Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Open offices lets me be around my colleagues and inspires me to focus on my work and get access to help promptly when I need it. " Actually any co-location scheme allows this, walls or no walls. It's a matter of culture, not of vertical dividers. But I concur, it's a bit over the top to say that "everyone" hates open offices since clearly some people don't. Personally, to me it feels like a quarter suffers, of which…
The "quarter that thinks its OK" is something of an understatement. Some of that quarter are self-employed people who still think it's so much better for their productivity to be around other people that they're prepared to pay money and sacrifice an hour commuting in order to sit at a desk in a big, trendily-decorated room with an assortment of other entirely-unrelated microbuses-owners rather than a desk in their o…
I think that sounds more like a team room and not an open office. Team rooms are awesome.
I value spontaneous human interaction very much. I just don't value being aware of the spontaneous human interaction between 40 different people around me.
The key to understanding why open offices suck is that the amount of disturbance - statistically - is relative to the number of conversations that can spontaneously happen.
If we take n people then the number of spontaneous interactions is (back of the envelope) k * n * (n - 1) where k is some scaling factor.
It looks like this: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...
The point is, the more people there are, the more disturbances there are - exponentially. It's totally different to work in a space with 10 people than with 20 people - in the latter there is a 4 times more likelihood there is a disturbance than with 10 people. If we compare a room with 4 people with 40 people then the room with 40 people have relatively 130 times more disturbing events despite there are only 10 times as people around.
This is of course a ridiculously simple model but I think it essentially captures the fact that very large rooms have different dynamics than just large rooms.
And I want that people communicate and ask things spontaneously! But I don't appreciate the fact that without walls people like me need to suffer from noises coming from four different teams. And I don't mean suffer in an aesthetic sense, but in a very gut wrenching, unhealthy, "I cannot concentrate on this algorithm and it pisses me off like no other thing in this earth" way.
"...they get bored and demotivated when the office is quiet."
Do you mean you get bored and demotivated or are you describing how someone else feels specifically about their job?
Could it be rather that their job is just not that meaningful to them? If that is the case then I would hold that as a point against open offices - give people tiny meaningless jobs and remove all the walls so they are peer pressured to perform. I'm obviously exaggerating here to make a point.