Good for promoting collaboration, or merely an obstacle to privacy and productivity? Seems like it's very difficult to find a Bay Area tech company these days which doesn't use the open office plan. Facebook now has a 2800 person room in its headquarters, for example.
I'm not a fan of <i>working</i> in a open plan office - but I think they are a <i>great</i> idea for the companies I compete against. ;-)<p>A tiny team (2-4 developers) with some sort of walls (so you aren't looking over your monitor at someone else) is probably a good compromise between getting things done (concentration) and "collaboration" i.e. keeping others from concentrating.<p>I concentrate really well but it's still hard for my brain not to react to hearing my boss asking another engineer in the next cubicle say "What's the kind of matrix where the inverse is also its transpose?" That actually happened to me once and I blurted out the answer. When he then asked me directly, "Hey, you know about matrix math?" I smiled and told him "Not as far as you know." :-)
I think it's poison for a developer. I work(ed) for two companies with open floor plans as a freelancer and I try to minimize my onsite time as much as possible. Either I get close to zero work done or I have a splitting headache at the end of the day. Phones ringing, people talking, people walking, music playing - it's distracting as heck.<p>In my home office, which is a couple of miles outside the city, all I hear is birds chirping and rustling tree leaves. I guest I'm a bit spoiled in that way but it's a great working environment.<p>In my opinon, open floor plans serve only two purposes: lowering the costs of building and maintaining an office and keeping the staff monitored.<p>> Facebook now has a 2800 person room in its headquarters [...]<p>That sounds like a complete nightmare to me.
Some people really enjoy open floor plans and get a productivity boost out of them, particularly if they are often working as part of a small team or across multiple small teams. However, others much prefer and are more productive as solitary workers and would legitimately benefit from having stable offices. Sitting in an open area with your headphones on is not a serviceable substitute for an office. Accordingly, I think a mixed floor plan including both dedicated offices and some open space is ideal. I frankly don't understand why so many people tend to approach these as mutually exclusive things.
Open office is a deal breaker for me, because it simply underlines the ignorant approach of the company towards their employees - especially coders.<p>I have yet to see someone that performs better when constantly distracted or interrupted. Socializing ? I do that in my free time at other places and with people that I choose on my own.<p>Employee monitoring ? If you need such desperate measure to ensure that workers actually do their work, there's something terribly wrong.<p>Best setup from my personal experience are small 2-4 person offices.
I do my best work when uninterrupted for long periods.<p>My productivity suffers when I am interrupted seemingly at random by the needs of those inconsiderate enough to assume their need trumps whatever I am working on at the time.<p>Email, texting and instant message are controllable mediums. The only acceptable barrier to the real world interruptions accompanying open concept is a pair of headphones and that is too light a defense in my experience.
Part of the reason you get so many differences in opinion for these kinds of questions is it depends on the type of work and environment.<p>For example there are thousands of HN users who work in companies with <20 people. I personally have more than 5x that number of people on my floor.<p>There are companies where anything not directly work related is discouraged and then there are companies where having a 20min coffee break with co-workers, or having weekly team events, etc is encouraged. In the first kind of company it would be isolating to work in a private office, whereas in the second kind of company it could work well.<p>Etc, etc. Personally I hate open offices... but I work next to sales people and a few very loud co-workers.
I find that having about 20 people in room is a good number, above this many people, after discussing with them, find that larger rooms makes you less likely to collaborate due to being self-concious of so many people listening to the conversation
I really love them. I may be a programmer, but I still like have SOME social interaction and daylight. I could never work in a cubicle, that's really what hell looks like to me.