Fog Creek has(had) 3 major products:

- FogBugz: profitable but less of a success than Atlassian

- Trello: not profitable (sold to Atlassian)

- Stackoverflow/StackExchange : not profitable yet [1]

According to the open-office "distractions/interuptions" theory of killing productivity, the Atlassian programmers should have been severely handicapped and as a result JIRA should have evolved at a snails pace. Instead, the opposite happened and Atlassian JIRA released more features than FogBugz. Both FogBugz and Trello lost to Atlassian.

That Joel Spolsky post about private offices gets repeatedly cited in threads about its benefits but I recommend people not mention it. It undermines their point. It's ineffective at convincing executives. However, it's very effective at making other programmers reading it nod in agreement (aka "preaching to the choir").

Don't link ineffective articles devoid of business evidence that happens to confirm your desires. Instead, study the way some executives actually think. Too many programmers dismiss companies' rationale for open offices merely as "saves square footage costs" or "it's a way to spy on employees because of distrust". Yes, some of that may be true but others also have different reasons. (Take a look at the Mark Zuckerberg video I linked and listen to what he's saying about his desk in the open floor plan. Is he trying to recreate that elbow-to-elbow collaboration he had at the Harvard kitchen table or is he just trying to spy on people? Would that Joel Spolsky article convince Mark Z to build private offices? No? Why not?)

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2015/01/20/stack-exchange-rai...

At Trello everyone is either remote or has a private office. I'm not sure how to prove that they're 2x (I'd say it's too vague to be provable), but they've managed to do well without taking large amounts of investment, which speaks well of their productivity.

I think you're inadvertently undermining your point. Trello wasn't profitable.[1] They were "cash-flow break even" which is also another way of saying they still had not earned enough "free cash flow" to pay back their past internal investments that got them where they currently are.

Trello has private offices.

Atlassian has open offices.[2] They are also profitable.[3]

Atlassian was the one who bought Trello. Trello didn't buy Atlassian. Trello did not perform 2x better than Atlassian JIRA. (E.g. the ideal narrative would have been, "because Trello programmers have less interruptions than Atlassian programmers, their productivity was proven to be 2x superior and they made Atlassian JIRA obsolete.")

If you want to change the hearts & minds of people like Mark Z, the Trello example is not a case study to use.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2016/05/23/trello-get...

[2] http://blogs.gartner.com/tom_murphy/2012/02/25/atlassian-eve...

[3] http://www.zdnet.com/article/atlassian-records-20m-profit-in...

Instead of using Trello, you could compare Atlassian against Fog Creek. Fog Creek was founded two years before Atlassian, and both companies are more or less in the same space - they make productivity tools for developers. And yet it's hard not to look at Atlassian as the more successful business so far.

So, recognition of need for deep concentration and focus, but in an environment totally inimical to those.

Only if you "decide" to be informed immediately when an email/message comes.

With IM you can turn it off if you need to focus, and turn it on when you are doing busy work anyway.