[hyperman1]

I do wonder about this, to be honest.

I vaguely remember a study, long ago, about which professors and assistants did the best work.

They found a correlation between where in the hallway your office was and the quality of your output: when more people were walking by, the quality went up.

The assumption was that output of work was comparable or even slightly higher for the loners, but the relevance and creativity was higher for the more walked by people. Other people pull you back to reality and let unrelated things pop up in your mind

I can't find the study and don't condone management pushing their workforce against trying to get work done. Even so, I do find the result of that study plausible.

[showsover]

That does seem like it would make sense if you're working on the same product, in the same team, or in the same location. My team consists of 6 developers, 4 of which in one city, 1 in another city, and the last one in another country. Every time we 4 go to the office we're still in remote calls and meetings, but this time in an open office with no noise cancellation.

The other people in the office are either sales people constantly in calls, or other teams with their own issues.