[msluyter]

I call your one study and raise you 100:

In 2011, the organizational psychologist Matthew Davis reviewed more than a hundred studies about office environments. He found that, though open offices often fostered a symbolic sense of organizational mission, making employees feel like part of a more laid-back, innovative enterprise, they were damaging to the workers’ attention spans, productivity, creative thinking, and satisfaction. Compared with standard offices, employees experienced more uncontrolled interactions, higher levels of stress, and lower levels of concentration and motivation. When David Craig surveyed some thirty-eight thousand workers, he found that interruptions by colleagues were detrimental to productivity, and that the more senior the employee, the worse she fared.

Source: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/currency/2014/01/the-o...

Edited to add: the study by Matthew Davis referenced above is behind a paywall; if anyone can actually access it, I'd be curious to know for sure if this summary is accurate/correct.

[Anderkent]

It's not clear from the article if the study measures individual productivity or team results. The pdf is paywalled unfortunately, can anyone clarify?

[shaneofalltrad]

These studies are all great, but fall under what type of students and/or test subjects that already have been filtered in other ways before being tested. We all are different. Along your request to clarify, I would like to request any studies on a 7-9 man team.

I am one of those people who get distracted easily and am a new programmer. Working on a Scrum team of less than 10, I found this has grown into being very productive for the team and my growth, as I pick up the conversations, I am actually learning things and I throw my music on if the chatter is unproductive. I think the amount of dev's in the pit really can max out and that is what the writer of this article has probably experienced.

[cwal37]

Google cached what is presumably a draft or first submission of the article: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Im7GHQR...

[cwal37]

I spent a while trying to get it, went through the online library systems of two very different universities, which should theoretically cover almost every topic, and a lab. However, it seems that it's listed as an ebook in at least one of the systems, and it won't let me grab any specific article. I could request a physical or scanned copy I guess, but that would take longer than is probably worthwhile.

However, google search turned up that leeds link you probably came across in google scholar (or at least I did), and while the link appears to be dead, google has kept a cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Im7GHQR...

[briantakita]

> he found that interruptions by colleagues were detrimental to productivity, and that the more senior the employee, the worse she fared.

My personal take. Learning a craft is a lifelong endeavor. Experience builds. The path is organic & fractal-like.

If someone is senior, they have a context of experience that a more junior person does not have. Their brains are literally wired differently.

It's less satisfying to be around ignorant (I don't mean judgement, just lack of context) people. Especially ignorant people who affect how you do your job.

Being a senior person means there is an aspect of leadership involved. You mentor & lead the more junior people in your craft. However, masters don't spend most of their time mentoring. They spend most of their time growing their own personal craft. They try to instill this process of continuous improvement onto their students.

[abalone]

I'd be curious to read the study too.

One of the most fascinating observations by Cornell is how self-interested employees are biased towards maximum individual productivity to the detriment of team productivity. I wonder if the 100 other studies controlled for that. Cornell is a pretty reputable institution. You know what they say.. 1 great study is worth 100 good ones.

[Realskeptic]

woah, thanks for sharing