[codeonfire]

A point on 3. Some devs know what they are doing and prefer working alone in a quiet area. A lot of other devs have no idea what they are doing and disparage any situation where people aren't practically sharing seats and doing each other's work. Why? because they want other people around them to answer their questions, to do their work, and solve their problems. They are not "feeding" off interaction. They simply don't know the job. Do surgeons only work in groups because surgery is such as social experience that they feed off the social energy which lets them really bro down and do some surgery? No.

The people who typically put offices together usually don't come from an academic background and they typically don't do anything by themselves. Ever. They go from meeting to meeting all day. They have no basis for understanding that some jobs require individual effort. They buy group B's pitch by default. So they make some really bad mistakes:

Open floor plan - great for people who need to ask a lot of questions. bad for people who know the answers and will get interrupted.

Face to Face seating - great for people who want to get other people's attention. bad for people who want to concentrate on hard problems.

[lefthansolo]

Good points, but I work with someone that is very able, very smart, but is an extrovert. I've actually never worked with anyone that was an extrovert and didn't do the work on their own, but I've heard of them. Usually if someone doesn't know what they are doing, they don't want to let on about it. It just becomes obvious.

What I don't understand is that when I go to small tech startups, the layout is almost always like Facebook's: face-to-face in an open room. Sure it is cheap, but I agree it is hard for some of us to think in those environments. I think Microsoft's "everyone gets an office" is best from the introvertive, thinking developer's point of view. Unfortunately, that isn't enough to make them great. And cubes suck.