> Open plan might work great for some types of work […]
I'm curious to know: why types are, or people consider to be, good for open plan?
Generally, office type jobs tends to be one where people need to use their brains to concentrate on something, and open plans tend to be able to create / not block distractions, they would be antithetical to being able to concentrate.
Open plan is good for collaboration/communication heavy types of jobs. In this kind of jobs, disruptions is a way to propagate "just in time" information through the organization. You can still eliminate disruptions in such setting, and it superficially leads to a high "productivity" in terms of LOC produced, but you act on outdated/misleading information (or you deny that information to others), which often leads to working on wrong things in wrong ways.
People often argue this can be fixed by just not needing to communicate. Like all user stories have all necessary information prepared. All the (functional, non-functional) acceptance criteria are defined, all the design documents are perfectly specified etc. But that's a pipe dream, which leads to other kinds of productivity losses.
Apologies, I left out the word "synchronously" in front of "communicate". Synchronous communication is either planned meetings or unplanned disruptions, which many people strongly dislike. A complete lack of communication is of course impossible, so these people strongly prefer asynchronous communication - very detailed spec in advance, emails with the implicit expectation they might get answered with a day-long delay etc.
Marketing? Where ideas and concepts need a lot of input and discussion. Basically anything that is very human and not zero or one.
Customer support via telephone support where not one agent knows everything. I.e., you tell customer to hold the line and then ask some other agent for a solution.
I used to be in marketing (but now developer) and not really (of course depends on the specific role). Sure, parts of marketing is meetings and discussions stuff but so is software development (need to discuss requirements, architecture, etc) - the rest of the job is deep work and execution on ideas (just like coding).
Manufacturing, close to the floor, where you often need to react fast and start in the morning with no idea what you will be doing that day, yet will still have more work than hours.
In the case of where I work, the marketing team seem to work better in groups, they oftent colaborate and (I hate that they do this) all crowd round one laptop to discuss ideas and thoughts - why they dont arrange a metting and do this in the appropriate room is anyones guess but its gone on for years, and is one of the main reasons open plan for developers failed at the place I work.
Thankfully our place is very much pro WFH but we do have an office with a 'quiet room' (basically a room with less desks) and a few pods for when you need to concentrate. The open plan areas are almost always 100% marketing folks though.
Mostly everything that is not creative: creativity needs focus. Take any job that isn't creating something, anything related to customer, operations, support, ... and one can do it in almost any conditions.
I wasn't talking about solitude, but focus: you can focus in a quiet room with other people sitting and doing their stuff, but it is not possible in a room with people moving around, with people speaking, with intense external noises like construction works nearby, ...
I'm curious to know: why types are, or people consider to be, good for open plan?
Generally, office type jobs tends to be one where people need to use their brains to concentrate on something, and open plans tend to be able to create / not block distractions, they would be antithetical to being able to concentrate.