The open-office trend is destroying the workplace.

[Blog]

A good worker can manage in any situation, same as a competent programmer can write viable PHP code. If the open-plan office were an unavoidable consequence of some other restriction/decision, then sure; tell people they have to work like this, and the good ones will. But the question is whether or not the open office is worth deliberately *choosing*, which means it has to be overall *better* than its alternatives. Those conversations where you saved people weeks of wasted effort are to be weighed against the loss of concentration to a large number of conversations where your overhearing didn't help anything (because the people involved were already planning to do the right thing). How many minutes a day do you lose to those?

I think there might be a general misunderstanding of when to use open office that is contributing to the negative opinions. I see offices that are open for no reason, in the last place I worked completely different product lines all had an open office together, there is no reason for that. Also as Frobozz pointed out if your job is one where you just sit down and process stuff all day with minimal interaction, there is no reason for open office there either. Putting 3 purchasing people together doesn't accomplish anything, you just sit there and order shit all day, it doesn't go better if you can talk to another purchasing person while you do it.

Open office is good for creative work that requires collaboration most often associated with R&D teams. The more of a team you put together the more effective it will be, if you just sit the 6 R&D engineers together in an open office and leave the marketing and quality guys in the marketing and quality areas, you're not going to gain much. But putting them all in one place is better than to spreading them out then having weekly 1 hour meetings. Most creative work I see done now, and I'm betting it applies to Google, is the actual "work" is done very quickly, software programs are written in hours or days, then you spend months collaborating to make it better, review, testing, writing it up, etc. Usually when I ask for a software build to test some iteration out it takes me longer to fill out the paperwork than for the guy to actually code it.

One other caveat is that you have to address employee issues no matter what type of office it is. If you just hired a guy who sucks at microsoft office, he's going to bug people for help no matter what type of office he's in, yes it will be worse in an open office, but a closed office just hides how much that guy sucks because he bugs two people too nice to tell him to go away who don't bring it up to anyone else. Likewise if you have people who don't want to work, they're going to find some way to distract themselves regardless. Open office just makes it more obvious more quickly.

[Aristotle]

Blog: Good points, but that still doesn't address issues like privacy, illness spreading, noise disruption, etc. that are far more serious in an open office.

[Sigfreid]

The single most disruptive illness at my office was not caused by it being open planned but rather by a caterers potato salad. Having an open or closed office would make no difference to this kind of event and in an open office you don't spend as much time together in cramped meeting rooms. Not saying that it is wrong just that i feel that it is the result of people not wanting change and using limited sets of data to prove their hypothesis that probably doesn't represent the effects of this to the whole population once the system has matured.

[Aristotle]

Having an open or closed office would make no difference to this kind of event

Doesn't that make it an irrelevant example then in the discussion of whether open office plans are good or bad?

[Rosuav]

Not saying that it is wrong just that i feel that it is the result of people not wanting change and using limited sets of data to prove their hypothesis that probably doesn't represent the effects of this to the whole population once the system has matured.

The python-dev community has a motto: "Status quo wins a stalemate". (Other people follow the same kind of principle, but I mainly hear it expressed thus on python-dev.) "People not wanting change" is actually a perfectly viable argument in and of itself; not a strong one, but an argument. It's the person proposing the change who has the responsibility to overcome that argument by demonstrating that the alternative is materially better than the current.

So if you're currently working in an open-plan office, you have to show that it's a significantly worse option than whatever you propose replacing it with; but across the whole industry, the accepted wisdom is to give people a little privacy and separation, so the open office advocates MUST justify the concept with more than just vague hand-waving. I've seen a number of weak arguments on each side, and I have yet to see anything that demonstrates enough difference to get over the "churn hill". Maybe open office is better, but I'm not seeing it. It's had enough experiments now that I would expect to see some serious evidence, if it really is better; so why aren't we seeing any?

[Blog]

Maybe open office is better, but I'm not seeing it. It's had enough experiments now that I would expect to see some serious evidence, if it really is better; so why aren't we seeing any?

I was thinking that Google probably has enough resources to prove the open office concept is better or worse for them at least. I'm guessing if you get one team that really works well together, open office is going to be a better option, then some project manager is going to look and say, hey this team is twice as good as other teams, I'll talk to them, and they talk and it turns out that team likes open office so there you go. Plus no one is going to go with closed office, but I'm thinking this could be your niche Rosuav, crush google with closed office, you can recruit all the introverts!

[Reshad]

I was thinking that Google probably has enough resources to prove the open office concept is better or worse for them at least. I'm guessing if you get one team that really works well together, open office is going to be a better option, then some project manager is going to look and say, hey this team is twice as good as other teams, I'll talk to them, and they talk and it turns out that team likes open office so there you go. Plus no one is going to go with closed office, but I'm thinking this could be your niche Rosuav, crush google with closed office, you can recruit all the introverts!

I don't think you can look *just* at open-office layout vs not when it comes to Google. They do so much to cater to employees morale that there are just too many factors that would need to be considered with it.

If you're going to look at effectiveness of the open-office layout then you really need to compare businesses where the work environment is more nearly identical beyond that one thing.