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).
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.