Remember that what we're asking folks is to self-report on what they like or not.
This may sound either pedantic or highly-controversial, but what people like and what might be best for the work they are doing are two different things. We do a great disservice to both to confuse the two.
I would like to have a great big office. Better still, I'd like a cabana at the beach, a laptop, and a hammock. What's best for my team or the project I'm on? Different things entirely.
What disturbs me is this idea we see repeated over and over again that if I like it, it must be good. No, that's not true at all. Going to medical school and having a brutal internship are not things you like, but they are things that take you somewhere you want to go. Life is full of things that are unpleasant yet work out for some greater good. We cannot blithely assume that we can follow our instincts on what feels good with every project we engage in. It doesn't work that way.
This may turn out to be one of those things. Or maybe we get our cake and eat it too: what feels good is what's best. But that determination has not been made, and this study doesn't advance the conversation along these lines at all.
We could take an anecdote from Richard Hamming's talk "You and Your Research"(+) - speculation on why some scientists do great work and go on to win Nobel prizes, and others don't, even if they are also clever and hard working. It includes this paragraph:
Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame.
It might be similar with open plan offices - less pleasant and more difficult to concentrate in today and tomorrow, but resulting in better, more competitive, more coherent software in twelve months.
I coach teams to perform better, so this topic is a bit of a sore point for me. I think Hamnming was on to something.
I've worked in about every possible configuration, and I've seen teams work in about every possible configuration. In addition, I've coded in all of these environments.
After working from a nice, quiet home office for many years, I'm trying out coworking. When I'm not with clients I drive an hour to an office to work with random people.
Why would I do this? Don't I value my time? Sure thing. But I find that the hassle and pain of being interrupted actually helps me to a reset to think about whether what I'm doing or not is important. Without that reset, I'll just grab on to some problem and keep tweaking it. I'm like that -- and I suspect many others are like that too. We desire uninterrupted time because we desire a deep problem to dive down in and forget about everything else. And sure thing, there are problems like that.
But 99% of the time problems are not like that, and we hurt ourselves more long-term than we help.
All of this is just conjecture, mind you. But this is an area where I see the natural inclinations of technology people diverge for what looks better for the effort as a whole. It's non-intuitive and uncomfortable. But that's the way life is, right? Dang humans.
This may sound either pedantic or highly-controversial, but what people like and what might be best for the work they are doing are two different things. We do a great disservice to both to confuse the two.
I would like to have a great big office. Better still, I'd like a cabana at the beach, a laptop, and a hammock. What's best for my team or the project I'm on? Different things entirely.
What disturbs me is this idea we see repeated over and over again that if I like it, it must be good. No, that's not true at all. Going to medical school and having a brutal internship are not things you like, but they are things that take you somewhere you want to go. Life is full of things that are unpleasant yet work out for some greater good. We cannot blithely assume that we can follow our instincts on what feels good with every project we engage in. It doesn't work that way.
This may turn out to be one of those things. Or maybe we get our cake and eat it too: what feels good is what's best. But that determination has not been made, and this study doesn't advance the conversation along these lines at all.