There's one environment in which an open-plan office makes sense: a trading desk. (I was a trader for a year.) That's because 5 seconds means a lot on the marke

There's one environment in which an open-plan office makes sense: a trading desk. (I was a trader for a year.) That's because 5 seconds means a lot on the markets. If millions of dollars can be lost per second, you can't afford the Bell Labs culture. However, on-the-desk quants and IT are genuinely respected for their sacrifice. Sure, they have to be highly available from 9:20 to 4:10, but the rest of the time is completely their own (usually for research; they tend to work 11-hour days not because anyone is making them, but because they love the work). They're paid very well for that intense 7 hours, and no one would subject them to the humiliation of "Agile" micromanagement. Quants have traders come by to ask about trading strategies at high levels, but they don't deal with PMs and "story points" and arguments about whether what they worked on over the past week was "in the backlog" or not. Quants have something much closer to an open allocation environment than most software engineers, and if they can't hack the stress (and not everyone can, especially for years on end) of being on the desk, they're usually moved to off-the-desk roles and the change isn't stigmatized. (Some will come in and say that quants are second-class citizens in hedge funds and, if one looks at 95th-percentile compensation, that appears to be true. Quants hit a ceiling around $500k-1.5M, which is 1% of what the best traders make, but they're respected. On the other hand, non-managing programmers are third-class citizens in most Valley startups, and they aren't making any money either.) Open-plan offices make sense on trading desks, just as "Agile" makes sense for a small consulting firm on the make-or-break project that'll take it into the big leagues (under which it's reasonable to ask the tech staff to truly "sprint", because delivering the project will result in a quantum leap in client relations, quality of work, and compensation). The problem is that management tends to take these processes that conditionally result in high performance (for a short while) and attempt to implement the costly, negative and painful aspects (e.g. open-plan offices and Scrum) while failing to deliver the upside (e.g. quant-level bonuses, genuine equity rather than 0.05% bullshit) that makes talented people willing to tolerate the pain.