Why private offices are important for programmers

Around the year 2000, the company that I had co-founded in 1995, Digital Focus, went agile. We adopted eXtreme Programming (XP). We therefore had to undergo our own "agile transformation", to figure out how to adapt all of our processes and infrastructure to support this new way of working. One of the issues that we faced was how to arrange teams.

It is pretty standard nowadays that agile teams are co-located into a bullpen so that they can collaborate easily. A purportedly ideal setup includes lots of whiteboards and a wall for posting the agile stories and other information radiators. This is indeed a nice setup: it is cozy and one can hear conversations that are often relevant. And if you want to talk to someone, you simply stroll over to his or her desk and start talking.

But there is a deep down side to this. In such a setting, distractions are constant. You overhear conversations when you don't want to - often while you are trying to focus on a problem. It is kind of like being in a Starbucks: it is fun, but you will not do your best work there.

I have found that in such settings, people who really need to focus often go home for a day in order to crack a hard problem or to come up with a fresh approach. To really focus, one needs quiet and isolation - like one used to have with a private office.

During the mid 1980s I worked for two compiler development companies. In each case, the teams were co-located in that everyone had an office on the same floor of a small building. Thus, if you wanted to talk to someone, you simply strolled over to their door: and if the door was open, you walked in and started talking. But if the door was closed, you knew that they were trying to focus (or were talking on the phone), and you went back to your desk and tried a little later, or perhaps shot them an email saying that you need to chat.

The disadvantage of this is that you don't have the opportunity to accidentally overhear things that are relevant to your work. At Digital Focus, we solved this by giving each developer their own office, but also having a bullpen right next to those offices. It worked really well.

Unfortunately the use of cubicles and now bullpens for software development is so prevalent that it has set a new standard for the square feet needed per developer, which translates into a direct cost per developer. CFOs will now balk at giving developers private offices - something that was standard practice during the 1980s.

The hidden cost is that we might be losing the best creativity and ideas of developers. In an environment with distractions you never really think deeply. Your thoughts can get down to a certain level of depth, but never all the way. In a recent article in the New York Times Sunday Review, "Hit the Reset Button in Your Brain" by Daniel Levitin, director of the Laboratory for Music, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University and the author of “The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload,” Levitin says,

"...the insight that led to them probably came from the daydreaming mode. This brain state, marked by the flow of connections among disparate ideas and thoughts, is responsible for our moments of greatest creativity and insight, when we’re able to solve problems that previously seemed unsolvable."

Collaboration is great; but it is not a silver bullet. People sometimes need to think quietly by themselves. If we deny them that, we are not getting the best parts of their mind.