Office Space: TV Documentary Looks At the Dreadful Open Office

sandbagger writes "The CBC (it's like PBS only without the begging) is broadcasting a documentary about the open plan office this evening. You can hear a radio interview about the documentary here. In this documentary, the history of the open office is looked at, how it has evolved, and how the justifications for it being best for everyone else are used by those with offices. Advocates say fewer doors and walls means more collaboration. Critics say it's all driven by bottom line economics--crowding more people into smaller spaces saves money. Is it just me or do the people who want you to work in open offices sound like the nobility in Downton Abbey?"

Comments

I like the open plan

[GlobalEcho]

> Is it just me or do the people who want you to work in open offices sound like the nobility in Downton Abbey?

It's just you...here's my anecdote from which you can synthesize data.

I've had an office. It was lonely and I got sleepy. Give me an open plan any day, where I'm more productive and learn more about what's going on.

(And for what it's worth, in the last few places I've worked, the multimillionaire bosses have always sat right in the middle of the open plan with everybody else).

Re:I like the open plan

[Anonymous Coward]

Decent headphones make open plan offices bearable.

I wonder if it's an extrovert/introvert thing.

Re:I like the open plan

[TechyImmigrant]

>And for what it's worth, in the last few places I've worked, the multimillionaire bosses have always sat right in the middle of the open plan with everybody else

I bet they didn't write much code.

Re:I like the open plan

[Marxist Hacker 42]

I'm still in cubicle land- and the ONLY time I can get anything productive done, is between 6-8am. After that, there is just way too much noise. Even headphones don't really help.

Re:I like the open plan

[BonThomme]

perhaps I can interpret. you don't actually do any work. that's why you get sleepy when left alone. in the open plan, you keep yourself awake by bothering everyone who does do work.

Re:I like the open plan

[alexander_686]

It is kind of an extrovert/introvert thing. I have worked in both. Open offices encourages collaboration but discourages deep thinking. This has been my experience and there are studies that back this up. The odd thing is that you can skew people one way or the other depending on the environment. Extroverts skew towards collaboration but put them in a office and they do more deep thinking. Opposite is true of introverts. So it kind of depends on what you are trying to do.

Re:I like the open plan

[Pepix]

I wonder if it's an extrovert/introvert thing.

I am positive it is.

Ob. reference: http://www.thepowerofintroverts.com/about-the-book/

DISCLAIMER: I am in no way related to the author, just liked her book.

Re:I like the open plan

[BonThomme]

yes, everyone with headphones on, you can just see the collaboration, can't you?

Re:I like the open plan

[Anonymous Coward]

One new type of person I met I like to call the "punctuation farter." I met a fat, dumb slob who preferred to fart during certain words, but it was unclear whether or not he was trying to disguise his farts or reinforce his point. For example, he would say things like, "Yeah, if we drilled the hole *PBBBHHT*here, then we could have enough slack in the cable to move the light fixture that *PPBBBBHT*far from where it is (him farting plosively when he said "here" and "far").

This "real life" thing is amazing, you all should try it sometime. It's far more bizzarre than anything "reality" TV can cough up.

-- Ethanol-fueled

Re:I like the open plan

[Antipater]

I like my company's open plan, too. Working in cubeville felt like I was in a pen - there was a subtle "what are you doing outside your cube? Your work isn't done yet!" vibe going on. It was dehumanizing.

At my current job, we have L-shaped desks arranged into plus-signs, with all the monitors at the center. So if you want human contact, all you have to do is lean back to talk to the guy next to you. If you don't want human contact, just don't talk to the guy next to you.

Now, I can definitely see how it can go bad. We keep peace and quiet because everyone in the room is also an engineer, and nobody wants to be Loud Howard. We keep our sales guys and people-on-the-phone-all-day in a different place. If those didn't happen, or if our "open office" was really just us being stuffed into a tiny space for budget reasons, then I would have a problem with it. But overall my experience has been very positive.

