3 ms·

Open floor plans can be a double edge sword buddy

• throwaway2037 4y ago
  Yes, exactly. When you sit right next to your business users and listen to their day-to-day activities or phone calls, it is priceless "ambient information". However, if you sit next to completely unrelated, but noisy team, it is hell! The trick is floor layout. The best companies in my experience obsess about floor layout to get relevant teams close!
  • UncleOxidant 4y ago
    In my experience as a software dev the "ambient information" that has tended to be most valuable was information about how the product was doing financially. I worked in an environment where we all had offices with doors and it was great but the "ambient information" I missed was that the sales of the product weren't going all that great and there were layoffs on the way. In a cube environment I think I would've heard a lot of chatter about layoffs coming weeks to months earlier. In this case I was pretty much blindsided.