I really feel that the open office environment really only makes sense for junior programmers. For them, it's great to have a pool of knowledge(experienced programmers) around all the time to push them along, bounce ideas off of, and in general, act as mentors.
I think when you really start getting to the point where you know what needs to get done, and approximately the right way to go about it, open office loses it's luster very quickly.
I would agree, but at least for me, there is always technology I am working with that I am not an expert. For example, I am kind of the javascript guy at work, so people come to me with js questions. When I have to make a change to something on the server, or even debug something on the server, I could save a lot of time asking someone else how the server works.
CircleCI is based in SF (2nd & Market), and we all have private offices. We really feel strongly about this, especially after spending time in open plan offices in the last few years.
A somewhat related question: I'm about to start a job at a company with "open office" structure, after having my own office for the last 4 years. Anything I should be prepared for?
* On top of the direct impact of interruptions and distractions, you'll want to be aware of the way you are seen to react to them.
Pay attention to who the rest of the office does or doesn't attend to when that person decides to convene a huddle or start soapboxing - regardless of the topic
Dutifully working away under your headphones when a ranking person is looking for attention is a great way to end up labeled in a bad way.
* Don't mistake an open floor plan for an open structure. Be careful about who you accept work from / collaborate with / delegate to until you understand the landscape.
Want a quick heuristic to know who matters in the company? Watch the people that steal the conference rooms every day to do work. Make friends with them.
I've worked in both environments and my productivity (not to mention my morale, overall happiness, etc, which are likely related) were much, much higher in a non-open seating environment. Even shared offices (2 people to an office) were far better -- still much easier to avoid distractions because you don't get cafeteria-style escalation of volumes from different conversations and people are far more likely to be sound-considerate in a 2 person setting (especially if both are developers... don't mix devs with sales).
It is virtually impossible for me to hit real states of "flow" in an open office. Unfortunately the industry has gone bonkers and it is really difficult to find developer jobs that aren't using open office layouts anymore. I'm at the point now though where the next time I am looking for a job I will assign a lot of value to any company that provides real offices or allows nearly full-time remote work.
I've also worked in both, and have been far (far) happier in an open office layout, to the point where I'll never work in a closed-door office layout again. It's so isolating and depressing to me. Sure, I could get into a flow -- that's all I could do. I'd go to work and work for 8 hours a day, not talking to anyone. A pretty miserable existence.
Also why I could never work remotely/from home, I guess.
Having used both noise-canceling and noise-isolating headphones, I'd recommend going for noise-isolating headphones, at least if you expect office chatter to be your major irritant. Most active noise-canceling systems do best with constant sounds and not so well with random bursts of speech.
I use Beyerdynamic Custom One Pro headphones and am pretty happy with them. They don't provide complete isolation, but they do block out a lot of sound, and I don't need to play constant music to make up for bad noise cancellation.
For a cheaper solution, wear earplugs and just put on some crappy headphones for the visual signal.
When I worked at a big company with an open office wore ear plugs while also wearing earphones, on really high volume. It was like I had my own office.
Is it a case where you have to take the job because you need the money? If so, fair enough, but always remember 'have to take this job today' doesn't imply 'have to stay in it indefinitely'. Go ahead and start work in the open office, but in the meantime put out feelers, be quietly looking for a job that will give you a private office or let you work at home. The best situation in which to be looking for a job with your preferred conditions is one where you aren't desperate to find something quickly.
While well-written, his conclusions on a number of headphones (particularly the extreme love for the AKG K551s) seem a little idiosyncratic. It's worth cross-referencing any of his suggestions with head-fi or other review sources.
I have found that whatever peace blocking noise gives you, it is more than offset by the paranoia of being watched or the terror of people sneaking up behind you.
For me visual distractions (even if it is just people walking) are a lot worse than noise. I can tune out the chatter but whenever I feel or see movement around me, my head snaps to attention to find out what it is. Some evolutionary thing most likely
I have had this happen to me a few times. Really into my work with my ear phones & music playing, can hear nothing besides my music. Turn to the side and my co-worker is there waiting on me to go over something. Scares the *$#$ at of me every time.
FWIW, I've seen some people attach a small convex mirror to the edge of their monitor to avoid this kind of surprise. I'd expect this is just trading audio distractions for visual ones, though.