Re:I like the open plan

[CubicleZombie]

Any PHB who puts developers in an open plan has no clue what we do. Which they don't. Obviously. My last job put the developers AND phone tech support in the same room.

My current gig is so cheap that it's an open floating plan where nobody even has their own chair and we telecommute half the time. So half the time I'm in a noisy office with a shitty laptop PC and no personal space, and the other half I'm at home listening to a screaming baby from the next room.

I'm amazed at how much money they'll pay us in salary and then cheap out on little things that kill productivity.

Re:I like the open plan

[i kan reed]

I got moved to open office while still doing the same job. My productivity plummetted. I spend more time on slashdot than ever before because it's the only thing I can actually focus on.

Re:I like the open plan

[i kan reed]

I've noticed it doesn't impair slash-dotting at all.

Re:I like the open plan

[ebno-10db]

Open offices encourages collaboration but discourages deep thinking. This has been my experience and there are studies that back this up.

In other words it sucks for things that require sustained concentration, like programming and engineering. If you're supposedly in one of those fields, and you don't need to concentrate, then you're probably doing no more than glorified clerical work.

Yes, it's useful to informally hear about other things going on in the project, but continual eavesdropping (which also destroys concentration) isn't necessary. I find that the proverbial water cooler works fine. Even at times in the past when I had an office, they were kind enough not to lock me in during business hours. I could walk around to talk to other people (without disturbing everyone in the place), and could even go to the restroom without permission.

Re:I like the open plan

[denis-The-menace]

I come in late so that I can code late with no distractions

All they care is that I put in my hours and produce.

Re:I like the open plan

[nitehawk214]

cough up

With all the farting you have to deal with, I can see why.

Re:I like the open plan

[operagost]

I'm a music lover, but I still don't want to listen to music through headphones while I'm working. And if you have to wear headphones to drown out the noise of your working environment, it means the working environment is faulty.

Re:I like the open plan

[pepty]

Open offices encourages collaboration but discourages deep thinking. This has been my experience and there are studies that back this up.

In other words it sucks for things that require sustained concentration, .

Absolutely. If anything it's management that should be in the open plan environment: their jobs are the definition of continual multitasking, small interruptions, and needing to keep tabs on everything going on.

Re:I like the open plan

[ElectricTurtle]

Now, now Ethanol-fueled, we've been over this before. When you go into a room with a mirror, that's not a different person that you are "meeting".

Re:I like the open plan

[mjwalshe]

Its because salary and building services come out of a different budget.

Re:I like the open plan

[pepty]

Then there's the other problem: there's a documented higher incidence of colds and flu in open plan environments. It's hard to concentrate when your head is exploding or you lack the energy to get out of bed. They also find higher blood pressure and stress associated with open plan, but that probably has more to do with the "stuffed into a tiny space for budget reasons" implementations.

Re:I like the open plan

[penglust]

No, I don't know where you are going with this. A couple of people doing it wrong does not make an argument. I have worked on open floors, high cubes, low cubes, 2 people to a large office and everybody had their own 8x8 office with a door.

By far was the best was the 2 person office. My office mate and I were working 2 sides of the same development project most of the time and the collaboration worked well. At the same time I large blocks of time to think about some real low level code I was creating. At the same time we never closed the door to the office and when ever somebody wanted to talk, work together, etc. they just came in.

Since I have come back to cube land I have noticed there are many that sit in their cube, wear the head phones and will only communicate through chat or email even if they sit 3 feet away over a cube wall. Your lonely guy exists anyway.

Re:I like the open plan

[ewibble]

Not for me, I would say I am introverted,I am shy, I won't be comfortable talking to someone about anything non pragmatic for about 6 months.
Took a online test at http://www.thepowerofintrovert... says I am an introvert, no real surprise.

But I like open offices, I am quite capable completely blocking out the rest of the world if I am busy, just ask my wife. But I like people, it definitely lets me know whats going on, since I won't actually go to the water cooler for a chat. In an office I would not make an effort to go and see someone, for a chat, ever.

