Having spent almost equal amount of time in open office and private office, my own anecdote is that productivity wasn't dramatically better with private offices. In open offices, I just used to put head phones on, listen to non-vocal music and be super focused for many hours. In fact that was much better than private office because others would see you wearing headphone and they don't want to bother you. In private office, anyone is welcome to distract me anytime and I have to entertain that because person walked all the way to my office no matter how focused I was on something.
Another thing is that teams with private offices suffer greatly in communication and more importantly in energy and passion. Teams in open office often go to lunch together, have more personal exchanges and have far more socialization. When people see their teams working hard around them, they have little excuse not to follow the suit. In private offices, I often see people catching up on news websites and FB and in fact I even knew a guy who freely admitted that he spent entire days on YouTube. These were smart people and it's not that they were slacking off but most people are actually fairly weak against distractions generated from their own computer. Those distractions in private offices far out number distractions by people in open office.
A 3 person team packed in to a private office is likely the best of both worlds. In private offices, you mostly rely on bumping in to someone in the lobby for serendipitous discussions. Unless your work is isolated and you don't need to talk to anyone, open office is usually better option generally speaking. However I agree that people working in open office have to establish proper norms such as don't talk loud, put phones on vibrate, for long talks go outside, don't disturb a person wearing headphone etc. In most places, I see these norms are generally established.
> When people see their teams working hard around them, they
> have little excuse not to follow the suit.
> In private offices... ...most people are actually fairly
> weak against distractions generated from their own computer
I think this is true. When left totally to my own with medium-term or long-term deadlines it's hard to resist the pull of distractions on the web.
But that is also fairly easily mitigated with methodologies like Scrum where you are frequently touching base with other team members. During the daily standup meetings you publicly commit to what you're going to do in the next day, and inform the team of what you did during the previous day (along with any roadblocks you hit, if any).
I don't find myself tempted to YouTube the day away when I know I've told the team I'm going to to X, Y, and Z today and that I'm going to have to stand up in front of them again tomorrow and let them know my progress (or lack thereof!)
> In private offices, you mostly rely on bumping in to someone
> in the lobby for serendipitous discussions.
Collaboration is crucial! If private offices are so private that collaboration is discouraged, then that's a problem that needs to be solved somehow.
> A 3 person team packed in to a private office is likely the best
> of both worlds.
I think I find this to be the worst of all worlds, hahaha. A conversation can be easier to ignore in a wide-open space (where it's part of the overall din) but there's no such aural camouflage in a 3-person office: it's just you, your work, and a noisy-ass conversation in close proximity.
It's difficult for people to recognize that open offices exist for a reason, but they absolutely do. They are a systemic solution to communication, collaboration, and motivation problems. All three need different systemic solutions in a private office context, but those solutions would be more forced and less natural.
The open floor plan is also a huge cultural boon for that reason. The types of systems that enable communication, collaboration, and mutual motivation in a closed office are the ones that feel "old" and unnatural and corporate. Despite productivity decreases in day to day heads down work, open office collaboration feels very natural and genuine, and that has greater effects.
Plus, it turns out, most of the work in a company larger than a few dozen people is in that communication and collaboration space; not sitting at a desk typing.
How is the simplest cheapest emptiest thing a systematic solution to anything. It's starting to design a workspace, drawing the interior/exterior border, then getting an interruption and coming back an hour later and thinking you are done.
It would be excellent parody of the the hula hoop circle "you know, for kids" gag from that old movie.
Often the simplest, cheapest, emptiest things make pretty good systems. They reduce waste, and have certain advantages.
Your joke is funny, but I promise you that's not the reason for open floor plans.
The key is that even an open plan is a system—it's just a less constrained system, with fewer rules. You still have to view it as a system and study the effects and interactions involved.
[open offices] are a systemic solution to communication, collaboration,
and motivation problems. All three need different systemic solutions
in a private office context, but those solutions would be more forced
and less natural.
I don't understand how those three things require "systemic solutions" in an office environment. When I need to collaborate with a coworker I just travel ten feet to their office or click their name in HipChat.
The question is if the tradeoff in the reduction/change of collaboration is worth the increased productivity from the better layout. That's not an obvious question to answer, in fact—that's what I'm saying. You need to prove which system is actually superior, with data.
A 3-person team in a small office works well for me. The other two people are working on the same project, and since they're also developers they are quiet -- if a phone rings they step outside with it. The room is quiet, so people that walk in tend to be quiet as well.
