Last week I published an article that’s gotten over 10,000 views, and appeared on the front page of Hacker News. If you haven’t read it, I’ll wait while you do
Photo courtesy of Paul McJones
Or you can just absorb the three-word subtitle: Open Offices Suck. The “Return to Office” effort after the pandemic is flailing for a number of good reasons, but one of them is that people genuinely hate what office work has become.
The official management position, “Open offices lead to better communication!” is utterly dishonest. Everyone forced to work in one wears headphones because they don’t want to be constantly “communicating.”
On the “Internet Old Farts” group on Facebook, I got 184 comments, only a small fraction of which I was able to include. To the objection that that was a skewed sample: yes, it sure was! These people have actually worked in private offices. If you never have, you’re not qualified to express an opinion. So here’s what they said (names are redacted unless they specifically asked for them to be included).
Notes on format: the posts from Facebook are shown as block quotes
Like this
I try to separate them with at least a word or two, like “Another.”
My initial goal was to put them all in here, but there turned out to be just too many. This was a hot topic, and there are a lot of people who’d bring back private offices in a heartbeat!
Academic Studies on Office Layout
Bruce F Webster: I cover this issue in the CS 428 ("real-world software engineering") class I teach at BYU. One of the books my students read is Peopleware (DeMarco & Lister), which chastises management for subjecting developers to bad work environments.
Replies
Another good book is the Mythical Man Month. It discusses how distracting environments affect productivity.
to which the author replied
They have to read that one as well. 😁 Also, Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering by Robert Glass. Plus they read "The Five Orders of Ignorance" by Philip Armour, the "Heuristics for System-Level Architecting" appendix from The Art of System Architecting" by Meier & Rechtin, and a number of my articles and blog posts. This class (created by Charles Knutson) is basically survival training for CS seniors going out into the real world.
The Severance TV series was filmed at Bell Labs’ old building:
Just watch "Severance"
Replies
(me) I've actually found those articles. The problem is, the TV show intentionally made it look sinister.
someone else said:
my companies solved that by having "first Friday" which was an afternoon of whole company BBQ and Beer (or wine) that started noon the first Friday of the month and went until close of business (you might say that noon was COB) - we would bring plates to the network operations folks 🙂
and THAT I stole from Tandem Computers who had a version of it (they did every Friday as Beer Bust but I think that got abused too much really when I was there anyway)
free taxi rides home if you drank too much to drive
another:
I worked at a startup that did a Friday beer thing. The CEO even had a bottle opener installed under one end of the big conference room table. Funny thing: they purchased a boilerplate "employee manual" ad modified it for their own use. They didn’t change the "no alcoholic beverages allowed on site" section.
More Experiences
I had one for three years or so at wrq in seattle. i was the most senior network support weenie. it even had a view.
i liked working in playrooms, though, as long as they were big enough and i liked the people. worked in one early days at ftp software; miss that.
Google Offices
Early post IPO Google: We were in the old SGI buildings. The majority of the floor plan was high wall cubicle, but you could ask for an office and get in line. These were two person offices.
Later on, in a refurbished building 40, there were 4 person offices with glass walls (which allowed light in so that the middle of the building didn't become overly dark) surrounding a high wall cubicle farm. Generally, staff got to choose which they wanted.
Returned in the mid 2010's and almost everything was low wall cubicles (i.e. completely pointless walls). Our first location was next to the phone testing team, which was utter hell for anyone with noise sensitivity issues. I fought for my team to get offices, but the best the facilities team would do was 6 person offices.
A very early Internet person
At University of Southern California/Information Sciences Institute (home of the origins of TCP/IP (Jon Postel), DNS (Paul Mockapetris), "Cookies," early attempt at digital money '82 (Dan Lynch), VOIP, wideband communcation, I was the design director creating innovative graphics for everybody, the institute director Keith Uncapher, Vint Cerf, Dale Ellis, senior researchers Balzer, Postel, Danny Cohen, Brakenridge, Chloe Holg, Bob Blechen, each department in the business office, each research group and department and the hardware development lab, MOSIS, Cue and Counsel (early AI expert systems), diagram for computing hardware (Lynch), the association for computation linguistics, IJCAI, the institute annual report, promotional materials, the technical library, archive doc storage and maintenance, institute photography, facilities maps, did the redesign of the institute logo and stationary design, graphics, hardware panel design, every document seeking funding was successful and illustrated with graphics and diagrams I had created, everybody.
