[opo]

>How would you feel about larger offices that fit ~8, and housed your entire immediate team, but no one else?

I've experienced that kind of environment and it is slightly better than the sea of tables filling a floor but is still very bad. A few of the things I've noticed:

- Collaboration inside an individual team was never a problem with individual offices and so it isn't noticeably improved

- Unless the programming/debugging work is very simple, it will often require intense concentration. With distractions an engineer is less productive

- People waste a lot of time looking for an area to have a private conversation, talk to their Dr on the phone, etc.

- When we had offices, people would tend to decorate them with pictures of their kids, awards, etc. With an open floor plan, the place looks very sterile and it seems like overall morale and interest in the company is lower than it used to be.

- The big issue with any organization (with more than say 10 people) is communication BETWEEN teams, not inside the team. This design of isolating each individual team has led to a lot of inefficiency as the sort of ad-hoc conversations people would have with others on other teams basically stops.

[ericd]

Thanks for the feedback on the idea. My main complaint with open floor plan is the level of background noise is very high, and of a very distracting type. Within teams, though, we'd often gather around to discuss solutions to tough problems before we coded them up. This was all ad-hoc, so it did help that we were all in the same area. The main thing I could have done without was the cross chatter from other teams.

Small call rooms were available throughout to address the private call issue, so there was never any sort of hunt.