[nnq]

It's slightly amusing that everyone seem to miss the huge difference between:

    A. Individual office with open door
    B. Open plan office

I'd imagine the ideal would be individual offices with no doors:

This would create a good enough sense of intimacy and would be obvious to people that when they pass the space of you non-existing door they are entering your space so they should have a reason to do it and you acceptance. And of course, having an actual separate ceiling atop your office is important - the visual part matters, we need the feeling of "private cave" even if we agree to share it most of the time. And open space above only brings anxiety and makes you feel that you are in an open savannah and a predator can jump at you from behind the bushes anytime.

But of course, we live in a plentiful age, obsessed with efficiency (oh, the bitter irony of the contradiction...), so all that wasted space and extra paid on rent because open-office spaces are probably cheaper is a no-no...

[greenyoda]

It's slightly amusing that everyone seem to miss the huge difference between: (A) Individual office with open door (B) Open plan office

Exactly. And Hamming didn't work in an open plan office at Bell Labs. The fact that he writes about open vs. closed doors implies that they had offices with doors.

"I'd imagine the ideal would be individual offices with no doors"

Doors are very useful to have, even if they remain open most of the time:

- Closing your door allows you to have a meeting with a couple of people in your office without disturbing your neighbors.

- If you manage people, you'll need to be able to have private conversations with them (e.g., performance reviews).

- Sometimes, you really need to concentrate on a difficult problem without interruptions.

- You'll occasionally want to be able to have private, personal phone conversations, e.g., with your doctor.

[nnq]

> Doors are very useful to have

Then I'd use them as some kind of status token, to gamify things a bit. Mangers would have offices with doors by necessity, for private conversations with employees etc. And for the rest, if you are a lead developer, or tech lead or senior developer, than you get a door added to your office. Otherwise the hinges stay, but no door... like a hint of "when you'll get better, you'll get that door" :)

[chris_wot]

An "incentivise the workforce through privacy deprivation", eh? I'd probably take it a step further - open plan toilets. Some employees spend far too long on the John. You can't stop them from going, that would be gross and impractical. But you can use social engineering to help them remember they are there to work and to do so collaboratively.

I can't tell you how much time I've lost to the porcelain throne! (I never measured it) but I do know that I want to get ahead, and when I get to do a crap in a cubicle with a door, I'll have made it!

P.S. This is why wifi and laptops are so great. A lot of thinking time can be had on the dunny. To really get your creative juices flowing, encourage your employees to think about direction on the bog. You could get your next Gmail there. Think of it as 10% time, without need to allocate the 10%. Your employees will thank you!

[SmellyGeekBoy]

Or just kill two birds with one stone and swap all of their chairs for toilets!

[chris_wot]

The CEO could be given a squatty potty instead of an executive chair. It's doable.

[dkersten]

I find that 50% of my work I can do in an open plan or open door environment and for the other 50%, I need quiet and a distraction-free environment. Open plan definitely doesn't provide that, but I'm not convinced that open door does either -- it very much depends on the floor layout (eg how busy is the corridor outside the office?)

If its a quiet-low-traffic work environment, then open door is perfectly fine, but if not, then it won't provide the quiet that a closed door does. I don't care about privacy, I care about (lack of) noise and distractions.

My ideal setup would provide a communal quiet library-rules room with couches; sound-proofed meeting rooms with doors; breakout areas for groups to sit and talk; hot-desking space; and 1-man offices with doors. Then allow people to use them as preferred or necessary for the work they're currently doing.

Failing that, at a minimum have open-plan + plenty of silent "library rules" space.

> "when you'll get better, you'll get that door"

So, you want to sabotage my work quality until I produce better quality work?

EDIT: Forgot to say that movement (seeing people walk past out of the corner of your eye, for example) can be just as distracting as noise.

[ccvannorman]

New idea: Open-office floor plans, within individualized ceilings above every workstation! ;-]