Why open offices are bad for us (http://www.Bbc.Com/capital/story/20170105-open-offices-are-damaging-our-memories)

It’s not just loud and sniffly, open offices are actually hurting our brains. Now some businesses are bringing back walls and doors.

By Bryan Borzykowski

Four years ago, Chris Nagele did what many other technology executives have done before — he moved his team into an open concept office.

His staff had been exclusively working from home, but he wanted everyone to be together, to bond and collaborate more easily. It quickly became clear, though, that Nagele had made a huge mistake. Everyone was distracted, productivity suffered and the nine employees were unhappy, not to mention Nagele himself.

Whether it's noisy personal phone calls or constant interruptions, most of us have been victims of the open office. Share your stories with us on Facebook.

In April 2015, about three years after moving into the open office, Nagele moved the company into a 10,000-square foot office where everyone now has their own space — complete with closing doors.

We’re 15% less productive, we have immense trouble concentrating and we’re twice as likely to get sick in open working spaces

Numerous companies have embraced the open office — about 70% of US offices are open concept — and by most accounts, very few have moved back into traditional spaces with offices and doors. But research that we’re 15% less productive, we have immense trouble concentrating and we’re twice as likely to get sick in open working spaces, has contributed to a growing backlash against open offices.

Since moving, Nagele himself has heard from others in technology who say they long for the closed office lifestyle. “Many people agree — they can’t stand the open office,” he says. “They never get anything done and have to do more work at home.”

Small distractions can cause us to lose focus for upwards of 20 minutes

It’s unlikely that the open office concept will go away anytime soon, but some companies are following Nagele’s example and making a return to private spaces.

The more focus the better

There’s one big reason we’d all love a space with four walls and a door that shuts: focus. The truth is, we can’t multitask and small distractions can cause us to lose focus for upwards of 20 minutes.

What’s more, certain open spaces can negatively impact our memory. This is especially true for hotdesking, an extreme version of open plan working where people sit wherever they want in the work place, moving their equipment around with them.

We retain more information when we sit in one spot, says Sally Augustin, an environmental and design psychologist in La Grange Park, Illinois. It’s not so obvious to us each day, but we offload memories — often little details — into our surroundings, she says.

We retain more information when we sit in one spot

These details — which could be anything from a quick idea we wanted to share to a colour change on a brochure we’re working on — can only be recalled in that setting.

We don’t collaborate like we think

For many of us, it’s the noise that disturbs us the most. Professors at the University of Sydney found that nearly 50% of people with a completely open office floorplan, and nearly 60% of people in cubicles with low walls, are dissatisfied with their sound privacy. Only 16% of people in private offices said the same.

They asked people in various office types how dissatisfied they were with their space and in 14 different respects, including temperature, air quality and sound privacy, closed fared better than open.

Beside the cheaper cost, one main argument for the open workspace is that it increases collaboration. However, it’s well documented that we rarely brainstorm brilliant ideas when we’re just shooting the breeze in a crowd. Instead, as many of us know, we’re more likely to hear about the Christmas gift a colleague is buying for a family member, or problems with your deskmate’s spouse.

“People do talk to each other more, but they don’t talk to each other more about work-related things,” says Augustin. Think about it: if you work in an open office, you’ll book a meeting room to brainstorm. It’s still an act that requires some level of planning and privacy.

And it turns out our best work is done when we have total focus, says Augustin. We can work in a busy space, but the final product won’t be as good as if we are in a quiet locale.

“[It’s] inefficient,” she says. “It’s a shame to waste people by not giving them a place that supports what they actually do.”

Of course, she says, it’s important for us to bond and to get to know each other. But there are plenty of ways to bond in closed offices. Nagele’s team, for instance, eats lunch together every day. A few ideas come out of lunch time chats, he says, but most are developed from more focused brainstorming sessions.

Finding the right balance  

For jobs that require focus,  like writing, advertising, financial planning and computer programming, some companies that aren’t ready to ditch open plans are experimenting with quiet rooms and closed spaces.

The trouble with that, is some of us don’t feel comfortable leaving the team to go off on our own—it can feel as if we’re not pulling our weight if we’re not present. That’s particularly true in high-pressure environments. Some of us even feel that escaping to a quiet room is a sign of weakness, Augustin says.

Other companies are creating closed spaces for smaller teams. Ryan Mullenix, a partner with NBBJ, a global architecture firm ,has worked with tech firms that have built offices for between three and 16 people.

