I prefer the open plan — I love it! In my 30+ years of corporate life, I have the smallest working space ever (36 inches of desk space), and I think it's awesom

I prefer the open plan — I love it! In my 30+ years of corporate life, I have the smallest working space ever (36 inches of desk space), and I think it's awesome. I work at a place that does pair programming, so I'm always engaged in some form of communication. I worked from home on occasion, but I didn't like it: I got lonesome, and was easily distracted and my productivity suffered. Sometimes it gets really loud. Yesterday my pair said, "It's too loud; I can't think." I hadn't noticed. I'm not an epidemiologist — I don't know whether working closely makes people sick more often — but I do know that in the last 5 years I only took 3 hours of sick leave when I didn't feel good one afternoon. Other than that I've been has healthy as ever. I'm not a one-size-fits-all guy — I realize that an open plan doesn't work for many people (one of my talented peers is now working at Uber partly for that reason), but for some of us it's a godsend.