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Comment by pbreit | Hacker News Reader

I'm mostly with you. I'm astounded that the "open plan" is the current "state of the art" in silicon valley considering we are supposedly so creative and innovative and meritocratic. My only misgiving about pure enclosed office is that it does seem a little solitary for 8+ hours/day, 5 days/week.

I remember Fogcreek came up with an interesting design that used angles and transparency to get some good light, etc: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html

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I like offices with 2 to 4 people. They don't even need to work on the same things. I have developed lots of good friendships with people in such environments.

In open office I rarely talk to people because it's so loud.

That actually sounds kind of interesting, especially the not necessarily grouping same teams. What do you think of rotating every so often?

I think it's a bad idea. Stability is good.

Change is nice too. We've got an open office and we change desks 2 to 4 times a year. So far we're grouped only with other engineers, but even with a small team you get much more comfortable with the people you work in close proximity to.

I think if the team is small and synergy is good, then this could work well. Sometimes a bad apple in the bunch (aka The Talker) can really be a drag on productivity.

Rotation is fine. It just goes on my nerves when management rotates people randomly to "improve collaboration". I am not aware that the VPs switch offices a few times a year.

Slightly aside, I liked what Valve did, where they standardised on desks with wheels, and a single power and network hookup per desk. - Want to work next to someone, move your whole desk.

I was hoping that mid-range/business laptops would go in a similar direction with power-and-thunderbolt connectors, so you could have you monitors, network etc all through one connector, and just pick up your laptop and move to another desk.

It looks like we might be getting there with USB-C, but it seems much delayed to me.

I like having tchotchkes on my desk, and I hate packing with a passion.

For many years I worked in a big tech company that had 2 and 3 person offices grouped into bays of 6 offices around a small common area where a secretary had a desk and files, printers and coffee machine were kept. The grouping usually corresponded to a "Section", the first level of the organizational structure, with a Section Head in one of the offices.

Yeah, old school, and it worked well, better than later work places with various cubicle themes and shared conference rooms that you had to compete for if you needed quiet or privacy.

It shouldn't be solitary. At any given time it'll have a range between zero and the entire team in it based on what needs to happen... You do work with other people right? :)

And now you can actually talk to each other which you can't really do in an open space...

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