Unless you fly or are muting HVAC or server room sounds, I haven't found that noise-cancelling headphones are superior to isolating (close-backed circumaurals or in-ear monitors). NC doesn't work well for voices, and the extra expense tends to put them into "I'm too paranoid to keep them on my desk" category.
I'd save the $$$ and just go for a nice pair of isolating ones.
I've also become a huge fan of wireless headphones for the added mobility--I switch between a few different computers and monitors, and not wrapping myself up in the wire is worth a slight hit in the sound.
Sony MDR-10RBTs are an excellent model for the price, hella light and comfortable, don't leak much sound out or in, and sound quite decent with Bluetooth AAC/AptX enabled (I listen to rock, metal, industrial, pop, dance, rap--can't speak much for classical, jazz, etc.)
I use the Sony MDR-7506 which are rated as the best $150 Over Ear Headphones (actually $90ish on Amazon) and they are very popular with audio pros. Not noise canceling but they are comfortable enough for wearing all day and if you're listening to something, you don't have sound leaking in or out.
Yeah, the MDRV6 with Beyerdynamic Velour earcushions are my secret sauce for getting in the zone. The stock pleather earpads will give you "hot ears" that make long shifts uncomfortable.
If you keep going down the audiophile rabbit hole like I did, next up is a DAC or a tube amp. A good starter cheap one (sub $100) is the Qinpu:
I've been highly recommending Sony's for a long time now, but for my left-at-work pair, I use a MDR-XD200 headset that I paid $18 new 10 years ago. They're nearly indestructible, sound better than most non-Sony sets I've tested them against and when I've got music playing, they block out the world really well. And, most importantly, they're so comfortable that I forget I've got them on...I almost wish they were less comfortable so I didn't have them ripped off my head when I stand up without remembering to take them off first.
I use a more expensive pair of Sony's at home where there's less chance they'll be damaged.
Get a good pair of over ear noise canceling headphones that are light. In-Ear work well but will probably start hurting you ears if you wear them for an extended period of time.
It depends. Are you a manager, or PM and is your main responsibility to socialize and play the game? If yes, it is gonna be great! The game is a lot more engaging with the "open office" structure.
Are you an engineer? Well... sorry. You'll have to sit in the headphones now. Get a pair of some good ones.
Parent probably talking about Bose QC-15 mythical noise cancelling headphones. Some people say their build quality is meh, which prevented me from buying them.
Does anyone have any thoughts on the comfort (for extended use in an office) and effectiveness of the QC-20 vs the QC-15. It seems the QC-20 is better on both counts, despite its in ear design. One downside to the QC-20 is that he battery isn't replaceable, but I plan to use them plugged in, so they should still work even when the battery can't hold much charge.
Anything in-ear or over-the-ear will start hurting your ear one way or another.
Around the ear + active noise cancelling is the way to go.
My choice is Bose Quiet Comfort 15.
The guy behind me talks whole day explaining low level network connectivity issues to half of the world.
The guy in front of me talks spanish to someone he loves non-stop for a few hours daily.
I get to choose when I go to HN. I just closed a bug I'd spent the better part of the week on, I'm fine with relaxing.
In an open office I lacked the ability to choose interruptions. I still remember Dipesh coming over, slamming his hands down on my shoulders, to ask "what's up buddy". You could hear the stack falling out of my brain. He just wanted to chat.
Have you ever considered that FB, HN, etc are the way people cope with the extra stress, distraction, and low level anxiety of working in an open plan office?
When I work from home I don't waste time on these distractions like I do when I'm in the office.
I have considered that, but I don't buy it for one moment. Open plan offices have many advantages, you just need to hire people that are mature enough to deal with it. People who can self regulate. I don't mind some time spent on FB and HN etc, I think the latter is actually a net-positive, there are technologies that osmotically people become familiar with through reading about people's experiences. But FB is 100% a waste of time. Corporate IT don't block it, they just measure it and provide management reports on it's usage.
71 comments so far and only 2 people actually answered the question and they both said the same company: Circle CI.
Personally I'm more interested in the answer to the question posed than a debate on the merits of an open office plan vs closed so if anyone else knows of any other startups that don't use an open office plan I would love to know. I imagine others clicking into this conversation are probably interested too.
