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I heard (in Seattle area) that MS office are on the way out, depending on the team you're on :/

Maybe someone can confirm...

Yes, our buildings at MS are transitioning to open space. We now have a large room for each team. Everyone has a height-adjustable desk that can be moved around within the room and a pair of good quality headphones.

Each room has its own small meeting room for devs to have long design discussions, and a larger conference room that is shared with the room next door. For making phone calls, there are really nice phone booths in the hallways.

That's discouraging. MS did a study to determine offices improved productivity, so what happened?

Open office = more dense work areas = profit

That is certainly the idea in general but it will depend on how badly it affects worker productivity. It's just strange to see a company do a study, prove that offices produce the best results and still go with a measure that presumably isn't cost effective (else the initial study should have concluded that the difference was well within tolerable loss).

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