Maybe you can't just categorize people into boxes.

Ps, I hate cubicles they are the worst of both worlds, I feel isolated, and surrounded by people, at the same time.

Re:I like the open plan

[aaarrrgggh]

Fair enough!

The only reasons the managers in my company have private offices are: to simplify the process of confidential meetings; to allow conference calls to be conducted on speaker with another member of the project team present; additional work surfaces and storage; and because they were built before we moved in.

Better (more modern) office layouts with lots of teaming rooms (6x6' conference rooms), adequate medium and large conference rooms, and work surfaces and storage matched to job functions dramatically reduce the need for a private office. If you shrink the offices to 8x6 and get rid of the windows then most managers would prefer the cubes.

For me, the biggest impact is a cube would make it harder for me to ride my bike to work, as I keep all my work clothing and toiletries in the office. The savings to the company would be about $2,000/year per office eliminated.

Re: I like the open plan

[chromeronin799]

I only don't like it when the managers get their own offices. If they want a private conversation. They should have to grab one of the meeting rooms just like us plebs. The bank I am contracted to at the moment operates open an for all the areas I've worked in, and in most of their big corporate sites now have full wireless, standing desks you can move to, small meetingrooms, large kitchen and cafe space as well as cube farms. No one gets a perminant private office, and over all I like working there. The company that employs me however has got cramped open plan for the plebs, private offices for middle management and above, only one meeting room per floor and the tiny kitchen bay is right by the copier and printer so is never quiet. Luckily, I almost never have to work there.

Re:I like the open plan

[Anonymous Coward]

L-shaped desks arranged into plus-signs. Heil! Your entire post takes on a whole different meaning doesn't it. Let me paraphrase for you...

Working in the camp felt like I was in pen - there was a subtle "arbeit macht frei" vibe going on. It was dehumanizing.

At my current job as a sonderkommando we keep peace and quiet because everyone in the room is also a Jew, and nobody wants to be Loud Avigdor.

Re:I like the open plan

[Anonymous Coward]

They make you put in produce?

Re:I like the open plan

[bill_mcgonigle]

Precisely - they do not respect his time outside of work, care that his job requires concentration, or that he may be an introvert or blessed with ADD.

Open plan offices work well for people who have jobs that require collaboration and not individual concentration. These jobs tend to be favored by extroverts who tend to occupy management positions because humans tend to favor the illusion of strong leaders.

Re:I like the open plan

[weilawei]

I always thought Cold Fjord got pretty creative... ;)

Re:I like the open plan

[weilawei]

have a girlfriend. Very, very fortunately she doesn't live with me

You won't have one very long if that's your attitude toward coming home to her. Pro-tip: women usually expect you to move in with them (or vice versa) after a while.

Re:I like the open plan

[xelah]

AIUI, and a quick Googling seems to confirm it, there are physiological responses to noise that don't go away with habituation (though you do get habituated at a conscious level). It seems to have been looked at most with aircraft noise (eg http://pss.sagepub.com/content... - higher stress in schoolchildren from aircraft noise - and http://pss.sagepub.com/content... - poorer long term memory and reading). So maybe you should blame the noise rather than lack of space.

Re: I like the open plan

[Gorobei]

That's a really good analysis. I'd add one idea: you can have more than one work location! I have my open plan desk (a massive 24 sq ft) of space where I try to spend most of my day: my direct reports are all within 20 feet, and 64 people are within "stand up and talk" distance. I also have an office for the confidential/chat stuff: we walk to it if needed. Almost all business gets done in the open: it's more transparent, we talk tech in the open, we talk strategy in the open, every direct and second level report can at least listen to what is going on and figure out if they can help.

Re:I like the open plan

[mjwx]

Decent headphones make open plan offices bearable.

I wonder if it's an extrovert/introvert thing.

I don't like listening to music whilst working, its a distraction. I also don't like earplugs or other forms of hearing protection that block out noise (my ears end up covered in sweat, which is uncomfortable.

