Mentioned this on HN previously but as a nearly 40 year old developer who has been developing professionally for nearly 20 years -- it used to be the norm for programmers to get their own offices, even just the regular joe programmers... Places really tight for space might put two guys in a very spacious shared corner office...

A few years into my career the idea of cubicles caught on and quickly became the norm, and now of course we're stuck with these horrible open offices that are, in my experience, just absolutely dreadful for productivity; but since everyone is doing it nobody really notices anymore.

> A few years into my career the idea of cubicles caught on and quickly became the norm, and now of course we're stuck with these horrible open offices that are, in my experience, just absolutely dreadful for productivity; but since everyone is doing it nobody really notices anymore.

You can largely thank Jim McCarthy of Microsoft fame for that, who in the mid 90s coined the concept, "beware of a guy in a room":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oY6BCHqEbyc

https://blogs.msdn.com/b/david_gristwood/archive/2004/06/24/...

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/06/dont-go-dark.html

Absolutely relevant article by Joel Spolsky: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fieldguidetodeveloper...

Also relevant video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=NF...

The fundamental issue is a mismatch between crafting and coordinating roles.

When I'm in a coordination role, open concept is better because I can hear everything in the office and route information accordingly.

When I'm in a crafting role, open concept is death to productivity.

it's funny. The place i'm at now, in the valley and a successful post IPO SaaS company, management believes that open space and engineers running around, yelling and waving hands is sign or productivity. I have to escape to the kitchen to get anything requiring the tiniest level of concentration.

Yep. The difference in one role (management) the conditions you're describing read as signals of activity. In the other role (development) it reads as noise interfering with the activity you're working on.

A "successful" company probably already has a culture that's going to be hard to change, but where management is trainable, you can sometimes improve things by giving them something else like else to focus on, like commit logs, test suites, or ticket updates.

Glad you bring that up. I'm a manager. I do mostly the things you mentioned to give my team some breathing room, and have to WFH when i want anything serious done. As you can imagine if the ambience is bad for me, it is horrible for my team. I try to help with some WFH days here and there. But it is a culture thing. It's in the freaking DNS of the place. Only so much i can change.