I asked for an office. There was an empty larger office, room for a sofa, a desk a table, credenza that were stored in there. I said I needed to allow my eyes to rest by looking out to the horizon after doing intense graphics work. With this office I was in charge of a large design work area, the closed off hallway to the business office, the hallway with the copier and daisy printer and this larger office with windows along the long side looking inland from our place on the 12th, 11th and 10th floors of the office towers, this was the 10th floor.
Researchers and department heads and Danny Cohen were upset and he worked to get me ousted so he could bring in his very capable assistant Victor Brown to take over my position. He would do the design work I was doing, get the office real estate, it would be easy as it was thought that I didn't do anything but walk around and talk to people all day (many people had seen me do this) Victor had to get Sheila to help him with the overwhelming workload. The business took back the "storage" room office I had used and that they had coveted.
A few months later I visited and found Victor and Sheila slaving away at their design tables, they looked up, their eyes glassy from staring at design work and in unison asked "How did you get everything done?" I smiled broadly! I don't know, experience maybe, by the time I got to ISI, I was a senior graphic designer at GE computer graphics division, college design education, had a design firm, worked for ARCO as a graphic designer and designed the layout of the front section of the LATimes so I guess I just did the work based upon extensive experience and design skills. Designed the first map, sketched out by John Postel of the earliest internet with 8 sites, then 30 sites of the internetwork - in that office.
Neurodivergent People
I had a long quote from such a person in the original article. Here is another:
Deborah Grönke Bennett: I am a retired system software engineer. My working years were 1982-2004, in Silicon Valley.
I suspect I am somewhat neurodivergent. I cannot work well in an environment where I hear voices. I just cannot tune them out, so I constantly get distracted. For me, cubicles are a nightmare. I once had a cube next to an engineer who had a test machine in his cube. His team of 3 or 4 would gather there and run tests while talking. Ugh.
People suggest “wear headphones”. For me, it doesn’t work well. Back when I was working, they were heavy, and noise cancelling headphones didn’t exist. And I had 2 sets stolen out of my desk at one job. There was no Internet streaming, so it was either the radio or a walkman for something to listen to.
I also hate working with overhead lights and their glare. In cubicle-land, I can’t control the overhead lights, and there are always a few folks who won’t let us turn the lights off.
I had an office at Ampex (my first job), and both times at Sun. (About 14 years total, all before the year 2000). I had cubicles at all the smaller companies. At one, the cubicle walls were only 3 feet high, so we could all see each other. Visual AND aural distraction. At a summer job at Texas Instruments, we all shared a big cubicle with three other people, each of us in a corner. One guy was a manager. It was never ever quiet.
Companies use cubicles because they are cheaper and easier to change than offices. There is always a BS reason like “encourages collaboration”. Hah. For mind workers like engineers, we need to concentrate, not chat (most of the time). Break rooms and labs are where you can chat. At one summer job, the cubicle walls were 6 feet tall, and I’m shorter than that. Many times people were startled when I would emerge from a passageway since they couldn’t see me coming.
I’m retired, but now I see a trend to open offices with long tables, and hot-desking, where there is a big room of identical work spaces, and you keep your stuff in a locker, and have to set up your working space every day. I really don’t think I could work in the long tables setup, shoulder to shoulder with other people. And in a hot desking setup, I can’t make the ergonomics adjustments I needed to be comfortable.
These trends show workers being treated as interchangeable pegs, not individuals. It’s a one size fits all, and if you don’t fit, you’re screwed. Those of us who don’t fit the physical mold of of an average-size male who can ignore distractions and keep working are left out. And accommodations for disabilities are completely ignored.
Sorry for the long rant. My issues with distractions dogged me my whole career, so I am pretty passionate about this subject.
Another:
>> Has anyone thought that cubicles and open offices just suck, and workers have finally rebelled?
Well, duh. Commutes also suck. "Butts in chairs" are not a good indicator or productivity. Needing to be physically present when all of your interactions are electronic is ridiculous.
I have had a private hard-walled (8x10) office at two companies: Taligent and Apple. No noise. If I had to be on company property, that's the way to go.
Otherwise, it's always been cubicles. I interviewed once at a company that did open office. Ewwww.
Given the option of a private office vs 100% WFH, I would choose wfh.
Another:
I was lucky enough to have private offices the whole time I worked at Xerox and Adobe.
At Xerox, working just down the hill from PARC, I did volunteer for a while to share a big office with a new mother, who brought her daughter in. Our door had a baby gate across it, and even the division VP would come by to play with her.
