We worked with around 15 people in a large office for around 9 years.
 
> On 01.07.2015, at 10:26, David Lang <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 30 Jun 2015, Stephen Potter wrote:
> 
>> There are several thought factors at play with open floor plans. They may or 
>> may not be fully valid, but they are why some people like them.
>> 
>> Open floor plans increase interpersonal interaction.  The ability for anyone 
>> to be able to provide input into anything is "good". Collaboration, crowd 
>> sourcing, open source development, DevOps all benefit when more people are 
>> involved.  If you throw everyone into a room where they can see and hear 
>> everything, you get the best ideas from everyone and quality or productivity 
>> must improve.

++ for that. 
It was the best enviromnet ops-wise I have ever seen.
Many “findings” presented in recent talks about team org, monitoring, root 
cause analysis are just amusing since this was stuff we happily practiced in 
our “Corp IT”, “Non-Devops” team for years.

Easily < 1 Minute Reaction times during multiple outages
quick assignment and reorganization
avoiding duplicate work / unclear responsibilities
one-step handovers / escalations can be incredibly quick as an Ops team in an 
open floor env
Also, peer review was just a absolutely normal practice and incredibly easy.

Conf calls were not needed because we were in the same place.

> until you have 90% of people wearing headphones to cut out/drown out the 
> chatter.

Actually we only had 10% of headphone people.
They happened to be the same that later damaged the team beyond repair.
I’ll go as far as saying that they were not “fit” to interact with other people.

Yes, I also had headphones at times, to concentrate, to not hurt my ears in the 
datacenter etc.
But besides that - 
no I don’t think at all that it’s all logical to prefer an environment where 
you don’t hear the people you work with.

The one exception was the SAN admins who needed the interruption free work env 
to concentrate during their rather dangerous tasks.
They had an adjacent room and could switch desks.

But in general: 
Put up dashboards and tickers and hipchat all you want - human interaction with 
mouths and ears is far better.
Even if you might get hit by a paper flyer at times.

Florian

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