The inexplicable rise of open floor plans in tech companies

Has anyone studied open plan offices and choice of programming language?

Does an environment with a high chance of interruption lead to languages where you have to write a lot to do a small task, because you can write simple code between interruptions, and over time get enough code to do the task - and if you get interrupted well you only lose one minute's thinking.

Contrast with a powerful language where you need half an hour of thinking to build an intricate machine in your head, then you write it down in a little code, and need to hold its workings in mind while you test it. With no long spans of concentration you won't go slower or write half an intricate mechanism, you will write nothing.

Or to put it another way, is the problem of working in an open plan office: you aren't choosing the right tools and work pattern for your environment?

Or to put it another way: are enterprise languages 'blub' languages because they come from big offices and academic languages 'powerful and terse' because they come from people with time and quiet for deep thought.

Or another way: could we redesign our languages, tools and their UI to make us as effective, and feel as good, in open plan offices, like f.lux changes a screen for night use instead of complaining that it's not daytime.

It's not so much open plan vs offices. It's quiet vs. not-quiet.

One of the most effective office setups I have seen had two kinds of work areas:

1) Reconfigurable "team rooms" where most of the team can work together. These have a door that is kept closed to reduce conversation noise leaking into other areas, and a glass wall so you can see who is in the team room. The other two interior walls can be moved to adjust the size of the team room.

2) On a different floor, there is an open quiet area equipped with large monitors for individual coding, writing, and CAD work.

There are other workspaces, such as lab rooms for fabricating things. Their larger locations have large shops with all kinds of fabrication equipment.

Everything is hot-desked. Many people spend part of the week working at home. The company with this workspace is a major design firm, and I'd wager they put a lot of thought and objective measurement into the design of their workspaces.

Great term, does that make when multiple people ask you questions a distributed denial of service?

I enjoy the chaos as well - I am not productive at home alone at all. But strangers don't interrupt my every 10 minutes (or ever.) Software development requires sometimes being collaborative and sometimes needing uninterrupted work time. An optimal environment would allow for both of these, as needed. Open floor plans and closed-door, isolated offices only allow for one.

I have the exact same feelings, in an open office and are a developer who does braindead work then it's great as you can chat while working on repetitive tasks.

Anything that requires thinking, such as fixing a release-blocker bug that is very obvious once you get in the zone is pretty much lost.