[JeremyMorgan]

The thing to consider here is Stack Exchange is a company that serves geeks, and is built by geeks. Naturally the culture and values of the company are going revolve around developers. But for a huge chunk of the companies out there everything revolves around sales and marketing. The actual role and importance of developers varies from company to company but very few of them are going to revolve around them in the same way. At many they're an afterthought.

While there is no "typical manager" it's safe to say that if you sample any given company and take all their managers and executives you won't find a lot of coders. Executives don't sit around talking about Rust vs Go, because it really isn't that important to their business most of the time. So they really have no idea what it's like to be a coder, and probably don't take up a lot of cycles thinking about it.

Most jobs do benefit from collaboration. Development is no exception, however too much socialization and interruptions kill us. This is what they fail to understand on most levels. They see sales, marketing, and other groups that benefit from being able to swivel a chair and ask a question and automatically assume that it will help developers, since they "never meet their deadlines" anyway.

So in my opinion the push for open offices for coders is mostly out of touch thinking, a little need for micromanagement, and of course being able to show off work being done for people taking a walk through. How that affects developers is of little concern.

[GFischer]

Consultants are also part of the problem.

I did a Master's degree that shared half its classes with the MBA, and we had some case studies where a consultant was the hero by literally tearing down a wall between sales and operations (the small company had communication and "empathy" issues).

I always end up linking to this summary of Chapter 12 of Peopleware:

http://javatroopers.com/Peopleware.html#Chapter_12

[Terr_]

I'm reminded of an old Dilbert comic--which I can't seem to find online--where the CEO or consultant is hailed as visionary by alternately proposing "centralize everything which is decentralized" and "decentralize everything which is centralized."

I guess that could be applied to physical space...

[m_myers]

I believe it's a page from Build a Better Life by Stealing Office Supplies, not an actual strip.

[Terr_]

I'm quite certain there was--if not a full strip--at least an illustration involving the the CEO... Not the now-staple pointy-haired manager, but the heavily-jowled guy who's been supplanted by the bullet-headed CEO in recent years.

Each time, a diagram is behind him, either of a hub-and-spoke diagram or a spread-out cloud of nodes.

[m_myers]

I remember exactly the illustrations you're talking about. They were on a left-hand page of the book.

Build a Better Life is composed mostly of pages divided into quadrants, in which Dogbert introduces the page's theme in the upper left and the next three sections illustrate it.

[Phlarp]

This line of thinking becomes even easier to justify internally when the open office answer is generally also the cheapest solution.

[anotherevan]

That depends by what metric you measure the cost. It may be the cheapest up front in terms of dollars, but hideously expensive in terms of lost effectiveness of employees.

[Someone1234]

I do agree with what you're saying. However whenever any popular startup's offices are posted a lot of developers/coders down fawn over it, so there does seem to be a lot of developers who seem to like the concept of an open plan office even if they'd regret it once they actually started working there.

[JeremyMorgan]

Yeah it's not a hard rule, some people like it. Personally I have no problem with either layout and can adapt. But with most of the people I've worked with over the years, the constant interruptions and people looking over your shoulder drives them nuts.

[emodendroket]

What I've seen in newspapers suggests even for non-coding jobs these sorts of plans reduce productivity.

[normloman]

Marketing person here. I hate open offices too.

My boss insists it makes everyone more "open."

[totalforge]

Open to him.