[unclebucknasty]

I can't say for certain, but I would guess it has something to do with the idea that all people must be available to each other at all times for the sake of raw productivity. So if there is a problem there is no time to wait. You just walk right up to the person you need to speak with and get it resolved then and there.

Open offices facilitate that feeling of persistent accessibility and production. No closed doors to slow anyone down, and no notion that you are there to do anything but work every minute of every day. So why on Earth would anyone need privacy?

This is full-on agile ethos. And, for the same reason, agile is also responsible for the reversal of telecommute policies at some companies.

[fxtentacle]

You make a valid point. And I believe open office spaces are wrong for the same reasons that I believe agile is wrong: both assume that all work is fundamentally similar.

When I call someone and in the background I can hear 20 other people talk, I immediately assume that the person I called is not considered important in his/her company. Because high-level work needs uninterrupted quiet time.

For agile, it's similar. When you stop having different roles, then you implicitly assume that your lead architect and your junior trainee can do the same work, albeit at different speeds. If your architect has useful experience, that's an insult. Or it means that your entire product is simplistic enough to be built purely by trainees.

So both open office and agile effectively reduce your programmers to expendable grunts.

[hanche]

I have read somewhere that there is often _less_ face-to-face communication in an open landscape than with single offices. Possible reasons include an unwillingness to disturb everyone else, and that people in such situations tend to turn inward in order to isolate themselves from everything and everyone around them.

Also (and somewhat contradictory to the above), I expect that, if your colleagues are _too_ easily available, you'll be running to them with a half baked question in your head, only to blurt it out before realising you didn't think it through, and wasting both their time and your own. But before you go knocking on someone's office door to ask a question, you really want to be sure that you know what you want to ask, and that you understand the problem well enough for the answer to make sense to you. Which leads to a better conversation, less time wasted, and better learning.

[asdff]

In practice, this sucks. I have been both the asker and the reciever of the open floorspace surprise question. The reciever looses their train of thought and will struggle to give a decent answer off the cuff, the asker gets a shitty response as a result, and probably has to ask someone else more questions. Far better would be an email, and definitely not slack.

[ohvirginia]

I understand but I think this is wrong. there's a benefit to asynchronous work and having multiple tasks in your queue that you're chipping away at its like the idea of task scheduling on a single processor I just think asynchronous is fundamentally more efficient for humans because they can maximize their productivity per task. And asynchronous "get back to you" allows there to be like a homeostatic equilibrium of priorities and allows everyone everything to get addressed. like hardware interrupts, and giving everyone that power, when it has a knock-on effect as well to whatever you working on it just doesn't make sense to me as something smart. I think it decreases productivity.