[Declanomous]

I technically work in marketing, and even I don't think that open-offices are better. A private office is way more productive for the 75% of the time we aren't collaborating. It is a lot easier to write and design things when it is quiet. The idea that creative extroverted people work better the more riotous an environment is is absolute nonsense.

[hotsauceror]

No offense intended, of course. In my mental picture of a Marketing department, there's lots of creative back and forth and sort of, "brainstorming all the time" which is probably about as accurate as any stereotype. Everyone needs a time and a place to go heads-down.

[Declanomous]

None taken. It probably depends on the marketing department. There is a lot of brainstorming and back-and-forth, but I personally need my own space to brainstorm.

A lot of my conversations go like this:

Person A: Hey, have you decided what you want to do with [x] thing?

Person B: No, I was thinking [y], but I got stuck with [z].

Person A: That makes sense, what happens if we do [w]?

Person B: That's a good idea, but [v] might be a problem. I'll think about it and get back to you.

Person B sits down and works for a few more hours

If you have individual offices, that conversation might take ten minutes, and it only occupies 20 man-minutes. If you have an open-office with your entire marketing department, the conversation will probably take a full-man hour between all the people who get distracted and the other people who need to chime in.

Honestly, I think easy collaboration works better for programming/IT than it does for sales/marketing/communication, because the problems in IT are more concrete. So I think you are more likely to be able to chime in with a useful comment when the problem is "I'm getting this weird error" than when the problem is "does this have the tone we are looking for?"

In both cases, I think open offices are terrible. 2-3 people per office seems about right to me.

[Florin_Andrei]

> The idea that creative extroverted people work better the more riotous an environment is is absolute nonsense.

The only place where that worked well was the old-timey trading floor, as seen in Gary Cooper-era movies.

[Declanomous]

My dad worked on the floor of the Chicago Option Exchange for years. Even the craziest open-outcry pits were way more organized than any movie has made them seem.

I'm sure trading is way more productive now that it's done from a desk in an office, in the same way that auctions done online are probably more productive than auctions conducted in-person.