Suffers from the same flaw as most critiques of open plan: it focuses on individual productivity while failing to understand how it contributes to team productivity. Cornell did a study of open plan awhile back that you should all read. I posted it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7507404 The misunderstanding here is that it's just about serendipitously "overhearing" other conversations. 1. Open plan makes…
I think some of the best and most productive days I have had have been where I have been in the same cramped office as the rest of my team and we were all working on different chunks of the same problem - "Bob - are you using a list or a dictionary to pass the foobars in?" That's great for a single team all working on one thing - but I do not see the open plan office as a series of nicely appointed open plan offices…
This is an important point. For many of us who have worked in startups, "open office plan" really just means "team room". I enjoyed working in open office plans in smaller companies since it basically just meant 5-10 engineers sitting in the same space.
Last year I worked for a mid-size company of about ~200 employees, most of whom were crammed into a gigantic factory like space with endless arrays of fluorescent lights lining the ceiling.
The experience was among the most distracting I can remember. This was in no small part due to having to overhear loud conversations between people in different departments, such as marketing and sales, which require much more verbal communication than engineering. if I can help it I will never work in a similar environment again.