Open plan offices attract highest levels of worker dissatisfaction

It's increasingly becoming evident how ineffective offices can be as workplaces, especially in light of better and better communication for developers over the internet. Obviously this isn't true for all places and all cultures, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't frequently question my basic physical presence in the office sometimes. It is common for me to not talk to a single coworker about work throughout the day. Meetings are rare, always scheduled ahead of time, and always short. I feel like our office mostly exists as a vestige of past tradition, a celebration of our success (it's styled after our products), and also out of a deep-seated paranoia about the productivity of workers you can't see, even though as developers we have very, very concrete ways of measuring productivity.

(Also, the nondevelopers are in constant verbal communication.)

All that said, I'm not dissatisfied. Our office is always very quiet and cool. The kitchen is stocked. The chairs are comfortable. It's not a bad set up at all and I don't find that it really hinders my productivity too much. But it does feel unnecessary, and I personally know I'd be more productive telecommuting 3-4 days a week. Dressing up and behaving professionally for 8-9 hours straight does take a toll on my ability to output good code, albeit a minor one, and the location of the office in the city certainly takes a huge toll on my bank account (housing is 2-3x more expensive in this area, but the commutes are horrible from far out).

Can you work if you can't hear your thoughts?

This is close to my current office environment.

I have a typical cube, located in a typical cube farm, if I want some relative peace and quiet.

And the team has a dedicated "lab" where I spend most of my day. It's not a totally open-plan area - just a conference room. Never more than 6-7 developers, of whom 4 are on my team, and the rest are transients from other teams working on related projects.

I prefer the lab and only head down to the cube if I need to take client calls. Several of the developers prefer the cubes and spend most of their day there, only coming to the lab for a few hours/day.

I don't think open offices are necessarily bad, but that they're harder to get right. What you need is:

- A a decent cultural protocol around it. One place I worked had the very strong rule that you start all non-emergency communication asynchronously (usually text chat), even if the person is right next to you. Another place I worked at strongly respected headphones as the "don't bother me" signal. - A reasonable number of walled-off rooms for anyone to use. Need to take a phone call? Have a quick 1-on-1? Debate something loudly with 3-5 people? You need to have rooms, of varying sizes, to handle these use cases near at hand. - Minimal noise that's not related to collaboration. Eg, no loud ringing phones. No phone-based customer support department in the same room as the devs. No kitchen (full of dishwashers, coffee grinders, etc) area facing the open workspace.

Open offices can work, but only if you go out of your way to make them work. Just throwing a few dozen devs in a warehouse is a recipe for dissatisfaction. I think that that happens more often than not, resulting in things like this study.

Yes. I am in my own office. I've more or less been in a single office since, oh, 95 or so.

It's impossible to think in bullpen/cubes. Well, that's hyperbole, but it is both wearying and distracting. I'm sure there are personality types that thrive in that situation, but it is just really hard for me to be in an environment like that for long. There's a reason there's a "no talking" rule at libraries, after all.