Dear recruiter, “open floor space” is not a job benefit (opens in new tab)

Don't tip off the recruiters, if they do figure out that we're filtering on "open office space" then they'll stop putting that in the job descriptions, and we won't be able to easily tell anymore.

I think it really depends on the company, and the interior architecture of the office. We have what is considered an open floor space, but have rooms available for private meetings and for heads-down working. Couple that with a headphone-respecting and results-only culture (as in, nobody cares if they see you on facebook, you're only judged on your overall output) and I don't really have a problem with it.

Its also not really feasible with the size of our office for people to have individual offices. We've set up privacy curtains and worked with the natural partitions of the space to at least mitigate the potential issues with a purely open plan. We also have our desks set up in functional pods where you're working next to people on your team. I'm just saying it can be done correctly, with the right interior planning.

I've also been in an office that went the opposite direction and had individual offices for everyone, and I felt that to be too isolating and depressing over time, although there were other factors that made me feel that way too.

Take it with a grain of salt though - we're ~60 people, and I've seen some of the bigger open-floor offices that seem more in line with the arguments presented here. It really comes down to the individual company and their needs.

I think the biggest problem with open floor spaces is that they include the sales/marketing teams, most of whom (in my experience) speak on the phone or with each other all day. Sometimes, believe it or not, on speaker.

I don't mind working with fellow engineers in the same table in a quiet room every now and then. It's when you have no escape to work in quiet focus that it becomes a problem.

I feel like the article ascribes way too much to the "control" aspect. In my experience, the truth seems closer to the "ignorance" than to "malice"; companies are lazy: they see other companies touting their open floor plans — big ones, like Facebook! — and think, if Facebook is doing it, it must be good! That, and/or it's just cheaper / easier to cram people into an open floor plan than trying to figure out walls.

Mix into that that so often recruiters seem to be outsourced to a third-party company composed of people who know next to nothing about engineering, and it shouldn't be surprising. They're parroting what they've seen other job posts tout. Until a significant number of job postings start listing "closed floor plan" or something along those lines, the cycle will continue.

And, it's not even just "control": it's also a loss of productivity through noise and disease. The last time I was in an open floor plan and a mild cold struck, it cost two engineer weeks. That's a couple thousand dollars; if a better layout could have quarantined that even slightly (it went through four people), the extra space required might actually pay for itself after some modest amount of time. But I don't know for sure, and someone would actually need to do the math, but nobody can: things like illnesses, and illness spreading are so untracked that it's a completely hidden cost that shows up on no ledger.

Open-plan offices are inherently age-ist. It's well known that older adults have more trouble identifying the location of sounds, discriminating between foreground and background sounds (dynamic range), etc. This means that someone talking elsewhere in the office seems just like someone talking right in their ear, requiring a conscious effort to block it out or concentrate on the person who is actually talking right in front of them. A noise level that wouldn't bother young people at all can thus be quite harmful to older people's productivity, putting them at a disadvantage and effectively "filtering them out" of many workplaces. It's only a matter of time before some of the people now singing the praises of open workspaces start filing lawsuits regarding those very same workspaces, as each position suits their personal interests.

If I see "open floor space", I better also see "a pair of headphones of your choice"

My god I saw a picture of Facebook and it looked like hell to me.

I really like this open office plan trend. Well, not for me, but for the companies I compete against. ;-)