It's funny but I think both sides of this argument are equally valid. Personally I think you need to interrupt coding frequently, for health and for cognitive

It's funny but I think both sides of this argument are equally valid. Personally I think you need to interrupt coding frequently, for health and for cognitive freshness. When I've been tech lead, often the most heads-down devs produced the most problematic code if you didn't check in on them. My belief was along the lines of "if you don't throw away everything and start over at least once you're doing it wrong," with the idea being that coding too fast results in complex, un-elegant solutions. Finally, in a fast-paced environment, you simply have to check in with each other, and having to schedule meetings or calls just sucks. The team I'm in right now is not co-located and we're losing tons of productivity. And yet. When I work at a remote location (not home but near-home, not at the main site), I get TONS more coding, research, writing, and shit work done. No comparison. The work I'm doing now is perhaps more amenable to sole-contributor stuff, but I recall in the faster-paced jobs this was also true. It seems like flexibility is needed. Open-plan is great, but maybe rotating offices would be good, where people can spend a day in them cranking some stuff out, and then come up for air for the rest of the week.