Open-plan offices make employees less productive, less happy, and more sick

I've been places that claim exactly that. But if that were really true, then a much more effective way to do that would be to include engineers in the design meetings, the customer feedback sessions, and strategy discussions. In most open plans I've seen, the engineers sit together. That doesn't sound like exposing them to the rest of the business.

But I think we're probably in violent agreement here. I like team rooms. Small team including product people, engineers, qa, even support and sales sometimes, in one enclosed space. Much less random noise, and a more focused vibe. Either that or 100% remote with a single shared team chat room.

In the span of 4 years, I went from a cube farm, to an office, to taking almost a year off and being by myself at home, to an entirely open-plan. It took a couple of weeks to get used to but I really like the open-plan. I enjoyed being by myself at home alone tremendously and didn't miss the social interaction at all, since I IM with most of my friends anyway, but I have to say I do like the open-plan now. My team is very social, I very much like everyone on the team, and I get to interact with my teammates a lot more, and if I need some solitude I can move to a smaller room (we're all laptop-based).

We do respect each other's space though, so most times it gets as quiet as a library, and even though my teammate is just on the other side of the table from me, he will IM me instead of just looking past the monitor and talk to me. It's usually quiet, but closer to lunch or near the end of the day, we play StarCraft 2, start chattering a bit more, and it's generally a bit looser.

For the most part, we don't work remotely, but the VP of Engineering insists that if one of us is even possibly sick, to stay at home and not infect others.

It's definitely a different set of "rules", but I really do enjoy it.

I work in an open-plan office where all developers have laptops. We're free to code anywhere in the office, but at our desks we have the benefit of an additional two monitors. Some people prefer to be closer to their team because they like discussing things in person; others prefer IRC/Gmail chat. Use of the assigned space boils down to personal preference for us.

The major benefit of a designated home base, though, is that people who need to deliver papers or other physical goods to you don't have to hunt you down through the entire office.

I'm wondering why people even considered that kind of office layout.

Didn't anyone of them read the famous books of Tom DeMarco, such as "Peopleware"? Decades ago, DeMarco argued (IMHO very convincingly) for closed rooms to cut distractions - at least for thought workers. DeMarco even concluded that telephones are bad, especially if in the company's culture it's not socially accepted that people are free to ignore a phone call.

While I don't prefer open office plans, I think it needs to be emphasized that not all open office plans are equal.

There are compartmentalized open plans, where a specific team or division is grouped together in close proximity, and then you have some form of the "kitchen sink", where any number of teams (if not the whole company) is just thrown into a room.

The latter is extremely unpleasant, IMHO. Being constantly disrupted by the loud side chatter that inevitably comes out of another group (e.g. marketing, finance, sales, etc.) is infinitely more distracting than ancillary chatter that is relevant to a specific team / department. In addition, obviously, the more open a plan is the more physical distractions are present which doesn't help matters either.