I spent a couple of years at a startup where we were in old-fashioned high-walled cubicles. It was OK, because I worked with a bunch of crazy Russians — we had a lot of fun and they taught me quite a bit of Russian.
By total coincidence, I quit Adobe the day before they were going to move me to an open office. Everyone hated losing their offices!
For me, it was especially annoying because I was a manager and they were telling me I had to book a tiny room, often in a completely different building, to have my one-on-ones and private meetings with team members, or to make private phone calls about personnel matters. (Plus, it meant weeks of a certain difficult team member complaining about who she had to sit next to.)
Costs: Are Private Offices More Expensive?
one thing about startups - sometimes you have to take space that someone else has configured and there is no TI (tenant improvement) money available to change it
at early Cidera, we had some space that a builder/architect had built for themselves, and it was built with lots of leftovers from their building for commercial clients, so a set of the offices had glass walls with sliding glass doors - straight up residential outdoor units - that really worked amazingly well !
one set of offices had these metal "blast shield" like sun shields that would come down slowly and dramatically, and prompted a lot of "close the blast doors! close the blast doors!" from those residents LOL
Another
worth checking Professor Tom Allen’s work on creating spaces that work - closed door offices can be brutally bad for effectiveness but it’s way better than home workers. Yes, discovered in the 70s but repeat research shows it’s still as valid today as it was then - his book goes into some fantastic detail and use cases. I took his class in 2007. And even with the latest in collab software the curve is still there.
May be a graphic of text that says '30% 25% 20% 15% Allen Curve 10% 5% Frequency of Communication VS Distance of Separation (MIT Press, 1977) 80 24m 32m 40m 55m 72m'
The Organization and Architecture of Innovation: Managing the Flow of Technology Allen, Thomas J ( Author ) Oct-19-2006 Paperback https://amzn.eu/d/bJcb5rS
The Organization and Architecture of Innovation: Managing the Flow of Technology Allen, Thomas J ( Author ) Oct-19-2006 Paperback
AMAZON.CO.UK
The Organization and Architecture of Innovation: Managing the Flow of Technology Allen, Thomas J ( Author ) Oct-19-2006 Paperback
The Organization and Architecture of Innovation: Managing the Flow of Technology Allen, Thomas J ( Author ) Oct-19-2006 Paperback
More Experiences
I had a large private office when I was a network engineer at NASA. The office was probably 12 feet wide and 30 feet deep. I had enough space to dedicate space to a telco rack with diverse power available...so, I had my own small test lab and a closet and coat hooks, as well as a large desk and typical government office accoutrements like filing cabinets. This was in the early 1990s.
Another:
At the late, great X Consortium, everyone had a private office with a big window. That was an excellent work environment, thanks in no small measure to the excellent Bob Scheifler. We also had ice cream from Toscanini's at staff meetings. Since then, except for one private office in the sub-sub-basement of a library, it's been all cubicles or remote work for a Unix sysadmin-kinda person.
Another
I recall my first visit to Scientific-Atlanta after Cisco purchased them. Some employees had cubicles with real doors and tall walls, it was basically a small truly private office with no ability for others to peek in.
I agree the open plan spaces (designed to make real estate cheaper) was a primary driver in the downfall. My team's average daily badge-in rate dropped to less than 25% when we moved to the open space building.
Another
The first game company I worked at, *everybody* had a private office. Everybody. From the president of the company all the way down to the new college grad. And not just the engineers. Product managers, accounting staff, artists, programmers ... everybody. That was one of the most productive teams I've ever worked on.
Another
Henry Mensch: offices at MIT (E40), IBM (summer job), Oracle (once in a repurposed conference room), ADS,... once place (Razorfish) was laid out like a 1930s newsroom with long tables but only one or two offices. Porn studio had the largest office but it was painted chartreuse and contained a safe that hadn't been opened. Then, NINE YEARS in a cube at the VA and two more in a cube at a library software company.
The home office is the best!
Another
US Air Force - Private Office (Network manager, system admin, and programmer - Space Command at Geophysics Lab)
Apollo Computer - Private Office (At corporate / cube in field - Systems Engineering)
NeXT Computer - Private Office or work from home (Systems Engineer/Consultant).
Every job after (Except HP) - Private Office or work from home. (Mostly management - up to CTO/VP.)
Another
at BBN, private office. At IBM Boston Programming Center, shared with one person. At U Mass Boston, private. At MIT AI, private. At IBM Yorktown, private, but worked most of the time in first project in a “terminal room”. At IDA, Princeton, private, but shared during summer. At Meta, open plan (yuck). At SRI, private.
