Point of order: a punch card environment would have typists do the actual keypunching. Programmers wrote on paper coding forms by hand.

Of course writing out programs by hand is also a long obsolete and useless skill — except for interviews at all the top companies, where it's vital.

Is there any study that shows that adding distractions to people and removing personal privacy makes them more productive and/or lowers stress hormones?

For example:

>...In 2011, the organizational psychologist Matthew Davis reviewed more than a hundred studies about office environments. He found that, though open offices often fostered a symbolic sense of organizational mission, making employees feel like part of a more laid-back, innovative enterprise, they were damaging to the workers’ attention spans, productivity, creative thinking, and satisfaction.

http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-open-office-t...

Makes you wonder why more companies don't measure these things. Google and Facebook A/B test button colors, but can't be bothered to measure programmer productivity in any scientific way.

To be fair, its not easy. You would need:

- Some kind of informed consent (because quitting)

- Separation of space (to prevent jealousy)

- A good way to measure programmer skill (this one's harder)

- A lack of unquestioned dogma that open plan is better

It's not as easy as you make it out to be, but either big G or Fbook could probably do it, given the will (which i suspect is the actual problem).

EDIT: parentheses are hard to match