The Joel on Software Discussion Group

we had cubicles which were fine until today. Management has decided to go with an "open office" concept. So we go from a cube with adequate space to literally a bunch that is not big enough to even stretch your legs. There are no walls and no privacy at all.

They want better communication... I am going to have to go out and spend $300 on white noise headphones just so I can get some work done. This is a very social team and people don't shut up all day long.

The desk I have no is about the size of the desk I had in Junior High.

Pointy-Haired Bosses are ruining the world.

What is management using?  Do they still have offices?

If it is so great, maybe they should also be using the concept.

What a shame.  Sorry to her about it. 

You can always take a stand...

I am also working in an open plan office. My managers are sitting right next to me, at the same desks as I work at.

"This is a very social team and people don't shut up all day long. "

So what you are saying is you're not a team player.

This "open office" crap really irks me. 

I'm willing to bet that no one who espouses this concept ever had to go though the open classroom fad back in the 70's.

My wife went to high school in a building that had no walls between classrooms.  Try learning Chemistry when there's a Spanish class right next to you with no walls.

The real way to foster communication is to provide employees with an area where they can hang out away from their desks to have technical discussions.  Oh yeah, the other necessity is to hire people that will talk to colleagues.

I've never heard of the open classroom but it sounds horrendous.

I think managers forget that there are people with different work styles.  Some like to work in silence and others like to work with background noise.  Plus they can cram more workers into a smaller physical space when you don't need cube or office walls.  I think that's what the OP's situation is - sounds like the boss is trying to stuff more people in.

Good! That means they're hiring :)

Or they are reducing the space they rent.

One time I had a dba job with a cube in the middle of a bunch of telemarketers.  Fortunately it was only temporary until they got new offices, but cripes, how can you think?  The only good part was I controlled the thermostat, muahahaha.

Now I'm sharing a cube with a hell desk person, as a dba/programmer in a too-quiet office.  Most people doing our kind of work wouldn't even stand for it and the other typical bs, but somehow I don't care.  I'm happy to have a job.  The 8-track in my head is playing Gentle Giant just now.

I'm tempted to say, if you are out in the open, passive-aggressively start behaviors like picking your nose, and other irritating things you can probably google, until they decide privacy is a good thing.  But that's just my inner Molotov talking.  All you can really do is try to come up with some rationalization about how it is less stressful and therefore more productive to have more control over your local personal environment.  You have to make them think it is their own idea, too.  Somehow spin this into a positive direction towards what you want.  Good luck.

""This is a very social team and people don't shut up all day long. "

So what you are saying is you're not a team player.  "

What does this have to do with being a team player. When people gather around to yap for 30 minutes I have to sit there and listen to it while I am working. What does this have to dow ith the team when they talk about the football game or about whatever?

even if it is about work, it doesn't involve me most of the time. I don't care about their issues. I have work to do. I need quiet.

@contractor

as stated by our favorite Sgt. of all time, "Lighten up, Francis"

(that line, by the way, was a joke, same as the 'not a team player' crack above)

(:->

A team player is someone who accepts the dictates of management without question and who everyone likes because he never minds being interrupted all day long to hear stories about what the coworkers kids did in kindergarten.

Also, everyone in management knows for a fact that the openness of cubicles enhances teamwork, cooperation and communication, and open office plans enhance them even more. The only worker bees that object to this openness are those who are afraid of change, and those who are not team players. But I repeat myself.

I spent a month in Munich working in an 'open office' type of setting.  It was quite a change of pace from my usual office with a door or cubical aka 'fortress of solitude'.  I found that I was more productive than ever, but also much less happy.  I felt much more self conscious about even something so trivial as checking my email (1 newegg email ad, and it looks like your shopping), but the real problem was that I could see how unproductive those around me were.  It's a real drain to work a 12 hour day, if the guy next to you comes in at 9 looks at cars online for 3 hours has lunch, then goes home at 5.  I think the privacy walls offer goes both ways.  I don't want to know how little work the guy next to me is doing, it'll just depress me.

Jasper Duba:
"It's a real drain to work a 12 hour day, if the guy next to you comes in at 9 looks at cars online for 3 hours has lunch, then goes home at 5.  I think the privacy walls offer goes both ways.  I don't want to know how little work the guy next to me is doing, it'll just depress me."

Maybe he just gets everything done in those 4-5 hours in the afternoon.

Not everyone has their productivity distributed uniformly throughout the day.

@scott

yes, everyone in mgmt knows this. 

however, the people who work in those hell holes know better.

Someone spending 3 of 8 hrs a day doing shopping for cars is not doing their work. Same goes if they are talking with their friends on the phone, watching movies, playing video games or viewing porn. All those are completely inappropriate for work and people should be fired if this is at all a regular occurrence.

