It was analyzed considerably in the book Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams which even has a chapter entitled "Bring Back the Door." Joel Spolsky, co-founder of Stack Exchange and Fog Creek, is also deeply committed to providing private offices even for workers in Manhattan, and had some SO tech bloggers recently wrote up a little about the cost per square foot and some other financial considerations when searching for new urban office space.

I don't actually consider this to be interesting or controversial. It's been talked about and thought about significantly since at least the 80s when Peopleware was written, and even much further back. Christopher Alexander also talks about the detrimental effects of poor office design in The Timeless Way of Building.

You can Google for dozens of studies about communicable diseases in open plan offices, decreased morale, cognitive health problems related to lack of privacy, fatigue caused by listening to music for too many hours, effects of curtailing workplace conversations and speaking superficially to avoid overstimulation from constant contact and interaction, etc. etc.

I'll put some links at the bottom (you can easily find summaries of Peopleware and it's easy to find the Stack Overflow real estate blog posts). But before I do, I just want to point out that the whole issue is well modeled by what Michael O. Church called "artificial scarcity" -- that executives and corporate management are fully aware of what they are doing and that spending money of gaudy and over-the-top open-plan offices with climbing walls, gourmet cafes, and hideous open-plan sweatshops workspaces, they are perpetuating a hedonic treadmill atmosphere. Getting that coveted private space becomes the carrot they can dangle, basically starting you out by making you work in poor conditions and making you feel like you must sublimate away your human needs to signal loyalty, and if you do that long enough, you might be rewarded with a physical environment that supports basic human needs like privacy and quiet. Many firms just do cargo cult copying of trendy start-ups, and so they do this by accident. But you really do have to put your radar out and be extremely careful not to work for the firms that do it intentionally -- places where, as described in Moral Mazes, there is real, intentional effort placed on social engineering employees and pitting their intrinsic human needs against what the employer demands of them.

I once worked for a company that had offices across the U.S. Their Columbus, Ohio, office mostly housed executives, regional sales, and a large portion of the company's senior HR staff. When a new CTO took over, he was able to rally others in the company to a mandate that "engineers like open-plan spaces" and that they needed to radically alter their current office spaces, moving into artsy neighborhoods of metro areas, loft spaces, creating a cross-country theme of exposed brick and ductwork with fancy kitchens, glass walls, etc. Totally cliche. Douglas Coupland couldn't have scripted it better.

When I did my exit interview with that company, I talked with an HR rep from Columbus about how the distraction and noise of the open-plan layout in Boston was just killing me. As an introvert, it made me feel exhausted and like eyes were constantly on me no matter what (even if people overtly insisted they weren't). And it was just impossible to work. She told me that the exact same thing happened to the Columbus office, and that there was not even an engineering presence there. Most people there had 10+ years of tenure with the company and had always worked with private offices, and in fact really needed them because all of them handled private HR calls and employee personal matters all day every day, things that can't be done in an open-plan area. Now they were constantly crowding each other out of booking the few private conference rooms and making everything exceptionally hard.

Amazingly, the company spent over $12 million on just that Columbus office re-design!! They actually spent money to tear down productivity-enhancing privacy features and replace them with superficially trendy open-plan designs that were overwhelmingly obviously counter-productive, all under a mandate about engineering which did not even take place in that office location!

When people try to tell me it's about saving money, I just laugh. Maybe for some bootstrapped start-up accepting zero outside funding. But for any company with VC backing or any established, revenue-generated business, it's a million percent bullshit.

A few links

[0] < http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272494413... >

[1] < http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00140139.2013.87... >

Quoting from the first paper:

> "Our results categorically contradict the industry-accepted wisdom that open-plan layout enhances communication between colleagues and improves occupants' overall work environmental satisfaction considering previous researchers' finding that satisfaction with workspace environment is closely related to perceived productivity, job satisfaction and organisational outcomes, the open-plan proponents' argument that open-plan improves morale and productivity appears to have no basis in the research literature."

You do have to be extremely careful about confirmation bias, of course. You can Google a zillion opinion pieces arguing voiciferously for or against open-plan offices. But the real productivity research does not lend any support to them.