I like working in quiet areas, I can happily tolerate and filter out a certain level of background noise but open plan offices mean I have to listen to the vapid conversations of all the stupid people I inevitably have to sit near. In one of my previous jobs they put me right next to sales. I've lost count of the number of times I had to tell them to shut up because I couldn't hear my client (who expects me to fix their problems). Conversations about boring weekends, kids, cats, whatever crazy religion they've started following, almost nothing work related (not that sales and marketing do actual work). All of it driving me nuts when I've got a complex problem the client wants fixed 20 minutes ago.

So I'd rather be in a nice sensible cube farm. If anyone wants to talk to me they can use IM, email, the phone or just come to my cube. If I need the entire team, we'll go into a meeting room and when I need to get down to work I can be relatively isolated from distractions in my cube.

I also don't buy that whole collaboration thing. Open plan is nothing more than a tax dodge. A full sized partition is considered a wall (part of the building) and is depreciated over 40 years. Smaller partitions are considered furniture and depreciated in a much shorter time (3 years in Oz).

Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

After reading the headline I seriously expected to see a documentary about Apache OpenOffice. That would've been a justified rant!

The solution is obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

Switch to LibreOffice. It's much less dreadful.

Re:The solution is obvious

[0123456]

Or Google Docs. Work anywhere.

And you get a free backup at the NSA.

Re:The solution is obvious

[jfdavis668]

I had to call them the other day to restore some files I lost. Very helpful

Humans are territorial animals

[Anonymous Coward]

Forcing someone to work in the same space as someone else is psychologically stressful no matter how fine you are with it.

Re:Humans are territorial animals

[CanHasDIY]

Forcing someone to work in the same space as someone else is psychologically stressful no matter how fine you are with it.

You think that's bad? When the company I work for sends 2 same-sex employees off for any sort of training or event, they only spring for 1 hotel room.

I haven't found much in my career that's more unsettling than having to split a bedroom/shitter with someone who is, essentially, a complete stranger.

Re:Humans are territorial animals

[ThatsDrDangerToYou]

I mark my turf, carefully pissing along the perimeter of my cube. It really keeps people from bothering me, well, until the cops arrive..

I miss walls...

[Moof123]

Cubeville is bad enough. I'm having to overhear folks politics the next row over right now (not my politics...). For real design work you need to be able to shut out enough outside noise and distraction to really immerse yourself for a couple hours at a shot, and a door would be awesome right now...

Re:I miss walls...

[Oligonicella]

Hell, I'll beat that. I had to endure two women talking very explicitly about their last births. Ain't no stacked wall of manuals that can keep that out.

Re:I miss walls...

[cusco]

I work in a Security Operations Center, where pretty much everyone needs to hear what everyone else is up to in order to make sure that alarms and events are handled without duplication. There's no cell reception here (in the basement of a data center), so anyone having to make personal calls steps out of the SOC anyway. It's really the first and only time that I have ever seen an open floor plan that actually made sense. Helps that the entire team gets along really well.

Re:I miss walls...

[Gryle]

Defecation is just as natural (and more common) than childbirth but having a loud and explicit conversation about how big of a turd you just left in the men's room will probably get you reported to HR. Granted, I'm not likely to discuss such a thing but if I'm required to tailor my conversation to the sensitivities of other, they could show me the same courtesy and tailor their conversation to my sensitivities (within reason of course, I'm not talking about two people arguing over politics).

Human capital

[ThePhilips]

To me the reasons for the open office space are partially explained by this Dilbert strip.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

It's the other factors.

