I work in an open office, and have been to Facebook's open office campus many times. I love working in an open office, and think Facebook's campus looks excellent.
I think the disadvantages of open offices are radically exaggerated by people who have difficulty imagining how easy it is to book a small conference room for yourself for a few hours, to walk away to a hotel desk in a more quiet part of the office, or (more typically) for the white noise of the central air to obscure everyone's mild sounds as they quietly work.
I chronically had focus issues growing up and was easily distracted, and I have no problem focusing at work in an open office - even when it's crowded with people.
Some countries mandate, for good reason, that you can't work on you laptop, without an external monitor, mouse and keyboard, when not on the road. Plus you're desk is require to be height adjustable. That sort of eliminate the option of moving around to much.
Personally I feel that a persons desk is the place where they're suppose to be doing the majority of their work, so that should be the quite area. The noise people can book a conference room for phone calls.
One thing I find fascinating is that all the people I've meet that claimed to love open offices, or require background noise, all, every single one, have had head phones glued to their head. At my last job I asked if we could not have the radio on: Nope, people like the background noise, and I was just being difficult. The next week I asked again, adding that the people wanting the noise where wearing head phones anyway, or where rarely in the office. So the radio was turned off.
All Scandinavian countries have these rules, FWIW.
Height adjustable desk is nice-to-have rather than essential (would hate to go without it though, since it allows me to stand while working once in a while).
But external monitor should rightfully be mandated by law, IMO. Looking down, even slightly, puts a lot of strain on your neck muscles and can easily cause injury over the longer term. Your head and neck is like a bowling ball balancing on a pencil - fine when it it right on top, but dangerously heavy if tilted slightly off center.
Depends what you do, I suppose. The reason most devs have large or multiple monitors is so they can keep a lot of things open at once, and reduce the amount of window switching they need to do to improve focus. When you leave that setup and drop down to a small 13-14" monitor you lose most of the advantages there.
I find about half of my time needs to be spent with as few distractions as possible, and the other half I can be open to interruption. I categorically don't get as much done when in a coffee shop or breakout table when needing to concentrate, though still more than working in a distracting environment.
Having to keep 10 disperate systems and their interfaces in your head requires concentration, I don't care who you are. Its like doing a very difficult math problem, or painting, or drawing, or any other number of things. When it takes half an hour to build context for a problem and another half hour after that to get anything meaningful done, 3 attention grabbing distractions a day can mean a zero productivity day.
I'm in an open office now, but work at home 2-3 times a week because the job requires concentration. If they required me to be in the office all days I would have to quit because my productivity would go down and I wouldn't be able to hit ship dates.
> book a small conference room for yourself for a few hours
I'm supposed to work all day every day, not a few hours. And the open offices I've been stuck in didn't even have enough conference rooms for actual meetings.
> walk away to a hotel desk in a more quiet part of the office
If that space existed, I would move into it full time. But open offices are wall to wall with people who do not shut up. In practice I stay very late and get things done after they leave.
> I think the disadvantages of open offices are radically exaggerated by people who have difficulty imagining how easy it is to book a small conference room for yourself for a few hours, to walk away to a hotel desk in a more quiet part of the office, or (more typically) for the white noise of the central air to obscure everyone's mild sounds as they quietly work.
There are those of us who can only do our jobs from our desks for various reasons and who have direct experience with crappy, noise-polluted environments. The disadvantages are not radically exaggerated unless you always use best-case open office implementations as your baseline.
At my job developers can't book conference rooms. Not by design, unless they are super devious, but the room booking software doesn't work on Macs which 90% of devs use. (Sure I could use a vm but I'm not going to install it just to reserve a room)
A moot point because all the new conference "rooms" are just open spaces with bean bag chairs and a projector.
> how easy it is to book a small conference room for yourself for a few hours, to walk away to a hotel desk in a more quiet part of the office, or (more typically) for the white noise of the central air to obscure everyone's mild sounds as they quietly work.
So open offices are wonderful if you go out of your way to avoid the aspects that make them horrible.
I think the disadvantages of open offices are radically exaggerated by people who have difficulty imagining how easy it is to book a small conference room for yourself for a few hours, to walk away to a hotel desk in a more quiet part of the office, or (more typically) for the white noise of the central air to obscure everyone's mild sounds as they quietly work.
I chronically had focus issues growing up and was easily distracted, and I have no problem focusing at work in an open office - even when it's crowded with people.