> The prevailing wisdom previous to Covid, was that you had to be colocated in an open floor plan, sitting next to each other, and overhearing conversations, in

> The prevailing wisdom previous to Covid, was that you had to be colocated in an open floor plan, sitting next to each other, and overhearing conversations, in order to facilitate collaboration. That may have been the prevailing trend, but programmers were pretty clear in pointing out how destructive for performance and focus this open office trend was. There is an avalanche of data pointing to how harmful the openoffice layout is for everything from declining morale to decreasing productivity hits to faster spread of disease and increasing worker stress levels. This clear and unambiguous data was widely disseminated in the popular press. The only reason firms ignored all the data and did this was to save on real estate costs and to mimic other firms. To anyone who bothered to spend 10 seconds googling the topic, all the research was obvious, except no one bothered to do that very basic due diligence and see if there was any data whatsoever to support the openoffice thesis. https://www.workfront.com/blog/what-science-says-about-open-offices https://www.workfront.com/blog/what-science-says-about-open-... https://www.forbes.com/sites/jiawertz/2019/06/30/open-plan-work-spaces-lower-productivity-employee-morale/?sh=16605d1d61cd https://www.forbes.com/sites/jiawertz/2019/06/30/open-plan-w... https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/07/in-open-offices-workers-chat-70-less-are-less-productive-and-email-more/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/07/in-open-offices-work...