[Admodieus]

The problem with open office floor plans is that every other office accommodation is also affected, but in a negative way - at least at the companies I've seen or worked in. Conference rooms are downsized as well and are given uncomfortable chairs (such as bar tools). Quiet places or "phone booths" are moved to reservation systems. Kitchens, cafes, and cafeterias are no longer respites from work, but just another area to hold meetings. Any office implementing an open floor plan should also set aside traditional offices, cubicles, or booths that can be rented out, ad-hoc, when a serious conference call or task comes up that requires undivided attention. Moreover, these workspaces should be equipped with all of the necessary amenities (laptop dock, second monitor, etc.) so that workers can truly come and go at a whim. Having to pack up my desk and wander the halls for half an hour just so I can hear myself think over the lady having the daily conversation with her college-aged daughter or the guy slurping his coffee is not productive at all.

Hearing loss

[jordanjay29]

I'm someone with a hearing loss (mildly hard of hearing, good enough for one-on-one conversation, adequate in group situations, bad in loud environments) and open office plans drive me crazy. My brain spends half the time trying to catch what people are saying, even as I'm consciously trying to block it out, and then I can't hear when someone actually needs to get my attention.

It's worse when the folks who are used to talking at a low volume, to their computer screens, and can still be heard by the other person then have to talk to me, and can't figure out why I can't understand what they're saying. If they had to physically get up and walk over to me, instead of just talking across the open office, it would be far easier to work with.

Choice

[ChodeMonkey]

Probably participation in an open office design should be optional so that all the extraverts can follow their desires and get together in one ginormous noisy collaborative hive and all the introverts can follow their desires and perform deep contemplative naval gazing in their alone-cave.

Re:Choice

[jordanjay29]

In reality, it would work better to take the preferences, then do the opposite.

Right, because that's how you foster positive employee morale.

Re:it isn't always about money...

[amiga3D]

You know, if a boss has to peek at desks or screens to know if people are productive they've got a real problem. I can tell if people are productive by what gets accomplished. If someone is working his ass off and just spinning his wheels getting nothing real done then he might just as well be fucking off. Bosses like that are incompetent little martinets.

Re:Downton Abbey

[93 Escort Wagon]

It's just you, since I don't watch Downton Abbey

Neither does the submitter, since there's no way Lord Grantham would talk that way about "commoners".

Re:Downton Abbey

[jfdavis668]

I want a cubical that is bigger on the inside.

Re:I like my own office, thanks

[93 Escort Wagon]

Am I the only programmer in America who still has his own office (with four walls, and a door, and everything)? To me, the idea of working in a cubicle (or, god forbid, one of these weird open offices) sounds like a fucking nightmare. Shit, I hate it when the person in the office next to mine turns her goddamn music up too loud. I can't imagine working in an office where my co-workers were literally looking over my shoulder all day too.

You're not the only one - I am fortunate to have my own office at a university (staff, not faculty).

However lately - no joke - some of the faculty have been talking about wanting to replace everyone's walls with glass panels. They've even got a design person to work on plans. Yeah, that'll work out well...

Semi Open

[Grizzley9]

Why not both? I prefer the semi-open office plan where you have multiple cubicles in a group where 4 people share the square space and their cubicles have only two walls. Basically a large 4 person cubicle. It promotes communication between the people there but can be private and quiet enough so that you can focus and get things done.

The shrinking cubicle wall, from cube farm to open

[netsavior]

I worked for a big corporate overlord for a long time, and for some reason every 3 years or so our cubicle walls got shorter. They started out at 6 feet high, which was great and quiet and semi-private. They got short enough so if you sat up straight and leaned forward, you could barely peak over... which was a little distracting.
The breaking point was when they got lower than the average person's stupid mouth. Then EVERY phone call was basically broadcast across the entire warehouse of an office complex. Seriously, god help you if you are within shouting distance of sales, because you are never ever ever going to get any work done.

As a final insult they shrunk our desks from U shape to L shape, then lowered the cube walls to desk height... so if something rolled off your desk, it could roll down the hall too. It was insanely stupid...

Eventually they just sent all the tech people to work from home... since they had sabotaged our work so much at the office, we might as well take the initial hit on telecommute.
I am all for ruining the office so badly that we no longer regard meat based presence as mandatory, but I wish it could happen faster, rather than the phased "lets ruin everything every 3 years" approach.

