[bjourne]

In my experience, regular programming is doable in open floor plans. You can write stupid crud sites and winforms apps just fine. As long you have headphones on.

But when you have a system crash and need to dive through 100mb of log files to try and figure out what went wrong. Good luck doing that in a standard open office! You just have to schedule a few hours after everyone else has gone home so you can have some peace and quiet to do your log diving.

I honestly think the traits that make you able to hack the Linux kernel, optimize the linear algebra required for the internals of a 3d engine, write Haskell etc are incompatible with preferring open floor plans.

Edit: Btw, if you are able to do these "high level advanced" programming tasks while in a noisy open floor plan I would be very amazed. For me it's like trying to play chess against a highly rated opponent and that is impossible to do competently if you have to endure constant interruptions.

[TillE]

This really says it all. If you're doing something which involves a great deal of concentration or careful thought (eg, software design) or learning something new, then interruptions are death.

Simpler work where you know exactly what you're doing, where there are no difficult choices to be made, can probably be accomplished in any environment. Sometimes that's the vast majority of the work you're doing, sometimes it's not. It really depends on the type of application.

[thejosh]

I have the exact same feelings, in an open office and are a developer who does braindead work then it's great as you can chat while working on repetitive tasks.

Anything that requires thinking, such as fixing a release-blocker bug that is very obvious once you get in the zone is pretty much lost.