Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study

It was advocated, it was not meant to be advocated, but it was.

And Agile has it's fault and it has become filled with consultants, buzzwords and all kinds of things but early days when I built an internal system used in factories for a large company. The old ways of building and documenting software there was pretty much waterfall and there was a lot of middle-management, reporting, architects, documenting etc.

I was a part of a pretty young team + one offshore team in India (that was not great but not bad either) and we had a great boss who fought for us when we wanted to develop using pretty standard Scrum instead and we had a great product owner who immediately got what we were after and had great domain knowledge.

That project went sooo much better than previous ones and even if there were a lot of fighting and escalations in the beginning the whole concept of "Just call into our demo's we have every three weeks and see what we are developing and then give feedback" was like a revelation for some would be users of the system or owners of processes we implemented.

i've missed it the last time and it's very relevant for my near-future situation.

I hate the open office plans with no view blockers or ones that are too low that peoples eyes peek over. It's so distracting to see movement or peoples eyes that I now deliberately lower my chair as far as it goes so that the tiny short wall blocks everything.

The author of the article (and, presumably, most businesses) are living in the past.

I work in an open-plan office in a place that makes heavy use of the latest collaboration software, and it works great. There is virtually no use of email or IM internally. Just persistent chat and collaboration with Teams.

If workers rights or material concerns won’t inspire software engineers to consider organizing, perhaps day to day work “lifestyle” hassles like open offices will. It’s been often repeated that developers eschew organizing because one can always go and find a better paying job if they don’t like the work environment they’re in- but good luck trying to find a workplace that gives the average developer their own office instead of adhering to the industry standard.

Perhaps if engineers had some type of labor union, professional association, or guild, then they can collectively stand up to management and get rid of annoyances like open offices. Why not? If it’s something universally unpopular with hackers, yet embraced by management, doesn’t that provide a valid use case for organizing? Or are we just going to forever grouse about it until management loses interest on their own and embraces an even worse floor plan fad?

And consider the other nearly-ubiquitous or common annoyances in tech- unpaid overtime, lack of support for remote work, whiteboard interviews. Why don’t the workers in the industry rally to solve them, if those in charge are unwilling to? If we care so much about “disruption”, why are we so content with the status quo of work?

Upton Sinclair said of The Jungle that he was aiming for the public’s heart and hit it in the stomach. Perhaps software engineers will not be appealed to by arguments or neither the heart, nor the stomach- but of the flow.