TLDR: The benefit is to the team, not the individual. When executing open concept, ensure communication is relevant to the team by not including unrelated teams in the same space. We have had private and open offices; we're much happier with the results of open offices.
Overview:
First, we believe the benefit of the open office space is derived at the organization/team level by an increase in communication and ambient awareness. The mental load of this awareness and communication negatively affects the productivity of individuals but results a net benefit to the whole. This is why many individuals working in an open space will have their complaints, but project managers/product owners will often sing the open concept's praises. I'm in the latter group but I work in our open office as well.
In Practice:
Here in our office, we've done it both ways. We're located in Texas and space is plentiful, we've got enough private offices to go around and we did it that way for quite some time. After years of struggling through project overrun, bugs, and misallocated resources we decided to try an open concept.
Doing it Wrong:
The difference in team productivity couldn't be more apparent, at first it was much worse... we combined QA, Engineering, and Customer Service in one open concept office. Everyone was unhappy; Customer Service was constantly talking and distracting others with their one-sided phone calls, QA was very collaborative and yet had to talk over Customer Service, and the poor engineering team was just annoyed by both and resorted to headphones and instant messaging each other.
Doing it Right (the second time):
We realized that the biggest benefit in better communication is to the teams of people who are directly working on building our new products and features and anything else in the room just distracts from those goals.
After reorganizing our teams we moved QA and Customer Service out of the room, and instead filled it with more engineering teams and added our design and product teams as well. By including the right teams in the open space, the ambient noise level is much lower, when conversations do occur they're often directly relevant to all other teams in the room. Overall everyone is much happier in the open space even though some miss the privacy of their own offices.
To address the needs of those who occasionally need to work in a quiet place, we've turned a few of our private offices into "break out rooms" where anyone can go work as they wish. They're a great place to take phone calls and they're communal and provide limited amenities so nobody is occupying them constantly and removing themselves from their core team.
Months Later / Conclusions:
Today, we have one large open office which includes web engineers, iOS engineers, Android engineers, OSX/Windows engineers, UX designers, quality assurance, and product managers. We have breakout rooms for private work and all other staff is in private offices just outside the open space.
After our second try at an open office we can confidently say that we made the right decision. We've launched two major products in one quarter of the time it took to previously launch one. We've launched numerous bug fixes, updates, and features. And most importantly, our metrics not only show the real world results of that work, but everyone on the team is aware of them in their everyday workflow. The pace of development is not only faster, but we're making better engineering and design decisions. And, as an added benefit, our sense of team solidarity and moral is way up as well. People (who previously had private offices) still occasionally complain about being distracted, and sometimes they choose to work in a breakout room, but overall everyone has adjusted now and feels like we're kicking butt.
Of course, I'm simplifying months of thoughts and work down as much as I can here, and there's a lot more in the details of executing a good open office. I'm happy to expand on anything if this is at all helpful to anyone.
Thanks for the insights! I've just got a couple of questions:
1. What's the ratio of junior to senior level developers?
2. When you were in private offices did the company set aside work time each day to socialise with your coworkers (e.g. Board games for an hour each day)?
3. How many of the developers use headphones during the day?
No problem :)
1. Our ratio is about 1 senior developer to 2 juniors, although as far as organization structure we're fairly flat and in some teams it's more 1 to 1. Average team size is about 3 engineers.
2. Yes, every Wednesday was game day and we'd alternate through a number of card and board games. Now this happens more organically, people are setting up their own games and times. We (of course) have ping pong and pool tables as well.
3. We have about 16 people in our open space and at any time one or two have headphones on (max). The way we have the room laid out seems to cut down on ambient chatter.
If you're interested: We have 4 pods of 4, plus conference and lounge separating the room into 2 sets of 2. Each desk in a pod has roughly about 49 square feet of space, all desks are L shaped (ikea galant with extensions), facing out towards the corners. We have half-height cubicle-style walls between pods, otherwise no walls between desks (other than dual 27-30in displays). It seems to be just the right amount of privacy/openness/sound dampening. We're currently building out another identical one of these open offices in our extra warehouse (did I mention space in Texas is cheap?) to house a few more engineers who are still in private offices and in anticipation of hiring.
A bit off topic, but does anyone here prefer / not mind open office plans?
