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jamieb

Here's my experience, best to worst:

1. Small team of programmers, sharing a closed office.

2. Small team of programmers sharing an open office.

3. Team of programmers each with their own office.

4. Team of programmers in one big room.

5. Team of programmers in one big room along with a bunch of other people.

Small team, in a circle, with their backs to each other, was by far the most productive environment I've ever experienced. We could concentrate on our work, but when shit happened we could turn to look at our compatriots screen and help each other out.

You have to be a real team for this to work. Not just a bunch of people with the same employer.

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6. Small team of programmers, sharing an office with salesmen shouting into phones.

In one place I worked the sales-guys would walk over to the programmers (where it was quiet) to make noisy calls so they wouldn't disturb the other sales-guys.

And you never addressed this? First, by politeness. If that doesn't work, by triangulation. (Talk to your boss and have him get it straightened out.) If that didn't work, defenestration.

We tried but at that point in time the company had been taken over by salesmen. They ruled with a swagger, parking large BMWs in the disabled parking bays, spending a weeks wage on lunch, making promises we couldn't keep and barking orders at experienced coders.

It was straight out of the IT crowd (only much darker).

(In fact around the same time we witnessed an actual scene from the IT crowd: the CEO gave a speech at the launch dinner for of our revolutionary new product (3 years in the making) where he lavished praise on every department apart from the dev team who planned and built it. We looked at each other dumbstruck waiting for him to thank the cleaners next…)

You are an optimist. The most probable result is sales people shaking their heads at the programming curmudgeons.

One real story. The head of PR guy has a very strong voice. We were lucky that he doesn't talk in the phone too often, because he took me out of the zone, almost out of the office every time.

Then he was moved and placed in the sales people row, farther from programmers. Now he complains that he can't concentrate because their chatter.

Do you really think that this guy was just a little bit aware of the effect of his conversations? I really doubt it.

7. Small team of programmers, sharing an office with the boss and his secretary / saleswoman, several people smoking, and the office radio running music you do not really care for. And a wall mounted webcam pointed at the programmers "so the cleaning woman does not nick stuff".

But at least the billiard table was great.

I think the biggest productivity spike comes from removing "other people" from the room where programmers are.

Mixing people on a maker's schedule with those on a manager's schedule is never going to work. Also don't mix people who need to think with people who need to talk on the phone.

On one project we started in a large, but private room. Each programmer staked out their own space. Might as well have been separate offices. About 8 weeks into the project, we rearranged the desks into a circle, facing out. Relevant communication increased massively. I was aware of exactly what my colleagues were working on all the time (yet still able to focus on my own tasks). Yes, there were times when someone would interrupt me when I had a complex problem gelling in my mind, but it was offset by having the required expertise for the entire product immediately available.

From personal experience, we have a team of programmers all from the same group working in an isolated area. At some point a secretary for some unrelated manager was seated among us at it became a huge destruction. By the nature of here work, she was constantly talking on the phone of having her phone ring.

Exactly. Which is why I don't see much difference in most of the scenarios jamieb describes, except for 5.

In our current office, we don't have the luxury of closed offices, but we do have separate spaces (kitchen, meeting room, small "lounge" room, hallway.) So the informal rule is: the big open room where everyone sits is on the maker's schedule, if you have to big discussions or use the phone, go elsewhere.

Works well enough most of the time. Of course it helps that there are very few non-programmers, and those are out of the office most of the time, so the open plan office is usually peaceful anyway.

Concur on #1 -- I've never been so focused as when six of us shared a large office that was isolated from the rest of the company by two doors and a set of stairs.

Similarly, a set of closed offices around a common area with couches and whiteboards. Here you get to choose; individuals can isolate, when cranking, and they can also include themselves into conversations by leaving their doors open.

Note that this is WAY different from having a set of offices along a long hallway (where you get no community at all -- hallways are just like motels, or crappy apartments).

I also concur with #1's finding (small group in a room shut off from the rest). I once worked with 5 other C++ developers all sitting at a couple fold out tables in a one room office to work on a software that was used in a highly competitive niche market and this was by far the most productive I ever was. Like the OP, we could instantly talk to one another about a problem or to ask why certain blocks of code were a certain way. We wrote software used to track bets (off shore gambling). Our software sold for around $100K and at the time (about '93-'95) our only competitor was a large corporation that appeared to struggle to keep up with us. We were so innovative and fast to deliver. Those days long behind me, I often wish to find that same cohesiveness in my work-life again.

This is called caves and commons

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CaveAndCommons

which is not very common because then the company has to buy both caves and common space for everyone.

One to try, if you can, is a team, each with their own office, but also a large "war room" where folks can rotate in and out of during their projects. During "crunch mode" everyone involved is in the war room, but they still had a private office to retreat to when needed.

This was my favorite, and this company made software for government forms, each family of forms had their own schedule, so what groups were pressured changed during the year.

I prefer facing one another at a long table. I probably don't need to see your screen to fix your issue and if I do, I'm coming over to sit with you for a few minutes. Most likely, seeing your face and answering your question is enough. Less disruption to my own work as well.

id Software rocked the gaming world with #1 when they were building their first games

By their accounts it was their most productive era

Heh, according to "Masters of Doom", Carmack was known to lug his 22 inch CRT back to his place when things got too distracting.

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