kitten smoothie posted:

Yeah, basically people see this and then end up cargo-culting it.

At the job I had before my current one, our two development teams were originally spread out across three rooms of cubes. People were generally quiet, and people gravitated toward sitting with those who they worked with often so you could just turn your chair to talk quietly.

They then "remodeled" some old unused space, which basically amounted to cleaning and waxing the linoleum floor (strike 1), and installing a bunch of 4-seat desks. It was clear they were doing this on the cheap and I expected them to install crappy carpet squares, but they went really cheap and had no carpet at all. They put both teams in here, with 32 seats in this room. The idea was to get the teams all in one place so they could "collaborate."

The problem though was that they did not seat people together who worked together (strike 2). Instead they assigned seats based on seniority and people picked based on preferences like "back to the wall so people can't see me slacking" or "back not facing the door so people can't see me slacking." So the teams were all mixed about and people would shout across the room. Or they'd stand up and go hover behind a teammate without regard to the people on either side who probably had no stake in the conversation.

We had no impromptu un-schedulable meeting space (strike 3) to go take a conversation if it needed to be something in-depth that might bother other people. Hell, we had a huge shortage of meeting rooms of any sort; at one point they put the breakrooms on the calendar as meeting rooms and blocked out 11am-1pm so people could eat.