Another
As a new college hire, I had a private office when I worked at ROLM, pre-IBM. Over the course of my career, it’s been downhill in terms of office facilities since then.
Another
When I worked at Wildfire, the first office I got as a junior lackey sysadmin was a corner one, but temporary. Then they moved me into a storage closet, but in ways that was better because no one would bother me. When I was at Comcast, I had a shared office, all glass, with three others and it was called 'the fish tank', because everyone could see who was in, and it was hard to get work done. I've worked at companies too small for you to hear of with immense offices that were actually disused lab space, and barely heated, and at another company where it was the recently deceased company founders office and all I needed was a laptop, and was told "don't touch anything"....as his children bickered over who would get the enormous, ornate office with years of dust. I work at a route 128 firm where my office also double as the bicycle park, and that was no fun at all. When I was at Harvard, I technically had an office shared with interns, but most of them weren't around much so it was pretty much my own.
Some Contrary Notes on Private Offices
Here are a couple notes on social interactions and how sometimes private offices really do stifle communication:
IBM's Santa Teresa facility had individual offices for everyone; here's a paper by the architects on their design considerations ("IBM's Santa Teresa Laboratory - Architectural design for program development" by Gerald M. McCue): https://drive.google.com/.../1MkN-BPNzkk.../view...
But they did a bad job of encouraging social interactions - people simply sat in their offices with the doors closed, and the lack of overall architectural unity of the products showed. When I left, I chatted with the facilities manager, who said that they were thinking of experimenting with removing some walls between offices. In retrospect, part of the problem was the overall layout - no lounges at the stairways (Almaden Research had these), I don't remember the break rooms, and the cafeteria wasn't a great meeting place as I recall.
At IBM Toronto, we had individual offices, although often the larger ones were shared by 2+ people. These had glass walls, and there was definitely more social interaction. But there were also cultural differences -- Canadians seemed to take "knock&enter" as an invitation to come into an office but Americas seemed to consider a closed door as "do not disturb".
At my first Silicon Valley startup job, we all had individual offices, although people often left their door open. But most jobs after ~1993 were in "open" spaces, some nicer than others.
This one’s an email from a friend, not from Facebook:
As it happens, I was one of those evil execs. I abolished offices and cubicles at <company>. And it worked brilliantly - efficiency went way up (as measured by more productivity metrics anyway), and most folks (okay, not everyone) liked the new spaces. Communication really did improve.
As with most things, the details matter.
Our spaces looked nothing like the barracks pictured. Instead folks were grouped together, in various permutations, and with the pods separated. There were plants everywhere, whiteboards everywhere, alternative places to sit everywhere. The space looked beautiful. And the other thing is this: I ate my own dogfood. I got rid of my office too and sat with everyone else, rotating around in various pods. Good enough for them, good enough for me. That was noted.
And man, the important and useful things I learned sitting with folks. Made a big difference, and absolutely not replicable in any other configuration.
Worked so well that the CEO ordered all departments to follow suit.
I think this shows that the “hybrid arrangement” I mentioned in the last article, where people have a private space but there’s a large, inviting space for social interactions, is probably the best. But there are companies and cultures where some kind of more open arrangement really is best, much as I hate to admit it.
Also, the comment about closed doors is pertinent. In both the places where I had an office, the custom was that you left your door most of the time, but a visitor would still knock and wait to be admitted. They wouldn’t just barge in. If the door was closed, they needed a good excuse but people did still knock.
Apollo’s policy was that all engineers got a private office. There was one attempt to change that, and the compromise was that all the managers got the same size office as the engineers (they promptly reserved two next to each other).
Then HP bought us, their policy was that nobody got a private office. The Apollo Conniption (the parody version of the official Apollo Connection internal newsletter) then announced that the office walls would be all lowered one foot a month.
On HP: I worked at 3Com, which was very much a descendant of HP (Bill Krause was an alum). They acquired Bridge Communications, which at the time was the leading router company. Bridge did have private offices, and 3Com insisted on getting rid of them. That acquisition is generally considered a disaster, and Cisco ended up owning the router market (not 3Com).
And More
I was a Senior PM at Boeing. Became a Principal Project Manager and kept same office. Shared my office with the first Sun mini. At the DOE National Lab, most people at all levels had private offices.
And I’m Exhausted
There were more. Too many to copy them all over into here! Join the Internet Old Farts group on Facebook to see them all.