Having been scrum master myself at different times, you would be surprised how many times people outright lie "What did you do yesterday" part. They are not necessarily evil or lazy or stupid. It's becoming just super hard for people to be disciplined and stay away from distractions from so many things. Comparatively, distractions by people around in open offices is nothing.
But that is also fairly easily mitigated with methodologies like Scrum where you are frequently touching base with other team members.
Seriously, FUCK THAT SCRUM SHIT. A daily status meeting isn't that bad, but "you can only work on it if it's in the backlog" and "sprints" and backlog grooming meetings and this brand of aggressive micromanagement that has revived itself in the name of "Agile"... all of that nonsense needs to die in a taint fire.
We do a pretty relaxed version of it; it's fun. It doesn't feel like micromanagement to me.
If I need to do something that doesn't have a task in the backlog, I just add one and then click "start" in Sprintly. No big deal. It's basically a shared to-do list, and I'm a to-do list kind of guy.
I like the daily stand up meetings. Specifically the emphasis on the fact that it shouldn't be more than 15 minutes in length.
You have my sympathies though. I can certainly see how some companies would implement Scrum in a way that is really anal-retentive and gets in the way.
Maybe that's how it works if you are doing it "right". But nobody ever seems to do Agile "right". If Agile is so hard to do right, and breaks down so badly when it's done wrong in a small way (like letting your manager in the scrum), then isn't that in itself a problem with Agile?
I don't see a problem in a manager participating. But what would the manager do if backlog is handled by the PO and work load by the dev team? I think any process would break down if a manager decides to fly solo and push extra work outside the framework, for example.
I did "Agile" for 1.5yrs and it was the least agile team I've been on so far. We never had a product owner (we were all expected to understand the user's needs enough to serve as "product owners"). We had devs and a manager, and a "scrum master"/team lead, who was one of the devs and reported directly to the manager. Our scrums were 30m+ long because the manager wanted to know every little detail, and there would be a lot of back-and-forth, most of which would be irrelevant to any given team member. Complexity poker involved guessing what number the manager wanted you to pick, and sprint reviews were two-day experiences in self-flagellation.
Not that all of this would have magically gone away if we weren't an "Agile" team but it did contribute to the problem. "Proper" Agile just doesn't fit well with the way most companies want to run their teams. So managers take Agile and make their own personal tweaks to it. Since their brand of Agile has 80% the same rules to what they read in the book, they expect to get 80-100% of the benefits of Agile. Any questioning of the actual results of this system is heresy, since Agile is a well-established management method used by many successful companies.
If that manager had picked up a management system that worked within the company's framework without making so many changes, or if there wasn't so much Agile-worship in the industry that an "Agile" setup was politically unquestionable, the situation would have been a lot easier to fix. As it is, it wasn't until our team completely collapsed that the company reassigned half of that manager's responsibilities to a new department, and the manager decided to retweak their personal brand of "Agile". Even that is probably too little too late; more and more projects are being moved from that dep't into others, to the point where I'm wondering what the devs there will actually have left to do.
So yeah. I'm very skeptical of anything calling itself "Agile", because it's such a nightmare when done wrong, and I'd bet dollars to donuts there are more places doing it wrong than right.
I actually believe that Scrum is a way to avoid micromanagement. There's no way of getting around the fact that the people who pay you want to see steady progress toward the thing they're paying you to do. One 15-minute meeting each morning to assuage that concern is a reasonable solution to me.
You're talking about standup, not Scrum. It's a common conflation to call a status meeting a "Scrum meeting".
Status reporting, if the overhead is around 3% (e.g. 15 minutes per day, or a one-hour weekly meeting) isn't so bad. I think it's actually good if it defuses the suspicions ("what does he do?") that, unchecked, can devolve into political behavior.
Scrum involves a lot more, like user stories and an explicit disallowance of working on things not in the backlog. By the book, you have to leave written records of what you did in insulting detail. It's horrible stuff. But I agree: 15 minutes per day for an all-team status meeting isn't that bad, and can be better than the alternative if that alternative is a culture of suspicion and resentment.
A culture of trust where engineers are treated as professionals and adults, not as children who have to justify weeks and days of their own working time. Open allocation as far as is possible within the confines of the needs of the business.
What? Of course private office is better. In an open office, I always have to worry about if my fart is too loud for the person next to me to hear. It's like every time I have to pass gas, it interrupts my train of thought so I get to let out a silent one. Or even better, some times I have headphones on, and totally forgot that I'm in an open office.
In a private office, I wouldn't have to worry about this.
>> Another thing is that teams with private offices suffer greatly in communication and more importantly in energy and passion.
I really wish people would stop repeating this. It's complete hogwash. It doesn't even stand up to the most basic of scrutiny. If it were true, how the hell did we ever get work done before the open office plan?
Suddenly transporting a failing team of globally located people into the same room together isn't going to magically make them into an effective team. People don't fail to communicate because they aren't sitting next to each other. People fail at communicating because they are terrible communicators. PROTIP: if they actually write "excellent communicator" on their resume, then they are not.
Similarly, suddenly scattering a succeeding team across the planet isn't going to make them fail. People who are good at communicating figure out how to communicate even under the worst conditions. Most of the developers on all of the big FOSS projects have never even heard each other's voices!
But no, let's treat people like cattle and make them hotbunk on workstations. If you have room to put up your own photos of your family at your desk, clearly you're wasting company resources and your desk could be smaller. You exist only at the pleasure of the company.
The problem in open offices is that I DON'T see people around me working hard. Instead they are talking about dogs, what kind of candy they prefer and how their friend found someone from Tinder. It's super hard not to listen, even with headphones on. The only thing that almost works are these noise-cancelling headphones, but you still need to blast some pretty loud music. I'd rather sit in a room coding :(
In open offices, I just used to put head phones on, listen to non-vocal music and be super focused for many hours.
Being visible from behind puts stress on you. You may not be aware of it, but it will catch up with you before you're 35. Headphones don't help for that. It's not just the noise that makes open-plan offices so terrible. Booth-style open-plan offices would be a step up, but nearly as expensive as private offices and since this open-plan thing is really about cheapness (and back-door age discrimination, in some cases) that does not sell it.
Teams in open office often go to lunch together, have more personal exchanges and have far more socialization
This has more to do with the people than the office layout. There are open-plan offices with eat-at-desk culture and there are private-office layouts where people eat lunch together and play board games after work. Private offices don't mean that there aren't open spaces when people want them.
In private offices, I often see people catching up on news websites and FB and in fact I even knew a guy who freely admitted that he spent entire days on YouTube.
I spend more time goofing off in open-plan offices, because I have to hide the goofing off. Here's how it works for me. I have a certain amount of goofing off that I need to do per day, just because I'm a curious person (it's not actual "goofing off", it's just not immediately work-related). In a private-office layout, it might be 10 minutes every 2 hours spent checking the news, on HN or Reddit, reading a poetry book on the internets, whatever. In an open-plan layout, it takes 20 minutes to get that 10 minutes of goofing off in, because even though I don't actually need to hide it (I'm senior enough that I could pull the "so fucking what" card, and no one cares anyway because everyone goofs off a little bit) I still feel that social pressure.
I once was working for a UK govt department as a contractor and was between tasks with nothing to do. The management thought it was easier to keep me on than to hire again when the work increased, so I was there with nothing to do. My manager and everyone around me knew I had nothing to do, but I still found it quite stressful doing things like reading Slashdot while at work (it was a long time ago). In the end I started my own project using the work development tools so it looked like I was working as normal, but after a while that was also too much so I found another contract.
I do agree about extra stress in open plan workspaces. I'm the kind of person that can't block out people around me like I notice some other people do, so everyone that walks past my desk I feel the need to glance up at them. In coffee shops I prefer the seating with my back to the wall. Music can be used to block out some of that distraction, but not all of it.
Another thing is that teams with private offices suffer greatly in communication and more importantly in energy and passion. Teams in open office often go to lunch together, have more personal exchanges and have far more socialization. When people see their teams working hard around them, they have little excuse not to follow the suit. In private offices, I often see people catching up on news websites and FB and in fact I even knew a guy who freely admitted that he spent entire days on YouTube. These were smart people and it's not that they were slacking off but most people are actually fairly weak against distractions generated from their own computer. Those distractions in private offices far out number distractions by people in open office.
A 3 person team packed in to a private office is likely the best of both worlds. In private offices, you mostly rely on bumping in to someone in the lobby for serendipitous discussions. Unless your work is isolated and you don't need to talk to anyone, open office is usually better option generally speaking. However I agree that people working in open office have to establish proper norms such as don't talk loud, put phones on vibrate, for long talks go outside, don't disturb a person wearing headphone etc. In most places, I see these norms are generally established.