Screw that. I want my own office and I don't want any New Age team-oriented cubicle. If I wanted that, I'd work at Lexis-Nexis or some other corporate beehive with all the other drones.

I want my own office where I can shut the door, think about problems, and write code with no interruptions. Where I can call my girlfriend and not worry about who is listening in. Where I can eat lunch in peace, shut the door, and tell the PMs to go away and work on their spec and not bother me while I fix bugs.

You can take your new wave drone space and shove it. I'll take my own little office any day.

Sorry, but if MS engineers don't get private offices, I won't be returning any MS recruiters' phone calls. You can't write code in a cubicle that's worth a damn.

Does anyone remember the Airstream groups experiment on this in 1999?

Mark Ledsome spent more money that it would cost to put offices in a space where they had curvey walls, cubebes & private spaces. all i remember is people leaving the team in droves (which could have been more related ot the management style...).

Solution to "no door"?

I bought a shoji screen - "that Japanese folding screen thing made of paper and wood". Normally it's folded up by the side of my cube. Working hard on a project? Eating lunch? Pissy mood and really want to be left alone? Unfold the screen

I simply am not able to concentrate when someone behind my back is typing away to glory or talking continuosly on the phone or making some weird swallowing or breathing noises. I am afraid to bring it up with my manager cos i dont want to be called a whiner and plus there's not much he can do about it. I hope they get us more space real quick.

Remind me, bro, to tell you what I think about going from an office-based to a no-private-office design - at the same company, with no extra conference rooms made available, and while supervising nine people; and with a job that requires long stretches of intense concentration. Not Good.

I work in the new p&p space, and I really like it. Feel free to read this thread over on Joel On Software for my opinions.

http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.368689.8

It seems that those who hate open spaces are those who have been just thrown into whatever warehouse happened to be open at the time. This is NOT the case with the p&p space. We *chose* to move to open collab spaces. It works for our teams. It may not work for everyone else, but at least we have the opportunity to try.

I'll be happy with a cubicle the day that the executives move into theirs. Riiiiight....

Sorry - put me in "flexible open space" and I'm out the door (oh, no door...OK, I'm out the, um, space). There are few things the company could do that would motivate me to leave more than this.

Towels, schmowels...

I have always dreamed of joining MS over Google because of the beautiful offices that MS doles out its employees. I hate long table or cubicle work culture. If dicussions are required, then have plush discussion rooms, or even bigger offices so that people can move to each others office to discuss. Very nice! This simply adds more value to the discussions also. Otherwise my lesser skilled colleagues simply blurb out questions that they can figure out for themselves with little effort. They lose their skill to find things for themself. I loose my concentration and patience. And our company looses employee efficiency.

BS. I was contracting in MS and one of the main reasons I decided to become an FT (and accept the big cut in the paycheck) was having my own office.
Ask contractors (the ones who are good at their job) and their biggest complaint is sharing offices.
I will be gone at no time if they get my office. This is one of those stupid decisions to save money which ends up costing much more.

I must admit, I'm an open office person. I've been in both open and closed offices and much prefer the open style - yes, more talking happens, but more decisions get made correctly instead of people just heading in their own direction.

As for people seeing your monitor at all times, what have you got to hide?

Alok, it's true that in an open space you are more likely to ask your colleagues for help. Is this a bad thing? It may interrupt you briefly, but if it gets the other person unstuck and saves them hours of delay, overall isn't that a good thing for the company? And I disagree that people lose their will/skill to find things out for themselves, I would posit that Microsoft employees want to be viewed as competent and will quickly try to get up to speed to avoid having to ask others for help all the time.

- adam

Adam -

Joel Spolsky gives a beautiful example in "Joel on Software": programmer A forgot the name of unicode version of strlen. He can look up on the net (30 seconds) or ask programmer B (15 seconds).

If programmer B is in the cubicle next to A, then A will ask; this will cause B to loose concentration at least for 5 minutes (this is because development requires extreme concentration - not only development, PM/test too - to a lesser degree).

If B is in an office a few feet away, with a closed door, then A will only disturb B with questions that really get him stuck - which is exactly what you want to have a productive team.

Alex, that's a pretty contrived example. It's something that is trivially searchable on the net, which many such questions are not (especially if it's an internal product detail). Plus, the numbers are just made up. Maybe it would take 10 seconds to search for and 20 seconds to ask the person in the next cubicle (who might not know anyway). And it assumes that no social pressure has evolved to not interrupt people in situations like this.

But even if Joel had come up with a good example, which is easy to do, the point is not to play the "I can think of one situation where this idea is bad, so the whole idea must be bad" game (although Joel, as a former Microsoft PM, is presumably adept at this game). Nobody is claiming that moving to a more open workspace (which, as I've mentioned elsewhere, is NOT a requirement of Workplace Advantage, just an option that many groups will probably choose) is a panacea which is universally better in every way compared to private offices. The theory is that overall it is better.

- adam

I've been working for some company with open space office. This really sucks. Currently I'm working at home and I'm happy that I can shut the door and code alone.

We moved to an open space office a year ago. There is about 15-20 people in a room.( the reason was that the teams could work in groups ).
I think that all mentioned above in the comments is true. You can get easly disturbed and on the other hand ideas flow more freely.

I was thinking about ask for an office(we have some nice offices with two in a room), becouse I realy can't concentrate on work with all the talking going on around me.

Bye,
Peter from Slovenija

If you aren't doing pair programming, then offices make a heck of a lot of sense. If you are doing pairing a lot, then maybe some other office layout would be better. I'd sure like to give it a try.

Programming solo in cubicles is hell on earth.

-Kelly

As a member of the patterns & practices team, I have posted my comments on the space at http://blogs.msdn.com/mpuleio/archive/2006/07/26/679669.aspx

Enjoy

Open workspace? Man, that's the exact hell I'm trying to escape from. See my post a few days ago: http://bdory.blogspot.com/2006/07/noise-noise-noise.html