Scott Adams on the Open Office Format

I guess the trend of this kind of office has peaked since Microsoft just started doing it. (A friend of mine just left the Visual Studio team there as they were planning this shift.)

And Scott Adams has his barbed pen aligned with mine:

I'm just about to move into options trading for a living (I think) so this will no longer be an issue for me. But anybody who hates to sit in this kind of space will have to look for a telecommuting gig or for one of the few places that still offers developers a modicum of privacy.

Evidence cited in support of open offices ... but is it true?

I just today read a University of Michigan Study from 2000 that concludes that "radical collocation" type open offices show significant productivity benefits over more private workspaces.

Maybe, but I have some questions about this study that may require another look at the results:

1. There was no control group. There were six groups studied, but none of the study groups were using "closed" offices. The study groups' results were scored against an existing corporate baseline of productivity.
2. The productivity gain, while impressive, is within range of the 10 to 1 difference that's been measured in the literature repeatedly. This means that the 4x improvement could easily have been due to the particular programmers chosen rather than the office environment's effects as cited.
3. Finally, there's the Hawthorne effect! All groups knew they were being studied, which has been shown repeatedly to increase productivity no matter what details of changes in the environment are made!

Does anyone know of a controlled study of both kinds of offices compared against each other with no change other than the office space styles between groups? Or of a similar study of 'closed' offices against baseline data collected from 'open' offices?

Maybe 'radical collaboration' does work better, but the Michigan study does not prove the point to my satisfaction. 

Recruiting costs of an open office plan: an anecdote

Since Facebook emerged to take over the world, many startups have emulated its open office plan, looking something like this:

However this trend got started, a little reflection can show some costs associated with it. How does a knowledge worker concentrate in a wide-open room like this, especially when conversations are going on? Doesn't productivity have to suffer?

I am normally an extrovert, but I do strongly prefer at least a modicum of privacy in my workspace. I don't know how prevalent my view is, but an experience I had last night makes me think some introverts may agree with me.

I attended a networking event at the fascinating startup climate.com, whose Seattle office is lovely but wide open with apparently no private space except a conference room. I mentioned my concern to the hosts. They responded respectfully, but obviously aren't in a position to rearrange the office after just getting it set up in February. Especially if I'm the only one whining about the issue.

I had a conversation with a fellow potential recruit who shares my view of this office layout saying, "it's lovely but our [less attractive] office is a quieter and nicer place to work." I suggested that he join me in emphasizing this to our hosts but he declined, not wanting to "come in and tell them how to arrange their office." Instead he left quietly and will probably stay at his current job rather than considering climate.com.

Maybe there are a lot of introverts who feel the same way; how would we know? Is there any measurement being done of the effectiveness of these recruiting events? I thought the company looked very attractive and interesting place to work, but ...

What would I do if I were in charge at climate.com? For starts, I'd allow/encourage any sort of shogi screen or other barrier between workspaces. I'd also allow anybody sensitive to the issue to work remotely up to about 1/2 the time, and in the meantime be looking for a longer term strategy of moving to or transforming the current space into one giving workers more privacy.

I don't think the definitive study on office space has yet been done, but I tend to think that in 20 years the open plan for knowledge workers may be considered as we now consider smoking in restaurants. What were we thinking letting this go on for so long?