Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace

First of all, Google isn't to blame for this trend and Google's open-plan offices, although flawed, are more spacious and better planned than what most companies use. I've seen startups and banks under the 100 SF/employee barrier.

Second, it's not even the noise that wrecks people but visibility from behind ("open-back visibility"). That's not because people are constantly hiding things. It suggests low status and makes it hard (and stressful) to perform at one's best.

There are environments where open-plan offices are better, but they're rare. One is a trading floor, where seconds matter (a lot) and information must be broadcast quickly and verbally (i.e. yelling). Unless there's a real-time sensitivity to what they're doing, programmers are better off with more privacy.

If you are going to use an open-plan office, the least you can do is to give everyone a 7-foot wall at his or her back.

As someone with a mild amount of ADD, I disagree completely here. The Internet is way more distracting than people moving around in my field of vision. Having a private office gives me the privacy that I need to "Internet" and that winds up driving down productivity more than I would care to admit. While I haven't actually experienced an open office plan recently, I actually welcome the change to see what effect it would have on my productivity.

I thought it has been solved years ago. Open offices have the same benefits as huge halls in a 20th century industrial factories as long as workers are doing "routine, mechanical tasks". Filing forms, coding html, translating a small specifications into Java code, any kind of a "drone work" - repetitive tasks with a little or no variation - could be done in an open space with the best benefits/costs ratio for an employer.

The only kind of work which cannot be done efficiently in a constant noise and distractions are these "engineering tasks" which require intense mental concentration (or what they usually call "meditating on a problem").

But such kind of high-skilled jobs are about 5% (and the best guys have their rooms, because they are worth it) so there is no wonder that 90% is an open space.

An example of such a task, which requires a quiet place would be "analyzing and decomposing an unfamiliar problem domain into a reasonable, valid metrics/heuristics to be used within machine-learning algorithms, given that you have no PhD in ML or problem domain's field". Very common scenario, isn't it?

I work on a large open-plan floor. My two 24" screens completely fill my field of view. My earphones block my ears and fill them with beautiful, not very loud, flow-inducing music. A low wall separate my desk from passing people.

On the other hand, when I want to give my eyes some rest, I can focus on Manhattan high-rises in the window. When I need to talk to my colleagues face to face, or just see if they are at their desks, it is easy to do, too. If we need to talk for more than a minute, we could walk to the coffee point of to a meeting room.

I can imagine an open space implemented badly: people cramped together, with little elbow room, phone-talking sales reps next to code-laden programmers next to number-crunching financial guys, and no meeting rooms. I won't like such a setup either.

But from where I sit, the open space plan looks pretty okay.

Yeah, cutting costs and Taylorian big brotherism.

Effectively companies trade productivity for higher transparency and cheaper office space. What happened to the need to actually maximize productivity?

To give the benefit of doubt it is plausible people might confuse open plan offices with team rooms.