Why open-office layouts are bad for employees, bosses, and productivity - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3019758/dialed/offices-for-all-why-open-office-layouts-are-bad-for-employees-bosses-and-productivity <comment><USER2> The best environment I've ever worked in was a combination open office, private space hybrid. You had your desk, whether you wanted a sitting desk or standing desk, you could choose from either, and you were by default in the open office area. However, surrounding this large room were a dozen or so closed offices where you could pop in and have a meeting or do some coding in private.

However, one of the organize-all-the-things guys on the internal operations team once caught me in a coding marathon in one of those offices and sent an email to the entire company "reminding" everyone that those offices were for _God-knows-what-he-thought-they-were-for_ , not for work. So I returned to my ergonomic island and toiled away, surrounded by the noise of a hundred private conversations.

I've always thought since then that if that had panned out, that you could choose at any moment if you wanted to be in the open room or in a private room in the perimeter, that would have been the ideal layout.

<comment><USER3> The large pharma I used to work for is still in the process of spending millions of dollars redoing all of their floors to open work space areas. Around the outside of the floors are "focus booths" which just have a small desk/phone/monitor setup for someone to work in for a few hours.

These booths are always full and occupied by folks for the entire day, since most people don't like the loud open area workspace and sit in these small offices so they can have phone calls and concentrate.

<comment><USER4> _most people don 't like the loud open area workspace and sit in these small offices so they can have phone calls and concentrate._

FWIW, good acoustical engineering can make a significant difference in how loud an open-space "feels." Putting sound-absorbing materials on all architectural features and hanging sound-diffusing baffles from the ceiling can change a loud room into a significantly quieter and less distracting room.

It isn't a panacea, but it isn't hard to do. You will need someone experienced in room acoustics to design it for you. I'd still prefer small offices over an open space, but if management is stuck on having an open-space then getting good sound control in there will make the best of a bad situation.

You can hear the reverse in a lot of trendy restaurants nowadays where, for some reason that I can't comprehend, it is fashionable to deliberately make the dining area as loud as possible.

[http://www.grubstreet.com/2013/07/adam-platt-on-loud- restaur...](http://www.grubstreet.com/2013/07/adam-platt-on-loud- restaurants.html)

<comment><USER5> I can't google for references now, but restaurants like loud dining areas because there is a linear relationship between the dB of background noise and the money customers spend on drinks.

<comment><USER6> I haven't seen the references you mentioned, but is it possible that the cause and effect here are swapped? It seems more likely that increased drinking leads to increased noise.

<comment><USER7> I believe the logic is that talking and drinking compete for the oral mutex, so limiting the ability to talk (by making it so loud that talking becomes pointless because nobody can ear you) increases drinking throughput. Or something like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Perhaps the worst aspect of all this, is the purposeful, or even casual, ideologue. An arrangement works for them, or they think it does -- or, BEST PRACTICES dictate that it should... and viola, a dictate.

I am one who needs some control over his environment. In the majority of cases, these means peace and quiet particularly/mostly from human noise, as well as a lack of visual distraction. (Although there are times when I work well -- best even -- in a frenetic environment; however, these are limited in both type and frequency.)

I'm a bit older, and I fell into a generation that was subscribing to and prescribing whole-heartedly the "open", "collaborative" environment.

It did not work for me. Yet I received _unrelenting_ pressure, including from medical professionals, that _I_ was the one who... "simply" needed to learn to adapt.

Well... now we know a bit better. (Although I don't trust society to have truly "learned" this in any permanent fashion.) But the chronic stress of this situation has caused for me major adjustments in career and, eventually, rather run me down.

To put the bottom line at the bottom, here: If a situation is not working for you, IT IS NOT WORKING FOR YOU. TRUST THIS. TRUST YOURSELF!

"Professionals" of varying occupations and levels of training will all -- _ALL_ \-- tell you all kinds of crap. Even several years of medical school does not divorce most from their prejudices nor from cultural suasion.

Don't waste your time -- your life -- running yourself down trying to live up to someone else's idea of the "right way".

<comment> w0rd-driven Definitely. I'd add, if "medical professionals" were telling you you were wrong from something you felt clearly, run away. You aren't incorrect or just "need to adapt". We are all not built the same and as an introvert I do fit the "only critics" mold but damn do open plans suck for me.

I'm in a large shared office of 4 desks. I have a single coworker that sits right next to me though him or I moving to the vacant lot doesn't really cross our minds. I am however consistently distracted as he's particularly fidgety, talks to himself (I do when I'm alone), and either chews really loudly or I've just grown to hate it. I have had no problems with him as a person but the effects of the constant disruption bring about a certain disdain towards others that distract him or myself. I can't divorce myself from it and my ears can't take a full day of headphones even if I severely enjoy the music I listen to.

I see open plans as facilitators in nothing but pain all around and where I am currently. We've always been in a open office cube farm of some nature but something about the move to a new place specifically designed to be this way was a bigger kick in the balls than I had anticipated. I can't think of any place that would prize distractions as a badge of honor either, at least not where developers are concerned. Yet that's exactly what we have now and that I've allowed some shitty process to make me this much of a shitty person is the real problem. Its like I can't ever correct it either so I just need to move on or it's going to continue to push me into atrophy.

Basically your last paragraph is key. Notice this early. If you can change policy for your sake, good. If you can't, run away. You don't deserve the inevitable downturn it'll have on your livelihood.

</comment></comment><comment> at-fates-hands It's interesting to note most people don't know the history of the cubicle and why it was invented in the first place:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubicle](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubicle)

"The office cubicle was created by designer Robert Propst for Herman Miller, and released in 1967 under the name "Action Office II". Although cubicles are often seen as being symbolic of work in a modern office setting due to their uniformity and blandness, they afford the employee a greater degree of privacy and personalization than in previous work environments, which often consisted of desks lined up in rows within an open room.[1][2

Image of an office circa 1937: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Photograph_of_the_Division...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Photograph_of_the_Division_of_Classification_and_Cataloging,_1937.tif)

I've never liked the open office layouts anyways. The two companies I worked for used it and it was tremendously noisy and so I usually did anything I could to avoid having to work in the office. Either by going to the cafeteria to work, or staying home. It made both of the teams I worked on very inefficient. The exact opposite goal it was meant to address.

<comment><USER9> There's another huge reason the cubicle office is dominant: Cubicles are immediately tax deductible, while building out offices is considered a capital improvement, and therefore has to be depreciated over a longer period of time.

Tax law all too frequently shapes behavior, and this is one of those cases.

<comment><USER10> Yikes. I'd never even considered that.

Do you have any other (terrifying) examples?

<comment><USER11> I have heard it asserted that the reason for poor construction quality of postwar US commercial buildings in their 39-year depreciation life: [http://yourbusiness.azcentral.com/irs-depreciation- schedule-...](http://yourbusiness.azcentral.com/irs-depreciation-schedule- commercial-real-estate-15798.html)

Hence the lack of much brick or stone, built-for-the-ages construction beyond veneers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> 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.

<comment><USER13> 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?

<comment><USER14> 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.

<comment><USER13> > 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.

<comment><USER15> > 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.

<comment><USER16> 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.

<comment><USER15> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I find it hilarious that a bunch of people who work on internet technologies apparently need so much face-to-face communication.

If you want my attention, send me an e-mail. Also: get off my lawn.

<comment><USER18> Face-to-face communication is the primary and most efficient way for humans to interact. Coming to a consensus in email with more than two people is a nightmare.

<comment><USER19> This is over-generalized. Most generalizations about the human race are based off of extroverted personalities, and not the introverted people that comprise the vast bulk of programmers.

This is now pure anecdotal, but the programmers I know prefer to communicate over email, if they're forced to communicate at all. Typically, because this allows them to take the time to get their point across perfectly before sending it.

Programmers have done amazing things while collaborating on massive projects across the planet using nothing but mailing lists and the occasional IRC chat. While this doesn't disprove they might not have communicated _better_ if they were all in one big room together, I'd say it does shine some doubt.

Also, for what it's worth, I'm currently typing this from an open floor plan and I quite dislike it. I miss my quiet office.

<comment><USER20> I am an introvert but when trying to communicate something complicated that requires lots of roundtrips, I'll take a 15 minute face-to-face meeting over a day long email chain full of misunderstanding any day of the week. Any company where this is understood will move fast and kick ass.

<comment><USER19> I don't disagree with you. However, the problem arises when said company decides to stick everyone in a big room and says "go forth and collaborate." Before having my office moved into an open floor plan, we still had plenty of face-to-face conversations. Meetings, hallway talks, getting up and walking to another's office, and phone calls were still an option when email wasn't.