It's OK to be napping or reading tech journals, listening to music, or staring off into space as these are at least plausibly associated with continuing education and design work. It's also OK if after 6pm people are staying for a games tournament. But it's not OK to spend significant parts of your day screwing around.

"everyone in mgmt knows this"

Yeah, regarding teamwork I am parroting the standard view I hear constantly from open space advocates.

Ugggh.  I feel for you :(

I worked at a place like that once (a startup within a bigger company).  Within a year ALL the engineers left the group -- to hard to focus with marketeers throwing balls and goofing off in the background.

Just make sure you don't stay later.  If your work takes longer, then let it take longer.  You didn't create this scenario.

I worked in an open office for a few years and actually liked it.  Given a choice, I would have preferred a private office, but the open plan wasn't nearly as bad as I'd feared.

It helped that we were organized so that all of the techies were grouped together, sales were grouped together elsewhere, etc. 

Good headphones help too.

I think it all comes down to your getting things done  attitude. Where I live pretty much small open-plan offices are the norm. By small I mean 10-20 people mostly developers.
I got lucky .. I work with only 5 persons in a small room(3 are my team). It is crowded but during lunch I really get to focus on coding :). 

Since I am a team leader I am not allowed to keep my headphones on as I need to delegate/help/mentor most of the time. I tend to do overtime for coding things the right way.
How do I get by ?
1) GTD - priceless get organized such that you only store in your mind little information. I also use mind mapping tools (FreeMind) to plan my day(before the other guys come in).
2) Tasks that need intense concentration such as coding , designing, bug solving are started at 8.30 AM before anybody else comes in.
3) Headphones and MP3's

I would love a private office but I realize that unless I become a manager there is now way I can get close to that.
I was laid off in December last year so between having a job in a noisy open-plan and not having a job at all I choose the job :(. 
I can be all alone when I retire and I can think clear then.
With that in mind I still think future generations of programmers 20-30 years from now will wonder how we worked in these noisy conditions(and how inefficient we were) and create rules for noise hygiene(somebody already mentioned this on this forum).

Mike,

Sounds awful. 

You have to come in early to get your thoughts together.
You have to stay late to get coding done right.
You can't wear headphones

All the things you say are OK you compensate by working longer (which, I presume, you're doing for free)

Sounds like an indictment of open offices if ever I heard one.

Currently, in my job we have an open office environment and I must say it is useful, but at the same time, it's very frustrating to be noticed by everyone you're doing. Let's say, if I want to put my head down to relieve a little headache or think about a pain in the ass problem, I can't do that. I also hate those days when a guy behind me talking with users all day long when I am trying to concentrate on design issues or actually THINK.

I can't speak for or against it in their entirety. However, I do like the idea of walls around me. In my last job, we had large cubicles for 4 developer, each one sitting in their corner with a center table for discussion. The walls were 5 feet high or so, it provide you the openness at work and not make you feel you're in a pigeon hole either. In this setting, I could actually put my head on my hands, if I am tired of doing something, or pick my nose I had to, which by the way I never did.

In my current job, a lot of people running around trying to be noticed or honestly work, whatever, which seems to work quite a bit in the eyes of management. Regardless, there are no perfect jobs so you just have to take it for it's worth, go home and don't try to make work more than what it is not.

@schlabotnik - it is not ok and yes every since 2004 when looking for ideal working conditions  I found Jos I knew it was not.

@all
The problem is that programming work is not something you see . Being focused on something or thinking about a difficult problem look just like sitting around and staring at the screen/paper.
So a lot of people translate work by communication which is obvious  :talk a lot , ask questions without thinking first (Joel's classic example) or are simply being chatting discussing the latest movie/sports event although you have to be there and work and REALLY focus on the problem at hand.
Sorry to be re-posting but last day was a mess indeed(people tapping my shoulder with the headphones on , noise all around , new movie in cinema , politics , juniors asking me "what does this equals method do?"  couldn't even write a simple unit-test for some trivial code) which reminded me why I hate open space offices so much  .. so I had to pay that with 1h 30 minutes of my own time to get things done and I think it's the last time I do that .. as I cannot control the environment and cannot be responsible for it's effects(working from home is not allowed of course).

No, Mike, there's another (unmentioned) option.  Work your eight hours and get done what you get done.  Then, when your productivity has dipped 25-50% and your boss asks why, ask him/her WHAT has changed since the last time they measured you.

Not that they're going to care, but at least you (and they) will know.

I recommend the Beyerdynamic DT770 Pro headphones.  They're about $200 and are not "white noise" headphones, but they are great noise blocking headphones.  I spent a day a few months ago looking at all kinds of noise blocking solutions, and tried a dozen different kinds of high end headphones before I decided on this model.  Obviously no headphone will block out all noise but these were the best I found, even going up to $300+ headphones.