One thing I am wondering is how much of the perceived benefits of an open office are losses as the employees start to push back. A couple of years ago I had th

One thing I am wondering is how much of the perceived benefits of an open office are losses as the employees start to push back. A couple of years ago I had the interesting opportunity to visit a new startups offices frequently. They employs was about 50% developers and 50% sales, where a lot of the sales was done on the phone. During a 1 year period their environment changed dramatically: * They first started with only laptops and a clean desk policy (at the end of the work day one had to remove everything and take ones laptop home). They also wanted a paperless office. * Soon one developer started using an active noise cancellation headphone. Some laugh at first, but during the next 3 months everyone got hold of a pair for them self. * Many then moved away from the active noise cancellation headphones to full earmuffs originally meant for indoors firearms shooting. * More and more of the developers demanded desktop computers, because thus cannot be easily moved so they would get a de facto fixed seat. * To remove visual noise, some started wearing sunglasses and turned the brightness of their monitors to maximum, so they could only see their two monitors when they looked around. * A couple of mount out one got hold of a bookshelf to store some computer parts. He sat in a corner and quickly made a third wall with his new bookshelf. Soon everyone else also demanded their own bookshelf to. * People then started to erect walls using ad hook materials like plants, empty soda bootless, spear desks and rack servers that had become redundant when stuff got moved to the cloud. * Some of the sale people started to hang out in small groups in their cars. There they could smoke cigarettes, talk loud on the phones and surround them self with printouts. They looked a lot happier doing so :) * One developer quit citing all the noise as the only reason he left. Another refuses to come in to the office, and instead suggested that the company should rent an office for him at a startup incubator nearby (I believe they eventually made some kind of compromise where he would work 3 days from home and 2 days at the office). * Eventually the company was bought by a larger entity, but things deteriorated further, so almost everyone eventually left. The owners had signed a particularly bad earn-out agreement that severely punished them if there were any decrease in revenue, so when everyone left they only got about 20% of what they would have gotten if the company had stayed afloat. All in all I believe the end result could have been very different if they had had a better office layout. They sure at least did not save anything :)