That's what human resources tells you. Do managers work in open office spaces? Surely they must communicate. Typically you don't communicate non-stop during the work day. If you're a developer at Facebook that might be 10 - 20%. With open office you are in a busy environment for 100% of the time. It is because the management is stupid and cheap, of course.prdlm2009 wrote:An open office makes the assumption that you actually want to communicate with your co-workers. Why would anybody want to do that?
Bleh. Stupid, because IBM already found out and fixed this over 30 years ago, even Microsoft does it right. It's the basics of peopleware, the research is all there. In summary it's more expensive to destroy the limited ability of people to concentrate than to give people proper work spaces and proper meeting spaces.
Basic fact: 2/3rd of more of your developers will be introverts, they hate open offices designed by/for extroverts who don't realize that, it destroys them and their productivity, it makes them sick and many quit. That's very expensive.
Cubicles suck, but they suck much less than open office imo. The average human can (re)concentrate 17 times a day. After that it's all much worse. You might find this interesting. When IBM was still into making stuff that mattered some decennia ago, they contructed a new campus and to get the best out of their developers, they came with this floor plan after extensive research:
