[lifeisstillgood]

I think some of the best and most productive days I have had have been where I have been in the same cramped office as the rest of my team and we were all working on different chunks of the same problem - "Bob - are you using a list or a dictionary to pass the foobars in?"

That's great for a single team all working on one thing - but I do not see the open plan office as a series of nicely appointed open plan offices for 4-8 people with sound-proofing.

I have worked in open plan offices with hundreds of people in the same open-plan - hearing birthdays, laughter, horror, lunchtimes and socialising that have nothing to do with me personally or professionally.

Cornell may have found that it is useful to know what the rest if your physically co-located team is working on - yes - but not hundreds of others that I need to filter out too.

If serendipity is valuable to you as a company, throw a Wednesday afternoon mixer and expect groups to form and make something new to try out. But give them team rooms for that wednesday.

I am a big fan of "team rooms", and a big big fan of remote working and always on video. But living in the middle of hundreds of others just teaches us to ignore everyone.

[matwood]

I agree, team rooms are really the best of both. I've worked in all sorts of environments.

When I started programming years ago I had to wear a tie to work, and shared an office with one other person. I've since worked in large open plans, at home, in cubes, and in what would be called team rooms with everyone from the intern to the boss sitting within earshot.

IHMO, team rooms really do work. They help facilitate communication while not bothering those working with undue noise. If the team is under a crunch then naturally non-work conversations are kept to a minimum because the whole team knows it is crunch time. When there is more free time then the team adjusts accordingly.

[maaaats]

I agree, team rooms is a suitable middle ground. You get the info and time-saving disrupting between members of the team, and get to ignore stuff from outside the team. If there's people running between all the rooms, a designated "contact person of the day" for each team is a good idea.

[gtirloni]

I think team rooms are a problem if, and only if, they are permanent. I've worked in cubicles, open floors and permanent team rooms and in the later all people did was to use the privacy to surf the web, talk about stupid stuff they would not dare to mention in a open floor. It made it very tricky to concentrate, but at least the problem was concentrate and a talk with the team leader / manager would usually quiet thing down for a while.

Ad-hoc team rooms sound like a very good idea though.

[doktrin]

> But living in the middle of hundreds of others just teaches us to ignore everyone.

This is an important point. For many of us who have worked in startups, "open office plan" really just means "team room". I enjoyed working in open office plans in smaller companies since it basically just meant 5-10 engineers sitting in the same space.

Last year I worked for a mid-size company of about ~200 employees, most of whom were crammed into a gigantic factory like space with endless arrays of fluorescent lights lining the ceiling.

The experience was among the most distracting I can remember. This was in no small part due to having to overhear loud conversations between people in different departments, such as marketing and sales, which require much more verbal communication than engineering. if I can help it I will never work in a similar environment again.

[lifeisstillgood]

That is probably the most important point - the reason startups go from a "team room" to massive open plan is because when it all began there were only 5 of them so open plan equaled sane. Add 20 more people and it's not sane anymore.

the reason startups do open plan offices is because no one is concentrating on managing the culture of the startup as it grows. Open plan is then I suspect both cause and symptom.

A campaign for team rooms is needed