Bodil Stokke tweets an excellent point on open space offices
This bears repeating: NOTHING is more hostile to developer productivity than the modern open plan office. http://t.co/Q9K3XMtMfZ
— Bodil Stokke (@bodil) January 4, 2014
I’ve written about this before and even then I thought the point was so obvious that it didn’t really need saying. Apparently, in this as in so many things, I was wrong.
Bodil’s tweet points to Paul Biggar’s post Silence is for the weak. In it he recounts how widespread this nonsense is. As Biggar points out, there’s plenty of relevant research on the matter and it’s not late breaking news that hasn’t had a chance to filter down to working managers yet. Twenty seven years ago DeMarco and Lister were already talking about these issues in their excellent Peopleware1
Listen again to Bodil: “Nothing is more hostile to developer productivity than the modern open plan office.” If you’re a manager and you’re running an open plan office, now would be a good time to rethink that decision. And for goodness sake, knock off the “team building/improve communication” nonsense. It’s malarkey and you know it.
Footnotes:
A book well worth reading even if you aren’t in management.