Open layouts are the worst. They make literally no sense at all. Why do our employers feel compelled to make us work in a zoo-like environment?
How are we supposed to get any valuable work done? An open space is only as quiet as the least quiet person at any given moment. This essentially means that it’s noisy all the time.
In addition to the audio pollution, visual noise is also everywhere. Your monkey brain is under constant assault with things to pay attention to.
The people that came up with open spaces could not have been engineers, I refuse to believe otherwise. How are we supposed to hold entire call stacks and codebase flows in our head, or carefully design systems with complex constraints.
Do you remember being in college and being so focused on something that you would look up and realize hours had passed? I haven’t felt that once in my professional career in open spaces (or late in the evening when they’re empty, but that hardly counts).
They seem so cool when you’re young and fresh into the workforce, or if you want to socialize instead of working, but from a productivity standpoint they don’t make any f*cking sense!
The only value they have, one could argue, is them being economical. The lie that I hear way too often is that they make employees “collaborate” more.
Unbelievably, I get jealous when I see “dystopian 90s” cubicles ☝️ in old movies like The Matrix or Office Space.