Taken as a whole, I think programmers realize that email is a tool like any other- it has its uses, and its times when it should not be used. I feel the same could be said for group settings- there are times it makes sense, and there are times when it doesn't. I'll never understand the tendency of corporations to say "This methodology is good in this particular set of variables, therefor we will use it 100% of the time for every situation."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Heh. Open layouts were a response to the cubicle system which isolated people and gave the impression that you are nothing but cattle on an assembly line. It also reinforced status (size of cubicle/office/location). Just watch any 80s or 90s movie. Now the pendulum is swinging the other way. Have the original problems with cubicles been solved?

The problem is that people look for ideological purity and look to absolutes because an unambiguous answer seems simple, whereas the reality is quite grey. The reality is that some people work better in cubicles, and some prefer open layouts. To complicate things even further, some situations call for one, others call for the other.

I see a similar debate going on between proponents of traditional schools (rows of desks, and teacher in front) and structure-less/self-pacing schools. Which is better? Well, some kids thrive in one, others thrive in the other. Worse, some kids get absolutely destroyed within the wrong king of system.

There are no simple answers.

<comment><USER22> Strange. Never seen cubicles here in Europe.

<comment><USER23> Really? In the UK it seems to be pretty normal in the newer buildings. My first experience of them was at a city bank shortly before 2000. Very nice interview, all going swimmingly, "Let me show you around our offices"...

The programmers sat near the printer so that people could hassle them every time it ran out of paper. You could identify where the sales team sat before you entered the room. Everybody above the rank of team leader had an office elsewhere.

The next interview I went to was also open plan - in the sense that 5 programmers shared a decent size office. Stayed there for almost 10 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> My last company visited a company with open office and took pictures to prove to us how great it is. In the pictures the people are hunched down behind their screens, to avoid the distraction of the person facing them, and 90% have head phones on because of the noise distraction.

Basically, they were in mental cubes when they were lacking physical cubes.

P.S. The company I worked for went with the open office, productivity plummeted and the office is now closed. When I pointed out the above issues in the pictures I was told: "You don't like it? Maybe you need to work somewhere else". Well, now, they all work somewhere else.

</comment><comment><USER25> They had open-office layouts 100 years ago, too. Back then, though, they called them sweatshops.

<comment><USER26> Hah, nice. I sometimes think that..

A few years back I worked for a prominent design company. Our small group (of 4) had a nice little corner of 1/4 of an entire floor. "Oooh, nice, brick walls and people that look busy" I thought when I first joined. Not even a week later, reality started to set it. It was so ridiculously noisy.

And there were, of course, a few people that contributed to everything. I would sometimes get in around 8, it would be quiet and the usual offenders were actually working. From 10-6, it was like, forget it, noise non-stop. After 6, back to quiet.

This became really frustrating and after asking the offenders to chill, I made a trip to HR to ask wtf? HR was basically like, meh, nothing we can do. I ended up wishing those offenders would quit or worse. It was so bad and they were so loud.

After that I was like, never again an open floor plan. It was the worst thing ever and a total sham for those that want to focus and just get things done. Requiring the people whole want quiet to put headphones on only adds insult to injury.

Too bad quiet just isn't valued anymore..

<comment><USER27> Sounds a lot like a place I was at for a bit. My observation was that the noisy people killed productivity for the whole place. Not only because no one else could focus enough to get work done, but also because the noisy ones never really _did_ anything (yes, I checked commit logs). Passing cat video links around, playing music through laptop speakers("your headphones broken, bro?"), bro-style fist bumps because they put a sheen on a button, but no real actual coding.

<comment><USER28> I see a lot of people entering and exiting and their usual reason is taking a break. Emails about jokes and social activities get sent around the office fairly frequently as well. I'm just wondering how do you draw the line between allowing the employee freedom vs just clamping down on shenanigans.

<comment><USER27> For coders, check commit logs and the like. They can email cat video links to each other all day long for all I care, but if their last commit was last week then we've got a problem. IOW, you don't cut down on the shenanigans, you make sure the work is getting done. As it often turns out, if there's a lot of cat video links there probably isn't a lot of work and vice versa.

Were I appointed to be king, if you're noisy then STFU, full stop, whether you're getting your work done or not. Indoor voices, people, or take it somewhere else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> In my open office, I currently code next to some project managers, who spend all day on the phone negotiating.

This is a bit bad, but I just wear PPE Ear Defenders all day, on top of in ear headphones. With both of these, I can't hear a thing.

The eerie quiet is great for short bursts of concentration, but it also means I can turn my music up to a normal level without worrying about escaping noise annoying my colleagues.

It looks very nerdy, and people need to email me or wave if they want something (which cuts down interruptions a lot). I take them off about half the time so as to be social, which I guess is like leaving an office door open.

Sort of sad it's necessary though. Hope this helps people with a similar situation.

Ear defenders, buy good ones -> [http://goo.gl/NlgnPv](http://goo.gl/NlgnPv)

<comment><USER30> Unfortunately for me it's not that simple since I'm also very distracted by visual noise. Someone who passes by in my peripheral view can bring me out of flow as will the feeling of having someone behind my back do.

I recently was fortunate enough to have my own office for a while and I haven't been as productive since...well, since last time I had my own office some five years back. It's an awesome feeling to enter flow almost as you enter your room...

It's interesting to think back at my 15+ years long career and realize that the times when I've been most productive coincides with the times I've had my own office.

<comment><USER31> I'm the same. Can you put some pot plants to the left and right behind your screen? (more socially acceptable than other barriers) Request a second or larger monitor for your work? You can argue that it'll improve your productivity; you don't have to tell them that's because it'll block out your FOV, not because you actually want to display stuff on it…

Another thing that would help is moving to a different desk, but I'm guessing that might be a bit more difficult to negotiate.

(These days I'm self employed and work from home but that's what I did when I worked in an open-plan office. Also, if you can, come in to work before everyone else, while it's still very quiet. Usually more acceptable than coming in later than everyone else and staying later.)

<comment><USER30> Thanks for the tips.

The sad thing is that even if you look at it economically it doesn't make sense. Say that in order for each employee to have their own office you need 10m2 extra space per employee. Where I live, that would amount to ~2.5% of the employees salary, i.e. if a private office makes your emplyees more than 2.5% more productive you're profiting from private offices. In my experience my productivity boost when working in a private office amounts to maybe as much as 25% or more.

<comment><USER31> Oh, definitely. But then there are plenty of other ways of increasing programmer productivity which don't look like busywork so non-programmer managers won't have them. I guess try to get out of employment situations like that...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I work in an open office with no dividers. Unfortunately for me I don't have selective hearing, so 95% of the time I'm trying to drown out the buzz by wearing over-ear headphones (usually with no music playing). I also spend a _lot_ of time fending off product managers and testers who just refuse to acknowledge the headphone rule and constantly bug me about trivial things that can be put in an email or an IRC message.

The other 5% of the time is great - as other people have already mentioned, it's really easy to listen in to conversations and get an idea of what everybody is up to.

<comment><USER33>
        work in an open office with no dividers.
        Unfortunately for me I don't have selective
        hearing, so 95% of the time I'm trying to
        drown out the buzz by wearing over-ear
        headphones (usually with no music playing)

My wife has the same problem (no selective hearing). And while I understood it intellectually, it never really made sense. Of course you can focus your hearing, you just have to try... never said that, but that was my thought.

Then recently, an odd combination if sinus infection, cold, and related ear troubles inflicted this on me. I was attending a company/community even with several hundred attendees. Quite suddenly, it was like _every_ conversation in the common area was happening right next to me. It didn't matter how close or far, or how loud - it was all happening at once, and I while I could still hear the person I was talking to, I could no longer distinguish what they were saying as there were too many other conversations that my brain was trying to interpret. This went on for about two hours, then my ears popped, and things were roughly back to normal.

Ho-ly crap. Even with that experience, I find it difficult to fathom living with that nonstop - I don't know how you do it without going insane, particularly if you have to work in an open office.

TL;DR: I finally understand the experience of lacking selective hearing, and sympathize. While hoping it never, ever happens to me again.

<comment><USER34> "I don't know how you do it without going insane, particularly if you have to work in an open office."

You end up tuning out everything, and can't have a conversation in a noisy area.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Cornell did a study of open-plan offices for software engineering awhile back. It's well worth a read if you're interested in this subject.

It's definitely not anti-open. They basically found that closed offices benefit individual engineers the most while open plans benefit the team. Interestingly, while noting the need for concentration, they note a whole bunch of ulterior careerist motives for developers wanting to work in private.