Re:Open Plan currently suffering this situation

[ebno-10db]

goyims

The correct plural is goyim; the singular is goy. If you're going to use Yiddish, at least be a mensch and do it right.

Re:I like my own office, thanks

[CanHasDIY]

Music? No problem... most of us here in our offices like music.

But do you like all music?

Because, see, I've got this Anal Cunt* CD I've been wanting to bring in....

*Yes, it's a real band, and yes, they are absolutely terrible.

Re:I like my own office, thanks

[fisted]

I'm the lead singer, you insensitive cunt

Re:I like my own office, thanks

[CanHasDIY]

Nice try, but if you'd ever listened to them you'd know the term "singing" is definitely not in their vernacular.

remember this one?

[terryk29]

"He didn't fit in."

Anecdotal Experience

[FellowConspirator]

The company I work for has been migrating to the open-office concept over the past year or so, first with a new building, and then by doing floor-by-floor conversions of existing buildings on the campus. Some of the people are being migrated from offices to desks, some from cubicles to desks. Almost everyone has been very good about going along with the plan and giving it a shot. The results are a mixed bag, overall, but as time goes on, it's proving to be more a liability than an improvement.

Pros:
Everyone gets new furniture, and the worse shape their old furniture was in, the better the first impression.
The lighting is MUCH better - even in areas that don't have direct sunlight; the large number of smaller light sources on the ceiling with little obstruction works well.
There's more people in the same area
- makes more efficient use of space
- don't have to walk as far to get to someone

Cons:
There's more people are in the same area
- in the older buildings, this means that the number of toilets is no longer proportional to the demand
- its noisy; sometimes a little, sometimes a lot
- people sneeze and it hits their neighbors
- you can't make a phone call without annoying everyone, so now nobody uses the phone unless in a conference room; phone communication in general has dropped precipitously and now takes a back-seat to e-mail
- folks are increasingly annoyed with their neighbors and it increases stress and some talk less
There's visual distraction (things always coming in and out of your field of view)
The clever storage ideas don't make up for the overall lack of storage volume or shelf space
You can't have a conversation without annoying everyone, so you have to spend time hunting for a "huddle room" or chat in a stairwell or utility closet
Older employees (>40) especially have a hard time with the din (and the white-noise generators don't help).
It's super difficult to work on certain types of things - anything that has personnel info, or HIPPA protected info that you're not supposed to let your neighbors
Anything that really takes focus (reading a complex scientific paper, for example), is really out of the question
Lots of people try and drown out the din with headphones (which produces noises that annoy those without), and effectively the employees are being trained to tune each other out
There's lots of "unplanned interactions"

I think everyone agrees that we: are less productive, are not collaborating any more than before, and are collaborating less with the outside. HR is already noticing that people are using more sick days. However, I presume that the loss in productivity and decreasing office morale are offset by gains in energy and space efficiency (lower cost facilities).

For me, it means that my work space has shrunk by 50% and I no longer have shelf space that I used to put reference materials and manuals on (all that's not sitting in boxes in my attic). I also just walk away from my desk when the din gets to a certain level where I can't concentrate on what I'm supposed to be working on. If you call my phone extension, it automatically forwards you to a voicemail instructing the caller to e-mail me (there's not even a phone at my new desk, none of have them). I don't read papers in the office anymore, and sometimes take what the office calls "productivity days" where I work from home (no, they don't give anyone money for home office stuff or to pay for Internet service). All of our experienced job candidates that have rejected offers have cited the open-office plan as a contributing factor in their decision not to accept the offer (we lead in compensation, so it's not like they wouldn't be well compensated).

Company I worked at in the 90s did this

[mrflash818]

I worked for a Japanese company in the 90s.

The white-collar workers all worked in a single large room. Desks all facing the top-level boss, and the bosses desk faced them, almost like an American elementary school classroom.

We mostly worked like we were in a library: quietly.

Zero privacy.

