1. These are clearly marketing pictures taken by professional photographers. Well done ones I might add. They are meant to demonstrate (perception/reality) what daily life of an any employee is. Not every big tech company is a composed of 99% engineers. Cassandra and HHVM were built there (or somewhere similar), yet people whose only evidence is a bunch of marketing pictures decide to question the design decisions of people with intimate knowledge about their company's organization.
2. There is yet to be conclusive evidence that open offices work or don't work, and I don't expect this to change anytime soon. What is clear to me is that the correlation between good code and office does not exist. Think of how much code has been written in kitchens, garages, vans, etc that may have changed the world...
> 2. There is yet to be conclusive evidence that open offices work or don't work
There's actually quite a few studies that show that they most definitely do not work.
Here's a meta-study that reviewed hundreds of specific studies [1] and the conclusion is inescapable.
Here's a survey of tens of thousands of workers [2]
And here's a New Yorker article collecting lots of this [3]. It includes a reference to a study that found actual measurable health detriment to open offices.
Arguing that issues with open offices are ambiguous is a bit like arguing that global climate change isn't happening.
I've got a list of articles that say the same thing and refute it again. Happy to share, but I think it's only going make this discussion go in more circles. The Leed study you reference in particular has so many biases in it's approach, that I don't know where to start in refuting it.
> Here's a meta-study that reviewed hundreds of specific studies [1] and the conclusion is inescapable.
If the conclusion is inescapable, then what's the explanation for why so many companies chose to implement it? Especially ones with highly disposable cash flows (a la Facebook/Twitter) where money and desk efficiency isn't a problem.
The only real conclusion I can draw at this point is that this topic is a merry-go-round of anecdotes, imperfect studies, and agendas.
1) your child's test were conducted in the lunch hall while lunch was going on.
2) You were expected to take the SATs in a gynasium during a basketball game.
3) when your kids go to the library to study everyone is allowed to run around
4) your kids try to do their homework in front of the tv while talking to their friends on the phone.
I suspect you'd be outraged. We know noise is distracting and affect productivity. I don't understand what is controversial about that claim.
My agenda is that I want to be productive. I kinda feel that if you pay me to do something, I should be able to make my best effort. I know by looking at my svn/git commits just how productive I am. It's very empirical.
Nothing's controversial about your particular claim, what's controversial is whether the overall product produced in an open enviroment better. I suspect it depends on what your putting together and who your working with, hence contradictory studies.
Children's grades are on an individual basis, collaboration is discouraged. It makes sense to seperate them. If kids were instead being graded on the whole school's output on these tests and SATs (customers never seem to care how productive I am, only the team's output), then I think allowing, maybe even forcing them to collaborate by using open eviroment would be best. They might even be encouraged to show up alot more if they got to play basketball or have free lunch. I think this is what management has in mind.
I can see both sides of the argument: when working on my own projects or mostly solo-work projects, I need long stretches of quiet time alone; open enviroments suck for this. When working on a group project, especially one that I am new to, I gain more by being able to overhear people talking about it and being able to quickly unstick myself by asking people questions than I lose in slocc.
I've never tried to work in an office with arcades and foosball so I'll let someone else comment there.
None of those 1-4 exist in any open-office-layout company that I've ever experienced. People playing foosball? They're in a room where the walls keep sound in.
The only reasons open offices are popular is because they're cheap and flexible (w/r to layout). That's it. People responsible for office layout make the wrong prioritization, that office space is expensive vs. knowledge worker productivity. But this keeps being demonstrated to be flatly wrong. Humans make dumb prioritizations all the time, even when there's ample data refuting it. Open offices exist basically because of broken belief systems.
Knock yourself out with some studies showing that open offices offer higher productivity. From anecdotes to data, it's been shown over and over and over agains that, in the general knowledge worker sense, they don't...and the body of studies that keep showing this is growing faster than any that show it's a good idea to pile a bunch of people who's job it is to think into a noisy crowded cluttered space full of distractions.
There are specific cases where they might, call-centers for example, but that's simply because you can pack more people making more calls per square-meter and thus productivity is easy to measure. But call-center workers are basically the same as production-line workers, they're measured in calls-per-hour in the way a worker at a car factory is measured in body panels mounted per hour.
There's been a very long road in management science, a road that's still being walked, where each step along the way, the field comes to the realization that knowledge workers are not in fact the same as production-line workers. You can't measure a software developer's productivity in KLoCs/unit time, and you can't make development go faster by throwing more people at it. I'm using software here, but any knowledge job works the same way.
If you need to think to do your job, things that distract you from thinking will cause you to not be able to do your job.
Cubicles are cheap and flexible, yet they solve the distraction problems open offices present. Who decided to knock the walls down when irrefutable data and science says otherwise?
> From anecdotes to data, it's been shown over and over and over agains that, in the general knowledge worker sense, they don't
> You can't measure a software developer's productivity in KLoCs/unit time, and you can't make development go faster by throwing more people at it.
So what metric do you use to show that open offices simply don't work? What reproducible scenario can I use (i.e. scientific method) that will demonstrate your stated inefficiencies in perpetuity?
> Knock yourself out with some studies showing that open offices offer higher productivity.
Can't say I've ever stated that. For the record, I personally don't find open offices to be effective, but that doesn't change my stance that an irrefutable conclusion is impossible to draw on this issue.
It's staggering to think, if you are right, how much more profitable Facebook or Twitter or Dropbox would be if they had productive office space, don't you think?
These companies have golden egg-laying geese products and 15% more or less productivity won't make a big difference in making or breaking the market for them. Think about it this way: did Google beat Altavista because its employees were 15% more productive?
Meanwhile, Microsoft, Google, etc. have whole huge divisions that don't make any money.
Yup, agreed! Precisely my point above - for a bunch of companies who pride themselves on engineering efficiency and see progress as a result, it would seem very odd that they would chose to actively defy an irrefutable claim on productivity...
2. There is yet to be conclusive evidence that open offices work or don't work, and I don't expect this to change anytime soon. What is clear to me is that the correlation between good code and office does not exist. Think of how much code has been written in kitchens, garages, vans, etc that may have changed the world...