[mathrat]

I used to think this. And then I went to work in an open plan office... and discovered I love it! The office is surprisingly quiet, considering there's about 50 people in the open plan. When conversation does spring up, it's often really interesting and worth listening in on. When it's not, I find I have no trouble tuning it out. Other people seem to more trouble, and they bring noise-canceling headphones.

Not saying that this can work for everyone at every organization. But I for one was pleasantly surprised. Fwiw I'm a pretty introverted guy who deeply values his privacy.

[mahyarm]

This really is organization dependent. Do your managers look over your shoulder and micromanage you? Would they get upset if they see HN in your web browser more than once or twice a day? Do you worry about them 'catching' you? Are you surrounded by 4 dozen people with multiple loud passionate discussions guaranteed to happen per day? Possibly in a language you don't understand most of the time? And whenever they do this making it very difficult to concentrate? Do they ignore your social requests to move it to a conference room, since they only last a few minutes and they're hunched over someones desk looking at something?

Do you know some people get a minor feeling of background anxiety when their back is to an open space with people talking and walking around? Their peripheral vision and senses conflict with the deep concentration required for software work.

Those noise cancelling headphones are meant to take out droning noises, such as AC system fans or jet engines in airplanes. Conversations with their lack of repetitiveness and human vocal ranges are not filtered out well, if at all. The music they will have to listen to filter you out is distracting in its own right.

Open Offices also decrease the barriers for interruption. Managers like it because they make their jobs a lot easier, because they get to hear what is happening and get status on their workers progress passively.

This is what open office means to many people.

[mathrat]

Agreed it's totally organization dependent. Basically fishtoaster said what I wanted to say more clearly than I did. It requires thoughtful management to get right. But I think the same is true of any office environment, open plan or no. I think the article is a bit unfair and essentially saying "badly managed open plan offices are bad."

[mahyarm]

It's like the Java argument. It's less likely for founders and managers setting the culture to screw up private offices or small group offices than open offices.

[jacques_chester]

> This really is organization dependent.

There are also personal factors at play. Different people thrive under different combinations of stimuli. I'm not a psychologist but I think it'd be related to the intraversion-extroversion axis of personality.

[avn2109]

If the discussion is in an unintelligible (to me) language, then it becomes ambient noise and is far less distracting.

[adestefan]

I was working at a place that switched to an open office plan with desks in groups of three or four. I was looking forward to it thinking that would foster much needed communication between two teams that shared the space. Instead, I found that I hated it and quit the job based largely on the open office plan.