I don't like pure open office setups, but I do enjoy bullpen style arrangements with a team of say 5 to 7 in the same shared space. It is a hard setup to get right though.
High wall cubes are fine too... Obviously a real office with a door would be ideal, but I think that door has closed at this point in time.
IMO the optimal arrangement for technical teams is small groups of people in shared offices, say ~4 per office.
What I've noticed is that a handful of people together in a space will typically work out issues like music vs. no music, lights on vs. off, blinds open vs. closed, etc. without a lot of trouble.
But there's a tipping point where it gets much harder. Put 20 people in an open office and suddenly everyone is wearing headphones and nobody is talking (except the people who are ALWAYS talking/yelling to each other) and it sucks.
I think as far back as the late 70s, "Peopleware" cited a bunch of studies that found that small shared offices with flexible policies on letting people move around (so people can self-organize either around their teams or with people they share space well with) was optimal. Sadly few offices seem to have adopted this.
> but I do enjoy bullpen style arrangements with a team of say 5 to 7 in the same shared space.
Worked in an office like that and agree, it worked pretty well. It's not always feasible to assign individual offices to people but 1-5 people works. I'd say 5 is even high, ideally it would be 2-3.
> but I think that door has closed at this point in time.
Well, I'd say working from home is like that? :-) Hopefully that's an option for more people. I am doing that now and it's pretty good, but the idea is that the whole team has to be remote, otherwise you don't want to be the odd one out.
I currently work in a bullpen with about 10-12 people. It works because we all work on the same thing, so collaborating or shooting the shit together is a good thing :)
If you organize bullpens around clumps of people who work together constantly, it makes more sense than doing it to an entire department or company. Though you should also have a quiet space per bullpen and meeting rooms for anything requiring cross-team collaboration or secretive stuff.
To be honest, 10-12 just sounds more like a small open office to me rather than a shared team space. When I think of a shared office, I think of maybe 2-4 people in a spacious private office. Even at 5 people you'd start to lose the benefits of the office rapidly.
Even if all 12 folks are on the same team, I'm sure it's possible to split them up into subspecialties or working groups. An unstructured blob of 12 people on a team doesn't sound that ideal either way, regardless of seating arrangements.
Depends on your home and family situation. I've been working from home for eight months, and my current situation is far from ideal due to young kids and not having a great space to isolate myself from them. I'm building a new detached garage that will include office space for myself, but that's not an option for many people that are in more expensive locales and/or lacking access to capital.
Still, looking back over the past eight months at all of the distractions from kids, I'm still dealing with less distractions (external, at least...) than my previous gig in an large open office environment.
I found that 2 people per office/bullpen works best. That way you're either talking to your colleague or you're working. Even with 3 people, there are situations where the other two are talking while you're trying to get work done.
Haven't worked there in fifteen years, but still know plenty that do (including my spouse), and that's...not true across the board. The summary is: depends on the team.
Which is unfortunate because it's one of the many things I liked about working at Microsoft: they really seemed to take your productivity seriously when I worked there.
Im a huge fan of the bullpen as well. You get the benefits of spontaneous conversation and collaboration, without the overwhelming anxiety that some of us feel in a crowded room. Its a solid compromise between collaboration and privacy.
High wall cubes are fine too... Obviously a real office with a door would be ideal, but I think that door has closed at this point in time.