You and all the research seems to agree. Of course, the anecdotal evidence outliers will disagree, but I don't see how there's a debate anymore when you look at productivity.
Google yourself on pros and cons of open office. There are lots of studies on both.
I am yet to see practical solutions to noise and disease spread (e.g. flu season) problems.
I've seen the phrase "all the research" thrown around quite a lot in this thread. Would you mind linking to a few studies you refer to?
Mainly, I'm curious about how they define productivity. An office full of people performing completely independent tasks is almost certainly less productive than having separate offices; the advantage of open offices comes when everyone's work is interrelated. In an open environment, whenever I need to make a decision on implementation, I can easily ask someone intimately familiar with the area my code effects, and vice versa. The result is that people are more likely to make the better choices for the long-term future of the code base.
I'm also curious if there are any longitudinal studies that address moral. I wouldn't be surprised if people in open offices feel less like a cog in the system. I could also imagine it's a lot harder to develop a hatred of your coworkers and your boss if they're working right in front of you.
> I've seen the phrase "all the research" thrown around quite a lot in this thread. Would you mind linking to a few studies you refer to?
There's a good New Yorker article[1] from last year that references a number of studies. This blog post[2] links to a couple others and addresses costs/alternatives. Also, "a study of over 40,000 survey responses collected over a decade has found that the benefits for workers are quickly outweighed by the disadvantages"[3]. Here's a Washington Post article[4] referencing Facebook's new building and linking to a few other studies.
Of course you can certainly decide to dismiss the research and base your opinion on anecdotes or assumptions, but don't judge research as being poorly done just because you disagree with the findings.
I don't know if the research is that crystal clear right now.
I have no doubt that developers will write more code whilst in offices free of distraction. But the question is do they miss out on key business knowledge by not being around other people. Especially if they are in Agile feature teams.
When I was working in offices I felt the cross pollination was actually superior in that environment. I could have a long (hours long) talk with a co-worker in their office or mine and really dig down into something and share a lot of knowledge (either general or tribal). Whereas with an open office you tend to try to keep things short because you tend to be interrupting many people instead of just one, and because you lack the almost conspiratorial intimacy that you can have with an office the sorts of discussions you have are comparatively constrained.
Again the trend seems to be mixed plan. Open plan offices with private areas.
In which case you can not argue that there is significant money/effort involved. It's either the cost of headphones and the effort of walking tens of metres. Developers are going to need better arguments than that to convince HR/Management that this is not a trend worth doing.
> Again the trend seems to be mixed plan. Open plan offices with private areas.
What do you mean, "again"? This statement is the first mention of such in this sub-discussion. Also, I'm not going on a tangent about the joke that the "private areas" in such offices turn into or how infeasible this design is for many lines of business.
> In which case you can not argue that there is significant money/effort involved.
"Significant money and effort" as in the sum total devoted to finding solutions to the problem of distracting, sub-optimal environments being foisted upon engineers, not the cost to a single hypothetical engineer.
> It's either the cost of headphones and the effort of walking tens of metres.
That statement presumes: a) headphones are allowed; b) headphones work for everyone; c) people have work they can pick up and move; d) that private areas actually exist in sufficient quantity for those who want them; e) that private areas are not appropriated permanently by people up the political food chain.
> Developers are going to need better arguments than that to convince HR/Management that this is not a trend worth doing.
That statement assumes HR and Management care about any argument besides cost.
Also, you completely ignored the point I was actually making, which is that throwing engineers together into a giant room does not give you the cross-pollination that so many management consultants claim you get.
If I have to walk tens of meters to meet in a private space with anyone I want to talk to, then 1) the supposed serendipitous transfer of knowledge does not happen, and 2) we could just as easily have had this encounter in my or their private office space.
Maybe you can train your Agile developers to write down "key business knowledge" in complete sentences. You don't prefer to live under the tyranny of oral tradition, do you?
The debate isn't whether or not collaborative work is highly beneficial. It is highly beneficial. Crucial, even.
The debate is about whether or not we want to force employees to exclusively in a collaborative way, with no reliable option for quiet solo work -- as many of these "open office" workplaces do -- is a good idea.
