I'm not claiming open offices are superior nor am I recommending that people copy Facebook's practices.
Instead, I'm asking people to suspend the common Dilbert-PointyHairedBoss disadvantages about open offices and instead, really try to get inside the head of people like Mark Zuckerberg.
To exercise the notion of entertaining thoughts we don't agree with, let's write out a very uncomfortable sentence that might be uttered by Mark Z: "I don't want to build private offices because that would be a competitive disadvantage and handicap Facebook's ability to innovate."
Did that sentence make your eyeballs hurt? Good. If the programming community can't honestly engage with people executives who feel the truth of the above statement in their heart, the discussion on the topic will go nowhere. Showing news articles such as the one by Lindsey won't convince them.
>There are countless researches on the importance of focus and the impact of distractions.
Yes, of course uninterrupted focus and shielding from distractions is important. However, that factor will take a back seat if collaboration outweighs it. Unless that research shows that a _group_ of programmers in private offices outperform programmers in open offices, it means nothing to people like Zuckerberg.
If you watch the Mark Zuckerberg video, it is clear he prioritizes collaboration over disruptions. He's not stupid and knows that there will be inevitable distractions. He's optimized for collaboration because it matches his experience for success.
The way to counteract that thinking is to create a company with private offices that crushes Facebook (or one of Facebook's business units.) You need some type of business evidence that frightens him into building private offices.
Did that sentence make your eyeballs hurt? Good. If the programming community can't honestly engage with people executives who feel the truth of the above statement in their heart, the discussion on the topic will go nowhere. Showing news articles such as the one by Lindsey won't convince them.
An executive, including Mark, can be an arsehole and hold any kind of BS opinion (e.g. "I can't hire women and/or pay them the same, because they are not as good as men").
If they can't see why something is bad for their employees, fuck them. It's not like they run the only game in town.
And "it's good for the bottom line" is not an excuse. All kinds of shit can be good for the bottom line, including illegal practices (e.g. blackmailing foreign employees that you'll have them deported).
You don't need data to know that sexism, employee abuse and other social ills are are bad so that's not a good comparison.
Then the comment I was replying to missed TFA, because it gives pointers to research on the issue.
The research[1] that various journalists in Washington Post, Harvard Business Review, WSJ, etc are pointing to is a survey of employees' satisfaction levels and not an analysis comparing business results.
If that oft-cited survey is the best ammunition we have, it won't move the needle towards private offices. What we need is business evidence of private offices enabling productivity levels superior to everyone else with open offices.
[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272494413...
E.g.: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~gmark/CHI2005.pdf
Or:
"In 80 clinical trials, Dr. Glenn Wilson, a psychiatrist at King's College London University, monitored the IQ of workers throughout the day. He found the IQ of those who tried to juggle messages and work fell by 10 points -- the equivalent to missing a whole night's sleep and more than double the 4-point fall seen after smoking marijuana. "This is a very real and widespread phenomenon," Wilson said. "We have found that this obsession with looking at messages, if unchecked, will damage a worker's performance by reducing their mental sharpness."
You are disagreeing with people who may not actually disagree with you (I know I think open concept offices are terrible for most purposes).
People have gotten to multi billion IPOs without open spaces.
It's just a random historical accident on Facebook's story, and it that sense it would be like considering PHP essential to Facebook's IPO, as if if they used Python or Ruby or anything similar, they wouldln't have made it.
>Why would Mark Z care about these surveys? Of those respondents that were dissatisfied, what did those workers who require private offices build that was great? He built a multi-billion dollar company with a cramped elbow-to-elbow open office.
People have built "multi-billion dollar companies" with all other kind of traits, including private offices (Microsoft, Apple) but also sexism, treating employees badly, death marches, poisonous work culture, etc.
It doesn't mean that companies should imitate all these to get to the "multi-billion dollar" part, any more than they should imitate open offices.