The actual purpose of open offices is to save money.

The collaboration stuff is marketing nonsense managers tell themselves to try and ease the cognitive dissonance of lying about it.

Depends on the kind of work you do. If you're in sales or marketing the open office plan may indeed stimulate creativity or whatever.

But for people who have to concentrate (like software developers) it's a productivity killer. Joel Spolsky used to touch on this occasionally - he claims all sorts of research shows the most productive arrangement is to put everyone in his own office with a door.

Where I work that will never happen, because there are corporate-wide rules about who gets an office and who doesn't. You have to be a director to get your own office, which is two levels above non-managers. They're so anal about it one time I worked on a floor with no directors and they left all the offices unoccupied. They crowded everyone into cubes and even doubled one up when they ran out of (cubicle) space.

Then the question comes: Do they really save money, or does it just appear like they do?

Saving money on office space is money saved. People being distracted and doing poor work is money lost. I wonder how it sums up.

Money saved on office space is easily measurable and directly attributable to the bean counter responsible.

Productivity loss is hard to measure, and even when it's blatantly obvious, it's easy to shift the blame.

It highly depends on the team. In a small team that know each other well, it can work. Most of the time it's not the case, however.

The main purpose of open offices is to save on real estate costs, stimulating more spontaneous collaboration is just a flimsy excuse.

Partitions can still be installed between the work pods to provide a measure of privacy. Many of the open-plan offices I've seen have no partitions, the only thing between you and everyone else is a computer monitor. It's insane.

Partitions don't do much to cut down on noise unfortunately.

With partitions, at least I don't have to watch the office gumbies milling around flapping their arms and smacking their pieholes. Half of my monkey brain is tracking their movements for threats, and the other half is struggling to prevent me flinging handfuls of my faeces at them out of annoyance.

For sound? I can just put on headphones.

It depends on the partitions and how other surfaces are finished.

With sufficiently high walls (about 6'), carpeting, and acoustic ceilings, you'll actually cut noise quite a bit. Lower and sound travels in straight lines.

One of my gigs had a "pod" style cubical layout with 6' high walls, glass in the upper 2' or so, arranged in groups of four (see diagrams below). It's still one of the best workspace designs I've seen, period.

https://plus.google.com/photos/104092656004159577193/albums/...

I think one benefit is the cost savings? More people in smaller area + large area for group chats when needed, etc?

Cost savings until Cold/Flu season hits. Watch that burn through the office...

If people are in the same office space overall, everyone will likely catch whatever's going around anyway.

They are recirculating too much HVAC air, too.