They found that the nature of communication was markedly different in each environment. Open was not only more frequent and immediate, it raised the bar for what was considered a frequent amount of team interaction, suggesting greater knowledge-share. The conversations were also shorter and subject to "cues" about whether it was a good time to interrupt someone. And the stronger social bonds encouraged more people to ask for help and bounce crazy ideas around.

They do note that it comes at the cost of distractions, and in the end they call for a balance.

[http://iwsp.human.cornell.edu/file_uploads/office_ex2_123825...](http://iwsp.human.cornell.edu/file_uploads/office_ex2_1238259706.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER36> I currently work in an open office and I really hate it. I've previously had jobs with cubicles and one job where everyone got their own full fledged office. Of the three, I actually think cubicles are the best.

Everyone having their own private office was detrimental in the opposite way. Everyone was closed off and really inaccessible. Knocking on someone's door felt invasive and wrong, so people would avoid doing it.

Cubicles give everyone privacy and space, but not so much that it stops collaboration dead. The impediment to interruptions seems to be at just the right level.

I'm also interested in offices that have open collaborative spaces combined with private offices. I've never had that and I think it could be a good compromise too.

<comment><USER37> An other nice option is small shared offices, 2-6 people in a room, ideally working on related things (not necessarily together). Avoids the noise and discomfort of an open office, but also avoids the complete isolation and frustration of singles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> How many more times is this "open plan is the best!" "open plan is terrible!" cycle going to continue to receive your clicks? This has been an ongoing topic literally _all year_! These sites are playing the community like a piano, and the comment threads all read exactly the same: anecdotes.

I'm guilty of participating, too, but no more. My assumption will now be that any article with a headline that presents an absolute for a subject that is a matter of preference is garbage. It's all part of growing up, I guess.

<comment><USER39> It's an everlasting controversial subject. Perfect material for page views and ad revenue.

<comment><USER38> It's not controversial that some people like it and some people don't. Eliding this fact means the writers are doing their job in bad faith.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I sit in an office with desks with half-height dividers. I enjoy it. A while ago our company expanded into another floor, and my product's team was moved there (dev, QA, product, services, support). Previously the layout was arranged more by department than product.

Pretty much everyone on the team loves it, and has felt a major boost in productivity and team cohesion, as virtually anyone you might need is "right there" in the room with you, and you can tune in to some of the chatter for an organic understanding of what everyone's up to. I imagine if everyone were in offices it would feel dead and empty, and totally kill the team spirit.

I think the only thing we're missing is more ad-hoc space - more conference rooms for breakout groups and individuals seeking temporary escape from the floor.

<comment><USER41> Given that environment, what do you do when you're trying to concentrate on a particularly challenging issue and you need to tune out the chatter and what others are doing?

<comment><USER42> I think if you have a good culture around open offices, then it's a lot better. If you have a bunch of people who have loud conversations without moving it to a meeting room, interrupt you constantly, don't respect the headphone rule, micromange and shoulder surf vs. treat it as the quiet library environment it should be then it can pretty bad.

<comment><USER43> Why should people have to worry about all gross lame situations? What is open office delivering to overcome those limitations? A bit of serendipity?

<comment><USER42> Money, it's cheaper to do open offices, especially in a startup vs giving a good chunk of people private offices or even shared offices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> It may not be for everyone, but for people like me it really boosts productivity. The last office I worked in was a massive open-office in a warehouse which sounds just miserable, but it was great. If I ever had a question, I could just lean over and ask the person I had a question for. No waiting for emails to bounce back and forth or for people to get back to their IMs. If I needed to make a private phone call, I'd just walk out of the office to do it. Plus, having people around me made it easier to focus on work instead of fucking off on Hacker News or Facebook.

Now, as a self-employed individual I rent a seat in a shared open office to maintain that focus. It's far too easy to turn on the TV or play a video game or linger on the phone with a friend when I'm working from home. In a different setting -- with people around: all focused on work -- it's much easier to maintain a focus on work and getting done what's important.

<comment><USER28> Just to play devil's advocate, your productivity might have gone up but what about the people that you've been directing your questions to? They might have been disturbed and thus, their productivity might have gone down. I get asked a lot of questions which always breaks my train of thought.

I'm not advocating for an open office or a closed office but I do appreciate something balanced. People around me are always collaborating and discussing a great number of things which really makes me lose my focus. I usually come in early when it's really quiet and no one's in yet to get things done. After that, headphones on but even then, I miss the sound of silence rather than drowning out noise with more noise.

<comment><USER44> Absolutely valid point. But I think most of us just put on headphones if we wanted to be left alone. And in those cases, I'd absolutely email someone instead of interrupting them -- unless it was both important and urgent.

<comment><USER45> Small or urgent is the same level of distraction [http://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt- interrupt-...](http://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt-a- programmer)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> It's all about balance. Open offices work for certain occupations but not for others. When it comes to software development I think you need a combination of open office and cube farm. The best balance I've found is open office with all communication happening in a place it can be persisted (Campfire, HipChat, etc.) for others to see and benefit from. Occasionally the entire team can break into talking in the open office area but this should only be done if the entire team is participating. If the entire team isn't participating then communication should be handled in a chat (preferably) or in a conference room.

If you're trying to build software in an open office where people are constantly talking then I'm sorry, good work will not get done. Decisions to change your office layout should be in the interest of boosting communication, team cohesion and productivity. Cubicles are too restrictive, completely open is too distracting.

<comment><USER47> _When it comes to software development I think you need a combination of open office and cube farm._

And I think that developers should be in private offices, with doors. However, I will add that I think that a good environment _also_ features plenty of open spaces, conference rooms, breakout areas, etc., where group can coalesce on an ad-hoc / temporary basis, on those occasions when people benefit from the high-bandwidth, face-to-face communication.

<comment><USER48> Personally I want to be in an open office with the team I'm currently working with, an no one else. While IM works, it's a lot less band with in IM and you miss out on a number more spontaneous design discussions. A good team will not interrupt you with questions they could just as easily goggled.

On the other hand, I hate talk from other teams or projects. The mostly unrelated and in worst case interesting (thus 10 times as effective in distracting me.). So the current open office plan with 6-7 teams in an open area is occasionally really annoying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> "That's what work is: It is a vacillation between collaboration and solitary exploration."

It's weird that the author notes that, but then proposes that the solution to focusing on one half of the vacillation is to just focus on the other half instead. Surely the ideal is to support _both_.

If I could I would run an experiment like this:

1\. Have a large number of small, quiet office-like spaces. 2\. Have a big open plan area. 3\. Have a fixed schedule during the day where for a certain number of hours, everyone is required to be in the open plan area.

You can still hack there if you want, but you're expected to be there, and you understand that during that time you're free to interrupt and be interrupted.

The reason for making the open space mandatory is so that people actually go there. If it's optional, then it looks like people only go to the open spaces to not do "real" work. Since no one wants to be seen slacking, the open space just ends up unused.

<comment><USER50> > The reason for making the open space mandatory is so that people actually go > there.

Doesn't that tell you something? Why force people to work in a less productive way?

<comment><USER51> Perhaps there are greater long-term gains from some collaboration that don't seem as obvious as the immediate gains from "cranking away" in an office alone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> peopleware was written 27 years ago. why on earth is this still news?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Projects...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Projects_and_Teams)

</comment><comment><USER53> On my first day on one job, my managers invited me to lunch. I thanked one for assigning me a desk next to a corner in their open office. The other supervisor could not resist chiming in that they could move people around at will. The other manager averted his eyes. I never expressed gratitude for my working conditions again.

Headphones would be too distracting for me--however I am developing tinnitus, which has become a blessing in disguise. Although I find it difficult to listen to music now, I would rather listen to the ringing in my ears than office chatter.

</comment><comment><USER39> Something not brought up often: smell.

I don't work in an open office, but I wonder what it _smells_ like. When in closed meetings or an elevator I can keenly smell people, sometimes good (women's fragrance) but most of the time distracting (perfume, odor). I'd hate to be surrounded by distracting smells all the time.

This can be fixed with proper ventilation (and proper hygiene let's hope), but ventilation can be hard to come by in the non-summer months. (without freezing everyone out)

</comment><comment><USER54> This is great - in theory. Let me bring up something which the article brings up right away but none of the comments seem to discuss.

Look at it from the startup's side of things: The ideal office that we'd all love to work in - that perfect 4-6 person bullpen with private offices surrounding (x number of 4-6 person teams), is _expensive_. Very few companies can afford a build-out like this until much much later in company-life.

