[bane]

Having worked in a variety layouts, I'd say the small team room setup is among the best. It's open layout within the team room, but the team gets their own room, sets their own culture etc. The lead for the team is the interface into the room. When the team is heads down on work it'll get quiet, and the room doubles as a conference room saving floor space. The only hard part is sizing the rooms and teams appropriately so you don't end up with stragglers sitting away from the team -- they'll never ever integrate into the team.

Open floor plans with offices are among the most caustic I've ever encountered as everybody jostles and resents those that get offices. Inevitably some criteria for office assignment will get set and then you'll run out of offices and some various persons who've worked long and hard to "earn" an office won't be able to get one and now you have a senior disgruntled bad apple in among your rank and file.

Open floor plans are terrible too, but a step down from open with offices. They often backfire in weird ways as well. In one place I worked the dev area was an open office with breakout conference rooms. The unwritten culture was that it had to be as quiet as a tomb. Which also meant there was no communication happening...so it was pointless as a communication mixer. People stopped checking their email and communication deadlocked.

[zhemao]

Wait, why did people stop checking email? I don't see how that relates to the open plan office. I've worked in open-plan offices and team rooms before, and people were generally pretty responsive on email and IM.

[bane]

Like I said, it can backfire in weird ways. I think it happened because the silence rule made people stop verbal communications, which is the most natural thing in an open office, and it never switched to using email because well...it seems weird to email somebody who's right there. So email clients stayed closed and the communications culture just generally shut down.

[andrewflnr]

Odd. Everywhere I've been with an open office, it's perfectly normal to use electronic chat with someone who's next to you. I guess you would want to make that part of the culture early on, to make it less awkward.