Open office has a feeling of a lab, the research lab, where undergrads do whatever, while grads are suffering their way to Master/Ph.D. and those that do resea

Open office has a feeling of a lab, the research lab, where undergrads do whatever, while grads are suffering their way to Master/Ph.D. and those that do research as a paid job get some privacy to make sure the grant money keeps on coming. You can't force a research result, so watching that everyone is "busy" just doesn't make sense practically. If the undergrads don't learn how to convert their time into an expected result, they just wasted _their own_ time. Taking an open office without this sort of research mentality is simply making everyone uncomfortable, and is setting up unrealistic expectations. If a team is result-oriented, then it doesn't matter if one didn't type N number of lines, or closed X number of tickets in a day. At the end of all, one reports to the team, not just a boss. You trust your team for the result, not for their not reading HN instead of resolving another bug.