I work from home full time now in a dedicated office space, however over the years I've worked in variety of setups ranging from:
1) four to six desk offices - quite enjoyable, peaceful, reasonably sociable at appropriate times and lots of natural light. The occupants were always developers or sysadmins who know the value of a bit of peace and quiet.
2) ten to sixteen desk open plan offices - not terrible because the occupants were almost entirely developers plus or minus a few sysadmins. Meetings were always held in an adjoining dedicated meeting rooms. Again quite peaceful, reasonably sociable and again both these places had plenty of natural lighting. Letting developers have a peaceful environment was respected and project management and sales folks were located in the next set of offices along the way so they could yell and shout over the phone in their own bubble.
3) Massive open plan 30-40+ desks (a bank) - bloody awful depending on where you were allocated a seat. Space was also used hyper efficiently so no four desk pods or the like. Just rows and rows of tables. Several different teams were packed into an entire floor, the noise was quite distracting and was like working in a barn. Would never do this again.
Ideally I like working in my own dedicated office space, but if I had to go back to working in an office again then options 1 & 2 above wouldn't be terrible provided phone calls and arsing about were kept to a minimum. However anything larger than that would be a turn off for me now.
That said I've never worked in a cubicle farm, that might not be too terrible for me provided I could see daylight.
These Facebook type "fun" open plan offices are a total turn off for me, but that's probably an age thing. Perhaps if I was in my 20's again it might be ok for a while. But then I've never had a desire to work for Facebook, Google et al.
1) four to six desk offices - quite enjoyable, peaceful, reasonably sociable at appropriate times and lots of natural light. The occupants were always developers or sysadmins who know the value of a bit of peace and quiet.
2) ten to sixteen desk open plan offices - not terrible because the occupants were almost entirely developers plus or minus a few sysadmins. Meetings were always held in an adjoining dedicated meeting rooms. Again quite peaceful, reasonably sociable and again both these places had plenty of natural lighting. Letting developers have a peaceful environment was respected and project management and sales folks were located in the next set of offices along the way so they could yell and shout over the phone in their own bubble.
3) Massive open plan 30-40+ desks (a bank) - bloody awful depending on where you were allocated a seat. Space was also used hyper efficiently so no four desk pods or the like. Just rows and rows of tables. Several different teams were packed into an entire floor, the noise was quite distracting and was like working in a barn. Would never do this again.
Ideally I like working in my own dedicated office space, but if I had to go back to working in an office again then options 1 & 2 above wouldn't be terrible provided phone calls and arsing about were kept to a minimum. However anything larger than that would be a turn off for me now.
That said I've never worked in a cubicle farm, that might not be too terrible for me provided I could see daylight.
These Facebook type "fun" open plan offices are a total turn off for me, but that's probably an age thing. Perhaps if I was in my 20's again it might be ok for a while. But then I've never had a desire to work for Facebook, Google et al.