Meh. YMMV - I work in a smallish office (20 people) which is entirely open and it works out pretty well.
I suspect the real problem is that if you take a dysfunctional office culture and change it from one-person-to-an-office to an open plan it's (shocker) still a dysfunctional office culture. See also "hey, if we just buy $SOFTWARE_METHODOLOGY_X our code will suddenly not suck anymore!"
Some factors that may help open-plan work in our case:
* we pair pretty much all the time, so that may be acting as cultural filter selecting against people who don't work well with a certain level of noise / distraction.
* the main office is open, but there are plenty of smaller conference rooms for times when the lab is too noisy / too distracting / etc.
* although we share an environment, we're still in control of it. The current layout was arrived at after a bunch of collaborative tweaking and furniture shuffling. I suspect having a layout imposed from on-high wouldn't work as well.
I suspect the real problem is that if you take a dysfunctional office culture and change it from one-person-to-an-office to an open plan it's (shocker) still a dysfunctional office culture.
I believe this is probably true, but noise and distractions are still noise and distractions no matter what your culture is like. My feeling is that (almost) all teams would be better off with people in private offices, regardless of the culture.
I suspect the real problem is that if you take a dysfunctional office culture and change it from one-person-to-an-office to an open plan it's (shocker) still a dysfunctional office culture. See also "hey, if we just buy $SOFTWARE_METHODOLOGY_X our code will suddenly not suck anymore!"
Some factors that may help open-plan work in our case:
* we pair pretty much all the time, so that may be acting as cultural filter selecting against people who don't work well with a certain level of noise / distraction.
* the main office is open, but there are plenty of smaller conference rooms for times when the lab is too noisy / too distracting / etc.
* although we share an environment, we're still in control of it. The current layout was arrived at after a bunch of collaborative tweaking and furniture shuffling. I suspect having a layout imposed from on-high wouldn't work as well.