I would like to disagree. I have found that an office that is too quite is an office where people probably don't communicate much, and is not a healthy environment. And it's the office where people sit by each other's desks all the time is where work gets done. Of course there are extremes to everything, though.
> And it's the office where people sit by each other's desks all the time is where work gets done.
Then I wonder how projects like Linux kernel, KDE, Python, etc manage to get any work done.
In software development, I think the most important communication needed is to do everything in the open. This means things like a ticketing system so that everyone knows what everyone else is working on, a continuous integration system that permits deployment only if all tests pass, a wiki system to share various insights, etc.
Currently, I work in an open plan. Information hoarding is the norm here, despite chatters going on all days long. Open communication is a concept that has nothing to do with open plan.
I agree, you can have openness without a lot of talking, and you can have a lot of talking without openness. The two might be correlated, but not as strongly as one might thing. Information sharing and openness are what you want to promote, and it's the culture, not the seating plan, that either promotes or stifles it.
