here's an almost comical excerpt from the Cornell study

http://iwsp.human.cornell.edu/file_uploads/offices1_12382569...

The data showed that younger workers liked these kinds of offices more than older workers. The reason was instructive: they felt they could learn more from their “officemates” in this kind of office. This makes sense, since in interviews a common reason for wanting to join a company was the opportunity to work with “great” people. Having great people around, whom you rarely see and even more rarely talk to, is not of real value. Respondents talked about the much greater learning opportunities in a more open environment. Older respondents, in contrast, found it harder to concentrate and more disruptive. It also seemed the case that older respondents were simply comfortable with how they had learned to do things over a number of years, and did well.

Hmm, that's one interpretation.

Here's a simpler interpretation.

Younger workers generally aren't going to know what they're doing and need to ask questions, so being able to ask questions is important to them. Older workers already know what they're doing and don't need to ask as many questions, so they don't really get anything out of it.

This BTW, squares exactly with my experience. All the benefit of open floor plans go to employees with the least expertise at the expense of the employees with the most expertise.

If you're the most talented, expert employee in an office, in general there's not going to be anyone in the office that can answer your questions, so an open office doesn't buy you anything.

"If you're the most talented, expert employee in an office, in general there's not going to be anyone in the office that can answer your questions, so an open office doesn't buy you anything." I've never worked at a place where I was the "most talented, expert employee" in an office, and as such there was nothing that I could learn from my co-workers. I consider myself to be a good developer, and believe that I benefit my coworkers with useful interactions. Similarly, I have co-workers who know things that I do not, and I can learn from them too.

If you're the most talented, expert employee in an office, then presumably you are being compensated proportionally. How much of that extra pay can you really earn by being the super-human solo coder, compared with how much can you earn by sharing your knowledge and raising the productivity of the entire team?

If you are not being compensated proportionately, that's a separate issue entirely...

Half of the time the rest of the team doesn't seem to give a shit about learning anything new.

Or, arguably worse, they are only interested in new, shiny things, whether they work or not. Let's run scalaz streams in production. It compiles, so it must not have any performance problems!

that squares with my experience as well

the question though is who needs does it make sense for the business to cater to?

also, from my experience, sometimes getting good answers to those early questions makes young workers exponential more productive going into the future

everything you say makes sense.

My initial thought is the best setup would really depend on the task.

For really complex tasks I would guess that you'd want a more closed environment. As a concrete example, if you're trying to make a theoretical breakthrough in cryptography, I'd guess you need an environment where you can seriously concentrate.

For maybe a less complex task, one where execution matters the most, like web development, a more open plan where its easier to coordinate might be better.

And obviously the quality of your co-workers matters a lot. High quality co-workers will have less questions and the value of training them up will be greater.

It lowers the overall productivity, because the people who most need to be left alone are the people who do most of the work. Worse, it's a long-term detriment to each developer's individual capabilities, as it trains them not to use google or read documentation.

You can still interrupt someone without an open plan office, there's just a slightly higher bar that prevents most people from asking the knuckleheaded questions, and keeps constant non-conversational visual and auditory distractions to a minimum.

> do you remember the times you interrupted someone else and saved valuable time?

No, because I've never been so at a loss for things to do that I couldn't do something else productive while waiting for an email or IM question/answer response cycle to continue.

Interrupting is rude, full stop. Like other instances of rude behavior, it should not be undertaken lightly.

I have been at my place for around 3 years, and it was pretty new when I started. I was in an office with one other girl, so when she was speaking, it was usually to me. Now there are 4 of us in the same office, team leads like to discuss stuff with the developers in the office(despite having their own larger offices with tables for that sort of thing). Plus we have more people using my database, so I am getting way more interruptions. I would give my productivity about a quarter of what it was.

Open plan may be better for team productivity, but I doubt it will be 300% more productive.

I personally prefer emails. That way you have something to refer to rather than having to remembered all of the tiny details. Plus we change our mind so often I often can't remember what the final choice was. And tehy don't interrupt what you are doing.