My company gives all engineers their own office with a door. Recently four of us petitioned to be able to have an open office together. We collaborate better, feel generally happier, and knowledge sharing happens so much more fluidly.
I was going crazy the first 6 months here because I was holed up in a office by myself with little in-person communication. There was no benefit to being in the office versus working remotely. My first attempt was to get the company a HipChat account for engineers to stay more connected. I even pushed for a couple of monthly engineer events so I would have an opportunity to interact with other engineers.
Open office setups can go horribly wrong. Never allow anyone who spends time on the phone into the open office setup. That stifles all interaction due to the need for silence. Additionally, engineers are forced to listen to a single side of a conversation that likely has nothing directly to do with the engineers. Project and account managers have a valuable job, and engineers should not need to be distracted by work that is not related to what they need to accomplish.
Additionally, I believe an open office for engineers should be reasonably small (4-10 people), and there should be some common responsibilities or projects between the engineers.
Other steps can be taken to give people the appropriate space for the task at hand. I've used a stand-up desk for the past three years. I hardly ever spend a whole day standing. I alternate between sitting and standing as my body gives me signals. Similarly, having quiet space (alternatively headphones, if desired) to crank on certain work can be useful useful. That said, three of the four of us have not used solitary space in the past 2 months.
Basically all of this is to say the issue is not black and white. If you prefer to work in a private office, like more than half of the engineers at my company do, that's fine. If you prefer to work in the company of others, that is fine too. Not everyone wants to work at a startup, and not everyone hates working for big financial companies.
Team-sized open plans look interesting. Even better if there is plenty of private space (like meeting rooms) available for people never using all of them... But that arranjement is unstable - the meeting rooms won't survive office politics - much better to have private offices for everybody, with an open "patio" shared by the entire team where you could work if you want (yes, I did keep the arranjement, just changed the names).
As an afterthought, now that phones are all VoIP, are there WiFi endpoints available for sale?
Sure, just be sure your WiFi network has been deployed for voice (much higher density of APs). Cisco Jabber, Avaya One-X, Microsoft Lync are all available on PC, Mac, Android and iOS. For Asterisk and SIP based deployments, Bria makes an excellent softphone for the same platforms.
I seriously cannot understand the lasting attachment people have for $400 plastic devices, but using a tablet or smartphone avoids problems caused by an unstable/busy PC. In 2005, at an accounting firm (conservative user base, broad mix of ages) voluntary / satisfied softphone users was 35%, today I would expect it would be nearly double. Never hurts to ask the IT department.
> I seriously cannot understand the lasting attachment people have for $400 plastic devices
It helps to have a phone that is not the computer you are working on. At least for me that excludes any tablet I have on hand (if I have it nearby, there's probably something there that I should read). I didn't think about using smartphones - bring your own SIP endpoints for work, could be nice.
> It helps to have a phone that is not the computer you are working on.
Agreed. A coworker of mine rolled back to a restore point, which caused his computer to get kicked off the domain. He couldn't log in at all, so he had to call IT. The problem was his phone was a softphone on his computer.
The problem is that your company is a cheapskate outfit just buy a separate ip based phone and plug that into the other port at your desk - oh you did follow standard practice and pull two cat5's to every desk.
We have hotel cubes now. We can't assign names to a hardware phone because a different person could be sitting in the desk every day, and giving someone a floating hardware phone would mean you have to carry it home daily.
Not sure if we have 2 drops per cube. There's 2 ports, but I don't know if they're active, cabled but not hooked up to a switch, or not even run to the cube. Haven't bothered to test because our old Cisco phones had a pass-through port, and now I only have 1 device that could use an ethernet port.
Totally agree with you. While there are times I'm very busy and wished I had a closed in office, 90% of the time I find it highly beneficial to be in an open office.
One of my biggest reservations with a programming career is the general lack of human contact. Open offices alleviate this somewhat, and make work much more tolerable to me. I do realize that I am significantly more talky than most of my coworkers though (Sorry guys!)
Heartily agree. At larger companies in the past, I was part of a cube farm. Absolutely hated it, so much noise and interruption. At my current gig, it's a LOT quieter, smaller, friendlier and virtually no phones ringing off the hook. I've left my office with a door to sit in the open area for more social opportunity as I started feeling lonely. I could get in the office and leave after a full day of work without talking to anyone. :(
Exactly! When i first started this job, there was no sitting room with the team. So i was assigned an office of my own near the Execs. (Its my first job after graduation). So obviously that was a privilege, but it truly is hellishly boring. I was so disconnected with my team.
Eventually i got shifted to sit with my team in an open space and its really great. It's a small enough room with around 20 people, people sitting in teams. i suppose The presence of other teams can be a bit distracting at times, but it also gives you more people to interact with. You get a grasp on more than just your current assignment. You connect with more people than just your current team. So it ain't all bad. there are pros and cons. I guess when you're a senior, you want more space to yourself.
The telephone is my main gripe at the moment. My line manager likes to conduct all his business over the phone. One of my colleagues likes to project her voice across the entire office despite the phone being less than an inch from her mouth. In addition to this many in the office have developed an idiotic system whereby the phones of absent colleagues are answered. When the phone is answered the caller is informed that the intended recipient is not there and a message is taken. For some reason my colleagues do not understand that they are doing exactly what the voice-mail service does.
At my office, if you don't answer your phone for an internal call (for example, due to being busy talking to another developer about a tough problem, or deep in concentration on a problem) the person who called you will get up and come in to your office to see why you didn't answer. Really makes it impossible to have any solid development time.
At my previous two companies I've found that HipChat is generally much more accessible to non-engineers. Ideally there aren't multiple communication tools for the same purpose, so I'd rather have HipChat than AIM + IRC.
Additionally, it has some nice features like cross-device chat history, various embed support, etc.
I can see the accessibility to non engineers being slightly better. At the same time HipChat does horrible things with XMPP support, so unless you are using their client, you are in trouble. Also, if I remember correctly their client does not support other chat protocols, which means I'd have to run two separate chat clients, which is increasing the number of applications I normally run by 33% (chat, terminal, browser). I can see its value, but I cannot recommend it over IRC or just your own jabber server.
I was going crazy the first 6 months here because I was holed up in a office by myself with little in-person communication. There was no benefit to being in the office versus working remotely. My first attempt was to get the company a HipChat account for engineers to stay more connected. I even pushed for a couple of monthly engineer events so I would have an opportunity to interact with other engineers.
Open office setups can go horribly wrong. Never allow anyone who spends time on the phone into the open office setup. That stifles all interaction due to the need for silence. Additionally, engineers are forced to listen to a single side of a conversation that likely has nothing directly to do with the engineers. Project and account managers have a valuable job, and engineers should not need to be distracted by work that is not related to what they need to accomplish.
Additionally, I believe an open office for engineers should be reasonably small (4-10 people), and there should be some common responsibilities or projects between the engineers.
Other steps can be taken to give people the appropriate space for the task at hand. I've used a stand-up desk for the past three years. I hardly ever spend a whole day standing. I alternate between sitting and standing as my body gives me signals. Similarly, having quiet space (alternatively headphones, if desired) to crank on certain work can be useful useful. That said, three of the four of us have not used solitary space in the past 2 months.
Basically all of this is to say the issue is not black and white. If you prefer to work in a private office, like more than half of the engineers at my company do, that's fine. If you prefer to work in the company of others, that is fine too. Not everyone wants to work at a startup, and not everyone hates working for big financial companies.