If we're talking about an Apple or Google, fine - let's have the debate. But for a vast majority of early-stage startups, this simply isn't a viable discussion to have. Office space is very limited in many parts of the big tech hubs, and often it's a matter of just getting an affordable space in the first place, much less being able to build out the perfect working environment. And the fact of the matter is, most spaces are open and filled with $200 IKEA tables because that's all the company can afford.

So I'm not sure what the answer is. On the one hand, you can say "well, budget more for office space", but we all know it's not that easy. It's not a small expense -- big buildouts for private offices costs tens of thousands of dollars (or more), precious capital for a small business.

<comment><USER55> > The ideal office that we'd all love to work in - that perfect 4-6 person > bullpen with private offices surrounding

Not all of us. My (and I assume many others) ideal office is a room with a door, with my computer hooked up to 2-3 monitors and a bunch of other things I find useful to my work. Moving out of the open space to a side room... losing my monitors, taking the time to setup my keyboard and mouse, etc. That is far from ideal for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> For people working in open plan offices or cubicles: Would small hoods help? (Especially if combined with headphones / earplugs?)

Here's an example. (Ignore the desk, which looks a bit fragile. I'm just asking about the hood.) [http://www.designboom.com/design/gamfratesi-the- rewrite-desk...](http://www.designboom.com/design/gamfratesi-the-rewrite- desk/)

<comment><USER57> No, it doesn't address peripheral vision or noise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> It's a hard one to solve. In the company I work in I've sat in 3 different places as teams expanded. Given the density of employees you can achieve in an open plan office vs individual offices, it is hard to justify to an employer.

However one thing we do is, that it is perfectly within your right to work from home if you feel you have enough to get on with and people do this often.

As to headphones, we have golden rule, if they are on, the building better be on fire if you disturb somebody. Not quite a sackable offence but damn close. :)

I've also found that sites like www.coffitivity.com offer a 'break' from the music. They can kill any background conversation distraction. ANY. Investigate white noise.

As to socialising, jokey things still get passed around. We're encouraged to use IM, and we also go in groups to the coffee machine which is kept in a cafeteria area, away from workers where you can chat freely and loudly.

I personally hate open plan offices, but in my 20+ years of working, I've only worked in an office once and that still had 4 people in there because they could squeeze that number into it.

<comment><USER59> "As to headphones, we have golden rule, if they are on..."

Man I hope that's not the rule here, because when I have headphones on it's to wake me up, not keep the world out; I really don't care if someone disturbs me. Maybe I need an additional indicator...

(open plan office, I like it fine, clearly some here would like more seclusion though)

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> The real lesson is that there is no silver bullet. No matter what {office layout, technology} you choose, there's going to be upsides and downsides. There's no one-size-fits-all solution. We had a backlash against separate offices for a reason, and we're having the same sort of backlash now (and will likely have plenty more in the future.)

It's the price paid for what often seems like blind fad-following; rather than analyzing whether X really makes sense given the attributes of the organization (people/culture, type of work, department, etc.), it's adopted, used, and eventually, revolted against. A more thoughtful, situation-specific analysis might produce better results.

</comment><comment><USER61> I dig working in an open office. I see my work as very collaborative, so I wouldn't want to be in an environment where I was siloed off. That being said, headphones are critical.

<comment><USER47> _headphones are critical._

But headphones can't replace _quiet_. They can just replace one source of noise with another. And they aren't necessarily comfortable to wear for extended periods of time anyway.

Headphones _help_ mitigate the grotesque and evil nature of "open plan" offices, but they are no panacea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> This is such a big, important topic that surely not all tech firms have settled on the "open plan" which intuitively and in my experience is awful.

I think the breakthrough will come when workplace interiors get much more modular and flexible. I'm envisioning different teams getting to choose (within reason) what types of setups they would like from enclosed offices to bullpens to cubes to open desks.

And I can even see planned re-arrangements every 6 months or so to eliminate the moss.

</comment><comment><USER62> I think the reason this persists is because everyone is doing it. Thus your open-plan, inefficient office is only competing with other equally open-plan, inefficient offices. We are all in a less-productive equilibrium together.

This of course gives those willing to make offices for everyone (like, say, Fog Creek) a competitive advantage. But your average corporate manager doesn't care about that. They still get their office and get paid.

<comment><USER63> The opportunity costs from an open plan office are invisible and difficult if at all possible to quantify, but the savings from cramming twice as many people into the same space are very real and tangible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Open office schemes has been around awhile. The earliest research that, I know about, into them is by Allen & Gerstberger from 1973 [0]

In essence they found that performance was roughly the same as before but the employees preferred the new arrangement and that communication was improved.

Here is part of a summary of the article, made when revising for an exam:

> "The most important and most obvious conclusion that this paper found is > that the non-territorial idea works. It not only reduces facilities costs by > eliminating the need for rearranging walls, air ducts, etc. every time an > area is re-organized, but it also allows for the allocation of space based > upon an expected population density at any point in time. More important > than the cost savings, however, is the fact that people find it comfortable > to work in."

The open plan arrangement is not only to benefit the employees, which it may or may not do, but to reduce costs. Office space isn't exactly cheap in many locations.

[0] [http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/1866/SWP-0653-...](http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/1866/SWP-0653-45078245.pdf?sequence=1)

</comment><comment><USER65> Open office layouts are bad for some employees and some people's productivity.

Having a private office is bad for some employees and some people's productivity.

I went from an open office that I loved to having my own office, which I hate.

I could write this same article saying the opposite things and it would be no less correct.

I hate my office. In the almost 2 years I've been at my current company I feel like less of a team member than I did in 2 months at my last job.

<comment><USER66> For me I want to work in an open space, but have somewhere private and quiet I can go hide and get down to business and focus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> I cannot stand the selfish arrogant thoughtless behavior shown by the few that destroy the productivity of an open office. Your constant sniffing and playing drums with your fingers is not respectful or mindful of others trying to work.

Has anyone thought about doing a study on the effects of people wearing headphones all day to drown out these distractions? I mean ear infections and hearing loss must surely be long term side effects.

End rant.

<comment><USER62> Haha. You just reminded me of when I worked in an open plan office with a developer who would continuously, rapidly click his left mouse button on text as he read it. The day was a constant click-click-click-click-click-click- click. Like double click speed but hundreds in a row, and for long periods sprinkled throughout the day. It was one of the most infuriating things I've ever experienced.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> My company does the open-office thing really well. The building we're in used to basically be all offices so everyone has an "office", but most of us share a room with someone else. This leads to "just enough" exposure, for me, to other people while still leaving me time to get work done. Rarely are people coming into my office to talk about things that don't pertain to me. When that does happen, I happily put on headphones. There's also a large common area with couches and bean bag chairs you can sit on, if you want a larger place to work, and we have a whole wall of ideapaint if we need to do a big meeting of some kind.

This is in sharp contrast to my last job, a fully open office where it was pretty much one gigantic room and everyone was LOUDLY talking over one another. Pretty much had to have the headphones on the whole day just so people wouldn't bother me. I'd even have them on without playing music just to signal to people not to come around...that's how annoying it was. It was truly interruption-driven development at that place.

</comment><comment><USER69> The best office layout ever is the one that allows me to works from home.

<comment><USER70> I came here to say exactly that.

If you want privacy and focus, nothing is better than remote work.

In my current company, I work from home and go to the central open space something like once in a month or couple month. My productivity is way lower in open space, but I get to know my coworkers and share thoughts way easier (those thoughts being wild ideas, because written asynchronous language is always better to make very specific suggestions).

In my previous company, we were working remotely too, and twice a year, we were joining together in a villa next the sea. Those sessions were unambiguously called "team building", and it did a very good job at that. We were chatting a lot, laughing, and at evening, we were playing videogames together or having a beer in a bar, and we were becoming closer that way. I think this is very good to raise solidarity and friendship between coworkers. And once at home, we got the real job done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> We have offices for every developer, if they want one. We also have an open space. I used to have an office (still do, it's just empty now). I work in the open space, but it's not typical. There's only two of us that work in this open area, so it's very quiet as we're both developers. I think it's an unusual setup, but being more extraverted, I feel less lonely as I can see when people are going to the lunch room, I can participate in conversations around the pool table, etc. If there were more than 3 people in this area, I'd head back to my office, but for now, it's a great environment. I also have to mention that our open area isn't very large, and the desks are tripods (three workstations to a pod); again, my pod is just me. I'm also surrounded by windows and sunlight, where as my office only had one window.

Not complaining, just sharing a different situation.