It did seem to keep people from being chatty or goofing off in the office, if I remember correctly.

Not Downton Abbey

[DaveAtFraud]

Is it just me or do the people who want you to work in open offices sound like the nobility in Downton Abbey?

No, the nobility in Downton Abbey seem to genuinely care about their help. I think some of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn books more sucinctly capture how management views and treats employees.

Cheers,
Dave

Wearing headphones = ugh

[sjbe]

Decent headphones make open plan offices bearable.

Unless you hate wearing headphones and find music/talk distracting. Personally having to wear headphones all day would drive me insane in short order. I like a relatively quiet office with minimal visual or auditory distractions when I'm trying to get serious work done.

Re:I like my own office, thanks

[CanHasDIY]

When I was in college, I hung out with a group who would sit around a tiny, single room apartment on weeknights, watching "music videos" that mainly consisted of a half-dozen German guys in various leather outfits, using power tools to hack away at random objects in a scrapyard.

People say drugs are bad, but I say if not for the fact someone left a bottle of ether uncapped in the room, I probably wouldn't have been able to sit through the overture.

Why not just herd them into camps

[gestalt_n_pepper]

It's clearly the direction we're going. Herd the lumpenproletariat into open spaces so they can be survielled and managed more efficiently.

Open offices are disasters for development

[drew_eckhardt]

The problems are noise and interrupts. For simple problems less communication is better because minutes lost by an engineer using Google instead of his friend make a smaller impact than the fifteen minutes of context switch overhead which can result for the person interrupted. When more communication is needed people can always grab a conference room.

IIRC IBM's Santa Tersa Laboratory - Architectural design for program development lists a 40% throughput delta for engineers in quiet spaces provided by enclosed offices or with partitions at least six feet high.

With fully burdened per-engineer costs that can break $200K per annum open offices can waste at least $58K (I don't recall if the comparison was stated as 140% for the good performers implying you get $142.9K of work for $200K from slow ones or slow movers loose 40% of their throughput and don't do $80K worth of work) per engineer per year and cost more than closed offices.

_Peopleware Productive Projects and Teams_ by Demarco and Lister provides some anecdotes and hard numbers in chapters 8 "You never get anything done around here between 9 and 5" and 9 "Saving money on space."

Comparing coding wargames participants who performed in the first and fourth quartiles

57% versus 29% have "acceptably quiet" space
62% versus 19% have "acceptably private" space
38% versus 76% do not have "people often interrupt them needlessly"

Median time to complete the programming tasks was 2.1 times the best and bottom half as a whole 1.9 times the top half.

Participants with acceptably quiet spaces were also one third more likely
to produce zero defect work.

Open for all, not just minions..

[Rick in China]

As some other people have mentioned - in my current company everyone is in the same open office. It's an open office of over 100 people, and no matter the level of the team member or visiting 'executive' everyone shares the same big desk spaces with no specific assigned (but sometimes habitually claimed :D) seating. There are tons of offices for people to use, but nobody uses them for long and often only for noise-reduced client conversations. I can, however, see why people can lean towards the critics *or* the advocates point of view, because every office is different and every company has different levels of trust and transparency, if I worked in an office with execs in private offices and everyone else forced into an open space, I'd be critical too.

One size surely doesn't fit all.

[jotaeleemeese]

A French company I know about has different spaces for different functions.

People doing clerical repetitive work sit in an open office area, but in small clusters of 2-3 seats so you don't feel like participating in a dystopian future.

People that require to concentrate for long stretches of time have offices, shared between 2 people at most. In the middle of that area there are standing up long desks were these people can congregate with colleagues to discuss technical matters.

There are lots of offices since most people are not doing repetitive work.

They also have several meeting rooms of different sizes, tables of differing sizes where quick improvised meetings can be held, and the canteen is communal, airy with striking views of town centre.

This is not a tech firm, it is an old school utilities company (oil, gas, that kind of stuff).

A company that is not going to great lengths to understand the kind of working space its workforce needs is not helping itself.