Kevin's Weblog

With our office relocating soon, there’s been a lot of talk about what the desk layouts will be like and whether it will be more like our wide-open layout or more like the traditional cubes in Sunnyvale. Yesterday definitely helped me gel my feelings on the matter.

I spent the morning working in an unoccupied cube. It was a little wierd because I had no idea who was around me, what they were doing, etc. But, I could also concentrate and bang out code.

In the afternoon, I borrowed some space in a conference room that’s been turned into the office for a 4-person team. In this case, there was a collegial atmosphere where there was almost constantly conversation at a low-level. Despite that, I actually found it fairly easy to withdraw when I was coding, then drift back in while waiting for a build or test run to complete.

I’m not sure which of the two I preferred, but I definitely found both superior to our setup, which is essentially 300 people in one big room. For whatever reason, I find the discussions there much more distracting. Also, it leaves you exposed to all of those 300 people deciding they need to walk over and talk to you about something. My conclusion is that this is what comes from startups growing up and failing to realize that their office layout doesn’t scale. 4-8 people in a room together, all working closely on one thing, is fun and productive. 300 people in a room together is a recipe for massive productivity loss from communication overhead and constant distractions.