They can still collaborate, but they can also block out noise from other teams of people they don’t need to hear from. Technology can also help. Mullenix’s own office has sensors, placed 10 feet apart, that can track noise, temperature and population levels. Staff can log on to an app and can find the quietest spot in the room. 

The bad news for unhappy open-office dwellers: the concept isn’t going away any time soon.  But, says Nagele, more companies should consider what he’s found. His employees are happier and more productive—and that helps not just the company, but the team.

“People can now do focused work and they have more time to work,” he says. “That’s helped everyone’s mindset.”

Text 4

Hedge Funds Find Open-Sourcing Software Attracts the Best Developers

(http://europe.newsweek.com/hedge-funds-open-sourcing-funds-developers-tech-543191)

"Open sourcing things is really one way of raising a virtual flag above the office."

By Ian Allison

An illustration picture shows a projection of binary code on a man holding a laptop computer, in an office in Warsaw June 24, 2013. Open-sources could benefit hedge funds to a great extent.

A commonly held view of hedge funds is of secretive organizations that jealously guard the tools that make them money. Contrary to this is the trend among certain firms to open source their software and invite collaboration from the developer community.

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Firms that have blazed a trail in the open sourcing of this sort of technology are the likes of AQR, that kick-started the Pandas libraries project, and Man AHL, that has open-sourced its Arctic data storage system.

Arctic powers Man AHL's vast financial market data store and is built on top of the open-source no-SQL database MongoDB. The Arctic codebase was made available on GitHub back in 2015. Gary Collier, Co-CTO of Man AHL is taking part in a session on open source technology at Newsweek/IBT's forthcoming Data Science in Capital Markets event in London, alongside Wes Mckinney, who created Pandas.

Collier, who holds a Masters in Theoretical Physics from Cambridge, has been a technology hobbyist since the age of 11. He started building software commercially at age 21, and has been in a technology management role for the past few years at Man AHL, that has about 60 technologists. These technologists cover a range of front office duties that include data capture and distribution platforms, continual evolution of Man AHL's in-house Python quantitative research platform, and the production trading platform which trades silently and automatically 24 hours a day. In addition to building the tools and platform, around half of the technology team work directly alongside the quantitative researchers on model development.

Collier remembers the days when there was a lot suspicion from corporates about even using open source software. But over time there has been a rising tide of open source code consumption and it's become vital to engage with the developer community in this way—not least because an open source ethos attracts the brightest developer talent to the fund.

"Open sourcing things is really one way of raising a virtual flag above the office which is saying, the ideals that you as a brilliant developer hold dear—community engagement, openness, collaboration—are also ideals that our business holds dear," said Collier." In contrast to some in the quant trading space, internally Man AHL is somewhat different. It's not an organization comprised of secretive silos, where an individual won't talk to the individual next to them for fear of giving away their secret sauce.

"So the external presentation that we are giving with community engagement and openness also reflects the internals of Man AHL where the environment is highly collaborative and research is shared among members of the team, with technologists and quantitative researchers working together on the same code base." The American data scientist Wes McKinney pioneered open sourcing of hedge fund software at AQR Capital Management. This became the Pandas package for data analysis in the Python programming language.

"Wes has been very influential with his Pandas library and he has been really a pillar figure in the Python data science community," said Collier. "And if we take a few steps back, we see a whole ecosystem of open source databases, messaging systems, analytics libraries, operating systems—even that's just a very small part of the tidal wave of progression of open source as a whole."

While Pandas is all about handling frames of data in Python, Arctic is a storage layer designed to persist that type of data very efficiently. "It allows people who want to obtain that type of data and perhaps perform parallel computation across a cluster, a very efficient means for them to extract that and perform analysis, run back-tests, risk models etc," said Collier.

"Just like the apps that we see on our phones nowadays and the websites we visit, complex data analysis systems are often constructed by taking together small, high quality libraries that do a particular thing and do it well, and joining them up in innovative ways.

"So if you think about the kind of functionality that Pandas gives you and the functionality that Arctic gives you, and then you say okay, we are going to layer Arctic on top of MongoDB, which is—an open source database.

"Pandas on its own gives you the ability to crunch frames of data to perform analysis on them, but it's not designed as a means of storing, say, 20 years' worth of tick data that correspond to maybe two trillion data points.

"So that's three freely available things there that immediately bootstrap you to do data science and analysis work that would be completely unthinkable a few years ago; you would be spending a lot of money on proprietary closed-source packages."