</comment><comment><USER72> I like working in the same room as the rest of my team. It means I can ask them questions, they can ask me, we can quickly discuss little things without getting out of our chair.

I can imagine private office might be preferable if you really work on your own. But I work in a team, and I prefer working in the same room as them.

Though the stories about noise suggest that some people are sharing a room with a hundred people, and that's just ridiculous. 6, 12, or even 20 programmers in a room don't make a lot of noise. The occasional question or discussion really isn't that distracting (though nerf-gun battles certainly are).

Just keep it sane. Put people in a room with the people they need to be in a room with. Don't make them hide from their team. Don't put them in a crowd of noisy strangers.

There's good and bad ways to do this.

</comment><comment><USER73> Never mind the inherent dangers of open lines-of-sight: [http://www.theonion.com/articles/open-floor-plan- increases-o...](http://www.theonion.com/articles/open-floor-plan-increases- office-shooters-producti,34597/)

</comment><comment><USER74> There is no one size fits all solution...for me personally, I require a mix of social and private time to maximize my productivity. Working from home half the time, and working in the other half tends to be best...For those who want to talk/meet, knowing I'm only there at certain makes them more likely to think twice about prioritizing meeting time. Also, the quiet of home and lack of distractions (no giggling coworkers or visitors to the office) leads to the best writing/thinking.

You just have to know how you work best, and hope your company can support it. If you're a startup, be flexible about optimizing workers' time...

</comment><comment><USER75> I so agree with the author.

Autodesk used to give glassed off individual OFFICE to EVERY single employee, no matter how junior. This was in 1996 or 1997. I remember being very envious.

Do they still do that?

One commenter on the article on fastcompany.com left a condescending remark how the writer of the article does not need to collaborate (for simply writing an article) with others while the commenter (the almighty coder) needs to collaborate with other coders, hence open layout is good.

Well in office when 2 or 3 coders are 'collaborating' in middle of open office, everyone ELSE (including other coders) in the space not working on the specific task is being interrupted.

Open space layout is not good.

</comment><comment><USER76> It's been one year since I joined my current employer, and we work in a big open floor. There are around 30 people in this big room, and its very distracting and we have no privacy. It is weird as someone who is setting next to me or walking by can just peep and see what I am doing and read my IMs. Since this is my first big office, it has been terribly distracting and has really crashed my productivity. But then again, this is a big company, and office space is pricey. I don't expect them to give us all more personal space of our own.

</comment><comment><USER77> During my career, I went from office to cubes, to office and now open layout. I thought I would hate the open layout, but actually I like it a lot. I'm not easily distracted, so it's convenient being able to ask questions directly without having to walk around or knock on a door.

The other thing I enjoy that I didn't expect was the social aspect, where I can chat with everyone in the room before work starts in earnest in the morning, or after 6-ish when we're all ready to leave for home anyway.

</comment><comment><USER78> One trick I've recently adopted: I use this site:

[http://mynoise.net/noiseMachines.php](http://mynoise.net/noiseMachines.php)

In particular, the "babble" generator. The babble blends with actual conversations so you can no longer distinguish spoken words and reduces what would otherwise be attention grabbing conversations a to coffee shop level din.

<comment><USER79> I often resort to this too, since I often find actual music distracting ("whoops, just spent 30 minutes listening to the music instead of programming...").

The sources I generally use are rain.simplynoise.com and a "nature sounds" playlist on Songza. The latter sometimes requires you to skip "Songs of the Whaaale" tracks you might hear in a crappy crystal-stuffed gift shop, but it's generally fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> Team sized offices for the win. Team office doesn't have to have a door, but it should have small room with door very close for phone calls and longer (or involving more than two people) face to face chats. Short two person chats are initiated by one person getting of his ass, comming to the other persons computer and talking quietly.

</comment><comment><USER81> Well, I write this from a quiet corner I escaped to from my open office area so I could have a sustained focus time.

I've worked in open office, half-cube, full cube, shared office, and sole office. Of all of those, sole office was best for concentration and shared office was best for collaboration.

</comment><comment><USER82> Part 1 certainly is very strawperson in not addressing the real issue, cost.

Everyone knows open offices are worse but they are also far cheaper, if productivity is down 15% but TCO of the office space saves more then that's ok.

Labour is a commodity, it has value but so do many other factors.

Part 2 perhaps will talk on this issue.

</comment><comment><USER83> In open offices, these are the things that are problematic (when it happens from the person who is sitting next to me):

\- cell phones \- chats \- social networking \- random web surfing

(when my neighbor does it)

Maybe I'm not just concentrating enough at work. But perhaps there is a way to solve these problems?

</comment><comment><USER84> I think it all comes down to the employees and the culture. Some people thrive in these open environments and some down. For large companies a mix probably works but if you are a small shop might as well do what works for you.

</comment><comment><USER85> At my office I always have someone looking over my shoulder, and to be honest, it keeps me on task. At my last job I had my own space and there were days when I just decided, "welp, not gonna do any work today."

</comment><comment><USER86> I share a small office with 1 other dev. This is the absolute max I can handle while coding. I am in meetings a good chunk of the day. I really don't need to be sitting next to 20 coworkers the rest of the time.

</comment><comment><USER87> I think the amount of time spent talking about this topic is bad for employees, bosses and productivity. Its been beaten to death and the truth is everyone is different so there is no ONE solution.

</comment><comment><USER88> I've worked in all kinds of set ups, and I've never worked anywhere where everyone liked it. One problem with designing an office is having a diverse bunch of people like the same space.

</comment><comment><USER89> It sucks when you want to considerate and someone flies a RC helicopter!

<comment><USER90> Sounds like it sucks for them when I decide to play King Kong and smack it from the air.

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> I miss having an office.

I also miss having 2 30" monitors in my office.

Who would have ever thought that working conditions for engineers would be more comfortable in florida than the bay area? Not me, and boy was I wrong.

</comment><comment><USER92> I think people should have a choice. Can't stand a quiet office and much prefer it if other people have music playing. Other people can't work with noise. Everyone's different.

</comment><comment><USER93> Many good points, but this doesn't touch of the issues of sickdays, lost productivity and how illness burns though open and traditional offices at very different rates.

</comment><comment><USER94> Open office layouts always remind me of factories and conveyors. I don't like these short dividers as well, they aren't conductive for productivity at all.

</comment><comment><USER95> I used to work in an open office and it was super annoying. People would throw stuff around the office and you could hear everything that was going on...

</comment><comment><USER96> Forget these OpenOffice layouts. I think LaTeX is more flexible... oh wait, never mind.

</comment><comment> sTevo-In-VA I was in an open office for ten years and I can verify every thing that Jason wrote.

</comment><comment><USER97> Different types of people thrive in different types of environments.

<comment><USER13> And the same kinds of people thrive in different types of environments at different times. It's almos like we need both.

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> Bad for health and lifespan too.

</comment><comment><USER99> An alternate story in favour of open-office layouts. Here in Aus, the Department of Human Services (DoHS, has had many previous names) is responsible for welfare. The old offices were an arrangement with a counter - staff on one side, clients on the other. Aggressive incidents rose and the counters ended up having old-school bank bulletproof windows installed.

Some bright spark changed that - got rid of the counters, and made the offices all open-office plan. You wait off to the side, and when it's your turn for whatever, someone comes and fetches you to their desk in the open-office plan with some space between desks. Instead of shouting your personal issues across a counter, you could discuss it in a normal tone, and if it was private, you could be quieter or more subtle about the topic. Aggressive incidents dropped off a cliff - and there was much less of an 'us-versus-the-gummint' mentality seeded by the demarcation line of a [fortified] counter.

So in this particular use-case, an open-office layout was clearly superior for employees, bosses, productivity, and clients.

<comment><USER100> As an occasional DHS client, I partly agree, but there's one crucial thing they severely fucked up in the new layout: the "client" has _no idea_ when "someone" will come fetch them. So you get an intensely frustrated mob of people waiting off to the side, wondering if they'll be stuck there for 10 minutes or three hours, and straining to hear when every few minutes one of the geriatric case workers shuffle over and mumbles horrible mispronunciations of random last names. Which means you can't work, can't listen to music or concentrate on anything, really, just sit on the edge of your seat.

Compare with the normal take-a-number bank queue system, when you have a fairly good idea of how long it will take to go from "now serving 123" to "your queue number is 567".

