[jobu]

"As a company grows, the cost of restructuring an office to accommodate more people in different layouts is time consuming and expensive. By having desks in an open plan and telephone rooms for quiet time, the idea is that you can solve the cost and flexibility problems while still offering a quiet place to retreat if needed. From a growth perspective this is smart. If I planned to add 30 employees to our office in the next 12 months I might not have a choice otherwise."

Well said. Some people like to blame it on founders too cheap to buy decent furniture, but rearranging people every few months is time consuming and disruptive (It can also kill morale when someone loses a window or gets stuck under a vent.)

[Swizec]

I still prefer to just stay home when I have to actually get stuff done. Offices are weird.

It's not even about open or not. But I can only be really productive if I'm completely alone.

[practicalpants]

This is the elephant in the room in these open office debates.

Yes, for programming at least, concentration and productivity is better when you move from an open office to something slightly more insular... But you're still thinking within a traditional office paradigm. If your goal is truly increased productivity, let's talk about remote flexibility.

Yet... for stake holders, it just seems wrong to have your workers be too independent. "Company culture" and "we're all in it together" is great for company owners, but at it's core it's really just a now widely normalized practice to get workers to invest even more energy and mindshare.

I can only imagine an increased openness to remote work setups (for geographically local workers) in the coming years. Makes too much sense.

[Swizec]

This is the elephant in the room in remote work debates: remote makes you more productive at work work, on-site makes you more productive at office politics.

Which is better for your career? Hint: it's not remote.

[Florin_Andrei]

+1 million

Really hard problem that needs to be solved real fast? Call me on my cell phone if a fire breaks out, otherwise see ya tomorrow.

If I had a private room (or even a cube on a quiet floor) I'd stay at the office instead.

[robotkilla]

I have been working (programmer - contracting) from home for 3 years and these have been the most productive 3 years of my life.

[marssaxman]

Yes, the seven years I worked from home every day were without question the most productive of my life so far.

It was interesting to see how different coworkers liked to communicate. Some people strongly preferred phone calls, while I strongly preferred IM - I can carry on a conversation or two via text without fully dropping out of my flow, while engaging speech/hearing seems to require a full context transition.

[VLM]

"the cost of restructuring an office to accommodate more people in different layouts"

From actual experience having been there, we saved money by simply not doing that. We did move cubes and offices on a fairly regular basis such that someone "tortured" by the air conditioner wouldn't suffer for long and likewise I only had a nice office for about a year.

WRT colocated teams, a long time ago I sat kitty corner to a guy who programmed FPGA based ISDN channel PBX cards for a living, and I should care why, exactly, as long as we were good neighbors to each other, which we were? I sat next to the guy who was in charge of OSPF internal routing despite my being a BGP guy and my BGP partner in crime sat fifty feet away, and it didn't really matter much because some of my BGP peers sat two thousand miles away? When I got a call in the middle of the night to fix something, I fixed it, not drive to one of my teammates houses so I can sit next to them before starting work.

Architecture decisions can help. All cubes must have a visitor chair preferably 2 or 3, although people "illegally" stacked manuals or threw coats on their chairs if they wanted to keep people out. A bit of work is necessary to stop people from sneaking up on you by orienting desks facing the cube entrance.

One of the most shocking things I've seen in open plan offices is the visual clutter. Its like working in the dirtiest most distracting looking house I've ever seen. I have junk laying around on my desk, but most open plans look like a tornado struck a Walmart. What a heap.