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Open plan offices have been known to be bad since at least 1987, when the first edition of Peopleware was published. A good portion of the book discusses issue

Open plan offices have been known to be bad since at least 1987, when the first edition of Peopleware was published. A good portion of the book discusses issues with employee distraction and its inverse relationship to productivity. They use evidence from the field to discuss office layout, and also other issues like office wide paging systems (that used to be a thing!), phone calls, and email.

bitwize 8y ago
Have the authors of Peopleware actually run the numbers? If they are such a bad idea, why do open offices proliferate? It seems to me like the backlash against open offices is a small minority of programmers with autism spectrum disorders and chapped-ass syndrome. Your job is not to have your whims catered to so you can be maximally productive. Your job is to bring value to the company. And that means working well in an open-office environment since that seems to work best for the company.
- opo 8y ago
  >...It seems to me like the backlash against open offices is a small minority of programmers with autism spectrum disorders and chapped-ass syndrome. What makes you say that? The vast majority of the comments on this thread are from people who have had bad experiences with open floor plans. While there may be some who have been diagnosed on the autism spectrum, none have mentioned, that. >...Your job is to bring value to the company. And that means working well in an open-office environment since that seems to work best for the company. If you find something that makes yourself and your team less productive, the way you bring value to the company is to let people know. For example, if your work machine is 10 years old and takes N times longer to do a build than a new machine would, don't pretend you are being a good employee by not mentioning it to the company. Same goes for other parts of the work environment.
- sctb 8y ago
  Could you please not post shallow, inflammatory dismissals like this? The context for this discussion is a recent study (see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17448187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17448187) that ought to count as “running the numbers”.

bitwize 8y ago

Have the authors of Peopleware actually run the numbers? If they are such a bad idea, why do open offices proliferate? It seems to me like the backlash against open offices is a small minority of programmers with autism spectrum disorders and chapped-ass syndrome. Your job is not to have your whims catered to so you can be maximally productive. Your job is to bring value to the company. And that means working well in an open-office environment since that seems to work best for the company.

opo 8y ago
>...It seems to me like the backlash against open offices is a small minority of programmers with autism spectrum disorders and chapped-ass syndrome. What makes you say that? The vast majority of the comments on this thread are from people who have had bad experiences with open floor plans. While there may be some who have been diagnosed on the autism spectrum, none have mentioned, that. >...Your job is to bring value to the company. And that means working well in an open-office environment since that seems to work best for the company. If you find something that makes yourself and your team less productive, the way you bring value to the company is to let people know. For example, if your work machine is 10 years old and takes N times longer to do a build than a new machine would, don't pretend you are being a good employee by not mentioning it to the company. Same goes for other parts of the work environment.
sctb 8y ago
Could you please not post shallow, inflammatory dismissals like this? The context for this discussion is a recent study (see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17448187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17448187) that ought to count as “running the numbers”.