<comment><USER101> These are not exclusive, you can have both. In fact, last time I had to visit an administrative office they had an open office for the employee workspaces with numbered desks and a traditional waiting area with a take-a-number queue system (well, actually an online appointment booking system) that directs to you a specific desk if it's your turn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER102> The best tradeoff I've found is 1\. Open-office layout two (specified) days a week; perfect for collaboration and meetings. 2\. People work from home three days a week; perfect for those coding marathons.

Obviously you can still code in an open-office and you can still collaborate working from home, but it's sub-optimal. With the setup above, you're in the right environment for the right type of work most of the time, and employees love it.

Lots more about this here: [http://www.archonsystems.com/devblog/2013/09/19/open- offices...](http://www.archonsystems.com/devblog/2013/09/19/open-offices- private-offices-heres-a-third-option/)

</comment><comment><USER103> This is also not very interesting question. It was recognized ages ago that mechanical, manual labor, such as assembly line or McDonald's , should be organized in an open-space, while thinkers must have their private comfort zones (which is very expensive) and occasionally meet in a small groups to share ideas.

The balance is quite subtle, as usual. So-called brain-storming sessions (which in the language of normal people is called a discussion group) could be very effective (only if participants have something to be stormed) while meeting of committees of idiots is always a disaster. The first activity is centered around subjects and goals, while the second is dedicated to the action itself and a sense of self-importance.

In other words, for those who think of software development as an assembly line (which is very wrong) mass-production best practices are quite appropriate, while others, who think of it as a process of writing poetry, the best practices appropriate for a writers and thinkers should be considered.

Unfortunately, idiots dominate the world.

</comment><comment><USER104> He is missing the point of Open office plans. Frankly, the blog post comes off as a little entitled when he says "we all deserve office of our own" (paraphrasing). Really ? How about a bed to nap while we are at it (well ok google has the nap pods). The point of open office plan is to _try_ and encourage a culture of equality (in my opinion). I love open office plan because I could be sitting next to a college graduate and an executive director at the same time. Imagine the level of access you have if you have the balls to actually utilize it. With closed doors, even if the person inside is welcoming, it just creates a senseless fear of rejection.

All this point about not being able to focus and getting disturbed all the time is hardly an issue. Most co-workers are respectful of your time whether they are in open office or closed office. The ones that are not respectful will bother you regardless of where you sit. Behind closed door ? No problem, I will give this guy an annoying phone call.

Now is there a binary answer to this ? Of course not. But claiming that Open office plans are completely useless is stretching it a little too far.

<comment><USER105> I heartdly disagree... And Joel also :P

"Here's the simple algebra. Let's say (as the evidence seems to suggest) that if we interrupt a programmer, even for a minute, we're really blowing away 15 minutes of productivity. For this example, lets put two programmers, Jeff and Mutt, in open cubicles next to each other in a standard Dilbert veal-fattening farm. Mutt can't remember the name of the Unicode version of the strcpy function. He could look it up, which takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which takes 15 seconds. Since he's sitting right next to Jeff, he asks Jeff. Jeff gets distracted and loses 15 minutes of productivity (to save Mutt 15 seconds).

Now let's move them into separate offices with walls and doors. Now when Mutt can't remember the name of that function, he could look it up, which still takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which now takes 45 seconds and involves standing up (not an easy task given the average physical fitness of programmers!). So he looks it up. So now Mutt loses 30 seconds of productivity, but we save 15 minutes for Jeff. Ahhh!"

From here: [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html)

<comment><USER104> certainly. I am sure there are many points against open office plans. All I am saying that there is no binary or "my way or the highway" kind of solution to this. It has to be balanced. You just should not dismiss open office completely. My 2 cents.</comment></comment></comment>


Is C++ fast? - <AUTHOR> https://zeuxcg.org/2019/01/17/is-c-fast/ <comment><USER2> Why is he optimizing for compile times when his compile times are only 1/2 second?

<comment><USER3> Because for a single 1000 line file, a half of a second is an eternity.</comment></comment>


Oracle shuts down Sun's OpenSSO, a Norwegian company picks it up. - <AUTHOR> http://not403.blogspot.com/2010/03/example-of-awesomeness-of-open-source.html

<comment><USER2> I am literally building an authentication implementation right now on OpenSSO. Anyone have any recommendations on a good alternative. I have never really been an Oracle fan, and was really worried when they got Sun. Well, it looks like my fears are coming true now if they just kill Glassfish and Netbeans, I can have enough reason to dump Java all together and go back something a little more fun.</comment>


Finishing what Aaron Swartz started with PACER - <AUTHOR> https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/2013-January/006578.html <comment><USER3> I hate to rock the bandwagon, but this will accomplish nothing and it's pretty tactless. As rayiner has already pointed out, PACER is a source of court documents, not case law. 99% of the public would have no use for PACER documents even if they had completely free, open access. The people who truly have a legitimate need to access PACER documents are able to afford the fees, although that still doesn't mean the current fee structure is justified or fair.

Many lawyers who use PACER also rely heavily on the fact that it's updated almost immediately -- a project like this could never accomplish that, and could lead to malpractice if used in its place. For example, you can't sue people for certain things if they've declared bankruptcy, so you need a reliable, up-to-date way to verify they haven't (a common strategy is to wait until the last minute to file bankruptcy just to delay legal proceedings).

What's worse is that this project seems to be encouraging some kind of witch hunt:

> Now he wants to make "every U.S. Attorney and AUSA's full career as a > prosecutor available to the public to examine in its entirety." So those are > the links queued up in Project Asymptote.

That's how you want to honor Aaron? By using PACER and an army of volunteers to pursue someone's personal vendetta? I can't even begin to describe how tasteless that is; to take one of Aaron's projects and turn it into some kind of misguided inquisition, then call it a "poetic tribute to Aaron Swartz's memory".

If you really want to make court documents available to everyone for free, then do that. Don't use Aaron as an excuse to target US prosecutors.

<comment><USER4> > 99% of the public wouldn't know what to do with PACER

99% of the public wouldn't know what to do with the YouTube API[1] but the fact that it's readily accessible means the 1% can do interesting things for the 99%. Don't be so presumptuous about the value of this information being freely available. Neither you nor I can envision all of the possible use cases.

[1] Replace with government data, open source code, etc.

<comment><USER3> My point was that PACER documents are not inherently useful to the public -- edited to make that more clear.

Several people have already pointed out that there are also malicious uses for this data that could negatively impact normal people. Do you want all your neighbors and potential employers to know you've filed for bankruptcy? And would you want to give them completely open access to all court filings in your name?

<comment><USER5> >Do you want all your neighbors and potential employers to know you've filed for bankruptcy? And would you want to give them completely open access to all court filings in your name?

Isn't that a completely separate question? You can argue that things like that should be sealed, but if they're not sealed then they're a matter of public record and the government should publish them for free on the internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've yet to hear why the nominal 10c/pp charge is too onerous. If this information was truly no cost, it will likely become subject to abuse.

I went through personal bankruptcy in 2009 and my personal history is available through pacer. I'm not proud of what I went through, and it was my own fault, but I at least take some solace in knowing that in order for scammers to access my information, they will have had to cull through many thousands of other cases at a cost of hundreds of dollars.

Perhaps the answer then is to allow PACER access at public libraries without cost - having the access based on a physical location may help reduce the speed with which $criminal_element can build their portfolio.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Ten cents doesn't seem like much, but when you consider that an average court case consists of thousands of pages of text in PDF files, those dimes add up rather quickly. When you further consider that in the course of prosecuting one's own court case, one must refer to many, many other cases because of the nature of legal precedent, legal research can suddenly cost thousands of dollars—and that's without even hiring an overpriced lawyer."

<http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/essay.html?id=84>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why do people believe that this data is a "public good"? In the case of disputes between individuals, such as divorce, I do not accept that this information belongs to the general public and must be "emancipated". On the contrary, I believe that this is owned by the individual participants in the case and not the government or public. Only if they collectively agree to publish this material should it be available in public. There is no moral justification for the wholesale distribution and publication of material relating to other people's private lives and affairs.

<comment><USER8> > There is no moral justification for the wholesale distribution and > publication of material relating to other people's private lives and > affairs.

Should state recognized marriage be considered something that is considered private? If you want public recognition of your marriage it makes sense that it isn't private.

<comment><USER7> A marriage is a private contract between consenting parties just like any other. The state should not get involved.

<comment><USER8> Maybe that is how it should be, but that isn't how it is right now.

If you don't want public recognition of your marriage, I'm sure you could write up some private contracts, but it won't confer all of the same rights that a state-recognized marriage gets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Another HN user kindly pointed out to me in a related thread that the Gov't has modified their terms to specifically prohibit the use of RECAP. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5059847>

<comment><USER10> That is incorrect based on PACER's own words. PACER has a free version, but the free version limits your ability to transfer to other bodies. Although I'm sure that gets people freaking out, that's hardly RECAP being "prohibited."

