Comment by jsutton
6 years ago
In my experience, open offices help out the team's productivity and rapport, at the expense of personal productivity.
I get the desire to have one's own semi-private space to focus on their work and not be bothered. But if you're working in a team, then open plans probably are beneficial and worth the trade off.
How can the team be productive if its members are not personally productive? It seems to me about the only person that would be getting a productivity boon out of this is the team leader.
It allows for more questions for the team leads and ad-hoc pair programming, which likely cuts the productivity of the team lead (or more knowledgable workers) while benefitting the members on the team with less experience.
There's a big difference between huge-room open floorplans with no or low-walled cubicles, and open team rooms with a handful of people in them.
Personally, I like opens spaces for small teams, so closed offices big enough for maybe 6-8 people, tops
This is what we have that I rather enjoy. Half a dozen programmers in a room with cubicles, just have to lean over to talk to somebody (teams are next to each other).
Further discussions are moved to the conference room which is dedicated to us programmers, with a TV we can cast to, etc.
Off topic discusssions or lengthy ones are expected to take place in the conference or break room.
We have ms teams (bleh) for trivial questions.