[jasode]

>Joel Spolsky tried to set the record straight,

Joel Spolsky may have tried but his companies (Fog Creek, Stackexchange) are not big enough nor influential enough to convince the industry.

Microsoft in 1990s was one of the few companies that deliberately provided private offices with a door for every programmer. However, that ideology later morphed into putting 2 or more developers to share one room and then relocating a large group onto open floor plans[1]. It shows that even a company that originally prided itself on private offices eventually deviated towards open offices. (They still have lots of private offices.)

As a counterpoint to offices with doors, there was billionaire Gordon Moore (CEO Intel) in 1996 without a private office.[2]

The issue is that the touted benefits of private offices are not obvious slam dunks to observers. For example, if open floor plans with their distractions kill productivity, Google (open cubicles) should have lost to Microsoft Bing. Amazon and their AWS programmers distracted by open offices should be losing to Microsoft's Azure programmers. (Of course, there are multiple other factors at play besides office layout but that may also prove that open-vs-private doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things -- i.e. it's statistical noise.)

There are no slam dunk business case studies that definitively proves that private offices produce superior business results. The narrative for private offices needs spectacular headlines of success in Harvard Business Review or Techcrunch articles about YC companies with private offices defeating every competitor. So far, the proponents like Spolsky (not big enough) and Microsoft (not considered a trendsetter in the tech world) is not enough.

[1]http://www.geekwire.com/2014/microsoft-developer-division/

[2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sX5g0kidk3Y&feature=youtu.be...

[lj3]

> Microsoft in 1990s was one of the few companies that deliberately provided private offices with a door for every programmer. However, that ideology later morphed into putting 2 or more developers to share one room and then relocating a large group onto open floor plans[1]. It shows that even a company that originally prided itself on private offices eventually deviated towards open offices. (They still have lots of private offices.)

It's worth noting that when Microsoft was at its peak was when they had private offices. Correlation is not causation, but it's hardly a glowing recommendation for open offices.

> As a counterpoint to offices with doors, there was billionaire Gordon Moore (CEO Intel) in 1996 without a private office.[2]

That's not a serious counterpoint. We're talking about private offices for engineers who are on the maker schedule, where interruptions are harmful. CEOs run on a manager's schedule where interruptions are less harmful.

[jasode]

>but it's hardly a glowing recommendation for open offices.

To be clear, I'm not "recommending" open offices. Microsoft still has private offices and I believe it's still the majority configuration of their Seattle campus (MS employee can chime in to confirm this.)

>We're talking about private offices for engineers who are on the maker schedule, where interruptions are harmful.

The Intel programmers don't have private offices either. (The ideology was that the CEO's open cubicle was copied down to the engineers as well.)

Also, the problem is that "harmful" open layout has not been proven to lead to business failure nor has "beneficial" private offices proven to lead to business success. We need a company with private offices to beat Facebook/Google/Apple/Intel who all have open offices without doors for their engineers. Instead, what we have is a bunch of articles that do surveys and of course the employees will respond "open offices suck!"

What influences the industry is concrete business success and not employee satisfaction surveys that preaches to the choir. If people don't understand that distinction, they are being naive about what it takes to sway the industry.

[sheepmullet]

> We need a company with private offices to beat Facebook/Google/Apple/Intel who all have open offices without doors for their engineers.

I know at least two of those four companies have very liberal working policies.

If I want to work on a problem with a team member we can take over a meeting room for a few days.

If I want to work from home for a couple of days that's ok as well.

Sometimes I'll go work from a cafe.

Hell, sometimes I'll have an intense meeting then play a couple of hours of table tennis to relax.

Basically if I want quiet time I can easily get it. It's not really like that for most software development jobs at normal companies.

[ajmichael]

I left Microsoft in 2015 and at that time my team was in private offices. Some had their own office, some shared with one other person. It was based solely on number of years at the company.