But, really, even with a 100% populated RECAP, all lawyers use PACER for their real work. The fact that any joker in the world can upload documents to RECAP makes it unsuitable for anything you are going to put before a judge. RECAP is fine for bloggers, though.

<comment><USER9> Here, in PACER's own words. <http://www.pacer.gov/announcements/general/exemptnotice.html> "A fee exemption applies only for limited purposes. Any transfer of data obtained as the result of a fee exemption is prohibited unless expressly authorized by the court. Therefore, fee exempt PACER users must refrain from the use of RECAP. The prohibition on transfer of information received without fee is not intended to bar a quote or reference to information received as a result of a fee exemption in a scholarly or other similar work. "

<comment><USER11> I read that to apply to a "fee exempt user" -- one of a very narrow class of persons exempt from fees, no matter how much they download.

A regular user who happens to download less than $15.00 per month is not a fee-exempt user. They are someone for whom, in the words of the website, "fees are waived for that quarter."

[See this page and look at the questions "How much does PACER cost?" and "Can the user fee be waived?": <http://www.pacer.gov/psc/faq.html> ]

<comment><USER12> I think this is correct.

The Judicial Conference of the United States determines the PACER fees and appears to draw a distinction between the quarterly "fee waiver" available to all accounts and a "fee exemption" granted by a court after making the requisite findings (e.g., exemption is necessary to avoid unreasonable burdens and to promote public access to information, research is for academic/non- commercial use, etc.).

Sources:

Reports of the Proceedings of the Judicial Conference of the United States at [http://www.uscourts.gov/FederalCourts/JudicialConference/Pro...](http://www.uscourts.gov/FederalCourts/JudicialConference/Proceedings.aspx)

March 14, 2001: "no fee … [will] be owed until an individual … accrue[s] charges of more than $10 in a calendar year. … providing a basic level of public access consistent with the services historically provided by the courts."

March 16, 2010: "In order to encourage use of … PACER … by the public, … users [will] not be billed until their accounts total[] at least $10 in a one-year period. To increase the amount of data available without charge … users [will] be allowed to accrue $10 in free usage quarterly, instead of yearly, before they would be charged."

September 13, 2011: "… the current waiver of fees of $10 or less in a quarterly billing cycle be changed to $15 or less per quarter so that 75 to 80 percent of all users would still receive fee waivers"

September 23, 2003: "exemptions to the fee are only to be given upon a showing of cause, are limited to specific categories of users, may be granted for a specific period of time, may be revoked at the discretion of the court, and are only for access related to the purpose for which the exemption was given."

March 15, 2011: The Electronic Public Access (EPA) Fee Schedule provides for exemptions … upon a showing that an exemption is necessary to avoid unreasonable burdens and to promote public access to information. … [T]he Conference approved, a modification of the EPA fee schedule to include the following sentence: "For individual researchers, courts must also find that the defined research project is intended for academic research purposes, and not for commercial purposes or internet redistribution."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is a bit of plug, but last summer I worked on a project that required PACER documents to identify judges who heard cases involving companies they owned stock in.

[http://cironline.org/reports/federal- judge%E2%80%99s-rulings...](http://cironline.org/reports/federal- judge%E2%80%99s-rulings-favored-companies-which-he-owned-stock-4030)

My colleague and I applied for a fee exemption as my employer, The Center for Investigative Reporting, is a non profit. We were able to examine enough PACER records to identify several judges with conflicts of interest but our work was cut short when our fee waiver was revoked. The waiver was revoked because we are members of the media (though we disclosed this in our application).

[http://californiawatch.org/money-and-politics/pacer- federal-...](http://californiawatch.org/money-and-politics/pacer-federal- court-record-fees-exceed-system-costs-18685)

Our lawyers are appealing the case which could lead to more open access to PACER and allow us to continue searching for conflicts of interest across the nation. If you support Swartz's efforts consider donating so we might continue our investigation.

<https://donate.centerforinvestigativereporting.org>

</comment><comment><USER14> As a user of PACER, it's very frustrating. $0.10 per "page" is total BS, since most federal filings are done electronically anyways. There is very little marginal cost for me to download a PDF from their servers.

I wouldn't mind paying a flat monthly fee for access as opposed to the current fee schedule. PACER is definitely getting further and further behind the times. It seems designed to discourage use by its own users.

</comment><comment><USER15> Much of this is quite uninformed, which makes me question the value of Mr. Foster's other points.

> What other options are out there for accessing federal case law?

Mr. Foster seems confused. PACER is a system for accessing court dockets, not a repository of case law. You can think of court docket's as a court's "inbox." When the parties file a complaint, motion, or brief, or when the judge issues an interlocutory order or other memorandum, it goes in the docket. Court dockets are mostly concerned with the mechanics of a single case --they are not intended to be a source of law.

> Open government pioneer Carl Malamud says commercial ventures such as Lexis- > Nexis, West Law, and Bloomberg Law compete for a $6.5 billion market built > around extracting rents from this public commons:

Mr. Foster completely mischaracterizes what Lexis and West do. These services do not charge you for access to the case law, which are in the public domain. What they do is provide a value-added service on top of the publicly available case law. They have armies of legally-trained professionals who read cases as they come out and annotate them with "head notes" which give summaries of the case and index the case into Lexis's or West's legal ontology. E.g. if I'm thinking of using a case to support a proposition, I can log on to West Law and have it give me a report of all the cases that cite that one. The report not only gives me a simple "citation list" like you can get with Google scholar, but a summary of the contexts in which each case was cited, whether it was referenced in a positive or negative light, and how extensively it was discussed. They can do this because they have (expensive) human readers who go through the cases to generate this meta-data.[1]

This is not "extracting rents from the public commons." This is charging for the valuable service of organizing and summarizing publicly available information.

There are legitimate complaints about access to case law. While all federal courts that I'm aware of freely post their opinions on their websites (e.g. <http://www.ca3.uscourts.gov/recentop/week/recprec.htm>), the same isn't true for all state courts. But as a practical matter that's a state-by-state issue --the federal government doesn't have much say in the internal administration of the state courts. Going after PACAR while completely ignoring that much more pressing problem smacks of not understanding the underlying issue (to be charitable), or going after the federal system because it's guaranteed to generate more outrage on the internet (to be less charitable).

[1] Note that there is a ton of money to be made "disrupting" this industry through automation. To date, nobody has succeeded in building anything close to being as sophisticated as Lexis and Westlaw. Google Scholar is a pale imitation (to the point of not even being the same kind of product) that's only good for doing a bit of quick background research to save time and fees before you log onto Lexis or Westlaw.

<comment><USER16> I think you may have misunderstood the criticism. Yes, of course Lexis and Westlaw provide digital copies of case reporters. But they also do a ton of other stuff. One of their extremely expensive services allows you to watch state and federal court dockets and get a notification about new entries.

Published cases themselves are in relatively good shape -- most of what you can find in the West National Reporter system over the last 50 years is available for free on Google Scholar.

In response to your, "These services do not charge you for access to the case law, which are in the public domain." Sure they do. It costs money to buy the West Federal Supplement or Tennessee Reports in print. It also costs money to access those reporters online, via Westlaw or Lexis-Nexis. Many of these old cases (despite being uncopyrighted) are only available by visiting a law library or a paid online service. You can't just download them for free.

<comment><USER17> You're correct that Rayiner's statement that Westlaw/Lexis don't charge for access to case law is wrong. But he is right about the broader point that they do provide some value-add, and that value-add is why people continue to use their service.

With the entry of Google Scholar, the access and value-add businesses are divorced. The cost of the underlying access has reached zero. But the reason Westlaw and Lexis are still huge is because they do provide value-adds.

So this talk of opening up PACER is really missing the broader access point - the opinion access problem is largely solved via Google Scholar. PACER documents may be opened up, but they are not useful to lawyers in anything other than some basic docket scenarios.

<comment><USER5> >So this talk of opening up PACER is really missing the broader access point - the opinion access problem is largely solved via Google Scholar.

Yes and no. Suppose I want to take a stab at automating Westlaw. Now I need to download all of the court opinions ever so that I can put them in my database and use them to train my machine learning algorithm. Can I actually get them for any reasonable price? All of them? And without doing something that will get me charged with unauthorized access to a computer like Aaron? Because if not, fixing that is a legitimate goal. (And if so, do post the link.)

