Rather than asking a hypothetical, it probably would have been better to test it. Create an open floor plan with say 100 engineers. Survey job satisfaction be

Rather than asking a hypothetical, it probably would have been better to test it. Create an open floor plan with say 100 engineers. Survey job satisfaction before and N months after. At that point decide how people can be the most productive. People believe a lot of things about themselves that don't hold up to scrutiny. For example, people think they can multitask, etc and studies show that the aren't nearly as productive doing that as they think they are. People think that open offices help collaboration, but that is not what the research shows. >Previous studies of open plan offices have shown that they make people less productive, but most of those studies gave lip service to the notion that open plan offices would increase collaboration, thereby offsetting the damage. https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/its-official-open-plan-offices-are-now-dumbest-management-fad-of-all-time.html https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/its-official-open-plan-of... >..A study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology of more than 40,000 workers in 300 US office buildings: "...Enclosed private offices clearly outperformed open-plan layouts in most aspects of IEQ (Indoor Environmental Quality), particularly in acoustics, privacy and the proxemics issues. Benefits of enhanced 'ease of interaction' were smaller than the penalties of increased noise level and decreased privacy resulting from open-plan office configuration." https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/science-just-proved-that-open-plan-offices-destroy-productivity.html https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/science-just-proved-that-... An article in the New Yorker summarizes some research on open offices. Besides the effects on productivity, there are also health effects. For example: >...In a recent study of more than twenty-four hundred employees in Denmark, Jan Pejtersen and his colleagues found that as the number of people working in a single room went up, the number of employees who took sick leave increased apace. >...In laboratory settings, noise has been repeatedly tied to reduced cognitive performance. The psychologist Nick Perham, who studies the effect of sound on how we think, has found that office commotion impairs workers’ ability to recall information, and even to do basic arithmetic. Listening to music to block out the office intrusion doesn’t help: even that, Perham found, impairs our mental acuity. Exposure to noise in an office may also take a toll on the health of employees. In a study by the Cornell University psychologists Gary Evans and Dana Johnson, clerical workers who were exposed to open-office noise for three hours had increased levels of epinephrine—a hormone that we often call adrenaline, associated with the so-called fight-or-flight response. https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-open-office-trap https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-open-office-...