As someone who prefers open office plans to private offices / cubicles, I've always wondered if the large number of anti-open-plan articles are because that opinion is the majority, or because it is the loud minority.
This is the first job I've worked that the company had a sales team. One of my jobs is developing solutions for the sales team. Being able to overhear their interactions with customers is invaluable to understanding the types of technology solutions they need.
That being said, right now our two engineers sit in the middle of sales guy crossfire. 3 sales guys in front of me, 2 behind me, all talking in my direction. That's not ideal, and we're going to change that soon.
It's also helpful if you consider a programmer at a startup to be more than a programmer. Sure, I don't sit and code for 8 hours a day, but I'm also a product guy, marketing guy, growth guy, business dev idea guy, etc. That's what I love about startups. Sure, I get to work on cool coding work, but I also get to contribute and shape almost all the other things that I do, and I can do that better by being exposed to all sides of the business in the open plan.
Now, as we grow we plan on separating off engineering teams so they can focus, but at an early stage startup being in the heart of everything is invaluable.
I think having your own private "home" space, with access to a shared area for collaboration beats dumping everyone in an open space with the private spaces for occasional use.
I've been in both, and typically if you are getting great benefit from being in an open space that is not coming free, but at the cost of someone else's productivity. A lot of times there is still a net benefit, but one should be aware that co-workers might get really distracted when they want to "get things done".
I've had both, and in the open plan I find I have my headphones in so much that I might as well be working on my own private island. I'd rather have my own quiet office than blare music all the time, but both work well enough at driving out distraction.
Neither of these jobs have been team oriented though, I am 'the rails guy' at both, so isn't much knowledge transfer except from stuffy stakeholders in formal meetings either way. I'm sure it's different in a team environment.
I think if you keep different "functions" (engineering, sales, ...) separate, then each can have their own open office without losing productivity. Don't you think so?
I'm not convinced. I'm in an engineering area but if it's open plan then I'd still be able to see people, hear their (arguably more interesting than sales) conversations, and constantly have to split attention between monitoring the area around me and focusing on whatever problem I'm solving.
An engineer coming into my cube to chat a few minutes ago is what distracted me and now I'm frustrated and browsing HN. It's bad enough in high-walled cubicles; I don't know that I could maintain deep focus for meaningful amounts of time in an open plan.
I put a door on my cubicle recently and being able to mentally expand to fill my space while free from worrying about anybody else has done wonders for my productivity.
I worked at a company that did that. I think there might still have been a productivity loss. All the engineers and programmers got huge studio monitor headphones to shut out the sound of everyone else working. Because of that we all used instant messaging for most our communication even though we were sitting in the same room. We salvaged our productivity by essentially turning ourselves into telecommuters with a commute.
The sales and customer service roles were trying to schedule their calls to minimize the time when two people would be on the phone at the same time, in order to limit background noise.
I don't think the company could have afforded private offices, but I have a hard time believing all of that energy being put into working around the work environment was less expensive than the cost of some high partitions.
I had a similar situation, but it made sense. Instant messaging grants the asynchronicity of emails without the overhead of long waits between replies.
When you want to talk to somebody without interrupting them, it's ideal. I might also suggest more 'got a sec?' type messages to get more of the swifter voice conversations.
That and sometimes we engineers prefer to build our sentences rather than blurt them.
Depends. In my opinion, for engineers you can have open office rooms with 2-5 people, all engineers/no bullshitting managers. But not more. I've noticed that a lot of work can be done in groups like that...
How many programming questions do you field a day? I think it's probably 3 or 4 for me. I probably bother people 3 or 4 times a day too.
Every one of those conversations happens in someone's office right now, and distracts at most 2 people.
How long does it take for you to get "back in the groove" afterwards? Probably 5-10 minutes for me, more if I was doing something particularly intensive.
Now, lay out me and my ten coworkers in an open floor plan and watch what happens.
I have to disagree. One of my main advantages of working at home is that I'm not constantly flooded with tiny requests for comment/help or general small talk - and that's only talking about the engineering part of that company.
(And that company didn't have an open floor plan, but did have shared offices for 2-6 people)
In my opinion it depends on the culture and the people, not the roles/positions in the company.
I think when you really start getting to the point where you know what needs to get done, and approximately the right way to go about it, open office loses it's luster very quickly.