I'm not a fan of working in a open plan office - but I think they are a great idea for the companies I compete against. ;-) A tiny team (2-4 developers) with s

I'm not a fan of working in a open plan office - but I think they are a great idea for the companies I compete against. ;-) A tiny team (2-4 developers) with some sort of walls (so you aren't looking over your monitor at someone else) is probably a good compromise between getting things done (concentration) and "collaboration" i.e. keeping others from concentrating. I concentrate really well but it's still hard for my brain not to react to hearing my boss asking another engineer in the next cubicle say "What's the kind of matrix where the inverse is also its transpose?" That actually happened to me once and I blurted out the answer. When he then asked me directly, "Hey, you know about matrix math?" I smiled and told him "Not as far as you know." :-)