You do your best work remotely or late at night when you are alone, but feel open offices are great? Open floor plans don’t create a more cooperative work space, people do.
Private offices often lead to better cooperation. Your standup and team meetings are in an open area or a conference room. If someone needs help, up you pair up in an office so you aren’t distracting 20 other people. You need to focus on a tough problem? You don’t have to drive home or wait till everyone leaves. You get to solve it right there and then.
90% or more of what I overhear in an open office has nothing to do with my project, it’s the web or Weber team or Game Of Thrones or last nights game. Even the 10% that’s about my project is rarely useful. It’s QA talking to project management about their smoke tests.
The myth of open offices being collaborative is so misleading. It’s like saying you can learn new programming skills by reading random blogs. Sure if you read enough web pages, and get past the cat pix and political screeds and cooking recipes you’ll run into some programming blogs eventually. It will still likely be a while before you find a useful one.
Why not design our interactions to promote useful, efficient collaboration. Stand ups are exactly that, a short focused meeting to share what you are doing and problems you have. So is Slack. Having shared lunches. Having team planning sessions.
All of those can be done without robbing you of your ability to focus and do your best, most difficult work. Open floor plans rob everyone of any opportunity for that, all to have a bunch of devs with headphones cranked so high they can’t hear to “collaborate” and distracted every time someone walks by their desk.