagine that worsening employee experience to cut costs is the goal. (Especially when you see open-plan offices even at non-urban companies.)
I think a lot of people really do believe the hype about open plan being better, especially if they're the boss and don't have to actually experience it.
If there is another force behind this, I’ll take a stab at it and guess it’s conditioning against the idea of privacy.
If you can get a community of people who work together to ignore the basic human idea of privacy by cramming people together such that they are forced to live out in the open without privacy, it then becomes easier for them to ignore questions about privacy when creating privacy violating services.
Big successful new companies started out scraping by being built in garages with just a computer, table, chair to use, no private offices. When they grew up they saw no reason to change because it worked for them. So now the company is big and successful and believes that part of its success was the open plan office. So now other companies try to emulate the new young fresh hip fashionable company and so everyone gets open plan, even if its worse than offices.
Why not? They're following the fashion of minimalism, first in their hardware and software styling and now in their offices. They're making their workplace look like they aspire their software to be, even if its to the detriment to the users.
Fashion certainly seems like an explanation for a lot of what Apple does. Whether it's selling thin phones while knowing they bend, insisting on a metal unibody that drops calls, or converting to an 'elegant' touchbar for function keys that cripple usability, it's not hard to find bad decisions made for style reasons.
Apple's definitely following fashion to the point of self-harm, but Apple started in a garage but then had offices until just recently and were kicking ass that way.
Given that some open plan employees sit shoulder-to-shoulder (as in, roughly 4 feet between chairs), yes, absolutely. I've also seen open offices with employees seated at 3-foot intervals around glorified dining room tables.
I’ve seen places where developers were nearly literally shoulder to shoulder and back to back. As in, the distance between people was determined by monitor width. With a normal sized keyboard, a 27inch monitor gives you about 6 inches of mouse space before you hit the next guy’s keyboard.
They tried to cram in 30% more at my employer by turning U shaped desks into L shaped, and adding more rows. They were stopped by fire code and OSHA bathroom/employee requirements.
Everywhere I work is an open office and we all wear our noise cancelling headphones, playing whatever music doesn’t break our concentration, and communicate via Slack.