<comment><USER17> The distinction here is between you as _the public_ trying to understand the law, and you as _a businessperson_ trying to make money off of the law. The push to open up PACER is based on ideals about the former, not the latter. (And the former is Google Scholar Legal's Raison d'être.)

Certainly it will be great to have free access to the data in bulk, and that day will come. But from a practical perspective, the barrier to entry as _a businessperson_ in this space is not data. There is enough data at <https://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/> to experiment with. And if your experiments work, there are companies that will sell you access to all the data.

<comment><USER5> I don't know if you can distinguish the two so easily. You can't really expect the government to provide a slick interface or make the data easy to use. It's well outside of the court system's core competency. But if you make the raw data easily accessible then it creates the possibility for entrepreneurs to do something innovative with it, which leads to the public benefit.

Heck, that's pretty much where Lexis and West came from so long ago, but now technology is offering the possibility (at least in theory) to democratize the process so that someone can screw around with the data over a weekend or three and see if they can create something worth following up before they go through the trouble of looking for funding in order to buy data.

I don't know if we're even particularly arguing about anything. Is there really an argument to be made that this data should not be freely available? If "that day will come" then I guess all I'm saying is that sooner is better than later.

<comment><USER17> There may not be a disagreement: I'm not arguing that this data should be closed. I believe it should be freely available, and should be freely available in bulk form.

My only point was that providing open access to cases so that individuals can learn the law is a solved problem via Google Scholar. Bulk access _is not a problem for individuals_. I say this as someone who has worked to create better legal research tools for nearly 5 years: the first 2 on a startup that failed, the next 1 at Scholar, and the last 1.5 on a new startup that I believe will finally succeed.

So while the desire to open up PACER - and the attention given to it - <USER2> great, I don't think it will have any effect on the future of individual access to law, or to the future of innovation and business in the legal space. I don't think lack of innovation _today_ has anything to do with lack of bulk access _today_. I think the deficiencies are more a reflection of the fact that innovation in this space is really hard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why doesn't the government just make dumps of all documents available either by BitTorrent for free or on a hard drive at cost, and let the free market decide how much to charge (or not) for access?

<comment><USER19> Because they want to maintain a high-availability online system, not one where you have to wait for physical media in the mail or for someone to seed. How many law firms do you think would bother to use BitTorrent?

<comment><USER18> My point was 3rd parties could provide the same service cheaper. The gov could continue to run PACER as it currently is too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Every state and the Feds should have what Maryland has. [http://casesearch.courts.state.md.us/inquiry/inquiry- index.j...](http://casesearch.courts.state.md.us/inquiry/inquiry-index.jsp)

Its all cases, online. People should be able to do what they wish with the data.

I, for one, have turned it into a business ranking lawyers. <http://www.injurylawyerdatabase.com>.

This isn't going to be okay until we accept nothing less than a feed from all judicial data sources.

Sometimes it's evasion. Mostly, governments are inept. Stop looking at this from a sinister standpoint. The business is in helping governments get the data online in an acceptable fashion while complying with all appropriate laws.

Maryland's system should be a dinosaur. Instead, it's cutting edge. That's a situation that will be fixed. By whom? By you. Isn't this some sort of rockstar tech company launching pad?

</comment><comment><USER19> Records access, storage and collection are not free. The network connections are also expensive. PACER has redundant commercial network connections to over 2000 courthouse locations. Although costs have come down, this system aggregates data from 94 separate districts, including Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii and the Northern Mariana Islands. It is triple redundant, so that the systems can survive any natural disaster. After Hurricane Sandy, records were still available and the courts were open for electronic filing even though the buildings were flooded and off the grid. These systems are far more expensive than a simple FTP server; they serve terabytes of data. The Federal Courts are open 24/7 for electronic filing, one of the more accessible government agencies in the world.

PACER charges a fee to maintain the systems that support public access and improve IT services in the Federal Courts. It is very similar to using fishing license fees to support fisheries or drivers license fees to maintain the DMV. User fees are an important way to maintain systems separate from a reliance on the political system. PACER fees are the only fees coming into the Federal Courts that are not appropriated by Congress. Most of the fees are collected from the law firms that practice in Federal Court.

One could argue that the funds to run PACER should in fact rely on the political system and come from congress. If you want to change this, contact the members of the House judiciary committee (<http://judiciary.house.gov/>) and lobby them. However, the federal courts have not actually received a budget since September and are under a lot of stress to keep running despite this.

One could argue that PACER should be charging 5 to 7 cents per page rather than 10 and should not be generating money for general court IT projects. But be aware that these projects are not frivolous. They save significant amounts of time for the litigants. Given the high cost of legal services, this helps reduce financial the burden on both prosecution and defense.

With a cost of 10 cents per page up to a maximum of 3 dollars per document, the implicit comparison to a journal subscription which costs hundreds of dollars is specious. Also, this fee is waived if an individual's costs are less than $15. The OP acknowledges, "That means that any individual using PACER can download 150 pages every quarter for free." So the system is already free for anyone who is making casual use of it. There are also academic and financial-hardship waivers available. I argue, as many on HN have done about free-of-charge web services run by companies, that those who rely on a system in order to do business should pay for its upkeep in order to make sure the system stays around.

Where does RECAP's funding come from? What standards of availability does it guarantee? If it succeeds in serving most documents but without an availability or document authenticity guarantee, what has been accomplished but a degradation of service? If this diverts most funding away from PACER and makes it harder to maintain reliably, will that actually increase public access to court records? Will that actually contribute to a more just world?

As rayiner points out, state courts do not make their documents available nearly as freely as the federal court does. While that is separate from the argument over whether it is right to maintain PACER the way the court does, it does indicate that effort spent to increase access toward court records would be better allocated toward state courts.

Also, one could argue that PACER's UI could be better. This is true. Anyone want to put together a proposal?

<comment><USER21> Someone looked it up in a previous thread a week or so ago. IIRC, the PACER system had ~80-90 million in revenues, and $25 million in costs last year. I remember the discussion mentioning that all of the extra cash goes towards making up for a lack of proper budget from Congress for running the court system. It's a complicated issue.

Edit:

Looked up the posts:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5053611>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5053483>

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Aside from other considerations, I'm afraid that abusing a good move (the $15 waiver) will discourage similar moves in the future.

</comment><comment><USER23> Stanford Vs MIT

When MIT makes education widely available you get "open courseware" notes and unstructured videos.

When Stanford makes education widely available you get coursra and udacity.

When MIT is presented with Aaron Swartz you get unfair prosecution.

When Stanford is presented with Aaron Swartz you get PACER.

Hmm.

<comment><USER24> Ha! Alum much?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Not sure making everything accessible via a Google search is liberating. People should have a right to move on, not have everything they did or said a few decades ago in depositions, lawsuits, bankruptcy, divorce or whatever on top of a Google search. Imagine your prospective employer searching for "your name" and reading what your ex-wife, landlord...said about you in a court case.

<comment><USER26> You know what I would do if I was googling a potential employee and came across divorce documents?

Hit the back button.

Not out of some respect of privacy, but because reading that seems like an extremely boring waste of my time. Maybe I'm weird like that.

<comment><USER27> I don't like pepper, but I don't expect the pepper industry to disappear overnight.

Or in other words, I don't know why your personal experience is relevant to the parent comment, there's entire entertainment industries that are funded by gossip and gossip alone so obviously there _are_ people out there who would care about that kind of thing.

<comment><USER26> Yeah, people dig celebrity gossip, but does it follow that HR is going to be interested in Joe Smoes divorce five years ago? I don't think so, particularly when they are looking at dozens of Joes a day. It would be a waste of their time to read that stuff, and boring to boot.

Sure, someone out there will probably do it, but I just can't wrap my mind around this becoming a pandemic.

<comment><USER27> HR isn't the concern. If it's public, _anyone_ who gives a shit about that kind of stuff can find it, usually with just a simple focused Google search.

It used to be that you had to hire a private detective to find dirt on people... I get that Google is going to make that easier but we don't have to go out of our way to help that along. :)

<comment><USER26> Can't you just pay 10 cents per page for this stuff right now? I don't think using a suboptimal non-google search should present _that_ much of a hardship. I don't really see this being a game changer for someone who just wants to smear a particular person; only if you need a very large amount of documents (in other words, are using it for its intended purpose.)

<comment><USER27> The difference between "free" and 10 cents is quite stark. That's the famous problem holding back microtransactions in general.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I see walls of text on a place called Hacker News taking issue with free information.

Free information and damn the consequences.

<comment><USER27> "Kill them all; Let God sort them out"</comment></comment>