Environmental noise is much lower with 6 people then with 30. It is huge difference in amount of noise and interruptions. On average, 30 people generate five time as much "weekend golf" discussions and all on-topic debates of other teams are off-topic to you. It is also easier to police interruptions with around 6 people, unless they are jerks - but chance of jerk among 6 is still lower. By policing I mean saying something like: "you are noisy today and I cant focus, take it please elsewhere".

You don't get zero interruptions, but there is significantly less of them and the barrier to communication in team is still small.

Unless the colleges are very noisy, I would say that most people can focus in reasonably large room with 6 people. I guess it is individual, but the need to be completely alone with everything completely as you like it is rather on the more extreme side of spectrum. Most people can make compromise about lighting, are able to share window etc and can still focus. (I am absolutely cool with home office or whatever for those who cant. Just that the average worker should be both able to work in non-perfect privacy and simultaneously not to consistently disrupt those who are focused.)

If the relevant questions happen too often and you are not an analyst or pm or senior responsible for teaching new person (in such case it is your job to answer questions as they arise to speed up process), then it warrants organizational discussion in team and bundling questions into one meeting. After all, if private office would stop them, then they are not that necessary and it should be possible to lower them down by discussion.

The example of colleges seems odd to me, since it’s a common resource at most colleges to get a study carel or private study room at the library, and it’s a place where even in common areas, there is rather strict enforcement of silence, lack of cell phones, and certainly nothing like modern open plan office noise or distraction.

Also, I think it misses the point to talk about whether or not people can make compromises. The question is about how to empower and enable workers to generate their best output.

For example, you could also say something like, “even though people like having two 27-inch monitors, I find they can make compromises and just use one 17-inch model.”

It’s myopic, because the question has nothing to do with whether or not workers can compromise. It’s about whether it’s cost-effective to pay for quality tools (monitors, offices, private workspace).

So when you say something like, “Just that the average worker should be both able to work in non-perfect privacy and simultaneously not to consistently disrupt those who are focused,” it just misses the mark.

The question is, why would a company wrongly think that providing “non-perfect” privacy is somehow good when empirically it’s known to be bad, even for the company’s own bottom line.

Lastly, I think it’s important to totally avoid framing the desire for adequate private space as if the worker wants “perfect” privacy or they are inflexible and uncompromising. This is a false and worker-unfriendly way to look at it.

Having a private office is not “perfect” or overly demanding to request. Rather an office is just a simple, cost-effective tool. Workers who use offices are still good at compromising to have good communication and collaboration, for example with open door policies, scheduled meetings, and all sorts of non-audio collaboration, in addition to getting to use their extra productive time for dedicated focus on things like code review, to directly collaborate in ways that help the whole team.

Open plan offices on the other hand represent zero willingness to compromise on the part of the employer. The employer is saying they will not invest in good tools for you, and instead dogmatically insist there is only one type of communication (real-time, constantly preemptible audio stream) that is permitted, and anything else has to require contortions and inconvenience on the part of the worker (e.g. working from home, using headphones when it is uncomfortable or distracting to do so, etc.)

So really, we have to move past the anti-employee attitude that a private office is some type of primadonna special request from someone who doesn’t compromise. That is what greedy employers would want us to falsely think.

In reality, an office is just a simple, cost-effective tool literallyno different than ergonomic desk chairs, monitors, or the company’s commuter benefits.

I can't imagine any non-senior employee (for instance) asking for a dedicated private office and not being laughed at, of course exempting any employees who require a private office to perform the core function of their job (not sure if any of these exist, though).

I can't imagine how you believe that private offices are not a luxury. Depending on where the company is operating out of, the rent for the floor space of their office could cost more than the company pays the employee.

This comment seems like pure provocation or something. What does it matter what you can imagine?

Stack Overflow, for instance, famously gives private offices to all developers, even junior ones, and even in Manhattan.

I worked previously at a defense research lab in the eastern US, and had my own office straight out of undergrad (it didn’t even occur to me to ask).

I have former colleagues or friends working in private offices in: computer graphics form film, defense research, hospital research, quantitative investing, adtech, large ecommerce retailer, and education tech.

Private offices are utterly not a luxury. They are a basic tool. One simple reason is because they are cost efficient, so you don’t spend more on offices in any sense but the most narrow-minded. Other reasons include all of the decades of research on their basic ergonomic benefits.

This would be like calling an ergonomic chair or a trackball mouse “a luxury” because they superficially appear to cost (slightly) more than basic alternatives, without accounting for the cost-savings they cause. And, like offices, it’s a trivial extra cost for the company.

> “Depending on where the company is operating out of, the rent for the floor space of their office could cost more than the company pays the employee.”

Given that this is not true in Manhattan (e.g. see Stack Overflow’s big write-ups on it), can you provide data to show where this is true?

You're absolutely right about the floor space, I had not considered 3x4m glass boxes, and I apologise that my post came across that way (pure provocation) -- perhaps I was in a sour mood. I have not worked for a significantly wealthy company in my history, and so it has never been the case that a private office has been the most cost-effective way to improve profits. To make a reasonable argument: Typically the equation is simply money-in vs money-out. If you can spend an extra 100k a year on private offices for developers and get 300k a year in chargeable services/development effort, vs spending 100k on another salesman and get an extra $1m in net profit, which would you choose? The choice here is clear and 2 monitors vs 1 monitor is a $100 cost for 1.5x efficiency, and is an absolute no-brainer. An office on the other hand is usually not the most cost-effective option, but if you have enough cash to fund all of the other more cost-effective strategies plus private offices, then it is another place in which management can increase profits.

Please follow up with your thoughts, and again, I apologise if what I wrote was inflammatory or came across that way. It was likely coming from a position of "unknown unknowns".