I worked in a room with just my team and it worked out great. We were able to have discussions and draw stuff on white boards on the wall without distracting anyone else. It also helped with team bonding.
In an open room where half a dozen or so people sit, if two people stand up, walk into a conference room, and shut the door, that's weird and curious.
This also happens all the time, thus not weird. (or people don't talk ...)
Personally, I've been very happy with the environment. It helps that the open part of the office is bright, quiet and pretty sparsely populate.
Why don't you introduce the rule that entering another office is only allowed for scheduled appointments and emergency cases (life is in danger or the production server crashed).
There were things I liked at that company (mostly the people), but everything about the way the offices were set up had me on edge all the time. No private meeting space, not a single person had their back to a wall, people were thrown into offices at random with no regard to who was on what team...
After I got laid off, I landed at a place where I work in a cube farm, and it's so much less stressful.
I hope your leaving was voluntary, though... if it was, then congrats on the new job!
(and, yeah, I figured out who you are from the about section on your profile... I used to sit right behind you)
Yes, people do use it for those conversations, but you have to walk past all the business/marketing/sales people and your boss(s). Outside the office is a place to confide - where an "official" meeting or neutral meeting room is a place that puts everyone on the defensive, more so than anywhere else.
The idea put forth by Mark Cuban that "there should be no secrets at a startup" is extremely unfounded in my opinion - unpopular opinions or contrary positions frequently only flow in privacy as to not cause embarrassment or hostility.
That's a barrier compared to just chatting at someone's desk. Or the developer doesn't want to move their laptop, so they'd rather stay at their desk that go to the meeting room.
That leads to too many conversations in the open plan office.
If you put everyone in a private office and default conversations to email lists / group chat (which is the model that basically the entire open source community uses), that's fine. If you have an open floor plan where it's easy to wander over to another team's area, that's also fine. But making it super easy for your own team to talk without other people hearing seems the worst of both worlds; you have all the distraction problems of open floor plans (every conversation concerns you), and you don't get the organic conversations that open floor plans are supposed to promote.
On one hand I totally agree with you. On the other hand Conways law exist for a reason.
I see no reason why this shouldn't be another case of "[...] these ought you to have done, and not to leave the other undone."
However, lots of in-person offices like these serendipitous conversations, and that's often pitched as an advantage of open plan layouts. That's also pitched as an advantage of getting lunch together, team outings, etc. etc. If you're going to decide to use this advantage (which I think is okay, but suboptimal), you had better put some systems engineering thought into how you want to use this advantage.
Abstraction layers around teams sounds like a good thing, as long as they abstraction layers make sense.
My rebuttal to this point is the amount of time my previous co-workers would spend discussing lawn care strategies.
Overall though, I agree with you. Team sized rooms are a livable compromise, and have some nice upsides while tamping down the downsides of a fully open office.
I'm really distraction and noise sensitive so I really prefer working from home when there's code to be written.
The "key person" is really a key figure and his opinion is valued for a lot of different things, so he's talking a lot to different people. But almost none of it concerns me.
Even if I worked together with the guys I sit next to, I'd prefer that there was a door between me and them. I prefer to work in silence and uninterrupted and if my opinion is required I'd rather work it out before/after lunch or schedule a time slot for it.
But the big thing, I think -- Put a wall between the hallway and the work area. Too many irrelevant people have irrelevant conversations when they're walking by and it's distracting.
No, individual areas are the way to go.
Team rooms are still better than cramming people side by side row after row.
I'd rather have either a cube farm or a two-person office with both our backs to the wall. I like my privacy.