[dasmoth]

The argument has shifted to "worse for individual productivity but what actually matters is teamwork."

Plus a lot of claims, some of them coming from practising software developers, that you shouldn't trust the output of the lone hacker holed up in her own office.

No, I don't buy it either.

[cyberferret]

Well, Joel advocated private space for developers, but with an emphasis on 'paired coders' working together from time to time to mitigate the risk of 'lone wolf' programmers going off on a tangent, and to ensure code quality and consistency.

This was all before the dot com boom IIRC. At one stage, a few years ago there seemed to be a movement towards private developer offices, but it seems to have been overturned somewhat of late.

[dasmoth]

I don't recall Joel being much of a pairing advocate. Actually, more the opposite [1]. Are you sure you aren't thinking of someone else?

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FiveWorlds.html

[cyberferret]

Hmm... you could be right. I am trying to remember a more than decade old blog post, so I may have conflated Joel with someone else. I thought perhaps his business partner Jeff Atwood, but a quick Google search shows that he is not an advocate of paired programming either.

I definitely know about Joel's insistence on private offices for his developers at the (then) new FogBugz offices, but stand corrected on my other statements.