I'm sitting here feeling stunned that anybody could ever want their desk facing a wall, as the implication (in terms of any "open plan" environment) is that their back is facing, well, nothing. IOW, somebody can walk up behind you unnoticed. Me personally, I hate that with a passion. I'd pay money to have my desk facing out with my back to the wall, just so nobody can walk up behind me.
Might as well sit in a box then. :)
No way this is real marketing image.
I'm not a code monkey. I don't sit alone in an office all day hammering out code. If that was what expected of me, I would change job.
So, not exactly open floor plan, but not separate offices either. I think that's perfect.
Sure, just keep your collaboration out of my concentration. That is, "Alice and Bob collaborating" may just be keeping Joe from getting any work done. It's easy to lose track of the effect of your collaboration in any open environment. Doing it in an office with a closed door eliminates that problem.
I'm not a code monkey. I don't sit alone in an office all day hammering out code.
Having an office does not in any way imply that you're supposed to "sit alone in an office all day hammering out code".
My point? So many factors are at play for a healthy office.
Code review seems pointless at a company with a defined code conventions.
I don't mean to disrespect you, but either you are you are very green or are living in a completely different universe of software engineering than I am. It's interesting to hear this viewpoint.
But yeah if I was just churning out CRUD apps then I'd probably be more productive on my own.
I think too many developers have a "shut up and let me code" mentality that ironically hurts their progress in any collaborative effort.
I used to work in a small open office where one guy would constantly hold debates with everyone. It was pretty hard to stay out of it, and very distracting.
Now I'm in an office with a similar layout and staff, but it's like a library. There's the occasional group discussion or banter, but not enough to bother.
I've worked in finance my whole career, so it's all open plan, lots of screens. Never had my own office, people always needed (well so they say) to be accessible.
And all it takes is two chatty hires to ruin it (as a chatty person, I'm fine unless someone encourages me). If they kept a lot of private meeting rooms when they changed the floor plan, you have a good chance of convincing the chatty people to fuck off to a room if they want to talk, but most places don't do that. They use open floor plans to reduce costs, and then there are shortages of meeting space, kitchens, ventilation, and bathrooms.
The sales pitch of sitting in a group is that you can ask people questions and get an answer, but it's based on bad information about recovery periods after task switching. And as a lead I've been crippled by the inability to get candid answers from junior and midlevel engineers, and being unable to negotiate agreements with senior engineers by hashing out our disagreements in private where I can steer the conversation toward addressing their personal concerns instead of general ones. We should be concentrating on finding a compromise or promising more functionality so they're happy, so that it's two or three advocating for an idea when it's time to discuss it as a team. Instead it just gets shit on while I'm stream-of-consciousing it in the middle of a bunch of myopic people, leading to more confirmation bias and reaffirmation of the status quo.
[Edit] And good luck healing a rift between QA and dev if the QA folk have to wander into the lion's den to talk about an issue. I have only been a lead once in an open office plan (working on #2), because half of my skill is in knowing more about what's going on by liaising across functional or personality boundaries. Half of the rest is in fixing unidentified pain points, which often requires hearing from people who don't like to be a bother. Open plans don't encourage candor, they crush it like a bug.
Steve Job's line, as reported by Jonny Ive IIRC, about ideas being fragile and needing space to grow really hit home when I figured out I'm doomed to be in open offices until the pendulum swings back.
I currently work in the former environment (but everyone is like that guy), and it's super noisy and distracting but also fun.
It is more fun though, to have a constant debate. Just not productive.
Almost every open office I've worked in has been super loud and disruptive, but one of them that happened to have high ceilings and very soft, warm lighting turned and turned out to be the fantastic. Something about the space gave the room a kind of library-style hush, which I think helped create a feedback loop compelling people to speak quietly and move longer conversations into closed rooms.
I think there's also an element to establishing the culture of how you interact in the open space early on, I think even with the hushed atmosphere of the room itself, it only worked because people had been talking quietly and taking louder conversations into private rooms for as long as they'd been working in the space. Pulling back from a culture of having a boisterous open space to a quiet one is, I think, much harder than doing it from the get-go.
However, the ability to move your desk at will makes open space work well, assuming you have enough space to work with. If your desk is on wheels and your company lets you, you can just relocate: Find a quieter spot to work, or go sit next to a few people you're working closely with for a while.
But the combination of open offices and assigned seating is terrible. It feels like preschool. I prefer to be treated like an adult at work, not a child or a slave.
Of course, cubes or offices would let us have the best of both worlds, but ...
A lot also depends on the people that work around you.
If everyone respects one another, then it's usually OK.
However, there is often at least one person who talks and talks and talks for most of the day (and somehow keeps their job), and at least one person who talks VERY LOUDLY on the phone all day (because they're far away, so obviously you need to shout to be heard?!).
The first case -- the one I hated -- had a) long rows of desks, b) bright overhead fluorescent lights, c) a lot of noise due to being in a large room with sales/marketing, d) a lot of visual distractions due to people walking up & down the aisles, and e) few available areas to go to collaborate away from your desks.
Now, I'm also in an open office, but I find it quite livable, because: a) my desk faces the wall, for fewer visual distractions, b) the room is comfortably lit (ie, not too bright)[1], c) it's a smaller room with only engineering and is generally quieter[2], d) there are enough areas to go if you need to collaborate.
All this is to say that, while the evidence is that open offices generally suck, there's probably a number of ways to ameliorate their problems to some degree without having to resort to private offices. I don't think I'd prefer an office to my current setup, actually.
[1] I think this element is underrated. In fact, I'd be curious to know if there's a verifiable correlation between brightness levels and how loud people tend to talk. There's something about a dim room that seems to induce people to lower their voices.
[2] Small, but not too small. There's a sort of sweet spot. I was once in a room with 3 other people and it was maddening because it was generally quiet but every little noise -- coughing, swallowing, etc... -- was seemingly amplified by the overall quietness to became hugely annoying. (An inverse concept explains why I can work quite well in a coffee shop despite the background din.)