Re:Why Open Offices?
by bryanlarsen on Wednesday July 29, 2015 @09:16AM
(#9968367)
Yes, that's my theory as well. As noted in other comments, some studies have shown that an office of 4 people all working on the same project is the most efficient, and other studies have shown that a single office is best for companies with < 10 people.
And Zuckerberg and Brin and Page probably switched from mostly programming to mostly management by the time their companies reached substantially more than 10 people. They probably have really fond memories from their time when their companies were <10 people.
My personal theory is that the open office trend at Google (and probably Facebook, and others) was initially driven by the fact that the founders jumped directly from school, and never had a "real job" with a normal, old-school office when they were first starting.
Thus they have never personally seen the immense value of a real office, but they HAVE seen the value to the "computer lab" sort of bullpen environment that was common in the 90s (when almost everybody had to show up to the lab to get their work done, as very few people had *nix machines elsewhere where they could do their assignments).