Comment by ChrisMarshallNY

I know that one of the main patterns in Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language was "Light From Two Sides."

Basically, corner rooms are best.

When we worked with a German company, I was impressed by their offices. They tended to have two engineers per office, with really large windows.

I was told there's actually a law that requires it.

I remember visiting the Facebook office, in New York, and was kind of aghast. It was this huge open-plan cavern, with the managers' offices around the edges (with the windows), and rows of desks, in a fairly dimly-lit pit, in the middle. Of course, the desks all faced each other, and the engineers' backs were to the aisles, with no real buffer between where people walked, and where they worked. It was also noisy.

The Japanese do something similar, but at the company I worked for, there was a lot of natural light in the open-plan offices. The managers don't get offices; just desks, nearer the windows, and the aisles were quite wide.

A VP, with a billion-dollar budget, would have a little desk in the corner that would embarrass a fifth-grade teacher.

And the offices were whisper-quiet, with hundreds of people working in the room.