[akeefer]

At Guidewire we've worked in an open-plan office for basically the whole life of the company (roughly 10 years), and it's worked really well for us (by whatever metric you like: successful products, financial success, employee retention). Yes, it can be distracting to people, so most people bring headphones, and it's important for people to be considerate and move discussions or phone calls into side offices and conference rooms.

At least with the type of software we build, though, communication is absolutely critical, and it's amazing how much a difference of even 10 feet makes in the frequency with which people talk. The optimum layout for us is roughly 1 or 2 clusters of 4-6 desks per "pod" (i.e. a cross-functional team consisting of developers, product managers, and qa that are all working on the same area of the product). At that level, when people are talking about something, what they're talking about is almost always relevant to you, so it's not necessarily a distraction: they're talking about your code and your project, so it's a good thing that you can overhear and participate in the conversation if you wish. If you didn't hear those conversations, you'd be out of the loop. It's often better to be a little more distracted and all on the same page than have a team of 5 engineers plowing ahead in different directions.

That's a common conflation when talking about software engineering in general: it's not just how much you get done, it's what you get done. If you get a ton of work done on the wrong thing, you might feel really productive, but you're not actually creating any value. At least with our software, a high level of communication is necessary for most projects to ensure that everyone is on the same page and rowing in the same direction. When that communication breaks down, projects start to fail.

Your mileage may vary, of course, depending on the size of your team and the nature of what you're building. (And it goes without saying that a giant warehouse with desks arranged like an 1890's cloth factory is a terrible idea; you have to consider lines of sight, and acoustics, and other environmental things. Not all open plan offices are the same.) But this assumption that open plan offices have been "proven" to be sub-optimal flies in the face of plenty of empirical evidence from companies like mine that have used them very successfully.

[enginous]

I'm glad this is working for you. I agree that different teams will probably respond in different ways to open-plan offices, and that not all such offices are created equally.

However, your claim that this has worked "really well" for you "for basically the whole life of the company ... by whatever metric" is not "plenty of empirical evidence." It's anecdotal, and most importantly lacks a comparison to a different arrangement (a control). You have no idea if any of your chosen metrics (however debatable for team effectiveness) would be better for your current team in a different set-up.

I also disagree that just because the conversations people hear are about the product, constantly overhearing conversations is therefore productive. If you need everyone in the team to talk about every decision at all times, this is probably either brought on by too few conversations or a lacking framework for productive communication.

> If you didn't hear those conversations, you'd be out of the loop.

Why aren't you keeping track of decisions and new information formally, e.g. by e-mail? How do you keep employees functional after they get sick or go on a leave? If you have processes for that, then it is not absolutely essential to hear those conversations; employees can read the important stuff at the end of the day.

[akeefer]

The problem with all these debates about "optimal" office layouts is that they're all a series of non-repeatable experiments: someone can always say "Sure, you were successful doing X, but if you'd done Y instead you would have been more successful."

The hypothesis that Y is superior then becomes non-falsifiable: if someone doing Y fails, it wasn't because they did Y it must have been another factor, and if someone not doing Y succeeds, then they would have been better off doing Y. At some point, the argument becomes completely unhinged from any real-world experience.

So really, all I can say is: we have open-plan offices, and we've been successful/productive/kept employees happy, so clearly it is possible for open-plan offices to work. For someone that's convinced that open-plan offices can't possibly be a good idea, and who rejects other people's real-world experiences, what is there left to argue over? The hypothesis becomes non-falsifiable and there's no point talking about it.

To your point about conversations, when people are sick or on leave or working remotely those conversations don't happen and we suffer as a result. We haven't found any replacement for impromptu conversation, or for gaining knowledge through overhead conversations, and so on.

Just as a stupid example (though this sort of thing happens all the time), suppose Chris goes to ask Bob a question, and Alice is setting next to Bob. Bob thinks the answer is that you have to do A, but Bob's wrong, and Alice knows it: the right answer is now to do B. On top of that, Denise, who's also sitting there, hears the answer as well, and just learned something effectively by osmosis.

If Alice wasn't sitting there, able to hear the question, she wouldn't have jumped in, and Chris would have gotten the wrong answer and wasted hours or days doing the wrong thing. Denise also wouldn't be clued in to how things should work either. If Bob had a private office that Chris went to, or it was a one-off IM or phone call, you'd have the same problems. Did everyone get a little distracted by overhearing that conversation? Yes. But ultimately, that productivity hit was worth it, because Chris was saved a ton of time and Denise and Bob gained useful knowledge.

If you can convince people to use something like Campfire where they route all communication through such that people who are remote or momentarily absent are included, I think that can take the place of overhearing those conversations, but it's impossible (in my experience) to convince people to do that when they're working in the same building: people would rather just go chat face-to-face since it's much higher bandwidth than typing.

[enginous]

You're right, office conditions are notoriously hard to research because variables are abundant. However, there are ways to measure it empirically. In the design of an experiment like that, you'd want to use metrics that are heavily dependent on the change. Measuring financial outcomes is no good, because they are affected in significant ways by a number of other factors (including a large factor of luck).

A better metric for this kind of research could be stress levels because they are significantly dependent on changes in physical working environments. Stress is affected by a number of other work factors, such as management, work/life balance and workload, but these can be measured and controlled for. The effects of stress on various performance outcomes are fairly well understood, so this relationship can be used in tandem with other variables to ensure that a change is having the hypothesized effect. Again, it's not simple, but it's far removed from having no comparison.

I wouldn't suggest using online communications for every decision, but rather recording the essence of each substantial conversation digitally. Tasking one person with sending an e-mail containing the conclusion of a discussion takes a fraction of the man-hours consumed by a conversation, especially if many people are frequently involved (which I still advocate against).

Further, summarizing by e-mail is an aid to people's memories, helps avoid miscommunication by establishing a mutual understanding, and chronicles decisions and progress for later review or lookup.

[gizzlon]

Just FYI, I think that really depends on what kind of a person you are.. Some people prefer to write because it gives them an opportunity to explain things in an ordered, and well thought out fashion.

[Drbble]

That is a great example and happens all the time. This can be handled decently well by something like Skype, or just using code reviews and design reviews like professional engineers we claim to be.